Tracing My Steps
We Have Never Been Modern is the first book that I read in this sequence. Before reading this book, the only Latour I had read was Science in Action and parts of Reassembling the Social. Coming off of Science in Action, I was honestly a little overwhelmed by WHNBM, which struck to me to be a much more philosophically ambitious work, both in its scope and in the sophistication of its arguments. It just seemed like Latour was going so quickly over such a huge expanse of philosophical ground that it was hard for me to get a firm hold on what he was saying. I’m glad I read it, however, because it really helped frame my understanding of the rest of the books in the sequence (especially AIME), but if I had to do it over again, I’m not sure I would have read this one first, with only Science in Action as my background. I encourage any reader of this blog to follow their own path through Latour, and please leave comments on how, why, and where your path through the network deviated from mine. But I also realize that it can be helpful to have some advice offered your way. So, here’s what I would personally recommend. It seems to me that it would be best to read Pandora’s Hope before We Have Never Been Modern, especially if the only book of Latour’s you’ve ever read is Science in Action. I think PH would be a nice transition between Science in Action and WHNBM for three reasons; first, PH is heavily grounded in an empirical approach to scientific practice, like Science in Action; second, it is a little more philosophically oriented than Science in Action, and it covers much of the same ground as WHNBM; and yet, to give a third reason, Pandora’s Hope goes at a little bit slower pace than WHNBM.
So, all told, I’m glad I read this book toward the beginning of my sequence, but I do wish I had something to ease me in a little. I will end this section with one more suggestion. I do think that in order to understand An Inquiry into Modes Existence (AIME), you must first read WHNBM. I mean, I suppose you could make your way through Latour’s network of books by going from AIME backwards. I would actually be fascinated to hear what that process is like, but I suspect that it would be pretty frustrating for the person doing it.
Description of the Text
The Proliferation and Denial of Hybrids
Latour begins by pointing out what he considers to be an odd phenomenon in today’s world. He notices that many of our most heated and important controversies and contentions center upon what he calls “hybrids”, which is his word for any topic, entity, technology, or idea in which several worlds of knowledge and controversy are wrapped up and at stake. As an example of a hybrid, he refers to global warming, a topic which is not simply one thing in its essence, but rather several things. It is not just meteorology, or chemistry, or politics, or economics. It is all of these things, and yet it is none of them because it, as a collective entity, does work in our world all its own. Despite the complex nature of hybrids, Latour notices that we often talk about them as if they are simply one thing, and we ignore the multiplicity of connections that these hybrid topics have with so many other topics. Thus, a hybrid is a construct that does not have one, unified essence in itself, but rather serves as a locus of intersection for a multiplicity of other constructs.
The problem that Latour sees concerning hybrids is not that they exist, but that we in the modern age fail to see them for what they are. We deny, at least implicitly, that hybrids exist. Latour traces this phenomenon of denial back to the foundations of Modernism, arguing that what makes our age “Modern” is the scientific concept of purified, compartmentalized, spheres of knowledge. The more the “Moderns” are dedicated to the endeavor of discovering, developing, and producing purified knowledge in the sciences, the more they create new technologies, new objects and subjects,, that contribute to the conglomeration of different issues and technologies; thus, modern “Science” produces hybrids. The great paradox about hybrids and the Modern age is that through the activity of “purifying” knowledge, the moderns create hybrids, and yet they are forced to deny that hybrids exist, or else the entire basis on which they stand as Modern collapses. The reason that the Moderns do not recognize the possibility of hybrids is that they (the Moderns) focus only on one side of knowledge/fact production: purification. But Latour insists that there is a twin aspect to knowledge production: the process of translation, or mediation (two words that he uses almost interchangeably throughout his essay).
Intermediaries vs. Mediators
The key to understanding Latour’s idea of the process of translation lies in the important distinction he insists upon between “intermediaries” and “mediators”. According to Latour’s theory, as ideas, claims, facts, data, move through the various networks of association that are necessary for their legitimation in the world, each scientist, lab experiment, journal publication, radio broadcast, or any other mode of knowledge production or communication, actively changes the nature of the information at hand. Traditional approaches to the development of knowledge, especially scientific knowledge, operate under the implicit assumption that pure factual knowledge can be transferred from one mode of observation and communication to another, without losing its purity as knowledge. But Latour argues that this kind of pure transfer is never possible. The fact that the knowledge was produced in a lab necessarily changes the nature of the knowledge, and the same rule holds true for every other “translation” of the knowledge along the way. Thus, all the various practices and methods of knowledge-making, along with all the various methods and means of communicating that knowledge to larger communities, are not simply “intermediaries” that act as pure transfer media. Rather, they are “mediators”, actors in the network who change the nature of the knowledge as that knowledge passes through them. A “fact” produced in a laboratory is not the same as a “fact” produced in a software engineering research facility, and those “facts” disseminated in a scholarly journal are not the same as those “facts” disseminated in a popular newspaper article. Here, the words of Marshall McLuhan are helpful: “The medium is the massage.”
For Latour there is no such thing as “pure” knowledge that does not pass through this process of mediation, or translation. Therefore, if we are to honestly and earnestly set ourselves about the task of analyzing how knowledge gets made, we must follow each knowledge claim through the chains of association and mediation that are at one and the same time responsible for their production and their transformation. In other words, instead of simply studying “facts”, we need to study networks. The problem with Moderns, for Latour, is that they render themselves incapable of studying networks because they deny that mediation ever takes place. As we mentioned before, one of the fundamental assumptions of Modernist epistemology is that knowledge can be purified and communicated in its purity. Under this epistemological system, a laboratory, a scholarly journal, a newspaper article, a radio interview, a documentary, all are simply intermediaries that serve the purpose of transferring knowledge, in its purity, from one place to another. These erroneous epistemological assumptions constitute the basis on which Modern science, as purified knowledge, is founded.
And so we can start to make sense of Latour’s titular claim: We Have Never Been Modern. If being “Modern” means that we are the culture that produces pure knowledge, unadulterated by biases of culture, if we have succeeded in separating what constitutes “Nature” from what constitutes “Society”, then we have never been Modern, because such purification and such separation is impossible. Therefore, there is no such thing as being Modern, and those whom we call “the Moderns” are not those who have accomplished these aforementioned epistemological goals; rather, they are merely those who labor under the illusion/ delusion that such goals can be accomplished in the first place.
But how could the Moderns be so blind? How could they miss/ ignore/ deny that this process of mediation/ translation is happening all the time? What foundational assumptions are the Moderns clinging to so desperately that they can thus delude themselves? In other words, where/ when did all of this start? Latour answers these questions by tracing the process back to the Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth century. Desperate to establish new bodies of knowledge that were free from the controversies that led to and stemmed from the English Civil War, “scientists” (though, of course, they wouldn’t have called themselves this at the time) such as Robert Boyle turned to an inductive method of knowledge creation based upon controlled experimentation, unbiased reporting, and purified “matters of fact.” In order to construct such matters of fact (and this is the crucial move of Modernism, according to Latour’s analysis), these “scientists” were forced to adopt an epistemology based upon what Latour calls “The Two Great Divides.”
The Great Divides
The first Great Divide separates “Nature”, the always already present and “True” world of objects, on the one hand, and “Society”, the world of humans and their interactions, on the other. The second Great Divide separates the human from the non-human, making the objects of our analyses of Nature fundamentally, ontologically, different from, other than, “us”, the subjects doing the analysis. Latour insists that such divisions between Society and Nature, between the human and the nonhuman, although they serve as the foundations of Modern thought, are merely constructions of Modernist epistemology, and as such, are not necessarily an accurate or tenable description of the world that we inhabit. Below I have included the chart that Latour provides for this section of the book. I can't say whether it will be helpful or not. Latour's diagrams are rarely helpful for me, but I can't speak for others.
To clarify what it is that Latour finds so problematic with these divisions, he makes reference to the two different “camps” that make use of them when talking about scientific knowledge. In the first camp, there are those firm believers in the doctrines of Modern science, those who believe that knowledge of the world of objects (Nature) exists “out there”, or independently of human culture (Society). Such a view is akin to a sort of Scientific Positivism, an epistemology that assumes that pure knowledge can exist apart from our interpretations of it, and that human language (controlled by scientific principles, of course) is sufficient to express this knowledge in its purity. Extreme Positivism would even go as far as to say that any use of language that does not communicate such purified knowledge is inherently meaningless. Latour’s problem with this Modern Positivist epistemology is that it fails to consider the role that humans play in the construction of facts. In the other camp, occupying the opposite end of the same Nature/ Society divide, there are the “social constructivists”, those who insist on the idea that all facts are constructed by humans, reducing everything down to an explanation of “the social.” Latour’s complaint against the social constructivist approach, despite his appreciation for what this approach has revealed to us, is that it runs the risk of forgetting that objects really do exist, and things really do happen that are outside the scope of human control and agency.
Latour also goes to great lengths to disassociate his approach from a third camp that sometimes arises when the topic of the Great Divides is discussed in Criticism: the discursive camp. According to Latour’s description, the discursive critics are those who would essentially claim that there is not real Nature or any real Society, but only language games and discourse. While he acknowledges the relevance and importance of language in the construction of knowledge, Latour insists on keeping in mind that objects really are real, not just figments of our linguistic imagination. He insists that when he and other sociologists of his particular ilk trace associations and networks, they are describing the relations between things that are always Natural, Social, and discursive all at once.
Scientific Realism vs Constructivism: Two Sides of the Modernist Coin
One of the central problems that Latour has with the Modern Constitution is that it leads only to two equally untenable epistemological worldviews: Scientific Realism and Social Constructivism. If one is committed, a priori, to the complete ontological distinction between subjects and objects, then in the end, one has to believe, according to Latour, that reality is fixed, immutable, and always already there in the form of objects in “Nature”, or that reality is completely constructed by thinking subjects in “Society”, or “”Culture”, or “Politics”. The first of these viewpoints describes Scientific realist (of course, that’s Science, capital ‘S’, not ‘s’, an important distinction for Latour, while the latter describes social constructivism. For Latour, these two viewpoints, while they seem to be in conflict, are simply opposite sides of the same coin. Social constructivism doesn’t offer a paradigm that differs in its essence from that of Science, capital ‘S’; all constructivism does is reverse the poles, placing all the agency for knowledge creation on the other side of the spectrum. The problem with the whole Modernist Construction for Latour, no matter what pole gets to play the active role, is that it fails to take into consideration the ways in which knowledge is both constructed and real, and yet it is constructed by humans and nonhumans. We should not be thinking in terms of subjects and objects, of Society and Nature; we should only be thinking in terms of networks, of collectives, of what’s tied to what. The Modernist Constitution denies the role of mediators (actors who change the very nature of the network as other actors pass through them) and only sees intermediaries. Instead of comparing cultures, we should be comparing networks, for he argues that the only difference between what we would erroneously call “different cultures” is a different way of sorting humans and nonhumans in the network. What makes reality is our way of sorting the collective.
A New Model: Networks, Symmetrical Anthropology, and Relative Relativism
At the end of WHNBM, Latour offers a few prescriptions for a new way of looking at the world, particularly the Modern world. First, as has already been mentioned, we need to start looking at the world in terms of collectives, or networks, of the complex tying and sorting of humans and nonhumans to one another. It does us no good to continue explaining the world in reductionist terms, boiling everything down to Society, or Nature, or Politics, or Culture. Of course, political actors, spokespersons, and mediators, are all part of the collective, as are “economic” ones, and “nonhuman” ones; it’s just that in an anthropology of networks, the identity of the entire collective cannot be reduced to any of these.
Second, Latour encourages what he calls “symmetrical anthropology.” He argues that there is a certain sense in which the Modern Constitution forbids the Moderns from doing any sort of anthropology of their own “culture”. Because we Moderns already assume the we have the only authentically true knowledge of the Nature and Politics, of Objects and Subjects, there is no need to study our own culture to look for patterns of sorting. The Moderns don’t sort; they know. So, under this Construction, only other cultures are interesting subjects of study, only they are the ones who curiously mix-up the world of objects and subjects. And yet it would be a mistake to think that Latour dislikes anthropology. On the contrary, he appreciates that anthropologists have brought us studies on the ways that, in other cultures, humans and nonhumans are not ontologically separated along the lines of subject and object. He writes, “In works produced by anthropologists, you will not find a single trait that is not simultaneously real, social, and narrated” (7). What Latour dislikes about anthropology is that it is not symmetrically applied to the West, to the Moderns, like it is to other peoples in other places around the world. What we need, according to Latour, is an anthropology of the Moderns (for just such an anthropology, see An Inquiry into Modes of Existence), one that disregards the entire Modern Constitution, one that simply seeks to describe the ways in which humans and nonhumans are sorted in the collective (network) of the people who have never been modern, but always thought they were.
The third prescription that Latour argues will come out of an network-oriented anthropology is what he calls relative relativism, which he opposes to absolute relativism. For Latour absolute relativism is yet another untenable byproduct of the Modern Constitution because it still relies upon the Nature/ Society split. Absolute relativism claims that since all reality is constructed by subjects in Society, and because there are no universal principles of truth outside of societal constructs, all cultures are equal and it does no good to try to compare them. Latour argues, however, that this philosophy ignores the role of nonhumans in shaping the collective, and therefore it ignores the idea that reality is co-extensively produced by humans and nonhumans, depending on the ways in which these actors are sorted in a particular network. What relative relativism does is describe and compare networks without committing foolishly to the separation between Nature and Society, between subjects and objects, between “our culture” and “the Other culture”. For Latour, “Culture” is not a real thing because it insists on “bracketing off Nature” as he puts it. There are no cultures, only networks, and once we can understand that, we can start to understand that how networks come to dominate others, how they may shift in their respective features, and how we might be able to evaluate their advantages and disadvantages (but that comes later, in AIME).
I appreciate the recommendation on where to start with Latours work. Exposure to his work came to me serendipitously through Michael Crichton’s book “Micro”. I’m looking forward to reading his work and using your blog as a resource! Thanks!
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