Latour, Bruno. We Have Never Been Modern. Trans. Catherine Porter. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993.

“Hybrids ourselves, installed lodsidedly within scientific institutions, half engineers and half philosophers, ‘tiers instuits’ (Serres, 1991) without having sought the role, we have chosen to follow the imbroglios wherever they take us” (3).

“and this is why I will 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 scientists” (4).

Everything is “simultaneously real, social, and narrated” (7).

“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. At the same time we stop having been modern, because . . .” (11).

“the more we forbid ourselves to conceive of hybrids, the more possible their interbreeding becomes” (12).

Modern Constitution
1) “It is not men who make nature; Nature has always existed and have always already been there; we are only discovering its secrets” (30).
2) “human beings, and only human beings, are the ones who construct society and freely determine their own destiny” (30).
3) “there shall exist a complete separation between the natural world (constructed, nevertheless, by man) and the social world (sustained, nevertheless, by things); secondly, there shall exist a total separation between the work of hybrids and the work of purification” (31).
4) Remove God “from the dual social and natural construction, while leaving Him presentable and usable nevertheless” (33).

Again:
1) “guaranteed Nature its transcendent dimension by making it distinct from the fabric of Society” (139).
2) “guaranteed Society its immanent dimension by rending citizens totally free to reconstruct it artificially” (139).
3) “assured the separation of powers, the two branches of government being kept separate, watertight compartments” (139).
4) “guarantee of the crossed-out God made it possible to stabilize this dualist and asymmetrical mechanism by ensuring a function of arbitration, but one without presence or power” (139).

“They have not made Nature; they make Society; they make Nature; they have not made Society; they have not made either, God has made everything; God has made nothing, they have made everything” (34).

“To undertake hybridization, it is always necessary to believe that it has not serious consequences for the constitutional order” (41).

“It is the impossibility of changing the social order without modifying the natural order—and vice versa—that has obliged the premoderns to exercise the greatest prudence” (42).

“The less moderns think they are blended, the more they blend. The more science is absolutely pure, the more it is intimately bound up with the fabric of society” (Latour 43).

“a nonmodern is anyone who takes simultaneously into account the moderns’ Constitution and the populations of hybrids that the Constitution rejects and allows to proliferate” (47).

“Up to that point, dualism had seemed to work, since the ‘hard’ part of society was used on the ‘soft’ objects, while the ‘hard’ objects were used only on the ‘soft’ part of society” (54).

“Society is neither that strong nor that weak; objects are neither that weak nor that strong. The double position of objects and society had to be entirely rethought” (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 full-fledged society” (Latour 55).

“They [quasi-objects] raise what had been only a distinction, then a separation, then a contradiction, then an insurmountable tension, to the level of an incommensurability” (Latour 59).

“The moderns declare that technology is nothing but pure instrumental mastery, science pure Enframing and pure Stamping [Das Ge-Stell], that economics is pure calculation, capitalism pure reproduction, the subject pure consciousness. Purity everywhere! They claim this, but we must be careful not to take them at their word, since what they are asserting is only half of the modern world, the work of purification that distils what the work of hybridizations supplies” (66).

“The moderns have a peculiar propensity for understanding time that passes as if it were really abolishing the past behind it” (68).

“The more they accumulate revolutions, the more they save; they more they capitalize, the more they put on display in museum. Maniacal destruction is counterbalanced by an equally maniacal conservation” (70).

“An intermediary—although recognized as necessary—simply transports, transfers, transmits energy from one of the poles of the Constitution. It is void in itself and can only be less faithful or more or less opaque. A mediator, however, is an original event and creates what it translates as well as the entities between which it plays the mediating role” (Latour 77-78).

“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” (Latour 78).

“Instead of denying the existence of hybrids—and reconstructing them awkwardly under the name of intermediaries—this explanatory model allows us instead to integrate the work of purification as a particular case of mediation. The only difference between the modern and the nonmodern conception is therefore breached, since purification is considered as a useful work requiring instruments, institutions, and know-how whereas in the modern paradigm there was no explicit function and no apparent necessity in the work of mediation” (Latour 78-79).

“Nature does revolve, but not around the Subject/Society. It revolves around the collective that produces things and people. The Subject does revolve, but not around Nature. It revolves around the collective out of which people and things are generated. At last the Middle Kingdom is represented. Natures and societies are its satellites” (79).

“History is no longer simply the history of people, it becomes the history of natural things as well” (82).

“Real as Nature, narrated as Discourse, collective as Society, existential as Being: such are the quasi-objects that the moderns have caused to proliferate. As such it behoves us to pursue them, while we simply become once more what we have never ceased to be: amoderns” (90).

“‘The only pure myth is the idea of a science devoid of all myth’ . . . (Serres, 1974)” (93).

“If we are to be realist in the one case, we have to be realist in the other; if we are constructivist in one instance, then we have to be constructivist for both. Or rather, as our investigation of the two modern practices has shown, we must be able to understand simultaneously how Nature and Society are immanent—in the work of mediation—and transcendent—after the work of purification” (Latour 95).

“the very notion of culture is an artifact created by bracketing Nature off. Cultures—different or universal—do not exist any more than Nature does” (104).

“All collectives are different from one another in the way they divide up beings, in the properties they attribute to them, in the mobilization they consider acceptable. These differences constitute countless small divides, and there is no longer a Great Divide to take one apart from all the others” (107).

“This is because the principle of symmetry aims not only at establishing equality—which is only the way to set the scale at zero—but at registering differences—that is, the final analysis, asymmetries—and at understanding the practical means that allow some collectives to dominate others” (107-108).

“In other words, the differences are sizeable, but they are only of size. They are important (and the error of cultural relativism is that it ignores them), but they are not disproportionate (and the error of universalism is that it sets them up as a Great Divide)” (108).

“Relativists, who strive to put all cultures on an equal footing by viewing all of them as equally arbitrary codings of a natural world whose production is unexplained, do not succeed in respecting the efforts collectives make to dominate one another. And universalists on the other hand, are incapable of understanding the deep fraternity of collectives, since they are obliged to offer access to Nature to Westerners alone, and to imprison all others in social categories from which they will escape only by becoming scientific, modern and Westernized” (108).

“Modern knowledge and power are different not in that they would escape at last the tyranny of the social, but in that they add many more hybrids in order to recompose the social link and extend its scale” (109).

“There are indeed differences, but they are differences in size. There are no differences in nature—still less in culture” (109).

“Moderns do differ from premoderns by this single trait: they refuse to conceptualize quasi-objects as such. In their eyes, hybrids present the horror that must be avoided at all costs by a ceaseless, even maniacal purification” (112).

“Through this opening, sciences and technologies will emerge in society in such a mysterious way that this miracle will force Westerners to see themselves as completely different from others. The first miracle gives rise to a second (why don’t the others do the same?), then a third (why are we so exceptional?). This feature generates a cascade of small differences that will be collected, summarized, and amplified by the Great Divide, the great narrative of the West, set radically apart from all cultures” (112).

“The universalists defined a single hierarchy. The absolute relativists made all hierarchies equal” (113).

“Why do we get so much pleasure out of being so different not only from others but from our own past? What psychologist will be subtle enough to explain our morose delight in being in perpetual crisis and in putting an end to history? Why do we like to transform small differences in scale among collectives into huge dramas?” (114).

“How could we be chilled by the cold breath of the sciences, when the sciences are hot and fragile, human and controversial, full of thinking reeds and of subjects who are themselves inhabited by things (Pickering, 1992)?” (115)

“Just as the adjectives ‘natural’ and ‘social’ designate representations of collectives that are neither natural nor social in themselves, so the worlds ‘local’ and ‘global’ offer points of view on networks that are by nature neither local nor global, but are more or less long and more or less connected” (Latour 122).

“But instead of seeing these processes as the modernizers do—as glorious, albeit painful, conquests—the antimoderns see the situation as an unparalleled catastrophe. Except for the plus or minus sign, moderns and antimoderns share all the same convictions. The postmoderns, always perverse, accept the idea that the situation is indeed catastrophic, but they maintain that is to be acclaimed rather than bemoaned” (123).

“What do the antimoderns do, then when they are confronted with this shipwreck? They take on the courageous task of saving what can be saved: souls, minds, emotions, interpersonal relations, the symbolic dimension, human warmth, local specificities, hermeneutics, the margins and the peripheries. An admirable mission, but one that would be more admirable still if all those vessels were actually threatened” (123).

“The more the antireductionists, the romantics, the spiritualists seek to save subjects, the more the reductionists, the scientists, the materialists imagine that they possess objects” (124).

“But if the centre and its totality are illusions, acclaim for the margins is somewhat ridiculous” (124).

“No, we do not fall from Nature into the Social, from the Social into Discourse, from Discourse into God, from God into Being. Those agencies had a constitutional role to play only so long as they remained distinct. No one of them can cover, fill, subsume the others; no one of them can serve to describe the work of mediation and translation” (128).

“It is the conception of the terms ‘transcendence’ and ‘immanence’ that ends up being modified by the moderns’ return to nonmodernity” (128).

“When we abandon the modern world, we do not fall upon someone or something, we do not land on the an essence, but on a process, on a movement, a passage—literally a pass, in the sense of this term as used in ball games” (129).

“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” (129).

Postmodernism: “Having been slapped in the face with modern reality, poor populations now have to submit to postmodern hyperreality. Nothing has value; everything is a reflection, a simulacrum, a floating sign; and that very weakness, they say, may save us from the invasion of technologies, sciences, reasons. Was it really worth destroying everything to end up adding this insult to that injury?” (131).

“If, as I have been saying all along, the Constitution allows hybrids to proliferate because it refuses to conceptualize them as such, then it remains effective only so long as it denies their existence” (132).

“Let us keep what is best about them, above all: the premoderns’ inability to differentiate durably between the networks and the pure poles of Nature and Society, their obsessive interest in thinking about the production of hybrids of Nature and Society, of things and signs, their certainty that transcendences abound, their capacity for conceiving of past and future in many ways other than progress and decadence, their muliplication of types of nonhumans different from those of the moderns” (133).

“The expression ‘anthropomorphic’ considerably underestimates our humanity. We should be talking about morphism. Morphism is the place where technomorphisms, zoomorphisms, phusimorphisms, ideomorphisms, theomorphisms, sociomorphisms, psychomorphisms, all come together. Their alliances and their exchanges, taken together, are what define the anthropos. A weaver of morphisms—isn’t that enough of a definition?” (137).

“How could the anthropos be threatened by machines? It has made them, it has put itself into them, it has divided up its own members among their members, it has built its own body with them. How could it be threatened by objects? They have all been quasi-subjects circulating within the collective they traced. It is made of them as much as they are made of it. How could it be deceived by politics? . . . How could it be manipulated by the economy? . . . Where does the threat come from? From those who seek to reduce it to an essence and who—by scorning things, objects, machines and the social, by cutting off all delegations and senders—make humanism a fragile and precious thing at risk of being overwhelmed by Nature, Society, or God” (137-138).

“The human is in the delegation itself, in the pass, in the sending, in the continuous exchange of forms. Of course it is not a thing, but things are not things either. Of course it is not a merchandise, but merchandise id not merchandise either. Of course it is not a machine, but anyone who as seen machines knows that they are scarcely mechanical. Of course it is not of this world, but this world is not of this world either. Of course it is not in God, but what relation is there between the God above and the God below? Humanism can maintain itself only by sharing itself with these mandatees” (138).

“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” (139).

New nonmodern Constitution:

1) “The first guarantee of our new draft thus becomes the nonseparability of quasi-objects, quasi-subjects” (139).
2) “The second guarantee of our new draft thus makes it possible to recover the first two guarantees of the modern Constitution but without separating them” (140).
3) “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” (141).
4) “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” (142).

“Every concept, every institution, every practice that interferes with the continuous deployment of collectives and their experimentations 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” (139).

“Every new call to revolution, any epistemological break, any Copernican upheaval, any claim that certain practices have become outdated for ever, will be deemed dangerous, or—what is still worse in the eyes of the moderns—outdated!” (141).

“When we amend the Constitution, we continue to believe in the sciences, but instead of taking in their objectivity, their truth , their coldness, their extraterritoriality—qualities they have never had, except after the arbitrary withdrawal of epistemology—we retain what has always been most interesting about them: their daring, their experimentation, their uncertainty, their warmth, their incongruous blend of hybrids, their crazy ability to reconstitute the social bond” (142).