Digital Spirits in Religion and Media

Possession and Performance

Alvin Eng Hui Lim

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9780815393320
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351188852
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Religion
• Index: Social Sciences

In many contemporary and popular forms of religious practice, digital technology and the spiritual are inseparable. Ranging from streaming broadcasts of spiritual possessions to screenings of mass prayer conferences in stadiums, spirits and divinities now have new forms in which they can materialise. By offering the notion of 'digital spirits', this book critically attends to the intersections of digital media and spiritual beings. It also puts forward a new performative perspective on how they interact.

Taking cues from the work of Stewart Hoover and Heidi Campbell, among others, the book begins with an outline of the current debates around religion, performance and digital media. It then moves on to examine how mediality and religion, where embodied practices are carried out alongside virtual practices, work together in contemporary Asia. These case studies focus on lived religious practices in combination with various forms of media, and so help demonstrate that digital technology in particular reveals the layered processes of spirituality in practice.

Gods and divinities have always relied on media to manifest, and this book is a fascinating exploration of how digital media has continued that tradition and taken it in new directions. As such, it will be of great interest to scholars of religious studies, digital media and performance studies.

1 Digital spirits in religion and media

The hand is not far, there again – or more exactly the finger of the hand. The finger is not far, in fact, since this even deals with the “close range,” with “close vision,” … with the mind, the very mind… . “[T]he whole and the parts give the eye that beholds them a function that is haptic rather than optical. This is an animality that can be seen only by touching it with one’s mind, but without the mind becoming a finger, not even by way of the eye. (In a much cruder fashion, the kaleidoscope has exactly the same function: to give the eye a digital function.)”

(Derrida 2005, 123)

This book has a similar function to a kaleidoscope. It goes in close range to particular religious practices; it gives the mind a close vision of those practices through a discursive apparatus that opens up possible understandings of the intersections of material practice and the spiritual. Most of all, it has a digital function – to touch on the performativity of spirits performing – like the finger of a hand possessing your mind as you perform the haptic function of reading. This book is about spiritual possessions. It is about their repetitions and the significance of those possessions as they go digital as YouTube and Facebook videos, Twitter tweets and *.mov/mp4 file formats. Alongside or touching them are the material objects – the talismans, the whips, the tables and chairs – that assist the possession rites, with which the practices perform their efficacy.

The digital is – as the late Jacques Derrida (2005) hints at in relation to touching – an extension of the finger touching, or ‘a supplementary touch’ (300). But I am not going to take this literally, because Derrida’s suggestion is that the digital goes beyond the bodily act but, in need of surfaces and books, it performs an “obduracy of duration or enduring, resistance.” Then, the main question of this book is whether the spiritual can be digital, as the spiritual endures, resists and persists in yet another place.

Concepts of the digital sometimes assume a human quality on the part of digital things:

If we think about the digital things we make as kinds of human expression […] Religion is just one mode of human expression, but it too is a mode of encounter, a set of processes or programs that shape us and that we also program for ourselves.

(Wagner 2012, 14)

What if we revise this anthropocentric tendency and consider the human alongside spiritual agency? I propose to think of religion as a mode of spiritual expression, that is, as a way for spiritual beings to appropriate a proximity to the world, this human world. This proximity value and (extending from Deleuze and Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus and Derrida in On Touching – Jean-Luc Nancy) because of this vector of close presence to spirits and spirits’ close presence to humans, I identify their term ‘haptic’ as covering all the senses wherever they appropriate a proximity (Derrida 2005, 124). Instead of establishing (yet another) opposition between humans and the numinous, the ‘object of study’ in this book is a haptic space (to use Deleuze’s terms after he extended the term used by twentieth century art theorist Alois Riegl) constituting all the irregularities and repetitions of mixed givens of human and God, spirit and body. This space is not even continuous but a haptic and digital space “shared out, parted, partaken of, divided, partitioned, pluralized – in a word, syncopated … but as well given to others, distributed, dispensed” (Derrida 2005, 128). It would take the ensuing chapters to specify what constitutes this haptic and digital space but as a first entry point, the book attends to variations and redistributions of practice as religion meets new media, as Heidi Campbell puts it.

In the past decade, there is a burgeoning growth in academic literature on religion and new media (see Cheong et al. 2012; Campbell 2010, 2013; Dawson and ‎Cowan 2004; Højsgaard and Warburg 2005; Brasher 2004; and Lim 2009). However, the academic study of religion has yet to adequately address the theoretical significance of spirits and numinous beings that are in a mutually dependent relationship with digital technology. While religious scholars often discuss contemporary expressions of religious beliefs and knowledge in terms of new media’s transformative properties or as contexts and receptions for religious meaning, the synthesis of spiritual (beings) to digital technology deserves critical attention. Moreover, there is widespread evidence of religious communities embracing the latest digital media technologies in the proliferation and practice of their respective beliefs. What this book first attempts to grasp (and present to you) are the ways in which digital technology mediates and affects spiritual practices. Thus it is a critical study on the performative attributes of specific spiritual practices where digital mediation intricately enfolds spirits and deities, unfolding through performance. As such, the case studies in this book offer ways to observe and elaborate on contemporary religious practices, where the spiritual constantly negotiates with the digital and where the realms of ‘religion’ and ‘media’ can no longer be easily separated (see Hoover 2006, 1).

Taking this notion a step further, this book attends to the digital aspects of religious traditions and knowledge on the spiritual, where ‘being digital’ expresses the intersections between spiritual abstraction and material practice. By locating the many assemblage points of ‘being digital’ and ‘being spiritual’ as observed in popular religious practices, the discussion leads to explicating the interactions between entangled mediums in a religious context. On the one hand, contemporary offerings of religion heavily incorporate digital technology because of its prevalence in society. On the other hand, such religions already have the numen (or potential) to involve technological mediation in the materialisation of their gods and spirits. Conceived in theatrical terms, a religious event can be understood as the gathering of media to point to a spiritual presence sensorially and corporeally [Latin: dig/dict or Traditional Chinese: 數碼 (digital; and to gather digits)].

The idea that “beliefs emerge from and enfold within the practices, things, and feelings that shape individuals and communities over time” is not new, as David Morgan (2010, XIII–XIV) argues in Religion and Material Culture: The Matter of Belief. In order to break into the potential circularity of relations between religion and media, Stewart Hoover argues, “We must stand somewhere and take account of ways by which mediated religion is realized in contemporary life” (Hoover 2006, 3). Thus he echoes Morgan in locating the practice of religion where media experiences of religion are entangled with material acts of religious belief. My stand is to suggest that the spiritual can be inherently digital and thus combines with the digital medium in order to perform a reconstituted presence.

The performance practices covered in this book provide, as it will become clear in the case studies, means to conceptualise the meanings of spiritual in relation to mediality, specifically digital modes of mediality. The digital, as I shall argue throughout the course of this book, is a distinctive break from older forms of technology. Yet it oftentimes echoes ancient notions about spirituality and religious philosophy, at least in the examples covered in this book. The combination of digital and spiritual may suggest an analysis of the immaterial as a wholly separate realm of existence. However, digital spirits as a religious phenomenon bleeds into both the immaterial and material realms of human experience. When spirits are digital, they suspend this opposition and offer both the trace and material imprint of a spiritual being carrying out religious acts. It concretises in the “embodied, material features of lived religion” (Morgan 2010, 7), where the spiritual is also implicated in a digitally encoded practice. In fact, the spiritual in contexts I examined are entwined in digital frameworks because they mutually support multiple material manifestations. Without the digital, spirits are contained; whereas by being digital, they can exist beyond their physical vessels. Simultaneously embodied and digital, spirits and deities coexist and co-perform their presences during religious performances. Thus Heidi Campbell’s (2010) primary question of “when religion meets new media” gains new meanings because the consideration here is the status of spirits assembled in performance and materially expressed through performance – processions, rituals, theatres and YouTube channels.

Heidi Campbell’s conviction that, “current scholarship related to religion and new media needs to push past a tendency to frame media technology only as a determinative force unto itself driven by its own set of values” (2010, 6) somewhat informs this study. My use of ‘spirits’ and ‘spiritual’ has a twofold purpose. First, it denotes an availability of a spirit or a spiritual being involved in the mediating process. Second, it recognises the intangible existence of spiritual agencies and spiritualties that “make other people act” (Latour 2007, 236). However, the ever-expanding meaning of ‘spirituality’ (as opposed to ‘spirits’), at least in Western societies, complicates my definition of spirituality and connection with the digital. Moving beyond institutional structures of religion, to the extent that “the spiritual appears to have transcended the religion that once contained it” (see Houtman and Aupers 2007), scholars have identified plural forms of spiritualties, such as New Age spiritual movements (see MacKian 2012 for a summary of this). More recently, Sara MacKian (2012) locates a quotidian pragmatics of “everyday spirituality,” where individuals “feel a link to some notion of spirit and hence see spirituality as a key part of their existence” (13).

I derive my understanding of spirituality from multiple sources. For example, Ting Guo makes a compelling connection between computational thinking and spirituality. By closely studying the life and work of Alan Turing (who is considered the father of artificial intelligence), Guo traces spirituality to its “immanent human quality,” where the intellectual nature of human is innately spiritual (see Guo 2015, 270–271). Guo summarises the origins of spirituality with the Greek pneuma (πνεύμα) and its adjective derivation of pneumatikos (πνευματικός) or wind, breeze, breath, ghost (Beeks 2010, 1213). Citing Thayer’s Greek-English Lexicon for New Testament, pneuma would mean the following:

1. (1) The spirit – i.e., the vital principal by which the body is animated
   1. (a) the rational spirit, the power by which the human being feels, thinks, decides
   2. (b) the soul
2. (2) A spirit – i.e., a simple essence, devoid of all or at least all grosser matter and possessed of the power of knowing, desiring, deciding and acting (Thayer cited in Guo 2015, 270).

Tracing further back into the western etymological roots of spirituality, such as Geist, Guo makes the link to Hegel, where “Geist also means ‘mind’ and ‘intellect’; in Hegel’s Phänomenologie des Geistes (Phenomenology of Spirit), the Weltgeist (‘World Spirit’) takes on an abstract concept not as a God-like existence, but an intellectual concept for philosophising history” (Guo 2015, 271). However, by loosely translating spirituality¹ into Chinese, I discovered that the ancient oracle bone script (Chinese: 甲骨文) and Traditional Chinese script also illustrate the immanent quality of spirituality and how a medium is central to spiritual communication. In simplified Chinese, this meaning is erased. Thus turning to the traditional scripts, we can see that Ling (Traditional Chinese: 靈 and Oracle bone script: 霝) visually present composite characters:

The earlier characters are made up of Yu (Chinese: 雨; or rain) above a set of Kou (Chinese: 口; or mouths). Later, the addition of Wu (Chinese: 巫; or a shaman) beneath them signals a specific religious function – that is, a shaman chanting to pray to the heavens for rain to fall. Hence it is not surprising for me to make the connection between a medium’s interventions to the affairs of spirits. In this respect, spirituality combines the abstract even transcendental concept of spirituality to the immanent and performative aspect of religious practice. Tying spirituality to actual spirits and gods that people believe in and worship to ‘digital spirits’ directly refers to mediated spirits across different modes and forms.

Thus, following the earlier etymological impulses and given that much of my case studies are about popular Chinese religious practices, this book threads a very precise and interventional path into several debates. Though it cannot do justice to a body of work on religion and spirituality in a post-secular and post-modern age (see Caputo and Vattimo 2007; C. Taylor 2007), it recognises the plurality and persistence of religions, and the diversity of spirits and spiritualties with contrasting concepts of the spiritual. Thus this book exists insofar as there are practices that richly deny the view that their gods are dead. The reason I am able to place the spirit in religious experience is that I was able to observe how mediums “make other people act” (Latour 2007, 236). ‘Mediums’ is not exactly what Bruno Latour is referring to when he talks about “agencies that make people do things” (Latour 2007, 235), but it has the advantage of including a range of entities that mediate religious experience and performance, sometimes without intention involved. It also reverses the intuitive privilege placed on the human as the sole agent that makes people do things. In fact, certain objects found in a religious event may participate casually and not be intentional agents in carrying out a particular ritual. Nevertheless, they still constitute the overall practice by virtue of their appearance.

At an empirical level of observation, I increasingly find devotees in temples praying to an effigy while making digital copies (both photographs and video recordings) of their deities on their camera phones. From religious objects, human bodies, to video recording devices, media negotiation always foregrounds spirituality in my case studies. In many respects, the media and mediums elaborated in this book refer to a ‘hybrid technology,’ to use Heidi Campbell’s term, that includes text, images and sound. I would add that it is hybridised because of the slippages between supposed old and new technologies. I often face the challenge of interpreting traditional practices, such as the use of sacred texts, music production and accompaniment with traditional musical instruments, and the presence of religious authority, alongside the production of digital images and videos. These digital forms, as I shall show, are increasingly embedded in traditional practices and formalised rituals.

The practice of digital spirits

I evoke the sense of ‘digital’ to mean several things. Derived from the Latin root word dict (a saying), the shorter form dig and echoing other derivatives (dictum, ditto, dicere), ‘digital’ suggests a performative act (see Partridge 2006). Dict is also akin to the Greek word deiknumai (to show) and to the Sankrit diśati (to show or to point out). A digit, corporeally speaking, would involve the use of toes or fingers to point to a number. In showing a bodily gesture, one derives the meaning of a certain number. From dig, Partridge suggests, we derive digitus and digit, which in English would refer to ‘the pointer.’ Thus in yielding digital from digitalis, the adjective form derived from dig and digitus, I become conscious of the performative acts (showing, pointing and counting) and embodied codes that make, for example, the pointing of an abstract number sensible. In my case, when I combine ‘digital’ to ‘spirits,’ I become aware of the discrete values and bodily extensions that perform religion and render the spiritual beings I describe in this book performatively distinct, even dependent on bodies to manifest as spirits. Hence while computers and digitally enframed images made up of pixels are part of the analyses in this book, it is also a book about spiritual and religious practices acting digitally.

The associations of digital with performativity keenly show us the connections one can make with digital media, performance, corporeality and translation. When I translate ‘digital’ into Mandarin, the possible readings of ‘being digital’ expands. There are three possible Mandarin translations of digital depending on the context: Shu Zi (Chinese: 數字), Shu Wei (Chinese: 數位) and Shu Ma (Chinese: 數碼). The first points to a numerical or a digit, with Zi (Chinese: 字) meaning a word or a character, which in this case means a character representing a number. In the second translation, Wei (Chinese: 位) emphasises the position (of a digit in a number). Lastly, Ma (Chinese: 碼) is a metric standard (a yard), but it also recalls the accumulation of things, such as the gathering of boats at a pier (Ma Tou; Chinese: 碼頭). The constant here is Shu (Chinese: 數) consisting of two characters combined together: Lou (Chinese: 婁) and Pu (Chinese: 攴), the latter being rendered as ‘攵’ when combined with other characters. Their combinati...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Digital spirits in religion and media
• 2 Medium’s medium: table talks of a medium to a spirit medium
• 3 Corporeal gods: performing excess, country and corporeality in a pharmaceutical theatre
• 4 Cybernetic deities: the Taoist technology of the Nine Emperor Gods (九皇爷) festival in Singapore
• 5 Digital spirits – an interpretation of spirit possession: a case study on Ku Witaya and Sia Chan Hong
• 6 Christian interfaces: protestant technology and pastoral media
• 7 #ECCESS: access through excess
• Index