1
INTRODUCTION
“Then the boat on which embark the dead, that the old Ferryman, Charon, used to steer, they
found not within its moorings…”
1
This is the first existing textual reference to the Greek steersmen of the dead: Charon.
Charon is a ferryman, a psychopomp who communicates living to dead across a river by
navigating the flow of water, steering his vessel to bring human beings from one side to the
other, requiring a fee of coins to transport the bodies.
2
As a steersman of the dead, the figure of
Charon binds death and ritual as forms of mediation between human and non-human worlds.
From living to dead or otherwise, the precarious mediations of human and non-human worlds
(worlds of the dead, worlds of the gods, worlds of reincarnation) take place through the body as a
place and an interface for ritual. This present story of communication, mediation, death, and
going outside the human begins at the shores of the rivers Styx and Acheron, with Charon
pushing his paddle to steer the ferry of the dead across the flow of the water and continues
through a theory of communication named after Charon’s movements, a story that binds digital
computation to the mediation of death.
This work is a look at the rituals that mediate between life and death through an analysis
of the tools that mediate them, the subjectivities they shape, and what that means for the study of
religion, digital culture, and death. It is a story about how we mediate death, whether it be with
paddles and rivers or keyboards and hard drives. This is a story of mediating death through these
technological and embodied interfaces, like Charon and his paddle. As new scales for
understanding death settled over the world after the Second World War, American engineer
1
Ronnie H. Terpening, Charon and the Crossing: Ancient, Medieval, and Renaissance Transformations of a Myth
(Cranbury, NJ: Bucknell University Press,1985), 1.
2
Agnes Alfody-Gazdac and Cristian Gazdac, “"Who Pays the Ferryman?“ The Testimony of Ancient Sources on
the Myth of Charon,” Klio 95, no. 2 (2013), 298.
2
Norbert Weiner took this Greek word for steersman, kybernetes ( χυβερνήτης) to name his new
study of communication, Cybernetics: “the entire field of control and communication theory,
whether in the machine or in the animal.”
3
Cybernetics emerged from Wiener’s attendance at a
series of conferences aimed at understanding human communication, the nature of the human
mind, and the mechanics of mediation. The “Macy Conferences” gave rise to theories of
communication and mediation that founded modern computing. From this postwar interest in
communication came Cybernetics and the computational architectures for contemporary digital
communication.
New mediations of death make this also a story about how such rituals in America help
us theorize religion and digital technology more broadly, and how we can think about the human
being in the light of these new conditions. Death is a discrete moment of crisis: physiologically,
culturally, and ideologically as well as a moment of numerous transitions: from life to death,
living with to living without, caring to mourning. Such a singular moment locates and marks the
influences of material, ethical, and ontological forces at play, and this project charts these
influences. Death and mourning practices in America locate interactions between digital media
and ritual at a particular time and a particular place from where we can model a type of
scholarship accounting for these intersections of media, ritual, and death.
These stories of mediating death via digital religion are about going outside the human.
Whether it be through the act of conceptualizing an afterlife or media technologies that exceed
human sensory capacities, death and the digital both go outside the humanby imaging material
and social relations outside the humanform and granting social agency and power to non-human
3
Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, Second Edition
(New York: The MIT Press, 1961), 18.
3
subjects and materials whether they be spirits of circuit boards. In order to understand both
stories of going outside the human, we first need to look at their formative characters and
account for any concepts of functions arising from them that overlap, that interchange, and that
create bridges for theorizing American death and media technology. Here belongs
posthumanism.
Leading posthuman theorist Cary Wolfe defines posthumanism as
a historical moment in which the decentering of the human by its imbrication in
technical, medical, informatic, and economic networks is increasingly impossible to
ignore, a historical development that points toward the necessity of new theoretical
paradigms (but also thrust them on us), a new mode of thought that comes after the
cultural repressions and fantasies, the philosophical protocols and evasions, of humanism
as a historically specific phenomenon.
4
Cristin Ellis, in her study of the creation of the posthuman and the rise of scientism in
antebellum America, adds that posthumanism “suggests that a truly materialist conception of the
human obliges us to relinquish—or at least steeply qualify—Western humanism’s conception of
the human as an autonomous subject free from physical causality. In doing so, posthumanism
erodes the grounds upon which Western humanism has traditionally upheld the innate superiority
of the human to all other forms of being.”
5
Posthumanism broadens what is contained under the
label of the human by emphasizing functional understandings rather than essential definitions. In
other words, posthumanism does not rely on the leverage of a term like “the human” to
demarcate what belongs in and around the category of human being, instead only assuming
relationality as inherent to being and agency as visible through relation.
4
Cary Wolfe, What Is Posthumanism?(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), xv.
5
Cristin Ellis, Antebellum Posthuman: Race and Materiality in the Mid-Nineteenth Century, First edition (New
York: Fordham University Press, 2018) ,6.
4
Orientations
As a set of ideas of going beyond the concept of the human in order to explain or diagram
relations between materials and subjects, posthuman theory creates a bridge between death and
media technology by primarily attending to function rather than essence, action rather than
object, and interactivity rather than subjectivity. Through first an outline of digital media and
then rituals of death, we can gain a better understanding of the contingency of death and
mediation, the transformation of embodiments and orientations towards death through key areas
of mediation, ritualization, and play.
Digital or “new” media reform information between human and computational
sensibilities through digital apparatuses where human and computer sensibilities translate and
mediate each other at the level of the interface. Interfaces, as new media theorist Alexander
Galloway states, “ are not things, but rather processes that effect a result of whatever kind.”
6
In
other words, digital mediation depends on action and interaction, on the mediation of sense,
understanding, and experience between human and non-human agents. Action and interaction (in
the form of performance, embodiment, and materiality) make up the interface as a kind of action,
a process of inter-action. Action and interaction (between worlds of the living and the dead, the
human and the non-human) are the primary functions within a digital ritual interface. Keyboards,
joysticks, monitors, touchscreens are all the human end of an interface that goes on to
incorporate mechanical and digital processes that make up new media processes.
6
Alexander R. Galloway, The Interface Effect (Malden, MA; Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2012),vii.
5
The digital turn, according to new media theorist Mark B.N. Hansen, is when the body
takes on the “function of the processor,” and where networks are “elemental.”
7
This interfacing
and interaction between computational and human logics takes place through a material medium
– the interaction of the human body and its sensibilities through an interface with the machine
materiality and its sensibilities. In other words, “new” mediation is “new” not because it involves
differing technological apparatus or artifacts per se, but because the ways of thinking made
possible by these machines changes how we can think about how mediation functions. New
media is a new way of thinking about media, a new theory of media more than new mediation,
one that incorporates digital technologies into a sense of mediation going beyond the
particularity of the medium (visual, audio, etc.).
New media scholars attend to the materiality of media technologies and the bodies they
act upon as a way of making new theories of media. Hansen’s advisee and media theorist
Amanda Starling Gould names a metabolic media framework linking the human, the
environment, and digital into a contingent network by way of their material interdependence.
8
Hansen turns to the philosophies of Henri Bergson and Gilles Deleuze as a means of
understanding digital media as relying on the body as a place of mediation. Such attentions to
emergent, embedded, and contingent subjectivities by way of intermediation between human
bodies and non-human technologies creates an ecological view of how digital practices form
where “new media” is a co-operation between technology and human, within a material world,
7
Mark B.N. Hansen, New Philosophy for New Media, Book, (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2004) , 21 ; Mark B.N.
Hansen, Feed-Forward: On the Future of Twenty-First-Century Media, (Chicago; London: University of Chicago
Press, 2015) , 2.
8
Amanda Starling Gould, “Restor(y)Ing the Ground: Digital Environmental Media Studies,” Networking
Knowledge 9, no. 5 (July 2016); Alexander R. Galloway, The Interface Effect, (Malden, MA; Cambridge, UK:
Polity Press, 2012; Mark B.N. Hansen , Feed-Forward: On the Future of Twenty-First-Century Media, (Chicago;
London: University of Chicago Press, 2015); John Durham Peters, The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of
Elemental Media (Chicago;London: The University of Chicago Press, 2016).
6
preceding essentialist questions of on/offline or virtual/real. By blurring or exceeding boundaries
between what is mediated and what is not, what is “on” or “off” line, “virtual” or “real,” “digital”
or “not,” these new approaches to new media liberate media scholarship to interact with other
forms of theorization on a functional rather than essential level.
This insistence on theorizing the interface forwards a sense of a functional and embodied
performance between digital and human being. Performance stands out as the mode that makes
new media, and more specifically the interface, new. If we take the interface to be a process, as
Galloway does, then that process is a performance. Performance, for purposes here, is an always
mediated and embodied action taking place within a recognizable system of conventions that
establishes an argument about a world through its repetition. In other words, performance is a
recognizable and repeatable embodied epistemology. Following Elin Diamond, performance at
its simplest is doing, an action.
9
But these actions must be recognizable within a cultural system.
And in order to be recognizable as such, a performance must be mediated – whether this is
simply through the body of the performer itself or through a more complex media apparatus.
Through a repeated and recognizable action, a performance begins to form a particular argument,
a view of the world, or a sense of identity.
The performance of an interface does something, forms an argument about the world
through its repeated interaction between human beings and digital apparatuses. By continuing to
interact with digital technologies, human being is per-forming ideas about what the digital is and
can be, what new mediation is, and what being human means in relation to the performance.
New media theories (and this project as having a part in those) are largely an exploration of what
9
Diana Taylor, Performance (Durham: Duke University Press Books, 2016),7.
7
argument in particular this performance is making. For this project the performance is one
mediated by bodies, both living and dead, digital technologies, and the cultural (and otherwise)
systems that dictate, limit, and make recognizable these repeatable actions.
Ritual studies offers a conceptual way into the performative aspects of the new
mediations of religion as it maps the activation and performance of human and non-human
interactions around death and dying. Rituals organize behaviors to transform the world from how
it is into the world as it should be, and religious rituals explicitly interact with non-human realms
of gods, spirits, and the supra- and super-human. As Victor Turner puts it, “[r]eligion, like art,
lives insofar as it is performed, i.e., insofar as its rituals are ‘going concerns.’ If you wish to spay
or geld religion, first remove its rituals, its generative and regenerative processes. For religion is
not a cognitive system, a set of dogmas, alone, it is meaningful experience and experience
meaning.”
10
Religion and ritual are bound theoretically and conceptually together through their
shared attention to material forms of interrelation, creating meaningful and communicative
subjectivities. Ritual theory charts these living performances of ritual through action and
interaction, communication and mediation between subjects and objects, and the human and non-
human (dead, divine) as mediated.
Bodily comportment, spatial layout and design, designated objects and costumes, order of
operations, particular texts or speech are all subject to ritual theorizations: these are the things
out of which ritual is made, which ritual mediates. Ritual draws attention to these things by
attending to them. In other words, ritual pays attention to particular things in particular places for
particular purposes. Jonathan Z. Smith takes this one step further to name ritual itself is a mode
10
Victor W. Turner, From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play, (New York City: Performing Arts
Journal Publications, 1982),86.
8
of paying attention – a “process for marking interest.”
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Ritual is a way of paying attention, a
way of marking interest, and a way of making and marking difference. Beginning to define ritual
this way, as a process, is a project developed by landmark ritual theorist Catherine Bell when she
renames her object of study “ritualization” and continued by this project. Citing Bell on Smith
and reconceptualizing Smith’s formal rigidity into Bell’s reflexive (and cybernetic) sense of
ritual not only brings together these two substantial theories of ritual but marks a definition of
ritual that is both formal and processual, both structural and reflexive.
One way of making and marking difference is the making and marking of different
bodies or changes in embodiment. Attention to bodies means attention to how specific bodies are
formed and reformed under these performative regimens. Victor Turner’s work on coming of age
rituals paid attention to the treatment of female versus male-gendered bodies and the impact of
ritual forms not only on these embodiments of the form of the ritual themselves. By dividing
rituals into his three-part process of separation, liminality, and return, Turner turned ritual into an
embodied and material process and turned too towards real experience and away from previous
linguistic models of rituals like Claude Levi-Strauss.
12
Such ritual theory pays attention to not
only the formal structures which make up what we call ritual but the impacts that these structures
have on the formation of bodies and subjectivities.
13
Ritualizing dead bodies is a play between human and non-human beings and human and
non-human worlds that emphasizes the materiality of embodiment and the transformation of
these embodiments from human to non-human, living to dead, human to post-human. From
11
Jonathan Z. Smith, To Take Place : Toward Theory in Ritual, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987),103.
12
Victor W. Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure, (Chicago: Aldine Pub. Co, 1969), vii.
13
Jonathan Z. Smith deals in the domestication of violence through ritual action and Ronald Grimes focuses on the
negotiation and contestation of boundaries (racial, socio-political, and otherwise).
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living to dead or otherwise, the precarious mediations of human and non-human worlds (worlds
of the dead, worlds of the gods, worlds of reincarnation) take place through the body as an
interface for ritual. As they are cleansed, wrapped, burned, and buried, bodies transform
materially and ideologically, from one state of being into another, from one realm of being into
another. Dead bodies are liminal objects between human and non-human and are themselves
objects for ritualization. Attending to ritualizations of death and their mediations through digital
technologies assure a material and embodied approach to digital ritualizations.
Examining ritual as a doing of religion means incorporating material and interactive
dimensions of doing subjectivity – specifically religious subjectivities. Ritual studies examines
the forms human beings make and take, both create and perform, in demarcated spaces for
effectual ends that involve problems of living and dying through ritualized modes of rulemaking
and repetition. Ritual studies now emphasizes these performative acts of subjectivity and identity
and has moved away from its earlier symbolic and linguistic roots. Action and interaction are
primary to social and subject formations within this constellation of ritual and performance
studies, from “Victor Turner’s ethnographic descriptions of ritual as a processual form of ‘social
drama,’ J. L. Austin’s linguistic theory of ‘performative utterances,’ and Erving Goffman’s
analyses of the scenarios of ‘social interaction.’”
14
As Catherine Bell notes, the term
“performance” was embraced in the 1960s by sociologists and anthropologists “as a means of
sidestepping the mind/body and thought/action dichotomies that previous approaches to ritual
appeared to impose.”
15
This performative approach to subjectivity formation lends itself too to
the new form of media theory.
14
Mark C. Taylor, ed., Critical Terms for Religious Studies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 206.
15
Ibid.
10
Both theories of new media and ritual incorporate the kind of “sidestepping” mentioned
by Bell by focusing on spaces of relation and connection rather than division. Stepping aside
means stepping into spaces and places of mediation. New media and ritual theories both focus on
mediation -- the spaces in between -- and their material connections. Encapsulating a sense of
“ritual” and “new media” from Charon to Cybernetics means going beyond territorial subfields
to find connective tissues and functional bonds between them and accounting for their broader
territories and what these territories show us about media, ritual, and death in contemporary
American contexts. Posthumanism offers this encapsulating tissue. As both an ontology and
ethics, epistemology and methodology, posthumanism emphasizes material and embodied
subjectivities across human and non-human boundaries and is sympathetic to the performative
emphases of both ritual and new media theories.
Posthumanism sees interactions between plant, animal, and the technological as networks
of embodiments and subjectivities that re-assign the “human” subject as a material expression of
relation. By rejecting and moving beyond humanism’s anthropocentric legacy of excluding and
obliterating non-normative (non-“human”) subjects and bodies through patriarchy, racism,
colonialism, and ecological destruction, posthumanism seeks a new referent for the human that
relies on ecological and material networks and relations rather than discursive, logocentric or
autonomous models of subjectivity.
16
In other words: posthumanism sees human being as an
active relation rather than a static subject mode. In its striving to think past anthropocentrism to
include broader arrays of objects, subjects, and means of being, posthumanism operates with a
set of tools beyond those currently being deployed in the study of digital religion.
16
Rosi Braidotti, The Post Human, (Cambridge, Malden MA: Polity, 2013), 2 ; Cristin Ellis, Antebellum
Posthuman: Race and Materiality in the Mid-Nineteenth Century, (New York: Fordham University Press, 2018), 6.
11
Feminist posthumanism in particular attends to materiality and embodiment. Donna
Haraway’s formative work explores the limits of what it is to be human through feminist
ontologies focused on scales of inclusion by encompassing the animal, human, and technological
in an interdependent ontology.
17
Kathryn Hayles’ posthumanism is most concerned with
rebutting the type of techno-escapist fantasies that proliferated in the first wave of religion and
new media scholarship.
18
Rosi Braidotti suggests a constructed, expansive, and materially
interdependent sense of human embodiment relating to media technologies.
19
These ontological
models are attractive alternatives to the instrumentalist models of technology and media in
contemporary scholarship on religion and media technologies that obscure the particularities of
material interactions between human and non-human in the performance and functions of digital
religion.
As a matrix of critical and ideological orientations emphasizing non-human being
arriving from ethical and ontological thinking that both prescribes and describes states of human
and non-human being, posthumanism is not just thinking past the human but thinking about how
to think past the human, relying upon a transdisciplinary way of thinking through fields of
feminist, animal, and disability studies. Posthumanism works to understand human difference by
exceeding anthropocentricism and its conceptual and historical legacies of exclusion, which has
“obscured the relationship between human and non-human animals but it has also masked other
relationships such as that been the organic and inorganic, the animate and the inanimate, and the
17
Nicholas Gane, “When We Have Never Been Human, What Is to Be Done?: Interview with Donna Haraway,”
Theory, Culture & Society 23, no. 7–8 December 2006, 135–58 ; Donna J. Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women:
The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991); Donna Jeanne Haraway,
Modest₋Witness@Second₋Millennium.FemaleMan₋Meets₋OncoMouse: Feminism and Technoscience, (New York:
Routledge, 1997).
18
Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics,
(Chicago, Ill: University of Chicago Press, 1999) , 4.
19
Rosi Braidotti, Metamorphoses: Towards a Materialist Theory of Becoming, (Malden: Polity Press, 2002); Rosi
Braidotti, The Post Human, (Malden MA: Polity), 2013.
12
classical opposition between subject and object.”
20
A posthumanist methodology begins from the
position that human subjectivities are not either materially or ideologically separate from their
environments. This feminist posthumanism of Rosi Braidotti and Kathryn Hayles rejects the idea
that human beings can be independent of their bodies or their technologies, as it is “historically,
scientifically and culturally impossible to distinguish bodies from their technologically-mediated
extensions,” with Braidotti describing human beings as “shot through” with technologies.
21
Donna Haraway agrees: “Not letting anyone think for a minute that this is immateriality rather
than getting at its specific materialities.”
22
This project seeks this descriptive specificity in
accounting for how digital technological apparatuses interact with the materials around and
within them and seeks out modes and nodes of both connection and interference.
Constructing a methodology that seeks where and how digital devices of plastic, metal,
and mineral interfere and interact with human, animal, and plant bodies requires some mode of
connectivity. Cary Wolfe frames this as a methodology that: “…far from surpassing or rejecting
the human – actually enables us to describe the human and its characteristic modes of
communication, interaction, meaning, social signification and affective investments with greater
specificity once we have removed meaning from the ontologically closed domain of
consciousness, reason, reflection and so on.”
23
If we are going to take materiality seriously, this
methodology needs to account for a way in which real material interactions (touch, friction,
fusion, diffusion, dissolution) are taking place through digital interventions into religious
practice. Within these senses of posthuman embodiments, how do these material specificities
20
Cary Wolfe, What Is Posthumanism?, 3.
21
Braidotti, Metamorphoses: Towards a Materialist Theory of Becoming, 228.
22
Gane, “When We Have Never Been Human, What Is to Be Done?”,140.
23
Cary Wolfe, What Is Posthumanism?, xxv.
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tether themselves together? What makes them inseparable? Most importantly for this proposed
methodology: how do we analyze and make sense of it? Posthuman theory gives us a second hint
towards a methodology: performative interaction.
As Peter Mahon notes in his Guide for the Perplexed, posthumanism is “just an
acknowledgment that humans and humanity are constantly changing through their interaction
with technology and tools.”
24
While this definition of posthumanism is overly simplistic and
leans into some humanist tendencies, it offers a certain clarity: if human and tool are the poles of
posthumanisms, if the simplest relation of posthuman thinking is between humanity and its tools
(those things that reach out into and manipulate the world) then being posthuman requires being
interactive. If posthuman being requires these interactions, then derivative posthuman thinking
must focus, as Pramod Nayar puts it: “not on borders but on conduits and pathways, not on
containment but on leakages, not on stasis but on movements of bodies, information, and
particles all located in a larger system.”
25
Nayar points to cybernetic and biological systems as
interactive systems that are both “open” and “closed,” both affected by the environment and
maintaining their integrity, as systems that must communicate, which must mediate. These open
systems, by remaining open, interactive, and wholly undetermined, allows Braidotti to play-off
of Spinoza’s fundamental question: “…we simply do not know what our enfleshed selves, minds
and bodies as one, can actually do.”
26
Posthumanism offers unique advantages to religious studies through their shared
engagement with striving beyond human being – the same strivings of religious experience or
divine ontology that religions and religious studies seek to explain. In other words, both
24
Peter Mahon, Posthumanism: A Guide for the Perplexed ,(New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017), 2.
25
Pramod K. Nayar, Posthumanism, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2014, 10.
26
Braidotti, The Post Human,190.
14
posthumanism and religion work from a notion that the human being is capable of exceeding its
own subjectivity, its own materiality, and its own realm of being to act and interact with and
through non-human forms, whether they be plant or animal, god or ghost. This dissertation
founds a heuristic posthumanist methodology for understanding digital religious actions in
contemporary American embodied practices around death and play that work at going beyond
these religious boundaries. In particular, it invests in how posthumanism opens new
understandings of human and non-human interaction around digital religious practice, and what
possibilities posthumanism offers for the study of digital religion in general, beyond the few
cases covered herein. What does it mean to think religion from the posthuman perspective? What
does ritual look like under a posthuman lens? How does a definition of “the religious” or “the
spiritual” change?
Directions
In order to answer these questions about the function of digital religion in light of
posthumanism, this dissertation divides itself into two parts: an opening set of chapters exploring
the contexts for posthumanism as a concept and heuristic tool for theorizing ritual and new
media, and the second pair of chapters deploying this set of tools over two case studies on green
digital death and death in video gaming.
Chapter one offers a functional and methodological introduction to posthumanism.
Establishing both ethical and ontological orientations, it charts two foundations for each, a
Foucauldian anti-humanism and material feminism for the former, and science and technology
studies and cybernetics for the latter. Ethical posthumanism in Foucault and material feminism
prescribe solutions to the exclusive, exclusionary, and anthropocentric histories of humanism
through their opposition to logocentric and essentialist understandings of the human and
15
attentions to alternative bodily formations. Ontological posthumanism by way of science and
technology studies and cybernetics grant functional and material understandings to these
alternative ethical prescriptions by enmeshing human and nonhuman technologies as co-
emergent. Through these prescriptive and descriptive modes of thinking beyond humanism, the
chapter develops a posthuman epistemology and methodology that attends to the situated,
embodied, and performative aspects of digital religious performance.
The second chapter goes on to chart new media and ritual theories from their origins to
present interactions with a posthuman epistemology to show the shared power of both in
exposing what is already there: the mediated and interactive nature of religion and human being.
Both emerging from smaller schools of thought, new media and ritual theories are
interdisciplinary, reaching out to cobble together effective new ways to speak to mediation and
performance. From Durkheim and Freud, ritual theory has always been concerned with how
rituals organize communal and individual values and desires, bringing with them anxieties
around the impact of ritual on bodies and communication, and ritual’s ability to impact the
everyday. From Benjamin to McLuhan, (new) media studies worries over the authenticity of the
image and agency within media technologies. Together, ritual and new media theories have a
shared focus around embodiment, performativity, and interfaces towards understand how new
media technologies function within a religious practice.
The first and second chapters organize and present a theory of posthuman ritual for
digital media by forwarding embodiment, performance, and interface as primary to
conceptualizing the function of digital media in ritualizations of death. The second half of the
dissertation then turns to examples of ritualizing the posthuman through case studies in digital-
eco mourning and playing with death in video games.
16
Chapter three picks up posthuman, new media, and ritual theories to analyze a case of
digital mourning within the broader contexts of the green burial movement. The BiosIncube is a
three-gallon planter housing a tree sapling and human cremains, monitored for its need for light,
water, or temperature change via a smartphone application. As part of a global green burial
movement focused on ecologically friendly burial and memorialization, the Incube offers a
domesticated device that brings the life of the tree into relation with digital and human bodies.
Ritualizing the BiosIncube locates posthuman subjectivity as ecologically, technologically, and
biologically contingent and gives place to green burial through the tree, the planter, and the
digital application. In anticipation of human and ecological death, the Incube puts dead human
materiality back into circulation with plant and human life through digital technology and offers
a place to ritualize the posthuman into being. This chapter turns to three aspects of ritual - place,
intensification, and performance – to locate the digital mediations of the BiosIncube as
exemplary of an ecological, co-emergent, intersubjective, posthuman process.
The fourth chapter follows the rise of video gaming to understand relations between
gaming, play, and death through the practice of “No-Death Runs,” player prescribed rules within
video games that exceed the prescribed means of play. The history of the study of religion and
play extends from early studies around mythologies and meaning-making to contemporary
studies of ritual and video gaming. This chapter marks its way through this history before
applying a posthuman ritual media theory to no-death runs, identifying three ways this kind of
play ritualizes death. This chapter brings the study of religion and games into broader
conversations about death and mediation by navigating both the priorities of the study of gaming
and religion and exercising the posthuman epistemologies of the present theory.
17
Destinations
From Charon’s paddle to keyboard clicks, mediating death has always involved
prosthetic tools, helping us move (materially and otherwise) from one side of death to the other,
or through a process of mourning, or from the living to the dead. As the tools for mediation
transform, they transform the mediating rituals they enact and help perform. By doing so, these
tools reshape what the limits of human being can be and question if the term human can even
apply to what is happening in these mediating rituals. Posthumanism is inherently concerned
with thinking outside the humanand how these interactive performances of human beings to non-
human beings create spaces for subjectivity formation or networks for creating modes of
differentiation between what we call the human all the non-human. For religious studies
specifically, the advantage here can be thinking about the divine or the sacred – what does it
mean to be not only not human but superhuman or suprahuman?
Looking to functional definitions of religion where religion is a type of doing that
mediates the human and non-human, posthumanism shows (in combination with something like
ritual studies) the very types of relationships that make up these larger functions – where subjects
connect, how, at what material or conceptual level, through what form and function, to what
ends, and in what shades and shapes. What makes up that function – the materials and
relationships between the materials – and what is motivating that relationship? Posthumanism
can reveal the function of religion at the material and intersubjective level. Posthumanism
attends “the human and its characteristic modes of communication, interaction, meaning, social
significations, and affective investments with greater specificity once we have removed meaning
from the ontologically closed domain of consciousness, reason, reflection, and so on” to access
ecological and networked ways of looking at human practices of religion that integrate non-
18
human elements through mediations of body and ideology.
27
Posthumanism offers a way of
understanding these words “digital” and “religion” through their material and functional
specificity.
This dissertation and its posthuman intervention go beyond digital religion into broader
conversations about the relationship between religion and science, religion, and materiality and
American sensibilities in navigating these relationships. By centering around the body as the
place of digital interface, this project finds common ground in these broader discussions. As
such, the dissertation itself serves as a mediation between interests in religious studies, American
studies, and science and technology studies and by presenting a way of thinking about death,
media, ritual, and religion within the context of American techno-capitalism and consumerism.
Science and technology studies and a recent turn in religious studies towards new
materialisms coalesce around investments in how material conditions shape ways of knowing.
28
Both new materialism and science and technology studies recognize the agency of things, of
objects of materials: the ability for material objects to act on human ways of being. Together,
they share not only this interest in the agency of materiality but they want to use this recognition
of non-human agency to exceed the assumptions and limitations of humanism. The urgency with
which religious studies is turning to material agency beyond the confines of humanism and
anthropocentrism and incorporating material sensibilities of nonhuman from the animal, plants, ,
27
Wolfe, What Is Posthumanism?, xxv.
28
Donna Jeanne Haraway, Modest₋Witness@Second₋Millennium.FemaleMan₋Meets₋OncoMouse: Feminism and
Technoscience, (New York: Routledge, 1997); Catherine Keller, ed., Entangled Worlds: Religion, Science, and New
Materialisms (New York: Fordham University Press, 2017); David Cave and Rebecca Sachs Norris, Religion and
the Body: Modern Science and the Construction of Religious Meaning(Boston: Brill, 2012); Stacy Alaimo and
Susan J. Hekman, eds., Material Feminisms (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2008); Peter M. Scott,
Anti-Human Theology: Nature, Technology, and the Post-Natural, Book, Whole (Westminster John Knox Press,
2010); Jeremy Stolow, Deus in Machina: Religion, Technology, and the Things in Between, Book, Edited (Fordham
University Press, 2013).
19
ecological, and digital supports and elevates the present proposed approach to how religious
activity is formed through and with emerging digital technologies. Science and technology
studies and new materialism together form another region into which this dissertation can travel.
Along with these contributions to American studies and the new materialism of Science
and Technology Studies, this project is an interrogation of what has come to be called Digital
Religion, a reassessment of what can be meant by both these terms, and what consequences these
definitions have for a changing sense of the human in the study of contemporary American
religion and digital culture. This is a look at rituals mediating life and death through an analysis
of the tools that mediate them, the subjectivities they shape, and what that all means for the study
of religion, digital media, and death. Using posthumanism as a macro lens for exploring new
media, death, and ritual reveals a few landmarks:
Posthuman epistemologies, rituals, and new media theories are a constellation of shared
concerns leveraged towards understanding digital religion and mediation beyond demarcations of
human and non-human or digital and non-digital. This posthuman approach offers a functional
understanding of religious practice as primarily situated, embodied, and performative. With these
theoretical and methodological orientations in place, this dissertation unveils death and
mediation in America as an exemplary location for understanding how these new mediations and
ritualizations function to both expand a sense of what counts as within the sphere of the human
conceptually, and what can be effective methodologically for understanding digital religion
beyond the screen. Digital burial objects like the BiosIncube and playing with death like “No-
Death Runs” illuminate the contingency of death and mediation, the transformation of
embodiments and orientations towards death through mediation, ritualization, and play, and the
ways posthuman theories help us see these connections.
20
Posthumanism going forward is a heuristic typology. Like any typology, it has its
limitations. With the task of both creating and implementing this heuristic typology, it cannot
account for all things. Developed for studying digital religion within its currently established
discourse and for the case studies at hand, it is able to capture only certain aspects of what could
go on to be a more comprehensive and applied study. Through the limited case-studies chosen
and the works cited, this posthumanism does offer new avenues of exploration in these areas
without being able to go down all of them.
As Charon dips his paddle into the mediating flow, his body functions with his tools to
bring human life closer to human death, like the religious rituals and media technologies that
follow. This dissertation charts these movements between bodies, tools, and the non-human
spaces and ways of being accessed through religion. In all, it is a story about mediating life and
death and the tools and performances that make that possible, the worlds we imagine and achieve
through these mediations, and what role bodies and media technologies have in creating these
possibilities. Through understanding the extension of human life through human death and media
technologies mediation of this extension, we can grasp a posthuman lens for religion and ritual
that can peer through to the movements of a steersman, as he cranes over his paddle, pushing
human life into the unknown.
21
CHAPTER ONE – Posthumanisms: Ethics, Ontology, Epistemology
Charon’s journey of death and mediation begins long before bodies reach his shores. This
journey extends to the limit of human being: its limits of life and death, being and non-being,
human and non-human. So too must our journey extend into understanding new mediation of
death. Here posthumanism and its collected set of concepts and values come into play. To
understand posthumanism’s methodological usefulness for theorizing digital religion, we need a
sense of posthumanism that exposes its working roots, pulls its connective tissues into view, and
fires its circuity. In other words, we need to understand posthumanism primarily as a way of
thinking about being human. We need a working definition of posthumanism that favors function
over essence by looking at the conceptual and theoretical composition of the ethical and
ontological aims of posthumanism. Four root systems make up these ethical and ontological
functions of posthuman thinking: Anti-humanism and Material Feminism under an ethic, and
Cybernetics and Science and Technology Studies under an ontology.
Only by unsheathing these active edges of a posthumanism can we fully account for its
utility and consequence. Understanding going outside the humanthrough digital religion requires
what philosopher of science Karl Popper in 1953 called a “bold hypothesis,” one that reaches
beyond the rational or the sensible to a place tested only by trial-and-error, “of boldly proposing
theories; of trying our best to show that these are erroneous; and of accepting them tentatively if
our critical efforts are unsuccessful.”
29
This kind of post-war thinking from Popper is part of a
broader theory of “heuristics,” what mathematical theorist George Poyla defined in 1945 as
“reasoning not regarded as final and strict but as provisional and plausible only, whose purpose
29
Karl Popper, “Philosophy of Science: A Personal Report,” in British Philosophy in the Mid-Century; A
Cambridge Symposium, ed. Cecil Alec Mace (New York: Macmillan, 1957), 166.
22
is to discover the solution of the present problem…[w]e shall attain complete certainty when we
shall have obtained the complete solution, but before obtaining certainty we must often be
satisfied with a more or less plausible guess.”
30
Coming from the Greek “heuriskein," “to
discover,” heuristic thinking involves concepts, terms, hypothesis, and thesis that are by
definition uncertain, adaptive, or reflexive. Heuristic concepts are beginnings for thinking rather
than endings, devices for trial-and-error, tools rather than foundations, functions rather than
essences.
Heuristics and cybernetics (the basis of all things digital) share both Greek and postwar
origins: they both were conceived as exploratory endeavors dependent on “feedback,” the ability
to send something (like data or a concept) into the flow of the current to watch its ripples, see its
impact, and reshape that thing according to how the environmental impact. In other words, both
cybernetics and heuristics are functional tools for uncertain environments. The uncertain
environment in the case of this dissertation is the relationship between digital structures, human
beings, non-human beings, and religious practice. The heuristic concepts here (in their most
functional plainness) are humanism and posthumanism. We must first understand how these
terms operate around and through each other in order to understand how digital religion changes
them. This chapter offers up lineages of “humanism” and “posthumanism” as heuristic concepts
for the purposes of understanding digital religion in order to position them to go forward into the
forthcoming case-studies as functional tools for trial-and-error.
(Post)Humanism
30
George Poyla, How to Solve It (Princeton University Press, 1945),113.
23
Using posthumanism as a tool to understand relations between the human and the non-
human in digital religion requires first understanding how posthumanism is “post" “humanism”:
posthumanism only functions in relation to something called humanism – so we first need to
understand humanism in the context of posthumanism. Humanism (rather than being one thing or
even one set of things) is a set of value systems that theologian and posthumanist Elaine L.
Graham calls “to account for their implicit idolatries.”
31
Humanism exists for the present project
at its breaking point with posthumanism – in a mid-twentieth century post-war, post-modern
atmosphere. Humanism (in all its changing forms, from renaissance humanisms to seventeenth-
century rationalism, to its nineteenth-century critiques) was, as Tony Davies puts in his summary
of Humanism “called to account” in the face of atrocities of the Nazi regime and the atomic
fallout. Both Graham and Davies see humanism chiefly as an object of critique, one that
(particularly in a post-war/post-Foucauldian moment) exists not as real historical fact but as a set
of values persisting since the renaissance, when man overtook god.
Humanism that began, as William Robert puts it, as a “ domineering self-assertion based
on an appeal to some intrinsic ‘human nature’ and shared ‘human condition’ that distinguished
humanity from divinity” evolved after the Second World War into a theoretical object within a
“broader field of gender, sexual, racial, and colonial relations” according to race and gender
theorist Zakiyyah Imán Jackson, when thinkers like Franz Fanon called for a more expansive and
inclusive humanism.
32
Humanism as a value system and theoretical-heuristic object was
positioned for its critique in the “post” moment. In particular, Graham points to Nietzsche’s
31
Elaine L. Graham, Representations of the Post/Human: Monsters, Aliens, and Others in Popular Culture, Book,
Whole (New Brunswick, N.J: Rutgers University Press, 2002).225.
32
William Robert, Trials: Of Antigone and Jesus, electronic resource, 1st ed, Perspectives in Continental Philosophy
(New York, N.Y: Fordham University Press, 2010), 37; Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, “Animal: New Directions in the
Theorization of Race and Posthumanism,” ed. Kalpana Rahita Seshadri, Michael Lundblad, and Mel Y. Chen,
Feminist Studies 39, no. 3 (2013): 669–85, 669.
24
influence on Foucault as placing humanism within a genealogy as an object of critique.
Humanism, in the late half of the twentieth century, became more this object of critique than a
locatable historical object, with posthumanism as the point of departure for such a critique. This
chapter first positions humanism within such a lineage before introducing it as a heuristic object
as critiqued by and through the construction of posthumanism.
Posthumanism acknowledges the imbrication and co-evolution of the human and the non-
human in a heuristic, exploratory and wholistic sense to integrate human ethics, ontologies, and
epistemologies with non-human elements of the world: cosmic, sacred, animal, plant, and
technological. These various ethics, ontologies, and (finally) epistemologies guide the present
study and formation of a particular posthumanism for understanding digital religion. In her book
Antebellum Posthuman Cristin Ellis defines posthumanism as an “admittedly heterogeneous set
of material ontologies” that “insist upon the constitutive entanglement of mind and body, human
and nonhuman being upon material and cultural forces.”
33
The heterogeneity is inherent to
heuristics: a posthumanism for the emerging and always changing contemporary study of digital
religion should be heuristic (of trial and error, flexibility and feedback, adaptable) and therefore
epistemological: driven by an exploratory way of knowing based on a value system that critiques
humanism.
Posthumanism (as heuristic feedback of humanism) follows Popper’s “bold hypothesis”
and the Greek roots of heuristics “to discover” as an exploratory term that (1) critiques the value
system of humanism and (2) seeks to go beyond or beside the category of humanism to create a
more inclusive value system. For the study of religion and digital religion specifically,
posthumanism puts human subjectivity and being heuristically back into play with non-human
33
Cristin Ellis, Antebellum Posthuman: Race and Materiality in the Mid-Nineteenth Century, (New York: Fordham
University Press, 2018),6.
25
subjects like ghosts, gods, trees, data, animals, and machines through a re-orientation from
humanism to give religious studies’ already eclectic and collective sense of theories and methods
a new tool. As posthuman theorist Pramod K. Nayar puts it, posthumanism is “the radical
decentering of the traditional sovereign, coherent and autonomous human in order to
demonstrate how the human is always already evolving with, constituted by, and constitutive of
multiple forms of life and machines.”
34
Acknowledging this “co-evolution” is itself heuristic: by
opening up the channels through which the concept of the human being can flow, there are
increasingly possibilities for feedback, for echoes, for ripples of new relations. Posthumanism is
a system of trials and errors, and an imperfect but bold hypothesis that reaches outside the
human. Like religious studies and wondering beyond the limits of death, posthumanism works at
the limits of human experience.
But this heuristic and epistemological posthumanism cannot emerge out of whole-cloth:
in order for it to be responsive to something called humanism, it needs to arrive from particular
critiques of that value-system. The task of this chapter is in large part to lay out and defend the
lineage of posthumanism I have chosen as a tool to understand digital religion, a posthumanism
that is particularly suited for the heuristic task ahead. Following again from a Nietzschean
influence and Foucauldian grounded approach to identifying genealogies of value systems, this
chapter introduces four “root-systems” for understanding a posthumanism heuristically fit to
understand digital religion: a Foucauldian Anti-Humanism, Material Feminism, Cybernetics, and
Science and Technology studies and what follows is a close reading of exemplary models of
each type of thinking. These genealogies or what I am calling (to avoid any particular Nietzchean
obligations) “lineages” characterize my particular use of posthumanism, and in particular, the
34
Pramod K. Nayar, Posthumanism, Book, Whole (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2014), 2.
26
kind of tools each methodology allows for the proposed heuristic approach. Each of these
four roots generates a range of posthuman concerns as a response to a humanist value system that
bring ethical (Anti-Humanism and Material Feminisms) and ontological (Cybernetics and
Science and Technology Studies) concerns to new media practices involving religion and the
non-human.
This heuristic methodology chosen for such a task (of root and value systems, close
readings and trials and errors) is imbricated in the same historical period when the roots of
posthumanism take to ground. Heuristics emerged as of interest to mathematicians, philosophers
of science, psychologists, and economists in the 1950s and 60s alongside Foucault’s anti-
humanism, feminism, cybernetics, and science and technology studies. This project sees both
humanism and posthumanism as heuristic concepts: built to be reformed and re-shaped through
interrelation and feedback, as adaptive but not amorphous terms held up to signify a network of
values, ethics, ontologies, and epistemologies. In order to introduce a specific posthumanism for
the purposes of digital religion, this chapter offers a set of exemplary close readings representing
each of the four roots of posthumanism that illustrate their investments in the mediation and
materials involved in the doing of digital religion. Selecting a methodology for constructing a
posthumanism that is inherent to the material both grounds posthumanism in a particular history
of thought while reinforcing its heuristic nature: posthumanism only exists as a critique of
humanism, and humanism only exists for posthumanism at its point of departure with humanism.
From here they both become objects of echoes and feedbacks, ricocheting concepts that build
and defeat each other, that in their trial-and-error chaos function more as tools than touchstones,
more as orientations than objects: beginning with the ethical and ontological implications of a
posthuman heuristic.
27
Posthuman Ethics, Posthuman Ontologies
I approach ethics (principles for being) and ontology (conditions for being) with caution,
not wanting to wade into overly contested philosophical territories but instead simply marking
modes of thinking as two different ways of understanding posthumanism. I do not wish to embed
this discussion in contested lineages of capital “E” Ethics and capital “O” Ontology but instead
divide posthumanism into recognizable categories to clarify the literature and its consequences.
As Pramod K. Nayar puts it, “’Posthumanism’ on the one hand merely refers to an ontological
condition in which many humans now, and increasingly will, live with chemically, surgically,
technologically modified bodies and/or in close conjunction (networked) with machines and
other organic forms…As a philosophical, political, and cultural approach, it addresses the
question of the human in the age of technological modification, hybridized life forms, new
discoveries of the sociality (and ‘humanity’) of animals and a new understanding of life itself.”
35
Nayar’s division between material conditions and political questions hews posthuman into
distinct categories of the “ontological” and the political/cultural, or what I am calling the
“ethical.”
Ethical posthumanism demands reprioritizing inter-species and inter-material relations at
a moment of ecological, technological, and economic precarity. It reads humanism as being
inherently exclusionary, drenched in a history of colonial and hegemonic violence. In response to
these violences and exclusions of anthropocentric humanism and the changing material
conditions of being human on earth, ethical posthumanism, as Braidotti tells us, seeks a new
referent for “ourselves.”
36
Looming posthuman ethical problems include agency and self-hood,
35
Ibid., 3.
36
Braidotti, The Post Human, 12.
28
what constitutes a human subject, and how we can understand the imperatives and
responsibilities of human beings as agents concerning nonhuman agents, and constitute an
ethical imperative through its questions: how does human-made climate change impact the
security and well-being of both human and nonhuman? How do invasive technologies alter
bodily integrity and autonomy? How does new knowledge of animal behaviors infringe on
human exceptionalism?
A peril of enlisting a purely ethical posthumanism for theorizing the human condition is
that it can fall victim to its own critical fangs and become an ouroboros – the snake eating itself.
By critiquing all conditions of being human through the lens of humanism, ethical posthumanism
can create a two-pronged trap: first, the reification of a straw-man humanism that represents no
realized conditions for being human and second (as a consequence of this) the possibility that the
prescriptions of an ethical posthumanism will become just as exclusionary or impossible as those
of the perceived humanism. In order to avoid the purely prescriptive nature of ethical
posthumanism (and hopefully these pitfalls) within the proposed heuristic, this project too turns
to ontological posthumanism as a descriptive and material echo or feedback apparatus. A
functional posthumanism must be not only prescriptively ethical but also descriptively
ontological in order to effectively venture out into cases of death and mediation.
Where an ethical posthumanism seeks to decenter humanism, ontological posthumanism
describes a world where the human has already been decentered by focusing on material and
functional relationships between subjects and bodies that problematize the bodily and subject
integrity label of “human.” Ontological posthumanism is concerned with subject integrity,
function, and conditions for being. Ontology concerns itself with the substance and function of
being, whether it be called monads or planes or rese extensa. Posthuman ontologies focus on the
29
material and functional being of the posthuman subject. Where ethics prescribe a conditional
way of being, posthuman ontology describes a current state of becoming and is the material
position to which prescriptive ethic relates. In other words, ethical posthumanism extends from
the material conditions observed by way of a posthuman ontology. Rosi Braidotti describes such
a posthuman ontological state as materialist, vitalist, embodied, and embedded, part of a nature-
culture continuum, and most importantly for understanding digital religion in this case, as “shot-
through” with techno-cultural constructs.
37
Posthuman theorist Don Ihde too sees technology and
the posthuman body in a prosthetic “embodiment relation,” where the environment is
experienced only through the embodiments of a device.
38
Dividing ethical from ontological posthumanism untangles a posthuman spectrum that
swings from immortal cyborgs to the agency of minerals by marking the prescriptive critique of
humanism as unique but not separate from the analysis of ontologies under new material
regimes. Together, ethical posthumanism concerns the category of the human while ontological
posthumanism accounts for everything from minerals to microchips and flora to fauna. This
more complex approach to posthumanism disassembles a monolithic capital “P” Posthuman into
constituent histories of thought by attending to two unique origin points for ethical and
ontological posthumanism and creates a self-reflexive heuristic to explore the limits of human
being and digital religion.
Ethical and ontological posthumanism arrive from dual genealogies of posthuman
thinking: the ethical branches from the final passages of Michel Foucault’s Order of Things in
37
Braidotti, Metamorphoses: Towards a Materialist Theory of Becoming,188; Braidotti, The Post Human, 2.
38
Ihde 126: Don Ihde 1934 et al., Chasing Technoscience: Matrix for Materiality, (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 2003), 126.
30
which he declares the death of man, the ontological at the Macy conferences, a post-war series
organized around understanding human thought and communication technologies.
39
These two
points, first Foucault’s statement that “… man is an invention of a recent date. And one perhaps
nearing its end,” and conclusions from the Macy Conferences that “When human atoms are knit
into an organization in which they are used… it matters little that their raw material is flesh and
blood” are the origins of an ethical and ontological posthumanism.
40
Each makes bold statements
in the postwar period about the end of humanism and the beginning of the evolution and
revolution of human-being into a new posthuman state. But new compared to what? Before fully
unpacking what it is to use posthumanism heuristically, we must understand what posthumanism
is “post.”
Humanism
A central assumption of both these posthumanisms is that there is something called
humanism to begin with. As Cary Wolfe puts it posthumanism, “…comes both before and after
humanism: before in the sense that it names the embodiment and embeddedness of the human
being in not just its biological but also its technological world…[b]ut it comes after in the sense
that posthumanism names a historical moment in which the decentering of the human by its
imbrication in technical, medical, informatic, and economic networks is increasingly impossible
39
I adapt this dual-genealogical framework from Cary Wolfe and further show how these dual genealogies lead to
different sense of the posthuman and how these different senses of the posthuman can help us understand the
particularities of its effectiveness for understanding digital religion.
40
Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, (New York NY: Vintage Books,
1994),386-7; Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings, (New York: Doubleday and Co., 1956),185. Each
of these origins have lineages of their own becoming, lineages that, excluding points directly supportive of present
arguments, are too broad for my aims. However, it must be said, these chosen lineages are wholly white, western,
and masculine. It must also be said that the lineages are post-war. However, I hope my most critical interventions
arrive from the feminist perspective, interventions around specific embodiments.
31
to ignore.”
41
This “decentering” of the human being comes after the labor of humanism to put
the human being at the center of all things. In order to place posthumanism as a heuristic concept
in relation to this before and after, we need to understand humanism and its power primarily as a
heuristic concept to which posthumanism responds.
As Tony Davies notes, many historical concepts have been called “humanism”:
..the civic humanism of quattrocento Italian city-states, the protestant humanism of
sixteenth-century northern Europe, that rationalist humanism that attended at the
revolutions of enlightened modernity, and the romantic and positivistic humanisms
through which the European bourgeoisie established their hegemony over it, the
revolutionary humanism that shook the world and the liberal humanism that sought to
tame it, the humanism of the Nazis and the humanism of their victims and opponents, the
anti-humanist humanism of Heidegger and the humanist anti-humanism of Foucault and
Althusser…
42
As a concept, “humanism” can be traced through its philological roots in Greek, its transcription
through the nineteenth-century into a classical curriculum inspired by a romantic Hellenism, and
its subsequent development as the “humanities” as a scholarly discipline.
43
Legal theorist Fred
Baumann, in an attempt to reinvigorate the category of humanism in this “post” moment, breaks
this history of humanism and its changing referents into four broad historical moments: (1) the
renaissance humanities, (2) the seventeenth-century rationalism exemplified by Renee Descartes,
(3) the nineteenth-century critique of humanism exemplified by Friedrich Nietzsche, and (4) the
twentieth-century neo-liberal humanism and the accompanying (what he calls) “cultural
embarrassment” around this idea of humanism.
44
Baumann is helpful here, for not only does he
41
Wolfe, What Is Posthumanism?, xv.
42
Tony Davies, Humanism, (New York NY: Routledge 2008), 130.
43
Davies, Humanism, 2 ; Stefan Lorenz Sorgner and Robert Ranisch, Post- and Transhumanism : An
Introduction,(Frankfurt: Peter Lang, Internationaler Verlag der Wissenschaften, 2015), 7; William Robert, Trials: Of
Antigone and Jesus, 38.
44
Baumann, Fred. 2010. "Humanism's Four Stages." The American Interest, Sep, 83-93 ,92.
32
give a clear lineage of this thing called humanism, but in doing so recognizes its inherent
ambiguity or malleability. In each of these moments, humanism is defined by the things around
it, the presence of a value system within a particular cultural environment, more so than it is
defined by some essential nature.
45
What Baumann allows for here, more than anything, is the
resilience of a heuristic humanism. Following Baumann, and rather than a comprehensive
account of humanism, I hope to provide an account of humanism as critiqued or exceeded
through posthumanism. The danger here, of course, is the meticulous and unintentional
reconstruction of a strawman. However, humanism is as multi-valent as its critique, and so I
choose to preserve points for heuristic purposes to reconstruct the humanism that posthumanism
responds to or rejects.
Davies gives us a more dualistic view of this heuristic: “‘humanism’ is either the
“philosophical champion of human freedom and dignity” or an “ideological smokescreen for the
oppressive mystifications of modern society.”
46
Davies’ humanisms, as either triumph or
smokescreen, represent the kinds of intentionally polarizing positions that posthuman attempts to
counter. Of interest to this project is the concept of humanism at the point of its break with
posthumanism in the post-war period. Davies argues that this brand of humanism is in one way a
project of modernity, of separating human being from non-human being through historical and
scientific narratives.
45
In addition to these many humanism, William Robert categorizes humanism under a central idea of
autonomy, calling it a “theory of human independence and self-sufficiency that frees humanity from reliance on
divinity and positions it atop a hierarchical ordering of reality.” (William Robert, Trials: Of Antigone and Jesus, ,3)
Such autonomy is not only from god but from anything other than human being. It is self-sufficiency built upon self-
determination, and self-determination built on reason and rationality. Rationality, or the hierarchy of thought or the
mind over the material and the body sustains a long line of relations not necessarily of human mind over human body,
but mind over body.
46
Davies, Humanism, 5.
33
Davies’ two-part conceptualization and Baumann’s four-part lineage of humanism helps
avoid getting too far away from humanism as a heuristic object shaped by its circumstance. I
follow Baumann’s line beginning from Cartesian rationalism as a starting point for
understanding humanism. As David Roden puts it in Posthuman Life, Descartes’ internal
epistemology (cogito ergo sum, I think therefore I am) is “arch-humanism”, for it completely
dismisses anything other than the human mind (or more precisely rational thought) as the essence
of rational being.
47
This emphasis on rationality re-centers humans as the axis of a new world of
being where humans detach themselves from the non-human world in order to make that world
more intelligible. Whether a hierarchy or field of orbit, rationality pulls all things towards the
human at the center.
In his 1637 Discourse on Method, Descartes abstracts a number of ideas articulated
further in his later works, including the formation of rationality as a unique human property that
functionally separates humans from all other life. After working through such concerns as
scientific consideration, rules of method, morals of method, and the proof of god and the soul,
Descartes turns to “Part V: on physics, the heart, and the soul of man and animals,” -- what he
calls the “rational soul.” The rational soul is a unique object created by god alone and imbued
into human beings alone, in “that it could not be in any way derived from the power of matter,
like the other things of which I had spoken, but that it must be expressly created.”
48
Here
Descartes forms of a singular relationship between humans, god, and this thing called rationality:
God has formed the rational soul for the unique purposes of human being and this rational soul
47
David Roden, Posthuman Life: Philosophy at the Edge of the Human, Book, (London: Routledge, Taylor &
Francis Group, 2015), 23.
48
Rene Descartes, Mediations on First Philosophy, trans. Donald A. Cress, (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1993), 36.
34
“should also be joined and united more closely to the body in order to have sensations and
appetites similar to our own, and thus to form a true man.”
49
Descartes arrives at such a unique relationship between man, god, and rationality through
his familiarity and fascination with automata, or mechanical puppetry. Deploying his own case
study, Descartes recognizes that many automata can, with “very few parts in comparison with the
great multitude of bones, muscles, nerves, arteries, veins, or other parts that are found in the
body of each animal” in fact closely mimic the outward appearance and behavior of those
animals.
50
He extrapolates from this that if there were a far more complex automata, one
“possessing the organs and outward form of a monkey or some other animal without reason, we
should not have had any means of ascertaining that they were not of the same nature as those
animals.”
51
Materiality and performativity are particularly important to Descartes’ analysis, as
they are both indeterminate and easily disguisable or unknowable things: “organs and outward
form” can easily deceive his epistemology, it seems. Functionally speaking, an automata and a
monkey collapse into the same category if their materiality and performativity are effectively the
same. It is only rationality that ascends from this confusing mix.
Descartes, in thinking animality, mechanics, artificial life, rationality, and the essential
human being together elevates only the rational soul as the height of difference between human
and other animals (or “brutes” as he calls them).
52
In doing so, he forms a humanistic
epistemology that eliminates all but the human from the category of rationality, subjugating
animals, machines, plants, and other forms of materiality, life, or performativity into one broad
category: the non-human, and makes them seemingly indistinguishable from each other. In
49
Ibid.
50
Ibid., 36.
51
Ibid., 35.
52
Ibid.
35
proving human rationality by way of showing no discernable distinction between a well-made
machine and a monkey, Descartes expemlifies the exclusionary, categorical, and bifurcating
power of “rationality” and its ability to create two categories: human and non-human. This
Cartesian rumination contains all the materiality and performativity of later posthuman
responses: by bringing these categories together only to separate them, Cartesian-rationalism-as-
humanism has declared its boundaries.
53
This Cartesian brand of rational autonomy is, under the critique of posthumanism, failing
to hold. This failure, Roden points out (citing Katherine Hayles and Donna Haraway), is “in part,
technoscientific in origin. Descartes’ dualisms between inner and outer, mind and mechanism
have become harder to maintain since the computation revolution showed that rational operations
can be implemented by appropriately structured mechanical processes…”
54
Part of this
dissolution of a Cartesian heuristic-humanism has to do with this dualism. But the roots of this
critique go far deeper than this “computational revolution.” The cracks were showing well before
then - at the end of the Second World War.
Anti-humanism, feminism, cybernetics, and science and technology studies found their
particular posthumanisms on ethical and ontological responses to humanisms. Anti-humanism
and a feminist critique prescribe alternative ethics to those of humanism, while cybernetics and
Science and Technology studies create material grounds for alternative posthuman ontologies.
All create mirror images of humanism where their critiques form the objects of their criticism
alongside new possibilities for humans as subjects and as materials. Without these critiques,
53
Of interest too perhaps to religious studies in particular is the division of god and man on one side and all other
forms of life or being on the other: in Cartesian rationalism there is no room for a religion of anything else other
than humans. Likewise, materiality and performativity are not critical categories, but are rather indiscernible: only
rationality, interiority, and thought (like language) are categories for determination or critical categorization.
54
David Roden, Posthuman Life: Philosophy at the Edge of the Human, Book, Whole (London: Routledge, Taylor
& Francis Group, 2015), 24.
36
these mirrors, these alternative ways of seeing human being, there is no full account of the power
of posthumanism. It is from this territory of humanism both as a construction and as an object of
critique that I map the paths these critiques form for posthumanism as fruitful for digital
religious studies as material, embodied, and performative. One crack in this monument of
humanism began in the post-war periods with a direct response of “anti-humanism” that
culminated in Michel Foucault declaring the death of man.
Anti-Humanism
As the Second World War ended and the Cold War settled over the earth, new scars and
fears emerged from the genocidal fascism and paranoid nationalism, with concurrent regimes of
mass murder and terror redefining human being by creating new mortal categories of who was
allowed to live, be morally good, or exist within a certain state-hood. Anti-humanism came to
resist these tendencies. Anti-humanism sought the dissolution of the category of “humanism”
through a resistance to the hegemonic cultures facilitating atrocities of the World and Cold wars.
A particular strain of Foucauldian anti-humanism cited by posthumanists and religion scholars
cracked open humanism as a concept, creating the possibility for a new ethics around the idea of
the human. Posthumanists cite Foucault as indicative of this mid-twentieth century break and
credit the passage with exposing humanism itself (as Baumann notes) as a heuristic concept now
turned tool for critique.
55
Posthumanist theories look to Michel Foucault’s 1966 Les Mots et les Choses or The
Order of Things as a primary document for the death of humanism and as representative of anti-
55
Braidotti, The Post Human,16.
37
humanist thinking for the purposes of posthuman ethics.
56
Specifically, ethical posthumanists
point to this closing paragraph as a place where ethical posthumanism began:
One thing in any case is certain: man is neither the oldest nor the most constant problem
that has been posed from human knowledge...one can be certain that man is a recent
invention within it...And that appearance was not the liberation of an old anxiety, the
transition into a luminous consciousness of an age-old concern, the entry into objectivity,
of something that had long remained trapped within beliefs and philosophies: it was the
effect of a change in the fundamental arrangements of knowledge. As the archeology of
our thought easily shows, man is an invention of a recent date. And one perhaps nearing
its end. If those arrangements were to disappear as easily as they appeared, if some
event...were to cause them to crumble, as the ground of classical thought did, at the end
of the eighteenth century, then one can certainly wager that man would be erased, like a
face drawn in the sand at the edge of the sea.
57
Ethical posthumanists cite this final passage as the (dis)orienting point for a thinking about the
death of “man.” It marks, for them, the mid-twentieth century as the breaking point of
posthumanism from a cohesive, autonomous, and wholly unique “humanism.” Cary Wolfe
claims that the roots of posthumanism begin with the “pronouncements of the sort made famous
by Foucault in the closing paragraph of The Order of Things…”
58
Pramod Nayar cites Foucault
here as proposing that we “treat humanism as a set of techniques or processes…Foucault sees
humanist philosophy as a device through which powerful groups and institutions were able to
control other individuals and groups.”
59
Rosi Braidotti claims the “death of Man, announced by
Foucault formalizes an epistemological and moral crisis that goes beyond binary oppositions and
cuts across the political spectrum…Anti-humanism consists in de-linking the human agent from
the universalistic posture, calling him to task, so to speak, on the concrete actions he is
56
Neil Badmington, Posthumanism,c(Routledge, 2011), 29; Nayar, Posthumanism.,12-14; Davies,
Humanism.;Sorgner and Ranisch, Post- and Transhumanism : An Introduction,51.
57
Foucault, The Order of Things, 386-7.
58
Cary Wolfe, What Is Posthumanism?, xii.
59
Pramod K. Nayar, Posthumanism, 14.
38
enacting.”
60
By problematizing the concept of man as response to the concept of God, and
wrapping this in a genealogy of the humanities as creating certain forms of knowledge that
create this idea of “man” or human,” Foucault re-creates “humanism” as a heuristic term, one
now ready for use as a critical tool. A Foucauldian anti-humanism began to create the
possibilities for a posthuman way of thinking, cracking open the concept of humanism as it stood
(per Baumann) at the middle of the twentieth century, for a new revision and critique.
Religion scholar Richard King similarly points to this final passage in The Order of
Things as generative of religious studies as we know it today, when he says “For Foucault the
death of God …has led to God’s temporary replacement by “Man” (and the establishment of the
‘sciences of man’ as they replace of the science of God, theology). This, he suggests, is little
more than an aftereffect (an “aftershock” if you will) of the death of God. Similarly, this “Man”
(actually a white European male) is destined to be displaced as the figure on which to establish
the foundations of scientific knowledge and history.”
61
Foucault’s passage on the death of man
has opened up the possibility of a critical engagement between concepts of man and god through
an idea of the “sciences” by throwing both concepts of “god” and “man” into a tumble, as King
suggests. For opening up a posthuman heuristic for the study of religion in the contemporary
moment, Foucault’s words are unavoidable: they are cited not only by posthumanist and
religionists as the roots of a new way of (re)thinking the human, but they do so within and
through a post-war reaction to the human condition, coinciding in time with the cybernetic
heuristics inherent to this project.
60
Rosi Braidotti, The Post Human, (Cambridge, Malden MA: Polity, 2013), 23.
61
Richard King, “The Copernican Turn in the Study of Religion,” in Religion, Theory, Critique: Classic and
Contemporary Approaches and Methedologies, ed. Richard King (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017), 3-
4.
39
The post-war rise of anti-humanism coincided with the Macy Conferences’ investment in
understanding human being and human thought. Anti-humanism resisted human cognition as the
central, determining factor for both human and non-human existence. Anti-humanist tendencies
destabilized the category of the human by refusing this central component of a dominant
humanism and upended the category of the human or “man”, opening up the possibility for a
new, proto-posthuman ethic.
Material Feminism
What qualifies as “human” has always been a political question of race, gender, and
class. Feminism first worked to include the category “woman” amongst those qualifying as
human, while later feminisms exposed the internal political struggles within this very aim by
questioning categories upon which both human and woman stood, and how and why these
categories are constructed – through what models of thinking, literacies, and recognitions. This
third-wave feminism demanded a re-evaluation of how human subjectivities are conceived and
created by upsetting the roots of the female/feminine. As Braidotti puts it: “[f]eminism has
contributed in fact to re-thinking the living processes of existence, literally the spaces in between
the mental and the physical, the theoretical and the experimental. Feminist philosophers have
also connected this shift to the task of overthrowing centuries-old dichotomies.”
62
Both re-
thinking spaces between the mental and the physical and overthrowing dichotomies contribute
directly to feminist theories’ influence on posthuman theories of the digital and how they shape
the present project.
First, feminist scholarship validates limit-experiences of both the ineffable and the
material by looking for the production of thought and ethics beyond the limits of phallogocentric
62
Rosi Braidotti, Metamorphoses: Towards a Materialist Theory of Becoming, (Malden: Polity Press, 2002.,69.
40
and logocentric humanism. Feminism has sought out alternative ontologies and epistemologies
for creating new knowledges that aim to re-center those ways of being excluded or silenced by a
logocentric humanism.
63
These third-wave and materialist feminists make room for religious and
mystical experiences and claims under an ethical stance that accepts nonrational or ineffable or
irreducible claims as claims of and for a kind of non-unitary subjectivity. Feminist reworkings of
ethics and epistemology lay claim to limit experiences of human and non-human being (both
near and beyond death) in ways that challenge humanism and extend into the posthuman.
Material feminism is another re-working of the ethical epistemologies leading away from
the exclusionary anthropocentrism of humanism, using feminist theories of subjectivity and the
body to include human and nonhuman actors and agents in networks of being and doing,
including the digital. Material feminism emerged out of third-wave feminism, which questioned
the very categories upon which this idea of the female/feminine stood and the rigidity of such
categorization. First and second wave feminisms depended on a fixed notion of the
female/feminine to leverage arguments for equal rights and representation.
64
These femininities
were more often white and western than anything else, dependent upon Enlightenment notions of
agency and autonomy.
65
Third-wave feminism “rejected the fixity and homogenization of the
63
Nayar, Posthumanism.155;Helene Cixous,The Book of Promethea (University of Nebraska Press, 1991); Julia
Kristeva, New Maladies of the Soul, trans. Ross Guberman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997); Julia
Kristeva and Arthur Goldhammer, In the Beginning Was Love: Psychoanalysis and Faith (New York: Columbia
Univ Pr, 1988); Luce Irigaray, Sexes and Genealogies, Book, Whole (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993);
Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, Book, Whole (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985).
64
Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, 1 edition (New York: Routledge, 2006);
Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa, eds., This Bridge Called My Back, Fourth Edition: Writings by Radical
Women of Color, 4 edition (Albany: SUNY Press, 2015); Mary Daly, The Church and the Second Sex (Boston:
Beacon Press, 1986); Betty Friedan, Gail Collins, and Anna Quindlen, The Feminine Mystique, 50th Anniversary
edition (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2013); Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. Constance
Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier, 1 edition (New York: Vintage, 2011); Elizabeth Cady Stanton, The
Woman’s Bible (Palala Press, 2015); Margaret Fuller, Woman in the Nineteenth Century (New York : Greeley &
McElrath, 1845), http://archive.org/details/womaninnineteent1845full.
65
Darlene Juschka, “Feminist Approaches to the Study of Religion,” in Religion, Theory, Critque: Classic and
Contemporary Approaches and Methedologies, ed. Richard King (New York NY: Columbia University Press,
2017), 509–22 ,512.
41
category of ‘women’ while it embraced post-colonial, post-structural, and queer theorizing, it
turned to cultural analysis, embracing difference, fluidity, and uncertainty” by questioning
categories on which feminism based its concept of the female/feminine.
66
Rejecting rigid subject
categories opened up new political and material orientations by way of fluidity and difference.
As Katherine Hayles points out, erasure of the body in general and particular
embodiments more specifically is part of both the worst parts of liberal humanism and escapist
visions of posthumanism that simultaneously proclaim freedom from the body, either through
rational thought or digital manipulation: “only because the body is not identified with the self is
it possible to claim for the liberal subjects its notorious universality, a claim that depends on
erasing markers of bodily difference, including sex, race, and ethnicity.”
67
Materialist feminism,
in particular, conceptualizes subjects through both new embodiments and ecological
philosophies by re-valuing spaces between a mental and physical dichotomy while unsettling
grounds upon which the categories of human/woman/female/feminine stand. A demand for
particularity, materiality, and situatedness precludes body occlusion from the formation of
subjectivities by including these as a necessary element for subject formation prior construction
of categories of the human and non-human. By favoring material interdependence and
connection, material feminism allows for a kind of non-unitary subjectivity that defies humanism
and gestures towards the posthuman, or “an enlarged sense of inter-connection between self and
66
Darlene Juschka, “Feminist Approaches to the Study of Religion,” 517; see also Barbara Findlen, ed., Listen Up:
Voices from the Next Feminist Generation, New Expanded Edition, 2nd edition (Seattle, Wash: Seal Press, 2001);
Jennifer Baumgardner and Amy Richards, Manifesta: Young Women, Feminism, and the Future (Macmillan, 2000);
Leslie L. Heywood, The Women’s Movement Today: An Encyclopedia of Third-Wave Feminism, Vol. 1: A-Z by
Leslie L. Heywood (Westport, Conn: Greenwood, 2005); Rebecca Walker, ed., To Be Real: Telling the Truth and
Changing the Face of Feminism, 1st Anchor Books Ed edition (New York: Anchor, 1995); R. Claire Snyder, “What
Is Third‐Wave Feminism? A New Directions Essay,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 34, no. 1
(September 2008): 175–96.
67
Katherine Hayles 1943, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics,
Book, Whole (Chicago, Ill: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 4.
42
others, including the non-human or ‘earth’ others, by removing the obstacle of self-centered
individualism.”
68
Material feminism fosters a concept of the posthuman that remains imminently
connected, undeniably material, and inescapably ethical.
In the introduction to her landmark compendium of material feminist works, Stacy
Alaimso writes that material feminists
are developing theories in which nature is more than a passive social construction but is,
rather, an agentic force that interacts with and changes the other elements in the mix,
including the human…[t]hey explore the question of nonhuman and post-human nature
and its relationship to the human. One of the central topics in this approach is the
question of agency, particularly the agency of bodies and natures. Material feminists
explore the interaction of culture, history, discourse, technology, biology, and the
“environment,” without privileging any one of these elements.
69
This lack of privilege allows technological apparatus and ecological conditions to have agency in
the formations of human and other subjects. So, rather than a humanism that works from the
human outward in terms of agential power and influence, material feminisms adopt a networked
and ecological approach to subject and body formations.
Karen Barad takes material feminism into an explicitly posthuman realm. Following
Foucault, she points to the ideological systems of power that create and enforce discursive and
linguistic representations of subjectivities like “man” or “human” and proposes a different,
performative approach to subjectivities, what she calls “agential realism.” Agential realism
defines agency as at the point of interaction (or “intra-action”), not as a capacity for action. For
agential realism, interaction and performance are what make up agency, rather than an inherent
capacity to act or essential characteristic. For Barad’s agential realism, agency is functional
rather than essential. Agency are physical and material interactions, not inherent or essential
states. This performative and interfaced approach to agency is posthuman.
68
Braidotti, The Post Human,49-50.
69
Alaimo and Hekman, Material Feminisms,7.
43
As Barad says, “[t]heories that focus exclusively on the materialization of “human”
bodies miss the crucial point that the very practices by which the differential boundaries of the
“human” and the “nonhuman” are drawn are always implicated in particular materializations.”
70
These “particular materializations” are the interactions included in her agential realism. Human-
being then becomes a function of agential inter and intra action, rather than an essential
characteristic. Barad’s alternative, focusing on function rather than essence, grants agential
power to things beyond a human/nonhuman binary in order to recognize the performative nature
of ontology. Barad’s agential realism is a helpful link for understanding posthumanist ethics for a
digital religion: it arrives from a Foucauldian focus on the function of ideological systems of
power and arrives at a performative and interactive (cybernetic) way of thinking about agency
that involves non-human agency in subject formation.
Material feminism’s opportunities for ethical posthumanism helps scholarship on digital
religion and digital religion theory (1) by attending to alternative bodily formation and relations
and (2) considering the ineffable as relational and legible. By keeping alternative embodiments
in play, feminist critiques account for their negotiations and formations and Barad’s agential
realism pushing for a performative sense of agency and materiality – for the study of digital
religion this allows for what Rosi Braidotti calls seeing bodies as “shot through” with
technology: technological embodiments that are performatively and materially co-formed with
technology and human embodiment. One way these embodiments form is through ritualization
of thought and relationships with non-human subjects and materials. In other words, material
feminists like Barad, Grosz, and Haraway not only prioritize materiality conceptually but offer
methodological tools for capturing and contending with these materials as part of subject. This
70
Karen Barad, “Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter,” Signs:
Journal of Women in Culture and Society 28, no. 3 (March 2003): 801–31, 824.
44
ethical posthumanism by way of materialist feminism allows the study of digital religion to
construct new models of ritualization, subject formation, and modes of thought by allowing in
both the material and ineffable as themselves critiques of humanism. From its critique of the
feminine as exclusionary to its inclusion of the nonhuman in subject formations, material
feminism deconstructs an exclusionary humanism into its parts and rebuilds a more inclusive
model.
Ethical Posthumanism for Digital Religion
Both of these foundations for an ethical posthuman heuristic - Foucault’s anti-humanist
urge and material feminism - respond directly to the occlusions and oversights of humanism by
destabilizing and offering alternative models for human subjectivity and performance. First,
Foucault’s anti-humanism tests the endurance and utility of “the human” by digging into its root
system and revealing a recent and shallow past, ready-built to be washed away by a new form of
knowledge and a new “order of things.” Second, from feminist theory, “man” is the inadequate
model for “human,” an incomplete image requiring alternative modes of embodiment and
knowledge production. Together, they ground a going outside the humanas posthumanism as a
direct response to a humanism heuristic in ethical terms: in other words, anti-humanism and
material feminism prescribe a world as it should be (posthuman) in direct response to a world as
it is (humanism).
Anti-humanist and feminist theories made human being contingent – contingent on
ideological hierarchies of what is included in or under the category of the human under the
epistemology of a humanist heuristic, and that this humanism was itself a political project. In
other words, being human is not what one is but what one does. First, the category of the human
becomes a political question, and second, human being becomes a formation of extensions and
45
functions rather than essences and ideals. Foucauldian and feminist theories reveal these terms as
negotiated – as both dependent upon and constructing hierarchies of what is included in the
category of the human (i.e., race, gender, nationality) and as such making humanism a politics.
These dual contingencies at the roots of ethical posthumanism make it both critical and
prescriptive.
Cary Wolfe labels these kinds of ethical posthumanism as “reactive” to new crises of
humanity, and while this is true in the sense that it reacts, we must be careful not to call it
reactionary in a pejorative sense and instead hold them as reacting to a heuristic reacts to a
dominant ideology: as itself reformative. Such ethical posthumanisms embed themselves within
histories of political prescription by citing both Foucault’s “death of man” and feminist theory as
launching points for understandings of the human. By sticking themselves to Foucauldian and
feminist underpinnings, ethical posthumanism arrives from these assumptions and motivations,
pitfalls, and histories. They “react” (not as reactionary) to long histories of oppression, violence,
and exclusion that demand forceful rebuttals. I label these seeds of posthumanism “ethical” to
both categorize their concerns and objectives and to place them within the task at hand: using
posthumanisms to understand digital religious practice. Locating anti-humanism and feminist
critique as lodestars for ethical posthumanisms sets them in an intellectual constellation that also
harbors religious studies as a discipline in the mid-twentieth century.
Contemporary religious studies emerged from the same post-war cultural and political
forces that gave rise to Foucault's anti-humanism and critical feminisms like material feminism.
Alongside other major anchor points for this dissertation like cybernetics, the 1950s and 1960s
are central to appreciating connections between ethical posthumanism and the study of digital
46
religion, not only due to their coinciding timelines, but for grounding them all in similar
sentiments, motivations, and eventual after currents.
The political, material, and moral consequences of WWII greatly impacted the study of
religion in the Western Academy. The violence of war and the healing that violence impacted
how the academy viewed itself and the objects and subjects of its study. The global trauma of
WWII left a world with shattered boundaries and persecuted peoples, bodies displaced and killed
on ideological grounds and brute categorization. Under these forces the study of religion came
into its own as an academic discipline. As the study of religion became “Religious Studies,”
there was a self-reflexivity brought on by the violence of colonialism and WWII. Wilfred
Cantwell Smith’s 1962 The Meaning and End of Religion argues that “religion” as an object of
study is artificial and inconsistent with the practice of what has been labeled as such. Smith
proposes a dualistic model of parallels of “faith” and “cumulative traditions.”
71
This logos and
praxis model favors personally held beliefs on the one hand (think William James) and
historically entrenched traditions on the other (think Marx). Clifford Geertz, writing in the mid-
1960s, argues that not much has changed in the study of religion since the close of the first
World War.
72
He complains that few have ventured beyond the ground set up by Durkheim and
Weber and suggests that rather than attempt to do away with these great fore-fathers, we work to
broaden the discipline of religious studies in both theory and method. This self-criticism gives
that field or discipline some autonomy to define its own boundaries. Jonathan Z. Smith arguably
embodies the complexities of studying religion in the post-modern and post-structural moment –
Smith is flexible and adaptive in his deployment of concepts. Even the form of his publications,
71
Wilfred Cantwell Smith 1916-2000, The Meaning and End of Religion: A New Approach to the Religious
Traditions of Mankind, (New York: Harper & Row, 1978), ix.
72
Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays, (New York: Basic Books, 1973)
47
collections of short essays represents an attempt to work quickly and change tact often (whether
he has done this or not is another matter). Like Weber and Eliade, Smith offers a typology of
religion, but one that is highly unlike those offered by his forefathers. His typology is rhizomatic,
inspired by the grasses he studied as a child. Where there is only grass (religion) there are still
the many ways and places from which it can grow and reshape itself.
73
Like both Cybernetics and Foucault’s anti-humanism, religious studies in the post-war
moment prioritized a way of understanding not only its object of study (religion) but its own
form (as religious studies). Anti-humanism, feminism, and religious studies all share this
moment under a new ethic, one that prioritizes the deconstruction of monolithic concepts like the
“human” or “religion” into more reflective and reflexive heuristics and self-conscious objects of
study. In other words, each of these ethical agendas creates a functional and heuristic term out of
its object of analysis, one to be deployed into the stream of the world and traced for its echoes
and reflections. By sharing these roots with religious studies, Foucault’s anti-humanism and
material feminism calibrate an ethical posthumanism for the study of digital religion. By forming
the basis of my proposed heuristic, they not only ground ethical posthumanism in particular
literature, but they also venture beyond that literature in the same spirit of evolving religious
studies. At the same time, these new ethics for heuristics were emerging, two other disciplines
were taking on a more ontological form.
Ontology
Where ethical posthumanism provides conceptual conditions for unraveling humanism
and a prescription for re-evaluating the human as a subject, ontological posthumanism describes
73
Jonathan Z. Smith, Relating Religion : Essays in the Study of Religion, Book, Whole (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2004) ,193.
48
material formations and functions of these new subjectivities in relation with technologies,
animalities, and other non-human life. Ontological posthumanism invests in the necessary
interconnectedness and contingent being of human and non-human agents. In other words,
ontological posthumanism assumes the conditions that ethical posthumanism anticipates exist
already and re-describes or analyses the world within those terms.
Like with posthuman ethics, two intellectual and conceptual roots for ontological
posthumanism ground its utility for charting digital religion: cybernetics and science and
technology studies (STS). From the post-war Macy conferences that brought together leading
thinkers about the human mind and information studies, cybernetics emerged from a want to
understand human thought. Science and technology studies emerged from a want to re-evaluate
the absolute authority of scientific fact in the face of its exclusive (and at times) violent past
within the categories of race and gender. Both cybernetics and STS and depend on seeing
technological artifacts as dependent upon human materiality and performance, and both
emphasize interdependence, materiality, and historical contingency. Together, they support an
ontological posthumanism that emphasizes functional thinking, one that along with the ethical,
forms a complex posthuman heuristic for digital religion, one that begins at the roots of digital
architecture itself.
Cybernetics
The study of systems of automation and communication that is cybernetics began as a
series of post-war discussions about communication technologies and human advancement called
the “Macy Conferences,” bringing together scholars of information, medicine, linguistics,
anthropology, philosophy, and more to reach a systematic understanding of technology, artificial
intelligence, computational systems, learning machines, and the essence of human thought. The
49
Macy Conferences’ most lasting output was credited to Norbert Wiener, now dubbed the father
of cybernetics.
74
Wiener’s published Cybernetics and its layman companion The Human Use of
Human Beings as the foundational public understandings of early computational theory,
primarily emphasizing the co-emergent and contingent relationship between feedback machines
and human beings. Wiener’s claim is that society can only be understood through studying its
communication between man-man, man-machine, machine-machine. Wiener asserted and early
posthuman thought when claiming: “what is used as an element in a machine, is in fact an
element in the machine," meaning the human being.
75
In other words, understanding society
requires understanding networks of communications between humans and machines, and as part
of these feedbacks systems, humans are part of this macro mechanic.
“Feedback” is the central concept in cybernetics, and it remains central to modern
computation and automated systems.
76
For purposes here, feedback is defined as output from a
system becoming new input for the same system. Wiener uses two examples to explain feedback:
one of a ship, the other a human hand. The first describes feedback as a series of comparative
relations between the orientation of the ship, the position of the steering wheel, and the position
of the tiller used to direct the ship. Each reacts to each other in a system of movements that
roughly make up the direction of the ship itself. In other words, the position of the ship is a
relation of these three agents, rather than its place in the water. The example of the human hand
involves the seemingly simple process of picking up a pencil. Wiener points out that throughout
the whole of the process, the pencil, in relation to the hand, is in various states of being “picked-
74
As Wiener is most frequently cited in the works addressed across this text when referencing the impact of
cybernetics, I too will focus on his work as the landmark for cybernetics and posthumanism.
75
Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings,185,16.
76
Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics, 15; David A.
Mindell, Between Human and Machine: Feedback, Control, and Computing before Cybernetics, Johns Hopkins
Studies in the History of Technology (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002).
50
up” or “not picked-up.” A series of reports through the nervous system by way of nerves in the
hand and visual inputs help in making slight adjustments in delicate hand muscles to ensure the
pencil is properly picked up. As Wiener puts it, feedback occurs when “…we desire a motion to
follow a given pattern… the difference between this pattern and the actually performed motion is
used as a new input to cause the part regulated to move in such a way as to bring its motion
closer to that given by the pattern.”
77
In both examples, feedback is a function of desiring
towards a pattern and how performances approach that ideal pattern. Whether these desires have
machine or human interfaces, cybernetics charts their function and performance, rather than
essence or ideal.
For cybernetics, feedback is desiring towards a pattern. Within digital religious practice,
desiring towards a pattern includes not only the cybernetic movements within digital mediation
but forms of ritual and ritualization that likewise desire towards a pattern. For both cybernetics
and ritualization, there is feedback and adjustment, performance and ideal, material function, and
imagined outcome. Rituals feedback systems, which desire towards an ideal pattern and adjust
their performances to achieve them. Covered more in the next chapter, new media (the results of
cybernetic thinking) and ritual offer furthers shared methodological resonances, but for the sake
of the sense of posthumanism, we shall stay here with desiring towards a pattern.
These desires for feedback within computer theory began by thinking about human
interaction. Wiener is a thinker of human relations, from his anecdotal exemplars to his formal
structures. Cybernetics and its influence have at their center the premise that human thought is
not internal but interactive. Wiener ruminates on the changes this type of thinking might have for
our understanding of the human being: “The central nervous system no longer appears as a self-
77
Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine,(New York: The
MIT Press, 1961), 6.
51
contained organ, receiving inputs from the senses and discharging into the muscles. On the
contrary, some of its most characteristic activities are explicable only as circular processes,
emerging from the nervous system into the muscles, and re-entering the nervous system through
the sense organs, whether they be proprioceptors or organs of the special senses.”
78
This troubles
a functional sense of the independent or self-contained human subject and poses a posthuman
concept of the human.
79
For Wiener, cybernetic concepts are ultimately concerned with human
systems. Rather than read this as a humanist origin for cybernetics, I see this rather as the
beginnings of posthuman thinking about the human – Wiener’s human is already posthuman.
Cybernetics founds posthumanism in early computational models by recognizing primary
relationships between human and machine as computational systems. These support posthuman
calls to conceptualize human beings as part of larger systems by putting human thought itself
outside the mind and placing human beings as part of the machinic computer from its
beginnings. Feedback (and all the images and analogies it entails) points to theories of
computing machines as foundationally entangled with human materiality and behavior – these
digital technologies evolved from a desire and aimed to understand human thought rather than
machine thought. The machine entangles human thought and behavior, both in its conception and
its theorization. That is, both in cybernetics and digital machines are embedded from their
inception in human behavior, as relational rather than foreign to human conditions.
For studying digital religion, understanding how a cultural form and force like religion
functions through digital and computational machines means understanding these cybernetic
formations, especially if we are to take a heuristic approach. While the next chapter will take on
ritual theory in relation to new media technologies in a much more elaborate form, for now, it is
78
Wiener, Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine,8.
79
Nayar, Posthumanism,36.
52
important to see ritual as a technology itself, as a function itself, as a kind of programming. Just
as feedback is a function of desiring towards a pattern, ritual too is such a function, one that
depends on action and interaction. Ritualization is a process that strives towards an ideal within
and through a series of intersubjective performances, an inter-objective performance that works
to make the world as it should or could be out of the world as it is. Just as cybernetics seeks the
uninterrupted or most efficient flow of information or communication, rituals too seek a kind of
perfected or idealized world, in frequent communication between human and non-human realms.
Rituals are cybernetic.
Science and Technology Studies
Science and Technology Studies (STS) emerged in the 1960s alongside cybernetics, anti-
humanism, and feminism, as a reaction to dominant philosophies of science that emphasized
individual intervention and achievement as the major motivator of scientific advancement. For
STS, the origins of new technology lie not in some scientific imperative or sudden interventionist
flash of individual brilliance, but instead, scientific discovery arrives from relational forces of
power where scientific truths and technological advances are constructed rather than uncovered.
Science and Technology Studies abstracts this reflexive study of technology to approach the
concept of technology as a whole through a study of the “origins, dynamics, and consequences of
science and technology.”
80
Like cybernetics, STS sought interconnection and function over form
or essence when looking at the foundations of scientific or technological advancement.
80
Edward J. Hackett and Society for Social Studies of Science, eds., The Handbook of Science and Technology
Studies, 3rd ed (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press : Published in cooperation with the Society for the Social Studies of
Science, 2008),1.
53
As a collection of disciplines and a foundation for posthuman thinking, STS
conceptualizes technological objects and artifacts as functionally co-creative with cultural and
political forces. STS grounds the present concept of posthuman ontology in its own kind of
lineage, one that embeds technological creation and scientific discovery in a co-evolution and co-
creation with the material and social forms around it. By recognizing the embeddedness of
technological objects in scientific discourse in the cultural contexts out of which it arrives, STS
creates a kind of scientific or technological ontology for posthuman thinking. Under an STS lens,
science and technology function with and through other material and cultural forms. For the
study of digital religion, this allows religious formations like ritual and death to be co-formative
with the technological objects and procedures they encounter. Two critical STS interventions
warrant further discussion when thinking about the ontological implications for STS, new media,
and digital religion: first, its rejection of technological determinism, and second its ecological
framework.
Raymond Williams, in his landmark essay on society and technology, writes that
technological determinism
is an immensely powerful and now largely orthodox view of the nature of social change.
New technologies are discovered, by an essentially internal process of research and
development, which then sets the condition of social change and progress. Progress, in
particular, is the history of these inventions, which ‘created the modern world’ The
effects of the technologies, whether direct or indirect, foreseen or unforeseen, are as it
were the rest of history. The steam engine, the automobile, television, the atomic bomb
have made modern man and the modern condition.
81
Technological determinism marks technology as an independent factor causing social change –
in some cases being the sole factor of technological change. In other words, technological
81
Raymond Williams, “The Technology and the Society,” in The New Media Reader, ed. Noah Wadrip-Fruin and
Nick Montfort (Cambride MA: The MIT Press, 2003), 289–300,293.
54
determinism accounts for a one-way relation between technology and human being, with
technology in the dominant role. While this completely upends the hierarchy of anthropocentric
humanism, it at the same time perpetuates humanism’s forms of relation between subject and
object, only reversing its flow of power.
A frequent example of technological determinism is Lynn White’s argument that the
stirrup caused feudalism. White argues that the invention of the stirrup allowed for a new kind of
mounted combat. With the rider now securely on the horse, they were able to swing and impact
violence from horseback with greater confidence and efficiency.
82
Maintaining and deploying
such shock troops required training and funding and thus required the reorganization of society
into economic units capable of maintaining such levels of violence and control, and so, as the
argument goes, the invention of the stirrup led to new political and social structures.
Marshall McLuhan’s famous contention that “media is the message” (to be addressed
explicitly in a later chapter) is the flagship of media technological determinism. Theories
arriving from this mantra of media technology frequently deploy technological determinism,
with the advents of television, radio, and film marking massive shifts in human behavior. Noah
Wardrip-Fruin points out the role technological determinism has played in media studies in
particular and how scholars respond: “Technological determinism, a viewpoint for which
Marshall McLuhan is the canonical figure in media studies...has been rejected, or greatly
qualified, in its use, by most academic writers since McLuhan. However, it remains the dominant
popular discourse on technology, and many academic writers remain engaged in outlining their
82
Donald A. MacKenzie and Judy Wajcman, eds., The Social Shaping of Technology, 2nd ed (Buckingham [Eng.] ;
Philadelphia: Open University Press, 1999), 5.
55
positions as alternatives to this viewpoint."
83
This project, too, must engage in this kind of
outlining.
The idea that technological media alone, that objects alone, make or determine social and
human behavior has persisted in popular cultural opinions. Apocalyptic film depictions of
autonomous technology overpowering human society (think the Terminator), or trains corrupting
the American West, or dystopian cybernetic fantasies all perpetuate a tech-determinist
worldview. Scholarship must take care however, to not fall down a rabbit-hole that turns
technological determinism into a straw-bogey man for ungrounded and cynical fodder.
Critiquing technological determinism in good faith requires taking seriously what STS has
contributed to a broader understanding of science and technology rather than being satisfied
solely with its rejection of technological determinism as a previous stance. This might be where
STS begins, but it does more than paint a poor portrait and then tear it down.
84
STS posits a counterpoint to technological determinism – the Social Shaping of
Technology (SST). SST maps the movement of technology in the direction opposite of
determinism: insisting that societal conditions like economic, state, and gender shape the need
for an appearance of particular sciences and technologies.
85
SST instead insists that material
conditions create opportunities for emergent technologies and scientific schemas and both STS
and SST turn technological determinism on its head. This interactive and social
conceptualization of technology under SST and STS can be thought of as ecological, as both
83
Raymond Williams, “The Technology and the Society,” in The New Media Reader, ed. Noah Wadrip-Fruin and
Nick Montfort (Cambride MA: The MIT Press, 2003), 289–300, 289.
84
The following chapter goes into greater detail around the impact of technological determinism in particular on
media studies, and offers a more nuanced approach to both tech determinism and its reception.
85
Donald A. MacKenzie and Judy Wajcman, eds., The Social Shaping of Technology, 2nd ed (Buckingham [Eng.] ;
Philadelphia: Open University Press, 1999),18.
56
having an impact on what is commonly understood as the ecological (flora and fauna) and itself
being an ecological formation embedded in a series of relations. Within an ecological worldview,
technologies provide food and shelter, warmth, and security; they also corrupt and kill
environments and ecosystems, as well as preserve and shelter them.
86
This ecological and social
shaping of technology seeks to “understand the nature of relations and action across the arrays of
people and things in the arena, representations (narrative, visual, historical, rhetorical), processes
of work (including cooperation without consensus, career paths, and routines/anomalies), and
many sorts of interwoven discourses."
87
These interwoven discourses manifest as an ecological
web of technological intervention and impact, a recursive set of relations between technological
and non-technological forces, dually shaping each other in constant revolution.
Technology, under the gaze of STS, is ecological both in its impact and as a part of the
world of things and beings. STS embeds technical innovations and artifacts within material
networks and breaks down distinctions between human and non-human by resisting
technological determinism and seeing technology as ecological. Donna Haraway points out that
technoscience (the use of digital technologies as scientific instruments) blurs perceptions
between the exterior and interior, mind and body, cultural and natural, by making the
imperceptible perceptible in new ways. Hayles sees information and materiality as not distinct
entities but part of what she describes as the Platonic “backhand and forehand” between ideal
and material.
88
This Platonic tennis-match is the result of scientific-technologies ability to create
an ideal human form through what is imagined through a technological device. Certain imaging
86
Ibid., 4.
87
Edward J. Hackett and Society for Social Studies of Science, eds., The Handbook of Science and Technology
Studies, 3rd ed (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press : Published in cooperation with the Society for the Social Studies of
Science, 2008),115.
88
Katherine Hayles 1943, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics,
Book, Whole (Chicago, Ill: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 12-3.
57
technologies that allow insight into, say, brain activity allow for a sense of the human brain or
mind once only held as an idea or idea, now visualized. Thus now the blurring of the interior and
exterior, ideal and real.
Both STS and cybernetics establish this blurred and contingent sense of tech and human
by making cultural and material forms like race, gender, and embodiment foundational to
technological ontology, grounding posthuman thought in an inclusive sense of the technological.
STS merges the human and the technological into a functional pattern rather than the discrete
objects and subjects of technological determinism by attending to the ways technologies work as
practices and how they negotiate meaning and understanding. This troubling of human and
technology, subject and object is critical to understanding how posthumanism can function as a
method, as STS offers both a response to a history of thought (technological determinism) and a
means of posthuman thinking that echoes Cary Wolfe’s call for ways for thinking outside the
human: seeing larger ecological and technological concepts as in concert with (rather than
oppose to or in service of) human being. For a study of digital religion and death ritual, STS
provides a historically embedded backdrop for understanding practices and processes like digital
religion as co-emergent with their technological objects, as co-formative and intermingled.
Ontological Posthumanism For Digital Religion
Both Cybernetics and STS claim technology as emergent and interdependent alongside
human beings, as ecological (both socially and materially), and see technology as not exceptional
to human being but interlaced with it. By doing so, cybernetics and STS perform ways of
examining posthuman ontologies. This posthuman interdependence is foundational to digital
technology from Weiner’s example of feedback involving the pencil-in-hand all the way up to
the aims of the Macy Conferences: cybernetics and modern computing are theoretical contingent
58
upon the human condition – not wholly derived from it, but rather embedded historically in it.
For STS, this interdependence is historically narrative – our images and stories of technological
advance and necessity and invention seep into our notions of necessity and progress, are
conditioned by broader conditions of power, visibility, and control.
For thinking about formations of posthumanism and death, ritual, and digital religion,
STS and cybernetics eliminate determinism while making even the concept of the technological
contingent upon material and ideological conditions. Technological determinism states that
technological artifacts intervene in human affairs and shape human behavior (the stirrup and
feudalism), thus elevating technologies to a position of agency and influence beyond human
being (or, it seems, any other being). By illustrating technological origins in cybernetics and
embedding them in human and non-human ecologies through STS, these foundations of
ontological posthumanism recalibrate agential and motivational parameters between human and
non-human, technological, ecological, and otherwise and make human being and non-human
being contingent upon the other, irreversibly interdependent, materially interwoven.
The confluence of STS, cybernetic and religious studies thinking in the Post-War period
lead to a set of shared orientations. Like religious studies emerging insistence on attending to the
interactions between objects and subjects in the material formations of religious meaning, these
cybernetic and STS underpinnings resist the supremacy of thought over action. Ritual studies in
particular (to be covered in-depth in the next chapter) leans into the performative and interactive
aspects of religious practice in similar ways with new media studies that lean on these cybernetic
and STS ontologies. STS and cybernetics activate possibilities for a posthuman subjectivity, one
(as the non-unified subjectivity of ethical posthumanism) that materially and conceptually binds
the ecologies and understandings of being both human and non by unhinging the nature of the
59
technological from determinism and embedding it in negotiations and ecologies of power,
meaning-making, and cultural systems. Under these conditions, ontological posthumanism serves
as a material investigation into this hybridity, this non-unified subjectivity. And, like the
prescriptive ethical posthumanism, folds together a technological posthumanism with ecological
and animal posthumanisms emerging in material feminism.
89
An Epistemological Posthumanism for Digital Religion
90
Dividing posthumanism into ethical and ontological branches liberate their
methodologies from the force of dominant discourses like a capital “P” posthumanism and
creates a more flexible and viable methodology, a heuristic and reflexive way of doing
posthumanism. Within my proposed posthumanism ( like Karen Barad’s onto-ethical agential
realism) “the practices by which differential boundaries for the “human” and the “nonhuman”
are always already implicated in particular materializations. The differential constitution of the
‘human’ (‘nonhuman’) accompanied by particular exclusion are always up for contestation.”
91
Both anti-humanism’s oppositions to ideological and essential understandings of humanity and
the feminist critiques' attention to alternative bodily formation and the legibility of the ineffable
exemplify ethical posthumanism’s functional and material imperative to principles for being.
Ontological posthumanism historically enmeshes human and technology in co-contingent
emergence by locating its origins in Wiener’s technological understanding of human being in
cybernetics and its STS critique in reversing technological determinism cultural blindspots.
89
Juschka, “Feminist Approaches to the Study of Religion.”,518.
90
Special thanks here to William Robert for forcing me to finally admit “epistemology” into my thinking.
91
Barad, “Posthumanist Performativity.”,824.
60
These four origins for two emphases of one posthumanism elevate non-human elements
of human being through function, form, and material specificity. They reveal material,
functional, interdependent, and historically embedded approaches to thinking past the human by
defining posthumanism as a matrix of orientations rather than a stable “post-humanism.” Instead,
posthumanism becomes a heuristic device, something to investigate with. Without attending to
these flexible root systems, posthumanism is in danger of becoming an ineffective trope or
uncritical rhetorical device rather than a means of theoretical analysis. A flexible and functional
posthumanism allows for its deployment rather than adherence to certain definitional principle or
essence.
Ethics can tell us what we should be looking for, ontology can describe what it is, but
only through an epistemology does this looking and seeing become knowing. Posthumanism
functions as an epistemology by way of these four root systems, and it is through this heuristic
epistemology that this project functions. A material and functional posthumanism
epistemologically links ethics and ontology by offering a way of knowing that accounts for both
prescription and description and a way of thinking that embeds itself in both practices. Where
ethics demand and ontologies situate, epistemologies sense, and act. In this way, a posthuman
epistemology activates the kinds of knowledge made possible through the ethical and ontological
demands of our four root systems.
Both Descartes’ and Foucault’s ethical demands for an (anti)/humanism arrive from
particular epistemologies, from ways of sensing and acting on the world that tether humanism
and its reactions to these ways of knowing. Descartes’ “arch-humanism,” that is, his way of
seeing the world that excludes anything but a human mind, is just that, a way of “seeing.” His
optical metaphors about candles, monkeys, and men in hats reveal an epistemological ethics and
61
a way of doing prescribed by way of knowing. Descartes’ ontology and ethics are primarily
epistemological in that they depend on his way of seeing the world. Foucault too arrives at his
anti-humanism from epistemology, the movement from the totemic God to Man as rationale for
rationality, and that human being is created through the sciences, with man an invention of this
epistemological stance.
Part of this epistemological tethering lies too in material feminism and STS’s dependence
on situated kinds of knowing. Material feminism, in particular, demands an awareness of
embodiment and materiality, without succumbing to the closed sense of a humanist embodiment.
In other words, material feminism seeks an agency for materiality that is not dependent on a
humanist notion of cognition or rationality or intention, but rather is embedded and inherent in
all materiality. Material feminism broadens a sense of agency to include materialities and
subjectivities beyond the scope of humanism. This agential materiality is similarly taken up in
science and technology studies, re-calibrating the excess of agency given to objects in a
technological determinism to create a social, collaborative, and contingent formation of
technology, science, and subjectivity instead. Bruno Latour’s “actor-network theory” is a
colorful example of the kind of work possible when STS gives real attention to the interplay
between society, technology, and forms of knowledge production.
92
Science and Technology Studies’ located knowledge depends on feedback between
agents and forms a cybernetic way of knowing. Feedback and cybernetics are functionally
epistemologies dependent upon posthumanism ontologies. Wiener begins his thinking about
computational and cybernetic systems from the particular materiality of the human body, making
92
I stay away here from “Object Oriented Ontology” or “OOO” as a similar epistemology, being wary of its
Inhuman rather than posthuman treatment of objects and subjects. It (like transhumanism) could be accused of being
a hyper-humanism in disguise.
62
materiality and embodiment part of a cybernetic epistemology. Both STS and material feminism,
too, work from this embodied and material epistemology, functioning within cybernetic or
feedback systems to create new forms of knowing.
This epistemological (onto-ethical) posthumanism synthesizes functional heuristic
approaches to interactions between human being and digital religion. Offering functional,
material, historical, and embodied approaches to the study of religion corresponds with what
Tom Tweed calls an “organic-cultural flow” approach to religion.
93
With roots of ethical and
ontological posthumanism that arrive from historical and material specificity, Tweed asks that
such a flow theory of religion be grounded in “both neural pathways and ritual performances”
that “that conjoin to create institutional networks that, in turn, prescribe, transmit, and transform
tropes, beliefs, values, emotions, artifacts, and rituals.”
94
My grounded posthuman theory attends
to these concerns, specifically around the digital, through their inclusion of technological and
digital materialities into such networks and in their ability to include technological and material
together
Posthumanism can include the ineffable, the things in between, the more than human in
its material and religious networks. This, for religious studies, can mean an inclusion of the
divine or the sacred as the more than human elements of posthuman thinking. Like certain
elements of material and other feminisms, an epistemological posthumanism casts a wider net for
what is sensible, what can be made sense of, or at least what can be included in descriptions or
prescriptions for the human condition. Applying an epistemological posthumanism to religious
studies means accepting these new limits of and for human experience as valid, as useful, and as
93
Thomas Tweed, Crossing and Dwelling: A Theory of Religion, Book, Whole (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 2006), 54.
94
Ibid.,69.
63
within the purview of a posthuman situation. For the study of digital religion in particular, this
means including the human and the non-human (digital/technological) as agential in processes of
knowing.
Histories and genealogies of anti-humanism, feminist critique, cybernetics, and STS are
essential to the coming analysis of death and digital religious practice in their accounting for the
unaccountable in human/digital interaction and interface. But before applying such a
methodology, we need to know where we are going and the location for such a knowing. The
next chapter turns to these grounds, to ritual theories and new media as a location for this theory
of posthuman digital practice. Ritual theories’ (like cybernetics’) emphasis on function and
performativity, and new media theories recent turn to historically embedded materiality flourish
and empower each other under this posthuman rubric. The following chapter turns to the
specifics of how the study of digital religion can benefit from both new media and ritual theory
within such a posthumanism epistemology and its attention to embodiment, performance, and
interface.
64
CHAPTER TWO- Ritual Theory and New Media: Concepts and Approaches
In combination with posthumanism, ritual and new media are the guiding orbits of my
heuristic project. This chapter lays out a theory for new media and ritual through reviews of
landmark and present literature before turning to three intersections of ritual and new media
elaborated on in the following two chapters. Ritual will go on to be defined as a technology that
transforms subjects from one cultural state into another and re-orients material embodiments of
being through formalized action and agency through attention to these cultural states, both
human and nonhuman. So-called “new” media refers to data-driven media that can function and
perform without human intervention and without the intention towards human perception. What
is new about new media is not its ability to make sense of things at a human level of perception
that is remarkably different from other forms, but it is forcing us to think beyond human
perception of data and information, to re-imagine what mediation of information can mean.
This chapter (1) establishes the location and characteristics of each of these concepts and
(2) sets a trajectory of interests linking the two in a shared system for understanding religion and
new media practices, while arguing that what is “new” about new media, and what is unique
about ritual are their shared ability (as heuristic devices) to expose what is already there, to see
media and religion as inescapably material and mediated and together to see digital religious
practice as the same. New media rituals interface between places like a possible world and a
realized one, the sacred and the profane, the living and the dead. Like the previous
posthumanism chapter, the present chapter approaches aspects of the study of both ritual and
new media for their usefulness and their function for the present project – that is, understanding
death and new media in American contexts – while still establishing enough conceptual territory
and apparatus to suggest a broader methodology for posthumanism, ritual, and new media.
65
While interest in media and interest in ritual have deep roots in the humanities and social
sciences, their explicitly named “theories” and “methods” have only been around a short while,
comparatively. Ritual and media studies formed as smaller “schools” or subfields within
departments in the mid-twentieth century, and while their particular institutional histories are less
pertinent to present purposes, they both were foundationally interdisciplinary and secondary
pursuits -- these specialized sub-fields in the study of religion did not begin until the 1960s
through the 1980s with formations of departments, journals, and the subsequent establishment of
the canon. As a result, these sub-fields have always been cobbling and collecting theoretical and
methodological resources from other established disciplines, making their edges ragged and
blurry and their methods adaptable. Media studies and ritual studies depend upon established
canons, methods, and interests to create a sense of gravity and utility.
I turn later to three of these shared interests: embodiment, performance, and interfaces as
bridges between media and ritual studies, as not only vital and pressing objects of study but
modes and methods and ways of seeing and looking at (what are) concepts like “new media” and
“ritual.” In looking at embodiment, performance, and interfaces as modes of inquiry and as
trajectories for interrogating broader categories, this chapter synthesizes ritual and new media as
lenses for viewing the other, using the techniques and forms of other disciplinary territories to
create another lens for seeing, revealing the shared investments in the other. Like the previous
chapter’s approach to posthumanism, new media, and ritual serve more as ways of seeing than
things to be seen.
Defining both ritual and new media, like defining anything else, is a matter of utility –
rather than the essential definition of anything, this project favors a functional definition, the
means of defining for use. As Jan A.M. Snoek puts it in their introduction to Defining Rituals,
66
“the intention is not to propose a generally applicable definition of the term…but to show how
one could proceed if one wanted to construct a definition of this term for a specific project
(which in my opinion, is very wise to do).”
95
I agree, and as I layout working definitions of both
ritual and new media below, think of them as way-points rather than directions, clusters rather
than lodestars, vehicles rather than destinations. When thinking of ritual as a technology of
transformation and new media as data-driven and non-anthropocentric, each supplies the other
with a functional understanding of death and religious mediation. Though the two topics at hand
here are objects of this study, they are more importantly subjects, reflexive and reflective of the
aims here and should be taken as guides rather than targets. The explications and definitions
below aim at the usefulness of new media and rituals for understanding current objects and looks
at cases in the study of religion and death that gravitate towards forms and functions that best
serve these ends.
(New) Media Studies
Media theorist Fredrich Kittler once asked: “what’s new about new media?”
96
I have
been asked the same question more than once when presenting (or defending) my own work and
have come up with various answers with various degrees of success. Some sounded like Janet
Murray’s response in The New Media Reader (an early foray by MIT press in establishing a
canon of new media), emphasizing essential properties of new media: it is procedural,
participatory, encyclopedic, and spatial in ways that media have never been before.
97
Other
95
Jens Kreinath, Joannes Augustinus Maria Snoek, and Michael Stausberg, eds., Theorizing Rituals, Numen Book
Series-Studies in the History of Religions, v. 114-1, v. 114–2 (Leiden ; Boston: Brill, 2006),10-14.
96
Alexander R. Galloway, Eugene Thacker, and McKenzie Wark, eds., Excommunication: Three Inquiries in Media
and Mediation, Trios (Chicago ; London: The University of Chicago Press, 2014),1.
97
Janet Murray, “Inventing the Medium,” in The New Media Reader, ed. Noah Wadrip-Fruin and Nick Montfort
(Cambride MA: The MIT Press, 2003), 3–11,6.
67
answers focused on the medium itself, drawn around this new idea that data itself is what makes
new media new – that new levels of information capacity or accessibility are inescapably
unique. Both of these definitions, one focused on properties of new media and the other on its
forms, are accurate – these things are in some ways new about new media. But, is this what
makes new media so vastly different in the way we treat it, in the way it impacts us, and the way
it plays out in the world? Or, as some have suggested, do new media forms rely on old media
forms – like text and image and is treated and utilized in much the same way? An answer to
Kittler’s question becomes clear through a particular history of media studies: what is new about
new media is nothing to do with mediation, in the sense of human sensibilities of
images/sounds/language, but in the capacities digital mediations have for re-imagining the
concept of media itself.
But what of this term “media”? What is meant by media or mediation in comparison to
what is “new” media? From the Latin for middle, or middle layer, media has to do with coming
in-between, a point of passage from one thing to another. It also has to do with human modes of
experiencing this middle, the human sensoria of taste, sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch.
Media is, then: the material and process of storing, organizing, and transmitting information for
the human sensoria. It is both the material technologies and the process, in that media objects
cannot be separated from their performances. Media, in other words, is mediation. And media is
tied to human legibility, human sensation, and the human sensoria.
This definition arrives from a constellation of a few thinkers, beginning with the
aforementioned Frederich Kittler, who defines media as defining “the quasi-transcendental
68
condition for experience and understanding.”
98
This “condition” is what I am dividing into the
material and the process, following Jeremey Stolow’s assertion that media is “not just the textual
or iconographic systems of representation, but also much broader terrain of sensorial techniques,
tools, material artifacts, and systems of coordinated action.”
99
Media is, from here, the
technologies and processes through which sensation takes place. But towards what end? Both
Stolow and Kittler go on to agree that media have to do with the storage and retrieval of
information or knowledge.
100
Alexander Galloway, Eugene Thacker, and Mackenzie Wark
further qualify this information or knowledge as human knowledge, with media being about
“sense-making,” or making sense of and making sensible this information and knowledge.
101
Media is tied to its material technologies and particular to their processes. This material and
humanistic understanding of media precedes any understanding of new media technologies or
processes.
New media reshapes this concept of media through two unique positions: the uncanny
persistence of the image as a descriptor and the (in)accessibility of informational mediums that
are not necessarily anthropocentric in either their conceptual description or their function. These
two observations on new media create a bridge between the above-established definition of
media as tied to materiality and sensoria and a new concept of media as it proceeds from here. In
other words, what is new about new media has little to do with media itself but with how we
think about the function and role of media. To understand what is new about new media in
98
W. J. T. Mitchell and Mark B. N. Hansen, eds., Critical Terms for Media Studies (Chicago ; London: The
University of Chicago Press, 2010).,vii.
99
Stolow, Deus in Machina: Religion, Technology, and the Things in Between., 4.
100
Ibid. ; F. Kittler and C. Weinberger, “The Cold Model of Structure: Friedrich Kittler Interviewed by Christoph
Weinberger,” Cultural Politics an International Journal 8, no. 3 (January 1, 2012): 375–84,
https://doi.org/10.1215/17432197-1722109., 383.
101
Alexander R. Galloway, Eugene Thacker, and McKenzie Wark, eds., Excommunication: Three Inquiries in
Media and Mediation, Trios (Chicago ; London: The University of Chicago Press, 2014), 2.
69
relation to religious activities around death requires first reflecting on the field of media studies
itself, on what it accomplished by way of defining its terms, and in turn see what we can make
“new” about a theory of media, rather than a theory of new media.
Studying the nature and function of media in the Euro/American academy begins
primarily in five “schools” of thought that cobble together different sets of priorities, ideologies,
and tools to describe and prescribe the uses and usefulness of media in the twentieth century. The
Columbia, Frankfurt, Toronto, Chicago, and British Cultural Studies schools, to greater and
lesser extents, form a network and legacy for understanding media and mediation from text to
hypertext, image, and sound. The Frankfurt and Toronto schools have had the most considerable
influence on the new media theory that deals directly with digital mediations of the body and the
human, gravitating around such monumental names like Walter Benjamin and Marshall
McLuhan.
Benjamin is the Frankfurt school’s most famous critic of media, encapsulated in his essay
“The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.”
102
In it, Benjamin marks the loss of
the power of the original artwork ( its “aura”) in an age or easily reproduced images, and the
depletion of the museum as a place of transformative aesthetic potential, where: “By replicating
the work many times over, it substitutes a mass existence for a unique existence. And in
permitting the reproduction to reach the recipient in his or her own situation, it actualizes that
which is reproduced."
103
In the same work, Benjamin praises the advent of film as an egalitarian
and potentially revolutionary media with no original, a place of distributed social and political
power for the masses. This turn positions Benjamin as a foundational critic of mass media, which
102
Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media,
Book, Whole (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2008).
103
Ibid., 22.
70
he saw as producing a “different kind of participation” in media forms.
104
Benjamin saw this
kind of participation as re-formatting the relationship between human beings and the technical
apparatus of mediation into a more participatory or “progressive” form, where “the most
important function of film is to establish equilibrium between human beings and the
apparatus."
105
For Benjamin, mass media formations create the potential for revolutionary and
liberatory acts. For mass-media theorists, Benjamin represents the earliest political and critical
theories of twentieth-century mass media.
“The Work of Art…” represents an early example of critical mass media studies, one still
held up to this day in critiques of mass media and reproduction. Jay David Bolter and Richard
Grusin, in their early but comprehensive study of digital mediations, Remediations, point to
Benjamin as breaking crucial ground for two aspects of media studies: “Perhaps for Benjamin,
the immediacy offered by film is the immediacy we have identified as growing out of the
fascination with media: the acknowledged experience of mediation. Furthermore, film for
Benjamin is a medium that demonstrates the inseparability of technology and reality.”
106
Mike
Featherstone, in his essay “Post-Bodies, Aging and Virtual Reality” encapsulates the perceived
ambivalence of Benjamin amongst new media scholars, where “ …at different places in his
writing he actively supports the potential of the shocks and fragmentation of the new
technologically-induced experiences, yet in other places he seeks to bemoan the shallowness of
such transacted experiences.”
107
For new media theories like Bolter, Grusin, Featherstone,
Galloway and Hansen, Benjamin has become a touchstone for landmark discussions of human
104
Ibid.,39.
105
Ibid., 37.
106
Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media, 6. Nachdr (Cambridge, Mass.:
MIT Press, 2003),74-5.
107
Mike Featherstone, “Post-Bodies, Aging and Virtual Reality,” in The Cybercultures Reader, ed. David Bell and
Barbara M. Kennedt (New York NY: Routledge, 2000), 616.
71
and technological agency and new forms of mediation, and subsequent discussion of authenticity
and authority.
The “Toronto” school revolves around largely one man, largely one book, and largely
one phrase – Marshall McLuhan, his 1964 Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, and
the title of its opening chapter “The Medium is the Message.”
108
McLuhan and his legacy
constellate admiration and critique, straw men and rehabilitations. Such an enduring legacy
revolves around his most contentious point, that “…the personal and social consequences of any
medium – that is, of any extension of ourselves – result from the new scale that is introduced into
our affairs by each extension of ourselves, or by any new technology.”
109
In other words, “…the
dominant medium of each age uniquely constrains the ways in which our brains process in
formation, which, in turn, shapes our personalities and our social systems.”
110
This assertion that
“the media is the message” conflates with broader forms of techno determinism and over the
years has become the sticking point for any conversation around the role of media and human
behavior. Any one paragraph or section or chapter will do little to address this properly. I
introduce the man and the phrase here only as a provocation and catalyst for further discussion
regarding McLuhan’s repercussions on discussions of technological determinism and
anthropocentrism, central to the broader concerns of this project.
Legacies of Benjamin and McLuhan persist into new media studies, manifesting as
anxieties around the authenticity and authority of the reproduced image and human agency in
modes mediations. Like the turn to digital religion, the turn to new media studies or a new media
108
Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, 1st MIT Press ed (Cambridge, Mass: MIT
Press, 1994),7.
109
Ibid.
110
Elihu Katz, ed., Canonic Texts in Media Research: Are There Any? Should There Be? How about These?
(Cambridge : Malden, MA: Polity Press ; Distributed in the U.S.A. by Blackwell Publishers, 2003), 154.
72
studies (that is either a study of new media or a new study of media) means both recuperating
and rejecting, fostering and forgetting canon and paradigms like those of Benjamin and
McLuhan. These anxieties and contestations pull on and ground some of the problematic
divisions within the field of digital religion– things like authenticity and authority, technological
determinism, and so-called “mediatization.”
111
The following explication of some of these
recuperations or rejections lays out a path from mass media to a material media, in a move away
from mediation and towards a medium, one that fosters a new answer to an old question: what is
so new about new media?
New (Media) Studies
Robert K. Logan, a former colleague of McLuhan’s, wrote the 2010 Understanding New
Media “to develop an understanding of ‘new media’ and their impact using the ideas and
methodology of Marshall McLuhan…”
112
Logan is not the first and will not be the last to wrestle
with McLuhan’s legacy in the study of new media, which confronts and ultimately recuperates
McLuhan’s work, particularly around ideas of materiality, embodiment, and technological
determinism. We have seen already how Science and Technology Studies offers a critical
response to technological determinism in the broad scale of the (post)humanities, but media and
new media studies and theories have their own particular response, one that revolves largely
around materialism and specificity of the medium.
Media scholar John Durham Peters begins his own reevaluation of McLuhan and
technological determinism by recounting McLuhan’s cameo appearance in Woody Allen’s 1977
111
Heidi A. Campbell, Digital Religion: Understanding Religious Practice in New Media Worlds, Book, Edited
(Routledge, 2013),99.
112
Robert K. Logan, Understanding New Media: Extending Marshall McLuhan (New York: Peter Lang, 2010),1.
73
film Annie Hall, in which McLuhan and Allen puncture the fourth wall of the film to rebuke a
man who is incorrectly espousing McLuhan’s theories (luckily McLuhan and Allen have no such
capacity in this present medium).
113
While spelling out the history of technological determinism,
Peters notes that that the term “starts to bend in the mid-1960s…[i]t was less a term for sectarian
squabbles in historical materialism than a global term for the fallacy of giving technology too
much weigh in societal prognostication,” and that McLuhan had become the harbinger of this
fallacy.
114
For all its specificity of use, “technological determinism” had been abstracted to
almost a point of uselessness, a straw man without referent.
Peters argues that the villainizing of technological determinism (like the man rebuked in
Annie Hall) is a “problem of the long shot,” in which academics cling to hyperbolic definitions
of a term like “technological determinism” to leverage their argument, and in turn overshoot the
bulk of the term’s worth.
115
As a result, technological determinism became an object of ridicule,
rarely examined in any seriousness rather than something to work through and with, and
McLuhan, in many ways, went with it. However, with the maturation of things like STS and
actor-network theory, Peters assures us that “[t]he concept of technological determinism has
more or less stabilized since the 1990s as a morally inflected trade-off between resistance (by the
people) and domination (by machines or their captains).”
116
This “trade-off” is where we stand
now, where McLuhan’s brand of technological determinism or medium-determinacy stands not
so much as a straw man, but a hinge point: a more nuanced discussion point about where and
113
John Durham Peters, “'You Mean My Whole Fallacy Is Wrong?': On Technological Determinism,”
Representation 140 (Fall 2017): 10–26.
114
Ibid.,17.
115
Ibid., 20.
116
Ibid.
74
how particular forms of “resistance” or “domination” take place around and through technologies
of mass mediation.
McLuhan’s approach was recuperated mainly through this stabilization, and in working
out a new media theory, his ideas (particularly those around the interrelation of human ontology,
materiality, and media technologies) have found new life. I make this bridge between McLuhan
and new media theories not to draw attention to McLuhan and his thinking in particular, but
more simply to relate the maturation of thought on media into thought on new media. The
concepts that interested McLuhan continue to be of interest in current theories of new media,
namely technological specificity and extension of human being through technological devices.
The recovery and recuperation of McLuhan is less a redemption story of a man and his thinking,
and more a single echo of one concept that exists among many in the study of media, concepts
and problems that persist even unto so-called “new media studies.”
In their introduction to Critical Terms for Media Studies, Mark B.N. Hansen and W.J.T.
Mitchell re-organize the subtitle of McLuhan’s landmark text Understanding Media: The
Extensions of Man to re-envision McLuhan’s work as concerning that very extension in the form
of “media as a prosthesis of human agency.”
117
McLuhan’s work, they say, implicates the logic
of human embodiment in media history in a way that makes common cause with some important
contemporary media theorists and philosophers of technics, including feminist posthumanist
Katherine Hayles, who always views mediation and information as tied in with bodies, as
working through bodies. By recognizing the embodied and material aspects of McLuhan’s work,
Mitchell and Hansen tether him to broader discourses of contemporary media studies while
117
W. J. T. Mitchell and Mark B. N. Hansen, eds., Critical Terms for Media Studies (Chicago ; London: The
University of Chicago Press, 2010), xii.
75
simultaneously giving those current studies a lineage and history they may not (previously) have
credited. With the re-engagement of these old figures and terms, there arrive new paradigms and
new battlegrounds.
One such contestation is the place of “image” versus “information” as the medium of or
for new media. The “image” has held a special place in thinking about mediation and mediation,
especially during the rise and proliferation of film and filmic images. Benjamin’s main concern
in “The Work of Art…” was the integrity and endurance of the “image” in the face of
mechanical or technical reproduction. Visual media theorist W.J.T Mitchell has taken this one
step further by writing extensively on what he calls the “pictorial turn,” the turn to images and
image analysis in the humanities and critical theory, and “the realization that while the problem
of pictorial representation has always been with us, it presses inescapably now, and with
unprecedented force, on every level of culture, from the most refined philosophical speculations
to the most vulgar productions of mass media.”
118
For media studies, the “image” is emblematic
of a distilled essence, that which is in and of the medium, the generative core of what is mediated
and serves as the contested space for defining how media and mediation shape this “image”:
visual media. But as computer technologies began to produce, re-produce, and project images
within their own medium, some media scholars called for a move away from the image as the
center of mass for visual media studies. Alexander Galloway nods to Kittler as already skeptical
of what is so new about new media, taking exception where “[m]any scholars today continue to
classify the computer as another installment in the long march of visual culture. As Kittler makes
118
W. J. T. Mitchell, Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation, (Chicago: The University of
Chicago Press, 1994), 16; W. J. T. Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want? : The Lives and Loves of Images, (Chicago:
The University of Chicago Press, 2005); W. J. T. Mitchell, “Dinosaurs and Modernity,” in From Energy to
Information: Representation in Science and Technology, Art, and Literature, ed. Bruce Clarke and Linda Dalrymple
Henderson, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 351.
76
clear, such a position is totally wrong. Subsequent to television, which began a retreat away from
optical media and a return to the symbolic form via signal codification, the computer
consummates the retreat from the realm of the imaginary to the purely symbolic realm of writing.
"In contrast to film, television was already no longer optics.”
119
For Kittler via Galloway,
television’s move to encoding visual media into signals for transmission and then their
transference back into a visual media for consumption or viewing represented the first step away
from the purely visual medium of film and towards something else. So for them, digital
codification is the culmination of television's beginnings.
For many, information becomes the new lodestar for new media studies and battles
waged over the place of “information” and its analysis. An early and unavoidable attempt to
reorganize and reconcile the image within the medium of information is Lev Manovich’s 2001
The Language of New Media, the title alone giving some clue as to how he will approach the
structure of new media.
120
In it, Manovich argues that computers have fulfilled the cinematic
ways of “seeing the world, structuring time, of narrating story, of linking one experience to the
next…In this respect the computer fulfills the promise of the cinema as a visual Esperanto…”
121
Manovich’s analogic project works through cinematic and poetic comparisons to reconcile
computer-based mediation with previous technologies and modes of sensing. Above all,
Manovich emphasizes narrative, language, and cinematic metaphor to explain the structure of
new media more than its operation, switching back and forth between film and digital analysis to
strengthen his more significant points on media, rarely taking into account the use, reception, or
cultural contexts of these structures. While one could argue that this (relatively) early attempt at
119
Alexander R. Galloway 1974, The Interface Effect, (Malden, MA; Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2012), 17.
120
Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media, 1st MIT Press pbk., (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2002)
121
Ibid., xv.
77
understanding new media should be forgiven for these oversights, Manovich’s work has since
continued to emphasize visuality and language, especially in his turn to software studies, which
turns to code into language and obscures both materiality and particularity in favor of poetics,
where “software is the interface to our imagination and the world – a universal language through
which the world speaks, and a universal engine on which the world runs.”
122
This emphasis on
software and language keeps Manovich clearly in a linguistic (rather than imagistic, material, or
interface) based approach to digital media.
Such early turns in new media analysis that draw comparisons to established media forms
for analysis by analogy are now targets for a new class of new media theorists.
123
Whether these
critiques are based on what was theorized or what thinkers like Manovich represent (like with
McLuhan) in hyperbole is still an open question. But such evaluations and refutations do reveal
new priorities in the study of new media: particularly the materiality and particularity of
“information” over “image” as a primary point of analysis. This re-alignment rests both in
technological specificity (that is, paying attention to the particular type of device, interface, mode
of mediation being analyzed rather than generalizing about “new media) and the talking about
information and data as the primary medium of digital media.
Galloway cites Kittler as cautioning against adopting a predominately visual-based
interpretation for computer mediation. Galloway later expands on this complicated relationship
between visuality and digital media, saying
122
Lev Manovich, “Software Is the Message,” ed. Raiford Guins, Journal of Visual Culture 13, no. 1 (April 2014):
79–81; Lev Manovich, “The Practice of Everyday (Media) Life: From Mass Consumption to Mass Cultural
Production?,” Critical Inquiry 35, no. 2 (January 2009): 319–31; Lev Manovich, “The Poetics of Augmented
Space,” Visual Communication 5, no. 2 (June 2006): 219–40. See also Mark B.N Hansen 1965, New Philosophy for
New Media, (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2004), 31.
123
Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media, (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press,
2003).
78
…any understanding of contemporary visual mediation that ignores software does so at
its peril, in an age when cinema has become synonymous with Final Cut Pro,
photography with Photoshop, writing with Microsoft Word, and on and on…But at the
same time I am sympathetic to a certain minoritarian refrain running through recent
media theory in the specificity of computers as non-optical if not altogether non-visual
media, for anyone wishing to cram computers into the framework of ‘visual culture’ is
certainly suffering from an unfortunate fetishization of the physical interface, as if the
computer monitor were an adequate substitute for the medium as a whole, in which, in
addition to screens of various shapes and sizes, consists of any number of other
technologies: nonoptical interfaces (keyboard, mouse, controller, sensor); data in memory
and data on disk; executable algorithms; networking technologies and protocols; and the
lost continues.
124
Rather than tether themselves to established theories of visual media to understand the
digital, Galloway, Hansen, and others drift away from the image as an entry point, instead
choosing “data” or “information” as a vehicle for exploring both the nature and function of
digital media. For Hansen, information and data offer a multifaceted approach, one that escapes
the velocity of the history of the image, when “regardless of its current surface appearance,
digital data is at heart polymorphous: lacking any inherent form or enframing, data can be
materialized in almost a limitless array of framings…”
125
Data (as a concept) grounds much of
digital media studies as the “stuff” of new media, the medium in and out of which digital media
is sensed and made sense of, the new location for theorization. For thinkers like Hansen and
Galloway, data and information are both the “stuff” of digital media and the means of relation
between these “stuffs”.
Galloway grounds his definition of “data” in the Latin dare meaning “to give” and in its
perfect passive form, “the things having been given.”
126
So, for Galloway, data are those things,
124
Galloway, The Interface Effect, 63-4.
125
Hansen, New Philosophy for New Media, 34.
126
Alexander R. Galloway, “From Data to Information,” Culture and Communication (blog), n.d.,
http://cultureandcommunication.org/galloway/from-data-to-information.
79
those things that can be given. But he admits this definition is incomplete: “The true definition of
data, therefore, is not simply ‘the things having been given.’ The definition must conjoin
givenness and relation. For this reason, data often go by another name, a name that more suitably
describes the implicit imbrication of givenness and relation. The name is information.
Information combines both aspects of data: the root form refers to a relationship (here a
relationship of identity as same), while the prefix in refers to the entering into existence of form,
the actual givenness of abstract form into real concrete formation.”
127
For Galloway, information
and data are about things in relation and in communication.
Mark B.N. Hansen develops a similar definition of information from early cyberneticists
Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver’s “information theory,” where information is the result of
the interpretation of data after transference.
128
In other words, for Shannon and Weaver (and
therefore, for Hansen), “information” refers to meaningful interpretations of mediated data.
Much of Hansen’s larger project is to free this kind of information-as-meaning-making from its
linguistic, imagistic, or cerebral realms and put the ability to make meaning back into the body.
For both Galloway and Hansen, data and information as terms are based in relation. Data
are things relayed, and information is the meaningful or actionable relation of those things.
“Data” goes beyond digital bits or bytes in definition and becomes the primary means of
analysis. For digital media theory, data and information are terms based around the meaningful
interpretation of communication – whether that be from machine to machine or machine to
human.
127
Ibid.
128
Mark B. N. Hansen, Bodies in Code: Interfaces with Digital Media (New York ; London: Routledge, 2006),249.
80
While data/information has become the medium of the media and the stuff for theorizing,
language of “the image” still lingers, even in Hansen’s thesis “…the digital image demarcates an
embodied processing of information” (emphasis mine).
129
The idea of the image, then, in the face
of the “information” age, persists, but why? W.J.T Mitchell suggests its endurance by way of his
definition of the image, as “…the uncanny content of a medium, the shape or form it assumes,
the thing that makes its appearance in a medium while making the medium itself appear as a
medium.”
130
This is what Mitchell goes on to describe as the “uncanny” nature of the image,
both its containment in and revelation of its own medium, the self-revealing way in which
images are both in and of. In this way, Hansen speaks of the digital “image” in all its embodied
and material formations – as still that thing, that image in and of the digital that maintains (as
Mitchell puts it) “the uncanny, ambiguous character that has from the first made them objects of
fascination and anxiety.”
131
So, the question of whether we are dealing with the “image” or “data” or “information”
as what is new about new media becomes beside the point. In other words, the visuality or
image-ness of new media is not what is “new” here – what is potentially new is what we
prioritize when we discuss what is new about new media, and the levels of perception and
function used to demarcate so-called old from co-called new media. The question “what is new
about new media?” becomes a question less about the content or form of mediation but the ways
in which we can talk about mediation because of the provocations of new media as a term. New
media has the ability (in all its conceptual and material forms) to create new modes of
perception, whether through its interfaces, as Galloway suggests, its ambivalent data as Hansen
129
Ibid, 11.
130
Mitchell and Hansen, Critical Terms for Media Studies,30.
131
Ibid., 47.
81
suggest, or the persistent and uncanny image, as Mitchell suggests. All of these suggestions
together question what is new about new media: not as mediation, but as a concept.
For Hansen, what is new about new media is not its impact on the image as an image, but
rather the way computer and data-driven mediation force us to rethink the specificity of
particular interfaces as inherently tied to certain sensations (image, sound, text). New media
instead forces us to think about computer technology as multi-modal in its form of mediation. He
wonders “[c]an it be that, for the first time in our history, media (meaning the storage,
dissemination, and transmission of experience) has become distinct from its own technical
infrastructure, from the computational networks and machines that undergird most of what we
consume as media?”
132
He goes on to describe this separation of media from technology as the
computer’s “indifference to medial difference” where computer technologies emulate other
technologies for human sense perception with no regard for that media’s original form.
133
He
gives an example of wax cylinder recordings that can now only be read by sensitive digital
equipment, which then translate the data into audio for our own perception – granting us the only
way to access this lost medium. This “indifference” reveals that a wholly different context --
what is new about new media is not its ability but rather its ambivalence – that data-driven
media can function and perform in some ways without human intervention and without the
intention towards human perception.
This is what is new about new media: it is forcing us to think beyond human perception
of data and information, to re-imagine what mediation of information can mean. New media
moves away from the specificity of any form of mediation (image, sound) and any specific
132
Mitchell and Hansen, Critical Terms for Media Studies, 72.
133
Ibid.
82
technology of mediation (film, text) and towards an indifferent and multi-modal form of
computer mediation. This means that “…humans must rely on technologies to perform
operations to which they have absolutely no direct access whatsoever and that correlates to no
already existing human faculty of capacity."
134
What is new about new media is its movement away from an anthropocentric sense of
mediation towards a posthuman or ecological sense of media, where media is untethered from
both their form and their technology. Wark, Thacker, and Galloway, in their introduction to three
essays on media, push for “…not so much a post-media condition but rather a non-media
condition, not so much the extensions of man but the exodus of man from this world. Our task is
not so much a reinvigorated humanism, no matter how complicated or qualified it might need to
be, but rather a glimpse into the realm of the non-human.”
135
Like the roots of the posthuman in
the previous chapter, these thinkers oppose a heuristic “humanism.” Instead of leaning on an
anthropocentric (or what they call “reinvigorated humanism”) approach to new media, they
instead look to prioritize the non-human elements of mediation. In thinking beyond media
specificity and in turn thinking outside the human, Wark, Thacker, Galloway, Hansen, and
Mitchell are all responding to the questions of Kittler, the assertions of McLuhan, and the
anxieties of Benjamin more than rejecting the old/new media theory of someone like Manovich.
Instead, they endeavor to think that what is new about new media is not in the media itself (as
Bolter, Grusin, and Manovich did) but in prioritizing the non-human in a conception of media.
134
Mark B.N. Hansen, Feed-Forward: On the Future of Twenty-First-Century Media, (Chicago; London: University
of Chicago Press, 2015), 4.
135
Galloway, Thacker, and Wark, Excommunication, 21.
83
But if the “image” no longer has any utility, and “data” is of no real interest beyond
human perception (or at the very least a poor substitute or mimesis of “image” as a concept), to
modify Kittler’s question: what is there new to study about new media? Kittler expounds on the
problem: “[t]here are physiological computer interfaces that you can continue to regard as media.
But inside, in the realm of hardware and software, there is nothing imaginary. Along these lines:
media are the visible sides, turned toward laypersons and others, of a world that science invokes
as the dark side of the moon.”
136
How do we get to the dark side of the moon if we can’t sense it?
How do we make sense of it? What is there to hold on to? We need to pay attention to the
vehicles that get us to that dark side of the moon, grasp what specifics we can about how these
devices function in the ways we can sense them – because we depend on them whether we can
know how they work or not.
Materiality, embodiment, interfaces, performance: these are the kinds of tangible things
to grasp as we venture towards the dark side of the moon. At Kittler’s urging, we need ways to
orient ourselves towards a better understanding of what is new about new media: how we think
about mediation itself. While Hansen argues that media is not tied to specific materiality, it is
inescapable (through Kittler’s admission as well) that new media is bound to one materiality at
least – that of the digital computer. John Durham Peters, Amanda Starling Gould, Katherine
Hayles, and others demand we think of this digitality as materiality. Hansen (like the feminist
posthumanists) urges us to think the digital “image” as contingent on the human body for
translation. Galloway’s Interface Effect is an examination of how the “interface” as a concept
can help us think about how new media functions. All of this materiality, embodiment, and
136
F. Kittler and C. Weinberger, “The Cold Model of Structure: Friedrich Kittler Interviewed by Christoph
Weinberger,” Cultural Politics an International Journal 8, no. 3 (January 1, 2012): 375–84.
84
interfacing must too be ultimately performed as such, brought out into space and time as
mediation, as mediated, as media. Turning away from Kittler’s question (“what is new about new
media?”) and instead turning to his provocation (the dark side of the moon) leans away from
searching for conceptual generalities and qualifying essences of so-called new media and
towards sensible practices and material contingencies for a functional understanding of media in
context, recognizing technological mediation as a broader set of practices and extensions of a
human and nonhuman world. These materialist approaches to mediation invite contemplating
“technology” as a grounding term for understanding how computer-based mediation operates
within human and nonhuman worlds, as a means of excavating the hidden aspects of the “dark
side of the moon,” what is inaccessible about new media by way of humanism, or at least the
effects these technologies have on their sensible counterparts.
These co-extensive and collaborative relationships between media, technology, and
organic life see technology as a major mediating factor in the material and social lives of the
planet and human being. Bernard Stiegler presents the idea of the homo faber, that technologies
and humans co-originate, that they are dependent of each other as means of mediating
experience. Jeremy Stolow defines technology as mediation, as “the material appurtenances,
mechanical operations, and expert knowledge that enable humans to act upon, and in concert
with, the very tangible domains of nature and society.”
137
Both these approaches (and like those
encouraged by Hansen and Galloway) see media and technology as co-extensive while
maintaining the importance of particularity of technical function and materiality.
137
Pramod K. Nayar, Posthumanism, 20; Mitchell and Hansen, Critical Terms for Media Studies.xiii; Bernard
Stiegler, Technics and Time, (Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press, 1998), Jeremy Stolow, Deus in Machina:
Religion, Technology, and the Things in Between, (Fordham University Press, 2013),2.
85
Approaching technology and mediation as co-extensive with human and nonhuman
experience through the interface, materiality, and embodiment compliments a Science and
Technology Studies approach to seeing tech and media in and of a larger world. STS (the same
which Peters cites as a balm for the technological determinism backlash) bridges both new media
studies and posthumanism, as the new media theorist wrestled with above and others all
emphasize (to varying degrees) media technologies as within a spectrum of co-extension and
codependence with human and nonhuman life and ecologies. From the nonhuman sensibilities of
computer-based technologies (Hansen, Thacker) to the co-extension of human and technology
(McLuhan, Hayles) and the ecological impacts and sensibilities of media (Starling Gould,
Peters), these material approaches to media technologies incorporate the interdisciplinarity and
exploratory nature of early media studies.
From Benjamin’s anxieties around authenticity and McLuhan’s human and technological
agency, the problems and questions of media studies persist. They now have gravitated towards
functional and material questions of what technology and mediation do and what impact they
have on the human and non-human world, in a vastly embodied, material, and ecological sense
of being and world. In other words, what new media studies allow us to do in a broad sense is to
understand the performances and impacts of technologically (namely digitally) mediated
experiences of the world, whether these experiences be strictly anthropocentric or not, sensible
by humans or not, impacting humans or not. A new theory for media is material, embodied, and
ecological.
From New Media to Religion (Ritual)
The concept of new media is but one of two parts for a posthuman method to study digital
practices in America around death and mourning. It also requires a corresponding understanding
86
of religion. As with the definition of new media, the aim is to create an understanding that is
useful for the ritualizations of death at hand in the subsequent case studies, and one that picks up
on and interacts with the concepts and theories around it. So, when constructing a definition or
concept of religion that corresponds with new media in a way that is useful, I propose following
the turn to things like materiality, embodiment, and the interface to locate an idea of religion that
is useful. “Ritual,” as a term for analysis, does just this.
Ritual studies relies on the material and performative aspects of religion. As with the turn
to specifics in a new theory of media, this attention to specifics in ritual is part of considerable
resistance to a thought/action dichotomy (the residuals of a Cartesian dualism/humanism).
138
And
like the new theories of media, ritual theories largely turn to function, impact, and performance
as points for analysis. Ritual theorist Ronald L. Grimes charts the constellation of ritual study’s
concerns as Space, Time, Sound, Identity and Action.
139
These are some of the material objects
for ritual studies, its “realm”, what it accounts for when looking at religious or ritual action. As
with the term “image,” “ritual” slips away, replaced by more material fields for investigation.
And like with new media, defining ritual requires understanding the field from which it
emerged, so I offer a sense of ritual studies relating to new media studies, where the following
case study chapters further activate these ritual theories in the specifics of their analysis. This
sense of ritual studies begins with its emergence (like media studies) as an interdisciplinary and
nascent subfield, marking its founding figures, blurry boundaries, and (for our purposes) its
attention to the body. I then turn to what ritual studies attends to as its own rubrics or heuristics –
138
Catherine M. Bell 1953, Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 21.
139
Ronald L. Grimes 1943, Beginnings in Ritual Studies,(Columbia, S.C: University of South Carolina Press, 1995),
25-38.
87
doing and being, place and difference, human and non-human – to establish a definition of ritual
that suits understanding digital religious death practices in America today.
Ronald Grimes tells us that “[t]o theorize is to look at something in a special way, one
that achieves its perspective by distancing or by probing beneath the surface. Well executed,
either theoretical tactic should enable scholars to notice previously unnoticed dimensions of their
objects of study.”
140
For theorizing ritual, I’ll take two steps back in order to create some
distance – one step to look at the state of ritual studies and theory as an academic pursuit, and the
second step to look at what remains for a definition of ritual within the context of American
digital religion. The first echoes a similar step back taken above for new media, to gain
perspective on the field, where it came from, its concerns and questions, and its aims. The second
step back places particular aspects of the ritual theory into the context of this project’s pursuits
and aims – to understand digital religious practice around death in America, by selecting aspects
of ritual studies to arrive at a definition of ritualization as a technology that transforms
individuals from one cultural state into another and re-orients material embodiments of being
through formalized action and agency through attention to these cultural states, both human and
nonhuman.
Ritual studies (again, like media studies) is itself a relatively new specialized sub-field,
with roots in the beginnings of anthropology and sociology. Iconic names like Durkheim and
Freud were both interested in ritual, but with the Journal of Ritual Studies only forming in 1987,
the canonization of these icons within a set of theories and methods called “ritual studies” is
relatively recent. Reasons for this recent emergence are many-fold, including the Protestant bias
140
Ronald L. Grimes, “Performance,” in Theorizing Rituals: Issues, Topics, Approaches, Concepts, ed. Jan Snoek,
Jens Kreinath, and Michael Stausberg (Boston, MA: Brill, 2006),79.
88
in scholarship for thought over action, belief over practice, doxy over praxy, and the sense that
action and ritual were, in fact, the opposite of “theory.”
141
More positively, the elevation of ritual to the realm of acceptable theory came alongside
the rise of media theory in the 1960s as the turn to cultural studies took more seriously ideas of
performance and materiality.
142
Ritual studies here aligns with the rise with other academic
movements at the time (like posthumanism) working to resist these dichotomies, and instead turn
to specifics of function and encounter. The persistence of these theoretical orientations, along
with the recent blossoming of ritual theory, keep attention on the blurred lines between formal
and informal religious or ritualistic behavior, what Catherine Bell calls activities that are
“particularly ubiquitous and fluid.”
143
For Bell, such acts are the simplified evocation of more
elaborate ritual patterns in the culture: “such rites hover on the blurry boundary between formal
religion and informal domesticity.”
144
Ritual studies now attends to these blurry boundaries, the
formal and the domestic, the unique and the ubiquitous.
Objects dotting both sides of these blurry boundaries make up the “field” for ritual
concern highlighted above: Space, Time, Sound, Identity, and Action - what Grimes suggests we
question and examine about the structure and construction of ritual action. One constellation of
these active space/time objects of identity and sound is the human body, of great importance to
rituals studies from its beginnings. From early anthropologies of ritual like Arnold Van Gennep’s
The Rites of Passage, the form and performance of the body in relation to other bodies and
141
Kreinath, Snoek, and Stausberg. xv; Graham Harvey, Ritual and Religious Belief: A Reader (New York:
Routledge, 2005),3.
142
Catherine Bell, “Performance,” in Critical Terms for Religious Studies, ed. Mark C. Taylor (Chicago, Ill: The
University of Chicago Press, 1998).
143
Catherine Bell, “Embodiment,” in Theorizing Rituals: Issues, Topics, Approaches, Concepts, ed. Jens Kreinath,
Jan Snoek, and Michael Stausberg (Boston, MA: Brill, 2006), 541.
144
Ibid.
89
objects (human and non-human, alive and dead) has been central to understanding the layout and
function of rituals.
Bell points out two basic orientations to the body in ritual studies: a specific,
constructivist approach or a recursive, reflexive, performative approach. The first
(specific/constructivist) asks either: how the ritual shapes the body or how the body shapes
ritual. Each, Bell points out, is unilateral in its approach and limited its reflexive analysis. These
limitations give rise to a “more complex theory of social constructionism- one in which there is
no unconstructed priority granted to either the ritual or the body. This stance is apt to be called a
discursive or performative approach.”
145
This unconstructed approach to ritual and the body
allows for a reflexive approach, one in which neither the body nor the ritual is a stationary object
of study, but both are subject to constant fluid (re)formation. This approach is crucial to
understand the body as itself a process of the interface.
A Theory of Ritual
Combining the blurring of lines between the formal and the everyday and a recursive role
of the body and ritual in formations of each other, a few things can be said about ritual towards a
functional definition for our purposes: ritual is about both doing and being; ritual is about place;
ritual agency is not necessarily human; ritual is of the everyday; and ritual is a technology of
transformation. Each of these nodes reaffirm the definition that ritualization is a technology that
transforms individuals from one cultural state into another and re-orients material
embodiments of being through formalized action and agency through attention to these cultural
145
Ibid., 539.
90
states, both human and nonhuman, and what follows is a quick sketch of the ritual theory origin
of each of these projections.
146
Overarching all of these proceedings is a key distinction between two of the most
dominant theorists of ritual: Jonathan Z. Smith and Catherine Bell. The key distinction is
between what they each mean by “ritual” and “ritualization,” respectively. As noted above, Bell
opposes a hard structuralist approach to ritual. “Ritual,” as a term for Bell, is too static, too set
apart itself, too, perhaps, structural. Thinking with “ritualization” rather than “ritual” turns away
from structures and towards processes, where, as Bell puts it: “acting ritually emerges as a
particular cultural strategy of differentiation linked to particular social effects and rooted in a
distinctive interplay of a socialized body and the environment it structures.”
147
Theorizing ritual
in and as a social process is not unique to Bell – from Durkheim to van Gennep to Turner to
Geertz there has always been an emphasis in ritual theory on the social roles that rituals play in
building and maintaining communities. But Bell desires to move beyond the sphere of ritual -as-
societal-tool to seeing ritual as itself social action. In other words, Bell wants to move away from
seeing ritual as instrumental to community maintenance and towards understanding ritual as a
human behavior outside of structural terms. As Bell states:
In a very preliminary sense, ritualization is a way of acting that is designed and
orchestrated to distinguish and privilege what is being done in comparison to other,
usually more quotidian, activities. As such, ritualization is a matter of various culturally
specific strategies for setting some activities off from others, for creating and privileging
a qualitative distinction between the 'sacred' and the 'profane,' and for ascribing such
distinctions to realities thought to transcend the powers of human actors.
148
146
Again, the following case-study chapter will take further labors to play out these connections in context, here I
only flag them up towards a working definition of ritual.
147
Bell, Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice,8.
148
Ibid., 73.
91
Here, Bell is not without the influence of Smith’s structuralism. These “strategies” and
“qualitative distinctions” are what Smith calls setting things apart. Placemaking is central to
ritualization’s setting things apart and calling for a certain type of attention. Smith writes:
“[r]itual is, above all, an assertion of difference.”
149
This “difference,” he goes on to explain,
marks ritual as a mode of comparison, a moment for incongruity, and a means of relation.
150
Comparison, incongruity, and relation make and resolve difference: in setting something apart,
ritualization forces contemplation by creating stark contrasts and binaries, “ins” and “outs,”
qualifications of status, privilege, and relation. Smith writes, “Ritual is, first and foremost, a
mode of paying attention.”
151
Asserting difference is paying attention to these comparisons,
incongruities, and relations, so ritualization is primarily about both an assertion of difference and
a mode of paying attention, taking asserting difference as a particular mode of paying attention.
So, in my own use of “ritualization,” I include Smith formal influence on Bell – as Smith
classifies ritual as a “mode” or an “assertion” or a “means,” I allow him into a kind of procedural
or processual thinking that Bell would admit has a kind of reflexivity or recursive quality,
perhaps outside a hard formal or structuralism.
Ritual is about both doing and being. Roy Rappaport notes that “ritual expresses
individual status within a structural system” – it is an action (in that it is an expression) of a way
of being (in that it is about status).
152
Victor Turner’s structuralizing of ritual involves three
movements and two states of being. The first movement is removal from society, the second into
a removed/ritualized space that mirrors societal structures, the third a return to society. The two
149
Jonathan Z. Smith, To Take Place : Toward Theory in Ritual,(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987).109.
150
Ibid., 110.
151
Ibid., 103. With his sense of humor, ritual is both “above all” and “first and foremost” two different things
152
Roy Rappaport, Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity, (Cambridge, U.K. ; New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1999), 52.
92
states are of liminality and communitas, both found in the second stage. Turner (in a form
adapted from Arnold Van Gennep) illustrates the interrelation of action and being (combining as
transformation) in and through the kinds of expressions of social status Rappaport discusses.
153
These primary orientations towards ritual reveal a dual-core – that is, ritual is not primarily about
action or being but about both, and this interrelation plays out through ritual’s transformative
function, tackled below in more detail.
Ritual is about place. Jonathan Z. Smith is most clear on this point when he says that
sacred spaces are focusing points. For Smith, a sacred space is created as such when “nothing is
accidental” when a place is so intentionally constructed for one purpose that everything within
that space becomes identifiable and singular. Here ritual is primarily about setting things apart.
This is not just a spatial metaphor: there is a particular and set-apart place.
154
Richard
Schechner, in his performative and staged approaches to ritual theory, recognizes the importance
of not only particular place but placing. Placing, for Schechner, is the act of putting objects and
bodies and things in certain ways in relation to each other as an act of ritualization.
155
Like
Smith, Schechner emphasizes place and relation place, the interrelation of subjects and objects in
place-making. Both Smith and Schechner articulate the specifics of place as part of ritual act –
both a particular place and the act of placing in particular. Ritual is about putting things in their
place and the actions and identities that become of them.
Ritual agency is not necessarily human. William S. Sax forwards Science and
Technology and Actor-Network theories as examples of making decisions between ritual actors
153
Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure, 96; Gennep, The Rites of Passage.
154
Jonathan Z. Smith, Imagining Religion : From Babylon to Jonestown, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1982), 54; Smith, To Take Place : Toward Theory in Ritual, 109.
155
Richard Schechner, Performance Theory, (New York: Routledge, 2003), 13.
93
and agents where “ritual actors (like social actors generally) are particular, conscious, embodied,
and intentional beings, while ritual agents (like social agents generally) may be non-human or
human, complex or individual. Actions are performed by particular social actors, whereas agency
is distributed in networks.”
156
Sax points to anthropology’s long history of recognizing non-
human agency in ritual, “..of ancestors, spirits, gods, winds, and so forth” along with “recent
discussions of the agency of non-human primates, machines, technologies, and signs” as a reason
to take seriously the non-human agency in ritual.
157
Citing both ethnographic and
anthropological accounts of ritual and theories of agency, Sax affirms the non-human agency of
rituals as not a “trend” or development in theory, but a standing conceit of ritual agency and
action, one which entangles place, being, and action.
Ritual is in and of the everyday. Catherine Bell makes this clear through perhaps her most
significant move: the switch from discussing “ritual” to discussing “ritualization,” to “draw
attention to the way in which certain social actions strategically distinguish themselves from
other actions.”
158
Bell is careful to point out here that it is the act of ritualization that makes these
distinctions within and through the raw material of the everyday – that ritual action in and of
itself is not separate from the everyday, but rather is itself the separating action. In other words,
ritualization take material from the everyday and sets them apart as special. Caroline Humphrey
and James Laidlaw similarly make this point in their ethnography of Jain rituals, that ritual is not
altogether separate from the everyday, but attributable to the very things that make it up.
159
For
156
William S. Sax, “Agency,” in Theorizing Rituals: Issues, Topics, Approaches, Concepts, ed. Jens Kreinath, Jan
Snoek, and Michael Stausberg (Boston, MA: Brill, 2006), 477.
157
Ibid., 478-9.
158
Bell, Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice, 74.
159
Caroline Humphrey and James Laidlaw, The Archetypal Actions of Ritual: A Theory of Ritual Illustrated by the
Jain Rite of Worship, Oxford Studies in Social and Cultural Anthropology (Oxford : New York: Clarendon Press ;
Oxford University Press, 1994).
94
Bell, Humphrey, and Laidlaw, ritual is of the everyday both in a structural way (because it is
made up of the very ordinary-cum-extraordinary) and social way (as they are transformative
social actions that persist outside ritual place). Ritualization is a process that turns the ordinary
into the extraordinary for the purposes of transformation – it takes everyday objects, like plants,
animals, machines, and food and transforms them (in a specific time and a specific place) into
extraordinary things.
Ritual is a technology of transformation. If ritual is an action taking place through not
necessarily human agency through the everyday, it must be functioning through that every day to
create some sort of change, and its acting on bodies and objects makes it, therefore, a technology
of this transformation. Bruce Kapferer tells us that ritual is a “technology (techne) for bringing-
forth, or poesies.”
160
Eric W. Rothenbuhler points to ritual as a synthesizing mechanism in its
form, where "...there must be about it some properties attributable to idea (meanings, emotions,
elements of internal experience) put in material form (written, spoken, recorded, externalized) by
some individual (an action taken, by someone, for a purpose) in order to be understandable by
others (with a syntax, semantics, and pragmatics we can share, according to the sign system
common to the group."
161
Kapferer goes on to note that this technique is about making things as
they currently are not, into something they are not yet but could be – a transformation.
Ritual is a technology of transformation. Turner, Van Gennep, Schechner, Bell, and
Rappaport all acknowledge “efficacy” as central to the ritualization of peoples, places, and things
– that is, the efficacy of a ritual to effect change, to transform. In other words, rituals function.
160
Bruce Kapferer, “Virtuality,” in Theorizing Rituals: Issues, Topics, Approaches, Concepts, ed. Jens Kreinath, Jan
Snoek, and Michael Stausberg (Boston, MA: Brill, 2006) ,672.
161
Eric W. Rothenbuhler, Ritual Communication: From Everyday Conversation to Mediated Ceremony (Thousand
Oaks: Sage Publications, 1998), xii.
95
Rituals function to transform their objects and subjects through action: to change social and
cultural status, to move from one state of being into the other. Richard Schechner outlines these
transformations, from what he calls “actuality 1” to “actuality 2” – from a pre-ritual(1) to a post-
ritual(2) state and like Turner’s liminal state of transformation, the ritual is the medium for these
transformations.
162
Turner and Van Gennep both point to coming-of-age rituals as emblematic of
the transformation from adolescent to adult, where Schechner looks to contestation rituals where
two warring groups reconcile into one through ritualized acts of war. J.Z. Smith notes that rituals
are primarily about a certain type of transformation, “an assertion of difference,” the setting of
things apart, the transformation of the everyday into something else (no longer the everyday)
through ritualization, whether this difference be internal to the ritual objects (that is, they are
differentiated as ritual objects) or the transformation (or the making different) as highlighted in
Turner and Van Gennep that persists outside the ritual place and action.
163
Ritualization is a technology that transforms individuals from one cultural state into
another and re-orients material embodiments of being through formalized action and agency
through attention to these cultural states, both human and nonhuman. This definition for
ritualization arrives from all of the above to offer a functional definition of ritualization as a
process, a transformation of material forms through formal action, dependent upon place and
action, made up of the everyday (including the non-human) and then acting as a technology of
transformation. Both Freud and Durkheim would be satisfied, as in truth, the parameters of this
definition don’t stray far from their own functional definitions, but instead open them up to a bit
more specificity through the inclusion of ritual theory developments and an eye for the task at
162
Schechner, Performance Theory, 2003, 118.
163
Smith, To Take Place : Toward Theory in Ritual, 109.
96
hand. Seeing ritual as a technology or a techne or a process forwards it primarily as a function
and a formatting. As such, this formatting, or way of doing or being can be re-formatted, re-
functioned, and re-applied to form fit new circumstances. Ritual is no one thing, it is a process of
becoming one thing from another. It is a contingent, embodied, and performative mode.
From Durkheim and Freud through Van Gennep and Turner to Rappaport, Schechner,
and Bell, ritualization, identified as a technology, strives to transform the everyday into
something else and imagines something else, where this transformation must be idealized before
being acted on. This definition of ritualization hints at one more concept of transformation, from
the declarative to the imperative, to what is to what could be, from the present to the possible.
This is what Rothenbuhler articulates when he calls ritual a combination of the material and the
ideal, the communication of a transformation into a previously imagined state.
164
Tom F. Driver
labels this as the switch from the imperative to the declarative, from an ideal (imperative) to a
state of being (declarative).
165
Picking up on the language of Deleuze and Guattari, Bruce
Kapferer describes ritual as a “virtual reality machine…as a kind of scaffolding erected at
particular moments and sites...shaped according to the type of interruption and intervention into
human actuality that it intends.”
166
J. Z. Smith too contends that ritual is about performing things
the way they ought to be in conscious tension with the way they are.
167
All of this adds up to
ritualization as being a technology of the possible – a means of striving, making towards, and
transforming into imagined or currently unattainable states of being. Not unlike what is new
about new media, ritualization helps us move towards the unknowable.
164
Rothenbuhler, Ritual Communication.xii.
165
Ronald L. Grimes, ed., Readings in Ritual Studies (Upper Saddle River, N.J: Prentice Hall, 1996), 173.
166
Kapferer, “Virtuality.”,676.
167
Smith, To Take Place : Toward Theory in Ritual, 109.
97
Concepts for New Media and Ritual: Desiring Towards a Pattern
Media and Ritual theories are not strangers to each other. Besides their co-emergence as
cobbled together sub-disciplines in the mid-twentieth century, ritual and media studies have both
been exploited within religious studies scholarship to explain both media and ritualization, at
times working at cross purposes to assign essential qualities of one concept to the other. Ronald
L. Grimes' 2006 Rite Out of Place: Ritual, Media, and the Arts offers a refreshing and necessary
step back from this co-habitation of ritual and media theories to assess the utility of each in
trying to understand the other.
168
Grimes warns that “[t]he equating strategy (media = ritual) has
limited utility…If the two terms are not differentiated as well as connected, conversation
between ritual studies and media studies is hardly worth pursuing.”
169
Instead, he suggests that
“[m]eaningful ritual-and-media discussion becomes possible when the two domains are neither
equated nor segregated but rather differentiated and conceived as sharing a common
boundary.”
170
Towards a conclusion to these two functional definitions for (new) media and ritual and
in offering some context for the following case studies, I would like to suggest three shared
boundaries between ritual and new media: Embodiment, Interface, and Performance. I aim here
only to point out places either traversed above and upcoming below at the intersections of ritual
and media rather than fully chart each intersection, where the following chapters will then fully
activate these boundaries. See these three shared concepts as condensations of the above, rather
than new ventures – more a streamlining for travel than a finalizing.
168
Ronald L. Grimes, Rite out of Place (Oxford University Press, 2006)
169
Ibid., 10.
170
Ibid., 12.
98
Embodiment (Material, Ecological)
Ritual and new media are both embodied: they require bodies, and they embody. While
Katherine Hayles points to early new media theory as reinforcing a Cartesian mind-body divide,
with “information” (or data) images as disembodied and disembodying, we have seen above how
new theories for new media push back against this very divide. Hansen argues that even the
concept of new media requires the body as the mediator, and Galloway and Thacker both look to
the materiality of the body as a place to locate our thinking and anxieties about what is “new”
about new media. These anxieties around bodily integrity and agency persist from McLuhan and
Benjamin’s fears in the face of new media technologies. Bernadette Wegenstein, writing on the
body for Mitchell and Hansen’s Critical Terms for Media Studies, confirms “Marshall
McLuhan’s prophetic insight into the dual function of mesa – at once extension of the body and
amputation…”, as both the functional extension of the body as a place of mediation and the fear
of disembodiment at the hands of new media “information.”
171
From formative theories of media
to new media studies, the body and bodily anxiety remain all too present.
Bell points to the body as particularly critical to ritual studies, where the materiality of
the ritual space/place/objects is central to Smith and where Turner notes that the “whole person”
is affected by ritual.
172
Freud and Durkheim agree that ritual has something to do with embodied
and bodily formations. What and how that formation works, Bell points out, has since taken on
one of three theoretical orientations: the constructionist orientation argues that ritual shapes the
body, and “makes the body the object of social action, the recipient of social molding, it invokes
171
Bernadette Wegenstein, “Body,” in Critical Terms for Media Studies, ed. W. J. T. Mitchell and Mark B. N.
Hansen (Chicago, Ill: The University of Chicago Press, 2010). 21.
172
Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure, 43.
99
embodiment in its passive sense.”
173
The second orientation is a simple solution to this, asking
instead how the body shapes ritual. Bell finds both lacking, in that they both prioritize an
assumed constructed entity (wither the body or the ritual) and do not recognize the co-formation
of each. This is what Bell offers as a “performative” third orientation, where the body and the
ritual are both recursive, reflexive, and co-forming. For ritual theory, embodiment is central to
understanding not only what ritual does, but how.
Performance
Embodiment requires performativity in both new media and ritual. In new media,
performance is mediation-as-cooperation of bodies and machines. Galloway charts playing with
new media as a co-operation between human bodies and machines: “[t]he work itself is material
action. One plays a game. And the software runs. The operator and the machine play the video
game together, step by step, move by move”.
174
Playing video games and other new mediations
are performances of mediation as much as anything else – performances of a co-operation of
embodiments and materialities. If we take what is “new” about new media to be its potential for
re-imagining mediation and its co-extension with embodiments, then these co-operative
performances take seriously McLuhan’s early claims that media technologies are both extensions
and erasures of the human body – performances of posthuman embodiments. If new media is
embodied media, new media then is performative media.
Ritual and performance share genealogies, from Freud and Durkheim’s assertions that
rituals are expressions and performances of individual and communal anxieties and desires, to
173
Catherine Bell, “Embodiment,” in Theorizing Rituals: Issues, Topics, Approaches, Concepts, ed. Jens Kreinath,
Jan Snoek, and Michael Stausberg (Boston, MA: Brill, 2006).538.
174
Alexander Galloway, Gaming: Essays On Algorithmic Culture, Book, Whole (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2006), 2.
100
Schechner (and later Victor Turner’s) explicit turn to theorizing performance and ritual
synthetically.
175
Performativity forms embodiment in ritual, and ritualization transforms
embodiments where performative agency is not necessarily human and therefore neither are the
embodiments. Further, Grimes points to “performativity” as the “general human predilection to
enact meanings in the presence of others” citing the likes of Judith Butler and others as bringing
the concept of performance out from the purely theatrical into the everyday performances of
meaning and identity, the everyday places out of which ritual is built, where ritual interfaces
between possible worlds and lived worlds.
176
So, if as Diana Taylor suggests, we are to think of performance as concerning an always
mediated and embodied action taking place within a recognizable system of conventions that
establishes an argument about the world through its repetition, these arguments are world-
building activities, specifically within the context of digital mediations of death as the system of
conventions. This world is being built using the embodied mediations of new media about a
posthuman sense of being as made possible through the interface.
Interface
Rituals mediate between the world as it could be and the world as it is (what Clifford
Geertz calls an “ethos” and a “worldview”) by using material and immanent technologies of
practice, performance, and embodiment to express or describe (and create the possibility for) and
idealized or otherwise state of being. Both Bruce Kapferer and Eric Walter Rothenbluther (in
discussing the virtual and communication, respectively) see ritualization as this technology of
175
Victor W. Turner, From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play, (New York City: Performing Arts
Journal Publications, 1982).
176
Ronald L. Grimes, “Performance,” in Theorizing Rituals: Issues, Topics, Approaches, Concepts, ed. Jan Snoek,
Jens Kreinath, and Michael Stausberg (Boston, MA: Brill, 2006), 391.
101
mediation, this interfacing, between the ideal and the material, or the possible and the actual.
Kapferer describes ritualization as a kind of “virtual reality machine” erected at certain times and
places to reform or reformat social relations. This picking up on ritual as a kind of techne in itself
(along with the colorful and helpful language) furthers ritual as a kind of interface.
177
Rothenbuhler similarly sees ritual as a form of communication (the meaningful relation of
information) that synthesizes “the ideal and the material.”
178
By being that point where a false
dichotomy of thought and action collapse in processes of performance and embodiment,
ritualization becomes a mediating action, itself the interfacing between both that which could be
and that which is and the processes by which those things are negotiated: concepts, materials,
actions, ideals. Ritual interfaces between places like the possible world and a realized one, the
sacred and the profane, the living and the dead.
Galloway so much as describes rituals when he defines interfaces as “not things, but
rather processes that effect a result of whatever kind.”
179
Interfaces are technologies themselves:
interactive, performative, and transformative processes. Beginning with Kittler, media “form the
infrastructural basis, the quasi-transcendental condition, for experience and understanding,” and
interfaces are neither neutral nor transparent, rather actively shaping modes of being and
perception, as McLuhan insisted.
180
By foregrounding materiality, performance, and embodiment
as places to locate the “new” of “new media,” these theories and theorists require rethinking the
interface. Galloway goes so far as to say the computer can no longer be thought of as an object
but rather a “…practice, in that it introduces a structure of action, a recipe for moving
177
Bell, Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice, 21.
178
Rothenbuhler, Ritual Communication., xii.
179
Galloway, The Interface Effect, vii.
180
Mitchell and Hansen, Critical Terms for Media Studies, vii.
102
procedurally through a certain state of affairs.”
181
Like ritual theory, new media turns to
interfaces as processes and technologies rather than things, as processes and technologies
shaping ways of being and knowing, intentional prescriptions for being and living.
Conclusions: Posthumanism, New Media, Ritual Theories
The first chapter illustrated how a posthuman epistemology emerges out of shared ethical
and ontological concerns about the occlusions of humanism and emphases on material ways of
knowing towards a methodology for understanding digital religious action accounting for human
and non-human agency in a matrix of embodied practices. It posited that even defining
posthumanism in relation to humanism is a paradoxical endeavor, with posthumanism working
on describing human being while at the same time emphasizing non-human being. Through this
paradox, anti-humanism and material feminism take ethical stances to emphasize the oversights
and violence of humanisms, where Science and Technology studies and Cybernetics offer
alternative ontological orientations to human and non-human interaction as a way of facilitating
these ethical imperatives. In all of this, posthumanism comes to take on its own epistemological
and methodological claims for digital religion: an emphasis on co-emergent subjectivities,
interactive agencies (human and non) and reflexive materiality.
This chapter picks up this same heuristic endeavor, one built on experimentation and
reflexivity, and finds them again, with specificity, in the history of the study of both media and
ritual. New media and ritual are both concerned with embodiment, performance, and interface,
and their theorizations help us understand digital religion at both ends – as digital and as religion.
They do so by lending their depth of theory to a kind of posthuman epistemology for
181
Galloway, The Interface Effect, 120.
103
understanding how new media technologies function within performances of religious thinking
and (particularly) doing. Like with a theory of the posthuman, identifying to what new media and
ritual theory attend reveals their shared functions. As a mode of inquiry, ritual theory makes
sense of what is "new" about "new media" through their shared boundaries of embodiment,
performance, and interface.
I have selected two studies that pull on the edges of what could be considered digital
religion – an eco burial with digital elements and video gaming practices. These case studies play
out both the functional posthumanist epistemology and shared theories of new media and ritual
around and through death and mourning. Each incorporates different aspects of the first two
chapters and lean heavily on their interpretive explications and vocabularies. Through them,
these theories come to themselves be functional rather than theoretical, to reveal more broadly
how the study of digital religion benefits from the posthuman perspective.
104
CHAPTER THREE – Eco-Digital Death and Mourning
Introduction
New media and ritual studies help us understand digital religion as digital and as religion
through a posthuman lens by focusing on function and the formation of posthuman being. The
previous two chapters traced a lineage of posthumanism, ritual, and new media thought to
construct a justified theoretical approach to new media rituals, especially those around death.
This heuristic approach to the creation of these concepts determines their flexibility when
applied to case studies: heuristic concepts (posthumanism in this case) are driven by an
exploratory epistemology, always adaptable and reflexive. The following case studies picks up
that approach to investigate a case of intermingled plant, human, and digital materiality in the
“Incube,” an urn-cum-plantar representative of the growing digital and green burial movements.
This chapter turns to the Incube as exemplary of digital religion’s imbrication in networks of
cultural moments, including the role of the body in modern and postmodern funerary rites, the
natural burial movement, ideas of place and placeless-ness in burial and memorialization, trends
in digital memorialization and uses ritual analysis of the Incube as an example of digital,
posthuman religious practice surrounding ideas of place, domestication, and performance
through ecological, intensifying, and interfacing aspects of posthumanism.
As the green burial movement offers alternatives for thinking about the place of the
human corpse in the circulation of life and death on an ecologically precarious planet, the Incube
offers alternatives for thinking through funerary rites. With its explicit use of a digital interface
in concert with human and plant materialities, the Incube offers religious studies and digital
religion an example of digital religious practice that moves beyond solely the screen in its
interfacing and towards understanding digital religious practice as material, networked, and
105
performative by illustrating ritualizations of the posthuman within digital religious practices.
This chapter explores how the Incube as an object locates posthuman bodies as performed
interactions between biological and technological ecosystems.
182
Pulling together the formation
of posthumanism arrived from STS and material feminism and the new media and ritual theories
of the previous chapters, here we set our sights on an object in context.
Glossy. Plastic. Filled with dirt. And human remains. This is the Bios Incube, a planter
housing tree sapling and human cremains monitored for its need for light, water, or temperature
change via a smartphone application.
183
The Incube consists of a sensor-rich monitoring device
that reaches into the soil and interfaces with a smartphone application to analyze soil and
environmental conditions and prompt the user to make accommodations for the health of the
tree.
184
The digital network creates a unique ecosystem of grieving and memorialization where
the Incube links mourning rituals and human materiality into a digital, posthuman, religious
practice.
182
I use the word ecosystem here to expand a sense of what we can think of as the so-called digital, moving beyond
a screen centric approach, to think of an interface as something that encapsulates all the materiality it accounts for,
expresses, and mediates.
183
https://urnabios.com/support/faq/; The base model Incube costs four hundred and fifty USD and the advanced
model five hundred and fifty USD Created in 2016, by design team Gerard and Roger Moliné, the Incube is the
digital appendage to the Bios Urn-- a biodegradable urn that nourishes a tree seedling.
184
The Bios Incube emerged through marketing and funding built around an internet culture. It was crowdsourced --
funded by small donations made by the public. These donations are tiered at different levels of investment, with
increasing access and reward as the tiers increase. Through platforms like Go Fund Me and Kickstarter,
crowdsourcing (or crowdfunding) is particular to younger and more tech-literate communities. They promote a sense
of communal support, of transparency, and sense of intimacy between producer and consumer. The digital
infrastructures of crowdfunding sites like Kickstarter, sites which (while made to benefit the underfunded) survive
through benefiting large founders and firms.
106
Fig. 1 The BiosUrn inserted into the Incube, the Incube, sensor, and application
(Biosincube.com)
The Incube is part of larger natural burial movements growing in the UK and US since
the 1980s.
185
In the face of ecological crises, natural (or “green”) burial techniques make human
death more ecologically responsible through biodegradable caskets, chemical-free embalming,
and non-landscaped burial grounds. These low impact burials avoid the use of invasive memorial
markers (headstones, vaults) – objects that typically give place to and name the dead.
186
These
burials are in one way place-less in that they give little or no formal indication that there has
been a burial at all, that there is a body present, and that this is a place of and for mourning.
Foregoing such demarcation means natural burial sites often give no marked presence to human
remains, and this can leave no place to mourn and memorialize the dead, and - in the case of sea
scatterings or other materially dispersed disposal methods- no place at all.
187
Such placeless
burials can cause difficulty for mourners needing a place or means to ritualize the dead. Without
a place to mark the dead, or with that place inaccessible (such as at the bottom of the sea), there
185
Andy Clayden et al., Natural Burial: Landscape, Practice and Experience, 1 edition (New York: Routledge,
2014) , 18; J. Hockey, C. Komaromy, and K. Woodthorpe, eds., The Matter of Death: Space, Place and Materiality,
(Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire ; New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 148.
186
Jenny Hockey et al., “Landscapes of the Dead? Natural Burial and the Materialization of Absence,” Journal of
Material Culture 17, no. 2 (2012): 115–32.
187
Like sky and sea burials
107
is nowhere to conduct memorialization rituals, from the most elaborate funerary rites to the
simpler placing of tokens of remembrance.
Planting trees is a non-invasive way to mark the place of the dead.
188
In the US and UK,
planting a tree as a memorial marker (either at the place of the burial or another location) is a
practice that gives place to green burial in a non-invasive way. The Incube adapts and extends
practices of placing trees as memorial markers by bringing the tree into the household and
bringing the human cremains closer to the mourning bodies.
189
The digital interface extends this
ability to make place by providing users with sensory feedback from the plant through the
sensors via the application. By bringing data about the tree and the soil/cremains mixture
together and interfacing that data with the mourner through the application, the Incube distributes
the location of mourning across plant life and digital technology. The Incube’s ‘place’ of
mourning and memorialization is accessible by being in the home marked by a tree, and through
the mobile application: the physical state of the memorial can be monitored from afar. Unlike
non-digital urns or planters, one could know about the Incube’s current internal temperature and
need for water while at a great distance from the object itself. This distributed sense of place
makes the Incube an explicit part of a posthuman digital network of death and memorialization
by effectively extending the limits (both material and conceptual) of what is human (both living
and dead) through plant and digital material across boundaries of death and life towards
posthuman modes of interaction, in that they are contingent upon seeing human being as
contingent.
190
188
Clayden et al., Natural Burial, 73.
189
And its predecessor the bios urn, a biodegradable urn meant to house a tree sapling and planted in the earth.
190
I use “digital material” to call back a previously argued for concept of the digital as material in that it requires
interactions between human beings and material objects from the micro (coding/processor chips) to the macro
108
Digital interfaces network cremains with plant and human life, a network where the
bodies of mourners interact with now life-sustaining cremains through a smartphone. The Incube
models a posthuman network that gives place for mourning green burial through the tree, the
planter, and the digital application. Further, the Incube gives place within religious studies for
understanding posthuman embodiment as ecologically, technologically, and biologically
contingent by placing dead human materiality back into circulation with plant and human life
through digital interventions. Just as STS can help us draw out these connections, the Incube can
perform them. These digital interventions visualize and organize relationships between plant and
human and tech, living and dead through robust interactions: the tree and the cremains interact
on a cellular level, that interaction is visualized, and in turn, interacted with through the digital
application.
Human death creates a particular type of posthuman body – the type of “post” humanism
embodied only through death, that is, being dead as being post-human. While this could be a
tired bit of wordplay, I instead hope to reflect kaleidoscopic conceptions of the posthuman as
pried at in previous chapters. Posthumanism engages multiple possible relations between bodies
human and non-human, the kind of reformations and reengagements that feminist posthumanists
like Braidotti and Hayles see as crucial to locating human ontology as interdependent with, and
therefore answering to, ecologies both biological and technological. Posthumanism, in turn, sees
human bodies as nodes in ecological and technological networks, one of many nodes making up
the human condition. Dead human bodies offer a look at what it means to be posthuman while
post-life, an opportunity for thinking the posthuman at a moment (material and social) when the
(seeing the BiosUrn and its ritualizations as a digital artifact, as the so-called digital) -- there is no "digital" without
these material groundings and interactions.
109
human body must be reconciled with as material and resolved in relation to other material
conditions. The moment of death and ritualized internment processes offer this opportunity. This
chapter works through entanglements of bodies living and dead at this moment (and the
possibilities of the Incube in particular) to theorize ecological, economic, and mediating places
of the posthuman body within digital funerary practice.
Death: Rupture, Entanglement, Ritual
The human corpse is an intersection of both rupture and resolution. As Kathleen Garces-
Foley puts it: “Death sets in motion a flurry of activity surrounding the body of the deceased as
well as the social body. Something must be done with the physical body if for no other reason
than that its presence will soon become unbearable. Something must be done about the people
who are mourning. Something must be done about the dead person’s stuff.”
191
Human death
creates biological, emotional, and communal crises – material decays, relationships rupture and
reform, mourning, and grieving processes emerge and unfold. Death is both a physiological,
material moment – a sudden arrival from life into its absence – and a material and social process
negotiated through funerary and mourning practices.
Ritual studies attend to such structuring of human behavior and its negotiations – the
types of negotiations that surround death and engages such entanglements of bodies, space, and
technologies along with larger social regulations (governmental, religious, and otherwise) as
placemaking for placeless natural burial demands a theoretical tool for understanding how these
materialities constellate and organize around death. From Van Gennep on, ritual theory has
attended to how performance and transactions are regulated, managed, and attended to within
191
Kathleen Garces-Foley, Death and Religion in a Changing World, (Princeton, N.J.: Routledge, 2005).,.ix.
110
liminal spaces of passage – from child to adult, single to married, alive to dead. Following J.Z.
Smith and Catherine Bell’s conceptualization of ritual as a process of behaviors rather than a
static state, this chapter sees funerary practices around the digital media like the Incube as
moving towards posthuman embodiments and subjectivities.
Ritual, as Catherine Bell notes, “…has simultaneously become an object, a method, and
even something of a style of scholarship on the American academic scene.”
192
Ritual is a
method, a mode of charting relations between subjects and objects in action and interaction, and
through her own examination of ritual, Bell works towards “uncovering strategies by which
ritualized activities do what they do.”
193
The aims throughout this work are not dissimilar –to
understand how certain digital interventions into funerary rituals reshape how rituals “do what
they do” and how these transformations are posthuman. Such points of transition from life to
death, as Smith says, are focusing points of and for activity, where “nothing is accidental.”
194
It
is this focus on intentional actions that frame relations of bodies human, plant, and technological,
that ritual studies helps unfold here. Part of this turn to ritual as a mode of analysis includes the
deployment of “ritualization” over “ritual” as the conceptual word of choice.
195
Briefly, Bell
describes ritualization as “…that way of acting that sets itself off from other ways of acting by
virtue of the way in which it does what it does. Even more circularly, it can be described as the
strategic production of expedient schemes that structure an environment in such a way that the
environment appears to be the source of the schemes and their values…”
196
In other words,
192
Catherine M. Bell 1953, Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice, Book, Whole (New York: Oxford University Press,
1992), 3.
193
Ibid.,4.
194
Jonathan Z. Smith, Imagining Religion: From Babylon to Jonestown, Book, Whole (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1982) , 54.
195
For a concise history of the term, see Bell Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice. 88-9.
196
Bell, Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice,140.
111
ritualization is a mode of action, in particular the act of relating to differentiated subject and
objects, an act that sets itself apart by way of its mode of action, by calling particular attention to
itself as an intentional action.
My work as a whole invests in ritualization as a mode of mediation – as mediating human
and posthuman bodies and subjects. As Bell notes:
Despite many popular preconceptions and a number of anthropological models of
ritual, ritual is not primarily a matter of unchanging tradition. On the contrary,
some analysts now see ritual as a particularly effective means of mediating
tradition and change, that is, as a medium for appropriating some changes while
maintaining a sense of cultural continuity. It is necessary to remember, however,
that if ritual plays such a role, it does not do it as some type of external
mechanism that acts on a culture from the outside. Ritual can play such a role
only from within the system, that is, as a component of the system that is defined
and deployed in ways that interlock with how tradition and change are viewed.
197
In this sense, ritualization acts as mediation within culturally recognized systems of symbols and
relations. Part of what is so attractive about ritual studies for the present posthuman approach is
this attention to material and cultural entanglements in the structuring, production, and mediation
of subject and object distinctions and positions. Ritual theory is useful for understanding how
posthuman positions can be created through digital religious ritualizations. Understanding digital
mediations as ritualization and the structures and relations that come with them, human bodies
(living and dead) become calculable as data points to relate to each other through apparatuses
like the Incube and allow for new capacities for understanding material relations within these
ritual structures. Before turning to a discussion of the place of digital mediation in contemporary
funerary practices (and the place of the Incube within these) it is important first to place
posthuman funerary practice within a history of the modern and postmodern.
197
Catherine M. Bell 1953, Ritual: Perspectives and Dimensions, Book, Whole (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1997), 251.
112
Modern, Postmodern, Posthuman: Economies, Ecologies
Funerary practices reflect, refract, and reject larger cultural shifts, and modes of bodily
preparation and burial differentiate peoples and practices.
198
In other words, funerary rites offer a
microcosm of religious practice centered around bodily practice. As this project as a whole is
particularly invested in understanding technological innovations in the United States, the
following sketch of historical epochs is a focused rather than comprehensive one on the major
movements of burial practices in the eighteenth to twentieth-century west as context for natural
burial and digital memorial practices. I try to attend to the bias of the literature surveyed and the
conclusions drawn from them, including the categories of modernity and postmodernity.
Modernity changed the treatment of corpses within funerary practice. Late nineteenth and
early twentieth-century industrial capitalism brought with it life insurance companies that both
abstracted and monetized death, professional funerary associations that brought the aesthetics of
modern business practice to death and dying, and made home funerals less acceptable or
practical within urban tenement housing.
199
In turn, cemeteries rose as new spaces for the dead,
an option outside the churchyard, that were intentional and contrived spaces, set apart as places
for families to mourn and memorialize, and became places where class and culture visibly
intertwined through variances in memorial marking.
200
The aesthetics of perceived economic
success bled into funeral accessories, as companies began producing funerary goods to model
comfortable middle-class status. Undertakers then moved on from selling or manufacturing these
198
Separate burial grounds can differentiate religious tradition, class, and more. Greeks and Romans buried
themselves outside of towns and away from the gods, early Christians buried their dead alongside Jews and pagans
until the 4th century, when special dead began being carried into churches (Lacquer 299, 94).
199
James J. Farrell, Inventing the American Way of Death, 1830-1920, (Philadelphia: Temple Univ Press, 1980),10.
200
Professor Thomas W. Laqueur, The Work of the Dead: A Cultural History of Mortal Remains, Illustrated edition
(Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2015).282,286,309,312.
113
goods to selling services, like cremation.
201
Modernity also brought about this techno-scientific
process, a mobilization of scientific knowledge, in all its “austere technological modernism.”
202
As Farrell notes, the first crematory in the United States opened in 1876, the year in which the
Stein Co. displayed its caskets at the World's Fair, and two years before August Renouard issued
the first edition of his Undertaker's Manual.
203
Through the spaces of funeral homes and cemeteries and the technologies of embalming
and cremation, bodies became units of data to be recorded, registered and eventually,
commodified.
204
Each new institution a body passes through needs to account for that body, and
bodies then begin to count in different ways – on ledger sheets as fees and charges, as materials
used or wasted, as units passing through the door. As data, corpses themselves became mediated
by a new professional class of funerary technicians, in a modernity cultivating both scientific and
consumer thinking.
205
The postmodern funeral rejected institutional control of funerary rites present within the
modern period. Fueled in some ways by a mid-20th century critique of an exploitive funeral
industry, post-modern funerary practices react to both the institutional and medical expertise
associated with modern funerals. This mid-century critique was fueled by Jessica Mitford’s 1963
expose The American Way of Death, which took a hardline against the marketing and
entrepreneurial practices of a funeral industry she saw as overindulgent and exploitative.
206
Other
literature of the time highlighted a banishing of the old institutions, the relegation of dying to
201
Farrell, Inventing the American Way of Death, 1830-1920,148.
202
Laqueur, The Work of the Dead: A Cultural History of Mortal Remains, 502.
203
Farrell, Inventing the American Way of Death, 1830-1920,164.
204
Gary 1962 Laderman, The Sacred Remains: American Attitudes Toward Death, 1799-1883,(New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1999), 2.
205
Ibid.,164;Garces-Foley, Death and Religion in a Changing World,211; Cann, Virtual Afterlives: Grieving the
Dead in the Twenty-First Century,1; Davies, Death, Ritual and Belief, 260.
206
Jessica Mitford, The American Way of Death (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1963).
114
hospitals and burial to funeral homes, and an emotional vacuity replaced with ornamental
funerals as arguments for the banishment of death or the disappearance of death in American
culture.
207
Of course, different religious traditions adopted a spectrum of responses to these social
and political changes. Northern protestantism is often positioned as the norm and the assumed
subject of the large swath of literature on death and funerary practices in America, as The
American Way of Death (the title of Jessica Mitford’s influential mid-century critique of the
American funeral industry, which focuses almost entirely on middle-class Protestant practice).
As James J. Farrell notes, while “…a broad middle class ideology shaped funerary ideas of
comfort, prestige, and an ideology of separating men’s work from their homes and women’s
work from men’s, an ideology of separation that included life and death…there have been
important deviations from the American Way of Death…”
208
While I would include these so-
called “deviations” as part of this “American Way,” Farrell’s capitalization serves as a critique
of its own, making “American Way” an exceptional title.
While majority northern Protestants adapted practices of cemetery burials, cremation, and
the commodification and professionalization of a mediated and disembodied death and funeral,
many smaller ethnic and southern funerary practices remained either resistant to or unaffected by
such shifts. For example, Judaism’s focus on the integrity of the body and observation or
uninterrupted care over the body made techno-scientific interventions like organ donation,
autopsy, and cremation problematic.
209
Muslim law allows for "bid'a" (innovations), but they
need to be approved and classified, including things like elaborate tombs or memorials made for
207
Farrell, Inventing the American Way of Death, 1830-1920, 3.
208
Ibid., 214-218.
209
Rebecca Golbert, “Judaism and Death: Finding Meaning in Ritual,” in Death and Religion in a Changing World,
by Kathleen Garces-Foley (New York, N.Y: Routledge, 2006) ,56.
115
visitation and ritualized funerary structures forbidden by certain laws.
210
These exceptions, while
not necessarily falling outside the narrative of privatization and modernization, must too be
considered as part of the American way of death. With this in mind, I turn back to the narrative
of the so-called modern/postmodern funerary practices as argued for the death studies literature,
not solely because it represents the majority of the literature, but because it too serves as the
narrative of a field of study into which this chapter hopes to intervene.
Described as “grassroots” movements, postmodern funerary practices frequently operate
outside conventional practices and institutions in their treatment for and care of the dead. The
largest amount of momentum involves taking back individual control and visibility of death, in
particular the visibility of the corpse.
211
Operating outside modern funerary institutions to create
such visibility could mean a home embalming in combination with a natural burial or memorial
car decoration or jewel rather than a cemetery plaque. Candi K. Cann’s Virtual Afterlives
catalogs a number of emerging funerary and memorial practices like these that work through new
channels of production and distribution, as well as taking place differently around race and class.
Postmodern funerals and memorials are a social and personalized set of practices, piecemeal
rather than packaged, revolving around and turning back to the body.
212
The postmodern
practices of natural burial and digital memorialization share two key characteristics: both reject
formal institutions (both religious and commercial) as means of memorializing the dead, and
both comprise individual and individualized ritualizations that combine into unique means of
mourning and memorializing the dead.
210
Juan Eduardo Campo, “Muslim Ways of Death,” ed. Kathleen Garces-Foley (New York, N.Y: Routledge, n.d.)
,164.
211
Candi K. Cann, Virtual Afterlives: Grieving the Dead in the Twenty-First Century, (Lexington: University Press
of Kentucky, 2014).. xii ; Davies, Death, Ritual and Belief., 258.
212
Davies, Death, Ritual and Belief, 224, 258.
116
Green burial activist Suzanne Kelly describes the ethic of natural burial as both about
reclaiming and securing death care rights (by way of rites) that have been seized by modern
intuitions, and also about recouping ways of caring for the dead that “bespeak a different way of
knowing death, and, ultimately, a different way of knowing nature.”
213
Green alternatives include
non-chemical embalming practices, biodegradable caskets and urns, natural or wilderness burial
grounds, and using human remains to actively promote new ecosystems, like the Bios Incube.
Natural burial practices aim to make little impact on current ecosystems in the processing and
interring of human remains, emphasizing safety and legality while turning away from
environmentally harmful chemical and industrial practices. The natural burial industry has
standards organizations that regulate these emerging practices within larger cultural movements
of ecological awareness. Natural burial has boomed in the UK, with approximately 250 natural
burial sites, compared to 13 in the US.
214
The Green Burial Council (GBC), founded in 2002,
certifies products for green burial, measuring their ecological impact (or lack thereof) on a scale
of one to three “leaves,” the higher the number of leaves, the better the product is for the
environment. Led by a board of funeral home directors, cemetery owners, and land managers, the
GBC exemplifies the types of structures and practices developing within the commercialization
of ecological concerns and burial.
215
Natural burial is part of a capitalist-cultural turn to “going green.” As public awareness
of the negative environmental impacts of twentieth-century industrialization on air, soil, and
water systems became apparent, civic, and industrial regulations were put in place to slow further
213
Kelly, Greening Death,129. ; “What Is Green Burial? | Green Burial Council,” accessed March 12, 2018,
https://greenburialcouncil.org/home/what-is-green-burial/.
214
While an institutionalized sense of natural burial may be new to the twentieth and twenty-first century, human
remains have been thought of in an explicitly ecological sense in western though at least since the French revolution.
215
Hockey, Komaromy, and Woodthorpe, The Matter of Death, 148; Laqueur, The Work of the Dead: A Cultural
History of Mortal Remains, 256.
117
negative impacts. Over the past two decades or so, western capitalist cultures have in turn seized
ecological consciousness as a business model. Capitalist cultures monetized “going green” by
opening up a new marketplace of eco-friendly products that could give public relations facelifts
to companies struggling under such new regulations. This awareness of an ecological crisis, the
introduction of new regulations, and a cultural and popular turn to “going green” made space for
natural burial practices and products. The industrial capitalism that contributed to the ecological
damage causing the response of “going green” is also the embedded capitalism that incubates
emerging burial and mourning products like Bios Incube through crowdfunding sites and online
retail.
216
In other words, digital-capitalist architectures support both the conditions that give rise
to green and digital burial practices and foster their availability and growth: all alternatives are
already imbricated in the consumer economy.
Consumer capitalism drives both the visibility and availability of green burial. Visibility,
in that products are funded, advertised, and supported by communities on digital platforms.
Availability, because the purchasing of products and services is largely through internet services.
So, while green burial works to reverse or slow the effects of global industrial capitalism on the
environment, at the same time it survives and thrives through those very global networks. The
Incube is largely a symptom of these conditions, with its crowd-funded production, sleek
“Apple” styling, and approachable marketing. Acknowledging this, however, does not mean
having to exclude the way the Incube is changing means of mourning or dismissing it as a
novelty. Corpses intervene into these markets of ecological precarity and are material nodes of
human embodiment in death and mourning. Institutionalized funerary practices conflict with
216
Douglas Davies and Hannah Rumble, Natural Burial: Traditional - Secular Spiritualities and Funeral
Innovation, (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2012),59.
118
ecological and economic crises as they become increasingly harmful and expensive, while
natural burial offers an alternative through familiar channels of consumer capitalism and
products like the Incube materially link the corpse to ecological and digital technologies.
The Incube is an ecologically oriented product exemplifying how funerary performances
are changing under emerging conditions of environmental concern and increasing
commodification of such concerns. Entanglements of environmental ethics, techno-capitalist
commodification, human death, digital interface, and ritualized place converge in the Incube-as-
object. This invites a posthuman analysis to understand formations made possible through the
Incube. These objects and ideas are bound together by how they relate to each other through
ritual. The way the Incube is acted upon and acted out demonstrates these interdependencies, and
the Incube exemplifies ways posthuman bodies facilitate and reorganize relationships of the
human as contingent with other lives and materialities. Embodiments and the performances
around them are central both to these broader movements and the symptomatic Incube.
Embodiments: Natural, Digital
The body takes a prominent role both in postmodern funerary rites and the rise of death
studies in the latter half of the twentieth century.
217
Candi Cann points to the absence or erasure
of the body in modern funerary practices as being reversed by the postmodern turn: the body is
either replaced with other materiality when making a place to mourn where bodiless memorials
lack a sense of presence for mourning.
218
Jennifer Hockey names this absence and erasure within
modernity “sequestration” – where corpses (and death itself) are marginalized. As Farrell noted
earlier on, the rise of these death studies could be viewed as pornography of death, a further
217
Davies, Death, Ritual and Belief, 235- 6.
218
Cann, Virtual Afterlives: Grieving the Dead in the Twenty-First Century.133, 141.
119
distancing through aesthetic glorification.
219
Death scholar Douglas Davis notes that attention to
death and the corpse heightens in a globalized, imaged, hyper-mediated worldview.
220
Death studies argues that corpses have agency in their ability to materially or socially
impact the world of the living. As Cann puts it,
Martyr and saint relics, for example, help bestow sanctification on a place, mapping the
power of the corpse onto a geographic location...The political agency of corpses can be
seen in the veneration of bodies of the dead (such as Mao in modern China and Evita in
Argentina and, most recently, in the burial at sea of the body of Osama bin
Laden)...Bodies in the form of corpses are important because they are powerful and can
be inscribed, reinscribed, covered, hidden, destroyed, exhumed, and metaphorically
resurrected in the world of the living.
221
The extent of this agency granted to corpses (material, social, or otherwise) varies, but the
suggestion that corpses reshape the material world or at least social landscapes is significant for
understanding the cremains of the Incube as part of a digital, posthuman network. Giving dead
bodies agency expands, like Barad’s agential realism and Latour’s actor-network theory, what
has potential agency while remaining grounded in material interactions so as to not re-create a
humanism or anthropocentric sense of agency, one dependent upon rationality and cognition.
222
These agential bodies destabilize dichotomies between living and dead, human and non,
dead and alive. Hockey et al. write “social theory is underpinned by a set of assumptions about
embodied agency which often overlook the intersubjective and indeed collective nature of self-
identity, not only in life but also in death. For bereaved individuals, for funeral directors,
embalmers, coroners solicitors and the clergy, the corpse, the grave, the will, and the empty
219
Farrell, Inventing the American Way of Death, 1830-1920,223.
220
Davies, Death, Ritual and Belief, 1.
221
Cann, Virtual Afterlives: Grieving the Dead in the Twenty-First Century, 20-1.
222
Hockey, Komaromy, and Woodthorpe, The Matter of Death., 10-18.
120
armchair can form powerful evocations of full-bodied if absent persons.”
223
These
“intersubjective and “collective” constructions of self are dependent on the social agency of
corpses as well as (through the Incube) the material blending of human and non-human
materialities (in this case human death and plant life) towards a blurred sense of agency and
subjectivity.
Intersubjective agency in corpses also takes place through processes of memorialization.
Memory and processes of mourning are theorized as practices within which the living and the
dead share a space.
224
Cann elaborates:
Though dead bodies, or pieces of them, help sanctify a space, this act of sanctification is
no longer exclusively the realm of corpses, but also dependent on the memory of the
living…In a world where the dead and their bodies are literally hidden, disappeared or
spirited away, memorialization offers a way in which survivors can reinscribe the dead
into the realm of the living in a virtual and spatial way....Additionally, grieving
individuals determine the location of the memorial spaces...[m]emorials are mapped onto
the geographical contexts of the living, in ways that are not always publicly
sanctioned.
225
While Cann is speaking largely of public, ad-hoc memorials, the importance of place,
particularly quotidian place, extends into digital memorials like the Incube, whose entanglements
and ritualizations are dependent upon a quotidian sense of place.
Postmodernism brought with it an attention to the body, both in scholarship and funerary
rites. Death studies focus on the agency of corpses, intersubjective relationships between the
living and dead, and memory and mourning as a shared space between life and death recognized
the reforming of places for bodiless or placeless deaths like the low impact burials that leave
223
Elizabeth Hallam, Jenny Hockey, and Glennys Howarth, Beyond the Body: Death and Social Identity (London ;
New York: Routledge, 1999). 6-19.
224
Beyond the Body, 77.
225
Cann, Virtual Afterlives: Grieving the Dead in the Twenty-First Century, 21.
121
little or no monument for mourning. Landscape architects are developing new strategies and
materials for creating a sense of place that leaves no environmental impact but maintains a sense
of place. There is, however, a note that the “prominence” of a site in relation to certain
landmarks or a “perceived degree of naturalness.”
226
Place and Placelessness
Without headstones, without urns, mourners are without a place to mourn – to place
tokens of affection, to visit on anniversaries and holidays, to tend to. In order to give some sense
of place, landscape architects and craftsmen create places and objects for mourning with a low
impact on the environment, including wooden grave markers, fieldstone headstones, landscaped
burial plots, and more. Creating a place for mourning and memorialization where there is no
place means setting something else (other than the body) apart; it means creating intentional
spaces. Besides landscape architecture and eco-friendly craftsmanship, the internet has become
such an intentional place-apart, where death is mourned and tended to. The internet is both a
public and private place of mourning, making the invisibility of death visible.
227
Digital
memorialization can help mourners reach out towards, interact with, and feel connected to
placeless burials (i.e., natural, bodiless, scatterings) far out of reach – like the depths of the sea.
The Neptune Memorial Reef, forty feet below the waves three miles off the coast of
Miami, Florida, is the “largest man-made reef ever conceived and, when complete, will have
transformed over 16 acres of barren ocean floor.”
228
Conceived in partnership with the Neptune
Society, one of the country’s largest funerary and cremation providers, the reef is made of steel-
226
Hockey, Komaromy, and Woodthorpe, The Matter of Death,152.
227
Hockey et al., “Landscapes of the Dead?”,121 ; Kevin O’Neill 1941, Internet Afterlife: Virtual Salvation in the
21st Century, Book, Whole (Santa Barbara, California: Praeger, an imprint of ABC-CLIO, LLC, 2016), 17.
228
“Overview | The Neptune Memorial Reef,” accessed March 23, 2018, http://www.nmreef.com/overview.html.
122
reinforced concrete structures, laid out into an interpretation of the city of Atlantis, featuring
arches, figurines, benches, and roads that all meet government and industry standards to both
support a new ecosystem and withstand harsh weather conditions, with the reef having an eye
toward creating anew and supporting existing marine life.
229
Internment of human remains into
the reef is a process called “deployment,” where human cremains are mixed with concrete, then
molded into a shape appropriate for the reef (column, starfish, etc.), and this mold is installed in
or around the features of the reef, with mourners have the opportunity to participate in the dive.
A copper memorial plaque with the name of the deceased is affixed to the concrete/cremains
feature, and mourners can receive a certificate of the memorialization, which includes the
geographical coordinates of the memorial feature.
230
This underwater ecosystem made of human remains and concrete is accessible through
both dives and a digital platform. In combination with obits.org, the Neptune Memorial reef staff
photograph and catalog each of its “deployed” memorials on their website. These photographs
are a touchstone for an interactive online memorial, featuring a “memory book” visitors can
write in, a place to “light a candle,” make a charitable donation, upload a photo, and set a
reminder to your digital calendar for the date of death.
231
These visual interfaces are just one part
of the larger network of memorialization with threads extending into the sea and necessarily
expand the location or manifestation of the digital beyond the screen. Ritualized practice binds
together placeless natural burials and the digital as one process of burial and mourning.
229
“Overview | The Neptune Memorial Reef.”
230
“Process | The Neptune Memorial Reef,” accessed March 23, 2018, http://www.nmreef.com/process.html.
231
“Amnery Lopez Soler | Life Story, Memories, Photos, Service Informations,” accessed March 23, 2018,
http://www.obits.org/memorials/5736-amnery-lopez-soler/life_story.
123
Fig. 2. Memorial Reef and Memorial Placement (nmreef.com)
Digital memorial features of the Neptune reef integrate established technological
innovations in mourning and memorization. New technologies have always augmented the
treatment of the dead, from ancient embalming techniques, to modern cremation practices, to
digital interventions. Digital memorials range from the online obituary to coffins with digital
displays and wireless capabilities, but all can be characterized in-part as belonging to postmodern
movements of individuation and customization. Digital innovations augment death practices
beyond onscreen appendages to modern funerary practices.
232
Rather, they are digital
entanglements that, while on the fringe of common practice, still speak to changing ways of
thinking and treating the dead.
233
By adding such a digital apparatus, Neptune Reef both taps into
established means of mourning online and extends its presence, literally, into the sea. The
inaccessibility of the sea memorial – barring the specialized equipment and training needed for
232
Christopher M. Moreman and A. David Lewis, Digital Death: Mortality and beyond in the Online Age, Book,
Whole (Santa Barbara: Praeger, 2014), 114-118; Garces-Foley, Death and Religion in a Changing World, 222
;Cann, Virtual Afterlives: Grieving the Dead in the Twenty-First Century,106-111.
233
Moreman and Lewis, Digital Death: Mortality and beyond in the Online Age., 121-2; Sites like cemetery.org and
apps like ripcemetery provide features like leaving flowers and writing notes.
124
sea diving – elevates the need for a place to perform mourning rituals. The digital infrastructure
provides that place. The digital is one way to make a place for placeless natural burial. Human
cremains, concrete, and marine life make up one of the reef’s ecosystems. The network of the
reef, mourners, and the digital (and the ritualizations of the reef via the digital) make up another.
Neptune is a broad example of the culture out of which the Incube emerges, as it
rhetorically places itself within the natural burial movement by foregrounding the industrial
guidelines met and government permits acquired as well as its membership in the Green Burial
Council.
234
Promotional language highlights place, permanence, and conservation: “Why do
people choose to deploy to the memorial reef? To become part of something original, to be part
of the circle of life in an intimate and meaningful way, for a permanent memorial following
cremation, to help counter reef destruction by contributing to a new Reef, to celebrate a love of
the sea, as a green burial alternative.”
235
Both the conservational and digital aspects of Neptune
Memorial Reef create networks. One between the marine life, the material corpse, and the
funerary rites of the mourners, and the place of internment and the place of memorialization
online. These networks extend place by making the depths of the sea interactive and accessible
from a desktop and material, in that they put lifeless human materiality back into circulation with
marine plant and animal life. These networks are materially sustained by the labor of divers and
server operators. These material strands are maintained by ritualized activities.
While the depths of the sea offer a vivid example of networks made possible through
digital technologies, the function of the digital in the case of Neptune is no more extreme than in
234
“The Neptune Memorial Reef™ project is environmentally sound and meets the strict guidelines and permitting
of the EPA, DERM, NOAA, Florida Fish and Wildlife and the Army Corps of Engineers. The Memorial Reef™ is
also a member of the Green Burial Council.” “Overview | The Neptune Memorial Reef.”
235
“Deployment | The Neptune Memorial Reef,” accessed March 26, 2018,
http://www.nmreef.com/deployment.html.
125
any digital memorialization: to make a place for mourning and memorial where there is none:
digital memorialization can be used for other placeless burials or death, such as deaths in foreign
wars, deaths without a body, and deaths in mass tragedies. Catherine Bell notes that,
increasingly, Euro-American societies are going to greater lengths to embody bodiless burials or
retrieves those bodies that seem out of reach. She notes that “A funeral without a body may need
to rely more heavily in the meaning systems…provided by religious beliefs” and that if these
“meaning systems are no longer very socially effective, funeral rites without a body risk making
all too clear an unnerving fact – that rites are primarily for the living, not the benefit for the
dead.” Bell reassures us, however, in support of innovations like Neptune and the Incube, that
“ritualization is a very creative activity. A rite without a body must, by eulogy or gesture or
metonymic association, create a type of body that can be mourned, fondled by grief, and then
laid very clearly to rest.”
236
While it must be acknowledged that choosing a natural burial is deciding to have a
placeless burial, where as losing a body in war, mass tragedy, or the like lack this kind of agency
or sense of autonomy, mourning and memorialization require place, and digital interfaces create
that place, through three acts of ritualization: Placing, Domestication, and Performance. These
three kinds of ritualizing posthumanism will be the focus of the following analysis. Each ritual
aspect of the digital interface (here exemplified by the Incube) highlights interactions between
new media and ritual, ways of thinking new media and ritual through posthumanism, and forms
what this can say about death rituals and mediation in contemporary American cultures.
Ritualizations: Place, Domestication, Performance
236
Catherine Bell, “Embodiment,” in Theorizing Rituals: Issues, Topics, Approaches, Concepts, ed. Jens Kreinath,
Jan Snoek, and Michael Stausberg (Boston, MA: Brill, 2006), 542.
126
Whether at the distance of the sea or the immediacy of the Incube, places of memorialization
are performed, in that they are set apart, paid attention to, and acted upon. Ritualization, then, is
primarily about setting things apart in culturally specific ways within societal contexts.
Ritualization is a social process, one that, while focused on setting apart, does not take place
apart from societal cues, norms, structures, and influences. I would like to focus on three of these
societal influences for ritualization within the posthuman digital religious practice around the
Incube: place-making, domestication (or intensification), and transformative performance, which
emerge from Bell, Smith, and performance and ritual theorist Richard Schechner towards a ritual
analysis of the Incube, asking: how does the Incube work within funerary rites? Living and dead
bodies moving through space (organic, urban, and technological) compose the kind of techno-
ecology put forth by Rosi Braidotti. How is the posthuman performed or situated here? Through
these questions, three forms emerge – the Incube ritualizes the posthuman in three distinct ways:
the tree places, the planter domesticates, and the digital performs.
Trees: Placing
Planting trees with cremains is not unique to the Incube as a non-invasive way to mark the
place of the dead. Associating trees with death at all is not particular to any postmodern or even
modern funeral practice. Even only in western traditions, the Yew tree was held to be the “tree of
the dead” frequently overhanging European churchyards, and trees have marked spaces for ashes
within the modern funeral since at least 1945.
237
Trees and their associations with longevity,
endurance, regeneration, and transformation all ground trees trees in a wide spectrum of
associations with life, death, and rebirth. Just this partially inclusive history makes the tree the
237
Laqueur, The Work of the Dead: A Cultural History of Mortal Remains,133, 546.
127
least unique aspect of the entire assemblage. But, by sharing aspects with other burial practices,
it is recognizable, where the Incube indexes the larger natural burial movement, where it brings
itself to these cultural significations.
The type of tree planted receives much attention on the Incube website – a choice of six
seeds (Maple, Honey Locust, Pine, Oak, Tree of Life, Redwood). Each option pairs with a write -
up on its symbolism along with specific planting instructions. The symbolism provided for each
tree is broad:
The Honey locust Tree is a symbol of beauty, tolerance, and protection. Its name comes
from the sweet legume found in the tree’s pods, which serve as a food source for wildlife.
Aside from being used by wildlife and animal for food, the sweet legumes were also
consumed by Native Americans as a food source. The first scientific observations of the
honey locust were made in the 1700s and was subsequently named “honey locust” due to
the sweet honey-like substance contained in the legume pods. These legumes have a
sweet and fragrant aroma. Flowers of this plant are also a target of many insect species
and are important source of food for bees.
238
By ascribing definite characteristics to each seedling and leaving open the option for planting
a tree of your own choosing, the Incube calls attention to the unique status of the tree itself
(above the planter and the cremains) as the marker of memorialization and mourning, in Smith’s
sense of “paying attention” – that is, the tree (as part of the funerary ritual structure that is the
Incube) sets itself apart as part of a network of ritualized meanings and understandings, by
calling attention to both a cultural movement and a human body and by being within the
ritualized structure at all, the tree calls attention to a unique place.
238
Bios Urn, March 6, 2018, https://urnabios.com/honey-locust-planting-instructions/.
128
The Incube’s tree sapling makes place, setting things apart for a means of paying attention,
by making the unseen cremains seen and by placing itself within the natural burial movement.
The tree combined with cremains makes each Incube unique – with the tree the only visible
marker of this uniqueness as it branches out from the blank cube. The tree marks not only death
(as the marker both of the body itself and the cultural movement of natural burial) but individual
human death, a distinct death, as the focusing point of the Incube assemblage monitored and
tended to. Smith reminds us that in ritualized spaces and places, “nothing is accidental. ”
239
The
tree makes visible the invisible human materiality buried beneath it. The biological needs of the
tree call attention to itself, demanding action, demanding care. The tree also calls attention to
itself (sets itself apart) as part of the larger movement of natural burial, carrying implications and
inferences to the discussion above regarding ecologies and economies as a part of this network of
meaning. Every Incube is identical in its smooth, blank whiteness: the tree (within its capacity as
a marker or natural burial) serves as the memorial marker – the headstone, the plaque. The tree
not only gives place to the human cremains but the mode of ritualization – natural burial. The
tree within the Incube adapts the common imagery of natural burial, this symbol, and places
itself within that movement.
The tree gives place to posthuman ritualizations of the Incube at the intersection of plant life,
memorialized life, cremated materiality, tree materiality, with the tree as a place holder for the
ethical implications of and for that human body located within a natural burial movement. This
intersection charts human being as an “emergent condition,” a process rather than a stable sense
of being – a marker of posthuman subjectivity.
240
Where the tree’s life is interdependent with
239
Smith, Imagining Religion : From Babylon to Jonestown,54.
240
Pramod K. Nayar, Posthumanism, 35.
129
material human death and caring for both through data provided to the interface performs this
contingency: in caring for the dead, one is caring for the tree, and in caring for the tree, one is
caring for the dead. This contingency makes the tree functionally more than a tree alone and
makes it a marker of place and interaction, a marker of life and death. In that for Smith, ritual is
so much about making place, and for Bell so much about interaction, this interaction designation
gives place to the tree through ritualization. By setting the tree apart, the Incube not only gives
place to memorialization but also to posthumanism.
Planters: Domesticating
The Incube is designed something like older Apple products, described by the manufacturer as
“[s]oftly Personal: Add a human touch that only those who need to know will recognize," white,
smooth edges, minimal visible ports, wires, or buttons. The simple, minimalist design makes it
“softly personal,” but also homogenous with smart home products like Amazon’s Echo, Apple’s
HomePod, or Google’s Home.
241
The Incube is recognizable within this genre of technological
devices, signaling their approachable, user-friendly interactivity, as the Incube becomes part of a
smart-home aesthetic. In ways that the tree sets itself apart as a ritual object, the planter
assimilates itself into a recognizable set of material and technological practices. It is interesting
to note here the “only those who need to know will recognize” latter half of the product
description: it contains both the idea that this device has seamless integration with the rest of
your home and they acknowledge that it is an urn is privileged information. Such homogeneity
domesticates natural tree burial by bringing it into the home in a recognizable (and
unrecognizable?) way.
241
“Bios Incube,” Bios Urn, accessed March 16, 2018, https://urnabios.com/incube/.
130
The Incube brings natural burial indoors and brings cremains closer to mourning bodies, both
domesticating and making intimate the memorialization tree.
242
Smith points to domestication as
another movement of ritual, with animal sacrifice as a ritualized intensification of the
domestication of plants and animals. Sacrifice intensifies (places apart, calls attention to) the
selections, attentions, and controls over reproduction, health, and death common to
domestication processes and condenses more unpredictable processes into controlled and
controllable circumstances and gives agency back to the ritual performer.
243
Ritual, then, could
be described (using both senses of the word) as the domestication of domestication, bringing
larger processes into the home. Intensification of domestication domesticates by cultivating,
taming, and controlling unpredictable social and natural events. Like sacrifice domesticating
domestication, the Incube planter intensifies and domesticates caring for the plant and the dead
through the comprehensible design of the planter and increased modes of interaction made
possible by the digital interface. In the way that Smith argues that the sacrifice is the
domestication of domestication the Incube planter is the domestication of care for the dead.
Along with the familiar aesthetic, the Incube’s interactivity ritualizes through an
intensification of interaction: “The Bios Incube+ brings a whole new level of detail adding
environmental capabilities to the product. Bios Incube+ also watches for air temperature,
humidity, and solar irradiance.”
244
This additional “level of detail” (a careful kind of attention)
intensifies (in the sense that Smith talks about ritualization as a mode of intensification) the ways
one can attend to the tree (and via the tree, the dead) by increasing ways of analyzing, assessing,
and knowing the tree. In addition, the Incube uses a Wi-Fi connection to update the “profile” of
242
“Bios Incube.”
243
Smith, Relating Religion : Essays in the Study of Religion. 152 - Smith too, argues that pre-hunting rituals are an
intensification of the hunt itself, made perfect and safe by way of its ritual attentions.
244
Bios Incube.”
131
your tree and its specific needs based on the seedling selected. Increased interactivity is
frequently pointed to as unique to digital mediation, along with increased data collection and
production, as well as communicating that data across space and time. This so-called
“datafication” intensifies interactions with the tree through points of and for control and
management of the tree assemblage. Smith too calls ritualization a form of “elaborating
obsessively” over a commonplace activity – perhaps in this case caring for a houseplant – as a
means of creating greater meaning or networking this ritual activity with broader cultural or
social forms.
By bringing the tree inside into a comprehensible container and by multiplying means for
interacting with and caring for it, the Incube tames natural burial in the way that Smith speaks of
domestication, and in turn, domesticates posthumanism through its design interventions. The
Incube’s intentional design aligns itself visually with other smart-home devices and interactive
functionality and domesticates posthumanism by making it both approachable and explicit.
Again, dual meanings here are helpful – both of ‘posthuman’ and ‘approachable’: the Incube
makes the posthuman-as-dead-human approachable in a literal sense. The proximity of the
cremains to quotidian life increases as cremains are brought into the home via the planter and
making the cremains accessible through a smartphone also makes death more approachable as
accessible through an object increasingly becoming part of the everyday body schema – the
smartphone. The dead are only a click or a swipe away, part of everyday communication
techniques. The Incube communicates with you through the "same channels you use to
communicate with other people."
245
The ambiguity or confusion of the subject here is helpful for
245
Bios Urn, Bios Incube - World’s First Incubator Designed for the after Life., accessed March 23, 2018,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RMynd1oplC8.
132
thinking the posthuman position: What or who is communicating with the user through these
“same channels”? The Incube as object? The dead? Both/and?
Interfaces: Performing
The Incube also makes the posthuman approachable by materializing a posthuman
network into discrete, interactive objects. The cremains/dirt, dirt/tree, tree/planter,
planter/smartphone make up a series of interfaced relationships that are independent aspects of a
whole assemblage. Each relation is approachable, comprehensible, and tactile. They combine,
through ritualized performance, as a functioning Incube. In other words, the Incube only
functions as a memorializing, funerary object if the assemblage is intact, is interactive and
interacting, where ritualization brings these objects into a functional assemblage that is the
Incube. Interfacing here then is key to the Incube as a functioning, posthuman, domestic
assemblage.
All of these means of domestication, of bringing death closer while simultaneously
setting it apart through its ritual function, echo when Smith claims that “[r]itual is a relationship
of difference between “nows” – the now of everyday life and the now of ritual place; the
simultaneity, but not coexistence, of “here” and “there”…one is invited to think of the
potentialities of the one “now” in terms of the other; but the one cannot become the other. Ritual
precises ambiguities; it nether overcomes nor relaxes them.”
246
Here, closeness is not equal to
sameness: in practice, the Incube depends upon closeness without sameness – by highlighting the
interfacing of each discrete aspect (tree, dirt, planter, cremains) of its makeup, the Incube class
attention to their interaction through its unique interfacing. The process of the Incube as an
246
Smith, To Take Place : Toward Theory in Ritual,110.
133
object of mourning and memorialization performs of ritualized interactivity between these
distinct materialities, and it is the digital interface that makes visible and tactile, that realizes
these networked relations.
This digital interface distributes the location of the cremains across plant life and digital
material through interaction as mediated by digital sensors, data, and the smartphone application
to create a third form of place. The digital interface facilitates a network between plant and
human life, through which a mourner can interact with the cremains, and by unifying dispersed
aspects of the plant, cremains, and environmental factors as data points. This interactive attention
ritualizes the human body as a posthuman network, as part of this ritualized transaction and
exchange. Catherine Bell tells us interaction and exchange anchor performance-based theories of
ritual: “Among the most influential formulations were Victor Turner's ethnographic descriptions
of ritual as a processual form of ‘social drama’ J. L. Austin's linguistic theory of ‘performative
utterances,’ and Erving Goffman's analyses of the scenarios of ‘social interaction.”
247
From Van Gennep onward, ritual theory focused on performances of transformation (as
Smith notes, coming of age rituals and sacrifice have always been of great interest to ritual
theorists). Interaction activates a ritual structure into a ritual transformation: where ritual
structures demarcate potential, ritual actions realize potential. Performance is what activates
‘ritual’ towards ‘ritualization’; performance realizes ritual potential, performance is the doing of
ritual. Performance theory helps elaborate ritualization as a concept by focusing on the creation
and activation of ritual structures through performative ritualizations of objects (that is, folding
247
Bell, Catherine. "Performance." In Critical Terms for Religious Studies, edited by Mark C. Taylor. The
University of Chicago Press, 1998.
134
objects like the aspects of the Incube into ritual structures through performance and paying
attention).
248
Such ritualized performances are transformative in two senses: first in Smith’s sense of
“intensification” (the transformation of domestication into sacrifice) and second through the
transformation of social or material status. First, performance intensifies action: the actions of
sacrificing (binding, cutting, bleeding, cleaning) compound, intensify, magnify, and embed
larger processes of domestication into concentrated, extreme actions of control over life and
death through and as the sacrifice. Second, performance transforms status: performance within
ritual boundaries (and the witnessing of that performance) creates new temporary and permanent
social relations.
249
Ritualization transforms one stable state of relation towards a new state of relation. Nascent
ritual theory paid particular attention to both these transformations in social relation within
coming-of-age rituals, which encapsulate both temporary (performative) and permanent (social)
changes for Van Gennep and Turner. Director, producer, and theater theorist Richard Schechner
names these pre and post ritual states of relation “actualities.”
250
Ritualization transforms states
of relation through transactions – transactions of materials, of status, of knowledge.
251
Rituals
transform material and social status through ritual transactions, depending upon existent
ecosystems and create new ones. Like posthumanism, ritual necessitates seeing human being as
fully relational, with an ability to transform material and social status through networks of
exchange and performative interaction.
248
Schechner, Performance Theory, 118-9.
249
Ibid., 119.
250
Ibid., 143.
251
Ibid., 119.
135
Ronald Grimes, in an essay encapsulating transactional and relational views on ritual from
indigenous traditions and Roy Rappaport’s ecological anthropology to biogenetic structuralism,
argues in the end that ritual is in no one way relational – it is in many ways relational,
determined by the places we live and the cosmologies that make sense of them, the conditions of
our lived world and the needs and necessities they and we demand of each other, where
“religious ritual is the predication of identities and differences (metaphors) so profoundly
enacted that they suffuse bone and blood, thereby generating cosmos, an oriented habitat.”
252
These “oriented habitats” make up the ecologies and materials that ritualizations use to reshape
the world through transformative transaction. Transactional ritualizations correspond to how
posthumanism makes networks of social and material transformation, and provides a sense of
“ecology’” here that combines the ecological and network thinking of posthuman embodiments
within eco-burial rituals and materials.
Interaction is not only part of the process of ritualizing the Incube, but as Mark Hansen
insists, interaction is inherent to new media interfaces, and a changing a sense of “the image”:
…we must accept that the image, rather than finding instantiation in a privileged
technical form (including the computer interface), now demarcates the very process
through which the body, in conjugation with the various apparatuses for rendering
information perceptible, gives form to, in-forms information. In sum, the image can no
longer be restricted to the level of surface appearance but must be extended to encompass
the entire process by which information is made perceivable through embodied
experience.
253
As discussed in the last chapter, the definitional realm for the digital “image” has expanded
beyond visual regimes of representation in new media studies. Alexander Galloway notes “[t]he
252
Grimes, Rite out of Place: Ritual, Media, and the Arts, 146.
253
Hansen, New Philosophy for New Media, 9.
136
history of visuality and computing is a complicated one,” and while it is dangerous to wholly
divorce one from the other, he is
…sympathetic to a certain minoritarian refrain running through recent media theory on
the specificity of computers as non-optical if not altogether non-visual media, for anyone
wishing to cram computers into the framework of ‘visual culture’ is certainly suffering
from an unfortunate fetishization of the physical interface, as if the computer monitor
were an adequate substitute for the medium as a whole, which in addition to screens of
various shapes and sizes, consists of any number of other technologies: nonoptical
interface (keyboard, mouse, controller, sensor); data in memory and data on disk;
executable algorithms; networking technologies and protocols and the list continues.
254
As Lev Manovich points out, “new media today can be understood as the mix between older
cultural conventions for data representation, access, and manipulation and never conventions of
data representation, access and manipulation. The "old" data are representations of visual reality
and human experience, i.e. images, text-based and audio-visual narratives – what we normally
understand by "culture." The "new" data is numerical data.”
255
Both Manovich and Galloway see
earlier theorists of new media like Fredrich Kittler as recognizing even television as moving
away from optics towards signal codification and the importance of keeping the concept of the
computer or digital “image” always contextualized and complicated by the technologies that
support and produce visualized or optical data.
These changing senses of the image allow Hansen to tell us that the image “now demarcates
the very process through which the body, in conjugation with the various apparatuses for
rendering information perceptible, gives form to, in-forms information.”
256
Embodiment is
central to Hansen’s interpretation of how within the digital turn media lose their material
specificity and the body takes on the function as the processor of images: the same digital
254
Galloway, The Interface Effect, 63-4.
255
Manovich, The Language of New Media, 19.
256
Hansen, New Philosophy for New Media,9.
137
photograph can be imaged on a PC screen or a smartphone or watch, or printed on paper, or
projected onto a wall.
257
The representational media has lost its specific form and this framing
function is put back on the body. As Hansen puts it: “Because digitization allows for almost
limitless potential to modify the image, that is any image – and specifically, to modify the image
in ways that disjoin it from any fixed technical frame – the digital calls on us to invest the body
as the “place” where the self-differing of media gets concretized.”
258
In other words, the body
becomes the place where digital information becomes sensible through interaction with digital
interfaces. Interfaces, like the image, also take on a processual role in new media literature. The
image is no longer restricted to the level of surface appearance but must be extended to
encompass the entire process by which information is made perceivable through embodied
experience.
259
For the Incube, the smartphone’s digital interface (as interaction) performs the plant/cremains
assemblage by way of the digital sensor data by positioning the body as a node in this processual
relationship with technological apparatus. The digital image is a process of interaction between
the body, apparatus, and information. This process of interaction taking place through the Incube
includes bodies living and dead, human and non, the planter, and the smartphone appendage.
Here Hansen and Galloways’ approach to the digital image helps conceptualize both
posthumanism and ritualization in the present context. As prefaced in the previous chapter on
ritual and new media, these new media theorists have raised up embodiment, and like the
feminist posthumanists, they have emphasized embodiment as processual and contingent, as part
of a material relationship with, in this case, digital technologies and data. Second, this emphasis
257
Hansen, New Philosophy for New Media, 21
258
Ibid., 30.
259
Ibid., 9
138
on process and processual relationships invites a ritual analysis of the ways digital images are
processed with and through the body as both theories prioritize the interaction of bodies and
objects as a process that creates new ways of thinking and being about subject integrity, place,
and mediation.
New media theorizations of the digital image as embodied interactivity help read this as
part of a process of ritualization of transformation. The digital appendage of the Incube allows
such potential ritualizations of the tree/planter through its performative demand: software
analyses data from the tree, visualizes this data as a digital image mediated by the smartphone
application, and calls attention to the needs of the tree (and via the tree the cremains). This
calling of attention is a call for human interaction, making the needs of the tree known.
Following Hansen’s reading of the digital image as networked, transactional, and embodied the
digital aspects of the Incube visualize posthumanism as a digital image, as a relationship between
plant and human materiality. Only through the data gathered by the sensors in the planter could
one know particular environmental conditions of the tree, and only through the digital apparatus
can these particular conditions be visualized and viewed across space and time from a material
remove. Visualizing this information through a digital image visualizes the posthuman as an
interaction between imaged data and what it demands. Digital interventions within this
interaction make death visible through the data, the unknowable knowable through the
application. By imaging data about the plant, the application performs the demands of the tree
(for water, light, temperature change) and, beyond that, an interaction between living and dead
human material and a living tree. This kind of posthuman interaction, this kind of posthuman
image, is performed and ritualized only by way of these apparatus.
139
Lev Manovich, in later theorizations of new media going beyond the linguistic,
spatializes this kind of data availability, naming it “cellspace” - space overlaid with accessible
information and contrasts cellspace to digital surveillance technology, writing: “[i]f video and
other types of surveillance technologies translate the physical space and its dwellers into data,
cellspace technologies (also referred to as mobile media, wireless media, or location-based
media) work in the opposite direction: delivering data to the mobile physical space dwellers.”
260
For Manovich, translating material into data and then dispersing it into available networks
spatializes information and materiality. Thinking with this cell space captures the placing,
domesticating, and performative ritualization of the Incube in one place by reformatting it all
into available data and forcing us to rethink where the limits of materiality lie. In other words, if
we follow Manovich that datified space is cell space (dispersed and available), then these
mediations and translations of human cremains and plant life into cell space make this space
available to users in an extended, posthuman sense.
Conclusions
Ritualizations of the tree, the planter, and the digital application as a place-making,
intensifying, and performative digital artifact activate a posthuman network of relations between
human and non-human life by creating new ethical, ontological, and ultimately epistemological
relations between the living and dead, human and nonhuman. Posthumanism (as a heuristic and
experimental concept) pays attention to processual and contingent relationships between the
human and the non-human, and the Incube’s operation is dependent upon these interrelations.
The performance of these networks as mediations that place, intensify, and transform bodies
260
Manovich, “The Poetics of Augmented Space.”, 4.
140
living and dead, technological and biological, makes the Incube an object of posthuman analysis
of digital religious practice. Theorizing such processual emergent posthumanism requires
analyzing the performative interactions that ritual theory helps elucidate, and posthumanism (as
both a method and subjectivity) calls attention to contingent relations between biological and
technological forms. The three ritualizations above offer a few pathways towards understanding
posthuman burial and ritualization by illustrating ritual ways of doing and posthuman ways of
knowing.
261
The Incube helps understand digital religious practice as posthuman religious practice by
providing an intimate blending of materialities in the cremains and the tree soil and a ritual
structure to observe interactions between the human, plant, and digital, the biological and the
technological. In other words, the Incube’s ritualization of death makes explicit the material
connections theorized through posthumanisms. The Incube is a place where present theories of
the posthuman and ritual and new media combine to form a methodology that allows for object
and media analysis beyond the screen to congregate the resources and inclinations of religious
studies, and attend to form, performance, and interrelations of the human and non-human.
The Bios Incube’s commercially attuned design unveils posthuman material links
between ecologies of life and death taking place within the broader natural burial movement and
gives place to bodies within natural burial rites. The Incube’s visualization and imaging of the
networks entangles a history of funerary rites through the modern, postmodern and posthuman,
like the natural and sea burial like the Neptune reef’s material nodes of ecological and economic
crisis.
261
Sea burials, reefs, and cemetery apps, offer other such inroads.
141
As an assemblage of tree, planter, and interface ritualizes posthumanism through place-
making, intensification or domestication, and transactional performance: the tree makes place
both within a movement and for the placeless burial—the planter domesticates by both
familiarizing and intensifying. The digital interface performs transactions between these discrete
objects. These three ritualizations taking place around and through the Incube emphasize the
posthuman aspects of this digital religious practice by exposing ecologies of relation and
material interdependence, where the Incube is not a single object, is not human or non-human,
but is posthuman, in that its performance requires a network and extended sense of materiality
and subjectivity.
For the study of digital religion, in particular, the Incube offers an instance of having to
think beyond an on/off divide and instead think in the between spaces of division of life and
death, human and nonhuman, plant, and animal. Taking what the roots of a posthumanism (Anti-
Humanism, Material Feminism, STS, and Cybernetics) can offer, through a new understanding
of media and a functional theory of ritual, this posthuman, heuristic epistemology reveals a
material, networked, and performative practice of mourning.
142
CHAPTER FOUR - Playing with Death in Video Games
"Let me play when you are dead," "Let's switch-off deaths," "Can we wait until I die?" –
Such phrases have wafted from arcades, living rooms, and basement refuges since the 1970s.
Luckily, the deaths discussed were not permanent human deaths but the markers of failure in
video games – the death of characters, avatars, or any other representation of the player in the
game. Death has always been a marker of video games, a way of dividing up playtime, effort,
accuracy, and accomplishment.
262
In many ways, we measure our success in video gaming by
our deaths (or lack thereof). Video gaming deaths have been around for decades, but as the
possibility for gaming pervades our everyday lives more and more through advanced and more
portable devices, the rise of games and their deaths comes looming into view.
The twenty-first century marked the rise of video-gaming to cultural dominance. By
2008, global video games sales surpassed global box office sales for the first time.
263
As of 2017,
all digital gaming combined (mobile, PC, and console) generated $100.5 billion in global sales
where, in the same year, the global box office brought in $40 billion: in less than ten years, the
market impact of video games over box office films more than doubled.
264
Video game's social
pervasiveness is no less complete. In 2012, 58% of Americans played video games, with women
making up 45% of these players, at an average age of 31.
265
A 2010 Pew poll found that in the
262
Frank Bosman offers a typology of types of death and dying in games, calling death “the most prominent
feedback systems of almost all digital games. It communicates to the player his or her (in)ability to achieve the
positive goals that the game has set.” Frank G. Bosman, “Death Narratives : A Typology of Narratological
Embeddings of Player’s Death in Digital Games,” 2018, https://media.suub.uni-bremen.de/handle/elib/3491.
263
Heidi A. Campbell et al., “Gaming Religionworlds: Why Religious Studies Should Pay Attention to Religion in
Gaming,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 84, no. 3 (September 1, 2016) ,647.
264
Of course, we have to consider the impact of other factors on the box office including streaming services.
265
Campbell et al., “Gaming Religionworlds: Why Religious Studies Should Pay Attention to Religion in
Gaming,”654.
143
United States, "fully 97% of teens age 12-17 play computer, web, portable, or console games."
266
As foundational video game and religion scholar Gregory Grieve puts it, "[d]igital games are to
the twenty-first century what films were to the twentieth century."
267
Simply speaking, video
games have become a dominant form of culture.
The precipitous and pervasive influence of video-gaming as a cultural form is reason
enough for religion scholars to take an interest, but, as Heidi Campbell et al. point out in a cover
article for the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, valuative and formal reasons
warrant investigation as well. The religious content of games and religious institutions'
engagement with gaming, games formal comparison to ritual, and existing connections between
religion and play are all different inroads to approaching religion and video games. Studying
religious symbols in games and religious institutions’ use of games means a focus on content.
Looking into ritual and play means looking at form. Investments of categorization breaks down
into its interest in either the form or the content of religion and video-gaming. "religion in" and
"gaming in" both look towards religious or gaming content. "Religion as" and "gaming as" look
to form.
This divide between form and content falls across the same lines as a long-held argument
in game studies around the primacy of "narratology" versus "ludology" (gameplay), with the
question being: which is that which makes a game, its narrative form or its play form and which
is that worth studying? The divide began after emerging game scholarship saw narrative
scholarship lacking the ability to capture what was unique about games. Espen Aarseth,
266
“Teens, Video Games and Civics,” Pew Research Center Internet & Technology (blog), September 16, 2008,
https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2008/09/16/teens-video-games-and-civics/.
267
Campbell et al., “Gaming Religionworlds: Why Religious Studies Should Pay Attention to Religion in
Gaming,”654.
144
described it this way in 2004: "One side argues that computer games are media for telling stories,
while the opposing side claims that stories and games are different structures that are doing
opposing things…Here we find the political question of the genre at play: the fight over games
generic categorization is a fight for academic influence over what is perhaps the dominant
contemporary form of cultural expression."
268
Aarseth sums up the weight and relevance of this division well – it is less a debate about
the essential nature of video games and more a land grab for academic and disciplinary territory.
As the study of video games has moved forward, the stated division between narratology and
ludology has become more of a trope than a true divide, with the ludological approach largely
winning out in terms of publication and focus, as the narratological approach takes new form,
focusing less on something strictly like narrative and instead transforming into synthetic studies
like Flanagan and Nissenbaum’s Values at Play in Digital Games (cited above), which takes
both narratological and ludological approaches to games, dividing them along functional rather
than essential lines to account for how games can shape our thinking.
As a central and influential part of popular culture, digital games reflect and shape the
performance of norms and values and studying both video games' content and form attends to
values and performance within gaming.
269
Science and technology studies and social shaping of
technology theories show us that not only do technologies shape our norms and values, but
technologies themselves are embedded with these values, and games are no different. In their
introduction to Values at Play, Flanagan and Nissenbaum point out that "just as narrative and
268
Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Pat Harrigan, First Person: New Media as Story, Performance, and Game, (Cambridge,
Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2004). 45.
269
Mary Flanagan and Helen Fay Nissenbaum, Values at Play in Digital Games (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The
MIT Press, 2014), 3-4.
145
game rules carry values, so do lines of code, game engines, mechanics, and hardware."
270
These
formal elements shape how digital games evaluate and value cultures and human beings. "Unlike
traditional forms of other media, which do not responds to player's journey or to their readings
and interpretations, digital games are particularly compelling environments in which players
explore and act based on at least a partial understanding of a systems relational dynamics."
271
In
other words, video gaming opens up digital systems to a new level of interactivity that explicitly
performs value systems by way of this formal interaction.
One such value system performed through games surrounds attitudes towards death and
dying – as Frank Bosman puts it, death is perhaps the most “prominent feedback system of
almost all digital games.”
272
This chapter investigates the attitudes and ritualizations of death in
games through a model for understanding religion and video gaming dubbed the
“gamevironmental” model, one that (like posthumanism) incorporates the technical and socio-
cultural aspects of gaming and play into a networked sense of what is a “game” (as an object of
play). Beginning with primary conceptual relationships between religion and play to specific
inquests into religion and video gaming, this chapter concludes with a case study on “No-Death-
Runs,” the attempt to complete a game with not dying at all. No-Death-Runs (or NDRs)
exemplify a posthuman approach to play and death, as playing with digital architectures of being
in full awareness of and in spite of the constant presence of death.
By ritualizing the game through posthuman modes, NDRs perform posthuman ways of
being with and through mediated death. No-death illustrates death at play through three unique
270
Ibid., 9.
271
Ibid., 5.
272
Frank G. Bosman, “Death Narratives: A Typology of Narratological Embeddings of Player’s Death in Digital
Games,” ed. John W. Borchert, Gamevironments, 2018,5.
146
relations of a player to death made possible through digital technologies and posthuman
subjectivities by way of ritualization and material assemblages. These negotiations of death and
(alternative) life are performances of posthuman ritualization and show the value of play in
illumination religion in and as a technology of mediation human experience and ontology. This
human experience of death, as Ernest Becker notes in his treatise on psychoanalysis, religion,
and modernity The Denial of Death, is “one of the great rediscoveries of modem thought: that of
all things that move man, one of the principal ones is his terror of death.”
273
Becker marks
human experience as a cycle of denying and confronting death, through what he calls the “hero-
quest.”.
274
In this quasi-Campbellian language, Becker claims that to become conscious of what
one is doing to earn his feeling of heroism is the main self-analytic problem of life.”
275
While the
psycho-analytic and gendered aspects of this argument cannot be accounted for in my treatment
of NDRs, it is worth placing Becker here as a backdrop to the hero-like quest of video-gaming
and in the ways it allows players to confront death.
Play and Religion
Before arriving at the subtleties of NDRs and how they “play” with death, we first must
appreciate the intertwined history of the study of play and religion in general. The study of play
and the study of play alongside religion have entangled histories where scholars have wrestled
over claims as to the importance of play, as pre-eminent play theorist Brian Sutton-Smith points
out in his cumulative 1997 work The Ambiguity of Play
…biologists, psychologists, educators, and sociologists tend to focus on how play is
adaptive or contributes to growth, development, and socialization…. Sociologists say that
play is an imperial social system that is typically manipulated by those with power for
273
Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death, (New York: Free Press, 1973), 11.
274
Ibid., 5.
275
Ibid., 6.
147
their own benefit… Art and literature, by contrast, have a major focus on playas a spur to
creativity. … In psychiatry, play offers a way to diagnose and provide therapy for the
inner conflicts of young and old patients alike. And in the leisure sciences, play is about
qualities of personal experience, such as intrinsic motivation, fun, relaxation, escape, and
so on.
276
Sutton-Smith points out that each of these approaches to play reveal different attentions rather
than unique essences – in other words, each of these studies, in arriving from individual
disciplines, aim at different goal and therefore make and take different types of play. The
category of play, then, has always been up for debate.
Since its colloquial beginnings within different fields and disciplines, play studies has
gained its independence, thanks in no small part to the works of Sutton-Smith, and his lasting
influence. His Ambiguity of Play is itself an ode to the study of play, to the ways it appears, and
the approaches taken to it. As the study of play and play theory has evolved, almost all studies of
play (not unlike studies of religion) balk at the idea of defining play in and of itself but rather
choose to define play in relation to other things or as a process of relationships. Ian Bogost,
popular game designer, and philosopher of games and play does find some common ground
amongst these definitions however in his comparison of Derrida, Sutton-Smith, and Salen and
Zimmerman "For Derrida, play is a name for a text's ability to bear new meanings for different
readers in different contexts. The play theorist Brian Sutton-Smith discusses a similar
phenomenon the ‘play of light, the play of waves, the play of components in a bearing case, the
inner play of limbs, the play of forces, the play of gnats, even a play on words... the game
designers Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman adopt this sense of play too, in their formal
definition of the concept, which is really the same as Derrida's but without the philosophical
276
Brian Sutton-Smith, The Ambiguity of Play, (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 2001). 7.
148
window dressing: ‘free movement within a more rigid structure.’”
277
Such definitions (or the
realm of definitions – getting close without a commitment) is where a lot of folks studying video
gaming and culture have landed – that play is the movement within a structure. Bogost goes on
to point out that such a definition works particularly well for studying technological apparatus
(like video games) and play: "Machines and apparatuses are good metaphors of understanding
play. When you operate a mechanism like a steering wheel, the device has some "play" built in: a
space through which the steering wheel can be turned before the steering shaft couples with and
turns the pinion at its end."
278
Rather than an essential definition of play, contemporary play
studies instead turns to its functional and relational role.
Thinkers like Bogost, Jan Rune Holmevik, and Miguel Sicart represent contemporary
concerns and methods in the study of play, and not necessarily just play and video games.
279
The
going concern between Bogost and Sicart is where to place play – that is, in other words, where
does play take place, rather than what is play. Bogost places play firmly in things, whereas Sicart
places it in human being when he says: “Instead of deriving an understanding of play from a
particular object or activity, like war, ritual, or games, I see play as a portable tool for being. It is
not tied to objects but brought by people to the complex interrelations with and between things
that form daily life."
280
So, where Bogost might find play as essential to an object or a form (like
277
Ian Bogost, Play Anything: The Pleasure of Limits, the Uses of Boredom, and the Secret of Games (New York:
Basic Books, 2016)., 94.
278
Bogost, Play Anything,95.
279
Jan Rune Holmevik, Ian Bogost, and Gregory Ulmer, Inter/Vention: Free Play in the Age of Electracy, Illustrated
edition (Cambridge, Mass: The MIT Press, 2012); Miguel Sicart, Play Matters, Reprint edition (Cambridge,
Massachusetts London: The MIT Press, 2017); Bogost, Play Anything. These three texts and three thinkers make up
a fragment of play studies. I pick these three here as contemporary amendments to Brian Sutton-Smith, Johan
Huizinga, and Robert E. Neale as the represent the particular intersection between play studies and video game
studies, where they are able to synthesize both worlds for best use here. For other influential theorists of play see:
Patrick Bateson, Play, Playfulness, Creativity and Innovation, 1st edition (Cambridge ; New York: Cambridge
University Press, 2013); Roger Caillois, Man, Play and Games, Reprint edition (Urbana: University of Illinois Press,
2001); Thomas S. Henricks, Play and the Human Condition, 1st edition (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2015).
280
Sicart, Play Matters, 5.
149
a game), thinkers like Sicart see play as a function of being human. Like many other territories
for critical or cultural theory, play theory has moved into debates around material culture and
essential versus functional definitions – asking: where is play? What is play? And how does it
effect/affect?
Specific to the study of religion and play, in the 1960s and 70s, along with the turn of
postmodern scholarship and the development of formal departments for the study of religion,
came a renewed interest in the seriousness of play and in the value of play as a subject for
academic study. David L. Miller, in his 1970 Gods and Games, charts this emergence not only in
the humanities but specifically in the study of religion. Along with books like Roger Callois
Man, Play, and Games and Robert E. Neale's In Praise of Play, the 1960s and 70s saw an influx
of serious investment in play in the study of religion and culture.
281
Citing the likes of Joseph
Campbell, Mircea Eliade, Sigmund Freud, and Erving Goffman, these works on religion and
play rely heavily on psychological and history of religions approaches to reach chart play as a
"modern mythology" and play and work as the sacred and profane.
282
The study of religion and play has expanded from an interest in mythologies and
psychologies of games and play to more inclusive models of play and religion, including
frequent comparisons between game and ritual. Studying play and religion as shared territories
began with sociologist Johan Huizinga's early comparisons between ritual and play, and his
focus on the formal and structural elements of both, finding no formal difference between play
and ritual, where the “ ‘consecrated spot’ cannot be formally distinguished from the ‘play-
281
David L. Miller, Gods and Games: Toward a Theology of Play (Stillpoint Digital Press, 2013); Caillois, Man,
Play and Games; Robert E. Neale, In Praise of Play: Toward a Psychology of Religion, 1st edition (Harper & Row,
1969).
282
Miller, Gods and Games, 4; Neale, In Praise of Play,101.
150
ground.’"
283
This idea of a set-apart world (or "magic circle") as a space within which both
religion and play take place is frequently picked up as a model for both ritual and play spaces. In
their introduction to their edited collection Religions in Play, Phillipe Bornet and Maya Burger
note the advantages to studying games and religion for the study of religion itself, including "one
step back from the traditional textualist paradigm "the universality of play and games as
compared to terms like "sacred," "religion," and "church," and the sustainable comparison
between games and ritual and bounded and bordered activities.
284
Within the American Academy
of Religion, religion and play come together with religion and sports to form a unit of study,
gathered around texts and concepts that bind play, sport, and games to nationalism, gender,
identity, and the like.
285
Play theory and the study of play entangles itself in the humanities, and its foci and
debates have traveled along with the trends in scholarship – particularly in the study of religion,
from Miller's occupation with myth and symbol to contemporary debates about agency and
materiality. I sketch this very brief history of game and play studies not to make some enduring
point about its own essence or function, but more humbly to point out that there is nothing
unique about the study of play per se, either to the digital or religious studies. Rather, pointing
out that it is not particularly unique to either frees me to look at what interventions digital games
and scholarship around digital games and religion has made into these arenas of games and play,
283
Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture (Martino Fine Books, 2014),10.
284
Maya Burger, Religions in Play: Games, Rituals, and Virtual Worlds, ed. Philippe Bornet (Zürich: TVZ -
Theologischer Verlag Z|rich, 2012),7.
285
Alter, Joseph. The Wrestler’s Body: Identity and Ideology in North India; Baker, William J. Playing with God:
Religion and Modern Sports; Byrne, Julie. O God of Players: The Story of the Immaculata Mighty Macs; Price,
Joseph. From Season to Season: Sport as American Religion.
151
and from there point to the additional lengths posthuman theories of new media and ritual can
take these explorations of play, digital games, and religious studies.
The Magic Circle Problem
Where to begin this parsing then, of play studies and digital religion studies, ritual, and
new media? Why not with the one sticking point that has endured from early sociological,
anthropological, and psychological studies of games up until the latest manuscripts on digital
games and religion: Huizinga's magic circle. Johan Huizinga's "magic circle" has become a locus
for understanding the limits of play and game spaces, in game studies writ large and within the
study of gaming and religion. His 1938 Homo Ludens has a singular influence in the field of
game studies as a work of cultural theory and history that began a serious and encyclopedic
interrogation of play both in and as culture, covering play and war, play and law, and play and
poetry. The most enduring and influential concept from all this is that of the magic circle, the
most-often quoted passage being
All play moves and has its being within a play-ground marked off beforehand either
materially or ideally, deliberately or as a matter of course. Just as there is no formal
difference between play and ritual, so the "consecrated spot" cannot be formally
distinguished from the playground. The arena, the card-table, the magic circle, the
temple, the stage, the screen, the tennis court, the court of justice, etc., are all in form and
function play-grounds, i.e., forbidden spots, isolated, hedged round, hallowed, within
which special rules obtain. All are temporary worlds within the ordinary world, dedicated
to the performance of an act apart.
286
Huizinga's language of marking off, setting, apart, materially, ideally, deliberate, or matter of
course have all embedded themselves within enduring game studies discourses around what
286
Huizinga, Homo Ludens,10.
152
is play, and what is a game and the term "magic circle" has come to encapsulate all these
debates.
The "magic circle" as a term itself began with Salen and Zimmerman's work on Huizinga,
making its most prominent appearance in Rules of Play
Although the magic circle is merely one of the examples in Huizinga's list of "play-
grounds," the term is used here as shorthand for the idea of a special place in time and
space created by a game. The fact that the magic circle is just that—a circle—is an
important feature of this concept. As a closed circle, the space it circumscribes is
enclosed and separate from the real world. As a marker of time, the magic circle is like a
clock: it simultaneously represents a path with a beginning and end, but one without
beginning and end. The magic circle inscribes a space that is repeatable, a space both
limited and limitless. In short, a finite space with infinite possibility.
287
For Salen and Zimmerman, the magic circle is both a place and an attitude. It is a space in
that "the magic circle of a game is where the game takes place. To play a game means entering
into a magic circle, or perhaps creating one as a game begins. The magic circle of a game might
have a physical component, like the board of a board game or the playing field of an athletic
contest. But many games have no physical boundaries—arm wrestling, for example, doesn't
require much in the way of special spaces or material."
288
The magic circle is an attitude or
orientation, for "[w]ithin the magic circle, special meanings accrue and cluster around objects
and behaviors. In effect, a new reality is created, defined by the rules of the game, and inhabited
by its players…Suddenly, the materials represent something quite specific. This plastic token is
These. These rules tell you how to roll the die and move. Suddenly, it matters very much which
plastic token reaches the end first."
289
287
Tekinbas and Zimmerman, Rules of Play, 95.
288
Ibid.
289
Ibid.
153
The idea of the magic circle holds particular currency for the study of religion and games,
parceling along with it Huizinga's initial direct comparison between ritual and game spaces.
Huizinga's own fascination with religion invites his use (and subsequently for the study of
religion and video games the use of Salen and Zimmerman's adaptation of his magic circle) for
understanding the functional and formal relationships of ritual and game. Rachel Wagner,
Gregory Grieve, and others directly leverage the magic circle or the discussion of the magic
circle to justify arguments about game spaces as ritual spaces by leveraging the spatially
dependent work on sacred spaces and rituals places by the likes of Emilie Durkheim, Mircea
Eliade, and Jonathan Z. Smith and extend the metaphor of the magic circle to reach broader
conclusions about ritual space and action.
290
I do not disagree with these uses for the concept of a
magic circle, nor do I disagree with the conclusions reached by way of these uses – in fact, much
of the scholarship below is leveraged on just this kind of work.
The magic circle problem begins when the concept of the magic circle itself is leveraged
as content for critique rather than used as a tool for description. That is, in other words, when the
binary nature (or the perceived binary nature) of the magic circle (you are either in the circle or
out of the circle) becomes an object for ridicule or critique. T.L. Taylor's 2006 Play Between
Worlds, an achievement itself in sober scholarship on multi-player games, begins one such
critique. Taylor notes that while "Salen and Zimmerman suggest that this boundary is open or
closed depending on the approach used to understand the game, that is, where viewed through
the lens of rules, play, or culture…there remains a somewhat implicit divide at work in their
290
Heidi Campbell and Gregory P. Grieve, eds., Playing with Religion in Digital Games, Digital Game Studies
(Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2014); Rachel Wagner, Godwired: Religion, Ritual, and Virtual
Reality, Media, Religion and Culture, Book, Whole (New York: Routledge, 2012).
154
model."
291
This critique, and ones like it, unfortunately, represent a concretizing or solidifying of
the magic circle that not only misrepresents it’s critical utility but also begins the construction of
a magic circle strawman, one which is rigid, binary, and absolute – the enemy of the postmodern
critic.
In 2012, Eric Zimmerman directly responded to these critiques of the magic circle, citing
his encounters with them at various conferences: "Invariably, these presentations have a single
aim: to devalue, dethrone, or otherwise take down the oppressive regime of the magic circle.
They begin by citing either Huizinga's Homo Ludens or Rules of Play (the game design textbook
I co-authored with Katie Salen), and then elaborate mightily on the dangers of the magic circle
approach. They proceed to supplant the narrow magic circle point of view with one of their own
– an approach that emphasizes something like social interaction between players, a wider cultural
context, or concrete sociopolitical reality. Dragon slain."
292
The dragon, Zimmerman reinforces,
is the kind of straw man binary debate first alluded to above by Taylor, but then reinforced and
attacked by the very kind of critiques Zimmerman cites. "The argument goes something like this:
the idea of the magic circle is the idea that games are formal structures wholly and completely
separate from ordinary life. The magic circle naively champions the preexisting rules of a game,
and ignores the fact that games are lived experiences, that games are actually played by human
beings in some kind of real social and cultural context."
293
This is the essence of the magic circle
291
T. L. Taylor, “Living Digitally: Embodiment in Virtual Worlds,” in The Social Life of Avatars:Presence and
Interaction in Shared Virtual Environments., ed. Ralph Schroeder, Book, Section vols. (London: Springer-Verlag,
2002)., 152.
292
“Jerked Around by the Magic Circle - Clearing the Air Ten Years Later,” accessed July 8, 2019,
https://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/135063/jerked_around_by_the_magic_circle_.php.
293
Ibid.
155
critique – that it is sterile, rule-based, and exclusive of particular contexts. It is hard to disagree
with such a straw man debate if you do not know the straw man.
Zimmerman writes in his response to these critiques that, ultimately, things like the
magic circle were intended to and should be used as game design tools and heuristic devices that
"derive their value from their utility to solve problems. Their value is not derived from their
scientific accuracy or proximity to truth", and that "The magic circle, as put forward in Rules of
Play, is the relatively simple idea that when a game is being played, new meanings are
generated. These meanings mix elements intrinsic to the game and elements outside the game."
294
A skeptic could assert that what looks like a response from Zimmerman could, in fact, be a
corrective and a softening of his own stance to appease the critics. But, in the end, that matters
less than how game scholars continue to move forward with (or without) the magic circle.
Here I will admit to my own paradox: I am one of the "earnest graduate students" that
Zimmerman cites as launching these full-throated but short cited attacks, and in dealing with
religion and video games, it is irresponsible not to mention the magic circle. But, at the same
time – I do not want to deal with it. I am tired of it, and I think it is tired of us.
295
So instead, I
will suggest ways not of going beyond the magic circle or breaking the magic circle, but rather
suggest that posthumanism for the study of religion and video games is a way of going beyond
the magic circle debate. In other words, a way of giving up the ghost on the magic circle while
still keeping its heuristic efficacy firmly in our memories. I believe Zimmerman and follow his
assertion: to see the magic circle as a heuristic device rather than a structural or functional truth
and carry on beyond a debate about its veracity or utility.
294
Ibid.
295
Ibid.
156
Posthumanism (itself a heuristic device for understanding digital practices of religion)
bridges gaps remaining in the magic circle by repositioning self or subject rather than space or
place and creating an expansive sense of both agency and embodiment, self and structure. By
including technological devices, cultural systems (like rules and ideals), and the human body in
one networked understanding of subject formation (or an enlarged sense of the subject),
posthumanism allows the magic circle to not be such a problem. It is simply a parsing of the
larger incorruptible web of relations, a way of seeing or thinking rather than an ontological or
epistemological truth. Thinking through posthumanism breaks down not only binaries like
human/non-human but the concern or need to so strongly think such binaries like those painted
in the image of a magic circle strawman. Religious studies itself offers one such alternative
methodology coinciding with both a posthuman and game studies model for understanding
religion, ritual, and video games: gamevironments – which look both at the games and the
cultural worlds they create.
Religious Studies and Studying Video Games
Beyond the narratology and ludology and magic circle debates, cultural and critical
studies need methodologies to study video games – a common language or at least a set of
priorities for a critical approach to video games. Even if we forgo the magic circle, an
interdisciplinary approach to video gaming needs a shared language. In their Rules of Play, game
designers Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman offer three schemas for studying relations of form
and value, focusing on different aspects of games, with "formal schema focused on rules (i.e.,
games as systems of uncertainty or as cybernetic feedback loops), experiential schema focused
157
on play (games as social play or as the play of desire), and cultural schema focused on context
(games as cultural rhetoric or as ideological resistance)."
296
"Form," "Experience," and "Culture" mark territories for understanding video games, and
these landmarks have largely held in place since Salen and Zimmerman’s 2003 text. Recent
critical video games studies work on time, space, place, affect, disability, and queerness in and
around games largely follow these schemas, identifying how they place themselves within these
concerns.
297
Considering form means considering things like the hardware and software, the
programming, the rules, and the interface. Considering experience means considering things like
play, performance, temporality, and spatiality, and affect. Considering culture means considering
things like fandoms, tropes, and symbols. Altogether, these three schemas (and their accordant
territories) largely make up current approaches to studying digital games.
Religion scholars adapted these approaches towards gaming and religion specifically, as
the study of games evolved and then moved into the study of religion. As Greg Grieve and Heidi
Campbell point out in their cumulative monograph Playing with Religion in Digital Games, the
study of video games began in earnest in 2007 at an American Academy of Religion panel,
which brought together new scholars wrestling with how to study religion and video games.
298
In
296
Ibid.
297
Katherine Isbister, How Games Move Us: Emotion by Design, (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016), The MIT
Press, “The Art of Failure,” The MIT Press, accessed January 13, 2020, https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/art-failure;
Kristine Jorgensen and Faltin Karlsen, eds., Transgression in Games and Play (Cambride MA: The MIT Press,
2018); Christopher Hanson, Game Time: Understanding Temporality in Video Games, Illustrated edition
(Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2018); Bonnie Ruberg, Video Games Have Always Been Queer
(New York: NYU Press, 2019); Bonnie Ruberg, ed., Queer Game Studies, 1st edition (Minneapolis: Univ Of
Minnesota Press, 2017).
298
Campbell and Grieve, Playing with Religion in Digital Games.
158
the last decade or so, the study has increased, with a number of full-length book projects and a
journal dedicated solely to religion and video gaming.
299
A dominant methodological approach to studying religion and video games is what Vit
Sisler, Kerstin Radde-Antweiler, and Xenia Zeiler named their "gamevironments" model for
understanding gaming: focusing on the formal, technical, and cultural environments of a game.
As Radde-Antweiler puts it, gamevironments "focuses on actors within or outside the game.
They do not necessarily have to be gamers, but they can also be actors that are confronted with
game content."
300
The gamevironments model is synthetic rather than systemic, as it looks at how
schemas like Salen and Zimmerman's interact to locate how a game functions in context by
focusing not only on the object of play but the social and material worlds in which they are
embedded and reflected. It theorizes games as playing out through, in, and as a part of broader
material and social worlds. Working through a gamevironments methodology means accounting
not only for game content and game actors but those encountering game content and game
actors, and the game itself as a material and cultural object. By understanding games beyond the
screen and beyond the narrative, gamevironmental thinking reveals games as spaces where death
is contested, an object of play, and subject to playfulness.
The gamevironmental model lends itself to the SST and STS model which inform my
own present posthuman methodologies by focusing on the formal elements of a game and tracing
their influence on values outside of the game space itself. Salen and Zimmerman and the
gamevironmental model bolster SST's claim that formal factors of technologies are value-laden
299
Šisler et al., Methods for Studying Video Games and Religion, (Milton: Routledge Ltd, 2017),
https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315518336; Frank G. Bosman, Gaming and the Divine: A New Systematic Theology of
Video Games, (Routledge, 2019); Chris Hansen, Halos and Avatars: Playing Video Games with God, ed. Craig
Detweiler, 1st edition (Louisville, Ky: Westminster John Knox Press, 2010).
300
Šisler et al., Methods for Studying Video Games and Religion,210.
159
and ideological. By attending to the material and performative elements of religion and gaming,
this chapter emphasizes that posthuman lineage of thinking within the gamevironmental model,
fulfilling Zeiler's hope "…to critically reflect on the issues of how to study the field in a more
organized way, with suitable methods, and to systematize and develop adequate methodological
approaches."
301
Playing with Death
Studying play and religion through this gamevironmental model means finding a middle
ground, a networked place for thinking through the deep meaning of play in relation to religious
practice. One shared space of both religion and play is the negotiation of death. Play theorists
Neale, Sicart, and Bernard Suits all see play as in relation to (or in spite of) the omnipresence of
death. For Neale and Sicart alike, writing some forty years apart, the former on religion and play
and the latter on play and video games, play is a direct response to death, an affirmation of being
a live in spite of the reality of death, and a way of living in direct opposition to this reality.
Explicit modes of play like NDRs demonstrate an explicit ritualization of these relationships
between play and death.
Why do we play? Sicart writes: "Brian Sutton-Smith gave one possible answer to this
question: we play because life is crap. I propose another answer: we play because we're all going
to die….Being conscious is knowing that self-reflection itself will go away… Playing is an
affirmation that we are living, and not just surviving…We play because life is crap, and it will
end, but we can be more than slaves to those inescapable facts. Mortality gives us meaning and
purpose and being human is embracing that meaning and purpose as forms of expression, of
301
Ibid.,4.
160
celebration, as a victory."
302
Similarly, Neale posits that "[T]he player lives a sanctified life. He
does not alternatively fight the world and escape from it as the secular worker does, nor does he
usefully and abusively covenant with it as the magical worker does. Rather, the full adult
adventurer is in communion with the world, demonstrating the love that is identical to that
expressed by the gods in their creation of the world in the beginning. The paradise of play is here
and now. What happens to the child in play can happen to the adult, and when it does, paradise is
present."
303
For both Neale and Sicart, play functions as a kind of coming to terms with death, as a
recognition of the mortality of human being and the need to create meaningful lives through
play, not to dwell for too long on either end of a spectrum of euphoria or despair, but to play
within the limits of the times and spaces and experiences that we have, in order to realize that
death is an end to them, and that escape from death is not possible. Bernard Suits' utopic parable
on play and games, The Grasshopper, begins with the death of his titular character, who refuses
to work during the summer to save for the winter, and would rather die than refuse to be himself,
one who does not work. For Suits, games and play are the opposite of work. This book, in large
part is a defense of the importance of the act of playing, a focus on inefficient means, the
imposing of arbitrary rules, where the rules make possible a certain type of activity.
Together for Suits, Sicart, and Neale to play is to accept death, but not on its terms. To
play is to recognize the power of death, but not in this time or place, to play in spite of the power
of death. To play is to refuse death, if only for the moment. To play is precisely not to die.
Perhaps to play is to play with being human, at the limits of being human. Perhaps to play is to
302
“Play Matters,” accessed July 8, 2019, http://www.playmatters.cc/.
303
Neale, In Praise of Play, 172.
161
play at being post-human in the face of death. Previous definitions of play hold up under these
circumstances and apply under this presence of death. Working off a definition of play as "free
movement within a more rigid structure," the movement is a certain kind of living, and the
structure is that of death.
304
But what kind of living is made possible by play, and what can play
and games teach us about death? What do video games in particular teach us about playing with
death?
305
No Death Runs
Death has been an imminent threat to gamers since the earliest cabinet arcade games,
where many early arcade games were no-death runs at their basic structure, with scores based on
an ability solely to stay alive – so, No-Death Runs have been around as long as video-gaming
and death has always lurked at game's edges, directing negotiations of narrative and play.
306
“You Died,” “Dead,” and “Wasted” showing up on the screen textualize death as a central and
orienting game event, and playing a video game demands repeated death and demand repeated
failure. Video games are, in one way, about the constant presence of death as defining the
boundaries of play. Game designers have structured in many means of avoiding or forestalling
this inevitable death. Health bars, new lives, potions, spells, shields, countdowns, and armor all
defer imminent death. After this death, games ask players to try again – video games then, in
304
Bogost, Play Anything,94.
305
For even more on explicit relationships between video gaming and death, see John W. Borchert, “Introduction to
a Special Issue on Video Gaming and Death,” 2018, https://media.suub.uni-bremen.de/handle/elib/3499.
306
We must also remember here that death (particualry in an arcade game) means you must drop in more coins to
play again. For an excellent account of the arcade as a public commercial practice, see C.A. Kocurek, “Coin-Drop
Capitalism: Economic Lessons from the Video Game Arcade,” 2012, 189–208.
162
another way, are about overcoming death. Success in games can mean avoiding death in different
degrees, and in some cases, avoiding it altogether.
"No Death Runs" (NDRs) are player-imposed and community held sets of rules and
structures where players must complete a game (whether that means by completing specific
objectives or playing out the narrative) without incurring a single death. NDRs are self-imposed
with their own rules and limits – gamers and gaming communities establish what it means to
"die," what can and cannot be done or used in avoiding this death (using health packs or certain
weapons, for example). The simplest of these rules is a complete run of the game from its
opening to the defeat of its final level without dying or respawning: this could mean dashing
through dangerous areas to avoid conflict or mastering difficult techniques that break or bend the
game’s structure to avoid damage unto death.
NDRs derive (especially in their communal aspects) from "Speed Runs," where, rather
than being concerned with not dying and completing a game, players are concerned with
completing the game in the quickest time possible. This too can involve breaking or bending the
rules and structures of the game and its digital architecture (through glitches) in order to
complete the task at hand. Speed runs began in earnest in the early 1990s, with PC game Doom
and its built-in ability to record and share runs (a key to authenticating the veracity of a claim to
the fastest time), but has since evolved into a vast online community and set of shared practices,
including the annual "Games Done Quick" charity speed run event, which in 2019 raised three
million dollars in two days.
307
307
David Snyder, Speedrunning: Interviews with the Quickest Gamers, ed. Matthew Wilhelm Kapell (Jefferson,
North Carolina: McFarland & Company, 2017).1;“Games Done Quick,” accessed July 8, 2019,
https://gamesdonequick.com/.
163
Speed Runs and NDRs mean playing games in ways they were not intended to be played.
In "The Importance of Playing in Earnest" Rachel Wagner redraws distinctions for play and
games and religion from ones between "seriousness" and "fun" to those between "earnest" and
"insincere," where "the error people tend to make the most in thinking about games and religion
is to assume that the primary opposition at work is the idea that religion is ‘serious’ whereas
games are ‘fun.’ I propose that a more accurate distinction is between being earnest as opposed
to being insincere in one's engagement with the ordered world views that religions and games
can evoke."
308
Wagner defines playing in earnest as "To be earnest in play is to buy into the
system willingly and fully, to say yes to the world created by the rules."
309
She goes on to adapt
categories from the likes of Suits and Salen and Zimmerman to distinguish four categories of
insincere player: triflers, cheaters, spoilsports, and nihilists. Triflers play by the rules
(technically) but do not care about or aim at the prescribed outcome. Cheaters actively transgress
the prescribed rules of the game. The spoilsport exposes the constructed nature of the game
world and the rule system, attempting to create new rules unto themselves, where the nihilist
similarly exposes the rule system as a created world but refuse to acknowledge its power and
labels it meaningless.
These speed and no death runners are not playing in earnest according to Wagner's model
of earnest versus insincere play. But they are certainly more than triflers, cheaters, spoilers, or
nihilists. They are not concerned with the game at hand but are up to something else completely.
But they are also certainly playful and communal. Going back to defining play as freedom within
a system is helpful here, as NDRs certainly exercise freedom – but not within the system of the
308
Rachel Wagner, “The Importance of Playing in Earnest,” in Playing with Religion in Digital Games, ed. Heidi A
Campbell and Gregory P. Grieve (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2014), 194.
309
Ibid.
164
game itself, but the system of the digital architecture. Rather than playing only in the game (that
is, going along with the rules, performing a given role, and subjecting to the system of play), no
death runners are playing with the game (creating space for movement within and outside those
rules, the play that moves within the structure without rupturing it, but without exactly following
the rules of law), and building an earnest community around it.
NDRs include communities that extend the gamevironments model. In addition to the
self-imposed limits making up the death run, no-death gamers on Twitch (an online platform
where gamers can live stream gameplay and interact with fans) calculate time and hits taken, as
well as personal records (among other things). Such metrics quantify their relationship to the
game, to other attempts, and the community of gamers, making new data around the values, and
this communal and quantified accountability further extends no-death runs as a ritualized
practice. The self-imposed limits, structures, and attentions create new ways of seeing and
playing the game, resembling ritualizing structures (following JZ Smith and Catherine Bell) –
those limits imposed upon regular activity towards a goal, the paying of attention to certain
aspects of an everyday task that then takes on greater meaning.
NDRs are both playing in and playing with the game and require a facility and knowledge
exceeding the game developer's expectations: that a player will die more than once. This kind of
facility creates new ways of playing and playing with the structures of the games, the kinds of
functional re-imaginings advocated by ethical posthumanists like Braidotti.
310
NDRs reimagine
possibilities for death through three unique relations. First, death is known as a state (of failure)
and as a quantity (of non-life, as quantified by a health meter or hit-points), and this allows a
310
Braidotti, The Post Human, 2.
165
player to see death clearly, as a known presence, a constant threat, and a visible limit. Second,
death is avoidable: avoiding death consumes the play style, with strategies and techniques to
avoid death, the focus of the community of players gathering around these attempts and gamers
develop expertise in sidestepping death, as death becomes no longer inevitable as a condition of
living. Third, death becomes an object of play, and the line between livings and dying becomes a
place of play through the processes of knowing and avoiding. Gamers play with rather than in
the game by re-orienting the object of play towards the difference between living and dying
rather than the narrative structure the developers intended. These ritualized relationships between
gamers and death reveal value-laden posthuman thinking that encapsulates STS and SST
thinking and turns NDR play into a relationship between player and machine, values and
structure. Epistemological, ethical, and ontological thinking combine in the three ritualizations of
no-death runs involved here as knowledge, possibilities, and performances.
Such ontological entanglements of digital games and materiality travel via Alexander
Galloway's suggestion that games are interactive material systems, where "[t]he work itself is
material action. One plays a game. And the software runs. The operator and the machine play the
video game together, step by step, move by move" Galloway points to gaming as not only
"material action" but material interaction between human and non-human actors.
311
Digital
gaming is a material push and pull between machine and human, negotiating bytes and bits of
code through material interfaces like controllers and keyboards. Look at this through the
gamevironments model beyond game content alone turns material forms as part of the values
they form. Part of these formations are the norms of communities of no-death runners.
311
Alexander Galloway, Gaming: Essays On Algorithmic Culture, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
2006),2.
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Three Types of Death at Play
NDR players and communities gather around particularly technical and difficult games,
ones in which completing an NDR (or even a “no-damage run” – where a player takes no
damage at all!) is a marked achievement. These games often require defeating many enemies
(both normal recurrences of the same type of “bosses,” which are unique in their style and
difficulty) and take hours to complete. The playstyle is often dense, where a player’s memory
and technical skill with the material interface (mouse, keyboard, controller) is tested. NDRs are
typically not attempted on so-called “casual” games but focus around large-scale, high-budget
“AAA” titles – the blockbusters of video games.
One series of games that has attracted the NDR community is the Souls series from
Japanese developer FromSoftoware. The central trilogy of the series, Dark Souls I,II,III combine
elements of action and fighting games with role-playing elements. Action games typically focus
on a quest, the completion of discrete objectives across a narrative world made up of varying
locations and scenarios. Fighting games focus solely on technical combat, with complex
controller manipulation and timing elements. Role-playing games demand managing all aspects
of the player character, notably the growth of certain skill sets, abilities, and the curation of an
inventory of weapons and useful items. Dark Souls games combine these elements within a
mythical medieval landscape.
Playing Dark Souls involves fighting enemies with well-timed dodges, sword strikes, and
magic potions and collecting items like armor and spells, which will help you more easily endure
these encounters. One unique aspect of the Souls series which makes it more difficult is health
reduction upon death: each time your character is killed, their overall health bar (indicating their
ability to endure a certain amount of damage from enemies) is reduced. So, each time you die, it
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becomes more and more difficult to defeat the enemies that killed you. And each of these
encounters demands memorizing not only your own movements and capabilities but those of the
programmed enemies as well. This feature, along with the game’s difficult controls and long
play-time, makes it attractive to NDR players. Dark Souls and NDRs correspond in form and
style and make evident three types of death in or at play in games: death is known, death is
avoidable, and death is in play.
First, in the ritualization of death through no-death runs, death is knowable. In the Dark
Souls series, when your character dies, the screen goes black, and "YOU DIED" appears in red
letters – making it pretty clear what has just occurred. This is a stable state, a knowable space.
The moment of death is recognizable and coherent. Control disappears, the character falls, and
the screen fades to black, bringing you back to your last save point. Death is unmistakably death.
In this way, death is a known limit – this is a familiar understanding of death – as all there is, the
end.
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Fig. 3. Dark Souls Death Screen
In The Art of Failure, video game theorist Jesper Juul marks this failure as the central paradox of
gaming -- where, like in attending a tragedy, we sign up for and submit to unpleasant and painful
experiences as part of what we say we enjoy doing. The paradox, Juul admits, is different, in that
the game player, we are the one who fails, not simply a character through which we are living.
Games, however, he notes, offer us a way out: “Games promise us a fair chance of redeeming
ourselves. This distinguishes game failure from failure in our regular lives: (good) games are
designed such that they give us a fair chance, whereas the regular world makes no such
promises.”
312
For Juul, failure is inherent to gaming, just as death is an integral part of play. But,
so is the chance at overcoming death or failure. In these cases, before overcoming death, we
must know death.
Death becomes knowable through the new image of new media – that is, the new ways
new media forms like video games allow us to think about the image in relation to the body, the
interface, and the performance of both, by making death or dying one type of interface between
the image and the embodied experience of playing the game. Death is an intersection, a breaking
point where the ability to play in and with the game space becomes interrupted in the player's
experience and then becomes known as that intersection between the mechanics of the game, the
narrative, and the ludological (or playful) elements of video-gaming. This is, again, what is new
about new media – not what or how it is mediating exactly, but how it allows us to rethink
mediation points and processes.
312
Jesper Juul, The Art of Failure: An Essay on the Pain of Playing Video Games (The MIT Press, 2013),7.
169
Dying in the game (and then attempting to overcome that death) is a process rather than a
representation of death – through new media forms like video games, it becomes performative.
The game itself performs a kind of death in its narrative and ludoloigcal rupture and resetting (to
the last place in the game you advanced to before dying), and the player experiences that kind of
death through the rupture of their playing and the need to start again. This, as Alexander
Galloway notes, is the machine and the human being playing together.
313
By enacting this
together, the game and player are creating the lived and experienced world together, somewhere
between the idea of death, the performance of dying, and the playing on in spite of death.
Furthermore, the proximity of death and life is a known quantity. The health bar and its
rate of depletion as indicators of death are monitored and managed. Life in Dark Souls is a
quantity, and the distance to death a known measure. This quantity can be managed and
negotiated through knowledge of how quickly the bar will recede when facing certain enemies,
and potions and healing spells can directly intervene to bolster this health bar. Death here is
known both as a state and as a proximity, both as a condition and a quantity. Quantifying death
explicitly turns it into an incremental element for ritualization -- ritualization, as Smith notes, is
about an obsession with detail, the making of difference, the setting of things apart. Setting living
and dying into proximity, known quantities, particular elements on a scale from "most alive" to
"fully dead" makes microcosms out of the essential condition to continue playing – staying alive.
The microcosmic conditions are then manageable, and dying and living become functions of
playing.
314
313
Galloway, Gaming: Essays On Algorithmic Culture, 2.
314
This is not to mention the recent trend in games, i.e “Stay Alive” – whose sole objective is not dying, through the
management of body temperature, food intake etc..
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Second – death is avoidable. NDRs depend upon the possibility of not dying in-game,
and the community surrounding no-death runs gather around the sole act of avoiding death.
These communities gather on forums, at conventions, and on video streaming platforms to
develop strategies and encourage each other. Game streaming platforms like Twitch attract No-
Death Runners and fans to share strategies, tips, and develop a shorthand for the game as a no-
death game. What items to use, what routes to take, what bosses to run around or fight, are just
the crudest examples of the many negotiations taking place towards making that perfect no-death
run. "Personal Bests" (or PBs) are one metric to gauge their accomplishments, but time and hits
or damage taken become other metrics. Through these metrics developed by these communities,
death becomes not only knowable but knowable as avoidable or not necessary to the play of the
game. All games present death as avoidable – it is possible but not probable. Most players, when
they begin a game, accept the inevitability of death. No-death runs refuse this inevitability. Death
becomes negotiable and becomes avoidable.
The avoidance of death through No-Death Runs expresses a crucial mechanic of
ritualization—bringing into being the world as it could be in the world as it is, or creating an
interface for new conditions for being through practice and performance. The interface is both
the game itself (as a process for negotiating in-game death and a broader sense of the
inevitability of death) and the communities of no-death runners that gather to discuss correct
strategies and processes. Both interfaces ritualize death through performed and playful
interaction.
This second interface, the community, is full of ritual expertise and of ritual experts.
There are famed No-Death Runners, like Faraaz Khan, whose strategies are studied and
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replicated as the proper procedure for creating certain outcomes.
315
Experts like Khan use
shorthand, lingo, and elaborate statistics to explain and analyze their own attempts at No-Death
Runs, creating metrics and guides for others Guides like these and video playthroughs of NDRs
become topics of debate, where best practices for the most effective process are negotiated and
contested. These videos and guides then become like ritual texts, where the goal is to achieve the
perfect outcome or the flawless attempt.
Ritual expertise interfaces the ability to avoid death within the game as a process towards
a particular result ( as Galloway defines interface), and expertise becomes a way of parsing
things apart (in Smith's sense of ritualization) to make better sense of things and make them
more accessible. From simply avoidable to a process of avoidance, quantifying living and dying
through the interface of NDRs further ritualizes it towards the way the world should be in
contrast to the way the world presents itself. As the game presents itself, you must die. But as the
NDR ritualizes it, death is avoidable by way of quantification and ritualization.
Third, through this knowledge and avoidance, death comes into play. By stabilizing death
as a quantity and negotiating it as a known state, death becomes both an object of play and itself
at play. Bringing death into play by way of new knowledge re-orients life and death by playing
with limits between the body of the game and the gamer through the kinds of structure and
repetition pointed to by Smith and Bell as structures of ritual. By self-imposing new limits to the
game in the form NDRs, gamers create new means of relating between the death of the game
body and the successes of their embodiment as gamers. Success and failure are the only two
conditions of gameplay. However, through this re-orientation, gamers are always encountering
315
“Faraaz Khan - YouTube,” accessed November 25, 2020, https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCsi0z-
rurGV30mc_wFnyA7A.
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failure in death and trying to avoid it on the next run. Through this repetition, no-death runs
bring death closer to the gaming experience.
Video game theorist Chris Hanson argues that digital games are uniquely constituted of
repetition “by their algorithmic materiality…be it via looping conditional statements in code or
their structural and sensory reliance on similarity and difference.”
316
He goes on to further note
that this inherent repetition is made explicit through how players (like Speed Runners and NDRs)
use these games. In these cases, he states, “players are not necessarily encouraged to actively
replay the game by the game itself, but instead choose to do so for perfecting and ultimately
recording their play as demonstrative exposition of their mastery.”
317
In these cases, death, as the
object of and at play, overrides the narrative, overrides another objective – it becomes the sole
objective. The game then itself is at play, now ritualized as a stark contest between living and
dying.
NDRs highlight the place death has always had at the center of video-gaming by re-
negotiating and re-orienting the role death plays in games through these three discrete
ritualizations. In other words, by playing with death, they call attention to its omnipresence in
gaming by making it avoidable, and through this, put it into play – in the sense that it is now
negotiable, as there is now space within the boundaries to move. This kind of negotiation is a
ritualized one in that it is done through the regulations of a community of gamers and the
regulations of the game architecture itself: through limits of peer monitoring and platform
316
Christopher Hanson, Game Time: Understanding Temporality in Video Games, Illustrated edition (Bloomington,
Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2018), 111.
317
Ibid., 131.
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restrictions, no death-run gamers construct means of performing beyond the limits of death, or at
the least, see death as practically negotiable.
Playing with the predicament of death across mediated space invites a posthuman
approach to new media and gaming by welcoming in the material and cultural aspects of
subjectivities within gameplay. Posthumanism carries with it a responsibility to account for all
material and ontological nodal points along an expanded sense of human and non-human
subjectivity and thus brings with it certain ethical and ontological consequences or awareness
when considering gaming as a posthuman practice of knowing and or being. Such a posthuman
orientation involves both the ethical and ontological aspects of posthumanism as discussed above
because NDRs illustrate a comprehensive approach to gaming, a gamevironmental approach.
Ritual theory parses these ethics and ontologies, forming the NDR into strategies for negotiation,
means of accountability for the task at hand, and metrics of success or failure. By re-making the
object of play death, NDRs ritualize gameplay. Thinking of video games as part of a posthuman,
cybernetic, and symbiotic relationship between humans and machines, and the no death run as
implicated in a ritualized practice of this posthuman ontology, means seeing NDRs as working
out a human relationship between life/death machine and human all within and across the social,
political and ecological locations of a gamevironment.
Playing with death bleeds outside of the so-called game space or "magic circle."
Gamevironmental models for religion in games and new media theories from Alexander
Galloway, John Durham-Peters, and others invite an expanded sense of media as ecologically
and materially integrated with human and non-human alike. These expanded and material senses
of media and mediation may not allow for such bounded ritual spaces at all but instead insist
their lines are transparent or at least porous. If we follow along with new media theories and
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bolster that with a gamevironments theory of games, these ritual negotiations of death through
no-death runs take place across disrupted boundaries between the in-game and out-game spaces
– spaces whose discrete categories are contested both within ecological and material models of
new media along with the gamevironmental model.
Conclusions: Strawmen, Magic Circles, and Religion
NDRs demonstrate how a posthuman epistemology overcomes a strawman magic circle
to bridge divisions between human and machine by relocating the object of focus from ludology
or narrative to the material relations and ritualizations taking place through gaming. By attending
to what playing with death does rather than what it means or represents, a posthuman
epistemology does not get bogged down in what is or is not play, what is or is not a game space,
what is or is not religion. Mackenzie Wark wrestles with the consequences of this (what she
calls) “gamespace” as the overtaking of all spaces as themselves subject to the rules of a game or
the rules of play in her 2007 Gamer Theory: “[w]hether gamespace is more real or not than some
other world is not the question; that even in its unreality it may have real effects on other worlds
is. Games are not representations of this world. They are more like allegories of a world made
over as gamespace. They encode the abstract principles upon which decisions about the realness
of this or that world are now decided.”
318
So for Wark, like for posthumanism, gamespace or
playing becomes a matter of abstract principles – like epistemologies, as a matter of determining
a way of negotiating the world, like death.
318
McKenzie Wark, Gamer Theory (Harvard University Press, 2009). 20.
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Posthumanism looks to the ways in which the structures of the game and death are re-
negotiated through a kind of playing with the game. From earlier entanglements of studying
religion and play, a posthuman focus remains on both how play and ritual are functionally
similar while taking seriously the co-formations of subjectivity and meaning-making potential
taking place through human/machine/system interactions and agencies. Just as Rachel Wagner
points out, there are various ways to play with a game (though trifling, cheating, spoiling, and
nihilism), and NDRs demonstrate another type of playing with a game: the freedom of
movement and co-expression between machine systems, game systems, and players. By playing
in earnest to overcome the aspect of death, the aspect of failure within the game, no-death runs
fold in human and machine elements in material and conceptual ways to ritualize death and its
defeat, where a posthumanism as inspired by Science and Technology Studies and material
feminism can help us better understand these infoldings.
These interactions and agencies in NDRs reinforce what play studies says about play: it is
done in full awareness of and in direct reaction to the presence of death, where no-death runs
make this explicit by making death the only object of play. For no-death runs, playing in spite of
death transforms into playing with death by confronting death head-on, as an object to be known
and to be played with. It plays with death by ritualizing it through the ways pointed to above –
making it known and avoidable through certain expertise, communal knowledge, and machine
manipulations.
By making death an object of ritualized play within a digital medium, NDRs are
emblematic of how video games function without a magic circle or ludology/narrative divide or
function in spite of them. Debates over such methodological and theoretical categories do little to
capture how these no-death runs function as an aspect of play and as a response to the presence
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of death. Instead, no-death runs point to an interfaced and performative approach to play and
games that exceeds capture by anything but a methodology that includes a posthuman lens.
No-Death Runs re-orient thinking about play, games, religion, and death around largely
two key intersections of new media, ritual, and posthumanism: interfaces and performance.
As an interface, as a process that effects a "result of whatever kind," NDRs mediate
between the world as it is and the world as it could be: one with necessary death and one
without.
319
This pulls on both Galloway's concept of the interface and Geertz's idea about the
ritual – that it is a mediating factor between a real-world and a possible one, one which uses the
resources available to it to shape and make possible that world within a ritual setting. In thinking
of digital mediation as an embodied practice (like Galloway or Hansen), NDRs become a
material interface between the (game) world as it is and the (game) world as it could be, a (game)
world that quickly expands in its consequences beyond the world of a game or play, as it leaves a
magic circle debate behind to take on a posthuman form.
Through this interface, performative agency is granted to both machine and player
through new relations that further posthuman connections. Machine and human push back and
forth, negotiating possible outcomes of death or no death, ritualizing contestations between
possible outcomes. The performance of this co-operation between machine and non-machine
materiality blurs the lines between what kind of subjectivity is being performed, as lines between
game-space, player, and operating systems break down. When no-death runs play both in and
with the game, they perform this posthuman interface.
Taking video games seriously (as an economic and cultural force) means taking
seriously how they can reshape what and how we perform religion and religiosity. By re-
319
Galloway, Gaming: Essays On Algorithmic Culture,vii.
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orienting thinking about play, games, religion, and death through posthuman interfaces and
performances, NDRs further imbricate ritual and new media theories, illustrate the performance
of religion as itself mediation, and move the study of religion and video games itself out of its
own magic circle, and into a broader conversation regarding death, mediation, and play. My
proposed posthuman approach to understanding digital religion and mediation through
ritualization and new approaches to new media unfolds across something like no-death runs to
reveal their interfacing and performative approaches to death and to how scholars of digital
religion can understand gaming without magic circles or ludology, but instead with materiality
and ritual.
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CONCLUSION
We left Charon at the banks of the river, watching as he stooped low to steer human life
and death into the fogs of a technological future, and we lifted our posthuman lens to hopefully
clock his path. By now, that lens has become clear, revealing the interfaces between bodies and
tools, living and dead. Charon’s body shows that through history and form, death and mourning
have always been about technological mediation, transportation, information, and moving across
boundaries. As the kybernetes, the steersmen, of the dead, Charon’s body and tools mediate
while Norbert Wiener’s cybernetics carries on a lineage of naming mediation and death together.
So as death implicates technological mediation, so does mediation implicate death.
This dissertation’s turn to a religious studies of posthuman digital death is one little bend
in the banks of Charon’s path, an appreciation of the etymological, historical, and material
connections between mediation and death as primary to understanding new digital death rituals.
The above theories and cases in digital mediation have shown that following technological
mediations of death requires a methodology incorporating new media and ritual theories towards
a posthuman epistemology.
Having introduced a lineage of posthuman thinking that demands an epistemological
bridge between its historically ethical and ontological roots, our lens first realizes the potential
for posthumanism in thinking ritual and new media practices. Posthumanism cannot escape
humanism. Instead, we must look at it as a heuristic and optimistic tool that demands we escape
the velocity of humanism’s limits towards a contingent and interfaced sense of human being as
an action and a mode of being. From here, we can stitch together new media and ritual theories
that share a similar imperative towards recognizing function. A posthuman influence on ritual
and mediation incorporates materiality and ideology alongside ritual theory and new theories for
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mediation alongside digital media. It goes on to see mediation beyond media, a new theory for
media rather than a new media theory – one that sees religious rituals around death as themselves
as performed or performative interfaces. The BiosIncube and No-Death Runs go on to illustrative
how looking towards materiality and performance in digital cases of mourning reveal these
posthuman connections, these interfaces, and material performances of embodied and ritualized
mourning by calling attention to place, performance, and embodiment. In all, this dissertation
illustrates a posthuman epistemology for digital mourning through these four distinct chapters.
The first chapter allowed us to see past the fuzzy boundaries of techno-utopias and
dystopias towards a posthuman methodology by establishing a functional definition of
posthumanism. This ethical, ontological, and ultimately epistemological lineage emerges from its
own histories as a heuristic that critiques the values of humanism as a paradoxical, exploratory
term intended to reveal the human by going beyond it. Such a posthumanism is based on a
situated way of knowing and oriented towards a wider horizon of what is sensible or knowable
through a networked and interconnected sense of human being. This heuristic methodology
opens itself up to the interfacing inherent in the functioning of religious rituals and new
mediations of death by basing itself in these networked senses of being. And by basing itself in a
particular history of this kind of thinking, this methodology, in turn, grounds its thinking in a
post-war, heuristic, posthuman moment. With each of its concurrent trends emerging at this
moment, Anti-humanism, Cybernetics, Science and Technology Studies, and Material
Feminisms all support such an exploratory posthuman for religious studies. So, both
conceptually and historically, posthumanism coalesces around shared concerns about death,
mediation, interfacing, and modes of being in communication. In all, this functional
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posthumanism serves as a religious studies heuristic for exploring how new mediations of death
and mourning take place.
From here, the second chapter relayed convergent concerns for new media and ritual that
open up a new theory for media rather than a new media theory. By folding together emergent or
emerging disciplines, this second chapter follows the first by concentrating a posthuman
epistemology on the shared concerns of new media and ritual theories, namely: embodiment,
performance, and interface. This focus furthers a fuller understanding of the functional nature of
the proposed heuristic for understanding new mediations of death and mourning by granting a
history and depth of theory to a posthuman epistemology. In other words, the second chapter’s
look into the shared aims of new media and ritual theories further articulates the reach of a
posthuman epistemology by grounding it in particular thinkers, histories, and disciplines of
thought. As both desiring towards a pattern, ritual and new media share a cybernetic operation by
basing themselves off feedback and reintegration of information. Embodiment, Performance, and
Interface offer signposts for the remainder of the work, as it moves from shaping the heuristic
tools and territories to sampling them over the two case studies that make up the latter half of the
work.
From these theoretical chapters, we moved in chapter three to further unfold the specific
function and utility of ritual studies in understanding a new media object of death and mourning
by focusing on three aspects of ritual within this heuristic framework: place-making,
intensification, and performance. Each applies to the BiosIncube as a place to think about the
swirling network of connections between human, plant, and digital agency and materiality as an
interface through death and mourning. This reveals death and mourning in particular as a
location for thinking about posthuman embodiments and methodologies, showing how the
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conceptual or theoretical path leads both ways: death leads us to think about mediation, and
mediation points us back to thinking about death. In particular, the Incube leaves us remarking
on the profound importance of performativity for the functioning of interfaces. Without the
ritualizing of the Incube through both the embodied dead and living, there would be no
functioning interface, no Incube at all. Rather, it is through the delicate, contingent, and
networked relationships of the plant/cremain/digital interface that a posthuman ontology is
revealed.
Looking finally at No-Death Runs in chapter four reverses the direction from using ritual
to understand digital media (in the case of the Incube) to using digital media to understand ritual
in the case of no-death-runs. In other words, instead of beginning from ritual studies as the
starting point for understanding, the fourth chapter begins by embedding itself in a history of
games, play, and video-game theory to understand and appreciate the place for ritual theory in
expanding this understanding. Unraveling this intertwined history of the study of play, games,
and religion reveals a shared sticking point around place-making and meaning-making. From the
magic circles to the debates about ludology and narratology, play and video-game studies open
up a discussion about how playing both in and with ideas around death can retrace the very limits
of what is and is not a game space or a space of play. In other words, playing in the face of (and
oftentimes in spite of) death reveals the kind of interfaced and performative approach to new
media and death rituals emblematic of the proposed posthuman epistemology. Playing with death
through no-death runs activates gamevironmental models for studying gaming and religion
without the burden of the so-called magic circle, instead focusing on games and play as locations
for rethinking ritual and materiality.
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These case studies allow a pragmatic application of a heuristic device in epistemological
posthumanism for religious studies. It becomes a function of these chapters, a way of speaking
across and through disciplinary or conceptual concerns with a constant eye towards the
establishment of what is human or non-human interaction. Like its foundational paradox,
posthumanism is a way of thinking about the human that emphasizes the non-human, and these
examples of digital-ritual behaviors towards death fortify this way of thinking by incorporating a
shared history of death and mediation into a theory for its analysis. In other words,
epistemological posthumanism allows religious studies an approach to thinking new mediation
through an interface of the human and non-human by allowing in a shared etymological,
temporal, and conceptual history that grounds digital rituals around death in these shared spaces.
Being a pragmatic and heuristic posthumanism does mean that it comes with certain
limitations. In that it is a paradox, posthumanism in these cases can never truly escape the
humanism it sets out to critique – it is always applied to that term it is moving against. And being
pragmatic, it can only apply to the cases at hand and the discourse in which it exists. For these
reasons, an ambivalence can developed around the extended usefulness of posthumanism in all
cases around digital religion. So, while posthumanism as developed here is useful for
understanding the cases at hand, it does have lurking limits and blind spots in its ability to fully
account for the oppressive and exclusionary discourses it sets out to critique in humanism. From
here though we can only move forward, with the hope for further comprehensive use of this
fruitful typology.
Moving beyond digital death to broader reaches in religious studies, posthumanism and
digital religion help understand religion as mediation, as embodied and as in direct relation to
death. Each of these three insights: mediation, embodiment, and death, both fortify established
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and secure new areas of study or interest in the discipline. Attending to religion as mediation can
free scholars from a functional/essential dichotomy and instead look to religion in and as that
thing in between. Attention to the performances of embodiment now has a stronghold on the
discipline, and this work offers an expansion of that into the digital and posthuman spaces for
what counts as a body. And as thinking religion in direct relation to death moves the world of
death studies closer into an established circle of scholarship around ritual and rites.
This functional approach to the study of religion allows for scholars and teachers to see
religion as a form of mediation. Doing so not only escapes definitional problems of essential
versus functional by putting religion itself as somewhere in the middle, as an in-between, but it
also avoids getting hung up on particular forms of mediation and by turning towards an activated
and functional sense of religion as mediation of bodies and things in the broadest sense. In other
words, by seeing all religious activtiy as always mediated and mediating, scholarship can free
itself from prefatory questions of authenticity and originality to instead attend to the material and
social realities of the practice at hand. So for both religious studies in general and studies of
media and religion, thinking of a posthuman epistemology for all religious practice frees
scholarship from getting bogged down in questions that precede mediation and instead allows it
to look at the function of the mediation itself.
Religion as embodied is nothing new to this project, as shown by the thinkers and
theories it has borrowed and built upon throughout. So, this posthuman epistemology instead
extends this sense of embodiment across and through a spectrum of what can be considered
human and/or non-human. By gathering in the elemental, technological, and plant/animal life
into an ecology of being a posthuman epistemology for religious studies broadens this sense of
what is or has a body. Religious studies has a distinct investment in extending this sense into the
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realms of the divine or supra-human, and posthumanism obliges this investment into other modes
of relationality. Where religious studies has long been interested in how human beings commune
and communicate with non-human (divine) beings, posthumanism extends this vertical
connection horizontally.
Seeing religious practice as in relation to death is a particular facet of this mediating and
embodied extension of human being into non-human being or life into non-life. And like with
embodiment, seeing religion as inherently tied to anxieties, questions, and relations to and after
death is not unique to this project. However, by calling attention to the intervention of death
studies and by drawing on these resources to support a material and posthuman sense of relation
to death, this project creates a new way to understand death and the afterlife as “posthuman”
conditions. As noted before, this wordplay leads to an understanding of posthumanism itself as
tied to death, mediation as tied to death, and religious studies investment in death as requiring the
shared material and cultural awareness of death studies. As a field largely isolated to small
pockets of religious studies (and particularly the United Kingdom), death studies is tremendously
helpful for understanding the ecological, political, and social consequences and repercussions of
new and emerging death practices. For a religious studies posthumanism, it is invaluable.
These posthuman understandings of religion as mediated, embodied, and tied to death
have implications within the study of American religion as well, touching on the American ideal
being held up through ideas of technoscientific salvation and the erasure of certain types of
bodies and embodiments in and through death. One way to take these posthuman methodologies
is to further evaluate the impacts of technology on material religion in American contexts.
Archival work and media analysis could examine how the sense of the body has been shaped by
American religious reactions and adaptions of technological advances through the late nineteenth
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and early twentieth centuries and how this lineage impacts current theories of religion in the
Americas. Charting a genealogy of American religious practice and its interaction and impact on
movements of technocratic modernization from the rise of cremation to advanced digital
mourning practices could reveal impacts of cultural forces on material embodiments in a moment
shaped politically by technological infrastructures and algorithms.
On particular future focus could be further exploring how utopian communities in
America historically reacted to technologies of change and how these reactions are reflected (or
not reflected) not only in the archives of the communities themselves, but how they are
accounted for within religious histories of America, specifically around questions of gender and
race, and what these histories of utopian communities include or don’t include regarding so-
called secular adoptions of similar technologies. Another could be a look at the impact the rare
metals making up the material infrastructures of digital technologies have on global ecologies
and economies, and how digital religious practice responds to these impacts. Electronic waste (or
“e-waste”) refers to the un-recyclable waste from disused electronics, mainly consisting of the
rare and sometime volatile earth metals that make up circuits and motherboards. One of the
largest informal areas for such economic e-waste recycling is in the Agbogbloshie region of
Ghana. Each of these cases could lead to greater exploration of race, gender, and class in its
confluence with posthuman digital religion.
With both these specific inquiries into American religious history to potential
interventions into religious studies around mediation more broadly, the proposed posthuman
epistemology and heuristic case studies look to the rituals and tools that mediate death. From the
Incube to video gaming, from green burial to magic circles, from Charon to cybernetics, they all
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explore and explain the limits of human being and continue telling a story about how we mediate
death.
So, as Charon dips his paddle into the stream and floats away, if we want to understand
mediations of death, we must attend to every bit of the mediating apparatus and its performance:
the stream, the boat, the paddle, the bodies. The digital American psychopomp is posthuman.
