modernity and the mystical 55we inevitably exercise a kind of faith or trust in powers for which we cannot
account in terms of our own knowledge or reasoning. Hence, while according
to Max Weber’s analysis of the rationalized and disenchanted worldview, any
apparent gap between technological know-how and the science that makes
such know-how possible would remain, in principle, reducible if not always
actually reduced (in other words, even if I don’t really know how the streetcar
works, I can, in principle, always find out), for Derrida technoscientific per-
formance takes place more and more today within a gap that proves irreducible
between a high level of technological power or manipulative competence and
a relatively low level of actual knowledge or scientific comprehension on the
part of those agents—both individual and, increasingly, collective—who exer-
cise such manipulative power: “... because one increasinglyusesartifacts and
prostheses of which one is totally ignorant, in a growing disproportion between
knowledge [savoir] and know-how [savoir-faire], the space of such technical ex-
perience tends to become more animistic, magical, mystical.”^15 A major part
of humanity, Derrida notes, lives today by means of technoscientific systems
whose effectiveness is exploited and taken for granted even in face of the ab-
sence—or the impossibility—of actual comprehension or mastery by any sin-
gle, stable, self-identical subject.
As Derrida will emphasize, the faith involved in my use of technological
powers whose ground and logic I do not comprehend serves to highlight, more
broadly, the kind of faith or trust that proves indispensable, in fact, for any
system of authority—including that of a modern, rational science. The au-
thority of any system, Derrida insists, requires what he calls a “mystical foun-
dation,” by which he means a founding moment of decision that could not be
dictated or justified by the system it founds, a ground, then, that is itself
groundless; the decision, for example, to accept science and its rationality as
authoritative, the decision that leads me to begin thinking scientifically, could
not itself be dictated or justified by science; it could not be based on the au-
thority of science itself, for, precisely, it alone gives that authority its force.
Hence, from this perspective, even science requires faith, and all knowledge,
practical or otherwise, necessarily involves an element of belief.^16
This disproportion that Derrida emphasizes between scientific knowledge
and technological power, which itself would highlight a kind of mystical faith
at the heart of any technoscientific performance, proves operative today within
immeasurably complex networks whose most evident, even cliche ́d, symbol is
perhaps the Internet—a global technoscientific network whose striking resem-
blances to traditional mystical worlds have been noted recently not only by
leading philosophers and theorists like Derrida or Michel Serres, but also by
important fiction writers such as Don DeLillo, and even by a major public
institution such as the Getty Center in Los Angeles.
Indeed, by exploring the complex intersections among science, technology,
and popular culture, a 2001–2002 show at the Getty, entitled “Devices of Won-