58 theory
technoscientific contexts and divine (as well as human) self-creation in certain
mystical traditions might be understood to constitute processes founded on an
essential ignorance or unknowing—and it is the important function of just
such ignorance or unknowingwithinthe process of self-creation that I would
like to emphasize in my reflections here on the modern and the mystical.
In other words: just as the infinitely incomprehensible God of certain
mystical thinkers (Eriugena is a decisive example) is himself created in and
through the world that he creates, and just as that same God never fully com-
prehends himself in and through the creation where alone he comes to know
himself,^27 so might it be that we ourselves are created and re-created today by
those technoscientific networks that we fabricate, even as we remain, in and
through that self-creation, unable fully or finally to comprehend ourselves—
perhaps above all because we are unable to foresee what we are becoming.^28
Human Self-Creation and the Logic
of Technoscientific Networks
In order to suggest the role of such ignorance or unknowing within our own
self-creation, and in order to recognize the senses in which such a role might
unsettle the modern model of subjectivity tied by thinkers like Weber and
Heidegger to the modern project of technoscientific mastery, we would need
to recognize the ways in which the operation of networks such as those evoked
in Serres or DeLillo can unsettle the founding oppositions upon which that
modern model of subjectivity rests—above all the opposition between the
knowing or representing subject and its known or represented object, but also
many related oppositions, such as that between culture and nature and that
between the human and the machine.
In this direction, among religious studies scholars, some of the more far-
reaching analyses are to be found in the recent work of Mark C. Taylor. Em-
phasizing especially the relational and interactive quality of our technoscientific
networks, Taylor elucidates both the ways in which they allow “subjectivity” to
extend itself by means of “objective” devices and the ways in which seemingly
“objective” devices come to act or even to think more and more like “subjects.”
Departing from a straightforwardly instrumental conception of technology, ac-
cording to which a discrete, self-contained or self-sustaining subject would
manipulate some independent, objective reality by means of instrumental tech-
nologies that would leave both subject and object standing apart in their ap-
parent independence, the relational and interactive conception of technology
that becomes unavoidable in today’s “network culture” highlights the senses
in which technology itself perceives and reacts to our thought and behavior,
understands and speaks to us through a kind of interaction that breaks down