I may use an electric drill, but I also use a hammer. The former is thirty-five years old, the latter hundreds of thousands. Will you see me as a DIY expert "of contrasts" because I mix up gestures from different times? Would I be an ethnographic curiosity? On the contrary: show me an activity that is homogeneous from the point of view of the modern time. Some of my genes are 500 million years old, others 3 million, others 100,000 years, and my habits range in age from a few days to several thousand years. As Péguy's Clio said, and as Michel Serres repeats, "we are exchangers and brewers of time." It is this exchange that defines us, not the calendar or the flow that the moderns had constructed for us. Pile up the burgraves one behind the other, and you will still not have time. Go down sideways to grab hold of the event of Cherobino's death in its intensity, and time will be given to you.
-Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, 75
One of my favorite little bits from Latour, which I'll be posting on next week on our reading group's website: wehaveneverbeenblogging.blogspot.com. This week, we're discussing The Pasteurization of France, or Pasteur: Guerre et Paix des microbes (Evan has already rightly pointed out how the weirdly bland English version covers up a central question of the work: as Evan puts it, "how essential are agonistic and adversarial metaphors to a sociological understanding of reality?") and Science in Action. This is just to say, our little adventure with Latour has started, after a couple weeks of book-accumulation.
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