Acts of Fact and Fetish

Smash the fetish and we are suddenly in the process of gathering it (or something else like it) back together. This is the thrust of Bruno Latour’s 1996 essay, translated as “On the Cult of the Factish Gods” (2010).[^1] Latour’s moral was that we should stop believing in belief, because truth and facts are always made up through action and dialogue, and if we sanctify what we make instead of the process of making, then we lose our power. A few years later (1998), Richard Rorty and Bjørn Ramberg, following Donald Davidson’s lead, concluded that accounts of truth are automatically accounts of agency. Rorty called this the “inescapability of the normative.”[^2] When similar ideas emerge at once in different places, a significant event has occurred. The next step, I think, is theorizing internormativity, or a multilingual meta-ethics.

But for now, I am back at Latour’s essay, which is tricky and enlightening. I got lost in its thicket of wordplays and references, so I intend this post as a guide for returning to. Here is a summary of the main point about fetishes:

... even among the Moderns, the fetish, far from being drained of its efficacy, always seems to act in such a way as to shift, muddle, invert, and perturb the origins of belief, as well as the very certainty that mastery is possible. The fetish immediately regains the power that people seek to deny it.[^3]

Latour’s opening figures[^4] depict what all this is generally about:

These show the process of debunking and its obverse (rebunking?), although “power” is missing, which explains the asymmetry behind Latour’s symmetrical design. The subtext is moral – should we Moderns be doing this to others? But the essay does not really get at the human heart of the matter, the why.

Here is a passage that approximates why:

Why insist so strongly on an absolute distinction [between fact-objects and fairy-objects] that can never be applied? Because it is used precisely to redouble the advantages of practice with those of theory. The double repertoire of the Moderns cannot be discovered in their distinction between facts and fetishes, but in the *second*, more subtle distinction between the separation of facts from fetishes that they institute in theory, on the one hand, and the totally different passage from one to the other that they carry out in their practice, on the other. Belief then takes on a new meaning: it is what allows one to keep the practical form of life, in which one causes something to be fabricated, at a distance from the theoretical forms of life, in which one has to choose between facts and fetishes. This is how critical thinkers can go on purifying theory indefinitely, without having to face the possible consequences of their purification.[^5]

Latour got religious with the last sentence – why do we set apart theory from practice, despite everything? A unifying theory of our nature would show how real vagaries necessitate the distinction, but it remains elusive.

So, Latour invented a new term instead:

Joining the two etymological sources [of fact and fetish], we shall use the label *factish* for the robust certainty that allows practice to pass into action without the practitioner ever believing in the difference between construction and reality, immanence and transcendence.(^23: One should add to this the artifact, in the laboratory sense of a parasite mistaken for a new being. Unlike facts, artifacts are surprising, because human actions can be discovered where they have not been expected. The word thus provides a transition between the surprise of facts and the surprise of fetishes. There is no more reason for giving up the word "fetish" than for giving up the word "fact," on the pretext that the Moderns believed in belief and wanted to disqualify the former term while retaining the latter. In practice, no one has ever believed in fetishes, and everyone has paid astute attention to facts. The two words thus remain intact. Since the phonemic difference between the French terms *fée* and *fait* ("fairy" and "fact") is not always audible, some might prefer *factiche* over *faitiche* in French. In the English "factish," the etymological link to "fairy" is unfortunately lost.)

I am uneasy with the claim that no one has ever believed in fetishes, although this is not to argue that no ever practiced a belief in fetishes. Following Mircea Eliade’s hierophany and Alexei Lidov’s hierotopy, and also de Certeau’s axiom that “space is practiced place,” it does seem that wherever fetishes feel most real, we find people practicing habits about them and thereby acting in line with (social?) facts. But this is relativistic in the extreme. My experiences as a guest among various communities have aligned with the idea that, regardless of place (but conditional on other things), we share a basic kind of moral reciprocity, or fundamental norms, or even the fear of god(‘s’) watchful eye. This could be called a fact of life, but our sacral behavior toward it puzzles me. Latour came around somewhere near this point, noting how we “continue doing what we have always done,” albeit with a practical justification and/or in secret:

The very notion of practice arises from the requirement that the Moderns impose. Since we cannot express ourselves in the either-or terms of critical thinking, we are obliged to continue doing what we have always done, but in secret.(^28: Amusingly enough, the pragmatism that could be taken for the philosophy of practice remains so intimidated by the authoritative position of its adversaries that it is forced to depict practice as modest, limited, utilitarian, humanist, and convenient, thereby occupying – unquestioningly – the place critical philosophy had prepared for it. Modesty is a philosophical virtue only if it decides for itself how it will keep from telling somebody what to do or from proposing foundations.) Practice is the clandestine wisdom of the passage that stubbornly maintains (but since it can no longer say so out loud, it is content merely to act accordingly, to murmur its message in hushed tones) that construction and reality are synonyms.[^6]

It will take time to sink in. Meanwhile, Latour prudently digressed on Bhharathipura, a 1973 novel by the Kannada-language writer U.R. Ananthamurthy. It tells the story of a Brahmin, Jagannantha, who blasphemes his ancestral religion by taking his family’s shaligram, a holy black stone (lit. an ammonite), from its sacred spot and trying to force members of a pariah caste to touch it. They do not. Jagannantha only succeeds in besmirching his own nest:

The priest, the aunt, and the pariahs already know what Jagannath discovers by his failure: it has nothing to do with belief, it is all about behavior. It is not about a fetish-stone, but about factishes, about those off-center beings that allow us to live, that is, to pass continually from construction to autonomy without ever believing in either. Thanks to factishes, construction and truth remain synonymous. Once broken, they become antonyms. We can no longer pass. We can no longer create. We can no longer live. Then we have to set up factishes all over again.[^7]

Here, the wellspring of facts and fairies ran dry, so Latour code-switched into the “language of philosophers” and plumbed it again:

"[The] stubborn refusal to choose [between immanence and transcendence]... always shows up, we now understand, as a simple practice, as something that can never be spoken or theorized, even if the 'actors-themselves' keep on saying it and describing it in luxurious detail.(^32: ... [T]his amounts to generalizing an ethnomethodological approach by extending it into metaphysics by way of semiotics, the only *organon* we have at our disposal that can fearlessly maintain the diversity of modes of existence – at the price, to be sure, of putting them into language and text, a restriction that we have nonetheless sought to overcome by extending the overly-restrictive definition of semiotics to things themselves. And so once again we come across the entities that had interested us from the start – under the vague heading of "actor-network" – and that are at once real, social, and discursive.)[^8]

Voilà. But since we grasp things better when they have concise names like “actor-network theory,” I prefer Rorty’s parsimonious phrasing: Any account of truth is automatically an account of agency. This leaves open the question of how to make up an actual research method that models people and their dialogic processes of truth making, their crafts for fabricating fetishes, their science in action, etc.

Latour preferred ethnography, and his footnotes also say: go read Tobie Nathan and Isabelle Stengers. He could not resist another coinage, however, and in his pamphlet’s last trick, he made up the word “transfears” after observing a patient’s diagnosis at a psychiatric clinic. Evidently tiring of factishes, Latour instead began using “divinities” to describe how an objective temperament – a mental syndrome, or perhaps, an orisha – comes to be seated on one’s head. Religious initiation and psychiatric diagnosis require the conferral / transferal of a supposedly new status, hence why he reached for a new word:

Let us venture one more term to define these divinities at last. I propose to call them "fears," borrowing Tobie Nathan's lovely explanation for this word, which has the advantage of presuming neither essence nor person.(^62: Nathan, *L'influence qui guérit*. Nathan contrasts "anguish" and "fright." Anguish is supposed to have no outside cause and comes entirely from the subject's own projection; fright, on the contrary is clearly the realization that there is something outside that has caused you to be frightened.)[^9]

Much earlier, around 1665, François de La Rochefoucauld expressed fear’s incitement of action in Maximes, no. 38:

Nous promettons selon nos espérances, et nous tenons nos craintes. / Promises are made according to our hopes, and kept according to our fears.[^10]

Perhaps ethnographies of fear phenomena can describe both facts and fetishes, or why we make and worship them, better than philosophies – something I will continue to ponder. But for now, I am quite finished with Latour’s essay and will leave further discussion of his iconoclasm for another time.

Finally, here are some closing quotes and figures to bookend the discussion:

No one, in practice, has ever displayed naive belief in any being whatsoever.(^43: From one year to the next, each of the canonical examples finds itself overturned by modern historiography, as in the admirable case studied by Jeffrey Burton Russell in *Inventing the Flat Earth: Columbus and Modern Historians* (1991). How those monks have been mocked for being naive enough to believe in a flat earth in the literal sense. The author proves, with brio, that this particular belief in naive belief dates back to the nineteenth century, when there was actually nothing naive about it, since it shared in the beautiful Enlightenment scenography that was emerging from the dark ages.) If there is such a thing as belief at all, it is the most complex, sophisticated, critical, subtle, reflective activity there is.(^44: Catherine Darbo-Peschanski's *Le discours du particulier: Essai sur l'enquête hérodotéene* (1987). This has been a decisive work for me: it can serve as an overall method for bringing together the diversity of positions that has been crushed by the notion of belief. For more recent examples, see Émilie Gomart, "Methodone: Six Effects in Search of a Substance," *Social Studies of Science 32, no.1 (2002): 93-135.) But this subtlety can never unfold if one first attempts to break it down into cause-objects, source-subjects, and representations. To take away the ontology of belief, on the pretext that it occurs inside the subject, is to misunderstand objects and human actors alike. It is to miss the wisdom of the factishes.[^11]

Denouement (all following correspond to a single footnote below)[^12]:

Quote:

Instead of a causal chain transmitting a force that actualizes a potential, realizes a possibility, you will never obtain more than a series of slight surpassings. Events: here is another name for the factishes and the worship they deserve.

Quote:

Really? Is an engineer master of his machine? Was Pasteur master of his lactic acid? Is a programmer master of his program, a creator, of his creation, an author, of his text? No one who has ever truly acted could utter such impieties. It is because God is a creature and because our creations possess, in relationship to ourselves, as much autonomy as we possess in relationship to God, that we can continue to use the words "construction" and "creation" without lying.(^83: Discoveries in theology are rare; but Whitehead's discovery of the creature god certainly counts as one. Indeed, for Whitehead it was less a matter of discovering than of understanding, through a different language, what everybody had already understood in a different way: Whitehead's god is *incarnate*. "All actual entities share with God this characteristic of self-causation. For this reason every actual entity also shares with God the characteristic of transcending all other actual entities, including God" (*Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosomology*. New York: Free Press, 1978, 222). To believe that God will now submerge himself among his creatures is to keep on repeating the same mistake. Creatures are not immanent. Mediations, events, passages, and *factishes* can be used neither for drowning, nor for dissolving, but only for producing. They come to pass. They differ.)

Finally:

In the common world of comparative anthropology, lights cross paths. Differences are not there to be respected, neglected, or subsumed, but, as Whitehead said, to act as "lures for feelings, food for thought."

As priests say, amen, and neurochemists say amine.

[1] Bruno Latour and Catherine Porter, On the Modern Cult of the Factish Gods (Duke University Press, 2010).

[2] Richard Rorty, 29 December 1998, “Response to Bjorn Ramberg,” Richard Rorty papers, M2558 Box 2, Folder 2, Special Collections and Archives, Green Library, Stanford University, 1.

[3] Latour and Porter, “Factish Gods,” 11.

[4] Ibid., 12-15.

[5] Ibid., 20-21.

[6] Ibid., 24.

[7] Ibid., 28.

[8] Ibid.

[9] Ibid., 52.

[10] The Duc de La Rochefoucauld, Reflections, or Moral Opinions & Maxims: a bilingual edition, trans. Jack Mitchell (CreateSpace Independent, 2017), 25.

[11] Latour and Porter, “Factish Gods,” 42.

[12] Ibid., 63-66.