The Stack On Software and Sovereignty · 第 239 页

1. Interfaces in the Stack 3: Theo-Interfaciality

This slow transference of the human body onto a landscape of software subroutines is not limited to the hand. It also includes other forms of embodied thought and intelligence, but the blossoming of fully fledged nonhuman Apps does nothing to prevent traditional anthropocentric Apps from operating with the full spectrum of stupidity that our species is capable of bringing forth, and among these are doctrinal cognitive fundamentalisms. Etymologies of “ religion ” describe a binding and a rebinding of a community of belief, or of a bond between a believer and a covenant or commitment. The repetition of prayer, of ritual, of weekly services is all testament to the procedurality of the sacred. These are techniques of anamnesis and the invested memorialization of the divine into sites and objects. For example, by sublation the Eucharist involves the masses of the Mass into a divine symbolic cannibalism, and through this, the spectacle of sacrifice and resurrection at the core of Christianity is repeated over and over again. Rebinding upon rebinding, there is the first incanted memorialization of Christ ’ s body into the bread and wine, and the second memorialization in the devout cycle of the eating and drinking these every Sunday. Are these processes of binding the social at work in The Stack? In his essay “ Religion in the Age of Digital Reproduction ” (and his book Google: Words Beyond Grammar), Boris Groys laments the eclipse of anamnesis by software regimes that do the work of memory and memorialization on the User ’ s behalf. ⁴⁵ We, the Users of Google, need not exercise our faculties of memory in order to remember anything, it seems, and so the mind is free to wander through a vast flat moment, presented as an endless archive. As Groys tells it, the devout need not consciously perform the work of memorialization, or even really comprehend the work that is done for them, when it is sufficient, for example, to download a portfolio of important texts and carry them along on one ’ s hard drive. ⁴⁶ He shakes his head in pity at his wannabe-extremist students for whom it ’ s enough to possess copies of incendiary, uncompromising (unread) PDFs on their laptops in order for the act of identification to stick, or so they think; radicals not even radicalized, merely fanboy collectors. ⁴⁷ Groys laments that without the necessary and difficult investment of interpretation and an exacting self-transformation into the position of faith through the physical training of repetition and memorialization, however arbitrary it may be, then the rebinding (and the religion itself) is empty. By this view, today ’ s Cloud theology without anamnesis is actually a self-dispossession of commitment by which the experience of faith, now without opinion or interpretation, is outsourced to cognitive prostheses. Devout Apps can have devout opinions for you. For Groys, this subcontracting is not just an externalized memorialization of belief into digital artifacts, a sacralization of interfaces with theological distinction; it is, rather, religion evacuated of religio. Even if so, it does not mean that such interfaces cannot also motivate extraordinary acts of motivated devotion and violence.

Interface Layer

239