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Lecture and Discussant Text Thomas
A. Carlson Discussant: Matthew Turk, Department of Computer Science All text below is in unrevised form exactly as presented. Do not cite without permission of author. Do you have thoughts on the Carlson lecture or
discussant comments below? While they are not the same thing, science and technology do nevertheless prove inseparable today: the reality we come to know scientifically appears to us thanks only to technology, by means of the framing or mediation, perhaps even the cognition or imagination, exercised by our technological instruments--and science itself finds support in our culture largely, if not primarily, to the degree that it yields (or is believed to yield) knowledge having a demonstrably practical value, which is to say an instrumental or a technological application. (This intimate tie between scientific research and "practical" application would go a very long way, I think, in helping to explain the striking discrepancies in funding--and other support--between scientific and humanistic inquiry, just as it might help explain, at another level, why parents usually prefer that their children major in something like engineering or pre-med rather than philosophy or religious studies; the practical application or "real life" value of humanistic study is not always easily or straightforwardly demonstrated.) To understand, then, both the actual work of scientists and the place of science in our culture more broadly (and it will be mainly this latter issue that concerns me tonight), one needs to speak about science in its intimate cooperation with technology--a cooperation that I will refer to by means of the single, somewhat awkward, term "techno-science." Throughout my talk, I want to suggest that in our everyday lives we think and act unavoidably and increasingly by means of techno-scientific systems whose operation does not simply open access to some independent, objective reality "out there" but rather plays a fundamental role in constructing what we see and know as reality. Furthermore, I want to argue that in and through the techno-scientific construction of the worlds we inhabit, we continually shape and re-shape not only what we take to be reality "out there" but also, at the same time, what it means at bottom to be "human." Indeed, I want to hold that in our techno-scientific thinking and practice today, we are engaged in nothing less than the task of human self-creation. Such a task, I hope to show, remains necessarily open, incomplete, and always to a certain degree blind--and for this very reason it engenders both our deepest anxieties and our greatest hopes concerning techno-science, whose promise and danger do seem to grow in direct proportion. We can very quickly gain a sense of the logic and the stakes of such human self-creation if we think for a moment about the ways that techno-science can actually re-shape our relation to life and death themselves--which it does, for example, by means of bio-engineering or the thermonuclear bomb. As French philosopher Michel Serres recently suggests, in the last half-century we have in some new and very decisive sense assumed responsibility for both "the end and the beginning, creation and annihilation":To change the way humans approach life and death, Serres rightly indicates, is to alter the human itself. Thanks to techno-science, the nuclear bomb very concretely forms a new, global humanity--for in August of 1945 the global extinction of humanity itself shifts undeniably from the realm of apocalyptic myth to the realm of material possibility. Likewise, with our mapping of the genome and our achievements in biotechnology, the generation and manipulation of human life itself seem to fall within our grasp. A kind of destruction and creation that remained previously the privilege of gods, become our own responsibility--and we thereby become, like God, our own cause (HM, 50). As these examples should clearly suggest, our techno-scientific redefinition of humanity would signal enormously complex and far-reaching questions about the relation between science and religion. Tonight I'd like to frame our discussion of that relation by focusing on the categories of the "modern" and the "mystical," and I choose this focus because it is perhaps the mystical dimension of religious thought and experience that is most often and almost automatically assumed to exclude religion from the rationality of a truly modern science. I will, of course, want to challenge such an assumption, and I will do so on the basis of my suspicion that we are in fact seeing today not only a major techno-scientific revolution but also a re-emergence of something like the mystical in precisely those rationalized, techno-scientific contexts that have long been thought by scholars and theorists to exclude any trace of the mystical from our modern experience. The common assumption that modernity stands at odds with the mystical goes back, of course, to those Enlightenment traditions according to which the human subject would achieve his freedom--which here means his individual autonomy or self-determination--through the exercise of a rationality or science that yields a full and accurate understanding of the natural and social worlds we inhabit. To comprehend the rational order and operation of our natural and social worlds is, from this perspective, to acquire the means to manipulate or control those worlds. Central to this search for practical control by means of rational comprehension, of course, would be the ongoing attempt to eliminate from our relation to reality any form of "ignorance" or "unknowing." The best scientists are, indeed, those who can most fully and most precisely define and measure the boundaries of their ignorance--which they will do, of course, not at all in the hope of reaching the kind of "mystical unknowing" or "learned ignorance" sought and cultivated by religious mystics, but rather, precisely, in the hope of overcoming their ignorance by subjecting the hitherto unknown to the power and reach of a purely rational and purely human comprehension. By contrast to those mystical traditions that one might trace in the Christian world, for example, from Pseudo-Dionysius to Nicholas of Cusa and beyond, the celebration or cultivation of "unknowing" or "ignorance" as a good or a goal in itself simply does not belong to the attitude that defines scientific approaches to reality--and at this level, despite an often overlooked diversity amidst the sciences, all science would stand on the same ground: to a scientific perspective, the unknown appears never as unknowable but always and only as the not-yet-known. Scientific ignorance, in other words, is simply the space of scientific knowledge waiting to happen--indeed, it might be seen to operate as one of the most powerful provocations driving the scientific quest for such knowledge. We can find a powerful (and still widely echoed) analysis of this scientific attitude, I believe, in sociologist Max Weber's classic 1918 lecture titled "Science as a Vocation," a lecture in which Weber emphasizes that the rationalized attitude defining modern science (and modern culture more broadly) implies both a "disenchantment" of the world and, correlatively, a calculated attempt to master that world technologically. As Weber very famously puts it, our world would be "disenchanted" when we approach that world in "the knowledge or belief" that "there are no mysterious incalculable forces that come into play" in the world and hence "that one can, in principle, master all things by calculation" (W, 139). While the "savage" or religious believer as Weber imagines him would implore mysterious powers by magical means, those of us moderns shaped by the process of rationalization find rather that "technical means and calculations perform the service" (W, 139). Now, as Weber will note in discussing an individual's use of the streetcar whose workings the individual cannot in fact explain, the individual agent within a disenchanted world does not need actually to possess or to command the scientific knowledge that grounds the technological powers upon which that individual nevertheless counts; he needs rather to know--or, more precisely, to believe--that such knowledge is, in principle, at all times available or at least possible. From Weber's perspective, then, the type of rationality governing the intersection of science and technology in modern culture is one that aims to secure both conceptual and practical control over our natural and social worlds by means of a thinking that is calculative and instrumental, concerned primarily with understanding and manipulating means-ends relations. As is well known, in order to function as it does, such thinking attempts to frame being or reality in terms of an "objectivity" that would stand open to the comprehension, manipulation, and eventual mastery of a rational human subject who can analyze such an objective reality in value-neutral terms--which means in terms that say nothing about the purpose of such reality or about the direction we ought to take in our manipulation and mastery of it. (We might note that a good deal of the rhetoric within and around science today still clings to the pretense of such a value-neutrality, a pretense that becomes increasingly difficult to maintain as scientific knowing is bound ever more intimately and powerfully with technological activity that does always have some direction ). With a similar emphasis on the will to mastery that one might see operative in the technologies of an instrumental and calculative rationality, one of the most influential European philosophers of the twentieth century, Martin Heidegger, will argue (already in his 1938 essay "The Age of the World Picture" ) that modern science is built on the foundation of a distinctively modern understanding of reality or Being, which itself implies a distinctively modern attitude concerning the nature and purpose of the human subject who would seek to know "the truth" about that reality or Being. Within these modern perspectives as Heidegger analyses them, the nature of "Being" itself, the nature of the real, is framed primarily in terms of "objectivity"--and the essence of "truth" is located in subjective certainty or security with respect to the knowledge and control of an objectified being. Operating according to pre-established ground rules, science will count as "real" only that realm of being which can be defined objectively, which means observed empirically, measured quantitatively, etc., and it ranks degrees of truth or knowledge according to the level of rational certainty that the human subject can reach through such definition, observation, and measurement--in short, through what Heidegger calls "calculative" thinking. Certainty, in other words, is sought through the calculative or predictive power of science, and that power derives from the possibility of verification through methodic regulation and repetition. As Heidegger puts it, "knowing, as research, calls whatever is to account with regard to the way in which it lets itself be put at the disposal of representation. Research has disposal over anything that is when it can either calculate it in its future course or verify a calculation about it as past" (WP, 127). Now, as Heidegger will indicate, the emphasis on subjective certainty within modern science and its culture has a lineage, both religious and philosophical, that is important to any understanding of how we tend to relate certainty with "freedom." The religious lineage would be seen most notably in Protestant conceptions of faith as the inward, individual certainty of salvation, and the philosophical lineage would be seen notably in René Descartes' decisive attempt in the early 17th century to re-ground philosophy in the self-certainty of the thinking subject. The religious and, especially, philosophical obsessions with certainty in the modern world imply a conception of freedom that decisively shapes both science and our attitudes about science: This philosophical conception of freedom as the subjective self-determination that is certain of itself, a conception that will stand at the heart also of modern science, involves, Heidegger wants to insist, a kind of imperialistic thinking and practice within which the world as a whole would become the object of human conquest--"conquered" by the human subject who, in representing the world to himself rationally, becomes the "relational center" of all that is (WP, 128) and thereby secures a hold or control over all that is both conceptually and practically. From this perspective, the key to modern man's conquest of the world is the mental activity through which the rational human subject "represents" the world to himself--and here, "to represent" (vorstellen) would mean "of oneself to set something before oneself and to make secure what has been set in place, as something set in place" (WP, 149). Within the modern age, Heidegger argues, by means of the subjective representation of objects, by means of the attempt to put all things in their place, "man contends for the position in which he can be that particular being who gives the measure and draws up the guidelines for everything that is" (H, 134)--and through such contention, "man brings into play his unlimited power for the calculating, planning, and molding of all things" (H, 135). Now, if major theorists like Weber and Heidegger in the earlier twentieth century can see in modern science and its technologies primarily a project of human mastery over reality, a project that would, as heir to certain tendencies of the Enlightenment, seem to exclude any operation of the mystical from our world, more recent thinkers are beginning to glimpse a persistence or a re-emergence of something like the mystical in precisely those forms of techno-scientific practice that are so often taken to exclude the mystical. For example, in an essay titled "Faith and Knowledge: The Two Sources of Religion at the Limits of Reason Alone," French philosopher Jacques Derrida recently argues that our everyday experience of techno-science takes on an increasingly mystical quality as the technological and scientific systems we inhabit and navigate reach a scale and complexity that set those systems beyond our actual comprehension and control. In making use of those systems, then, we inevitably exercise a kind of faith or trust in powers for which we cannot account in terms of our own knowledge or rational argumentation. Hence, while according to Max Weber's analysis of the rationalized and disenchanted world-view, any apparent gap between technological know-how and the science that makes such know-how possible would remain, in principle, reducible if not always actually reduced (even if I don't know how the streetcar works, I can always find out), for Derrida techno-scientific performance takes place more and more today within a gap that proves irreducible between a very high level of technological power or manipulative competence and a relatively low level of actual knowledge or scientific comprehension on the part of those agents (both individual and, increasingly, collective) who exercise such manipulative power: "...because one increasingly uses artifacts and prostheses of which one is totally ignorant, in a growing disproportion between knowledge [savoir] and know-how [savoir-faire], the space of such technical experience tends to become more animistic, magical, mystical" (FK, 56). A major part of humanity, Derrida notes, lives today by means of techno-scientific systems whose effectiveness is exploited and taken for granted even in the absence--or impossibility--of actual comprehension or mastery by any single, stable, self-identical subject. As Derrida will emphasize, this faith involved in my use of technological powers whose ground I do not comprehend serves to highlight, more broadly, the kind of faith or trust that proves indispensable for any system of authority--including that of a modern, rational science. The authority of any system, Derrida insists, requires what he calls a "mystical foundation," that is, a founding moment of decision that could not be dictated or justified by the system it founds, a ground, then, that is itself groundless; the decision, for example, to accept science and its rationality as authoritative, the decision that leads me to begin thinking scientifically, could not itself be dictated or justified by science; it could not be based on the authority of science itself--since, precisely, it alone gives that authority its force. Hence, even science requires faith, and all knowledge necessarily involves an element of belief. Now, this disproportion that Derrida emphasizes between scientific knowledge and technological power, which itself would highlight a kind of mystical faith that he sees at the heart of any techno-scientific performance (or, indeed, of any authoritative system whatever), proves operative today within immeasurably complex networks whose most evident symbol is, of course, the World Wide Web--a global techno-scientific network whose striking resemblances to traditional mystical worlds have been noted recently not only by leading philosophers and theorists like Derrida or Michel Serres, but also by important fiction writers such as Don DeLillo--and even by major public institutions such as the Getty Center in Los Angeles. Indeed, by exploring the complex intersections among science, technology and popular culture, a recent show at the Getty, titled "Devices of Wonder: From the World in a Box to Images on a Screen," succeeded beautifully in highlighting an often overlooked tension (and hence a coexistence) in modern thought and culture "between a disenchanted rationality and an obsession with mystifying metamorphoses," quasi-religious metamorphoses achieved, precisely, 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 "Devices of Wonder" show was able convincingly to argue that "the typically modern 'Enlightened' association of technology with secularization tends to overlook its historical role in materializing the sacred" (DW, 53)--and in making such an argument, the show managed to signal and illustrate with particular force a deep mystical tendency in the human effort to frame reality, to capture all time and space, the cosmos as a whole, in and through techno-scientific media. Such media, from the sorcerer's mirror through the lenses of telescope and microscope to the desktop processor, can indicate the operation or even the realization in technology and science of a desire, much like that found throughout the mystical traditions, to transcend space and time, to reach an omniscience or 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 comprehended or finally controlled. Taking a similar perspective on techno-scientific media in his recent book titled Angels: A Modern Myth, Michel Serres is able to interpret our global communication and transportation networks as concretely 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' techno-scientific angels would comprise, through their infinite inter-connectivity, a global techno-scientific city that Serres names "Newtown" (recalling in striking ways the "the gigantic" and the "monstrous" in Heidegger's analyses of modern science and technology. ) A kind of realized utopia, or a place that is "no-place," this techno-scientific "Newtown" would constitute "an unimaginable mediator, invisible and all-embracing, informatic, pedagogic, stable in its rapid intercommunications [...] realizing intimate proximities across immense distances. [...] [It] has its center everywhere and its circumference nowhere" (ANG, 71). If one can hear echoes of the mystical cosmos in the philosophers words here, so might one glimpse such a cosmos in Don DeLillo's recent novel Underworld, 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" (U, 808): "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 and linked, hyperlinked, this site leading to that, this fact referenced to that, a keystroke, a mouse-click, a password--world without end, amen" (U, 824-25). What do these cultural signals point to? What are we to think when American novelists, French, philosophers, and Californian museums all find themselves moved, in very similar ways, to note and reflect on apparent resemblances between our highly rationalized techno-scientific networks, on the one hand, and, on the other, historically distant mystical worlds? The resemblances, we would have to admit, are indeed striking, for by means of their seemingly infinite connectivity and comprehensive memory, which can seem together to unsettle any clear division between the local and the global or between the temporal and the timeless, our techno-scientific 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 perspectival cosmos whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere--a cosmos, in this sense, much like that thought to embody the mystical God in speculative mystics and writers throughout the West from John Scotus Eriugena in the 9th century, through Nicolaus of Cusa (1401-1464) and Giordano Bruno (1548-1600) on the eve of modernity, perhaps even into the late-modern reception and re-working of these same thinkers in the cosmic vision of James Joyce's Finnegans Wake. Perhaps more striking, then, than this quasi-mystical ubiquity and simultaneity would be another point of resemblance between our techno-scientific networks and more traditional mystical worlds--and that would be the point at which both are related intimately to processes of self-creation. Just as we human subjects can be thought constantly to re-create ourselves in and through the techno-scientific networks we build and inhabit, so for key mystical thinkers, the cosmos itself constitutes the space and time of God's own self-creation. Any number of writers, of course, including those we've just mentioned, will note the senses in which our techno-scientific systems constitute very concretely the means of our self-creation. As art historian and cultural theorist Barbara Maria Stafford indicates in the "Devices of Wonder" catalogue, the history of technology teaches us that "subjectivity is creatively modifiable, reaching outward and inward, to other beings and to the mechanisms we continually fabricate" (DW, 114); 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 astonishments. We are the astonishment. The miracle is what we ourselves produce, the systems and networks that change the way we live and think." Now, while various writers and thinkers will indeed emphasize the fact that our techno-scientific 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 techno-scientific contexts and the self-creation of God in certain mystical traditions might be understood to constitute processes founded on an essential ignorance or unknowing--and it is precisely the important function of such ignorance or unknowing within the process of self-creation that I would like to emphasize in my reflections tonight on the modern and the mystical. In other words: just as the infinitely incomprehensible God of certain mystical thinkers (Eriugena, for example) is himself created in and through the world that he creates, and just as that same God never fully comprehends himself in and through the very creation where alone he comes to know himself, so might it be that we ourselves are created and re-created today by those techno-scientific networks that we fabricate, even as we remain, in and through that very self-creation, unable fully or finally to comprehend ourselves--perhaps above all because unable to foresee what we are becoming. Now, in order to elucidate 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 associated by thinkers like Weber and Heidegger with the modern project of techno-scientific mastery, we would need to recognize the ways in which the operation of networks such as those evoked in writers like 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, including especially 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. Emphasizing especially the relational and interactive quality of our techno-scientific networks, Taylor will elucidate both the ways in which they allow "subjectivity" to extend itself by means of "objective" devices and the ways in which seemingly "objective" devices can appear to think and act more and more like "subjects." Departing from a straightforwardly instrumental conception of technology, according to which a discrete, self-contained or self-sustaining subject would manipulate some independent, objective reality by means of a objective technologies that would leave both subject and object standing apart in their apparent independence, the relational and interactive conception of technology that becomes unavoidable in today's "network culture" will recognize 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 the clear distinction between subject and object, rendering it "virtually impossible to be sure where the human ends and the machine begins." 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" (H, 325). Within his analyses of networks as complex adaptive systems, Taylor's emphasis on relation and interaction will yield two insights that are especially important to our concerns. The first insight is that subjectivity is not discrete, self-contained or self-sustaining but rather emerges and evolves within distributed 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 aThe 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 most notably by exploring the logic of "distributed" mind or intelligence. Recalling G. W. F. Hegel's understanding of "objective spirit" (MC, 230), Taylor emphasizes that information processing is something that goes on constantly throughout our natural and socio-cultural 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). From this perspective, we come to be shaped by informational currents that circulate "through us" and that "bind self and world in increasingly complex relations" (MC, 230). Today, of course, these informational currents are mediated, these relations binding self and world are embodied, by increasingly sophisticated and pervasive technologies, so that "in network culture," technology becomes "an indispensable prosthesis through which body and mind expand" (MC, 230). If understood according to the relational and interactive logic of techno-scientific interfacing, thinking and acting "subjects" are never wholly self-contained or self-identical, to the degree that they realize themselves in and through the various technological prostheses that always already extend subjective intelligence and agency "beyond" the subject, or embody the apparently "subjective" in the apparently "objective"; and likewise, as constituted relationally within techno-scientific networks, "objects" are never simply or only "objects" insofar as they themselves come to act with their own kind of intelligence--which does not simply extend but also, at the same time, re-shapes or transforms the subjective itself. As Taylor emphasizes, "this relationship is always two-way: as the body and mind extrude into the world, world intrudes into body and mind" (MC, 230-231) by means of technological prostheses and the informational currents flowing through them. Our technologies, then, act or even think on and through us just as much as we act or think on and through them--and in such a way that "the networks extruding from and into our bodies and minds form something like a technological unconscious, which, like conscious mental processes, screens information" (MC, 231). In other words, according to Taylor's analysis, we think and act through technological and informational systems--and they through us--without our being wholly conscious or in control of such thought and action. Much as Freud argued that the operations of psychic life as a whole are far more complex and extensive than the relatively limited sphere of the conscious ego's awareness and command, so Taylor argues that the individual subject of network culture never thinks and acts as a purely self-contained or self-determining entity but rather thinks and acts only in and though complex and evolving systems, networks of distributed intelligence and agency over the whole of which no subject could ever claim full comprehension or mastery. What Taylor signals here in terms of nodular subjectivity and the technological unconscious has also been taken recently by theorist Katherine Hayles to signal the emergence of a "posthuman" model of subjectivity that would render untenable the modern model of subjectivity as a self-contained or self-determining individual. Whereas modern Western thought, especially in its liberal humanist forms, would tend to presuppose an autonomous, independent subject who might seek to assume responsibility for technological mastery over its world by means of conscious agency, the posthuman perspective that Hayles elaborates would insist that "conscious agency has never been 'in control.' [...] Mastery through the exercise of autonomous will is merely the story consciousness tells itself to explain results that actually come about through chaotic dynamics and emergent structures." Along with feminist critics of science like Donna Haraway and Sandra Harding, and echoing the Heideggerian analysis of science that we noted above, Hayles will highlight the intimate ties "among the desire for mastery, an objectivist account of science, and the imperialist project of subduing nature" (PH, 288)--and she will seek to offer an alternative account within which "emergence replaces teleology; reflexive epistemology replaces objectivism; distributed cognition replaces autonomous 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 control nature" (PH, 288). From this post-human perspective, Hayles emphasizes, "subjectivity 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" (PH, 291). Decisive to this re-conception 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 extending what Derrida signals under the category of the mystical, or what Taylor names the "technological unconscious." Because "the distributed cognition of the emergent human subject correlates with [...] the distributed cognitive system as a whole, in which 'thinking' is done by both human and non-human actors" (PH, 290), each shaping the other, we humans participate everyday, Hayle rightly emphasizes, "in systems whose total cognitive capacity exceeds our individual knowledge..." (289). From this perspective, thinking occurs through us perhaps more than within us, for it occurs by means of networks wherein we are only limited--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. In a philosophy insisting that relation and communication are more fundamental than substance or being, Michel Serres likewise emphasizes this dimension of unknowing that Hayles and Taylor highlight in our techno-scientific self-creation--and through his treatment of such unknowing, Serres points us toward an understanding of the human that would account for the mystical resonance in such self-creation. From a perspective much like that of Hayles on the "posthuman," Serres has recently coined the term "hominescence" in order to name and describe precisely that techno-scientific process that, while actually bringing forth a new humanity, "does not yet know what humanity [homme] it is going to produce" (HM, 14). As Serres indicates, we now inhabit humanly-constructed and fully global systems whose cognitive and agentive capacity exceeds us and transforms us--in such a way that the self-creation we realize by means of those systems transpires always in conjunction with an insurmountable ignorance or unknowing. As suggested already in Taylor, Hayles, and Serres himself, such ignorance proves operative in forms of techno-science that fundamentally alter human relations not only to time and space, as occurs through media like the World Wide Web, but also to death and life themselves, as occurs through techno-scientific achievements like thermonuclear bombs and bioengineering--and to the degree that such achievements bestow on us a whole new responsibility for life and death themselves, a responsibility still difficult even to imagine, we are no longer passive recipients or even vigilant observers of a fixed nature "out there" but rather nature's "active architects and workers" (HM 49). Taking "nature" as a verb, one could say not only that we "are natured," as passive recipients of the given, but also that we "nature," by actively interfacing with the given so as to shape and transform it. Assuming a kind of "omni-responsibility" (HM 164) or even "omnipotence" (HM 163) known formerly only by God, we are becoming in concrete ways "our own cause, the continuous creator of our world and of ourselves" (HM 165). This passage of humanity into an "omnipotence" that, paradoxically, we do not fully comprehend or control takes place especially through the emergence of what Serres calls "world-objects"--that is, humanly fabricated "objects," devices or systems (such as the World Wide Web or the bomb ) whose scale reaches the dimensions of an entire world, creations of ours that finally exceed us, such that rather than defining and controlling them (as circumscribed objects) from a safe distance we actually live and move within them and find ourselves shaped by them: "We dwell in them as in a world" (HM, 180). In these cases, the "object" of human thought and action, like Hayle's distributed systems or Taylor's networks, would differ from any object that might be set apart and placed securely in front of the subject, defined discretely, circumscribed and hence located in such a way as to fall under the conceptual or practical hold, mastery or possession of the subject. As Serres suggests, the emergence of such "world-objects," which goes hand in hand with the irreducibly techno-scientific processes of globalization, yields indeed a "new universe" that would challenge the modern philosophy of domination and possession insofar as that philosophy is founded on a clear and stable division of the subject from the object--a division thanks to which alone the subject might hope finally to comprehend and thereby control the object. And just as the nature of "object" here changes fundamentally, so too does that of "subject." Indeed, the subject emerging in a vision like that of Serres is no longer the self-grounding or self-possessed individual subject of modern thought (Descartes, Locke, etc.) but rather a thoroughly relational and interactive "we," an irreducibly collective subject whose distributed intelligence and agency make impossible any discrete, punctual location of subject. Philosophy, then, as Serres indicates, needs urgently to re-examine its basic categories and concepts:
If, however, we are somehow losing our finitude today, if we are indeed undoing the kinds of spatial and temporal limit that have long defined us, how are we to understand the human itself--and how would such an understanding shed light on the mystical or quasi-mystical character of our techno-scientific experience? What becomes of the human in light of those networks that occupy thinkers like Tayor, Hayles, and Serres? In responding to this question, Serres highlights a gap in our constitution as human between self-knowledge and practical power--a gap that recalls at one and the same time the deepest traditions of mystical reflection and the most contemporary disjunction noted above by Derrida between our scientific knowledge and our technological know-how: As suggested in this passage, the power of humanity, its seemingly endless potential, might be understood to depend on its lack of definition or determination. Echoing mystical thinkers (going back at least to Gregory of Nyssa) who associate the incomprehensibility and the power both of God and of the human subject with their essential infinitude, Serres suggests here that the erasure of our limits by means of techno-scientific achievement would go hand in hand with the insight that we cannot in essence be defined--precisely because our limits cannot be fixed. This lack of definition, I believe, this essential indetermination of the human, is intimately related to the fact of our being self-creative beings in techno-scientific contexts as well as others--and we need to understand this relation between our indetermination and our self-creation in two directions: on the one hand, through the kind of self-creation unfolding by techno-scientific means today, we constantly undo the limits that might be taken to define us, but also, on the other hand, we become self-creative beings thanks precisely to our indetermination. Hence, from a perspective that might apply as much to modern techno-science as to mystical tradition, we do not know our essence because through self-creation we constantly unsettle the boundaries that might define or fix any essence, and, conversely, we become self-creative precisely in the measure that, or indeed because, we do not and cannot know our essence. Commentary: Harold H. Oliver It is a privilege to have the opportunity to comment on this very substantial lecture, but in view of certain time constraints I must be very selective in choosing which aspects of it to treat. The two major issues I wish to elaborate upon are what Carlson identifies as new features of contemporary culture: the emergence of a new relational dimension and the similarity of this new dimension to classical themes of mysticism. Perhaps we should treat them separately. On the theme of relationality, I shall explore whether this understanding of relational is similar to what I presented last night. As you would expect, I welcome the recognition of relational categories in the newer cultural developments. In this respect there is a substantial similarity between Carlson’s thesis and mine. We share a common devaluation of the Enlightenment’s disenchantment of the world in favor of rationality and its overemphasis upon subjectivity, “as a self-contained and self-determining individual.” We both single out Descartes for his role in discovering the modern subject which gave to modern culture its unique character. We both seek a proper re-enchantment of the world based on a disenchantment of rationalism. In elaborating the details of these common features, however, our positions seem to diverge at some points. In this lecture, by relationality Carlson means connectivity, that is, the weblike inter-connectivity of “techno-scientific networks that we fabricate,” but which finally have the effect of fabricating us. The result is a new reality, a “we” that entails humans who are no longer “subjects,” but “subject-objects” and machines which are no longer “objects,” but “”object-subjects.” He says of this new “we,” quoting Hayles, that it involves “a dynamic partnership between humans and intelligent machines [that] replaces the liberal humanist subject’s manifest destiny to dominate and control nature.” When we see how this new “we” is characterized by some of Carlson’s sources, however, it reminds us of Nietzsche’s “herd” and Heidegger’s “das Man,” the “they.” It troubles me that this techno-human “we” is primarily characterized as “omnipotent,” which suggests that relational is here understood in terms of coercive power. Listen again: “What is man? Answer: A possibility within a range of powers, potency, omnipotence, because he can become all. What is man? This range itself, this omnipotence.” To me this language resembles the “sovereign” self” of the Enlightenment rather than the relational self which on all accounts is embodied, passionate and–above all–compassionate. Here there is talk of a “we” but no “you.” Is Nature is reduced to techno-subject-objects? Where are the flora and fauna of our experience? I do not think that either Gregory of Nyssa or Heidegger would want to inhabit the world described by these neo-modern prophets of culture. Carlson gives much attention to Heidegger’s devaluation of the calculative thinking of modern science, but does not develop Heidegger’s rich “mother lode” of primal thinking. The other feature of this lecture I would like to evaluate is its thesis of the emergence of a new mysticism (Derrida) , or of something like (classical) mysticism (Carlson). Carlson’s thesis is that the new techno-scientific culture has produced “something like mysticism” in that both feature a kind of “knowing-cum-unknowabiliity” I have given some reasons for questioning the use of the term “knowledge” with respect to scientific progress, and I should like to point out that Carlson seems to vacillate between the view that the scientific “unknowable” is a “not yet knowing,” and hence different from the “unknowability” of classical mysticism, and the view that in neo-modern culture there is an “insurmountable gap of unknowing for the human subject,” which for Derrida signals the category of “the mystical” and for Taylor, the “technological unconscious,” and which for good reason may form a parallel to classical mysticism. I suppose that Carlson would argue for what Arun Balasubramaniam, professor at the National University of Singapore, in a recent article on Quantum Mechanics and Madhyamika Buddhism, would call parallels of analogy rather than parallels of identity. If so, we are to think that the new mysticism and classical mysticism are roughly similar in some noticeable ways, but dissimilar as in others. Carlson’s impeccable knowledge of classical mysticism forms the basis for much that is valuable in this lecture and lends credence to his thesis of similarity. But nothing proves an identity between them, and in the final analysis they appear to me to more dissimilar after all. In conclusion, I will add a word about the “we.” The newly proclaimed techno-scientific “we” turns out to be not the empathetic relational self of classical mysticism around the world, but a hubristic non-self intent on world mastery. Is it the case that this non-self is the Enlightenment self in a new guise? Gregory of Nyssa’s self-transcending through love is so unlike the self-creation, or self-transcendence, of the new “we” which seems to lack compassionate embodiment. And Pseudo-Dionysius’s “unknowing” based on the Sinai epiphany is so unlike the “unknowable” of the new techno-scientific “we,”both of which manifest basic finitude. To illustrate the difference I cite lines from Dionysius’ Mystical Theology. Describing the Sinai epiphany, he says that Moses did not meet God himself, but contemplates, not him who is invisible, but rather there where he dwells.He continues:
Earlier in the same text, when Pseudo-Dionsysius
calls the mystical “unknowing”(agnosia) an “unknowing”
that is “beyond unknowing”(hyperagnoston), this is a further
indication that there are fundamental differences between classical mysticism
and what is being called neo-modern mysticism.
As the token technologist here tonight, I would like to comment mostly on some technology issues raised by Prof. Carlson’s lecture. Then, as the token non-philosopher here tonight, I will close by commenting on what I see as a “common sense” or introspective reaction to some of these interesting ideas. (This is not to imply that philosophy and common sense are mutually exclusive, but I suspect it can be useful to get a “man on the street” viewpoint from time to time!) First, a couple brief notes. Arthur C. Clarke made the somewhat famous statement that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” I think this quote is particularly apropos to Prof. Carlson’s lecture – especially his comments on disenchantment. As a technologist, I am constantly being disenchanted; learning about how television and film works, for example, has taken some of the magic out of watching TV and movies. Also, I applaud Prof. Carlson’s comments regarding Derrida’s “mystical foundation,” and the implication that all knowledge, even science, requires faith. I wish this were articulated more often in popular science. My primary response to the lecture, as a computer scientist, is that I believe Prof. Carlson didn’t go far enough – his case would be stronger if he were to give more and better examples of technologies that are beginning to transform what it means to be human. The technologies that were presented in the talk as primary examples of the techno-scientific redefinition of humanity are (1) bioengineering, (2) nuclear physics (in particular the thermonuclear bomb), and (3) the World Wide Web. The first two of these are clear and obvious to me, but I take some issue with the third. The World Wide Web is a set of computer software applications – including browsers, servers, and often databases – that are built upon the infrastructure of the Internet. The Internet is the connected network of computer hardware and software that enables many applications: not only the Web, but also email, instant messaging, ftp (file transfer), videoconferencing, computer-mediated phone calls, and others. I would argue that the Web is perhaps only the third most important of these applications, after email and instant messaging. Email – not web browsing – is in fact the real “killer app” of the Internet – unless you’re under 18, in which case it’s instant messaging. Why are email and instant messaging so popular? Because they connect people. These technologies enable people to stay in touch with their families and shoot the breeze with their friends, both near and far away. They primarily serve to reinforce what it means to be human, supporting communication and community. Rather than adding to the “essential indetermination of the human,” they reinforce what it is to be human. Having said this, what I mostly mean by saying that Prof. Carlson didn’t go far enough is that there are several technologies that perhaps make the point more forcefully. That is, they certainly add to the blurring of distinction between human and machine, between individual and environment, and between subject and object. Let me list just a few: 1. Ubiquitous Computing (or, Pervasive Computing) – This is the idea that technology is receding into the background of our lives; like the air we breath, it is everywhere but we don’t notice it. When computers and sensors are everywhere and they mediate much or all of human activity, there are no visible boundaries. How will we then comprehend the distinction between individual and environment? Between man and machine? 2. Virtual Reality (VR) – Virtual Reality immerses people in computer-generated, synthetic worlds. In the ideal case, a person in a VR environment sees, hears, feels, and experiences what the computer allows him or her to. VR has been depicted in many science fiction movies and novels, and it is on the way towards becoming a mature technology (albeit slowly). 3. Artificial Intelligence (AI) – Although it has fallen out of favor in many circles in the past decade or so, there are many people still very optimistic about the prospects for reaching true human-level intelligence (and beyond) embodied in machines in the not-so-distant future. (For example, see recent books by Hans Moravec and Ray Kurzweil). This brings about a different kind of boundary blurring, directed towards others rather than the self. 4. Nanotechnology - Nanotechnology is molecular manufacturing or building things one atom or molecule at a time. It proposes the construction of novel molecular devices possessing extraordinary properties. One of the primary interests in Nanotechnology is in self-replicating manufacturing systems. As biotechnology enables us to “play God” with living things, Nanotechnology will enable us to “play God” with inanimate things (and probably living things as well). There are other technologies that would be very interesting to talk about (such as biomedical prosthetic devices and computer implants), but due to limited time I will move on. The “essential indeterminism” that Prof. Carlson describes I find somewhat unsurprising, since I believe that even without technology we are in exactly the same situation – new knowledge changes us, our bodies change over time, our cells die and are replaced, a loved one dies and we are forever changed by it, and so on. As the saying goes, “the only thing constant is change.” I suspect that most people understand this at a very fundamental level, and that technology does not alter the equation so dramatically. Finally, let me remove the hat of a computer scientist or technologist and briefly comment as a non-philosopher “man on the street”, so to speak. Despite the promise and fear that all these technologies inspire, and despite the concerns about possible blurring of subject/object boundaries, I am very confident that people can discriminate between self and machine, between self and environment, and between self and other. I expect that we will always be grounded in human relationships and in the wonder and awe of what is “out there,” external to ourselves, and that this will help to keep us from losing sight of what is essentially human. Certainly, I am a bigger and more important mystery to myself than any technology ever will be. |
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