Bruno Latour Quote on Modernity: Never Modern

We have never been modern, and we never will be. — Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern (1991)

Bruno Latour's We Have Never Been Modern (1991) is one of the most provocative philosophical statements of the late twentieth century. Its title and thesis: the "modern" constitution — the strict separation of nature and culture, subject and object, science and politics — has never actually described how the world works, and the more modernity insists on the separation, the more it produces the hybrids it denies.

Context

Latour, trained as a philosopher and anthropologist, had spent the 1970s and 1980s studying scientific laboratories, showing through fieldwork how scientific facts are constructed through networks of instruments, texts, and colleagues. We Have Never Been Modern generalizes this insight into a diagnosis of modernity as a whole. The book analyzes what Latour calls the "modern Constitution": a set of practices that simultaneously purifies — separating nature from culture, science from politics — and translates — producing hybrids such as the ozone hole, the embryo in the freezer, or the computer chip, which are simultaneously natural and cultural, real and constructed.

Latour's central claim is that the work of purification and the work of translation have always proceeded together. The more moderns insist that nature and society are separate, the more hybrids proliferate beneath the surface of the separation. The constitution's power lies precisely in its denial of what it produces: it can treat hybrids as mere intermediaries while the moderns multiply them without end. "We have never been modern" means that the constitution has never been faithfully applied — and that the categories on which it rests never held in practice.

Meaning

The sentence is a claim about the history and ontology of modernity. To be "modern," in Latour's sense, is to believe that time advances in a single direction, that the moderns are radically new, and that nature and society are cleanly separable — that facts are facts and values are values, that science speaks for things and politics speaks for people, and never the twain shall meet. The claim that we have never been modern denies all three beliefs: the purification never succeeded; the subjects and objects always leaked into each other; and the very technologies that define the modern world — laboratory science, industrial production, information networks — are the great hybrids that cross every line the constitution draws.

The deeper meaning is that modernity is not a period but a claim, and the claim is false. The moderns have always been, in Latour's terms, "nonmodern" without knowing it: they have always woven networks that mix nature and culture, and the intellectual apparatus of the modern constitution has served mainly to render those networks invisible. The ozone hole is at once a natural phenomenon, a scientific fact, a political issue, and an economic problem; to classify it as purely one of these is to misunderstand it. The sentence thus invites us to stop believing in the categories that organize our self-understanding and to attend instead to the networks — the "quasi-objects," the hybrids — that actually compose our world.

The additional clause, "and we never will be," extends the claim into the future: this is not a failure that could be corrected by trying harder. The constitution is not a project that failed but a misdescription of what was always happening. The task, Latour argues, is not to become modern at last but to give up the ambition — to stop purifying and to begin, explicitly and deliberately, the work of assembling the common world of humans and nonhumans.

Philosophical Significance

The book is a foundational text of actor-network theory (ANT) and of constructivist science studies. It refuses both the realist claim that nature is simply discovered and the constructivist claim that facts are merely social: both positions, Latour argues, remain trapped within the modern constitution. Instead, he proposes a symmetrical anthropology that treats humans and nonhumans as actors in the same networks, and that follows the associations wherever they lead. The sentence "we have never been modern" is the methodological charter of this project: since the categories of modernity never held, we are free to describe the world in terms of networks, hybrids, and translations rather than in terms of purified domains.

The claim also reconfigures the politics of knowledge and technology. If science and politics are never actually separate, then the technical sphere is irreducibly political, and the political sphere is irreducibly technical. Latour's later call for a "Parliament of Things" — an institution in which the representatives of humans and nonhumans would debate the composition of the common world — follows directly. The sentence is thus not merely a skeptical deflation of modernity but the opening move of a positive, postmodern (or nonmodern) program.

Critics have charged that Latour's account overstates the coherence of the "modern constitution," and that the rhetoric of hybridity can obscure the very real distributions of power that structure science and technology. Yet the sentence has proved to be one of the most generative formulations in the philosophy of science and technology: it gives us a way of asking, about any artifact or any fact, who and what are enrolled in its network, and what purifications are being performed to make it appear natural, neutral, or necessary. We have never been modern — and the recognition of that fact is where thinking about our technological world begins.

Sources

• Latour, Bruno. We Have Never Been Modern. Translated by Catherine Porter. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993.