speculative grace book review

7/27/2019 Speculative Grace Book Review

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Adam S. Miller's Speculative Grace: Bruno Latour and Object-Oriented Theology

A Review by Terence Blake

1. Grace is Deconstructive Emergence

"Speculative Grace: Bruno Latour and Object-Oriented Theology" is a very interesting

read. It gives an excellent account of Bruno Latour's pluralist ontology, one that is far superior,

because more faithful, to that given in Graham Harman's book "PRINCE OF NETWORKS:

Bruno Latour and Metaphysics". Unfortunately Miller relies too much on Harman's

terminology and so the formulation of the book's project that is contained in the title is quite

misleading. I am very sympathetic to the book's project of porting grace into a non-theistic

pluralist ontology, and also to the heuristic intermingling of theology (in the widest sense),

philosophy, science, the arts etc that this involves. However, examined in the light of this project

I think Miller's book is only partially successful, and one of the problems comes from an

inadequate definition of the project itself, as can be seen already in the title and Miller's

explications of the project.

1) The book's whole tendency is Latourian, and not at all "Object-Oriented", despite

Miller's terminological choice in favour of an ontological vocabulary that treats everything as

objects. Latour's preferred theoretical terms are "actors" and "networks". He calls his account

"actor-network theory", as he wished to keep his ontology as open as possible. Miller quotes

Latour's formulation of this metaphysical openness in his slogan "we do not know in advance

what the world is made of", but then proceeds to use Graham Harman's term of "objects", that

does pre-decide on the basic components of the universe. "Actor" is a verbal term, as Latour

approaches elements in terms of what they do, and he situates them in "networks" as he considers


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them also in terms of their relations. Harman's preferred term "objects" is far more static, and he

considers objects as "withdrawn" from relations. It is to be regretted that Miller chose to express

his Latourian (dynamic, pluralist, relational) theology in the language of Harmanian (static,

dualist, withdrawn) ontology.

2) Nor is the concept of grace presented in the book "speculative" in the technical sense

of that word derived from the movement of "Speculative Realism" (of which Graham Harman,

the creator of object-oriented philosophy, is a founding member). Rather the book proposes a

concept of immanent grace, as it explicitly sets out "to operationalize grace.... to port it out of a

traditional theistic framework and into the immanent domain of a non-theistic, object-oriented

ontology" (page 3). So the first part of the title is misleading. "Speculative" is not a good

adjective to link to Bruno Latour's experimental metaphysics. "Immanent Grace" would have

been a more accurate title. The choice of the adjective seems to have been dictated by the desire

to avoid repeating himself, as Miller has already published a book with the title "Badiou, Marion

and St Paul: Immanent Grace". One of the senses that Miller gives to the notion of "object-

oriented" is not having any transcendent fundamental unity that serves to unify, synthesise,

organise, and reduce the multitude. This sort of non-reductive pluralism is closer to the idea of an

"immanent" approach than to one that is "speculative".

3) Even the word "grace" itself is potentially a lure, and quite other names for the central

concept are possible, e.g. "love" or "gift". An example of this can be found in Paul Feyerabend's

account in his autobiography KILLING TIME of his passage from "icy egotist" to a human being

capable of friendship and love. Feyerabend declares: "there is no merit in this kind of love. It is

subjected neither to the intellect nor to the will; it is the result of a fortunate constellation of

circumstances. It is a gift, not an achievement" (173).


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implication religion) are totally unreal ("utter shams"). On a Harmanian acception "speculative

grace" would seem to be a new designation for the ideology of neo-liberalism, a secular

religiosity, a sort of Zen and the Art of Stock Speculation.

OOO is a movement that is obsessed with its own origin story, regularly recounting its

generic common origin with other Speculative Realist (SR) philosophies, and its specific

differences. This myth of origins is one of the best examples of the default of origin or originary

default described by Bernard Stiegler. The title "Speculative Realism" was coined at a

conference in 2007 as a retrospective label for the positions of its founding members (Ray

Brassier, Quentin Meillassoux, Iain Hamilton Grant, and Graham Harman), each of whom had

already been through an autonomous philosophical development, before endorsing, however

briefly, the new common label. One reason for Miller's use of the adjective "speculative" seems

to be an ill-advised attempt at branding. The book has a foreword by Levi Bryant, a member of

the object-oriented ontology movement, which is a spin off from "Speculative Realism" . The

subtitle contains reference to a possible "object-oriented" theology juxtaposed to the mention of

the name Bruno Latour. This grouping of disparate tendencies of thought is a conceptual mess!

All of the original speculative realists (with the possible exception of Grant) have views of

science that are incompatible with Bruno Latour's views. In particular Graham Harman (the

founder of the "object-oriented" approach), expounds a view of science (in the second half of his

book on Latour, and also in his book THE THIRD TABLE) that is the exact opposite of

everything Latour has argued for. In that sense writing the book on Latour was a magnificent

propaganda move because many people have the impression that there is some huge overlap

between both authors' systems, but this is not at all true. Similarly Brassier's "bleak" scientism is


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quite antiquated epistemologically, and certainly pre-Latourian in its separation between the

manifest image and the scientific image. The same must be said for Meillassoux, whose

mathematism and dualism of primary and secondary qualities are a regression to positivistic

fairytales, that the logical positivists themselves soon went beyond.

This heterogeneous assemblage of philosophers does not constitute a Badiousian "event"

(one possible translation for "grace") but a pious wish on the part of some of its faithful, though

not all (thank God for the hard-headed Brassier, for example,) that this intellectual branding

(SR,OOO) has enough substance to protect them from the crisis of foundations (it does not). Far

from embodying speculative rigor, Harman's OOO is all metaphor, unconscious of its own status

as such. The problem is not with the use of metaphor (though the metaphor of "objects" is rather

uninspiring) but with its unconscious deployment under the aegis of metaphysical realism.

The expression "speculative grace" can be interpreted in other ways. For me

"speculative" evokes conceptual creation (creation of and with concepts", which Deleuze

claimed to be the defining characteristic of philosophy). "Grace" evokes graceful movements and

acts, something indescribable about ordinary things and happenings that gives them a "shining"

quality, the extraordinary in the ordinary that Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Kelly describe in their

book ALL THINGS SHINING. "Speculative" connotes logos, and "grace" is associated with

pathos, and also eros. Speculative grace would be a case of the "erotic logic" that the poet

Kenneth White considered to be the outcome of post-modern explorations ("post-modern is pre-

world" he used to say).

"Speculative grace" can be read as designating the use of religious vocabulary after the


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death of God. Speculation is what has been held in check by onto-theology and the imposition of

transcendences that stop thought at certain boundaries fixed from outside. Grace is an item of

religious vocabulary that designates an emergent excess over the calculable lines of causality.

One could object that such words are irrevocably contaminated by their monistic onto-

theological origins and that the old religious vocabulary should no longer be used, not even as

metaphor. But these words do not owe their origin to theology, which took over words from the

common tongue. So speculation should not be limited a second time by prohibiting such

vocabulary.

Speculation is the property of noone, nor is realism. The whole direction of Anglo-

American empiricism for at least a hundred years has been to argue that speculation is an

essential, ineliminable, and positive ingredient of our knowledge - being both heuristically useful

and compositionally fecund. Such thinkers as Bertrand Russell, Rudolf Carnap, Willard Van

Orman Quine, and Karl Popper were in no way against "speculation". Far from trying to

eliminate it, they argued for the necessity of speculation and for its usefulness not only in

philosophy but in the sciences as well. There has been no generalised abandon of speculation in

anglophone philosophy but rather a continuous critique of certain types of empty specualtion, of

which Harman's Object-Oriented Philosophy is a good example.

Realism is another battle-cry without a battle. Those who arrogate to themselves the title

of realism often fail to (or refuse to) comprehend their rivals and predecessors. Those declared to

be "anti-realist" are most often the most radical phenomenologists, those who deconstruct the

dualism of subject and object and release us from the idealist trap of "correlationism" (to use for

once this pseudo-concept, which is used by OOO in a sense that has a little historic or even


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speculative content). They are thus the most thoroughgoing realists. Derrida is a realist, it is the

whole point of his theoretical work, as are Foucault, Lyotard, and Deleuze. Harman on the

contrary is in a counter current to this radicality, and is correlationist and non-realist through and

through. Harman needs to consider adversaries like Derrida and the other poststructuralist

thinkers to be anti-realist in a Pickwickian sense that exists only in his own imagination. He

cannot use their actual texts to prove his point so he has recourse to "Sturm und Drang", bluster

and bravado, repeating his accusations over and over without the slightest argument.

There is nothing wrong with such repetition if it allows us to sketch in a context without

losing time, a reminder to awaken the spirit to push its research further. This is the whole

Deleuzian theme that we need habits that are both contemplative and productive, but we must

stop them from hardening into stereotypes. Harman's stereotypes of Deleuze and Derrida and

"philosophies of access" lull thought into a stupor where clichs replace concepts, and the history

of philosophy is replaced with ready-made travesties. Harman is an atavism, a throwback to a

legendary realism that exists only in his own imagination. There is nothing realist about a man

that claims that the objects of common sense, of the humanities and of the sciences are all "utter

shams".

The philosopher of science Paul Feyerabend, for example, has just as much claim as any

to the title of "speculative realist", in work published 60 years before the "event" (Note 1). He is

both a full-blooded realist, and in favour of speculation as an instrument of the exploration of

reality and as a means of access to a life of grace (which he calls "full development"). John

Caputo, another speculative realist decades before the self-conscious proclamation of the

movement, provides us with the best framework for examining Speculative Realism and for


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contextualising Adam S. Miller's book "SPECULATIVE GRACE". I agree with Caputo that the

positive contribution of postmodernism is the unmaking of demarcationist philosophies. He sees

this in the coming together of the spiritual and the material, and thus of theology and the physical

sciences, their intermingling and indetermination. More generally, I think it is interesting to

contextualise Miller's project not in terms of Speculative Realism and of Object-Oriented

Philosophy, but by relating it to other pluralist philosophies that are elaborated in the works of

Deleuze, Feyerabend, Caputo, Dreyfus and Kelly.

This is what Miller is working on - an ontology of abundance and emergence, this is what

Harman is missing with his ontology of demarcation and "withdrawal". Miller belongs to this

movement of bringing science and spirituality together, of arguing for the speculative and

spiritual import of contemporary scientific visions. He affirms that "in light of contemporary

science, we have good reason to take seriously the claim that complex, dynamic, material

systems are capable of producing extremely rich patterns of self-organization without the

superaddition of any higher, designing, goal-oriented intelligence" or transcendence (this is from

the preliminary blog version of some of the ideas of the book:

http://churchandpomo.typepad.com/conversation/2009/06/speculative-grace-an-experimental-

port.html). The very expression "speculative grace" makes one think of Caputo's idea that not

only is contingency grace (WHAT WOULD JESUS DECONSTRUCT?, p 41) but so also is

"felicitous ambiguity" (p 51). Language too contains events that can be assembled in a style

composing with the grace of the event, the paradox engendering sense. Miller's title "Speculative

Grace" embodies such a paradox, juxtaposing words from different disciplines to signify the

abandon of all reductionism.


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3. Deconstruction vs Protectionism:

Does Latour show the speculative fly the way out of the ontotheological fly-bottle?

The first two thirds of Adam S. Miller's book SPECULATIVE GRACE, exploring the

immanent plurality and abundance of objects following the first wave of Latour, where he doesn't

talk much explicitly about religion, feels more religious than when he explicitly talks about

religious themes. This is already my objection to Latour. Attempting to assert a demarcation

between science and religion by talk about scientific objects as "far" and religious objects as

"close" violates Latour's own cautionary remarks about the relativity of scale, and imports a

transcendent bias in favour of one or the other term. Atoms are not "farther" than angels, and if

we were brought up from childhood by adults telling us to "take care of our particles" they would

not seem so. Intuitions like concepts are constructed, they cannot just be imported, no matter

how plausible and reassuring it may be to do so. Far is not the same as "resistant", nor is close a

synonym of "available". The signs here are ambiguous, and one could equally argue that the

close is resistant and that the far is available, because constructible with fewer objectors. Once

you start including the objectors in the networks the distances are themselves objects of

controversy, and not to be presupposed by some pre-accepted framework.

Latour's view of religion is too protectionist, where Deleuze and Feyerabend and Jung's

views are transversalist, favorising not just symmetry (finding that both religion and science have

cognitive aspects, and that both are performative, i.e. that the cognitive/performative distinction


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is not pertinent for demarcating science and religion) but also interference and heuristic

interaction. Steve Fuller's claim that many scientific discoveries were made by researchers who

were acting out of a religious worldview rather than a materialistic one seems to me to be quite

probative. Religion has "interfered" positively with science throughout its history, and not just

negatively as a popular positivist myth would have us believe.

The distinction in terms of different "felicity conditions" is not at all new, and was

advanced by post-Wittgensteinian religionists over 40 years ago. It is a protectionist,

territorialising, conservative move, unworthy of the rest of Latour's ontology. It is too strong, and

its normative force has methodological consequences for the conduct of science. Such a

demarcationist approach is illegitimate (it is normative and not "agnostic", as Latour's method

requires). It is purificatory and unrealistic, and so would have had disastrous consequences for

scientific progress if it had been applied by the actors whose intuitions and comportment are

supposed to be described in Latour's account.

The most that Latour can do is to create a protected reserve with its own felicity

conditions for some sort of "generic" religion. After all, he is a Catholic and Miller is a Mormon,

and there is something very diluted about a shared religiosity that does not foreground actual

religious objections and controversies, which are not mere differences of opinion but

incommensurable rifts within the religious "truth rgime". Either the particular identity of his

religious obedience is dissolved or his own religious tradition is being treated as a model and

imposed on the rest. Thus Latour is committing the fallacy of homogeneity by his partitioning of

the truth rgimes, unless he is willing to turn the transversality of religious experience and

performance against the creedal boundaries and lose the religious affiliation and the institutional


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identity.

Latour claims to liberate religion from belief yet he is a Catholic, and not a Jain or a

Mormon or a Buddhist. So there is a form of belief present. If religion is purely non-cognitive,

being reduced to the transformative function, then all he can say is "I was transformed by this

Word, empirically speaking, given my birth situation and socio-historical context". In which

case, any transformatory word will do, not just religion but philosophy or literature or sport:

wherever you can "shine" and see the world "shining". Setting up the felicity conditions that

demarcate out such transformative words and practices and pre-supposing this characterises

"religion" is a conservative and dogmatic assumption. There is some form of "belief", even if it is

not propositional, presupposed by Latour's system. And so I think that to follow through his ideas

he must choose: either religion is so diluted that it could be anything, any transformative

practice, or it is totally deconstructed and dissolved, being present everywhere as a dimension of

performance, participation, conversion, transformation. Latour is supposedly a sociologist, but

where is the sociology that tells us that belief plays no part at all in religion?

Latour wishes to avoid "fundamentalism" in questions of religion and also of science

and politics. He defines this fundamentalism as "the refusal of controversies" (i.e. of discussions

where there is no pre-given arbiter) and "the attempted exercise of hegemony of one mode of

existence over the others" (CRITIQUE, Nov. 2012, p 953). This is what many pluralists have

fought under the name of reductionism. Reduction on this view lies in treating religion as a

matter of belief, and as submitted to the same truth-rgime as referential domains like science.

Latour is quite explicit that for him, and I think for many other religious people, religion is not a

question of belief at all, not a question of reference to the physical world, but one of a


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transformative message. One can find this sort of analysis of religious discourse in the movement

of demythologisation, but it can also be found in ALL THINGS SHINING, and in the writings of

post-Wittgensteinian philosophers of religion, even Zizek propounds this as a possible use of

religion. It may be a minority position compared to the number of fundamentalists, but in the

philosophical domain it is not negligeable.

From this point of view fundamentalism as the insistence on religion as a matter of

belief in factual propositions about the world is a deformation of religion. It seems to me that this

"transformative" or "performative" understanding of religion has something good and something

bad to it. The bad part is that it looks suspiciously like trying to have your cake and eat it too,

making seeming claims about the world and then dancing back and saying that you are in fact

doing something else, and so immune to criticism. But the good part is that it preserves an

important use for religious language. I must admit that I am not indifferent to this language if it

is used "poetically", that is to say to express deep or transformative experiences. But I would

argue here that the religious person would have to accept that this transformative language is

becoming in itself more pluralist. So the brute fact of finding that one is moved by certain words

and images and rituals that are closely tied to profound experiences and insights becomes a little

suspicious when it conveniently conforms to a pre-constituted faith, let us say Catholicism in

Latour's case. Philosophy intervenes when there is cognitive dissonance, when one's beliefs and

intuitions, one's affects and reactions, no longer conform to the prevailing models.

One can agree then that there is more to religion than referential claims about the

physical universe, and that fundamentalism is a reductionist approach to religion. This heuristic

(or "transformative") use of religious language and images is more common than one might

think. It corresponds to what Stiegler (and Simondon, and Jung) calls individuation. Both Bruno


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Latour and Paul Feyerabend give accounts of religion that, in related but different ways, remove

it from its customary opposition with secularism. For Latour religion is one "rgime of

enunciation" or "mode of existence" among others, with its own "conditions of felicity", aimed at

transformation rather than information. Feyerabend extends Latour's view of religious traditions

as different in kind from secular traditions, by nevertheless insisting that as raw materials they

can be incorporated in secular traditions such as the sciences or even be used to correct (or at

least relativise positively) these traditions. this is where Feyerabend goes further than Latour.

Latour "protects" religion from the accusation of , for example, scientific insufficiency or

political violence. These sorts of accusations amount to criteria of the demarcation of religion

from and its subordination to some other instance (very often science). Latour makes this

impossible by claiming that religion is so different that it is "not even incommensurable" with

referential rgimes such as science:

http://www.bruno-latour.fr/sites/default/files/86-FREEZE-RELIGION-GB.pdf

Feyerabend recognises a possible qualitative difference between religion and straight

referential traditions in that religion includes a performative aspect, but not to the detriment of a

referential cognitive aspect. So the difference in kind is that religious traditions are more

complete than (most) secular traditions. He is willing to add that in fact, but unbeknownst to

them and so in truncated form, secular traditions have this performative aspect too.

In sum, I think Latour is only a partially reliable guide. In trying to find a place for

religion he moves towards a pragmatic reading in terms of its effects but then shies off and

invents a separate precinct for religion. In effect he should be going towards a similar position to

Deleuze's or Feyerabend's, but he then limits this pragmatic transformative power to "religion" as


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something familiar and pre-constituted. Secondly, by limiting religion to a mode of existence

defined by a special set of felicity conditions he is obliged to deny it all cognitive function. By

his own principles we should not compare religion as product to science as product as Richard

Dawkins does, he should examine religion as process and its relation to science in action, and

then he would find hybridising heuristic cognitive, as well as performative, interaction.

4. Non-theistic Porting and Dialogical Pluralism

Miller in SPECULATIVE GRACE presents his book as a deconstructive thought

experiment: porting a concept from an ontotheological plane of monism and transcendence to a

speculative and object-oriented plane of pluralism and immanence to see what transformations

ensue. "I want to port the theological concept of "grace" into a non-theistic framework in order to

see if the concept survives and, if so, what modifications it would need to undergo. My

hypothesis is that grace can survive such a port and that, in fact, outside of a theistic ontology,

grace may continue to thrive and abound." (quoted from the blog posts that constituted a

preliminary draft of some parts of the book. This quote is from the first post: "Speculative Grace:

An Experimental Port": http://churchandpomo.typepad.com/conversation/2009/06/speculative-

grace-an-experimental-port.html). This experiment in porting religious concepts into a non-

theistic conceptual field , while very interesting and worthwhile, is not unprecedented. Other

experimenters include: John Caputo, Michel Serres, Gilles Deleuze, Jean-Franois Lyotard, Paul

Feyerabend, James Hillman, Norman O. Brown, Alan Watts, Carl Jung, and Friedrich Nietzsche.

I have often regretted the posture of "monological pluralism", where an otherwise

impeccable pluralism is elaborated in the manifest absence of referring to or acknowledgement

of other pluralist thinkers. This is regrettable as pluralism is not just a content but a mode of


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thinking and acting. Further, Miller relies rather heavily on one pluralist, Bruno Latour, who is

not always clear on his obvious debt to other pluralists, and in fact who represents a weakening

of their potential impact, preferring in his later works an attitude of rhetorical "diplomacy" to an

earlier comportment of ontological provocation.

The thinkers I have mentioned "port" various religious terms and concepts into an

immanent framework, and each has transformed the concept of "grace" by subtraction from

transcendence. Yet this term "grace" is not the the one that is most highlighted, the terms most

preferred for transformative porting are "love", "hope" or even "faith". These words are not

intrinsically ontotheological or religious (which, of course, is not the same thing) and come from

the common tongue. But I think that "grace" is a particularly difficult term to deploy without

falling back into a personalistic miraculating God. This may explain why the other spiritual

pluralists I have cited make only sparing use of it.

We are all aware of the risks of porting, dramatised in David Cronenberg's film THE FLY.

A scientist develops a working prototype of a porting machine, and tries it out on a human

subject, himself. He does not notice that a fly enters with him and though the teleportation is

successful he has been reassembled with the fly's DNA combined with his own. At first all seems

well, but then begins his slow transformation into a giant fly-thing. I think something like this

happens in the course of Miller's book.

The first two thirds of SPECULATIVE GRACE are truly excellent, and consist in a

radical pluralist reading of Bruno Latour's oeuvre. But beginning with Chapter 31 (the book

contains 41 short chapters, mostly 3 or 4 pages long) the tone changes and a very unsatisfying


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comparison of science and religion is expounded, following Latour's more recent "modes of

existence" pronouncements. In a striking rhetorical inversion, science is declared to be concerned

with the distant and transcendent, while religion is supposedly an affair of the close and the

immanent.

This is where I feel that a transcendent framework has been subtly reintroduced. Bruno

Latour himself has argued convincingly that questions of "scale" (big and small, macro and

micro, and thus far and close) are framework dependent (see his REASSEMBLING THE

SOCIAL, pages 183-186). Miller's initial re-framing of "grace" in a pluralist non-theistic

ontology is here considerably weakened by his resorting to a religion-oriented framing of science

and religion where science reveals "transcendent objects" and religion "immanent objects". The

DNA of ontotheology was surreptitiously ported along with the concept of grace and reaffirms its

hegemonic power as the book progresses through its last 40 pages. The book begins to resemble

its "preachy" double, evoked in the previous section of this review.

I think this weakness could have been avoided if Miller had conceived his project in

dialogue with other pluralist thinkers. A case in point is his response to Dreyfus and Kelly's ALL

THINGS SHINING. He published a review that concentrated on their demonstrably false

understanding of David Foster Wallace's life and works, while passing over in silence the main

philosophical themes of the book. There are interesting similarities between Miller's

SPECULATIVE GRACE and ALL THINGS SHINING, both being treatises in pluralist

ontology. (Unfortunately the book is incomplete compared to Dreyfus and Kelly's lectures,

because that is where they complemented Heidegger's (and their) pluralism of "understandings of

Being" paradigm with his later thing paradigm, where "things" correspond to Latourian "objects"


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as Miller presents them). I tend to equate their "shining" with Miller's "immanent grace", and to

explicate grace as an indescribable shining of the givenness and perfection of the ordinary,

transforming all objects into neighbours that are no longer the indifferent objects of scientific

distance, but agents that matter and demand our care, engaging objects of religious closeness.

This whole idea of givenness and mattering are what is contained in Dreyfus and Kelly's notion

of "shining". One thing that Miller could have gained from engaging with ALL THINGS

SHINING, that is lacking in SPECULATIVE GRACE, is a sense of the importance of

diachronicity.

5. Agents: dynamic and relational vs objects: passible and withdrawal

Miller's program of "porting" grace into a non-theistic universe is an ambitious one.

However, I think that as in many stories of porting and portals, for example in STARGATE SG-

1, Miller has been too timid in his dialing of a destination, and perhaps in a later book he will be

able to port to an even further destination, once he discovers how to dial an even more

deterritorialised address, as his pluralist aspirations would encourage him to do. Bruno Latour is

not really in another galaxy from Miller, porting to Latour's ontology involves only dialing a 7

chevron address, to use Stargate terminology. Latour is in fact a Christian (a Roman Catholic)

and so not really in a totally different conceptual galaxy. I have argued that this can be seen at the

level of Latour's system, which involves a protectionist strategy with respect to religion. And that

it can be seen in Miller's book, which changes in tonality in Chapter 31 entitled "Science and

Religion".

In Chapter 34 ("God") Miller discusses how religion, in contrast to science which deals

with distant "transcendent objects", speaks about and relates us to the close, ordinary, common


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objects of our daily life. He ends the chapter with this statement: "God himself has always

insisted not on orthodoxy, but on the religious centrality of the least, the common, the ordinary,

the vulgar, the downtrodden, the poor" (p 135). In this sentence purportedly about immanent

ordinary objects there is one non-ordinary non-immanent term "God". Here Miller is not content

to just quote Latour, he cites God in support of his claim. He really needs to engage an eighth

chevron to dial out of the theistic galaxy.

Latour is quite good in what he says about science, even if it is derivative (as Steve Fuller

has justly remarked), and then he goes on to contradict himself when talking about religion.

Miller, like Latour tries to have it both ways, but either it's hybrids and heterogeneity all the way

down or it isn't. If it's hybrids and heterogeneity, then you can't have these purist "felicity

conditions" for separate modes of existence, and you cannot demarcate science and religion on

the basis of near and far, immanent and transcendent objects. So I think that "infelicity" is the

missing chevron, call it "intermingling" as Caputo does, or "transversality" (Deleuze and

Guattari), or "transgression" (Bernard Stiegler) it is the source of innovation and individuation.

John Law seems to me to be following the lines of heterogeneity without falling back into the

grand coherencies of Latour's more recent speculations. If Miller had ported grace into John

Law's ontology of multiple worlds in becoming, instead of into Latour's "common world",

perhaps he could have tested its viability in a more radically non-ontotheological galaxy.

Latour's position is best named, but with a name that he only grudgingly endorses, "actor-

network theory". We can see some important differences of emphasis compared with object-

oriented approaches by examining the two names and their possible ontological implications

First, Latour's expression recognises both elements (actors) and relations (network). Harman's


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term drops the relations and we now have only objects and their withdrawal. Secondly, Latour

uses dynamic, temporal, terms: "agent" (elements having agency act on other agents and on the

relations between them) and "network", which is a tissue not just of any relations, but

specifically of relations of translation and transformation, ie of dynamic relations. Latour lifts

objects to agency, Harman, and to a certain extent Miller, reduces agents to objects. Latour's

"experimental" metaphysics is not just an experiment for him, nor even for all those who wish to

follow it. It is a metaphysics for which every actor is experimental, every agent is actively

engaged in experimentation, composing and being composed in different networks, trying out

different relations with whatever objects may lend themselves to composition.

Nowhere is the damage done by this move of reduction to objects more apparent than in

chapter 21 on "Suffering". To be sure, Miller talks about both agency and passibility, but he puts

the accent on "passibility" (philosophical lexic) that he translates also as "suffering" (seemingly

existential lexic, but principally religious in its connotations). The expression that Miller has

chosen to characterise objects, as constitutive duality, is "resistant availability". He even

establishes an equivalence between this and the "universal" feature of suffering: "suffering,

because it names the double-bind of resistant availability constitutive of every object, cannot be

expunged" (81). (Note: This permits a potential confusion between the transcendental suffering

of passibility and the ordinary empirical suffering of pain and misery and loss). In a strange

intensification by a redoubling of passivity, "availability" entails that "every object passively

suffers its passibility". "Resistance" entails that every object suffers the recalcitrance (51) of

those objects it means to influence. Miller, of course, has a chapter on "Agency", but sets out

from a strangely passified definition: "To be an agent is to act on someone else's behalf", which


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he qualifies later by allowing also that an object can act on its own behalf. Nonetheless passivity,

while not exclusive, is a primary characteristic in Miller's translation of Latour.

I cannot resist as a thought experiment entertaining the idea of replacing "resistant

availability" with a near synonymous expression to bring out my qualms about Miller's coinage.

Let us imagine replacing it with "proliferating obduracy" (or "obdurate proliferation").

"Obduracy" is a form of resistance, but it is far more agentive in resonance. "Proliferation" is

more agentive than "availability", and permits one to specify that what an object proliferates is

not so much other objects, though it does this too, but relations between objects, translations, and

transformations. Both agency and (dynamic) relationality are down-played by Miller's lexical

choices not only in the title, but also in the body of his text.

"Obduracy" is John Law's word, but he used it in the wake of his earlier (1994) book

ORGANIZING MODERNITY, before he became fully poststructuralist in terminology. He

explains how he uses it in polarity with "ordering", which means for him establishing relations in

a field of heterogeneous materials and processes. So I could have tried out "ordering obduracy",

but I think in that case Miller's expression is by far superior. Drawing on Latour's own

vocabulary I could have constructed "transformational recalcitrance", but that is too scholarly.

All three of these alternative expressions have the advantage of highlighting relationality, which I

find to be insufficiently highlighted in Miller's book. I am reassured in the importance of this

aspect of my proposed translations as Latour himself declared that he liked Mike Lynch's

proposition of "actant-rhyzome ontology". Here once again relationality (rhyzome) is given

equal place with objects. Miller follows Graham Harman's usage, in PRINCE OF NETWORKS,

of reductively substituting the one term "objects" for Latour's more varied lexic (Latour uses


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actors, agents, actants, and even "elements", as well as objects).This is a reductive move that

homogenises Latour's terminolgy, replacing a dynamic relational process ontology with with its

synchronic shadow.

Note: The conceptual coup of transposing a diachronic ontology such as Latour's into its

synchronic travesty can be seen on page 14 of PRINCE OF NETWORKS: "the world is made up

of actors or actants (which I will also call 'objects')". No mention that the world is also composed

of relations and their grouping with objects into networks. No mention that the relations that

Latour considers are dynamic, temporal ones (association, translation, transformation, mediation,

diffusion. No awareness that when Latour uses a noun like "association" he keeps the verbal or

processual component of the meaning primary. Harman seems to automatically and

unconsciously translate theories into synchronic terms, and then afterwards begins to analyse

them and take position.

I think this important as I find that there is a lack of emphasis on diachronicity in Miller's

book, ie not just that objects themselves are historical, but that the very ontology that describes

them must be itself diachronic. This for me is tied to the fact that Latour talks in terms of

relations that are dynamic. For me the real opposition is not between subject and object, not even

at a rhetorical level, and this is not why I protest against the substitution of "object-oriented" for

"actor-network". The actual words chosen do not matter so much as the conceptual fields they

implicate. Drawing on a comparison between Harman's system and the ideas of Paul Feyerabend,

I think that the major opposition is that between synchronic objects on the one hand and

diachronic elements and relations on the other. (Note: I have discussed this point at length in an

article on elements and relations in the light of a diachronic ontology as against Harman's objects


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in his synchronic ontology see: http://www.theoria.fr/is-ontology-making-us-stupid).

In conclusion: the context into which Miller "ports" the notion of grace , insofar as it is

immanent, pluralist, dynamic, and atheological, transforms the meaning. I think the interest of

this sort of translation points both ways. It shows that if one is willing to be supple on the

doctrine, theological concerns can be translated into more up to date language. Conversely, it

shows that seemingly "non-religious" language has spiritual and theological overtones that may

go unnoticed without that sort of juxtaposition.

speculative grace book review

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