CONCEPT
Purification
The constitutive operation of modern thought: the <em>clean separation</em> of humans from non-humans, nature from society, facts from values. The move that makes hybrids invisible — and that AI, as the hybrid that explodes the constitution, finally renders indefensible.
Purification is Latour's name for the central operation of the modern constitution: the division of the world into two ontological zones — active humans and passive things, society and nature, politics and science, facts and values — with specialized authorities governing each. The divisions are not neutral descriptions of reality. They are philosophical commitments enforced with remarkable consistency, and they conceal the fact that actual phenomena are almost always hybrids that cut across the divisions. Proliferation of hybrids continues everywhere; purification insists on denying them. AI is the hybrid that makes the denial impossible — simultaneously technical artifact and social institution, mathematical optimization and political instrument, individual empowerment and collective transformation.
In The You On AI Field Guide
In We Have Never Been Modern (1991), Latour argued that the modernity that Western societies believe themselves to inhabit has never actually existed. What actually exists is a constant proliferation of hybrids — entities that are simultaneously natural and social, technical
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