“Religion, Time, Media” by Wolfgang Ernst (Faculty of Cultural Studies, Humboldt University Berlin)

Abstract

This chapter looks at the relation between media and religion at the media-archaeological level: the regime of non-discursive technologies with an inherent logic of its own. Once they are operative, are technologies indifferent to the question whether they have been installed out of a religious bias, even if they bear the imprint of this bias in technical form? A media-archaeological revision of cultural history discovers a couple of tight relations between religion and technology, with a seductive force to reformulate religious practices in technological terms (e.g., the association between liturgy and algorithm). On the one hand, a religious bias has even triggered the birth of certain strands of modern media theory (e.g., McLuhan); on the other hand, however, religious metaphors obscure media practice. This chapter thus argues for the need for more precision in thinking about what differentiates ‘cultural technologies’ (of all kinds) from genuine ‘media technologies’, insisting on the non-cultural character of technical media (according to their inherent auto-poietical logics). It focuses on the analysis of the ‘birth’ of the oscillating clock from late medieval monasteries: the epistemological dis/continuity from ‘religious timing’ to ‘time-based media processes’, resulting in an awareness of differential oscillations (Huygens, Mersenne, Leibniz et al.) that separated the Pythagorean cosmology from the electro-technical and techno-mathematical (Norbert Wiener) media age, and thus emancipated occidental culture from its dependency of cosmic-religious time (heaven). This chapter argues that, stimulated by a quasi-religious idea of infinity, there are two religious sources for ‘media time’: the invention of the automated clock in late medieval monasteries, and the linear sense of time as developed in Christian theology.  As the chapter shows, the sense of ‘periodic beats’ was originally closely linked to liturgic practice, but it led to a distinctly non-religious take-off in awareness of oscillating mechanisms (such as the vibrating string, developing modern acoustics, and other wave analyses to be synthesized in electronic media, and finally, the timing mechanisms of modern computers).

About the Author

Wolfgang Ernst holds the Chair of History and Aesthetics of Media, Faculty of Cultural Studies, Humboldt University Berlin, where he teaches and conducts research in media archaeology and communication theory. His publications include: Das Rumoren der Archive. Ordnung aus Unordnung (Berlin: Merve 2002); Computing in Russia. The history of computer devices and information technology revealed. Ed. together with Georg Trogemann and Alexander Nitussov. (Braunschweig: Vieweg, 2001); and M.edium F.oucault (Weimar: VDG, 2000).

Contact and Further Links

Contact Information: 
Seminar für Medienwissenschaft
Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
Sophienstraße 22a
10178 Berlin
Tel. 030-2093-8234 (direkt)
Tel. 030-2093-8210 (Sekretariat Frau Franke)
Fax 030-2093-8231
Email: wolfgang.ernst@culture.hu-berlin.de
URL: www.medienwissenschaft.hu-berlin.de