Author Archives: yuling

This entry is reposted from Yu-Ling’s Phd Research blog:

Religion’s just a technology. How the hardware of humanity gets used will depend on the software – Irwin Kula

In a Time article, titled, This is Why Religion is Just a Technology (published July 25, 2014), I was first introduced to Irwin Kula, an eighth generation Rabbi. The article would introduce Kula, a progressive Rabbi who would be among the speakers at the BIF – a Business Innovation Factory conference.

In the TIME article, Kula asks, “what would happen if we applied innovation theory to religion, to compress the resources it takes to create good people?” In his talk, Kula explains how he is going about researching this questions. He is conducting a study on religious traditions in America where people are asked “what is the actual impact on the user” and “what is the actual impact on the person in their life.” His research questions include, will gratitude increase? Will hope increase? Will a sense of belonging increase? Kula’s research should appear in a peer reviewed article in Jan/Feb 2015 which would have implications for the business model and pedagogical model of religious practices, as he is attempting an empirical analysis into his definition of human flourishing.

As Kula is speaking to a business audience, he suggests the development of “accountability technologies” as there is no more God in the sky as the overarching seeing eye may be replaced by the technological surveillance eye, or perhaps a spiritual sense of inner seeing eye, being accountable to our communities.

While Kula’s research is indeed interesting and merits further investigation, his ‘practical suggestions’ and general posture seem to veer towards what David Noble calls, the religion of technology. It may be that his research is perpetuating the religious fervour for a technological utopia which may include spiritual rituals mediated through accountability technologies. Of course, this discussion would be greatly clarified and further enhanced once his research article comes out and his notion of human flourishing is clarified.

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This entry is reposted from Yu-Ling’s PhD Research blog:

As TED continues its proliferation of offering content related to technology, entertainment, and design, its newest booklet, The art of stillness, ventures into areas of the technotheological. Below is the trailer for the book, written by Pico Iyer:

In an article published by TED, titled, Why we need a secular sabbath, Iyer outlines the core concept of his book – that there is an urgent need to slow down, to rest, to find sabbath in our lives. He notes that many businesses, particularly tech companies such as Google have created spaces, schedules, and/or work cultures to promote mindful rest. Intel experimented with a ‘quiet period’ of four hours every tuesday, in which all engineers and managers were to refrain from e-mails, phones, and meetings for four hours, creating space for ‘thinking time.’ General Mills has meditation rooms throughout its campuses. Kevin Kelly (founder of Wired magazine) and many others in Silicon Valley practice an “internet sabbath” every week.

These practices of rest seem to draw from the religiously abundant practices of rest, meditation, prayer, and sabbath. Iver himself, connects these modern practices of rest to the ancient ones of sabbath in the Judeo-Christian tradition. He rightly points to the book of Numbers, which outlintes the boundaries of sabbath, because the sabbath is holy. Abraham Joshua Heschel, the Jewish theologian would say that in sabbath, we find “a cathedral in time rather than in space.”

How then, can Iyer limit the sabbath to a secular time and space?

One reading of Iyer may be to limit practical forms of sabbath by removing all connections to the religious or spiritual. The case of transcendental meditation (TM), a form of mantra meditation, offers an example of just how complicated it may be to claim such practices as religious or non-religious. While many of its practitioners claim TM is non-religious, it “unsuccessfully fought a legal action to defend itself from being declared a religion in New Jersey” (Wallis, 2003, p.54).

The secular thesis merits further study as, in this case, it co-opts the religious practice of sabbath rest and delimits secular boundaries for the general populous. One voice to consider is Charles Taylor, who describes the secular as a theological distinction which privatizes transcendent experiences, redefines belief, or making unbelief in religion a possible reality (Taylor, 2007, p. 3). Secularization, for Taylor, is therefore a theological construct with its own conditions of belief, as one among many new religious subjectivities in the modern world that is characterized as individual spiritual fulfillment of the self (Taylor, 2007, pp. 508-510). This privatization may be another way to read Iyer, in that sabbath practices are necessary for all, yet forced to the private sphere.

We continue to wonder, to ask, to reflect on how the idea/belief/practice/enactment of sabbath has become a secular sabbath? Or at least, how did Iyer come to frame his book with this particular narrative? This story is further complicated with other actors and actants: TED, Kevin Kelly, e-mail, Google, the Bible, God, Sabbath, sabbath, sabbath-ing, and sabbath-ness.

While this can immediately be framed as an ANT problem, I am thinking, a way to go about this issue is from Day Reconstruction Method (DRM), questioning and problematizing the daily routines and subjective well-being of those who practice a form of sabbath keeping. In this way, perhaps some data can emerge within this network of the technotheological.

Taylor, C. (2007). A secular age. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Wallis, R. (2003). Three types of new religious movement. In L. L. Dawson (Ed.), Cults and new religious movements: A reader (pp. 36-58). Malden, MA: Blackwell.

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This entry is reposted from Yu-Ling’s PhD Research blog:

Donna Haraway (1991) observed that she “would rather be a cyborg than a goddess” (p. 181). However, John Law (2004) in  After method: Mess in social science research believes we do not have to make such a choice. They are different “goods” enacted together and condensed at particular moments, while partially separated at other times. For Law, this is part of his methodology, or his method assemblage:

generally, the process of crafting and enacting the necessary boundaries between presence, manifest absence and Otherness. Method assemblage is generative or performative, producing absence and presence. More specifically, it is the crafting or bundling of relations in three parts: (a) whatever is in-here or present (for instance a representation or an object); (b) whatever is absent but also manifest (that is, it can be seen, is described, is manifestly relevant to presence); and (c) whatever is absent but is Other because, while necessary to presence, it is also hidden, repressed or uninteresting. Presence may take the form of depictions (representational and/or allegorical) or objects. Manifest absence may take the form of a reality out-there that is represented, or the relevant context for an object. Method assemblage is distinguished from assemblage in the priority attached to the generation of presence. The definition by itself is symmetrical, telling us nothing about the form taken by presence, absence, or the relations between these. A further provisional definition of method assemblage is offered in Chapter 2. Here it is treated as the enactment of a bundle of ramifying relations that generate representations in-here and represented realities out-there. This is a special case of the more general definition above. (Law, 2004, p. 161)

For Law, there are a multitude of goods generated by method assemblages. This means ‘truth’ is no longer the only arbiter, not the only good. Politics as a good, for instance, is about how to achieve better social and non-social arrangements, in which we can judge its products politically. Certain things can be made more political. Similarly, there is the good of aesthetics. What counts as beauty can be arranged more probable, or stronger, or made more real.

In this post, we are particularly interested in the spiritual as a good. Law offers two case studies of the spiritual: Quakers and the Australian Aborigines. They offer a glimpse into a world “permeated by the spiritual, and who participate in assemblages that enact its realities” (p. 150). Their spiritualities, or using Law’s terminology, inspirations, suggest three considerations. First, like the other goods of truth and politics, we cannot insist that they are the only goods, else this becomes spiritual reductionism/religious fundamentalism. Second, these spiritualities/inspirations are enacted in their specific contexts and cannot/should not be generalized across all of the spiritual. Third, we must consider whether these goods would, should, or always must be enacted. Instead, there is a temporal, or partial connection in this fractal view of world-making that re-orders the world.

For Law, method as we understood it (from a Euro-American perspective) has created a duality in which much is hidden, or becomes Othered into a kind of hinterland. Instead, his conceptualizing of multiple goods allow for different partially connected goods to be made and remade. Truths and politics, aesthetics, and spiritualities “are variously woven together and condensed at particular moments, and partially separated at others” (p. 151). The suggested image is one of choreography, a dance, or of weaving. And so, Law responding to Haraway’s observation about choosing the good of cyborg over that of a goddess, will suggest that both goods are found in this great dance, partially connecting and  separating at times, enacting alternative methods that is more generous, more modest, and perhaps more technological AND spiritual at the same time.

References

Haraway, D. J. (1991). A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology and Socialist Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century. In D. J. Haraway (Ed.), Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (pp. 149-181). London: Free Association Books.

Law, J. (2004). After method: Mess in social science research. New York, NY: Routledge.

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