Page 207 - Key Words in Religion Media and Culture

190 Jeremy Stolow

Horkheimer and Adorno (1973); Jacques Ellul (1964); Quentin Schultze
(2002); Albert Borgmann (2003); and others who share an understanding
of technology as a deep, systemic, and insidious mode of apprehending and
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dealing with the world. In this narrative—no less indulgent in the language
of cosmogony and prophecy—technology is disparaged for its privileging of
the principle of efficiency over all other normative criteria, which compels
us to regard all of nature as nothing more than an object of mastery and
control or, to use Heidegger’s term, to see the world as Gestell (“standing
reserve”). This suspicion seems most readily confirmed by looking at the ways
in which modern technologies develop: as they incorporate larger and more
complicated functions, their operational properties become increasingly
difficult to discern, increasingly unpredictable and unstable, and to those
extents increasingly displaced from the willful intentions of their designers
and users. Their apparent autonomy and self-determining functionality thus
makes modern technologies appear inexorable, sublime, even imperious.
To borrow the famously sinister salutation of The Borg, the rapacious and
technologically omnivorous alien villain in the Star Trek television series,
“resistance is futile.” Or, as Heidegger himself put it, in a posthumously
published interview, we have become so thoroughly entangled within the
thickets of modern technology that “only a God can save us.” 3

Religion and technology

All these accounts also appear to share a common approach to religion as
something set apart from technology: in other words, as a mode of thinking,
feeling, and acting that can be layered on—and therefore also detached
from—the objectively knowable arena of technical actions and effects. This
way of dividing religion and technology rests on a deeply fraught history
of cosmology, science, and popular imaginings of the relationship between
humans and nonhumans, including transcendent, supernatural, or sacred
things. Our commonsense definition of technology is in fact a modernist
abstraction—what Bruno Latour (1993) calls a “purification”—of a messier
and far more ambiguous set of historically sedimented representations of and
interactions among human, nonhuman, and supernatural beings. In classical
Greek philosophy, we might bear in mind, techne—a term that originally
meant to put together, to weave, or connect things through art, artifice or
craft—was generally understood to furnish an inferior form of knowledge
about the cosmos in comparison to contemplation—episteme—which
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furnished universal and timeless truths. The inherent flaws of technical
knowledge were further underscored by the tendency to use the plural form,
technai, which were conceived as separate crafts, not necessarily united by
an overarching set of generalized principles. It is only in the modern period