#brunolatour from the text #afterlockdown Bruno Latour 🤌🏻 A critical reanalysis of Kafkas Metamorphosis and the honesty of ‘becoming an insect’. We exude our environment just the same. “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 anthil that is so pleasantly ventiated 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 and organism from what surrounds it. ` Strictly speaking, nothing surrounds us, everything conspires in our breathing. An 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!” Image 1 - Cyanobacteria Image 2 - Leafcutter ant nest #kafkasmetamorphosis #criticalzones #leafcutterants