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Modernity and the Mystical:

Technoscience, Religion, and

Human Self-Creation

Thomas A. Carlson

Introductory Remarks on Technoscience and Its Re-Definition
of the “Human”: A Sign of the Mystical in the Modern?

While not the same thing, science and technology do nevertheless
prove today, both conceptually and practically, inseparable. The real-
ity we come to know scientifically appears to us thanks only to tech-
nology, by means of the framing or mediation, the computation and
memory, even the cognition and imagination, exercised by techno-
logical instruments that function as indispensable faculties—and
science itself finds support in our culture largely, if not primarily, to
the degree that it yields (or is believed to yield) knowledge having a
demonstrably practical value, which is to say an instrumental or a
technological application. This intimate tie between scientific re-
search and “practical” application, quite complex both historically
and theoretically, would go a long way in helping to explain the
striking discrepancies in support—financial and otherwise—enjoyed
today by scientific research and teaching, on the one hand, and by
humanistic inquiry and education, on the other. The practical appli-
cation or “real-life” value of humanistic study is rarely presupposed
as it is for scientific study (and this is so even when the latter takes
the most theoretical and esoteric forms). To understand, then, both
the actual work of scientists and the place of science in our culture
more broadly—and it will be mainly this latter issue that concerns
me here—one needs to speak about science in its intimate and com-
plex cooperation with technology, which I will signal here by the
term “technoscience.”