modernity and the mystical 57and linked, hyperlinked, this site leading to that, this fact referenced to that, a
keystroke, a mouse-click, a password—world without end, amen.”^22
What do these cultural signals point to? What are we to think when French
philosophers, American novelists, and Californian museums all find them-
selves moved, in similar ways, to note and reflect on apparent resemblances
between our highly rationalized technoscientific networks, on the one hand,
and, on the other, historically distant mystical worlds?
The resemblances can be striking, for by means of their seemingly infinite
connectivity and comprehensive memory, which can seem through their in-
terplay to unsettle any clear division between the local and the global or be-
tween the temporal and the timeless, our technoscientific networks can seem
to realize a ubiquity and a simultaneity that recall the mystical God; they can
seem to constitute, indeed, an infinitely variable, combinatorial, and perspec-
tival cosmos whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere—a cos-
mos, in this sense, much like that thought to embody the mystical God in
speculative mystics and writers throughout the West from John Scotus Eri-
ugena in the ninth century or Alain de Lille in the eleventh, through Nicholas
of Cusa (1401–1464) and Giordano Bruno (1548–1600) on the eve of modern-
ity,^23 perhaps even into the late-modern reception and reworking of these same
thinkers in the cosmic vision of James Joyce’sFinnegans Wake.^24
Even more striking, perhaps, than this quasi-mystical ubiquity and simul-
taneity would be another point of resemblance between our technoscientific
networks and more traditional mystical worlds—namely, the point at which
both can be seen as related intimately to processes of self-creation. Just as we
human subjects can be thought constantly to re-create ourselves in and through
the technoscientific networks we build and inhabit, so for key mystical think-
ers, the cosmos itself constitutes the space and time of God’s own self-creation.
Any number of writers, including those we’ve just mentioned, will note the
senses in which our technoscientific systems constitute very concretely the
means of our own ongoing self-creation. As art historian and cultural theorist
Barbara Maria Stafford indicates in the “Devices of Wonder” catalog, the his-
tory of technology teaches us that “subjectivity is creatively modifiable, reach-
ing outward and inward, to other beings and to the mechanisms we continually
fabricate;”^25 or as Don DeLillo puts it in his haunting essay on 9/11, noting
more explicitly the religious resonance of our technological self-assertion, “the
materials and the methods we devise make it possible for us to claim our
future. We don’t have to depend on God or the prophets or other astonish-
ments. We are the astonishment. The miracle is what we ourselves produce,
the systems and networks that change the way we live and think.”^26 But while
various writers and thinkers will thus emphasize the fact that our technoscien-
tific networks constitute a means for human self-creation, and while some will
also note a kind of religious resonance in such self-creation, no writer to my
knowledge has noted or explored the sense in which both our self-creation in