Alec Toufexis

agt9@geneseo.edu

INTD 105-19- Scientific Writing

Latour’s essay states that our society is in fact not modern. To be modern we must be able to consider two practices. “Translation” ,which is a hybrid of nature and culture, and “Purification”, which takes the hybrid and focuses on it’s constituents. However, there is a great dichotomy between the two practices, which is making modernity an unreachable reality.

The author makes it clear that this dichotomy is evident in the newspapers. Right now, our society is more of a hybrid. Latour says, “Press the most innocent aerosol button and you’ll be heading for the Antarctic and from there to the University of California at Irvine, the mountain ranges of Lyon…”. This is what the author calls a “network”, which is more of an “Ariadne’s Thread” that exhaustively takes the reader of a newspaper from one discipline’s view on the subject to another. That is why we need a balance between “Translation” and “Purification”.

With respects to The Greek Tree, I find that we utilize both the “translation” and “purification” practices. We view the tree as associated with Greek Life, but we also see the artwork separate from the natural beauty of the tree.