Page 211 - Key Words in Religion Media and Culture

194 Jeremy Stolow

Indigenous animists and Spiritualist “pseudo-scientists” are not the
only ones who have such trouble distinguishing religion and technology.
Here we might also invoke a growing body of historical and ethnographic
scholarship that only adds to our difficulty in holding on to the popular
narrative of modern techno-science as a mundane, “disenchanted” realm
of mechanical interactions. Indeed, given their imponderable complexities
and their dramatic abilities to compress time, erase distance, store memory,
or reproduce identical copies, many modern technologies are said to elicit
from their users affective dispositions and modes of conduct that are
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phenomenologically comparable with prayer, ritual, and magic. Likewise,
the performance of modern techno-science—in laboratories, workshops,
conferences, schools, and other places—is said to resemble a system of magical
or religious action, to the extent that it partakes in a pragmatic engagement
with the world through skilled techniques and disciplined perceptions,
through the power of spectacle, and through the institutional organization
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of faith regarding the true workings of nature. The latest advances in the
arenas of bioengineering, computer modeling, or nanotechnology have
even further eroded once-confident distinctions between humans and
other bodies, giving way to a variety of fantastic creations and half-human,
half-machine hybrid “monsters” (Balsamo 1999; Graham 2002; Haraway
1991). Through these increasingly dizzying interpenetrations of humans and
nonhumans and of spirits and machines, a significant challenge has been
mounted to the longstanding authority of Linnaean taxonomy, wherein the
world of the living is supposed to be divided into stable categories of plant
and animal, vertebrate and invertebrate, or male and female. In its wake, we
find a cosmos that far more resembles the one perceived “primitively” as a
relatively undifferentiated order of humans, gods, animals, and the diverse
forms of equipment that tie them together. All of this suggests that the
distinction between religion and technology is far more invidious than the
aforementioned popular narratives might have us believe. Indeed, the more
one looks, the more difficult it becomes to determine where, or even how, to
draw the line separating “religious” and “technological” things.

Religion as technology

So, when posing the question of how “technology” would most fruitfully
serve as a key word in the study of religion and media, one might wish
to try the following thought experiment: imagine any form of religious
experience, practice, or knowledge and see what you have left “without
technology.” No instruments, tools, or devices; no architecture or clothing;
no paint, musical instruments, incense, or written documents; not even
the disciplined practices of bodily control—such as learned and performed