The History of Moderns

At some point around midnight last night, I was starting to wonder whether I was a genius, or going crazy, because Bruno Latour actually started making sense (we'll see if any of that is true). The power and the contradictions of the Modern ideology, it's brilliance in pivoting between the poles of Nature and Society, Immanence and Transcendence. Modernism conquered the world, because when faced with any opposition, it could mutate, a protean shift and appeal to whatever technique would offer superiority at that moment. Yet, for it's integrity, Modernism had to separate the Natural and the Social. The world of humans and the world of atoms could never meet.

However, since the dawn of Modernism, hybrids have proliferated, techno-social networks where technologies embody human purpose, and human beings are delineated and defined by natural science. These hybrids are illegal monsters. Their illegality is sometimes explicit, as with Arizona making research into human-animal chimeras a felony, but more frequently implicit in how we continue to try and demarcate what is politics and what is science, even as they blend together in expert advisory panels and Congressional votes about climate science.

Modernism can never understand a hybrid, it cannot even allow their existence. But pre-modernism is not adaptable enough to handle their power and diversity, and post-modernism ignores their real aspects in favor of the symbolic. In order to come to grips with the hybrids that populate our would, Latour suggests that we use the methods of ethnography and history, applied symmetrically to explain there aspects. This is where I begin to become confused, because history, the specific facts of the air pump, or the ozone hole, is vital to Latour's project. Yet history is also the tool of the Moderns, forever breaking them off from the past. How can we conceptualize history, so as to understand actants?

What is history? Is it a trajectory through space-time, a record of positions and events. Can the history of a sandstorm be reconstructed from the trajectories of every grain of sand? No, the whole is more than the sum of its parts. Do pre-modern people have history? I think not, pre-moderns carry their culture internally, in practice and in legend. Only Moderns, forever separated from the past and from each other, must write fictions in order to pin down their past. The difference between legend, history, and historicity is subtle and confusing.

So, where do hybrids and monsters find their history? Should they embrace their criminal past? All Moderns have been complicit in gross crimes against the ecosystem, indigenous culture, the self. Perhaps what we need is not a “Parliament of Things”, but a Tribunal of Hybrids, a truth and reconciliation committee to move us past the crimes committed, and towards a clearer understanding of our hybrid pasts.