I could easily escape the curse by claiming that the name of a theory is of no importance, and that, after all, serious scientists avoid the name Gaia as much as possible, preferring the euphemism “sciences of the Earth System.” But this would be cheating; it would amount to passing from one ambiguous character to another that is even harder to define. “System”? What weird animal is that? A Titan? A Cyclops? Some twisted divinity? By avoiding the real myth, we would land on a false one. Myth and science, as we well know, speak languages that are only apparently distinct; as soon as we approach the metamorphic zone that we have learned to identify, they begin to exchange their features, so that they can manage to express, to extend, what they want to say. “There is no pure myth other than [that of] science purified of any myth,” as Serres put it.
Bruno Latour, Facing Gaia: eight lectures on the new climatic regime, 2017 # 31
Science as pure myth
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- What is a myth? If you ask a Native American, there is a strong likelihood that the answer will be: a story from the time when humans and animals were not yet distinct. This definition strikes me as very profound, because—despite the clouds of ink raised by the Judeo-Christian tradition to obscure …
Entangled matters
This quote has been selected as part of one of the thematic collections of Alterlibrary, titled Entangled Matters.
In this collection, we gather inspirations that invite us to look beyond the boundaries separating nature and society, humans and non-humans, individuals and their environments. We explore how thought, knowledge and imagination emerge through networks of relationships and interdependencies — and what we might learn from thinking of societies as ecosystems.
Here you can explore the collection Entangled Matters.
of our Imagination
