After Lockdown. Bruno Latour

After Lockdown - Bruno  Latour


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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.

      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.

      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’?

      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, a vast canopy that’s a bit stable and for him to survive in it for a while. If I want to swiftly learn from Gregor, the bug, how to conduct myself, I have to accept that it’s through technical devices, factories, hangars, ports, laboratories that I’ll best be able to grasp the work of living organisms and their capacity to change the living conditions around them, to build nests, spheres, surroundings, bubbles of conditioned air. It’s through them that we can better understand the nature of ‘nature’. Nature is not first and foremost ‘green’, it is not first and foremost ‘organic’; it is above all composed of manufactures and manufacturers – provided we leave them the time.

      Of that outside – this is the most amazing thing – I long ago learned we never have a direct experience. Even the most daring cosmonaut won’t repeat her spectacular space walks unless she’s carefully squeezed into a tight ad hoc suit – a mini-sphere that connects her to Cape Kennedy as if by a solid cable anchored in the ground and which she can’t quit without promptly perishing. As for the numerous


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