Pluralism becomes interesting when it is not just an acknowledgement of a plurality of closed and finished totalities but when it sees each totality as open and porous, whose unification is an ongoing process, and constituted as well of open and porous subpluralities. One of the consequences of this way of thinking is that totalities are not consituted by one sole synthesis, but by several different and conflicting operations of synthesis that may draw the boundaries in different ways. Another is that the subpluralities are in interaction inside a totality and between totalities. So I would distinguish a “structuralist” pluralism emphasising macroscopic wholes and closure, and a “poststructuralist” pluralism that completes this picture with a swarm of underlying interferences and interactions and hybridisations.

This means that pluralists in this sense are ready to analyse innovations in terms of transformation, transfer, translation, transport, transversality, etc and to break down all identities into multiplicitous components. The problem is that they only rarely incorporate these insights into their style of work. Deleuze and Guattari, with their idea of the rhizome and with their slogan “pluralism is not just something you talk about it’s something you do” (my words), made important gestures in this direction. But more can and should be done.

When these pluralists explain that closed totalities are hallucinatory or fantasmatic pseudo-entities (ie the opposite of Luhmann’s notion of “operational closure”, which characterises what I am calling structuralist pluralism)) with quantum tunnels and relativistic wormholes underlying and undermining their macro-structure, then they should not act like they were the only pluralists in the world. No, Latour’s system is not born from some philosophical tabula rasa and he is wrong not to engage with past and present pluralists, and when he talks about Souriau and modes of existence he is doing misdirection in my eyes. He is wrong to talk about pluralism without discussing people like Laruelle and Stiegler and Deleuze and Feyerabend and Badiou, who sometimes confirm sometimes contradict his analyses, and sometimes just plain go further along that path than he does. etc etc.

Latour wishes to avoid « fundamentalism » in questions of religion and also of science and politics. He defines this fundamentalism as « the refusal of controversies » (ie 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 lies in treating religion as a matter of belief, and as submitted to the same truth-régime 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 transformative message. You get this in the movement of demythologisation, you get it in ALL THINGS SHINING, you get it in 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 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. This is too convenient by far!

In my own case, I have practiced tai chi and yoga for many years, and I did a jungian analysis, where religious language came up in my dreams or in analysing them and it seemed to apply to my life, as does yoga and tai chi talk. Yet I consider myself a total atheist, and not at all a “seeker” in Charles Taylor’s sense. And I do not think I’m alone in this. This is why I think that there is more to religion than referential claims about the physical universe, and that fundamentalism is a reductionist approach to religion. I think this heuristic (or « gnostic ») use of religious language and images is more common than one might think. It corresponds to what Stiegler (and Simondon, and Jung) calls individuation.

In the discussion of the cognitive status of religion I find I have a difficult position to maintain. I am, as I said, an atheist; I am in matters of knowledge an anti-positivist and a pluralist; I am fascinated by religious language and feel that sometimes it is the best way to express what I think or feel. This underlies , for example, my favorable reaction to Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Kelly’s Heideggerian treatment of both polytheism and monotheism as useful contemporary ways of understanding the world and ourselves ( in ALL THINGS SHINING, which revitalises the polytheistic understanding, and in their promised sequel, which will talk more about the monotheistic understanding, via discussions of Pascal, Kierkegaard, and Dostoyevsky). Their account is “existential” and so situates religion as having a cognitive function but as incommensurable with the type of referential cognitive function which characterises natural science, as incarnating a type of understanding of the world radically incommensurate with, and so unable to contradict or be contradicted by or even enter into conflict with the natural sciences. It is at this price of the referential neutralisation of religion that they can employ it to fulfil their program: lure back the shining things, lure back the gods, “to find meaning in a secular age”.

Both Bruno 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 “régime 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 of use in secular traditions such as the sciences or even to correct (or at least relativise positively) these traditions.

I think that 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 régimes 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 it includes a performative aspect, but not, he argues 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.

Feyerabend is classically deconstructive here, accepting initially a binary demarcation (science/religion) to go on to re-valorise the weaker term (in rationalist discussions this is often religion), to then efface the demarcation and leave a more complex and more ambiguous situation (complexity and ambiguity being terms that Feyerabend uses to describe his own “deconstructive” strategy – Feyerabend explicitly compares his arguments to deconstruction, though he declares that he prefers “Nestroy, who was a great, popular and funny deconstructeur, while Derrida, for all his good intentions, can’t even tell a good story”). Latour is funnier, but I find that there is something protectionist about his humour.