MDDM Ch. 76 ..a sort of Shadow ever in the Room [747.27]

[lorentzen-nicklaus]

Dave Monroe schrieb:

> Latour, Bruno.  We Have Never Been Modern.
>    Trans. Catherine Porter.  Cambridge, MA:
>    Harvard UP, 1993 [1991].
>
> http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog/LATWEH.html
>
> http://www.hup.harvard.edu/reviews/LATWEH_R.html
>
> "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 'modern' 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. If so many of our contemporaries are
> reluctant to use this adjective today, if we qualify
> it with prepositions, it is because we feel less
> confident in our ability to maintain that double
> asymmetry: we can no longer point to time's
> irreversible arrow, nor can we award a prize to the
> winners. In the countless quarrels between Ancients
> and Moderns, the former come out winners as often as
> the latter now, and nothing allows us to say whether
> revolutions finish off the old regimes or bring them
> to fruition. Hence the scepticism that is oddly called
> postmodern even though it does not know whether or not
> it is capable of taking over from the Moderns."
>
> http://english.ttu.edu/clarke/WeHaveNeverBeenModern,chapter1.htm
>
> http://www.ensmp.fr/PagePerso/CSI/Bruno_Latour.html/
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "David Morris" Sent: Sunday, September 22,
> 2002 6:05 AM
> Subject: Re: MDDM Ch. 76 ..a sort of Shadow ever in
> the Room [747.27]
> > 
> > What is _NOT_ modern?
>


 + while "pandora's hope" is a milestone of science- & technology-studies, this 
 one is latour's weakest. if there's one solid result of sociological research  
 -  read marx, weber, durkheim, parsons or luhmann (btw, 'stanford university  
 press' is closing down their humanities section which implies that important  
 works of luhmann, for example 'die gesellschaft der gesellschaft', will not be 
 translated into english: even culturally the continents are drifting apart ...) 
 - it's the theory of modernity. taking off from renaissance, the printing  
 press, reformation and the colonialization of the american continent, modern  
 society develops, on a more and more global scale, self-referential   
 sub-spheres (in luhmann's terminology: "funktionssysteme"), like economy,   
 politics, law, science, art or education which operate with corresponding  
 communication-media (money, power, 'truth', 'beauty' etc) and which can neither 
 be integrated with each other properly, nor changed in their basic structures, 
 nor stopped ... "it is too late" ... we passed the 'point of no return' by the 
 time of 1850: now culture is, as adorno put it, definitely "misslungen"  
 (miscarried, failed). henry adams knew that, too.      

kfl *