In Bruno Latour’s We Have Never Been Modern, hybrids are monstrous, unthinkable mixtures that blur the boundaries between politics and science, meaning and materiality, agency and passivity. How should one approach genetically modified food, artificial intelligence, or the burning Amazon rainforest? Hybrids, seemingly from a past unable to distinguish between nature and culture, destabilize the modern worldview built on this divide. To address their proliferation, Latour suggests to think the unthinkable making the “work of hybridization” visible and laying the foundations for a new social order where subject and object are no longer separate realms.
The Latin encyclopaedic or didactic poem embodies such premodern hybridity, blending didacticism and poetry, sign and object, human and nature. Besides being irritating, this hybridity often bores the modern reader, perhaps explaining the genre’s long neglect by scholars and contemporary audiences alike. However, in the context of posthumanism and the Anthropocene, hybrid poetry offers valuable ecopoetic insights and perspectives on community-making that include both human and nonhuman actors. This potential will be examined through the lens of Latour’s philosophical thought.