Publisher Description

On the Modern Cult of the Factish Gods continues the project that the influential anthropologist, philosopher, and science studies theorist Bruno Latour advanced in his book We Have Never Been Modern. There he redescribed 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 naive 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 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 religious icons.

Notes

One of the leading figures in science studies offers a provocative look at the way science shatters the "fetishes" of magic and religion only to recreate other sorts of fetishes (factishes) in their place

Back Cover

"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 fully to discern. A spontaneous reflexivity, an iconic quality of its own. 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 broke into bloom 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)

Author Biography

Bruno Latour is Professor and Dean for Research at Sciences Po in Paris. His many books include Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory; Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy; Pandora's Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies; Aramis, Or, The Love of Technology; and We Have Never Been Modern.

Table of Contents

Preface vii
1. On the Cult of the Factish Gods 1
2. What is Iconoclash? Or Is There a World Beyond the Image Wars? 67
3. "Thou Shalt Not Freeze Frame," Or How Not to Misunderstand the Science and Religion Debate 99
Notes 125
Index 151

Review

"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 Ree, New Humanist, July 2012

Promotional

One of the leading figures in science studies offers a provocative look at the way science shatters the "fetishes" of magic and religion only to recreate other sorts of fetishes (factishes) in their place

Review Quote

"What immense spiritual and intellectual relaxation! With what vivacity and cunning Bruno Latour gets us out of the cage holding us hostage to the mumbo-jumbo of Subjects and Objects all these long years of Western Civ. Out-fetishizing these fetishes, nudging us toward the mastery of non-mastery, he invites us thereby to the sort of thinking needed to remake a failing world."- Michael Taussig , Columbia University

Promotional "Headline"

One of the leading figures in science studies offers a provocative look at the way science shatters the "fetishes" of magic and religion only to recreate other sorts of fetishes (factishes) in their place

Details