Speculative Grace: Bruno Latour and Object-Oriented Theology

30. Laboratories

30 Laboratories A reading is an experiment. Exegetes do the same kind of work scientists do in their labs. In both instances, it is not the interpreter’s job ‘‘to decide in the actor’s stead what groups are making up the world and which agencies are making them act’’ (RS 184). Instead, like the scientist, it is the interpreter ’s job ‘‘to build the artificial experiment—a report, a story, a narrative, an account—where this diversity might be deployed to the full’’ (RS 184). Rather than deciding, good science experiments. Good interpretations do the same. A reading is an essay, a try, an attempt, a shot. There is no guarantee of success and all success is only partial. ‘‘Textual accounts can fail like experiments often do’’ (RS 127). Good texts successfully highlight workable through-lines without alienating their base. ‘‘I would define a good account as one that traces a network. I mean by this word a string of actions where each participant is treated as a fullblown mediator’’ (RS 128). In a bad text, shortcuts are 113 taken that leave too many objects aside. ‘‘In a bad text only a handful of actors will be designated as the causes of all the others, which have no other function than to serve as the backdrop or relay for the flows of causal efficiency. They may go through the gestures to keep busy as characters, but they will be without a part in the plot, meaning they will not act’’ (RS 130). The efficacy of a text depends on balancing its degree of fine-grained focus with the necessity of a sufficiently wide-angle lens. The writing itself needs to be persuasive, but it must draw its persuasive strength from a display of the objects it foregrounds rather than from an effacement of them. Badly written interpretations are bad, in particular, because ‘‘they do not convoke in their reports actors recalcitrant enough to interfere with the bad writing’’ (RS 125). Like a good reading, a good experiment is a bit of theater . Laboratories host this theater. A laboratory is a place where groups of normally diffuse actors are gathered, packaged , and aligned. Whether conducted in the archive or the operating room, ‘‘research is best seen as a collective experimentation about what humans and nonhumans together are able to swallow or withstand’’ (PH 20). In this sense, laboratories are train stations, centralized hubs, arti- ficially constructed points of convergence that amass an unusual number of objects, on an unusual variety of scales, and of an unusual diversity, in order to test what kinds of configurations these objects are willing to ratify. ‘‘The layman is awed by the laboratory set-up, and rightly so. There are not many places under the sun where so many and such hard resources are gathered in so great numbers, sedimented in so many layers, capitalised on such a large scale’’ (SA 93). A laboratory is a fulcrum that multiplies the hermeneut ’s strength. Configurations that would be impossible to construct and display in the wild, become possible 114 Laboratories here. In the laboratory, in the folders and filing cabinets of the historian or in the samples and DNA sequencers of the geneticist, ‘‘the power ratio is reversed; phenomena, whatever their size—infinitely great or infinitely small—are retranslated and simplified’’ (PF 74). Laboratories stockpile these extracted through-lines in a way that invites their assembly into new objects capable of displaying surprising revelations. The scientist, like the exegete, is successful when he has ‘‘invented such dramatized experiments that the spectators could see the phenomena he was describing in black and white’’ (PF 85). What was confused becomes clear. What was resistant becomes available. What was invisible becomes visible. Laboratories are essential to this work because they manufacture these previously inaccessible points of view. ‘‘To ‘force’ someone to ‘share’ one’s point of view, one must indeed invent a new theater of truth’’ (PF 86). Laboratories, classrooms, offices, and churches are theaters of truth and these theaters are themselves objects. Here, an object is a point of view and to assemble a new object is to engineer a new point of view. Or, better: an object is not one point of view but a set of overlapping and not entirely compatible points of view. No objects—human beings included—are ever confined...