On the Modern Cult of the Factish Gods (review)

Bruno Latour’s On the Modern Cult of the Factish Gods is a continuation and elaboration of the project Latour set out in 1991 in Nous n’avons jamais étés modernes (English translation, 1993). The book is composed of a longer, title essay, followed by two shorter essays previously published in English (Latour and Weibel 2002; Latour 2005). Built around two Latourian neologisms—the factish and the iconoclash—Latour attempts to break down the boundaries erected by the so-called “Moderns” between knowledge and belief, between religion and science, between fact and fetish.

In the title essay, a “pamphlet” originally published in French in 1996, Latour begins with Fontaine’s fable of the artist who, having sculpted his masterpiece, returns the next day to his studio only to step back in shock and fear. His work was so convincing that he believed it to be real. This fable—of the artist lacking mastery over the work he has created—is more than an example for Latour. The possibility, which Latour argues is readily recognizable, though often misunderstood, is the very basis of the argument. Instead of reading Fontaine as pointing to the artist’s naïveté, Latour argues that this scene indexes the essential character of image making: namely, that the maker gives the object an autonomy he does not have in the first place, but through this process, the object is literally out of his hands and takes on a life of its own, transforming the maker in the process. He traces this operation through the useful juxtaposition of examples from Pasteur’s laboratory and Candomblé initiation.

It would have been useful to devote more time to tracing the operation of these non-mastered objects through their referential and pragmatic chains. Instead, Latour focuses his critique on the anti-fetishists, of both the religious and Marxian variety, attempting to break down the binaries of subject and object, interiority and exteriority, fact and fetish. These binaries arise in their strongest form in the colonial encounter, according to Latour, when the Portuguese Christians accused the “savage” Africans of evil fetishism for worshipping meaningless objects that the latter admitted to making themselves. This encounter is part of what Latour calls the “first critical denunciation” (12–13) in which the “critical thinker” alerts the fetish worshipper that he “projects the power of his own action onto an inert object,” which “‘in reality’” has no power itself (13). The Portuguese have done this for the native “Blacks” while Latour performs a similar operation on the Portugeuse, pointing out that their worshipped Christian icons were said to have come from God but in fact originated from their own making. What is the difference between these two critiques? Instead of convincing the Portuguese to throw off the yolk of their oppressor (the fetishes), Latour wants to attend to that very moment of making and the subsequent operation of the object. While the Moderns accuse Candomblé initiates of fetishism, Latour hopes to learn from those initiates about how to understand objects as fabrications that are not controlled by their makers.

The accusation of fetishism is only the first critical operation, and Latour points out that it is often followed by a second denunciation. Once the subject has been liberated from the bounds of the fetish, is she thus autonomous and de-alienated? No! Cries the critical thinker:

The free and autonomous subject boasts, a little too soon, that he is the primal cause of all his own projections and manipulations. Fortunately, the critical thinker, who never sleeps, once again reveals how determination works. The subject believes he is free while “in reality” he is wholly controlled. In order to explain the determinations involved, we must take recourse to objective facts, revealed to us by the natural, human, or social sciences. The laws of biology, genetics, economics, society, and language are going to put the speaking object, who believed himself to be master of his own deeds and acts, in his place

(13).

For Latour...