Purification and Mediation

Title

Description

Modernity is often defined in terms of humanism, either as a way of saluting the birth of 'man' or as a way of announcing his death. But this habit itself is modern, because it remains asymmetrical. It overlooks the simultaneous birth of 'nonhumanity' - things, or objects, or beasts - and the equally strange beginning of a crossed-out God, relegated to the sidelines. Modernity arises first from the conjoined creation of those three entities, and then from the masking of the conjoined birth and the separate treatment of the three communities while, underneath, hybrids continue to multiply as an effect of this separate treatment. The double separation is what we have to reconstruct: the separation between humans and nonhumans on the one hand, and between what happens 'above' and what happens 'below' on the other. These separations could be compared to the division that distinguishes the judiciary from the executive branch of a government. This division is powerless to account for the multiple links, the intersecting influences, the continual negotiations between judges and politicians. Yet it would be a mistake to deny the effectiveness of the separation. The modern divide between the natural world and the social world has the same constitutional character, with one difference: up to now, no one has taken on the task of studying scientists and politicians in tandem, since no central vantage point has seemed to exist. In one sense, the fundamental articles of faith pertaining to the double separation have been so well drawn up that this separation has been viewed as a double ontological distinction. As soon as one outlines the symmetrical space and thereby reestablishes the common understanding that organizes the separation of natural and political powers, one ceases to be modern.

The common text that defines this understanding and this separation is called a constitution, as when we talk about amendments to the American constitution. Who is drafting such a text? For political constitutions, the task falls to jurists and Founding Fathers, but so far they have done only a third of the work, since they have left out both scientific power and the work of hybrids. For the nature of things, it is the scientists' task, but they have done only another third of the work, since they have pretended to forget about political power, and they have denied that hybrids have any role to play even as they multiply them. For the work of translation, writing the constitution is the task of those who study those strange networks that I have outlined above, but science students have fulfilled only half of their contract, since they do not explain the work of purification that is carried out above them and accounts for the proliferation of hybrids…

Let us say, then, that the moderns have caved in. Their Constitution could absorb a few counter-examples, a few exceptions - indeed, it thrived on them. But it is helpless when the exceptions proliferate, when the third estate of things and the Third World join together to invade all its assemblies en masse. In order to accommodate those exceptions, which are hardly any different from those of savage thought (see below), we need to outline a space that is no longer the space of the modem Constitution, because it fills the median zone that the Constitution claimed to empty. To the practice of purification - the horizontal line - we need to add the practices of mediation - the vertical line. Instead of following the multiplication of hybrids by projecting them on to their longitude alone, we also need to identify them by means of a latitude. The diagnosis of the crisis with which I began this essay is now quite clear: the proliferation of hybrids has saturated the constitutional framework of the moderns. The moderns have always been using both dimensions in practice, they have always been explicit about each of them, but they have never been explicit about the relation between the two sets of practices. Nonmoderns have to stress the relations between them if they are to understand both the moderns' successes and their recent failures, and still not lapse into postmodernism. By deploying both dimensions at once, we may be able to accommodate the hybrids and give them a place, a name, a home, a philosophy, an ontology and, I hope, a new constitution.

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 3.1. Page 51.

depict things of type

Structural or Hierarchical

has attribute

Circle

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