Speculative Grace: Bruno Latour and Object-Oriented Theology

33. Iconophilia

33 Iconophilia Latour’s claim is that, in order to understand the revelatory force of religion, we must allow religious objects to speak for themselves. This means both making room for dismissed objects and stemming the backwash of scientific expectations into religious self-understanding. Between the iconoclasm of a scientific approach to religious objects that dismisses them and the idolatry of a religious burlesque that freezes them, Latour advocates ‘‘iconophilia.’’ Iconophilia is an object-oriented approach to religious objects that allows what is too near, too immanent, too available to be made visible in them. It is an approach to religious objects that allows the objects themselves to be simultaneously the targets and agents of revelation. Both the iconoclast and the idolater are conspiracy theorists . Both succumb to the drive for purity and exhaustive reduction. Both dream of a world without mediation and, as a result, obscure the real objects at work. Further, both 128 discount the double-bind of resistant availability. The idolater dreams of perfectly opaque objects that have no over- flowing sets of constitutive but partially incompatible objects packed-away inside. In this way, the idolater denies that the object refers and reduces it to its face-value. Similarly , the iconoclast dreams of perfectly transparent objects that, with clean efficiency, convey us without deformation to the ‘‘real’’ objects behind them. ‘‘The iconoclast dreams of an unmediated access to truth, of a complete absence of images’’ (HI 421). In this way, the iconoclast reduces the object to its cash-value. The iconoclast empties religious objects first by treating them as if they were frictionless signs and then by declaiming that they can’t find any of the transcendent objects to which they putatively refer. On this account, religious objects are just signs for something else, not agents in their own right. And, because this something else is missing, religious objects are empty signs. ‘‘The iconoclast is able to empty the world of all its inhabitants by turning them into representations, while filling it up with continuous mechanical matter’’ (PH 285). For the iconoclast, religious objects are just empty husks, hard candy shells without any promise of a sweet chocolate center. Their disappointment is a product of their naiveté about objects in general. ‘‘If the iconoclast could naively believe that believers exist who are naı̈ve enough to endow a stone with spirit,’’ Latour argues, ‘‘it was because the iconoclast also naively believed that the very facts he employed to shatter the idol could exist without the help of any human agency’’ (PH 274). Iconoclasts fail to understand the nature of religious objects not because there is something peculiarly religious about them, but because they fail to understand the nature of objects per se. People who buy the iconoclastic account of religion—an account that casts religion as having defaulted on its promise to deliver some transcendent collateral—may still try to Iconophilia 129 cook up some positive account of religion in terms of symbols . Religion, they say, is fine without objects because at heart it is ‘‘symbolic.’’ Latour does not find this tack to be an improvement. It still disassociates religion from its actual objects. ‘‘The symbolic is the magic of those who have lost the world. It is the only way they have found to maintain ‘in addition’ to ‘objective things’ the ‘spiritual atmosphere’ without which things would ‘only’ be ‘natural’’’ (PF 187). A symbol is a watered-down supplement to the bare objects of the natural world. It is a hint of rouge for the sake of color. But this supplement comes too late because once the bare objects of the natural world have arrived, it is the lively character of the objects themselves that has been lost. ‘‘There is no difference between those who reduce, on the one hand, and those who want a supplement of the soul, on the other. The two groups are the same. When they reduce everything to nothing, they feel that all the rest escapes them. They therefore seek to hold onto it with ‘symbols’’’ (PF 187). Denied objects, religion must make do with dressed-up platitudes, colorful symbols, and the curation of quaint values. Caught between the antiquated language of medieval metaphysics and the misapplication of scientific expectations , religious folk may themselves often do a poor job of describing what is going on in religious practices. But the practices tell a different story...