Isabelle Stengers is here dealing with the ways in which we name and categorize entities, environments and non-human things impacts our perception of their agency, their relationship with us and their capacity to talk to us outside of the normal human communicative context.
Gaia, referring here to the planet earth as a interlocked system containing both “living” animal creatures and “non-living” plants, minerals, atmospheric conditions, all of whom interact with each other and react in complex ways, and which reacts to the meddling of humans in ways unpredictable by the ecological used by humanity to simplify and understand it. This theory was first put forth by James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis.
Stengers extends this thought in her essay, interrogating further what it means to name and be named: how can naming something both complicate and also simplify it? To turn Earth into Gaia is to acknowledge its awesome and mysterious powers and forces, the ways in which our actions affect it deeply, and can come around on uneven timetables and distributions, it’s blowback to our centuries of ecological abuse and destruction to be sent back our way with equal and opposite force
But, Stengers asks, in what ways does this naming and labeling still lead us back into an anthropomorphism which reduces even as it complicates? Put another way, does this still reduce Gaia to an entity that is at all comprehensible to us, and in doing so reduce its ability to respond, to react, to the set of preconditioned ideas for “how we ‘fix’ it”, what it’s telling us?
Our societies “response” to the oncoming (really already here) climate catastrophes has largely limited itself to “how can we alter what we are doing in as few ways as possible to minimize ‘disruption.’” In doing so, our “dealings” with Gaia have limited themselves to shallow gestures to reduce numbers and figures, figments which lock this planet into our capitalist conception of relationship and exchange; giving it a name, so it can be labeled like cattle and sent back into the factory, to the spreadsheet.
Does seeing these forces as not just “things” but “beings” involve a deeper recognition? One that acknowledges that these beings have names, and also have the agency to not share them with us.
To understand Gaia, to understand any one, is to recognize and protect your responsibility to it, to treat it fairly and with kindness. That they participate in the successive built experience of the world, and these experiences are interrelated even if they are not, cannot, be fully shared and mutually understood. What happens when we acknowledge we cannot fully understand each other, and that we must work together anyways if we are to create a future for us both.
To name is to construct a reality, and a reality constructs a future, a world, a hope, and an agency. When this reality is made static and unchangeable, it is made hollow and empty. To make a future, even a past, it must, inherently, change and swing.
What is it for Gaia, to name itself? To change its destiny, and let us know? What does an equitable reaction to that even look like?