Objects circulate through us. A subject is a site, a passage point, a relay station, a halfway house that hosts the objects passing through. Some objects are solids and some are liquids. Some objects are words, some are ideas or images or sensations or desires. Some objects are just passing through, some stay for a time. Some leave a mark and some don’t. Prayer minds this circulation. Rather than running, it says amen to the double-bind of their coming and going. In prayer, your will to go away gets broken and you are brought to rest, instead, in the compassionate, attentive stillness of acknowledged grace. Practicing prayer, the circulation of ordinary objects comes into focus as Spirit.
Spirit slips the knot of subjectivity and prayer distributes the self. You are more than, other than—and less than—you thought you were. You both are and are not the objects that compose you, the desires that elbow your ribs, the emotions that flush your cheeks, the thoughts that circle your brain. Even your “cognitive abilities do not reside in ‘you’ but are distributed throughout the formatted setting, which is not only made of localizers but also of many competence building propositions, of many small intellectual technologies. Although they come from the outside, they are not descended from some mysterious context: each of them has a history that can be traced empirically with more or less difficulty. Each patch comes with its own vehicle whose shape, cost, and circulation can be mapped out” (RS 211–212). Minds, unlike brains, are not endosomatic. Minds are distributed throughout their formatted settings. Minds lean on, borrow, repurpose, and get enabled by the competencies of the objects that circulate through and around them.
Borrowing software jargon, Latour describes these circulating, competence enhancing objects as plug-ins. “There are plug-ins circulating to which you can subscribe, and that you can download on the spot to become locally and provisionally competent” (RS 210). Each of these plug-ins has its own history and each of these histories shapes and overwrites portions of your own story as they get used, incorporated, and discarded with varying degrees of duration and intensity. My father’s hammer, my neighbor’s cheesecake recipe, my mother’s preference for yellow, my brother’s ideas about Spider-Man, my son’s way of bounding down the stairs, my grandfather’s curly hair—borrowed and exapted, these objects traverse me, enable me, compose me. They bind me and resist me as they make the world available to me.
Religion, in refusing to go away, practices not only prayer but family history. When the circulation of ordinary objects comes into focus as Spirit, the histories that trail them—and mark me—come into focus as well. “If you began to probe the origin of each of your idiosyncrasies, would you not be able to deploy, here again, that same starlike shape that would force you to visit many places, people, times, events that you had largely forgotten? This tone of voice, this unusual expression, this gesture of the hand, this gait, this posture, aren’t these traceable as well?” (RS 209). Aren’t these gestures a borrowed grace? Doesn’t Spirit shine through them from some other place, from some other mind, from some other hands? Who do you see when you look in the mirror? Our liberation is interwoven with the fate of these adopted objects. We cannot be saved without them, nor they without us, because they are the stuff we’re made of.
But it is tempting to let this slip and, instead, feign sufficiency. The plug-ins that we depend on most, the objects of most general use, the ones that bear the brunt of our daily weight, tend to get worn smoothest. They withdraw transparently into their availability. These ordinary objects are clichés. Though they appear empty, they are light and flexible and strong. We depend on their invisible grace. Religion, in caring for them, declares itself to be in the business of clichés. What could be more obvious about religion? When did you last plant yourself in a pew, determined, no matter the resilience of boredom’s membrane, to pray rather than go away? Religion is the rigorous practice of clichés. Our competences, however exotic, rely on them. “How many circulating clichés do we have to absorb before having the competence to utter an opinion about a film, a companion, a situation, a political stance?” (RS 209). How many clichéd sermons must you hear before, relentless in your attentive amen, boredom breaks your will to flee and you are left, to your liberated surprise, shaking your fellow congregant’s bare hand? Out of your too-narrow box, distributed, you are discharged into mystery. Here, you may say: “I don’t know how things stand. I know neither who I am nor what I want, but others say they know on my behalf, others who define me, link me up, make me speak, interpret what I say, and enroll me. Whether I am a storm, a rat, a lake, a lion, a child, a worker, a gene, a slave, the unconscious, or a virus, they whisper to me, they suggest, they impose an interpretation of what I am and what I could be” (PF 192). In such a state, the cliché has recovered enough resistance to be visible. You’re no longer certain what it means, but you hear it for the first time.