Ways of Being Alive. Baptiste Morizot
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are political, for the discreet and pre-institutional essence of the political sphere is played out in the shifting thresholds that dictate what deserves our attention. The question of feminism has highlighted these shifts in recent decades, and the issue of gender difference has suddenly become a political landmark attracting considerable attention. The question of alienated labour, the question of the condition of all those who do not have the means of production but sell their labour power, is a question that was naturalized in early capitalism, and became – with Marx and after him – an object of the most searching collective attention. The tectonic shifts in the art of the attention of a human collective are highlighted by one eloquent symptom: this is the feeling of the tolerable and the intolerable.
A king by divine right is no longer tolerable today: the unconscious device of the tolerable and the intolerable is a delicate machine, incorporated in each of us, shaped by social and cultural flows. The point is that our current relationships with living beings are becoming intolerable. The idea of the disappearance of field birds, European insects, and more broadly the life forms around us, through inaction, eco-fragmentation and extractivism (the obsessive stage of the extractive industry which considers everything as a mere resource), must become as intolerable as the divine right of kings. We need to pave the way for encounters that will bring living beings into the political space of what deserves attention, i.e. calls for us to be attentive and considerate to it. Affiliations provide access to an expanded form of self. I remember a passenger on a train looking out anxiously at a rainy spring sky. When he revealed the reason for his concern, I was dumbstruck: he wasn’t concerned that the bad weather would ruin his vacation. He announced to me as if he were talking about a relative of his: ‘I don’t like rainy springs, they’re bad for bats. There are a lot less insects. Mothers can’t feed their young any more.’ An expanded self that other living beings can move into means a few more worries, admittedly, but it is also strangely emancipatory. It is only in this way that the basic value system is transformed, and not because everyone has been made to feel guilty and terrified by the announcement of apocalypses affecting beings who do not exist in their cosmos as beings.
The arts of political attention will have changed once we experience the plunder of ocean life, or the pollinator crisis, as being every bit as intolerable as the divine right of kings. The contempt of a sector of industrial agriculture for soil fauna should be as intolerable as a ban on abortion.
We could thus defend the idea that, to a certain extent, in democratic societies crisscrossed by massive flows of information, politics comes after culture, in the sense of representations of desirable life, of the thresholds of the tolerable and the intolerable. Consequently, if we are to change politics, we cannot be content merely with becoming activists, struggling, organizing things differently, raising the alarm, leveraging as much as possible those who are closest to power, and inventing other ways of living; we must also transform the attention we pay to what matters. Hence the fourth text in this collection, an investigation carried out in the open air in contact with wolves, sheep, shepherds, night skies and meadows, which attempts to sketch the outlines of a policy of interdependence. It’s a long-term job, but it deserves to be done, because we still have a few millennia to live together on this planet with its cosmopolitan life.
In what direction should we open up this field of our collective political attention? The problem of our systemic ecological crisis, if it is to be understood in its most structural dimension, is a problem of habitat. It is our way of living that is in crisis. And the main reason is its constitutive blindness to the fact that to inhabit is always to cohabit, to live among other life forms; the habitat of a living being is entirely made up from the interweaving of other living beings. The fact is that one of the major causes of the current extinction of biodiversity is eco-fragmentation. This is the invisible fragmentation of the habitats of other living beings, a process which destroys them without our realizing it; we have made our roads, our cities, our industries out of the discreet and familiar paths that ensure their existence, their lasting prosperity as populations.
The significance of eco-fragmentation in extinction has philosophical implications that are not always noted: this fragmentation does not directly originate from productivist and extractivist greed (although this is the contemporary and many-faceted aspect of the destruction of habitats, one which requires us to engage in the bitterest struggles against it). It originates first of all from our blindness to the fact that other living beings inhabit: the crisis in our way of inhabiting amounts to denying others the status of inhabitants. So we need to repopulate, in the philosophical sense of making visible the fact that the myriad life forms that constitute our nurturing environment have always been, not a backdrop for our human tribulations, but fully-fledged inhabitants of the world. And this is because they make that world by their presence. The microfauna of soils literally make the forests and fields. The forests and the plant life of the oceans create the breathable atmosphere that nurtures us. Pollinators literally make what we innocently call ‘spring’ as if it were a gift from the universe, or the sun: no, it is their humming, invisible and planetary, which each year, at the end of winter, summons into the world the flowers, the fruits, the gifts of the earth, and their immemorial return. Pollinators, bees, birds, are not placed like furniture on the natural and unchanging scenery of the seasons: they make spring live. Without them, we might have snow melts when the sunshine increases around March, but they would take place in a desert: we would not have the cherry blossoms, nor any other blossom, nor any effect from the cross-fertilization which forms the basis of the life cycle of angiosperms (all the flowering plants on the planet, which form more than nine tenths of earth’s plant biodiversity). We would have only an endless winter. A type of being that makes spring ‘with its own hands’, so to speak, isn’t just part of the decor, a mere resource. It is an inhabitant, one that enters the political field of the powers with which we will have to negotiate the forms of our common life.
Lack of political attention to living beings
Part of what modernity calls ‘progress’ describes four centuries of devices that relieve us from having to pay attention to alterities, to other life forms, or to ecosystems.
The conceptual character we are targeting here is someone we could call the ‘average modern’ (we all are to a certain extent this kind of person in the cultural area which claims to be modern).
Let’s observe a typical colonial phenomenon, since this is often where the strangeness of your ‘average modern’ is best revealed. For a Western colonist, when he arrives in the jungles of Africa or the monsoon rice fields of Asia, civilizing the area where he settles traditionally means making it possible to live there in complete ignorance of its non-human cohabitants. It means suppressing, controlling and channelling the wild animals, insects, rains and floods. Being at home is being able to live without paying attention. However, for the natives, it’s the complete opposite: being at home implies a vibratory vigilance, an attention to the interweaving of other life forms which enrich existence, even if it is necessary to compose with them – which is often demanding, sometimes complicated. Coming to an agreement is a costly business in diplomacy between humans, and it is the same with other living beings.
Many of the techniques and representations of the modern world serve this purpose, and that is their function: to dispense with attention, that is to say to be able to operate everywhere, in any place, despite one’s ignorance, quite carelessly, i.e. without knowing a place and its inhabitants. It’s a disconnection from what in the living world around us calls for a generous openness, an interweaving with pollinators, plants, ecological dynamics and climates. It’s a practical metaphysics, whose secret but powerful function is interchangeability: everything must be interchangeable, all places, all techniques, all practices, all skills, all beings, honey bees, apple varieties and wheat strains. It’s a matter of being at home everywhere, homogenizing the conditions of existence so you don’t need to know the ethology of others and the ecology of a place, in other words the habits and customs of the peoples of living beings who inhabit and constitute it. In this way, the ‘average modern’ can devote himself to what is ‘essential’ in his own eyes: the relationships between fellow human beings – relationships of power, accumulation,