How Can We Seek The Divine Without Memory?

Han positions stillness as a conduit for the divine—the higher order of things that can only be sought through choosing to do nothing and listening. The divine arrives at those who are able to just be without compulsion. But the information regime fosters a “destructive hyperactivity” (81) among those it dispossesses of thingness and bodies: ourselves. We’re constantly distracted, moving from screen to screen and swipe to swipe, communicating flashes of information only to watch them fade into the de-narrativizing roar of data exchange. After all, as Han writes, “Everything that rushes is condemned to disappear” (83). The only way to puncture this roar is by seeking communion with things: through the time-place anchor of ritual, we become sited and stilled among other presences, our bodies repossessed and our need to remember—our need for a memory—reignited.

Dataists argue that there’s another celestial power: the “divine gaze” of big data and AI, which optimizes and harvests society as though it were an organism (36). Our egos are in service of this divine power, which is fueled by our perceived freedom to create, reflect, and reference the self, uninterrupted by the presences of others. Interconnectivity replaces relationality. We are free to connect—or, to share data with one another across time and space—but, with the material absence of the other, we are no longer able to build and sustain relationships.

But what is memory if not relational? A hologram whose texture and precision coheres, however briefly, by a relationship between an encountering self, an other as witness, a time, and a place? What is memory without things? And where is the divine without memory? (271)