Latour on "Double Click Communication"

From the review of rejoicing by Bruno Latour from the Journal of Communication and Religion

[S]cience and religion... are saddled with the expectations of what Latour calls “double-click communication,” in which one expects “immediate and costless access” to knowledge, as easy as tapping a computer’s mouse (22). This demand harms both science and religion by stripping away all their difficult and laborious work and expecting that both speak as oracles. Latour has rejected this reduction in science, and he now rejects it in religion. “It’s impossible to simplify. There is no straight path. No angelic inspiration, no muse whispering in your ear” (7). Latour’s project in Rejoicing is not to invent more persuasive discourse in order to buttress religion in its fight with science. Instead, he seeks to tease out the complexity of religious utterance in the same way he has done for science...

Latour’s use of rhetoric never becomes this explicit, his vision of religious speech is thoroughly rhetorical. Latour calls such speech “faithful invention” (111, emphasis in original). “To find the right words again you have to use whatever speaks to the ears of those you’re addressing” (156). To miss the rhetorical nature of religion is to judge religion by the wrong set of felicity conditions and therefore to undermine the true power of religious rhetoric. It does not simply deliver religious information, but rather offers new formation: “angels do not convey messages; they change those they address. What they transfer is not an information content, but a new container” (32). Latour understands religious rhetoric as a means not of persuasion, but rather as a means of forming new identities and communities. He asks, “So, there really exist such miraculous words, then, that produce those who say them at the same time as those who hear them, gathering them together into a newly convened people united by the same message finally made real?” (50)...

[T]he question of religion is not one of belief. “To confuse belief (or non-belief) in ‘God’ with the demands of religion means taking the decor for the room, the overture for the opera” (6)... For Latour, saying “I believe” is not to anchor in being so much as engage in becoming... God is “The thing that begets neighbors” (135). God is more of a project than a “person.” 

Paul Lynch, Saint Louis University

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