Elias

“The reference to Latour that helps to introduce some of the background of the present study is to his We Have Never Been Modern (Latour 1993). In that book, Latour seeks ways out of the nature-culture divide —just like Barker, Strathern, Haraway, and many others whom I have not mentioned. Latour doesn’t follow the way this divide was framed and institutionalized in the twentieth century, but, in a wider gesture, links it up with modernity. All modern thinkers, he claims, glorify their ability to distinguish between natural and social phenomena, disqualifying those who are ‘‘unable’’ to do so as premoderns. Meanwhile, however, or so Latour argues, in the practices of the so-called modern world the natural and the social are as intertwined as they are in so-called premodern thinking. This implies that there are clashes between the knowledge articulated in technoscience societies and the knowledges embedded in their practices. While the importance of a clear-cut distinction was loudly proclaimed, it wasn’t converted into action. Therefore, modernity is a state we have never been in, for only our theories make modern divides. Our practices do not. (pp. 30-31)”
― Annemarie Mol, The Body Multiple: Ontology in Medical Practice

“Male domination is so rooted in our collective unconscious that we no longer even see it.”
― Pierre Bourdieu

“Every established order tends to produce the naturalization of its own arbitrariness.”
― Pierre Bourdieu

“The hypothesis of this essay is that the word ‘modern’ designates two sets of entirely different practices which must remain distinct if they are to remain effective, but have recently begun to be confused. The first set of practices, by ‘translation’, creates mixtures between entirely new types of beings, hybrids of nature and culture. The second, by ‘purification’, creates two entirely distinct ontological zones: that of human beings on the one hand; that of nonhumans on the other.”
― Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern