On the Modern Cult of the Factish Gods

On the Modern Cult of the Factish Gods continues the project that the anthropologist, philosopher, and influential science studies theorist Bruno Latour advanced in his book We Have Never Been Modern. There he proposed to re-describe the Enlightenment idea of universal scientific truth, arguing that there are no facts separable from their fabrication. In this concise work, Latour delves into the “belief in naïve belief,” the suggestion that fetishes, objects invested with mythical powers, are fabricated, and that “facts” are not. Mobilizing his work in the anthropology of science, he uses the notion of “factishes” to explore a way of respecting the objectivity of facts and the power of fetishes without forgetting that both are fabricated. While the fetish-worshipper knows perfectly well that fetishes are man-made, the Modern icon-breaker inevitably erects new icons. Yet Moderns sense no contradiction at the core of their work. Latour pursues his critique of critique, or of the possibility of mediating between subject and object, or the fabricated and the real, through the notion of “iconoclash,” making productive comparisons between scientific practice and the worship of visual images and of religious icons.

Bruno Latour

"Latour came into view in the 1980s as an uncommonly engaging as well as radical practitioner of the new discipline of science studies.... witty, imaginative, literate and unrelentingly ironic. For some, all this spells something manifestly frivolous and naturally suspect. Others, including many not ordinarily drawn to treatises on science and technology, are attracted by Latour’s style into engaging with ideas they find illuminating and a mode of analysis they can use.” - Barbara Herrnstein Smith, London Review of Books, March 8th 2012 "What immense spiritual and intellectual relaxation! With what vivacity and cunning Bruno Latour gets us out of the cage holding us hostage of the mumbo-jumbo of Subjects and Objects all these long years of Western Civ. Out-fetishizing these fetishes, nudging us towards the mastery of non-mastery, he invites us thereby to the sort of thinking needed to remake a failing world.”--Michael Taussig, Columbia University

"Bruno Latour’s is a joyous and generous science, not a warmongering, invidious one. His unique intellectual trajectory beautifully replicates those strange objects he was the first to fully discern. For his work is eminently suitable to an actor-network treatment; it thrives on associations; it deals in mediations; it articulates heterogeneous modes of existence; it modulates its own regime of enunciation as the truth it describes changes its own conditions of production. What started as a ‘social description of scientific practice’ morphed into a radical redescription of the social at least as much as of science itself, and it bloomed as a daring project of a general anthropology of truth, within which facts and fetishes, divine forces and material forms, art and science, religion and law, all are made to inhabit a virtual plane of coexistence, which we are challengingly invited to bring into actuality as our common world.”--Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Museu Nacional (Rio de Janeiro) "Eloquent, amusing and fabulously well-informed, Bruno Latour is one of the superstars of French intellectual life.... His recent book On the Modern Cult of the Factish Gods shows that Latour remains a great star, even if he has been through some kind of midlife crisis about the work that made him famous.... he also grapples for the first time with a problem that has always haunted the philosophy of science: the question of religious belief.

"Any change in the way science is considered,” he observes, "will have some consequences on the many ways to talk about religion.” There is of course a hoary orthodoxy which maintains that the rise of science annihilates religion just as the dawning of day dispels the darkness of night.” ¬ - Johnathan Rée, New Humanist, July 2012

Preface One: On the Cult of Factish Gods; Two: Iconoclash; Three: Thou Shalt Not Freeze Frame Notes; Index