Hybrids

Definition

Hybrids, in Latour's account of modernity, are the mixtures of nature and culture — of humans and nonhumans, facts and values, technologies and societies — that the modern constitution has always produced but systematically denied. Modernity works through "purification": the creation of two distinct ontological zones, nature and culture, and the assignment of everything to one or the other. But "the more purification happens, the more it creates conditions for the growth of hybrids" — the ozone hole, the genetically modified organism, the climate-altered city, all irreducible to either pure nature or pure culture. For architecture, the hybrid is the truth of every building: a building is never purely "technical" or purely "cultural" but a knot of materials, regulations, meanings, and humans. Acknowledging hybrids means "we stop being modern."

Key Thinkers

• Bruno Latour — hybrids as the denied product of the modern constitution; "we have never been modern."
• Albena Yaneva — hybrids and the socio-technical nature of architectural objects.

Related Concepts

• Nonhumans — the nonhuman side of hybrids.
• Actor-Network Theory (ANT) — the method for tracing hybrids.
• Modernity — the constitution whose purification work produces hybrids.
• Gaia — the planetary hybrid par excellence.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Latour for Architects — purification, hybridization, and "we have never been modern."