We Have Always Never Been Modern
“We have never been modern,” Bruno Latour announced in the title of his 1991 book. But what is the nature of this modernity that we have never been? And what does Latour’s understanding of modernity offer to those who feel that they are indeed modern, but don’t quite understand how or why?
To answer this question, we might first of all take a step back. Latour does not frame his definition of modernity in terms of a particular culture, sociology, or geography. What he has in mind is fundamentally epistemological. For Latour, there is no situation that can’t be explained by zooming in to the microscopic level. His strategy, then, is always to seek a more particular account of the world. “Details, please, always more details,” as he puts it in Reassembling the Social (2006). The moderns, by contrast, are those who remove their eye from the lens and prefer to subsume the plurality of the world under broad, generic categories. Famously for Latour these would include such apparently benign categories as “Nature,” “Society,” and “the Economy.” We might describe some physical occurrence as adhering to “the laws of Nature,” or we might analyze human behavior in terms of the “norms of the Social world,” or we might refer to the circulation of “Economic forces.” But in each case, the category is reductive of the concrete reality it is purporting to explain. The moderns, then, are those who exchange the complexity of the local for the simplicity of the global.
Of course, Latour suggests that “we have never actually been modern.” What he means is that our lived experience has never in fact corresponded with this separation, since our daily existences are subtended by a hybrid reality that cannot be erased. Just open a newspaper or switch on the TV—see how the complex issues we address every day transgress, exceed, and overflow the boundaries of the epistemological categories that are imposed upon them.
But for all that, modern is precisely what we are. For Latour’s point is that the epistemological maneuver that characterizes modernity is endlessly repeated today. It underpins some of the most cherished institutions of western society. It is reinforced in various programs of education and can be detected in different political alignments. Most crucially, it frames a hierarchical narrative through which certain groups of people will understand themselves as superior to those whose worldview has been left behind (the “nonmoderns,” as Latour calls them). There is a post-colonial critical dimension to Latour’s work, especially in his (underrated) 2010 book On the Modern Cult of the Factish Gods.
But the question I’d like to address here is: if this is what Latour defines as modernity, then what is its heritage? When was it first enacted? What trace has it left in history? It is here that some valuable genealogical work can begin to take place.
"An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump" by Joseph Wright of Derby
An initial candidate is suggested by Latour himself. Through analysis of Shapin and Schaffer’s celebrated 1985 book Leviathan and the Air-Pump, Latour proposes that the respective projects of Boyle and Hobbes constitute the beginning of modernity. Through their construction of the purified categories of “nature” and “the social contract,” these two stand at the threshold of the epistemological regime that was to define modern European history from the seventeenth century onwards—as he puts it, these are “the inventors of the modern world,” no less.
And yet, Latour does not think of the birth of modernity as taking place in one particular historical moment. Nor will he allow us to attribute to modernity a stable, linear narrative. Instead, what he describes is more akin to an epistemological front, waxing and waning here and there in history, whose distribution might be unevenly spread across different human societies at any given moment. This is what I call the “transversal” function of modernity. And it raises the interesting possibility that the concept of modernity can be applied as a flexible diagnostic of different periods of world history addressed in parallel, wherever these display an equivalent epistemological structure.
Understood in these terms, Latour’s work can enter into constructive dialogue with other attempts to trace the genealogy of modernity. Take, for example, the work of intellectual historian Stephen Toulmin. In his 1990 book Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity, Toulmin identifies modernity as inhering in a similar epistemological structure. But he offers a slightly different historical periodization. For Toulmin, it was at the end of the sixteenth century that “European attitudes underwent a drastic transformation.” Prior to this time, he claims, the European mind had been characterized by two features: first, it was “pluralistic” (which means it was sensitive to the distribution of meaning and truth across multiple discourses, including natural philosophy, religion, law, rhetoric, and so on), and second, it was “embedded” (which means it was interested in “thick descriptions” of the empirical world, and amenable to refinement and correction by the input of new events and experiences). For Toulmin, this was embodied above all in the humanist writings of Erasmus, Rabelais, Palissy, and Montaigne. Between the years 1590 and 1640, however, a transition took place. Now, “the focus of intellectual attention turned away from the humane preoccupations of the late sixteenth century, and moved in directions more rigorous, or even more dogmatic, than those these Renaissance writers pursued.” For Toulmin, this was the birth of modernity. The transition was embodied in the contrasting intellectual projects of Montaigne and Descartes, the humanism of the former emblematically giving way to the decontextualized rationalism of the latter.
Latour cites Toulmin’s book approvingly, describing it as nothing less than “un livre un peu inconnu mais tout à fait étonnant.” This is because Toulmin agrees with his diagnosis; for both, the transition into modernity is found in the attempt to organize or regulate the contingency of the plural world by means of an epistemological perspective that is removed from it. The local is captured and purified by the global. That Toulmin is plausibly able to propose an earlier historical moment in which that capture occurred suggests that Latour intends his concept to be applied flexibly and diachronically.
Another genealogical account that can be considered in parallel with Latour’s is the magisterial intellectual history of Stephen Gaukroger, whose projected five volumes have yet to be completed. For Gaukroger, the transition into modernity likewise revolves around an epistemological shift from the local to the global, this time in the form of “the naturalization of all cognitive values to scientific ones.” With the advent of modernity, modes of enquiry as varied as metaphysics, political economy, law, history, and theology found themselves subordinated to a unified, scientific explanation of reality. Just like Latour, Gaukroger identifies modernity as inhering in an act of purification and simplification. But his historical reconstruction is again different, since Gaukroger begins his account with developments in natural philosophy in thirteenth-century Europe.
But we can identify even deeper timelines. For example, in his studies of ancient near eastern history, Jan Assmann has proposed the occurrence of an epistemological shift that he calls “the Mosaic distinction.” He identifies a transition from a mode of rationality that was pluralistic, integrative and coextensive with the institutional, linguistic and cultural conditions of the society in which it took shape, to one that was monolithic, concerned with the differentiation and qualification of different claims to truth, and thus conducive to forms of hegemony and exclusionary violence over dissenting groups. By naming it “the Mosaic distinction,” Assmann identifies this shift with the insistence on the absolute truth of YHWH-istic religion in the exilic and post-exilic Jewish communities.
But here too we find an interesting flexibility of periodization. For Assmann is an Egyptologist. And so he is able to propose an analogous transition as taking place in an even earlier period, namely, in the religious reforms of Akhenaten carried out in the Egyptian New Kingdom. These reforms, he argues, should be understood as a systematic political campaign to erase pluralism (devotion to the traditional pantheon of Egyptian deities) in favor of monotheism (the cult worship of one deity alone, namely, Aten). “In that stroke,” writes Assmann, “man became emancipated from his symbiotic relationship with the world and developed, in partnership with the One God, who dwells outside the world yet turned towards it, into an autonomous—or rather theonomous—individual.” For Assmann, the Akhenaten religious reforms, and the mode of subjectivity they imposed upon the population, were equivalent in form to the epistemological transition that initiated modernity. Can we really envisage the birth of modernity as taking place in ancient Egypt? Is this too abstract a conceptualization? Perhaps. But we should at least note that Latour has cited Assmann in various places as a way of clarifying what he means by modernity.
What conclusion can we draw? Latour offers a concept of modernity that functions transversally to many of our established accounts. There is no doubt that parts of his work can be mapped onto canonical narratives relating to early modern and Enlightenment political theory. But I have also argued that it can be understood in broader terms as describing an epistemological front whose impact has structured human existence in analogous ways at different historical moments. His work therefore provides a bridge by which genealogies of modernity might be brought into dialogue with a new set of conversation partners, especially those within a broader tradition of cultural and intellectual history. It is to be hoped that the wide-ranging conversation that Latour has initiated will continue to be tested and applied by others in the years ahead.
Dr. Tim Howles is a Researcher at the Laudato Si' Research Institute at the University of Oxford and an ordained minister in the Church of England. His book, "The Political Theology of Bruno Latour," will be published next year with Edinburgh University Press.