If there’s one thing machines are good at doing, it’s one thing. Tireless, consistent, repetitious labour isn’t something we humans particularly enjoy or excel at, so it’s nice to be able to delegate – even, apparently, in the sphere of worship, where various technologies have, through the centuries, been invented to help realise the ideal of ceaseless prayer. Tibetan prayer wheels are spun to accrue benevolence in the same way the repetition of a mantra is supposed to, materialising and mechanising faith. Votive candles perform a similar function.* In the fictional theocracy of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale computerized printers perpetually churn out prayers ordered by phone, a vision that’s not so far from the truth; some Catholics now program Twitter to post hourly prayers to their feeds. The ‘Buddha Machine,’ meanwhile, is a personal music player stocked with nine sonic fragments that loop in a manner intended to be conducive to meditation. Ranging from eight seconds to something over a minute in length, the pieces are available for download on FM3’s website under a creative commons licence. My favourite right now is the kinda John Cage-ish ‘loop 03 – piano,’ which does pretty much what it says on the tin and weighs in at 26 seconds.
The Buddha Machine project is about faith, duplication and dissemination, the same issues central to Richard Dawkins’ concept of the meme as outlined in his 1976 bestseller The Selfish Gene. Although at the time Dawkins wasn’t yet posterboy for a queasily image-conscious, humanistic strain of atheism, he nevertheless illustrates his point about memes’ capacity to “paristize [the] brain” with the example of “the meme for, say, ‘belief in life after death,’” which “is actually realized physically, millions of tomes over, as a structure in the nervous systems of individual men [sic] the world over.” Even abstract and airy memes require material means of transmission and storage –vibrating air molecules conveying phonemes from larynx to ear for example, or wax cylinders or blu-ray discs. Chiefly though, memes need people. Just as gods require worshippers, so memes need (to be) thought.
Since 1976 Dawkins’ neologism has thriven, colonising countless acres of neural tissue. In order to do so – and like any successful organism – it has had to adapt. Circa web 2.0, ‘meme’ has come to denote any catchphrase, image, video or trope that ‘goes viral.’ Inevitably, the term has become somewhat blurred and bleached. But the fear and resentment Dawkins articulates regarding memes’ psychically co-optive capacity abides, finding echoes in, say, the outrage of fans exposed to ‘spoilers’ before they’ve had the chance to see a movie or the half-joking horror of commenters who complain of not being able to ‘unsee’ ‘Two Girls One Cup.’
Ouroboros eating its own tail
George Sieg argued in a recent issue of Collapse (get your pdf version here) that horror, like awe – and like faith – is peculiar to humans.This is because horror requires self-consciousness. In fact, it both promotes and feeds on self-consciousness; the horrible only becomes more so the more we think about it. The scene in Herzog’s Grizzly Manwhere the director listens to a recording of Tim Treadwell being dismembered before advising Treadwell’s ex-girlfriend never to play the tape vividly illustrates the ability of recorded media to rewire us, turning viewers into players – doomed to relive/replay the moment of revelation over and over again, on an endless loop.
This scenario represents the nightmarish flipside of the ideal of ceaseless prayer, of the one-track mind the true believer aims to cultivate (a mindset according to which the Buddha Machine’s nine-track hard drive becomes something to aspire to). This isn’t to say we should forget about faith, however. After all, seen from the right angle, faith constitutes the ability to draw more from a text, an idea, an object or a person than is ‘really’ there, to care more about it/them than might appear appropriate.** And in a culture of cynicism and scarcity, where cowardice masquerades as pragmatism, that makes it an indispensable resource.
*essentially, of course, it was the complexity and the systematicity of Catholicism’s God/worshipper interface that the first Protestants had beef with, believing that the telling of Rosaries and the prescription of however many ‘Hail Marys’ etc. made for a machinic sort of faith
**as an example – and to cite a book that touches on the topic of ceaseless prayer – I love Salinger’s Franny & Zooey, and in no way resent the proportion of my neural real estate it takes up or the consequent way it can tinge and inflect what I think. And – as much as advertisers might try to leverage this sort of love – I love the way hardcore DJs made tracks vehicles for movie quotations, memic units they cared enough about to want to log and transmit in a new format.
