Reading :: After Lockdown

 After Lockdown: A Metamorphosis

By Bruno Latour

Bruno Latour has long been one of my favorite academic authors. I fell in love with his exuberant writing style in books such as Laboratory Life, Science in Action, and Aramis. Even more so, I really enjoyed his contrarian takes on controversies, particularly as they came out in his field research. For instance, in following around researchers at the Salk Laboratory, Latour watched what they did rather than simply following what they said, and these observations led him to argue that science is not necessarily done by geniuses, but by technicians who set up chains of re-representations in order to make arguments using longer and stronger networks of actants. His fieldwork, in fact, is much more interesting to me than his purely conceptual or theoretical works such as We Have Never Been Modern.

Latour retired in 2017 and passed away in 2022 of pancreatic cancer. His last fieldwork book (The Making of Law) was published in English in 2010; his books since then have been conceptual and theoretical, and largely focused on ecology and the question of how we are to live in the world. After Lockdown (2021) is in this vein. It’s not his last book — looking at Wikipedia, it looks like he published a coauthored book in 2022 and a set of interviews with Nicolas Turong in 2024 (neither of which I have read.)

So how is After Lockdown? In a word: underwhelming. Like his previous two works on climate change, Down to Earth and Facing Gaia, this one pulls out some of Latour’s well-work author’s tricks, tricks that seemed so fresh in the 1980s but that have become threadbare. He uses a controlling metaphor throughout the book, that of Kafka’s Metamorphosis. He sets up dichotomies (natural and artificial, pp.20-21; map and territory, p.72), only to pull out the rug from under them. He assembles people into two camps, then represents them as differing reactions to the same underlying reality (in We Have Never Been Modern, it was the modernists and postmodernists; here, it’s Extinction Rebellion and Great Replacement theory, p.39). Ah, and networks get a look in: COVID lockdowns, he says, exposed the networks that keep us alive (p.35). Finally, just as Latour famously and daringly suggested that we have a ten-year moratorium on cognitive explanations, here he challenges us to stop saying that things have an “economic dimension” (p.62).

And what is the central lesson of After Lockdown? Latour essentially argues that we will have to reorient our lives and localize ourselves differently, because nothing has been left untouched after lockdown. If that seems like a revelation to you, certainly you should pick up this book. 

For me, however, this book really felt like Latour himself had run out of steam. He still manages to write both allusively and clearly — quite a gift — but his declarations do not seem revelatory, instead retreading points that he made in the halcyon 1980s and 1990s.