We Have Never Been Modern

by Latour, Bruno; Porter, Catherine

• ISBN13: 9780674948396
• ISBN10: 0674948394
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1993-10-15
• Publisher: Harvard Univ Pr

Summary

With the rise of science, we moderns believe, the world changed irrevocably, separating us forever from our primitive, premodern ancestors. But if we were to let go of this fond conviction, Bruno Latour asks, what would the world look like? His book, an anthropology of science, shows us how much of modernity is actually a matter of faith. What does it mean to be modern? What difference does the scientific method make? The difference, Latour explains, is in our careful distinctions between nature and society, between human and thing, distinctions that our benighted ancestors, in their world of alchemy, astrology, and phrenology, never made. But alongside this purifying practice that defines modernity, there exists another seemingly contrary one: the construction of systems that mix politics, science, technology, and nature. The ozone debate is such a hybrid, in Latour's analysis, as are global warming, deforestation, even the idea of black holes. As these hybrids proliferate, the prospect of keeping nature and culture in their separate mental chambers becomes overwhelming--and rather than try, Latour suggests, we should rethink our distinctions, rethink the definition and constitution of modernity itself. His book offers a new explanation of science that finally recognizes the connections between nature and culture--and so, between our culture and others, past and present. Nothing short of a reworking of our mental landscape. We Have Never Been Modern blurs the boundaries among science, the humanities, and the social sciences to enhance understanding on all sides. A summation of the work of one of the most influential and provocative interpreters of science, it aims at saving what is good and valuable in modernity and replacing the rest with a broader, fairer, and finer sense of possibility.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements	ix
Crisis	1	(12)
The Proliferation of Hybrids	1	(2)
Retying the Gordian Knot	3	(2)
The Crisis of the Critical Stance	5	(3)
1989: The Year of Miracles	8	(2)
What Does It Mean To Be A Modern?	10	(3)
Constitution	13	(36)
The Modern Constitution	13	(2)
Boyle and His Objects	15	(3)
Hobbes and His Subjects	18	(2)
The Mediation of the Laboratory	20	(2)
The Testimony of Nonhumans	22	(2)
The Double Artifact of the Laboratory and the Leviathan	24	(3)
Scientific Representation and Political Representation	27	(2)
The Constitutional Guarantees of the Modern	29	(3)
The Fourth Guarantee: The Crossed-out God	32	(3)
The Power of the Modern Critique	35	(2)
The Invincibility of the Moderns	37	(2)
What the Constitution Clarifies and What It Obscures	39	(4)
The End of Denunciation	43	(3)
We Have Never Been Modern	46	(3)
Revolution	49	(42)
The Moderns, Victims of Their Own Success	49	(2)
What Is a Quasi-Object?	51	(4)
Philosophies Stretched Over the Yawning Gap	55	(4)
The End of Ends	59	(3)
Semiotic Turns	62	(3)
Who Has Forgotten Being?	65	(2)
The Beginning of the Past	67	(3)
The Revolutionary Miracle	70	(2)
The End of the Passing Past	72	(2)
Triage and Multiple Times	74	(2)
A Copernican Counter-revolution	76	(3)
From Intermediaries to Mediators	79	(3)
Accusation, Causation	82	(3)
Variable Ontologies	85	(3)
Connecting the Four Modern Repertoires	88	(3)
Relativism	91	(39)
How to End the Asymmetry	91	(3)
The Principle of Symmetry Generalized	94	(3)
The Import-Export System of the Two Great Divides	97	(3)
Anthropology Comes Home from the Tropics	100	(3)
There Are No Cultures	103	(3)
Sizeable Differences	106	(3)
Archimedes' coup d'etat	109	(2)
Absolute Relativisim and Relativist Relativism	111	(3)
Small Mistakes Concerning the Disenchantment of the World	114	(3)
Even a Longer Network Remains Local at All Points	117	(3)
The Leviathan is a Skein of Networks	120	(2)
A Perverse Taste for the Margins	122	(3)
Avoid Adding New Crimes to Old	125	(2)
Transcendences Abound	127	(3)
Redistribution	130	(16)
The Impossible Modernization	130	(2)
Final Examinations	132	(4)
Humanism Redistributed	136	(2)
The Nonmodern Constitution	138	(4)
The Parliament of Things	142	(4)
Bibliography	146	(8)
Index	154