A Perfect Nicking Pattern

Abstract

Almost a generation ago, Bruno Latour’s trenchant long essay, We Have Never Been Modern, proposed as its governing hypothesis that the ideological fiction of “modernity,” under which we had long engaged our actions, was itself dependent on the simultaneous deployment of two complementary practices, which he termed “purification” and “translation.” To be fully modern, according to this formulation, was to openly avow the productions of those works of purification that separated the social world (realm of the human) from the natural world (realm of the non-human), while simultaneously disavowing those hybrid productions resulting from translation.