As is well known from art historians and theologians, many sacred icons that have been celebrated and worshipped are called acheiropoiete; that is, not made by any human hand. Faces of Christ, portraits of the Virgin, Veronica’s Veil; there are many instances of these icons that have fallen from heaven without any intermediary. To show that a humble human painter has made them would be to weaken their force, to sully their origin, to desecrate them.
The same is true of science. There, too, objectivity is supposed to be acheiropoiete, not made by human hand. If you show the hand at work in the human fabric of science, you are accused of sullying the sanctity of objectivity, of ruining its transcendence, of forbidding any claim to truth.
But what if hands were actually indispensable to reaching truth, to producing objectivity, to fabricating divinities? What would happen if, when saying that some image is human-made, you were increasing instead of decreasing its claim to truth? That would be the closure of the critical mood, the end of anti-fetishism. We could say, contrary to the critical urge, that the more human-work is shown, the better is their grasp of reality, of sanctity, of worship.