How will we emerge from this Covid nightmare? What will we wake up to or, perhaps more to the point, wake up as after lockdown? Latour has an idea or rather a hope: we will wake up as ‘terrestrials’, with a different awareness of (and appreciation for) the space in which we have always been locked down, the space called Earth, or, as he prefers to say, Gaia. Two or three kilometres above the ground, and two or three kilometres below it, is where the Earth stops and the Universe begins. This is where we are truly confined: ‘the biofilm’. Travel any further and we have to take the earth, and the things we have manufactured from it, with us: oxygen, food, aeronautical suits, big metal canisters to ride in, and any number of other prostheses. Our habitat does not extend infinitely. Not even the astronauts, tied to their life-sustaining goddess mother as if by a great umbilical cord, ever truly leave the Earth. Perhaps, Latour urges, it’s time we learnt how to live here. But how?

The surprising hero of After Lockdown is Gregor Samsa, the tormented protagonist of Kafka’s novella Metamorphosis (1915), who rises one morning to find himself transformed into a cockroach. For Samsa, it’s a nightmare without end, for Latour an awakening into (another) life. Could it be, he asks, that we have read Kafka the wrong way? Inspired by the possibility of a ‘happy Samsa’, liberated rather than devastated by his metamorphosis, Latour invites us to see our recent experience of living like insects, of being confined to the nest and making only occasional forays out for food, as the unintended gift of a virus that wants only what every living thing wants: to live on, to keep ‘engendering’ itself. Thanks to its persistence, we too have an opportunity to wake into another life, cognisant finally of the interdependence between us and other living things. But it won’t be easy. Like Samsa, we have to undergo a metamorphosis, beginning with our understanding of the terrestrial home where we are, and always will be, in permanent lockdown.

And here we are in for another surprise. ‘On earth,’ writes Latour, ‘nothing is natural’, everything is constructed. That which we perceive to be ‘organic’ and are in the habit of calling ‘nature’ is in fact composed of manufactures and manufacturers who have been toiling away forever. All living things, he tells us, are builders, and builders, what’s more, who are ultimately inseparable from the buildings they create to house and sustain themselves. Latour delights in the example of termites who work in tandem with a symbiotic fungus to build vast nests of chewed earth, their own air-conditioned ‘clay Prague’, which expands as they eat. But the termite is not unique. For Latour, it makes no more sense to divide the city from the city-dweller than it does to divide the termite mound from the termite. Both are really just ‘exoskeletons’, no less organic than the living things that made them.

Time, then, in the ‘becoming-termite’ moment of Covid, to stop thinking that a great gulf exists between the organic and the inorganic. Rock formations, coral reefs, rainforests, termite mounds, and cities – all of them alike, insists Latour, are ‘bioclastic’, formed by living things out of the debris of other living things as they go about the activity of engendering themselves. This is what we need to understand about the Earth: it is composed of nothing more or less than living organisms – what Latour likes to call ‘agents’ – the effects of their actions, and the traces they leave behind. Ultimately, we humans (no, ‘terrestrials’!) are just actors in a vast network of actors surrounded, quite literally, by ‘Life’.

Written, Latour tells us, in the style of a ‘philosophical fable’, After Lockdown moves so effortlessly between philosophy, science, politics, literature, and biography that it is hard not to be enchanted, even seduced, by it. I can scarcely remember the last work of non-fiction (but is it really that?) I enjoyed as much as this one. Even the Brothers Grimm would be in awe. But the stylistic delights of the text scarcely alleviate the need to ask questions about the significance of Latour’s enticing vision of the Earth as a vast, interlocking system of ‘engendering life’. Exactly what bearing does it have on the climate emergency foreshadowed in the opening pages?

There are moments in After Lockdown when one could be forgiven for thinking that Latour is simply reiterating the thesis of the ‘grand economy of nature’, whose origins can be traced back to the author of another famous story about Metamorphoses. In Ovid’s epic poem, first published in the eighth century, one already finds the Earth figured in its totality as ‘Life’:

All things are always changing,
But nothing dies. The spirit comes and goes,
Is housed wherever it wills, shifts residence
From beasts to men, from men to beasts, but always
It keeps on living

                                                                (trans. Frank Justus Miller)

In Ovid’s grand economy, there is at once perpetual flux and eternal constancy. Though individual life forms come and go, there is no overall decline in spirit or energy – only endless mutation, metamorphosis.

Latour’s philosophical fable resembles Ovid’s epic poem in its ‘monist’ assertion that there is ultimately nothing on Earth except Life. However, there is a crucial difference. Unlike Ovid, Latour does not endorse the idea, implicit in the vision of the grand economy, that the timeless Earth will do just fine come what may. His claim is rather that the Earth is very much a product of time and that now, more than ever, time is of the essence. As he is at pains to underscore, this remarkable planet of ours is not a gift of providence that just so happens to be perfectly suited to life; it is rather the end result of countless manufacturers working over countless millennia, all of whom have made (and continue to make) critical contributions to the Earth’s liveability. Like the termites, these manufacturers are unstoppable, always at work. But nothing, not even a termite mound, is built in a day. If a climate emergency is upon us, Latour suggests, it is not because the ‘manufacturers’ have downed tools, but because we are no longer giving them enough time to do their jobs.

Terrestrials (and this is one of the things that differentiates them from ‘old-fashioned humans’) understand that it is in the nature of living things to impact other living things. Concerned only with engendering itself, each manufacturer has the potential to interrupt the manufacturing efforts of others near and far, forcing them to make adjustments on the run. This, Latour suggests, is just how life works (and why it is so difficult to replicate its processes in a lab). But, as the accelerating rate of species extinction shows, there are limits to these processes of adjustment. The problem with the manufacturers known as the human species is that they build at breakneck speed, while their many counterparts on Earth can only go so fast. Ever accelerating in our work, we are constantly disturbing them in theirs, jeopardising the contribution they make to the liveability of the planet – the only one where we can survive.

Warnings that we might, in fact, be accelerating towards the extinction of our own life have been coming thick and fast in recent years, but nothing looked like stopping us until that ironic twist of 2019. Evidently as unconcerned as we have been with anything but its own manufactures, Covid gave us a taste of our own medicine. Now, it is we humans who have been interrupted, dramatically slowed in our building processes, while other species have been given a small window of time in which to go about their work undisturbed. They have adjusted: how will we?

Our first inclination in this moment of crisis has been to do to Covid what Daddy Samsa wanted to do to Gregor: ‘squash it’. After the many deprivations of lockdown, the desire to bring an end to our insect-like existence and return to normal is, of course, understandable. But perhaps, for once, we shouldn’t be in such a hurry. How ‘normal’ was the old normal anyway? Latour invites us to consider whether we might not, really ought not, simply ‘spring back’ once we have made our own adjustments in the form of vaccinations. Ironically enough, he suggests, the lockdown moment of Covid has done much to free us from our economic cage of growth and productivity. Long accustomed to thinking that ‘the Economy’ (Latour uses the capital ‘E’ to underline the mystical aura it exudes) forms the bedrock of existence, we have since learned that other things are more fundamental. In the suspended moment of Covid, it is those ‘engendering’ and ‘subsistence’ concerns – ones relating to the care of life – that have proved ‘basic’ in the true sense of the word. Oddly enough, it was only when he was locked up at home that the sovereign, self-made man called homo economicus rediscovered his dependence on other life forms.

The critical issue for Latour is how this revaluation of things gets embedded, culturally and politically, once the ‘pause’ created by Covid has ended. How might our new-found sense of interdependence be formalised institutionally? As Latour rightly notes, one of the biggest problems we face at present is a lack of alignment between the territories we live in, as citizens of states, and the territories we live off, as humans on Earth. By dividing the world into independent sovereigns, the political map makes us forgetful of the interconnections between living things, spanning the local, the national, and the supranational. It is, as he puts it, ‘unrealistic’. But what system, if not the Westphalian system?

Perhaps it is expecting too much of a philosophical fable, but Latour is regrettably elusive with respect to the kind of institutions that might be more realistic. If the diplomatic structures of international relations that we have been relying on at Glasgow are unequal to the task, we need to find alternatives – and fast. How exactly can we overcome the crisis of representation created by the mismatch between territorial constituencies (states) and de-territorialised dependencies (life)? What kind of political institutions would realistically represent us in our affiliation with lichens, earthworms, rivers, trees, migratory birds, and, dare I say it, viruses? The only advice Latour has to offer is that we must place ourselves ‘under the sovereignty of Gaia’ and ‘reinvent everything all over again – the law, politics, the arts, architecture, cities’. Metamorphosis indeed.

After Lockdown is unlikely to please those who think nothing good has come of Covid. They will almost certainly find perverse its assertion of a liberation in, rather than from, lockdown. The best thing I can say in the book’s defence is that reading it felt like an awakening. Latour might not convince you that Gregor Samsa is better off as a cockroach, but he deserves praise for having sketched another, more promising, ending to the becoming-insect story, one in which our recent experience of lockdown is grasped affirmatively as a true ‘pivot’, a metamorphosis. Bruno Latour does not doubt the need for recovery after lockdown. He simply asks that this ‘recovery’ be the recovery, not of the Economy, but of the Earth and its respiratory system. If the science is right, the life of our species, and every other, may well depend upon it.