We Have Never Been Modern

Once you have the two jobs in view, the objects Latour opened the book with stop looking like exceptions. The ozone hole is a hybrid: a real chemical process in the upper atmosphere, and a matter of industrial policy, and a story about consumer aerosols, all in one. You cannot hand it to the chemists and be done, because the chemistry is entangled with treaties; you cannot hand it to the diplomats, because the diplomacy answers to molecules. It sits in the middle of the table refusing to be filed.

Latour's claim is that these middle-of-the-table objects have been multiplying faster and faster, precisely because the constitution gave them room to grow unwatched. The more energetically the moderns insisted on the separation of nature and society, the more freely the mixtures proliferated in the gap between the boxes. A frozen embryo, a genetically modified seed, a piece of software that reshapes an election — each is more thoroughly a knot of the natural and the social than anything a supposedly premodern culture ever produced.

If the mixtures are the reality, why has the denial held for so long? Latour's answer is that nature and society are not two independent poles that happen to be hard to connect. They are twins, born together, each guaranteeing the other. Nature is defined as the domain we did not make and cannot argue with; society as the domain we did make and argue about endlessly. The strength of each definition comes entirely from its contrast with the other. Pull one loose and both fall.

This is why the recurring debate between the realists and the constructivists is, for Latour, a trap rather than a battlefield. The realist says the facts are simply out there, discovered. The constructivist says the facts are simply made, fabricated by human interests. Each is half right and therefore wholly wrong, because each accepts the very split that needs undoing. The air pump did not reveal a pure nature waiting to be seen, nor did Boyle merely invent a social fiction. He built an apparatus that let a real gas and a room of real gentlemen produce a fact together. The fact is not on one side of the divide. It straddles it.

Suppose we take Latour at his word. What follows is not a return to some enchanted past, nor a leap into the postmodern, which he treats as merely the modern in a state of exhaustion, still obsessed with the same divide, only now ironically. He proposes a third word: nonmodern. To be nonmodern is to keep the moderns' genuine achievements — the sciences, the long networks, the capacity to build robust facts — while dropping the story that those achievements required a wall between things and people.

The practical stakes land on politics, and this is where the book still bites. If our objects are hybrids, then our assemblies are missing half their members. A parliament that represents only human citizens cannot govern climate, or epidemics, or a poisoned river, because it has no seat for the nonhumans those crises are made of. Latour's provocation is a parliament of things: a public arena where the ozone hole, the embryo, the virus are brought in with their spokespersons — scientists, yes, but also the affected — and debated openly, instead of being smuggled through the back door as neutral facts that end argument before it starts.

The book that began with a page from the newspaper ends by handing that page back, unsorted. The ozone hole, the frozen embryo, the treaty and the virus are still there, still refusing to be filed under nature or society. What Latour has done is remove our permission to pretend the filing ever worked. The moderns were never the clean sorters they took themselves to be; they were tireless weavers who called their weaving something else. Admitting this does not diminish the sciences or dissolve politics. It simply lets us see the two doing what they always did together.