ABSTRACT
In We Have Never Been Modern, Bruno Latour (1995: 48) suggests we stop thinking about modernity in art, science and politics as ‘the stuff of saga, a vast saga of radical rupture, fatal destiny, irreversible good or bad fortune.’ His contention is that the narrating of the modern as a series of grand ‘ruptures’ arises out of the Western tendency to think in terms of ‘dualisms,’ especially those that differentiate culture from nature, human from the nonhuman, and present from the past. For Latour, Western modern thought is saturated with the desire for ‘purity’; in its place, he would have us think about ‘hybrids’ and the ‘non-modernity’ (rather than ‘post-modernity’) of much of our culture. Yet Latour’s attempt to puncture the self-confidence of the ‘modernity rhetoric’ raises its own set of problems: do we become free of ‘modernity ideology’ simply by pointing out that modernity has never existed in the idealized forms of the ideologues? And, in any case, how do narratives concerning modernity as time (modernity as the ‘new,’ the break with ‘tradition,’ etc.) come to be infused with notions of, as Latour puts it, ‘fatal destiny,’ ‘irreversible good or bad fortune’? In Modernity and Ambivalence, Bauman (1991) poses the same set of
questions somewhat differently:
How old is modernity? This is a contentious question. There is no agreement on dating. There is no consensus on what is to be dated. And once the effort of dating starts in earnest, the object itself begins to disappear. Modernity, like all other quasi-totalities we want to prise off from the continuous flow of being, becomes elusive, we discover that the concept is fraught with ambiguity, while its referent is opaque at the core and frayed at the edges.
