Crossed Out God

Latour lays out some classic dichotomies and the reasons they were formed. Such as nature/culture, modern/postmodern and subject/object. He maintains that one cannot reduce issues to simply nature, politics, or discourse. As someone who has been trained to break down these dichotomies I find it somewhat amusing how hard I hold onto the social explanations. This is one of the reasons I am coming to enjoy STS so much. It recognizes the importance of both (though other modes of thinking attempt to do the same thing, they are more critical of the scientific process dismissing it as entirely social). While scientists and the practice of science are embedded within the broader societal context (institutions, norms, standards, etc) the fact remains that there ARE in fact objects which hold certain properties (which may or may not change over time depending on our discoveries about them and what scientists find particularly interesting about such objects). Social scientists really like parenthetical comments! Oh, human geography training, what have you done to the structure of my writing!?

Latour traces the fundamental assertions of modernism and post modernism instructing us that to be post-modern is simply to live under the modern constitution (of the separation between nature and culture and the separation of hybrids from purification) while not believing in the guarantees it offers (46). The modern view holds conflicting viewpoints simultaneously which serve one’s own interests. He maintains that by separating the natural realm from the social realm, modernists simply propagate more hybrids. This part lost me a little bit. Is his argument that by virtue of neglecting the “hybridity” of the world, we do not recognize and therefore create more hybrids because we don’t know it? My rendition doesn’t seem to make any sense. Moving on. The notion of the crossed out God was interesting to me. Early science and social science for that matter, still incorporated notions of God whether or not the theorists actually believed in God, they had to pretend they did in order to be taken as credible in the eye’s of the dominant power structure (largely made up of clergymen doubling as politicians). See Newton, Darwin, etc. etc. The idea that rather than having an omnipresent God or Gods who control everything on earth, the paradigm began to shift to a point where okay, maybe God set in motion the mechanics of earth, but he/she/they need not maintain a presence in these entities on a constant basis. The interesting part for me is that Latour seems to believe that the idea of God does not still play a dominant role in politics (only to the extent that the sovereign must in theory answer to God-or maybe this is just Hobbes’ conception). Though it seems clear that some Americans wish their politicians to at least pay lip service to Christianity as a part of their public persona. But the way the Modernist paradox comes in is by way of the role of God in the home-for the individual.

This interesting passage reveals the confusion of the moderns:

“A threefold transcendence and a threefold immanence in a crisscrossed schema that locks in all the possibilities: this is where I have located the power of the moderns. They have not made Nature; they make society; they make Nature; they have not made society; they have not made either, God has made everything; God has made nothing, they have made everything” (34).

God has made Nature? Or is that one simply a given? Because these categories are not in fact distinct, questions of agency become muddier. We touched on some of the complications of agency in class today, and some are willing to take the concept further than others. I like the image of the “crossed out God”. The term remains God underneath the crossing out, so that it hums along in the background without proper attending to. Perhaps in the United States at least, and of course debated surface from time to time on the role of religion within a supposedly secular society.

I need to give some more time to Latour I think as his ideas resonate with me.