Latour’s We Have Never Been Modern is an analysis of the concept of ‘modernity’ that rightly identifies it as a historic phenomenon characterized by an insistence on the absolute nature of several related dichotomies. This insistence, as he observers, has inevitably resulted in contradictions that have been consequential for both theory and practice. For example, an absolute divorce between ‘nature’ and ‘society’ means that we want to view nature as both absolutely real and socially constructed, and society as both a force that is independent of ourselves and as something that is subject to volition.
The oppositions Latour detects are certainly visible, and the broad contentions that ‘modernity’ is the peculiar product of certain features of European history and that it is manifestly paradoxical are sound. Moreover, the position he wants to take up – which is critical of post-modernism (including deconstruction) as remaining within the modernist intellectual horizon, of Marxism as self-defeating, and of Heideggerianism as a form of anti-modernism than thus remains deeply implicated with it rather than simply side-stepping it like his own ‘non-modern’ position – is refreshing in a French intellectual.
However, there are some strange omissions, and some problematic notions. For someone so concerned with the relationship between science and politics (he regards the Hobbes-Boyle controversy as exemplary), it is odd that Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions receives no attention. Nor does he really give the work done on history of science in the Anglophone tradition enough credit for appreciating the socio-political context of scientific thought; what about Butterfield’s The Origins of Modern Science, for example, written as long ago as 1947?
Again, the Anglophone revival of rhetoric studies (well underway in the 1990s when the book was written) is simply passed over. A work like McCloskey’s The Rhetoric of Economics makes the point that ‘science’ (whether natural, social, or historical) is inevitably rhetorical and persuasive but is nonetheless ‘true’ and ‘objective’ for all that. One would have thought that economics was a kind of paradigm case of the interaction of the human and non-human (people on the one hand and money, commodities, and raw materials on the other), but it is simply missing.
So too is the entire movement of historical thought from Vico in the eighteenth century onwards. The rise of historical thought in Germany in the nineteenth century is simply absent, and hermeneutics is treated far too briefly, as one in a series of perpetual failures to overcome the dichotomies set up in the early modern period. Dilthey in particular was capable of a degree of historical sensitivity that entirely transcends the crude divisions present in Latour’s ‘constitution’ of modernity. Nor does Latour seem to appreciate very clearly, in his championing of anthropology, that it, like sociology, is just one branch of the modern historical science (along with archaeology and history ‘proper’).
Worse, Latour’s reading of the history of philosophy at large is very contentious – Kant may have set up a division between the ideal world of things in themselves and the empirical world of appearances, but he also pioneered a new approach to categoriality which allowed him to specify the conditions of various forms of experience – practical, religious, aesthetic, and scientific – in a way which potentially supplies solutions to most if not all of the problems Latour addresses. Yet this side of the Critique of Pure Reason goes undiscussed. The treatment of Hegel is similarly superficial. Latour simply dismisses dialectics rather than appreciating the way in which Hegel’s rendering of Kant’s categories into dynamic forms in the Encyclopedia provides them with a historicity which both detects and evades the very problems Latour thinks he is being novel in identifying.
Then there are the concepts of ‘quasi-objects’ and ‘networks’ that carry most of the load. ‘Quasi-objects’ are supposed to bring together the non-human and the human in a way that modernity cannot explicitly account for. But in many respects we are quite right to keep them separate. Who has ever mistaken a tree, or for that matter a computer, for a human being? The notion of a quasi-object only appears problematic for Latour because he is loose in his use of words like science, technology, and nature.
While it is commendable that Latour avoids any Heideggerian hostility to technology, the very notion of technology – some portion of the material world transformed into an instrument for human use according to a rational design – suggests that it already combines the human and the non-human in its meaning. There was, of course, ‘technology’ long before there was ‘science’. But technology assisted by science (the machine gun) is really no more conceptually problematic than technology that is the product of exclusively practical experience (the flint arrow-head). Admittedly, one wants, in understanding both technological innovation and scientific thought, to look at all the circumstances of their production, and their filiations with ideas in other fields; but this is hardly revelatory.
Science-based technology has indeed become such a large part of our lives that our interactions with machines and with each other in ways that are both enabled and constrained by machines are interesting to study; but they are arguably far less problematic than Latour believes. No doubt one interesting fact about these interactions is that they appear transparent to the user who remains ignorant of the manifold conditions of their operation and indeed of all their potential consequences.
Nevertheless, what Latour calls ‘quasi-objects’ are only difficult to grasp conceptually (as distinct from the undeniably painstaking labour of investigating them empirically) if one persists in mixing up, as he does, (i) ‘science’ as an ideal form of inquiry distinguished by certain categorial presuppositions with ‘science’ as an activity requiring specific people and particular materials for its pursuit, and (ii) ‘nature’ as an exclusively physical concept, where homogeneity is indeed the rule, with ‘nature’ as it is experienced in diverse ways between cultures. (Cp. the remark on universal gravitation at p. 120)
As for the idea of a ‘network’, what is a ‘network’ but another term for a context? Latour only finds the nature of groups (with their local and global manifestations) as problematic as he does because he again ignores the work of any number of writers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (Ferdinand Tonnies in C19 Germany and Antony Black in our own day in particular spring to mind) who have engaged with the history and theory of associational life. Nor, perhaps, does he give Foucauldian ‘archeology’ the attention that it should receive in this context as one of his notable precursors.
So, there is plenty to criticize. But the desire to overcome the ‘modern’ sense of disconnectedness from the past, and of absolute difference from all other cultures, including earlier phases of its own, can only be applauded. Admirable too is the opposition to the idea that we are in the grip of impersonal forces, whether of nature or society, that we are forced to be simply victims of. Latour is also sophisticated enough to pay tribute to the contributions of both modern and post-modern thought, and not to simply repeat their mistake of trying to do the impossible in rejecting all that had gone before.
What one wonders is where it all ends up. The degraded environment, on the side of nature, and the impoverished masses who constitute the majority of the world’s human population, on the other, are consequences of modernism. One can only agree with Latour about this, though of course he is by no means unique in making the point. But his talk, in general terms, of ‘relocating the human’ and ‘amending the constitution’ of modernity does not amount to truly practical thought on how we are to deal with our present discontents.
Remarks like ‘A democracy extended to things themselves’ are neither perspicuous (will my mobile phone want to vote? Should I buy one for someone who doesn’t have one?) nor helpful. There is something awfully ‘modern’ and even complacent about Latour’s concluding declaration that ‘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’. Others, indeed, are trying – look at Monbiot’s Age of Consent, for example, which tries to envisage, in institutional and constitutional terms, what a world government might look like. But one wouldn’t learn this from Latour.