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?       

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