Tag Archives: communication

Notes on Techno-Religion

I was involved in an ESF-sponsored workshop on technology and religion this past week. While the discussion focused on communicative technologies and media, we did drift at times beyond that. Here are some scribbles and notes of mine from the various sessions.

Mediation

Our first session started with Birgit Meyer and Bengt Kristensson Uggla. Conceiving of media as something external to religion makes questions regarding the intersection of the two unanswerable. However, if media is seen as being embedded within religion, these issues are transformed into understandable practices. Media, then, is able to mediate religious thoughts and beliefs. In this way, media become sacralised so that mediation is made immanent and the gap between and believer and the transcendent is significantly reduced. This immediacy, mitigated through semiotic ideology, denies media as media and leads to its being externalised. It may be a good idea to think of theology as a theory of mediation. Lastly, technology makes globalisation immediately local (again, mediation).

Identity

The second session was led by Siegfried Zielinski and Jan-Olav Henriksen (sorry, this one is in Norwegian). One important thing to keep in mind is that media as a generalised concept did not arise until the mid-20th century (i.e. the last 50-60 years). Communicative technologies existed prior to that (obviously), but these were particulars. Today’s globalisation is seeing the harmonisation and unification of media so that the different technologies appear seamless. Electricity has become the ‘soul’ of ‘new media’, animating it as a machine. Machines always reduce complexity and mediate between two objects. It used to be that we humans had to believe in machines in order for them to work (i.e. by turning a switch, etc); but now machines have returned the favour by believing in us to animate them (e.g. interactive games, television, etc). On the other hand, religion provides a chain of memory–however fragmented and disjointed it may be. This is mediated by technology. However, technology can create a sensory excess that creates a feeling of divine presence without that chain of memory. In other words, technology has made it possible for one to participate in a religious community without ‘really’ participating in that community (e.g. Yoga videos in YouTube that provide simple instruction without the ‘full Yoga experience’). As Zielinski noted,  one is ‘always the same, never myself’ (his own reversal of the Calvin Klein tag line ‘Always myself, never the same’).

Secularisation

The third session was presented by Ola Sigurdson, Jayne Svenungsson, and Lieven Boeve. It is quite clear that religion isn’t ‘returning’ because it never left in the first place. The ‘privatisation’ of religion has led to a loss of body and particularity as religion loses its institutional form (c.f. Olivier Roy’s Globalised Islam). This ‘private religion’ turns religion into a fetish. In fact, this new ‘personalised’ religion has transformed religious pilgrimages such that the relics now go to the people instead of the people going to the relics. Technology isn’t showing us a ‘post-secular’ world (as in a ‘return of religion’) but rather a transformation of religion in the public space, particularly in the cases of extremist religious groups which have found new solidarity and strength in the techno-globalised world.

Revolutions

The fourth session was led by Caroline Vander Stichele, Ward Blanton, and Edmund Arens. Echoing the sentiment of the first session of technology being closely tied to religion, this session dealt with looking at religious revolutions based on technological revolutions. One example is that of Yoga in the West as a practice originally separated from its Hindu roots. However, it has become its own consumer-driven religion in which one can get meditative tranquility instantly. Another example, is Augustine’s discussion of the divine postal network (e.g. messenger angels, etc) in relation to his understanding of the Roman Empire’s postal network. Religion needs to be addressed as a communicative practice of memory and narrative. The danger of a consumer-driven religion is, as I mentioned above, the kind of (private) participation without (public) participation. Religion must occur in both the public and the private sphere.

Subjectivity

The final session was led by Arne Grøn and Anne Kull. Subjectivity is the key notion to formulate the problems above (between religion and society) as it gets directly at the concept of identity construction both in relation to the world and the self. In expressing oneself, one exteriorises oneself and bridges the divide between the public and private spheres. Public life is only possibile if it acknowledges a private life as well. Religion, as a public activity, is a meta-sphere of visibility of publicised figures (i.e. private individuals). However, one should be wary to use the term ‘virtual’ in describing religion in the new media (e.g. online churches) because in one very real sense, all churches are ‘virtual’ as they represent the ‘real’ church in a locality. There must be a hermeneutics of subjectivity as it is implied by a phenomenological ontology (a la Heidegger).

On Communication

What is communication?  Can one communicate without langauge?  What would that look like?  In other words, can one communicate meaning without a language?  I would like to argue that this is not (always) the case.

Here’s an example (which triggered this thought process in me)…Imagine a person who is born deaf and never learns a structured language (i.e. sign language, written language, etc).  To this person, letters, words, and phrases do not correspond with what one would expect.  This is no different than one who encounters an unknown language.  Our example person is also an artist.  Must his art convey meaning?  In a recent seminar I attended, some people contended that all art must convey meaning.  However, I disagree.  Meaning is a product of language because meaning can only be conveyed by appealing to a common language.  For instance, the meaning of this post is predicated upon a commonality of language between myself and you, the reader.  When there is no commonality, the meaning I am conveying (if any) is lost; for example, if this post was written in Swahili, the current readership would not be able to understand it.  It is in this sense that meaning is a product of language.

Now, back to our deaf artist.  Sure, he could have been communicating something, but we, as foreigners to his world of language, are unable to discern that meaning.  Any understanding we interpret from his artwork is what we have imposed on the art.  If instead of art, he wrote a text in an unknown language (so unknown that his writing is the only existing sample), we’d have no linguistic context to properly frame it.  We have no Rosetta Stone which we could use to decipher his language.

Furthermore, we have no guarantee that our deaf artist was even trying to communicate something.  For all we know, he was doodling (quite extensively, but doodling nevertheless) without any intent of communication.  He could have been drawing what he saw through a lens of what he felt–in other words, a private language (and I hope my allusion to Wittgenstein is not lost).  We are trying to find meaning where it is possible no meaning exists.

Another example, possibly more concrete, is the recent film Burn After Reading.  Brad Pitt’s character comes across some documents which he suspects are highly classified CIA information.  In reality, these are just notes from a relatively low ranking, retired CIA agent played by John Malkovich.  The movie is interspersed with a running conversation between two higher-ranking CIA officials trying to figure out what is happening.  As the discourse between Pitt and Malkovich continues with attempts to blackmail, extort, and include foreign agencies (the Russians for instance), the two CIA officials are at a complete loss. The entire movie is based on three separate language games: Pitt’s belief that he has valuable information, Malkovich’s discovery that his personal notes have been stolen, and the CIA’s attempt to reconcile those to their understanding that the information is not valuable at all.  In the end, Malkovich and Pitt are removed from the plot and the CIA’s response is on the lines of “whatever happened, it wasn’t important, but we’ll cover it up just to be sure.”  In other words, the CIA never discovers the hidden discourses and continues on with normal life because those discourses did not matter in the first place.  The hidden languages that Pitt and Malkovich operated within had no value in the economy that the CIA was interested–they were meaningless.

So what is the point of all of this meandering?  Only to say that meaning is a product of language and is not always necessary or guaranteed.  Or, to recycle Freud: “sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.”

Liquidity

This is part 3 of 4 in the Language & Interpretation series

In my previous post in the series, i outlined some strands of the emergence of as it relates to its earliest core: language. Postmodernism is, by and large, a reaction to modernism’s schema of , most notably the that was becoming dominant in the early-to-mid twentieth century. Prior to the “rise” of , there was a major infatuation with language in philosophy. Everyone in that time period was becoming increasingly obsessed with language. Nietzsche, Heidegger, and others while not focusing on language each had their own view of language. Others like Wittgenstein were more focused on the language phenomenon. But, after post-structuralism, language became less of a focus. Of course, there are different trains of thought today when it comes to language, the emphasis has become less and less. The following is primarily my thoughts on language from some kind of postmodern context. It is adapted from a paper i wrote in March on the question of language after postmodernism.

Sense

One of the major strands that arose in the post-structuralist movement was put forth by . He had criticised the concept of “deep structures” where the meaning of a given utterance was below the surface of the actual utterance. His primary suggestion was that meaning was also found at the surface but at the edges of it. Think of it like a plate where the utterances are closer to the center of the plate, but the meaning understood by the recipient is found around the edges and corners. Beyond this, he suggested that there is some kind of “external” reality (although this doesn’t really require any particular kind of epistemological view for it to work) and an “internal” reality. The internal was marked by thought while the external was marked by objects of thought (or even representations of those objects). Communication occurs, for this view, when the two randomly intersect at points Deleuze calls “singularities.” Each singularity is the transmission of thought from one to another. Here, though the meaning of a given phrase is in some kind of contextual flux where the given utterance is understood within the given context and isn’t necessarily understood that way in a different context.

Understanding

Derrida picked up on some parts of Deleuze when he said that “there is nothing outside the text.” For , the meaning of an utterance is only as good as the known context…and everything is context. This is where i will pick up. Deleuze’s “external” reality is more like a formless liquid. The meaning of a given utterance is arbitrary in that something like the word “red” refers to what is considered “red” because it has been imposed upon the “external.” There is nothing inherent to a cherry or an apple that makes it necessarily “red.” That color can just as easily be “grurpue” and those objects would be that. Therefore, i suggest that language is much like a glass which is used to constrain the “external” reality. Language is limited by itself and is self-referential. The “external” reality that remains apart from the glass of language is beyond a given language community’s understanding. Things like death and infinity are beyond most, if not all languages, but that is because the cup of language hasn’t been able to contain those “external” concepts. Communication is only possible when the communicants have some understanding of each other’s cup of language. It is generally assumed that those who use similar utterances are using similar cups, but that is just an assumption. There is nothing inherent in any of my writing here that guarantees i am using English. That is something assumed by you (my reader). In a more functional view, this assumption is worthwhile because otherwise nobody would be certain of their communications.

Sensing Meaning

This leads us to a kind of disjunct where the theoretical differs from the functional. It would be better to continue using the functional for the reason that it is functional. The theoretical is good for conversation pieces, but not for any kind of functional working. Yet, this leads us to the matter of interpretation. Not only should one be concerned with how one interprets another’s communication directed at the one (e.g. how do you interpret these symbols and the meaning contained within their patterns) but also how does one interpret something written by another to another (e.g. how do you interpret something like the Bible which was written by somebody to somebody else…and neither of those people are you). In the next part, i will explain this further and how we should approach interpreting communications that are completely external to somebody. It may well be impossible to place oneself within a totally foreign context, meaning that we may never be certain of the . But, there may be some functional method with which we can have some kind of working understanding that will remain fluid so that if more context becomes available, the interpretation can change.