Fetish VS Factish

Subject-Object?

The belief is the caricature of religion exactly as knowledge is the caricature of science.

——Latour, p.121

This week’s reading deconstruct the boundary between subject and object, in Latourian terms “factish,” “a fact-maker, a talk-maker” (35) and “iconoclash,” “an uncertainty about the exact role of the hand at work in production of a mediator” (72), written in “sermon”-like style (99). At the very beginning of the book, Latour brings up a fable of an artist who misrecognizes his own work as real, which raises up the question he constantly attempts to solve: for human-made object, is there any autonomous power out of the maker’s intention? Or, put it another way, through the process of attaching power/emotion/meaning to the object, could it escape from the mastery of the human-being and gain agency itself? Questioning the binary opposition posed by the “Moderns” of anti-fetish and fetish, knowledge and illusion/belief, fact-object and fairy-object, Latour successfully deconstructs the “established objective sciences” (11-15) via his illustration of the fabricating process by which both religious and scientific images produce “invisibility.” In Latour’s argument, science and religion should be considered as “two types of objectivities” rather than “opposition” (113). Hence, he sermons against the “frame-freeze” which refers to the “isolating a mediator out of it chains , out of its series” (122).

As far as I am concerned, Latour’s notion of “regimes of invisibility” is hard to digest (112). I can see his denial of traditional binary illustration of religion and science and tend to get a thorough, fundamentally common understanding for them, while the “regime” here remains unclear for me. How does the regime work? What is its effect? In addition, placing religion and science in juxtaposition in light of “invisibility,” are we, readers of Latour’s images and words, escaping from the mastery of the fabrication he creates? How can we achieve that?

上面是Fetish课上读到Latour的weekly reflection，总体来说阅读Latour是很舒服的，大概因为期末论文有关新疆，看到科学制造Factish和iconoclast直接就联想到了Edward Said疯狂批判的东方学，虽然后者更多是从大众传媒角度来说，但两位大神的根源还是Foucault的考古。