It is through a network of infrastructures that power reduces local particularities, exploits resources, and fights autonomy. Living in territories in struggle allows one to resist it. “Being a forest,” from Notre-Dame-des-Landes to Borneo, means becoming ungovernable.
It is not necessary to be a tree or to be woody to “make a forest” – at least according to the definition proposed by Jean-Baptiste Vidalou, since
There is forest where one cannot bear the generalized existential misery, this preventive neutralization of all life.
His work, Being forestis a call to reject the government of the world by numbers of which engineers are the implacable artisans.
Jean-Baptiste Vidalou is part of the Foucauldian tradition of denouncing the government of men by a technostructure. The thesis is well-known, but he adds a territorial dimension, because the Panopticon dear to Bentham, essential for monitoring and punishing, comes up against the rough edges of geography. Unlike a factory or a prison, the world, especially when the living gets involved, is not flat: in the folds of valleys, in the depths of mountains, where the eye cannot penetrate, men escape from central power.
From then on, power has no other solution than to seek to develop this territory, to penetrate it with roads, to plaster a two-dimensional map on space: “To govern men is to govern their environment.” It is through a network of transport infrastructures that power connects territories, communities, reduces local particularities, exploits resources, projects its force of control and combats autonomy. The modern State, from the canals of Sully to the smart grid of the energy transition, connects, fluidifies, homogenizes.
Like the blood of a great body
If the territorial network is already constitutive of theRoman Empirethe capacity for this had been largely lost during the Middle Ages, and for France it was necessary to wait until the end of the XVIIe century and the XVIIIe century so that the central power would once again be able to administratively control — and not just politically — territories and people. This is demonstrated, in a paroxysmal manner, by the great royal roads of the intendant of Languedoc Nicolas Lamoignon de Bâville (1648-1724), which would allow the “Great Burning of the Cévennes” — the destruction of 31 parishes and the deportation of 13,000 inhabitants — and to overcome the Camisards fighting for freedom of religious conscience during the War of the Cévennes (1702-1704).
However, if roads and communication routes are used for repression, they also have the function of economically integrating the territory, by allowing the circulation of people and products, as well as the exploitation of natural resources. It is to Quesnay (1694-1774), a doctor by training and the first of the physiocrats, that we owe the theorization of the circulation of goods, by analogy with the circulation of blood, between the production sectors of the kingdom. Quesnay, who sees agriculture as the primary source of all wealth, conceives prosperity as the result of the circulation of initial wealth and its transformation, in this body that is the kingdom. From then on, facilitating the circulation of blood – money, goods – is to increase prosperity. A good government will therefore ensure that the economy is more fluid.
The computation of the world
Quesnay’s theory, however, comes up against the apparently irreducible singularity of reality. Two craftsmen do not make two identical objects, two trees do not give the same beams, two populations do not have the same measurements.
It is therefore up to the engineer to liquefy reality, to establish equivalences and standards, to zone; in short, to allow through the computation of the world to quantify, evaluate, flatten, connect, circulate, and finally govern the world. From then on, men and territory no longer exist by virtue of a local singularity, nor according to their own symbolic and emotional dimensions, but by virtue of their inscription in a network of exchange of standardized signs: signs of money, energy, tons of CO2etc.
The energy transition, renewable energies, smart grids Would they constitute the ultimate avatar of a body of engineers who, under the cover of ecological optimization, are implementing a project to control resources and populations? Negawatt, a group of engineers working on a renewable energy system, and Eon, a German multinational proposing to develop with theONF The Cévennes in the form of wood energy are, for the author, only the two arms of a soulless engineering ideology, destroying all singularity, and whose obsession is to “predict everything, calculate everything, that is to say reduce everything to the economy”.
Under their gaze, the forest no longer exists as such. There is only a reserve of biomass that must be managed to feed the network. As for the mountain, its value is relative to the number of wind turbines that can be installed there — and too bad if the waves emitted destroy local life.
Now the forest, especially in the mountains, was the refuge of populations pushed back or taken refuge to escape the central power. Under its shelter, counter-societies were maintained or developed. The forest is the place of another relationship to the world, a world whose borders are porous. No need to connect within what already constitutes a community of life, where beings can share a common identity. Not a virgin forest, but a forest inhabited in another relationship to the world, a sensitive relationship.
In the current context, this relationship to the world is not only deployed in the forest: it is the matrix of all the movements that refuse the disenchantment of the world and claim a sensitive approach. In urban struggles or against large useless projects, two visions of the world are now at war. On the one hand, calculation, numbers, networks, mobility, homogenization; on the other, sensitivity, form, place, rooting, singularity. We can therefore “be a forest” at Notre-Dame-des-Landes, at Broadback, in Borneo. To be a forest is to “become ungovernable”.
A very French approach
While having appreciated the intention and many parts of Jean-Baptiste Vidalou’s essay, and without recommending against reading it, I stumbled several times over the content and the form.
On the substance, first of all, the reduction of modernity to the figure of the engineer seems to me to be very marked by the French context, in which the corps of engineers has in fact provided administrators for the central power. Without denying the fact that the engineer and his organization of the factory could have served as a matrix for industrial societies, making him the first explanatory factor, or even the only one, leaves one perplexed. The double-entry bookkeeping that inspired Lavoisier is a creation of Italian bankers; the affirmation of the superiority of the mind over the body, a legacy of the Neoplatonists. As for the will to power, it already inhabited Louis XIV. XIVwith or without Vauban.
The author, an agrégé in philosophy, could have underlined the responsibility of philosophers and moralists in the emergence of the capitalist world, as Albert Hirschman (1915-2012) showed in Passions and Interests. Moreover, the same modernization is also occurring, or even before, in countries like the United Kingdom or the Netherlands, where engineers never had the administrative power they had in France. What can be said about the role of Italian Renaissance artists, who changed the relationship to space, while the frescoes of Lorenzetti (1290-1348) in Siena constitute a project for regional planning?
All things considered, it would be more accurate to say that in many countries engineers were the useful idiots in the systematic division of the world. In order to account for this movement, which is certainly deplorable, it is necessary to take into account other driving forces, both in the field of anthropological changes and the emergence of capital. Technology is certainly not neutral: it is part of a society, but it is not sufficient, on its own, to determine it.
A work plan
We would therefore have liked the author to also question the consumerism of our societies, the passion for speed, the will to power, the emergence of the financial system, etc. In a holistic perspective – to which the author should be sensitive – the engineer appears as a component, not as the generating fact. As for sending back to back Eon and the designers of Négawatt (the latter having always put forward sobriety and energy efficiency before the use of renewable energies), it is a truly damaging simplification. “Being a forest” also means knowing how to differentiate between a multinational that sells electricity to satisfy its shareholders, and committed people who are trying to find the least bad solution to the ongoing ecological disaster.
In terms of form, Jean-Baptiste Vidalou has chosen to combine chapters of testimony, historical and philosophical analysis and, finally, philosophical dissertation around the metaphor of the forest. This combination of approaches is sometimes disconcerting, but it is a mark of the author, thus diversifying the points of view.
Being forest appears therefore as a draft, a work plan that deserves to be matured. Let us hope that it will develop not in the form of the straight trunk of a spruce destined to end up as wood pellets, but in that of the great Sherwood oak, dear to all rebels, with its powerful structural branches – an essay in social science, a manifesto of rebel forests, a novel, a collection of poems, with roots in struggles, but also in fertile alternative communities.