56 theory
der: From the World in a Box to Images on a Screen,” succeeded nicely in
highlighting an often overlooked tension—and hence a coexistence—in mod-
ern thought and culture “between a disenchanted rationality and an obsession
with mystifying metamorphoses,”^17 that is, quasi-religious metamorphoses that
are achieved in and through the very technologies often taken to realize or
embody modernity’s “disenchanted” rationality. Tracing the logic and legacy of
the early-modern “cabinet of wonders” into contemporary cyberspace, the “De-
vices of Wonder” show was able convincingly to argue that “the typically mod-
ern ‘Enlightened’ association of technology with secularization tends to over-
look its historical role in materializing the sacred”^18 —and in making such an
argument, the show managed to signal and illustrate with particular force a
mystical tendency in the human effort to frame reality, to capture all time and
space, the cosmos as a whole, in and through technoscientific media. Such
media—from the sorcerer’s mirror through the lenses of the telescope and
microscope to the desktop processor—can indicate the operation or even the
realizationintechnology and science of a desire, much like that found through-
out the mystical traditions, to transcend space and time, to achieve an omni-
science and omnipotence in which the limited self would surpass itself, moving
ecstatically into a cosmic totality that, much like the mystical God and his
cosmic body, could never be objectively defined, discretely located, fully com-
prehended, or finally controlled.
Taking a similar perspective on technoscientific media in his 1993 book
titled (in the English translation)Angels: A Modern Myth, Michel Serres is able
to interpret our global communication and transportation networks as con-
cretely angelic systems in whose light our contemporary world can seem to
resemble a mystical cosmos. Figures for the complexity and flux of message-
bearing systems, Serres’s technoscientific angels would comprise, through
their infinite interconnectivity, a global technoscientific city that Serres names
“Newtown” (recalling in striking ways the “the gigantic” and the “monstrous”
in Heidegger’s analyses of modern science and technology).^19 A kind of realized
utopia, or a place that is “no-place,” this technoscientific “Newtown” would
constitute “an unimaginable mediator, invisible and all-embracing, informatic,
pedagogic, stable in its rapid intercommunications...realizing intimate prox-
imities across immense distances...[It] has its center everywhere and its cir-
cumference nowhere.”^20
If one can glimpse a shadow or image of the mystical cosmos in the phi-
losopher’s words here, so might one see such a cosmos in Don DeLillo’s recent
novelUnderworld,which, itself haunted by angels, will imagine the encounter
between an old-school nun and the “miracle” of the Internet, “where everybody
is everywhere at once”^21 : “She is not naked exactly but she is open—exposed
to every connection you can make on the world wide web,” and she discovers
that “there is no space or time out here, or in here, or wherever she is. There
are only connections. Everything is connected. All human knowledge gathered