Speculative Grace: Bruno Latour and Object-Oriented Theology

14. Dislocated Grace

14 Dislocated Grace It is this dislocation—a dislocation of transcendence from its status as a founding and singular ontological exception to its dispersal as what characterizes the resistant availability of the multitude—that simultaneously marks the dislocation and distribution of grace. Traditionally, grace is defined as an immanent expression of God’s transcendence and, traditionally, this transcendence is itself dependent on God’s being an exceptional One. Transcendence names that supernatural, theistic gap between an unconditioned, original One and the created, conditioned, and contingent multiplicity of everything else. Grace, then, is understood as stemming from God’s being an excessive, enabling, and absolute exception to the rest of reality. Master of his own house, he can do as he will and guarantee the result. If, however, there is no such Prime Mover, if reality is always already an irreducible mess, then God cannot be a supernatural exception and, in turn, grace 45 cannot be defined in terms of such a transcendence or con- fined to what originates from that single point of origin. While Latour does not directly addresses the topic of grace—it is the work of this book to do just that—it is clear that in his pluriverse grace cannot descend from the heavens . Heaven and earth have been emulsified. Rather, grace must emerge from the fermentation of the multitude. It must be embedded in the bustling give and take of objects. In Latour’s scenario, grace, like transcendence, now lacks a metaphysical ‘‘contrary.’’ And lacking a contrary, grace, as Gould put it, is deposed as an ‘‘unknowable, large-scale cosmic force’’ and, instead, operationalized as an ordinary, ‘‘testable, small-scale force.’’ Ported into a non-theistic, object-oriented metaphysics, grace gets operationalized as objects at work. Latour welcomes this proliferation of transcendences— and, by extension, this proliferation of grace—as good news. At the very least, the proliferation means that all the prophets of nihilism who have impugned us for disenchanting the world and chasing away the sacred with science, plastic forks, and cell phones are full of hot air. ‘‘If there is not immanence, if there are only networks, agents, actants, we cannot be disenchanted. Humans are not the ones who arbitrarily add the ‘symbolic dimension’ to pure material forces. These forces are as transcendent, active, agitated, spiritual, as we are’’ (WM 128). We may have sins aplenty, but at least we are not guilty of this metaphysical crime. The world, always already an imbroglio, is no different now than it is has ever been. It is the urge to reduce and purify that desacralizes the world, not the world’s own ontological promiscuity. We cannot be guilty of mixing up this world with another or of cutting the string that once tied us to a higher plane because this world (i.e., these transcendences) is all there is. If the gods exist, they live and move and have 46 Dislocated Grace their being in the same motley pluriverse as every other object. The good news is that, ‘‘as soon as there is no other world, perfection resides in this one’’ (PF 233). Every object is simply and perfectly whatever that object is. ‘‘There is no rear-world behind to be used as a judge of this one’’ (RS 118). This does not mean that legitimate judgments cannot be made, but it does mean that non-messy, nonprovisional , non-concatenated judgments cannot be made. It means that the messiness of these judgments does not stem from our poor access to what is real, but from the messiness of the real itself. And it means that, with nowhere else to go, ‘‘God has come down from Heaven to Earth’’ and he too must go ‘‘to work to discuss, through experimentation with possible worlds, the best of deals, the optimum that no one is allowed to calculate in others’ stead’’ (PN 177). God, as an object among a multitude of objects, has no free pass. He must translate, compromise, and negotiate with other objects just like every other object. Resistant availability is ubiquitous. One may not care for the word ‘‘negotiation’’ when it comes to the operation of grace, but this, Latour claims, is only ‘‘because one measures the deals negotiators make by the yardstick of an ideal situation that of course has all the advantages—except that it does not exist!’’ (PN 175) As long as we continue to posit...