We Have Never Been Modern

The core claim here really can be summarized in a couple of sentences, and Latour more or less admits that himself in the closing pages, but the implications of those sentences are what took him a whole book to work out, and honestly took me a couple of readthroughs to actually absorb. The claim: modernity’s whole self-image rests on a clean separation between nature and society, between facts and politics, and that separation has never actually held, not once, not even in the moment it was being declared.

Where this gets its teeth is in the specific case studies, ozone holes, AIDS research, anything that’s simultaneously a natural fact and a political controversy, which turns out to be most things people actually argue about. Latour’s point is that these hybrids, part nature, part culture, part discourse, have been multiplying the entire time modernity claimed to be purifying them into separate categories, and the “post” prefix everyone’s been slapping onto every era since, post-industrial, post-structuralist, post-modern, is itself a symptom of a society that keeps defining itself by what it’s supposedly leaving behind rather than by what it actually is.

I’ll be honest that the middle section, where he works through the history of science studies in detail, slumped for me the way a few other readers have noted, philosophico-historical detail stacked on detail before the anthropological turn in the later chapters brought me back in. The prose doesn’t do him favors either, dense, occasionally self-satisfied, the kind of writing where I found myself rereading a paragraph a third time not because the idea was hard but because the sentence made it harder than it needed to be. And I say that as someone who came around to liking the book. There’s a real, useful idea buried in here about why our categories for talking about climate, technology, and politics keep failing us, but Latour makes you dig for it more than the idea itself demands. Worth the dig if you’re already interested in the territory. Not a starting point for anyone who isn’t.