REVOLUTION
3.1 The Moderns, Victims of Their Own Success
If the critical apparatus of the moderns has made them invincible, why are they hesitating over their own destiny today? If the effectiveness of the Constitution depended precisely upon its obscure half, why can I now relate it to its luminous half? The bond between the two sets of practices must indeed have changed for me to be able to follow both the practices of purification and those of translation. If we can no longer adhere wholeheartedly to the tasks of modernization, unforeseen obstacles must have interfered with the mechanism. What has happened that makes the work of purification unthinkable, when a few years ago it was the deployment of networks that appeared absurd and scandalous?
Let us say that the moderns have been victims of their own success. Its a crude explanation, I admit, yet it would appear that the scope of the mobilization of collectives had ended up multiplying hybrids to such an extent that the constitutional framework which both denies and permits their existence could no longer keep them in place. 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.
When the only thing at stake was the emergence of a few vacuum pumps, they could still be subsumed under two classes, that of natural laws and that of political representations; but when we find ourselves invaded by frozen embryos, expert systems, digital machines, sensor- equipped robots, hybrid corn, data banks, psychotropic drugs, whales ourfitted with radar sounding devices, gene synthesizers, audience analyzers, and so on, when our daily newspapers display all these monsters on page after page, and when none of these chimera can be properly on the object side or on the subject side, or even in between, something has to be done. It is as ifthe two poles of the Constitution had been conflated in the end precisely because of the practice of mediation that this Constitution at once liberates and disavows. It is as if there were no longer enough judges and critics to partition the hybrids. The purification system has become as clogged as our judicial system.
Perhaps the modern framework could have held up a little while longer if its very development had not established a short circuit between Nature on the one hand and human masses on the other. So long as Nature was remote and under control, it still vaguely resembled the constitutional pole of tradition, and science could still be seen as a mere intermediary to uncover it. Nature seemed to be held in reserve, transcendent, inexhaustible, distant enough. But where are we to classify the ozone hole story, or global warming or deforestation? Where are we to put these hybrids? Are they human? Human because they are our work. Are they natural? Natural because they are not our doing. Are they local or global? Both. As for the human masses that have been made to multiply as a result of the virtues and vices of medicine and economics, they are no easier to situate. In what world are these multitudes to be housed? Are we in the realm of biology, sociology, natural history, ethics, sociobiology? This is our own doing, yet the laws of demography and economics are infinitely beyond us. Is the demographic time bomb local or global? Both. Thus, the two constitutional guarantees of the moderns – the universal laws of things, and the inalienable rights of subjects — can no longer be recognized either on the side of Nature or on the side of the Social. The destiny of the starving multitudes and the fate of our poor planet are connected by the same Gordian knot that no Alexander will ever again manage to sever.
Let us say, then, that the moderns have caved in. Their Constitution could absorb a few counter-examples, a few exceptions — indeed, it thrived on them. But itis helpless when the exceptions proliferate, when the third estate of things and the Third World join together to invade all its assemblies en masse. In order to accommodate those exceptions, which are hardly any different from those of savage thought (see below), we need to outline a space that is no longer the space of the modern Constitution, because it fills the median zone that the Constitution claimed to empty. To the practice of purification — the horizontal line – we need to add the practices of mediation – the vertical line.
Instead of following the multiplication of hybrids by projecting them con to their longitude alone, we also need to identify them by means of a latitude. 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. The moderns have always been using both dimensions in practice, they have always been explicit about each of them, but they have never been explicit about the relation between the two sets of practices. Nonmoderns have to stress the relations beteen them if they are to understand both the moderns’ successes and their recent failures, and still not lapse into postmodernism. By deploying both dimensions at once, we may be able to accommodate the hybrids and ive them a place, a name, a home, a philosophy, an ontology and, I hope, a new constitution.
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FIGURE HERE
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Figure 3.1 Purification and translation
3.2 What is a Quasi-Object?
Using the two dimensions at once, the longitude and the latitude, we may now be able to locate the position of these strange new hybrids and to understand how come that we had to wait for science studies in order to define what, following Michel Serres (1987), I shall call quasi-objects, quasi-subjects. To do so, we simply have to follow the little comic strip in Figure 3.2.
Social scientists have for long allowed themselves to denounce the belief system of ordinary people. They call this belief system ‘naturalization’ (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992). Ordinary people imagine that the power of gods, the objectivity of money, the attraction of fashion, the beauty of art, come from some objective properties intrinsic to the nature of things. Fortunately, social scientists know better and they show that the arrow goes in fact in the other direction, from society to the objects. Gods, money, fashion and art offer only a surface for the projection of our social needs and interests. At least since Emile Durkheim, such has been the price of entry into the sociology profession (Durkheim, [1915] 1965). Tobecome a social scientist is to realize that the inner properties fof objects do not count, that they are mere receptacles for human categories.
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Figure 3.2 What is a quasi-object?
The difficulty, however, is to reconcile this form of denunciation with another one in which the directions of the arrows are exactly reversed. Ordinary people, mere social actors, average citizens, believe that they are free and that they can_modify their desires, their motives and their rational strategies at will. The arrow of their beliefs now goes from the Subject/Society pole to the Nature pole. But fortunately, social scientists are standing guard, and they denounce, and debunk and ridicule this naive belief in the freedom of the human subject and society. This time they use the nature of things — that is the indisputable results of the sciences ~ to show how it determines, informs and moulds the soft and pliable wills of the poor humans. ‘Naturalization’ is no longer a bad word but the shibboleth that allows the social scientists to ally themselves with the natural sciences, All the sciences (natural and social) are now mobilized to turn the humans into so many puppets manipulated by objective forces — ‘which only the natural or social scientists happen to know.
When the two critical resources are put together we now understand why it is so difficult for social scientists to reach agreement on objects. They too ‘see double’. In the first denunciation, objects count for nothing; they are just there to be used as the white screen on to which society projects its cinema, But in the second, they are so powerful that they shape the human society, while the social construction of the sciences that have produced them remains invisible. Objects, things, consumer goods, works of art are either too weak or too strong. But still stranger are the successive roles given to society. In the first denunciation, society is so powerful that itis sui generis, it has no more cause than the transcendental ego it replaces. It is so originary that itis able to mould and shape what is nothing more than an arbitrary and shapeless matter. In the second form of denunciation, however, it has become powerless, shaped in turn by the powerful objective forces that completely determine its action. Society is either too powerful or too weak vis-a-vis objects which are alternatively too powerful or too arbitrary.
The solution to this double contradictory denunciation is so pervasive that it has been providing social scientists with most of their common sense; it is called dualism. The Nature pole will be partitioned into two sets: the first list will incude its ‘softer’ parts — screens for projecting social categories — while the second list will include al its ‘harder’ parts — causes for determining the fate of human categories: that is, the sciences and the technologies. The same partition will be made on the Subject/ Society pole: there will be its ‘harder’ components — the sui generis social factors — and its ‘softer’ components – determined by the forces discovered by sciences and technologies. Social scientists will happily akernate from one to the other showing without any trouble that for instance gods are mere idols shaped by the requirements of social order, while the rules of society are determined by biology.
To be sure, this alternation is not very convincing. First, the lists are made haphazardly, the ‘soft’ list of the nature pole gathering all the things social scientists happen to despise — religion, consumption, popular culture and politics — while the ‘hard’ list is made of all the sciences they naively believe in at the time — economics, genetics, biology, linguistics, or brain sciences. Second, itis not clear why society needs to be projected on to arbitrary objects if those objects count for nothing. Is society so weak that it needs continuous resuscitation? So terrible that, like Medusa’s face, it should be seen only in a mirror? And if religion, arts or styles are necessary to ‘reflect’, ‘reify’, ‘materialize’, ’embody’ society — to use some of the social theorists’ favourite verbs ~ then are ‘objects nor, in the end, its co-producers? Is not society built literally — not metaphorically — of gods, machines, sciences, arts and styles? But then where is the illusion of the ‘common’ actor in the bottom arrow of Figure 3.2.1? Maybe social scientists have simply forgotten that before projecting itself on to things society has to be made, built, constructed? ‘And out of what material could it be built if not out of nonsocial, non- human resources? But social theory is forbidden to draw this conclusion because it has no conception of objects except the one handed down to it by the alternative ‘hard’ sciences which are so strong that they simply determine social order which in turn becomes flimsy and immaterial.
Dualism may be a poor solution, but it provided 99 per cent of the social sciences’ critical repertoire, and nothing would have disturbed its blissful asymmetry if science studies had not upset the applecart. 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 (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992). Social scientists could denounce the practices they did not believe in by using the solid science of society they had concocted and embracing the sciences they had complete confidence in so as to establish the social order. It is the glory of the Edinburgh school of social studies of science to have attempted a forbidden crossover (Barnes, 1974; Barnes and Shapin, 1979; Bloor, [1976] 1991; MacKenzie, 1981; Shapin, 1992). They used the critical repertoire that was reserved for the ‘soft’ parts of nature to debunk the ‘harder’ parts, the sciences themselves! In short, they wanted to do for science what Durkheim had done for religion, or Bourdieu for fashion and taste; and they innocently thought that the social sciences would remain unchanged, swallowing science as easily as religion or the arts. But there was a big difference, invisible until then. Social scientists did not really believe in religion and popular consumption. They did believe in science, however, from the bottom of their scientistic hearts.
Thus this breach of the dualists’ game immediately bankrupted the whole enterprise. What had started as a ‘social’ study of science could not succeed, of course, and this is why it lasted only a split second— just long enough to reveal the terrible flaws of dualism. 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. By disturbing the dualist pack of cards, the social students of science, revealed the complete asymmetry of the first and second denunciations, and they also revealed — at least negatively — how badly constructed were the social theory as well as the epistemology that went with those denunciations. 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.
To resort to dialectical reasoning was no way to exit out of the difficulty into which ‘science studies’ had put the social sciences. Linking the two poles of nature and society by as many arrows and feedback loops as one wishes does not relocate the quasi-objects or quasi-subject that I want to take into account. On the contrary, dialectics makes the ignorance of that locus still deeper than in the dualist paradigm since it feigns to overcome it by loops and spirals and other complex acrobatic figures. Dialectics literally beats around the bush. Quasi-objects are in between and below the two poles, at the very place around which dualism and dialectics had turned endlessly without being able to come to terms with them. 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 fulkfledged 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’. By trying the impossible task of providing social explanations for hard scientific facts ~ after generations of social scientists had tried either to denouce ‘soft’ facts or to use hard sciences unecritically – science studies have forced everyone to rethink anew the role of objects in the construction of collectives, thus challenging philosophy.
3.3 Philosophies Stretched Over the Yawning Gap
How have the major philosophies attempted to absorb both the modern Constitution and the quasi-objects, that Middle Kingdom which kept on expanding? By simplifying considerably, we can identify three principal strategies. 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.
Let me undertake a rapid survey of the first group. The more quasi- objects multiply, the more the major philosophies treat the two constitutional poles as incommensurable, even while they assert that there is no task more urgent than their reconciliation So these philosophies illustrate the modern paradox in their own fashion by forbidding what they allow and allowing what they forbid. Each of these philosophies is, of course, infinitely more subtle than my inadequate summary; each one is by definition nonmodern since modernism has never really begun; thus each explicitly addresses the same problem am awkwardly attempting to address; but their official and popularized interpretations nevertheless attest, on this point, to an astonishing consistency in the way they define their task: how to multiply quasi- objects without accepting them, in order to maintain the Great Divide that separates us both from our past and from other nature-cultures.
Hobbes and Boyle, as we have seen, fought so much only because they were just barely managing to separate the. pole of natural mute nonhumans from the pole of conscious speaking citizens. The two artifacts were still so similar and so close to their common origin that the two philosophers could do no more than make a small cut through the hybrids. 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. The two guarantees remain clearly symmettical, however, since knowledge is possible only at the median point, that of phenomena, through an application of the two pure forms, the thing-in-itself and the subject. Hybrids are indeed accepted, but solely as mixtures of pure forms in equal proportion. To be sure, the work of mediation remains visible, since Kant multiplies the stages needed to pass from the remote world of things to the still more remote world of the Ego. These mediations, however, are accepted only as simple inter- mediaries, which merely betray or transmit pure forms — the only recognizable ones. Multiplying layers of intermediaries make it possible to accept the role of the quasi-objects, but without giving them an ontology that would call the ‘Copernican Revolution’ back into question. This Kantian formulation is still visible today every time the human mind is credited with the capacity to impose forms arbitrarily on amorphous but real matter. To be sure, the Sun King around which objects revolve will be overturned in favour of many other pretenders – Society, epistemes, mental structures, cultural categories, intersubjectivity, lan- ‘guage; but these palace revolutions will not alter the focal point, which I have called, for that reason, Subject/Society.
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. But dialectics picked the wrong contradiction. It did manage to identify the ‘one between the Subject pole and the Object pole, but it did not see the ‘one between the whole of the modern Constitution that was establishing itself and the proliferation of quasi-objects — a proliferation that marked the nineteenth century, however, as much as it has marked our own. Or rather, dialectics thought it would absorb the second by resolving the first. Yet by believing that he was abolishing Kant’s separation between things-in-themselves and the subject, Hegel brought the separation even more fully to life. He raised it to the level of a contradiction, pushed it to the limit and beyond, then made it the driving force of history. The seventeenth-century distinction becomes a separation in the eighteenth century, then an even more complete contradiction in the nineteenth. It became the mainspring of the entire plot. How could the modern paradox be better illustrated? Dialectics further enlarges the abyss that separates the Object pole from the Subject pole, but since it surmounts and abolishes this abyss in the end, it imagines that it has gone beyond Kant! Dialectics speaks of nothing but mediations, yet the countless mediations with which it peoples its grandiose history are only intermediaries that transmit pure ontological qualities — either of the spirit, in its right-wing version, or of matter, in its left-wing version. In the end, if there is a pair that no one can reconcile, itis the pole of Nature
since their very opposition is retained and , denied. One can hardly be more modern than this. The dialecticians were incontestably our greatest modernizers, all the more powerful in that they seemed in fact to have gathered up the totality of knowledge and the past and brought to bear all the resources ofthe modern critique.
But quasi-objects continue to proliferate: those monsters of the first, second and third industrial revolutions, those socialized facts and these humans turned into elements of the natural world. No sooner are totalities closed in on themselves than they start cracking all over. The end of history is followed by history no matter what.
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Figure 3.3 The modem paradox
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. Once again the modern paradox is taken further. The notion of intentionality transforms a distinction, a separation, a contradiction, into an insurmountable tension between object and subject. The hopes of dialectics are abandoned, since this tension offers no resolution. The phenomenologists have the impression that they have gone further than Kant and Hegel and Marx, since they no longer attribute any essence either to pure subjects of to pure objects. They really have the impression that they are speaking only of a mediation that does not require any pole to hold fast. Yet like so many anxious modernizers, they no longer trace anything but a line between poles that are thus given the greatest importance. Pure objectivity and pure consciousness are missing, but they are nevertheless — indeed, all the more — in place. The ‘consciousness of something” becomes nothing more than a slender footbridge spanning a gradually widening abyss. Pheno- menologists had to cave in – and they did. During the same period, Gaston Bachelard’s dual enterprise — which further exaggerates the objectivity of the sciences by dint of breaking with common sense, and symmetrically exaggerates the objectless power of the imaginary by dint of epistemological breaks — offers the perfect symbol for this impossible crisis, chis drawing and quartering (Bachelard, 1967; Tile, 1984).
3.4 The End of Ends
The sequel to this story takes an involuntarily comic turn. The further the ‘reat gap is stretched, the more the whole business looks like a tightrope walker doing the splits. Up to this point, all these great philosophical movements were profound and serious; they established, they explored, they accompanied the prodigious development of quasi-objects; they wanted to believe, in spite of everything, that these objects could be swallowed up and digested. By speaking only of purity, they were aiming only at grasping the work of the hybrids. All these thinkers were passionately interested in the exact sciences, in technologies and economies, because they recognized in them both the risk and the possibility of salvation. But what can be said of the philosophies that came later? And in the first place, what are we to call them? Modern? No, because they no longer attempt to hold on to both ends of the chain. Postmodern? Not yet; the worst is still to come. 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.
The modern Constitution as a whole had already declared that there is no common measure between the world of subjects and the world of objects, but thatsame Constitution at once cancelled out the distance by practising the contrary, by measuring humans and things alike with the same yardsticks, by multiplying mediators in the guise of intermediaries. The pre-postmoderns, for their part, truly believe that speaking subjects are incommensurable with natural objects and with technological efficacy, or that speaking subjects ought to become so if they are not incommensurable enough already. Thus they cancel out the modern project while claiming that they are restoring it, since they comply with the half of the Constitution that speaks of purity but neglect the other half, which practises only hybridization. They imagine that there are not = that there must not be —any mediators. On the subject side, they invent speech, hermeneutics and meaning, and they let the world of things drift slowly in its void. On the other side of the mirror, of course, scientists and technocrats take the symmetrical attitude. The more hermeneutics spins its web, the more naturalism does the same. But this repetition of the divisions of history becomes a caricature: E. O. Wilson and his genes ‘on one side; Lacan and his analysands on the other. This pair of twins is no longer faithful to the modern intention, since they no longer make the effort to think through the paradox that consists in mulkiplying below the hybrids whose existence is precluded above, and in imagining impossible relations between the two.
It is worse still when the modern project is defended against the threat of disappearance. Jiirgen Habermas (1987) makes one of the most desperate attempts. Is he going to show at last that nothing has ever profoundly separated things from people? Is he going to take up the ‘modern project once again? Will he demonstrate the practical arrange- ments that underlie the justifications of the Constitution and finally accept the masses of hybrids as de Gaulle and Nixon finally recognized mainland China? Quite the contrary: he judges that the supreme danger arises from the confusion of speaking and thinking subjects with the pure scientific and technical rationality that is allowed by the old philosophy of consciousness! ‘I have already suggested that the paradigm of the knowledge of objects has to be replaced by the paradigm of mutual understanding between subjects capable of speech and action’ (p. 295-6). If anyone has ever picked the wrong enemy, it is surely this displaced ‘twentieth-century Kantianism that attempts to widen the abyss between the objects known by the subject on the one hand, and communicational reason on the other; whereas the old consciousness had at least the merit Of aiming at the object, and thus of recalling the artificial origin of the ‘two constitutional poles. But Habermas wants to make the two poles incommensurable, at the very moment when quasi-objects are multi- plying to such an extent that it appears impossible to find a single one that more or less resembles a free speaking subject or a reified natural object. Kant was already unable to bring it off in the middle of the Industrial Revolution; how could Habermas manage it after the sixth or seventh revolution? And even so, Kant multiplied the layering of intermediaries that allowed him to re-establish the transitions between things-in-themselves and the transcendental Ego. There is nothing of the sort when technological reason has to be kept as remote as possible from the free discussion of human beings.
The pre-postmoderns have something in common with the feudal reaction at the very end of the Old Regime: never was the sense of honour more prickly nor the calculation of degrees of nobility more precise; yer it was a bit late to bring off a radical separation between the third estate and the nobility! In the same way, it isa bit too late to carry off the coup of the Copernican Revolution and make things revolve around intersubjectivity. Habermas and his disciples hold on to the modern project only by abstaining from all empirical inquiry — not a single case study in the five hundred pages of his master work (Habermas, [1981] 1989); such an inquiry would bring the third estate to light too quickly, and would be too intimately mixed up with the poor speaking subjects. Let the networks perish, Habermas would say, provided that communicational reason appears to triumph.
Nevertheless, he remains honest and respectable. Even in the caricature of the modern project we can still recognize the faded splendour of the cighteenth-century Enlightenment, or the echo of the nineteenth-century Critique. Even in this obsession with separating objectivity from communication we can grasp a trace, a reminder, a scar arising from the very impossibility of bringing off such a separation. With the postmod- cerns, the abandonment of the modern project is consummated. I have not found words ugly enough to designate this intellectual movement — or rather, this intellectual immobility through which humans and non- humans are left to drift. Icall it’hyper-incommensurability’.
A single modern example will illustrate the abdication of thought as well as the self-inflicted defeat of the postmodern project. ‘As a philosopher, I offer a balance sheet of disaster,” replies Jean-Frangois Lyotard, who was being asked by some well-meaning scientists to conceptualize the bond that links science to the human community:
“I simply maintain that there is nothing human about scientific expansion. Pethaps our brain is only the temporary bearer of a process of ‘complexification. It would then be a matter of detaching this process from what has supported it up to now. I am convinced that that is what you people [scientists!] are in the process of doing. Computer science, genetic engineering, physics and astrophysics, astronautics, robotics, these discip- lines are already working toward preserving that complexity under conditions of life independent of life on Earth. But I do not see in what respect this is human, if by human we mean collectivities with their cultural traditions, established in a given period in precise locations on this planet. I don’t doubt for a second that this ‘a-human’ process may have some useful fringe benefits for humanity alongside its destructive effects. But this has nothing t do with the emancipation of human beings.” (Lyotard, 1988, xxxviii)
To the scientists who are surprised by this disastrous reckoning, and continue to believe in the usefulness of philosophers, Lyotard replies lugubriously: ‘I think you have a long time to wait!” But the debacle is that of postmodernism, not that of philosophy (Hutcheon, 1989; Jameson, 1991). 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. But they are mistaken, because true moderns have always surreptitiously multiplied intermediaries in order to try to conceptualize the massive expansion of hybrids as well as their purification. The sciences have always been as intimately linked to communities as Boyle’s pump or Hobbes’s Leviathan. “It is the double contradiction that is modern, the contradiction between the two constitutional guarantees of Nature and Society on the one hand, and between the practice of purification and the practice of mediation on the other.” By believing in the total separation of the three terms, by really believing that scientists are extraterrestrials, that matter is immaterial, that technology is ahuman, that politics is pure simulacrum the postmoderns in fact finish off modernism, by definitively taking away the mainspring that had been the source of its tension.
There is only one positive thing to be said about the postmoderns: after them, there is nothing. Far from being the last word, they mark the end of ends ~ that is, the end of ways of ending and of moving on that led to the succession, at an ever more vertiginous rate, of ever more radical and revolutionary critiques. How could we go further in the absence of tension between Nature and Society, or in the separation between the work of hybridization and that of purification? Will we have to imagine some super-hyper-incommensurability? The ‘postmods’ are the end of history, and the most amusing part is that they really believe it. And to make quite clear that they are not naive, they claim to be delighted with that end! ‘You have nothing to expect from us? Baudrillard and Lyotard delight in saying, No; indeed. But it is no more in their power to end history than it is not to be naive. They are simply stuck in the impasse of all avant-gardes that have no more troops behind them. Let them sleep till the end of the millennium, as Baudrillard advocates, and let us move on to other things. Or rather, let us retrace our steps. Let us stop moving on
3.5 Semiotic Turns
While the modernizing philosophies were doing the splits between the two poles of the Constitution in order to absorb the proliferation of quasi-objects, another strategy was being put in place to seize the middle ground, whose dimensions were continuing to expand. Instead of concentrating on the extremes of the work of purification, this strategy concentrated on one of its mediations, language. 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. This autonomization of the sphere of meaning has occupied the best minds of our time for the past half-century. If they too have led us into an impasse, itis not because they have “forgotten man’, or ‘abandoned reference’, as the modernist reaction is declaring today, but because they themselves have limited their enterprise to discourse alone.
These philosophies have deemed it impossible to autonomize meaning except by bracketing off, on the one hand, the question of reference to the natural world and, on the other, the identity of speaking and thinking subjects. For them, language still occupies that median space of modern philosophy (for Kant, the meeting point of phenomena); but instead of making it more or less transparent or more or less opaque, more or less faithful or more or less treacherous, it has taken over the entire space. 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 Signs to expand Barthes’s title (Barthes, [1970] 1982). While modernizing philosophers were increas- ingly reviving the distance that separated objects from subjects by making them incommensurable, philosophies of language, discourse or texts were occupying the middle ground that had been left vacant, thinking themselves far removed from the natures and societies that they had bracketed off (Pavel, 1986).
The greatness of these philosophies was that they developed, protected from the dual tyranny of referents and speaking subjects, the concepts that give the mediators their dignity — mediators that are no longer simple intermediaries or simple vehicles conveying meaning from Nature to Speakers, or vice versa. Texts and language make meaning; they even produce references internal to discourse and to the speakers installed within discourse (Greimas, 1976; Greimas and Courtés, 1982). In order to produce natures and societies they need only themselves, and, by a strange bootstrapping operation they extract their principle of reality from other narrative forms. Given the primacy of the signifier, the signifieds bustle about in the vicinity without retaining any special privilege. The text becomes primary; what it expresses or conveys is secondary. Speaking subjects are transformed into so many fictions generated by meaning effects; as for the author, he is no longer anything, bur the artifact of his own writings (Eco, 1979). The objects being spoken of become reality effects gliding over the surface of the writing. Everything becomes sign and sign system: architecture and cooking, fashion and mythology, politics — even the unconscious itself (Barthes, [1985] 1988).
The great weakness of these philosophies, however, is to render more difficult the connections between an autonomized discourse and what they had provisionally shelved: the referent ~ on Nature’s side — and the speaker — on the side of society/subject. Once again, science studies played their disturbing role. When they applied semiotics to scientific discourse, and not only to literatures of fiction, the autonomization of discourse appeared as an artifice (Bastide, in press). As for rhetoric, it changed its meaning entirely when it had truth and proof to absorb instead of conviction and seduction (Latour, 1987). 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 signifers 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. The Empire of Signs lasted no longer than Alexander’s, and like Alexander’s it was carved up and parceled out to its generals (Pavel, 1989). Some wanted to render the autonomous system of language more plausible by reestablishing the speaking subject or even the social group, and to that end they went off in search of the old sociology. Others sought to make semiotics less absurd by reestablishing contact with the referent, and they chose the world of science or that of common sense in order to anchor discourse once again. Sociologization, naturalization; the choice is never very broad. Others retained the original impetus of the Empire and set about deconstructing themselves, autonomous glosses on autonomous glosses, to the point of autodissolution.
From this crucial turning point, we have learned that the only way to escape from the parallel traps of naturalization and sociologization consists in granting language its autonomy. Without it, how could we deploy that median space between natures and societies so as to accommodate quasi-objects, quasi-subjects? The various forms of semio- tics offer an excellent tool chest for following the mediations of language. But by avoiding the double problem of connections to the referent and connections to the context, they prevent us from following the quasi- objects to the end. These latter, as I have said, are simultaneously real, discursive, and social. They belong to nature, to the collective and to discourse. If one autonomizes discourse by turning nature over to the epistemologists and giving up society to the sociologists, one makes it impossible to stitch these three resources back together.
The postmodern condition has recently sought to juxtapose these three reat resources of the modern critique – nature, society and discourse without even trying to connect them. If they are kept distinct, and if all three are separate from the work of hybridization, the image of the modern world they give is indeed terrifying: a nature and a technology that are absolutely sleek; a society made up solely of false consciouness, simulacra and illusions; a discourse consisting only in meaning effects detached from everything; and this whole world of appearances keeps afloat other disconnected elements of networks that can be combined haphazardly by collage from all places and all times. Enough, indeed, to make one contemplate jumping off a cliff. Here is the cause of the postmoderns’ flippant despair, one that has taken over from the angst of their predecessors, masters of the absurd. However, postmoderns would never have reached this degree of derision and dereliction had they not believed — to cap it all- that they had forgotten Being.
3.6 Who Has Forgotten Being?
In the beginning, though, the idea of the difference between Being and beings seemed a fairly good means of harbouring the quasi-objects, a third strategy added to that of the modernizing philosophers and to that of linguistic turns. Quasi-objects do not belong to Nature, or to Society, or to the subject; they do not belong to language, either. By deconstruct- ing metaphysics (that is, the modern Constitution taken in its isolation from the work of hybridization), Martin Heidegger designates the central point where everything holds together, remote from subjects and objects alike. ‘What is strange in the thinking of Being is its simplicity. Precisely this keeps us from it’ (Heidegger, 1977a). By revolving around this navel, this omphalos, the philosopher does assert the existence of an articula- tion between metaphysical purification and the work of mediation. ‘Thinking is on the descent to the poverty of its provisional essence. ‘Thinking gathers language into simple saying. In this way language is the language of Being, as the clouds are the clouds of the sky’ (p. 242).
But immediately the philosopher loses this well-intentioned simplicity. ‘Why? Ironically, he himself indicates the reason for this, in an apologue on Heraclitus who used to take shelter in a baker’s oven. ‘Einai gar kai entautha theous’ ~ ‘here, too, the gods are present,’ said Heraclitus to visitors who were astonished to see him warming his poor carcass like an ‘ordinary mortal (Heidegger, 1977b, p. 233). ‘Auch hier ndmlich wesen Gétter an. But Heidegger is taken in as much as those naive visitors, since he and his epigones do not expect to find Being except along the Black Forest Holzwege. Being cannot reside in ordinary beings. Every- where, there is desert. The gods cannot reside in technology ~ that pure Enframing (Zimmerman, 1990) of being [Ge-Stell}, that ineluctable fate [Geschick], that supreme danger [Gefahr]. They are not to be sought in science, either, since science has no other essence but that of technology (Heidegger, 1977b). They are absent from politics, sociology, psychol- ogy, anthropology, history — which is the history of Being, and counts its epochs in millennia. The gods cannot reside in economics – that pure calculation forever mired in beings and worry. They are not to be found in philosophy, either, or in ontology, both of which lost sight of their destiny 2,500 years ago. Thus Heidegger treats the modern world as the visitors treat Heraclitus: with contempt.
And yet – ‘here too the gods are present’: in a hydroelectric plant on the banks of the Rhine, in subatomic particles, in Adidas shoes as well as in the old wooden clogs hollowed out by hand, in agribusiness as well as in timeworn landscapes, in shopkeepers’ calculations as well as in Holderlin’s heartrending verse. But why do those philosophers no longer recognize them? Because they believe what the modern Constitution says about itself! This paradox should no longer astonish us. The moderns indeed declare that technology is nothing but pure instrumental inastery, science pure Enframing and pure Stamping [Das Ge-Stell], that econo- mics 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 hybridization supplies.
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. How could a being lose its difference, its incompleteness, its mark, its trace of Being? This is never in anyone’s power; other wise we should have to imagine that we have truly been modern, we should be taken in by the upper half of the modern Constitution.
Has someone, however, actually forgotten Being? Yes: anyone who really thinks that Being has really been forgotten. As Lévi-Strauss says, ‘the barbarian is first and foremost the man who believes in barbarism.” (Lévi-Strauss, [1952] 1987, p.12). Those who have failed to undertake empirical studies of sciences, technologies, law, politics, economics, religion or fiction have lost the traces of Being that are distributed everywhere among beings. If, scorning empiricism, you opt out of the exact sciences, then the human sciences, then traditional philosophy, then the sciences of language, and you hunker down in your forest- then you will indeed feel a tragic loss. But what is missing is you yourself, not the world! Heidegger’s epigones have converted that glaring weakness into a strength. ‘We don’t know anything empirical, but that doesn’t matter, since your world is empty of Being. We are keeping the little flame of Being safe from everything, and you, who have all the rest, have nothing.’ On the contrary: we have everything, since we have Being, and beings, and we have never lost track of the difference between Being and beings. We are carrying out the impossible project undertaken by Heidegger, who believed what the modern Constitution said about itself without understanding that what is at issue there is only half of a larger mechanism which has never abandoned the old anthropological matrix. ‘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 0 lead us back to what has never been abandoned. Yes, Heraclitus is a surer guide than Heidegger: “Einai gar kai entautha theous.”
3.7 The Beginning of the Past
The proliferation of quasi-objects was thus greeted by three different strategies: first, the ever-increasing separation between the pole of Nature — things-in-themselves – and that of Society or the subject — people-among-themselves, second, the autonomization of language or meaning; finally, the deconstruction of Western metaphysics. Four different resources allow the modern critique to develop these acids: naturalization, sociologization, discursivization, and finally the forget- ting of Being. No single one of these resources makes it possible to understand the modern world. If they are put together but kept separate, the situation is still worse, for their results lead only to the ironic despair ‘whose symptom is postmodernism, All these critical resources share the failure t0 follow both the work of the proliferation of hybrids and the ‘work of purification. 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.
Bur how are we to make these critical resources work together, given that they have emerged only asa result of their disputes with one another? We have to retrace our steps, in order to deploy an intellectual space large enough to accommodate both the tasks of purification and the tasks of mediation — that is, the two halves of the modern world. But how can we retrace our steps? Isn’t the modern world marked by the arrow of time? Doesn’t it consume the past? Doesn’t it break definitively with the past? Doesn’t the very cause of the current prostration come precisely from a ‘post’ modern era that would inevitably succeed the preceding one, which, in a series of catastrophic upheavals, itself succeeded the premodern eras? Hasn’t history already ended? By seeking to harbour quasi-objects at the same time as their Constitution, we are obliged to consider the temporal framework of the moderns. Since we refuse to pass ‘after’ the postmods, we cannot propose to return to a nonmodern world that we have never left, without a modification in the passage of time itself.
‘We are led from the definition of quasi-objects to that of time, and time too has a modern and a nonmodern dimension, a longitude and a latitude. No one has expressed this better than Charles Péguy in his Clio, ‘a stunning meditation on the brewing of history (Péguy, 1961a; see also Latour, 197). Calendar time may well situate events with respect to a regulated series of dates, but historicity situates the same events with respect to their intensity. This is what the muse of history drolly explains in comparing Victor Hugo’s terrible play Les Burgraves— an accumula- tion of time without historicity — to a litle phrase of Beaumarchais — a perfect example of historicity without history:
“When I am told that Hatto, the son of Magnus, the Marquis of Verona, the Burgrave of Nollg, is the father of Gorlois, son of Hatto (bastard), Burgrave of Sareck, I learn nothing,’ she (Clio] says. ‘I do not know them. I shall never know them. But when I am told that Cherubino is dead, int a swift storming of a fort to which he had not been assigned, ob, then I really learn something. And I know quite well what I am being told. A secret trembling alerts me to the fact that I have heard.” (p.276; original emphasis)
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. Anthropology is here to remind us: the passage of time can be interpreted in several ways — as a cycle or as decadence, as a fall or as instability, as a return or as a continuous presence. Let us call the interpretation of this passage temporality, in order to distinguish it carefully from time. The moderns have a peculiar propensity for understanding time that passes as if it were really abolishing the past behind it. They all take themselves for Attila, in whose footsteps no grass grows back. They do not feel that they are removed from the Middle Ages by a certain number of centuries, but that they are separated by Copernican revolutions, epistemological breaks, epistemic ruptures so radical that nothing of that past survives in them — nothing of that past ought to survive in them.
“That theory of progress amounts essentially to a theory of savings banks,” says Cli. ‘Overall, and universally, it presupposes, it creates an enormous universal savings bank forthe entire human community, a huge intellectual savings bank, general and even universal, automatic, for the whole human ‘community, automatic in the sense that humanity would make deposits in it and would never withdraw from it. And in the sense that the contributions would keep on depositing themselves, tirelessly, on their own initiative. Such is the theory of progress. And such are its blueprints A stepladder.” (Péguy, 1961a, p. 129)
Since everything that passes is eliminated for ever, the moderns indeed sense time as an irreversible arrow, as capitalization, as progress. But since this temporality is imposed upon a temporal regime that works quite differently, the symptoms of discord are multiplied. As Nietesche observed long ago, the moderns suffer from the illness of historicism. They want to keep everything, date everything, because they think they have definitively broken with their past. The more they accumulate revolutions, the more they save; the more they capitalize, the more they put on display in museums. Maniacal destruction is counterbalanced by an equally maniacal conservation. Historians reconstitute the past, detail by detail, all the more carefully inasmuch as it has been swallowed up for ever. But are we as far removed from our past as we want to think we are? No, because modern temporality does not have much effect on the passage of time. The past remains, therefore, and even returns. Now this resurgence is incomprehensible to the moderns. Thus they treat it as the return of the repressed. They view it as an archaism. ‘If we aren’t careful, they think, ‘we’re going to return to the past; we’re going to fall back into the Dark Ages.’ Historical reconstitution and archaism are two symp- toms of the moderns’ incapacity to eliminate what they nevertheless have to eliminate in order to retain the impression that time passes.
If explain that revolutions attempt to abolish the past but cannot do so, I again run the risk of being taken for a reactionary. This is because for the moderns ~ as for their antimodern enemies, as well as for their false postmodern enemies — time’s arrow is unambiguous: one can go forward, but then one must break with the past; one can choose to go backward, but then one has to break with the modernizing avant-gardes, which have broken radically with their own past. This diktat organized modern thought until the last few years – without, of course, having any effect on the practice of mediation, a practice that has always mixed up epochs, genres, and ideas as heterogeneous as those of the premoderns. If there is one thing we are incapable of carrying out, we now know, itis a revolution, whether it be in science, technology, politics or philosophy. But we are still modern when we interpret this fact as a disappointment, as if archaism had invaded everything, as if there no longer existed any public dump where we could pile up the repressed material behind us. ‘We are still postmodern when we attempt to rise above this disappoint- ‘ment by juxtaposing in a collage elements from all times — elements that are all equally outdated and outmoded.
3.8 The Revolutionary Miracle
What is the connection between the modern form of temporality and the modern Constitution, which tacitly inks the two asymmetries of Nature and Society and allows hybrids to proliferate underneath? Why does the modern Constitution oblige us to experience time as a revolution that always has to start over and over again? The answer, once again, has been offered by thedaring foray of science studies into history. The social history of science tried to apply the usual tools of cultural history no longer to the soft contingent local human events but to the hard necessary and universal phenomena of Nature. Once again, historians believed that it would be an easy task simply adding a new wing to the castle of history. And, once again, the absorption of sciences forced them to reconsider most of the hidden assumptions of ‘normal’ history exactly as it had done for the assumptions of sociology, philosophy or anthropol- ogy. The modern conception of time, as itis embedded into the discipline of history depends ~ strangely enough – on a certain conception of science that suppresses the ins and outs of Nature’s objects and presents their sudden emergence asifit were miraculous.
Modern time is a succession of inexplicable apparitions attributable to the distinction between the history of sciences or technologies and just plain history. If you suppress Boyle and Hobbes and their disputes, if you eliminate the work of constructing the pump, the domestication of colleagues, the invention of a crossed-out God, the restoration of English Royalty, how are you going to account for Boyle’s discovery? The ait’s spring comes from nowhere. It emerges fully armed. In order to explain what becomes a great mystery, you are going to have to construct an image of time that is adapted to this miraculous emergence of new things that have always already been there, and to human fabrications that no human has ever made. 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.
There are good reasons for thinking that the idea of political revolution was borrowed from the idea of scientific revolution (Cohen, 1985). We can understand why. How could Lavoisier’s chemistry not have been an absolute novelty, since the great scientist eradicated all the traces of his construction and cut all the ties that bound him to his predecessors, whom he relegated to obscurity? That he should have been executed with the same guillotine he had used on his elders, and in the name of the same obscurantist Enlightenment, is a sinister irony of history (Bensaude-Vincent, 1989). The genesis of scientific or technological innovations is so mysterious in the modern Constitution only because the universal transcendence of local and fabricated laws becomes unthinkable, and has to remain so, to avoid a scandal. The history of human beings, for its part, is going to remain contingent, agitated by sound and fury. 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 revolutions or epistemo- logical breaks; the other focusing on the more or less contingent or more or less durable agitation of poor human beings detached from things.
Through this distinction between the contingent and the necessary, the historical and the atemporal, the history of the moderns will be punctuated owing to the emergence of the nonhumans – the Pythagorean theorem, heliocentrism, the laws of gravity, the steam engine, Lavoisier’s chemistry, Pasteur’s vaccination, the atomic bomb, the computer — and ‘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’. With the vocal tremors that often accompany declarations on the modern destiny, people even go to the extent of speaking of a ‘Judaeo- Christian conception of time’, whereas that notion is an anachronism, since neither Jewish mystics nor Christian theologians have had any inclination whatsoever for the modern Constitution. They have con- structed their regime of time around Presence (that is, the presence of God), and not around the emergence of the vacuum, or DNA, or microchips, or automated factories.
Modern temporality has nothing ‘Judaeo-Christian’ about it and, fortunately, nothing durable either. It is a projection of the Middle Kingdom on to a line transformed into an arrow by the brutal separation. between what has no history but emerges nevertheless in history — the things of nature — and what never leaves history — the labours and passion of humans. The asymmetry between nature and culture then becomes an asymmetry between past and future. The past was the confusion of things and men; the future is what will no longer confuse them. Modernization consists in continually exiting from an obscure age that mingled the needs of society with scientific truth, in order to enter into a new age that will finally distinguish clearly what belongs to temporal nature and what comes from humans, what depends on things and what belongs to signs. Modern temporality arises from a super- position of the difference between past and future with another difference, so much more important, between mediation and purification, The present is outlined by a series of radical breaks, revolutions, which constitute so many irreversible ratchets that prevent us from ever going backward. In itself, this line is as empty as the scansion of a metronome. Yet it is on to this line that the moderns will project the multiplication of quasi-objects and, with the aid of these objects, will trace two series of irreversible advances: one upward, toward progress, and the other downward, toward decadence.
3.9 The End of the Passing Past
The mobilization of the world and of communities on an ever-larger scale multiplies the actors who make up our natures and our societies, but nothing in their mobilization implies an ordered and systematic passage of time. However, thanks to their quite peculiar form of temporality, the moderns will order the proliferation of new actors either as a form of capitalism, an accumulation of conquests, or as an invasion of barbarians, a succession of catastrophes. Progress and decadence are their two great resources, and the two have the same origin. On each of these three lines – calendar time, progress, decadence — it will be possible tolocate the antimoderns, who accept modern temporality but reverse its direction. In order to wipe out progress or degeneracy, they want to returntoward the past ~asif there were a past!
What is the source of the very modern impression that we are living a new time that breaks with the past? Of a liaison, a repetition that in itself has nothing temporal about it (Deleuze, 1968)? The impression of passing irreversibly is generated only when we bind together the cohort Of elements that make up our day-to-day universe. It is their systematic cohesion, and the replacement of these elements by others rendered just as coherent in the subsequent period, which gives us the impression of time that passes, of a continuous flow going from the future toward the past – of a stepladder, as Péguy says. Entities have to be made contemporary by moving in step and have to be replaced by other things equally well aligned if time is to become a flow. Modern temporality is the result of a retraining imposed on entities which would pertain to all sorts of times and possess all sorts of ontological statuses without this harsh disciplining.
The vacuum pump in itself is no more modern than it is revolutionary. It associates, combines and rede ploys countless actors, some of whom are fresh and novel – the King of England, the Vacuum, the weight of air — but nor all of whom can be seen as new. Their cohesiveness is not sufficient to allow a clean break with the past. A whole supplementary work of sorting out, cleaning up and dividing up is required to obtain the impression of a modernization that goes in step with time. If we place Boyle’s discoveries in eternity and they now fall suddenly upon England, if we connect them with those of Galileo and Descartes by linking them ina ‘scientific method’, and if, finally, we reject Boyle’s belief in miracles as archaic, we then get the impression of a radically new modern time. The notion of an irreversible arrow — progress or decadence ~ stems from an ordering of quasi-objects, whose proliferation the moderns cannot explain. Irreversibility in the course of time is itself due to the transcendence of the sciences and technologies, which indeed escape all comprehension for the moderns, since the two halves of their Constitu- tion are never specified together. It is a classificatory device for dissimulating the inadmissible origin of the natural and social entities from the work of mediation down below. Just as they eliminate the ins and outs of all the hybrids, so the moderns interpret the heterogeneous rearrangements as systematic totalities in which everything would hold together. Modernizing progress is thinkable only on condition that all the elements that are contemporary according to the calendar belong to the same time. For this to be the case, these elements have to form a complete and recognizable cohort. Then, and only then, time forms a continuous and progressive flow, of which the modemnsdeclare themselves the avant- garde and the antimoderns the rearguard while the premoderns are left On the sideline of complete stagnation.
This beautiful order is disturbed once the quasi-objects are seen as mixing up different periods, ontologies or genres. Then a historical period will give the impression of a great hotchpotch. Instead of a fine laminary flow, we will most often get a turbulent flow of whirlpools and rapids. Time becomes reversible instead of irreversible. At first, this does not bother the moderns, They consider everything that does not march in step with progress archaic, irrational or conservative. And as there are antimoderns who are delighted to play the reactionary role that the modern scenario has prepared for them, the great dramas of luminous progress struggling against obscurantism (or the antidrama of the mad revolutionaries against reasonable conservatives) can be deployed, all the same, for the greater pleasure of the spectators. But if the modernizing temporality iso continue to function, the impression of an ordered front of entities sharing the same contemporary time has to remain credible. Thus there must not be too many counter-examples. If they proliferate t00 much, it becomes impossible to speak of archaism, or of a return of the repressed.
The proliferation of quasi-objects has exploded modern temporality along with its Constitution. The moderns’ flight into the future ground to a halt perhaps twenty years ago, perhaps ten, perhaps last year, with the multiplication of exceptions that nobody could situate in the regular flow of time. First, there were the skyscrapers of postmodern architecture – (architecture is at the origin of this unfortunate expression); then Khomeini’s Islamic revolution, which ao one managed to peg as revolutionary or reactionary. From then on, the exceptions have popped up without cease. No one can now categorize actors that belong t0 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 antismallpox vaccine, Star Wars, the Muslim religion, partridge hunting, the French Revolution, service industries, labour unions, cold fusion, Bolshevism, relativity, Slovak nationalism, commer- cial sailboats, and so on, are outmoded, up to date, futuristic, atemporal, nonexistent, or permanent. It is this whirlpool in the temporal flow that the postmoderns have sensed so early and with so much sensitivity in the two avant-garde movements of fine arts and politics (Hutcheon, 1989).
As always, however, postmodernism is a symptom, not a solution. The postmoderns retain the modern framework but disperse the elements that the modernizers grouped together in a well-ordered cluster. The postmoderns are right about the dispersion, every contemporary assembly is polytemporal. But they are wrong to retain the framework and to keep on believing in the requirement of continual novelty that modernism demanded. By mixing elements of the past together in the form of collages and citations, the postmoderns recognize to what extent these citations are truly outdated. Moreover, it is because they are ‘outmoded that the postmoderns dig them up, in order to shock the former ‘modernist’ avant-gardes who no longer know at what altar to worship. But it is a long way from a provocative quotation extracted out of a truly finished past to a reprise, repetition or revisiting of a past that has never disappeared.
3.10 Triage and Multiple Times
Fortunately, nothing obliges us to maintain modern temporality with its succession of radical revolutions, its antimoderns who return to what they think is the past, and its double concert of praise and complaint, for or against continual progress, for or against continual degeneration. We are not attached for ever to this temporality that allows us to understand neither our past nor our future, and that forces us to shelve the totality of the human and nonhuman third worlds. It would be better to say that modern temporality has stopped passing. Let us not bemoan the fact, for ‘our real history had only the vaguest of relations with the Procrustean bed that the modernizers and their enemies imposed onit.
Time is not a general framework but a provisional result of the connection among entities. Modern discipline has reassembled, hooked together, systematized the cohort of contemporary elements to hold it together and thus to eliminate those that do not belong to the system. This attempt has failed; it has always failed. There are no longer – there have never been – anything but elements that ehude the system, objects whose date and duration are uncertain. It is not only the Bedouins and the !Kung who mix up transistors and traditional behaviours, plastic buckets and animal-skin vessels. What country could not be called ‘a land of contrasts’? We have all reached the point of mixing up times. We have all become premodern again. If we can no longer progress in the fashion of the moderns, must we regress in the fashion of the antimoderns? No, we have to pass from one temporality to the other, since a temporality, in itself, has nothing temporal about it. Itis a means of connecting entities and filing them away. If we change the classifica- tion principle, we get a different temporality on the basis of the same events.
Let us suppose, for example, that we are going to regroup the contemporary elements along a spiral rather than a line. We do have a future and a past, but the future takes the form of a circle expanding in all directions, and the past is not surpassed but revisited, repeated, surrounded, protected, recombined, reinterpreted and reshuffled. Elements that appear remote if we follow the spiral may turn out to be quite nearby if we compare loops. Conversely, elements that are quite contemporary, if we judge by the line, become quite remote if we traverse a spoke. Such a temporality does not oblige us to use the labels ‘archaic? or ‘advanced’, since every cohort of contemporary elements may bring together elements from all times. In such a framework, our actions are recognized at last as polytemporal.
T may use an electric drill, but I also use a hammer. The former is thirty-five years old, the latter hundreds of thousands. Will you see me as a DIY expert ‘of contrasts’ because I mix up gestures from different times? Would I be an ethnographic curiosity? On the contrary: show me an activity that is homogeneous from the point of view of the modern time, Some of my genes are 500 million years old, others 3 million, others 100,000 years, and my habits range in age from a few days to several thousand years. As Péguy’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. Pile up the burgraves one behind the other, and you will still not have time. Go down sideways to grab hold of the event ‘of Cherubino’s death in its intensity, and time will be given unto you.
Are we traditional, then? Not that either. The idea of a stable tradition is an illusion that anthropologists have long since set to rights. The immutable traditions have all budged — the day before yesterday. Most ancestral folklores are like the ‘centenary’ Scottish kilt, invented out of whole cloth at the beginning of the nineteenth century (Trevor-Roper, 1983), or the Chevaliers du Tastevin of my little town in Burgundy, whose millennial ritual is not fifty years old. ‘Peoples without history’ were invented by those who thought theirs was radically new (Goody, 1986). In practice, the former innovate constantly; the latter are forced to pass and repass indefinitely through the same rituals of revolutions, epistemological breaks, and quarrel of the Classics against the Moderns. One is not born traditional; one chooses to become traditional by constant innovation. The idea of an identical repetition of the past and that of a radical rupture with any past are two symmetrical results of a single conception of time. 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 flight.
What are we to do, if we can move neither forward nor backward? Displace our attention. We have never moved either forward or backward. 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 usa freedom that, in fact, we have never really lost. ‘We are not emerging from an obscure past that confused natures and cultures in order to arrive at a future in which the two poles will finally separate cleanly owing to the continual revolution of the present. We have never plunged into a homogeneous and planetary flow arriving either from the future or from the depths of time. Modernization has never occurred. There is no tide, long in rising, that would be flowing again today. There has never been such a tide. We can go on to other things – that is, return to the multiple entities that have always passed in a different way.
3.11 ACopernican Counter-revolution
If we had been able to keep the human multitudes and the nonhuman environment repressed behind us longer, we would probably have been able to continue to believe that modern times were really passing while climinating every thing in their path, But the repressed has returned. The suman masses are here again, in the East as well as in the South, and the infinite variety of nonhuman masses have arrived from Everywhere. They can no longer be exploited. They can no longer be surpassed, because nothing surpasses them any longer. There is nothing greater than the nature surrounding us; Eastern peoples can no longer be reduced to their proletarian avant-gardes; as for the Third World masses, nothing will Gircumscribe them. How can we absorb them? The moderns raise the question in anguish. How can they all be modernized? We might have done it; we thought we could do it; we can no longer believe it possible. Like a great ocean liner that slows down and then comes to a standstill in the Sargasso Sea, the moderns’ time has finally been suspended. But time has nothing to do with it. The connections among beings alone make time. It was thesystematic connection of entities in a coherent whole that constituted the flow of modem time. Now that this laminary flow has become turbulent, we can give up analyses of the empty framework of temporality and return to passing time — that is, to beings and their relationships, to the networks that construct irreversibility and reversibility.
But how can the principle for classifying entities be changed? How can the illegitimate multitudes be given a representation, a lineage, a civil status? How can this terra incognita that is nevertheless so familiar to us be explored? How can we go from the world of objects or that of subjects to what I have called quasi-objects or quasi-subjects? How can we move from transcendenvimmanent Nature to a nature that is still just as real, bur extracted from the scientific laboratory and then transformed into external reality? How can we shift from immanent/transcendent Society toward collectives of humans and nonhumans? How can we go from the transcendentimmanent crossed-out God to the God of origins who should perhaps be called the God below? How are we to gain access to networks, those beings whose topology is so odd and whose ontology is even more unusual, beings that possess both the capacity to connect and the capacity to divide – that is, the capacity to produce both time and space? How are we to conceptualize the Middle Kingdom? As I have said, we have to trace both the modern dimension and the nonmodern dimension, we have to deploy the latitude and longitude that will allow us to draw maps adapted both to the work of mediation and to the work of purification.
The moderns knew perfectly well how to conceive of this Kingdom. They did not make quasi-objects disappear by eradication and denial, as if they wanted to simply repress them. On the contrary, they recognized their existence but emptied it of any relevance by turning full-blown mediators into mere intermediaries. An intermediary ~ although recog- nized 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. If we simply restore this mediating role to all the agents, exactly the same world composed of exactly the same entities cease being modern and becomes 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 asa mixture of two pure forms. The modern explanations consisted in splitting the mixtures apart in order to extract from them what came from the subject (or the social) and what came from the object. Next they multiplied the intermediaries in order to reconstruct the unity they had broken and wanted none the less to retrieve through blends of pure forms. So these operations of analysis and synthesis always had three aspects: a preliminary purification, a divided separation, and a progressive reblend- ing. 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 Ican say without contradicting myself that no one has ever been modern, and that we have to stop being so. The necessity of multiplying intermediaries to reconstruct the lost unity has always been recognized — thus no one except the postmods really believes in the two extreme poles of Nature and Society radically distinct from free-floating and disconnected networks — but as long as those intermediaries were seen as mixtures made of pure forms, the belief in the existence of a modern world was inescapable. The whole difference hinges on the apparently small nuance between mediators and intermediaries (Hen- nion, 1991).
If weseck to deploy the Middle Kingdom for itself, we are obliged to invert the general form of the explanations. The point of separation — and conjunction ~ becomes the point of departure. The explanations no longer proceed from pure forms toward phenomena, but from the centre toward the extremes. The latter are no longer reality’s point of attachment, but so many provisional and partial results. The layering of intermediaries is replaced by chains of mediators, according to the model proposed by Antoine Hennion. 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 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.
Kant’s Copernican Revolution, as we have seen, offers a perfected model for modernizing explanations, by making the object revolve around a new focus [foyer] and multiplying the intermediaries to cancel ‘out distance between the two poles little by little. But nothing obliges us to take that revolution as a decisive event that sets us for ever on the sure path of science, morality and theology. This reversal may be likened to the French Revolution with which it is linked: they are excellent tools for making time irreversible, but they are not irreversible in themselves. I call this reversed reversal – or rather this shift of the extremes centreward 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 t0 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. The explanations we seek will indeed obtain Nature and Society, but only as a final outcome, not as a beginning. 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.
3.12 From Intermediaries to Mediators
As soon as we bring about the Copernican counter-revolution and place the quasi-object in a position below and equidistant from the former things-in-themselves and the former humans-among-themselves, when wwe return to our usual practice, we notice that there is no longer any reason to limit the ontological varieties that matter to two (or three, counting the crossed-out God).
Is the vacuum pump that has served as our example hitherto a new ontological variety in its own right? We cannot use asymmetrical historians to answer this question, since they will be unable to locate the common ontological problem. Some will be historians only of seventeenth-century England, and will have no interest whatsoever in the pump except to make it emerge miraculously from the Heaven of Ideas to establish their chronology. On the other side, scientists and epistemolog- ists will describe the physics of the vacuum without paying the slightest attention to England, or even to Boyle. Let us set aside these asymmetrical tasks, one of which ignores nonhumans and the other hhumans, and suppose symmetrical historians who will compare the two balance sheets when using mediators or intermediaries.
In the modern world of the Copernican Revolution there will be no new entities, since we are supposed to split it in two dividing its originality among the two poles: a first part would head toward the right and would become ‘Laws of Nature’ a second part would move leftward and become ‘seventeenth-century English society’; while we would mark the place of the phenomenon, this still empty place where the two poles have to be stitched back together. Then, by multiplying intermediaries, ‘we were supposed to take what we had just separated and bring them closer together. We were to say that the laboratory pump ‘reveals’ or ‘represents’ or ‘materializes’ or ‘allows us to grasp’ the Laws of Nature. We were to say, similarly, that the wealthy English gentlemen’s ‘representations’ made it possible to ‘interpret’ air pressure and to ‘accept’ the existence of a vacuum. By moving closer to the point of separation and conjunction, we were to pass from the global context to the local context, and we were to show how Boyle’s gestures and the pressure of the Royal Society allowed them to understand the defects of the pump, its leaks and its aberrations. By multiplying intermediary terms, we were to have ended up reconnecting the two parts that were at first infinitely distant from Nature and from the Social.
According to such an explanation, nothing essential has happened. To explain our air pump, we simply plunged a hand alternately either into the urn that contains forall eternity the beings of Nature, or into the one that contains thesempiternal mainsprings of the social world. Nature has always been unchanging. Society always comprises the same resources, the same interests, the same passions. In the modern perspective, Nature and Society allow explanation because they themselves do not have to be explained. Intermediaries exist, of course, and their role is precisely to establish the link between the two, but they establish links only because they themselves lack any ontological status. They merely transport, convey, transfer the power of the only two beings that are real, Nature and Society. To be sure, they may do a bad job of the transporting; they may be unfaithful, or obtuse. But their lack of faithfulness does not give them any importance in their own right, since that is what proves, on the contrary, their intermediary status. Their competence is not their own. At worst, they are brutes or slaves; at best, they are loyal servants.
If we bring about the Copernican counter-revolution we are then obliged to take the work of the intermediaries much more seriously, since it is no longer their task to transmit the power of Nature and that of Society, and sincethey nevertheless all produce the same reality effects. If ‘we now enumerate the entities endowed with autonomous status, we find far more than two or three. There are dozens. Does nature abhor a vacuum or not? Is there a real vacuum in the pump, oF could some subtle ether have slipped in? How are the Royal Society’s witnesses going to account for the leaks in the air pump? How is the King of England going to consent to let people go back to talking about the properties of matter and reestablishing private cliques just when the question of absolute power is finally about to be resolved? Is the authenticity of miracles supported by the mechanization of matter or not? Is Boyle going to become a respected experimenter if he devotes himself to pursuing these vulgar experimental tasks and abandons the deductive explanation, the only one worthy of a scholar? All these questions are no longer caught between Nature and Society, since they all redefine what Nature may be and what Society is. Nature and Society are no longer explanatory terms but rather something that requires a conjoined explanation. Around the work of the air pump we witness the formation of a new Boyle, a new Nature, a new theology of miracles, a new scholarly sociability, a new Society’ that will henceforth include the vacuum, scholars, and the laboratory. History does something. Each entity is an event.
We shall no longer explain the innovation of the air pump by reaching alternately into the two urns of Nature and Society. On the contrary, we will refill these urns, or at least profoundly modify their contents, Nature will emerge altered from Boyle’s laboratory, and so will English society; but Boyle and Hobbes will also change in the same degree. Such metamorphoses are incomprehensible if only two beings, Nature and Society, have existed from time immemorial, or ifthe first remains eternal while the second alone is stirred up by history. These metamorphoses become explicable, on the contrary, if we redistribute essence to all the entities that make up this history. But then they stop being simple, more or less faithful, intermediaries. They become mediators ~ that is, actors endowed with the capacity to translate what they transport, to redefine it, redeploy it, and also to betray it. The serfs have become free citizens once more.
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. In the world of the Copernican Revolution, in which everything had to be contained between the poles of Nature and Society, history did not really count. Nature was merely discovered, or Society was deployed, ‘or one was applied to the other. Phenomena were nothing but the encounter of already-present elements. There was indeed a contingent history, but for humans alone, detached from the necessity of natural things. As soon as we start from the middle, as soon as we invert the arrows of the explanation, as soon as we take theessence accumulated at the two extremes and redistribute it to the whole set of intermediaries, as soon as we elevate the latter to the status of full-fledged mediators, then history in fact becomes possible. Time is there not for naught, but for real. Something does in fact happen to Boyle, to the air’s spring, to the vacuum, to the air pump, to the King, to Hobbes. They all come out changed. 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
This Copernican counter-revolution amounts to modifying the place of the object to remove it from things-in-themselves and bring it to the community, but without bringing it closer to society. Michel Serres’s work is no less important than Shapin and Schaffer’s or Hennion’s for achieving this displacement or descent. As Serres writes in one of his best books: ‘We want to describe the emergence of the object, not only of tools or beautiful statues, but of things in general, ontologically speaking. How does the object come to what is human?’ (Serres, 1987). Bur his problem is that he ‘can’t find anything in books that recounts the primitive experience during which the object as such constituted the human subject, because books are written to entomb this very experi- ence, to block all access to it, and because the noise of discourse drowns out what happened in that utter silence’ (p. 216).
We possess hundreds of myths describing the way subjects (or the collective, or intersubjectivity, or epistemes) construct the object — Kant’s Copernican Revolution is only one in a long line of examples. Yer we have nothing that recounts the other aspect of the story: how objects construct the subject. Shapin and Schaffer have access to thousands of archival pages on Boyle’s ideas, and Hobbes’s, but nothing about the tacit practice of the air pump or on the dexterity it required. The witnesses to this second half of history are constituted not by texts or languages but by silent, brute remainders such as pumps, stones and statues. Even though Serres’s archacology is situated several levels below that of the air pump, he encounters the same silence.
“The people of Israel chant psalms before the dismantled Wailing Wall: of the temple, not one stone remains standing on another. What did the wise Thaledes see, do, and think, by the Egyptian pyramids, in a time as remote for us as the time of Cheops was for him? Why did he invent geometry by this pile of stones? All Islam dreams of traveling to Mecca where, in the Kaaba, the Black Stone is preserved. Modern science was born, in the Renaissance, from the study of falling bodies: stones fall to the ground. Why did Jesus establish the Christian Church on a man called Peter? I am deliberately mixing religion with science in these examples of inauguration.” (Gerres, 1987, p.213)
Why should we take seriously such a hasty generalization of all these petrifcations, one that mixes up a black religious stone with Galileo’s falling bodies? For the same reason that I have taken Shapin and Schaffer’s work seriously, ‘deliberately mixing religion and sciences in these examples of inauguration’ of modern science and politics. They had ballasted epistemology with an unknown new actor, a leaky, pieced- together, handmade air pump. Serres ballasts epistemology with an unknown new actor, silent things. They all do it for the same anthropological reason: science and religion are linked by a profound reinterpretation of what it means to accuse and put to the test. For Boyle as for Serres, science isa branch of the judiciary:
“In all the languages of Europe, north and south alike, the word ‘thing’, ‘whatever its form, has as its root or origin the word ’cause’, taken from the realm of law, politics, or criticism generally speaking. As if objects themselves existed only according to the debates of an assembly or after a decision issued by a jury. Language wants the world to stem from language alone. At least this is what it says…” (Serres, 1987, p. 111)
“Thus in Latin the word for ‘thing’ is res, from which we get reality, the object of judicial procedure or the cause itself, so that, for the Ancients, the accused bore the name reus because the magistrates were suing him. As if the only human reality came from tribunals alone.” (p. 307)
“Here we shall see the miracle and find the solution to the ultimate enigma. ‘The word ’cause’ designates the root or origin of the word ‘thing’: causa, cosa, chose, or Ding. … The tribunal stages the very identity of cause and thing, of word and object, or the passage of one to the other by substitution. A thing emerges there.” (p. 294)
Thus with three citations Serres generalizes the results that Shapin and Schaffer brought together with so much difficulty: causes, stones and facts never occupy the position of the thing-in-itself. Boyle wondered how to put an end to civil wars. By compelling matter to be inert, by asking God not to be directly present, by constructing a new closed space in a container where the existence of the vacuum would become manifest, by renouncing the condemnation of witnesses for their opinions. No ad hominem accusation will prevail any longer, Boyle said; no human witness will be believed; only nonhuman indicators and instruments observed by gentlemen will be considered trustworthy. The stubborn accumulation of matters of fact will establish the foundations of the pacified collective. This invention of facts is not, however, a discovery of the things that are out there; it is an anthropological creation that redistributes God, will, love, hatred and justice. 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 t0 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.
Thus we live in a society that is modern not because, unlike all the others, it is finally liberating itself from the hell of social relationships, from the obscurantism of religion, from the tyranny of politics, but because, just like all the others, itis redistributing the accusations that replace a cause — judiciary, collective, social — by a cause ~ scientific, nonsocial, matter-of-factual. Nowhere can one observe an object and a subject, one society that would be primitive and another that would be modern. Series of substitutions, displacements and translations mobilize peoples and things on an ever-increasing scale.
“I imagine, at the origin, a rapid whirlwind in which the transcendental constitution of the object by the subject would be nourished, as in return, by the symmetrical constitution of the subject by the object, in crushing semicycles that are endlessly begun anew, returningto the origin. … There exists a transcendental objective, a constitutive condition of the subject through the appearance of the object as object in general. Of the inverse or symmetrical condition on the whirling cycle, we have testimony, traces or narratives, written in the labile languages. … But of the direct constitutive condition on the basis of the object we have witnesses that are tangible, visible, concrete, formidable, tacit. However far back we go in talkative history or silentprehistory, they are still there.” (Serres, 1987, p. 209)
Serres, in his so-unmodern work, recounts a pragmatogony that is as fabulous as Hesiod’s old cosmogony, or Hegel’s. However, Serres, proceeds not by metamorphosis or dialectics, but by substitutions. The new sciences that deviate, transform, knead the collective into things that no one has made, are simply latecomers in that long mythology of substitutions. Those who follow networks, or study the sciences, areonly documenting the nth loop in the spiral whose fabulous beginning Serres sketches for us, Contemporary science is a way of prolonging what we have already done. Hobbes constructs a political body on the basis of animated naked bodies: he finds himself with the gigantic artificial prosthesis of the Leviathan. Boyle concentrates all the dissension of civil wars on an air pump: he finds himself with the facts. Each loop in the spiral defines a new collective and a new objectivity. The collective in permanent renewal that is organized around things in permanent renewal hhas never stopped evolving. We have never left the anthropological matrix — we are still in the Dark Ages or, if you prefer, we are still in the world’s infancy.
3.14 Variable Ontologies
As soon as we grant historicity to all the actors so that we can accommodate the proliferation of quasi-objects, Nature and Society have no more existence than West and East. They become convenient and relative reference points that moderns use to differentiate intermediaries, some of which are called ‘natural’ and others ‘social’, while still others are termed ‘purely natural’ and others ‘purely social’, and yet others are considered ‘not only’ natural ‘but also’ a litle bit social. The analysts who head left will be called realists, while those who head right will be called constructivists (Latour, 1992b; Pickering, 1992). Those who want to maintain a position plumb in the middle will invent countless combina- tions in order to mix Nature with Society (or subjects), alternating the ‘symbolic dimension’ of things with the ‘natural dimension’ of societies. Others, more imperialistic or more one-sided, will try to naturalize Society by integrating it into Nature (Hull, 1988), or to socialize Nature by getting it digested by Society (Bloor, [1976] 1991) (or by the Subject, which is more difficult).
Still, these reference points and discussions remain one-dimensional. To classify the entire set of entities along the single line that runs from Nature to Society would amount to drawing cartographic maps on the basis of longitude alone, thereby reducing them to a single line! The second dimension makes it possible to give every latitude to the entities and to deploy the map that registers, as I have said, both the modern Constitution and its practice. How will we define this equivalent of North and South? 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 know nothing at all about the air pump ‘when we say that it is the representation of the Laws of Nature, or the representation of English Society, or the product of the two opposite constraints of Nature and Society. 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 con the line that runs from the natural to the social ~ the longitude (see Cussins, 1992, for another and more precise mapping device).
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FIGURE HERE
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Figure 3.4 The modern Constitution and its practice
The ontology of mediators thus has a variable geometry. What Sartre said of humans ~ that their existence precedes their essence — has to be said of all the actants: of the air’s spring as well as society, of matter as well as consciousness, We do not have to choose between vacuum no. 5, a reality of external nature whose essence does not depend on any human, and vacuum no. 4, a representation that Western thinkers have taken centuries to define. Or rather, we shall be able to choose between the two only once they are stabilized. About the very unstable vacuum no. 1, in Boyle’s laboratory, we cannot say whether itis natural or social, only that it emerges artificially in the laborarory. Vacuum no. 2 may be an artifact made by human hands, unless itis transmuted into vacuum no. 3, which begins to become a reality that cludes humans. What is a vacuum, then? None of these positions. The essence of the vacuum is the trajectory that links them all. In other words, the air’s spring has a history. Each of the actants possesses a unique signature in the space deployed in this way. In order to trace them, we do not have to form any hypotheses about the essence of Nature or the essence of Society. Superpose all the signatures and you will have the shapes of what the moderns wrongly cal, in order to summarize and purify, ‘Nature’ and Society’.
But if we project all these trajectories on to the single line that connects the former ‘Nature’ pole with the former ‘Society/Subject’ pole, everything becomes hopelessly confused. All the points (A, B, C, D, E) will be projected along the single latitude (A’, B’, C’, D’, E’), with the central point A localized at the site of the former phenomena ~ precisely where, in the modern scenario, nothing is supposed to happen, since itis nothing but the meeting point of the two extremes of Nature and Society in which resides the whole of reality. With this single line, realists and constructivists will be able to quarrel over the interpretation of the vacuum for centuries: the former will declare that no one has fabricated this real fact; the latter that our hands alone fashioned this social fact; the advocates of the middle ground will waver between the two senses of the word ‘fact’, using — for better or for worse — the formula ‘not only. . . but also. ..”. This is because the fabrication is below the line, in the work of mediation, visible only if we also take into account the degree of stabilization (B’,C’, D’, E’).
The great masses of Nature and Society can be compared w the cooled-down continents of plate tectonics. If we want to understand their movement, we have to go down into those searing rifts where the magma erupts and on the basis of this eruption are produced — much later and much farther off, by cooling and progressive stacking — the two continental plates on which our feet are firmly planted. Like the geophysicians, we too have to go down and approach the places where the mixtures are made that will become — but only much later — aspects of Nature or of the Social. Is it too much to ask of our discussions that from now on we should spell out the latitude ofthe entities we are talking about as well as their longitude, and that we should view essences as events and trajectories?
‘We now have a better understanding of the paradox of the moderns. By using both the work of mediation and the work of purification, but never representing the two together, they were playing simultaneously on the transcendence and the immanence of the two entities, Nature and Society. That gave them four contradictory resources which allowed them an unusual freedom of movement. Now if we draw the map of the ontological varieties, we note that there are not four regions but three. The double transcendence of Nature on one side and Society on the other corresponds to one single set of stabilized essences. For each state of Society there exists a corresponding state of Nature. Nature and Society are not two opposite transcendences but one and the same growing out of the work of mediation. On the other hand, the immanence of naturing-natures and collectives corresponds to a single region: that of the instability of events, that of the work of mediation. The modern Constitution is therefore correct: there is indeed an abyss between Nature and Society, but this abyss is only a delayed result of stabilization. The only abyss that counts separates the work of mediation from the constitutional formatting, but this abyss becomes — owing to the very proliferation of hybrids — a continuous gradient that we are able to traverse as soon as we become once again what we have never stopped being nonmodems. If we add to the official, stable version of the Constitution its unofficial, ‘hot’ or unstable version, the middle is what fills up, on the contrary, and the extremities are emptied, We understand why the nonmoderns are not the successors to the moderns. The former only make official the latter’s denied practice. At the price of a little counter-revolution, we finally understand retrospectively what we had always done.
3.15 Connecting the Four Modern Repertoires
By setting up the two dimensions, modern and nonmodern, by operating this Copernican counter-revolution, by making object and subject both slide centreward and downward, pethaps we shall now be able to capitalize on the best resources of the modern critique. 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 of which we are not masters, which exists outside ourselves and has neither our passions nor our desires, even though we are capable of mobilizing and constructing it. The second deals with the social bond, with what attaches human beings to one another, with the passions and desires that move us, with the personified forces that structure society — a society that surpasses us all, even though it is of our own making. The third deals with signification and meaning, with the actants that make up the stories we tell ourselves, with the ordeals they undergo, with the adventures they live through, with the tropes and genres that organize them, with the great narratives that dominate us infinitely, even though they are at the same time merely texts and discourses. The fourth, finally, speaks of Being and deconstructs what we invariably forget when we concern ourselves with beings alone, even though the presence of Being is distributed among beings, is coextensive with their very existence, their very historicity.
These resources are incompatible only in the official version of the Constitution. In practice, we have trouble telling the four apart. We shamelessly confuse our desires with natural entities — that is, with the socially constructed sciences which in turn very much look like discourses and trace our society. As soon as we are on the trail of some quasi-object, it appears to us sometimes as a thing, sometimes as a narrative, sometimes as a social bond, without ever being reduced to a mere being. Our vacuum pump traces the spring of air, but it also sketches in seventeenth-century society and likewise defines a new literary genre, that of the account of a laboratory experiment. In following the pump, do we have to pretend that everything is rhetorical, or that everything is natural, or that everything is socially constructed, or that everything is stamped and stocked? Do we have to suppose that the same pump is in its essence sometimes an object, sometimes a social bond, and sometimes discourse? Or that it is a bit of each? That sometimes it is a mere being, and sometimes it is marked by the ontological difference between Being and beings? And what if it were we ourselves, the moderns, who artificially divided a unique trajectory, which would be at first neither object, nor subject, nor meaning effect, nor pure being? What if the separation of the four repertoires were applied only to stabilized and later stages?
Nothing proves that these resources remain incompatible when we move from essences to events, from purification to mediation, from the modern dimension to the nonmodern dimension, from revolution to the Copernican counter-revolution. 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 peopled 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 a its Constitution.
The linkage is impossible as long as we remain truly modern, since Nature, Discourse, Society and Being surpass us infinitely, and because these four sets are defined only by their separation, which maintains our constitutional guarantees. But continuity becomes possible if we add to the guarantees the practice of mediation that the Constitution allows because it denies it. The moderns are quite right to want reality, language, society and being all at once. They are wrong only in believing that these sets are forever contradictory. Instead of always analyzing the trajectory of quasi-objects by separating these resources, can we not write as if they ought to be in continuous connection with one another? We might well escape from the postmodern prostration itself caused by an overdose of the four critical repertoires.
Are you not fed up at finding yourselves forever locked into language alone, or imprisoned in social representations alone, as so many social scientists would like you to be? We want to gain access to things themselves, not only to their phenomena. The real is not remote; rather, it is accessible in all the objects mobilized throughout the world. Doesn’t external reality abound right hereamongus?
Doyounot have more than enough of being continually dominated by a Nature that is transcendent, unknowable, inaccessible, exact, and simply true, peopled with entities that lie dormant like the Sleeping Beauty until the day when scientific Prince Charmings finally discover them? The collectives we live in are more active, more productive, more socialized than the tiresome things-in-themselves led us to expect.
Are you not a lite tired of those sociologies constructed around the Social only, which is supposed to hold up solely through the repetition of the words ‘power’ and ‘legitimacy’ because sociologists cannot cope either with the contents of objects or with the world of languages that nevertheless construct society? Our collectives are more real, more naturalized, more discursive than the tiresome humans-among- themselves led us to expect.
Are you not fed up with language games, and with the eternal scepticism of the deconstruction of meaning? Discourse is not a world unto itself but a population of actants that mix with things as well as with societies, uphold the former and the latter alike, and hold on to them both, Interest in texts does not distance us from reality, for things 100 have to be elevated to the dignity of narrative. As for texts, why deny them the grandeur of forming the social bond that holds us together?
Are you not tired of being accused of having forgotten Being, of living ina base world emptied of all its substance, all its sacredness and its art? In order to rediscover these treasures, do we really have to give up the historical, scientific and social world in which we live? To apply oneself to the sciences, to technologies, to markets, to things, does not distance us any more from the difference of Being with beings than from society, politics, or language.
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.