Geoscience Reference
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fi rst set out his notion of 'the parliament of things' as the central motif for a new
kind of 'cosmopolitics' in which things and hybridity are forgrounded and political
settlement no longer depends on appeal to any transcendent realm of Nature
(Latour, 2004b; 2007; Latour and Weibel, 2005; Stott, 2008). Science has to change
from a hegemonic voice of modernity (representing nature in modern politics as an
external force which limits human choice) to a more polyphonic voice in chorus
with other discourses, which presents the panoply of non-human life in a reconfi g-
ured politics. Latour continues to pursue the idea of the parliament of things, but
it might now be multiple, mobile parliaments - communities incorporating humans
and nonhumans and building on the experiences of the sciences as they are actually
practiced.
Latour develops the idea of 'multinaturalism', to sit along side that of multicul-
turalism. Membership of these complex collectives is not determined by outside
experts claiming absolute (scientifi c) authority, but by 'diplomats' or spokespersons,
who are treated with caution but who speak for otherwise mute things in order to
ensure that the collective equitably involves both humans and non-humans. The
right to represent nature is expanded to include not just scientists but a whole range
of spokespeople for example ethicists, poets, farmers and architects. Nature becomes
internalised to 'social' systems.
Latour (2007) has termed these ideas 'Dingpolitik'. There is, as he puts it, (p. 1)
'a pixilation of politics'. Just as we have said that methodologies need to be site, or
entanglement, specifi c, then so do politics. New political practices form through and
around networks, collectives, and 'matters of concern', where the more-than-human
is recognised and takes voice, where political assemblies are therefore multiple, and
where there are not grand narratives of succession, but many streams of politics
fl owing at once. Collectives are fl exible are open to pragmatic and incremental
adjustments towards better futures of human and non-human fl ourishing.
Related forms of politics and governance are being proposed through which the
active agencies of things/nature can represent themselves or at least be better repre-
sented. Murdoch (2005) sets out some principles of 'ecological planning' whereby
the processes and forces of nature are built into the very fabric of planning. What-
more and Hinchcliffe (2003) - in the context of nature in the city - call for a cos-
mopolitan politics of conviviality.
They draw, as does Latour, upon the cosmopolitics
of Stengers which is
a politics of knowledge in which the admission of non-humans into the company of
what counts invites new alignments of scientifi c and political practices and more demo-
cratic distributions of expertise (Whatmore, 2005, p. 93).
This kind of cosmopolitics
learn[s] how new types of encounter (and conviviality) with nonhumans, which emerge
in the practice of the sciences over the course of their history, can give rise to
new modes of relation with humans, i.e., to new political practices (Paulson, 2001,
p. 112).
If Latour's politics is very much about tracing technical networks and the things
that comprise them, other related approaches to politics 'after nature' focus on
affect, emotion, and the body within networks. Thrift (2005; 2008), for instance,
discusses 'various kinds of practical affective politics' designed to stimulate kind-
