Année 2004 2003 2002 2001 2000 1999 1998 1997 1996 1995 1994 1993 1992 1991 1990 1989 1988 1987 1986 -1985 Year 2004 2003 2002 2001 2000 1999 1998 1997 1996 1995 1994 1993 1992 1991 1990 1989 1988 1987 1986 -1985		Articles 1990 - Index 043: [translation] Why Angels Do not Make Good Scientific Instruments 041: The Force and Reason of Experiment Why Angels Do Not Make Good Scientific Instruments Bruno Latour [illustration] FIGURE.1. Holbein, The Ambassadors, 1533 (National Gallery). ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- They stand leaning against a pedestal table on which geographical instruments are laid out. In the center of the picture, obliquely, the viewer can make out a sort of cuttlebone of a brownish color. If he puts his eye to the left side of the picture, almost touching his cheek to the painted surface, he will perceive a skull. These geographers who are beginning to construct the new space of the new world have asked the artist to include in their portrait a reference to vanity, a memento mori. Since he agreed, in order to obey the laws of this venerable genre, to place a skull in the lower part of the picture, why deform it ? Why not add it to the instruments for surveying, measuring, and projecting as had been done in the case of so many other still lifes and so many other memento mori ? It appears that a secret uneasiness lingers in these inventors of maps and these surveyors. What will their world be made of if they actually succeed too well in tracing it exactly through projection? Where will they put the other world, the ultra-world, that of God and of their faith ? A secret uneasiness also lingers in the painter, Holbein, first Catholic and then Protestant, one of the best artisans of this new perspective that gives the viewer the impression that she is looking through a window the same size as the picture frame, at a spectacle that is unfolding before her. If Holbein succeeds too well in producing this impression of a spectacle projected and represented exactly, how will he also paint the other world ? How will he render what is not a spectacle that one is witnessing but the movement of faith which transforms and converts ? Most importantly, how will he represent in the same relationship and in the same picture the exact projection of the new geographical world and that of the divine world ? Such is the enigma of this picture : representation triumphs, with its ceremonies and its works, its servants and its masters, before the dazzled eyes of the viewer. "But where has re-presentation taken place, that is, the act of bringing together, again, the convert and the subject of his conversion ?" is the troubling question asked by the commissioners of the painting, the painter, the faithful believer, and the viewer . In order to resolve this difficulty, Holbein superimposes in the same picture two antagonistic points of view. Of the servants and agents of the faith, there remains no more than a skull, but a deformed skull, which refuses to be integrated into the rest of the picture according to the same optical coherence as the paved floor, the tapestries, the bodies, the table, and the instruments of observation. Not only does this skull remind us of death, as with any symbol of vanity, but it is painted on a slant, projected from another plane, as though to remind us that there exists another angle of view, another plane. "You are alive, you will be dead," said the old memento mori. "You admire the beauty of your body, of the world, and of its forms, you will be disfigured and deformed like this skull," murmurs the new. Let us lean over the edge of the picture again, let us put our cheek against the varnish (in imagination only, for otherwise the guard would become red with anger and the alarms would go off). The cuttlebone becomes a skull. But what happens, now, to the proud ambassadors ? They turn into deformed, monstrous bodies. If you look straight at the geographers, the world of faith becomes misshapen, obscene ; if you take care to look straight at the world of faith, of which this skull is the residue, the artisans of the form of the world, the geographers, become in turn disfigured, grotesque. One cannot hold at the same time, and in the same relation, representation and re-presentation ; one cannot be at the same time, and in the same relation, viewer and convert. Between new science and old religion, there is now an incompatibility of points of view. What is concealed from the eyes of one is revealed to the eyes of the other. What is presented by one is distanced by the other. What is formed and figured by one is deformed and disfigured by the other. However, in this picture, that alternation is no more than an uneasiness and a reminder – a memento, in fact. The entire space is occupied by the embassy and geography, perspective and instruments. Representation has triumphed. There is scarcely more than this scrap of fog, this brown scarf to make us uneasy, to remind us that vision can be muddied, that embassies can fail, that geography can be insufficient to describe the world, that there is, that there has been, that there may still be, other angles of vision. This deformed skull resembles most of all a compunction, an obsession, a nostalgia. The ambassadors and geographers do not in the least want to abandon their new world. They want only to remember the possibility of the old one. Of the venerable religious pictures there remain only the minimum, projected askew. By introducing this skull, the ambassadors, so satisfied with themselves and their painter, Narcissus, literally look themselves in the navel, that is, the only scar remaining to them of the old matrix that made them. Let us now go back up the river of time, let us follow in thought the umbilical cord that Holbein wanted to recall by means of his anamorphosis. Let us go back, for a while, to the old matrix that will allow us to understand, by way of contrast, the tribulations of scientific imagery by comparing them to those, neither more nor less painful, of pious imagery. The two ambassadors or the two geographers are resting their elbows on the table on which lie instruments of cartography, cosmography, topography, in short, the graphy of the earth. Their mute faces, their heavy clothes, the flagged floor, the table, the beautiful green curtain that serves them as background – all this is meticulously rendered in a perspective so pure that the numerous commentators of this picture feel it to be somewhat maniacal. This picture offers to our eyes the exactly depicted image of representatives who in fact have the slightly rigid look of those who are, as they say, in représentation, "showing off." Even though Jean de Dinteville, Lord of Polisy, and Georges de Selve, Bishop of Lavour, may be there in flesh and blood and even though the former commissioned the picture, they seem so obviously representative of something that the title of the picture almost never mentions their names ; Holbein has rendered exactly the type of the Ambassador, that is, the loyal and cunning mediator, rather content with himself, from whom one demands an exact accounting of his mission. But these perfect intermediaries are presented in a geometrically constructed space, accompanied by the instruments of geometric construction or geographical surveying of the world. This is why the picture is called "the geographers" as often as "the ambassadors." The way in which the space of the perspective is rendered, the instruments that are positioned between the two men, and lastly the air, as the french say " d'être en représentation " that these two full-length figures assume – all this suggests a meditation on the nature of the new mediators, the new spokesmen. The old Mediator is also present, but at the top of the picture, to the left, in the form of a minuscule crucifix hanging crooked on the wall, crowded by the edge of the frame and half hidden by the green cloth that serves as background to the scene. Instead of the veil of the Temple being torn in two before the man dying on the cross, the stage cloth half covers the horror that one no longer wants to see or can see. The cross no longer occupies the center of the picture, surrounded by figures ravaged by grief. As though in anticipated homage to Max Weber, two figures full of themselves frame a chorale by Luther and Merchants Arithmetic by Petrus Apianus ! They say the Bishop of Livour was something of a reformer. I'm prepared to believe it. What bishop would agree to be painted standing in front of a book on the calculation of interests while his Lord, in the form of a tail of a cross, hangs rejected under a veil at the outer edge of the picture ? The old sacred painting, the old re-presentation, the old mediation, becomes incomprehensible to the new ambassadors – and becomes comprehensible again, perhaps, in the eyes of the lover of science. The men occupy the place of the holy figures but instead of contemplating some celestial apparition, piously kneeling, they stand before us and look us straight in the eyes as though they occupied the place of the old Pantocrator. They offer to our gaze the instruments that at last allow one to offer the world to our gaze. The centers of calculation have in fact become all-powerful. Are we contemplating a symbol of vanity or what should be called an "atonement" or even an "Extreme Atonement" ? The answer depends on the green curtain ; if you part it, the two geographers find themselves, according to Baltrusaitis {BALTRUSAITIS, 1984 #50}, in the very middle of Westminster Cathedral. On the other hand, if you keep the veil of the sanctuary closed, they find themselves in a warm and well protected spot in the Château de Polisy. Depending on whether or not you correct the anamorphosis, whether or not you part the veil, you experience either the extreme fragility of the world of representation or the anemic character of the world of re-presentation. In the latter case, Christ mediator has no more blood to spill ; no one possesses enough strength, now, to set down his Holy Face on painted canvas. Pictures are no longer epiphanies, no longer incarnate the Presence in oil, varnish, egg, and pigments. Nor do they really present the mediators of God ; they represent the world, men, merchants, and the sciences. They have become instruments, recording devices such as I showed earlier (see former chapter), and we have before us the mythical portrait of faithful scientists like Armand and René. Perspective has invented the change of location, without deformation, of an image in space (see Ivins p.xx) and {Kemp, 1984 #1113}]. Starting from a drawn figure, and without additional information, the viewer can reconstruct, with rule and compass, how that figure would appear from all the other angles of vision. This geometrical construction thus accelerates the production of those immutable motives, those constants, that define, as we have seen in the case of Amazonia, the work of the scientists, hard or supple, warm or cold. The Optics of grace Seventy-three years earlier, in 1460, Antonello da Messina had painted Saint Jerome in his study. He too was already using perspective, he too had placed books and instruments around the saint, he too depicted the flagstones of a sanctuary. To represent the sky, he needed no angel, gold, or cherub. No deformed skull recalled the possibility of things sacred. It is the painting as whole, without the least hesitation, that is steeped in the sacred, or rather, as Edgerton puts it so well, {Edgerton, 1976 #282}{Edgerton, 1991 #2221}, it is the sacred that, beginning in 1425, is steeped in perspective. For the first time and for a short time, optics, geometry, theology, grace, and painting are obeying the same laws. In Antonello, who joins the principles and methods of Flemish painting to those of Italian painting, the same space accommodates animals, humanmade constructions, nature seen through the window of the sanctuary, a symbolic lion, and God's saint, who is also perceived by the viewer as though through a window. Fiction, the other world, nature, and sanctuaries built by people for gods, have the same optical coherence, and by means of this they exchange their attributes : the saints and the fictions gain in realism, reality gains in light and perfection. Just as the sanctuary accommodates Saint Jerome, nature, people and animals quite simply, the space of perspective allows one to contemplate with the same eye the sacred and the profane. Through this redoubling of the sanctuary and the legitimate construction, it is the picture itself that becomes a sanctuary and that in fact receives the Real Presence [Sricchia Santro, 1986 ; {Russo, 1987 #832}. [illustration] FIGURE 12.2 Antonello da Messina, Saint Jerome in his Study, 1460 (National Gallery). Between these two pictures, three rooms away from each other in the National Gallery, something essential for the tribulations of the pious image has happened : what was redoubled in Antonello is distinguished in Holbein. The Real Presence has become really distant ; the distant lands have become really present. The system of mediations has been reversed. Because perspective brings us into the presence of what is distant and the sacred painting of icons brings us into the presence of what always exists anew, it is as though, over a few dozen years, the two meanings of the word "presence" had been combined, thus allowing the old faith and the new science to exchange their attributes. PROCESSIONS Message A Message B Message C Context 1 Context 2 Context 3 NETWORKS OF REFERENCE Center Message A1 A2 A3 A4 Message A5 ? ? ? ? ? Periphery Context 1 Context 2 Context 3 FIGURE 12.3. Two different ways of transmitting messages through contexts ; the first does not hesitate to modify the message in order to repeat the same thing – no transport without retranslation ; the second manages to maintain the constant message through the processions of transformations – a matter of constructing immutable motives. The first does not capitalize ; the second capitalizes indefinitely toward the center. In Holbein's picture, the two meanings of the word "presence" already differ so much that we can easily characterize the two different systems of translation. One is no longer going to modify the message completely as a function of the context, in such a way as to feel the same presence in each place ; one is going to try to transport information from one context to the other, through a processions of transformations, in order to be able to act, in one place, from a distance on another place which becomes, thereby, known and dominated. In both systems there is translation, transformation, and the maintenance of a constant, but the meaning of these three words is totally different. In the first system, one must invent in order to remain faithful to what remains always present. In the second, one must be able to align inscriptions in such as way that they remain always superimposable and allow access to what is distant. The first permits no capitalization since from one context to the other no information is acquired. The second creates centers of calculation through the accumulation of information which removes all the other places to the periphery. The first system maintains, through the processions of mediations, a revelation, whereas the second permits discoveries. The first system forms what I shall call processions, whereas the second creates alignments of references (see former chapter). To betray or to translate The painter who is painting Saint Luke painting in the foreground of the picture an image of the Holy Virgin, from the model offered in the background by a "real" Holy Virgin appearing in the clouds surrounded by angels and cherubim, is depicting, according to the viewer's viewpoint, at once a processions and a reference. As there are small differences of interpretation between Saint Luke's rendering of the holy apparition and said apparition itself, the viewer could take the alignment of the two images for an additional proof that the Holy Virgin did indeed have this face. We would have, there, the beginning of a network, faithfulness being judged by the possible superimposition of the three-dimensional Virgin in the flesh (already represented in two dimensions) and the painted Virgin on Luke's easel. In this case, the pointed finger of the angels and cherubim would play the same role as the stiletto of scientific recording devices. However, no viewer – unless he or she were impious – would have the preposterous idea of superimposing the two images in order to obtain an additional certainty as to the reality of the Virgin somewhere up there in the sky (as he or she would be obliged to do for the forest of Boa Vista, out there in Amazonia – see figure 11.2, p.xx). In the logic of a processions, the faithful believer sees this alignment only as a redoubling, a repetition in the sense that I defined earlier. The viewer prays before this picture, like Saint Luke before the apparition of the Virgin. Just as the latter was incarnated in the Evangelist's painting, she is now incarnated before the viewer. [illustration] FIGURE 12.4. Claude Le Bault, Saint Luke Paintinq the Holy Virgin, 1 xxx (Musée de Dijon, inventory CA 365). Is the painting itself exact ? Is Saint Luke himself painting faithfully ? Has Saint Luke really painted the Virgin ? Did Saint Luke exist ? Did the Virgin ever appear in a cloud ? Does the Virgin exist ? All these questions change meaning according to the system of the reading. In the logic of a processions, the Painting is faithful only if the nth viewer is moved and understands this emotion as being the same as that aroused in Saint Luke. If the Virgin appears for him in the picture, he is in fact connected, by a long chain of repetitions and redoublings, to Jesus's mother. "It is therefore this that the Scriptures meant. I believe, come help me in my disbelief..." If the viewer feels more faithful it is because the painting has in fact faithfully re-presented, that is, it has once again offered the viewer a chance, now, to grasp the content-less content of faith. In a logic of references, on the other hand, the painting is faithful if the nth viewer, through the more or less perfect alignment of successive mediations, can have access to the Holy Virgin in the sky, up there, such as she is, in the distance. We know so well how to read scientific instruments that we don't even remember others systems of representation anymore. For us, a picture of the Holy Virgin can no longer be read except as a fragment of aesthetics or art history, as evidence of a belief or of a history of mental habits. It is difficult for us to imagine a system of representation that would not trace a path leading to an object. Faithfulness, for us who are steeped in science to the marrow of our bones, can only mean the change of location, without deformation, of an inscription. We can only interpret deliberate betrayal all along a path as a lie – an unfounded belie – or as an aesthetic – the free divagations of an artist. However, an example taken from the midst of the "quarrel over ritual" will perhaps explain the two opposed sources of betrayal and faithfulness which lived on side by side for so long. Jesuits who have settled in China write to Rome complaining about the fact that, under pressure from the Dominican friars, they are obliged to utter the formula of the consecration in Latin. In effect, when the priest says: ''Hoc est enim corpus meum," it presents to the ear of a Chinese : "Hocu ye-su-tu ye-nim co-lo-pu-su- me-um," which, if the Jesuits did not provide a French translation of what the unfortunate Chinese hear at the moment of the transsubstantiation, could pass for a fairly good approximation, give or take a few consonants, of : "emanation, ancient, lord, office, rule, handsome, respose, each, road, flee, thing, meditate, greening, meadows" ! {ETIEMBLE, 1966 #297}. Which is the greater sacrilege ? the Jesuits then ask. To present to the Chinese ear a hodgepodge that one cannot make head or tail of, or to translate the Latin into Chinese, at the risk of using words that possess, in the current or literary language, a meaning perhaps shocking to Rome. Two definitions of faithfulness and of translation are opposed throughout the quarrel over ritual. Either the Jesuits say the message again making themselves Chinese with the Chinese, in which case the content of the message, compared word by word with that of the Romans, becomes incomprehensible ; or the Jesuits imitate the Dominican friars and repeat word by word the Roman message, in which case the movement of the message into another language, into another civilization, is suspended. The Dominican friars, like the Jesuits, can both be branded anathema or heretics ; the former because they bravely martyr themselves and see this martyrdom as additional proof of their faithfulness to Rome and the immunity which the Jesuits enjoy as a proof of their lack of ardor ; the latter, because those ignorant and filthy monks, by refusing to adapt their message, lose for Christ all of Asia, and if they are indeed faithful are so only to Rome. We know what happened. The Jesuits were forced to abandon their "dangerous accommodations," and the Church of Rome did in fact lose half the earth, preciously keeping a repository which has since shrunk like a leather skin and which even it no longer considers more than a treasure to be transmitted without deformation, that is to say, paradoxically, that it causes it to assume, against its proper use, the role of a scientific reference... I chose the quarrel over ritual because it was at that moment that the machine for repeating jammed, just as I chose Holbein's picture because in it, the sacred painting of a century earlier was already no more than a compunction. However, this machine did not always stall. When it functioned in full operation, a succession of speeches whose form differed seemed to be so many proofs of faithfulness, correct repetitions. If Saint Paul, if Jesus of Nazareth, if thd Church Fathers, if the unfortunate bishops lost among the Visigoths, had settled their quarrels over ritual in the manner in which Rome settled that of the 17th century, we would never have heard of Christianity. It would have remained one of the innumerable millenarian Aramaean sects known only to historians. The amplitude of the repetition, the amplitude of the translation, the amplitude of the betrayal, is precisely what characterizes, therefore, faithfulness to the message on the part of all these inventors, innovators, traitors, and translators. Let us think of the amazing faithful betrayal through which Jesus, announcer of God's kingdom, turned into the one who is announced, the Christ. Since it is now that he has been resurrected, the disciples say to each other, it is now, in their language, that the Gentiles, the Greeks, the Romans, the Visigoths, must understand him for themselves. And let us begin first by translating into Greek, into Latin, the words "Jesus," and the words "resurrection," let us transform the texts through and through, let us interpolate, let us add, let us cut and patch, let us adapt, let us invent. Saint Paul says nothing else throughout the epistles ; if it is necessary to be unfaithful to the Law and to circumcision, well, let us be. "Do not seek him among the dead, but among the living." Either the preaching refers to Jerusalem, to the customs and languages of an Aramaean sect of the circumcised, in which case the uncircumcised do not understand the message, and thus the message, which is all to do with presence, is not faithfully transmitted ; or it is faithfully transmitted, and immedately, speaking in their languages as on the day of the Pentecost, each begins saying something else. In this system of translation, through a paradox which we no longer understand, one must never cease to speak in a different way in order to be able to repeat the same thing. No transport from one point to another without transformation. The peoples who inhabited the Mediterranean basin and Europe for fifteen centuries were too different for the letter of the message to reamin recognizable. Even within a given culture, the letter must constantly change, since the message is understood only if it appears new, present again for the first time. Here too, no transports of enthusiasm without a profound transformation of lives, of rituals, of sentences, of works, of mores, of practices, of pieties. In this system of translation, one can remain faithful either through invention or through transmission and one can betray through tedious repetition as well as through innovation. Faithfulness Unfaithfulness Identity ritual tedious repetition Difference renewal heresy FIGURE 12.5 To Represent or to re-present This form of faithfulness has become paradoxical to us, because we no longer understand either religious transports (through the repetition, always different, of the same contentless message) nor scientific transports (through the maximalization of changes of location without deformation). In terms that have become common since the 17th century, the history of the first becomes a tissue of inventions ; as for the second, they constituted access to things themselves revealed at last after centuries of obscurantism, things which one can no longer deny except through myths respectable or absurd to different degrees. Religion becomes a belief when it accepts science's mode of movement while at the same time wishing to preserve its message. It then imagines it is speaking of another universe, distant like that of reference, but different. It begins to believe that it believes in another world, whereas until then it was only seeking to speak in another way. As for science, it becomes an object of belief also, once it forgets the work of reference and the fragile network it needs to create in order to accede to the distant, starting from a center of calculation. They begin to believe that they know and that they reside in an immanent world, as though nature were not transcendant, distant, mediated ! It remains true that, considered from the point of view of scientific networks, processions lie. In them people constantly embroider, add episodes to the Gospels, multiply pious anecdotes, add miracles, develop cults, reconstruct churches, enrich dogmas, establish correspondances, multiply the canonical rules, found or reform institutions and orders ; apparitions spread everywhere, cures are more and more numerous, the pulpits are always full of new orators with striking parables, walls are covered with ever more boldly inventive frescoes... But this tissue of lies is a tissue without a seam. It is because people do not stop inventing that this whole affair continues. Each time someone understands for herself that the message of the presence is present here and now, she immediately speaks of apparitions of the Virgin, sets about building a chapel, deflects a flood of pilgrims and commission a painter to make a picture so perfect that it will commemorate this apparition. And because others come who in their turn understand, face to face with the picture, what the first one understood, now they are cured and immediately speak of a miraculous image. Are they all nuts ? Are they all embroidering ? We no longer have the words to describe their invention, their pious lies : this understanding that obliges them to add forms to other forms, transmitting the message after having duly transformed it, because they have duly transformed it. We can no longer understand this continuous invention, this permanent recreation, anymore than we can understand this task of classification, of enquiries, of tribunals, of ecclesiastical decisions, of cold formalism, of eradicaton, by which orthodoxy is tentatively defined, that is, the straight path between tedious repetition and heresy, the two equally errant forms of betrayal. Indeed, to the continuous mediations of all those who understand the message as they transform it, we must add that of the authority who distinguishes, in the midst of the transformations, what extends the message from what betrays it. How can one distinguish the false prophets, the dangerous innovations, the feigned pieties, the stigmata painted on with mercurochrome, the apparitions in fake photographs ? How can one regulate this system of translation, so particular as it is, requiring at once and in the same breath unfaithfulness and faithfulness ? How can one pick and choose during these fifteen centuries in which millions of people have been madly innovating, each for him – or herself, and covering the earth with churches, saints, miracles, hunts, orders, and convents ? How can one maintain what computer manufacturers today call the "logicial compatibility" between machines of interpretation invented for Aramaeans in the year O and those of the Cartesians in the year 1650 ? We are astonished at this formalism, these ecclesiastical tribunals, these councils which seem to be composed of notaries, these niggling regulations, these beatification trials more meticulous than an experiment by the European Center for Nuclear Research. We would like to be able to translate the message purely and simply, to be able to say purely and simply whether such and such a version is faithful or unfaithful. We would like to expel all the mediators and have someone tell us once and for all what is the content of the Christian religion, just as we would like to eliminate all scientific instruments so that someone could show us once and for all truth emerging naked from its well. An impossible thing for religion as well as for science, because the analysis of this mediation (perhaps a miracle) by which the mediation of the mediators is understood (for example the Virgin), is itself the object of an even more abstruse mediation (an unending trial of acknowledgment.) Let's be done with it, say the iconoclasts ; let us add even more mediations, cry the iconophiles. We who live within other systems of translation no longer manage to understand this religious innovation except in the two forms it has taken since the 16th century : what we have are either pure (and pious) inventions, or useless additions. The first interpretation is rationalist, the second protestant. The first, unbelieving, claims that a great deal of embroidering has been done in the course of the ages of faith ; the second, believing, claims that the original message has been overly corrupted. Both imagine that what is in question is a message, a revelation similar in its form to that to which science has now habituated us and that this message could have, should have, been maintained unaltered during fifteen centuries. Both claim that, in any case, the Church is an intermediary one can dispense with in deciding these questions and sorting out the wheat from the tares. Later, both being mixed up with scientism in the great Biblical exegesis, they will attempt to rediscover the "Ur-text" that would allow one to hear "Ieshua" of Nazareth speak in person as though a reporter had been able to interview him with a tape recorder. A triumph for journalism and scientism. But the most striking paradox of this new way of considering religious innovation is that the previously catholic Church, intimidated, has in effect accepted it as such. At the Counter-Reformation it said to itself that it had exaggerated a little, that it must have embroidered a little and that it was proper to return, in fact, to an earlier purity. But it no longer understood this return as it had up to then accepted all the movements of reform, purification, renewal, that had shaken it every fifty years. Instead of understanding this one as an invitation to start the machine up again, to distinguish once again the letter from the spirit, content from container, particular forms and the motion of presentation, the Church understood the Counter-Reformation as a return to a certain message, a certain content, a certain form. By doing this, it interrupted for good the very soul of its movement of repetition : to say differently, to say again, not to hesitate to betray. Instead of going ahead and becoming even less faithful, it accepted the position of its adversaries and followed the direction that they pointed out to it, backwards, towards the past, transforming a logic of repetition, turning it into belief in something supra-worldly. An invention even more obscene than the white skull painted by Holbein. It is probably to science that we owe the obscurantism of religion, but it is the Church alone that made it a point of honor to assume the role of Night that science offered it in its great drama of Lights. Religion agreed to be a belief and to speak about a referent too, in the manner of scientific networks, even though its referent remains unassignable. Whence the solution to the quarrel over ritual, unthinkable in the time in which the unintimidated Church went off and mixed itself up with the Irish or the Celts and became "Roman with the Romans, Greek with the Greeks, Gentile with the Gentiles." It has taken its particularism for a proof of its rediscovered faithfulness. Instead of continuing to become catholic by "making itself everything to all," it agreed to be only Roman. Processions and networks In order to measure the abyss that separates the logic of processions from the logic of networks, let us return to Holbein and consider the way in which Henry VIII, after having taken him into his service in 1633, dispatched him as an ambassador to the continent so that he could bring back an exact portrait of one of the king's putative fiancées. The representation had to be so perfect that Bluebeard would be able to make his decision based on the imaqe itself. Of course we once again have, here, the problem of presentation, representation, relation to the original, and the effect of an image, of an intermediary, on a living spectator. But each of these elements of the translation is now transformed. If Holbein painted an icon, if he depicted the type of the beautiful fiancée, if he touched that woman-killer, even deeply, he still would not have fulfilled his new function of ambassador. He would not even have brought forward the painted fiancée in such a way that a relation of superimposition would become possible between the varnished form and the beautiful fleshly face the way one superimposes a geographical map on a geological one (see Figure 11-xx). He would not have connected the king's palace to that of the fiancée by a reversible road that would permit anyone at all to go back and forth by comparing the original to the picture. He would not have produced a representative of canvas and varnish substitutable, for a time, for the original that remained on the periphery of the kingdom. He would not have given Henry VIII a supplement of power over the beautiful sex by allowing him to make a thoughtful decision, without leaving his palace, concerning the face proposed for the conjugal sacrifice. By painting a type instead of reflecting a face, Holbein would have interrupted the placement of a network of references. The king who broke the venerable chains binding his kingdom to Rome did not like anyone to suspend the construction of his networks and chose with care the ambassadors entrusted with forming them. Holbein was an excellent choice, since he had learned that meticulous way of rendering faces and situations by plunging them into a geometrically calculated space. The portrait of the fiancée was exact. It moved across Europe without any additional deformation. At Windsor Palace, the king could contemplate his victim as if she lived in the castle. When the girl arrived – if she arrived, for modes of transportation were at that time not as sure as the rendering of pictures, the king would not have to be surprised. Thanks to his ambassador painter, he knew in advance what she would look like. He knew her. A man surrounded by such images and served by such intermediaries is a great scholar. Why should we be surprised that he had some contempt for the chains of the old religion ? The two ambassadors painted by Holbein are not represented with instruments of the passion carried by angels, but with instruments of navigation, commerce, cosmology, and geography flanked by men. Faithfulness has changed form and system ; the old faith is no more than something that twists and deforms skulls. The new faithfulness needs abacuses, trigonometric tables, account books, astrolabes, and maps. The surface of the picture itself has been transmuted into a map projected through the intermediary of a grid of coordinates, already prepared for its numerisation. Processions, too, transport messages, images, rituals, laws, books, works, tales, but each of these movements is made at the cost of a different transformation that has the form of a tradition. What is maintained by this chain of tradition is the certainty that, whatever may be the number of intermediaries, they all faithfully repeat something similar even if they transform it, because they transform it. The intensity of the revelation is proportional to the layering, the multiplication, the piling, the redoubling of mediators. An ample community is formed among all those faithful transformers, each one of whom realizes, for himself, what the others are saying and what he had not understood until then. The communion of saints emerges from this fraternity : they have had the same experience, they too have understood this. What is "this" ? What their predecessors had understood and what is still present today in the same forms, in other forms. The logic of the processions does not progress, except in intensity ; it is afraid of innovation even though it continually keeps on inventing ; it endeavors not to repeat tediousness, even though it continually keeps on repeating the same rituals. The tradition is enriched without wanting to win out. It layers intermediaries, it does not capitalize them. It likes above all to establish correspondances, saturate with transversal liaisons the different messages amassed in the course of time. It likes to purify the message continually, but each purification becomes a new treasure that is added to the sacred repository and enriches it, complicates it, further. It likes to make the message more precise, but this sets in motion, each time, councils, sessions of tribunals, congregations, that accumulate still more points of doctrine, theology, and canonical law, and complicate even further the movement of the message. Immense, venerable, complex, infallible, betraying and translating, saturated with mediations, such is this community that maintains the tradition intact by enriching it, by inventing it out of whole cloth, this Roman Church from which Henry VIII broke away, these long chains of re-presentation among which Holbein chose not to place himself and which he no longer depicts except obliquely, like a compunction, in his logic of networks. The Fall of the angels That which layers and forms processions, I will call angel in contrast to that which aligns and maintains networks, which I call instruments. The ambassadors-geographers are not angels. In saying that, I am not challenging their morality but their aptitude in creating successions of repetition. Inversely, the angels, contrary to common belief and etymology, are bad messengers and execrable geographers. Their intellectual capacities and their spirit of rigor are not in question, either, but simply their inability to show as good references as those of the instruments (see chapter xx). The angels do not transport an undeformable message through space-time, they call out to people and keep saying : "Watch out! Take care! He's not here! That isn't the question ! You're the one this is about ! Someone is going to talk to you ! Don't hang up !..." Angels are not messengers, but meta-messengers – and that is precisely why they are represented as beings superior to mail deliverers, telephone operators, and all the modems and faxes of this world here below. In painting as in tales, they have a phatic function, they say : "Hello !" Who is speaking, what are they saying, what is the object of the decision, what is the content of the message ? – this the Angel never says, never transports in the form of a pneumatique, an express letter, a packet of bytes. It is up to the interlocutor to decipher it. It is only if the viewer has understood for him- or herself what it is about that one can say the message was faithfully "transmitted." In other words, the exact content of the message is in the hands of the interlocutor, the receiver, and not in those of the messenger. The messenger carries a container, an interpellation, a metalanguage, a way of establishing every possible mediation. If one unfolds the phylactery unrolled by the angels one will find another messenqer, for instance "Rejoice, for a Savior is born unto you" ; and if one unfolds the name of Savior, one will find a messenger once again : "It is He the Son of God." In other words, there is never any message ; there are only messengers ; and this is the angelical and evangelical message. The angel painted on the holy picture – or the picture that one can consider in its entirety as an angel – addresses the receiver. If the latter occupies the place planned for him by the sender and by the messenger, he understands what they both want to say. To understand is to send another messenger, different in his content from the first, but one who allows a third receiver to realize for himself what the second and the first had also understood. From the third to the first one cannot say one has gained much since each picture, each tale, each figure differs from the preceding. Of course, from the point of view of an outside observer, one has gained in richness since new works, new dogmas, new acts of faith have been produced, but there exists no point, along this chain, where one could capitalize all the intermediaries and accumulate what the others have said, done, or been. In fact there is no outside observer, there is not yet any outside observer, capable of capitalizing. The first did not send any message-content to the third. The third did not obtain any information about the first. On the other hand, the third has the impression of understanding exactly what happened to the first, what burst in on the second, what descended suddenly in a great rustling of feathers and wings. The same thing is happening to him or her now. What is peculiar about religious truth is that it can never appear as a new idea, since it does not inform, and yet is mendacious if one does not have the impression one is hearing it for the first time. To understand the good news that the messenger is bearing is to perceive at last that this news is a renewal of all the messengers borne since the dawn of times. All the envoys are returning ; the delegates are swooping down on the interlocutor like a flight of thrushes ; everything is a great beating of wings. If other enunciations, such as those of fiction, for instance, consist in sending messages and messengers elsewhere, into another space-time, in order to take leave of the ego, hic et nunc, one can say that the angels, on the contrary, bring the interlocutor back to the ego, hic et nunc. When they appear, people are presented to one another. All disengagements are annulled ; all delegates merge. The multiplicity of witnesses now say only one thing, form one single body. Those venerable expressions are not so imprecise, that say that the Heavens gape, that one sees processions of angels, that one hears a divine music, that the light becomes blinding. To paint these illuminations is truly the faithful way of repeating the messenger : time is vanquished ; space is vanquished. "Death, where is thy victory ?" Let us take, as an example of these two logics of representation, the text of Saint Mark : 5. And entering into sepulchre, they saw a young man sitting on the right side, clothed in a long white garment ; and they were affrighted. 6. And he saith unto them, Be not affrighted : Ye seek Jesus of Nazareth, which was crucified : he is risen ; he is not here : bohold the place where they laid him. 7. But go your way, tell his disciples and Peter that he goeth before you into Galilee : there shall ye see him, as he said unto you. 8. And they went out quickly, and fled from the sepulchre ; for they trembled and were amazed : neither said they any thing to any man : for they were afraid. (Mark 16 : 5-8) But if we ask Saint Mark to tell us what hapened on Easter morning in the year 30, n Jerusalem, how will the tale be changed ? It is no longer Easter morning. It is no longer the year 30, in Jerusalem, how will the tale be changed ? It is no longer Easter morning. It is no longer the year 30. Something quite different happened. The same angels who were faithful transmitters of messengers begin to stammer when they are asked to transmit messages. The same evangelist who faithfully related the God News about Jesus Christ Son of God becomes unfaithful. Worse, he begins to tell storries and the tale of the empty sepulchre becomes a tissue of lies {Bultmann, 1971 #134} : The story about the women on Easter morning is a completely secondary formation. (...) Their intention of embalming the cadaver does not agree with 15, 46. (...) Verse 7 is therefore (...) a parenthetical remark inserted by Mark in the fragment of tradition in order to prepare for the appearance of Jesus in Galilee. (...) The story of the empty sepulchre is ''an apologetic legend of late formation..." (p. 352). Motives of dogma and apology thus essentially shaped the stories about Easter. (...) The most important question, but the most difficult one, is whether the dating of the resurrection on Sunday is based on the anterior designation of Sunday as the day of worship. If that were the case, the dating of the crucifixion on Friday would also be explained, Friday becoming the day of the crucifixion for scriptural reasons ("the third day according to the Gospels") (p. 356). Schenke (Auferstehungsverkündigung und leeres Grab, 1968) considers the tale to be an etiological worship legend. (...) N.Q Hamilton (JBL, 84, 1965, 415-421) believes the tale to be Mark's creation : according to him, Mark intentionally put the story of the empty sepulchre in the place of the other paschal apparitions in order to justify the idea of a last earthly activity of Jesus in Galilee (p. 630)[check english transl.$$]. What is going on ? We were on the point of seeing the Heavens open wide, of grasping the enigmatic words of the angel, we were about to understand that most mysterious phrase : "He is risen," we were at last going to relive faithfully that irruption of grace, and we find ourselves right back in the middle of the German exegesis, in the midst of a scholarly controversy, comparing scraps of texts and asking ourselves which is the least invented, glued back together, cut and patched, adulterated, forged. The fact is that the system of translation has changed. The rules of faithfulness and unfaithfulness have been reversed. The definitions of a message, of a messenger, and of a movement of the message have been overturned. The angels are now asked to inform us about what happened, at another point in space-time, and to report pieces of information, as little altered as possible, in order to allow a point that has become a center to extend its ascendancy by accumulating the greatest number of faithful intermediaries who become so many substitutes for what happened back there, in the past. The meaning of the word representation has mutated. The angels are no longer asked to present the good news once again to an interlocutor who will once again give content to the message ; they are asked to move through space-time a content which would be its exact representative whatever might be, in other respects, the moral or mental state of the receiver and whatever might be the successive materials assuring its transport. Angels are no longer asked to transport with enthusiasm a messenger and one of the faithful, but to transport faithfully a message. They no longer convoke the faithful ; they are convoked so that they may all align themselves and form, through the superimposition of their messages, a single continuous conduit that would give one access to Jerusalem "as though one were there." Alas, convoked and aligned in this way, not a single one of the old mediators superimposes his message on the preceding one. The good angels become bad angels. How wrenching it is to see that the wonderful pictures are dreadful informants ; that the successive apparitions of the truth are embroideries ; that the tales that had transported us with enthusiasm during fifteen centuries give no detailed information about anything and that the more precise, psychological, historical, and detailed they are, the more belated, apocryphal, or reshaped they are ! Used as instruments of knowledge, the angels immediately lose their colors and their feathers. They fall. Called upon to say once and for all what the message is that they bear, they are obliged to confess, embarrassed and sheepish, that they have no message, that they have lost it along the way, or that in fifteen centuries they have, believing they were doing a good thing, substituted many other messages for the original message. Once their physlacteries have been deciphered, they hang miserably and are not worth even the price of a fresh recording tape. This fall of the angels seems all the more dramatic because the two opposing systems of translation are both just as complete, they both excite the best minds of the time, and each defines truth, exactitude, faithfulness, and mendacity, but in different ways. In the translation of the angels, the signified can change form and this won't matter, provided the signifying remains intact. Past participles as different as "Yahveh is coming," "the Kingdom of God is near," "Jesus was the Messiah, "Son of God," "Mary mediator," can all express equally faithfully the present participle, the signifying, on condition, however, that the locutor presently participates in the movement. They all become equally mendacious as soon as the unfaithful reverses the movement and takes the superimposition of signifieds for faithfulness, independently of its participation in the signifying. Yet it is precisely this translation that assures, in the other system, faithfulness ! Only if it is possible to maintain intact a signified, a content, whatever may be otherwise its successive signifiers, will one be able to represent exactly in one point of space-time all the other points. Logic of PROCESSIONS Logic of NETWORK same container through same content through different contents different containers faithfulness = play of repetition faithfulness = superimposition which keeps the same message of the inscribed contents always new unfaithfulness = either dangerous unfaithfulness = loss of innovation or tedious repetition alignment through containers the message is a messenger the message is a piece of information the meaning depends on the the meaning does not depend on receiver moral state of the receiver gain = different repetition of gain = new information the same messenger multiplicity of mediators capitalization of mediations if transfer successful : all if transfer successful: annulment mediators are present of mediators return to the hic et nunc extension in space-time presentation access to the distant re-presentation representation faithful believer is struck scientist is dominant knowledge without possessions cumulative knowledge compatibility with the past progress through elimination FIGURE 12.6 If the viewer succeeds in aligning Le Bault's picture, the one of Saint Luke and the apparition of the Holy Virgin, then he or she will see, despite the variety of signifiers, the face of the Holy Virgin appear as a content. But in the other logic, he or she will see nothing at all for this impious reading of the repetition of the contents would lose the container forever. The Virgin no longer appears to the one who tries to discover her in this way. Inversely, those who seek apparitions by way of the angels will make precious few discoveries. The world of revelation and that of science have become, in relation to each other, what Holbein's deformed skull is to the proud ambassadors. We no longer understood religion because we had ceased to understand science, and because the men and women of the church themselves, scientists through and through, had accepted the humiliation of taking for a belief what circulated until then as a processions. The angels are not beyond the world, for the excellent reason that the world itself resides beyond. Science is no closer, more immediate, more continuous, more accessible, more worldly, more visible than "the other world." There exists a transcendance of science as there exists a transcendance of religion ; there is a reference of religion as a work of scientific reference ; there is a scientific representation as there is a religious representation. Transcendances abound. Only beliefs are lacking, whether they be religious or scientific, today the most numerous.