After Lockdown. Bruno Latour

1 One 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

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