Epilogue

The last three chapters of the book have a constructivist flavor. One might wonder if constructivism could point to new conditions of thought and rule within the modern world’s mighty frame. If so, Bruno Latour’s extensive, ever more influential body of work bears attention. He has directly, energetically attacked “the dominion of modernism” and sketched a “political ecology” for the future; he made an ancillary project of “saving constructivism” from constructivists in order stabilize conditions of thought for the world to come. Unfortunately, society is missing from Latour’s project because people have no faculties that distinguish them from other “actants.” Untroubled by issues of agency, he has proposed that actants somehow adopt a constitution for a new cosmopolis. Latour has had important allies, include Haraway. As with Haraway, he is a technological optimist. The illusion of control comes in many guises; saving modernity will not be so easy.