Ep. 230: Bruno Latour on Science, Culture, and Modernity (Part Two)

0:00 Mark: I guess I see what he's doing, maybe in your talk, Linda, of him seeing what we would call scientific facts as resistant as still being some sort of social ontology in the phenomenologist sense.

0:12 Linda: Right.

0:12 Mark: The phenomenologist did not say, because I'm doing phenomenology, that everything is just flowing from my consciousness, that I. It's my transcendental ego that's creating all this. No, when you're phenomenologist, you specifically put that aside. So it's just this is the world that we live in, and some of the facts that we believe in have an obvious source in our ideology. And the way to change them would be to convince people to think. Think different things. And some of these facts are resistant, but still it seems more a matter of degree than a matter of fundamental kind. Because if it was a matter of fundamental kind, then you couldn't have hybrids, Right? What is it to have something that is partially natural but partially social in that resistance terms? Well, it just. It resists less.

1:03 Wes: We should think about this in concrete terms. Could the concept of a quark, to use the famous example, could that be understood in some different way? Is there some hypothetical world with different social arrangements that would lead to a different outcome for that particular concept? At this stage of inquiry, you can think of the ideal limit of inquiry, however you want to put it. I don't think so. Not given our cognitive constitutions, not given the way we are as human beings and the way the world is. If all that stays the same, it's simply not a matter of power relations or any social thing, whether or not there are quarks or something else.

Now you can do all sorts of gymnastics around construction, going back to Kant, and you can say, and starting with Primary and secondary qualities. But the way the world looks to me is a matter of the interaction of my subjectivity with the world. And it's not. I don't have intellectual intuition of things themselves and all that stuff. The things in themselves aren't necessarily spatial or temporal. It's just that's something. Something I add. To go back to where all this idea of construction originates. That doesn't matter because once you've chosen a scheme, you still haven't done away with data.

And I think, Mark, you were kind of getting at this. That's why Kant needed things in themselves. Things maybe look spatiotemporal because that's the way our minds are constituted. But once they're constituted that way, it's not the case that the little dance that Mars does in the sky over the year could be any different. Once we've picked a scheme, then that's fixed and that's fixed by data. That's fixed by some sort of given some sort of mind independent element. And we cannot do away with that. And there is no social element that forces that in one direction or the other.

So whether or not you're a complete social constructionist or partial one, I don't see how you make that work.

2:57 Dylan: To clarify questions of interpretation that are genuine questions would still be questions of fact, so to speak. So whether it's a particle or a wave, or whether to pick on the quark or the electron example, whether they're distributed entities or not distributed entities, those are questions of interpretation of field theory and the alignment of field theory with the kinds of measurements we do and the interpretation of how those things align together, that's being distinguished from something that's socially constructed.

3:30 Linda: I think that being social constructivist doesn't prevent Latour from believing that quarks do their thing regardless of how they're described. I think what we may be doing is conflating problematic and non problematic situations for describing these things. So what Wes described as a non problematic ad, it's a hybrid, right? He said quark. Could a quark have been called something else?

3:56 Wes: Yeah, there's a difference between the arbitrariness of it. Could it exist under any other description? Given this world and given the cognitive constitution of human beings? I'm saying no. Whether or not it's called something in one language or not, or it's something in another, that conceptually could be no other way is my.

4:13 Mark: The quark itself is not a hybrid. That's what you're saying, that even if you say the concept quark well, of course it has a name, it has connotations. So any concept is going to be a hybrid of some sort, but the thing that the concept refers to, that's the fundamental distinction we're trying to make.

4:27 Wes: Yeah, you could put this in terms of reference or can never be hybrids and senses could be hybrids, but there's no hybrid here in the sense of there's a strong social or political component to this. Again, you could go back and you could talk about construction into more broader cognitive terms and say, hey, if our minds were different, we wouldn't look at the world this way and maybe everything would just look like code, everything would be zeros and ones instead of spatiotemporal this and that. But one has to be translatable into the other. They both are structured, they had isomorphic structures.

Like I said, I don't think that part matters. The constructed appearances part just don't matter. As long as everything is fixed on some mind independent reality. And if the mind independent reality is fixed, and if the cognitive constitution is fixed, then the description will always be the same. There's not some alternate world in which all that is fixed and people have come up with their radically different concept of subatomic physics. It would look exactly the same.

5:29 Linda: Right. But for Latour, the quark is a hybrid. So it is an admixture of culture, which means the labs in which, you know, particle physics was done and the theories that it was worked out in the languages in which the particles were named, those are all cultural things. And then the referent of the quark, whatever, you know, however, the hard physical reality that is the quark, Right. So it's a mixture of those things. And, you know, I guess we could talk about the quark existing out there without having any attachment to any of the labs or the language or anything like that, but it never has been that way.

Right. And this is what Latour is trying to get at when he says that universal laws are not universal. For Boyle, they happen in specific labs at specific times, and they were given specific names. So he said, yeah, if you want to, you can conceive of something that's out there. But that is exactly what the modern constitution let us do is conceive of things that are out there, unattached to culture, unenmeshed from or untouched by cultural things. But he's like, but it never actually happened that way. So you can talk about that if you want, but he's saying, I, as an anthropologist, as a historian, can't study that.

What I can Study are the labs, the working groups, the theories, the language that were used to bring the quark into our awareness. It's a real thing. He thinks it resists. It's real. You can do experiments where particles resist, right? They show up as diffraction gratings. They show up as, you know, wave patterns. They resist the instruments and the membranes that they are, you know, exposed to. And we know they're real, but we can never remove them from that instrumentation and from our language, from talking about them. So they are hybrids in that way.

To call something a hybrid is not. Not to negate the hard physical reality of it. But Latour would definitely say that we don't know these things other than through social and cultural inscriptions, so we can't detach those things from the social and cultural descriptions. He thinks the more descriptions we have between us and the quark, the more kinds of, like, inscriptions and descriptions we can have between us and the quark. We're making it sort of more distant from us by doing that, but we actually know it better and better the more representations and the more pictures of it that we sort of put in between us and it.

He thinks that knowledge becomes more stable and it becomes more real as we sort of do that.

7:45 Wes: It's a very neo Kantian picture, which, as everyone knows, I'm perfectly fine with, in which we can only know the world through our concepts and through language and all that stuff. And it makes no sense to talk of things in themselves outside of that, that we are somehow in some sort of contact with, except to the extent that there has to be something out there that fixes what you're saying, resists and fixes all those concepts. I think the word cultural gets a little misleading because it suggests that one culture might come to a different conclusion than another culture.

8:18 Linda: I see what you're saying. That's not what Latour means by culture,

8:21 Wes: though there are psychosocial factors. The way Kant would think of it is just in terms of the cognitive, the way the mind is structured and all that stuff. But what makes knowledge possible is that's the same between human beings. And it's not the case, for instance, that there's some alternative history in which there were different instruments, and so the world looks different because it wasn't. That's the point that I'm getting at. You can talk about culture, but if the implication is that, as Hacking puts it, if things could have been different, if some element like culture were different, that's where my objection lies. I don't object to Any of the stuff about the way we can only know our world through concepts and therefore our object appearances are hybrids in the Kantian sense of being, hybrids of concept and given.

9:08 Linda: And I would go out on a limb and say that Latour probably agrees with you on that. I think he thinks there is a stable reality.

9:13 Mark: See, I was interpreting some of what, you know, Wes's argument here as being something that Latour, through talking about the Constitution, would like to pathologize, that he wants to say that you're talking within the modern enlightenedness. Now, I think some of the details of what you said, Wes, about bringing in Kant maybe makes this more sophisticated than what he's criticizing. But, you know, as we go into section three of this, he explicitly says, oh, yeah, Kant, and then the phenomenologists like the Hegel, the people who think, oh, we finally gotten rid of the distinction between the thing in itself and the ideas that we have about the world of experience and the world of noumena.

That those guys were even. This was just the fruition of, you know, the natural evolution of this constitutional construction. Can we just spend some time here trying to say a little more about what he means by the Constitution, what the various tenets of it are? I think we've already made it clear a little how it is both descriptive and normative. Right. This was again in Berger's take in our social construction episode. If you say this is the world according to this ancient tribe, and that is both what they think of things and it's what they're supposed to think of things.

Because if they deviate from that, then they're outcasts and they don't know how to make meaning of their life. They go insane. Both these things, you know, it's a description of our ideology and is also a set of rules than how ideology kind of has constricted us insofar as we are modern. He thinks the fact that he's able to write this means that we've actually gotten over some modernity. I guess we're looking at 2.7, 2.8, the latter part of section two.

10:52 Linda: He's got a great summary of it in like 2.9, actually, where he's talking about the fourth guarantee, the crossed out God. Then on page 34 toward the top, the first full paragraph, he describes the Constitution as a threefold transcendence and threefold immanence and a crisscross schema that locks in all the possibilities. This is where I locate the power of the moderns. They have not made nature, they make society. They make nature. They have not made society. They have not made either. God has made everything. God has made nothing. They have made everything.

There's no way we can understand the moderns if we do not see that these four guarantees serve as checks and balances for one another. I would say that's the crux of the pathology of the modern constitution is that it's these pairs of denunciations and beliefs that you can slide from one to the other whenever your position is challenged, right? So if someone says, and he goes into this more in more detail a little bit later with the beliefs and the denunciations, but he says, you know, if someone says you're just a product of your society, you can say, if someone is just a product of their society, you can turn around and denounce that by saying, no, people have free will.

They're outside of. There's a part of them is like a natural right, sort of like your natural rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. They're outside of that right. And you can resort to that or, you know, vice versa. If somebody says, the other denunciation is where naturalists say that the society is actually a natural construction and you can't escape it, right? You can kind of fight that with. So to me, that's the clearest picture of the pathology of the constitution is the sort of endless slippage around this kind of star shape where you can just move from one position to another if yours is attacked.

Do you use the denial of the mixing of nature and culture in order to allow you to do that? You use the purification of those things from each other to let you slip from one position to another.

12:42 Dylan: He says, the power of the modern critique. Towards the end, he goes solidly grounded in the transcendental certainty of nature's laws. The modern man or woman can criticize and unveil, denounce and express indignation at irrational beliefs and unjustified dominations solidly grounded in the certainty that humans make their own destiny. The modern man or woman can criticize and unveil, express indignation and doubts, irrational beliefs and the biases of ideologies and the unjustified domination of the experts who claim to have staked out the limits of action and freedom.

You know, this is where I found Latour, the set of dichotomies that's in between these things that he wants to have, these quasi objects and stuff like that. I found that part less helpful to talk about them as a third thing than to really try to articulate these back and forths in modernity, these poles in the constitution in Figure 2.

13:35 Linda: 1.

13:36 Dylan: First guarantee, even though we construct nature, nature is as if we did not construct it. Second guarantee, even though we did not construct society, society is as if we did construct it. Third guarantee nature and society must remain absolutely distinct. The work of purification must remain absolutely distinct from the work of mediation. These poles of nature and society, I feel like they never end up being completely true in that we'll insist that there is a world out there, at least a scientist will, that we interact with and that we talk about.

Any scientist seems to me would acknowledge that we have a way of speaking about it that comes embedded with that nature, that even if it's outside of us, there's a way in which we built up, in the less provocative way that Wes referred to, that we've built up something to talk about it similarly on the social side, that we're free, but we're constrained by society.

14:31 Mark: Constrained by society. Sounds like there are laws and you shouldn't break the laws. But I think it's more that we have a shifting picture of causality, right? That we all want to be compatibilists. We want to believe that there is free will. But that.

14:43 Seth: That's a great word, Mark, that we're compatibilist about kind of everything. It's in section 2.1, I guess, he mentions humanism. I read this as saying that modernity is defined in terms of humanism as a movement, right? And this is what got me off on my enlightenment kick to begin with. But he's essentially saying something to the effect of that the creation of modern subjectivity, which is something that is the study of philosophy, it is what you study when you study philosophy. And it is something we've returned to again and again and again is the idea of modern subjectivity.

Cartesian, Kantian, Hegelian, all these different mechanisms for identifying subjectivity and contrasting it to objectivity. This idea that we create a distinction between the subject and the object and the movement of the history of philosophy or intellectual history is to push those things further and further apart with the idea that we are somehow attaining this purification, right? Somehow somebody will figure out how to separate them once and for all. What the result of that accomplishment will be, I'm not entirely sure. But what he says is in reality, it's almost like we create a vacuum by these things which are closely intermingled in the pre moderns.

There is no clear notion of subjectivity and objectivity. There's no clear distinction between society and nature. In the pre moderns, they're intermixed. In modernity, we start to pull those things apart. And as we do, we create this vacuum. And we think that by creating this vacuum, we're going to create empty space somehow that clearly separates them. But in fact, what we do is just open the space for all this other stuff to rush in, this mixture that Linda mentioned, the hybrids that come in. So he traces the Kantian notion and he talks about Hegel and Dialectic, and he talks about the postmoderns as a response.

But really what resonated with me about that is he's attacking or he's touching on what I think of as the critical, philosophical. Philosophical question that we talk about all the time, which is the notion of subjectivity, the notion of objectivity, the notion of essences and intentionality. And he's diagnosing how that construct comes into play. And in my mind, what he's saying is deludes itself or deludes us into thinking that it is going to accomplish something that it can't. Now, what it does do is simultaneously unleash a whole bunch of other things.

Predominantly, he talks about scale. We can think in terms of the political realities of globalization and so forth. But I feel like what he's really doing is saying that modernity is at its heart about a belief in a scientific belief in an autonomous subject and an autonomous nature, that we have to convince ourselves exist, even though we know full well that it doesn't.

17:37 Linda: I think you're getting close to what will sort of help us understand why Latour cares so much about this. He's diagnosing pathologies in our current situation. And a lot of them have to do with environment and climate, and some of them have to do with exploitation of groups of people or classes of people as well. He's concerned with all of that stuff. The upshot here is he's saying the modern constitution allows you to ignore certain kinds of damage that you're causing. What you do is you ignore your instruments, you ignore your means. So you want to create a global economy, or you want to create a clean source of energy, or you want to create a global supply chain.

You develop these technologies to make that happen. The Internet or the container ship. I went to a talk by an economist yesterday that credited Industrialization 3.0. The beginning was the container ship. You create these things in order to accomplish your goal, but you ignore the things that you're creating because you're so focused on your goal. And then the things that you're creating pile up in the garden gaps, like sometimes literally pile up in landfills and they get pushed to the side and ignored, but they often have really toxic effects on people and on the environment and even on the goals you're trying to accomplish.

And basically you're faced in a way like and this is what climate change has done, you're forced to face the breakdown of your scheme, the modern critique in your scheme when the things pile up so much that you can't ignore them them anymore, that they are making you sick, or they're literally making so much noise you can't get past them, or they're screaming for attention in a way. And this is what Latour is kind of saying is happening with the ozone hole and these other things is that the non human hybrids that we have created and the ozone hole is a hybrid, you know, it's not entirely natural.

Right. It's partly a product of things that we have produced through culture. So when these things start screaming at you such that you can't ignore them, then you have to turn around and face it and say, how did we get into this situation? And what he's trying to do in a way is just explain here's how we got into this situation and here's how I suggest perhaps we could do something different.

19:36 Dylan: Tons of that make clear sense to me. I'm trying to figure out what the addition of. And maybe it's just pointing out that these things are in the middle by calling them hybrids and stuff like that. We're very comfortable in our modern world talking about something like the economy and talking about how it affects us and talking about how oversimplified notions of the economy and how it works lead to mistakes about how we make economic policy. For instance, I guess I'm trying to understand why climate change and the ozone layer or pollution or other things aren't just simply the mistakes of intellect or maybe that's all that we're saying there and maybe Latour is trying to diagnose that's a kind of conceit or set of blinders that go on when you're trying to.

20:27 Linda: Yeah, that's exactly it.

20:29 Dylan: It's not clear to me why the answer to that isn't just the same answer that you have in figuring things out in general is that you realize, oh, you made a mistake. So you have to. You bring exactly the same thinking to bear on the problem, but have it enlarged that you realize, oh crap, that was really dumb of me. But it's made more complicated by societies and politics and stuff like that. But I don't see how there's anything different about the problem. I don't see how it changes by thinking about these hybrids. It seems like the same kind of problem. I just realized I have a new problem and I have a political problem to face. And I have a big argument going on back and forth between people who have different vested interests.

21:09 Mark: Let me just cast it in a slightly different light that we just covered Descartes, who we credited with coming up with the idea, the scientific idea, that you should quantify everything. And you could see Latour as identifying this trend toward insisting on the objectivity of nature as one and the same, as the idea that any legitimate thought involves this sort of quantification. And you can analyze this whole scientific approach and say, look at all these political effects that it inevitably has because you're engaging in quantification, because you're engaging in objectification, that inevitably things are ignored and you have these terrible byproducts.

Whereas I think you were just saying, Dylan, it's like saying, oh, you're doing economic theorizing. And as soon as you do economic theorizing, you're ignoring the happiness of people or whatever it is that's left out of the quantification of happiness through economics. But, well, what an actual economist will respond to that is say, yes, you're right, we need to make our economics more complex. The enemy is not economic thinking. The enemy is not quantification. The enemy is not objectification insistence that the natural world is distinct from the social world.

It's that we're not doing it with sufficient subtlety to keep us from making mistakes. So it seems, as you just said, Dylan, that the response from the scientific perspective is more science, better science, not there's something fundamentally wrong with the way that modernity and enlightenment has characterized what science is. And so we need to somehow not just reject it and be anti modern, but through a dialectical process, enter some third new way of looking, looking at things that avoids the fundamental problems of objectification.

22:51 Linda: We're kind of moving into what Latour says is the solution now, right? Like what he's proposing to do as a remedy, sections 5.1, 5.2, etc. And on page 135 toward the bottom, I would say that we get a good suggestion there of why he thinks that we can't just solve the problem with the same kind of thinking that created it. And he's got a sentence right there at the bottom of the page that says, is it Possible, Actually the whole paragraph, he says, is it possible to draw up a constitution that allow us to recognize this work? And that's the work of hybridization.

Officially we must do this, since old style modernization can no longer absorb either other peoples or nature. Such at least is the conviction on which this essay is based. For its own good, the modern world can no longer extend itself without becoming once again what it has never ceased to be in practice, that is a non modern world. Like all the others. This fraternity is essential if we are to absorb the two sets of entities that revolutionary modernization left behind. The natural crowds that we no longer master, the human multitudes that no one dominates any longer.

And I think if you take a look at those two things, the natural crowds that we no longer master, the human multitudes that no one dominates any longer. And if you look at sort of the condition of our political discourse on the Internet, right? So if you look at 4chan, right, and trolling and doxxing and digital gaslighting and all of these very sort of material abusive effects that happen on the Internet, you can see these two things coming together, right? This group of people that feels unrepresented and these proliferating non moderns, right?

These Internet networks, these social media artifacts, these images, these texts that fly around the world and lodge in people's consciousness one way or another. And we're in this very sort of toxic political discourse because these crowds of people that no one can seem to control and these crowds of technologies that no one can seem to control. And what Latour, I think is saying here, if we keep insisting on treating them from the same constitutional perspective that says, well, the item let's sort the items of nature over here and let's sort the items of culture over here, we are never going to be able to deal with a phenomenon like digital gaslighting, right?

Where an abusive husband leaves his home and turns up the thermostat in his ex wife's house to 110 degrees to make her miserable, right? Like if you. Our laws literally can't deal with that because they're built on this modern constitution that wants to put hard facts of nature over here and social things over here. And digital gaslighting is a hybrid that falls in the middle and is not really a member, a citizen of either of those parts of the old split constitution. I think we can see in literally populism and in the proliferation of like Internet abuse some of these things that Latour is saying we have to cut.

We cannot solve this problem with the same kind of thinking that has led to it. This no man's land of the Internet, where material damage can accrue from immaterial things, right? From natural immaterial things.

25:45 Dylan: I completely agree that we're having a very hard time dealing with those things. What I'm trying to sort through is the difference between there being mistakes in what the sort of problem is with us dealing with them. So first is in this section, one of the things I liked about it was this discussion about modern pre moderns and postmoderns and the what is retained versus what is rejected. So in this table, this is the table for Figure 5 1, he says from the was retained from the moderns are these long networks, which just means these intricate interconnectedness, size of things, experimentation, relative universals, final separation, excuse me, between objective nature and free society. But you reject the separation between nature and society. You reject clandestine practices of mediation. You reject universality and rationality, which to me means you reject a kind of scientism.

26:48 Mark: I think the clandestine ness of the practices of mediation is just that elitism about who is allowed to do the experiments. Is that what that, you know, the

26:57 Linda: mediation, it's the repression of the hybrids.

27:00 Mark: Just again, because I was again thinking just mediation as the scientist speaking for the inanimate air pump or whatever, like we were talking about with the Boyle example. I think that's one of them. But what is another example of a hybrid as a mediation that then we are somehow denying the existence of through our current ideology?

27:20 Linda: Mediation is the process that makes hybrids. So mediation is the process of admixing nature and culture. He uses the word translation for it as well. So mediation is the actual process of making an admixture. In the Boyle case, the mediation that Boyle created there was the air pump. So he created the air pump is an admixture of nature and culture. It obviously took a lot of assumptions about the structure of air and a lot of capital and a lot of belief and trust from his fellow scientists to make that air pump and the invisible technicians also that Latour mentioned.

So all of that is the cultural part of it, but it also nature is there too, right in the asphyxiating bird or in the two plates of marble that are being made to stuck together. And in quarks and particles, the nature is there as well. So that air pump is a result of the process of mediation. It is a hybrid that is the result of the process of mediation.

28:11 Mark: So can you apply that to what you were talking about as these Internet based hybrids that you know, if you have a harmful meme or you know, revenge porn or something seems another example of the kind of thing.

28:22 Linda: So this happens all the time in the. Like I study Internet misogyny. It's one of the things I study. This happens all the time. There's a special disavowal of these kinds of practices where the phrase sticks and stones is used. So in other words, doxxing people, death threats on the Internet, these are all presented as simply cultural. Don't get your feelings bent out of shape. Those are just words. They're just words. They can't hurt you. They're denied from having any real natural material effect on the women that they're aimed at. And because of that they fall in a gray space in the law.

Because our law is sort of set up on the modern constitution where you have freedom of speech, right? And that sort of protects culture, artifacts of, of culture. And then we have material consequences over here, people, you know, bleeding real blood and having real bones broken, etc. And there's a set of laws to kind of deal with that part of it and part of this. And this isn't sort of in the legal and political realm, not so much in the specifically scientific practice realm. But remember, the modern constitution covers everything. So this practice of digital gaslighting falls in the gaps between these two sets of laws and therefore can't be addressed by either set of laws.

And so what Latour would say here is this thing is a quasi object and we need a form of. I think he said we need subjects of law. That's part of what he wants in his constitution. We need external truth and subjects of law. I think it's on the previous page there he says on page 134. This is precisely the amalgam I'm looking for to retain the production of a nature and of a society that allow changes in size through the creation of an external truth and a subject of law without neglecting the co production of sciences and societies. So digital gaslighting is a quasi object that sort of falls in the gap right now.

And what we need is a set of laws and an external notion of truth that will allow us to grasp a hold of that hybrid and adjudicate it. And right now we can't. We keep saying that the material world and the cultural world are fundamentally can't touch each other or incompatible in some way.

30:13 Mark: Right. We had a free speech episode not that long ago that was getting on some of the same difference of opinion that sort of the paradigm for free Speech here is, as you said, there is a kind of the realm of ideas, and that should be absolutely free. And it's only when you go beyond that. I mean, we recognize that certain kinds of speech, an overt threat that crosses a line. You're no longer engaging in the world of ideas. You are stepping out of that and entering the physical realm. Even if you haven't done anything physically yet, it just has to do with how you interpret what the particular speech act is.

So the challenge to that just might be that that division is sort of problematic, that there is not a clear line between freely expressing ideas and taking an action that is beyond the realm of ideas. You'd think it can't be just when somebody gets mad. There's lots of legitimate intellectual argumentation where people get mad. So the traditional position would just be, yeah, okay, so there's a little fuzzy gray area in there, and we're not sure quite what to do with it. And we just might have to make decisions on how to police it relative to a given forum.

But Latour's response to that would be all action, all speech is action, or something like that. Right? All speech is engaging is a hybrid of some sort.

31:28 Linda: And yeah, that's true. So we might just be able to shift the boundaries. I have a feeling if that were. If that easy, we would have done it. So there is a way in which certain kinds of beings keep falling in the gaps here. Women, people of color, non humans, keep traditionally just falling in the gaps between this split. I think that's disturbing. Latour is mostly focused on non humans here. He doesn't focus so much on race and class and gender. He says explicitly elsewhere that it's because he thinks we have lots of great theoretical apparatus that lets us focus on those things. And he thinks we don't have a lot of great ways of talking about non humans. But, you know, that makes me a little suspicious that the modern Constitution is not working to address some of the hybrids of identity and reality that exist out there for people.

32:12 Seth: There's a point where he does associate modernity or the modern constitution with the west in a kind of metaphorical, but also in a real sense, the objectification, the distinction between subject and object, the way the Western culture has practiced it has objectified within Western culture those groups you talked about, Linda. But also outside in the Orient, entire blanket portions of the globe. And if you think about the mechanism of labor became too expensive or natural resources were exhausted in this particular place. So we go to another part of the world and for us, it becomes the silk region or the spice region or what have you.

And we move production of goods from one place to another because labor costs are reduced. That whole mechanism is not enacting all of the benefits. The benefits of the scale and the change that's made possible by the modern constitution are not evenly distributed in that sense. So in some respect, to answer Dylan's question from earlier about, like, why, why don't we just acknowledge we made a mistake and still try to operate from within the same framework? It's because that framework itself does not enable, I guess you could say, equality of perspective, that there's colonialism and exploitation and genocide and these sorts of things are all.

They all go along with the movement of creating more and more purified subjectivity and objectivity. And so we don't want to use that same mechanism because we'll be unable to escape creating objects out of some portion of society. Like, it's almost like the modern constitution doesn't provide a mechanism for acknowledgment or equality of perspective from all the participants. Which circles us back to the whole original talk about Hobbes and Boyle, right? Where Hobbes says, this is always going to be problematic because it doesn't acknowledge a kind of universal subjectivity.

There are going to be people left out in the way that this process unfolds, right?

34:16 Linda: So whether it's by accident or by design, when things were split into nature, culture, subject, object, certain groups of people got put on the nature side and on the object side and were thus kind of ripe for domination and objectification. And whether that's a necessary part of the modern constitution, I don't know, but it happened. And I think Latour is concerned about our ability, like Seth said, to fix the that situation without changing the way that we talk and think about hybrids and about the process of creating hybrids by creating the separation between nature and culture.

34:49 Mark: So I feel like we could recast this in Kuhnian terms. Latour has a section on the invincibility of modernity. Basically, if you try to make an argument against modernity, they're always going to have a response. And I've been trying to give some of this. I think that's what Dylan means by, no, it's a mistake. There's nothing wrong with modernity. We just made a mistake. That's to retain the modern paradigm in Kuhn's sense. Or you could say these mistakes are too systematic, they're too consistent. There must be something about the Constitution itself, about the whole point of view of modernity that we need to get over the logic of the situation does not insist that you throw off the paradigm or that you just keep persevering within the paradigm and try to fix your mistakes with the same basic approach.

35:37 Dylan: There's a way in which Latour's solution does amount to tweaking modernity in that table that I said. And if you go through that section on the final examination, you know, he goes through these categories of modern, pre modern and postmodern. And he says, what are we going to retain from the moderns? Everything apart from exclusive confidence in the upper half of their constitution that is in nature, I guess, or the purification,

36:03 Mark: the separation of nature from.

36:05 Dylan: Yeah. So I mean, if you look through it, basically, I don't think he would want to put it this way, but I could read it as he just wants to revise modernity and he wants to revise some of the attitudes about modernity that are the most problematic in terms of its. These aren't exactly words, but in terms of its narcissism and its scientism to make it more palatable and open to the aspects that understand that the way in which we talk about nature also affects society.

36:36 Linda: Yeah. And we should be able to do it. Right. Because it's prospective. This is prospective because we've never actually been modern, he argues, right. Like we said, this is what we wanted to do, but we never actually succeeded in purifying nature from culture. So, like, the Constitution has failed, essentially. It was a good idea, but it didn't work. So we have a chance to write a new Constitution. That's sort of the argument.

36:56 Seth: When I read this part, what I was put in mind of is I remembered back to our episode where we talked to Russ Roberts of Econ Talk. And, you know, I felt like he's a wicked rhetorician of his own in his own right. So we were never able to pin him down and say that something was actually wrong with free markets and capitalism. Right. It was always, ah, it's an application, it's an operational problem. Like, oh, well, you know, the laws are corrupting the movement of the free market. If we had a truly free market market. And when you look and it's like all the evidence points to the fact that corruption is inherent into the process and that the exploitation of this and the objectification of nature and the, you know, the destruction of resources and the problem of the commons, you have to kind of step back at some point and say, like, okay, maybe this thing is actually broken.

Maybe it's not reformable and redeemable because we don't seem to be able to set up an ideal laboratory or an ideal set of conditions that allow it to flourish without all of the bad things that happen. And I felt like Latour was saying, well yeah, no, I would really like all the good things about modernity. But he also says I want all the good things about pre modernity. Also, he doesn't want anything from the postmoderns. Right. Or is that the one that he doesn't want anti modern? Right. He doesn't want any milquetoasty not take a stand things like it's okay to have bad things as long as you have good things.

And he just wants to keep all the good things. But I understand that he's pointing to something. I don't know that I understand what his solution is actually supposed to be, but I do, like with many of the critiques of modernity and the Enlightenment and so forth that I'm sympathetic to. This gave me another vocabulary to amp up my bumper sticker campaigns against capitalism or what have you.

38:35 Linda: I don't know if we're allowed to do this, but we could read the Non Modern Constitution. It's in a section we didn't quite get to in our reading. It's in section 5.4 if you have a quote.

38:43 Mark: Yeah. Pull it out. Sure.

38:44 Linda: So it's on page 141. It's figure 5.2. The non modern constitution. First, guarantee non separability of the common production of societies and natures. Second, guarantee continuous following of the production of nature which is objective and the production of society which is free. In the last analysis, there is indeed a transcendence of nature and an immanence of society, but the two are not separated. Third, guarantee freedom is redefined as a capacity to sort the combinations of hybrids that no longer depend on a homogeneous temporal flow. Fourth, guarantee the production of hybrids by becoming explicit and collective becomes the object of an enlarged democracy that regulates or slows down its cadence.

In a nutshell, I think what he wants is us to start. He says this elsewhere in a different book. He wants us to start taking care of our monsters. So we create these hybrids through our the Modernist constitution. And instead of ignoring them, repressing them or just letting them pile, he wants us to attend to their birth and care for them throughout their lifespan. So to stay with the trouble is another way of putting it. That's from Donna Haraway. To Stay with the trouble. He uses a really great example earlier in this book of pre Modern societies that don't proliferate hybrids because they're very careful about the introduction of hybrids.

They're very deliberate and very careful in their introduction of new technologies, new admixtures of nature and culture. They're very deliberate and careful about that. And so they just don't proliferate as many of them as modern cultures do. And I remember when I read that the first time in this book, I had just gotten back from West Africa and I spent some time in a small village there. And the folks there, their word for airplane is, which means big bird. And they don't literally think an airplane is a bird, they know the difference. But what that sort of signifies is it needs to fit in the system of things that already work for them, the ecosystem they already have.

So this thing should behave like a bird, right? It should perch somewhere, it should not spew noxious gases into the world, it should not consume more than birds consume. So what comes with that is a whole, that hybrid itself comes with an admittedly hopeful constitution of what that hybrid, how that hybrid should interact with all the other collective that's already in place. Like it should fit in certain point in the collective. And if you take that attitude toward hybrids, then you really slow down their creation. And that's what he's calling for in the last part of this non modern constitution is just a slowing down of the proliferation of hybrids because we attend to their creation and we take care of them throughout their lifespan.

41:21 Mark: The biggest blockage for me in understanding this text is this mixing together of ideational constitution and physical causation that just talking about hybrids, we were saying when we were talking about quarks, that the idea of a quark, it's the mixture of the contribution of the in itself the data, as Wes was saying, with a bunch of contingent historical circumstances that led us to develop these particular tools of detecting quarks and coming up with the concept in that particular way. That's a mode of constitution between the objective and the subjective, you might say, or between the social and the natural.

And then there's the oh, these hybrids are things that are generated causally, you know, they're technology and they have an effect on society. Like that's a completely different kind of causality. And so a completely different kind of hybrid as far as I'm concerned. And by talking about them consistently as one sort of thing, this just makes it so, like you've just lost me. I don't understand when you say we need to have the non separability of the common production of societies and natures, when you could be talking about the material hybrids or you could be talking about ideational hybrids.

I just haven't gotten to the point where I can see those as the same thing. And so I need a separate essay or reread some of this again. Just like, how are these supposed to be the same?

42:41 Linda: Yeah, that one's called Aramis, or the Love of Technology. So you can read that one right after you get through cuddling this one close to your chest. But yeah, Latour thinks that both ideas and material things are hybrids. He does mix those two things together. Like ideas are things, things, words are things. When he talks about actor network theory, they are all the products of force and resistance and alliance. So, yeah, they are all kind of mixed together. There's not a separation between ideas and things because there's not a separation between culture and nature. Right. For him, or subject or object, these things are all quasi objects. So, yeah, those comfortable modern distinctions, he's trying to think around those or through them to get it a different way of seeing the. These admixtures. I cannot remove your discomfort with that part. They are all mixed up.

43:27 Mark: Any other sort of either thoughts or issues that maybe we need a little back and forth still about?

43:33 Dylan: I found it interesting and I liked doing this particular podcast a lot because I've just been thinking about it a lot while we're talking. So it was very helpful and fun to have Linda on the who just knows more about Latour and was able to bring some more of that context in it. So I really appreciate you being on. I find myself, maybe I'm a quasi philosopher in this respect that I find again, the polls and a lot of the diagnosis very provocative and interesting. And I find myself wanting to keep the mixture aspect of it together. And maybe part of what I'm resistant to is understanding how in some ways part of the articulation of the mixture as its own thing smooths out the mixture.

To me, it loses some of that tension that was there before, which is one of the reasons why immediately talking about hybrids rather than talking about the context involved between. And the tensions involved explicitly between society and nature, and expanding how we talk about the natural world and. And recognizing the context of the entities that we're talking about all of those things, it begins to lose something for me in the messiness of it. And maybe that's probably what I'm reacting to is in some of that revision of the naming is it becomes thinner rather than thicker for me.

45:04 Linda: You're exactly right. It becomes so thin that elsewhere Latour will describe it as two dimensional or flat. Part of the problem is we've been talking about hybrids as mixtures of nature and culture, thus just reverting to the modern constitution. Is describing them really? Hybrids are just hybrids. They are beings. They are what they are. Right. And we try to figure out which part of them is the nature and which part of them is the culture. But we're already purifying them. When we do that, what really helps instead, at least in sort of Latour's world to think about them is there isn't nature and culture.

There are just actors. And these actors are different kinds of beings. Some of them are non human beings, some of them are human beings, some are textual beings, some are images, some. Some are ideas, some are dollar bills, some are political networks. And these all form collectives. You have actors that are all in collectives and they mix all up and down the scale of being, these collectives. And then the goal of the analyst is to try to study where they go and what they do, these collectives, without resorting to the comfortable territory of saying, oh, well, of course, nature is making you do that.

Or of course, society is the explanation for everything. So instead of popping up to that transcendental level where you try to explain the patterns you're finding, you try to stay flat and just follow the articulations and associations among these actors and see where they go. So this book here, we've never been modern, is the manifesto for a whole. This is not his method. Right. This is just the sort of manifesto for what this will turn into, which is actor network theory, and that is insisting on holding everything flat as associations of actors in a collective, rather than resorting to a naturalist or sociological explanation for the patterns that you're finding.

46:40 Mark: So, Seth, is this the gold that you've been looking for and being able to articulate your get the logic bros off my lawn sort of sentiment that seems like you want to express?

46:50 Seth: My problem is I need to be on the street. I need to be an activist, and that I'm wrapped up in musings and theory and I just need to throw the books away and get out there and mobilize people to vote. But I feel strongly. So first off, let me say that I first met Linda like a million and a half years ago. Well, no, no, that would date her.

47:10 Linda: Speak for yourself.

47:10 Seth: Yeah, sorry, sorry, sorry. When I was younger in grad school, and she's one of my favorite people, and I was so happy to See her and so happy to have her on. So thank you, Linda, for being here. But I feel strongly. I'm very anti enlightenment. I'm very anti humanism, because I see the flip side of that coin. You know, starting off thinking not just about, you know, the violence of objectivity or whatever, but I think about the reality of the world wars in 20th century. I think about the Holocaust. I think about existentialism as a reaction to some of those things that were happening.

And this attempt to reform and revise the subject and to redeem it. We go through colonialism. I just finished a book. I just read two books. One called Fantasyland. So something like how the United States Lost Its Way or something about that. But it's basically about how Americans are magical thinkers. We have all these weird religious sects, and there's a license to basically make up your own facts and create your own factual reality. It's like Latour's diagnosis in some way helped very much illuminate this book about why it's okay for religious extremists in the United States to believe some of the things that they do and make it okay for them to have actual political ramifications for that.

And I just finished reading this other book that's like, all the Real Indians Died off, which is about these 20 myths by this woman who wrote the indigenous People's History of the United States. And it's like the narrative of the United States is literally as described by Latour of this. It's not false consciousness. It's not like, oh, we're perfectly pure beings and that we're not lying to ourselves in our national narrative about what the United States is. It's explicit in everything that we did that we were like, no, we need to kill all these people so we can take their land.

I see this, and I just think. I think the first stage for me was getting outside of the narrative of Western modernity and specifically an American modernity that says that, you know, we have this path of progress. Time is about progress. History is progress. And then the second part is they say, okay, now that I'm out of that. I recognize that the violence and all of the terrible things that happen are not a redeemable part of this because we made a mistake or because we could have acted differently. It's structurally part of it. Now, what to do about that?

I don't know. I just think Latour gives me a very. He steps outside of the traditional narrative and situates pre modern, modern, postmodern, all these things in a way that I think allows you to kind of step outside of the dialectic between those things and think about them as part of a bigger issue. But it helps illuminate a lot of things that I've just been stuck in recently.

49:46 Mark: Wes, did you find anything valuable out of this or in, you know, the way Seth is describing how it's inspiring him, or. Or you remain kind of befuddled as your sort of closing verdict on this.

49:58 Wes: Put me down for the opposite of everything Seth just said. Sorry, Seth.

50:05 Seth: No, no, no. I quite expected you to say something like, I'm a naive idiot.

50:09 Wes: No, no, it's not about naivete. It's about differing political proclivities. But I guess I. Unfortunately, I've been sick, so maybe if I had had more, could have put more effort into trying to get to the bottom of it. But I was turned off by what I saw as the vagueness and imprecision, and I didn't get beyond that.

50:31 Mark: Yeah, I don't know if it would have helped for us to read the relativism and the postmodernism sections because he's so anti the traditional third way, I would think, like the postmodernism. It's just that we haven't read enough postmodernism for me to feel like us reading him railing advanced postmodernism. And the specifics of what Derrida had to say or Lyotard would be particularly helpful. So I think in what we read, it's very easy for me at least to say, oh, yeah, he's a strong social constructionist. I really don't see the difference between.

Even though he claims otherwise, you know, he seems to fall into the same category of Rortyans or, you know, people that good, sensible analytic philosophers object to. So. So without sort of diving further down this rabbit hole and getting at the particulars, I don't know if I can distinguish the various strands of continental thought from each other. I look forward to reading more stuff in the 20th century. Neck of the woods here, you know, if not actually more Latour, then at least, you know, let's actually read some Derrida and see if this applies to it.

Read some Habermas in particular. That's been suggested a lot.

51:38 Dylan: So this is very different than either of those.

51:41 Mark: Yeah, yeah, totally.

51:43 Linda: Well, thanks for having me on, you guys. I absolutely love talking to you and I have such a great time every time I visit with you and I learn a lot, so I really appreciate it.

51:51 Mark: Well, thank you, Linda. Thanks, listeners. Folks can go to again, partiallyexaminedlife.com the blog post corresponding to this episode. Why don't you just respond to that post? Tell us what you thought of this, what else we should read in this area. You know that this was all a bunch of nonsense. Whatever you want to say or do the same thing on Facebook or don't start big things on Twitter. Come on.

52:11 Seth: You can just say whether you're team Seth or Team Wes. That's what.

52:15 Wes: There you go.

52:15 Mark: That's a good Twitter hashtag. TeamSeth, TeamWest. That's what the paradigm has reduced us to of Twitter.

52:24 Seth: Do you feel more like a vampire or a werewolf?

52:28 Wes: Werewolf, definitely.

52:29 Seth: Okay, then I'll be the vampire.

52:31 Wes: All right.

52:32 Mark: Today's closing song is called Mono no Aware. It is by Guy Sigsworth, who is a longtime producer and songwriter for folks like Seal, Bjork, Alanis Morissette, even Madonna and Britney Spears. I talked to him about this song on Nakedly examined music, episode 109, about how it's a dialogue between two motifs. So I thought this was properly symbolic for science versus culture. But you decide. Check it out at nakedly examinemusic.com all right, good night, everybody.

53:01 Seth: Good night.

53:01 Wes: Good night. Good night.

53:02 Linda: Thanks, Sam. Sa. Sa. Sat.