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Bruno Latour “Inside” (plus French Natures!)

October 29, 2018 by Steve Mentz

In the final phrase of his dazzling “anti-TED talk” “Inside,” which I saw at the Linney Courtyard Theater on West 42nd St Friday night, Bruno Latour named his vision for the future as something that might “merit the term Renaissance.” I was surprised enough that I had to ask the person next to me, an eco-modernist from City College, if I’d heard the R-word correctly. Has the man who denied modernity gone over to the side of Rebirth?

An image from Inside

After joining everyone on my twitterfeed in reading an engaging profile of Latour in this week’s Times, I was excited for the “lecture-performance.” Latour’s part of the show was mostly lecture, but in front of him on the stage electronic images and graphics designed by Frédérique Ait-Touati  superimposed themselves. The pictures started with a vision of the polar ice caps, which Latour said spoke to him on a flight from France to Calgary, and ended with a four-way image of the polarities of modern politics. One axis angled from the local to the global; its partner crossed between an empty circle that Latour associated with the current US President, matched against his hopes for what he calls “terrestrialism,” a way of living that engages with our shared planetary system in its era of stress. At its odd angle, terrestrialism represents Latour’s off-kilter optimism, his belief that ways of imagining our world — what he called “representations” throughout the lecture — can change political reality. Like his earlier notion of a “Parliament of Things,” his utopian future hinges on a radical expansion of representative democracy.

Much of “Inside” critiques traditional ways of thinking that Latour wants us to move beyond. Whatever his reservations about critique as a methodology, he ran through a litany of ideas he believes have distorted Western thinking. Here’s a partial list of Things Latour Doesn’t Like:

  • Plato’s Cave, which insists that true reality lies Outside, rather than before our eyes on the surface of the planet where humans and “everything we have ever cared about” live.
  • The desire to escape, which he suggests comes from, among other things, Plato’s cave. His hope throughout the lecture was to re-value being “inside,” rather than wanting to escape to an idealized or imaginary “outside.”
  • The sublime as a way to relating to nonhuman nature, which he associates with imperialism and global conquest. He’s not wrong about intellectual history, but his comments on the sublime made me think that an important project for the environmental humanities might be to conceive a non-imperial, non-racist, non-sexist sublime. That project means recognizing and refusing the imperial dreams of mountain peaks and storms at sea, but maybe also salvaging something of the sublime’s open-ness to nonhuman experience. My money is on swimming, not rock climbing.

    Stratigraphy

  • The blue marble image of the planet seen from orbit, which Latour associates both with NASA’s drive to escape our terrestrial “inside” and with the global view, which he, in a moment of uncomfortable agreement with nefarious forces in our current politics, wishes to reject. He reads the globe the way Peter Sloterdijk does, as Western culture’s dominant image of totality, abstraction, and global conquest. He seeks a different model to understand our planetary home.
  • Stratigraphy, which in a moment that surprised me he read as a problem, a lure into inhuman “deep time” which distracts and disorients human attention away from the terrestrial engagement at hand.

These elements all share a fundamental disorientation that historicist thinkers from Petrarch to Burckhardt to Foucault have associated with the sense of being “modern” that Latour has famously claimed we “have never been.” Disorientation, as I understood his lecture, emerges from the desire to escape from “inside” into a vastness and perspective from which we can see either the globe as a marble or human history as one more layer in the rock. He asked for a different response to disorientation, a burrowing into rather than escaping from the bounded experience of living on our planet. Trying out the thought experiment, I thought — as I often do — of a line from one of my favorite novels: “this is not a disentanglement from, but a progressive knotting into –”

A diagram of the local and the global

There are some things that can help. In its second half, “Inside” turned toward politics and also toward hope. Latour asked us to re-imagine being “inside” as a place of connection. The physical space he asked us to imagine was neither the globe as blue marble when viewed from orbit nor the deep layers of rock leading down toward the planetary core. Instead, he asked that we focus on what scientists call the “critical zone,” the narrow splash of “biofilm” that spreads across the earth’s surface and extends just “a few kilometers” above and below. Only on this thin, permeable layer, Latour reminded us, does life exist. It’s the space where living and nonliving things and systems interact. It’s where our bodies are, and where our attention should be.

He mentioned the word “Anthropocene” only one or two times in the lecture– he’s previously suggested that he doesn’t like the term — but when he talked about the Critical Zone I could not help thinking that he was asking Old Man Anthropos to look around his aging and broken body and remember that he’s only been in one place all this time. In a cave, on a thin membrane, inside the atmosphere, standing on rock, with wet toes on the edge of the sea —  these are all the same place, from a certain point of view. Have we always and only been Inside?

By chance — we were two among 4+ million riders the subway last Friday — I bumped into my sister in the West 4th St station when I was moving between NYU and Latour’s lecture. She lives in Florida and I live in Connecticut. Coincidences happen!

I wondered if it matters, from the point of view of Inside-theory, that roughly 70% of the Critical Zone is covered by salt water.

I also wondered if Latour’s vision of science as a technique for re-enchantment, for revealing the nearly infinite richness of the limited and in a cosmic sense tiny world Inside, might prove useful in re-structuring an eco-sublime for our broken world. He spent some time, when talking about the science of measuring the Critical Zone, engaging with Thoreau’s Walden. (He also got some comedy out of pronouncing the American writer’s name in several different ways in his French accent.) I wondered not only about the canonical pond in Massachusetts, but also about Thoreau’s wilder and less settled spaces, from the shipwreck beaches of Cape Cod to his failed attempt to scale Mount Katahdin in Maine. The mountain that repulsed him generated some ecstatic language:

Man was not to be associated with it. It was Matter, vast, terrific…rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks! the solid earth! the actual world! the common sense! Contact! Contact!

The mountain-top sublime bears many too-familiar Romantic and imperialist flaws, including a worship of masculine power and solidity, a rejection of social and feminine spaces down below, and the belief in a super-reality — “Matter” — that exists only in solitary splendor at the uttermost edge of things. But I wonder, too, if the matter-of-fact-ness of Thoreau’s matter, its “rocks, trees, wind” and “solid earth,” might lend itself to reconceptualization via Latour’s networks and actants and desire to find all the imaginable riches Inside. Is there a salvageable sublime still to be found? Might that project be what Latour enigmatically called a “Renaissance”?

Bruno Latour

It was a stunning lecture, and a pleasure to attend with many of the amazing people from the French Natures  “conference-festival” (shouldn’t all conferences also be festivals? an excellent idea!) that I caught a bit of at NYU earlier on Friday. Thanks to Phillip Usher, Frédérique Aït-Touati, and the other organizers, and also to Hannah Freed-Thali for a lively blue humanities-flavored talk about the modernist beach in French literary culture.

I’m looking forward to the English translation of Latour’s new book, Down to Earth, which should expand on many of these ideas!

Filed Under: Anthropocene, Environmental Humanities, Performance Updates, Talks

Romeo and Juliet in CT

June 27, 2012 by Steve Mentz Leave a Comment

I’ll see this one twice this summer. Once tonight in Greenwich with Olivia and my colleague Lee Ann Brown and her daughter Miranda — possible that Olivia may convince me to decamp at halftime, either b/c she needs her 9-year old sleep or because the play’s so much happier without Acts 4 and 5.

Then again only July 18 with my summer Shakespeare class in Rowaytan.

Looking forward to it!

Filed Under: Performance Updates, Shakespeare

Coriolanus

February 4, 2012 by Steve Mentz Leave a Comment

He’s a hard guy to look at close up.  Ralph Fiennes’s presentation of Caius Marcius Coriolanus hits with murderous intensity.  He is, as his make-up artists worked hard to show us, a “thing of blood.”

Transposing the Roman Republic to a faux-Bosnian contemporary warzone works surprisingly well, with the scruffy citizens as a rebelious mob, the Tribunes as Party Bosses, and Coriolanus and his fellow aristocrats as well-dressed generals in battle fatigues and bespoke suits.

Much of the film, esp. the early scenes in Corioles, is close-up action following the hero as warrior, heavily burdened by 21st-century battle gear, but still fighting intimate, hand to hand battles.  When he comes out of the mortal gates of the city, alone and covered with blood, it’s easy to see why he carried the day.

Fiennes is brilliant, and his movie-star face beneath make-up scarring and lots of blood communicates both Coriolanus’s powerful public inhibitions — the general seems physically unable to play to the crowd — and also his over-powerful heroic charisma.  He cannot be consul, he must be consul — and then suddenly he’s not.

The other performance that resonated was Vanessa Redgrave as Volumnia.  I’m not sure she hit the final confrontation as powerfully as she might have — the famous pause, “holds her by the hand, silent,” wasn’t quite as wrenching as it might have been — but in the early scenes her palpable combination of pride, blood-lust, and maternal intimacy was gorgeous and hard to watch.  “He is wounded,” she said with a sly smile that you almost felt you weren’t supposed to see, “I thank the gods for it.”  The production cut my favorite over the top line about the breasts of Hecuba and Hector’s Achilles-split skull, but the wolf mother’s brutal pride and terrible grip on her son was wonderfully visual.

But the hero’s isolation was the main visual point.  He was a general with no allies, no connection to family or country or troops.  Even the love-fight with Aufidius was never, in this version, an attraction of near equals, but instead a lonely dragon’s futile attempt to find someone in the world as violent as powerful as him.

I saw a little trace of Voldemort only once, in the film’s final moments when, after Coriolanus has betrayed his Volscian allies and saved Rome, Aufidius’s men murder the Roman on a deserted road.  The hero opens his moth spits his final words like the Dark Lord taunting Harry —

Alone I did it.  Boy!

As good a modern Shakespeare film as I’ve seen in a while.  

Filed Under: Performance Updates, Shakespeare

Blackfriars Conference, Oct 2011

October 21, 2010 by Steve Mentz 1 Comment

Here’s a link to a great Shakespeare and Performance conference, to be held next fall at the rebuilt Blackfriars indoor theater in Staunton, VA.  It’s a replica of the indoor theater in which The Tempest was staged, and the conference includes lots of performances as well.

There will be performances of The Tempest, Tamburlaine, Hamlet, Henry V, and The Importance of Being Earnest during the conference.

Blackfriars Conference Oct 2011

Filed Under: E. 110 Fall 2010, Performance Updates

Cutting Ball Theatre’s Three Actor Tempest in Rehearsal

October 4, 2010 by Bennett Fisher 3 Comments

In my dramaturgical research for The Tempest, I was delighted when I stumbled upon blog entries written by actors during the rehearsal process for Globe Theatre in London’s three-actor production of the play in 2005.  I found those entries profoundly informative, since the actors not only discussed their interpretation of the characters and their understanding of the play’s meaning, but addressed the challenges of manifesting those ideas physically in the production. So, when Professor Mentz offered to have us blog about our production at the Cutting Ball Theatre in San Francisco, which begins previews on November 5, I was delighted. I hope that these entries provide an interesting and worthwhile supplement to the course.

Our director, Rob Melrose, has chosen to stage the play with three actors – David Sinaiko, Caitlyn Louchard, and Donell Hill – playing all the roles, hoping that it will give “an up close and personal look at the monsters lurking inside all of us.” Our staging includes video projection, original music, and other surreal elements that I hope to describe in more detail in future entries.  Most dramaturgs are justifiably wary of more experimental stagings, but I believe theater is a living organism, and just in the way modern critics have been able to read everything from Freud to Fanon into The Tempest, so should we freely though heedfully dive certain fathoms into a piece to find what may be buried at the center. Combing through some critical writings on The Tempest and seeing the actors on their feet in rehearsal, I feel that this production succeeds in uncovering compelling and essential aspects of Shakespeare’s play that may not be as readily apparent in a “traditional” staging. Overlapping groups of threes abound in the play – the Prospero, Miranda, and Ferdinand trio, the Prospero, Ariel, and Caliban trio, the Caliban, Stephano, and Trinculo trio, and so forth. Seeing the same actor in a different role a few pages creates wonderful, unexpected moments of revelation. Prospero’s line to Miranda that “to the most of men this [Ferdinand] is a Caliban/And they to him are angels” is deliciously curious when the actor playing Ferdinand has just minutes before left the stage as Caliban: the audience is left to question whether or not there is any fundamental difference between the two. Just so, when Stephano (played by the same actor playing Prospero) shows affection for Caliban, we are reminded of that missing episode before the events of the play when Prospero was loving and compassionate to his sole subject on the island. Moments later when Caliban entreats  “Prithee, be my god”, we are viscerally made aware that this new allegiance, like Caliban’s allegiance to Prospero, is not much better. Oddly, by reducing the number of actors, we have revealed more about the similarities and differences between each character than one might be able to do with a larger cast.

Innumerable critics have talked about the relationship between The Tempest and psychology – likening the island to the human mind, arguing Ariel and Caliban are Prospero’s Superego and Id respectively and that the play is the story of reconciling these aspects of his conscience. Melrose is interested in exploring the play in this light, but also sees it as a deeply personal story about a father letting go of his daughter, a man forgiving his enemies, and the universal desire shared by all men and women to be “released.” I think this focus on the human element has helped keep our production grounded in the story, and, ultimately, is what preserves, what is, in my opinion Shakespeare’s most essential messages in the play, that “the rarer action/Is in virtue than in vengeance.” Freud and Jung are there, and plentifully, but the audience is not held hostage by the concept but given freedom to draw their own meaning. Our Island may be more surreal at moments, but we’ve built a bridge to the mainland.

-Bennett Fisher, Dramaturg

Filed Under: Cutting Ball, Performance Updates, The Tempest Tagged With: Cutting Ball

About Steve

Steve Mentz
Professor of English
St. John’s University
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