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