On the Modern Cult of the Factish Gods

Tracing My Steps

This is one of the only books I chose rather randomly. I had no idea what it was about before I read it; thus, I employed no rationale in choosing it where I did in the sequence, or in choosing it at all for the sequence. Honestly, I picked this book because I was intrigued by the title. My goal for this blog is to give you the information necessary to make a more intelligent/ strategic decision than I did. Anyway, I read this book third in my sequence (out of six), right after Aramis, which might partially explain why I picked it randomly. If you’ve read Aramis, you might agree with me that for all its charms, it doesn’t give you much to go on in terms of where to go next (unlike, say, We Have Never Been Modern, or even Factish Gods for that matter, books for which the segues seem more intuitive). So, I picked Factish Gods because I liked the title, but it turns out I was wrong about what the title meant in the first place. I thought the book was going to be a criticism of Science, capital ‘S’, because I thought the word “factish” was going to be used to cast doubt of the reliability and stability of facts. I thought “ish” was being used like it is in rough estimations (we’ll be there at 9 o’clock-ish). Well, I was wrong. It turns out that “factish” is a hybrid term combining “fact” and “fetish”. Imagine my surprise and confusion when Latour opens this book with a discussion of European anti-fetishism.

In hindsight, now that I’ve read it, I’m not entirely sure where I would put this book in a sequence. Of course, like everything else, it would depend on what came before and what you found interesting about it. For me, it transitioned beautifully into Rejoicing because I was fascinated by the religious arguments he makes in the third Chapter of Factish Gods. So, I picked Rejoicing next so I could delve a little deeper into his thoughts on religious matters. If you’re interested more in the mysterious ontology of the factish, if that’s what grabs you, maybe moving on to Pandora’s Hope would be a good idea. On the other hand, if you’re interested in the “modes of existence” part of the argument of the third chapter, then maybe AIME should come next. And as always, I’m curious to see what course would be followed if someone read Factish Gods first. In one sense I think it would give someone a very strange impression of Latour as a scholar. Who is this guy who writes about fetishism and religious icons and science all in the same book? Of course, in another sense, that gives one a perfect sense of who Latour is, a guy who’s not who is not afraid to mix it up and discuss connections wherever he sees them, a guy who is not operating out of the typical scholarly academic framework. But on the level of deciphering the argument through the prose style, I think this book is manageable. I wouldn’t say easy. Nothing in Latour is easy, but I think Factish Gods is more clear at many points than We Have Never Been Modern, and certainly more clear and easy to follow than almost anything in AIME.

Another feature of the book to take into consideration is its length. It’s a relatively short piece. This may be a good thing or a bad thing, depending on why you’re reading the book and what you want to get out of it. If you want a quick introduction to Latour, and you only have a few days to get familiar with him, then maybe this book would be a good choice. If you really want to know where he’s coming from philosophically, or if you really want all of his points to be sketched out in careful detail, then I would NOT recommend this book. If you’re teaching a class and you want to assign some Latour, I think this would be a good book to choose, or if you’re writing a paper and you need just enough Latour to get you by, this might be good, depending on the paper of course.

I’d be curious to see where reading it first would lead next. And if you didn’t read it first, I would love to know where in your Latour journey you read it. And how did it come about that you read it when/ where you did?

Description of the Text 

Factish Gods is a relatively brief (123 pages as opposed to AIME’s 480-something), three-chapter book in which Latour combines his reflections on a research internship with a few pieces that he had published previously. Chapter 1 is the product of the internship and deals primarily with the topic of fetishism and anti-fetishism in Modern anthropology. Chapter 2 is a republication of an essay he wrote on Iconoclasm after curating an exhibit called Iconoclash. Chapter 3 is also a reprint of an essay, one that Latour wrote on the debate between Science and Religion. The combination of these three essays in the same book may seem odd at first, but the common thread that guides Latour’s rationale for this assortment is that they all deal with how we regard what we would typically refer to as objects.

Chapter 1, “On the Cult of the Factish Gods” 

This chapter opens with a discussion of the topic of fetishism as it relates to the first interactions between the Portuguese and the Guinean “Blacks” of the Gold Coast. Right away it’s important to note that this essay is not a criticism of either the Portuguese or the Guineans specifically. They are being used as representative examples of the Modernist and “premodernist” mindsets respectively. Latour notes that when the Portuguese arrived on the Gold Coast, they immediately set about accusing the indigenous peoples of believing in fetishes. For the Portuguese fetish objects are mere objects that the Blacks naively imbue with divine powers. This power that they (the Portuguese or the Blacks, who knows?) believe is possessed by the object makes them act as if the object was not made by human hands, but dropped down from heaven by some divinity that infused it with its power. Of course, the Guineans don’t describe the objects this way, but the Portuguese do. When they question the Blacks about what a given fetish object is, the Blacks answer their questions in such a paradoxical way that the Portuguese, being good Moderns, can’t make sense of their answers. “Did you make this with your hands?” the Portuguese ask. “Yes, of course,” the Blacks reply. “Does it possess divine power that lies beyond that of a normal, manufactured, inanimate object?” the Portuguese ask. “Yes, of course,” the Blacks reply. The Portuguese simply walk away from these seemingly contradictory answers believing that the Blacks simply don’t understand what they’re really doing, and they (Portuguese) simply conclude that the Blacks display a naïve belief in fetish objects. Latour argues in this essay, however, that it is actually the Portuguese all along who do not properly understand what’s going on with these objects they (Portuguese) refer to as fetishes.

The reason the Portuguese don’t know how to make sense of the Blacks’ answers is because they are operating out of the epistemological and ontological confines of the Modern Constitution, which insists upon the great divides between Nature and Society, Outside and Inside, Object and Subject, Knowledge and Belief. For the Moderns, one can’t, at one and the same time, acknowledge that something is both made by human hands and possessed of its own ontological power. It has to be either or. Of course, Latour points out the irony that the Portuguese, while they’re busy accusing others of believing naively in fetishes, deck themselves out in holy amulets and icons from their own religious tradition, amulets and icons that they would acknowledge are made by their own hands, and that they believe at the same time possess power that is beyond that of mere objects. So, in the end, the Portuguese have their own fetish objects; they just won’t acknowledge that they are the same kind of things as the objects cherished by the Blacks. The Portuguese do not believe naively in their own fetishes, but according to them, the Guineans do. But Latour points out that the Blacks don’t believe naively; the Portuguese just think they do. And so, Latour characterizes the Moderns, or anti-fetishists, as people who naively believe that others naively believe. The Moderns believe in belief.

Latour argues that a belief in others’ belief leads to an impossible double-bind in the Modern Constitution that threatens to displace and reverse agency at every turn because their worldview won’t allow for any paradoxical double-agency. For the Moderns, the objects have to either be made or they have to be “real”, which for them means that the objects always already existed in nature, independent of human construction. But again, we have to remember that the Portuguese have their own fetishes, so they really, in spite of what they say, are not anti-fetishists. As Latour says, “No one, in practice, has ever displayed naïve belief in any being whatsoever”(p. 42). So, in the end, the terms fetishism and anti-fetishism, along with the terms “fetish” and “fact”, never accurately describe what’s taking place in the construction of fetishes or facts.

Latour proposes that we do away with these terms mentioned above and replace them with the term “factish”, which is a hybrid word that combines “fetish” and “fact”. The “factish” can be defined as “the wisdom of the passage; as that which allows one to pass from fabrications to reality; as that which gives an autonomy we do not possess to beings that do not possess it either, but that by this very token give it to us. The factish is a fact-maker, a talk-maker. “Thanks to factishes,” as sorcerers, initiates, researchers, artists, politicians might say, “we can produce slightly autonomous beings that somewhat surpass us: divinities, facts, works, representations” (p. 35). He argues that if we use this term, we can come closer to understanding the double-nature of construction. The only reason that this double-nature seems like a contradiction is because the Modern Constitution insists that we must choose between what is constructed and what is real, between subjects and objects, between knowledge and belief. Latour argues that everyone, everywhere, makes “factishes” all the time, even the Moderns, especially the Moderns. He argues that no one in the world produces more factishes than the Moderns because that is actually what Science does best, creates new entities. The “objects” or “truths” that Modern Science “discovers” are actually factishes, even though we continue simply to call them “facts”, as if they were not constructed by human hands, but rather always already there in Nature. Latour urges us to realize that just because something is constructed by human hands does not make it unreal. In fact, he would say that the more constructed it is, the more real. The independence, the autonomous reality of scientific facts depends on the nature of their construction by human hands. Scientific facts are, at one and the same time, things that are made and things that are real, real because they are made. And yet they possess an ontology of their own that is beyond the sum total of their “madeness.”

There is plenty more one could say about this chapter, but for me, in my reading, this pretty well describes the main arguments of this chapter. But, like I said in the Introduction to this blog, I am no Latour expert. I eagerly await your commentary/ criticism if you think I’ve left out something crucial.

Chapter 2, “What Is Iconoclash? Or Is There a World Beyond the Image Wars?”

This second chapter moves away the discussion of fetishism, anti-fetishism, and factishes, to a more in-depth analysis of the anti-fetishist gesture of icon and image smashing (i.e. iconoclasm). As I mentioned before, Latour tells us that this chapter is a republication of his reflections on curating the exhibit Iconoclash from 2002-2006. What Latour and his colleagues wanted to examine with Iconoclash was iconoclasm itself, a religious practice as old as religion itself. He goes to great lengths, however, to insist that he is not making an iconoclastic gesture with this exhibit. He is not gathering objects in his museum in order to “smash” them, either figuratively or literally. Instead, Iconoclash seeks to suspend for a moment the smashing hammer of iconoclasm and take a look at what the gesture might mean (I’m paraphrasing Latour’s metaphor here). In order to understand this exhibit, perhaps it is best to just reproduce here what questions the Iconoclash curators sought to answer. On page 70 Latour lists these questions:

Why have images attracted so much hatred?
Why do they always return again, no matter how strongly one wants to get rid of them?
Why have the iconoclasts’ hammers always seemed to strike sideways, destroying something else that seems, after the fact, to matter immensely?
How is it possible to go beyond this cycle of fascination, repulsion, destruction, and atonement, which is generated by the forbidden-image worship?

Latour conducts his inquiry into these questions by examining three different kinds of icon-making/ icon-breaking in our contemporary world: religious, scientific, and artistic. What the iconoclash inquiry examines is the odd way in which the creation and destruction of icons in these three domains actually leads to the creation of more icons, more images, more factishes. The first idea that he must establish is that each of these domains has its own way of being a critical, iconoclastic gesture, if they are approached, that is, from the standpoint of the Modern critical attitude (remember, this is the attitude that insists on the great divides, the attitude that cannot hold the paradoxical nature of factishes). In the realm of religious icons, it is considered an iconoclastic gesture to show the work of human hands in the creation of sacred objects. By showing how they are constructed, one somehow takes something away from the object’s power, or even its “realness”. Latour points out that the same is true of Science and its “facts”. If you show the work of human hands in the construction of facts, you somehow (of course, Latour doesn’t really believe this) lessen their ability to speak truth, because the Modern Constitution insists that facts are true because they exist independently of human construction. In contemporary art, he notes that while there is thankfully no pretense about whether or not images are made by human hands, there still arises the same tendency to smash icons in the form of destroying works of art. But Latour argues that each time icons are smashed in these three domains, more icons are restored in their place.

Latour argues that all this idol-smashing arises out of a misunderstanding of the nature of images in these three categories. Ultimately, he wonders whether or not we have drastically misinterpreted the first commandment about idol worship. He argues that any image, whether in religion (icons, relics, amulets, etc.), science (scientific documents, signs, charts, etc.), or contemporary art, derives its meaning from a myriad of other images. Only the “cascade of images” gives any image its meaning. In Science, for example, he points out that “Isolated, a Scientific Image Has No Referent.” The meaning, significance, the very ontology of a document signifying a scientific fact relies on a complex chain of mediated references, none of which have any meaning outside the chain. Latour argues that the same is true for religion and art.

The gesture of iconoclasm is therefore misguided because it treats images as if they are in isolation from the chain. The scientific “fact” is treated as an entity that stands alone and speaks for itself. The religious icon is mistaken for a fetish object that has its own power outside the chain of mediations. The contemporary art work is smashed so that no icon-worship can take place, as if that single work of art has meaning outside the chain of other representations. Latour argues that what iconoclasts do is “freeze-frame” images, smashing them because they mistake them for things that have meaning and ontology of their own, outside of construction and reference. And yet he also points out that the destruction of these images creates a certain excess that allows more and more images are produced. Images keep proliferating with their own power, outside of, and yet because of, our desire to smash them. This happens because they really never were mere images; they were factishes. As such, they possess a power that is beyond us, beyond our misguided will to misinterpret and destroy them. Latour suggests that we have misunderstood the first commandment. We interpret it as “Don’t worship any images at all.” But Latour insists that images (in the factish sense) are all we have. So, perhaps, he suggests, the second commandment really meant “Thou Shalt Not Freeze-Frame.”

Chapter 3, “Thou Shalt Not Freeze-Frame, Or How Not to Misunderstand the Science and Religion Debate”

Latour continues with this notion of freeze-framing and, as the title suggests, applies it to the debate between religion and science. He argues that the whole debate between Science and Religion is misguided because it arises out of a misunderstanding about what images and representations do in these two domains. According to Latour, the typical ways the Modern Constitution approaches these two domains needs to be completely reversed. Typically, the images produced by Science are thought of as those which give us access to the truth about the visible world, the world of objects, the world of the here and now, whereas the images of Religion are seen by the Modern Constitution as those which provide access to the distant, to the transcendent, to the world beyond our world. Latour argues that in truth, these images in their respective domains do exactly the opposite. With all its talk of neurons and neutrons, the images of scientific reference actually give us access to the distant, to the invisible. While Religion, with its concrete icons and speech acts directed toward specific audiences, actually makes people more present to the present, to the visible world, to the here and now. For me, this second point seemed a little more far-fetched than the first, but I think Latour provides a wonderful analogy that helps us understand what he’s getting at. I’ll try my hand at briefly paraphrasing this analogy.

Latour compares religious representations (speech acts or icon-making) to the speech of lovers. When a lover is asked, “Do you love me?” it makes no sense for the other partner to reply “Well, of course. You know I do. I told you last year.” Latour argues that such a response is an example of a “category mistake”, meaning that the second lover completely misunderstood the question in terms of establishing its veridiction. What he thought was that his beloved sought a truth that could be established by reference (in Latour’s example, he even plays her a tape recording of him saying “I love you” in order to “prove” it), when all along, all she wanted was for him to create an experience of closeness, of unity. Latour summarizes the point best when he says that the second lover thinks she seeks in-formation, when in fact she seeks trans-formation. He has to say something that transforms her into a person who feels loved, and transform himself into someone whose love is understood. Thus, love speech is supposed to establish a certain closeness, a sense of unity. He argues that religious speech is supposed to do the same thing. Successful religious speech aims not at information, but transformation. It seeks to convert someone in the present moment, to change them from an estranged lover to a close and unified one.

Latour argues that since Religion and Science are different “modes of existence” that operate according to completely different paths of what he calls “veridiction” (for more on these terms, see AIME, it makes no sense to attempt to invalidate one by applying rules of veridiction from the other. To ask scientific, referential questions of religion would be absurd because religious speech, and religious icons, are not made in order to provide reference to anything. They are made to bring people close together. They are made to transform, not inform. By way of contrast, it makes no sense to attempt to invalidate scientific truths by referencing religious ones and asking religious questions of science that science never sought to answer in the first place. Forcing these “inappropriate” (this is my word, not Latour’s) questions constitutes what Latour calls a “category mistake.”

He argues that the only people that do this are people who “freeze-frame”, or extract an image or speech act out of the context of other images and speech acts that make them meaningful. The sort of epistemological mode that insists upon freeze-framing is called double-click communication, that sort of communication that wants to transfer truth statements from one place to another without respecting the chain of mediations that lead to that truth. Double-click truth statements attempt to freeze-frame images, whether scientific ones or religious ones, as if such statements can represent truth for all time, for all modes of existence. So, it then makes sense, if people are operating out of a double-click mode of truth speaking, if people are freeze-framing, how a conflict between Religion and Science could ensue. Science’s double-click truth statements (true for all time, standing outside the context that created them, refusing to acknowledge the work of human beings) can be pitted against Religion’s double-click truth statements (true for all time, standing outside the context that created them, refusing to acknowledge the work of human beings). Latour argues, of course, that neither of these kinds of truth statements is faithful to the way truth is made in either mode of existence. If you want to make sure you don’t misunderstand the Religion and Science debate, simply (or perhaps not so simply) remember the first commandment, or at least, Latour’s translation of it: “Thou Shalt Not Freeze-Frame”.