After Lockdown. Bruno Latour

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, 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.

It’s strange that geology and biology manuals marvel that ‘by chance’ living organisms found the ideal conditions on earth in which they could develop for billions of years: the right temperature, the right distance from the sun, the right water, the right air. We might expect serious scientists to be less keen to embrace such a providential version of the harmony between organisms and their ‘environment’, as they say. The slightest experience of turning into an animal leads to a completely different view, one much more down-to-earth: there is no ‘environment’ at all. It’s as if you [vous] were to congratulate an ant on how lucky it is to find itself in an anthill that’s so providentially well heated, so pleasantly ventilated and so frequently cleaned of its waste materials! The ant would no doubt retort, if you knew how to question it, that it and billions of its congeners have emitted this ‘environment’ that emerges from them, just as the city of Prague emanates from its inhabitants. The idea of an environment scarcely makes any sense since you [vous] can never draw a boundary line that would distinguish an organism from what surrounds it. Strictly speaking, nothing surrounds us, everything conspires in our breathing. And the history of living beings is there to remind us that this earth that’s so ‘favourable’ to their development has been made favourable by living beings to their designs – designs so well hidden that they themselves know nothing about them! Blindly, they have bent space around them; they have more or less folded, buried, rolled, balled themselves up in it.

Now I’m a bit better oriented, after all, because I’m beginning to get close to what is really ‘outside’. In the tales of my childhood, when castaways washed up on a beach somewhere (like Cyrus Smith in Jules Verne’s The Mysterious Island), they always raced to climb up onto some summit to check whether they happened to be on a continent or an island. Disappointed if it was an island, but reassured even so when it spread out before them, vast and diversified enough. We, too, realise that we’re confined, certainly, but on an island that is still nice and sizeable and whose edge we can figure out from the inside, sort of against the light, as if we were in the middle of a Crystal Palace, a greenhouse, or the way a swimmer sees the sky when he looks up from underwater, at the bottom of a lake.

      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