Speaking for nature? Irreduction and demo-genesis in Bruno Latour

Abstract

This article examines what it means to speak for nature in the Anthropocene, a moment in which the Earth's agencies increasingly reshape political, epistemic, and institutional arrangements. The Anthropocene is approached as a challenge to inherited modes of representation, raising questions about how beings whose agencies circulate across heterogeneous networks become encounterable, articulable, and capable of participating in collective life. The article brings Bruno Latour's principle of irreduction into dialogue with his demogenetic proposal, a term used to designate a new process of engendering peoples through which heterogeneous beings are composed and granted a voice in common affairs. The analysis develops through an interplay of philosophical, anthropological, and geoliterary materials. Latour's reworking of Gaia provides a conceptual framework for engaging these intersections, presenting the Earth as a constellation of actants whose reactions and demands exceed the categories of nature, object, or environment. Through this lens, the article examines the shifting conditions under which beings become perceptible and representable within shared processes of world-making. The article concludes by outlining the conceptual, institutional, and situated arrangements through which nature may appear as a participant in collective life. Rather than seeking unified voices or stable representational forms, it highlights the practices and procedures that sustain encounters with heterogeneous agencies, contributing to ongoing debates in the environmental humanities and critical social sciences on agency, representation and the composition of collectives.