Abstract
Reviewed by: Shannon Trosper Schorey, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Deus in Machina is an important volume, representing the critical interjections of philosophy of science and technology approaches into the current debates about the relations actively produced and negotiated between religion, media, technology, and culture. While the chapters represent a wealth of disciplinary approaches (anthropology, communication studies, religious studies, and history are all present), the volume is held together by a common goal: To push back against the common claim that technology (and media more broadly) is an ontologically separate realm from other cultural or social forces (p. 2). This project borrows most readily from cultural studies as each chapter attempts to resituate the various projects of modernity that have rendered religion, technology, and science asunder. It comes as no surprise, then, that Bruno Latour appears as a particular intellectual darling among the volume’s varied bibliographies. While the “media turn” in religious studies has meant that more attention has been paid to media saturation and mediation in general, Deus in Machina advances the conversation through its clever attention to the critical work that both categories “religion” and “technology” are made to perform in these contexts.
The essays in the volume work together to interrogate the variety of interrelated binaries that accompany religion and technology: machine and human, agency and determinism, faith and reason, fiction and fact, authenticity and fraud, and body and mind. By doing so, they highlight the active production and maintenance work that each binary requires to “purify” and separate itself. To move beyond questions formed exclusively by an “and” (e.g., What is the relationship between religion and the Internet, or media and culture), the authors frame their inquiries based on questions that instead highlight intersectionality and mobility and probe how specific binaries are actively produced, reaffirmed, and co-constitutive of each other in the locations—historical, geographical, and cultural—of their deployment.
This book is a critical project. Stolow argues in his introduction that the “and” questions that have so far dominated intellectual inquiry into the relationship between religion and media have served to retain the essentialism of both categories. Calling upon an entrenched lineage of critical work on the category “religion” and its attendant colonial work (Asad, Masuzawa, Chidester, and Strousma are cited in particular), Deus in Machina asks that scholars of religion apply the same perspective to the implicit political consequences of the term technology. Unfortunately, readers not familiar with this wider disciplinary project (new students or those outside of religious studies) may not follow this argument well, as the volume assumes the critiques against “religion” (and its attendant terms magic, secularism, etc.) are both accepted and orienting.
Technology in popular (and often scholarly) use is most often configured as a tool or vessel of communication, emptied of any agenda or agency of its own, that can be studied or wielded without regard for its active or agentive properties. Deus in Machina takes a broader approach by viewing technology in “the enlarged sense of materials, techniques, instruments, and expertise [that] forms the gridwork of orientations, operations, and embedded and embodied knowledges and powers without which religious ideas, experiences, and actions could not exist” (p. 5). Even as media are recognized as providing “the deep conditions of possibility” for religious practice, belief, and imagination, Stolow asks us to “attend more closely to the modes of wonder-making” that shape technoscientific knowledge and practices (p. 5).
The volume also includes a sustained interest in the ways technology and religion shape the secular, how technological artifacts are often subjected to utopic or dystopic tropes, why an emphasis on the body yields a particularly rich and powerful site of inquiry of materiality, and a common (even popular!) interest in questions of the negotiation of authenticity via religious and technological discourses. Although published in 2013, the volume has a longer production history, arising initially out of a 2007 colloquium “Deus in Machina” held in Ontario, Canada. After nearly 10 years “out in the world” in its various stages, these essays continue to represent an important research agenda not yet fully popularized. Readers would be well served to situate this volume and its conversations within a parallel and emerging interest in overlap, coevolution, and escape (a la Deleuze, Haraway, Latour, etc.), which trace the histories of categories and their subsequent political consequences. In this way, Deus in Machina is not only in conversation with the ideological history of religious studies but also rooted in contemporary and changing cultural and intellectual tropes themselves. Ultimately, the volume is convincing in its collected argument that such research investigations (recovering the forgotten or erased hybrids) will have wide-ranging consequences, allowing us to rethink the very nature of our inquiry into the relations between and among these discourses of religion and technology.