modernity and the mystical 59the clear distinction between subject and object, rendering it “virtually impos-
sible to be sure where the human ends and the machine begins.”^29
Drawing on information and complexity theory in order to elaborate the
logic of these networks that break down the border between subject and object,
or human and machine, Taylor argues that informational networks would be
themselves “neither subjective nor objective” but rather constitute “the matrix
in which all subjects and objects are formed, deformed, and reformed.”^30
Within his analyses of networks as complex adaptive systems, Taylor’s empha-
sis on relation and interaction will yield two insights that are especially im-
portant to our concerns here. The first insight is that subjectivity is not discrete,
self-contained, or self-sustaining but rather emerges and evolves within dis-
tributed and fluid systems that exceed the individual and unsettle any clear
and fixed boundaries between individual and environment:
The self—if indeed this term any longer makes sense—is a node in
a complex network of relations. In emerging network culture,subjec-
tivity is nodular. Nodes, we have discovered, are knots formed when
different strands, fibers, or threads are woven together. As the shift-
ing site of multiple interfaces, nodular subjectivity not only screens
the sea of information in which it is immersed, but is itself the
screen displaying what one is and is not....Inthemidst of these
webs, networks, and screens, I can be no more certain where I am
than I can know when or where the I begins and ends. I am
plugged into other objects and subjects in such a way that I become
myself in and through them, even as they become themselves in
and through me.^31
The second and related insight is that a subject so constituted by means
of networks that exceed the individual is a subject haunted by unconscious
operations that are realized concretely in the technological prostheses through
which informational currents flow. Taylor develops this insight by exploring
the logic of “distributed” mind or intelligence. Recalling, to powerful effect,
G. W. F. Hegel’s understanding of “objective spirit,”^32 Taylor emphasizes that
information processing is something that goes on constantly throughout our
natural and sociocultural worlds—and in such a way that “it is no longer clear
where to draw the line between mind and matter, self and other, human and
machine.Mind is distributed throughout the world” (MC, 230).^33 From this per-
spective, we come to be shaped by informational currents that circulate
“through us” and that “bind self and world in increasingly complex relations.”^34
Today, of course, these informational currents are mediated, these relations
binding self and world are embodied, by ever more sophisticated and pervasive
technologies, so that “in network culture,” technology becomes “an indispens-
able prosthesis through which body and mind expand.”^35