Techgnosis by Erik Davis, Harmony, $25, ISBN 0517704153
O PITY us Pentiumed Brits. Quick on gear but slow on imagination, crippled by
a sense of cultural inferiority that lends a Yankie twang to our science fiction
and a faux-Milanese sheen to our consumer durables, here we sit every networked
night in thrall to purveyors of mediocrity. UK Plus, BT Online, Demon,
beeb.com鈥攖he massed Woolworths of the global strip-mall鈥攈ow can they
hope to lead us into the New World Order?
Of course, they can鈥檛; invariably, paper best carries the Net鈥檚 promise of
transformation to the yearning masses. Shoddy reality will always pale against a
decent Utopian rhetoric. But whence should we draw our literary fix? Europe we
ignore with its lethal love of abstraction鈥攚hat Erik Davis here
comfortingly dubs 鈥淔rench-fried philosophy鈥濃�攂ut now even America, our
positivist pal, has erupted in a welter of neognostic millenarian uptalk. You鈥檒l
find some superb one-liners in this study of transcendent belief in the
information age: 鈥淎 hallucinatory bitstream whose lava-lamp flows drip into
PC Computing ad copy, fractal screen savers, virtual reality, videogame
design, and the layout of Wired.鈥� Post-Sixties gnosticism is, Davis
admits, 鈥渁 kind of Silly Putty religious stance, capable of representing any
number of different philosophies and practices鈥�, or taking 鈥渢he widespread human
intuition that something is amiss to new levels of cosmic
肠谤补苍办颈苍别蝉蝉鈥�.
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But Davis鈥檚 real task is neither to rubbish, nor to champion, this or that
fragment of the gnostic imaginary, whether it is Dianetics, Heaven鈥檚 Gate, the
New Age, Technopaganism or the Esalen Institute. Rather, he intends to explain
from what and for what these bodies, practices and beliefs arise.
When techniques of communication develop rapidly, new means of
self-expression are born. The speculations they inspire鈥攖echnical and
cultural鈥攖end to Utopianism. These Utopian speculations promote in turn
the development of new technologies. And, says Davis, 鈥淗owever much we aspire to
embody the rationalism of our machines, we cannot escape this feedback loop
between techne and dream.鈥� He recalls the way a visitor to Leibnitz鈥檚 famous
giant thinking machine would find nothing inside but cogs and wires鈥攁nd
certainly no mysteriously embodied 鈥渢hought鈥�. So much for the dreams of today鈥檚
Extropians, those cybernetics enthusiasts who would use cutting-edge technology
to strip away their emotional and carnal 鈥渋nefficiencies鈥�, the better that
鈥渢hey鈥� (what 鈥渢hey鈥�, after such a stripping?) might more easily be translated
into silicon a few years hence.
Davis roots this looping history of technological Utopianism and
transcendentalist belief on the firm foundation provided by David Noble鈥檚 recent
book The Religion of Science鈥攁n account of the disproportionate
influence Freemasonry has had on the development of Western technology,
continuing as it does monastic belief in human perfectibility through useful
works. Both men argue that technological progress and the supposed
perfectability of human kind are two sides of the same millennialist coin. But
Davis鈥檚 history is at once more idiosyncratic and more ambitious than Noble鈥檚,
taking in the 鈥渆lectric imaginary鈥� of Mesmer and Tesla, the mythic influence of
Hermes Trismegistus, and even the inventions of 1st-century Alexandrian
tinkerer Heron, whose delightful proposal for 鈥淎 Sacrificial Vessel That Flows
Only When Money Is Introduced鈥� goes a long way to embodying Davis鈥檚 favourite
cultural contradiction, the unresolvable dialogue between materialism and
spirituality.
Davis draws from many sources and quotes them generously (even the most
disaffected reader will be rewarded with a huge and hugely enjoyable reading
list), but there is nothing frayed or secondhand about Davis鈥檚 study. For a
start, there is the sheer exuberance of the writing. Davis draws parallels
between the sects of today and classical mystery cults, gives an account of
Middle-Ages fantasy from the Renaissance to the roleplay games of Dungeons &
Dragons, and draws equivalences between Aristotle鈥檚 memory palaces, Foucault鈥檚
analysis of the Victorian prison panopticon and a recent German VR simulation of
planet Earth called T-Vision.
Davis has no time for Luddism. That in their frantic desire for
transcendence, today鈥檚 gnostic seekers, self-aware or inadvertent, are seen
repeating well-worn intellectual and spiritual mistakes is not Davis鈥檚 main
point. More worrying developments are taking place: a thinly disguised social
Darwinism is moving once more to the forefront of Western culture鈥攁 belief
that 鈥渢he market itself will act as an enormous selection mechanism, naturally
sifting innovative humans from the unambitious ones, the superbrights from the
slothful, the transhuman from the luckless and all-too-human鈥�.
In light of this, Davis does not berate latter-day gnostics for their
optimistic belief in human perfectability and/or spiritual escape, nor does he
expect the world to altogether break its cycle of utopian speculation and
technological progress; he simply asks us to recognise that such a cycle
persists. Only then, in a spirit of humility and humour, can we 鈥渞evivify the
social imagination, a revival that may very well demand a rekindling of some
basic `religious鈥� convictions about the purpose of life and the value of
individual souls鈥�.
Davis draws from familiar sources to exemplify this point. Considerable
insight, for once, has gone into Davis鈥檚 passages on Hesse, Teilhard and William
Gibson. And his brief appreciation of much-plundered science fiction writer
Philip K. Dick is the best theological analysis yet written, and a moving salute
to Dick鈥檚 humane concerns.
But it is Davis鈥檚 own humanity that lends Techgnosis its lasting
value. He measures his cast of latter-day seekers, mystics, visionaries, poets
and loons, not against an arbitrary ideological yardstick, but in a spirit of
open-minded ethical inquiry.
Consider, for example, the members of Heaven鈥檚 Gate, who committed suicide in
1997 believing death would free them from a life that was, they declared, a mere
30-minute holodeck training session. For them, suicide was an act of travel. It
was a means of beaming aboard the bridge of an alien 鈥減leroma鈥�, a
more-real-than-real craft that was鈥攖hanks to poor image-handling and bad
newsprint reproduction鈥攑erceived shadowing the comet Hale-Bopp.
Davis treats these dead voyagers seriously, interpreting the pop-cultural
references with which they surrounded themselves to reveal the gnostic core of
their beliefs. It is solely at this deadly serious level that he is prepared to
analyse, criticise and judge their act, with a passage full of melancholy
sympathy: 鈥淧erhaps the most remarkable and least-noticed aspect of the cult鈥檚
farewell tapes,鈥� Davis observes, 鈥渨as their backdrop: a green and succulent
garden soaking up the lazy southern Californian sun, with a chorus of songbirds
proclaiming the return of spring. It was as if these men and women were
subliminally telling us what the Marcionites proclaimed almost two millennia
ago: that even natural paradise is a simulacrum, a trap for the luminous beings
we are.鈥�