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We Have Never Been Modern

We Have Never Been Modern. Bruno LaTour. Translated by Catherine Porter.Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993. Pp. ix + 157. $29.95 (cloth); $12.95(paper).

Bruno Latour's Science in Action (1987) was the most important book on science,technology and their intertwining with society published in the 1980s. Latour arguedthat by following scientists and engineers around one could see that science,technology, and society were continually coproduced in a process of the reciprocaltuning of facts, theories, machines, human actors, and social relations. This actor-network analysis flew in the face of technological and social determinist perspectives(technological change causes and determines social change, or vice versa). Moreprofoundly, it transcended the dualist understandings that underpin suchdeterminisms, understandings that posit a clean and principled split between thehuman and the nonhuman and construct independent accounts of each--as, for

example, the natural sciences seek to grasp the material world as it existsindependently of human beings, or the social sciences seek to speak of a pure realmof the social. The question arises, of course, of why, if nature and society arecoproduced, we had to wait for Latour (and his colleague Michel Callon) to tell us this.What explains the grip of human/nonhuman dualism on our imaginations? We HaveNever Been Modern is Latour's admirably brief but also very ambitious answer.

We need, says Latour, to think about the "modern constitution" bequeathed to us inthe seventeenth century by people like Robert Boyle and Thomas Hobbes. Boyle andhis friends in the Royal Society invented a way of speaking about nature that was(ostensibly at least) independent of the speaker; this was the origin of modern

experimental science. Hobbes, at the other pole, found a way of theorizing social andpolitical order in terms of distinctively human conflicts and agreements, independentof material circumstances. Boyle and Hobbes, then, jointly constructed the programfor purifying the discourses of nature and society---expunging from each the traces of the other---that, for Latour, is definitive of modernity. Of course, the coproduction of nature and society has gone on in modernity just as it always did and always will, butthe modern constitution is systematically blind to this. "We have never been modern,"as Latour puts it, but we found a way of thinking that we were.

Such is the argument that Latour develops in his latest book, and he thus stakes outan original and important position in current debates about modernity, antimodernity,

postmodernity, and so on. These debates can only be enriched by Latour's attention tothe practical coupling of the human and the nonhuman, and they can only beenlivened by the thumbnail critiques offered along the way of thinkers as diverse asKant, Hegel, Bachelard, Habermas, Baudrillard, Lyotard, and Heidegger (all taken totask, and in that order, in the space of a dozen pages in the middle of chapter 3). Itherefore both hope and expect that this book will get the attention it deserves. Forwhat it is worth, I am in agreement with much of Latour's analysis, though, inevitably,certain lines of its development seem open to question. I can mention two.

Latour attributes almost magical properties to the modern constitution, ascribing to it

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