Groys had developed the relationship between this tautological automatism and digital media. He writes, “ The modern age has not been the age in which the sacred has been abolished but rather the age of its dissemination in profane space, its democratization, its globalization. Ritual, repetition, and reproduction were hitherto matters of religion; they were practiced in isolated, sacred places. In the modern age, ritual, repetition, and reproduction have become the fate of the entire world, of the entire culture. ” Our question then is whether this constitutes something like a ubiquity or dissolution of the utopian along with a ubiquity and dissolution of the religious culture within global network. Groys ’ s position is affirmative, but for a particular version of what the utopian means that is in some ways the opposite of Adorno and Jameson ’ s uses. “ The significance of the Enlightenment was not so much that it resulted in the complete disappearance of religion, but that religion became a matter of private choice, which then resulted in the withdrawal of religion into the private sphere. In the contemporary world, religion has become a matter of private taste, functioning in much the same way as do art and design. ” And in this, we would argue, political theology is linked more directly to the politicization of affect as the basis of its legitimacy. For Groys, this is linked intrinsically to the solipsism of the Internet unwinding the reason of deliberate authority, as “ the Internet favors private, unconditional, sovereign freedom over scientific, conditional, institutional freedom. ” In other words, “ The slogan of the previous age was, “ The private is political, whereas the true slogan of the Internet is, the political is private. ” See Groys, “ Religion in the Age of Digital Reproduction. ”
- The effect is drawn not only from the solipsism of information and opinion but from an automatism necessarily at work in the algorithmic recombinancy of the digital. Groys sees in this a dense synthesis of the ritual logic of religion: “ I would argue, however, that religion — any religion — is not a set of opinions but primarily a set of rituals, and that the religious ritual refers to a state in which there is a lack of opinions, a state of opinionlessness — a doxa— for it refers to the will of the gods or of God ultimately concealed from the opinions of mortals. ” The ritual and its repetition are not executed as the spontaneous expression of numinous insight but, “ as such, is neither true, nor false. In this sense it marks the zero point of freedom of opinion, that is, freedom from any kind of opinion, from the obligation to have an opinion. ” And isn ’ t it this opposition between what two experiences of the religious — the repetition of the spirit and the meaningful core of a religious concept on the one hand, and the mechanical carrying out of formal recitation on the other, “ between living spirit and dead letter ” — that structures our discourses on religion? What is the political form of this recitation? “ This is precisely what fundamentalism is, namely, the insistence on the letter as opposed to the spirit. ” Whereas for Adorno and Jameson, the utopian is that which properly precedes and exceeds any possibility of positive inscription, Groys demands instead that “ it is for this reason that religious fundamentalism has always possessed a revolutionary dimension: while breaking with the politics of spirit, that is, with the politics of reform, flexibility, and adaptation to the zeitgeist, it goes on to substitute for this politics of spirit the violent politics of the letter. ”
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Notes