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As Stephen Ross argues in Modernism and Theory, early twentiethcentury modernism and critical theory share an essential narrative structure, one with roots in the Enlightenment: a narrative of negation and renewal of the present, called "modern," which "depends on reinventing/ reviving the spirit of critique" (2009, 6-7). In the twentieth century, the uneasy tension between critical theory and modernist practice enlivened a range of theoretical and also artistic positions, as the contributions to the second part of Ross's volume demonstrate. While the conjugations of the canon of critical theorists with the high modernist canon of the twentieth century were multiple, contested, and ambivalent, most could agree that the critical and utopian stances of modernist thought live on in the various forms of "critique" practiced in the late twentieth century. Though these critical movements substitute the language of intellectual politics for an explicit "ethics" oriented, in the classical sense, toward a notion of the good life, the language of late twentieth-century critique retains a characteristic "ethos," a self-presentation of certain alignments, pleasures, attachments, and oppositions that constitute an implied ethical stance.1
Bruno Latour, often credited as one of the most eminent posthumanist theorists, has posed a basic challenge to the ethics of critical theory, as practice and sensibility: what happens when the modern project of critique "runs out of steam"? What should we do when, for example, the American Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) takes the Baconian and also Foucauldian motto Scientia est Potentia ("Knowledge is Power") as its motto? (2004b, 228). What new critical stances are called for after the call for intellectual negation and renewal has lost its edge? Though Latour's question was first posed to critical theory, broadly speaking, I will argue in the following that it has consequences for a "posthumanist" ethics of modernist literary studies as well. If, following Latour, we need to rethink the "modernist constitution" governing the intersection of nature, culture, and politics, we should ask what it would mean to embark on the paradox of a nonmodern modernist ethics and politics, one that would account for the ways that human and nonhuman networks of actors codetermine our texts and our scholarly accounts. In the following, I briefly summarize Latour's recent ethical thinking, placing some key questions and...