Jim Hicks

English Department
University of Massachusetts, Boston
hicks@umbsky.cc.umb.edu

 

Latour, Bruno. We Have Never Been Modern. Trans. Catherine Porter. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1993.

 

Illich, Ivan. In the Vineyard of the Text. A Commentary to Hugh’s Didascalicon. Chicago: U. of Chicago, 1993.

 

In his 1985 recension of the debate on postmodernism, Gianni Vattimo suggests that the arguments of each then major figure (Lyotard, Habermas, Rorty) are determined (and undermined) by an illegimate appeal to “the state of things”–some version or other of the postmodern present (Vattimo 105). Whether or not metanarratives have been invalidated, whether the project of modernism is down but not yet out, and whether or not philosophy has lost its role as the unifier and arbiter of knowledge, the question is in some sense the same: where are we now and where do we go from here? Although Vattimo’s own attempt to respond to such questions (which suggests “piety,” “weakness,” and “mourning” as key elements to a truly pomo stance) seems either intentionally perverse or downright funny, his reminder that “condition,” “project,” and “consensus” are each present-tense nouns remains a good place to begin, even in a now much-widened debate. Two recent books which should be of particular interest to readers of Postmodern Culture deliver additional stories about the state of things at present. Clearly not your common or garden variety contributions to this field, both works suggest that the present and future of Western civilization ought to be found in recalling our premodern past.

 

As an intervention into the contemporary critical fray, the book by Bruno Latour is the more direct. His title, We Have Never Been Modern, would seem to suggest his basic rhetorical strategy: “Stop all the bickering, whining and posturing . . . modernism, postmodernism, modernity, it never happened, it’s all a joke, it never happened.” Such an unfriendly tone, such an obvious attempt to grab the spotlight (and to foreclose the careers of so many, in so many fields), coming from someone other than a sociologist and historian of technoscience, from someone less beloved by those postmodern critics who have already made his acquaintance, from someone who wasn’t speaking, after all, in the name of Science, would no doubt cause only a ripple, passing through the critical pool as an instant of uncomfortable silence, a few heavy, disturbing seconds before the subject is changed. But when Science talks, people listen. When Science talks, we wait for an explanation.

 

It is, of course, precisely such expectations in regard to science that Bruno Latour has long opposed. In a marvelous series of books, including Laboratory Life (with Steven Woolgar, 1979), Science in Action (1987) and The Pasteurization of France (1988), Latour argues that neither science nor society can be studied in isolation, that both are determined by means of the complex web of translations which join them together. Thus, science, when it does speak, is heard only by subscribers to its network: a favorite analogy of Latour’s is to the termite, whose existence is impossible outside of its tunnels. We Have Never Been Modern is explicitly a work which elaborates such translations (between “the emerging field of science studies” and “the literate public” [ix]), thus marking at most a new deviation in his work. Latour justifies this turn, in part, by telling a story about the present.

 

That story begins with Latour himself, engaging in the act which he characterizes as “modern man’s form of prayer” (2), i.e. reading our daily paper. The stories that he finds there are familiar: the ozone hole, Professor Gallo’s laboratory, frozen embryos, and others. (If Latour had picked up an American paper, he might have pointed to stories about big business, condoms, guns and bible studies in our public schools, animal rights, pornography and sexual harassment, etc.) Diverse as they are, such stories have in common the manner in which they knot together nature and culture:

 

A single thread links the most esoteric sciences and the most sordid politics, the most distant sky and some factory in the Lyon suburbs, dangers on a global scale and the impending local elections . . . . The horizons, the stakes, the time frames, the actors–none of these is commensurable, yet there they are, caught up in the same story. (1)

 

Not that there’s anything wrong with such stories; on the contrary, according to Latour the imbroglio’s the thing. As he tells it, such “hybrid articles” are the best evidence of where we are–of the current crisis.

 

Implicated in this crisis is, among other things, the most essential characteristic of modernity: that critical stance which divides and conquers hybrids, purifying them of their monstrous quality through disciplinary ghettoization. Given the chance, “the analysts, thinkers, journalists and decision-makers will slice the delicate network . . . into tidy compartments where you will find only science, only economy, only social phenomena, only local news, only sentiment, only sex . . . . By all means, they seem to say, let us not mix up knowledge, interest, justice and power” (3). Hybrids themselves are nothing new; Latour credits premodern cultures with the rigorous, even obsessive, thinking through of hybrids (a focus, he suggests, which explains why their production in such cultures is limited successfully). On the other hand, the will to purify–which of course cannot operate or develop without a constant fresh supply of hybrids–is for Latour the mark of the moderns; their most fundamental purification is the dichotomy between nature and culture. This separation, a refusal to acknowledge networks of mediation, both creates new hybrid objects and makes them available for purification. (Latour’s key example, borrowed from Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, is Boyle’s air pump; the first “nonhuman witness” in modern science’s “theater of proof,” the air pump is for Latour “the hero of the story” which created a new experimental community–one independent of both God and the Republic–at the time of the Emglish civil wars.) The nature/culture dichotomy also allows a modern to believe that the production of new hybrids, because they belong to the natural order, is without consequence for that of society–a dream from which to be modern is never to wake up.

 

Once again, it would seem that the tone of Latour’s title, as well as that of his book, is clear. “Reason has been sleeping, and breeding monsters, for three or four centuries now. Wake up! Wake up!” The author himself assures us otherwise:

 

There is no false consciousness involved, since the moderns are quite explicit about the two tasks [of purification and hybridization]. . . . The only thing I add is the relation between those different sets of practices. (40)

 

To do otherwise, Latour is well aware, would be to participate in the logic of accusation, denunciation and revolution–discourses that are familiar by now, and extremely productive, but also quintessentially modern. Instead, he proposes that we investigate the modern period with an anthropologist’s eye, to write about ourselves with the ethnographic habit of “dealing calmly with the seamless fabric of . . . ‘nature-culture'” (7). Latour notes that “in works produced by anthropologists abroad, you will not find a single trait that is not simultaneously real, social and narrated” (7). Again it is the present state of affairs that enables this writerly position, this anthropology of the modern; modernism has become a “victim of its own success” (49), saturated by the hybrids that it has caused to proliferate.

 

Such an anthropology, Latour argues, would elaborate rather than anatomize relations between nonhumans and humans, between people, words and things. To be collected, sorted and followed rather than ghettoized and covered, the world would be seen as populated with “quasi-objects” and “quasi-subjects,” the former as well as the latter viewed as actants in the networks of nature-culture. On the one hand, since nature and culture are not now, and never have been, separate, we have “never been modern” (at least not in the way the moderns would have it). But on the other hand, we must still learn to stop being modern, i.e. to stop trying to be, since “we have never really begun to enter the modern era” (47). In the place of such efforts is a new form of democracy, or perhaps its only real form, a “nonmodern Constitution” in which “we have committed ourselves to providing representation for quasi-objects” (139). Nonmodern, Latour makes very clear, has nothing to do with the antimoderns:

 

Always on the defensive, they consistently believed what the moderns said about themselves and proceeded to affix the opposite sign to each declaration. . . . The values they defended were never anything but the residue left by their enemies. (134)

 

Indeed, when, in concluding, Latour sketches out such a Constitution, premoderns, moderns, and postmoderns all contribute–only the antimoderns get left out. This section, the most praiseworthy (but also the most hurried) in this short, dense book, will likely be elaborated in response to the polemics Latour’s essay will assuredly incite.

 

In my attempt to present somewhat carefully both the premises and the conclusions of We Have Never Been Modern, what has been left out is most of its contents. Awaiting its readers, in addition, are an explanation of modern productivity, a sorting through of continental philosophy from Hobbes to Habermas and Lyotard, a defense of “relative relativism” vis-a-vis nature-cultures, and a salutation of co-travelers as diverse as Michel Serres, Charles Peguy, and Donna Haraway. I should also add a warning-label for the disciplinarily over-identified: Latour reserves some of his best barbs–full of language that sounds nothing if not denunciatory–for postmodern theorists; he considers postmodernism “a symptom, not a fresh solution” (46), one which mistakenly takes the moderns at their word, and is characterized at best by “intellectual immobility” (61). But equally important, and nearly as numerous, are the occasions on which Latour attributes positive effects to postmodern practice (a practice to which, I imagine, some have even accused him of contributing).

 

In any case, the real strength of Latour’s analysis in this book, and a substantially new elaboration of his thought (also see, however, Irreductions), is his emphasis on the determining, as opposed to determined, nature of the object during the modern period–particularly his demonstration of the hybrid character of that object. Latour’s analysis also displays the vices of its virtues; on occasion he retains the metalanguage of modern science as a ground for his investigations (e.g., “[modernity] is much more than an illusion and much less than an essence. It is a force . . .” [40]). A thinker such as Latour, who in Science in Action gives a powerful display of the network which connects the military-industrial complex to life in the laboratory, must at times feel constrained by that language which links science, war and the movement of capital. Outside of science studies–i.e. through the door to women’s studies and transnational studies that Donna Haraway, Ashis Nandy, and others have wedged open, there is of course a myriad of other documentation of the effects of modernist hybridization. It may be that both the angels in the house and the barbarians at the gate (i.e., humans seen as nonhumans) have other words to add to the nonmodern Constitution, representations that they will provide themselves, given a place at the table. Having read Latour, and finding ourselves somewhat less reverent before the glow of modern technoscience, we may finally be ready to tune in.

 

It would also be possible, although parochial, to fault Latour for beginning his analysis of the moderns with Boyle and Hobbes, thus granting them too quickly that forefather status which is already an old story within the annals of modernism. Having never been modern, the West would be better revealed by focusing on a period where it didn’t believe that it was. The second book under review here, an extended essay by the medieval historian, contemporary social critic, and all-around visionary Ivan Illich, does just that, with a twist. Illich offers a meditation on the history of the book, conceived as an investigation into the symbolic gathering that shapes both reading practices and textual technologies. The twist is that he does so as an intervention into the current push toward computer literacy. The specific object of his analysis is Hugh of St. Victor’s Didascalicon (c. 1128), a work which Illich calls “the first book written on the art of reading” (5). Directed at what Illich sees as a watershed moment for Western thought, the shift from a culture of the book to that of the information-based “bookish text,” his commentary is also rich in insight into that historical moment. Illich offers this meditation “in the hope that the transition from monastic to scholastic reading may . . . throw some light on a very different transition now” (4).

 

An earlier book by Illich, Shadow Work, also contains an essay on Hugh–entitled “Research by People” (76-95). There Illich argues that Hugh provides a historical precedent for an alternative to “research for people” (i.e. “R & D . . . conducted by large institutions–governments, industry, universities, clinics, the military, foundations” [77]). Unlike Bacon (a key precedessor of “research for people”), Hugh envisions science as a remedy for our fallen nature, not as a means to subjugate Nature; Hugh also includes the mechanical arts within his understanding of science, thus in some measure making him a precursor to the technoscience studies of Latour. Illich’s commentary on the Didascalicon, by focusing on the text as “object par excellence” (116), also parallels that of Latour; both in fact demonstrate that “by centering our analysis on the object we turn this object into a mirror reflecting significant transformations in the mental shape of western societies” (Vineyard, 5).

 

One of the most fascinating aspects of Hugh’s writings as discussed by Illich is the medieval theologian’s concept of the role of memory training in pedagogy. Distinct from its later popularization in the Renaissance, Illich suggests that “Hugh seems to have been the first one to seriously revive classical memory training, and was then the last major figure to propose memory as the sole or principal means of retrieving information” (45). Not merely an eccentric or unusually skilled disciplinarian, Hugh was also unique in his application of such training: the De arca Noe, his memory book for experts, taught the construction of a complex, multicolored, almost monstrous, three-dimensional ark–“a space-time matrix built within the mind of the student and modeled on Noah’s ark” (37). The layout of this “moral and mystical ark,” according to one scholar, would require 220 square feet of paper for a still readable blueprint (37-8). Unlike the classical memory palaces, this mnemonic aid was not simply architectural–its function was to embody historia–and to provide a “mental home” for the student, thus become an intellectual pilgrim. According to Illich, “The Ark stands for a social entity, a process that begins with creation and continues to the end of time, what Hugh calls ‘the Church'” (46-7). In effect, it is a virtual cathedral; for “the construction of cathedrals,” no less than that of Hugh’s Ark, “can be understood as a public creation of a symbolic universe of memoria: the solemnly celebrated reminiscence of historia” (38, n.30). Latour would no doubt note the seamless fabric of nature-culture in such an achievement (as well as the rigorous, almost obsessive, thinking through of hybrids).

 

For Illich, Hugh’s arca also marks a liminal moment in the history of the text. With his construction of a “mental home” for the scholar, Hugh has begun to sever the text from the page, creating, in effect, a treasure chest which is also a floating signifier, a coffin from which the modern concepts of person and text will arise. In his Didascalicon, Hugh also makes evident the tremendous distance between his experience of the book and that form of studium which immediately followed him, created within the sanctuaries of the modern university. Monastic reading was a “strenuous exercise” proscribed for the “frail or infirm” (57), a dictated and mumbled rehearsal of those voces paginarum which commanded each of the interior senses as well: “When Hugh reads, he harvests; he picks the berries from the lines” (57); “For Hugh, . . . the act of reading with the eyes implies an activity not unlike a search for firewood, his eyes must pick out the letters of the alphabet and bundle these into syllables” (58); not merely an activity, for Hugh reading is “a way of life” insofar as recitation both accompanies daily toils and organizes the day according to its various incarnations (59); the book was “swallowed and digested” by Hugh “through the careful attention paid to the psychomotor nerve impulses which accompany the sentences being learned” (60). This sensurround experience of the book passes away along with Hugh, rooted out in the development of a bookish text. As for Illich’s intention in retelling this story, it is difficult not to see an uneven parallel with a comment he makes about Hugh: “At the last moment of the old regime of the book, he proposes the studium legendi as a new ideal, a civic duty, and universal learning as a gratuitous, celebratory, leisurely intercourse with the book” (84). As readers of Illich are aware, he has frequently written on the devastating effects of literacy on those outside the schools; the “threat of computer literacy” (5) is clearly more than a new and improved version of the same (see also Mirror 159-81 and 182-201). On the other hand, it seems to me that if today, “outside the educational system . . .there might be something like houses of reading . . . where the few who discover their passion for a life centered on reading would find the necessary guidance, silence, and complicity of disciplined companionship” (3), subscribers to Postmodern Culture, if anyone, must know where to find them.

 

The story of the development of the bookish text also contains Illich’s principal thesis: that, in the hundred or so years after Hugh’s death, the book as object underwent a fundamental transformation and that “the effect of this reformatting of the page and book on the ethology and semantics of reading and, hence, on thought, was more fundamental than that of print” (114). “The principal effect of the latter invention,” according to Illich, “was to mechanize the procedure by which the twelfth- or thirteenth-century page is still reproduced today” (114). Among these innovations, a “set of about two dozen new graphic conventions” (119), Illich describes the invention of alphabetical indexing, the recording of vernacular tongues alongside of Latin script, the shift towards silent reading and self-penned texts, various changes in layout (which made distinct the various contribution to book-making by author, editor, and critic), and the development of the portable book. Illich makes a strong case against either the technodetermination or the sociodetermination of this “scribal revolution” (116), arguing instead that “an eminently suitable and complex device already available within a society will be turned into a tool only at that historic moment when this task acquires symbolic significance” (72). (That he is here speaking of the circumstances surrounding the emergence, in Latour’s terms, of a new hybrid or nature-culture, is made clear by an earlier gloss on the “symbol”: for Hugh, “a symbol is a collecting of visible forms for the demonstration of invisible things” [32]; citing Gerhart Ladner, Illich emphasizes an opposition between symbols and mere psychoanalytic or cultural “myths.” On the contrary, for Hugh symbols are “facts and events, phenomena in and beyond nature and history” [Ladner, as cited by Illich 32]).

 

The import of this thesis is startling, and worth emphasizing. Applied to the present, it would suggest, for example, that the invention of comic books and Baedekers might well have marked a more fundamental change than, say, that of the Macintosh or cable TV. Like Latour, Illich’s purpose is to deflate easy, and disciplinarily safe, explanations by both constructivists and realists in the writing of history. For those that are familiar with Illich’s other writings, it is this emphasis which makes clear the connection between his work as medieval historian and that as radical social critic. To provoke a perspectival shift, one which challenges the most naturalized assumptions of a given field, is a longstanding, self-described role for his interventions: Ivan Illich, intellectual samurai and heretic for hire (see, for example, his comments in Mirror 10).

 

At the risk of letting this essay devolve from a book review into that most hated of primary school assignments, the book report, I have presented the above material from In the Vineyard of the Text rather directly, without what is perhaps the usual degree of critical intervention. My intention in doing so has been twofold. First, to advance, without unnecessary injury, the seduction of Illich’s endeavor; whereas Latour attempts to dismantle the modern mindset, Illich lures his reader towards another. My second motive, less laudable, was more influential; not born even into the era of the bookish text, not to mention that of the culture of the book, I also wished to conceal my ignorance.

 

I will turn, by way of conclusion, to an important point which my quasi-neutral presentation of Illich’s arguments has enabled me to sidestep. There exists an obvious opposition between the two books which I have thus far presented together: Latour wants to put an end to talk of our radical isolation, to appeals based on our unique difference as moderns; he doesn’t believe in historical revolutions any more than in those of epistemology. Illich, on the other hand, appears to offer just such an appeal; epistemological breaks are part and parcel of his sense of history. In fact, by reading these books together, I suggest my own sense of the present: I/we live in a moment where both positions are relevant (and revealing). If, as both Latour and Illich argue, the present is indeed a moment of crisis, Latour’s sense of possible futures is nearly as important as Illich’s search for precedents in our past. In the end, though, I side with Illich, with that wondrous vocation which has called him to intervene, not just in studies of technology and society, but in the history of education, gender, art history and architecture, policy making, philosophy, and more, always with the intention of shaping the future by “lampoon[ing] the shibboleths of the year” (Mirror 10). In any case, if Latour’s most recent book, and today’s newspapers, are any indication, the future–both ours and Latour’s–may ultimately be found in our premodern past.

 

Works Cited

 

• Illich, Ivan. In the Mirror of the Past. New York: Marion Boyars, 1992.
• —. Shadow Work. Boston: Marion Boyars, 1986.
• —. In the Vineyard of the Text. A Commentary to Hugh’s %Didascalicon%. Chicago: U. of Chicago, 1993.
• Latour, Bruno. The Pasterization of France and Irreductions. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1988.
• —. Science in Action. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1987.
• —. We Have Never Been Modern. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1987.
• Latour, Bruno and Steven Woolgar. Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1986.
• Shapin, Steven and Simon Schaffer. Leviathan and the Air- Pump: Hobbes, Boyle and the Experimental Life. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1985.
• Vattimo, Gianni. “Postmodernita e fine della storia.” Moderno postmoderno. Ed. Giovanni Mari. Milano: