latour I

5 August 2023

i want to believe

I'm reading through (the english translation of) latour's we have never been modern right now. reading the introduction i was like, okay, this fucks so hard i'm mad about it. i'm midway through ch. 2 now and struggling a little more to put the pieces together.

to drastically oversimplify. latour's thesis is that capitalist modernity's chief distinction from all other cultures is its inability to unify its theories of the social world, the natural world , and text/meaning/semiotics . this inability, and more pointedly the refusal to acknowledge it as such, proliferates what latour calls 'hybrids' or 'monsters,' theoretical objects which cannot be accounted for neatly under any one paradigm and thus inspire whirlwinds of deflective maneouvers.

in an attempt to deal with these 'monsters' or at least explain their conditions of existence, latour embarks upon an anthropology of modernity, or perhaps an anthropology of the moderns. latour correctly identifies that the one field in the (post)modern academy where you do see continuity between nature-culture-text is anthropology:

Once she has been sent into the field, even the most rationalist ethnographer is perfectly capable of bringing together in a single monograph the myths, ethnosciences, genealogies, political forms, techniques, religions, epics and rites of the people she is studying. Send her off to study the Arapesh or the Achuar, the Koreans or the Chinese, and you will get a single narrative that weaves together the way people regard the heavens and their ancestors, the way they build houses and the way they grow yams or manioc or rice, the way they construct their government and their cosmology. In works produced by anthropologists abroad, you will not find a single trait that is not simultaneously real, social and narrated.
. . .
It is even because they remain incapable of studying themselves in this way that ethnographers are so critical, and so distant, when they go off to the tropics to study others. The critical tripartition protects them because it authorizes them to reestablish continuity among the communities of the premoderns. It is only because they separate at home that ethnographers make so bold as to unify abroad.
(pg 7)

this is from the intro and it fucks! this part of latour's project i was really excited for, and hopefully i'll update here when the payoff comes along.

for now though, i'm kind of stuck in terminology hell. latour apologizes in the acknowledgements for the 'Gallic'ness of his text lmao. and it is quite gallic! but what's really getting me is his repeated reference to terms like 'transcendence' and 'immanence' that clearly have scientific-theological-political implications for both himself and his two current interlocutors (Thomas Hobbes, of the Leviathan, and Robert Boyle, of the invention of the air pump) that I'm. . .simply not picking up on.

I've kind of gotten away with picking up most of what I know about early modernity // the Enlightenment through reading bits of Foucault lol. I've avoided learning more mostly because the thought of reading like Hobbes or Locke or whatever makes me go

:/

://///

but I may have to swallow my pride and start mixing in some early modernists with my steady diet of theorists of the long never-ending 19th century.

my own ignorance of history aside

it's like, pretty clear that trans people would be a paradigmatic "monster" for latour. shocker, shocker. we haven't come up yet (he's focusing on the ozone layer at the moment, it's all very 1991), but i wouldn't be surprised if we do, or if someone since has made the connection.

latour compellingly includes (the Christian) Gd in his pile of "things modernity separates and therefore cannot account for fully/integrate." i'm hopeful that his analysis will help describe some of the theological implications or experiences of transness that i've been wanting to get at but lacking the language for for several years. here's hoping the next few chapters give me some material to chew up and mash together into something interesting.