Notes for Bruno Latour We Have Never Been Modern

Key concepts: delegation, hybrid, modern constitution, modernism, nonmodern constitution, Parliament of Things, quasi-object, sorting, symmetry.


Related theorists: Barthes, Bogost, Callon, Clark, Haraway, Hayles, Marx, Serres.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Tool use of philosophy; compare to software studies and critical code studies.

(ix) I have abstained from giving empirical examples in order to retain the speculative – and, I am afraid, very Gallic! - character of this essay. Many case studies, including several by myself, will be found in the bibliography. Having written several empirical books, I am trying here to bring the emerging field of science studies to the attention of the literate public through the philosophy associated with this domain.


1
CRISIS
1.1 The Proliferation of Hybrids
(1) The same article mixes together chemical reactions and political reactions. . . . The horizons, the stakes, the time frames, the actors – none of these is commensurable, yet there they are, caught up in the same story.
(3) They have cut the Gordian knot with a well-honed sword. The shaft is broken: on the left, they have put knowledge of things; on the right, power and human politics.

1.2 Retying the Gordian Knot

Compare Latour hybrid, half engineers and half philosophers, to Hayles cyborg, Heim cybersage, my paragenius.

(3) Hybrids ourselves, installed lopsidedly with scientific institutions, half engineers and half philosophers, 'tiers instruits' (Serres, 1991) without having sought the role, we have chosen to follow the imbroglios wherever they take us.
(4) Yet this research does not deal with nature or knowledge, with things-in-themselves, but with the way all these things are tied to our collectives and to subjects. We are talking not about instrumental thought but about the very substance of our societies.

How does this grouping of collectives affect unit operations?

(4) Here is the second misunderstanding. If the facts do not occupy the simultaneously marginal and sacred place our worship has reserved for them, then its seems that they are immediately reduced to pure local contingency and sterile machinations. . . . None of our studies can reutilize what the sociologists, then psychologists or the economists tell us about the social context or about the subject in order to apply them to the hard sciences – and this is why I use the word 'collective' to describe the association of humans and nonhumans and 'society' to designate one part only of our collectives, the divide invented by the social sciences.
(5) This is the third misunderstanding. . . . Yet rhetoric, textual strategies, writing, staging, semiotics – all these are really at stake, but in a new form that has a simultaneous impact on the nature of things and on the social context, while it is not reducible to the one or the other.
(5) In the eyes of our critics the ozone hole above our heads, the moral law in our hearts, the autonomous text, may each be of interest, but only separately. That a delicate shuttle should have woven together the heavens, industry, texts, souls and moral law – this remains uncanny, unthinkable, unseemly.

1.3 The Crisis of the Critical Stance

Wilson, Bourdieu and Derrida as representatives of naturalization, socialization and deconstruction; crisis of critical stance is lack of tolma to think all at once.

(5-6) The critics have developed three distinct approaches to talking about our world: naturalization, socialization and deconstruction. Let us use E.O. Wilson, Pierre Bourdieu, and Jacques Derrida – a bit unfairly – as emblematic figures of these three tacks. . . . Each of these forms of criticism is powerful in itself but impossible to combine with the other two. . . . We may glorify the sciences, play power games or make fun of the belief in a reality, but we must not mix these three caustic acids.
(6) Is it our fault if the networks are
simultaneously real, like nature, narrated, like discourse, and collective, like society?
(7) This would be a hopeless dilemma had anthropology not accustomed us to dealing calmly and straightforwardly with the seamless fabric of what I shall call 'nature-culture', since it is a bit more and a bit less than a culture.
(7) Why? Because we are modern. Our fabric is no longer seamless. Analytic continuity has become impossible. For traditional anthropologists, there is not – there cannot be, there should not be – an anthropology of the modern world (Latour, 1988a). The ethnosciences can be connected in part to society and to discourse (Conklin, 1983); science cannot.

1.4 1989: The Year of Miracles
(9) The various manifestations of socialism destroyed both their peoples and their ecosystems, whereas the powers of the North and the West have been able to save their peoples and some of their countrysides by destroying the rest of the world and reducing its peoples to abject poverty.

1.5 What Does it Mean To Be a Modern?
(10) To back a few steps: we have to rethink the definition of modernity, interpret the symptom of postmodernity, and understand why we are no longer committed heart and soul to the double task of domination and emancipation.

Modern designates translation and purification, operations which cannot combine, which is why we have never been modern; uses a confusing diagram to illustrate this in Figure 1-1.

(10-11) The hypothesis of this essay is that the word 'modern' designates two sets of entirely different practices which must remain distinct if they are to remain effective, but have recently begun to be confused. The first set of practices, by 'translation', creates mixtures between entirely new types of beings, hybrids of nature and culture. The second, by 'purification', creates two entirely distinct ontological zones: that of human beings on the one hand; that of nonhumans on the other.

Important point for laying theoretical foundations of texts and technology studies; does it invite adding software studies and other remainders of academic scholarship?

(11) So long as we consider these two practices of translation and purification separately, we are truly modern. . . . As soon as we direct our attention simultaneously to the work of purification and the work of hybridization, we immediately stop being wholly modern, and our future begins to change. . . . Finally, if we have never been modern – at least in the way criticism tells the story – the tortuous relations that we have maintained with the other nature-cultures would also be transformed.

Would a monster be Turkles latest conception of the human computer symbiosis; does the free, open source movement reflect this becoming necessary democracy of things, allowing Bogost to finally promote alien phenomenology?

(12) My hypothesis – which, like the previous ones, is too coarse – is that we are going to have to slow down, reorient and regulate the proliferation of monsters by representing their existence officially. Will a different democracy become necessary? A democracy extended to things?


2 CONSTITUTION
2.1 The Modern Constitution

(13) The double separation is what we have to reconstruct: the separation between humans and nonhumans on the one hand, and between what happens 'above' and what happens 'below' on the other.
(14-15) Who is to write the full constitution? As far as foreign collectives are concerned, anthropology has been pretty good at tackling everything at once. . . . Just as the constitution of jurists defines the rights and duties of citizens and the State, the working of justice and the transfer of power, so this Constitution – which I shall spell with a capital C to distinguish it from the political ones – defines humans and nonhumans, their properties and their relations, their abilities and their groupings.

Anthropological and ethnological methods tackle everything at once; compare his study of Boyle and Hobbes, the air pump, to Hayles of the Macy Conferences neuron model.

(15) I have chosen to concentrate on an exemplary situation that arose at the very beginning of its drafting, in the middle of the seventeenth century, when the natural philosopher Robert Boyle and the political philosopher Thomas Hobbes were arguing over the distribution of scientific and political power.

2.2 Boyle and His Objects
(15) A book by Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer marks the real beginning of a comparative anthropology that takes science seriously.
(16-17) Instead of setting up an asymmetry, instead of distributing science to Boyle and political theory to Hobbes, Shapin and Schaffer outline a rather nice quadrant: Boyle has a science and a political theory; Hobbes has a political theory and a science. . . . But even though both are thoroughgoing rationalists, their opinions diverge as to what can be expected from experimentation, from scientific reasoning, from political argument – and above all from the air pump, the real hero of the story.
(18) Boyle and his colleagues abandoned the certainties of apodeictic reasoning in favor of a doxa.
(18) Boyle did not seek these gentlemen's opinion, but rather their observation of a phenomenon produced artificially in the closed and protected space of a laboratory. . . . We know the nature of the facts because we have developed them in circumstances that are under our complete control.

2.3 Hobbes and His Subjects

Experimental with instruments and implied computation to generate indisputable facts.

(19) In this new regime in which Knowledge equals Power, everything is cut down to size: the Sovereign, God, matter, and the multitude. Hobbes even rules out turning his own science of the State into an invocation of transcendence. He arrives at all his scientific results not by opinion, observation or revelation but by a mathematical demonstration, the only method of argument capable of compelling everyone's assent; and he accomplishes this demonstration not by making transcendental calculations, like Plato's King, but by using a purely computational instrument, the Mechanical Brain, a computer before its time.

2.4 The Mediation of the Laboratory

Compare instrumental science to making software work, the practice of fabricating objects.

(20) For the first time in science studies, all ideas pertaining to God, the King, Matter, Miracles and Morality are translated, transcribed, and forced to pass through the practice of making an instrument work.

Can do same by focusing on fabricating personal computer or parts of the Internet as in Fire In the Valley.

(21) Shapin and Schaffer force their analyses to hinge on the object, on a certain leak, a particular gasket in the air pump. The practice of fabricating objects is restored to the dominant place it had lost with the modern critical stance. . . . But rather than speaking of the external reality 'out there', they anchor the indisputable reality of science 'down there', on the bench.
(22) Ridiculous! Hobbes raises a fundamental problem of political philosophy, and his theories are to be refuted by a feather in a glass chamber inside Boyle's mansion! . . . He denies what is to become the essential characteristic of modern power: the change in scale and the displacements that are presupposed by laboratory work (Latour, 1983). Boyle, a new Puss in Boots, now has only to pounce on the Ogre, who has just been reduced to the size of a mouse.

2.5 The Testimony of Nonhumans
(23) Here in Boyle's text we witness the intervention of a new actor recognized by the new Constitution: inert bodies, incapable of will and bias but capable of showing, signing, writing, and scribbling on laboratory instruments before trustworthy witnesses.

Trace development of personal computer from cumbersome to cheap black box for standardization of what Hayles calls the Regime of Computation following Latour lead with air pump.

(24) How does it become as universal as 'Boyle's laws' or 'Netwon's laws'? The answer is that it never become universal – not, at least, in the epistemologists' terms! Its network is extended and stabilized. . . . By following the reproduction of each prototype air pump throughout Europe, and the progressive transformation of a piece of costly, not very reliable and quite cumbersome equipment, into a cheap black box that gradually becomes standard equipment in every laboratory, the authors bring the universal application of a law of physics back within a network of standardized practices.

2.6 The Double Artifact of the Laboratory and the Leviathan
(27) The authors offer a masterful deconstruction of the evolution, diffusion and popularization of the air pump. Why, then, do they not deconstruct the evolution, diffusion and popularization of 'power' or 'force'?

2.7 Scientific Representation and Political Representation

2.8 The Constitutional Guarantees of the Moderns

Constitutional guarantees of moderns: nature and social constructed but seem natural, distinct from mediation under crossed out God.

(32)(Figure 2.1 The paradoxes of Nature and Society) CONSTITUTION.
First guarantee: even though we construct Nature, Nature is as if we did not construct it.
Second guarantee: even though we do not construct Society, Society is as if we did construct it.
Third guarantee: Nature and Society must remain absolutely distinct: the work of purification must remain absolutely distinct from the work of mediation.
(32) But the overall structure is now easy to grasp: the three guarantees taken together will allow the moderns a change in scale. They are going to be able to make Nature intervene at every point in the fabrication of their societies while they go right on attributing to Nature is radical transcendence; they are going to be able to become the only actors in their own political destiny, while they go right on making their society hold together by mobilizing Nature.

2.9 The Fourth Guarantee: The Crossed-out God
(33) No one is truly modern who does not agree to keep God from interfering with Natural Law as well as with the laws of the Republic. God becomes the crossed-out God of metaphysics, as different from the premodern God of the Christians as the Nature constructed in the laboratory is from the ancient
phusis or the Society invented by sociologists from the old anthropological collective and its crowds of nonhumans.
(34) There is no way we can understand the moderns if we do not see that the four guarantees serve as checks and balances for one another. The first two make it possible to alternate the sources of power by moving directly from pure natural force to pure political force, and vice versa. The third guarantee rules out any contamination between what belongs to Nature and what belongs to politics, even though the first two guarantees allow a rapid alternation between the two. Might the contradiction between the third, which separates, and the first two, which alternate, be too obvious? No, because the fourth constitutional guarantee establishes as arbiter an infinitely remote God who is simultaneously totally impotent and sovereign judge.

Summary of modernist position linked to hybrids, anchor points oscillate between transcendence/immanence of nature and society.

(34) The essential point of this modern Constitution is that it renders the work of mediation that assembles hybrids invisible, unthinkable, unrepresentable. . . . By playing three times in a row on the same alternation between transcendence and immanence, the moderns can mobilize Nature, objectify the social, and feel the spiritual presence of God, even while firmly maintaining that Nature escapes us, that Society is our own work, and that God no longer intervenes.

2.10 The Power of the Modern Critique

(35) In the hybrids of the first Enlightenment thinkers, the second group too often saw an unacceptable blend that needed to be purified by carefully separating the part that belonged to things themselves and the part that could be attributed to the functioning of the economy, the unconscious, language, or symbols.
(36-37) Marxism made it possible to retain the portion of truth belonging to the natural and social sciences even while it carefully eliminated their condemned portion, their ideology. Marxism realized – and finished off, as was soon to become clear – all the hopes of the first Enlightenment, along with all those of the second. . . . The critical power of the moderns lies in this double language: they can mobilize Nature at the heart of social relationships, even as they leave Nature infinitely remote from human beings; they are free to make and unmake their society, even as they render its laws ineluctable, necessary and absolute.

2.11 The Invincibility of the Moderns
(38) How could the other cultures-natures have resisted? They became premodern by contrast. They could have stood up against transcendent Nature, or immanent Nature, or society made by human hands, or transcendent Society, or a remote God, or an intimate God, but how could they resist the combination of all six? Or rather, they might have resisted, if the six resources of the modern critique had been visible together in a single operation such as I am retracing today.

2.12 What the Constitution Clarifies and What It Obscures
(39) Yet the modern world has never happened, in the sense that it has never functioned according to the rules of the official Constitution alone: it has never separated the three regions of Being I have mentioned and appealed individually to the six resources of the modern critique.
(41) So long as their contraries remain simultaneously present and unthinkable, and so long as the work of mediation multiplies hybrids, these three ideas make it possible to capitalize on a large scale.
(42) By saturating the mixes of divine, human and natural elements with concepts, the premodern limit the practical expansion of these mixes.

2.13 The End of Denunciation
(43) I am thus trying the tricky move to unveil the modern Constitution without resorting to the modern type of debunking. To do so I am accounting for this vague and uneasy feeling that we have recently become as unable to denounce as to modernize.
(44) However, Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thevenot have done away with modern denunciation, in a book as important for my own essay as Shapin and Schaffer's.
(45) So long as we imagine objective stakes for our disputes, he [Rene Girard] claims, we are caught up in the illusion of mimetic desire. It is this desire, and this desire alone, that adorns objects with a value that is not their own.
(45-46) But underneath moral judgment by denunciation, another moral judgment has always functioned by triage and selection. It is called arrangement, combination,
combinazione, combine, but also negotiation or compromise. . . . Underneath the opposition between objects and subjects, there is the whirlwind of the mediators. Underneath moral grandeur there is the meticulous triage of circumstances and cases (Jonsen and Toulmin, 1988).

2.14 We Have Never Been Modern
(46) Postmodernism is a symptom, not a fresh solution. . . . What remains? Disconnected instants and groundless denunciations, since the postmoderns no longer believe in the reasons that would allow them to denounce and to become indignant.

His thesis that we have never been modern calls for retrospective nonmodern attitude.

(46-47) A different solution appears as soon as we follow both the official Constitution and what it forbids or allows, as soon as we study in detail the work of production of hybrids and the work of elimination of these same hybrids. We then discover that we have never been modern in the sense of the Constitution, and this is why I am not debunking the false consciousness of people who would practice the contrary of what they claim. No one has ever been modern. Modernity has never begun. There has never been a modern world. The use of the past perfect tense is important here, for it is a matter of a retrospective sentiment, of a rereading of our history. I am not saying that we are entering a new era; on the contrary we no longer have to continue the headlong flight of the post-post-postmodernists; we are no longer obliged to cling to the avant-garde of the avant-garde; we no longer seek to be even cleverer, even more critical, even deeper into the 'era of suspicion'.
(47) A nonmodern is anyone who takes simultaneously into account the moderns' Constitution and the population of hybrids that that Constitution rejects and allows to proliferate.

Haraway cyborg is Latour hybrid, which will morph into quasi-object under nonmodern view.

(47) Now hybrids, monsters – what Donna Haraway calls 'cyborgs' and 'tricksters' (Haraway, 1991) whose explanation it abandons – are just about everything; they compose not only our own collectives but also the others, illegitimately called premodern.
(48) Seen as networks, however, the modern world, like revolutions, permits scarcely anything more than small extensions of practices, slight accelerations in the circulation of knowledge, a tiny extension of societies, minuscule increases in the number of actors, small modifications of old beliefs. When we see them as networks, Western innovations remain recognizable and important, but they no longer suffice as the stuff of saga, a vast saga of radical rupture, fatal destiny, irreversible good or bad fortune.

Adjust valuation of Western innovations; compare field of nonmodern worlds to Neel retrospective of sophists for benefit of freeing compositions studies from philosophy.

(48) The antimoderns, like the postmoderns, have accepted their adversaries' playing field. Another field – much broader, much less polemical – has opened up before us: the field of nonmodern worlds. It is the Middle Kingdom, as vast as China and as little known.


3
REVOLUTION
3.1 The Moderns, Victims of Their Own Success

Diagram of purification and mediation.

(49) The modern Constitution has collapsed under its own weight, submerged by the mixtures that it tolerated as material for experimentation because it simultaneously dissimulated their impact upon the fabric of society. The third estate ends up being too numerous to feel that it is faithfully represented either by the order of objects or by the order of subjects.
(50-51) The diagnosis of the crisis with which I began this essay is now quite clear:
the proliferation of hybrids has saturated the constitutional framework of the moderns.

3.2 What Is a Quasi-Object?

Quasi-objects between natural and social.

(54-55) By treating the 'harder' parts of nature in the same way as the softer ones – that is, as arbitrary constructions determined by the interests and requirements of a sui generis society – the Edinburgh daredevils deprived the dualists – and indeed themselves, as they were soon to realize – of half of their resources. Society had to produce everything arbitrarily including the cosmic order, biology, chemistry, and the laws of physics. The implausibility of this claim was so blatant for the 'hard' parts of nature that we suddenly realized how implausible it was for the 'soft' ones as well. Objects are not the shapeless receptacles of social categories – neither the 'hard' ones nor the 'soft' ones.
(55) Quasi-objects are much more social, much more fabricated, much more collective than the 'hard' parts of nature, but they are in no way the arbitrary receptacles of a full-fledged society. On the other hand they are much more real, nonhuman and objective than those shapeless screens on which society – for unknown reasons – needed to be 'projected'.

3.3 Philosophies Stretched Over the Yawning Gap

Excursion through history of philosophy since the Enlightenment through postmodernism stretching over gap.

(55-56) The first consists in establishing a great gap between objects and subjects and continually increasing the distance between them; the second, known as the 'semiotic turn', focuses on the middle and abandons the extremes; the third isolates the idea of Being, thus rejecting the whole divide between objects, discourse and subjects.
(56) It is with Kantianism that our Constitution receives its truly canonical formulation. What was a mere distinction is sharpened into a total separation, a Copernican Revolution. Things-in-themselves become inaccessible while, symmetrically, the transcendental subject becomes infinitely remote from the world.
(57) The greatness of dialectics derives from its attempt to traverse the complete circle of the premoderns, one last time, by encompassing all divine, social and natural beings, in order to avoid the Kantianist contradiction between the role of purification and that of mediation.
(57) Again, one last time, phenomenology was to establish the great split, but this time with less ballast: it jettisoned the two poles of pure consciousness and pure object and spread itself, literally, over the middle, in an attempt to cover the now gaping hole that it sensed it could no longer absorb.

3.4 The End of Ends
(59) Let us call them pre-postmodern, to indicate that they are transitional. They raise what had been only a distinction, then a separation, then a contradiction, then an insurmountable tension, to the level of an incommensurability.
(60) It is worse still when the modern project is defended against the threat of disappearance. Jurgen Habermas (1987) makes one of the most desperate attempts.
(61) Let the networks perish, Habermas would say, provided that communicational reason appears to triumph.
(61) The postmoderns believe they are still modern because they accept the total division between the material and technological world on the one hand and the linguistic play of speaking subjects on the other – thus forgetting the bottom half of the modern Constitution; or because they relish only in the hybrid character of free floating networks and collages – thus forgetting the upper half of that same Constitution.
(62) There is only one positive thing to be said about the postmoderns: after them, there is nothing.

3.5 Semiotic Turns
(62) Whether they are called 'semiotics', 'semiology' or 'linguistic turns', the object of all these philosophies is to make discourse not a transparent intermediary that would put the human subject in contact with the natural world, but a mediator independent of nature and society alike.

Barthes Empire of Signs is difficult reduction of all phenomena, especially when dealing with science and technology (see Hayles How We Became Posthuman).

(63) Language has become a law unto itself, a law governing itself and its own world. The 'system of language', the 'play of language', the 'signifier', 'writing', the 'text', 'textuality', 'narratives', 'discourse' – these are some of the terms that designate the Empire of Signsto expand Barthes's title.
(64) When we are dealing with science and technology it is hard to imagine for long that we are a text that is writing itself, a discourse that is speaking all by itself, a play of signifiers without signifieds. It is hard to reduce the entire cosmos to a grand narrative, the physics of subatomic particles to a text, subway systems to rhetorical devices, all social structures to discourse.
(64) The postmodern condition has recently sought to juxtapose these three great resources of the modern critique – nature, society and discourse – without even trying to connect them.

3.6 Who Has Forgotten Being?

Even computational objects are not pure simulacra.

(66) Who has forgotten Being? No one, no one ever has, otherwise Nature would be truly available as a pure 'stock'. Look around you: scientific objects are circulating simultaneously as subjects objects and discourse. Networks are full of Being. As for machines, they are laden with subjects and collectives.

Invocation of Nietzsche, Heidegger, Heraclitus on inability to really forget being.

(67) No one can forget Being, since there has never been a modern world, or, by the same token, metaphysics. We have always remained pre-Socratic, pre-Cartesian, pre-Kantian, pre-Nietzschean. No radical revolution can separate us from these pasts, so there is no need for reactionary counter-revolutions to lead us back to what has never been abandoned. Yes, Heraclitus is a surer guide than Heidegger: 'Einai gar kia entautha theous.'

3.7 The Beginning of the Past
(67) In order to exit from the postmoderns' paralysis, it suffices to reutilize all these resources, but they must be pieced together and put to work in shadowing quasi-objects or networks.
(68) The modern passage of time is nothing but a particular form of historicity. Where do we get the idea of time that passes? From the modern Constitution itself.
(69) Historical reconstitution and archaism are two symptoms of the moderns' incapacity to eliminate what they nevertheless have to eliminate in order to retain the impression that time passes.

3.8 The Revolutionary Miracle

Things have a history is from where Bogost launches unit operations and alien phenomenology, leading to secularized transcendental technological history.

(70) The idea of radical revolution is the only solution the moderns have imagined to explain the emergence of the hybrids that their Constitution simultaneously forbids and allows, and in order to avoid another monster: the notion that things themselves have a history.
(71) From now on there will thus be two different histories: one dealing with universal and necessary things that have always been present, lacking any historicity but that of total revolution or epistemological breaks; the other focusing on the more or less contingent or more or less durable agitation of poor human beings detached from things.
(71) On each occasion time will be reckoned starting from these miraculous beginnings, secularizing each incarnation in the history of transcendent sciences. People are going to distinguish the time 'BC' and 'AC' with respect to computers as they do the years 'before Christ' and 'after Christ'.
(71)
The asymmetry between nature and culture then becomes an asymmetry between past and future. The past was the confusion of things and mean; the future is what will no longer confuse them.

3.9 The End of the Passing Past

Example of a Latour list that Bogost loves to invoke, exemplifying proliferation of things with histories, leading to importance of sorting decisions typically made by small groups of agents in defining historical periods as well as ontologies.

(74) No one can now categorize actors that belong to the 'same time' in a single coherent group. No one knows any longer whether the reintroduction of the bear in Pyrenees, kolkhozes, aerosols, the Green Revolution, the anti-smallpox vaccine, Star Wars, the Muslim religion, partridge hunting, the French Revolution, service industries, labor unions, cold fusion, Bolshevism, relativity, Slovak nationalism, commercial sailboats, and so on, are outmoded, up to date, futuristic, atemporal, nonexistent, or permanent.

3.10 Triage and Multiple Times
(75) We have all reached the point of mixing up times. We have all become premodern again. . . . If we change the classification principle, we get a different temporality on the basis of the same events.
(75) As Peguy's Clio said, and as Michel Serres repeats, 'we are exchangers and brewers of time' (Serres and Latour, 1992). It is this exchange that defines us, not the calendar or the flow that the moderns had constructed for us.
(76) We cannot return to the past, to tradition, to repetition, because these great immobile domains are the inverted image of the earth that is no longer promised to us today: progress, permanent revolution, modernization, forward fight.

Sorting makes the times.

(76) We have always actively sorted out elements belonging to different times. We can still sort. It is the sorting that makes the times, not the times that make the sorting. Modernism – like its anti- and post-modern corollaries – was only the provisional result of a selection made by a small number of agents in the name of all. If there are more of us who regain the capacity to do our own sorting of the elements that belong to our time, we will rediscover the freedom of movement that modernism denied us – a freedom that, in fact, we have never really lost.

3.11 A Copernican Counter-revolution

Nuance between mediators and intermediaries; compare to Hayles intermediation.

(78) If we simply restore this mediating role to all the agents, exactly the same world composed of exactly the same entities case being modern and become what it has never ceased to be – that is, nonmodern. How did the modern manage to specify and cancel out the work of mediation both at once? By conceiving every hybrid as a mixture of two pure forms. . . . The critical explanation always began from the poles and headed toward the middle, which was first the separation point and then the conjunction point for opposing resources – the place of phenomena in Kant's great narrative. In this way the middle was simultaneously maintained and abolished, recognized and denied, specified and silenced. This is why I can say without contradicting myself that no one has ever been modern, and that we have to stop being so. . . . The whole difference hinges on the apparently small nuance between mediators and intermediaries (Hennion, 1991).

Reversed reversal like Clark rethinking cognition from the middle out to the pure extremes of mind and body.

(79) I call this reversed reversal – or rather this shift of the extremes centerward and downward, a movement that makes both object and subject revolve around the practice of quasi-objects and mediators – a Copernican counter-revolution. We do not need to attach our explanations to the two pure forms known as the Object or Subject/Society, because these are, on the contrary, partial and purified results of the central practice that is our sole concern. . . . At last the Middle Kingdom is represented. Natures and societies are its satellites.

3.12 From Intermediaries to Mediators

History of natural things; need to account for how objects construct the subject.

(81-82) By offering to all the mediators the being that was previously captive in Nature and in Society, the passage of time becomes more comprehensible again. . . . All the essences become events, the air's spring by the same token as the death of Cherubino. History is no longer simply the history of people, it becomes the history of natural things as well.

3.13 Accusation, Causation
(82-84) Yet we have nothing that recounts the other aspect of the story: how objects construct the subject. . . . Serres makes precisely the same point. We have no idea of the aspect things would have outside the tribunal, beyond our civil wars, and outside our trials and our courtrooms. Without accusation we have no causes to plead, and we cannot assign causes to phenomena. This anthropological situation is not limited to our prescientific past, since it belongs more to our scientific present.

3.14 Variable Ontologies

Mapping longitude between event and essence for objects along with latitude between natural to social in variable ontologies, depicted in another complex diagram.

(85) Mixing my metaphors, I would say that it has to be defined as a gradient that registers variations in the stability of entities from event to essence. . . . We still need to be told whether what is at stake is the air pump as a seventeenth-century event or the air pump as a stabilized essence of the eighteenth century or the twentieth century. The degree of stabilization – the latitude – is as important as the position on the line that runs form the natural to the social – the longitude (see Cussins, 1992, for antoher and more precise mapping device).

3.15 Connecting the Four Modern Repertoires
(88) The moderns have developed four different repertoires, which they see as incompatible, to accommodate the proliferation of quasi-objects. The first deals with the external reality of a nature in which we are not masters. . . . The second deals with the social bond. . . . The third deals with signification and meaning. . . . The fourth, finally, speaks of Being.

Quasi-objects of real, narrated, collective, and existential trace discursive networks of autonomous actants, which supporting liaison of four repertoires can house the nonmodern Middle Kingdom, allowing us to become amoderns.

(89) Of quasi-objects, quasi-subjects, we shall simply say that they trace networks. They are real, quite real, and we humans have not made them. But they are collective because they attach us to one another, because they circulate in our hands and define our social bond by their very circulation. They are discursive, however; they are narrated, historical, passionate, and people with actants of autonomous forms. They are unstable and hazardous, existential, and never forget Being. This liaison of the four repertoires in the same networks once they are officially represented allows us to construct a dwelling large enough to house the Middle Kingdom, the authentic common home of the nonmodern world as well as its Constitution.
(90) Real as Nature, narrated as Discourse, collective as Society, existential as Being: such are the quasi-objects that moderns have caused to proliferate. As such it behooves us to pursue them, while we simply become once more what we have never cased to be:
amoderns.


4
RELATIVISM
4.1 How to End the Asymmetry

(91-92) Unfortunately, it is not easy to reutilize anthropology as it stands. . . . It must therefore be made capable of studying the sciences by surpassing the limits of the sociology of knowledge and, above all, of epistemology.
(93) For Serres, as for actual historians of science, Diderot, Darwin, Malthus and Spencer have to be explained according to the same principles and the same causes; if you want to account for the belief in flying saucers, make sure your explanations can be used, symmetrically, for black holes.

4.2 The Principle of Symmetry Generalized
(94) He is no longer required to limit himself to cultures, since Nature – or, rather, natures – have become similarly accessible to study (Pickering, 1992).
(94) However, the principle of symmetry defined by Bloor leads rapidly to an impasse. . . . Constructivist where Nature is concerned, it is realistic about Society.
(95) The appearance of explanation that Nature and Society provide comes only in a late phase, when stabilized quasi-objects have become, after cleavage, objects of external reality on the one hand, subjects of Society on the other. Nature and Soceity are part of the problem, not part of the solution.

Callon principle of generalized symmetry needs applied to natures-cultures.

(95-96) It has to absorb what Michel Callon calls the principle of generalized symmetry: the anthropologist has to position himself at the median point where he can follow the attribution of both nonhuman and human properties.
(96) Everything changes when, instead of constantly and exclusively alternating between one pole of the modern dimension and the other, we move down along the nonmodern dimension. . . . No longer unthinkable, it becomes the terrain of all the empirical studies carried out on the networks.
(96) But if we superpose the two positions – the one that the ethnologist occupies effortlessly in order to study cultures and the one that we have made a great effort to define in order to study our own nature – then comparative anthropology becomes possible, if not easy. . . .
It compares natures-cultures. Are they comparable? Are they similar? Are they the same? We can now, perhaps, solve the insoluable problem of relativism.

4.3 The Import – Export System of the Two Great Divides

New scientific knowledge, conflated with nature, lies outside culture.

(98) For Levi-Strauss (as for Canguilhem, Lyotard, Girard, Derrida, and the majority of French intellectuals), this new scientific knowledge lies entirely outside culture. It is the transcendence of science – conflated with Nature – that makes it possible to relativize all cultures, theirs and ours alike – with the one caveat, of course, that it is precisely our culture, not theirs, that is constructed through biology, electronic microscopes and telecommunication networks. . . . The abyss that was to supposed to be narrowing opens up again.
(99-100) So the Internal Great Divide accounts for the External Great Divide: we are the only ones who differentiate absolutely between Nature and Culture, between Science and Society, whereas in our eyes all the others – whether they are Chinere or Amerindian, Azande or Barouya – cannot really separate what is knowledge from what is Society, what is sign from what is thing, what comes from Nature is it is from what their cultures require. . . . Even though we might still recognize in our own societies some fuzzy areas in madness, children, animals, popular culture and women's bodies (Haraway, 1989), we believe our duty is to extirpate ourselves from those horrible mixtures as forcibly as possible by no longer confusing what pertains to mere social preoccupations and what pertains to the real nature of things.

4.4 Anthropology Comes Home from the Tropics
(101) Western ethnologists cannot limit themselves to the periphery; otherwise, still asymmetrical, they would show boldness toward others, timidity toward themselves. Back home anthropology need not become the marginal discipline of the margins, picking up the crumbs that fall from the other disciplines' banquet table.
(103) Symmetrical anthropology must realize that the two Great Divides do not describe reality – our own as well as that of others – but define the particular way Westerners had of establishing their relations with others as long as they felt modern.

4.5 There Are No Cultures

Move from cultural relativism to natural relativism.

(106) All natures-cultures are similar in that they simultaneously construct humans, divinities and nonhumans. None of them inhabit a world of signs or symbols arbitrarily imposed on an external Nature known to us alone. None of them – and especially not our own – lives in a world of things. All of them sort out what will bear signs and what will not. . . . From cultural relativism we move on to 'natural' relativism. The first led to absurdities; the second will allow us to fall back on common sense.

4.6 Sizeable Differences
(106-107) We now find ourselves confronting productions of natures-cultures that I am calling collectives – as different, it should be recalled, from the society construed by sociologists – men-among-themselves – as they are from the Nature imagined by epistemologists – things-in-themselves.
(107) Those traits could be transcribed as a set of entries in the huge data base of anthropology departments – which would then simply have to be rechristened 'Human and Nonhuman Relations Area Files'!

Toward alien phenomenology paying attention to nonhumans; air pump must accompany Leviathan.

(108) The collectives are all similar, except for their size, like the successive helixes of a single spiral. . . . If you want Hobbes and his descendants, you have to take Boyle and his as well. If you want the Leviathan, you have to have the air pump too.

Sciences and technologies multiply nonhumans enrolled in manufacturing collectives; see Aramis.

(108-109) Sciences and technologies are remarkable not because they are true or efficient – they gain these properties in addition, and for reasons entirely different from those the epistemologists provide (Latour, 1987) – but because they multiply the nonhuman enrolled in the manufacturing of collectives and because they make the community that we form with these beings a more intimate one. . . . Modern knowledge and power are different not in that they would escape at least the tyranny of the social, but in that they add many more hybrids in order to recompose the social link and extend its scale. Not only the air pump but also microbes, electricity, atoms, stars, second-degree equations, automatons and robots, mills and pistons, the unconscious and neurotransmitters.

4.7 Archimedes' coup d'etat

Cannon of the savant from Marcellus Life by Plutarch exemplifies junction of political power and technology.

(109-110) To help us understand this variation in size, there is no more striking emblem than an impossible experiment recounted by Plutarch. . . . It is not surprising that Hiero was 'amazed' at the power of technology (sunnoesas tes tecnes ten dunamin). It had not occurred to him, until then, to bring political power into relation with the compound pulley.
(110-11) The Archimedean point is to be sought not in the first moment, but in the conjunction of the two: how are we to undertake politics with new means rendered suddenly commensurable, while rejecting any link between absolutely incommensurable activities?
(111) A new collective is constituted by enlisting geometry and denying that it has done so. Society cannot explain geometry, since it is a new geometry-based society that begins to defend the walls of Syracuse against Marcellus. . . . The social link does not hold without the objects that the other branch of the Constitution permits us both to mobilize and to render forever incommensurable with the social world.

4.8 Absolute Relativism and Relativist Relativism
(112) But the machine for creating differences is triggered by the refusal to conceptualize quasi-objects, because this very refusal leads to the uncontrollable proliferation of a certain type of being:
the object, constructor of the social, expelled from the social world, attributed to a transcendent world that is, however, not divine – a world that produces, in contrast, a floating subject, bearer of law and morality. . . . They are the tricksters of comparative anthropology.
(113) Absolute relativism, like its enemy brother rationalism, forgets that measuring instruments have to be set up.
(113) Relativist relativism restores the compatibility that was assumed to have been lost.

Empirical relativism must be cognizant of instrumental mediation.

(113-114) The relativist relativists, more modest but more empirical, point out what instruments and what chains serve to create asymmetries and equalities, hierarchies and differences (Callon, 1992). Worlds appear commensurable or incommensurable only to those who cling to measured measures. Yet all measures, in hard and soft science alike, are also measuring measures, and they construct a commensurability that did not exist before their own calibration. Nothing is, by itself, either reducible or irreducible to anything else. Never by itself, but always through the mediation of another. . . . Relationism will serve as an organon for planetary negotiations over the relative universals that we are groping to construct.

4.9 Small Mistakes Concerning the Disenchantment of the World
(114) Unfortunately, the difficulty of relativism does not arise only from the bracketing off of Nature. It stems also from the related belief that the modern world is truly disenchanted. It is not only out of arrogance that Westerners think they are radically different from others, it is also out of despair, and by way of self-punishment.

Latest belief that modern world is disenchanted is Turkle robotic moment, for we never reach being Spock-like mutants.

(115) In their hands, the uprooted, acculturated, Americanized, scientifized, technologized Westerner becomes a Spock-like mutant. . . . How we do love to wear the hair shirt of the absurd, and what even greater pleasure we take in postmodern nonsense!

Modernist confusion of products with process, dreaming of norm as Engelbart type C behavior.

(115-116) The moderns confused products with processes. They believed that the production of bureaucratic rationalization presupposed rational bureaucrats; that the production of universal science depended on universalist scientists; that the production of effective technologies led to the effectiveness of engineers; that the production of abstraction was itself abstract; that the production of formalism was itself formal. We might just as well say that a refinery produces oil in a refined manner, or that a dairy produces butter in a buttery way! . . . Science does not produce itself scientifically any more than technology produces itself technologically or economy economically.

Paradoxical that we know more about ethnic and technological others than ourselves.

(116) Paradoxically, we know more about the Achuar, the Arapesh or the Alladians than we know about ourselves. . . . Is anthropology forever condemned to be reduced to territories, unable to follow networks?

4.10 Even a Longer Network Remains Local at All Points
(117) To take the precise measure of our differences without reducing them as relativism used to do, and without exaggerating them as modernizers need to do, let us say that the moderns have simply invented longer networks by enlisting a certain type of nonhumans. . . . To dispel this mystery, it suffices to follow the unaccustomed paths that allow this variation in scale, and to look at networks of facts and laws rather as one looks at gas lines or sewage pipes.
(117) The secular explanation of the effects of size proper to the West is easy to grasp in technological networks (Bijker and others, 1987). . . . There are continuous paths that lead from the local to the global, from the circumstantial to the universal, from the contingent to the necessary, only so long as the branch lines are paid for.

Turkle Second Self is good attempt at learning more about ourselves, the railroad model, easy to enter via technological systems, as is recent science of team science.

(117) The railroad model can be extended to all the technological networks that we encounter daily.
(118) It seems, then, that ideas and knowledge can spread everywhere without cost. . . . If we had had only the world-economies of the Venetian, Genoan or American merchants, if we had had only telephones and television, railroads and sewers, Western domination would never have appeared as anything but the provisional and fragile extension of some frail and tenuous networks.

Value of studying tech, especially thinking machines, to better understand epistemology thanks to materialization of spirit: compare to Hayles, Kittler and others on linkage between spirit and computing machinery.

(119) The itinerary of facts becomes as easy to follow as that of railways or telephones, thanks to the materialization of the spirit that thinking machines and computers allow. When information is measured by bytes and bauds, when one subscribes to a data bank, when one can plug into (or unplug from) a network of distributed intelligence, it is harder to go on picturing universal thought as a spirit hovering over the waters (Levy, 1990). Reason today has more in common with a cable television network than with Platonic ideas. It thus becomes much less difficult than it was in the past to see our laws and our constants, our demonstrations and our theorems, as stabilized objects that circulate widely, to be sure, but remain within well-laid-out metrological networks from which they are incapable of existing – except through branchings, subscriptions and decodings.
(119) Try to verify the tiniest fact, the most trivial law, the humblest constant, without subscribing to the multiple metrological networks, to laboratories and instruments.

4.11 The Leviathan is a Skein of Networks

Leviathan IBM is skein of networks; myth of agentless bureaucracy mirrors myth of universal scientific truths.

(121) Could the macro-actors be made up of micro-actors (Garfinkel, 1967)? Could IBM be made up of a series of local interactions?
(121) We rediscover the same problem as that of trains, telephones, or universal constants. How can one be connected without being either local or global? . . . The myth of the soulless, agentless bureaucracy, like that of the pure and perfect marketplace, offers the mirror-image of the myth of universal scientific laws.

Use digital communication networks as tutorial for rethinking products, processes, and networks.

(121-122) Yet there is an Ariadne's thread that would allow us to pass with continuity from the local to the global, from the human to the nonhuman. It is the thread of networks of practices and instruments, of documents and translations. . . . It is a skein of somewhat longer networks that rather inadequately embrace a world on the basis of points that become centers of profit and calculation. In following it step by step, one never crosses the mysterious limes that should divide the local from the global. . . . The two extremes, local and global, are much less interesting than the intermediary arrangements that we are calling networks.

4.12 A Perverse Taste for the Margins

Defense of marginality popular in postmodernism perverse as it implies totalitarian center.

(124) The defense of marginality presupposes the existence of a totalitarian center. But if the center and its totality are illusions, acclaim for the margins is somewhat ridiculous. . . . It is admirable to seek to save Being, with a cry of desperation, at the very moment when technological Ge-Stell seems to dominate everything, because 'where danger is, grows the saving power also'. But it is rather perverse to seek to profit brazenly from a crisis that has not yet commenced!

4.13 Avoid Adding New Crimes to Old
(125) With misdeeds as with domination, with capitalisms as with sciences, what we need to understand is the ordinary dimension: the small causes and their large effects (Arendt, 1963; Mayer, 1988).

4.14 Transcendences Abound
(128) Naturalization, socialization, discursivization, divinization, ontologization – all these '-izations' are equally implausible. None of them forms a common basis on which collectives, thus rendered comparable, might repose.

Delegation is transcendence that lacks a contrary, makes it possible to remain in presence, starting from the vinculum itself.

(129) I call this transcendence that lacks a contrary 'delegation'. The utterance, or the delegation, or the sending of a message or a messenger, makes it possible to remain in presence – that is, to exist. . . . We start from the vinculum itself, from passages and relations, not accepting as a starting point any being that does not emerge from this relation that is at once collective, real and discursive. . . . What sort of world is it that obliges us to take into account, at the same time and in the same breath, the nature of things, technologies, sciences, fictional beings, religions large and small, politics, jurisdictions, economies and unconsciousnesses? Our own, of course. That world ceased to be modern when we replaced all essences with the mediators, delegates and translators that gave them meaning.


5
REDISTRIBUTION
5.1 The Impossible Modernization

5.2 Final Examinations
(134) Yet this is precisely the amalgam I am looking for:
to retain the production of a nature and of a society that allow changes in size through the creation of an external truth and a subject of law, but without neglecting the co-production of sciences and societies. The amalgam consists in using the premodern categories to conceptualize the hybrids, while retaining the moderns' final outcome of the work of purification – that is, an external Nature distinct from subjects.

5.3 Humanism Redistributed

Redistribute humanism for philosophers of machinery, animals, facts.

(136) Where are the Mouniers of machines, the Levinases of animals, the Ricoeurs of facts? Yet the human, as we now understand, cannot be grasped and saved unless that other part of itself, the share of things, is restored to it. So long as humanism is constructed through contrast with the object that has been abandoned to epistemology, neither the human nor the nonhuman can be understood.
(137) The scale of value consists not in shifting the definition of the human along the horizontal line that connects the Object pole to the Subject pole, but in sliding it along the vertical dimension that defines the nonmodern world. . . . The expression 'anthropomorphic' considerably underestimates our humanity. We should be talking about morphism. . . . A weaver of morphisms – isn't that enough of a definition? The close the
anthropos comes to this distribution, the more human it is.
(138) Human nature is the set of its delegates and its representatives, its figures and its messengers. That symmetrical universal is worth at least as much as the moderns' doubly asymmetrical one. This new position, shifted in relation to the subject/society position, now needs to be underwritten by an amended Constitution.

5.4 The Nonmodern Constitution

Nonmodern constitution first guarantee: nonseparability of quasi-objects and quasi-subjects, revealing the networks; immoral to interfere with work of mediation.

(139) In order to sketch in the nonmodern Constitution, it suffices to take into account what the modern Constitution left out, and to sort out the guarantees we wish to keep. We have committed ourselves to providing representation for quasi-objects. It is the third guarantee of the modern Constitution that must therefore be suppressed, since that is the one that made the continuity of their analysis impossible. Nature and Society are not two distinct poles, but one and the same production of successive states of societies-natures, of collectives. The first guarantee of our new draft thus becomes the nonseparability of quasi-objects, quasi-subjects. Every concept, every institution, every practice that interferes with the continuous deployment of collectives and their experimentation with hybrids will be deemed dangerous, harmful, and – we may as well say it – immoral. The work of mediation becomes the very center of the double power, natural and social. The networks come out of hiding.

Nonmodern constitution second guarantee: progressive objectivization of Nature and subjectivization of Society; immoral to not make sense of networks.

(140) All concepts, all institutions, all practices that interfere with the progressive objectivization of Nature – incorporation into a black box – and simultaneously the subjectivization of Society – freedom of maneuver – will be deemed harmful, dangerous and, quite simply, immoral. Without this second guarantee, the networks liberated by the first would keep their wild and uncontrollable character.

Nonmodern constitution third guarantee: freedom of sorting; fourth, democracy of things themselves.

(141-142) The third guarantee, as important as the others, is that we can combine associations freely without ever confronting the choice between archaism and modernization, the local and the global, the cultural and the universal, the natural and the social. Freedom has moved away from the social pole it had occupied exclusively during the modern representation into the middle and lower zones, and becomes a capacity for sorting and recombining sociotechnological imbroglios. . . . The fourth guarantee – perhaps the most important – is to replace the clandestine proliferation of hybrids by their regulated and commonly-agreed-upon production. It is time, perhaps, to speak of democracy again, but of a democracy extended to things themselves.

5.5 The Parliament of Things

Natures are present with scientists who speak in their name; neither are naked truths.

(144) Let us again take up the two representatives and the double doubt about the faithfulness of the representatives, and we shall have defined the Parliament of Things. In its confines, the continuity of the collective is reconfigured. There are no more naked truths, but there are no more naked citizens, either. The mediators have the whole space to themselves. The Enlightenment has a dwelling-place at last. Natures are present, but with their representatives, scientists who speak in their name. Societies are present, but with the objects that have been serving as their ballast from time immemorial.
(144) Half of our politics is constructed in science and technology. The other half of Nature is constructed in societies. Let us patch the two back together, and the political task can begin again.

Call for Parliament of Things grounds software studies, platform studies, Bogost alien phenomenology.

(145) I have done my job as philosopher and constituent by gathering together the scattered themes of a comparative anthropology. Others will be able to convene the Parliament of Things.



Latour, Bruno. We Have Never Been Modern. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1993. Print.