Latour Reading Guide
Chandler Griffith
Lindsay Skog
Lindsay Skog
GEOG 5100: Introduction to Social Theory
Week 15: Latour
In We Have Never Been Modern, Bruno Latour posits that modernity is constituted by two false dichotomies: 1) The division between objects of nature and the subjects of society, and 2) a separation between what has been purified through this division and what has not. In arguing that these divisions do not actually exist, and never have, Latour asserts that moderns and, indeed, modernity itself, has never existed. More broadly, Latour’s work contributes to what would become Science and Technology Studies by asking what ‘modern science’ actually is and what it does, rather than denying its foundations. In this way, Latour is positioned in the architecture of social theory between the materialists and idealists.
Like many post-modernists and post-structuralists, Latour contests the division between knowledge and power, the nature-culture divide, by arguing for nature-culture hybrids, or quasi-objects; however, unlike post-modernists and post-structuralists, Latour does not advocate an understanding of the ways in which Nature and Culture overlap in order to construct hybrids, but rather a recognition of the false premises that separate the two. To do this, Latour argues that the concepts of Nature and Culture do not exist independently of each other; rather, each is created out of the exclusion of the other. For Latour, moderns define Culture as all that is not Nature, and vice versa. Yet, because of this very definition, the two realms cannot overlap to create hybrids and instead need to be understood of false ontologies.
Latour breaks down the constitution of modernity into two paradoxes. The first paradox is the separation between human and non-humans, Culture and Nature. Yet, all objects and phenomena are both human and non-human, or constructed and given, and, therefore, hybrids. The second paradox is the division between what happens above and below the division of the first paradox. That is, modernity separates those things that were already joined, yet, beneath this division hybrids continue to multiple. Moreover, hybrids multiply as a result of the division of constitution of modernity. That is, moderns experience Nature as both given and constructed, Society as both constructed and predetermined, and the presence of God as omnipresent and selective. In themselves, these separations create hybrids.
In addition to the two paradoxes, Latour described the practices of purification and translation as the practices of modernity. The practice of purification calls for the categorization of all objects and phenomena as either human and non-human. Yet, the process of purification becomes problematic in light of the first paradox. Therefore, Latour describes that moderns mediate between the classifications of human and non-human through the process of translation. Translation, the act of moving back and forth between Nature and Culture, enables hybridity and creates a network of hybrids in need of purification. Latour argues that it is the consideration of the processes of purification and translation as separate processes that defines the moderns.
Ultimately, Latour is calling for a modern anthropology that approaches modernity as one epistemology among many. To do this, Latour identifies the knowledge-power, nature-culture divide as one of two great divides enforced through modernity. The other divide is that between moderns and not moderns. That is, moderns distinguish themselves temporally from the past by their ability to separation Nature and Culture. Yet, Latour argues that such a separation does not exist and that turning an anthropological lens toward the very institutions and processes that claim it does may reveal the falsity.
Ahn Lee
Ahn Lee
Geog 5100
Response: Latour’s We Have Never Been Modern
In We Have Never Been Modern Bruno Latour outlines his criticism of the Modern Constitution, the artificial and ever-contradictory separation of Nature and Society. Through his commentary on the contemporary experience of proliferating hybridization, his historical exploration of the birth of the Modern Constitution, and finally his comparison of modern, pre-modern, and post-modern assumptions, Latour offers up a solution that has always been: amodernism. This “new” perspective merely seeks to acknowledge the constants, the networks of actants and processes of translation and mediation that have always purified, naturalized, and hybridized. The only variation is scale. There has never been an “Us” and “Them”, Latour argues. Epistemological revolution is outdated!
The seemingly incommensurable conflict between Boyle and Hobbes serves as Latour’s primary illustration of modernism, his critique of Shapin and Schaffer’s book on the subject as proof of our continued epistemological “asymmetry”. Boyle and Hobbes, Latour argues, agreed on most everything: “They want a king, a Parliament, a docile and unified Church, and they are fervent subscribers to mechanistic philosophy” (17). Their “conflict”, he says, revolved around Boyle’s air pump experiments, which, along with its innovations in technology and use of the laboratory, introduced a new power of empirical scientific inquiry. Knowledge, for Boyle, comes from “matters of fact”. Hobbes rejected the air pump experiments on the basis that such methods for knowledge production would create a “double vision” with conflicting ideas of authority, essentially reinvigorating a growing divide between the Church and the monarchy and increasing potential for conflict. For Hobbes, power is knowledge and knowledge must stem from power. In other words, as Latour notes, “Boyle is not only creating a scientific discourse while Hobbes is doing the same thing for politics; Boyle is creating a political discourse from which politics is to be excluded, while Hobbes is imagining a scientific politics from which experimental science has to be excluded” (27). This, in essence, is the division that characterizes the Modern Constitution. What Shapin and Schaffer fail to do in their analysis of the conflict is to treat Hobbes and Boyle symmetrically, as both “founding fathers” of purification.
This process of purification, and the proliferation of hybrids on an unprecedented scale, is possible only when processes of mediation or translation are ignored. Thus, Latour says, the acknowledgement of another axis of knowledge production (the latitude of mediation) will provide the space necessary for a “symmetrical anthropology” to account for quasi-objects. If we can do this, we will come to see that the only differences between various collectives’ accounts of nature and society are differences of scale and position. The First Great Divide (between nature and society), which gave way to the Second Great Divide (between “Us” and “Them”) will amount to nothing more than different “communities of natures and societies” (103).
The resulting Nonmodern Constitution will thus take from the various epistemological eras the bits and pieces that make them useful. From the premoderns we can gain an appreciation for the inseparability of the Nature and Society poles, for transcendence, and temporal flexibility. From the Moderns we can retain experimentation and separation, leaving behind the Great Divide and the notion of universality. Finally, from the post moderns, we take a refusal for naturalization but leave behind the idea of a past, which has been surpassed. Most importantly, Latour seems to say, we must relinquish the idea of epistemological breaks, revolutions, or upheavals (141). Transcendence and immanence exist simultaneously and we are (as we have always been) free to explore the combinations of hybrids today proliferating at larger and larger scales.
Overall, Latour paints an optimistic portrayal of the possibilities for science and technology studies to enrich ongoing discussions related to any number of contemporary quasi-objects. While he makes this point very clearly throughout the book, his argument related to democracy (or sovereignty more generally) and the proliferation of hybridization is unclear. In particular, he notes as part of his nonmodern constitution that the proliferation of hybrids will serve as an “object of an enlarged democracy” with which to regulate its cadence (141). I’m not quite sure what this means and if he is speaking about the actual process of governing of people or if he is referring to a process of knowledge production? Additionally, I think we might spend a few moments talking about the relationship between a disciplinary society and the modern constitution: for example, how might we conceive of the relationship between a nonmodern constitution and deviance? What happens to notions of deviance when we start focusing more on processes of mediation and translation? How might practices of discipline or policing become complicated if we can truly abolish the “Us”/”Them” dichotomy as non modernism strives to do. Or, put another way, how heavily does the disciplinary society depend on the modernist perspective?
Kaitlin Fertaly
Kaitlin Fertaly
GEOG 5100
Response to We Have Never Been Modern by Bruno Latour
“Real as nature, narrated as Discourse, collective as Society, existential as Being: such as the quasi-objects that the moderns have caused to proliferate. As such it behoves us to pursue them, while we simply become once more what we have never ceased to be: amoderns” (90). As this short passage begins to show us, Latour has three main goals in this relatively short but dense theoretical work, We Have Never Been Modern. The first is to critique the modern critical stance for its reliance on binaries, specifically the poles of Nature and Society, and the second is to show us that even with of our attempts at “purification” and “translation,” we really haven’t ever been modern after all. Finally, Latour begins to sketch out a new theoretical paradigm that will allow us to do the kinds of analysis attempted by moderns, but never achieved because of their reliance on separation. In this response, I aim to further unpack Latour’s three main points and then to raise some questions about the impact of his actor network theory on agency and structure.
Through the example of Boyle’s leaky air pump experiment and Hobbes critique of it, Latour shows how the modern constitution was formed and how it brought about this unbridgeable separation of nature and politics. Each of these actors, Hobbes and his discourse of politics and Boyles and his discourse of science, were each imagining a world whether the other realm had no place. According to Latour, “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). Thus a separation that makes both sides, nature and society, impotent without the other one, while at the same time each only possess an authority of explanation if they remain separate. This authority comes from the ability of the modern stance to make either nature or society at any time transcendent or immanent as needed; this is the double language that gives the modern critique its power. This, however, results in our ability to see the actions taking place in the middle of the poles and makes us unable to conceptualize ourselves in continuity with premoderns (39).
However, this is where Latour makes his second point clear: we have never actually been modern. Nature and Society are not two separate entities that we can cling to as needed because hybrids have always existed. Therefore, if we instead simultaneously take into account the modern Constitution and the hybrids proliferating, then we can overcome the Great Divide that seems to separate the moderns from the premoderns. This is Latour’s third point. In order to do this we must start seeing objects, or quasi-objects, as agents moving through networks. The benefit of this, is that “Seen as networks, however, the modern world…permits scarcely anything more than small extensions of practices, slight accelerations in the circulation of knowledge, a tiny extension of societies, miniscule increases in the number of actors, small modifications of old beliefs. When we see them as networks, Western innovations remain recognizable and important, but they no longer suffice as the stuff of saga, a vast saga of radical rupture, fatal destiny, irreversible good or bad fortune” (48).
As part of this project to critique the modern critical stance and return our focus to quasi-objects and the networks through which they circulate, Latour dismantles totalizing notions of many of the moderns’ concepts such as capitalism, globalization, the State, and others. He argues that ignoring or hiding the objects that came to constitute networks and the durability of those networks allowed social theorists to imagine the concepts as mysteries. Studies of such concepts could either be conducted as micro or macro levels, but nowhere in between. For example, Latour resolutely critiques Marxist notions of capitalism by suggesting “it is not the total capitalism of the Marxists…It is a skein of somewhat longer networks that rather inadequately embrace a world on the basis of points that become centres of profit and calculation (121). This argument is clearly one way of disrupting the image of these totalizing forces by allowing the objects that constitute them to be traced through the networks, which appear as congealed concepts. However, Latour’s approach to dismantling this totalized concepts does not tell us how or why some actors can have a greater influence within those networks than others. How can we bring power into Latour’s network theory? Can we use it to understand inequalities?
On Wednesday, November 28, 2012 9:10:49 PM UTC-7, Chandler Griffith wrote:
jacquelynjampolsky
Jacquelyn Jampolsky 11.30.12
Reflection Paper: Latour
Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern
In his 1993 book We Have Never Been Modern, Bruno Latour attempts to re-categorize, or rather de-categorize intellectual pursuit in terms of how we view problems. He posits that, “the word ‘modern’ designates two sects of entirely different practices which must remain distinct if they are to remain effective, but have recently begun to be confused” (10). The first of these practices concerns the proliferation of ‘hybrids,’ or viewing things in terms of combinations between nature and culture; and the second separates human and nonhuman things to purify and organize our worldview. According to Latour, the second practice is what dominates ‘the modern.’ Specifically, he analyzes the way in which we use our categorical conceptualization of science versus culture to distinguish our ‘modern’ selves from those who don’t adhere to such hierarchies.
Latour’s point is this: we have never been modern (duh). In effect he claims that ‘moderns’ have fabricated these categories for the sole (perhaps subconscious) purpose of maintaining the “Great Divide” with the non-moderns, and that these categories are meaningless in terms of how things actually are. He concludes that because we are increasingly forced to view problems in terms of hybrids, “we are going to have to slow down, reorient and regulate the proliferation of monsters by representing their existence officially” (12). In the end, Latour expresses a relatively simple idea: we need to slow down, get back in touch with our innate and non-categorical conceptualization of the world, and be more holistic in our intellectual pursuits.
If I understand Latour correctly, I tend to agree with his general premise- but not with how he gets there. Latour employs a contradictory analytical method where he categorizes and separates the ‘modernists’ to analyze their worth. “To answer these questions, I shall have to sort out the premoderns, the moderns, and even the postmoderns in order to distinguish between their durable characteristics and their lethal ones.” If the premise of his essay were to promote re-integration of categorical analysis, why would he premise his entire analysis on arbitrary categorizations of the ‘moderns’? Is he saying that we must integrate nature, science, society etc., but within that larger body it is ok to keep our categories? Or is he proving, alternatively to his thesis, that categories are sometimes necessary to understand our own modern ideas? I do not know the answer, nor does Latour aptly address this contradiction in his essay.
In the wake of reading Judy Butler’s Gender Trouble, I began to contemplate if Latour would consider ‘gender’ as a phantom category along with chemistry, biology, or ethnoscience. Latour never addresses the issue of gender (although he does cite to Haraway). I think Latour’s project of dismantling modern categories fits with Butlers project of deconstructing the bi-partite categories of sex and gender. Just like Bulter refutes that there is any biological way to distinguish between man and woman, Latour would find that such a ‘scientific’ distinction between man and woman is really just a rhetorical process. On the other hand, Latour’s description of “the social” could be read to include gender- a category that to Latour sits outside the realm of scientific investigation. How would Latour converse with Judy Bulter regarding issues of gender performance?
Following suit, Latour’s ‘crises’ appears in line with Foucault’s conception of deviance and normalization. On page 4 Latour states, “[i]f the facts do not occupy the simultaneously marginal and sacred place of our worship has reserved for them, then it seems that they are immediately reduced to pure local contingency and sterile machinations.” How would Latour respond to a Foucaldian analysis sexual deviance? Is sexuality also a part of Latour’s preconceived “social,” or does it too lend itself to hybridization?
On Wednesday, November 28, 2012 9:10:49 PM UTC-7, Chandler Griffith wrote:
Eric Reiff
Eric A. Reiff
GEOG 5100 – Social Theory
Discussion Paper 10
Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern
3 December 2012
In this work Latour takes up a crisis that he has noticed within modernity. According to Latour the success and of the moderns has been to paradoxically keep the world purified into social and the natural poles. Latour argues that these visible poles do not represent much of the modern’s process. Rather all the work of purifying happens behind the scenes in the vast middle ground which is full of networks, collectives, and hybrids. He notices that science and technology have been very efficient at creating nature-society hybrids—like the ozone hole or global warming—which cannot be easily purified into either a transcendent social or immanent natural object (even with the use of longer networks). The modern system for purifying these hybrids into nature or society has become overwhelmed by its own success in producing new hybrids or quasi-objects and this has allowed Latour to see that the hybrids have always been there and that indeed we have never been modern in the sense of being able to purify the natural and the social from one another.
In order to frame his understanding of what it means to be modern, Latour lays out the modern position in the form of a constitution and why it has endured. The two branches of government are science and technology and society. This constitution has four guarantees 1) that nature is transcendent but mobilized, 2) that society is immanent but beyond us, 3) nature and society are totally distinct and that purification and mediation are distinct processes, 4) God is crossed out, totally absent, but ensures arbitration between the branches of government (141). The endurance of this constitution has been its division into an upper purification half and a lower mediation half. The moderns have used the trick of not talking about purification and mediation at the same time in order to go about their work of pure science. For instance, it would be ok in the laboratory to bring all of your education, technological tools, and external financial support to bear on finding a treatment for malaria as long as when you reported your findings you ignored all this and talked only of nucleotides, proteins, viruses, and mosquitoes. An unacknowledged flip occurs when one stops thinking in the bottom mediating portion of the constitution and starts thinking in the purification part of the constitution where society and nature are not allowed to coexist.
After exposing the modern’s paradoxes he walks through the pre-, anti-, and post-modern alternatives and stubs out a new constitution for us to live by. This constitution has a lot of qualities of the pre-moderns like the non-separability of things. But, ironically we find things like this actually already existed in the modern constitution once we brought the purification and mediation halves of the constitution into simultaneous focus. From the post-moderns he wants to keep several aspects including multiple times, which for instance allows us to want to grow our own food and access food commodity chains at the same time without seeming temporally confused. He doesn’t see any use for the anti-moderns because they accept the modern constitution as it stood, but with reversed polarity. While it is built on paradoxes the modern constitution has engendered the scientific, technological, social world we have today. We need to jettison the purification of nature and society, but keep the modern’s long networks, relative universals, and experimentation. This new constitution will give us “a parliament of things” in which the multitudes of nature-society quasi-objects can be negotiated in the light of day instead of hidden away and ignored.
He closes the essay reminding us that neither nature nor society are going to become modern so we (society) have to change (145). We can do this by developing a new hybrid constitution in which all the different positions described above are in play governing a parliament of things. We should also keep in mind that modernism has not been an illusion, but rather it has been a performance. Seeming to invoke Butler here, the way to the new constitution would not be through revolution (which we know no is a modern temporal trick), but through performing the new constitution.
On Wednesday, November 28, 2012 9:10:49 PM UTC-7, Chandler Griffith wrote:
Joanna Weidler-Lewis
Joanna Weidler-Lewis
Bruno Latour: We Have Never Been Modern
Latour's argument in We Have Never Been Modern is that the "great divide" between human and nature, subject and object, or society and science has never been real. Modernity is characterized by two processes: purification and hybridization. Purification is the process of analytically separating nature from society, and the creation of indisputable scientific facts, while hybridization is the mixture of nature and culture, and the ways in which science and nature responds to change. For example, addressing the hole in the ozone layer involves politics, science, technology, and nature. Latour argues that modernists simultaneously try to maintain the separation of the real, the social, and the discursive while continually create "nature-culture" hybrids which paradoxically show the separation is impossible.
He traces the rise of modernism to a debate between Boyle and Hobbes in the seventeenth century as recounted in Shapin and Schaffer's book. While Boyle is thought to be scientist, and Hobbes a political theorist, Latour shows that Hobbes is as much of a scientist studying the natural world as Boyle is a political theorist studying the social world. However, the "Modern Constitution" is such that not only do we separate out the scientific domination of nature from the political emancipation of humanity, we maintain a strict division between the two. If we allowed the two worlds to combine, this would confuse science and politics, facts and values, and knowledge and power and we would cease to be modern and revert back to a state of pre-modernism where no differentiated existed.
By enforcing the separation, the modern constitution obscures its inherent paradoxes. On the one hand nature is transcendent, its laws are uncontrollable by humans. On the other hand, scientific facts are constructed in laboratories. Likewise, society is immanent, constructed by free agents; however, sociology tells us that we are shaped by forces beyond our control. Similarly, the spiritual aspect of modernity, Latour's crossed-out God, is both transcendent and immanent. God was made to be completely transcendent as to be irrelevant in the politics, society, or science, yet remains capable of speaking directly to the heart of any individual. Meanwhile, hybrid "nature-cultures" - made up of stable actor-networks in which both human and non-human actors interact - continue to be created highlighting the modern contradiction.
What do we do in light of this contradiction? Latour says there are three options: continue to be modern, revert to pre-modernity, or be post-modern. In the first, we play dumb and forget about any contradictions in our attempt to continue to purify the world; we can reject the founding principles of modernism, or we can pessimistic relativistic post-modernists. Latour is critical of all these positions and suggests that we should be amodern and accept that we have never been modern and that the modern constitution never actually described the world. Hybrids have always occurred even with the pre-moderns. He suggests we take from each position: the hybridization of humans and non-human actors of the pre-moderns, the networks of the moderns that strengthen these hybrids, and finally, constructivism from the post-moderns. By combining all three we can create a new non-modern constitution in which we are bring nature-culture and quasi objects out in the open instead of pretending they do not exist.
Caitlin Ryan
Latour response
12/3
Bruno Latour’s We Have Never Been Modern is an investigation into the “Great Divide” between the natural or physical and the social sciences, between the inert objects and laws of nature and the contingent subjects and behaviors of society and culture. At its heart, Latour tells us, this is a discussion about the relationship between exact scientific facts and the exercise of power (p. 3). Along with a summary of Latour’s main argument below, I will pay particular attention to the significance of two key themes in this piece: time and power. I will also draw out some of his comments that are relevant to the study of human rights.
While the “Great Divide” is the topic of study, Latour’s aim is not to give us social explanations for hard scientific facts or to advocate for the study of nature-culture hybrids and networks. Modernity, he tells us, embraces hybrids and network studies plenty often enough. But herein lies the problem: modernity jumps back and forth between engaging with hybrids (translation or mediation) and then insisting that nature and culture are undeniably separate (purification). This ability to jump back and forth is a result of the moderns’ Constitution, which sets up the paradox that Nature, Society and God are simultaneously immanent and transcendent. Immanent nature is constructed in the laboratory; transcendent nature surpasses and comes before us. Immanent society is constructed by our actions; while the laws of transcendent society are beyond our reach.
This “double play” or “double separation” is a source of power. The Constitution makes the moderns invincible; they “hold all the sources of power, all the critical possibilities, but they displace them from case to case with such rapidity that they can never be caught redhanded (p. 39).” In a particularly evocative passage, Latour explains how the moderns hoodwink us into thinking that there is no space for hybrids: “If you turn round suddenly, as in the children’s game ‘Mother, may I?’, they will freeze, looking innocent, as if they hadn’t budged: here, on the left, are things themselves; there, on the right, is the free society of speaking, thinking subjects, values and of signs. Everything happens in the middle, everything passes between the two, everything happens by way of mediation, translation and networks, but this space does not exist, it has no place.”
In essence, Latour is taking issue with the multiplicity of epistemologies that modernity simultaneously accepts and propagates, which he calls “flagrant injustices”. “If you want to account for the belief in flying saucers, make sure your explanations can be used, symmetrically, for black holes (p. 93).” He argues that if we are to make critical arguments, we must do so from the same epistemological stance. He sees potential in anthropology as a field that can recover the links between the purifying and translating forces of science, but he warns that this discipline must overcome its asymmetrical focus on the human and occupy a more central point between the human and nonhuman. That is not possible so long as we are modern. Modernity eliminates this space (p. 96).
The double separation has another effect: it makes it impossible for moderns to conceptualize themselves within the same continuity as premoderns. The first “Great Divide” that exists between Nature and Society, internal to the west, is exported to the modern West’s relationship with the rest of the premodern world (p. 99, 133). As the moderns embrace hybrids while still clinging to purification, they let more and more hybrids enter into their consideration until the modern constitutional framework is saturated with them (p. 51). The biggest concerns of our day -- the ozone hole, deforestation, climate change and the “human masses that have been made to multiply as a result of the virtues and vices of medicine and economics (p. 50)” -- are impossible to place on either side of the Nature-Culture divide. While the laws of economics are transcendent, the plight of the Third World masses is the work of the moderns. (Here again, we have the paradox between transcendence and immanence.) The problems of the Third World masses are truly the kinds of hybrids that are saturating the modern Constitution, and that constitution has no place for the inalienable rights of subjects. They belong in a new space that mediates between the processes of purification and translation, in a space that is amodern, as we have always been.
On Wednesday, November 28, 2012 9:10:49 PM UTC-7, Chandler Griffith wrote:
Ian Rowen
Ian Rowen
GEOG 5100
December 2, 2012
Commentary: Latour, We Have Never Been Modern
Employing an endless array of inventive metaphors—a Constitution with balancing branches of government, the Middle Kingdom (as unknown as its namesake, China) that produces and harbors monstrous hybrids, the plate tectonics that mediate nature-cultures, Latour diagnoses modern rationality as fundamentally paradoxical and on its last legs, yet still with enough creative elements to deserve a surgical excision.
Latour’s opens his essay with a list of news reports describing entities that cannot be said to be entirely natural, nor entirely socially produced—the ozone layer, frozen human embryos, whales with tracking collars. These are not human, yet not entirely non-human. They are not quite subjects, yet not quite objects—rather, they are quasi-subjects and quasi-objects, collectives or networks mediating a wide variety of different elements. To Latour, accepting their existence, especially in the face of increasingly rapid proliferation, requires a rethinking, or at least a re-“sorting” of modern ontological categories.
Latour’s ambitious proposal is inspired by both his past ethnographies of science, as well as a historical review of modern theorists and technicians. He frames his discussion around Boyle and Hobbes, suggesing that these two figures are responsible for creating the nature-society distinction that characterizes the “Modern Constitution”. Latour refers to this distinction as “purification”. Boyle claims to be investigating the natural world with his laboratory construction of the air pump. Hobbes claims to be investigating the social world with his construction of the Leviathan. Yet, Latour, borrowing from Shapin and Shaffer, points out that Boyle’s work was a work of political theory, and likewise Hobbes’s account was a treatment of natural science. The two poles are not really opposed—the social is reliant on, and indeed constituted by non-human objects; meanwhile, investigation of nature requires social networks, human passions, institutional resources, and so on. Therefore, nature and society are inseparable, belying the conceit of the Moderns. Paradoxically, it is this very mania for purification that has allowed the Moderns to innovate ways to produce more and more hybrids, ultimately undermining their own ontological principles.
In just 15 brief pages, Latour eviscerates the sociology of Durkheim, the retro-modern rationalism of Habermas, the ontology of Heidegger, the disembodied semiotics of Baudrillard, and more. All the while, he maintains that he is not interested in critique, revolution, debunking or revelation—yet he provides a program for a non-modern “Constitution”, and for a “Parliament of Things” that encompasses not just human actors, but non-human actants as well. For Latour, our non-modern constitution should encompass the mediators, the networks, the collectives of “quasi-subjects” and “quasi-objects” that constitute a world that is real, constructed, and discursive all at once.
Latour is not calling for a rejection of “Modernism” in the form of a return to premodern modes of thinking and being, much less for what he dismisses as the ironic nihilism of postmodernism. In fact, as an admirer of the innovations and restless creativity of modernism, and a happy user of the hybrids it has spawned (his refrigerator that connects to Antarctica [144]), he saves his harshest words for such approaches. Rather, he calls for a “Copernican counter-revolution” that accepts mediation as well as purification, that incorporates the Middle Kingdom of quasi-subjects and quasi-objects rather than strictly distinguishing subjects and objects that can not be neatly relegated to the exclusive poles of society and nature.
As much as I loved this book, I remain troubled by a few of its conceits. He claims to vanquish cultural relativism by recasting the differences between different cultures (or nature-cultures, rather) as not of type, but of the size and scale of their networks. I suspect that size is an inadequate measure of comparison—it is not merely the number of actants in the network that matters, but their configuration and topology. Latour’s flat ontology does not clarify the persistent inequality or hierarchization of power between different actants in a particular network. Surely there is some kind of observable difference between a salmon, a nuclear bomb, and an oxygen atom, not to mention the more socially-familiar examples of gender and racial inequality. Perhaps we can accept quasi-objects as constituents of a radically egalitarian “Parliament of Things”, but they may not all have equal voting rights. Presumably, nuance and attention to modes of power specific to different quasi-subject/object configurations can come out in applications of ANT-style approaches to particular empirical cases. Even if the guidelines for such an analysis are not to be found in this book, Latour’s call for a radical rethinking of modern ontological assumptions deserves an answer.
Elizabeth Wharton
Elizabeth Wharton
GEOG 5100: Social Theory
Commentary on Latour’s We Have Never Been Modern
December 2, 2012
“This tribe… projects its own social categories on to Nature; what is new is that it pretends it has not done so.” (Latour, 1993, 102)
The Nature-Society divide upon which Western modernity has been constructed is untenable, argues Latour, and in fact has never existed. Rather, the separation of representational powers – between science “charged with representing things”, and politics “charged with representing subjects” is an invention (29), one that has never in fact operated according to its own rules. Thus, “No one has ever been modern. Modernity has never begun.” (47) Toward understanding this invention, its implications, and the possibility of solutions to the destruction it has wrought, Latour turns to lens of the anthropologist onto the society that has most resisted its gaze.
Latour locates the beginning of the “drafting” of the Modern Constitution with the arguments between Robert Boyle and Thomas Hobbes in the middle of the 17th century, with the former calling forth a modern science as a repository of non-political truth; and Hobbes conjuring the body politic. Despite standing in apparent opposition with each other, these two were in fact engaged in a unitary act of creation – that is the act of division as the defining characteristic of the spheres they respectively represented: “to Hobbes, the politics and to Boyle, the sciences” (25).
The Modern Constitution that began with Boyle and Hobbes came to comprise four guarantees: first, it defines nature as an eternal given, and our relationship to it as “discovering its secrets” (30); second, it conceives of humanity as separated from nature, able to “construct society and freely determine [its] destiny” (30); the third guarantee ensures the separation between nature and humanity, along with the translation and hybridization the separation (by being fundamentally false) necessitates; finally, the fourth guarantee concerns the roll of God, now “crossed out” but not eliminated, removed from both nature and society but able to serve as a kind of tie breaker between the two. The Modern Constitution has been both highly productive and highly destructive, but it has never overcome its illusory foundations. Instead, it has brought us to the contemporary point where “the proliferation of hybrids has saturated the constitutional framework of the moderns” (51)
Latour does not, however, reject everything contained in the modern project. Rather, in his closing pages, he proposes an “amalgam” – a new Constitution “To maintain all the advantages of the moderns’ dualism without its disadvantages” (134) The first principle of this new constitution is the impossibility of declaring Nature and Society as distinct poles; rather, they must be recognized as “one and the same production of successive states of societies-natures, of collectives.” (139) But, in asserting this, Latour still sees the separate treatment of Nature and Society as containing “the moderns’ major innovation” (140) – transcendent nature and immanent society. These he will keep in the Nonmodern Constitution’s second guarantee, while rejecting their separation and their inverse mechanisms. Thirdly, he proposes that we seek to understand our world without resorting to choices between false dualities – of the archaic versus the modern, the local versus the global, etc. (My understanding here is that the third guarantee calls on us to understand the world through actors and networks, but I look forward to clarification on this front.) The fourth guarantee he calls for is a broader definition of democracy, with a focus on moderating and regulating our production of hybrids. This final political task seems to be the most potentially consequential part of Latour’s Constitution, but also strikes me as the most difficult to realize. How do we begin to operationalize a concept of democracy grounded in a morality that can help us avoid (or counter) the monstrous hybrids we now face?
Questions
· Hybrids as phenomenon that are simultaneously real, like nature, narrated like discourse, and collective, like society?” (6) – that is, things that exist despite being “taboo” under the modernist constitution – make sense to me. However, I am unclear on Latour’s argument regarding the multiplication of hybrids as caused by the modern division. Why / through what process does the Constitution produce an increasing number of hybrids?
· How, practically, do we go about studying networks? How do we unveil or push aside the “sleek, unified surfaces” (118) that obscure the nature of the networks underneath? Are there examples of this we can turn to?
On Wednesday, November 28, 2012 9:10:49 PM UTC-7, Chandler Griffith wrote:
Joel
Joel Correia
Geography 5100
2 December 2012
Reading Response
Bruno Latour’s We Have Never Been Modern
In We Have Never Been Modern, Bruno Latour develops an anthropology of the modern world and employs it to deconstruct the falsity of nature/culture binaries upon which all notions of modernity are predicated. Latour’s argument is elaborated along three central points: 1) nature and culture are not distinct but are in actuality a hybrid nature-culture; 2) the modern Constitution is false and creates the modern paradox; and 3) because of the former two points we have never been modern. In this response paper I discuss these three ideas and then illustrate that the modern Constitution, as seen through a Latourian lens, fetishizes and obscures hybrids and quasi-objects. I close the paper by arguing that though Latour argues the condition of modernity never existed, his line of argumentation in this book reifies the category of modern in problematic ways.
I argued that Latour employs three central points to elaborate his argument. In this section, I first present a succinct passage that delineates these points and second I unpack the key concepts to illustrate their meaning and significance to Latour’s project.
If we understand modernity in terms of the official Constitution that has to make a total distinction between humans [i.e. culture] and nonhumans [i.e. nature] on the one hand and between purification and mediation on the other, then no anthropology of the modern world is possible. But if we link together in one single picture the work of purification and the work of mediation that gives it meaning, we discover, retrospectively, that we have never been truly modern (p. 91).
The “official Constitution” (ibid) is the foundation of the modernist ontology. It is site of the distinction between nature and culture. The Constitution is based on notions that nature is not a social construction (though it is) and culture is socially constructed (though it is not) (p. 32). This Constitution has led to the modern paradox, or the “insurmountable tension between object [i.e. nature] and subject [i.e. society]” (p. 58) conceived by Latour as the internal great divide (p. 99). The creation of manifold quasi-objects is a central outcome of the modern constitution and one of its internal contradictions. Quasi-objects undermine the modern ontology because they are the hybrid outcomes of networked relationships of nature-culture that moderns do not acknowledge yet continually create through the Constitution itself. “The modern Constitution allows the expanded proliferation of the hybrids whose existence, whose very possibility, it denies” (p. 34). However, these quasi-objects and hybrids are, indeed, hidden by the fetish of the modern nature/culture binary. Their existence is hidden by the act of purification. The modern Constitution mandates that purification (the process by which moderns construct nature as separate from society) and mediation (acts of transformation, translation, and distortion whereby hybrids are formed) are “absolutely distinct” (ibid.). Latour’s critique of modernity focuses on the binaries, contradictions, and paradoxes noted here.
Latour argues that modernity never existed because nature and culture dichotomies are false; the processes of purification and mediation are not distinct. They occur as imbroglios, quasi-objects, and hybrids in relation with one another, as constituents of one state of Being. This realization refutes the nature/culture binary at the root of the modernist ontology. If true, if there is no distinction or separation between nature and culture, purification and mediation, or society, nature, and discourse upon which the modernist ontology is created, then “we have never been truly modern” (ibid). Moreover, Latour critiques the modern ontology for its obfuscation of the production and existence of quasi-objects. He argues, “[their] genesis must no long be clandestine, but must be followed through and through, from the hot events that spawned them to the progressive cool-down that transforms them into essences of Nature or Society” (p. 135). Doing so would allow for new possibilities and understandings of the world that are not allowed in the modern project. This is central to the nonmodern existence that Latour envisions.
Latour closes the book by positing an explicit nonmodern constitution and alternative to the modern ontology that he critiques, deconstructs, and repeatedly argues never exists. Nevertheless, his argument reifies and co-constructs the category of modern. If we have never been modern and modernity has never and does not exist, then how can an argument be constructed against it? I am reminded of many critics of capitalism who call for its demise and for alternatives, though in the act of defining and arguing against capitalism they contribute to its social construction and materiality. For much of the book I found this vexing because Latour’s nonmodern alternative is juxtaposed in a dichotomous relationship to modernity rather than as something that is completely outside of it. However, his argument and project becomes clearer when he sates, “We have been modern. Very well. We can no longer be modern in the same way” (p. 142). Latour’s recognition of an existence based on a false notion (i.e. modernity and the nature/society binary) folds nicely into his greater argument of hybridity and symmetry. For Latour there is no asymmetrical modern/nonmodern binary. Rather, the nonmodern ontology recognizes the history of the modern ontology. In doing so the nonmodern moves beyond the modern distinction to creates new hybrids and deeper understanding.
Lauren Gifford
Lauren Gifford
We Have Never Been Modern (Bruno Latour)
1 December 2012
GEOG 5100
In We Have Never Been Modern, Bruno Latour encourages readers to re-imagine common conceptions of human-nature relationships. Moderns, or subjects of modernity, tend to purify beings into either nature or culture. But Latour argues that these divisions have never truly existed, and therefore modernity has never existed either. Instead, there is an inherent hybridization of nature-culture relationships, and the very act of overlooking these hybrids makes them propagate (12). Latour instead encourages scientists and thinkers to take a holistic or, what he calls “symmetrical,” approach to research that applies agency to both human and nonhuman actants. He argues that nature and culture are constantly linked, creating quasi-subjects. This linkage, however, is not part of modernity because, he writes, “modernizing finally made it possible to distinguish between the laws of external nature and the conventions of society” (130). Modernity, through the processes of purification and translation, not only separates human from nonhuman, it also separates things that were already joined, like Nature as both inherent and a social construct.
Latour calls for scientists to think more broadly, “beyond the margins” where they tend to dwell, and to seek to understand the collective hybridization of all subjects and objects. Latour refers to these Nature and Society hybrids as “nature-culture,” because “it is a bit more and a bit less than culture” (7). Of course, acknowledgement of this “middle kingdom,” where these nature-culture hybrids exist requires a paradigm shift that would reduce modernity to a pre-modern consciousness. This is the root of his foremost argument in this essay, that we have never been modern. Moderns simply don’t acknowledge the true nature of subject/object relationships, which are all hybrids. By denying the proliferation of hybrids, modernity is contradicting its central framework.
The modern notion that culture only exists outside of nature is similar to Butler’s notion that feminist theory only exists in relation to masculine theory; For Latour, modernity dictates that culture can only exist if we remove nature from the equation. He writes: “Nature exists as a corresponding state of society” (95). But, unlike Butler’s theory, he argues that nature and culture do not require an inverse, as they are eternally producing complex networks or hybrids that interconnect both Nature and Culture, as seen when one deconstructs, for example, the actants in the ozone hole. Latour writes that the phenomenon is “too social and too narrated to be truly natural” (6).
Latour argues that, in order to truly be modern, Moderns must acknowledge the existence of quasi-subjects and seek to better understand their constitution. This raises a number of questions: Who is considered “modern” by Latour? Where is the line between premodern and modern sensibility drawn? Also, when engaging notions of relativity, does Latour consider the spaces created by relationships between Nature and Culture to be hybrids themselves? If so, how would Moderns classify non-tangible space through the processes of purification and translation? Finally, at one point Latour sites a shortfall of post-tropic anthropology for its focus on the margins (100), but isn’t a hybrid, by nature, marginal? So isn’t Latour doing the very thing he is critical of other scientists for engaging?
galenbmurton
Galen Murton
December 2, 2012
GEOG 5100
Latour Response
In We Have Never Been Modern, Bruno Latour challenges the fundamental tenets of modernism – namely, the separation of nature and society – and brings into question the modernist ‘sanctity’ of science. As an “anthropology of science” itself, Latour examines the human-social construction of empirical science, and argues that what is really just a matter of faith is erroneously (and almost universally) embraced as “fact.” Framing his argument, and the book, on a series of dichotomies, paradoxes, and comparisons – Crisis, Constitution, Revolution, Relativism, and Redistribution – Latour offers “amodernism” as a non-binary, holistic alternative to the problems inherent in modern-, premodern-, and even postmodern-ist epistemologies.
According to Latour, modernism is designated by the tendency to separate and categorize things in a nature vs. society rubric and then to relate them back to one another via networks and hybrids. He bases his argument on a key hypothesis (which is ironic, considering his apparent disdain for the primacy of the scientific method). First, “purification” creates “distinct ontological zones” between humans and non-humans - the Great Divide. Second, practices of “translation” create hybrids, or new networks that mix nature and culture as “new types of beings.” This, Latour posits, is the basis of modernism, for “so long as we consider these two practices of translation and purification separately, we are truly modern” (11).
Taking the “crisis” of the binary-network “paradox of the moderns” as his starting point, Latour proceeds to show the fallacy of modernism’s very “constitution”: that an essential distinction exists between nature and culture (and God). Although they are hybridizable, this “critical tripartition” identifies nature, society/culture, and discourse/God as distinct realms, and therein lies the problem. Latour illustrates the error of this tripartite view with a review of the Hobbes-Boyle debate and uses Shapin and Schaffer to show how, at the end of the day (or the contest), Hobbes was as much of a scientist as Boyle was a philosopher. Latour then takes to task the apotheosis of the laboratory as an objective space of empiricism and the blind faith that holds scientific practice on a pedestal.
Latour’s turn towards amodernism follows a trajectory of “revolution” and “relativism” through the Middle Kingdom. While the modern experience is defined by the proliferation of quasi-object hybrids, Latour suggests that revolutionary tactics are acts of mediation. These acts reconcile the polar divides that quasi-objects (hybrids) assume between nature and culture/society. Relativism brings latitudinal stability to the longitudinal axis of essence-existence, or nature-society. Furthermore, relativism is necessary to bridge both the Internal and External Great Divides, not only that between nature and society (Internal), but the more pernicious, External separation of “Us” and “Them” (99). Finally, in a comparison of relativism and universalisms, Latour outlines the way to nature-culture collectives via symmetrical anthropology, transcending the unstable states of absolute relativism, cultural relativism, and particular universalism.
Modernism and capitalism are in many ways indistinguishable – driven by economic rationality, technological efficiency, and scientific “truth.” Furthermore, just as Marx identified as the contradiction of capitalism, so modernism is a paradox that appears ultimately self-defeating. However, it is not the violent revolution of the proletariat that signals the end of the modern. Rather, transition and transformation away from modernism and post-modernism is possible, Latour suggests, because we never left the nonmodern in the first place. That is, the amodern/nonmodern world has always been there, despite the concealment of purification and translation. And it is through a return to humanism that this reality can be further revealed, a “redistribution” that unifies nature-culture and subverts the dominant paradigms of modernism-capitalism.
On Wednesday, November 28, 2012 9:10:49 PM UTC-7, Chandler Griffith wrote:
Austin Cowley
Austin Cowley
GEOG 5100: Introduction to Social Theory
The Copernican Revolution: Hybridization and Reformulating the Modern Constitution
Published in 1993, Bruno Latour’s We Have Never Been Modern was clearly positioned against a growing canon of postmodern literature. As Latour argues, postmodern thinking is simply an extension of the original premise of modernism, and in only being able to deconstruct and requalify the modern thesis, it's necessarily doomed to endless particularism, fragmented realities, and the intellectual dead end of nihilism. Rather than simply providing a critique of postmodernism, however (the equally pointless “post-post-postmodernisms” that have followed), the author instead suggests a radical departure from the entire project. In what follows, I will outline Latour’s discussion of the modern constitution and its revolution while briefly exploring how his thesis can be used as a new method of inquiry in future research. In doing so I ask, how does inverting nature and society as satellites rather than poles of knowledge propose an more holistic approach to ethnographic research?
The Modern Constitution and Hybridization
In the essay’s introduction, Latour presents a well-understood conundrum. With so many specialized forms of knowledge, the modern world appears to be deeply fragmented, ruptured between competing notions of truth. Subjects like climate change – where science meets politics, global economics, social activism, and even religion – underscore the utter messiness of this dilemma. This phenomenon is likewise echoed across the various disciplines of social sciences, each dividing their different knowledges into particular subset whilst all appealing to the legitimacy of science. Rather than travel down the path of post- or antimodernist thinking, Latour circles around the very premise of the problem, a maneuver that takes him back to Hobbes and Boyle (or the point at which the very bifurcation of social and scientific knowledge emerged). In doing so, the author outlines the fundamental paradox in the modern constitution, one that assumes nature and society to be both immanent and transcendent. That is to say, modernist thinking both polarizes nature and society (and thus subject and object) into incommensurable realms that at one and the same moment are the artificial constructions of human beings and a truth that structures our very way of living. In setting up this paradigm, Latour is able to insert and critique various schools of thought – dialectical reasoning, phenomenology, existentialism – for trying account for the gap while unwittingly perpetuating the modernist constitution. It’s here that Latour presents a reformulation to the paradigm, what he calls the “Copernican Revolution”:
We do not need to attach our explanations to the two pure forms known as the Object or Subject/Society, because these are, on the contrary, partial and purified results of the central practice that is our sole concern. The explanations we seek will indeed obtain Nature and Society, but only as a final outcome, not as a beginning. Nature does revolve, but not around the Subject/Society. It revolves around the collective that produces things and people. The Subject does revolve, but not around Nature. It revolves around the collective out of which people and things generated. At last the Middle Kingdom is represented. Natures and societies are its satellites (79).
Thus, the author’s inversion is complete. Nature and society are no longer the polar extremes by which we position our understanding but indeed the opposite. Therefore, the work that follows this premise should be what Latour calls “symmetrical”, or rather a fixed gaze from the inside-out. This of course, has serious implications for any social science work that utilizes ethnography.
Amodern Ethnography
How does repositioning our knowledge of nature and society produce new methods of inquiry in the social sciences? Throughout his essay, Latour both praises and criticizes the work of anthropology, as well as the method of ethnography. On one hand, it illustrates how multiple epistemologies can all function in a single cultural space. On the other, it too often focuses its attention on the premodern world and should interrogate the modern constitution, the beliefs and assumptions that bolster its claims. That is not to say, however, that anthropologists (as well as geographers and other social scientists engaging in ethnographic research) should completely turn away from their inquiry abroad, but rather integrate the examination of socially constructed knowledge to include the hyper-modern. In doing so, Latour argues for breaking from the modern constitution but also from other epistemological divides such as scale and the dichotomy of local and global. Thus, the endless hybridization of our world should not only challenge the false divide between nature and society but also put forth a new way to reorder, modify, and completely intermingle the categories of our knowledge.
Eric Reiff
On Wednesday, November 28, 2012 9:10:49 PM UTC-7, Chandler Griffith wrote: