Atterrir
At Bruno Latour’s, “landing” names a political gesture: to renounce the two poles that magnetized modernity—the *Global* (the infinite horizon of globalization) and the *Local* (the refuge-ground, the closed identity)—and turn toward a third attractor, the Terrestrial. The Terrestrial is not “nature” contemplated from afar: it is the thin zone where life is possible, peopled by agents that react to our actions. To orient oneself in this landscape, and to find where one settles and with whom one agrees to cohabit—that is what *landing* means.
En effet, de façon surprenante, tout ce qu'il s'agit de connaître de ce troisième attracteur, le Terrestre, se limite, vu de l'espace, à une minuscule zone de quelques kilomètres d'épaisseur entre l'atmosphère et les roches mères. Une pellicule, un vernis, une peau, quelques couches infiniment plissées.
Latour begins with a sense of disorientation: moderns no longer know where to direct their public lives. “To resist this shared loss of bearings, we’ll have to land somewhere.” Landing, then, isn’t a step backward—it’s knowing how to find one’s way in a landscape where two old compasses—the Global and the Local—have stopped pointing toward a livable direction.
The ground on which to settle is the Terrestrial. And the surprise Latour underscores is its narrowness: everything that concerns us fits within a “tiny Critical Zone,” a few kilometers between the atmosphere and bedrock—“a film, a glaze, a skin.” We’re used to marveling at the vastness of the universe; yet none of that vastness shelters us. The Terrestrial is neither the Globe seen from Sirius nor the astronomical planet: it’s the thin, living layer, and the only one that’s habitable.
Its difference from “nature” is decisive. The Global, Latour says, grasps things “from afar,” as indifferent to humans; the Terrestrial grasps them “up close,” sensitive to our actions “to which they respond sharply.” Earth isn’t an inert backdrop: it answers back. This is the same reversal as Stengers’ intrusion of Gaia—a force that reacts and reminds us of our dependence—and the same density of agents as in a more-than-human world. Faced with the collapse mapped by collapsology, landing is the political response: not fleeing, but touching down.
Landing ≠ returning to the Local: the Local-as-refuge promises “the security of a protected space” but slides into “ethnic homogeneity, patrimonialization, historicism, nostalgia”—whereas “the Terrestrial is made to differentiate itself by opening up.” The Terrestrial ≠ “nature” as object: it doesn’t allow detachment, because it reacts to what we do to it. And “to land is necessarily to land somewhere”: not to hover above the Earth, but to declare where you’re setting down and with whom you agree to cohabit.