Response to Bruno Latour's "Thou shall not freeze-Frame"

Martin Holbraad, University College London (m.holbraad@ucl.ac.uk)

With his well-known taste for symmetry, Latour places religion and science on
opposite poles of an axis of his own making: that of proximity and distance.
Traditional philosophers of science assume that science is basically a
sophisticated version of common sense, concerned with producing discourse
that matches reality directly and transparently: there's the mat's cat, and there's
the neuron firing. Latour has for long insisted that this is prejudice. In action,
science is a much more delicate business, whose truth and objectivity lies in the
piecemeal transformation of information. Through ingenious acts of artifice - in
the field, the lab, the drawing board, the paper -, scientists seek to establish
viable chains of reference that connect copiously with distant, obscure and hard
to understand matters - regarding the firings of neurons and such - by
transforming them at each stage into increasingly manipulable versions of
themselves (they remain 'themselves' precisely to the extent that each link of the
chain is connected). A symmetrical paradox holds for religion. Traditionally it
has been assumed of Christianity at least (the point is moot, and we'll come to it
presently) that faith is directed at the obscure and the unattainable: mysterious
and subjective stuff that lies beyond the transparent objectivity of science. But
just as the chimera of representational transparency in science results from
bracketing off the long 'distances' traversed by scientists' fragile chains of
reference, so the notion of transcendence in religion (the distance faith is
supposed to 'leap' across) ignores the intimacy religious expression is meant to

elicit. For in religion, as in love, the message is the medium. Latour chooses
Catholic art, but the point could be made as well with reference to prayer, the
Eucharist or the Life and Passion of Jesus: each of these 'speech-acts' conspires
to efface its own propositional force so as to render present, in the act, the
intimacy of relation itself.
One of the many merits of Latour's sermon is that without apology it makes
explicit the messianic tendency in much of his previous work. When it comes to
science, and now religion, Latour is nothing if not a combative revisionist. You
thought science was about getting the facts straight, but let me tell you why it
isn't! You thought religion was groping at the unknowable, but let me show you
how it's about embracing what is most present! But, attractive as one may find
both theses, the problem is precisely that they are more than provocative. [1] One
thing is to suggest a radical re-interpretation of science and religion - in
conversation with other commentators, such as anthropologists and
philosophers - and quite another is to preach a wholesale revision of scientific
and religious - Catholic - 'cosmology', if one may speak in these terms. From an
anthropological perspective, the risk is not so much that of speaking over the
heads of one's informants, as that of speaking against them, by way of
conversion. No anthropologist should dream of 'correcting' his informants. It
seems that Latour is giving himself this licence, maybe because his informants
are less like natives and more like colleagues - here scientists and the putatively
pious. With regard to the argument on science, I wouldn't be surprised if the
resistance he encounters among practitioners ('do you believe in science?', as
he reports in Pandora's Hope) is due not just to the radical nature of his
argument, but also to the fact that it gives the lie to scientists' own common sense

view of what it is they do. More than analytical challenges, Latour's arguments
amount to indictments of false consciousness. And now, in good faith, we have
heresy!
The source of Latour's revisionism is his trenchant anti-representationism, the
root of his symmetrical argument on science and religion. There is no ontological
discontinuity between word and world - science is no mirror of nature -, and,
remarkably, there is no such discontinuity between (human) word and God
either. Statements about the world and about God should not be taken as
attempts to determine how things stand 'out there' or 'up there', for each
statement creatively re-casts our relationship with what it is we talk about: in
science words bring the most obscure facets of the world closer by transforming
them, and in religion words - and paintings - erase the very possibility of
distance between word and God by rendering Him present in the utterance. In
fact there is an important logical complementarity between Latour's respective
points about science and religion. For his point that words can perform
ontological work by transforming what they are commonly deemed to represent
- as in science - presupposes that the representational capacity of words may be
effaced - as in religious speech-acts. Science, in this sense, emerges as a
peculiarly pious exercise. A kind of marathon-run of religious intimacy, the
'circulating references' that bind the world and science together are
'transformations' only if premised on ontological proximity - the same proximity
that religious speech is supposed to elicit. God as Actor Network, or something
like it.

In anthropology at least, anti-representationism has been a revolution - to my

knowledge the most recent we've had. As vigorously as M. Strathern, Viveiros de
Castro and Wagner, Latour has articulated a frame within which old
anthropological problems are dissolved. For example, in the anthropology of
religion, the so-called problem of belief has been shown up as a simple category
mistake. As Latour says, only if you think religious utterances are statements of
fact can you even raise the question of how people can believe them. But this is
just the problem: whether Latour likes it or not, Christians do tend to think just
that - ask Pascal! Just like many scientists assume that toil in the lab is in the
service of accurate representations of the world, so Christians are often rather
worried about the effort they put into their faith, and this effort is construed in
the face of doubts that seem to be of a straight representational nature (e.g. how
can God and palpable evil coexist?). Latour's vision, by contrast, treats
Christianity on the same footing as what he has infelicitously called 'fetishism'
elsewhere. God is not the object of a representation but the subject of a
relationship that needs to be enacted afresh, be it by means of paintings that
'unsay' what they seem to represent or by consecrated fetishes that simply are
what they represent. In fact, insofar as vestiges of Victorian evolutionism still
animate Western thinking about religion, Latour's argument entails an attractive
paradox. Christian art here emerges as a peculiarly underdeveloped or logically
incomplete version of the 'fetishes' that anthropologists traditionally study in
animist, totemist or polytheistic contexts. In conspiring to redirect the viewer's
gaze from the transcendent image of the Saviour to our immanent relationship
with Himim, a Caravaggio is grappling with a problem the primitives 'solved'
long ago (in our manner of speaking) by allowing gods to reside in their images.

But Latour should be unable to comment on this paradox. In doing so, he would
have to admit that the 'problem' of Christian art is a function of the integral role
of transcendence and representation in Christian cosmology. And in not doing
so, he fails to offer any interesting distinction between Christianity and - say animism, an ethnographically blunt position.
More than a question of good manners towards one's informants, this lack of
ethnographic sophistication indexes what I think is the most pressing
theoretical/tactical problem for militant anti-representationist analyses. The
problem is characteristic of revolutions that reach maturity, as antirepresentationism has, insofar as Latour, Strathern, Viveiros de Castro etc. now
constitute orthodoxy for many of the more creative anthropologists of my own
generation. What to do with the rulers - bourgeois representationism! - once
they've been defeated? (ok, conceptually and in limited circles.) Latour's option
in this sermon is to flog them: let's show how the whole world, and God too, can
be repainted anti-representationally, thus lifting the false dominion of
representation yet further. But the risk with this is that under the cloak of
vanguard radicalism, militants repeat the injustices of their erstwhile
persecutors. For example, Latour rightly ridicules those who, having interpreted
religion as a set of frankly unreasonable representations ('beliefs'), proceed to
explain it away on psychological grounds, as a feel-good "supplement of the
soul". But isn't his own strategy regarding the 'modernist constitution' of
representationism essentially the same? Having shown that distinctions between
world and word, fact and value, nature and society, etc. are ontological chimeras,
he proceeds to explain them away as political conveniences (re. his fascinating
discussion of Plato in Pandora's Hope). In either case the conceptual import of

the phenomena discussed - viz. religion and representationism - is kept in the

box, analytically at arm's length, and thus pretty hopeless.
Why be so asymmetrical about asymmetry? It seems to me that a more consistent
strategy would be to keep asking new questions. If, from a Latourian point of
view, modern common sense seems exotic and nave, then let's take the natives
seriously, just like we would (or ought to) when studying 'fetishism' or whatever.
The question, then, would be this: taking the sophisticated analytical frame
developed by Latour and other non-representationists as the conceptual
baseline - as a kind of new 'common sense'-, what further conceptual work is
required in order to make sense of representationist assumptions? That further
analytical work is indeed required follows from the fact that, as things stand at
present in the non-representationist camp, representationism can only appear
as nave falsehood - the bane of Latour's relentless rhetoric. In other words,
commonsense representationism is to Latour (et al) as, say, 'fetishism' is to
commonsense representationism. So, if Latour has arrived at his current
position by revising modern common sense in light of such phenomena as
'fetishism' in India (and the practice of science in France, art in Catholicism,
etc.), then the symmetrical thing to do now is to see how far nonrepresentationism needs to be revised in light of commonsense
representationism.
Indeed, note: just as we don't expect the serious study of 'fetishes' to turn us into
fetishists ('going native'), there is no need to fear that taking representationism
seriously will turn us willy nilly into representationists. In other words, what I am
proposing is neither a backward move nor some sort of compromise. For the task

of developing non-representationist concepts that make sense of

representationism cannot be a matter of a retreat to modernist naivet, precisely
because, as Latour's formidable critique has helped show, representationism

cannot make sense of itself. Hence such 'constitutional' articles as truth by

correspondence, arbitrary signs, referential meanings, causalist metaphysics,
subject/ predicate semantics, mind/ body distinctions, individuals and social
contracts, free will and personal responsibility, etc. are no longer to be
discredited as analytical adversaries waiting to be debunked. Rather they are best
treated as ethnographic data; magisterial cultural pyrotechnics that beg
sophisticated anthropological analysis, by which I mean simply the search for
novel concepts that may make sense of such 'bizarre' data.
Christian cosmology may serve as an example of the kind of project I have in
mind. Let's take it as a given - rather than a sin, as Latour has it - that ontological
rupture is at the heart of Christianity. To put it in emblematic terms, after the
Fall, Man is estranged from God: we no longer enjoy Him in immanence, but
rather must have faith in Him as a transcendental guarantor of Creation. Sure,
He gave us his Son and the Sacra as media for our return to Him. But this is only
testimony to the fact that the distance is there - a (the) problem and a
predicament, and not a chimera or a category mistake. One of the reasons Latour
prefers to dissolve the problem rather than face up to it must surely be that
ontological distance (transcendence) to him smacks of representationism. The
last thing he wants to do is add Man v. God to the apples and pares of modernist
'purification'. His game is to show that, if you look closely and carefully enough,
all that seems like rupture is in fact continuous, so that terms that seem like
digital negations of each other (either Man or God, word or world) are really

ontological transformations of one another - related on a monistic (or hyperpluralist, n-dimensional - it's the same thing) plane by what French
philosophers sometimes call 'difference'. Science, love talk and religious art are
so many ways of generating relations between things by transforming them. But
Christian cosmology poses a challenge. How might this apparently asphyctic
universe of relations (the Latourian 'Network') accommodate the kind of
negativity implicit in Christian assumptions about transcendence, without
falling back into the mysterious antinomies of modernist ontology? How, in
other words, might the Network itself be extended (transformed, redefined) so
as to include its own putative opposite?
I don't have a full answer to these questions. But it may be worth sketching out
the sort of approach one might take to get there. The first point to note is that,
ironically, Latour's anti-representationism presents us with an antinomy (a kind
of meta-purification). On the one hand we have the armoury of the Network,
based on the logical priority of transformative relations (relations precede
entities in the sense that the latter are the products of ontological
transformation, viz. relations of 'difference'). On the other we have
representationism as the enemy, based on the logical priority of self-identical
entities, separated from each other by extensive gaps of negativity (either this, or
that). So the question is how the key concepts of relation and negation might be
brought under a single analytical scheme - how they may be 'hybridized', if you
like. What makes such a project an extension of non-representationism is the
fact that rather than negating either concept (as Latour does with negation
itself), we seek to bring them together by transforming both of them. That is to
say, since 'ordinary' concepts of relation (sensu Latour et al) and negation (the

either/or logic of representation) are antinomous, the task is to redefine them in

an 'extraordinary' way that would overcome the antinomy - to create new
concepts, as Deleuze has it.
A clue of how this might be done lies, I think, in the last section of Latour's
sermon, where he contrasts the movement of the relational transformations that
('true') science and religion involve with the 'freeze framing' stasis of
representationism. Though lightly scripted into Latour's text, this question of
motility goes to the heart of the matter regarding the relationship between
relation and negation. Inasmuch as the Network constitutes in transformations,
it follows that the priority of differential relations over self-identical entities in
non-representationism should be supplemented by the logical priority of motion
over rest: the Network is not only a relational field but also a motile one. This is
important because, as I propose to show, it renders explicit a sense in which
negativity is actually constitutive of transformative relations, though this sense is
appropriately different from that of negation ordinarily construed.
Consider an ontological transformation from A to B. As a transformation of A, B
is not just related to A (viz. 'A - B') but is also the product of it, i.e. the two are
related by a vector ('A -> B'). Now we may ask: how might this vectoral relation
be distinguished from another (e.g. A -> C, B -> C, C -> B, C -> D, etc.)? The
question seems hard to answer because questions of 'distinction' call to mind
ordinary senses of negation and identity (e.g. A -> B 'is not' A -> C), which are
obviously barred for our non-representational purposes. Rather what is needed
is a conceptualisation that would give the same results (distinguishing, say, A ->
B and A -> C) in a non-representational frame, i.e. without appeal to 'either/or'

negations. Or, to put it conversely, the question is whether one can retain criteria
of distinction (of 'negativity' in a peculiarly minimal sense) in a purely 'positive'
logical universe, where the only available connective is 'and' - the relational
connective, as Viveiros de Castro has discussed (Viveiros de Castro 2003).
The answer would appear to be obvious: in a positive universe distinctions must
be made in positive terms, i.e. not as a matter of this 'or' that, but as one of this
'and' that. But this simple reversal - which is really just a restatement of the
premise of non-representationism - has consequences that are as important as
they are counter-intuitive. Spelt out in terms of our example, the principle states
that A -> B and A -> C are distinct because (A -> B) and (A -> C). That is to say
that in the radically positive logic of non-representationism, a given
transformation can be distinguished from another inasmuch as there is a third
one that combines them both. So rather than distinguishing a transformation in
terms of what it is not, we now distinguish it in terms of what it becomes, and
'becoming' here must be understood as the transformation that occurs when
transformations are combined - a positive act of fusion. Somewhat profoundly,
then, the act of distinction is itself a transformation: to distinguish things is to
change each of them by bringing them together. (Hence, by the way, the
Wagnerian idea that in non-representational logic epistemological questions how to distinguish - turn into ontological ones - how to create. Or to put it in
pop 20th century physics terms, to know something is to change it.)
The point to note, however, is that while these 'creative distinctions' are
transformative relations just like the transformative relations they combine,
there is nevertheless an important logical asymmetry at play here. For, while

distinctions encompass the transformations they distinguish, the opposite

clearly is not the case. E.g. 'A -> B' and 'A -> C' are parts of '(A -> B) and (A ->
C)' but the latter is not a part of each of them. The point can be put in Aristotelian
terms: [2] 'A -> B' and 'A -> C' have the potential to transform into '(A -> B)
and (A -> C)', and the latter actualises that potential. So, simply, distinctions
actualise potentialities. In fact this is precisely the advantage of seeing relations
in motile terms, as vectors. For the asymmetry introduced, as it were, by adding
an arrow to the end of a line is constitutive to the logic of ontological
transformation, which plays out as a cumulative movement from relatively simple
potentialities to relatively complex actualisations.
The crux of my argument is that this asymmetry of movement - nothing other
than its direction - provides an opening for redefining (transforming,
distinguishing) negation in non-representational terms. Return to the example.
Representationally speaking, A -> B is distinguished from A -> C because A ->
B 'is not' A -> C. Non-representationally, they are distinguished because they
can transform each other by combination, so as to produce a further
transformation, (A -> B) and (A -> C). In the former case negation refers
straightforwardly to the external and extensive differences that distinguish A ->
B from A -> C as self-identical units. But in the latter case a kind of negation
enters the picture as well, not in the logical form of 'not', but as a kind of 'not yet'
- the positive 'not' of potentiality. For now the distinction between A -> B and A
-> C is recast as a matter of what each of them can become (viz. '(A -> B) and (A
-> C)'); as a matter, in other words, of internal and intensive self-difference,

projected at one step remove as a potential transformation. A paradoxical

expression seems fair: in the motile Network of non-representationism

everything is what it is because of what it isn't yet (though one would be tempted
to hyphenate this as 'is-not-yet', to show that what is at issue here is not an
ordinary privative negation, but rather the positive negation of 'potential' - the
one school teachers manage so well in their reports).
Now, I am under no illusion that these tentative abstractions are adequate as a
sketch of the 'motile logic' of non-representationism. [3] But I think they do
suggest that Latourian concepts may well admit further elaboration so as to allow
a more sympathetic engagement with Christian cosmology, and not least with the
notion of transcendence. Recall Latour's central claim, that Catholic art reveals
our proximate relation to God by conspiring to cancel the possibility of
representation. The problem, I claim, is that for Catholics our relation to God is

not initially proximate, since our predicament after the Fall is estrangement, i.e.
the transcendence of God is not an illusion but a cosmological premise. Unlike
Latour's notion of intimacy (analytically cast as the 'relation'), the idea of
motility (the 'vector') is able to render transcendence as an irreducible
dimension of our relationship with God. On this analysis, transcendence is not
to be understood as a mysterious alterity, characteristic of representationist
dualisms (the incommensurability of man v. God). Rather it should be taken as a
logical constituent of a particular kind of relationship, namely that of
transformation, properly construed as a motion that relates terms (man and
God) always at one logical step removed, as a potentiality is related to its own
actualisation. Man is what he is because of what he is-not-yet, the 'yet' here
being that of salvation - the hope of the immanence of God.

On this basis one may hazard an alternative interpretation of the art works
Latour discusses. As part of his anti-representationist strategy, Latour finds it
necessary to discount 'traditional defences' of religious icons - that they are not
intended as objects of idolatrous adoration but as copies that remind us of the
original. Certainly, the operative contrast of copy v. original reminds us - the
analysts - too much of obsolete representational thinking, and hence Latour's
distaste. But in this context the bathwater to the representationist baby is the
guiding iconodule contrast, between Christian icons and Christian sacra. For
certainly the contemplation of a Caravaggio or even a Byzantine panagia was
never meant to be on a par with liturgical acts of worship, such as the Eucharist,
and this is surely the main import of the 'traditional defence' of icons. I would
suggest that this crucial distinction can be preserved, provided we do not heed
the knee-jerk anti-representationsit impulse to interpret talk of copies and
originals in ordinary dualist terms. On such an account, Latour's fascinating
notion of 'inner iconoclasm' would require a different analytical spin. The point
of the 'kenosis' of Christian art is not to short-circuit the viewer's
representationist assumption so as to reveal Him as being 'here with us', for in
Christian truth He is only properly here with us when we take Holy Communion.
Rather, the lesson of kenosis would be that His peculiar (divine) way of being
here with us is by not being fully here, an injunction to embrace Him for what He
is to us, namely our own potential, with us always one step removed, in
transcendence.

NOTES

[1] By the way, the force of Latour's argument on religion stems less from the
originality of the ideas themselves and more from his willingness to apply them
in the relatively dusty field of Catholic art and theology. Inspired by speech-act
theory and Peircean semiotics, the guiding notion that religious speech-acts
bring about relationships (rather than representing contestable facts) has been
elaborated most famously in the study of ritual, by Bloch, Tambiah, and
Rappaport.
[2] A vocabulary favoured notably by Viveiros de Castro.
[3] For example, an apparently crucial question that has been dogging me while
writing this -and for which I have no answer- is whether one would need to
specify the conditions under which a particular 'distinction' (transformation of
transformations) might actualise, and, if so, how might these be expressed nonrepresentationally.