From archeology to networks

have we never been modern?

Abstract

Bruno Latour’s notion of “network” allows us to open a methodological perspective, which can go beyond the limits of Michel Foucault’s archeology. To indicate the conceptual framework in which the notion of archeology is installed, this article develops a discussion of modern science according to Foucault’s archeology and the position of Gérard Lebrun, as opposed to Husserl (Krisis). From the main question that unites them in spite of important differences, namely the diagnosis of the dispersion of the positive sciences in the beginning of modernity - as the beginning of modernity -, it will be possible to suggest the interest of the Latourian notion of network. And this, even showing that his interest implies exactly the reverse of what Latour insists on sustaining, the reverse of the thesis that we have never been modern.