Chapters 2 and 3.
It is helpful that the book is parced this way. One can feel the pleasure of finnishing a Chapet in a manageable time
I continue reading the book trying to remind myself that this is a book situated in the core modern tradition. I am a creole.
I combine the image of "Down to Earth" with George Samsa and Inquiry. So I imagine an insect with many tentacles (like the modes in Inquiry) that falls from the sky towards earth. It hits the ground. It is so painful that it turns towards protecting its "precious". The "precious" -as I see it - is natural science. Around it the insect builds its mythologising, its FICtoreal web: a new narrative for popularized science.
When I think in this sense "After Lockdown" is more suffocating than the Inquiry (at least till Chapter 3 as I reread):
- In the beginning there was the Bifurcation: an infinite world full of potential but all in one medium: the grey mud of mathematics (or mathematico-philosophy) that made the "true reality" of everything (this is how I understand the "matter" that is criticised in inquiry). Still, lots of vacuum and clarity but what we all cared about had to be whispered
- Then there was the world of Inquiry. Rest and Change in many tropes. Moderns philosophising "by their feet".
- And now "all are manufacturers". To me it sounds like a new bifurcation. The "Real Reality" is now the swarm of manufacturing entities, which in these chapters look like "dressed up" characters coming streight out from good old popularized natural science. The old bifurcation was more Victorean: math concepts do not smell. And they are very precise in their dealings. While now all this mess of actors, of touchings and smells and elbows pushing each other! Like rewinding the process Nobert Elias talked about. Like a bifurcation fitting the world after the 60s. Because there is not much space for the rest of us, the non-moderns, the non-modern part of creoles which has to be whispered again
Here is another image: Me , a creole Sancho Panza, follow my modern master Don Kichotes as he imagines the mills to be giants
The insect falls on Earth and looking around sees other producers. This is the image that we see broadcasted in these chapters. In the old bifurcatory cosmology the main emotion was awe. Now there is much more experience and appreciation and comradship in the new image. But -as I see it- there is no history. There are no other stories, no other traditions, no other people and histories but the popularized natural science heroes having become more human, less strict, than in their old bifurcatory times
Then I thought of it again and I reminded me that this is a story writen by a modern having as a principal audience moderns. And it tries to give them mythological bearings that they have thrown away a long time ago in the name of not being superstitious. As if they come now to other peoples telling "look, we can have a decent mythology as much as you can. Born from our own scientific tradition, improved through our manufacturing and enterprising experience"
It is moving -as every story of people getting away from deprivation-. But we are also talking about the moderns. People that can be amazingly cruel in the name of their higher knowledge and amazingly efficient in distruction as much as in construction.
Me, Sancho Panza, thought this: all the non-human producers mentioned survive through heavy labor. Their bodies are in constant push and pull with other bodies, they have to bend and fit. This is also the world of the traditional human worker. This is not the world of many many moderns.
The expression "freed from the bonds of nature" has an experiential significance. Modern people learned that they can bypass respect through imagination and symbols. Symbolic and imaginary labor in a universe that looked like the control room of bodily felt reality could take the place of problem solving through the active body. One could forget having an active interacting body and had instead thoughts, feelings, pleasures, pains. The old interactive body was also superstitious. In stead of those beings moderns instituted the pure slaves of reality, totaly un-communicating: atoms, molecules, forces.
So if moderns say: "around us there are producers like us", I think that they fool themselves. They are not producers like them. The modern in me is a conqueror, not a participant. It is like a West which claims it is for a multipolar world but takes care that it holds in its hands the precious institutions for the survival of everybody else, that it forms indeed a core of "necessary nations", the non disposable ones.
So me, Sanco Panza, show all this myth building and thought: these people are once more designing the ideology with which they hope to conquer us all. They do not meet Christians, Muslims, Budhists, whatever. They just meet "producers". Once more they do not care about our sensibilities but for their new found object of fondness: Earth.
- I feel like Latour talking against Latour-
But is there something of value here for me too, the creole? A reductio ad absurdum perhaps. I am not sure.
