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Technoculture and the Religious Imagination A Digitally Remastered Remix of an Improvised Word-Jam delivered live at Metaforum III, October 1996 By Erik Davis [The following is an expanded version of the piece that ran in ZKP4. So as to avoid stuffing your mail-box, I've broken it up into parts. Again, this is an edited version of the (kindly-provided) transcript of an off-the-cuff talk, so I'd ask the razor-sharp minds out there to remember the tentative and probing qualities of my presentation before they get down to slashing. As Alexei says, critiques ultimately boil down to axioms, and sometimes it's more interesting simply to watch what a different set of axioms than your own can carve out of the plenitude of thought. What especially disappoints me is when thinkers, rather than tentatively if critically relating to the inevitably faulty intellectual suppositions of their opponents, violently turn away with arrogance and spite. Maybe I'm just a mushy-hearted Californian, but it genuinely disturbed me when Richard Barbrook, with his characteristic meanness of spirit, snidely denigrated Alberto Gaitan's "piece of biobabble" with his question about whether "these people ever read any history?" Rather than directly respond to Gaitan's post (which was an acceptably intelligent and careful post from a person influenced by the legitimate if problematic arguments of systems theory), Barbrook turned to rest of the list to brand the man as one of the stupid (and most likely American) "them." In response to Barbrook's haughty question, I could only think: and do you, my friend, ever read any good non-specialist science? At their root, the questions in the "Declaration..." thread bubble down to some mighty tough and intriguing problems about the construction of scientific knowledge, the nature (and culture) of complex systems, the relationship of mind and nature, and the rigorous but always questionable analogies that drive scientific theory. But it's so much easier to invoke your own canon, isn't it? Enough already. Now you can read some stuff about religion.] Technoculture and the Religious Imagination A. READING RELIGION There's one very clear distinction I'd like to make up top, and ask that you keep in mind. Usually when we talk about anything religious, we focus on well-organized belief systems and the institutions that embody and enforce these beliefs. But it's very important to make a distinction between religion as a dogmatic belief system and the more experiential, imaginal, creative, and practical dimensions of religious life, dimensions which have little to do with ideological convictions and everything to do with what I'll call, using a sadly eviscerated term, "spirituality." Within the phenomena of religion, the relationship between these two modes is very complex and tangled, and not nearly so straightforward as is often assumed. One of the main concerns in my work is the question of the religious or spiritual impulse in cyberculture, a topic I come to more through the study of subcultures than through questions of theology or metaphysics. In writing about and researching a number of different imaginative subcultures, including Neo-Paganism, Santeristas, Rastafari, various media fandoms, Deadheads and punks and psychedelic ravers, I came to recognize that even in modern and secular subcultures, many elements -- the use of imagery, the notion of the tribe, of ritualized sociality -- resonated with what I would call popular religion. This carries over to technocultural tribes, who have their own "technologies of the self". Religious discourse -- and here I mean something quite broad -- is an inevitable and vital part of our discussions about technoculture, not only because contemporary technology has become a secular religion, with its own curious mysticisms, but simply because we are concerned with the social and imaginative implications of technology. Because of this, it is on our shoulders to become a bit more sophisticated about how we talk about religion. Numerous critics of the wackier elements of cyberculture have recognized strong elements of mysticism, apocalypticism, millenarianism, and what Richard Barbrook artfully calls "mystical positivism". And yet I find that the ensuing dialogue about religion and the sacred is often very simplistic. One example is the Critical Art Ensemble and their piece in ZKP3, "Nihilism in the Flesh." At one point this theoretically sophisticated crew discuss the way that religion relates to nihilism in a very different way than secular moderns, in that the wholesale embrace of the flesh, the ego, and the physical world is considered to be something of a problem. "In terms of the Eastern theology the situation of subject/object is mediated by the Hell of desire which can be only be pacified when the subject is erased, and thereby returned to the unitary void." There's more, but I'm interested in just that sentence. Besides the silliness of referring to a clearly Buddhist paradigm as being "theology" -- after all, Buddhism has no God -- CAE's notion of Buddhism derives directly from the earliest and crudest nineteenth-century Western interpretations of the dharma, which are dominated by budding Western notions of nihilism and the "void" as filtered through Nietzsche and Schopenhauer. Philosophically, this "void" is simply the notion that nothing at all has any abiding substance -- the ultimate de-reification of existence and the thought. Though the quest for simple extinction into Nirvana is somewhat relevant to Theravada Buddhism, it remains a crude depiction of Eastern wisdom traditions, and is devoid of any mention of Mahayana or Vajrayana, both of which mightily complicate the question of desire, nihilism, and immanence. In the Mahayana, for example, the recogniztion that there is no abiding substance to the illuosry self is accompanied, not by an escape to Nirvana, but by the bodhisattva's radical commitment to the world of suffering, where such illusions have real force. In the Vajrayana, all passions, including lust, are simply considered energies which can be tapped and alchemically transformed towards spiritual goals -- which can include sexual union. Dzogchen and Tantra are all about immanence, and Zen masters are known for their concupiscence and fondness for booze. Moreover, all these traditions insist that enlightenment occurs in the body, and in the human community of the sangha. And so religious ideas emerge into a very important discussion, and yet their power dissipates by their being caricatured as the easy "enemy:" world-denying transcendence and mushy, always-authoritarian unity. Another example, which is more interesting, is Richard Barbrook's ZKP piece on the sacred cyborg, which discusses a number of crude metaphysical and apocalyptic notions that are reborn within the frenzied edges of Extropian-styled technoculture -- Artificial Intelligence, digital immortality, and the radical separation of body and mind. I am compelled by the connections he draws, by his sharp analysis of "mystical positivism," and with the fact that these things are deeply problematic. And yet, for Barbrook, the error is simple: these images are utterly false irrational fantasies that deny the cold hard facts of historical -- i.e., economic -- materialism and the necessity of a social democratic grand narrative that has no recourse to such pesky atavisms. But spirituality, the sacred imaginary, and cosmology (which is what his mystical positivism boils down to) are not atavisms, though they contain seeds of all sorts of violent, stupid and authoritarian possibilities -- just as surely as historical materialism does. By saying this, I'm not attempting to defend the power structure of established religions. I just want to point out that one can mount critiques of the sacred cyborg from within religious language just as easily as you can from without -- and many do so. For me, this material is very much along the lines that Toshiya Ueno described in another context: a medicine and poison situation, a radical double bind. The mysticism that Barbrook describes is strange and powerful, and makes up a rather significant dimension of cyberculture. So, you might ask, where does it come from? As an intellectual I can critique these "illusions" all I want, but there is something rather significant going on here on a sociological, psychological, and imaginal plane that takes us beyond the critique of concepts into the abiding concerns of humanity as they have unfolded over millennia. Barbrook's piece relies on an interesting timeline, a deeply linear notion of cultural history which pegs these mystical elements as primitive, atavistic, and regressive. The idea here is that human civilizations arise from childish elements and then mature into modern self-consciousness, at which point we realize that the premodern worldview is no longer evident or relevant, that it erodes our own political autonomy, and obscures the real forces in the world. There's much to be said for this scenario, though to my mind it results in a bit of the throwing-out-the-baby-with-the-bathwater effect that Barbrook has criticized vis-a-vis the "postmodern" critique of leftism. One of the things I like about the Nettime discussions, in fact, is how unwilling they are to be satisfied with either the postmodern or the modern, as well as their willingness to mix these periods in very strong, exciting and open-ended ways. But I would add that one cannot really engage the sociological and imaginal hybrids of cyberculture without also including the premodern -- not as an atavism, but as a positive, productive, and dangerous regime -- just like all the others. Of course, this premodern that is not a pure return -- it is an articulated premodern, a constructed archaism or medievalism. And yet it forms a vital dimension of the strange, mutant environment that we find ourselves in, and we lose touch with both the juice and the terror of the moment by cluthing a strictly evolutionary -- or in the case of postmodernism, a rather vapid if exuberantly eclectic-- timeline. Perhaps the most interesting theory about the functional presence of the premodern I've come across is the interpretative matrix proposed by the great French historian of science Bruno Latour. In his book _We Have Never Been Modern_, Latour talks about the emergence of the Enlightenment, the how the new rhetorical and procedural constructions of modern science divided the world between nature -- a productive and determined reality articulate by science -- and the free range of culture and political self-determination. This "Great Divide" works in many different ways, and continues to inform many different questions. A crucial contemporary example, which is not Latour's, arises in gender studies. We recognize that gender is very much of a construct, and yet critics of radical social constructionists insist rather obviously that we remain saddled with physiologically and genetically differentiated bodies, limits that are succinctly and productively articulated in many ways by science. Unless you are willing to argue that your own death is merely a social construction, then you find yourself hopelessly entangled with a carnal organism with its own specific histories and limits. At the same time, the moment we speak of the body and make decisions about how we narrate its apparent limits, we are already in the realm of discourse and construction, including all of the dreadful power-games that are implied with the language of natural law. On the other hand, critics who deny the enormously productive and articulate activities of science in order to serve the idols of semiotics and hardcore relativism wind up with a distinctly unpersuasive combination of linguistic idealism and pessimistic irrationalism. And so we shuttle back and forth across the Great Divide, shifting the arrows of our causal explanations from society to nature to society again. In his book, Latour contrasts this modern intellectual condition with what he calls "the anthropological matrix" of the premodern. Within the anthropological matrix, the Great Divide does not really exist. There is not nature and culture, but what he calls nature-cultures. Things are not crisply divided between object and subject, but are hybrids: subject-objects, animist actors in a web of necessary relations. Say that I am a traditional Inuit and I kill a polar bear. What is the polar bear to me? At one level the polar bear is a perfectly useful material object that I manipulate in perfectly rational ways in order to fulfill perfectly human needs and desires -- nothing mystical about it. At the same time, and inextricably, the polar bear is a figure in an imaginal cosmological network, a slowly-shifting set of relationships drawn between material practices and all sorts of symbolic, religious, and mystical elements which co-create the ontology of my world. Though of course subject to historical change, this network is inherently conservative, because every action of production, every technical development, and certainly every emergence of novelty, is immediately registered and constrained by the entire matrix as a new subject-object, a new technical actor. It is this webwork that the Great Divide rips apart, allowing the astounding productivity -- in the broadest sense of the term -- of the modern world. One need only compare the hermetic and alchemical science of the Renaissance to the sciences of Boyle, Descartes, and the Royal Society to see this. What Latour wants to suggest, in a subtler way than I am proposing, is that today the Great Divide is breaking down. And it's breaking down because of the incredible complexity of the networks of inter-relationships that we find ourselves submerged in now, an ever-expanding network of mutating hybrids that cannot be captured by modernist disciplinary matrices or their underlying causal axioms. We must genuinely engage the new hybrids, which are most emphatically not simply semiotic cross-breeds of floating cultural signifiers that smash into one other and produce new cultural mutations. That kind of "postmodern" hybridity is fine and very fascinating, and makes for an exhilarating if overly-engineered cultural stew. But there is a far deeper kind of hybridity as well, which has to do with the way that cultural practices, images, technologies, knowledges, and myth fuse into novel and open-ended material and informational conditions: the subject-objects constructed by an increasingly market-driven science, the production of new goods and services, the explosion of new subjectivities, the collapse of master narratives, new information landscapes, new gadgets, etc. We are surrounded by new networks of subject-objects, and the animism that drives "mystical positivism" is not simply an ideology but a fundamental symptom of the fact that the conceptual reality constructed by the Enlightenment can no longer keep its act together. In many ways, this is terrifying, or at least disarming. But if you acknowledge the irreducible ontological, sociological, and imaginary force of this premodern return -- which is of course a return with a difference, and no longer definable as antecedent -- than the questions of the religious imagination -- of mythic perception, of technologies of the self, of radical interiority, of ecstasy, even of faith -- can no longer simply be written off as a set of dodgy concepts, reactionary ideologies, or regressive retreats from the intellectual and existential rigors of modernism. Though it's still fruitful to do so, one need not delve into the vatic utterances of Marshall McLuhan to recognize examples of this premodern return. Our whole Deleuzian, postmodern language of tribes and nomadism is shot through with the premodern imaginary. This language resonates because even intellectuals have established, in however constructed and articulated a fashion, a relationship with a partially mythic formation, one that suggests new-old subjectivities and perceptions -- D&G's "witch's flight". That doesn't mean that we can't use it in theoretically sophisticated ways, for one aspect of this return is that it is imbued with a new technical sophistication. I was very interested and very pleased that Heiko Idensen included the Torah in his hypertext project, for the traditional packaging of the Jewish scriptures is a great example of hypertext. In New York, you peek into these tomes that the Hasidim read on the subway: these books are stunning, as aggressively dense as Ted Nelson's _Computer Lib_, with patchworks of different typefaces to indicate the nested levels of interpretation and commentary. The mystical Kabbalah is full of recombinatory elements, full of codes and ciphers and deconstructions of the Book. Obviously, hypertext is not necessarily a religious mode of writing. But there is a strange technical resonance here that is very important, and it raises many questions about hermeneutics, the tactics of interpretation, the social construction of texts, and the ambiguous status of the author. Again there is a return, but with a difference -- an articulated return. One of the more ominous aspects of all this is that, if I am partly correct and the logic of the religious imagination gains steam as we plunge ahead, then the spread of "postmodern" communications technologies will hardly prevent the most insidious elements of religion from reappearing: manipulative control, fanaticism, and the violent imaginal divisions erected between self and other. One interesting example is discussed by Ravi Sundaram in his article in ZKP3, where he draws attention to the fact that it is the Hindu nationalists in India that dominate the Net. Of course, these movements are contemporary constructions, whose reactionary and quasi-nationalist politics have nothing necessarily to do with the blooming mosaic of cults, practices, and metaphysical jewels that we rather simplistically call "Hinduism." And yet these groups are also certainly religious, and they can dominate the Net partially because they are able to exploit its symbolic and imaginal possibilities. Specifically, Sundaram discusses how they project into the nomadic plasticity of the Net the virtual image of a nation unified by their version of Hindu culture. That information technology allows a premodern return of religious reaction should only really surprise us if we are under the mistaken assumption that the phenomenon of religious fundamentalism is not part and parcel of modernism. Whatever wellsprings of interiority it draws from, the exoteric forms of fundamentalism always take place within a contemporary context. Though you wouldn't guess it from listening to the U.S. media, Islamic fundamentalism is fundamentally a product of modernism -- or rather, of its failures. Such a return to foundations has next to nothing to do with Islam before the twentieth century -- a religion that, after its initial centuries of bloodthirsty expansion, is historically far more tolerant than Christianity. These things are still constructs of the now; they select and remix the past in extremely powerful ways, and they are very schizophrenic when it comes to communication tools. While the Taliban hang televisions and VCRs from the telephone poles like dead presidents, he Ayatollah laid the groundwork for the Iranian revolution through underground networks of cassette recordings -- an example of the "secondary orality" discussed by Walter Ong. New information technologies may continue to prove quite able to simulate and recrystalize "tribal" thought and practice. One important element follows from this line of thought. If we reocgnize fundamentalism as a hostile component of modernity rather than a leftover or a holdout from the premodern, that means that everytime we run across a contemporary religious formation with a political tinge, we should not necessary call out the dogs with cries of "Reactionaries!" If that is your instinct, then you should sit down and have a long hard look at the Zapatistas. And once again, I say this not as a defender of tradition, but as someone who is rather desperately interested in the various forms of resistance and revival that might take as we plunge into something that may well take the form of Mark Stahlman's New Dark Ages. Of course, one of the reasons we instantly launch into critiques of contemporary religious formations, and react to religious motifs and spiritual language with an instinctive horror, is that we are still reacting to the historical nightmare of institutional Christianity. Because of this, our dominant idea of religion considers it as violently institutional belief system, a totalizing ideology that functions as a repressive social, intellectual, and imaginal control mechanism. That's all very true and very accurate, but we must be careful not to treat religion as we do other ideologies. Culturally, the relationship between religious practice and the dogmatic or conceptual level of religious ideology is very complicated, producing many different problems and possibilities. Too often critics and intellectuals only recognize the belief system, reducing the whole complex of religious phenomena to symptoms of reactionary ideologies that can be attacked on both philosophical and political grounds. For example, both Richard Barbrook in his piece and Mark Dery in _Escape Velocity_ discuss various aspects of cyberculture that are apocalyptic, millenarian, New Age, gnostic, etc. They then radically critique these cultural phenomena, arguing that such ideas and dreams are obviously illusory, and that they absorb energy from the real world where we have work to do to resist noxious forms of power and to help the lives of a lot of suffering people. But techno-spirituality is not just some unthinking atavism. If I had time I would go into some detail and show the historical and psychological background of these phenomena, their roots in American spiritual heteroxy (which was once shot through with progressive elements), and how these tendencies wind up being so strangely intermingled with today's technology. Though I do not agree with the anthropological and psychological axioms that underlie Barbrook or Dery's critiques, I agree very much with many of their political concerns. The problem though is that you have to ask what the function these notions, experiences, or imaginations serve within a set of very different and open-ended kinds of practices and conditions. The problem with examining religious phenomena, and especially with spiritual people who are extolling a certain kind of vision of the world, is that we tend to respond to their level of discourse and not necessarily to their level of practice and experience. Things look very different if we take a broader, cultural studies perspective. In this regard, it's interesting to compare technopagans, Extropian transhumanists and the like to non-elitist and secular subcultures, particularly those associated with popular music. If we are coming from an older perspective of cultural critique -- the Frankfurt School/Debord model -- the spectacle is so dominant, the commodity is so dominant, that it seems impossible that anything organically cultural or subversive or revivifying could emerge from these mechanisms. The industrial production of popular music, the fetishistic consumption of records, the mindless fandom encouraged around stars -- how could this possibly be a site of anything interesting? And yet we know from cultural studies that there are a whole number of fascinating forms of resistance and of cultural re-creation found within the social consumption of recorded music. Moreover, many of these subcultures are also inflected with a certain kind of religious sensibility, and not just in terms of the "cults" composed of "fans" -- from the Latin _fanaticus_, used to describe inspired members of mystery cults. For example, you have the phenomena of reggae music in the seventies, a deeply religious and millenarian music whose political and spiritual force fed directly into all sorts of contemporary anti-colonialist cultural movements, and even the British punk scene -- superficially a most anti-spiritual subculture. The utopian ecstasies of the Deadheads are another example (a secret history of what we too often and too crudely call the "California Ideology"), and the Goa-style techno scene is very much an example now. What I draw from all this is that, just as we have to look at the imaginal and social practices of fans engaging commodities, poaching and reconfiguring signs, and developing relationships within the belly of a dominant commodity culture, so too should we bring more care and attention to the imaginal and social practices of people engaged in what we would recognize as religious or spiritual "ideologies" -- including those we discover in technoculture. All this brings to mind some of Michel de Certeau's notions about the practice of everyday life as being a locus of both resistance and creative accommodation -- notions that are certainly inflected by de Certeau's religious background and researches into mysticism. In a passage in _The Practice of Eveyday Life_, he talks about how, in our radically electronicized, technological, and engineered environment, the individual cannot so much directly resist these forces as attempt to detach themselves from them, to outwit them, to play games with them, to recreate within a technological environment the art and practices of earlier hunters and of rural people. It's a striking image, if a politically pessimistic (I'm tempted to say pragmatic) one. And yet it resonates with the tribe, the gang, the technopagan, the raver, any number of exuberant "atavisms" reconstellated in the postmodern ruins. But in order to uncork the essence of these phenomena, it behooves us to look at them through an imaginative as well as a critical or ideological perspective. All this becomes more interesting if we cease looking at religion as a belief system, and look at it instead as a kind of congealed institutional response -- a kind of apparatus of capture -- to the extraordinary psycho-spiritual potentials we carry within ourselves. It's tough to talk about these potentials these days. Despite the sophistication of critical discourse, it often displays a tendency to reduce complex, multi-layered networks of forces and agents to plots of land controllable inside certain disciplinary or theoretical languages. And this is particularly the case when we are talking about ideological or social formations, and how they interact with concrete individuals, their minds, souls, and altogether human potentials. How do we relate these two levels of reality, discourse, and experience? How do we relate the ongoing fact of our conscious, subjective, creative lives with these huge abstractions, warring ideologies, and complex media fields of simulacra? Faced with this situation, there is a very strong tendency to collapse levels, to reduce everything to an abstract field of ideological wars. Ferreting out the ideology embedded in cultural formations, often paranoically, becomes a way of avoiding the existential problem of our concrete embodiment in ideas, practices, institutions, and the flesh. The intellectual sits there and looks at a particular cultural formation and says: ah, I see the secret hand of ideology at work, reproducing its unwholesome notions beneath the surface. And so we lose touch with the lifeworld. It's not that we should cease considering questions of ideology, of the hidden hand clutching our own thoughts as well as the thoughts and imagination of the culture at large. But we can introduce a far more fluid, open-ended, and substantive multiplicity into our discourse, particularly when we are dealing with questions of experience and human subjectivity. It becomes a question of how you fit the enormous energies released by ecstatic experience, or the endless productions of the creative imagination, or the perceptual and philosophical changes introduced through hardcore contemplative self-examination, into the more mundane frameworks of life and thought, politics and art. --- # distributed via nettime-l : no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a closed moderated mailinglist for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo@icf.de and "info nettime" in the msg body # URL: http://www.desk.nl/~nettime/ contact: nettime-owner@icf.de