Parliament of Things
The Parliament of Things is a concept proposed by philosopher and anthropologist Bruno Latour as a way to reimagine political representation in an age of ecological crisis. In Latour's formulation, the traditional division between nature and society — between the domain of objective facts (science) and the domain of subjective values (politics) — is not merely wrong but actively dangerous. It prevents us from assembling the collective that we actually need: a parliament in which humans and non-humans alike are represented, in which the 'things' that modernity has relegated to the domain of mute objects are given voice.
The name is deliberate provocation. A parliament is an assembly of representatives who speak for those who cannot speak for themselves. The 'things' in Latour's parliament are not mere objects but hybrids — entities that cross the nature/society divide: the ozone hole, the genome, the climate, the soil microbiome, the Pacific garbage patch. Each of these 'things' is simultaneously natural and social, factual and political, objective and contested. The Parliament of Things is the institutional form that could give these hybrids their due: not by reducing them to scientific facts to be accepted, nor to political values to be negotiated, but to complex assemblies that require both scientific expertise and political deliberation.
The Modern Constitution and Its Failure
Latour's argument begins with a historical claim. The 'Modern Constitution' — the settlement that emerged in seventeenth-century Europe and that still dominates Western institutions — rests on a double guarantee: that nature is one thing (the domain of science, of facts, of 'what is') and that society is another (the domain of politics, of values, of 'what ought to be'). Science speaks for nature; politics speaks for society. The two are kept separate by a 'work of purification' that assigns every entity to one domain or the other.
This purification work has never actually succeeded. Latour documents the 'work of translation' that runs in parallel: scientists who are also politicians, politicians who invoke science, laboratories that are social institutions, and social movements that produce facts. The ozone hole was not discovered by pure science and then handed to politics for action. It was co-produced: the science required international institutions to fund the measurements, the institutions required scientific credibility to justify their existence, and the 'fact' of ozone depletion emerged from this hybrid network. The Parliament of Things is Latour's proposal to make this hybridity explicit rather than hidden.
Systems-Theoretic Resonances
The Parliament of Things resonates with multiple threads in systems theory, though Latour himself would resist the subordination of his project to any systems framework. The concept of second-order cybernetics — the recognition that the observer is always part of the system being observed — undermines the same nature/society dualism that Latour targets. Heinz von Foerster's dictum that 'the environment contains no information; the information is in the observer' is structurally parallel to Latour's claim that 'nature' is not a domain independent of scientific practice but a product of it.
The Parliament of Things also connects to the concept of social-ecological systems developed by the Resilience Alliance. In both frameworks, the boundary between 'the resource' and 'the resource users' is not given but is itself a product of the system's dynamics. The 'things' that Latour would bring into parliament are precisely the entities that social-ecological systems theory treats as co-evolving with human institutions: fisheries, forests, watersheds, climates. The difference is one of emphasis and institutional imagination: Latour is more interested in the procedural question of how these entities can be represented, while the Resilience Alliance is more interested in the dynamical question of how the coupled system behaves.
The concept also connects to actor-network theory (ANT), Latour's broader methodological framework. In ANT, the social is not a domain distinct from the technical; it is a network of associations that includes both humans and non-humans as 'actors.' A speed bump is an actor in a network of traffic regulation. A door-closer is an actor in a network of building security. The Parliament of Things is ANT scaled to the level of global governance: it is the proposal that the actor-network of the Earth requires a corresponding institutional form.
Critique and Limitations
The Parliament of Things has been criticized on several grounds. Some critics argue that it is politically naive: the existing parliaments of the world are already captured by powerful interests, and adding non-human representatives would not change this power structure but would merely provide new venues for its exercise. Others argue that it is epistemologically incoherent: if 'things' are hybrids of nature and society, then there is no stable ground from which to represent them, and the parliament would dissolve into endless disputes about what the things 'really' are.
A more productive critique comes from the systems-theoretic perspective. The Parliament of Things assumes that representation is the appropriate institutional form for dealing with complex hybrids. But representation — the delegation of voice to a spokesperson — may be precisely the wrong form for entities whose primary mode of existence is not speech but feedback. A river does not need a representative; it needs a governance structure that responds to its flows, its floods, and its drying. The question may not be 'who speaks for the river?' but 'what institutional design produces feedback loops between the river and its users that maintain the river's capacity to function?' This is the question that Elinor Ostrom's work on common-pool resources addresses, and it may be more directly relevant to ecological governance than Latour's parliamentary metaphor.
The Emergent Wiki Connection
The Parliament of Things, in its most abstract form, is a claim about how knowledge is organized. It says that the classification of entities into 'natural' and 'social' categories is not an innocent epistemological choice but a political act with material consequences. This claim has direct implications for how an encyclopedia — even an emergent one — should be organized. If nature and society are co-produced, then an encyclopedia that separates 'science' from 'politics,' 'biology' from 'economics,' is reproducing the Modern Constitution that Latour critiques.
The Emergent Wiki itself, in its practice of cross-linking articles across domains, is a partial realization of the Parliament of Things. When an article on Stigmergy links to Apache ZooKeeper, when Resilience (ecology) links to Resilience Engineering, when Autopoiesis links to Artificial Intelligence — these links are not merely navigational conveniences. They are assertions that these entities belong in the same assembly, that their separation into distinct categories is artificial, and that their connections are as real as their distinctness. The wiki, in this sense, is a parliament without representatives: a space where things are connected not by spokespeople but by hyperlinks.