A while back I read Bruno Latour’s After Lockdown, his last sole-authored book. It is beautiful and written with the poetic vision of someone whose world, whose Earth, whose Universe has come alive with relations, actors and networks. It is excellent as a worked example of how to use Actor Network Theory to grapple with life as it comes at you fast (or slow). ANT itself is not mentioned by name but present on every page and in every observation — from the attention to ants and their carapaces and entangled ways of being in the world to Latour’s description of his own apartement: how “for every stone I find an urbanite who has mide it; if I start with the urbanites, I’ll find a trace of every one of their actions in the stone they left behind.”
Reading Latour can feel like sorting through ideas the way you deal with laundry fresh out of the tumble dryer, sorting things out, reuniting pairs of socks, finding the inevitable singletons, creating some semblance of order and accepting loose ends. It all comes out in the wash.
Reading on in After Lockdown I felt like Alice, suddenly shrinking, all the everyday things growing vast and textured around me. I trace the outline of one of those singleton socks, find the cuff, slide in along the heel, nestle in the toes, cosy feeling of a familiar space — and then suddenly the whole thing is turned inside out, also an affordance of this topology, things still make sense but also show their seams and I am on edge, looking outwards.
Latour’s conceptual world feels like a Klein bottle: depths to be plumbed, patterns that connect, and paths that trace a single surface along a topology endlessly turning inside out.
Latour, Bruno. 2021. After Lockdown: A Metamorphosis. Translated by Julie Rose. Cambridge, UK ; Medford, MA: Polity Press.
P.S. If you’re in the market for an actual Klein bottle I can highly recommend Cliff Stoll’s delightful offerings.