The Characteristics of [REL], 3 of 3

The third characteristic of [REL] is hesitation. Hesitation is the reflex of reprise. It resists transcendent closure (‘religion is this or that experience’) and continually refers back to the performance of entities in the common world for its definition (‘this or that experience is religious’).

Latour suggests that hesitation, in the form of doubt, marks the response of the faithful even in light of what appears to be direct address from the Divinity (the paradigmatic instance being the ‘call of the prophet’ narrative forms of the Hebrew Bible): ‘not once, in all the Scriptures, do we find traces of someone who was called who could say that he was sure, really sure, that the beings of the Word were there and that he had really understood what they wanted of him’ (Latour, An Inquiry into Modes of Existence, p.310). Except, the same passage goes on, ‘the sinner’, who is thus defined as the one who unflinchingly accepts religious experience as an in-form-ational medium (ibid).^[1] In order to dis-amalgamate from [DC], Latour suggests that [REL] will tend towards appropriating and celebrating (what might be called) ‘sticky liturgies’, that is, words from its own tradition that are ‘hard to swallow’, ‘bristling with contradictions’, ‘bizarre’, ‘clumsy’, ‘sticking in our craws’, and so on (Latour, Rejoicing, or the Torments of Religious Speech, p.100). By means of sticky liturgies, [REL] turns its attention to the logistical procedures of the common world.

In this regard Latour reflects the influence of Michel Serres. For Serres, religion is best understood through its complex etymology derived from relegare (‘to read over again’), religare (‘to attach, bind, tie together’) or religiens (‘care, carefulness’, this word being the antonym of negligens): he suggests that religion inherits from all three roots but particularly the latter. In this way religion is orientated away from the notion of ‘belief’, which both Serres and Latour disdain, and towards the notion of ‘concern’, which they celebrate as orientation towards the secular, the mundane and the worldly.

Bringing these three characteristics together, we might therefore suggest that the most distinctive feature of [REL] is ‘subsistence’ (which can now be contrasted with ‘fundamentalism’ as the basic posture of the Religion of the Moderns). Subsistence is once again demonstrable from the empirical site. In seeking to affirm their love, Latour suggests that both partners understand ‘that their love is either a substance whose attributes serve no purpose, or that [they themselves] are responsible for bringing out its attributes and then, yes, effectively, their love stands underneath—which is precisely what the word ‘sub-stance’ means—all the shows of tenderness and affection’ (Latour, Rejoicing, p.126). Amatory speech can be encoded either as ‘substance’, where it lazily leans upon a previous utterance without taking upon itself the work of activating it in the present, or as ‘sub-stance’ (or ‘subsistence’, as Latour more commonly calls it), where it takes responsibility for continually activating its own value in the present moment by means of reprise. The same contrast applies to religion. Unlike the Religion of the Moderns, which operated via a ‘fundamental’ substrate of information, [REL] does not consist in ‘a substance preserved intact over time, like a gold coin forgotten under a mattress that you might come across happily years later’ (Latour, Rejoicing, p.126). Instead, [REL] encodes a movement of subsistence: first comes the performance of a religious experience, and only afterwards can this performance be validated (or not) according to the value it has incarnated. It is no exaggeration to say, then, that subsistence reverses the direction of meaning of a religious experience. A religious truth claim is revealed after (not before) its performance:

I begin with the utterance and end with a substance, I start from existence, from its fragile dependence on the right word, and I recapitulate it after that in an essence. First I make the thing exist and only after that do I name it. (Latour, Rejoicing, p.128)^.

Hence, it is more accurate to think of [REL] as a participial construction (‘religiously’) than as a referential object (‘religion’).

Defining [REL] in terms of subsistence, however, does not imply relativism.

This is because whichever mode is in view—whether this be [REL] or anything else—objectivity is not granted by appeal to a transcendent, unalterable notion of substance, but via the subsistent movements of entities. The telos of Latour’s entire intellectual project is towards the development of a realism without substance. The regime of truth specific to [REL], like that of any other mode, does not lose objectivity when it is validated by means of its performance within the common world. Rather, ‘as soon as we put it [religion] back on its feet, by taking it the right way round, starting from the attributes and going back (or not) to the substance, it becomes accurate again, since it retrieves all its truth values’ (Latour, Rejoicing, p.138). Only when religion trades in the trans-form-ational utterances of subsistence, rather than the in-form-ational utterances of [DC], will it attain to the status of fully rational discourse.

References 

[1]    Latour includes in this condemnation are the official representatives of the institutional Church when they collude with the Religion of the Moderns in seeking to preserve, rather than reprise, doctrine: ‘the people whose job it is to change words so as to keep the meaning, clerics, have preferred piously to preserve the words at the risk of losing their meaning: they’ve left us, the rest of us, we latecomers, ignoramuses, stutterers, equipped with words that have become untruthful for the purposes of recording the real things we hold dear to our hearts’ in Latour, Rejoicing (2013), p.8.

The Characteristics of [REL], 2 of 3

The second consequence of [REL], which evidently follows from the first, is that it will display strong inclusivist tendencies. That is to say, if it functions via reprise, [REL] will be alert to the arrival of new and unexpected entities by which that reprise might be furthered.

Once again this contrasts with the Religion of the Moderns which, as has been demonstrated, is resistant to such admission.^[1] [REL] is characterised by its readiness to incorporate any entity whatsoever—whether ‘large’ or ‘small’, ‘real’ or ‘abstract’, ‘material’ or ‘immaterial’, or indeed ‘human’ or ‘divine’—so long as the entity in question justifies itself as an agent of reprise that generates the value that is specific to religious experience.^[2] This procedure would apply to an entity provisionally called ‘God’, just as much as it would apply to an entity such as a rosary-bead, an angel or a doctrine. Indeed, it is quite appropriate that the adjectives by which those entities were marked above (‘large’, ‘small’, ‘real’, ‘abstract’, and so on) should be contained within inverted commas because to begin with such descriptions would be to assume that the qualities and attributes of the agents that actually comprise religious experience can be known in advance. This is precisely the interpretative hegemony that is disclaimed throughout Latour’s work: ‘the fact is, we do not know in advance what the world is made of’ (Latour, The Pasteurisation of France, p.10). [REL] might be composed by anything, even though not everything will configure an experience of [REL]. The only condition is that the analyst should act as a diplomat with regard to the empirical situation presented to him/ her:

The analyst […] should not try to be reasonable and impose some predetermined sociology on the sometimes bizarre inter-definition offered by [the actors] studied. The only task of the analyst is to follow the transformations that the actors convened in the stories are undergoing. (Latour, The Pasteurisation of France, p.10)

This is the great innovation that comes from understanding religion as a mode of existence. Religious experience is opened up to a scenography of production that was foreclosed by the premature unification enacted by the Modern constitution. The There is no limit whatsoever to the type or proliferation of beings that can populate this scenography: they might range, for instance, from the regular experience of liturgical worship at a Sunday Mass in a small French village^[3] to the ecstatic visions of the Virgin claimed by crowds of pilgrims at the shrine of Medjugorje in Croatia.^[4] The entities associated with these experiences might be very different (in the first case, the entities involved are material, habituated and mundane; in the second case, they are immaterial, extraordinary and supernatural). But both are allowed to exert their agency in the common world first in order to ascertain whether or not their agency mediates the value that is specific to [REL]. This criterion was made clear by Latour in private interview to me last year:

What is it that ensures the existence of a reality that you believe in, whether it be God, the Virgin Mary, a Saint, or whatever? Does it not follow a trajectory, does it not perform a movement, just like I have demonstrated above? (transcribed)

What Latour gives us, then, is the apparent paradox of an empirical methodology that liberates the phenomenon of religion for extraordinary metaphysical adventures.

References

[1]  It is in this sense that Latour describes the Religion of the Moderns as ‘reductionist’: not because it seeks to abolish religion by means of critique (after all, the intentions of the Moderns towards religion are pious), but because it submits it to purification, thereby foreclosing religion’s ability to express itself as a rational experience.

[2]  At many places in Latour’s later work, in particular in the Inquiry, these entities are called simply ‘beings’. Thus, each mode of existence will function by means of ‘beings’ that mediate the logistical configuration that is specific to that mode: for example, ‘the beings of [POL]’, ‘the beings of [ORG]’, ‘the beings of REL’, etc. However, the nomenclature is not always consistent. Other descriptions include ‘words that bear beings’; ‘a species of existent’; and ‘angels’. The idea that the reprise of religion comes through ‘beings’, rather than merely ‘words’, is not difficult to grasp: it would find an echo, for example, in the idea that a love relationship might be activated or reinforced as much through the impartation of a gift as by a spoken declaration per se.

[3]   Cf. Piette, Albert, (1999), La religion de près: l’activité religieuse en train de se faire (Paris: Métailié). 

[4]   Cf. Claverie, Elizabeth, (2003), Les guerres de la vierge: une anthropologie des apparitions (Paris: Éditions Gallimard).

The Characteristics of [REL], 1 of 3

Having shifted up to the mode of existence itself, a general description of [REL] can now be provided. Three characteristics in particular can be noted.

First, religion experienced as [REL] will take the form of progressive composition. This contrasts with the Religion of the Moderns, which (as has been demonstrated in various posts above) is characterised by rigid institutional boundaries. This is not to say that [REL] will be disposed to lose its own demarcation or that it will tend towards becoming less distinct and more relativized over time (after all, Latour has demonstrated that the felicity conditions pertaining to its regime of truth are extremely stringent). But [REL] will be activated as it is reprised by multiple and heterogeneous entities functioning as actor-networks within the framework of the common world. The moment [REL] forecloses this possibility to itself and resolves into a settled and stable composition of some sort, it will calcify into a [DC] operation and regress into the institutional form of the Religion of the Moderns. Thus it will end up decaying like the manna that was hoarded in the desert: its ‘meaning is lost if you stop gathering it, collecting it’ (Latour, Rejoicing, or the Torments of Religious Speech, p.10).

Thinking about the French thinking

Dr Sudhir Hazareesingh is a very important mediator of and commentator on French thought for an English audience (this book, for example, is a good start for anyone dipping their toes into the field). In this recent lecture delivered at the LSE, he argues that French ‘progressive’ (his words) thought currently finds itself in a cul-de-sac of moribund ideation and reduced influence on national and global politics.

However, the diagnosis (and therefore also the prognosis) is simplistic. First, he conflates ‘progressive’ with ‘leftish’, and then elevates this fabular entity into the standard-bearer for all ‘legitimate’ or proper’ French philosophy. Second, he defines the power of this entity as generated by its ability to foster grand and unifying narratives that can join up the dots of the complexity of meaning que l’on trouve sur le terrain and unify it towards a progressive end (although he does nod towards acknowledging the corresponding blindness of those within this ideology to assimilating the value of the ‘Other’ in their midst, and the straight line that leads to the appropriation of laïcité by Marine le Pen these days).

Perhaps it was for want of time, but Hazareesingh misses the strand of French thought that is really interesting – and that I and many others would claim represents, in fact, the true inheritance of French intellectual life: namely, the radically immanentist, fecundly pluralist ontologies of Michel Serres, Bruno Latour and (that adopted French intellectual) Peter Sloterdijk. Actually, Hazareesingh slips into precisely the error that Latour diagnoses as symptomatic of the Moderns: his definition of ‘progress’ has its arrow pointing the wrong way! So he ends up describing a politics that can do nothing but oscillate between the two traditional ‘attractors’ and has not yet taken account of the all-important third attractor, the one that changes everything.

So nice intro. Worth a listen. But in 200 years time the histories of French thought will, methinks, be identifying a very different lineage from the one for which Hazareesingh is writing the memento mori here.

Specifying Religion as a Mode of Existence

Continuing the general bent of this blog, which is towards a clarification of Bruno Latour’s concept of religion as a mode of existence [REL].

Having identified the empirical site that ‘gives’ it (amatory speech), the logistics by which it functions (reprise), and the value that it institutes (being brought-into-presence), it is now possible to clarify religion as a mode of existence itself. Finally, then, [REL] is being encountered. As Latour himself puts it, he will attempt ‘with the tiny flame of personal love to rekindle the fires of religion’ (Latour, Rejoicing, or the Torments of Religious Speech, English edition, p.126).

In shifting up from the empirical site to the mode of existence, a series of ‘specifications’ of the latter can be drawn up. This term is employed within the Inquiry with a nod to its usage in project management, where ‘specifications’ are the calibrations of the project that are agreed by all the stakeholders (cf. Latour, An Inquiry into Modes of Existence, p.182). Religion defined according to its specifications will therefore operate in the midst of the ‘common world’ and will proceed by means of fully diplomatic arrangements. (The contrast is intended, of course, with the epistemological reductionism characteristic of the Modern constitution, which defers from diplomatic procedures. In fact, I feel this is an altogether superior definition of what Latour means by ‘diplomacy’, which is not so much to do with the technical methodology of the platform via which we can contribute, so much it is to do with a gut reaction by which we ‘recognise’ the value that is veridicted by a mode of existence via experience).

As would be expected, the specifications of [REL] are precisely those given by its empirical site.

First, the value it institutes is the same. To undergo an experience of [REL] is to undergo an experience of being brought-into-presence. In the case of the amatory speech, being brought-into-presence was binary and limited (being restricted to the love relationship between two people). In the case of [REL], this value has a much expanded signification. It entails not only being brought close to one other person, but being brought-into-presence within an entire collective (Cf. Inquiry, p.300). Suitably amplified, it might even usher in ‘a virtual people of the saved and the newly close who elude all borders’ (Cf. Inquiry, p.148). Latour describes this collective as ‘a sacred nation’ (Cf. Inquiry, p.161) and frequently conveys its meaning via Pentecost-type imagery (which proliferates throughout his writing on religion and is grabbed from Serres’ Le Parasite).

Second, the mechanism by which [REL] functions is the same. The collective generated by a religious experience is brought-into-being by means of words of reprise. In fact, ‘religion is reprise par excellence, the ceaseless renewal of speech by speech itself’ (Cf. Inquiry, p.306). This means that the experience of [REL] will always be characterised by a rejection of in-form-ational transfer and a celebration of speech that seeks to take up an original utterance in a new way in the present moment.

Colloquium in Montréal

Here’s my proposed abstract for (what promises to be) a very interesting colloquium in Montréal to take place in May this year:

Jusqu’à présent, nombre de critiques ont fait preuve d’une certaine réserve au sujet de la fonction du mode d’existence de la religion—ainsi désigné par l’abréviation [REL]—et que l’on a souvent considéré subordonné à une décision herméneutique préalable de la part de Latour.

Par conséquent, on suppose que la notion de [REL] représente une anomalie dans la structure cohérente de l’Enquête, s’accordant mal à la situation que l’on trouve sur le terrain en Europe. Par contre, il sera montré que si on la comprend comme il faut dans l’ensemble de l’œuvre Latourienne, la notion de [REL] fait preuve d’une cohérence interne. De plus, elle sert à préciser une approche heuristique utile pour aborder le thème de la religion dans l’époque de l’Anthropocène.

La présentation comprendra deux parties. Premièrement, on tracera le portrait de la religion au sens où l’entendent les Modernes. C’est dans cette optique qu’on peut voir que, contrairement à ce que prétendent les Modernes, nous ne nous retrouvons pas dans un jeu à somme nulle entre la religion et d’autres régimes de rationalité qui s’y sont toujours opposés, mais plutôt dans la situation quelque peu paradoxale où la religion se trouve elle-même entravée par une modalité qui lui est imposée de l’extérieur. Deuxièmement, on cherchera à présenter la formulation positive que propose Latour pour comprendre la religion comme phénomène tout à fait nonmoderne, c’est-à-dire [REL], qui possède un régime de rationalité unique en soi et différent de tous les autres modes.

Latour on Durkheim: Summary

I recently mused on Bruno Latour’s review of Durkheim’s 1912 text in social theory, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. A summary of posts below.

• Why Bruno Latour is an interesting reader of texts: here.
• A critique of Durkheim’s sociological method in terms of the figuration of agencies: here.
• Durkheim’s psychology of the weak individual: here.
• The God of Durkheimian philosophy of religion begins to look more and more cheiropoiete (made by human hands): here.
• In spite of itself, Durkheim’s book begins to open up to analysis in terms of modes of existence: here.

Back to more analysis of [REL] soon, but I hope this was a useful detour!

Latour on Durkheim: Part 5 of 5

Latour’s core criticism of Durkheim’s sociology of religion has been as follows: ‘gods’ are springing up everywhere. And they are springing up beyond the purview of Durkheim’s own sociological method. It is as if Durkheim’s own statement—‘men know well that they are acted upon, but they do not know by whom’, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, p.209—has rebounded with ironic relish upon his own head.

[…] en pratiquant une telle hypothèse, on voit que Durkheim a parfaitement repéré non pas le ‘roc solide’ universel et intemporel du dieu société unique mais un polythéisme pratique bien plus suggestif et intéressant que le cadre immobile qu’il a propose (18).

[…] in pursuing such a hypothesis, what we can see is that Durkheim has perfectly captured not the unique, ‘rock solid’, universal and timeless Dieu­-Société, but rather a practical polytheism, one that is much more suggestive and interesting than the fixed framework he did propose. (my translation)

Durkheim’s book therefore has value if we can somehow recalibrate its core intuition that religion is a function of the performance of agents.

In fact, Latour takes this further, and suggests that if we can do away with this nonsense of the Dieu­-Société then we can take Durkheim’s book as diagnosing a number of such agencies, or as he will now call them ‘divinities’, each one functioning according to a different mode of existence:

• [POL]: in the book, Durkheim aptly describes the phenomenon of religious oratory, where a single individual is able to harness a large crowd towards some religious end. As a mode of existence, however, we can now see that this is a tantalizing expression of the political circle (p.19).
• [REP]: in the book Durkheim tries to make religious objects obedient to the overweaning ‘naturalised’ order that is given by the Dieu­-Société, as if such objects were granted meaning by this metaphysical paymaster. As a mode of existence, however, we can now see that Durkheim’s descriptions of objects in the world are not universal and impersonal, but granted meaning within a complex matrix of lines of force and lineages of reproduction.
• [MET]: contra his commitment to the unilateral agency of the Dieu­-Société, what we find in Durkheim are careful descriptions of human subjects welcoming a proliferation of religious agents into their lives with a view to metamorphosis and change (21).

For Latour, then, Durkheim is an ur-identifier of modes of existence, and thus shows himself more sensitive to the situation of pluralisme ontologique (22) than he is usually supposed to be. Modes of existence can be found in the most surprising places!

And so what is the conclusion of Latour’s review of Durkheim’s text? For Latour, the ‘elementary forms of religion’ proposed by Durkheim are an attempt to ignore or bypass the ‘advanced forms’ that theology should be preparing to handle and is able to handle if its regime of truth is correctly understood. It is precisely these ‘formes avancées de la théologie’ (p.21) that Latour himself will be handling in his configuration of religion as [REL].

An Ontology of Instauration

This is a fantastic collection of essays on Étienne Souriau’s concept of instauration—that concept being one of the hypostases of the ontological operation that underlies the whole Latourian cosmos (also known as Being-as-Other).

Well-worth reading alongside the new English publication of The Different Modes of Existence!

A New Political Triangle

An important new text from Bruno Latour on a ‘third way’ (or should it be: a ‘third point’) to advance a political theology in the contemporary moment:

Terroir, Globe, Earth – A New Political Triangle

Formerly, we used to enjoy ‘splendid weather’ or put up with a ‘lousy climate’. But in recent months we’ve found ourselves on the receiving end of some ‘awfully splendid’ weather. What is true of the weather is also true of politics. The present moment is both awful and tremendous: thanks to the concurrence of terrorist actions, the rise of the so-called ‘national’ Front, and the conclusion of COP21, it is possible that we might finally be coming to appreciate where we are and what kind of politics we have to pursue.

Up to now, most of the points of reference for assessing whether one’s position was ‘progressive’ or ‘reactionary’ have been situated along the length of a single, unique vector—either you were lamenting the old terroir or you were committed to globalisation. Between those two extremes there was a continuous line incorporating us all: the only thing that could vary was the position of the cursor. At the forefront of this modernisation front were those advocating ‘progress’—behind them, all those who were backward.

This entailed a contradiction, one that was well-known, depending on whether the vector concerned morality or markets. One could care about the emancipation of morality to the exclusion of economic globalisation (approximately the position of the traditional left); or one could desire the liberalisation of markets and oppose the emancipation of morality (let’s say the position of the moderate right). Alternatively, one could also wish for the joint emancipation of both morality and markets (the frenetic ideal of modernisation espoused by the ‘advanced’ sectors of left and right). Or, finally, one could fight against both.

For all that to function as a frame of reference, the elites themselves also had to believe in the existence of a world, of a globe, that had the potential to become a universally modernised planet, if only they were able to bring it about.

It’s at this point that we have to combine commonplace analysis of the political sphere with that of another sphere entirely: the planet that has made its entrance into politics. The historic importance of COP21 was that it enabled us to become cognisant of an entirely different way of proceeding: this planet Earth does not in any way resemble the globe of globalisation. To put it bluntly: there is no planet corresponding to the Promised Land of globalisation. There has been a signalling error! And so those positions no longer need to take their bearings solely by means of the classical polarisation that ranges from local to global, from national to universal, from identity to the ‘wide open spaces’ of the global market.

This classical politics was able to function only as long as the elites led us to believe that the world towards which we were modernising really existed. However, for thirty years now they have ceased to believe this. Those who recognised this first were not only the ecologists, but also those we call climate-sceptics. Contrary to what we often suppose, their denialism has nothing to do with archaism or with a lack of understanding. In fact, what they’d seen only too well was that if there was no planet corresponding to the world towards which we were supposedly modernising, then we’d have to defend ourselves by shutting ourselves away in a fortress of inequalities. The enormous shift that has seen the richest 10% become the richest 1%, and then 0.1%, cannot be understood until we appreciate that the elites have abandoned all hope of ever sharing their territory with those they had asked to modernise—or perish.

To understand quite how the times have changed, all we have to do is compare the scowl of Donald Trump (‘you’re fired!’) with the Hollywood smile of Ronald Reagan. It is no longer possible to allow ourselves to be hoodwinked as it was in the 1980s: previously optimists, the elites have now become sinister; where previously they led the way, now they have become defensive. If America is to continue to map out our future, the one proposed by the Republican Party, among others, sends chills down the spine.

All the more so as the masses have most certainly understood that, if the elites themselves no longer believe in modernisation, they will have to fall back in double quick time on the crumbs of identity that are still available to them. From Hungary to France, from Italy to England, from Russia to the United States, large numbers of people are acting as if to say: ‘if not the globe, at least let us have our terroirs!’ The white race, pork meat, nation, flag, caliphate, family, it really doesn’t matter what—as long as we’re not left with nothing. Everyone to the lifeboats! Of course, these communities are imaginary; not a patch remains of those former lands, now obliterated by globalisation. But one utopia for another: it is understandable that we should cling to the one that seems the least up-in-the-air.

Here is the turning-point at which we find ourselves, a fatal and decisive moment: is there an alternative definition of what it means to be attached to a ground, other than those provided by the ‘territory-terroir’ or the ‘territory-globe’? Could we postulate a third point that would allow us to redistribute all those positions and avoid the contemporary tragedy of a battle between the utopia provided by modernisation and that provided by national identities?

Such a triangle has not yet been mapped out, I know very well, but to the line that joins the ‘territory-terroir’ to the ‘territory-globe’ it now seems legitimate to add two lines linking those two traditional attractors to a third point, the apex of a triangle: this would be the ‘territory-Earth’ (we might call it the planet, or Gè, or Gaïa—the name matters very little). This is what I’ve called the ‘New Climactic Regime’. It is clear that the planet that was assembled at the astonishing climate conference in Paris has very few traits in common with the space towards which globalisation was supposed to be leading us, which was as undifferentiated as it was boundless. That planet possesses a climate, a ground, boundaries, front-lines, an entire geopolitics, with as little resemblance to the old maps of national identity as it does to the globe of the former world known as ‘natural’.

This third attractor is not opening a ‘third way’ between identity and universality (nor between ‘socialism’ and ‘capitalism’ of course, which are two projects without a ground). But its presence, its weight, its novelty are capable of radically transforming the political spectrum. It requires us to redefine the very soil to which we belong, and to reconfigure who is to be deemed reactionary and who progressive. In any case, if we don’t manage to re-territorialise ourselves on this earth very quickly, unfortunately it’s a war of the terroirs that will soon confront us.

I can’t recall a New Year’s Eve where the weather [temps] has been so ‘awfully fine’, nor a new year that leaves us with as little time [temps] between a decisive presidential election and the urgent requirement to claim back the climate in such a political manner.