Via Digitalis: From the Postdigital to the Hyperdigital

Acknowledgements: The research that has contributed to this article has been supported in part by a Research Fellowship of the 2022 Diverse Intelligence Summer Institute and a Research Fellowship of the William Temple Foundation. For the inspiration to think and write about the ‘hyperdigital’, I am grateful to Jenny Liu Zhang, Brandon Yip, Olivia Thomas, and the ‘How to Play with Fire’ Team of the 2022 Diverse Intelligence Summer Institute. I am also grateful for the support and accommodations provided by the MAGIS@Home Community of the Jesuit Young Adult Ministries and the Kensington Priory of Our Lady of Mount Carmel and St. Simon Stock.AbstractThe way beyond the digital can be discovered, not outside, but rather in and through the digital at its highest point. Since its introduction, the postdigital has neither been adequately defined nor scientifically demonstrated to be indefinable. If, on the contrary, the postdigital can be defined by a conceptual and genealogical analysis as a circuit of reflections upon the essential rupture of the digital, then the way that, in the digital, we calculate in writing can, in the postdigital, be assumed into a hyperbolic reflection in and from its more originary creative source. In this theological critique of Maggi Savin-Baden and John Reader’s volume Postdigital Theologies, I prosecute three theses: first, the postdigital has failed; second, postdigital theology is incompatible with Christian theology; and third, for mystical theology, the hyperdigital is the truth of the postdigital. The postdigital is not ‘ineffable’ but rather only appears indefinable because of a prior and contestable refusal to analyse the digital, as it predicates the ‘postdigital’ of the plural ‘theologies’, and as it speaks past theology. Once, however, it has been analysed into a circuit of reflections upon the rupture of the digital, the truth of the postdigital can be discovered in the hyper-negative or apophatic judgements of mystical theology. This theological critique of the postdigital has thus been written to prepare the mystical way of the digital or ‘via digitalis’ to read the digital and the postdigital on a spiritual ascent towards a hyperbolic cybernetic grammar, which, following Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, should be named the ‘hyperdigital’.