The Neognostic Myth in Cyberspace

Abstract

The subject of the study is the functioning of the neognostic myth in cyberspace. Such aspects of the topic as the relationship between religion and the Internet from a non-instrumental point of view on technology are considered in detail. Digital and network technologies are seen as a modern repository of religious beliefs, and not as tools for proselytizing or proclaiming the good news. With the help of an archaeological approach to technical media, the author proposes to determine the deep times of the digital disclosure of technological mysticism, depending on a specific technical materiality characterized by wireless networks and mobile devices. Currently, there are trends in world culture towards the construction of a syncretic myth, which contains elements of the dying Christian paradigm and trends introduced into it from the outside or emerging again. The categorical apparatus developed in the discourse of postmodern aesthetics makes it possible to apply such methods as phenomenological, discursive, hermeneutic and archetypal analysis to the analysis of visual culture. In the study of visual neognostic myth, the concepts of archetypal models, plots, cliches, the theory of the evolution of symbols, general cultural positions of psychoanalysis and the concept of myth are used. The main conclusions of the study are as follows. Gnostic epistemology underlies the imagination of cyberspace. There is a constant in the history of the West that Eric Davis calls "techno-gnosis." In this regard, cybergnosis would be only the latest incarnation of a profound phenomenon. In the world of cyberculture, technognosis manifests itself in hacker ethics, cyberpunk literature, science fiction films and video games. With the help of an archaeological approach to technical media, the deep moments of the digital are determined, showing that there is a technological mysticism in video games that depends on a specific materiality. The new metamodern perception of the world recognizes not only the possibility of perceiving various logical and irrational paradigms of the world order and gaining knowledge about it, but also gives a positive connotation to pluralism itself, when diversity becomes more desirable than truth, which is characteristic of cyberspace. The novelty of the research lies in the fact that the research is the basis for the formation of a clear conceptual understanding of the phenomenon of the neognostic myth in its visual form (as opposed to verbal) as a dynamic cultural model generated by digital art strategies and implemented today in media culture.