After Lockdown. Bruno Latour

After Lockdown - Bruno  Latour


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our laboratories, our telescopes or our institutions, without ever leaving these. Unless through imagination – or better still, through illustrated knowledge, via scientific inscriptions. As stirring as the view of our planet seen from Saturn is, it was inside a NASA office, in 2013, that the image was pieced together, one pixel at a time: to celebrate its objectivity, forgetting about the connections that let the earth be seen from a distance, is to misunderstand the object as well as the aptitudes of subjects to know with any certainty.

      For the moment, the thing that’s making life impossible for us is this generational conflict so perfectly described in the tale of Gregor Samsa. In a way, since lockdown, every one of us has been living through it in our own families.

      The two generations, the one from before and the one from after the general lockdown, don’t localise themselves the same way. To say that Gregor ‘doesn’t get along very well with his parents’ is a euphemism: their ways of measuring things and his are well and truly incommensurable. They don’t just lead to different quantities; their ways of registering distances simply have nothing to do with each other. It’s not all that surprising that in the twentieth century, focused on issues to do with ‘human relations’, people saw Kafka’s novella as a perfect illustration of ‘communication breakdowns’. But they might have been wrong about the distance between Gregor’s way of sizing himself up and his parents’. There is something literally crushing in the way the latter get their bearings in the world – that is, starting with a map.

      If we follow Gregor’s movement, we see that we distribute values in an entirely different way. We literally no longer live in the same world. They, the people from before lockdown, begin with their teeny little self; they add on a material framework which they say is ‘artificial’ or even ‘inhuman’ – Prague, factories, machines, ‘modern life’; and then, thirdly, a bit further down the track, they pack in a whole jumble of inert things that stretch to infinity and which they don’t really know what to do with anymore.

      But we distribute our belongings altogether differently. We’re beginning to realise that we don’t have, that we’ll never have, that no one has ever had the experience of encountering ‘inert things’. That experience, supposedly common for previous generations, is something our generation, in a very short time, has gone through the ordeal of no longer sharing: everything we encounter, the mountains, the minerals, the air we breathe, the river we bathe in, the powdery humus in which we plant our lettuces, the viruses we seek to tame, the forest where we go looking for mushrooms, everything, even the blue sky, is the result,


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