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!)