Sunday, October 29, 2006

Latour, We Have Never Been Modern

Latour, Bruno. We Have Never Been Modern. Trans. Catherine Porter. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard, 1993.

Latour carves through the layers of the "modern" episteme in an effort to back his argument that we have never been modern. "Moderns," he contends, have so eagerly pursued the polarization of ideas unto Nature and Culture (science and the social) that they have rendered the mediators (in translation, i.e., networks) invisible, concealed, mere and inconvenient intermediaries. As the two poles diverge, spanning them becomes exasperating (Hobbes and Boyle are representative figures here, splitting authority into the civic domain and the laboratory); Latour wants us to "retrace our steps" and "stop moving on" (62). Following a propensity for "purification," the so-called moderns have neglected networks, the imbroglios of quasi-objects and quasi-subjects, and thereby "drained [the modern world] of its mysteries" (128). According to Latour, the four bases for modernist critique allow these conditions to persist: "naturalization, sociologization, discursivization, and finally the forgetting of Being" (67, 88).

What accumulates is a kind of archeology of contemporary epistemologies (reminds me of The Order of Things, faintly), and Latour takes to task not only the moderns, but the antimoderns and the postmoderns as well. Eventually, after a biting critique of the postmoderns, however, he points out that all need not be abandoned. Latour wants to retain and reject selected precepts from the premoderns, moderns, and postmoderns (reflexivity and desconstruction/constructivism) (135).

While there's a whole lot more here, Latour ends with a pronouncement on behalf of things. In the final chapter, "Redistribution," humanism is recast as "a weaver of morphisms" (137) and "the networks come out of hiding" (139). With too many hybrids, the network is now stabilized (with objects like the air pump), and "[a]t last the Middle Kingdom is represented. Natures and societies are its satellites" (79): "In its confines, the continuity of the collective is reconfigured. There are no more naked truths, but there are no more naked citizens, either. The mediators have the whole space to themselves. The Enlightenment has a dwelling-place at last. Natures are present, but with their representatives, scientists who speak in their name. Societies are present, but with the objects that have been serving as their ballast from time immemorial" (144).

Key terms: nature-culture (7, 41), critical tripartation (7), translation and purification (10), constitution (14), inert bodies (23), social context (25), representation (27), modern critique (38), nonmodern and amodern (47), quasi-objects and quasi-subjects (51), dialectics (55), phenomenologists (58), polytemporal (74), mediators and intermediaries (77), silent things (83), skein of networks (120), micro and macro (121), size (113).

"To shuttle back and forth [between nature and culture], we rely on the notion of translation, or network. More supple than the notion of system, more historical than the notion of structure, more empirical than the notion of complexity, the idea of network is Ariadne's thread of these interwoven stories" (3).

"Our intellectual life is out of kilter. Epistemology, the social sciences, the sciences of texts--all have their privileged vantage point, provided that they remain separate" (5).

"In the eyes of our critics the ozone hole above our heads, the moral law in our hearts, the autonomous texts, may each be of interest, but only separately. That a delicate shuttle should have woven together the heavens, industry, texts, souls, and moral law--this remains uncanny, unthinkable, unseemly" (5).

"Either we have to disappear, we bearers of bad news, or criticism itself has to face a crisis because of these networks it cannot swallow" (6).

"The double separation is what we have to reconstruct: the separation between humans and nonhumans on the one hand, and between what happens 'above' and 'below' on the other" (13).

"No science can exit from the network of its practice" (24).

"In other words, they are inventing our modern world, a world in which the representation of things through the intermediary of the laboratory is forever dissociated from the representation of citizens through the intermediary of the social contract" (27).

"Here likes the entire modern paradox. If we consider hybrids, we are dealing only with mixtures of nature and culture; if we consider the work of purification, we confront a total separation between nature and culture" (30).

"A nonmodern is anyone who takes simultaneously into account the moderns' Constitution and the populations of hybrids that that Constitution rejects and allows to proliferate" (47).

"The antimoderns, like the postmoderns, have accepted their adversaries' playing field. Another field--much broader, much less polemical--has opened up before us: the field of nonmodern worlds. It is the Middle Kingdom, as vast as China and as little known" (48).

"How did the modern manage to specify and cancel out the work of mediation both at once? By conceiving of every hybrid as a mixture of two pure forms" (78).

"In following the pump, do we have to pretend that everything is rhetorical, or that everything is natural, or that everything is socially constructed, or that everything is stamped and stocked?" (89).

"By learning of Archimedes' coup (or rather, Plutarch's) we identify the entry point of a new type of nonhuman into the very fabric of the collective" (111).

"The two extremes, local and global, are much less interesting than the intermediary arrangements that we are calling networks" (122).

"So the strength of the error that the modern world makes about itself is not understandable, when the two couples of opposition are paired: in the middle there is nothing thinkable--no collective, no network, no mediation; all conceptual resources are accumulated at the extremes. We poor subject-objects, we humble societies-natures, we modest locals-globals, are literally quartered among ontological regions that define each other mutually but no longer resemble our practices" (123).

Posted by Derek Mueller at October 29, 2006 11:00 PM to Tools-in-use