Towards transmodernism: transcendence, technospirituality, and technoculture

This thesis argues that the pervasive merging of technocultural and sacred metaphorsuncovers a longstanding Western tradition of inscribing the technologically new with thelanguage of mysticism – a transcendental excess that underlies the logic of late capitalistnotions of progress and evolution. By claiming that the transcendent moment has utterlysaturated our technological desires, preserving an originary sense of the sacred at theinventive heart of science and technology, it sees this ‘technocultural transcendence’ as amodel for thinking about an ironic return of grand narratives like metaphysics, truth, andthe absolute, used wittingly to revitalise theory just as its last gasp has (perhapsprematurely) been proclaimed.The thesis therefore also seeks to theorise an emerging ‘transmodernity,’ or the post ofpostmodernism, through critical cultural readings of key transcendent myths intechnoculture – Italian Futurism (art), cyberpunk (science fiction), cyberfeminism (film andperformance art), and Integral theory (secular transformative spirituality). Each chapteroffers examples of how the twinned concepts of transcendence and technology helpcreate the conditions for the emergence of transmodernism, and works to providepotential examples of a resulting transmodern methodology in action. Throughout thisthesis, the burgeoning desire for reconstructing what was once deconstructed,fragmented, and disavowed is examined, not to simply return past foci of theoreticalenquiry to the margins or the marginalised to the centre, but to reveal the primarymessage of transmodernism – that both deconstruction and reconstruction hold equalsignificance on a continuum of understanding socio-cultural change.Fuelled by a growing sense of the interconnectivity that occurs with the multiplicity anddiversity of information enabled by the internet, world wide web, and social networkingchannels, this thesis holds that its model of transmodernity represents interconnectivitylaid bare. It is persistent renewal and eternal return, but with a witting nod to the processof culture’s perpetual becoming. It balances postmodernism’s dance of meaninglessnesswith the return of signification and purpose, reinserting the ‘Big Questions’ back into thefields of discourse – morality, ethics, truth, beauty, spirit – while remaining wary of theirpotential to generalise