/lit/ - Literature

>Bruno Latour formulates this in a different way: he sees it as the internal contradiction between two registers: on the one hand what he calls ’purification’,e.g. nature vs culture, subject vs object, and on the other hand what he calls ‘mediation’ or ‘translation’, meaning the production of 'quasi-objects’, or objects that are neither purely natural nor cultural (for example, the hole in the ozone layer). The latter, presented as a hybridisation, are according to Latour in fact nothing but the amplification of purification. Given this contradiction in the constitution of the modern, Latour claims that ‘we have never been modern’, in the sense that the ‘modern’ profoundly separates nature and culture, and embodies the contradiction between domination and emancipation. Although Latour does not characterise the modern in terms of technological unconsciousness, then, he recognizes that the modern refused to conceptualise quasi-objects. A quasi-object is something that is neither merely object nor subject, but a technical mediation between the two— for example (in Michel Serres’s example) a football in the football game which, when the two teams play, ceases to be an object, but transcends such a subject-object division. The refusal to conceptualise quasi-objects means that the concept of technics that functions to separate nature and culture, subject and object, as is the case in the laboratory, is not fully recognised or remains unconscious:

>Moderns do differ from premoderns by this single trait: they refuse to conceptualize quasi-objects as such. In their eyes, hybrids present the horror that must be avoided at all costs by a ceaseless, even maniacal purification...This very refusal leads to the uncontrollable proliferation of a certain type of being: the object, constructor of the social, expelled from the social world, to a transcendent world that is, however, not divine— a world that produces, in contrast, a floating bearer of law and morality.

>Technics remained unconscious, then, and yet this unconsciousness began to produce significant effects in the life of the mind at a certain moment in European history, namely the modern era, and this unconsciousness culminated during the Industrial Revolution. The transformation of this unconscious ness to consciousness characterises the contemporary technological condition. It is a turn, in which one attempts to render technics a part of consciousness, but not consciousness itself (which is why we can understand it as instrumental rationality).