Skimming through Bruno Latour’s We Have Never Been Modern, I’ve noticed a striking omission. The principle thesis of the book is that modernity involves the “work of purification”, which attempts to clarify (or impose) a sharp and exclusive divide between the natural and the cultural spheres. If we have never been modern, it is because this purification has never been attained, and is probably unattainable. Latour grants ontological priority to the mediations which, in constituting hybrids of nature and culture, ceaselessly undermine this divide. While praising the “modern constitution” for enabling a more massive mobilization and development on both sides than ever before, and hence a more dynamic hybridity between them, he nonetheless warns against the dangerous fixation on purification and disgust for hybridity that characterizes the “moderns”. While this definition of modernity doubtlessly has some traction, it’s not the only one, nor is it the most convincing.
A very different story: According to an at least partially mythologized account (and ironically so), the odyssey of modernity began as early as ancient Greece, when the first philosophers doubly rejected appeals to transcendent authority (a la mythology) in favor of immanent explanation of the world (the birth of science), and the use of argumentation for pathological gain in favor of the pursuit of Truth for its own sake. There is thus a simultaneous break with traditional authority, and with the cynical (in the contemporary sense of the word) opportunism that takes its place. Authority was rejected in the name of a higher ideal, which is not necessarily to say a higher authority. This double break endured centuries of suppression and co-opting at the hands of new authorities, often but not always religious in nature (although usually so in appearance), and while it would occasionally resurface, it had to wait until the Enlightenment for its most pronounced rectification.
The Enlightenment, far from the uniform and essentially unproblematic project whose legacy is so often either praised or denounced, is essentially the articulation of a problem we have yet to adequately solve: how to live without appeals to authority? In Kant, this articulation reaches its apex when the first break totally overlaps with the second, appeals to authority being characterized as essentially pathological insofar as a truly ‘disinterested’ thought would appeal only to its autonomy as rational subject, which is an ideal higher than all pathological interests. Kant was obviously not without his own problems, and the Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment tradition can for the most part be understood as a series of failed, but nonetheless important attempts to work through these problems, and to attain a truly non-pathological autonomy.
The double break can be understood in terms of the schema of premodern – modern – postmodern. Far from historical periods, these three designations refer to the possible consequences of the double break available at any time. Premodern designates the rejection of the first break, in which one recoils into the arms of traditional authority. Postmodernity accepts the first break, but denies the second, rejecting any ideal higher than personal pathological gain as no better than premodern authority. We can therefore see that not only ‘late’, but all capitalism is postmodern, even if not all postmodernity is capitalist (although capitalism is postmodern logic in its highest expression). Modernity, on the other hand, accepts both breaks. In the place of tradition, it advocates an experimental reconstitution of social practices. Yet the standard of evaluation for this experimentation is not simply pathological gain or its formalized sibling, economic growth. Experimentation – in the sense of an uncertain self-determination free from arbitrary impositions by others – must be undertaken for its own sake.
If we have never been modern, it is because we have never been capable of sustaining a social body faithful to both breaks, immune to collapse in one direction or another. And, given the extent to which tradition has been almost totally instrumentalized by capitalist cynicism, this collapse is now uniformly in the direction postmodernity. This doesn’t mean we need to go backward, that we must regress back to modernity to recover now defiled ideals. Modernity is not behind postmodernity, it is above it; we arrive at the latter after having fallen short of the summit, landing battered at the base with a fear of heights. We should remember Lenin’s parable of the mountain climber:
Let us picture to ourselves a man ascending a very high, steep and hitherto unexplored mountain. Let us assume that he has overcome unprecedented difficulties and dangers and has succeeded in reaching a much higher point than any of his predecessors, but still has not reached the summit. He finds himself in a position where it is not only difficult and dangerous to proceed in the direction and along the path he has chosen, but positively impossible. He is forced to turn back, descend, seek another path, longer, perhaps, but one that will enable him to reach the summit. The descent from the height that no one before him has reached proves, perhaps, to be more dangerous and difficult for our imaginary traveller than the ascent—it is easier to slip; it is not so easy to choose a foothold; there is not that exhilaration that one feels in going upwards, straight to the goal, etc. One has to tie a rope round oneself, spend hours with all alpenstock to cut footholds or a projection to which the rope could be tied firmly; one has to move at a snail’s pace, and move downwards, descend, away from the goal; and one does not know where this extremely dangerous and painful descent will end, or whether there is a fairly safe detour by which one can ascend more boldly, more quickly and more directly to the summit.
It would hardly be natural to suppose that a man who had climbed to such an unprecedented height but found himself in such a position did not have his moments of despondency. In all probability these moments would be more numerous, more frequent and harder to bear if he heard the voices of those below, who, through a telescope and from a safe distance, are watching his dangerous descent, which cannot even be described as what the Smena Vekh people call “ascending with the brakes on”; brakes presuppose a well designed and tested vehicle, a well-prepared road and previously tested appliances. In this case, however, there is no vehicle, no road, absolutely nothing that had been tested beforehand.
Despite the understandable resignation that accompanies retreat, failure, and the catastrophe of falling, the mountain remains before us. The condition in which this resignation leaves us – a society more brutal and unequal than any before – is unacceptable. We must continue on toward modernity; postmodernity doesn’t come after modernity, but after we have given up our pursuit of modernity.
Latour’s condemnation of the desire for a purified dichotomy of nature and culture is certainly warranted, but to equate this desire with modernity is at best to overlook the far more significant meaning of this term. Appeals to the authority of the dichotomy, for one, can only be premodern, insofar as it cannot survive critical scrutiny. Yet if we, like Latour, resign ourselves to the play of forces, even if these are generalized beyond those of humanity, it is hard to see where we can derive an ideal capable of withstanding the corrosive power of postmodern cynicism. Modernity is still in our future, or else ruin alone awaits us.
Hmm, I don’t really want to develop a full response to this, just to say that Latour puts Kant firmly on the side of the moderns (see especially in Pandora’s Hope)
Nice post, Reid. This actually anticipates much of Latour’s argument in chapter 2 of We Have Never Been Modern. In its attempt to purify or completely separate nature and culture there is, on the one hand, the attempt to completely divest the natural world of anything remotely human, treating it as pure mechanism devoid of anything resembling human intentions, while, on the other hand, purifying the social world of any vestiges of the natural, treating it as a world completely defined by human intentions, values, signs, meanings, etc. The since of premodernity according to modernity (in Latour’s account) is that it attributes human meanings and intentions to the domain of the natural, while it attributes natural causalities to the social world (e.g., that humans have a divinely ordained place in a great chain of being, that social actions reverberate in the natural world through phenomena like natural disasters and so on, etc).
Latour’s discussion of the Hobbes/Boyle debate analyzes exactly what you’re talking about with respect to the thought of a social and political world sans transcendence (his references to the crossed-out god of modernity). The social world, in the Hobbes-Boyle conception, becomes a purely immanent world that is defined entirely by human action and deliberation (rather than transcendent and divine laws). So on the culture side of the nature/culture split we get a new conception of the social and political, according to Latour, along exactly the lines you’re describing. In other words, there’s a collapse of appeals to authority such that government is thought as the people themselves, not as an estranged authority other than the humans that make up the social world. Latour then goes on to investigate a series of paradoxes that haunt this new “constitution” of the world.
I think it’s worth noting that for Latour it is not a question of rejecting modernity. He retains a good deal from the modern constitution, as becomes clear in chapters 4 and 5. The issue isn’t one of returning to premodernity or of falling into a correlationist anti-realism where it is argued that nature is really culture or that culture is really nature, but rather of developing a new position that moves beyond the correlationist deadlocks internal to modernity so as to arrive at a more robust realism.
Thanks for the response Levi. I obviously haven’t read much Latour, so the input is very helpful. I wasn’t sure if he could arrive at the kind of double break I’m talking about by way of his account of purification, but if, as you indicate, he does have a version of it, I’ll have to look into it.