Technology, Liturgy, and Ritual Rereading Krämer & Bredekamp’s “Culture, Technology, Cultural Techniques” (2003/2013) 1 Yearbo ok for Ritual and

By rereading Krämer and Bredekamp’s “Culture, Technology, Cultural Techniques” (2003/2013), this article aims at appropriating and evaluating the significance – and philosophy – of the mathematical and computer science elements in it. This contribution aims to answer the following questions: How do we understand, interpret, and evaluate the notion that symbol and technology interpenetrate and that their functional processes can mutually substitute for one another? How do we evaluate this theologically? This article provides a basic building block for a liturgical theology of the digital, the computer, calculations, and algorithms. After an introduction, I consider four aspects from the article of Krämer and Bredekamp: the relationship between technological creativity, imagination, and the metaphysical; the convertibility of the symbolic and technical; the connectivity of technical machines in a network; and the new knowledge order associated with these developments. In a concluding paragraph, future developments regarding technology, liturgy, and ritual are outlined and considered.


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and that their functional processes can mutually substitute for one another? How do we evaluate that theologically?
Without going into further detail in this context, the assumption of this article is that ritual and liturgy are a coherent and repeatable whole of symbolic language, symbolic actions, and symbols (things). By defining them in this way, it is clear that ritual -and thus liturgy -can be regarded as a cultural phenomenon, and indeed it is regarded as such in this article. The notions of ritual and liturgy can thus be subsumed under the notion of culture as Krämer and Bredekamp use it. Furthermore, I assume that liturgy is a ritual that also refers to a metaphysical and eventually divine reality. By more or less unsuspectingly replacing the notion of culture in Krämer and Bredekamp with that of ritual, a theological reflection is by no means impossible. One could argue that the Reformed theology of the word is a reflection on the invention of the printing press. However, I am well aware that such a claim is a reduction of the complex reality, leaving other aspects -such as its relation to medieval theology -unexposed.
1 Rereading Krämer and Bredekamp's "Culture, Technology, Cultural Techniques" putable Numbers" forms the basis of modern computer science. 10 I will come back to the notion of galaxy. In a few sentences, Krämer and Bredekamp summarize what I see as key to their article: Turing opens up a cognitive dimension with his claim that his mathematical formalism renders explicit what a human calculator does when working with paper and pencil, which is to say, when writing. Second, he further develops the convertibility between the symbolic and the technical already surmised by Leibniz, and along with it the convertibility between the semiotic and the physical, and, by extension, between software and hardware. And he finally projects the Turing machine as a universal machine capable of imitating every special Turing machine because the codes of the latter can be inscribed -that is programmed -onto the strip of the universal machine. 11 In the following, I consider the three points mentioned in this quotation.

Technological creativity, imagination, and the metaphysical
The first point claims that "mathematical formalism" makes explicit that mind and machine are closely related and thus cannot be considered independently of each other. 12 In a thought experiment that Turing calls an "imitation game," a human is challenged to have a keyboard conversation with another human and a machine and then decide which of the two was the human and which was the machine.
Turing envisions a machine that makes that decision impossible because it is indistinguishable from a human. 13 This Turing machine is an imaginary machine that was first technically materialized in the computer. 14 Coy describes its power as follows: "[t]he (algorithmic) describable doing … becomes 10) Alan Turing, "On computable numbers, with an application to the Entscheidungsproblem," in: This unmistakably evokes qualities that Huizinga attributes to a game. A game is primarily a "free act" and "gratuitous", but it is also "indispensable"; moreover, it is "a break from ordinary life." 19 In a similar way, Elaine Graham says that "technological creativity" takes us into the domains not only of the material object (the computer) but also of imagination and metaphysics: [A] practical theology of technology would begin from this irreducible link between the material and the metaphysical, and the way such an orientation between and amongst humanity -and its Others -nonhuman and divine -can serve as a practical wisdom that enables us to live more authentically. 20 This is an impressive but also dizzying quotation that links humans, machines, nature, metaphysics, and the divine with a reference to Heidegger's "authentic life." 21 It requires further explanation and reflection. In my opinion, the reference to Heidegger is extremely important here. 22 Authenticity in Heidegger refers to the relationships -with Graham's "Others" -in which a person stands and the commitment with which that person acts in this world. How does a machine play a role in reaching out to Others, that is, in symbolic and thus also in ritual and liturgical acting?
Let us take a closer look at what Heidegger says about technology. Graham speaks of a "technological creativity." Heidegger says that technology does call forth a truth, but he distinguishes it from "a more primal truth." 23 In his famous essay "The Question Concerning Technology," Heidegger wants to pave the way for a free relationship with technology. He does this by "asking questions in order to penetrate to the essence of technology." 24 According to Heidegger, "the decisive question" is as follows: "Of what essence is modern technology that it happens to think of putting exact science to use?" 25 The answer is twofold. First, modern technology is built on modern physics. Second, modern physics makes poiesis or bringing-forth become a demand made on reality or on nature. Heidegger calls this specific way of poiesis a "challenging-forth" ("Herausfordern"). 26 In technology, reality or nature reveals itself to be something that is at our command and at our disposal.
However, there is a parallel, yet at the same time contrasting and non-challenging, way of reveal- ing. This is the other way of poiesis: the way of the arts and, more specifically, of poetics. This is "a more original revealing" and "the call of a more primal truth." 27 Referring to a hydro-electric power station on the Rhine, Heidegger gives the example of a river, which is -as "a challenging-forth" -regarded as a source of energy at our disposal or -by "the call of a more primal truth" -"revealed" in a "more original" poetic way. Think of Marsman's poem "Herinnering aan Holland," in which the voice of the water itself is heard. 28 I would also like to refer to another example from Heidegger in this respect, that of the land and the earth, which in the frame of modern technology are seen as producing uranium for nuclear energy and food for a mechanized food industry. However, there is also a more poetic conception of the land, as the philosopher gives in his poetic description of the pair of peasant shoes painted by Van Gogh: "(T)he far-stretching and ever-uniform furrows of the field swept by a raw wind," "the dampness and richness of the soil," "the loneliness of the field-path as evening falls," and "the silent call of the earth, its silent gift of the ripening grain, its unexplained self-refusal in the wintry field." This is what the field and the soil are "in truth." 29 Heidegger makes a short excursion into theology. Let us take this matter to the heart of Christian worship. Can the consecration of the Eucharistic elements that reveals the bread in its most true substance -as the body of Christ -be performed by the Turing machine? Can the Turing machine as it is realized in the networked computer galaxy perform the liturgical play? I approach these questions in two steps. First, I explore how ritual symbol acting can evoke "a more primordial truth." I then return to the question of whether the functional processes of ritual symbol acting and computers are interchangeable.
How can ritual symbol acting call forth "a more primal truth"? Here we may refer to Louis-Marie Chauvet's sacramental theology. Quoting Heidegger on the "primal truth" of being as the "Incalculable," he refers to grace as precisely that which escapes causality. 32 In the liturgical play, the Eucharistic bread is revealed in its truthness, that is, as bread that is nourishing but that is always shared and eventually the body of Christ or the "autocommunication of God's very self in Christ." 33 Thus, the role that Heidegger assigns to the arts here has, along with Chauvet, strong analogies to symbolic and sacramental agency.
This brings us back to the Turing machine and to Graham's "technological creativity": imagination and metaphysics. The preliminary question here is whether computers and algorithms can be manipulated in such a way that they can also generate this poetic, sacramental, and "primal" truth.
Perhaps this is best illustrated by psychoanalytic theory. As Lacan demonstrated, the child gets to know itself in its "symbolic capacity"; it has access to its own subjectivity only in the language in which it represents itself. The self is never immediately accessible and is always mediated. 44 There is an inevitable break between "the subject and the ideal Self" that can only be experienced as "loss of … 'paradise'" and "mourning for the hope of ever recovering beatitude." 45 At the same time, exactly this split constitutes the subject. The human subject enters into relations with the other through a disinterested game of "symbolic exchange" that is always already characterized by a "presencein-absence." 46 Chauvet sees in this split and the associated gratuitous symbolic exchange also the possibility for relation to the Other, that is, communication with God. After all, God too can only be present-in-absence, most succinctly in the sacramental presence as bread and wine (see above). As a consequence, faith communication takes place exclusively at the level of the symbol (language, acting, and things). God has always already been symbolically present, just as we have always already been symbolically present to each other. Theology takes place on the level of the free play of symbols.
Thus, the split mentioned establishes a relationship of presence-in-absence, which creates the possibility of a "marvelous exchange" between God and humans (i.e., grace). 47 I will come back to the notion of "automatically executed action" in connection with the logarithms mentioned. Offering an indication of how I will do this, I quote Berry and Fagerfjord: "[F]or a humanist it will become increasingly important to think critically about algorithms and their implications. This algorithmic shaping of behavior is a key ethical question for computational disciplines." 48 The same holds for theology. In particular, how can the algorithmically determined play of symbols that characterizes and constitutes theology indeed be a free play that invites the good God and not a demonic force?

Technical machines are connected in a network
There is a third step in the quotation of Krämer and Bredekamp that we have to consider. In 1993, every Turing machine became a single star in what has come to be called the Turing Galaxy -a node in a network or the Internet. 49 Computers became able to communicate with one another on a global scale and thus became the "universal medium," in which all media, "written, optical and electrical," could be integrated. 50  computer is not only a medium, it is the 'media-integrating machine per se.'" 51 As a consequence, what McLuhan called the "Gutenberg Galaxy" of prints has been (or will be) swallowed up by the gravity of the much larger Turing Galaxy. Or, more nuancedly, the literal Gutenberg Galaxy has been included in the electronic Turing Galaxy. In yet other words, the 26-letter alphabet shifted to a binary, twonumber (0 and 1) technique. 52 In this integration, text has become information. This is not without consequences, which we cannot, however, go into now. 53 There is another aspect to this dynamic. to psychoanalysis, stating that every "reality check" is done against the background of "the complementary negative judgment": "This is not a dream, I am not hallucinating this." 54 Siegert claims that in the digital age, this "nomological logic" has been replaced by "the cybernetic logic" of "on/off." 55 Rather pessimistically, he notes as follows: With the retreat of the symbolic from the constitution of reality, and with the difference between inside and outside losing its form, the place of the law is replaced by a short circuit between the imaginary and the real. Lacan expressed where this is leading to: No one knows anymore whether a door opens to the imaginary or to the real. We are all unhinged. 56 If the distinction between imagination and reality is lifted, "reality takes on hallucinatory features." 57 The digital age is a radicalization of modernity that Theodor Adorno in the well-known 18th of his This is confirmed when we look again at another characteristic that Huizinga attributes to the game. Play is limited in time and space, he says. 61 However, exactly this limitation has been lifted in the "universal medium." Where for Immanuel Kant, time and space were the conditions for observing phenomena, in the digital age, there are, as Castells says, other notions, namely "timeless time" and "the space of flows." 62 The board on which the game is played is no longer separate or distinct from the real world, nor is there any limited playing time. Likewise, in online-offline dynamics, the distinction between offline reality and the game's own order with its strict rules of play has been negated.
The imaginary world of the technique par excellence of the Gutenberg Galaxy -the book -is locked between two covers, but the dynamics of the Turing Galaxy, in which humans and machines are convertible, removes this demarcation. The sky is the limit, and not even that! Virtual reality is infinite, and we are now even connected to the spacecraft Voyager 1 that has left our solar system and entered interstellar space, while the James Webb Space Telescope looks at the limits of the universe and the beginning of time and projects its images onto our desk screens and mobile devices. On a theological level, the boundary between symbol and reality can be erased, leading to a lifting of the boundary between God and humans, which conflicts with at least the ecumenical tradition of the West.

Knowledge order
There is a fourth point in the article of Krämer and Bredekamp that requires our attention. The authors examine the significance of technology and cultural techniques for epistemology. The emphasis on cultural, and in our case ritual, techniques has made it clear that knowledge is also generated in social practices, "legitimating itself through the handling of objects and instruments." 63 To this extent, the computer as a social practice is a cultural technique that legitimates knowledge in its own particular way. Krämer and Bredekamp conclude their article with the following statement:  Siegert claims that this will not make humans disappear, even if humans become more and more a hybrid of human and machine -a cyborg. As we have seen before, knowledge is always based on distinction and definition: this is X and not Y. 67 With an image of the mathematician, philosopher, and science historian Michel Serres, Siegert says that the challenge now is not to let the ocean of information and data slosh around us, allowing ourselves to sink into it, but to continue to steer and keep a course: "It is not a matter of man disappearing, but of having to define, in the wake of the epistemic ruptures brought about by first-and second-order cybernetics, noise and message relative to the un- stable position of an observer." 68 Or, in another image, it is about filtering a voice from the noise. 69 In other words, "the culture-technical operation of filtering that generates this sign from noise is in the position of a third" 70 that defines noise and voice, ocean and course.
Obviously, the power of definition again comes into view here. Or, phrased more critically, the question is how the hegemonic power of definition of large system controllers -think of the tech giants such as Facebook and Google -relates to the power(lessness) of more demotic definitions. How does the singularity of one world system relate to diversity, particularity, and locality? It is clear that with these questions, we are entering a domain in which theology, the humanities, and probably also the social sciences are preeminently specialists. 71  It has been pointed out on several sides that "the digital transformation of all media and their networking" threatens a "national knowledge order." 74 This is not new. Understanding one's own (national or regional) culture is no longer the core of the humanities. The moribund state of Dutch studies at Dutch universities is significant in this respect. In newly invented disciplines such as cultural studies, according to Reading, "culture" is "dereferentialized" and, as a result, "non-normative." 75 The same goes for theology and religious studies. The study of religion is no longer naturally rooted in a confessional knowledge order. Where theology in academia stands primarily for Christian theology or, even more precisely, for Reformed, Lutheran, or Roman Catholic theology, religion in contrast is an undefined concept. The question has even been raised whether religion actually exists or whether the concept, in a Wittgensteinian way, is just helpful "in its use." 76 The same applies analogously to liturgy and ritual. It is precisely the latter concept that has become increasingly volatile due to the abolition of strict definitions and their replacement by numerous kinds of qualities of the concept. 77 Precisely this has justified our more or less naive replacement of "culture" in Krämer and Bredekamp with, in this article, "ritual".
The now jubilant Institute for Ritual and Liturgical Studies initially existed as a Liturgical Institute. 78 Later "Ritual" was added after "Liturgical," and later still, both notions were included in the title in reverse order. However, liturgy has always been explicitly referred to in the name of the institute. There is room in the institute's publications for liturgical-theological studies from specific confessional perspectives, as well as for ritual studies that are less defined in advance. Keeping both notions together qualifies the institute and distinguishes it from, for example, the Societas Liturgica and its journal Studia Liturgica or, at the other end of the spectrum, the Journal of Ritual Studies. The institute is neither one nor the other.
2 Technology, liturgy, and ritual: future developments Much has been written about liturgy and ritual online, particularly in connection with the COVID-19 pandemic. Computers and the Internet have thus been regarded primarily as cultural techniques.
There has been less reflection on liturgy, ritual, and technology to date. Here and there, scholars in these fields are beginning to engage with technology.
Janieke Bruin-Mollenhorst shows how in the Netherlands "computational, automated algorithms become part of the process of selecting funeral music," as people turn to Spotify to make their choices. In other words, the personally crafted ritual uses a formula that cements high-ranking chart songs in their high ranking and thus makes them more common. 79 More broadly, research into the influence of strongly technology-dominated evangelical, charismatic, and Pentecostal forms of worship comes into view. What, for example, is the influence of permanently available charts of worship songs on the Internet? 80