Semi-modernism

Postmoderns, Latour suggests, think they are still modern, but in fact they have greatly oversimplified the modern Constitution. Postmoderns might emphasize the separation of subject and world, and stretch that opposition to a breaking point (Latour vividly describes them as doing the splits to keep subject and world apart); but in doing that, they forget the hidden “lower” axis of modernity, where hybridization proliferates. Or, postmoderns “relish only in the hybrid character of free floating networks and collages – thus forgetting the upper half that same constitution,” the move of “purification.”