On the Way to a Common World: Bruno Latour’s Compositionism as a Means of Addressing the Climate Crisis

Abstract

The article attempts to extract from Bruno Latour’s rich oeuvre a coherent theoretical program he called “compositionism”. The aim of compositionism is to derive a procedure for composing a “common world”, a form of reality capable of providing the best possible living conditions for the maximum number of agents within it. The article consists of two parts. The first outlines the theoretical features of the emergence of the compositionist project in the context of the development of Latour’s political thought from the 1980s to the 2010s. Originally articulated in the ‘Politics of Nature’ in order to find an alternative to the world comprised by the dominant constitution of modernity, the theory of compositionism gradually developed throughout Latour’s academic career. The notion of the ‘Parliament of things’ should be seen as the first attempt to propose an approach of realizing the process of composing the common world. Later, in the 2000s, Latour would substantially revise his political project. Turning to the tradition of direct democracy, he would try to make it more empirical. This is how “object-oriented politics” or Dingpolitik was born, part of which should be considered a political mode of existence [POL] that is always built around things. The second part of the article attempts to apply the established theoretical apparatus to the interpretation of Latour’s later studies about the climate crisis. Among these is the ‘Où Atterrir?’ experiment, which embodies what should be seen as a positive project of “bottom-up” overcoming of “political numbness” in the face of the environmental threat.