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I have been thinking about Bruno Latour and balloons since the week of September 22, 2014. I had taken in a lecture he gave at Columbia about the climate change crisis, gone to a theatrical performance he produced the next night entitled Gaïa Global Circus, and then did a bit of reading in preparation for a short paper I wrote up about it for a conference a few months later. Latour had brought the circus to town—literally—and I had a front-row seat to this most curious spectacle performed under a hovering big top, so I thought something ought to be said about it. At the time, it was nothing more than a bit of academic hustle and bustle, and then a harmless release of hot air—at most a minor airborne event.
And yet the work intrudes, calling itself back to mind, demanding that it be reckoned with, recurring at a cadence that has only increased over time. Three years later, I was at that same conference again, this time in Orlando, and I remember sitting in the hotel restaurant, watching the sparkle of light on placid lake waters, and becoming utterly transfixed by that scene of distinctly unnatural beauty. For in the Land of the Mouse, as Aphra Behn's Doctor Baliardo once said of the world in the moon, "that's just as 'tis here!"—only more so.1 Nature/Culture are bungled together inextricably: in the precisely negligent curve of the artificial lake dug out of Orlando's eternal swamps; in the secular temples to hyperconsumption dotting and scoring the low, soggy landscape; in the forced cheer of Disney Springs™ where we were compelled to forage our after-panel dinners. Recalling Latour and his balloons again in Orlando seemed to demand that I reckon in some way with that nonnatural scene spread out before me, and, beyond it, with the slow-motion disintegration of the natural and political orders that continues to unfold in the blur just beyond the stopped-down depth of field where we live and work so as to make the living and the working tolerable. In full view of that monstrous scene, within shouting distance of the grim news that bleated from ubiquitous public TV screens perpetually tuned to CNN, just what the hell is...