Addressing the contradiction posed by modernity, Latour points out that the coproduction of nature and society has always gone on in modernity and always will, it is just that the modern constitution is blind to this. Latour argues that modernism only pretends to make these separations; in reality it produces lots of nature-culture hybrids. Latour argues that we need to stop looking at modernism as break from the past when in fact because modernity proliferates hybridized forms it has never really been so different from the past. We have never been modern, we have only found a way of thinking that we were. This contradiction shows that the clear lines of a nature/culture dualism are no longer possible. Because of the contemporary state of our society and nature, nothing by itself can be reduced to anything else, but instead only through the mediation of something else. Thanks to a world filled with constructed nature and naturalized social facts, this interaction makes more sense. It becomes more and more difficult to pretend that nature exists on its own with its own rules, while the subject or society is separate. Latour states, “the modern Constitution allows the expanded proliferation of the hybrids whose existence, whose very possibility, it denies” (34). These hybrids are made by the public interaction of people, things and concepts, making the object/subject distinction of modernism inapplicable. As the number of these hybrids grows, it is more difficult to keep nature and society/culture separate. Latour suggests we should instead rethink our distinctions.
Latour argues that in fact “No one has ever been modern” (47). Thus, he introduces a new approach, what is the non-modern. This view addresses the contradiction that modernism poses and “takes simultaneously into account the moderns’ Constitution and the populations of hybrids that that Constitution rejects and allows to proliferate” (47). Latour’s method recognizes the connections between nature and culture and blurs the boundaries of distinction. He proposes that nature and society are no longer explanatory terms, so we must leave behind the purification of the two and instead use something that requires a conjoined explanation (81). Therefore, he introduces the idea of quasi-objects that help us to trace these networks of conjoined explanations. He explains that this explanation starts from quasi-objects, so we cannot use nature and society to explain things but must explain through these quasi objects and networks (95).
While very different arguments and concepts, I was able to make a connection between Latour’s points and some of the ideas in Electronic Monuments by Gregory Ulmer. Ulmer’s book proposes a new way to look at society through commemoration. In an effort to apply his concepts, particularly in how society works as a whole, Ulmer connects the idea of Lacan’s Y and the tree, where the tree was “schematized in the letter Y as the sign of the diverging paths of vice and virtue” (151). Here, Ulmer uses the Y to illustrate how we link things together. He talks about the letter Y as a metaphor for the separation and re-tangling that happens when the concepts come back together. He says that as an idiom it serves as “an assemblage linking together a series of disparate items (indexes) on the basis of the letter and shape “Y”” (158). In his discussion of the Y, he asks what responsibility the community has for choices made at the fork in the why (159). This is how the Y kind of symbolizes a point of convergence. He talks about the Y in terms of a diagram, where it is not a series of branching alternatives but a formless (holistic) tangle of discursive lines (160). He says “in these terms the Y marks not a parting of the ways but a merging (an interdependence)” (160). Also, he uses the Y as a double meaning, also implying ‘why’ to reflect on reasoning. He applies this to his idea of a project MEmorial that does not aim for a whole or a separation of different parts into branches, but instead a look at the tangle of meanings and how they work together.
Overall, the point behind Ulmer’s connection is that instead of working from the bottom up of the ‘Y,’ where we try to separate and delineate things to understand ‘why,’ we should work from the top down, where the ‘why’ comes together by understanding things together. I connected this to Latour’s rejection of distinction and promotion of hybrids. Just like Latour sees things as needing to be looked at through networks of conjoined explanations, Ulmer sees things as existing in a matrix with a tangle of meanings. It is no longer possible to look at something without considering the mediation of something else. In both cases, it makes more sense to look at how things work together instead of trying to keep things clear and separate. The world today is so intertwined and complicated by many things that it is almost impossible to do this anyway. Instead, maybe we should converge at the fork of this Y and see how it all works together through h‘Y’brids!
Ulmer, G. L. (2005). Electronic monuments. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
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