latour-we have never been modern (review) -libre

8/10/2019 Latour-We Have Never Been Modern (Review) -Libre

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/latour-we-have-never-been-modern-review-libre 1/4

We Have Never Been Modern (Review)Bruno Latour is a pioneer of science studies (or ‘science, technology and society’ as he calls it),

which examines the way scienti c knowledge is arrived at from a sociological point of view. As

one might expect, very often the outcome of this examination is that scienti c knowledge islargely in uenced by the social context. In Laboratory Life: The Social Construction of Scienti c

Facts (1979), Latour and Steve Woolgar argued that scienti c reality is “formed as a consequence

of” the social interactions between scientists. Thus what scientists claim is reality is, to a greater

or lesser degree, artefactual and so sociologists have the authority to speak on subjects of

science. Science is no more objective than sociology; there is a symmetry between the two. This

position may seem strange to us—we tend to think of scientists as nding out about nature,

rather than each other—but in We Have Never Been Modern, Latour tries to show us that this is an

illusion deeply engrained in the modern age.

He does this by outlining what he calls ‘the modern Constitution’: an unwritten understanding,

similar to the political constitutions which give roles to the di ff erent branches of a legislature,

but with a series of bewildering twists and contradictions, the most important being that the

Constitution only holds if we are unaware of it. Latour’s job is to disabuse us of the idea that

nature and culture are separate, and in so doing to set us free from the illusions of modernity: “As

soon as one outlines the symmetrical space … [between] … natural and political powers, one

ceases to be modern” (13). The modern Constitution is like the Emperor’s New Clothes. But

Latour’s surreptitious mission is to reassure us that once the emperor (nature) is exposed, his

empire of facts will not become wholly social, nor stay wholly natural, but be a compromise

between the two. But this, I suggest, is a false compromise: it collapses back into strong social

constructivism.

This Constitution consists of four guarantees. Firstly, “even though we construct Nature, nature is

as if we did not construct it” (33). Secondly, “even though we do not construct Society, Society is

as if we did construct it” (33). Thirdly, “Nature and Society must remain absolutely distinct” (33).

And lastly, God exists but never interferes with nature or politics (33). Why does Latour think we

need this constitution? So that we can alternate with impunity between two contradictory

positions, which he calls the rst and second paradox. The rst paradox is that although nature is

transcendent (i.e. real and waiting to be discovered), society is constructed by us. The second

paradox is that although we construct nature in the laboratory, society is transcendent. Under

the rst paradox, social scientists can “ridicule [the] naive belief in the freedom of the human

subject and society” (53). Society is subject to certain laws of human nature. And then, puttingon their other hats, sociologists can declare that “the inner properties of objects do not count,

John Ashton Thursday, 10 January 2013

1/4



that they are mere receptacles of human categories” (52). So now nature is nothing but what we

project onto it. For some things, nature is “hard” and leaves its imprint on “soft” society:

“economics, genetics, biology, linguistics, or brain sciences” (53-54). For other things, “hard”

society projects itself onto “soft” objects: “religion, consumption, popular culture and

politics” (53). Whatever “social scientists happen to despise” they treat as ‘soft’, and whatever they

want to use a tool for debunking, they treat as ‘hard’ (53). Latour is certainly right to lambast

these hypocritical double standards, if anyone has them—but just because some are

unprincipled in their use of the hard/soft distinction is not a good argument for abandoning it

altogether.

Perhaps the picture is not as simple as Latour suggests. It certainly seems inconsistent for nature

to be ‘hard’ one minute and ‘soft’ the next, but we shouldn’t be too hasty in moving away from

the idea that science can simultaneously govern us and be in

uenced by us; and in adoptinginstead the idea that nature is somewhere in-between ‘soft’ and ‘hard’. All we need to do is be

more careful with our use of the word ‘nature’. Nature in itself (that is: nature as it actually is,

rather than our interpretation of it) is ‘hard’, and impacts on human thought and society (which is

‘softer’), which in turn impacts on our understanding of nature (which is softer still). Latour

acknowledges that it is “implausible” to claim that ‘nature’ is always hard or always soft, but

instead of conceding that nature is half and half, he insists that it is all in-between hard and soft

(55).

The diff erence is very important because an ontology consisting only of ‘quasi-objects’ (as Latour

calls these things which are neither ‘hard’ nor ‘soft) is in danger of collapsing into strong social

constructivism. Latour wants to ban us from ‘purifying’ these quasi-objects—from conceiving of

them as “a mixture of two pure forms”, which we can separate out into the thing-in-itself, and our

human understanding of it. But to say that if humans were not there to understand a given

object, there would be nothing left of it, is tantamount to saying that objects only exist because

we construct them. This position is known as strong social constructivism, as distinct from weak

social constructivism which holds only that our representations of objects are socially

constructed. But it is the more extreme position that Latour is committing himself to, no matter

how vague he chooses to be on the issue: either there are some things which are at least partly

‘pure’ nature, or there are not. He seems to say ‘not’. “Quasi-objects are much more social, much

more fabricated, much more collective than the ‘hard’ parts of nature”, he says (55), and this “third

estate, which was nothing, becomes everything” (140). Quasi-objects are everything; nothing is

‘pure culture’ nor ‘pure nature’.

This position is reminiscent of the famous words with which George Berkeley summed up his

idealism: “the trees therefore are in the garden … no longer than while there is somebody by to


2/4



perceive them” ( A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge , 1734: section 45).

Though it’s tempting to leave the analogy with Berkeleyan idealism as a reductio ad absurdum ,

there’s more to be said. Latour has been trying to pass himself o ff as a moderate conciliator,

reconciling the two extremes: those who claim that nature determines the way society is, and

those who claim that society determines the way that nature is. He is at pains to rebuke the

excesses of sociologisation, naturalisation and discursivisation and to set his solution out as a

half-way house between the two poles of nature and society. But it is a wolf in sheep’s clothing,

because it denies that there is such a thing as an objective “reality ‘out there’”; that idea, he says,

has been “invented by the philosophers of science” (6). He’s just as extreme as ever: the objects

that science talks about may not be “arbitrary receptacles”, but that’s only a modest concession

which still leaves them oating in a sea of social construction, with no grounding in an

independent reality. The best that can be said for them is that they are constructed in ways

which are constrained by nature.

This ts well with actor-network theory, which sees the world as made up of relations between

actors. Our understanding of the gravitational constant is a relation, but the gravitational

constant itself is not, and so is not accommodated in the actor-network theory. This explains

Latour’s statement “[t]he weight of air is indeed always a universal, but a universal in a

network” (24). The weight of air simply doesn’t exist until it is experienced. Latour wants us to

think that science is safe (140) and that nature is real (77), but while we’re trying to get our heads

around his paradoxes and contradictions, he has furtively positioned himself where he can speak

with authority on matters of both society and science. There is a more charitable reading of

Latour: his statement that the category of quasi-objects “becomes everything” might have been

just one of his many hyperbolic embellishments. Hey may be retaining a place for nature in itself,

but claiming that the only things scientists ever deal with are quasi-objects. Either way, Latour

keeps his position of authority over both society and science.

In a similar act of aggrandisement, he tries to place under the scope of the modern Constitution

the very notion of time that passes (by which he means time which we divide up into discrete

eras, like modern and ancient). “Where do we get the idea of time that passes? From the modern

Constitution itself”, he tells us con dently (68). But Hesiod, who wrote in The Works and Days,

“now truly is an age of iron, and men never rest from labour and sorrow by day, and from

perishing by night”, can hardly be described as a modern, living two millennia before Hobbes

and Boyle. Hesiod saw the age he lived in as markedly distinct from the preceding Heroic Age,

which was characterised by patterns of behaviour as di ff erent from his age as those of the

premoderns are from those of the moderns. Latour continues: “The moderns have a peculiarpropensity for understanding time that passes as if it were really abolishing the past behind it.


3/4



They all take themselves for Attila, in whose footsteps no grass grows back” (68). This vivid

accusation is reminiscent of the famous line from Virgil’s Georgics (a poem which, inspired by

Hesiod, also sets out a succession of discrete ages): “time ies, never to be recovered”. There’s a

hint of irony to Latour’s claim: he is accusing the moderns of imagining that the modern age is

special, or di ff erent—in fact, the modern age is the same as all the other ages, right down to

imagining that they are di ff erent!

This isn’t the only place where Latour’s inattention to historical detail gets him into trouble. His

treatment of Shapin and Scha ff er’s Leviathan and the Air-Pump (1985) takes up a large part of the

book. He interprets Hobbes as advocating a state like 18 th century France: the absolute power

invested in the sovereign “does not lead to a totalitarian State” (19). But Hobbes’ vision was

nothing if not totalitarian, as the historian of science Margaret C. Jacob points out: “the sovereign

had the right to tax, dispossess, or banish any or all who would challenge his authority” ( A HouseBuilt on Sand: Exposing Postmodernist Myths About Science , 1998: 251). Latour labels both Hobbes

and Boyle “fervent subscribers to mechanistic philosophy”, but is, according to Jacob, “unaware

of the emphasis on immaterial and spiritual power embedded in Boyle's

corpuscularianism” (241). Latour sees symmetry between the two thinkers, when there are really

profound di ff erences between the two.

Despite these shortcomings, Latour gets a lot of things right. His dissection and characterisation

of the modern social sciences is clear and compelling, as is his framing of their crisis:“denunciation and revolution have both gone stale” (45). And he is right that science is

increasingly straying into the world of politics, as science and technology throw up both

problems and solutions for politicians, and technocracy takes centre-stage on issues like climate

change, control of drugs and the internet, and medical ethics. But much of the book is very

unclear and perhaps, in places, deliberately so. His cryptic references and sarcastic pasquinades

do little to help the reader’s understanding, as when he ends a section by repeating a mysterious

few words of transliterated ancient greek: “ Einai gar kai enthautha theous ” (67). It’s hard to

swallow Latour’s social constructivism, although he tries to make it more palatable. The historical

support for his title thesis is also uncompelling. Although it’s true that little separates us from

those we think of as premodern, the insidious delusions he attributes to the modern

Constitution which Hobbes and Boyle wrought between them are very unlikely to be peculiar to

our age. In this respect it’s probably more true that we have always been modern.


4/4

latour-we have never been modern (review) -libre

Documents