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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021
After the harrowing experience of the pandemic and lockdown, both states and individuals have been searching for ways to exit the crisis, many hoping to return as soon as possible to 'the world as it was before the pandemic'. But there is another way to learn the lessons of this ordeal: as inhabitants of the earth, we may not be able to exit lockdown so easily after all, since the global health crisis is embedded in another larger and more serious crisis - that brought about by the New Climate Regime. Learning to live in lockdown might be an opportunity to be seized: a dress-rehearsal for the climate mutation, an opportunity to understand at last where we - inhabitants of the earth - live, what kind of place 'earth' is and how we will be able to orient ourselves and exist in this world in the years to come. We might finally be able to explore the land in which we live, together with all other living beings, begin to understand the true nature of the climate mutation we are living through and discover what kind of freedom is possible - a freedom differently situated and differently understood. In this sequel to his bestselling book Down to Earth, Bruno Latour provides a compass for this necessary re-orientation of our lives, outlining the metaphysics of confinement and deconfinement with which we will all be obliged to come to terms by the strange times in which we are living.
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CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Endorsement
1 One way of becoming a termite
2 Locked-down in a space that’s still pretty vast
3 ‘Earth’ is a proper noun
4 ‘Earth’ is feminine – ‘Universe’ is masculine
5 A whole cascade of engendering troubles
6 ‘Here below’ – except there is no up above
7 Letting the economy bob to the surface
8 Describing a territory – only, the right way round
9 The unfreezing of the landscape
10 Mortal bodies are piling up
11 The return of ethnogeneses
12 Some pretty strange battles
13 Scattering in all directions
14 A little further reading
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End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Endorsement
Begin Reading
End User License Agreement
List of Illustrations
Chapter 9
Figures 1a and 1b
La Mégisserie, Saint-Junien, 1 February 2020. Launch of the ‘Où attérir ?’ ateli…
Figure 2
Drawing by Alexandra Arènes
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After Lockdown
A Metamorphosis
Bruno Latour
Translated by Julie Rose
polity
Originally published in French as Où suis-je ? Leçons du confinement à l’usage des terrestres © Editions La Découverte, Paris, 2021
This English edition © Polity Press, 2021
Cet ouvrage a bénéficié du soutien du Programme d’aide à la publication de l’Institut français / This book is supported by the Institut français.
Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press101 Station LandingSuite 300Medford, MA 02155, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-5003-6
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2021939921
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com
Dedication
For Lilo, son of Sarah and Robinson
Hast thou perceived the breadth of the earth? declare if thou knowest it all.
Job 38:18
1One way of becoming a termite
There are many ways to begin. For instance, like a hero in a novel who wakes up after fainting and, rubbing his eyes, looking haggard, murmurs, ‘Where am I?’ It’s not easy, in fact, to tell where he is, especially now, after such a long lockdown, when he emerges into the street, face masked, to meet only the fleeting gaze of the few passersby.
The thing that especially disheartens him, no, alarms him, is that recently he has taken to gazing at the moon – it’s been full since last night – as if it were the only thing he could still contemplate without feeling uneasy. The sun? Impossible to be glad of its heat without immediately thinking of global warming. The trees swaying in the wind? He’s eaten up with the fear of seeing them dry out or go under the saw. Even with the water falling from the clouds, he has the unpleasant feeling he’s somehow responsible for seeing that it arrives: ‘You know very well it’ll soon be in short supply everywhere!’ Delight in contemplating a landscape? Don’t even think about it – here we are, responsible for every kind of pollution affecting it, so if you [vous] can still marvel at golden wheatfields, that’s because you’ve forgotten that all the poppies have disappeared thanks to the European Union’s agricultural policies; where the Impressionists once painted swarms of beauties, all you can see now is the impact of the EU decisions that have turned the countrysides into deserts … No, really, he can only ease his anxieties by resting his eyes on the moon: for its circling, for its phases, at least, he in no way feels responsible; it’s the last spectacle he has left. If its brightness moves you [tu] so much, that’s because, well, you know you’re innocent of its movement. As you once were when you looked at the fields, lakes, trees, rivers and mountains, the scenery, without giving a thought to the effect your every move might have, however slight. Before. Not that long ago.
When I wake up, I start to feel the torments suffered by the hero of Kafka’s novella, Metamorphosis, who, while he’s sleeping, turns into a black beetle, a crab or a cockroach. The next morning, he finds himself terrifyingly unable to get up to go to work like he used to do before; he hides under his bed; he hears his sister, his parents, his boss’s lackey knocking on his bedroom door, which he’s carefully locked shut; he can’t get up anymore; his back is as hard as steel; he has to relearn how to control his legs and his claws, which are waving about in all directions; he gradually realises that no one can understand what he’s saying anymore; his body has changed size; he feels himself turning into a ‘monstrous insect’.
It’s as if I, too, had undergone an actual metamorphosis in January 2020. I still remember how, before, I could move around innocently taking my body with me. Now I feel like I have to make an effort and haul along at my back a long trail of CO2 that won’t let me buy a plane ticket and take off, and that now hampers my every movement, to the point where I hardly dare tap at my keyboard for fear of causing ice to melt somewhere far away. But it’s been worse since January because, on top of that, I now project in front of me – they tell me non-stop – a cloud of aerosols whose fine droplets can spread tiny viruses in the lungs capable of killing my neighbours, who would suffocate in their beds, overrunning the hospital services. In front as behind, there’s a sort of carapace of consequences, every day more appalling, that I have to learn to drag around. If I force myself to keep the regulatory safe distances, breathing with difficulty through this surgical mask, I don’t manage to crawl very far because as soon as I try to fill my trolly, the uneasiness intensifies: this cup of coffee is ruining a patch of the tropics; that tee-shirt is sending a child into poverty in Bangladesh; from the rare steak I was eating with relish emanate puffs of methane that are further accelerating the climate crisis. And so I groan, I tie myself in knots, terrified by this metamorphosis – will I finally wake from this nightmare, go back to what I was before: free, whole, mobile? An old-fashioned human being, in short! Locked-down, sure, but only for a few weeks; not for ever, that would be too horrible. Who wants to end up like Gregor Samsa, wasted away in a cupboard, to his parents’ great relief?
And yet a metamorphosis there has certainly been, and it seems that we’re not about to turn back by waking up out of this nightmare. Once locked-down, always locked-down. The ‘monstrous insect’ has to learn to move around lop-sided, to grapple with his neighbours, with his parents (maybe the Samsa family, too, will start mutating?), all hampered by their antennae, their vapour trails, their virus and gas exhausts, all jangling with their protheses, a hideous noise of steel fins banging together. ‘Where the hell am I?’: elsewhere, in another time, someone else, a member of another human population. How to get used to it? By groping around, feeling our way, as always – what else can we do?
Kafka hit the nail on the head: becoming a bug offers a pretty good starting point for me to learn to get my bearings and to now take stock. Insects everywhere are endangered, but ants and termites are still around. To see where it takes us, why wouldn’t I start with their lines of flight?
The thing that is indeed nice and practical about mushroom-cultivating termites and the way they live in symbiosis with specialised fungi able to digest wood – the famous Termitomyces which turns the digested wood into a nutritional compost that the termites then eat – is that they build vast nests of chewed earth, inside which they maintain a sort of air-conditioning system. A clay Prague where every bit of food passes into the digestive tube of every termite in the space of a few days. The termite is confined, it’s really a model of confinement, there’s no case for saying: it never goes out! Except that it is the one who constructs the termite mound, drooling clump after clump. As a result, it can go anywhere, but only by extending its termite mound a bit further. The termite wraps itself in its mound, it rolls itself up in what is both its interior environment and its own way of having an exterior – its extended body, in a fashion; scientists would call it a second ‘exoskeleton’, on top of the first one, its carapace, its segments, and its articulated legs.
The adjective ‘Kafkaesque’ has a different meaning if I apply it to a lone termite, isolated without food in a prison-like world of dry brown clay, or if it instead refers to a Gregor Samsa, who is ultimately pretty pleased to have digested his mud home thanks to the wood snaffled up by his hundreds of millions of relatives and compatriots who’ve produced food that forms a continuous floodtide from which he has taken a few molecules in passing. This would amount to a new metamorphosis of the celebrated narrative in Metamorphosis – after many others. But then no one would find him monstrous anymore; no one would try and crush him as a cockroach in the manner of Daddy Samsa. Perhaps I should endow him with other feelings, exclaiming, as they did with Sisyphus, though for quite different reasons: ‘We need to imagine Gregor Samsa happy …’
This becoming-an-insect, this becoming-a-termite could allay the terror of a person who now, to reassure himself, has only the moon to contemplate since the moon is the only close thing that’s outside his worries. Since, well, if you [tu] feel such uneasiness looking at trees, the wind, rain, drought, sea, rivers – and, of course, butterflies and bees – because you feel responsible, yes, at bottom, guilty for not fighting the people who are destroying them; because you have insinuated yourself into their existence, you have crossed their paths; well, it’s true: you [tu] too, tu quoque (you likewise); you digested them, modified them, transformed them; you turned them into your interior environment, your termitarium, your town, your Prague of stone and cement. But why then would you feel ill at ease? Nothing is alien to you anymore; you’re no longer alone; you quietly digest a few molecules of whatever reaches your intestines, after having passed through the metabolism of hundreds of millions of relatives, allies, compatriots and competitors. You’re not in your old room now, Gregor, but you can go anywhere, so why would you continue to hide away in shame? You fled; now take the lead; show us!
With your antennae, your articulations, your emanations, your waste matter, your mandibles, your prostheses, you may at last be becoming a human being! And it’s your parents, on the contrary, the people knocking on your door, anxious, horrified, and even your dear sister Grete, who have become inhuman, by rejecting becoming an insect themselves? They are the ones who ought to feel bad, not you. They are the ones who’ve metamorphosed, the ones the climate crisis and the pandemic have transformed into so many ‘monsters’? We’ve read Kafka’s novella the wrong way round. Put back on his six hairy legs, Gregor would at last walk straight and could teach us how to extricate ourselves from lockdown.
Since we’ve been talking, the moon has gone down; it is beyond your [tes] woes; alien but in a different way from before. You don’t look convinced? The uneasiness is still there? That’s because I reassured you a little too glibly. You feel even worse? You hate this metamorphosis? You want to go back to being an old-fashioned human being? You’re right. Even if we became insects, we would still be bad insects, incapable of moving very far, shut away in our locked room.
It’s this ‘return to earth’ business that’s got my head in a spin. It’s not fair to push us to come back down to earth if they don’t tell us where to land so we don’t crash, or what will happen to us, who we’ll feel affiliated with or not. I was a bit too quick off the mark. That’s the problem with starting with a crash site, I can no longer position myself with the aid of a GPS; I can no longer overfly anything. But this is also my chance: it’s enough to start where one is, ground zero, and then try to follow the first track that crops up in the bush, and see where it takes us. No point hurrying, there’s still a bit of time left to find a place to nest. Of course, I’ve lost my nice stentor’s voice, the one that used to hold forth from on high addressing the whole human race, off-stage; like Gregor’s to his parents’ ears, my diction is in danger of sounding like mumbling, that’s the whole problem with this becoming-animal. But what counts is to make heard the voices of those groping their way forward into the moonless night, hailing one another. Other compatriots may well manage to regroup around those calls.
2Locked-down in a space that’s still pretty vast
‘Where am I?’ sighs the person who wakes up to find they’re an insect. In a city probably, like half my contemporaries. Consequently I find myself inside a sort of extended termite mound: an installation of outer walls, pathways, air-conditioning systems, food flows, cable networks, whose ramifications run beneath rural areas, for a very long way. The same way that termites’ conduits help them get into the sturdiest beams of a house made of wood even over great distances. In the city, in a sense, I’m always ‘at home’ – at least for a minuscule stretch: I repainted that wall, I brought this table back from abroad, I accidentally flooded my neighbour’s apartment, I paid the rent. Those are a few tiny traces added forever to the framework of Lutetian limestone, to the marks, wrinkles and riches of this place. If I consider the framework, for every stone I find an urbanite who made it; if I start with the urbanites, I’ll find a trace of every one of their actions in the stone they’ve left behind – that big stain on the wall, still here twenty years later, is my doing, and so is this graffiti. What others take for a cold and anonymous framework, for me in any case virtually amounts to an artwork.
What goes for the city goes for the termite mound: habitat and inhabitants are in continuity; to define the one is to define the others; the city is the exoskeleton of its inhabitants, just as the inhabitants leave behind a habitat in their wake, when they go off or waste away, for instance when they’re buried in the cemetery. A city-dweller lives in his city the way a hermit crab lives in its shell. ‘So where am I?’ In, and through and partly thanks to my shell. The proof of this is that I can’t even take my provisions up to my place without using the lift that allows me to do so. An urbanite, then, is an insect ‘with a lift’ the way we say a spider is ‘with a web’? The owners still have to have maintained the machinery. Behind the tenant, there is a prothesis; behind the prothesis, more owners and service agents. And so on. The inanimate framework and those who animate it – it’s all one. A completely naked urbanite doesn’t exist anymore than a termite outside its termite mound, a spider without its web or a forester whose forest has been destroyed. A termite mound without a termite is a heap of mud, like the ritzy quartiers, during the lockdown, when we’d idly amble past all these sumptuous buildings without any inhabitants to enliven them.
If for an urbanite, then, the city is not exactly alien to his ways of being, can I actually go a bit further before I encounter something that really is outside? This summer in the Vercors region, at the foot of the Grand Veymont mountain, a geologist friend showed us how the entire top of this spectacular cliff was a graveyard of corals, another gigantic conurbation, long deserted by its inhabitants, whose remains, heaped, compressed, buried, then lifted up, eroded and suspended, had engendered this beautiful Urgonian chalk whose white stone with its fine crystals sparkled under his magnifying glass. He called these calcareous sediments ‘bioclastic’, which means ‘made of all the debris of living things’. So there is no break, then, no discontinuity, when I go from the oh-so-bioclastic urban termite mound to this valley in the Vercors that a glacier once carved out of a cemetery of countless living things? As a result, I feel a bit less alienated; I can go on crawling along like a crab further and further. My door is no longer locked shut.
Especially as, climbing up towards the Grand Veymont, I’m reminded by the giant anthills punctuating our walk every hundred metres that they, too, lead the life of busy urbanites. Gregor must feel less alone, since his segmental body has been resonating with his stone Prague whose every aggregate of cristals preserves an echo of an ocean of shells clinking together. Enough to leave his family laid out on the tiles, imprisoned at home, in their poor human bodies delineated the old-fashioned way like figures made of wire.
When he was in his room, Gregor suffered from being a stranger among his nearest and dearest; a wall and bolts were enough to lock him securely in. Once he’s an insect, he’s suddenly able to walk through walls. From now on he sees his room, his house, as balls of clay, stone and rubble that he has partly digested then regurgitated and that no longer limit his movements. Now he can go out at leisure without being mocked. The city of Prague, its bridges, its churches, its palaces? – so many clumps of earth that are a bit bigger, a bit older, too, more sedimented, all of them artificial, manufactured things emanating from the mandibles of his innumerable compatriots. The thing that may well make becoming an insect bearable to me is that, going from the city to the country, I find myself faced with other termite mounds, mountains of limestone, every bit as artificial, bigger, older, even more sedimented by the long shrewd labour and engineering of innumerable animalcules. The confined deconfines himself perfectly well. He begins to rediscover enormous freedom of movement.
Let’s follow this fine conduit, let’s prolong this minuscule intuition, let’s doggedly obey this bizarre injunction: if I can go from the termite mound to the city, then from the city to the mountain, is it possible to go to the very place in which I once had a hunch that all a mountain did was ‘be located somewhere’?
For an ant, the work of the anthill forms a bubble around it while maintaining its temperature and purifying its air; and the same goes for Véronica, who heaves as she breathes, on the strenuous climb towards the Grand Veymont. The oxygen she inhales doesn’t come from her, as if she had to lug on her back the heavy bottles the men who conquered Annapurna had to carry. Others, innumerable and hidden, invite her free of charge – for the moment – to fill her lungs with the stuff. As for the ozone layer that protects her from the sun – again, for the moment – it forms a dome above her that emerges from the labour of agents just as invisible, just as innumerable, and even older: two and a half billion years of bacteria in action. So, the puffs of CO2 she releases in breathing don’t make her an alien, a ‘monstrous insect’, but a breather among billions of breathers that some take advantage of to form the wood of the forest of beeches in whose shade she gets her breath back. Which makes this walker a pedestrian in an immense metropolis that she covered on foot one fine afternoon. Outside, here in the middle of nowhere, she is housed inside a conurbation that she can never leave without promptly dying of suffocation.
What a shock it is for Gregor to realise that manufacture, engineering, the freedom to invent, no, the obligation to invent, can also be found in what he took to be the air he breathed, the atmosphere, the blue sky, in the days when he was just a human reduced to a wire figure like his unworthy parents. For there to be a dome over his head, for him not to choke when he goes out – but that’s just it, he doesn’t really ‘go out’ anymore – what’s needed are still more workers, still more animalcules, still more subtle arrangements, still more scattered efforts to hold the tent of the sky in place; one more long, immensely long, history of manufactures, just for there to be an edge
