Essay Questions

How does “The Proliferation of Hybrids” depict the dilemma of modernism?

Bruno Latour elucidates, “A few paragraphs later, I come across heads of state of major industrialized countries who are getting involved with chemistry, refrigerators, aerosols and inert gases. But at the end of the article, I discover that the meteorologists don't agree with the chemists; they're talking about cyclical fluctuations unrelated to human activity. So now the industrialists don't know what to do. The heads of state are also holding back. Should we wait? Is it already too late? Toward the bottom of the page, Third World countries and ecologists add their grain of salt and talk about international treaties, moratoriums, the rights of future generations, and the right to development.”

Patently, environmental trepidations are leading in the modernist epoch. However, the barefaced incongruity between the ‘chemists and meteorologists’ gathers that the assertions regarding the input of humans in the ‘cyclical fluctuations’ have not been irrefutably corroborated. The discrepancy hints at the misperceptions that obfuscate modernism. Moreover, the “Third World countries and ecologists’” scepticism casts doubt on the controversies vis-à-vis climate fluxes. Obliteration of these objections would have supplemented the ‘modernist project.’ All stakeholders must comprehensively concur with the avowals apropos climate for modernism to be believable. Therefore, the intents of modernism have not yet unquestionably materialized; modernism is unqualifiedly puzzling.

What is the ideological import of “ the fall of the Berlin Wall”?

Bruno Latour expounds, “For everyone today, the fall of the Berlin Wall symbolizes the fall of socialism.’The triumph of liberalism, of capitalism, of the Western democracies over the vain hopes of Marxism’: such is the victory communique issued by those who escaped Leninism by the skin of their teeth. While seeking to abolish man's exploitation of man, socialism had magnified that exploitation immeasurably. It is a strange dialectic that brings the exploiter back to life and buries the gravedigger, having given the world lessons in large-scale civil war.” The earth-shattering fall is identical to the outright deconstruction of ‘Cold War” which is contributory in disbanding the manipulation that was advanced through socialist doctrines which endowed the exploiters and jeopardized subjugated personas. The fall construes that Marxism, which the wall exemplified, was ineffectual for it sponsored despotism instead of the collective advancement.