Artificial Modernity

With our technology advances, America probably thinks itself modern.  However, in art and history, the modern era took place somewhere between the 16th and 18th century, and we are now somewhere in the postmodern.  Now Latour seems to define the modern era as a time when we crossed out God and separated Nature and the Social.  It was possible (necessary) to create a network of connections between the two, but not condoned.  He goes on to say that really these separations are synthetic illusions at best--at least as far as I understand him--because nature influences society (hurricanes, earthquakes, and tidal waves have significant impacts on society) and society influences nature (deforestation displaces animals which causes the animals to migrate elsewhere and ultimately come in contact with humans or our wasteful use of earth's natural resources cause toxic gasses that add to the hole in the ozone layer).  Also, the way in which we understand society depends on tests made to nature while rules of nature are created using experiments in socially constructed laboratories --as was the Boyle-Hobbes examples Latour gave.  On top of this, both spheres are simultaneously created and maintained by language which means that a third sphere of language must be created.  However, language cannot be separated from the former two anymore than the former two can be separated from each other.

In this short film, "Gumdrop," a robot goes through an interview for an acting position.  This robot Gumdrop is conceivably a human-made machine, and yet she has the autonomy, intelligence, communication skills, most of the movement capabilities of a human.  She also has preferences and aspirations that give her a human aura.  Given these features and the fact that she has the ability to succeed and/or fail at being an acting robot, the audience could just about ask whether or not Gumdrop should be considered human.  She looks different and she uses wheels to get from place to place instead of legs, but these are the only known characteristics that separates her from most humans.

I suspect that Gumdrop technically fits in the Social sphere, but her ability to interact with humans as humanly as she does comments on the Nature of human intelligence.  Like in Boyle's vacuum experiments, Gumdrop is a socially created "laboratory" for the experiment of human intelligence and socialization.

As Latour says, we cannot completely purify or "untie the Gordian knot" anymore.  Even Alexander could not succeed in such anymore.
Published 11/27 3:41pm

Edit: I forgot to say the most important part!  I think I had worked out in my head to say this when I started this post yesterday, but then.... Anyway.

The modern vs. nonmodern discussion is much like Plato/Socrates' and Gorgias' debate on truth and justice. Plato took the modern approach and claimed that the two truth and lies as well as justice and injustice were separable things while the rhetoricians thought that what made something just and/or true is that a number of people had to agree upon it.  Moderns say that Gumdrop is not human.  Nonmoderns have to agree that she is or is not human.

Symmetry and Time

     In Bruno Latour's We Have Never Been Modern he examines many centuries of great philosophic thought and comes to the conclusion that the loss of symmetry between science, technology and human beings was a a wrong turn in human history. Even history, he says was ruined by the over zealous  application of science. "The modern concept of time, as it is embedded into the discipline of history depends --strangely enough -- on a certain conception of science that suppresses the ins and outs of Nature's objects and presents their sudden emergence as if it was miraculous.' This brought to my mind something I had seen while in the desert in Egypt. The landscape all around was devoid of greenery for as far as I could see. Sand and rock was all that appeared to be there. Yet, near a water point where a water tanker was parked, just under the faucet where spare drops of water landed on the sandy, rocky soil was a miniature garden of green sprouts. I wondered how many years the hidden seeds had waited for that life giving water. What else is hidden by time or history? The great moments in life seem to be the ones where surprising or highly contrasting events bring change to or notice, such as pre and post 9/11, or a death, or a birth.

     "Modern temporality" is based on a "line transformed into an arrow by the brutal separation between what has no history but emerges nevertheless in history -- the things of nature -- and what never leaves history --the labors and passions of humans. The asymmetry between nature and culture then becomes as asymmetry between past and future"( 71).

 In this scene from Harry Potter and the Prisoner from Azkaban, Hermione Granger and Harry Potter use a time turning devise to go back in time to correct wrongs that will save at least two lives.

They will make the past and present symmetrical by being in both at one time. Many themes in the Harry Potter series involve loss through death and the idea that those who are seeming gone are near at hand. Love is what make this all possible which echoes the Christian ideas of love, resurrection and eternal life after death. As Latour says, "...neither Jewish mystics nor Christian theologians have had any inclination whatsoever for the modern Constitution. They have constructed their regime of time around Presence (that is, the presence of God), and not around the emergence of the vacuum, or DNA, or microchips, or automated factories...(71).

 People who meditate sometimes say they have the feeling they are out of their own bodies. People sometimes find themselves briefly in scenes from the past or see visions of future events. No doubt they are, for the briefest moments in the symmetrical experience of past and present. How it happens or why I don't understand.

The Latourian Nonhuman and the Unreliable Witness

In "We Have Never Been Modern" Latour sets up the binary opposition of the human and the nonhuman yet never clearly states the distinct difference. He clarifies the human in chapter five, but not the nonhuman. So what does it mean to be nonhuman?

After Latour quotes Shapin and Schaffer, "witnessing as an ineffective and subversive enterprise" (23), he goes on to state, "Witnesses had always been human or divine - never nonhuman. The texts had been written by men or inspired by God - never inspired or written by nonhumans. The law courts had seen countless human and divine trials come and go - never affairs that called into question the behavior of nonhumans in a laboratory transformed into a court of justice" (23).

Later Latour goes on to distinguish the nonhuman as not "capable of showing, signing, writing, and scribbling on laboratory instruments before trustworthy witnesses. These nonhumans, lacking souls but endowed with meaning, are even more reliable than ordinary mortals, to whom will is attributed to but who lack the capacity to indicate phenomena in a reliable way" (23).

Is the nonhuman simply the "facts" resulted in scientific expeditions? Or is the nonhuman in fact a human but stripped of rhetorical agency? I assume it is the later. Latour labors on the ideas of scientific method and how the facts speak for themselves and require no human representative. Here is where I think the nonhuman resides. The human representative of scientific fact must appear nonhuman. The human element of scientific inquiry quickly discredits the credibility of its findings due to the stigma of rhetorical agency and unreliable witnesses. Humans are inherently rhetorical, science is not supposed to be.

A Sound of Thunder

                In We Have Never Been Modern, Latour makes the claim that modernism never really occurred. He explains modernism as a separation of Nature and Society. As a result of modernism, the cultures before it became known as pre-modern and a recent symptom of modernism is postmodernism. However, Latour is able to bring to light all of the facets of modernism and reveal them in their contradictory light. He outlines six resources of the modern critique during his explanation of other cultures as pre-modern: “They could have stood up against transcendent Nature, or immanent Nature, or society made by human hands, or transcendent society, or a remote God, or an intimate God, but how could they resist the combination of all six?” (38)

                Latour creates his own Nonmodern constitution in light of his discovery that we have never been modern. He claims that there is an objectiveness to Nature and an immanence to Society but that they are not truly separated from each other. That they are connected to each other. And that all of the objects, quasi-objects, in between are hybrids and are connected to a number of different aspects: nature, society, culture, technology, science, discourse, etc.

                While reading Latour’s book, I couldn’t help but think to myself – “Well, duh.” I don’t think Latour’s hypothesis is all that groundbreaking but that could be because we are separated by 20 years. What was considered innovative in 1991, that modernism never existed, might seem to be more commonplace in 2012. We have been proliferated by movies, books, scientific articles, newspapers, television, etc., that show our world is interconnected. That even in the past, things were interconnected. Whether or not people 300 years ago thought of the idea nonmodernism, doesn’t mean it wasn’t occurring. Latour uses the example of Hobbes and Boyle in his book to show the influence politics and science had on each other even though its creators might not have realized it. I think most of us realize our world is more of a hodgepodge of concepts rather than a strict dichotomy of nature and society.

But that doesn’t mean we don’t come from a world that believed in it. Historically modernism has been a powerful concept. That idea matches much of the Western society at that time. And now that we live in a much more globalized world, we realize that the world is much more interconnected and that Nature and Society influence each other.

After reading Latour and his theory of nonmodernism, it made me think about a short story I had read from Ray Bradbury about how everything is connected. The story “A Sound of Thunder” shows how the death of one butterfly in the time of the dinosaurs, changed the world in the 21^st century. One change to the natural world caused numerous changes in the current society including language and who won the presidential election. The short story was written in the 1950s and shows that even then, people were already thinking about hybrids, quasi-objects, and an interconnected world (though not with those explicit terms).  

Latour’s theory of nonmodernism helps to verbalize and contextualize what our world is already experiencing – an intellectual move away from the strict dichotomy of modernism to a world that doesn’t separate Nature and Society and celebrates the multiplication of hybrids.

A Sound of Thunder 

Modernity Ruined Education?

Bruna Latour's We Have Never Been Modern presents a case against modernity and post modernity. While very dense reading, I think there are some interesting points that can be drawn from his argument. One of his main concerns with the idea of modern and all the academic subjects which have come up around the topic is the idea that moderns have tried to separate nature from society and the self.  He writes, "The hypothesis of this essay is that the modern 'modern' designates two sets of entirely different practices which must remain distinct if they are to remain effective, but have recently begun to be confused... So long as we consider these two practices of translation and purification separately, we are truly modern - that is, we willing subscribe to the critical project, even though that project is developed only through the proliferation of hybrids down below," (10-11).

This passage in the book made me consider how the U.S. education system is up in a factory-like model. Factory mindset calls that parts and processes are separated out. There are various stages of production that need to be thought out. In the same way, each stage of education has its parts you must complete. In elementary school, its grades K-5. Then, you must complete secondary education (grade 9-12). It goes on like this and yet, this assumes that everyone has the same starting point and will be on the same page as they progress in their education. Much like one would expect a machine to progress through the factory production line. We are hardly machines.

Despite our need to separate subjects within the educational system and likewise grade levels, they often blend together. I think this is part of Latour's problem with the idea of modernity. We claim to separate things, but in practice, subjects become hybrids. He argues that when there is overlap in subjects, we cease to be modern and go back to being pre-modern. This contradiction is what has lead to postmodernism.

The idea that we need to see the overlap in subjects, much like an anthropologist blends culture, nature, and human interaction in study, seems very important with concern for education. In the U.S. Education system, we see this same inability to recognize overlap in some cases and ignore in others. For instance, in high school, the subjects are separated out. Except for math and science, teachers do not try to help students see how interdisciplinary subjects can be. Very rarely does history teacher delve into literature or science. However, in college, students are expected to start making these connections despite having been taught otherwise for their whole lives.

Coming from a liberal education background, I agree with Latour's claim that we need some sort of way to look at the overlap. Is hybridization a bad thing? I don't necessarily think so. Maybe his concern is with modernists and post-modernists persistence in pretending there is no nature-culture overlap. However, to acknowledge it, would mean rethinking many ways of knowing. Radical change doesn't come over night, but I think that these ideas could be very useful in reforming how we do education in the U.S.

Nature and Society and Truth, Oh my!

Because I've decided to focus on the idea of truth for my final paper, I'm always looking for what people believe is true or their idea of knowledge and how to obtain it. We've come a long way from Plato believing there is only one truth, to the more modern view of truth changing depending on the situation, so I was trying to be extra aware of what Latour had to say about truth, if anything at all.

On page 95, there is a section of diagrams that explain the principle of symmetry, which is what Latour says "reestablished continuity, historicity, and...elementary justice (93). To me, this concept is a little confusing, so I didn't quite understand all the parts that make up the principle of symmetry. With the generalized principle of symmetry, it appears to us that nature and society will both be explained using quasi-objects. If we go by the diagram, this looks the most appealing by an organizational standpoint, but, if I'm reading it properly, Latour tells us that this is wrong as well.  He states very plainly that there is no symmetry between nature and society, "it does not exist" (96). I felt a little cheated that he spent such a long time trying to explain something that he ultimately doesn't believe exists.

I don't think this means that Latour doesn't believe there is truth in nature or society, I just think it means he doesn't know where to find that truth. He isn't sure how to explain one with the other, so he suggests there is no way to do such a thing.

Bruno Loves Piet

"We Have Never Been Modern" raises the issue of modernity as a dichotomy of purity and hybridization. While the "moderns" and "postmoderns" view society and nature as separate, "pure" entities,  Latour claims they and the proliferations of objects are in fact hybrids of each.

The Dutch painter Piet Mondrian, whose modern school of painting, known as "De Stijl" would certainly subscribe to the modernists assertion of the separation of of society and nature, quite the opposite is true.

While Mondrian painted in a very geometric abstract style, using primary colors on a white ground, he is a prime example of Latour's hybrid theory. 

Piet Mondrian, "Broadway Boogie Woogie", Oil on Canvas, 1942-1943. 50"x50" Donated Anonymously to the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Latour, in a broad sense, lends his assertions on art and other objects thusly, 

Social scientists have for long allowed themselves to denounce the belief system of ordinary people. They call this belief system ‘naturalization’. Ordinary people imagine that the power of gods, the objectivity of money, the attraction of fashion, the beauty of art, come from some objective properties intrinsic to the nature of things. Fortunately, social scientists know better and they show that the arrow goes in fact in the other direction, from society to objects. Gods, money, fashion and art offer only a surface for the projection of our social needs and interests. (51 – 52)

While there is some credibility in this statement, art history tells us differently when it comes to Mondrian.

First, we must understand what abstraction is in regards to art. While the layperson will assume it is just a bunch of lines, colors, "my kid can do that", that is simply not the case. If we define abstraction, we discover that it is:

         an abstract or general idea or term.

the act of considering something as a general quality orcharacteristic, apart from concrete realities, specific objects, oractual instances.

an impractical idea; something visionary and unrealistic.

the act of taking away or separating; withdrawal.

While this definition seems to support Latour, with considering something as apart, Mondrian contradicts this assumption. Mondrian, who was a staunch advocate of nature, sought nature as his primary forms for abstraction. A detailed look into his body of work shows abstracted landscapes dominating his early paintings.

Piet Mondrian’s Farmhouse in Meadow Landscape near Duivendrecht. c. 1905

This love of nature, particularly it's formal qualities, led to such paintings as "Broadway Boogie Woogie". Mondrian's distillation of nature into it's purest forms, for him being primary colors, and a strict adherence to vertical and horizontal lines, was the basis for his later work. He said of it in the "New Plastic in Painting":

I construct lines and color combinations on a flat surface, in order to express general beauty with the utmost awareness. Nature (or, that which I see) inspires me, puts me, as with any painter, in an emotional state so that an urge comes about to make something, but I want to come as close as possible to the truth and abstract everything from that, until I reach the foundation (still just an external foundation!) of things… I believe it is possible that, through horizontal and vertical lines constructed with awareness, but not with calculation, led by high intuition, and brought to harmony and rhythm, these basic forms of beauty, supplemented if necessary by other direct lines or curves, can become a work of art, as strong as it is true

This seemingly "pure" style did not exist in a vacuum, but rather by intense study of the natural world. Without the hybrid process of the societal (Mondrian) and the nature from which his body of work was derived, there would be no real intellectual pursuit contained within the artwork. Could the painting exist without such an integration of society and nature? Possibly, however, there would be no substance to the painting. The canvas, which was woven from cotton, the pigments in the paint, which are derived from natural sources, as well as the binding agent (in most high quality oil paints, it is derived from rabbits) usurp the modernist notion that society and nature exist independently. 

Latour and Modern Art

In We Have Never Been Modern, Latour discusses several ideas regarding the separation and interaction of nature and humans. The author says this about moderns:

The critical power of the moderns lies in this double relationship: they can mobilize Nature at the heart of social relationships, even as they leave Nature infinitely remote from human beings; they are free to make and unmake society, even as they render its laws eluctable, necessary and absolute (37).

Moderns attempt to separate Nature from humans, yet as they separate, they are actually creating. Their attention to the Great Divide after “following the ridiculous constraints of their past” allowed them to further extend the “web of relations between things and humans” (39). So what does this mean in terms of not being modern? At the beginning, Latour spends a considerable amount of time fleshing out the relationships among issues from the Navy to the laboratory. As stated above, separating these things brings them together even more ( a point I’m still trying to fully grasp). Thus, to satisfy those who don’t agree with this, a new generation of thought emerged: postmodernism. Latour quickly nips this thought in the bud by declaring that what the postmoderns offer “is a symptom, not a fresh solution” (46).

With such a discussion of what comes before the moderns (premoderns?) and even after them (postmoderns?), the issue of time stuck out to me. Latour asks an interesting question: “Where do we get the idea of time that passes?” (68). The author answers with the modern Constitution. According to the moderns, once time passes, what was once there has passed forever. What happened in those moments can never happen again. But Latour is not satisfied with that outcome, because we still use things and ideas that are related to the past. An attempt to compartmentalize and cut time perfectly would not be realistic. Latour says it best:

“We do have a future and a past, but the future takes the form of a circle expanding in all directions, and the past is not surpassed but revisited, repeated, surrounded, protected, recombined, reinterpreted and reshuffled” (75).

It is, as Latour calls it, this exchange that describes time. Just like with things and humans, there is no distinction with time. Because everything meshes together in a web of ideas and possibilities, we are not modern. As I read about time, I was reminded of Salvador Dali’s famous painting, The Persistence of Memory. The flattened clocks remind me of memories and ideas that have been repeatedly experienced or encountered. I think that is what Latour is trying to drive home. We shouldn’t think of time as beginning and ending, but rather as something that is a “whirlpool” that doesn’t end (74). Within this whirlpool of time lie the networks of humans, nonhumans and Nature that are continuously in sync with each other. What is interesting, though, is that this painting is classified as Modern Art. I wonder what Latour would think of such a connection?       

Link to image

Spiraling in Time with Latour and Warcraft

Pardon my French, but this reading was like sitting through someone bitching about some totally opposite bitch. I must admit... I had no idea what I was getting into when I picked up Latour’s We Have Never Been Modern, and I still don’t think I really know what I got out of this after putting it down. I feel like I just rode on a roller coaster ride of conceptual affirmation and criticism... I’m such a horrible person for having a modern mind - thank goodness, there’s a little nonmodern to my thinking - oh wait, I’m such a relativist! - hold on, I think I think temporality is like this... oh my gosh, I don’t really know what the hell to think of both Latour and myself after this. 

I honestly don’t even know where to go with my response. While reading, so many things came to mind that I could relate Latour to, but I quickly realized how I was thinking was exactly what he criticizes... or at least, that’s how I feel. My difficulty with this read probably lies in my tendency to find and make relations... to view things through a mirror as (I think) Latour would scold... with what is being discussed and how it involves myself or things I understand. I want to make comparisons. I want to set up boundaries. I want to view things in a vacuum, enclosed in Boyles’ lab or as my own Hobbesian Leviathan. Is he wagging his finger at me for thinking the way I do?

Even if he is, I’ll keep on thinking this way for the purpose of this response and out of frustration. I can appreciate his suggestion to rethink the existence of modernity, but I am not convinced after one quick read-through of dense content. Perhaps after class, after the final reads that work with Latour, after more time to read this again and really sit on it... perhaps then I’ll give what he has to say some serious consideration. Until then...

I found many of the concepts discussed in We Have Never Been Modern intriguing. These include those Latour critiqued and condoned. Of most interest is “the temporal framework of the moderns” and the alternative nonmodern spiral temporality (67). According to Latour, the moderns’ sense of time is linear and continuously moves forward. It looks like this:

The Temporal Framework of Moderns: 

|-----[revolution]-----[revolution]-----[revolution]-----[present]>

Because moderns push away from the past, separating themselves from the former at turning points and revolutions of dominance, they “suffer from the illness of historicism” (69). They do not seek to replicate the past nor do they desire to relive it. They categorize and display the failed ways of old in an attempt to distinguish and divide themselves apart as present. They establish their own elements and collectives to define, compare, and contrast themselves with. Nevertheless, their sense of future is faulty. The present travels along its line securely convinced of its own perfection until it hits another revolution... then present becomes past, the future is present, and the pattern of modern time continues and none of what they determined of themselves and others really mattered.

Latour’s nonmodern, however, sees temporality not as some sort of framework, a network of detached history that supports the moderns’ conception of themselves. Rather, they view temporality and time as the result of connected elements of the past. I can’t figure out a good way to visualize this, but the nonmodern’s sense of time is a spiral that “takes the form of a circle expanding in all directions, and the past is not surpassed but revisited, repeated, surrounded, protected, recombined, reinterpreted and reshuffled” (75). For them, the past plays an active interconnected role in both present and future, but time is not in motion. Nonmoderns do not progress or regress; they sort through the results of conceptions of time, combing through its elements unconfined by an enclosed present they never created.

This idea of modern and nonmodern temporality had me thinking about World of Warcraft. So, the player engages with Azeroth and the Warcraft universe sort of... detached from the game’s actual narrative. Gameplay is linear, yet the game functions in an expanding spiral. The moment the player creates his/her toon, he/she is thrown into the actual beginning of the game in relation to the events leading out of Warcraft III (although, when you actually start depends on expansions, races, and classes some times) ... despite the fact that some one, or possibly that same player on a different toon, has already completed endgame material. That level-1-going-on-2-Orc-Warrior will eventually reach the level cap to defeat whatever boss awaits endgame... even though whatever it happens to be at that patch has been slain a countless number of times already. The narrative for that leveling toon develops as linearly as its increasing numerical level, but the game itself occurs spirally in order to compensate for its “real time” game play and dynamic player population. 

And while the external-to-internal playability is a temporal spiral, there is an area within the game that represents this nonmodern sense of time even better, although this relation may require actual time in-game to really grasp. So, there’s this place called the Caverns of Time where these dragon guys have collected various key events of Warcraft history... the player is able to enter portals that lead to these past events and essentially engage with the game’s history. Do not confuse this with time travel or whatever in order to alter the present. Just like Latour’s nonmodern sense of temporal connection, these preserved events represent the interconnectedness of Azeroth’s past to its present and future, how each event corresponds to the other not as some sort of revolutionary (the act of change) progression marker as the moderns view it but as a series of revolutions (the act of revolving) in the spiral of events we like to call “time.” Coincidentally, the Cavern itself is shaped like a spiral, and the player emerges inside it around its center and ventures to the surrounding portals.

The Caverns of Time sand timer... imagine the
upper/lower streams of sand converging/dispersing
at the center and each grain of sand an event.

How does all this talk of time and the temporal relate back to rhetoric? Well, I think to some degree this approaches the idea of the subject, which we have encountered heavily in our readings over the past two weeks, in a different way under different terms. Latour’s “modern” is similar to the “humanist” subject, that autonomous being that functions in Boyles’ lab of causes and effects, displacing those causes in order to preserve its effects but consequentially recreating the cause in a linear motion. His “nonmodern,” however, is an entity of its own quite unlike the “postmodern” subject who is still grappling with the cause/effect object/subject relation but is dependent on the influence of externals rather than internal determination. Latour’s “nonmodern” seeks an acknowledgement of external and internal hybridity and its proliferation that both the “humanist” and “postmodern” ignore, reject, avoid, but ultimately participate in. By trying to reduce the world, society, science, language, etc. as we know it into hierarchies and relative measurements, time into a continuously progressive line, they are in fact unknowingly reinforcing the nonmodern perspective.

Reading the Paper with Latour

Reading the New York Times this morning was a different experience after having read Latour’s, We Have Never Been Modern. Instead of enjoying the lack of political campaign discussion and the once again captivating and relevant stories, such as the political turmoil in the Congo, I was assaulted with the need to validate Latour’s theory of our lack of modernity.

As I clicked on my favorite tab, Health, I silently rejoiced in thinking that Latour was wrong: that we had not merged nature with humanism (although I don’t see what’s wrong with that). However, as I looked deeper into the headlines  realized that it was a foolish idea to think that the health page would be devoid of “nature”. Instead I was bombarded with the Quasi-Object and the many poles (51). One title on the page “A New Tooth, Made to Order in Under an Hour,” screamed modernity as it implies that the tooth is made without divine or natural intervention.

 However, as I scanned through the article my stomach sank as I noticed trends that Latour laments throughout his book. Not only did the author seem to propose a ‘modern’ concept, he also referred to past methods as the ‘dark ages’. Similar to the discussion of how humans always believe they are modern, the author is hailing the greater sophistication of our society today and how it no longer needs nature- despite the fact that the tooth he has the cavity in is from a natural occurrence. At one point the author receives a scan which tells a machine how to duplicate the tooth. It reminded me of the discussion of accusation and causation (although not quite the same context) but the “Copernican counter-revolution amounts to modifying the place of the object to remove it from things-in-themselves…” In a way, the construction of the tooth is an attempt to separate our society from its original state. “How does the object come to what is human?” (82)

In an attempt to recover from over-analyzing a petty story about an authors cavity, I move back to the main page and begin reading about the revolution in Congo only to be assaulted with Latour's “Impossible Modernization.”

“Modernization, although it destroyed the near-totality of cultures and natures by force and bloodshed, had a clear objective. Modernizing finally made it possible to distinguish between the laws of external nature and the conventions of society. The conquerors undertook this partition everywhere, consigning hybrids either to the domain of objects of to that of society….” (130)

And it goes on. 

The article about Congo describes the reinstating of new laws and regulations through violence and through it there will be new constraints born through this revolution. While not explicit with its relationship with nature, the article magnifies several of Latour’s arguments.  The society will define the importance of the relationship between society, power, and technology as the country recovers or continues to be in the throes of turmoil.

Thanks, Latour, for messing with my morning paper.