Latour’s Où suis-je?: Summary of Chapter 2

My previous post began my chapter-by-chapter exploration of Latour’s wonderful new book, Où suis-je? Leçons du confinement à l’usage des terrestres.

In the second chapter, entitled ‘Confinés en un lieu quand même assez vaste’, Latour shows how the model described in that first chapter, the self-regulating construction of a habitable space, applies to different scales of “outside”: a city, a mountain, the social world, and finally to the Critical Zone of the Earth itself.

The city

To live in a city is to occupy a networked space whose “channels” spread out deep around us. Whether we conceive of these channels figuratively, or as some more material network (like the London Underground tube system), it remains the case that the spread of the city is like a termitary: “la ville est l’exosquelette de ses habitants, comme les habitants laissent derrière eux un habitat dans leurs sillages” (18).

In this description, Latour is drawing heavily on his magnificent earlier book: Paris: Ville Invisible.

The city is almost an organic extension of our own activities. And if the human is removed from this space, which of course is precisely what happened for so many town centres during the pandemic, it no longer has the feel of a city. Thus, “la ville […] émane de ses habitants” (23).

The Vercors Massif

But can we move out of the city to find something that is truly external to us: “rencontrer quelque chose qui soit vraiment dehors” (19)?

Latour recollects the teaching of a geologist friend at le Grand Veymont, a mountain in the Vercors range that has an impressive Urgonian limestone cliff face.

Urgonian carbonate is a lithostratigraphic unit of rock in this area that was formed in the Early Cretaceous when high sea-levels permitted the deposition of carbonates rich in corals and rudists (reef-building organisms). These are called bioclasts: skeletal fossil fragments of once living marine or land organisms laid down in a marine environment, especially in limestone varieties around the globe. This rock therefore constitutes “une autre conurbation géante, depuis longtemps désertée par ses habitants” (19), engendered by “un long travail d’astuce et d’ingénierie d’animalcules innombrables” (20).

Interim conclusion: both environments (the urban landscape described above and this mountain face) are like termitaries: they have been constructed from within by their inhabitants.

Gregor’s labour

We deduce from the narrative of Kafka’s Metamorphosis that Gregor, whom Latour has already introduced in the first chapter above, must have been already alienated in significant ways … from his family, from his colleagues and especially from his mode of labour.

But what is amazing is that once he becomes metamorphosed, he discovers a new form of productive labour. He arranges the clothes and furniture in his room. He literally regurgitates food (which he uses as a sort of cement) in such a way as to mould the environment he inhabits to his personal taste.

Thus, although he remains confined to his room, he regains his freedom: “le confiné se déconfine à merveille. Il commence à retrouver une grande liberté de mouvement” (20).

The walker on the mountain

To ascend le Grand Veymont a pedestrian is likewise engaged in this sort of circulating labour, breathing oxygen offered by atmospheric processes and contributing in return a footstep of carbon dioxide. She is “la piétonne d’une metropole immense qu’elle a parcourue une belle apres-midi” (21) and “logée au-dedans d’une conurbation qu’elle ne pourrait jamais quitter sans aussitôt mourir asphyxiée” (21).

Agency processes

By broadening our horizon (from the city, to mountain, to individual human walker) we can begin to see that these processes are carried out by all sorts of actors. These might be “des travailleurs”, “des animalcules” or “des agencements subtils” (22). The point of unification is that they are all agents that have “la capacité à changer autour d’eux leurs conditions d’existence, à élaborer des niches, des spheres, des ambiances, des bulles d’air conditionné” (22).

Nature as constructed, not providential

We can better understand the condition of “nature” if we understand it as subtended by actors, rather than by (mute) organisms: “elle est surtout composée d’artifices et d’artificiers” (22).

This enables us to avoid the myth of providence that suggests the conditions for life were fine-tuned by “good fortune” (22), “une version si providentielle de l’accord entre les organismes et leur environnement, comes ils dissent” (23). This would be like congratulating the termite or the ant for the fine-tuned conditions of their termitary or ant-colony. What a nonsense!

On the contrary, were we to say that, these insects would surely reply that “c’est elle et les milliards de ses congéneres qui ont émis cet ‘environnement’ qui sort d’elles” (23). And this holds for all environments: “ce sont les vivants qui l’ont rendue favorable à leurs desseins” (23).

Islands

Latour cites the stories of his childhood (such as Jules Verne’s L’Île mystérieuse), where shipwrecked people would first mount to the highest point to ascertain where they were located and to gain their bearings. They are reassured when they realise that the edges of their environment can be spied from the centre.

Similarly, we too are disorientated at the moment, but there is comfort in knowing that the further edges of our environment are still accessible, that “nous devinons le bord depuis l’intérieur, par transparence en quelque sorte” (24). This is the definition of scientific knowledge (to use the language of the Inquiry, that is knowledge in the mode of REF), that is, we look outwards via numerous connections that link us to the “dehors” (23)

The inside and the outside

The inside (“le dedans”), then, is defined as the space that is subject to all these agency configurations, whether it happens to be near to us or far from us in space. This is the space of the Earth, “l’en deçà Terre” (26), and those who inhabit it are “les terrestres” (26): “c’est avec eux que je cherche à entrer en relation lançant mes appels” (26).

It is important to note that “terrestres” does not describe a “type” of thing (such as humans, viruses, animals), “mais seulement une manière de se localiser en déclinant la série d’ascendants et de descendants dont les soucis d’engendrement se croisent un instant” (44).

The only thing that would be outside this space would be that which is beyond the space of the Earth, which we might call the wider universe, “l’univers” (26). This links back to the opening chapter, where we had a guilty desire to look beyond the fragility of existence on Earth in order to sense the stability of the Moon. But although we may know a lot about the universe we do not have “l’expérience directe” (26) of it. That is reserved for the space of the Earth, the Critical Zone we occupy. It is to those who inhabit this space, “les terrestres”, that Latour will offer advice in the rest of this book.