11.21.11 Object Lesson

The idea of networks is important to Latour's point throughout We Have Never been Modern. I recently came across a YouTube video called “Social Networking in Plain English” that does a good job of depicting a network visually.

The example of getting from Chicago to Santa Fe is similar to Latour's example of the railroad. "Is a railroad local or global? Neither. It is local at all points, since you always find sleepers and railroad workers, and you have stations and automatic ticket machines scattered along the way. Yet it is global, since it takes you from Madrid to Berlin or from Brest to Vladivostok. However, it is not universal enough to be able to take you just anywhere." (117). In this same way we have to go to St. Louis and Dallas before we can get to Santa Fe in "Social Networking in Plain English." So the ultimate trip from Chicago to Santa Fe is both local and global. "There are continuous paths that lead from the local to the global, from the circumstantial to the universal, from the contingent to the necessary, only so long as the branch lines are paid for" (Latour 117). The entire trip is  is a continuous pass of local to global paths. One leg of the trip (i.e. Chicago to St. Louis) is local; the entire trip is global. I think it's important that Latour points out that networks are neither global nor local. Aspects of local and global can be applied but just one won't work alone.

Latour continues in his explanation of networks saying, "Between the lines of a network there is, strictly speaking, nothing at all: no train, no telephone, no intake pipe, no television set....They are connected lines, not surfaces" (118). It seems that the lines between components of a network allow for humans and nonhumans to come to terms with one another and to attribute meaning to one another. It may be an opportunity for mediation. As Latour notes "Nothing is, by itself, either reducible or irreducible to anything else. Never by itself, but always through the mediation of another" (113). This mediation explains why humans can't successfully "verify the tiniest fact, the most trivial law, the humblest constant, without subscribing to the multiple metrological networks, to laboratories and instruments" (119). The use of networks allows us to do this. Science doesn't exist in a vacuum. It relies on the connections we made through networks to mean something.

"Social Networking in Plain English" shows that many relationships in networks are hidden and that social networking sites can help in making relationships visible. This seems to be the idea of the Nonmodern Constitution, to make such connections visible. "Social Networking in Plain English" implies that you won't find love or a job if you're unable to see hidden relationships. Social networking sites allow those hidden links to become visible. In the same way Latour's Nonmodern Constitution seems to unveil or make visible the idea of continuity and combinations. It draws importance to mediation and emphasizes avoidance of placing items in containers, disallowing interaction. "The third guarantee...is that we can combine associations freely without ever confronting the choice between archaism and modernization, the local and the global, the cultural and the universal, the natural and the social" (Latour 140).