Science, Religion, and the Human Experience

modernity and the mystical 61

to offer an alternative account within which “emergence replaces teleology;
reflexive epistemology replaces objectivism; distributed cognition replaces au-
tonomous will; embodiment replaces a body seen as a support system for the
mind; and a dynamic partnership between humans and intelligent machines
replaces the liberal humanist subject’s manifest destiny to dominate and con-
trol nature.”^41 From this posthuman perspective, Hayles emphasizes, “subjec-
tivity is emergent rather than given, distributed rather than located solely in
consciousness, emerging from and integrated into a chaotic world rather than
occupying a position of mastery and control removed from it.”^42
Decisive to this reconception of subjectivity in terms of emergence and
distribution will be the sense in which the partnership between human and
machine, or between individual and environment, involves an insurmountable
gap of unknowing for the human subject, a gap recalling and perhaps extend-
ing what Derrida points to under the category of the mystical, or what Taylor
names the “technological unconscious.” Because “the distributed cognition of
the emergent human subject correlates with...thedistributed cognitive sys-
tem as a whole, in which ‘thinking’ is done by both human and nonhuman
actors,”^43 each shaping the other, we humans participate everyday, Hayle rightly
emphasizes, “in systems whose total cognitive capacity exceeds our individual
knowledge.”^44 From this perspective, thinking occurs through us perhaps more
than within us, for it occurs by means of networks in which we are only lim-
ited—and always shifting—points of intersection. More than thinking about
or knowing the world as an “object,” then, we always think within the world
as a network—which itself cannot be circumscribed or defined in terms of any
fixed objectivity.^45

Self-Creation and In-Definition of the Human

In his philosophical insistence that relation and communication are more fun-

damental than substance or being, Michel Serres emphasizes a dimension of

unknowing similar to that which Hayles and Taylor highlight within our tech-

noscientific self-creation, and through his treatment of such unknowing Serres

points us toward an understanding of the human that would help to account

for the mystical resonance in such self-creation: the human proves at once

creative and self-creative in just the measure that it lacks definite boundaries

(or vice versa), which is to say also in the measure that it cannot fully or finally

comprehend itself.

From a perspective much like that of Hayles on the “posthuman,” Serres

coins the term “hominescence” to name and describe the fundamentally re-

lational and interactive technoscientific process that, while actually bringing

forth a new humanity, “does not yet know what humanity [homme] it is going

to produce”^46 and, likewise, cannot know exactly what humanity “does” that