Jagannath’s Saligram: On Bruno Latour and Literary Critique After Postcoloniality

Introduction

 
Even though Bruno Latour is renowned for appropriating anthropological resources to study Western technoscientific norms and practices, he has been criticized for ignoring colonial and postcolonial history.¹ In light of such assessments, it appears significant that Latour has come to depict the failed actions of a fictional Westernized Brahmin named Jagannath as an allegory about the limits of ideology critique.² We believe that a useful way to analyze Latour’s invocation of Jagannath is to contrast his approach to literature with the style of postcolonial criticism favored by such figures as Edward Said (and others).³ This juxtaposition can establish a framework for attending to topics whose import extends beyond Latour scholarship, notably: (1) assessing the epistemic implications of using literature to intervene into meta-philosophical debates about the limits of ideology critique and its underlying logic concerning fetishized objects and primitive beliefs, (2) discussing the political and aesthetic effects that can arise from using the technology of the modern novel for the allegorical purposes that Latour has in mind, and (3) suggesting better ways for Science and Technology Studies (henceforth, STS)⁴ to collaborate with Postcolonial Studies.⁵ Latour develops the concept of the “factish” in order to distinguish the limits of ideology critique.⁶ In his deployment of this term, he misses the opportunity to engage work in postcolonial studies that has questioned ideology critique by considering alternative and multiple modernities rather than a single monolithic regime.⁷ By examining how Latour’s interest in ideology critique brings him to Jagannath’s tale, we can argue for the relevance in his work of occluded literary and cultural detail. By doing so, we comment on Latourian analysis from a vantage point that resonates with the fuller implications of Said’s work, thereby positing a critical space for a dialogue between STS and postcolonial studies.
 

Ideology Critique, Literature, and the Juggernaut of Reason

 
Latour does not discuss ideology critique in order to enlarge its available definitions.⁸ Rather, he aims to uncover a discursive formation to which all modern critics have allegedly adhered, regardless of how they define ideology and its associated concepts. According to Latour, the “very precise mechanism” of this formation circumscribes uniformly the manner by which the varieties of modern criticism have tried to debunk their respective objects of religious and secular mystification. What Latour tries to establish, therefore, is nothing less than the “modernist’s psycho-social profile” (Pandora’s 276, 277).⁹
 
As depicted within this framework, the primary goal of modern criticism has been to liberate the public from false beliefs. In the period traditionally referred to as “early modernity,” critics appealed to “transcendent” scientific facts in order to demystify religious convictions. Their goal was to demonstrate that religious experience untainted by politics does not exist; intuitions concerning “God” were asserted to be the result of social discipline that is imposed by groups that benefit from its deployment. In “late modernity,” however, critics shifted their focus. By appealing to the causal relations emanating from “society, discourse, knowledge-slash-power, fields of forces, empires, capitalism,” critics attempted to demystify the transcendent basis of scientific authority (Latour, “Why Has Critique” 229). In this transition between periods of modernity, scientists have gone from being the agents to the objects of critique,¹⁰ but their underlying discourse remains the same: normative guidance is legitimated by the critics’ appeal to “false consciousness” and to “hidden reality.”¹¹
 
In order to explain why the modern approach to criticism is problematic, Latour pursues a literary trajectory and analyzes Jagannath’s tale.¹² Jagannath’s story appeared in the seventies, a time in which “Marxism was posing a real threat to democratic socialism because of a profound change in people’s attitudes to certain Gandhian notions about the self, society, and history” (Nagaraj vii). At the end of Pandora’s Hope, Latour appropriates Jagannathanth’s failure to liberate his village’s untouchables from the oppression of the caste system for didactic purposes. He claims that it illustrates the way ideology critique fails to accurately capture how, why, and when power is abused: ideology critique distorts how authority comes to be overly esteemed; ideology critique imputes “extravagant beliefs” to whatever group is taken to be oppressed; ideology critique leaves the group that it perceived to be oppressed without adequate grounds for liberation; ideology critique distorts the relation between critic and the object of criticism; and ideology critique accusatively “destroys a way of arguing.” Latour thus treats Jagannath as the personification of the modern critic’s deleterious influence on modern intellectual and political history. Jagannath’s activities are supposed to demonstrate that the modern critic fails to appreciate that an artifact only becomes a powerful idol after an iconoclast attempts to demystify it:
 

Actually, as Jagannath’s move beautifully illustrates, it is the critical thinker who invents the notion of belief and manipulation and projects this notion upon a situation in which the fetish plays an entirely different role. Neither the aunt nor the priest ever considered the saligram as anything but a mere stone. Never. By making it into the powerful object that must be touched by the pariahs, Jagannath transubstantiates the stone into a monstrous thing–and transmutes himself into a cruel god . . . while the pariahs are transmogrified into “crawling beasts” and mere “things.” Contrary to what the critics always imagine, what horrifies the “natives” in the iconoclastic move is not the threatening gesture that would break their idols but the extravagant belief that the iconoclast imputes to them.
 

(Pandora’s 270-71)

The central point Latour conveys in this passage is that the modern iconoclast illegitimately dismisses diverse forms of social belief and practice by inventing a misleading concept, the “fetish.” The modernist’s conception of the fetish does not register relevant underlying social and political practices that exist apart from the condition of belief imputed to the native by the critic.¹³

Placing Jagannath in Context

 
Although we have thus far been discussing Latour’s invocation of Jagannath’s tale as an analysis of literary fiction, Latour never makes this identification explicitly.¹⁴ The bibliography at the end of Pandora’s Hope does not inform us of crucial features; its title, language, and author go unlisted. Furthermore, Latour introduces the reader to Jagannath as if he were familiarizing us with the actions of a real person:
 

His name is Jagannath, and he has decided to break the spell of castes and untouchability by revealing to the pariahs that the sacred saligram, the powerful stone that protects his high-caste family, is nothing to be afraid of.
 

(Pandora’s 268)

As it turns out, Jaganath’s tale is extracted from the novel Bharathipura.¹⁵ Written in Kannada–one of the Dravidian South Asian vernaculars–in 1974, its author, U.R. Anantha Murthy, remains a prominent figure in the literary world of Kannadan and Indian vernacular letters. What Latour interprets is but a fragment of the novel that first appears in English in Another India, a collection of translated vernacular Indian literature.¹⁶

 
The translations of prose and poetry that appear in Another India were originally composed in one of the dozens of vernaculars used in the subcontinent. The editors, Nissim Ezekiel and Meenakshi Mukherjee, primarily attempted to showcase the complexity and richness of Indian vernacular letters and to counter the disproportionate emphasis placed on Anglophonic “Indian” writing in Europe and North America. Such an ambition was prescient with respect to future debates. In 1997, on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of India’s independence, Salman Rushdie would contend that the only writing of substance in South Asia was composed in English:
 

The prose writing–both fiction and nonfiction–created in this period [the fifty years of independence] by Indian writers working in English is proving to be a stronger and more important body of work than most of what has been produced in the eighteen “recognized” languages of India, the so-called “vernacular languages,” during the same time. . . . The True Indian literature of the first postcolonial half century has been made in the language the British left behind.
 

(50)

Latour’s readers, however, are never apprised of this significant tension in South Asian literature (and in much writing characterized as “postcolonial”).¹⁷ Consequently, the significance of translation and the problem of incommensurability in Jagannath’s tale are never addressed. For example, there is no mention of the parallels between Jagannath’s inability to comprehend the Dalit and the postcolonial Indian writer’s dilemma of choosing from amongst the various possibilities for political identification and representation that different languages–notably local vernacular and the colonial tongue–afford.

 
Latour begins by informing the reader that “His name is Jagannath,” but his analysis of Jagannath’s story does not focus on its linguistic, historical, and etymological contexts. That the protagonist has this particular name is significant; it is replete with powerful associations in South Asian religious experience. The Temple of Jagannath in Puri, Orissa, celebrates a popular and mischievous avatar of Vishnu/Krishna and is a major pilgrimage site for many of South Asia’s Hindus.¹⁸ The reference to Jagannath (Sanskrit for “ruler of all the world” or “ruler of the universe”) draws associations to a figure revered by millions of South Asians. Significantly, this avatar of Vishnu is celebrated for his transgressive qualities; he is a cunning and lusty trickster. There is also an important etymological relation between a juggernaut and Jagannath. Although the name Jagannath is drawn from the temple in Puri, its European usage refers to religious spectacle. According to European travelers’ tales, during the Rathayatra Festival zealots would throw themselves underneath the giant wheels of a chariot towed by pilgrims to the temple gates.¹⁹ The “juggernaut” has long harbored characteristic features of Orientalist exoticism: its European legacy conjures irrationality and religious fanaticism in order to mark the Indian as “other”–a function that India has served in various European imaginaries, dating from at least Europe’s early modern period onward. As the English-educated, Kannada-speaking Brahmin, Jagannath thus carries in his name associations that reverberate in these contexts of South Asian religio-cultural consciousness and Anglophonic etymology.²⁰ Similarly, linguistic resonances relating to debates over Indian modernity can be found in Bharathipura, the novel’s title. The subject of caste has for many become synonymous with the “Indian condition,” and tales of uplifting the downtrodden from caste entrenchment have come to be seen as paradigmatic of the possibility of modernizing India. These issues have been rendered into numerous aesthetic forms–the subject of novels, films, and philosophical tracts–both inside India and abroad.²¹ It is not surprising, therefore, that the title of Murthy’s novel, Bharathipura, establishes a metaphorical relationship between a specific geographical site, Bharathipura, and the Indian nation as a whole. Bharat is the ancient Sanskrit name for “India,” and pura means village. Roughly translated, Bharathipura designates the “Village of India.” Thus, an element of general social critique via the microcosm of the village is prominently featured for the reader even before any of the novel’s plot is revealed.²²
 
Finally, as a work written for a Kannadan audience and only recently translated in its entirety, Bharathipura addresses several key issues raised within Anglophone postcolonial studies. The question of the significance of composing in the so-called colonizer’s language is a vibrant and contentious feature of postcolonial societies that concerns the manner in which categories such as “literature” and the “literary” are negotiated. Untranslated vernacular literary “traditions” consciously experiment with the problem of how to accommodate the enormous cultures of book and print that arose in connection with the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth century introduction of European print technologies. The language communities served by these vernaculars together constitute a diverse, national entity: a heterogeneous India where Gujarati, Bengali, Tamil, and fifteen other vernaculars are recognized as languages appropriate for literary expression. Thus, if the umbrella term “nation” can be used to refer to postcolonial India, it is only in the context of a sovereign nation that is learning to accommodate substantial regional and linguistic differences.²³ In this context, Murthy’s decision to write in Kannada is deliberate. Like many Indian literati, he works in more than one language. In fact, Murthy’s 1966 doctoral degree in comparative literary studies is from the University of Birmingham: three years earlier, the renowned Center for Cultural Studies was established at Birmingham by noted Marxist scholars Richard Hoggart and Stuart Hall. The complex treatment of varied Marxist/Socialist positions over the course of Bharathipura speaks to Murthy’s familiarity with contemporary “Western” scholarship, as well as to the prominent place of Marx amongst India’s own intellectuals and politicians. The English language translation of the entire novel was not available until 1996, more than two decades after Bharathipura’s first appearance in print.
 
What the excerpt of Bharathipura Latour reads occludes, and what the novel’s cultural texture helps focus, is Murthy’s critique of liberal ideas of cultural authenticity. At the beginning of Bharathipura, Jagannath recalls going to the University of London to study. Once there he uses his charisma and intelligence to seduce women with “revolutionary” zeal:
 

What had he done for five years in England? . . . He had become a magnetic existentialist . . . . His black eyes, olive complexion, his tone of voice . . . all of these he had used with superb sleight-of-hand. He turned liberal, a reader of The Guardian. Reason–simple. Liberal rhetoric helped him justify his aimless drifting ways. He favoured free love because he wanted several women without commitment. . . . He wanted to be free, and so dubbed life itself absurd. He assumed a variety of personalities so as to conceal his innermost appetites. Bluntly speaking, his life was one continuous debauchery. A masquerade.
 

(28-29)

But as his failing relationship with Margaret, a half-English/half-Indian woman, falls apart, Jagannath becomes motivated to abandon his charlatan ways and aspires to transform himself into someone who is “creative” and “authentic.” He returns to Bharathipura, believing that if he can liberate the village pariahs he will acquire the allure of a political revolutionary and thereby win back Margaret’s love: “He would write to her after he became more substantial. And for him to become that, the untouchables, who lived like birds or animals, should muster enough courage to take that first step into the Manjunatha temple. Their rebellion would bring him authenticity” (38).²⁴

 
Jagannath’s intervention is a failed act: his exercise in liberal largesse is grotesque, perverse, and utterly narcissistic. Back in India, Jagannath’s efforts to lead the pariahs out of their “ignorance” is hotly debated in the town and beyond. Undeterred by the skeptics, Jagannath eventually forces the issue upon the untouchables and the local community. At the end of the novel, he leads several drunken pariahs into a temple on a festival day only to find that their entrance is not considered blasphemous because the temple’s sacred lingam is missing.²⁵ In a plot twist, the reader is apprised that the priest’s physically and mentally abused son had exacted revenge on his cruel father the night before by digging up the lingam and casting it into the river–an act that resonates in Lingyat belief. When the thousands of faithful, who have come for the festival, hear what has happened, they conclude that although removing the lingam defiles the temple, it is a justified action; it occurred in order to stop the greater defilement that would have been caused by the pariahs. Although readers are privy to the psychological motivations of the priest’s son (much as they are to Jagannath’s), the worshippers are not duly informed; as a result, they appeal to indigenous beliefs to explain Jagannath’s failed actions, a move that allows their belief-system to remain intact. By contrast, the reader is aware of what motivates the novel’s protagonist and has the opportunity to consider the relation between personal psychology and social revolution. Murthy’s construction of this scenario allows for the modernist critic’s intervention to be absorbed by indigenous belief, a facet of Jagannath’s move that Latour’s analysis does not encounter and therefore address.
 

Representing the Unrepresented?

 
Latour, reading an excerpt of the novel, misses these dimensions of its plot and so its critique of liberal ideology. The broader implications of the novel’s politics of inclusion and marginality are also conveyed by its style. Narrative voice is so important to Murthy’s project that any analysis of Bharathipura that fails to engage with the ways it articulates multiple and competing points of view remains incomplete. While a range of characterization extends to a variety of different social groups–a feature reinforced by their access to narrative voice and point of view–this privilege is not extended to the untouchables. Many social and ideological positions are represented in the novel (the Brahmin ascetic, the Marxist politico, the corrupt Monk), but the untouchables, whose contested position within Indian society is the central plot device, are not represented as speaking for themselves. As indicated in the excerpt, and established more fully in the novel, Jagannath’s tale of failed cultural translation is exemplified by the very absence of Dalit narrative consciousness. But, unlike Marx’s formulation concerning Europe’s peasants, this lack of representation does not arise solely from the Dalit‘s lack the agency to represent themselves.²⁶ Rather, this particular Kannadan novel achieves its literary coherence by addressing the issue of untouchability through the objectification of the Dalit. Whereas some critics contend that this act of reification subjugates the untouchables further, we can perhaps better view Murthy’s literary strategy as one that highlights how dominant groups, even ones with emancipatory liberal intentions, find it difficult to view the “other” apart from their own projections and include the “other” on terms that do not exceed self-interest.²⁷
 
In this respect, Murthy’s literary and political aims are perhaps best understood in the context of the modern novel as a literary technology. Since the nineteenth-century, historical realist fiction has been used as an instrument that enables competing vantage points to negotiate their partial and situated perspectives against the reader’s God’s-eye view–a disembodied perspective through which all of the personal and institutional machinations that are central to the plot of the novel are perceived as transparent.²⁸ In the tradition of Marxist historical realist fiction, it is expected that the reader be left with a new view of social reality, one that is less ideologically distorted and that presents avenues for political action. In this context, the possibility of revolutionary activism links literary representation with political praxis: the reader is given the impression that as a result of understanding the novel, he or she is better placed to engage with injustice and ideological mystification. Indeed, the reader can feel transformed: he or she is no longer an ordinary social agent, but instead has become enlightened about matters of personal complicity vis-à-vis class complicity.
 
Although Bharathipura belongs to the genre of social realism, it is not Marxist; self-consciously Kannadan, Bharathipura relies upon the heteroglossic potential of the novel to suggest that caste politics at the local level cannot be altered when action is justified by non-local norms. Specifically, the reader is made to observe how modern critique and traditional beliefs confront one another: at novel’s end, traditional beliefs appropriate and circumvent critical intervention. While the Marxist realist tradition of the novel is invoked, Bharathipura defies the expectations of a genre that revolves around issues of domination and injustice. Because an untouchable consciousness is absent in it, the novel–as a genre and a form–seems to be rendered ineffective for adequately addressing the exclusion of minoritarian voices. In this reading, such an impasse offers an ironic, high-modernist perspective on the tropes of caste and untouchability in postcolonial India. Far from inciting the reader to revolution, Bharathipura seems to suggest that while the literary imagination has the potential to deflate overly zealous critical ambition, it cannot establish a direct course of action for citizens to pursue. If any of the diverse South Asian readers are implicated by the untouchables’ plight, the novel remains silent on why this is the case and what should be done to redress it. By not giving the Dalit representation, what the novel suggests ultimately is that until the Dalit represent themselves, “we” cannot represent them either. Their naming, as in the case of Dalit in modern Indian history, must occur through acts of self-naming. The impetus for Dalit representation must come from within communities of the excluded and enter into the larger body of civil society–a society that must be able to refashion itself in order to accept, and adapt to, Dalit inclusion in the postcolonial Indian nation-state.²⁹
 

Latour and Postcolonial Theory

 
It is tempting to compare Latour’s discussion of Jagannath to Said’s intervention into V.S. Naipaul’s politics of demystification in “Among the Believers.”³⁰ There Said takes issue with Naipaul’s portrayal, regarding his visit to Iran, Pakistan, Malaysia, and Indonesia, of the West as “the world of knowledge, criticism, technical know-how, and functioning institutions” and of Islamic culture as “fearfully enraged and retarded dependent [sic]” (114). Said’s position is that so long as Naipaul is, through his “acquired British identity,” prejudiced to see the world in this way, it is impossible for him to perceive or learn anything new: “What he sees he sees because it happens before him and, more important, because it already confirms what, except for an eye-catching detail, he already knows. He does not learn: they prove” (116, 113). The crucial point, one that is central to both Latour’s and Said’s respective analyses, is that neither an empathetic nor an epistemic connection to “otherness” is possible if the observer mistakes projected for genuine native beliefs. Recall Latour’s contention that “it is the critical thinker who invents the notion of belief and manipulation and projects this notion upon a situation in which the fetish plays an entirely different role” (Pandora’s 270). Said reminds us that so long as Naipaul remains within the space of “carefully chosen” and “absolutely safe” places to visit, so long as he fails to “live among them” and “risk their direct retaliation,” so long as he fails to be like Socrates and “live through the consequences of his criticism,” he can only present characters that “barely come alive” in landscapes that are “half-hearted at best” (116).
 
Despite these parallels between Latour and Said, important differences mark their approaches to literary analysis. By the time Latour publishes Iconoclash, it becomes clear that he is not familiar with the complete Bharathipura. The one-page discussion of Jagannath in Iconclash includes a reference to Murthy and his novel, but nothing to explain why Pandora’s Hope presents an incomplete citation. Although Latour goes so far as to claim that Jagannath’s tale is “at the origin” of the Iconoclash exhibition-discussing the inspirational value of Jagannath at the level of personal origin–he does not discuss the issue of cultural origins: he does not say why Kannadan writers were grappling with the limits of ideology critique in the 1970s. This occlusion allows us to distinguish between Said’s intervention into Naipaul and Latour’s intervention into Murthy. Although Latour connects his use of Jagannath’s tale to his project of “letting beliefs regain their ontological weight,” the fact remains that for Latour, India is imaginary at best–a phantasm connected solely with a literary fragment that, when taken out of context, bears unexamined but significant ethnographic traces.
 
We contend that the type of scholarship Latour exhibits in the context of his appropriation of Jagannath is problematic and relates to the questionable strategies he uses to solidify the disciplinary identity of STS by attempting to prematurely settle the question: what kind of expertise entitles one to speak authoritatively about science and technology, and in which contexts and for what purposes? As our discussion of Murthy demonstrates, the limits of ideology critique are already being established in South Asia during the early 1970s. By contextualizing that which is left out of Latour’s reading, we can register an “East” that is not essentialized and objectified. In recognizing the specific conditions that have contributed to the text’s production and circulation–its literary and “translated” status, its original production and consumption as a vernacular as opposed to “national” language, and its deliberate positioning with regard to contemporary intellectual and political life both in South Asia and in Europe–we can register more than an East that serves to put on display the hubris of the modernist critic. Indeed, in light of our contextualization, Latour’s deployment of Jagannath would be even more persuasive in that the use and abuse of ideology critique in South India highlights the heterogeneity and complexity of resistance to the supposed universalism of modernist reason. Once again, postcolonial instantiations of modernities, as opposed to the Eurocentric uniformity of a singular modernity, reveal the negotiations taking place in situ.³¹ As in the laboratory, decoding the practices of particular villages highlights the degree to which they cannot be abstracted out of their historical time and place.
 
When considering these factors, it becomes important to take into account the status of works of literature within Latour’s project of analyzing the limits of ideology critique. Literary investigations have been demarcated historically from more “proper” theoretical investigations based on considerations of the kinds of claims formal and conceptual arguments can yield and the kinds of claims narrative can provide. However well a story may allow readers to come to a new understanding of the world, however much it enables readers to imagine that things could be other than they currently are, some contend that the readers’ ability to articulate what is compelling depends upon their going beyond literary possibility by making philosophical arguments concerning what justifies (or fails to justify) the beliefs, intentions, and actions of the literary characters. When Latour reduces Jagannath’s tale to an allegory of the modernist iconoclast, he engages in conceptual reductionism. It is as if he is suggesting that whatever insights can be found in Kannadan literature, they remain insufficiently epistemic because they have yet to be conceptualized properly. This strategy of attribution belongs to a long history in which: (1) non-Western inventions are marginalized; (2) the West is given credit for inventing things that were already fabricated; and (3) complex postcolonial situations that have given rise to numerous responses to, critiques of, and alternate configurations for, so-called “modernity” are elided.³² In short, Latour proceeds as if textual violence were not an essential component of analyzing Jagannath’s tale as a model–as a minimal representation of the fundamental features that account for the failure of ideology critique. Although models can be valuable for a number of ends–particularly in the sciences, when they can strip away inessential details in order to clarify the forces of a situation–using Bharathipura in this way undermines Murthy’s literary intervention: exposing the limits of critique in a specific context through a heavily psychologized and historicized agent.
 
Latour’s reduction of Murthy occurs as if he were unaware of the value of Said’s distinction between “theory” and “critical consciousness”:
 

Theory, in short, can never be complete, just as one’s interest in everyday life is never exhausted by simulacra, models, or theoretical abstracts of it. Of course one derives pleasure from actually making evidence fit or work in a theoretical scheme, and of course it is ridiculously foolish to argue that “the facts” or “the great texts” do not require any theoretical framework or methodology to be appreciated or read properly. No reading is neutral or innocent, and by the same token every text and every reader is to some extent the product of a theoretical standpoint, however implicit or unconscious such a standpoint may be. I am arguing, however, that we distinguish theory from critical consciousness by saying that the latter is a sort of spatial sense, a sort of measuring faculty for locating or situating theory, and this means that theory has to be grasped in the place and time out of which it emerges as part of that time, working in and for it, responding to it; then, consequently, that first place can be measured against subsequent places where the theory turns up for use. The critical consciousness is awareness of the differences between situations, awareness too of the fact that no system or theory exhausts the situation out of which it emerges or to which it is transported.
 

(Said, The World 241-42, emphases added)

Whether Latour has read Said or should be expected to be well-versed in Said’s terminology is irrelevant here. The fact remains that when it comes to analyzing Western technoscientific practice, Latour has long advocated that STS practitioners should conduct empirical case studies that trace carefully how provisional identities and disseminated knowledge claims are stabilized temporarily through networks of heterogeneous actors and “actants” who engage in complex acts of translation and negotiation in real time. Indeed, when he discusses Western scientific achievements and failures in his books and articles, Latour depicts networks as strong and weak connections between people, objects, concepts, and events that cannot be specified independently of the activity of those particular people, objects, concepts, and events. In other words, when presenting the reader with an account of how Western knowledge is fabricated, Latour always displays great sensitivity towards to the spatial orientation and the “traveling” of theory that Said associates with “critical consciousness.” By contrast, his reduction of Jagannath’s tale to an abstract model transforms the story into a saligram: it appears magically, as an ahistorical object waiting to be de-fetishized by the postcolonial studies scholar’s contextualizing insight into historical networks of translation. What Latour’s objectification of literature impedes, therefore, is the appearance of Bharathipura as a “thing” of concern for those in STS.

Matters of Fact, Matters of Concern, Matters of Context

 
The exclusion of postcolonial historical context in Latour’s argument suggests that greater scrutiny should be given to his use of examples that resonate with a variety of global scenarios, be they postcolonial, multi-cultural, or otherwise involving the many local, regional, and national cultural situations systemically interlinked through geographically widespread economic, political, and social “development.” Our aim here is to highlight the effects of Latour’s analysis when it does not meet its own expectations for contextual specificity and situatedness.
 
For example, in his recent Critical Inquiry article, “Why Has Critique Run out of Steam,” Latour recounts flipping between C-SPAN 1 and 2 in February of 2003, during the prelude to the Iraq War. On one station, ongoing coverage could be found of the recent Space Shuttle Columbia disaster. Latour contends that this event was best understood as a “metamorphosis of an object into a thing” (234). A technology that had long been taken for granted as an “object”–another instrument in America’s technological arsenal–was becoming imbued with rich connections that could be characterized “in the respectful idiom of art, craftsmanship and poetry . . . . Here, suddenly, in a stroke, an object had become a thing, a matter of fact was considered a matter of great concern” (233-35). At that moment on another station, Latour finds a different process on display in which a “matter of concern” was being transformed into an “object”: a myriad of contradictory responses that had been proffered in relation to the Bush administration’s case for war were now being consolidated into a unified, monolithic narrative that justified preemptive military action. At the UN, “we had an investigation that tried to coalesce, in one unifying, unanimous, solid, mastered object, masses of people, opinions and might” (235).
 
But while Latour considers how these parallel events–broadcast over cable, satellite, and the Internet–can provide insight into the distinction between “things” and “objects,” he fails to address the issue of audience and, therefore, context. Consider that in those televised images of searchers combing the North Texas countryside, most of the footage was concentrated around a small town. As the United States ramped up its war efforts in the Middle East, millions of Muslims around the globe also watched and also registered the shuttle as a thing: an auratic entity–carrying six Americans and an Israeli-whose fall from grace, not far from the U.S. President’s ranch, had come to lie in Palestine, Texas. In light of such lack of contextualization, Latour’s claim rings hollow: “Frightening omen, to launch such a complicated war, just when such a beautifully mastered object as the shuttle disintegrated into thousands of pieces of debris raining down from the sky–but the omen was not heeded; gods nowadays are invoked for convenience only” (236). Perhaps Latour and Jagannath alike view the invocation of the gods as convenient cover for political actions. But for those believers, not only Dalit, but fundamentalists and religious literalists in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, these gods do indeed come to life, justifying belief and action.
 
Glib dismissal of current events that resonate in messianic and eschatological theology might allow Latour to present justified criticism of President Bush’s rhetoric, but only by stripping away the significance of C-SPAN as a global, multi-media network, parochializing U.N. actions, and evading the import of his response to these programs as incommensurate with the responses of many believers. Any analysis of President Bush’s rhetoric must account for the religious coding meant for a largely domestic Christian audience. It is conventional wisdom that Bush needs to keep the bloc of the so-called Christian Right happy. However, Latour does not address the tendency towards complex and diverse responses around the globe to the explosion–even though they are relevant to the sorts of issues that Latour seeks to clarify in the Critical Inquiry article: that Critique seems to have given way to conspiracy theory, with the former lending the latter its methodological tools; that Critique has become disabled by its own modernist tendencies, imposing a tautological form of critical reasoning that occludes that which it seeks to critique; and that the work for critical STS is to understand how that historicized and contextualized fact–the “factish” in Pandora’s Hope–actually strengthens rather than weakens the ontology of the fact. Yet the very example of C-SPAN leads us to understand how Latour’s network fails not only to interact with the historical and cultural dimensions of transnational media and communications systems, but also with the significant beliefs that render the media’s “facts” over-determined. It also prompts us to revisit the theme addressed at the beginning of this essay, namely the relation between philosophy and STS. If STS has differentiated itself from philosophy by taking itself to be a mostly descriptive enterprise, then how does Latour justify his implicitly normative use of the factish? While Latour appeals to the factish to show why Dalit beliefs should be respected, he fails to explain why the factish does not likewise support the judgments of those who saw the Shuttle disaster as a divine omen and sign of Judgment, and for those who cultivate such beliefs for political gain.