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With his well-known taste for symmetry, Latour places religion and science on
opposite poles of an axis of his own making: that of proximity and distance.
Traditional philosophers of science assume that science is basically a
sophisticated version of common sense, concerned with producing discourse
that matches reality directly and transparently: there's the mat's cat, and there's
the neuron firing. Latour has for long insisted that this is prejudice. In action,
science is a much more delicate business, whose truth and objectivity lies in the
piecemeal transformation of information. Through ingenious acts of artifice - in
the field, the lab, the drawing board, the paper -, scientists seek to establish
viable chains of reference that connect copiously with distant, obscure and hard
to understand matters - regarding the firings of neurons and such - by
transforming them at each stage into increasingly manipulable versions of
themselves (they remain 'themselves' precisely to the extent that each link of the
chain is connected). A symmetrical paradox holds for religion. Traditionally it
has been assumed of Christianity at least (the point is moot, and we'll come to it
presently) that faith is directed at the obscure and the unattainable: mysterious
and subjective stuff that lies beyond the transparent objectivity of science. But
just as the chimera of representational transparency in science results from
bracketing off the long 'distances' traversed by scientists' fragile chains of
reference, so the notion of transcendence in religion (the distance faith is
supposed to 'leap' across) ignores the intimacy religious expression is meant to
elicit. For in religion, as in love, the message is the medium. Latour chooses
Catholic art, but the point could be made as well with reference to prayer, the
Eucharist or the Life and Passion of Jesus: each of these 'speech-acts' conspires
to efface its own propositional force so as to render present, in the act, the
intimacy of relation itself.
One of the many merits of Latour's sermon is that without apology it makes
explicit the messianic tendency in much of his previous work. When it comes to
science, and now religion, Latour is nothing if not a combative revisionist. You
thought science was about getting the facts straight, but let me tell you why it
isn't! You thought religion was groping at the unknowable, but let me show you
how it's about embracing what is most present! But, attractive as one may find
both theses, the problem is precisely that they are more than provocative. [1] One
thing is to suggest a radical re-interpretation of science and religion - in
conversation with other commentators, such as anthropologists and
philosophers - and quite another is to preach a wholesale revision of scientific
and religious - Catholic - 'cosmology', if one may speak in these terms. From an
anthropological perspective, the risk is not so much that of speaking over the
heads of one's informants, as that of speaking against them, by way of
conversion. No anthropologist should dream of 'correcting' his informants. It
seems that Latour is giving himself this licence, maybe because his informants
are less like natives and more like colleagues - here scientists and the putatively
pious. With regard to the argument on science, I wouldn't be surprised if the
resistance he encounters among practitioners ('do you believe in science?', as
he reports in Pandora's Hope) is due not just to the radical nature of his
argument, but also to the fact that it gives the lie to scientists' own common sense
view of what it is they do. More than analytical challenges, Latour's arguments
amount to indictments of false consciousness. And now, in good faith, we have
heresy!
The source of Latour's revisionism is his trenchant anti-representationism, the
root of his symmetrical argument on science and religion. There is no ontological
discontinuity between word and world - science is no mirror of nature -, and,
remarkably, there is no such discontinuity between (human) word and God
either. Statements about the world and about God should not be taken as
attempts to determine how things stand 'out there' or 'up there', for each
statement creatively re-casts our relationship with what it is we talk about: in
science words bring the most obscure facets of the world closer by transforming
them, and in religion words - and paintings - erase the very possibility of
distance between word and God by rendering Him present in the utterance. In
fact there is an important logical complementarity between Latour's respective
points about science and religion. For his point that words can perform
ontological work by transforming what they are commonly deemed to represent
- as in science - presupposes that the representational capacity of words may be
effaced - as in religious speech-acts. Science, in this sense, emerges as a
peculiarly pious exercise. A kind of marathon-run of religious intimacy, the
'circulating references' that bind the world and science together are
'transformations' only if premised on ontological proximity - the same proximity
that religious speech is supposed to elicit. God as Actor Network, or something
like it.
But Latour should be unable to comment on this paradox. In doing so, he would
have to admit that the 'problem' of Christian art is a function of the integral role
of transcendence and representation in Christian cosmology. And in not doing
so, he fails to offer any interesting distinction between Christianity and - say animism, an ethnographically blunt position.
More than a question of good manners towards one's informants, this lack of
ethnographic sophistication indexes what I think is the most pressing
theoretical/tactical problem for militant anti-representationist analyses. The
problem is characteristic of revolutions that reach maturity, as antirepresentationism has, insofar as Latour, Strathern, Viveiros de Castro etc. now
constitute orthodoxy for many of the more creative anthropologists of my own
generation. What to do with the rulers - bourgeois representationism! - once
they've been defeated? (ok, conceptually and in limited circles.) Latour's option
in this sermon is to flog them: let's show how the whole world, and God too, can
be repainted anti-representationally, thus lifting the false dominion of
representation yet further. But the risk with this is that under the cloak of
vanguard radicalism, militants repeat the injustices of their erstwhile
persecutors. For example, Latour rightly ridicules those who, having interpreted
religion as a set of frankly unreasonable representations ('beliefs'), proceed to
explain it away on psychological grounds, as a feel-good "supplement of the
soul". But isn't his own strategy regarding the 'modernist constitution' of
representationism essentially the same? Having shown that distinctions between
world and word, fact and value, nature and society, etc. are ontological chimeras,
he proceeds to explain them away as political conveniences (re. his fascinating
discussion of Plato in Pandora's Hope). In either case the conceptual import of
ontological transformations of one another - related on a monistic (or hyperpluralist, n-dimensional - it's the same thing) plane by what French
philosophers sometimes call 'difference'. Science, love talk and religious art are
so many ways of generating relations between things by transforming them. But
Christian cosmology poses a challenge. How might this apparently asphyctic
universe of relations (the Latourian 'Network') accommodate the kind of
negativity implicit in Christian assumptions about transcendence, without
falling back into the mysterious antinomies of modernist ontology? How, in
other words, might the Network itself be extended (transformed, redefined) so
as to include its own putative opposite?
I don't have a full answer to these questions. But it may be worth sketching out
the sort of approach one might take to get there. The first point to note is that,
ironically, Latour's anti-representationism presents us with an antinomy (a kind
of meta-purification). On the one hand we have the armoury of the Network,
based on the logical priority of transformative relations (relations precede
entities in the sense that the latter are the products of ontological
transformation, viz. relations of 'difference'). On the other we have
representationism as the enemy, based on the logical priority of self-identical
entities, separated from each other by extensive gaps of negativity (either this, or
that). So the question is how the key concepts of relation and negation might be
brought under a single analytical scheme - how they may be 'hybridized', if you
like. What makes such a project an extension of non-representationism is the
fact that rather than negating either concept (as Latour does with negation
itself), we seek to bring them together by transforming both of them. That is to
say, since 'ordinary' concepts of relation (sensu Latour et al) and negation (the
negations. Or, to put it conversely, the question is whether one can retain criteria
of distinction (of 'negativity' in a peculiarly minimal sense) in a purely 'positive'
logical universe, where the only available connective is 'and' - the relational
connective, as Viveiros de Castro has discussed (Viveiros de Castro 2003).
The answer would appear to be obvious: in a positive universe distinctions must
be made in positive terms, i.e. not as a matter of this 'or' that, but as one of this
'and' that. But this simple reversal - which is really just a restatement of the
premise of non-representationism - has consequences that are as important as
they are counter-intuitive. Spelt out in terms of our example, the principle states
that A -> B and A -> C are distinct because (A -> B) and (A -> C). That is to say
that in the radically positive logic of non-representationism, a given
transformation can be distinguished from another inasmuch as there is a third
one that combines them both. So rather than distinguishing a transformation in
terms of what it is not, we now distinguish it in terms of what it becomes, and
'becoming' here must be understood as the transformation that occurs when
transformations are combined - a positive act of fusion. Somewhat profoundly,
then, the act of distinction is itself a transformation: to distinguish things is to
change each of them by bringing them together. (Hence, by the way, the
Wagnerian idea that in non-representational logic epistemological questions how to distinguish - turn into ontological ones - how to create. Or to put it in
pop 20th century physics terms, to know something is to change it.)
The point to note, however, is that while these 'creative distinctions' are
transformative relations just like the transformative relations they combine,
there is nevertheless an important logical asymmetry at play here. For, while
everything is what it is because of what it isn't yet (though one would be tempted
to hyphenate this as 'is-not-yet', to show that what is at issue here is not an
ordinary privative negation, but rather the positive negation of 'potential' - the
one school teachers manage so well in their reports).
Now, I am under no illusion that these tentative abstractions are adequate as a
sketch of the 'motile logic' of non-representationism. [3] But I think they do
suggest that Latourian concepts may well admit further elaboration so as to allow
a more sympathetic engagement with Christian cosmology, and not least with the
notion of transcendence. Recall Latour's central claim, that Catholic art reveals
our proximate relation to God by conspiring to cancel the possibility of
representation. The problem, I claim, is that for Catholics our relation to God is
not initially proximate, since our predicament after the Fall is estrangement, i.e.
the transcendence of God is not an illusion but a cosmological premise. Unlike
Latour's notion of intimacy (analytically cast as the 'relation'), the idea of
motility (the 'vector') is able to render transcendence as an irreducible
dimension of our relationship with God. On this analysis, transcendence is not
to be understood as a mysterious alterity, characteristic of representationist
dualisms (the incommensurability of man v. God). Rather it should be taken as a
logical constituent of a particular kind of relationship, namely that of
transformation, properly construed as a motion that relates terms (man and
God) always at one logical step removed, as a potentiality is related to its own
actualisation. Man is what he is because of what he is-not-yet, the 'yet' here
being that of salvation - the hope of the immanence of God.
On this basis one may hazard an alternative interpretation of the art works
Latour discusses. As part of his anti-representationist strategy, Latour finds it
necessary to discount 'traditional defences' of religious icons - that they are not
intended as objects of idolatrous adoration but as copies that remind us of the
original. Certainly, the operative contrast of copy v. original reminds us - the
analysts - too much of obsolete representational thinking, and hence Latour's
distaste. But in this context the bathwater to the representationist baby is the
guiding iconodule contrast, between Christian icons and Christian sacra. For
certainly the contemplation of a Caravaggio or even a Byzantine panagia was
never meant to be on a par with liturgical acts of worship, such as the Eucharist,
and this is surely the main import of the 'traditional defence' of icons. I would
suggest that this crucial distinction can be preserved, provided we do not heed
the knee-jerk anti-representationsit impulse to interpret talk of copies and
originals in ordinary dualist terms. On such an account, Latour's fascinating
notion of 'inner iconoclasm' would require a different analytical spin. The point
of the 'kenosis' of Christian art is not to short-circuit the viewer's
representationist assumption so as to reveal Him as being 'here with us', for in
Christian truth He is only properly here with us when we take Holy Communion.
Rather, the lesson of kenosis would be that His peculiar (divine) way of being
here with us is by not being fully here, an injunction to embrace Him for what He
is to us, namely our own potential, with us always one step removed, in
transcendence.
NOTES
[1] By the way, the force of Latour's argument on religion stems less from the
originality of the ideas themselves and more from his willingness to apply them
in the relatively dusty field of Catholic art and theology. Inspired by speech-act
theory and Peircean semiotics, the guiding notion that religious speech-acts
bring about relationships (rather than representing contestable facts) has been
elaborated most famously in the study of ritual, by Bloch, Tambiah, and
Rappaport.
[2] A vocabulary favoured notably by Viveiros de Castro.
[3] For example, an apparently crucial question that has been dogging me while
writing this -and for which I have no answer- is whether one would need to
specify the conditions under which a particular 'distinction' (transformation of
transformations) might actualise, and, if so, how might these be expressed nonrepresentationally.