on distinction

window sill of a train

 

I’m rereading Bruno Latour’s We Have Never been Modern. It’s time to reload my ammunition and this is part of that job, apologies to everything else that isn’t getting done. What’s striking me right now about this seventeen-year-old book is that it’s predicated on an argument against the modern sense of distinction between spheres. In the intervening period, it seems to me (please feel free to shoot me down …better now than later), the postmodern process of "blurring boundaries" has been made obsolete by a thorough loss of distinction in society and culture. The Enlightenment project of modernity, it seems to me, is increasingly something that our generation cannot even conceive of. 

 

window sill of a train

 

I’m rereading Bruno Latour’s We Have Never been Modern. It’s time to reload my ammunition and this is part of that job, apologies to everything else that isn’t getting done. What’s striking me right now about this seventeen-year-old book is that it’s predicated on an argument against the modern sense of distinction between spheres. In the intervening period, it seems to me (please feel free to shoot me down …better now than later), the postmodern process of "blurring boundaries" has been made obsolete by a thorough loss of distinction in society and culture. The Enlightenment project of modernity, it seems to me, is increasingly something that our generation cannot even conceive of.