We Have Never Been Modern

We Have Never Been Modern November 15, 2006

Bruno Latour’s We Have Never Been Modern (Harvard 1993) is a rich study. He describes modernity in terms of a dual process of “purification” and “hybridization.” Purification involves the clean construction of a nature (and science) separated off from society and the self, while hybridization involves mixtures of nature and culture. Latour sometimes describes the separation as one between things and subjects, or between the human and non-human worlds. The result is that the realms of the real, the discursive, and the social are believed to be separated from each other, each a pure form. That’s what moderns pretend to do at least, though in practice they produce all sorts of nature-culture hybrids.


For moderns, the purification process is overt, while hybrids are denied even though modernity proliferates them. Modern both purifies and hybridizes, but never brings the two together, never admits to doing both, never allows that there is anything going on between the interstices of Nature and Society, which are supposed to encompass all reality. Everything, Latour says, happens in the “middle kingdom” between society and nature, the middle kingdom that modernity cannot acknowledge without ceasing to be modern and collapsing back into “premodern” in-differentiation.

Once they are distilled into pure forms, and separated from each other, society and nature can be identified as causal factors, the one of the other. One of the unique features of modernity is its conflicted insisted that the causality goes in both directions. Society and the human subject is dominated by impersonal forces of nature that science discovers; yet at the same time, moderns also develop the opposite argument, namely, that science is nothing but ideology. In the first line of argument, the “fabricated” character of scientific facts is ignored (ie, the fact that scientific facts arise from laboratory environments through constructed experiments before qualified witnesses); in the second line of argument, the fabricated character of society is ignored. In the first, scientific knowledge is treated unproblematically; in the second, sociology is treated as a simple given. Latour wants to insist (shades of Milbank here) that Nature and Society are not explanations; they are what needs to be explained. And when the modern constitution is questioned, it becomes apparent that “culture” doesn’t exist because it is the imagined reality that comes into play when “nature” has been siphoned off. What we have instead of a collection of “nature-cultures” that all, whether “modern” or “premodern,” operate the same way.

(Latour spends a good bit of time reviewing and critiquing Shaffer and Shapin’s book on Hobbes and Boyle, and suggests that their conclusion that “Hobbes was right” to give a socio-political argument against Boyle assumes one part of the modern constitution – namely, and societies and polities are simply unproblematically there.)

The modern “Constitution” begins with a set of guarantees: First, Nature is beyond humanity, has always existed, and therefore that science only discovers its secrets instead of fabricating natural facts; on the other hand, human beings alone construct society and form their own destiny. These two guarantees are unstable: If Nature really is as remote as this suggests, how can we ever tame her; if society is a human construct, how can there be any sovereignty or order? These two internally contradictory guarantees are held together by a third uarantee: “there shall exist a complete separation between the natural world (constructed, nonetheless, by man) and a social world (sustained, nevertheless, by things); secondly, there shall exist a total separation between the work of hybrids and the work of purification.”

Latour also identifies a theological dimension of modernity, which he describes as the “crossed-out God” and which he identifies as the “fourth guarantee” of the modern Constitution. God is, on the one hand, effectively ignored in social and political and scientific pursuits, while, on the other, is invoked and appealed to as the immanent source of spiritual insight. God was made so utterly transcendent that he was irrelevant to the world, while at the same time he speaks directly to the heart: “Modern men and women could thus be atheists even while remaining religious. They could invade the material world and freely re-create the social world, but without experiencing the feeling of an orphaned demiurge abandoned by all . . . . Spirituality was reinvented: the all-powerful God could descend into men’s heart or hearts without intervening in any way in their external affairs.”

With these three factors in play – Nature, Society, and God – Latour suggests that modernity is an oscillation between the transcendence and immanence of each of these three. At one moment, Nature is so utterly transcendent that its “laws” control us and its ways can be used as the basis for criticism of human morality and society; at the next moment, Nature is a human construct, or at least subject to God’s control. At one moment, Society determines our every desire and action; at the next, it’s admitted that Society is a human construct that can be changed by the will of its creators. At one moment, God is judged to be so completely transcendent that he has no interest in science or economics; at the next, God is whispering quietly to my soul. This dynamic interplay of transcendence and immanence among these three factors constitutes what Latour describes as the “Constitution” of modernity.

The constitution, he says, makes moderns invincible. In one of his choice passages: “If you criticize them by saying that Nature is a world constructed by human hands, they will show you that it is transcendent, that science is a mere intermediary allowing access to Nature, and that they keep their hands off. If you tell them that we are free and our destiny is in our own hands, they will tell you that Society is transcendent and its laws infinitely surpass us. If you object that they are being duplicitous, they will show you that they never confuse the Laws of Nature with imprescriptible human freedom. If you believe them and direct your attention elsewhere, they will take advantage of this to transfer thousands of objects from Nature into the social body while procuring for this body the solidity of natural things. 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.”

This “constitution” of modernity depends on a temporal separation of modern differentiated societies from the monistic societies of “pre-modernity.” Since modernity proliferates hybridized forms, however, it has never really been so different from the undifferentiated peoples of the past. The “Great Divide” is based, in turn, on a “purification” of temporality, in which the present has to be viewed as “purely modern” and the past as outmoded and wearing thin. Without the myth of the Great Divide, modernity would have no foundation.

At best, modernity sees the “middle” between pure society/subject and pure nature/thing in a dialectic relation, or as the play of mere intermediaries. The middle doesn’t take on any force of its own, and plays no independent role. Modernity is unmasked, however, by the proliferation of the sphere of hybrids, by a world brimming with constructed nature, with naturalized social facts: “frozen embryos, expert s

ystems, digital machines, sensor-equipped robots, hybrid corn, data banks, psychotropic drugs, whales fitted with radar sounding devices, gene synthesizers, audience analyzers.” It becomes more and more difficult to pretend that nature is “out there” with its own rules, while the subject or society is “in here” running by very different principles.

This does not make Latour a postmodern, about which he has some very severe things to say. Rather, he denies that the modern constitution ever actually described the way things were, though he admits that as an ideal (like the ideal of “revolution”) it has played a massive role in the history of the last few centuries (evident in, for example, the way the history of science is separated from the history of politics). Nor is Latour anti-modern, a stance he sees as a variation within the modern Constitution (accepting, as it does, modern chronopolitical assumptions, wishing only to reverse the process). He says that the situation is simply a-modern.


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