The Two Great Divides

Title

Description

So the Internal Great Divide accounts for the External Great Divide: we are the only ones who differentiate absolutely between Nature and Culture, between Science and Society, whereas in our eyes all the others whether they are Chinese or Amerindian, Azande or Barouya - cannot really separate what is knowledge from what is Society, what is sign from what is thing, what comes from Nature as it is from what their cultures require. Whatever they do, however adapted, regulated and functional they may be, they will always remain blinded by this confusion; they are prisoners of the social and of language alike. Whatever we do, however criminal, however imperialistic we may be, we escape from the prison of the social or of language to gain access to things themselves through a providential exit gate, that of scientific knowledge. The internal partition between humans and nonhumans defines a second partition - an external one this time - through which the moderns have set themselves apart from the premoderns. For Them, Nature and Society, signs and things, are virtually coextensive. For Us they should never be. Even though we might still recognize in our own societies some fuzzy areas in madness, children, animals, popular culture and women's bodies (Haraway, 1989), we believe our duty is to extirpate ourselves from those horrible mixtures as forcibly as possible by no longer confusing what pertains to mere social preoccupations and what pertains to the real nature of things.

Designer

Latour, Bruno

Date

1993

Source

We Have Never Been Modern

Bibliographic Citation

Latour, Bruno. 1993. We Have Never Been Modern. Translated by Catherine Porter. Harvard University Press. Figure 4.2. Page 99.

depict things of type

Typological or Classification

has attribute

Circle

New Tags

New Tags