Abstract
There has been an ecologisation of social and political thought in recent decades. The planetary crisis has prompted scholars in the humanities and social sciences to become more acutely sensitive to the conditioning effect of the physical environment on their varied disciplinary interests. The growing influence of post-structuralism has also been a critical factor, giving rise to the ecologically inflected tradition of new materialism, of which Bruno Latour has been a prominent advocate. Latour's later ‘ecological’ writings seek nothing less than a Copernican-scale revolution in modern cosmology, more applicable to living in the Anthropocene. As this important intervention from Gonin et al. elucidates, this presents a challenge to the longstanding Westphalian conception of territory, which remains a dominant framework in political theory. In this commentary, however, I question their intention to transcend the state, suggesting that Gonin et al. risk downplaying Latour's own mounting concern with sovereignty while overlooking the lineage of his thought in post-structural political theory. This post-structural tradition remains more relevant than ever in an era marked by ecological crisis and the resurgence of the nation-state.
The state develops towards an ideologico-juridico-politico systemization; it tends towards a practical system that seeks to be complete and without fissure. (Lefebvre, 2016 [1965]: 18)
Scientific insights on the dramatically altered systems of the earth due to human activity, couched in the language of tipping points and thresholds, have challenged scholars to think geologically about political life (Clark and Szerszynski, 2021). A momentum-gathering ecologisation of political thought has occurred in the humanities and social sciences, prompting a fundamental rethinking of concepts such as democracy (Mitchell, 2011), capitalism (Moore, 2015), geopolitics (Grove, 2019), territory (Ochoa Espejo, 2020) and colonialism (Ferdinand, 2022). The ecological is no longer a specialist addendum to politics proper but a conditioning context through which all social formations emerge, crystalise and fragment. Political geography has experienced its own environmental turn, becoming once again concerned with the physical environment (Usher, 2020). While the ecologisation of political thought has been an instinctive response to the planetary crisis, it is also indicative of the ever-growing influence of post-structural thinkers, particularly Giles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, along with a subsequent generation of new materialists: Donna Haraway, Rosi Braidotti, Isabelle Stengers, Anna Tsing, Jane Bennett, Karen Barad, Timothy Morton, and Bruno Latour. Deleuze and Guattari's geophilosophy offered an alternative ‘image of thought’ (Deleuze, 1994 [1968]) to that which has underpinned modern political theory, looking not to the archetypal ‘royal sciences’, mathematics and physics, which posit universal explanation, but to the natural sciences focused instead on complexity, non-linearity, and emergence. This includes the subversive discipline of ecology, but also more destabilising aspects of biology, geology, and indeed geography. The ontological ground of political theory has in recent decades begun to move, contort, and shake, as its deeply anchored roots in rationalism (i.e. truth is arrived at deductively in our heads through logical reasoning and abstract representation) have started to loosen and break free.
Thomas Hobbes's 1651 treatise Leviathan, the foundation document of modern rational political theory, was strongly influenced by physics and the coordinate geometry of René Descartes, where (political) space was conceived in the abstract, as three-dimensional, homogenous, infinite, and mechanical in nature, governed by universal laws. This made modern territory epistemologically possible, amenable to calculation and coordination by a central authority (Elden, 2013). Westphalian-bordered territory is the prime example of the state's aspirations to produce striated space through geometric homogenisation, seeking ‘triumph of the logos or the law over the nomos’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 2004 [1987]: 373). The modern state is founded upon – and continues to draw legitimacy from – abstract political theoretical representations, which fix it in thought, elevate it above society. Deleuze and Guattari articulated their geophilosophy against what they called ‘state philosophy’ – a universalising discourse of sovereignty grounded in abstract geometric space – by liberating political theory from representational thinking, using the nomad science of ‘nature-thought’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994: 88), invoking the organic as a challenge to the mechanical. The earth, its physical geography, provides a counterpoint to ungrounded abstract thought that makes a transcendental notion like the state possible, which can only ever exist, as a unitary entity, in the mind. This is epitomised by their preoccupation with rhizomes, being horizontally organised and multidirectional, constantly proliferating, evading containment. As Deleuze and Guattari (1987: 3) observed, ‘[t]hought lags behind nature’, and as the state primarily exists in the mind, as a representation, they saw radical potential in ecology. The quintessential nomad science of new materialism channels this potential today, wrenching the social through the biological, ecological, and geological, to understand life as always grounded, lively, enmeshed, and emergent.
Latour followed closely behind Deleuze and Guattari in the twentieth-century lineage of French post-structuralism, oriented explicitly against rational political thought. His philosophical concerns moved gradually from Nature to ecology, finally venturing an ‘earthbound’ politics (Latour, 2017, 2018). Latour's later ecological writings were strongly influenced by Deleuze and Guattari, and like them, territory is used as a conceptual bridge to connect political theory and natural science. Latour drew from ecology and earth system science to formulate an alternative cosmology to that of Hobbes's Leviathan, one where the state can ‘no longer overfly anything’ (Latour, 2021: 7). The law-governed universe of physics is supplanted by the entangled cosmology of ecology, which is unrepresentable in its ineffable interconnectedness, putting paid to any notion that space, specifically territory, can be homogenous, calculable and centrally administered. Continuing what Deleuze and Guattari instigated, in more lucid and charming prose, Latour articulated an alternative conception of space, as entangled, folded, and writhing rather than flat, universal, and static. He and other new materialists arrived here not through philosophical speculation alone but prompted by a mutating climate, which precipitated a ‘crisis of representation’ in political theory (Latour, 2017: 275). Latour proposes in the ‘New Climate Regime’ that the character and valence of politics has been redefined, and indeed, ecologised; located within the context – and confines – of the earth. Gonin et al.'s (2025) intervention should be located within this unfolding environmental turn.
It is an ambitious project indeed to venture, conceptually and literally, ‘new ground for territory’. Their offering a challenge to the ‘classic conception of territory’ from an alternative yet complementary angle to that of a growing postcolonial critique is certainly welcome. The authors consider the genealogy of modern territory, drawing on French scholarship to expand on Elden's (2013) classic history, still tracing it back to quantification, calculation and mapping, and the ‘geometrization of space’. As they observe, ‘homogenous separation [of space] is at the very heart of the definition of a sovereign territory’, where the physical earth is deemed an inert substance, cut through like amenable putty. Locating their critique in a typology that includes decolonial (territorio studies), interactional (territoriology) and ecological positions is instructive, which they transcend by considering how the increasingly volatile planet challenges the static grid of the Westphalian international state system, which has long provided the framework for modern political theory, grounded in the infinite universe of the Globe. Through their notion of ‘terrestrial territory’, Gonin et al. develop and indeed extend Latour's ecological writings on Gaia, which were always only intended to be preliminary, a provocation for further work. To use the terminology of the authors, ‘globe-thinking’ has been enormously beneficial to what Deleuze called the ‘real state’, and its imperialist agenda of extractive capitalism.
Gonin et al. expound on Latour's insight that territory is a terrestrial more than legal entity, conceived not as a fixed juridical space, analogous to a container, but as a networked assemblage that sustains life through environmental connections, which are increasingly under threat as the habitability of the planet declines. As the authors persuasively contend, one must ‘take into account planetary biogeochemical cycles (carbon, water, oxygen, etc.) and planetary entities such as climate and biodiversity’ to understand, and indeed complicate, how territory is thought to function. Rather than focusing on division and enclosure, Latour, and Gonin et al., consider how humans (and other creatures) live off as well as in territory, which extends well beyond national borders, being entangled within, and dependent upon, vital earth systems. The venerable Westphalian representation – it is only a representation! – of territorial sovereignty, where a central authority glides and presides over a homogenous flat surface, is a convenient myth, as nation-states are, in an ecological register, overlapping and interdependent. Whereas movement on the Globe is infinite, unrestrained, and calculable, movement in Earth is muddled, inhibited and only occurs via the incremental fashioning of conduits: ‘No tunnel, no movement’ (Latour, 2021: 27). This cosmology projects quite an opposite image to state philosophy, grounding territory in soil, ecology, and dependency, rather than space, law, and authority.
Gonin et al. also gainfully develop Latour's thought on part-whole relations, differentiating between the Globe, a hierarchical scalar configuration, and Gaia, a ‘flat-ontology’ of web-like relations thinly covering the earth. Two very different conceptions of space, and two very different vantage points for thinking politics. For geographers, this discussion will likely resonate with the scale debate of the 1990s and 2000s, itself indicative of the expanding influence of post-structuralism. Latour's Gaia cosmology is fundamentally at odds with the conventional understanding of scale, an archetypal form of representational space. It reifies the state by giving it a scale, the national, providing the fulcrum around which the international system is arranged, ‘baking’ into the Westphalian framework a potent yet illusory abstraction. In the Gaia cosmology, the parts (territories) of the whole (state system) are not slotted together into a unified, integrated system like the mechanics of a car, but are complexly entangled in an open-ended system, akin to knotted roots, making the notion of exclusive territorial sovereignty untenable: ‘If a state was restricted to its borders, it couldn’t live’ (Latour, 2021: 41). Whereas the ‘geometrization of space’ had a profound impact on the (western) conception of territory, Latour, and indeed Gonin et al., intend to precipitate a comparably far-reaching shift in thought via the ecologisation of space, installing an alternative scenography that captures the interconnectedness of human and earth systems. As well as establishing relations of control through spatial demarcation, territory facilitates subsistence via networks that sustain it ecologically. For Latour (2021: 80), ‘[t]erritory is not what you occupy. It's what defines you’. A subtle yet fundamental reorientation of concern and inquiry.
Latour's philosophical project was no less ambitious than Descartes in that he sought to challenge received wisdom on the composition of the world, and thereby shift how modern society envisaged its place within it, prompting a Copernican-like revolution. From a closed, to an infinite, to an earthbound world. And in a similar register to Descartes, Latour articulated his Gaia cosmology in close dialogue with Hobbes's Leviathan, which he sustained in fact through his entire career. Indeed, Latour's political philosophy has been described as Hobbesian, where immanence is assumed to provide an antidote to transcendence in society (Harman, 2014). And yet, in his later writings, the figure of Leviathan offers the counterpoint to Gaia, as Latour's politics became earthier, more conventionally leftist (see Latour, 2018; Latour and Schultz, 2022). Physicist Galileo was to Descartes (and Hobbes) what natural scientists Lynn Margulis and James Lovelock were to Latour and other new materialists, whose opposing cosmology is oriented around matter rather than form, relations instead of surfaces, complexity in place of laws. Where Descartes and Hobbes dematerialised political thought, Latour (2017: 245) sought to rematerialise it, articulating ‘new forms of sovereignty’ beyond the social contract, which is founded upon a de-animated, de-politicised, mechanistic ‘Nature’. While Hobbes's Leviathan provided the intellectual foundation of the Westphalian state, and the political cosmology of the Old Climate Regime, the state nonetheless remained integral to Latour's thinking on the New Climate Regime but approached from the ‘bottom up’ (Latour, 2018: 95), starting with soil not space. These writings in fact represent the culmination of Latour's political philosophy, arrived at by the relinquishment of Hobbes, his longstanding sparring partner, defeating Nature by ecology, coming ‘down to earth’. Latour sought to redefine rather than transcend the state, as ‘ecological questions are about sovereignty … as well as about taking care of the land’ (Latour and Schultz, 2022: 90). And certainly, this work is steeped in state theory, articulated through Hobbes but also Carl Schmitt, scholars of sovereignty par excellence. ‘Terrestrial’ was Schmitt's term from The Nomos of the Earth, which proved formative for Latour's Gaia thesis. The state is both obstacle and vehicle for political ecology, where Latour contended the ‘ecological class … has to occupy the state apparatus on all levels and in all its functions’ (71). It was the European Union, not some speculative more-than-human construction, which Latour championed as an exemplar of interdependent, overlapping sovereignty.
Therefore, I would argue Gonin et al., in their efforts to move beyond the state, underplay this aspect of Latour's later thought, while overlooking its lineage in post-structural critique of rational state theory, most closely associated with Deleuze and Guattari, whose own political philosophy was often minimised. The authors explain that their ‘very generic vocabulary’ reflects an intention not to unduly restrict what counts as a territorial actor, where they refer increasingly to ‘entities’ as their argument unfolds. But Latour was quite forthcoming that humans, their political systems, and especially the state, must be front and centre: ‘Obviously there is no politics other than that of humans, and for their benefit!’ (Latour, 2018: 85). Anthropocentrism is not only unavoidable but more necessary than ever given the increasing centrality of humans to earth system processes, who bear the responsibility – some significantly more than others – for attaining something approaching planetary habitability. In the current era marked by the widespread reassertion of national borders and right-wing populism, we must keep all our critical attention trained on the state. It is no coincidence that ecology is a key battleground today between the political left and right, as it exposes the vulnerability of states to planetary change and depleting resources. The requirement to rein in sovereign interests and cooperate with other nations on environmental issues has been scorned by conservative governments across the world. Here, Latour found inspiration in geography, a field uniquely situated between the natural and social disciplines, in his call for a politicised ecology. Indeed, geographers are well placed to venture beneath the surfaces of representational geometry, to reveal how territorial states are necessarily earthbound, grounded in the soil and existentially dependent on ecological systems. No, they are not ‘power containers’ detached from planetary constraints, floating in abstract space. To uproot state philosophy and shatter its deceptive geometry, which gives the state a coherence and transcendence it does not have, we must, as Yusoff (2014: 455) implores, ‘jump into the crack!’
