Jeremy Harding

Bruno Latour was involved in Actor Network Theory (ANT), an open-ended way of thinking that redistributes agency to all the players in the drama of the sciences. ANT envisaged interactive networks, in which humans and other creatures – or ‘critters’, as Donna Haraway calls them – were on something like an equal footing. Scientific inquiry had always been conducted de haut en bas; the time had come to converse with its silent objects. For laypeople in an age of species extinction this feels like a crucial shift, yet it’s more often systems and technologies that ANT likes to explore, and it’s difficult to form an accurate picture of the networks if you’re not on the team. I think vaguely of Hegel’s dialectic being the wrong way up and Marx announcing that he had stood it on its feet. But in the ANT model there are so many feet for a dialectic to stand on that it could easily trip over itself. Or run amok. I think next of the sorcerer’s apprentice scene in Disney’s Fantasia (1940), where ‘things’, animated by the science of magic, rapidly get out of control.

The​ commune of Poilley in Brittany is fifteen minutes by car from the coast, but in Madeleine de Sinéty’s photographs we imagine a village miles from a beach or a harbour and further still from Rennes, the regional capital. Sinéty discovered Poilley by chance in the early 1970s. She had been on holiday, and heading to Paris, where she worked as a magazine illustrator...

In Tazmamart​ it paid to forget family and friends. Aziz BineBine dismissed the past by an act of will. ‘I had no personal memories and no future,’ he writes. ‘I was here and here only.’ Expunging all trace of his father was easy: Mohamed BineBine had been King Hassan’s court jester. He is also the subject of a novel, Le Fou du roi (2017), by BineBine’s brother Mahi. When the king was out of sorts, BineBine Sr, a prodigious memoriser of the Arabic canon, came to the rescue with an apposite line of verse or a witticism of his own. He never once asked the king to pardon his son. But BineBine and his comrades in Tazmamart also had mothers, brothers, sisters, fiancées; many had wives and children. Those who pined for their families, BineBine suggests, put their own mental and physical health at risk. He had already become devout during his earlier incarceration in Kenitra: faith, he discovered, was a defence against the profanities of Tazmamart.