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Technology 195

methods of breathing, sitting, or gesturing with one’s hands—for these too
are technical practices. Even thoughts and images seem to vanish with the
removal of the representational technologies of language and iconography.
The inescapable conclusion to be drawn from this exercise is that “religion,”
however we choose to define it, is inherently and necessarily technological.
Rather than searching for an interior experience or feeling of divine presence,
of the numinous, or the sacred that can somehow be shorn of all outward
trappings, we are more amply rewarded by examining the myriad ways in
which religious experiences are materialized, rendered tangible and palpable,
communicated publicly, recorded, and reproduced—in short, mediated—in
and through its given range of technological manifestations and techniques.
Mediation, Bruno Latour reminds us, means the creation of a link that did
not exist before, and to that degree it entails a modification of the originally
unconnected elements. Within a given network of action, mediation thus
refers to the process of redistribution and exchange of properties, functions,
competencies, and goals among associated actors or, more precisely stated,
the delegation of action programs from one actor (e.g., a human) to another
(e.g., a machine), as in the case of a lock that translates and replaces the
actions of a human guard, who no longer needs to stand by a door to keep
it shut (Latour 1999). From this perspective, the term technology refers to
the mediation of skills that have been extended from humans to nonhumans:
a translation that produces new forms of “congealed labour.” However,
as Latour is also at pains to show, as nonhuman actors, technologies are
never simply the means to ends that have been defined and circumscribed
by humans. On the contrary, technologies in turn shape human experience
by actively participating in—and thereby transforming—networks of action.
Put otherwise, when we exchange properties with nonhumans through
technical delegation, we at the same time allow artifacts to enter into the
stream of human relations as mediators, not simply intermediaries, that is to
say, as actors in their own right:

“Of course,” one might say, “a piece of technology must be seized and
activated by a human subject, a purposeful agent.” But…what is true of
the “object” is still truer of the “subject.” There is no sense in which
humans may be said to exist as humans without entering into commerce
with what authorizes and enables them to exist (that is, to act).
(Latour 1999: 192; cf 1993: 79–82)

For the purposes of this discussion, it is important to bear in mind that
the category of the “nonhuman” includes such things as staircases, chimes,
ink, flowers, hair, animal blood, video-recorders, and mobile telephones,
but it also encompasses gods, angels, jinns, demons, bodhisattvas, saints, and