31

Paul James, 'They have Never been Modern:

Then What Is the Problem with those Persians',
in S. Pascoe, V. Rey and P. James, eds, Making
Modernity from the Mashriq to the Maghreb,
Arena Publications, Fitzroy, 2015.

They Have Never

Been Modern?
Then What Is the Problem with those Persians?

Paul James1

The question of what it means to use the concepts of modernity and

the modern sounds like an arcane theoretical concern. Were not
those issues sorted out at the end of the twentieth century in the
Great Debate between the moderns and postmoderns? Did not the
postmoderns win that struggle, only to disintegrate a decade later
in their infinite recursions into relativism? Are not we now living in
a time when we are all a bit modern and a bit postmodern,
variously immersed in digital and personal networks of swirling
meaning?
However, for all of the marginal theoretical interest in the
question of the modern today, the concept continues to carry
extraordinary unacknowledged weight in mainstream descriptions
and arguments. Long after the Great Debate, the modern continues
to be counter-posed against other ways of life that are defined in
the negative as pre-modern. In other words, those persons living as
members of ‘pre-modern’ communities still do not have their
dominant formations named except in the negative or in relation to
the higher-order concept of ‘the modern’. They are held in place by

1 With thanks to Liam Magee and Simon Cooper.

32 Paul James

the prefix ‘pre’. This is not to suggest that the writers of such
narratives always intend that pre-moderns are lesser peoples.
Certainly, contemporary discussions of the Islamic State have gone
further than most to link the concept of ‘the pre-modern’ to the
adjective ‘evil’,2 but the overwhelming tendency is to just take the
term ‘modernity’ for granted as a description of our times — with
the inevitable few wormholes of stagnation or regression eating
into the map of modernity. Defining other ways of life in the
negative can take the form of both arrogant assumptions of superi-
ority and well-meaning descriptions of ‘the Other’. There are even
attempts to retrieve the integrity of their pre-modern way of life.
Thus, by inference, at least in the gentler version of this narrative,
pre-moderns become those who are on an anticipated civilizational
climb. They are treated as those who are yet to achieve modern
actualization beyond their ‘past’ identities, anticipating their
‘future’ potentialities. Thus the prefix ‘pre’ puts them on a timeline
that tends to assume that being before means being less developed,
while being later means being more developed. They continue to
live in ways that are before modernity, just as ‘we’, usually
designated as Europeans, were the first to take the necessary
journey into the modern. When it comes to describing civilizational
differences, this journey is said to require a renaissance or major
reformation to become more than a technological gloss. They may
have mobile phones and run airlines, and they may build tall
towers in the desert, but because they did not go through a
religious reformation, the continuing archaisms in their culture will
always mean that they are prone to recursion, atavism, exotica and
… terrorism. It is amazing how many scholars and politicians in the
West have missed the fact that Islam has gone through a series of
reformations, not dissimilar to those of Christianity. Just as in the
allegory of the Persian love cake, it is their rose petals and saffron-
cream icing that have seduced us, while it is their archaic or pre-
modern power that we fear. Overall, we have not had time to know
them more than at a distance.
This tendency to treat the ‘pre-moderns’ as located at a distance
in time is linked to the way in which the equally problematic
concept of ‘development’ is used. The dominant distinction
between ‘developed’ and ‘developing’ has for the last half century

2 <http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2015/03/16/has-christian-holocaust-begun-when-
will-west-wake-up-to-isis-threat/>, accessed 20 March 2015.
They Have Never Been Modern? 33

permeated the work of journalists, academics and practitioners. It

carries the same sense of a Great Divide between them and us. For
all of the attempts to find a different lexicon — Global North and
Global South, Minority World and Majority World — the condi-
tional terms ‘developed’ and ‘developing’ continue to form the
dualism of choice. More than just being the comfortable fall-back
position for most television commentators, trade negotiators and
aid workers, it sets up a modernist assumption that, given time,
there is no alternative. Development is the only achievable
condition. In coming from before or in being left behind, the only
other possibility apart from developing or being developed is being
underdeveloped. In short, they now also include peoples who
cannot develop due to actions perpetrated by us. This constituency
is similarly defined in the negative — they are ‘under’ us. By a
tightening circle of logic, they are understood as coming from the
past and are given no alternative but to develop, stagnate, or
succumb to a condition that is made by us. It is no wonder (think
the mainstream developmentalists, at least) that they build
spectacular and unsustainable towers in the desert. They are trying
to transcend the stifling sands of the past.
Why is there a common tendency to assume that peoples of the
deserts of Arabia to the jungles of Africa and Oceania, from the
Mashriq to the Maghreb, have never been modern? Rather than
trying to answer this question directly, the present essay uses this
question as a point of departure to go back to basics. The essay
is not about the Middle East and North Africa, but that region
figures largely in the thinking that sits behind the discussion. The
essay begins by exploring the general problem of defining
modernity and the modern. We then focus, secondly, on a
particular approach to elucidate further problems with
understanding such categories. I have chosen the approach taken
by Bruno Latour’s We Have Never Been Modern because many
people have turned to this text as a way out of the modernist
problem. Here the still-opaque question ‘How can one be a
Persian?’ becomes important. Its relevance will be explained
shortly, but to give a hint, the question was first written by an
eighteenth-century French social philosopher and put into the
mouth of a fictional Persian character. In the third major section, the
essay turns to set up an alternative approach to understanding the
modern. It emphasises a reflexively derived, relationally under-
stood and ontologically elaborated approach. Using the metaphor
34 Paul James

of constitutive levels,3 it continues to draw upon old concepts such

as the customary, traditional, modern and postmodern, but it puts them
in a very different context.

Defining Modernity and the Modern

The usual first step in overcoming the complexity of understanding

the modern is to set up a relational distinction between the
traditional and the modern. This move is not necessarily a problem.
However, it quickly sets up the need to grapple with a continuing
tendency across many fields of enquiry from political science to
history and anthropology to pose a Great Divide between these
ways of living. Most attempts to overcome bifurcation between the
pre-modern and the modern are associated with a continuing form
of blurring. The term ‘modernity’ often continues to be used prob-
lematically to specify an epochal period in toto without recognizing
that the concept when deployed other than to describe a period
characterized by an uneven ontological dominant becomes an
(almost) encompassing or (effectively) homogenizing formation. To
the contrary, in the period we might still contingently call
‘modernity’, other forms of social being continue to be critically
active and meaningful. And other forms are emerging — most
pointedly postmodern patterns of practice — that confound even
discussion of liquid modernity or late modernity. More than that,
different forms of social being are entangled in complex ways in
any one contemporary community or social setting. Witness the
way in which jihadist globalisms or cultural nationalisms are at
once modern ideologies and draw upon longer-run traditional
cosmologies of meaning.
When a method treats the modern or modernity as nearly all-
encompassing (albeit with a few wormholes or creases of
difference), it makes it impossible to conceive of an alternative
projection of a politics. Despite themselves, the alternatives tend to
be subsumed by dominant modern ideologies such as progress and
development. Here the concept of ‘projection’ is a key term in our
analysis. It is true that any reflexive politics — that is, one that
recognizes the nature of its own intersecting social forms as it enacts
its various projects — is by definition drawing on a standpoint

3 First elaborated in G. Sharp, ‘Constitutive Abstraction and Social Practice’, Arena no. 70,
1985, pp. 48–82.
They Have Never Been Modern? 35

made possible by a process of lifting knowledge out of customary

and traditional ways of understanding. But that is only at one level,
and in relation to one mode of practice — namely, enquiry. It is true
that the epistemologies of modernism and postmodernism are
formed in the analytical abstraction of knowledge, forcing a
process of constant reflection on the meaning of things rather than
providing a relatively stable set of analogical or cosmological
answers. But the fundamental point being made here is that the
‘encompassing’ of a social dominant, or what can be described as a
constitutive overlaying of levels-in-dominance, is never totalizing.
It is always just one level of the social. It is part of a process of
overlaying levels that may reconstitute prior practices and
understandings (and substantially dominate them). And, it tends to
generate ontological contradictions across the various intersecting
levels of social being rather than simply encompass or destroy all
that has gone before. A politics of projection responds actively and
creatively to such contradictions.
But we have jumped to the overall argument of the essay too
quickly. As a way of moving more steadily through these issues, let
me pose a few preliminary propositions:
Proposition 1. The concept of ‘modernity’ is no more than a contin-
gent and partial designation of a time and place, used
when it is possible to say that modern ways of being
predominate over other ways of being.
This temporal-spatial designation of modernity is always relative.
The term ‘predominate’ here means that modern ways of being
constitute the most powerful forces of a particular time and place,
not that they homogenize all before them. That injunction still
means that it is possible to talk advisedly of the uneven emergence
of global modernity in the sixteenth century. It is also thus possible
to talk of practices being modern before the coming of modernity,
just as there were limited lines of circulation of capital before capi-
talism. However, this naming needs to be done with great care. The
emergence of modernity was fractured, tracked across the world in
fragile lines of power, and never inevitable, teleological or pre-
expressed. And it largely continues to be so, with the difference that
modern life, rather than being just tracked through other ways of
being, is now layered globally across them. This means on the one
hand that it makes no sense to say that any person, community,
object or process is purely modern. On the other hand, neither does
36 Paul James

it make sense to talk of proto-modern practices before the coming of

modernity, as if the modern were an inevitable development and
these practices anticipated what came afterwards. These prior prac-
tices either had a modern layer to them (usually in intersection with
other ontological forms) or they did not.
Proposition 2. It is unhelpful to use the heavy noun ‘modernity’ to
name an ontological condition as such.4
To name a condition as one of ‘modernity’ is to bring a noun with
bulldozer tendencies into an area that is more appropriately handled
by a conditional adjective like ‘modern’. Alternatively, keeping the
term ‘modernity’ to the more limited task of handling the naming
of a temporal-spatial period characterized by an ontological
dominant continues to be useful, both analytically and politically.
The colonizing globalization of the modern across the world over
the last couple of centuries needs to be named. It is a remarkable
phenomenon. To be adequately contested or reoriented it needs to
be given a clear designation. However, while in ordinary language
it is meaningful and important to be able to say that ‘this or that
practice is simultaneously modern and traditional’, saying ‘this
condition is one of modernity’ tends to stop the discussion. A
parallel expression would be to say that the condition of the present
is ‘globality’ — that is, that the world is simply global all the way
down. Some early theorists of globalization unsuccessfully tried
out that idea for a while, but it quickly faded.5 Unfortunately,
‘modernity as a condition’ still hangs in the slipstream of the
current conceptual cavalcade in a way that ‘globality as a
homogenizing condition’ no longer does.
Proposition 3. The ‘multiple modernities’ approach does not ade-
quately solve the problems with the monolithic mod-
ernity approach.
While rightly intended to break up the singularity of the monolithic
description, to challenge its Eurocentrism and to suggest its
unevenness, the multiple modernities approach has served to leave
the theoretical problems in multiples rather than resolve them. It
does attend to one core question: if they are all different modern-

4 This ‘constitutive levels’ position is thus equally uncomfortable with using the concept of
‘postmodernity’ to name a comprehensive condition in the way it is used by David Harvey,
for example: D. Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1989.
5 M. Albrow, The Global Age: Society and State Beyond Modernity, Cambridge, Polity Press, 1996.
They Have Never Been Modern? 37

ities, what makes them modernities in common? But, it does so

only by using Europe as the descriptive base of that characteriza-
tion. We, in turn, can ask: what does it mean that Europe is said to
be the place of the ‘original’ modernity (singular); that the Americas
are the place of the ‘first multiple modernities’; and the Middle East
and Africa are last?6 This ethnocentric and Western-dominated
ordering is precisely what this volume is intended to counter.
Europe’s encounter with the rest of the world made much more
difference to making it modern than any endogenous process of
Euro-enlightenment by uniquely brilliant philosophers. That
unique endogenousness development is a myth anyway. Middle
Easterners, Persians, North Africans, Arabs and Jews contributed to
the European ‘miracle’ through many processes of interchange,
including the development of mathematics, geometry and
rationalized book-keeping.7
Proposition 4. Defining the modern is a relational process. The mod-
ern cannot be defined in terms of itself.
Modern ways of life are not a complete break from the past. As I
will argue, valences of practice and meaning that reach deep into
the ground of being reconstitute rather than replace prior forms.
Ironically, this proposition has some consistency with but neverthe-
less completely overturns current conceptual practices that compare
all other forms in relation to the modern. The problem with current
definitions is that they begin by defining the modern both for itself
and in itself, and then in a one-way relationality define all other
formations in terms of the modern — usually as pre-modern or
postmodern. What is being proposed here is both-ways relationality.
This means that the modern needs to be defined in terms of rela-
tional differences to other ways of social being, and vice versa.
Proposition 5. Defining the modern in terms of quantities, such as
faster (Rosa), more advanced (Rostow) or more tech-
nologically driven (Misa), or as characterized by
longer extensions of networked relations (Latour), is
not helpful.
Quantitative characterizations of life in a world dominated by
modern practices and meanings certainly make phenomenal sense.

6 S. N. Eisenstadt, ‘Multiple Modernities’, Daedelus, vol. 29, no. 1, 2000, pp. 1–29; S. N.
Eisenstadt, Comparative Civilizations and Multiple Modernities, vol. 2, Leiden, Brill, 2003.
7 J. Goody, The East in the West, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1996.
38 Paul James

They accord with how we experience the world. And they are
relational claims, which is positive. In this sense, to the extent that
they are evidence-based descriptions rather than just normative
assertions such as ‘advanced’, they are useful as just that — descrip-
tions. However, as definitional claims they are ontologically flat.
They limit what can be said about social difference to processes that
make only a secondary difference to the meaning of social life.
Alternatively, defining the modern in terms of qualities gives a
stronger sense of the form of the modern: as the transient, the fleet-
ing, the contingent (Baudelaire); as the experience of contradiction
(Lefebvre); as social life forks into order and chaos (Bauman); as a
secularization of what went before (Blumenburg); as the period
that creates its normativity out of itself (Habermas); as the period
in which reflexivity turns upon itself (Giddens). However, each of
these sophisticated attempts still flounders for different and
various reasons that would take a dedicated volume to explore.
Proposition 6. Defining the modern is an epistemologically complex
task that entails defining the valences that constitute
a pattern of practice, a system of objects and/or a
circulation of meaning as modern. It requires defining
its own limits.
This sixth and final proposition is the core of my argument
elaborated below. To define an ontological formation, whether it be
the modern or any other, entails first working with basic categories
of existence such as time and space, and then showing what makes
such ontologies different for different formations. It is ‘epistemo-
logically complex’, not the least because making the claim that
something is modern requires a modern (or at least abstracting)
standpoint, and this is arguably best qualified through activities of
modern reflexivity and postmodern relativizing. That is, in
defining ‘the modern’ we need on the one hand to acknowledge
that defining ontological formations is a modern thing to do. Ways
of knowing prior to the modern were not especially interested in
defining or analyzing the socially based ontological standing of
their own standpoint. A traditional philosopher, scientist or king,
for example, deeply analyzed the foundations of being but did not
feel any compulsion to defend the grounding of being traditional.
A traditional way of life did not construct what modern critics call
‘invented tradition’. We need, on the other hand, to acknowledge
that modern epistemologists are compelled to do so. And this
They Have Never Been Modern? 39

compulsion is as ontologically framed as the traditional or cus-

tomary (tribal) lack of interest in doing so. In other words, the act
of self-consciously making the world in one’s own image is not an
essentially human thing to do. The key word here is ‘self-con-
sciously’. Earlier formations made their worlds, but they did not
theorize the process of that construction as an act of self-making.
One poststructuralist uses this as a way out of some of the
methodological problems described earlier, particularly the
problems with periodizing. Jean-François Lyotard writes:
From this point of view, we can see that historical periodiza-
tion belongs to an obsession that is characteristic of modernity.
Periodization is a way of placing events in diachrony, and
diachrony is ruled by the principle of revolution. In the same
way that modernity contains the promise of its overcoming, it
is obliged to mark, to date, the end of one period and the begin-
ning of the next. Since one is inaugurating an age reputed to
be entirely new, it is right to set the clock to the new time, and
to start it from zero again. In Christianity, Cartesianism or
Jacobinism, this same gesture designated a Year One, that of
revelation and redemption in one case, of birth and renewal in
the second, or again of revolution and reappropriation of
liberties.8
It is an apparently elegant reprise: the modern has to epochalize
itself. It even has to mark its own end with a prefixed concept that
is self-containing of the period it surpasses — the postmodern.
Lyotard is right about both those issues. Historical periodization is
certainly an obsession within the modern (constructivist) sense of
time, and Lyotard is right to both historicize it and to criticize the
way in which it fetishizes new beginnings. However, deeper
problems of method in this approach come to the surface like sepia
stains seeping through the breached damp course of a beautifully
renovated old cathedral.
In particular, Lyotard succumbs to his own critique of the
modern tendency to flatten difference. In particular, he comfortably
flattens out the difference between Christianity, Cartesianism and
Jacobinism, as if they have the same ontological foundations
simply because they can be found coterminously in human history.
How very different is Yahweh’s (traditional) pronouncement ‘I am

8 J. Lyotard, The Inhuman: Reflections on Time, Cambridge, Polity Press, 1991, pp. 25–6.
40 Paul James

that I am’ from (traditional/modern) Cartesian attempts to reground

meaning and existence in the human statement ‘I think, therefore
I am’. Lyotard implicitly reduces the very different forms that their
epochalism takes to various expressions of the modern. Contra
Lyotard, they are ontologically different forms of periodizing. The
Year Zero for Christians, Anno Domini, Latin for the ‘Year of Our
Lord’, goes back at least to Dionysius Exiguus in the sixth century
and was commonly being used by the ninth century, long before we
can talk of the rise of the modern as an ontological dominant in
parts of the world. This periodizing was developed because
Christians had already lived through the end of time, as projected
by an earlier chronicle — Julius Sextus Africanus’ Anno Mundi
from the third century. But they had not yet witnessed the eternal
return and the resurrection of all the dead. In fact, for the sixth-
century periodizers, framed within a traditional cosmological
epistemology, we find an overlaying of cultural meanings: AD was
not after Christ in the modern sense. It was characterized as the
Age of Pisces, linking older cosmologies of the stars to the first
Christian symbol and the acrostic ICHTHYS (the fish in Latinized
Greek).9
In terms that I will develop later in this essay, what we have here
are intersecting ontologies in tension — in this case, customary, tra-
ditional and modern ontologies. At the same time, to be precise, we
also have a number of traditional cosmologies clashing — namely,
Christian notions of the end of time and Greek doctrines that
periods repeat themselves as planets and stars return to the places
that marked the beginning of time. To make it even more complex,
both of these doctrines draw upon and rework earlier traditional
astrological ideas. This is all quite different from the Cartesian and
Jacobin Years Zero, though these two have their own traditional/
modern tensions. Despite the usual interpretation of the Jacobins as
clearly modernists, they intertwined older cosmologies of the
vengeful traditional God and the new modern constitution.10

9 S. Rothwangl, ‘The Cosmological Circumstances and Results of the Anno Domini Invention:
Anno Mundi 6000, Great Year, Precession and End of the World Calculation’, in Anna-Teresa
Tymieniecka (ed.), Astronomy and Civilization in the New Enlightenment: Passions of the Skies,
Dordrecht, Springer, 2011.
10 See C. Brinton, The Jacobins: An Essay in New History, New Brunswick, Transaction Publishers
(1930), 2012, where he highlights the syncretic Christian dimension of the Jacobin faith: ‘et
dans ce moment que nos mains l’une dans l’autre recevaíent les dernières expressions de nos
âmes vos yeux et la voix ellevée vers le Ciel vous vous êtes ecriés, voilà, voilà les vrais Enfans
de la patrie, une Colonne de plus a la novelle constitution’ (p. 205). Here the new constitution
is evoked in the context of joined souls, with eyes and voice raised to heaven.
They Have Never Been Modern? 41

The problems with defining the modern are thus compounding.

The approach needs to be relational, but without dissolving into
relativism. The approach needs to allow comparisons between dif-
ferent ways of life, but without setting up a Great Divide between
them. The approach needs to be able to describe the dominant par-
ticularities of any one society, but without reducing that society to
a singular form of social being. The approach needs to get past the
usual Eurocentrism, without decentring Europe to the point that it
ceases to be the predominant core zone in which modern valences
coalesce. The approach needs to make an ontological claim to
comparability based on basic categories of social being, but without
becoming so complex that it becomes unmanageable. The approach
needs to acknowledge its own reflexively modern standpoint,
while eschewing any conclusion that the modern is a privileged
standpoint.
These add up to a demanding set of claims, but it is possible to
develop an approach that responds to them all. This has been one
of the driving tasks of the constitutive abstraction method devel-
oped over the last decades in the pages of Arena. It is the task of the
third part of this essay. However, first I want to explore an alternative
and much better-known approach, Actor Network Theory. Bruno
Latour’s approach has been chosen as a testing example because it
appears to resolve everything. He would accept most of the terms
of the problem as have just been set out, but replies: ‘no one has
ever been modern’.

One Alternative Approach: Actor Network Theory

‘Modernity has never begun’, says Bruno Latour: ‘There has never
been a modern world’.11 This insistent repetition appears to make
very clear one half of his argument. And lest you think this is the
pronouncement of a postmodernist, he immediately goes on: ‘we
have never begun to enter the modern era. Hence the hint of the
ridiculous that always accompanies postmodern thinkers; they
claim to come after a time that has not even started!’12 Latour is
openly and consistently disdainful of postmodernists.
For all that, his approach has all the contradictory gestures of a
postmodernist. At the same time as the recurrent assertion ‘we have

11 B. Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1993, p. 47.
12 Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, p. 47.
42 Paul James

never been modern’ is repeated throughout his writings, Latour’s

concurrent line of argument is that we are thoroughly modern:
modernity comes in as many versions as there are thinkers or
journalists … Modernity arises first from the conjoined cre-
ation [of non-humanity, things, objects and beasts], and then
from the masking of the conjoined birth … the modern
Constitution invents a separation between the scientific power
charged with representing things and the political power
charged with representing subjects [humans] … One can
hardly be more modern than this.13
In ordinary or modern logical terms, these opposing lines of argu-
ment are completely contradictory. So there must be an analytical
escape clause. Is it based on arrogant playfulness? Is it because
Actor Network Theory cannot be limited by modern syllogistic
logic? Halfway through the book, he finally explains the intrigue:
for the moderns the network of nature-culture hybrids ‘was
simultaneously maintained and abolished, recognized and denied,
specified and silenced. This is why I can say without contradicting
myself that no-one has ever been modern, and that we have to stop
being so’.14 In other words, Latour is comfortable with his argu-
ment being contradictory because the world is contradictory. That
is, if the world is contradictory, then why not theory too?
This way out does not, in my view, take us very far. Logically he
could have said that we have never been modern in the way that
we understand ourselves to be. But instead, he puts the argument
more elusively. We have never been modern and yet, since the time
when humans divided science and politics, we have been under the
spell of a modern paradox.15 Our very lack of understanding of the
terms of this lack of understanding confirms this modernism. Thus
the difference between meaning and practice and between theory
and the world is both collapsed and accentuated. We live, he says,
in subjective denial of the middle kingdom of nature-culture hybrids,
just as (contradictorily) we objectively act to produce such hybrids
at an ever faster rate: vacuum pumps, intercontinental missiles, holes
in the ozone layer, burkas, peptides and self-immolating bombs.
If Latour had said from the beginning of the book ‘we have never

13 Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, pp. 10, 13, 29, 57.
14 Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, p. 78.
15 For an important elaborated critique of this position, see S. Cooper, ‘Regulating Hybrid
Monsters: The Limits of Latour and Actor Network Theory’, Arena Journal, new series no.
29/30, 2008, pp. 305–30.
They Have Never Been Modern? 43

been truly modern’, we would have replied, ‘But, of course’, and

treated his analysis with care but less fascination. This is the subject
of Proposition 1 above. However, his book revels in insouciant
urgency. It intrigues through being ineffable. And this is part of its
writerly power. It leaves many readers thinking that they have
understood the argument — and then it slips away, confirming
their suspicion of themselves as half-reconstructed modernists. Try
as we might to overcome that constitutive condition, we confirm
our own blindness, and assume that it must be our obtuseness that
means we cannot escape the perplexity of not really understanding
how we have masked the meaning of the middle kingdom of
hybrid culture-nature.
As a perplexed reader myself, I would have stopped reading this
book except for two reasons. The first is that Bruno Latour is one of
the most cited authors in the humanities and social sciences — in
one study he comes in at ‘number ten’, ahead of Sigmund Freud,
Gilles Deleuze and Immanuel Kant.16 He is posited as having
solved the problems with which the essay began. The second
reason I will leave unstated for a moment longer in order to let him
speak for himself, but it concerns the question ‘How can one be a
Persian?’ My argument will be that he is part of the problem.
Latour’s argument is that we are only modern when, in effect,
we make ourselves modern by separating out two practices:
dichotomizing nature and culture; and creating hybrids of humans
and non-humans.
The hypothesis of this essay [he says] 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 … The first set corresponds to what I have called
networks; the second to what I shall call the modern critical
stance … So long as we consider these two practices of trans-
lation and purification separately, we are truly modern.17

16 <http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/405956.article>, accessed 5 April 2015.

17 Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, pp. 10–11.
44 Paul James

It is the second of these tendencies, says Latour, that explains why

they are treated as non-modern. They do not dichotomize nature
and culture as we do. They do not purify. The question that I want
to ask is: what happens in Latour’s argument to those who do
separate out nature and culture and yet in his terms are not
modern? What happens to purifiers extraordinaire who are neither
customary nor modern?18 It is my counter-argument to Latour’s
thesis that they almost completely disappear in his analysis, except
as exotic gestures. It is not just that the peoples of the Mashriq to
the Maghreb simply do not feature in his book. That is not the issue.
It is that they become the missing middle kingdom between custom-
ary and modern peoples. This is the first way that his argument
turns against himself. Latour’s entire argumentative force is directed
against either the descriptions of customary peoples as ontologically
different from us — Amerindians, Azande, Barouya, the Bocage,
the lagoon dwellers of the Ivory Coast, the Achuar of the Amazon
region, the Sioux, the Inuit, the Algonquins, and even the Tasmanian
aborigines, with a lower-case ‘a’; the list goes on — or against
descriptions of ‘us’ moderns as provided by any other approach
than Actor Network theorists.
There are no Arabs or Jews, no Mesopotamians or Egyptians in
his book, but that is not the issue: the problem is much deeper. The
Kurds appear once in We Have Never Been Modern, but not as
themselves. Rather they are used to provide a metaphor for
networks that are ripped apart by those moderns who believe
otherwise.19 In other words, the Kurds are used as a signifier of
something else. The parallel is uncanny. Just as he accuses the
moderns of using hybrid objects/subjects for other purposes —
that is, as things to act as intermediaries — Latour so uses the
Kurds. Latour thus succumbs to his own critique in a second way.
The only cultural grouping from the Middle East and North
Africa that is mentioned for itself appears as if from nowhere,
evoked by one word. That place name appears in a small question
in the middle of a massive claim that network theory explains
everything that we need to understand:

18 In my terms, elaborated in the next section of this essay, these are the peoples who live in and
through the dominance of traditional ontologies oriented around cosmological and
metaphorical valences. They do not live in worlds constituted in the same way as customary
peoples, even though their life-worlds are built upon and reconstitute valences of the
customary: genealogical, mythological and analogical relations.
19 Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, p. 6.
They Have Never Been Modern? 45

What reason complicates, networks explicate! It is the peculiar

trait of Westerners that they have imposed, by their official
Constitution [of the modern], the total separation of humans
and non-humans — the internal Great Divide — and have
thereby created the scandal of the others. ‘How can one be
a Persian?’ How can one not establish a radical difference
between Universal Nature and relative culture? But the very
notion of culture is an artefact created by bracketing Nature off.
Cultures — different or universal — do not exist, any more
than nature does. There are only natures-cultures, and these
offer the only possible bases for comparison. As soon as we
take practices of mediation as well as practices of purification
into account, we discover that the moderns do not separate
humans from non-humans any more than the ‘others’ totally
superimpose signs and things.20
The word is ‘Persian’. The question is ‘How can one be a Persian?’
It appears alone, and, at least on first reading, comes out of the blue.
It fills an aporia that can be called the ‘middle kingdom’ of humans.
His concern has been that as moderns we have relegated nature-
culture hybrids to a middle kingdom where they cannot speak for
themselves. But here he has done the same thing to a whole zone of
peoples (the third return of his critique upon himself).
The cruel irony here is that even the processes of Orientalism still
allowed ‘the Persians’ to have a voice. That is, while in Latour’s
writing the occupants of the human middle kingdom have no
voice, the classic texts of Orientalism find different ways of letting
them speak. In the preface of his Persian Letters, for example,
Montesquieu reflects upon what it means to tell a story about
people of the middle kingdom through the form of an epistolary
novel: ‘But in the form of letters wherein personages are introduced
at random, and the subjects treated of do not depend upon any
design, or plan, already formed, the author has the advantage of
being able to blend philosophy, politics and morality with romance,
and to connect the whole by a secret, and as if it were an undis-
coverable chain’.21 It seems to me that Bruno Latour’s book works
in almost the same way. The ‘undiscoverable chain’ is the network
of hybrid objects/subjects. And Bruno Latour is asking us to
discover the ‘undiscoverable’ about networks. However, just as

20 Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, p. 104.

21 Montesquieu, Persian Letters, 6th edition, Edinburgh, Alexander Donaldson, 1773, p. iv.
46 Paul James

Montesquieu is blind to his own traditional/modern Orientalism,

Latour’s obsession with nature-culture hybrids leaves him blind to
his own modern/postmodern ethnocentrism.
The situation gets layered with more complications with each
rereading of both texts. If you read beyond the preface of the
Persian Letters, you will find the following passage in Letter 30 from
Rico, a Persian man, writing to a person in Smyrna (now in Turkey)
from Paris, where he has been partly assimilated:
I do not think of myself as an especially curious or rare man,
and while I have a reasonably good opinion of myself, I would
have never imagined that I could have disturbed the repose of
a great city where no one knew me at all. It all made me resolve
to quit dressing in my Persian clothing, and to wear what
Europeans do, in order to learn whether there would still be
something all that fascinating in my appearance. Free of all
my foreign ornament I found that people took me more nearly
for what I am worth … But if by chance someone informed the
group that I was a Persian, I would soon hear a kind of mutter-
ing. ‘Oh really? Monsieur is a Persian. What a strange thing!
How can one be a Persian?’22
There is that question again: ‘How can one be a Persian?’ It turns
out that Bruno Latour is not actually asking the question in a way
that brings the Persians into contention. This is the fourth return on
his critique that comes back to haunt his own account. The
contemporary French social theorist is quoting an eighteenth-
century French social philosopher who is putting words into the
mouth of an imaginary Persian. And this is no ordinary Persian. It
is a Persian in Paris who now looks like a Frenchman. Montesquieu
intends to show his compatriots that they are pretty much like us,
and the French moderns can learn what we look like from an
unexpected perspective. In other words, Bruno Latour’s only
Persian is a French ventriloquist called Montesquieu who dresses
his Persian dummy in modern garb. And in the final recursion, the
‘Persian’ is not even talking about ‘himself’ or using his own
words. He is quoting a French interlocutor. That is, the ‘Persian’ is
musing on what a French person might say about him, given that
he can no longer be seen to be Persian.

22 Montesquieu, Persian Letters, Indianapolis, Indiana, Hackett Publishing, 2014, p. 47.

They Have Never Been Modern? 47

Steps Towards Treating Ontological Formations as

Relational and Layered in Contradiction

If Bruno Latour’s excursion takes us further into the problem rather

than giving us a way out, and if approaches such as the multiple
modernities method end up pluralizing the analytical problem, are
there alternative ways through this entanglement? Without
wanting to pose more than a method — certainly not an answer —
the constitutive abstraction thesis does provide some tentative and
careful steps towards an alternative.
The first step in the present method is to suggest that different
modes of social being, including the modern, can best be defined in
terms of how basic categories of the human condition are practised,
understood and lived. In the present approach, part of Arena’s
constitutive abstraction thesis, those basic and existential categories
are taken to be time, space, embodiment, knowing and performance.
This is not particularly novel in itself. What is unusual about this
move is treating this process systematically across a number of
categories of existence and relating these categories to each other.
Different social theorists often turn to the ontological category of
time to define the modern. But because modernity is associated with
progress and change, this is often done reductively or as a singular
claim. Hartmut Rosa suggests, for example, that time is the central
category of being critical to understanding the modern:
My guiding hypothesis [he says] is that modernization is not
only a multileveled process in time, but also signifies first and
foremost a structural (and culturally highly significant)
transformation of time structures and horizons themselves.
Accordingly, the direction of alteration is best captured by the
concept of social acceleration.23
While I obviously disagree with the primacy of time as an onto-
logical category, the key insight here is that the ‘transformation of
time structures and horizons themselves’ is important to any def-
inition. It thus appropriately begins to get at the qualitative ques-
tion ‘What makes modern time different from other forms of time?’
An earlier definition developed by Göran Therborn emphasizes the
same question of social form: ‘Modernity here will be defined’, he

23 H. Rosa, Social Acceleration: A New Theory of Modernity, Columbia University Press, New
York, 2013, p. 5.
48 Paul James

says, ‘as an epoch turned to the future, conceived as different from

and possibly better than the present and the past’.24 The quality of
time that defines modernity for him is thus its future orientation.
However, the limitation of Therborn’s approach, as with Rosa’s, is
that the nature of time is defined in terms of itself. We are certainly
given an understanding of the nature of modern time in their writ-
ings, but if we also ask the question, ‘What is the nature of space
that makes that form of spatiality modern?’, then it becomes clear
that their definitional claims have no generality at all. Future orien-
tation and social acceleration do not define other modern categories
of being. It is simply meaningless to say that the nature of modern
space or modern embodiment is future oriented or based on social
acceleration. Modern space or embodiment might be influenced by
the future orientation or social acceleration of time, but that is a
different and second-order question.
A further problem that arises with Rosa’s account is that he
paints himself into an even tighter Eurocentric corner than even the
multiple modernities approach discussed earlier. He asks the fol-
lowing question of his own position: ‘Doesn’t the focus on the
acceleration of processes and changes imply a certain Eurocentric
conception of time … ?’25 The question is a good one, but his
answer is not:
My reply to this criticism is that the present investigation does
not aim at being a universal history of time or the develop-
ment of an ahistorical conception of social time, but rather
represents an attempt to understand the essence and the
developmental dynamic of modernity following Western
patterns … A systematic analysis of pre-modern or non-
European cultures in which modernization processes have not
transpired is not required for this enterprise.26
His answer is again in temporal terms — ‘universal history’,
‘ahistorical conception’ — until the final spatial closure tightens
around the concept of ‘Western patterns’. If, for Bruno Latour, the
middle kingdom of peoples constituted in the dominance of
traditional practices and meaning disappears, including such people
living in the area from the Mashriq to the Maghreb, then for Rosa

24 G. Therborn, European Modernity and Beyond: The Trajectory of European Societies, 1945–2000,
London, Sage Publications, 1995, p. 4.
25 Rosa, Social Acceleration, p. 29.
26 Rosa, Social Acceleration, pp. 29–30.
They Have Never Been Modern? 49

this entire spatial zone disappears altogether, whether its people

are tribal, traditional, modern and/or postmodern. Much more
could be said here, but the intention of this brief discussion is
simply to begin to evoke the importance and the complexity of
dealing with different categories of being in defining an ontological
formation such as the modern.
The second necessary step, I argue, is thus to specify a series of
existential categories that, on the one hand, are sufficient to
understand the complexity of social life and, on the other hand, do
not take us into such mad complexity that any analysis becomes
completely arcane. Bruno Latour lists fifteen ontological categories
as the basis of his analysis: reproduction, metamorphosis, habit,
technology, fiction, reference, politics, law, religion, attachment,
organization, morality, network, preposition, double click.27 This
list does not help us with our task, because they are already framed
as being ‘modern’. They have been elected to answer the problem
of ‘we who have never been modern’. The list is also too unwieldy
for our purposes. Why law and not science? Why politics and not
culture? Why double click?
As a way of condensing the basis of this discussion, which has
already taken a lifetime of work,28 let me just note the criteria for
the choice of foundational ontological categories:
• That the categories are useful for describing all social
formations across all of human history whether or not the
concepts are part of the life-worlds of all communities;
• That the categories are basic to all ways of life across the globe,
whether or not they are explicitly recognized as such;
• That the categories are foundational in the sense that they
provide a foundation for discussing other categories; and
• That the categories feature cross-culturally in different philo-
sophical, theological, spiritual, and theoretical traditions as
ontological problems, contested concepts and existential
vexations.
The categories of time, space, embodiment, knowing and perfor-
mance have been chosen as fulfilling all these criteria. It does not

27 B. Latour, An Enquiry into Modes of Existence: An Anthropology of the Moderns, Cambridge,

Harvard University Press, 2013.
28 See for example, P. James, Globalism, Nationalism, Tribalism: Bringing Theory Back In, London,
Sage Publications, 2006, or most recently, ‘Despite the Terrors of Typologies: The Importance
of Understanding Categories of Difference and Identity’, Interventions: International Journal of
Postcolonial Studies, vol. 17, no. 2, 2015, pp. 174–95. For an early development of the ‘levels’
approach, see G. Sharp, ‘Constitutive Abstraction and Social Practice’, pp. 48–82.
50 Paul James

mean that all societies have these concepts as part of their

repertoire of practice and meaning, but rather that it is meaningful
to use these categories to describe patterns of practice and meaning
even in societies that do not have these concepts explicitly in their
languages. Categories such as ‘double click’ and ‘fiction’, for
example, are simply irrelevant to societies constituted in the domi-
nance of other than modern ways of being.
The third step is to work through the orientations or valences
that make each and all of these categories different for different
ontological formations. The concept of ‘valence’ (the Latin valentia
meaning strength or capacity) comes to us via chemistry, where,
from the nineteenth century, it was used to refer to the ‘combining
power of an element’. More recently it has been used to express an
orientation. To be more specific, a valence is used here not as an
absolute difference but as an ontological orientation. Each valence
has overlapping consequences. In practice they can occur at the
same time. And they can be analytically distinguished.
If we are interested in the modern as an ontological orientation
within a larger set of orientations that define the human condition
then the best place to begin is not with the modern, the place where
all other definitions start. Rather, our approach begins with the first
set of valences that made us human: analogical, genealogical and
mythological relations. An orientation to an analogical valence has
its primary embedding in the relation between the natural and
the social, or what is called the ‘nature-culture’ contradiction; a
genealogical valence is primarily embodied in the relation between
birth, becoming and mortality; and a mythological valence is prima-
rily expressed in the relation between practice and meaning.
Speaking broadly, these valences are treated as foundational for the
human condition, even today. Configured tightly together as social
dominants, they are the basis for an ontological formation,
provisionally here called ‘the customary’. It is a form of social life
that, with all its lived changes, continues to be as relevant to the
present as it was at the beginning of human history. A customary
community in these terms tells stories and practises mythologies
about the intimate natural-social realm. The subjects of those
mythologies are genealogies (relations of mutuality) in animated
social nature. They are narratives bringing forth ever-present
origins, ongoing reciprocal connections and deep continuities.
The second set of valences that abstract from and reconstitute
those forms are cosmological and metaphorical relations. With an
They Have Never Been Modern? 51

orientation towards the cosmological, basic categories of the human

condition — time, space, embodiment, performance and knowledge
— were and are abstracted in relation to a something else, both
immanent and beyond (with the emphasis on the beyond): God,
Nature, Form, Being. With an orientation towards the metaphorical,
foundational relations were and are abstracted in relation to
something enclosing and beyond (with the emphasis on the enclos-
ing): the City of Man, the body politic, the civitas, the res publica
Christiana (with none of these yet constituted as ‘abstract communi-
ties’ in the modern sense). Through these processes, human
relations to Being are often given metaphoric social resonance: the
singular King on the day of judgement; the threefold person of
Father, Son and Holy Ghost; the threefold Lords (Trimurti), their
wives (Tridevi) and their avatars; the eightfold Pathway. This is
living metaphor. And this kind of formation carries forward prior
valences while reconstituting them at a more abstract level.
The modern can in the same way be defined as carrying forward
prior forms of being, but fundamentally reconstituting (and
sometimes turning upside down) those forms in terms of technical-
abstracted modes of time, space, embodiment, performance and
knowing. Time, for example, becomes understood and practised
not in terms of cosmological connection but through empty
calendrical time lines that can be filled with the details and
wonders of history — events made by us. Space is territorialized
and marked by abstract lines on maps — places drawn by our own
histories. Embodiment becomes an individualized project sepa-
rated out from the mind and used to project a choosing self. And
knowing becomes an act of analytically dismembering and
resynthesizing information. In practice, modernism is associated
with the dominance of capitalist production relations, commodity
and finance exchange, print and electronic communication,
bureaucratic-rational organization and analytic enquiry, but there
is no teleological connection here. It is a historical connection that
lurches from periods of thriving to periods of crisis, but in all cases
naturalizes itself as the taken-for-granted pathway to development
and underdevelopment.
The modern is thus defined by the way in which prior valences
of social life — analogical, genealogical, mythological, cosmo-
logical and metaphorical relations — are reconstituted through
a constructivist reframing of social practices in relation to basic
categories of existence common to all humans: time, space, embod-
52 Paul James

iment, performance and knowledge.29 The word ‘reconstituted’

here explicitly does not mean replaced. Prior valences continue on,
even if framed by the new ontological dominance of constructivist
meanings and practices. In constructivist terms, these basic cate-
gories of human existence become the terrain of different projects
to be made and remade, thought and rethought anew. Bodies,
landscapes, genome systems, aesthetic principles and political
systems become projects for construction and reconstruction.
Other writers have suggested related themes for the basis of
their definitions of the modern. In one of his takes on a definition,
Zygmunt Bauman makes reflexivity central to its meaning: ‘We can
think of modernity as of a time when order — of the world, of the
human habitat, of the human self, and of the connection between
all three — is reflected upon … conscious of being a conscious
practice’.30 In another take he says it is ordering divided: ‘We can
say that the existence is modern in as far as it forks into order and
chaos. The existence is modern insofar as it contains the alternative
of order and chaos. Indeed: order and chaos, full stop’.31 In another,
he says that it is design that distinguishes the modern: ‘The exis-
tence is modern insofar as it is guided by the urge of designing
what otherwise would not be there: designing of itself’.32 Each of
these definitions is within a couple of pages of each other in a single
book, and he is not playing a game. It illustrates the difficulty of
defining something so basic. The (tertiary) valence of ‘construc-
tivism’ has been chosen to encompass those themes: an often reflex-
ive, sometimes restless drive to construct and remake the world,
nature and ourselves because we have no choice but to choose what
they and we should look like.
The present method with its emphasis on reconstitution of forms
rather than replacement of epochs also helps to make sense of
Bruno Latour’s counter-intuitive argument that we have never
been modern. This is not to agree with his claim that, ‘There has
never been a modern world’.33 That only works as the shock value

29 It seems uncomfortable to take only one additional social theme to have our definition of the
modern turn upon when previously we used three themes for tribalism and two additional
themes for traditionalism. However, it seems to be enough for our purposes. Given the
methodological principles of simple usefulness and sufficient complexity, I am currently
going with it while remaining open to better suggestions.
30 Z. Bauman, Modernity and Ambivalence, Cambridge, Polity Press, 1991, p. 5.
31 Bauman, Modernity and Ambivalence, p. 6.
32 Bauman, Modernity and Ambivalence, p. 7.
33 Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, p. 47.
They Have Never Been Modern? 53

of heresy in a world still dominated by modern self-congratulation.

Nevertheless, Latour’s political concern that the modern sets up a
Great Divide between the natural and the social is an issue that
requires urgent attention. Modern science and postmodern techno-
science do involve the relative occlusion of the embedded
genealogical-analogical. By recognizing the continuing relevance of
‘prior’ valences — for example, those carried into the present by
contemporary human processes such as being born of a mother and
father in deep genealogical-analogical connection to the life and
death of natural-cultural bodies — the constitutive levels method
can respond to such issues directly.
The levels method being developed in this essay puts the
emphasis on the reconstitution of ontologically complex forms and
handles this contradiction by showing how prior forms live on in
the swirling winds of the new. And it does so without refusing to
recognize that we are in this time dominated across the globe by a
formation that can contingently be called ‘modernity’. Of particular
relevance here, analogical relations between the natural and social,
dominant under conditions of the customary, have been redefined
or blustered aside in many ways. This is the first major difference
in method between the levels approach and Latour’s network
theory. The second difference in method is that his approach
emphasizes complete and unbroken continuity:
Seen as networks, however, the modern world, the revolutions,
permits scarcely anything but small extensions of practices,
slight accelerations in the circulation of knowledge, a tiny
extension of societies, minuscule increases in the number of
actors, small modifications of old beliefs.34
This is simply empirically wrong. By comparison, the levels
approach understands change in terms of dialectics of continuity-
and-discontinuity. This allows on the one hand for the recognition
of the comprehensiveness of the new crises that we face in the
contemporary world, including the increasingly disembedded
sense of our relationship to nature. On the other hand, this same
abstracted relationship to nature leaves us floundering to do
anything systematic in response to the potential of a calamitous
climate change crisis as it continues to creep up on us.
This broad process affects all ontological categories and dethrones

34 Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, p. 48.

54 Paul James

both of the dominant entities that once gave them meaning: God
and Nature. Time becomes the medium of passing or lost moments,
mapped day by day onto empty calendrical grids. In positive
terms, this is the form of temporality that allows for creative
historicity. It sensitizes politics. That is, it leaves the space for
reflection upon ‘historical time’ as it is measured (tautologously)
across time and space. But it is also a form of time in which, para-
doxically, crisis-consciousness becomes endemic while actual crises
lose their generality and ontological force. Crises become contested
points in history. The postmodern takes this one stage further to
where social life is reframed in terms of contested standpoints — a
kind of relativism that I would argue even fragments the possibility
of politically projecting or understanding other worlds.
In terms of the basic approach of the present essay, that task
requires both research and engaged practice. The same applies in
answering the question ‘How can one be a Persian?’ There is noth-
ing automatic about that task. It can only be answered by deep
research in the particular time and place to which the question is
directed. Across global history, Persians were part of making mod-
ernity, and they have lived in and across the same valences as the
rest of us. To what extent a particular Persian person is customary,
traditional, modern or postmodern depends upon which person,
what community, you are talking about. And finding out depends
upon letting them speak. The present volume is intended to begin
that task in relation to very different examples from across the
Middle East and North Africa.