“What Does it Mean To Be a Modern? Modernity comes in as many versions as there are thinkers or journalists, yet all its definitions point, in one way or another, to the passage of time. The adjective 'modem' designates a new regime, an acceleration, a rupture, a revolution in time. When the word 'modern', 'modernization', or 'modernity' appears, we are defining, by contrast, an archaic and stable past. Furthermore, the word is always being thrown into the middle of a fight, in a quarrel where there are winners and losers, Ancients and Moderns. 'Modern' is thus doubly asymmetrical: it designates a break in the regular passage of time, and it designates a combat in which there are victors and vanquished.”
Modernity presages novelty which ratifies the ‘Ancient versus Modern’ binary which necessitates that the modern epoch splits from the primordial trends. Modernity typifies transformation which controverts the antiquated undertakings that demarcated the past. Additionally, modernity prompts the ‘Winners versus Losers’ binary in such a way that contemporary and prehistoric ideals are incessantly contending.
“So long as we consider these two practices of translation and purification separately, we are truly modern - that is, we willingly subscribe to the critical project, even though that project is developed only through the proliferation of hybrids down below. As soon as we direct our attention simultaneously to the work of purification and the work of hybridization, we immediately stop being wholly modern, and our future begins to change. At the same time we stop having been modern, because we become retrospectively aware that the two sets of practices have always already been at work in the historical period that is ending. Our past begins to change.”
‘Critical Projects’ under modernism bank on ‘translation and purification’ which should be mutually exclusive for modernism to be unremitting. ‘Purification and hybridization’ do not endow modernity because they amount to the fine-tuning of the past. Inauguration of hybrids is a furtherance of history because the hybrids are moulded based on prevailing wares; accordingly, hybrids are not innovative, up-to-date inventions. Therefore, asserting that hybrids are modern formations is inconsistent because they are not inventive. For a creation to be unambiguously modernist, it should rise above modifications and hybrids.
“Perhaps the modern framework could have held up a little while longer if its very development had not established a short circuit between Nature on the one hand and human masses on the other. So long as Nature was remote and under control, it still vaguely resembled the constitutional pole of tradition, and science could still be seen as a mere intermediary to uncover it. Nature seemed to be held in reserve, transcendent, inexhaustible, distant enough.”
Bruno Latour stresses the overriding drawback of ‘modern framework’ which stimulates the ‘Nature versus Human’ binary through the highlighting on ‘universal laws’ and ‘inalienable rights.’ Segregating nature from humanity is not utterly modernistic; it underwrites the outmoded charter which employs science as a connection between Mother nature and humanity. This quote is instrumental in validating that modernism is not candid because it still endorses and guarantees tradition. The ‘modern framework’ confounds the cataloguing of some phenomena, especially those that are hybrids such as global warming, which are ubiquitous under modernistic criticism.
"Social scientists have for long allowed themselves to denounce the belief system of ordinary people. They call this belief system 'naturalization' (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992). 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 the objects. Gods, money, fashion and art offer only a surface for the projection of our social needs and interests. At least since Emile Durkheim, such has been the price of entry into the sociology profession (Durkheim, [19 15] 1 965). To become a social scientist is to realize that the inner properties of objects do not count, that they are mere receptacles for human categories."
Bruno Latour alludes to the ‘Naturalization versus Sociology’ binary. Naturalization advocates that the intrinsic worth which is in-built in objects is substantial. Comparatively, sociologists underscore that objects are representational of humans’ necessities; thus, their intrinsic efficacy is inconsequential. Sociology accentuates that the interface between humans are innumerable symbols is reliant on of the emblematic implication which the objects exemplify; the connotation is not inherent, it depends on idiosyncratic discernments of the objects which is dissimilar from naturalization.
