Modernity was founded upon a principle of purification: the separation of a transcendent human mind (res cogitans) from a purely mechanistic natural world (res extensa), a bifurcation that, as Bruno Latour observes in his articulation of the “modern constitution,” established the detached observer as the sole arbiter of an inert universe and thereby enabled the pursuit of objective certainty. This framework, however, sets up a fundamental paradox: it defines the world as an external, static ground governed by fixed laws, against which human reason – the figure – can act, manipulating and re-engineering that very reality at will.
To manage this paradox, to act upon the world while maintaining the illusion of purification, a powerful apparatus was required. The scientific pursuit of “matters of fact” functioned as this primary apparatus. It operates through a self-reinforcing and repetitive process with a binary logic that cannot tolerate ambiguity, deploying oppositions to suppress challengers. Its method is not one of mediation but of iconoclasm, demanding that new facts eliminate old ones in a perpetual cycle of replacement. This logic extends beyond the laboratory, shaping a politics that perceives the world through distinct divisions. The purpose of this entire apparatus was to produce facts seemingly cleansed of any social or material entanglement, thereby upholding the constitutional separation. The price of this simplification, however, was not merely ignorance, but a catalyst for a vast, unacknowledged realm where suppressed entanglements escalate in unpredictable ways.
It is from this unacknowledged realm that the project of purification met its failure. The work of hybridisation produced entities – complex environmental, technological, and financial systems – of such magnitude and entanglement that they can no longer be conceptually managed or purified away. These phenomena are not mere side effects but hybrids that emerged from our simplified worldview. Their existence now forces us to re-examine that very worldview and the actions it generated. The societal condition sociologist Ulrich Beck termed the risk society is not a paradox of modernity's success but the historical moment when these hybrids breach the constitutional wall. The ideal of a detached observer collapses because the foundational illusion of our separation has failed, revealing that we are inherently part of the systems we create. The pursuit of a stable, predictable ground has instead revealed our inescapable entanglement, forcing us to confront a world where our actions continuously remake both our environment and ourselves.