On the Modern Cult of the Factish Gods - Paperback

by Bruno LaTour (Author)

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.

Back Jacket

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.