Speculative Grace: Bruno Latour and Object-Oriented Theology

15. Resistant Availability

15 Resistant Availability Operationalized as a ‘‘tangible micro-force,’’ grace shows up as the ordinary business of objects at work. And, on Latour ’s model, all objects are engaged in the same kind of work: the work of negotiating the uneven local terrain of a multitude of transcendences. Or, again, all objects are engaged in the work of both resisting availability and making available what is resistant. Every object is characterized by resistance because ‘‘there are no equivalents’’ (PF 162). And every object is characterized by availability because ‘‘everything may be made to be the measure of everything else’’ (PF 158). Every object unfolds as the work imposed by this dual mandate. While each object is resistant to equivalence, it is nonetheless available for measurement. In an experimental metaphysics, if an object lacks resistance, if it is completely reducible, then it is not real. Resistance is the first mark of the real. Similarly, if an object lacks availability, if it is withdrawn entirely from 49 relation, then it is not real. Availability is the second mark of the real. Reality is jointly defined by resistant availability. Latour is a committed metaphysical realist—though, admittedly , an unusual one. He parts ways with the ‘‘religious ’’ conception of reality common among reductionists because he refuses to define what is real in relation to some original stuff or baseline uniformity. But Latour’s refusal to privilege one thing (or kind of thing) as more real or really real, is precisely what allows him to unilaterally invest the heterogeneous field of objects with their own irreducible reality . For Latour, objects of every kind emerge as real only if they are knotted together in such a way that (1) their tangled lines of availability cannot be cleanly pulled through any one loop of resistance, and (2) their tangled lines of resistance cannot be cleanly pulled though any one loop of availability. In Latour’s framework, neither resistance nor availability can be allowed to win this tug of war. If, for instance, God exists, he can be neither entirely resistant to the multitude, nor can the multitude be entirely available for him. Objects may vary in the amount of ‘‘play’’ their resistant availability offers, but every object must offer an uncountable number of ways to fail at the task of cleanly pulling either free from the other. As a practical matter, however, Latour gives pride of place to resistance because the default position of an experimental metaphysics is transcendence. The working assumption of his model is that all durable concatenations are rare and expensive. In this respect, Latour is happy to endorse Gabriel Tarde’s formula that ‘‘to exist is to differ’’ (RS 137). Or, as Latour more bluntly puts it, ‘‘whatever resists is real’’ (PF 227). How, then, should we characterize the nature of an object ’s resistance? When an object resists, what does it resist? 50 Resistant Availability Latour’s answer is straightforward and, for his part, it characterizes relationality as such: objects resist ‘‘trials of strength.’’ They resist the trying but constitutive push and pull of other objects—the objects that are near them, the objects that compose them, and the objects that they, in turn, compose. In this metaphysical scrum, all objects, animate or inanimate, human or nonhuman, ‘‘seek hegemony by increasing, reducing, or assimilating one another’’ (PF 154). As a result, Latour often refers to objects as ‘‘actors’’ or ‘‘actants,’’ a term that emphasizes the defining feature of an object-oriented approach: the investment of every object with responsibility to act, even if only by way of active resistance , for itself. Because even when ‘‘some actors are de- fined by others as being passive,’’ this passivity is only relative and provisional (PF 120). No actors are wholly passive or simply available. No actors lack active resistance, even when passive. ‘‘An actor is always active’’ and ‘‘no actant is so weak that it cannot enlist another’’ (PF 120, 159). Each object comes to be what it is ‘‘through the difference it creates in resisting others’’ and these differences follow the contours of an object’s stubborn opposition to reduction (PF 159). ‘‘Actors are defined above all as obstacles , scandals, as what suspends mastery, as what gets in the way of domination, as what interrupts the closure and composition of the collective. To put it crudely, human and nonhuman actors appear first as troublemakers. The notion of recalcitrance...