When Latour was first recommended to me, it was under the guise of his being an anti-postmodernist. Preying on my open-mindedness, some of my pomophobe friends so very often try to deter me from my postructuralist leanings, or at least try to get me to acknowledge the relative truth of contrarians. Of course, once delving into the book - which, to my surprise, I had to cull from the Science and Technology section as opposed to philosophy - it's obvious that the label unfairly characterizes him. Then again, the book is titled We Have Never Been Modern and he totally bashes Lyotard and other pomo thinkers, so I definitely understand the reference.

Written in 1991, the book itself is a rather interesting read, though I disagree with his stance on postmodernism as "a symptom, not a fresh solution" (46) to the rift between purification and hybridization in the framework of the modern mind (the modern Constitution), meaning the rift between the urge to construct an objective science and ideology separate from societal contexts, and the mixture of nature and culture based upon these contexts. As a firm touter of Lyotard's concept of the petit récit or little narrative, Latour's assertion that postmodernism leaves in the wake of its critique "disconnected instants and groundless denunciations" (46), really confused me, considering it suggests the creation of the exact network that he outlines using Deleuze and Guattari (117) - pointedly postmodern thinkers.

Writing during the onslaught of absolute nihilism and the shifting ground of the 1990's, though, must have been exceedingly hard. I'm one of the optimistic post-millennium poststructuralists - I believe in temporary context-based truths, the provisional quality of knowledge, and its rhizomatic relation to society as a system, but as it has so often been described, facing the void is odd and difficult for any socially constructed being. I'm really not entirely sure if I've done it yet, or what it would have been like to be an intellectual in the early 90's. Latour characterizes this postmodern logic as maddening as well, considering it's based upon an ever altering base. One really scathing anti-pomo passage that I loved:

The Postmodern condition has recently sought to juxtapose these three great 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 consciousness, 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 at all times. Enough, indeed, to make one contemplate jumping off a cliff. (64-65)

Grim! Poorly characterized! I'm not exactly sure where his idea that postmodern logic compartmentalizes discourse came from, but it's not cited so I can only assume it's his own pomophobia!

Despite this implicit - or maybe in the last passage, explicit - distaste for postmodern logic, I can't help but view his perspective as somewhat postmodern. He begins a critique of the pomo privileging of hybridity saying,

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 the same Constitution. (61)

Then, oddly enough, Latour nullifies the process of purification in the modern Constitution in the sciences by touting inherent absolute hybridity:

...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' Leviathan. It is the double contradiction that is modern, the contradiction between the two constitutional guarantees of Nature and Society on one hand, and the practice of purification and the practice of mediation on the other. (62)

To be painfully honest, Latour seems to be arguing in circles. Are postmoderns wrong to deny the validity of the process of purification? Isn't the process of purification simply that - a unrealized process? How can it be juxtaposed to hybridity when, admittedly, all science and knowledge is dependent upon its hybrid context? Latour's critique of postmodernism finds him in the same boat as his enemies. Sorry Bruno! You're one of us!

Aside from the cyclical pomo logic critique, this book is not worthless trash. It does offer a very interesting concept of the pre-modern as opposed to the rational modern subject, as well as a very well developed touting of network theory. I'm using in my thesis as a contrarian piece, though, through writing this little piece on it, I've realized he's not much of a contrarian afterall.

Anyone else know any really good staunchly anti-pomo philosophers I can spar with? (Please don't suggest Habermas, he's a bit of a joke...)