Mediology and Theology

A number of years ago, Regis Debray introduced the notion of “mediology” in an article in Le Monde . His intention was to break down the divisions between technology and culture, to show that the “higher” expressions of culture were shaped and even dependent upon the technologies by which they were expressed. This is not a new idea, as Brian Rotman says in a review of Debray’s recent God: An Itinerary : “this sort of mediality goes back to Victor Hugo’s recognition that the printed Bible superseded the cathedral as the defining medium of Christianity. Other examples include Walter Benjamin’s juxtaposition of mechanical reproduction and artistic ‘aura’; Jack Goody’s attributing to cuneiform writing the deployment of lists and linear thinking; Eric Havelock’s locating the source of Greek abstract thought and Plato’s ideal forms in the advent of writing; Richard Seaford’s rooting of these features in the monetisation of Greek society; and of course Marshall McLuhan’s celebration of the medium’s production of the message.” One key implication of mediology is that “the higher-level object — message, belief, dream — doesn’t pre-exist the lowly mechanism of its transmission . . . . The ‘origin’ is always the product of what it originates.”
Debray’s new book applied mediology to the “birth, transmogrification and death of the Judeo-Christian God.” The singular self-identical “God” of Christianity is “a succession of different Gods which, without a mediological analysis of their differences, have simply been collapsed into a single self-identical entity.” As an example of how he approaches things: He asks why the notion of the Eternal God arises so late (!), with Abraham: “The short answer, which Debray spends a hundred pages elaborating, is that God is unthinkable without writing, and more indirectly, without the wheel: innovations which reduce human dependence on time and space respectively.” Societies without writing “do not have the notion of a covenant or the concept of eternity,” so that the “appropriation of alphabetic writing in the context of the desert” provides the “technogenesis of transcendence.” Thus, the written text of the Bible is essential to the development of monotheism. The Hebrew Bible itself is, in Debray’s view, an internally contradictory collection of texts, but the collection of these diverse views in one written text and practices of interpretation emphasizing the unity of the Bible provided the technological ground for a unified conception of God and the political ground for a cohesive polity.
If this is going to work, then “the text must not only invent what it claims to convey, but must authenticate itself by ‘effacing its very act of utterance.’ Writing (like all media) always conceals itself as the condition of its performance, and the Bible never refers to the fact of its having been written.”
With the rise of the internet and other technologies of communication, the textual ground of transcendence is being unsettled: “The ‘obsolescence of the media of the alphabetic God’ in contemporary digital culture is marked by a shift from linear narrative and the conquest of time to an instantaneously occupied space, from collective accomplishment within history predicated on future deferment to a here/now culture of personal fulfillment. Thus, the death of the God of letters and the weakening of the religions organised around Him, far from producing a spiritual void or a new rationalist order, is facilitating a resurgence of mysticism, an era of superstition and eclectic spirituality, where pagan ceremonies dedicated to the earth-goddess Gaia mix with ecological science; astral fluids sit happily alongside Zen; kabala blends with witchcraft, yogi meditation, and Sufi mysticism; where belief in Buddhist reincarnation coexists with the Christian burial; where aliens from the cosmos surround us; where the dead are channeled on a daily basis.” In short, we are witnesses to a “re-enchantment of the world.”
There is more wrong with this analysis than I care to comment on, but a few things are intriguing and potentially helpful. I think there is something to the basic mediological insight that technologies shape the culture they claim to be merely transmitting. And it is also true that origins are often “fictional,” constructed in retrospect (just ask yourself when you started loving your wife or husband; surely it must have started somewhere, but just as surely any “starting point” had its own preconditions that could just as well be a starting point; even love at first sight occurs in a context, and that context might just as well be described as the beginning of love). And the influence of contemporary communications technology on theology proper is a question worth pondering. How Debray comes to the conclusion that the alphabetic God is dying is hard to fathom (note to Debray: check out The Next Christendom ), yet it is intriguing that the places where text-based religions flourish are largely on the margins of technological society.