Deus in Machina: Religion, Technology, and the Things in Between

Thinking about Melville, Religion,and Machines That Think

This chapter demonstrates that the concept of feedback-as a technological condition, historical ontology, and theoretical frame-challenges traditional ways of conceiving of religion and writing its history. This essay dwells within 1920's America, a moment when the capacity of machines to regulate both nonhuman and human systems reached a point of critical mass and intensity. The chapter addresses responses to this changing technological atmosphere among Anglo-Protestant leaders, American Dada, as well as leaders of the infamous "Revival" of Herman Melville and his long-forgotten Moby-Dick (1851). Historically, the chapter demonstrates how Protestant strategies of self-centering, so pervasive in the early twentieth century, failed to contain the billowing nature of feedback technology. Theoretically, the chapter argues that the principle of feedback allows us to redefine religion not as something primarily ideological-that is, not exclusively about ideas, beliefs, creeds, nor simply as some lived extension or revision of such ideas, beliefs, and creeds. The chapter concludes by arguing that attention to feedback pushes us to consider that religion is not about the freedom to believe but rather about the possibilities that condition our unbelief.