Important Artifacts and Personal Property

 
 
Important Artifacts and Personal Property from the Collection of Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris, Including Books, Street Fashion, and Jewelry
by Leanne Shapton
Sarah Crichton Books

2009

 

 

This is the good stuff. Important Artifacts and Personal Property from the Collection of Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris, Including Books, Street Fashion, and Jewelry is a novel in the form of an auction catalog, and it is a masterpiece.

 
What Shapton is doing with this book is what every museum exhibit is trying to do - tell a story through objects - and she does it so, so well. This is a masterclass in material culture. In fairness, Shapton got to invent everything she needed to tell her story, while actual curators are limited by what actually exists in their museum's collection, by the space available to display it, and by human endurance, since their audiences typically view the entire exhibition at one go, and while standing, while I got to lounge around enjoying Shapton's precise prose and well-crafted images at my leisure.

 
Shapton's book is the size and shape of a catalog, and each page has numbered black-and-white photographs alongside numbered paragraphs that describe the object photographed, and sometimes give a little extra context. Some wholly textual objects are described and the relevant text reproduced, but with no accompanying photo. The formatting is perfect. Each entry has a lot number, a bolded name for the lot, a physical description including condition, and a suggested price range for bidding. Her commitment to this gimmick is total.

 
And the gimmick itself is an absolutely perfect fit for the subject matter. The story we watch unfold is two people meeting at a mutual friend's Halloween party, starting to date, deepening their relationship, moving in together, then breaking up after maybe 3½ years. The auction date is the Valentine's day after  they ran into each other one last time, a few years after the breakup. The nostalgic, scab-picking impulse to revisit every little trinket and memento of your time together with someone after it's over is represented perfectly by the auction catalog. 

 
And Shapton chose her objects well. I'm in the middle of a move, and going through some of my own boxes of mementos from college and grad school, finding old photos and letters from friends when we used to send each other those instead of their electronic equivalents. The kinds of things you keep, not just to torture yourself but to remember fondly too, are exactly the kinds of things Shapton uses in this book.

 
(Also for anyone who's worried, my efforts during previous moves have largely weeded out any psychic hazards. Now I'm mostly left with photos of people I liked, flyers from events I'm proud I was involved with, letters I was happy to receive. If I want to be sad, I can do it without needing a reminder. I'm saving treasures, not curses or traps.)

 
We see photos of the couple, party invitations, presents they gave each other, notes they wrote each other or to themselves about the relationship, their toiletry bags with all the contents laid out and itemized from their first trip together, books they read (almost always with a note tucked inside,) clothes from significant occasions alongside photos of them wearing them, excerpts from emails, examples of their personal hobbies and professional work, and more.

 
When they first meet, Lenore is in her mid-20s, and Harold is in his late-30s. She's a food writer for the NYT who gets her own column about cakes during the course of their relationship. Harold is a photographer, I think freelance, and he travels a lot, going off around the world on assignment. You believe their love, but they're never able to overcome the problems that appear early on. Instead those just get worse. 

 

When Harold travels for work, Lenore misses him while he enjoys the excitement of the trip. When they fight, she's fiery and he's distant, sometimes literally walking away, which echoes their dynamic when he travels. And fundamentally, Lenore fears that Harold doesn't take her or her work seriously, that he looks down on her or feels superior. The eventual breakup is sad but not surprising.

 
When it first came out, this was optioned to become a movie, which never got made, which is kind of too bad, because I hope the filmmaker would've leaned in to the experimental aspect of the format. I highly recommend this one, because it's so well assembled, so well told.

Decelerate Blue

 
Decelerate Blue
by Adam Rapp
art by Mike Cavallaro
First Second

2017

 

 

Decelerate Blue is kind of depressing. It's a graphic novel about a protest movement that opposes the sped-up society of the Guarantee, which has replaced the United States. It's a book that both seems to side with the protesters, and at the same time, to be utterly nihilistic about what they might accomplish.

 
I've really enjoyed other stories that satirize the accelerated pace of contemporary life, and that criticize capitalism's and corporations' roles in structuring everyday life this way. Two of my favorites are Heinrich Boll's "Action Will be Taken: An Action-Packed Story" and RA Lafferty's "Slow Tuesday Night," both of which I like much better. They're sharp, funny, and exaggerated in just the right ways. Though in fairness to Decelerate, both of those stories are about characters who enthusiastically participate in the madcap rush of their society, rather than asking what resistance might look like.

 

This would have been a good candidate for art that uses a single color to add a little interest to the black and white, but Cavallaro did not choose to do that. He did use a few panels of full color in two key places, moments when the protagonist feels most alive, but otherwise, it's entirely black and white, without even any grey.

 
So, Angela is a high school student in the Guarantee. Communication is terse, adjectives and adverbs are suspect, and every sentence ends with the word 'go' to let the other person know you're done. Her school teaches condensed versions of literature, movies last 15 minutes, her friends love shopping at the Hyper Mall, her dad's company just developed some really quick-drying cement, and her mom bought a standing bed that helps keep your heart rate up while you sleep. Go. 

 
Also everyone has a tracker chip in their arm that gets scanned every time they interact with a business or government, soldiers patrol the streets, and there are cameras everywhere, even inside the home. Go. Someone slipped Angela a copy of 'Kick the Boot,' a dystopian science fiction novel that predicted a society much like the Guarantee, and that functions like a slow manifesto, radicalizing her against the hype. Go. And by the way, her grandfather is being sent to a 'reduction colony in Former California, because he's too old to keep up. Go. Go Guarantee Go. Go.

 
Against this backdrop, Angela accidentally discovers a commune of people living slowly, off the grid, literally underground in a cavern, and happily joins them. They're more like conscientious objectors than revolutionaries, although they do distribute copies of 'Kick the Boot' as a recruiting tool. Angela quickly adapts to the slow life. She meets Gladys and gets her first kiss, although we don't know whether or how sexuality is regulated in the Guarantee.

 
Then the group needs a volunteer to fetch a package of contraband from above ground. Angela volunteers, and retrieves it successfully, but she's unwittingly followed back by a camera. The package is a supply of a new drug, Decelerate Blue, that permanently slows your heart rate and increases your ability to dream. 

 
The drug is supposed to be the next step in their project, but it won't be. Everyone in the commune takes a dose and falls asleep, and before they wake, the police come and kill or arrest almost everyone. Angela escapes, and is reunited with her parents, who want to get her back up to speed and back to her normal life. Go. She could also try to live slow on her own, try to share the book with others, or even distribute the drug. Instead, Angela commits suicide by taking all the remaining doses of Decelerate Blue. The end.
 

There are ways that this future society could resemble ours. Tweets are 140 characters, most TikToks are 30 seconds, we know we're tracked everywhere online, and many jobs are subjected to scrutiny and time pressure like Taylor could only have dreamed of. In China the 'lying flat' movement to rejects the 9am-9pm, 6-day work week, in favor of accepting a lower income and getting enough sleep. But Decelerate Blue doesn't really evoke any of those things, they're just the first things I wished it would have resembled. The sped up society is so vague that it lacks the power to really make you feel troubled about our own.

 
One of the most interesting parts was a debate between two characters about the power of 'Kick the Boot.' In these kinds of stories, going back at least as far as The Man in the High Castle, there's always a book-within-the-book full of revolutionary ideas, and I guess often in the real world too. But these books are symbols of protest at least as much as they are actual inspirations or sources of ideology. It was refreshing to see someone doubt the supposed power of art, though it would've been moreso if the entire piece didn't seem so convinced that protest is necessary, pointless, and fatal.

Spelunky

 
Spelunky
by Derek Yu

Boss Fight Books

2016

 

 

I think Boss Fight Books aims to be for video games what the 33⅓ series is for music. Both series pick titles at the intersection of critical darling and indie fave and tell the history of its production. Spelunky is more or less unique for this format, because author Derek Yu is also the designer of the game. Usually they're written by journalists, critics, or other musicians / video game designers. (I think... Although I've looked into both series, truthfully, the only other one I've read is 33⅓'s history of In the Aeroplane Over the Sea.)

 
Yu describes the creation of the original pixelart freeware Spelunky, its unexpected success, and then the re-creation of the upgraded Spelunky for the X-Box. 

 
Yu programmed the original Spelunky using the GameMaker software. He'd previously made some small games himself with other engines, then worked with a programming partner to make Eternal Daughter and Aquaria - they wrote the code while he focused on the art and design. For this first version of Spelunky, the software acted a bit like a programming partner. 

 
Yu's biggest innovation, and the idea that launched a mini-renaissance of other games with the same inspiration, was to marry the difficulty and random level generation of roguelike games to the mechanics and art of platformers like Mario. The theme of the game is an explorer armed with whip, bombs, and rope, delving deeper and deeper into a cave system in search of treasure. Each time he dies, the cave map is randomly redrawn. 

 
I've played that version of Spelunky over 1000 times. A winning game lasts maybe 20 minutes, but a losing game, which is probably over 99% of them, goes much quicker, sometimes only a minute or two. Yu talks about the way he drew inspiration from classic arcade games, and how he tried to use the positive features of both halves of his genre mash-up to correct the flaws in the other, resulting in a game that's neither too complex, nor too repetitive.

 
After he released the original Spelunky to great acclaim in the indie PC gaming world, Yu was offered a chance to make an upgraded version for the X-Box. It was a project he thought could be completed in a year, but actually took three, even with a new programming partner to write the upgraded code. Yu discusses both the difficulty and the thrill of finishing a project, despite the obstacles to completing anything that's long and complex.

 
Yu talks about more of his design decisions, including some of the many secrets and surprises he filled the new version of the game with. One benefit of the game's popularity is that the fan community found them and shared the news with each other, creating a sense of exploration that fits well with the caving theme.

 
He also talks about the game's critical reception, both positive and negative, including from players who thought it was too hard, and a feminist critique of the original game's helpless blonde damsel.

 
I found Yu's account inspirational. In addition to learning more about a game I've really enjoyed, I feel like he has also told a more universal story about starting a new creative project, nurturing it, and bringing it to completion.

The Girl from the Other Side 11

 
The Girl from the Other Side 11
Siuil, a Run

by Nagabe
Seven Seas

2021

 

 

Volume 11 is the final collection of The Girl from the Other Side. It acts almost as an epilogue to a story that already had its ending.

 
Teacher is confronted by the Outsider who used to be Shiva. Teacher has his human memories back, and his body is no longer invulnerable. He feels cold in the snow. And his body and soul are both dying. The Outsider who used to be Shiva is probably dying too.

 
The Outsider suggests that Teacher return his soul to it, and says this might result in it turning back into Shiva. This might not work, and might result in both of them dying faster. Teacher is initially angry at the Outsider. They fight, separate, then he comes after it, and finally agrees. 

 
In the long last chapter, we see Teacher return to his cabin, accompanied by Shiva's voice. We see him revisit his memories of the place. We don't know if the voice is Shiva restored, the Outsider still in its monstrous form, or perhaps just a memory. After a lingering tour, Teacher and the unseen remnant of Shiva go to lie down in the grass, apparently to die of the Curse together.

 
It's a bittersweet ending, although since it previously seemed we'd get an end that was purely sad, it feels like the nicest we could hope for.

 
I think the next manga series I dive into might be Witch Hat Atelier. One of my coworkers also wants to get me into 7th Time Loop, which is still coming out.

Toxic Flora

 
Toxic Flora

by Kimiko Hahn

WW Norton

2010

 

 

Toxic Flora is another poetry collection by Kimiko Hahn. This time each poem is inspired by a specific article from the New York Times' science section. There's even a bibliographic key at the end, to link each poem to its inspiration.

 
I thought I was going to really like this one based on the premise, but it didn't do much for me. I have a sense that I'd rather have read the original articles, or prose essays inspired by them, instead.

 
Hahn writes about the relationships between plants and insects, about space including exoplanets and dwarf planets in our own system, about extinct birds, and about fish.

 
Each poem also links each topic to human relationships - her dates, her divorces, her fraught connection to her newly adult daughter. Often this link appears only in the final line, attempting to recontextualize what had appeared to be a simple description as a metaphor.

 
I'll probably wait a bit before reading more poetry.

Haunter

 
Haunter
by Sam Alden

Study Group Comics

2014

 

 

I saw an excerpt of Haunter in the most recent volume of "Best American Comics" I read, and wanted to see the rest. Alden uses ink lines and watercolor to tell a wordless story about a lone figure discovering a temple in the forest. 

 
The imagery - of the hunter, the temple, and the temple's stone guardian - reminded me of some classic video games, especially Zelda and Metroid. One of the back-cover blurbs mentions the same thing.

 
The hunter uses her bow and arrow to try to kill a boar, which eludes her. The closest to dialogue we get are word bubbles containing a single red X that announce her frustration. She gives chase into the forest and finds an abandoned stone temple decorated with triangle motifs.

 
She enters, explores, and encounters the guardian, a giant stone woman, armed with a giant stone bow and arrow, who pursues the hunter outside and into the forest. The fight, and despite their difference in size and strength, the hunter prevails and the guardian is killed.

 
The hunter seems to feel guilt, and runs away, but we see the start of a transformation, and we know - she will become the next guardian.

 
The story is short, not much longer than a standard comic book issue, I don't think, but its emotions and imagery are both powerful.

Black Sun Rising

 
 
Black Sun Rising

by CS Friedman
DAW

1991

 

 

It feels like I spent forever reading Black Sun Rising, but I think it's mostly that I've been busier at home and at work, and I've had less time to read. Also, at about 500 pages, while not especially long by fantasy-novel standards, it is longer than most of the books I've been reading lately.

 
Black Sun Rising is a science-fantasy novel set on the distant planet Erna, where the human colonists live in a pseudo-medieval society, 1000 years after arriving from Earth. Erna is home to a new fundamental force, like light or magnetism or gravity, that doesn't exist on Earth. Called 'fae,' it's a kind of energy that responds to thought, both conscious and unconscious, making it work quite a bit like magic. There are several varieties of fae with different sources, that remind me of the colors of mana in Magic: the Gathering. (Since "Black Sun" was published in 1991, and Magic first appeared in 93, it's possible that one influenced the other, though I have no idea if it actually did.)
 

The fae respond to the human subconscious at least as much as to conscious thought, giving humans a healthy fear of the night, when the dark-fae might manifest their nightmares. Anyone can learn to 'Work' the earth-fae, usually to gain knowledge, although perhaps in the same way that anyone can learn to play music or do math. 'Adepts' are able to see and wield the fae easily, almost without trying. A strong human Church exists to try to help people order their thoughts in a way that won't activate the fae, although its best days are behind it.

 
Also there's another sentient species on the planet, called Rahk, who are kind of alien lion people. When humans first arrived on Erna, a scientist identified a cat-like species, and claimed that if humans had never arrived, they would eventually evolve to be like us. The hopes and fears of the entire human society then caused the fae to cause that to happen in only a few generations. Humans tried to exterminate the new sentients, who fled across the ocean to another continent and erected a magic barrier, and since then, the two species have rarely interacted.

 
There's a lot of worldbuilding at the beginning of the book, which gives way to more action and subtextual romance as the book continues. Damien is a priest of the human Church. He's arrived in a new city on a holy mission that he'll drop for something more important, so nevermind. He meets Ciani, a local Adept, and the only person to ever live among the Rahk and return to tell about it. Ciani gets attacked by some kind of nightmare demons who steal her memories and her Adept ability. Damien vows to help her, Ciani and her apprentice determine that the demon came from the Rahk lands, and they set off on a quest to try to kill the demon before it boats home.

 
Along the way, the meet Tarrant, the Hunter, the lord of the dark Forest, who, as one of my friends has pointed out, is basically Dracula. He used to be the Prophet who helped found the human Church, then sacrificed his family to gain immortality, and has spent the past 1000 years kidnapping women and chasing them to death so he can 'eat' their fear. Friedman is obviously enamored with this guy, and she obviously ships Damien / Tarrant, though this remains just short of being explicitly acknowledged. This has a huge effect on the course of the narrative!

 
As a man of the Church, Damien is basically sworn to kill Tarrant, but he decides that this mission to get Ciani her magic back is more important, (a decision that is clearly influenced by his huge crush on the guy,) so he agrees to a temporary alliance. Tarrant considers it a matter of honor that he help Ciani, (and seems to have a crush on Damien too,) so off we go! In the Rahk lands, they are joined by Hesseth, a Rahk woman who knows the human language, and also wants to kill the memory-stealing demons, because they've been a much bigger menace over here than on the human continent.

 
It takes about half the book to get to this point, and then the quest story finally begins in earnest. As interesting as I found the worldbuilding, the second half is probably better written, more engaging, and faster reading. The group suffers some pretty serious hardships during their journey, and we learn more about the Rahk, who are pretty interesting. 

 
Eventually the group reaches the insane human sorcerer who commands the memory-stealing demons, and I actually wish we'd gotten to see more of that person before they're defeated. It seems there's an even greater evil on yet another continent farther away, so after their victory, they set sail for the next two books of Friedman's trilogy. (Will Damien and Tarrant ever declare their manly love for one another? Will they ever kiss? I, for one, will probably never find out.)

 
I read this one because I was interested in the concept of the fae, and the scientific-sounding explanation for a world animated by magic, and I liked the aliens and the evil wizard at the end. The ideal reader is probably someone who likes Reylo-style enemies-to-lovers subtext, and doesn't mind that it will probably never be acknowledged as actual romance.

Retronaut

 
Retronaut
The Photographic Time Machine
edited by Chris Wild

National Geographic

2014

 

 

Retronaut is a photo book of the blog-to-book variety, collecting Wild's favorite images from the first 4 years of retronaut dot com.

 
Wild's stated intention is to collect photos that in some way disrupt our image of the past. These include photos of prototype inventions that seem ahead of their time (like a two-disc crossfade phonograph), art that depicts predictions of the future, famous figure when they were young or doing something that clashes with how they are remembered today (like Martha Stewart as a fashion model), famous buildings and objects under construction, and a whole host of photos that create the appearance of anachronism or two different times meeting (like a woman in a cowgirl outfit tying her pony to a parking meter.)

 
It's a fun collection, and I often felt, as Wild hoped, an enjoyable frission between my mental image of some past time and the imagery in these photos.

The Alliance of the Curious

 
The Alliance of the Curious
by Philippe Riche
Humanoids
2012

 

 

The Alliance of the Curious is a French comic that tells a modern day adventure story that begins by accident and ends on a shaggy dog anticlimax.

 
The story opens during the 2007 heat wave in Paris, when many people, especially the elderly, are dying of the heat. One poor old woman's death, after her adult son is arrested while buying her bottled lemonade sets everything else in motion.

 
The king of France has died, and his son is set to inherit the fortune, but it turns out the old woman was a direct descendant of a Carolingian king, so her son has the best claim to inherit the dead king's entire fortune. The furious prince hires the Cocaine Sisters, three skinny blonde women who spend the whole comic in their underwear, to find and kill this rival heir.

 
The hotel where the old woman was living sells all her stuff. An antiques dealer and his girlfriend buy an armoire to refurbish. Inside, the find a clay head that holds an elaborately bejeweled skull. They take it to an appraiser, who gets the relic DNA tested and makes an astonishing discovery. The bone fragment he scraped from the skull shows it's a Neanderthal who died thousands of years ago. The hair he found inside too is only days old, and belongs to a still-living Neanderthal! The antique dealer, his girlfriend, and the appraiser form the Alliance of the title to try to find the man.

 
Meanwhile, the adult son of the old lady (the secret Neanderthal) gets out of jail and learns that she's dead and he's evicted. He meets some homeless men who invite him to join their camp under a bridge. He starts having ancestral memories - of a 1900 flood that ruined his insurance-selling family, to the battle where his Carolingian ancestor became king, eventually to the decision by his Neanderthal tribe to form a secret community hidden amidst humanity. He is drawn to steal back his mother's corpse, and to retrieve the reliquary skull.

 
So then, the Alliance does detective work to find this poor guy. The Cocaine Sisters manage to keep finding everyone too. They give chase in a sports car and spend a lot of time bickering and firing giant guns with bad aim. Eventually the Alliance and the last living Neanderthal end up in a cool-looking ossuary where every Neanderthal in the secret community has come to die for thousands of years. 

 
They all learn a prophecy that if the bejeweled skull is put back on the shaman's skeleton after his last descendant dies, then all the bones will rise as an army to crush humanity. The poor guy dies then too, and the Alliance decides ... to not put the skull back. Just in case. We see on the news that the jerk prince gets the fortune after all, and gets engaged to the last surviving Cocaine Sister (their aim was really bad.)
 

I realize that the elements of this sound kind of cool, and you might still enjoy the ride. I disliked how much the plot relies of coincidental meetings, and I found the Cocaine Sisters insufferably annoying. Plus the ending was such a letdown.

Loveless

 
Loveless
by Alice Oseman
Scholastic

2022

 

 

Loveless is a young adult novel by author / artist Alice Oseman, who's most famous for her Heartstopper comics. In a plot structure that reminds me of a lot of slice-of-life anime, and presumably many campus novels, we follow our first-person narrator Georgia from high school graduation through her first year of college.

 
Georgia has two best friends from high school, Jason and Pip (who is a lesbian,) and soon makes two more college friends, her party girl roommate Rooney, and LGBT club president Sunil. The five of them share an interest in theater, and one of the plot strands is about them forming a Shakespeare society and putting on a play by the end of the year.

 
The most important plot elements though, are all about romance. Georgia is a big fan of romcoms and fanfics. She's never dated or kissed anyone, but feels certain she's going to. What she begins to realize, is that while she wants to want sex and romance, she doesn't actually want then. In fact, every time she tries, she gets repulsed and nauseous. What the audience realizes, long before Georgia does, is that she's asexual.

 
Meanwhile, Jason has a crush on Georgia, and she tries dating him to see if she can learn to be attracted to someone. This goes poorly!

 
Georgia and Rooney, as roommates, quickly become good friends, even though Rooney is very confident and extroverted, while Georgia is introverted and awkward in social situations. (Although I'm not ace, I found Georgia's shyness and clumsiness very relatable!) 

 
Pip has a crush on Rooney, but assumes Rooney is straight. And Rooney realizes that she has a crush on Pip, but thinks Pip is jealous of her and Georgia's friendship. The audience can see their mutual attraction almost immediately, but it takes them all year to each figure the other out.

 
As I've noted, there's a lot of dramatic irony as the main characters struggle to understand emotions that the reader sees more clearly than they do. Writing for a YA audience, Oseman's prose is simple but clear, broken into quick chapters that are usually just a couple pages long. We don't get much visual description or poetic language, but we do get natuaralistic dialogue, authentic-seeming college social life, and a focus on emotional realism.

 
I like that Georgia doesn't start the book knowing that she's asexual, or even fully understanding that it's not just that she hasn't felt attraction yet, it's that she's probably not going to feel it at all. It takes her half the book to figure out, and when she does, she's sad and angry before she learns to accept herself. I also like that Oseman engages with the tension between the romantic narratives Georgia likes to read, and the reality of her asexuality. 

 
Some of the pop culture references feel a bit like Mad Libs (you could substitute another title and it would make no difference,) and some of the characters' conversations about asexuality sound a bit like one person reading an encyclopedia entry at the other. That is kind of how real people sometimes talk about their fandoms and their new identities, but I find it annoying when they do. It's what you do when you don't know your own mind well enough to speak authentically, so you resort to, effectively, paraphrasing a citation at the person you're tying to talk to. I wish Oseman had tried a bit harder to say some of these things in plain language. It probably is realistic for the characters to name-drop and try out jargon, but I wished that she as the author could have modeled a more naturalistic way of talking about these topics.

Foreign Bodies

 
Foreign Bodies
by Kimiko Hahn
WW Norton

2020

 

 

I think I saw Foreign Bodies on a list of the best book covers of 2020, of all places, but the description sounded interesting (and accidentally very relevant for the first year of the pandemic,) so I found a copy, along with another book of Hahn's poetry I'll read later in the month.

 
The poem that inspired the book's cover art, and that gets mentioned in the jacket copy, is based on Hahn viewing a museum's wunderkammer that housed a collection of objects children swallowed that were retrieved from their bodies by the doctor who invented the endoscope.

 
Much more of the book however, is devoted to Hahn thinking about her father who died recently, and her mother who died longer ago. Her father was a hoarder, and she likens his house to a museum's cabinet of curiosities. Among the things lost in there, somewhere, are her mother's ashes. Hahn also reflects on her grandmother's internment as a Japaense woman in the US, and, if I understood correctly, on a miscarriage she had years earlier.

 
So it's a pretty elagaic collection.

 
I don't read a lot of poetry, and I don't think I really know how to judge it. If these were just essays, I would say that Hahn draws interesting parallels between a museum exhibit of swallowed junk, her father's hoards, and the few treasured possessions from her mother she keeps in a safety deposit box.

We Have Never Been Modern

 
 
We Have Never Been Modern
by Bruno Latour
translated by Catherine Porter
Harvard University Press

1991, reprinted 1993

 

 

When Bruno Latour died recently, I thought I might want to read one of his books. I think We Have Never Been Modern is his most famous, and fortuitously, I already owned a copy. (Sorry, Laboratory Life... maybe next time...)
 

Latour is writing primarily to an audience of other social theorists. He claims that in light of two phenomena, we can no longer maintain the absolute divide between Society and Nature, which he dates back to Hobbes (whose Leviathan begets social science) and Boyle (whose studies of the vacuum establish laboratory science.)
 

The first phenomenon is the proliferation of what Latour calls 'hybrids' or 'quasi-object quasi-subjects,' things that cannot be understood as purely natural or purely social, such as climate change. 

 
The second phenomenon is science studies, or the application of social science research methods to study how laboratory scientists do their work. Latour claims that in such studies, we can see that scientists aren't 'just' discovering transcendent truths about the universe, but we also can't believe that they are 'just' imposing whatever concepts and labels they want either.

 
In light of those two phenomena, Latour says that social scientists can no longer carry on as before, and some have fallen into 'postmodern despair.' (Latour HATES the postmodernists, and his criticism of them is some of his liveliest writing.) What he wants instead is something like an anthropology of Western society, based on his understanding of how anthropologists study 'premodern' societies.

 
So rather than taking a 'hybrid' and trying to divide it up into parts that are purely social or purely natural, Latour thinks we would understand them (and ourselves) better if we start by acknowledging the inseparability of both aspects, and try to understand what each hybrid teaches us about nature and about society.

 
I'm trying my best to give a simplified account here. Latour isn't just talking about how to conduct social science, he's criticizing and reconstructing the whole modern Western self-image. And while he's a fairly clear writer, and easier to read than Bourdieu, this is still not what I'd call an easy text. It was 150 pages, but it's dense with ideas, arguments, and yes, schematic diagrams.

 
I think my next reading in this vein, rather than another primary work by a French theorist, will be a book I found about French social theory, which I'm hoping will give me a nice overview. (I'm also hoping it will be written for a slightly less expert audience!)