After Lockdown. Bruno Latour
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resemblance.
On Earth, nothing is exactly ‘natural’ if we take that term to mean that which has not been touched by any living being: everything is raised, put together, imagined, maintained, invented, intricately linked by agencies which, in a way, know what they want, or in any case aim at a goal that is exclusively their own, each agency for itself. There may well be ‘inert things’, forms that unravel without a goal or a will. But to find them, we’d need to go to the other side, up above towards the moon, down below towards the centre of the globe, beyond the limes, in this Universe that we can know but of which we will never be able to have personal experience. We know the Universe all the better, anyway, since it’s made up of things that gradually collapse according to laws external to them, making their collapse calculable to the tenth decimal. Whereas we always have a bit of trouble calculating the agents that raise and maintain Earth, since they persist, without obeying any law alien to them, in going back up the slope that others only ever go down. As they always go against the cascade of entropy, with these agents you’re always in for a surprise. ‘Infralunar’ and ‘supra-lunar’ weren’t such bad terms, in the end, for spotting the trace left by this great split.
It would be easy to say that your [tes] parents’ generation sees death everywhere and that the following generation sees ‘life’ everywhere; but the latter term doesn’t have the same meaning for both camps. Those who consider themselves the only beings endowed with consciousness in the middle of inert things, only count as living beings themselves, their cats, their dogs, their geraniums and maybe the park where they go to have a stroll, once Gregor has been thrown out with the rubbish, at the end of the novella. Well, ‘living’, for you [toi] who have undergone metamorphosis, doesn’t just describe termites, but also the termite mound, in the sense that, without termites, this whole heap of mud would not thus be laid-out and built up like a mountain in the middle of a landscape (but the same goes for said mountain and said landscape …). Not to mention that, vice versa, termites couldn’t live for a moment outside the termite mound, which is to their survival what the city is to city-dwellers.
I need a term that says that, on Earth, ‘everything is made of life’, if you understand by that the rigid body of the termite mound every bit as much as the agitated body of a termite, Charles Bridge every bit as much as the crowds swarming onto Charles Bridge, the fox fur every bit as much as the fox, the dam the beaver builds every bit as much as the beaver, the oxygen bacteria and plants give off every bit as much as the bacteria and plants themselves. Bioclastic? Biogenic? In any case artificial in the somewhat unusual sense that freedom and invention are always involved – hence the surprises at every turn. Not to mention the sedimentation that means that the termite mound, Charles Bridge, the fur, the dam and the oxygen hang on a bit longer than those from which they emanate – provided that other agencies, termites, builders, foxes, beavers or bacteria maintain their momentum. Unlike the generation that precedes us with their odd habits, we terrestrials have learned to use the adjective ‘living’ to refer to both lists, the one that starts with termite, and the one that starts with termite mound, without ever separating them. Which is something other peoples never forgot.
We can see how ‘generational conflict’ offers a bit more than a modern testimony to the incommunicability of human beings. I’m tempted to go further and say that it’s really a conflict between geneses and, quite frankly, between engenderings. Because in the end it’s not for nothing that terrestrials find a ‘family resemblance’ in everyone they meet. That is because they all have, or they all had in the past, what we might call engendering concerns. Those are after all, and movingly so, Gregor’s immediate anxieties once he’s become a bug: the thing that most upsets him is not seeing how he can meet the needs of his family!
I’ve just realised that the same thing goes for the ferns, spruces, beeches and lichens that try to withstand the harsh winters of the Vercors. But it was the same for the coral reefs that have since turned into this lovely Urgonian limestone that is the beautiful thing about the Grand Veymont, whose steep rock face dominates the celebrated Mont Aiguille. They all have to deal with issues of subsistence in the very simple sense that they must learn to stay alive. So I can understand how the engineers of the city of Prague are also keen to maintain Charles Bridge, jewel of the city, through regular inspections and numerous facelifts; how it is indeed the same kind of concerns that lead Baptiste Morizot to bring together wolves, sheep, dairy farmers, hunters and organic farmers around the ASPAS nature reserve in the Vercors; how it is indeed also through subtle inventions that the famous virus to whom we owe lockdown keeps on recombining so as to last a bit longer and spread further from mouth to mouth. What we can say of Earth is that it is the connection, association, overlapping, combination of all those who have subsistence and engendering concerns. An issue the Samsa family obviously simplified somewhat when Grete had the cruelty to ask: ‘How do we get rid of it?’ – speaking of her dear insect-brother …
I see, then, that I could explore this generational conflict more if I agreed to follow much further and, above all, for a much longer time, the lists of those who have engendering concerns. It actually turns out that it’s in no way by chance that those agents always feel there’s a family resemblance between them. That’s because every existing being corresponds, step by step, to an invention, the specialists say a ‘branch’, that relates to a predecessor and to a successor; a small difference, that enables us to construct, again step by step, something like a genealogy, a family tree, often bushy, at times incomplete, that allows every one of us to go back, as they say, to their beginnings, just as a salmon goes back upriver, then upstream, then finally to the waterhole where it was born.
Urbanites have learnt to draw up their family trees; urbanists can tell you [vous], block by block, about the evolution – that’s the word sometimes used – of their city. When they’re in the country, a stone’s throw from Saint-Agnan, geologists can do the same with the history – another word often used – of the sediments of the Vercors. And if you’re lucky enough to walk around there with a botanist, he’ll do the same for the sociology of the mountain plants that make the ‘Strict Nature Reserve’ at the foot of the Grand Veymont heavy with scent; and if Anne-Christine Taylor comes and joins you, she’ll tell you instead about the cross-geneses of the wonderful Achuar gardens. The story will be more disturbing, more ancient, still more bushy, if you add a bacteriologist who reads Lynn Margulis to the walk, as he will take you to where the protists are and the archaea and introduce you to the feats of their combinations. But if you lose the thread of the story, you can always go back to more recent times with a visit to the excellent Musée de la Préhistoire (just below the Musée de la Résistance), in Vassieux-en-Vercors. This will allow you to follow other threads that connect the story of the silexes, pollens and silex cutters whose magnificent blades were exported to all of prehistoric Europe. You’ll be amazed at each stage of these geneses, but you’ll never lose sight of the fact that it’s about solving problems that are, after all, familiar to you. Locked-down, yes, but at home …
Little by little, we see that the word ‘Earth’ doesn’t refer to one planet among others according to the old positioning system, as if it were a name common to numerous celestial bodies. It’s a proper noun that gathers together all existing beings. But that’s just it: they are never gathered together into a whole – they have a family resemblance because they have a common origin and have spread, spilled over, mixed, overlapped, just about everywhere, transforming everything from top to bottom, incessantly repairing their initial conditions with their successive inventions. It turns out that every terrestrial recognises in his predecessors those who have created the conditions of liveability that he benefits from – Prague for the Samsa family, the anthill for the ant, the forest for the trees, the sea for the algae, their gardens for the Achuar – and that he expects to have to look after his successors. ‘Just about everywhere’ means as far as terrestrials have been able to extend and share their unique experience – but no further.
‘Earth’, then, is the term that comprises the agents – what biologists call ‘living organisms’ – as well as the effect of their actions, their niche if you like, all the traces they leave in passing, the external