We Have Never Been Modern
Bruno Latour
translated by Catherine Porter
Harvard University Press Cambridge, Massachusetts
CONTENTS
Acknowledgements
- CRISIS
1.1 The Proliferation of Hybrids 1152
1.2 Rerying the Gordian Knot 2789
1.3 The Crisis of the Critical Stance 2648
1.4 1989: The Year of Miracles
1.5 What Does It Mean To Be A Modern? - CONSTITUTION
2.1 The Modern Constitution
2.2 Boyle and His Objects
2.3 Hobbes and His Subjects
2.4 The Mediation of the Laboratory
2.5 The Testimony of Nonhumans
2.6 The Double Artifact of the Laboratory and the Leviathan
2.7 Scientific Representation and Political Representation
2.8 The Constitutional Guarantees of the Modern
2.9 The Fourth Guarantee: The Crossed-out God
2.10 The Power of the Modern Critique
2.11 The Invincibility of the Moderns
2.12 What the Constitution Clarifies and What It Obscures
2.13 The End of Denunciation
2.14 We Have Never Been Modern - REVOLUTION
3.1 The Moderns, Victims of Their Own Success
3.2 What Is a Quasi-Object?
3.3 Philosophies Stretched Over the Yawning Gap
3.4 The End of Ends
3.5 Semiotic Turns
3.6 Who Has Forgotten Being?
3.7 The Beginning of the Past
3.8 The Revolutionary Miracle
3.9 The End of the Passing Past
3.10 Triage and Multiple Times
3.11 A Copernican Counter-revolution
3.12 From Intermediaries to Mediators
3.13 Accusation, Causation
3.14 Variable Ontologies
3.15 Connecting the Four Modern Repertoires - RELATIVISM
4.1 How to End the Asymmetry
4.2 The Principle of Symmetry Generalized
4.3 The Import-Export System of the Two Great Divides
4.4 Anthropology Comes Home from the Tropics
4.5 There Are No Cultures
4.6 Sizeable Differences
4.7 Archimedes’ coup d’ét at
4.8 Absolute Relativisim and Relativist Relativism
4.9 Small Mistakes Concerning the Disenchantment of the World
4.10 Even a Longer Network Remains Local at All Points
4.11 The Leviathanis a Skein of Networks
4.12 A Perverse Taste for the Margins
4.13 Avoid Adding New Crimes to Old
4.14 Transcendences Abound - REDISTRIBUTION
5.1 The Impossible Modernization
5.2 Final Examinations
5.3 Humanism Redistributed
5.4 The Nonmodern Constitution
5.5 The Parliament of Things
Bibliography
Index
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
In many places the English text differs from the French. I have modified the figures, added section 3.2 and qualified or clarified the argument without modifying its main structure. 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.
Many people have tried to make this essay less unreasonable. Among them I especially thank Luc Boltanski, Francis Chateauraynaud, Elizabeth Claverie, Gerard de Vries, Francois Géze and Isabelle Stenger.
I thank Harry Collins, Ernan McMullin, Jim Griesemer, Michel Izard, Clifford Geertz and Peter Galison for allowing me to present the arguments of this essay in their seminars.
Parts of Chapter 2 have been published in ‘Postmodern? No, simply amodern: steps towards an anthropology of science. An essay review’, Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science 21: (1990) 145-71. Some of the arguments in Chapter 3 have appeared in a different form in ‘One more turn after the social turn: easing science studies into the non- modern world’, in E. McMullin, ed., The Social Dimensions of Science. Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 1992, pp. 272-92.