Via Digitalis: From the Postdigital to the Hyperdigital

The 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’.

Postdigital Science and Education (2023) 5:823-850 Accordingly, the 'postdigital condition' is characterised as an 'interrelationship' between three terms: humanity, technologies, and theologies (Savin-Baden and Reader 2022: p. xii). As an interrelationship, the postdigital is considered to be not a singular but rather a plural concept of contextual practices, in which such practices always remain fluid. In this fluid exchange of practices, the postdigital is loosely characterised as the 'blending [of] the person, the digital, and machines', in an intermixture of all with all (Savin-Baden and Reader 2022: p. 6). At these outermost margins, the concept has been evacuated of its definitive meaning into a plastic and fluid context, in which all scientific knowledge of the postdigital has been represented upon the unthinkable stage of external and empirical practice.
In this external plurality, the elements of cybernetic grammar have been freely intermixed and dispersed into a chaotic assemblage of materially entangled relations. The postdigital can be characterised as a transcendental 'condition' of the interrelationship of humanity, technologies, and theologies as its circuit of reflections upon the rupture of the digital is hypostasised as the determinative force that shapes the relationality of cybernetics in society (Savin-Baden and Reader 2022: p. xii, 9). Since, however, this 'interrelationship' could only be as meaningful as its key terms, yet none of these terms has been dialectically analysed, and no further definition has been forthcoming, the definite meaning of the concept has been evacuated, even as the initial ambiguity of the postdigital has been chaotically ramified across all conceivable relations (Savin-Baden and Reader 2022: p. xii).
This evacuation of the concept into a sheer external plurality of relations has resulted from the editors' deliberate refusal to clearly define the postdigital. Since Socrates against the Sophists, an understanding of a word has been held to require a higher analysis, in which, from within a common genus, specific elements are divided and combined to explain its meaning (Plato 1961: Meno 79d, p. 362;Phaedrus 263a, p. 508;Sophist 218c, p. 960;Aristotle 1984: Topics 1.4.101b11-1.5.102b25, p. 169;cf. Charles 2010). Definition has since been regarded as a basic logical criterion for scientific knowledge: for if a word cannot be shown to mean one thing and not another, no judgement could be known to be true that is not also false, and no argument could be held to be valid that is not also liable to be invalidated by a consequent fallacy of equivocation (Aristotle, Posterior Analytics, 1.4., 1.8., 1.22., 73a21-27, 75b31-32, 82b36-84a26, pp. 118, 122, 124, 135;cf. Robinson 1950). And since, furthermore, such an argument that could be invalidated could not be held to be the certain ground of knowledge, no rigorous scientific discourse could be sustained as long as definitions are refused.
Originating in artistic rather than philosophical currents, the 'postdigital' has typically been illustrated with an assorted list of descriptions (see Jandrić, MacKenzie, and Knox 2022;Cramer 2015). For example, Reader and Savin-Baden list among the 'diverse understandings' of the postdigital: a disenchantment with information systems; a continuation of digital cultures; a blurred relationship between the analogue and the digital; the emergence of technoscience systems; the convergence of nano, biological, information, and cognitive science; the emergence of postdigital humans; the condition of the world after computerization; and the emergence of postdigital ecopedagogies (Reader and Savin-Baden 2021: pp. 681-682). As informative as such inventories may 1 3 initially seem, this prolific variety of descriptions has served not only to confuse but arguably also to further conceal from scholarly attention the embarrassing absence of any singular and scientific definition of the postdigital.
The central lacuna of postdigital studies has thus resulted from the absence of such an essential definition of the postdigital. In contrast to a simple list of attributes, an essential definition is an explanation not only of what it can but also of what the definiendum must mean: for, as 'the what it is' (to ti esti), essence (essentia) is the specific form, in which all attributes are assumed in so as to proceed of necessity from the identity of a single idea; and, as a spoken expression of such an idea, a definition is an explanation of 'what it is', in which the meaning of a word can first be analysed from complex into simpler elements and then assembled to explain both what it means and what it does not mean (Aristotle 1984: Metaphysics 7.4.1030a18-1030a26, pp. 1644-1645. According to this more rigorous criterion, the postdigital has never been adequately defined. It has, instead, often been acknowledged as 'hard to define' because, as 'both a rupture in our existing theories and their continuation' (Jandrić et al. 2018: p. 894), it appears to be a term of art that 'resists any final definition' (Jandrić and Ford 2022: p. 707).
This resistance to definition can, however, be argued to have resulted from a series of philosophical mistakes that have disastrously foreclosed any higher reading of the digital for theology. For in withholding this circuit of reflections upon the rupture of the digital from dialectical analysis, the postdigital can neither be analysed into nor defined as a specific mode of cybernetic grammar under the more generic ideas of cyberneticism, mechanism, and the externally projected spiritual organs of the syllogism (Kant 2000: § § 69-72, 78, pp. 257-263, pp. 279-284;2004: pp. 75-92;Hegel 2010Hegel : pp. 631-644, 1991cf. Kapp 2018). In contrast to Romantic Idealist mechanics from Kant and Hegel, the postdigital has tended to be studied after Negroponte and Cascone as a quasi-empirical assemblage of materially entangled relations. Following Jacques Derrida and Gilles Deleuze, it has suspended this reflection of analysis in favour of, expressly in Reader, a 'differential ontology', which privileges difference over identity, and attempts to differentiate the meaning of being from nothing (Reader 2017: p. 12;cf. Derrida 1973: pp. 151-152;Deleuze 1994: pp. 28-69). The rhetoric of the postdigital has thus been held captive by a succession of postmodern voices, on whose questionable authority the negation of reflection that is designated by the prefix 'post-' of the 'postdigital' identically reproduces and tragically recirculates the violent rupture of the digital across the radically immanent and virtual terrain of materially entangled relations. Since, however, in such a differentiation from nothing, the postdigital would either surreptitiously render nothing as something or make no difference at all, we can, with a higher hope, begin to critically reverse this suspension of analysis upon the digital.
The publication of Postdigital Theologies: Technology, Belief, and Practice first raised postdigital questions of theology. It asks absolute questions of 'the relationship between the postdigital and theologies' (Savin-Baden and Reader 2022: p. xii). And it invites theological reflections on postdigital approaches to the central doctrinal questions of God, the Trinity, the Holy Spirit, and the Kingdom of God (Savin-Baden and Reader 2022: p. xii). Yet in spite of its pious ambitions, Postdigital Theologies spectacularly fails to pursue these advertised theological questions of the postdigital. It questions theology from the standpoint of the postdigital, without, in a reciprocal way, investigating theological questions of the origin, ground, and truth of the postdigital. In thus assuming the postdigital as the subject and theologies as the object of critique, it privileges a secular rhetoric of the postdigital over the revelatory and ecclesial sources of theology. And, in assuming this standpoint of secular reason against the revelatory ground of sacred doctrine and mystical theology, it ultimately recapitulates the colonial domination of the cybernetic systems that continuously recirculate the ontological violence of the digital. This volume can thus be shown to have unwittingly accomplished the precise opposite of the purpose that it had set out to achieve. For rather than deconstructing the relationship between the postdigital and theologies, and reconstituting theology on the reciprocating influence of humanity and the digital, Savin-Baden and Reader have achieved little more than to have collected a medley of theological voices into a circuit of reflections that cycles through the relationality of the digital at the rupture of its incompleteness. In collecting a circuit of reflections that pivot upon this point of rupture, they have recirculated the violence of the digital among all materially entangled relations. In circulating the violence of the digital, they have expanded rather than achieving a genuine escape from the hegemony of digital systems. And, in collecting such an ensemble of theological voices to comment upon without critiquing the postdigital, they have ultimately suspended the truth of theology within a secular correlation of sacred to profane rhetoric -one that would ultimately relegate the voice of theology to the role merely of singing ancestral hymns in praise of the postdigital.
The lasting value of Postdigital Theologies will reside less in its answers than in its questions that deserve to be asked again. For in having once neglected to demonstrate its own definition, the meaning of the postdigital can again be contested with a more rigorous counter-definition. The rhetoric of the postdigital can thus be shown to have opened a window of absolute reflection upon the rupture of the digital, not only for art, but also for religion and theology. In gesturing beyond the immanent frame of the digital, the genuine religious calling of the postdigital is now to escape beyond, not only the 'binarism' of the digital, but also beyond any fixed opposition of the digital and the postdigital. And, in asking the most absolute questions, not only of God, but also, through him, of the entire system of philosophical science, including the cybernetic grammar of computers, a cry from the wilderness once suppressed will be heard again to echo beyond the conditions of its neglect.
In answer to this call, this article will seek, in general, to recollect the forgotten theological assumptions of the postdigital and, in particular, to critique Postdigital Theologies (Savin-Baden and Reader 2022) for its manifest failure to develop a theological critique of the postdigital. Since, as the following arguments will demonstrate, the postdigital can be more rigorously defined as a circuit of reflections that pivot upon the essential rupture of the digital, and, in recapitulating the violence of the digital, also falsifies its truth, the postdigital considered by itself is false, even as its truth can be assumed into and preserved in the hyperbolic cybernetic grammar of digital computers, which, following Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, we, the 'How to Play with Fire' team, propose to name the 'hyperdigital'.
Pursuant of this theological critique, this article will prosecute three theses: 1. The postdigital has failed. 2. Postdigital theology is incompatible with Christian theology. 3. For mystical theology, the hyperdigital is the truth of the postdigital.
The signature negation of the postdigital will thus be shown to designate a hypernegative or apophatic judgement of cybernetic grammar that is ever assumed into the hyperbolic arcs of mystical theology. Where the prefix 'post-' of the 'postdigital' indicates a circuit of empty reflections upon the rupture of the digital, the prefix 'hyper-' of the 'hyperdigital' indicates a higher or hyperbolic reflection upon the creative source and free accelerating use of the digital. Hence, the hyperdigital can be doubly contrasted with the 'digital', which scripts the algebraic calculation of mechanical operations, and the 'postdigital', which reflects upon an indefinite bricolage of conceptually evacuated relations of material entanglement. The way that, in the digital, we calculate in writing can, in the postdigital, be collected from this circuit of reflections, and spoken of as given in the hyperbolic cybernetic grammar of the hyperdigital. The hyperdigital ever calls for a journey of the spirit to and from this more originary creative source of the digital. This article has thus been written to prepare the reader to pursue the mystical way of the digital, that is, the via digitalis, on which we may discover the hidden and holy mysteries of God shining through the calculations of computers.

The Postdigital Has Failed
The meaning of the postdigital must be understood by a higher dialectical analysis of its circuit of reflections upon the rupture of the digital in and for the hyperdigital. The 'digital' is the cybernetic grammar of computers, in which the objective production of cybernetic engines is infinitely decomposed into the sheer and simple oscillation of binary opposites, which, as binary digits, are combined in algebraic calculations of all possible mechanical operations. Where the 'analogue' calculates the measure of continuous motion, the 'digital' calculates in this discrete binary algebra to script the programme of its subsequent mechanical operations. Since, furthermore, this calculation of algebra is formally independent of the continuous motion of matter and machines, the digital computer can assume the form of analogue computing as a virtual product of its free algebraic calculations. In such a leap beyond the analogue, digital computers can more freely calculate in writing to create a world. For in calculating to assemble the forms of mechanical force in motion, computers recursively script the programme of their own self-assembly and, in a cybernetic poetry, create virtual worlds of simulated media. As Wassily Kandinsky writes: 'the creation of the work of art is the Creation of the world ' (1913: p. 363).
In computers, this scripted assembly of creating, or poesis, is also a way of knowing, that is, of gnosis. For since the digital assumes to create in calculating finite analogue from infinite digital computing, and such calculations can be discretely analysed, the cybernetic grammar of the digital produces judgements of the world that are posited as true. In contrast to formal and transcendental logic, the judgements of computers are neither subjective nor objective, but rather the objectified production of subject-predicate combinations (Harris 1987: pp. 23-25, pp. 89-104). For, even in the ostensible absence of a singular and free self-consciousness, computers can nevertheless be observed to materially reflect from lines of finite analogue to infinite circuits of digital computing, recycle this negative unity of reciprocating operations, and, thereby, combine in subjects of coherent assemblage the predicates of all such productive operations. The copula of this subject-predicate combination is the expanding cybernetic circuit, which recycles from the digital computations at its core to the periphery of its human, social, and dialogic use. Shining from within this copula, the truth of computational judgements can be known by the coherence of its self-assemblage in the algebraic and logical consistency of its scripted mechanical operations.
The 'postdigital' is distinguished by its reflection upon what Kim Cascone has called the 'failure' of the digital (2000: p. 13). This failure is an expression of the essential 'rupture' of the digital to calculate in writing to create and know a world. The essential rupture of the digital is the explosion of a contradiction that is grammatically articulated in and by the generic idea of cyberneticism. This rupture is at first transcendental, but finally, and accidentally, manifested in the material failures of cybernetic systems. It results, essentially, from the contradiction of each singular calculation of mechanical operations that stand in and against the universal ground of its original possibility: for each algebraic calculation of geometrical motion is singular; this singular calculation is one among infinitely many alternative calculations; and, in enacting one singular against the universality of all possible calculations, it holds the singular in a pure opposition or contradiction against the universal, which is the more originary metaphysical ground of possibility from whence it proceeds.
This rupture of the digital can then be manifested accidentally in the material glitch, system-crash, and entropic dissolution of recycling mechanical operations. Geoff Cox describes such 'ruptures' as 'neither absolute nor synchronous but instead operate as asynchronous processes', which, as transcendental or logical contradictions, are transcribed by digital systems 'at different speeds and over different periods' in 'each affected context ' (2014: p. 71). The material consequence of this formal contradiction is the 'crash' of a material computer, in which, in a falsification of its truth, the recycling operations of cybernetic engines are negatively released from the coherent assemblage of its productive operations. In constructing a world that crashes, and automatically repeating this cycle of destruction, the digital can be rendered nihilistically as a cybernetic grammar of ontological violence, as it percussively inscribes in each singular calculation the pure opposition of oscillating binaries in and against the universal space of possible ways to calculate and write of the world as true.
The 'postdigital' can initially be defined as a circuit of reflections upon this essential rupture of the digital from one site of its failure to the next across the categories of art, religion, and all materially entangled relations. As such, it should not be understood as simply an isolated reflection of judgement from the site of this rupture, but rather, and more rigorously, as the collection of all such reflections into a circuit of reflective judgments, in which any one reflection leads to another, and altogether remains negatively united by nothing more than the axial rotation of all such empty and indeterminative reflections around the rupture and violence of the digital. The prefix 'post-' of the 'postdigital' can then be read to designate either a neo-analogue control of digital computers by analogue machines or a passing moment of offline reserve from the totalizing control of digital computation (Berry and Dieter 2015: pp. 5-6; Sinclair and Hayes 2019: pp. 129-130). It attempts 'to grapple with the immersive and disorienting experiences of computational infrastructure', of the 'postmodern condition', as 'connected instances of an effort to collectively develop concepts that reflect on the non-noetic aspect of the digital' (Berry and Dieter 2015: p. 4). It can be characterised as the grammar of 'agnotology', which sceptically 'undermine[s] structures of reflection and critique', including any dialectical analysis of the digital or the postdigital (Berry and Dieter 2015: p. 5). And it can, for Florian Cramer, not 'be understood in a purely Hegelian sense' as a dialectical supersession of the digital but rather 'as an antidote to techno-Hegelianism', in which the prefix 'post-' indicates an inconceivable pivot in a passage to the other, to the analogue, or to the neo-analogue (Cramer 2015: pp. 15-16).
Following this evacuation of the postdigital into a circuit of empty reflections, the truth of any singular judgement appears to be suspended by a plural, and negative judgement of infinite relations, such that, to speak of the singular is at once to negate any singular judgement as it stands open before the infinite. In negating the singular before the infinite, the postdigital can be momentarily withheld from dialectical analysis and spoken of in the infinite unknowing of negative or apophatic theology, as though it were 'essentially ungraspable' (Reader and Savin-Baden 2021: p. 682). Yet since even this rupture could be simulated, and all the reflections of the postdigital could be controlled by the digital, even this critical 'failure' of the postdigital can ultimately be said to have 'failed' (Cascone and Jandrić 2021: p. 570). Its failure is, moreover, not simply a contingent historical development but, as the following will show, a necessary consequence of this circuit of reflections upon the rupture of the digital, in which the negativity of its empty reflections is infinitely repeated to destroy the higher ground for a scientific analysis and definition of the postdigital. Neither the digital nor the postdigital can, for these authors, be adequately defined because this indeterminable reflection upon the essential rupture of the digital would thereafter seem to subvert the conditions for the production of all demonstrable and definitive knowledge.
Even, however, in the absence of an essential definition, the meaning of the word 'postdigital' can be reconstructed by recollecting its earliest use. For although 'the concept of the postdigital deliberately defies any attempts at definition', many scholars have nonetheless acknowledged that 'its history and genealogy strongly determine its research practices' (Jandrić, MacKenzie, and Knox 2022: p. 4). We can, with a genealogical analysis, begin to recall the essential meaning of the postdigital in the course of its ensuing development by recollecting its defining elements from among the founding voices of the postdigital. Nicholas Negroponte (1998) first suggested a way 'beyond the digital' to describe a condition of art that escapes the digital, in which, he suggests, 'being digital will be noticed only by its absence, not its presence', hidden behind its foreground operations. He writes: 'Face it -the Digital Revolution is over … Computers will be a sweeping yet invisible part of our everyday lives … But the really surprising changes will be elsewhere' beyond the digital (Negroponte 1998). At the point of its utmost saturation, the process of becoming digital, that is, of digitalisation, passes away, as the meaning of the digital subsides into a technical medium of aesthetic possibilities that continuously escape its grasp.
The 'postdigital' is, in Robert Pepperell and Michael Punt's The Postdigital Membrane, first introduced as a rejection of 'the implied conceptual shift of the "digital revolution"', which, as in Negroponte, is founded on the '"on/off", "zero/one" [binary] logic of the machines now pervading our daily lives' (Pepperell and Punt 2000: p. 2). They aim to 'avoid binarism' by reflecting beyond this operational circuit of cybernetic grammar to a higher ground of 'more flexible metaphors', which could preserve 'the very unpredictability and ambiguity of human experience' (Pepperell and Punt 2000: p. 14). 'Binarism' can be avoided by a higher reflection that 'negate[s] the binary opposition between "mystical" and "material" stances on observed phenomena', abstracts beyond the univocal 'categories of logic, reason, and the binary', and analyses the circuit of its operations to ascend to and from the more originary creative source of the digital (Pepperell and Punt 2000: pp. 123, 157). Since 'there are many aspects of reality that resist rational encoding', and yet 'the digital computer will never transcend binarism', Pepperell and Punt recommend a higher reflection 'beyond the immediate locus of the human body' in and from the more originary source of the digital (Pepperell and Punt 2000: p. 164).
This early theological trajectory was, however, abruptly suppressed in Kim Cascone's more influential announcement of the postdigital. Against the theological vision of Marshall McLuhan, he concludes 'the medium is no longer the message'-no longer the essential locus of artistic creativity (Cascone 2000: p. 12). Rather, 'specific tools themselves' for making meaning from the digital 'have become the message' (Cascone 2000: p. 12). He identifies the precise rupture of the digital with the '"failure" of digital technology', which is expressed in 'glitches, bugs, application errors, system crashes, clipping, aliasing, distortion, and quantization noise' (Cascone 2000: p. 13). However, Cascone recommends 'a more deconstructionist approach', in which there is a 'clear indication that contemporary computer music has become fragmented', as it is 'composed of stratified layers' of audio tracks 'that intermingle and defer meaning' from one expression to the next, 'until the listener takes an active role in the production of meaning' (Cascone 2000: p. 17). In this active role, the user can critically reflect from the fragmentary layers of conflicting meaning to discover not only the material conditions but essentially also the formal or virtual conditions of its consistent operations.
Since its introduction, the meaning of the postdigital has continued to be contested. Sy Taffel has acknowledged a variety of 'contradictory meanings', including those of 'return to the analog', 'rematerialization', 'escape', 'historicism', and 'revelation' (Taffel 2016: p. 325). Christine Sinclair and Sarah Hayes have critiqued the prefix 'post-' in the 'postdigital', and acknowledged 'that the digital takes place in a material world as well as a virtual one', in which matter can be freely calculated and communicated in digital media (Sinclair and Hayes 2019: p. 130). Florian Cramer and Petar Jandrić have further argued that 'the attribute "postdigital" doesn't make much sense any more since almost all art, except mainstream gallery and collector art, has become postdigital in that sense' of 'transcending older divides between "contemporary art" and "digital art"' (Cramer and Jandrić 2021: p. 979). Hence, Cramer advises that the 'postdigital' can at best 'help to complicate the terms "digital" and "analogue"' in the 'humanities and social sciences', such that the 'post' of the 'postdigital' passes after the digital to that which is other than the digital-not only to the non-digital or the neo-analogue, but perhaps also to the more originary creative source of the digital (Cramer and Jandrić 2021: p. 984).
Two decades after his initial article, Cascone has now acknowledged that the 'failure' of the postdigital has itself failed. For, he writes, the 'failure [of the postdigital has] itself failed when corporate media appropriated its stylistic visual and sonic signifiers' (Cascone and Jandrić 2021: p. 570). As the 'rupture', 'glitch', and 'failure' of the digital could be simulated, reproduced, and quarantined as little more than an anodyne interruption of its recycling motion, the critical escape that had been promised by the postdigital could ever again be captured and controlled under the hegemony of digital systems. And, as a circuit of reflections upon this rupture of the digital, the postdigital could thereafter only be momentarily transcribed across these channels of digital communication in which it is reproduced by digital computation.
After the postdigital is reproduced by the digital, there can, in contrast to Savin-Baden and Reader's too literal periodization, remain no coherent 'postdigital condition', regardless of whether this is conceived as a transcendental hypothesis or as a historical era of cybernetics, education, or theologies (Savin-Baden and Reader 2022: p. xii). Rather, the term 'postdigital' 'sucks and is counter-intuitive because', Cramer writes, 'we are not living in postdigital times in any literal sense' but rather and only in a passing aesthetic critique of digital art (Cramer and Jandrić 2021: p. 984). As, however, critique is but the catalyst for assimilation in a more universal assemblage, 'any critique or subversion that is not subsumed and de-toothed [could] then buried in the amnesia of media news cycles and social media' (Cascone and Jandrić 2021: p. 573). Hence, Cascone acknowledges the ideas 'put forth in "Aesthetics of Failure" seem quaint today' (Cascone and Jandrić 2021: p. 573).
Although announced with irony, this 'failure of the failure' is not simply a contingent historical event that could possibly have been otherwise. Rather, it is an essential and necessary consequence of the unstable concept of the postdigital itself. The postdigital has not been defined because the rhetoric of the postdigital has so far resisted a definition of its subject. In resisting definition, it has continued to fund research and writing that obstinately refuses to acknowledge its own critical obsolescence. Since a definition is required for any subsequent demonstration, this deliberate resistance to definition strategically withholds the concept of the postdigital from criticism. Yet in characterising the postdigital as 'essentially ungraspable', it would either paradoxically offer an essential definition of the postdigital as indefinable or merely offer a partial description of the postdigital as difficult to define (see for example Reader and Savin-Baden 2021: p. 682; Savin-Baden and Reader 2022: pp. xii, xix, 6). Such agnostic gestures tend unwittingly to reify the ignorance that results from a neglect of analysis in the vain guise of knowing that which is unknowable. Since, however, the former definition of that which is indefinable is clearly absurd, while the latter difficulty can be surpassed by further analysis, nothing now prevents us from offering a counter-definition of the postdigital for theology.
Clues of this higher theological meaning can be uncovered through a genealogical analysis of the founding voices of the postdigital. As this brief genealogical survey has recollected, the postdigital had, in Negroponte, been defined, not by the presence but rather by the absence of digital computation that passes over the horizon of its incomplete realisability (1998); in Pepperell and Punt, as an absolute reflection beyond the 'binarism' of the digital to the more originary creative source of the digital (2000); and, in Cascone, as an aesthetic reflection to 'deconstruct' fragmentary layers of deferred meaning (2000). This circuit of reflections had, in Cascone, been momentarily suspended in a 'deconstruction' of the digital, in which the negations, 'failures', or 'glitches' of the digital could be spoken of, not beyond but rather under a circuit of oscillating contraries. Since, however, as Pepperell and Punt (2000) had pregnantly indicated, the higher theological meaning of the postdigital had been to 'negate the binary opposition between the "mystical" and the "material"', this absolute reflection beyond the 'binarism' of the digital can be assumed into the hyperbolic arcs of mystical theology as it promises to escape capture under the immanent frame of material entanglement.
Once defined, it is now possible to demonstrate why the postdigital has failed. For if the cybernetic grammar of the digital can be analysed into an essential rupture, the postdigital can be analysed into a circuit of reflections upon this rupture. The postdigital is, in one sense, continuous with the digital, as a specific intensification of its variously deferred reflections, and, in another sense, an escape from the digital, as it reflects on this essential rupture to pass beyond the digital. Hence, it can be conceived as neither simply identical to nor different from the digital, even as, in collecting these reflections into a circuit that rotates around the rupture of the digital, the postdigital stands in an indirect and adventitious relation to the digital. Like amino acids at the release from the composition of all finite components, it collects these reflections into a circuit of reflections, which nevertheless sustain a negative unity of irreducible complexity in recycling from one reflection to the next. Yet since even this circuit of reflections can be calculated, virtually produced, and simulated under the control of digital systems, the critical escape from the digital that is advertised by the postdigital can be captured by and virtually reproduced in digital systems. Hence, Florian Cramer detects a performative contradiction in the rhetoric of the postdigital, in that, while rejecting 'new' digital media, the postdigital had nevertheless tacitly employed and 'relied on it' (Cramer 2015: p. 24). In performing this contradiction, the postdigital cedes the critical standpoint for its definitive self-understanding to the authority of materialist cybernetics, surrenders its trajectory of escape to the hegemony of digital systems, and infinitely repeats in an indeterminable circuit of reflections the violent rupture of the digital.
Rather than escaping from the digital, the postdigital thus represents an apocalyptic rhetoric of the latent ontological violence of the digital. For, in collecting from this rupture a circuit of reflections, the postdigital recycles without genuinely escaping from the essential rupture of the digital. Hence, Cramer acknowledges the postdigital as a 'post-apocalyptic' condition, in which 'the initial upheaval caused by the computerization and global digital networking of communication, technical infrastructures, markets and geopolitics' is deferred to an unknown aftermath, in which the world that has crashed can be recreated (2015: p. 15). In constructing a world that crashes and automatically repeating this cycle of destruction, the digital carries a trace reminder of violence against the order of being. And in collecting this cycle of destruction into a circuit of reflections and expanding this circuit to encompass all metaphorical relations, the rhetoric of the postdigital can be convicted for having expanded the ontological violence of the digital to a broader horizon of offline and neo-analogue relations.
Postdigital Theologies (Savin-Baden and Reader 2022) can now be specifically prosecuted for apotheosising the violence of the digital in the genre of theology. For, in collecting a circuit of reflection that rotates around the rupture of the digital, and predicating this circuit as postdigital to God, the editors appear to have attributed to God the ontological violence of the digital. In attributing violence to God, they would envision a malevolent deity who creates, not only the condition for, but also the constitution of evil in itself (malum in se), cascading through descending circuits from the general idea of cyberneticism to the cybernetic grammar of the digital. And, in arraying this production of digital evil in opposition to the higher ground of its abiding truth, they would ultimately suspend the sufficient ground of reason for a scientific demonstration and definition of the postdigital. Since, however, the negation that is indicated by the prefix 'post-' of the postdigital can be rendered, not simply nihilistically as a pure difference from nothing, but also, as Pepperell and Punt had suggested, beyond the 'binary opposition between the "mystical" and the "material"', the postdigital can be more rigorously defined as a hyper-negative or apophatic judgement that escapes capture under an immanent frame of material entanglement (2000: p. 123).

Postdigital Theology is Incompatible with Christian Theology
Once predicated of theology, the 'failure' of the postdigital has been absolutised in Postdigital Theologies (Savin-Baden and Reader 2022). Although advertised as a theological study of the postdigital, its failure to analyse the digital has allowed the postdigital to be written in a style that abruptly silences its promised theological voice. For the purpose of 'deconstructing' the relation of the postdigital to theology, John Reader presents a dialectical argument against two 'ideal types' of understanding the relation of the digital to God: the 'instrumental approach', in which external predication renders digital technology as an extrinsic tool; and the 'deterministic approach', in which internal predication holds humans to be shaped by the digital (Savin-Baden and Reader 2022: p. 60). As an example of the instrumental approach, he reads Pope Francis to have attributed the digital to God as an external instrument of God in creation (Savin-Baden and Reader 2022: pp. 60-61). And, as an example of the deterministic approach, he reads Ryan Haecker to have subsumed 'the digital as a component of divine Creation without remainder' (Savin-Baden and Reader 2022: pp. 62-72; cf. Haecker 2019). Each of these 'ideal types' is held to have denied the reciprocal shaping of the digital by the human and the human by the digital.
Against these ideal types, Reader offers three arguments (Savin-Baden and Reader 2022: p. 62). First, he argues that to attribute the human sub-creation of technical artefacts such as digital computers to a divine act of creation is implicitly 'to attribute moral value to machines'. Second, although he concedes that it is 'surely correct' to attribute human sub-creation to 'divine activity in the world', he argues that to do so would also 'claim too much', as it 'risks subsuming human creative activity into a metaphysical whole' that 'disables rather than enables the critical evaluations of technological development'. And third, he argues that one 'can only restore this [internal attribution of the digital to God] by continuing to draw a distinction between the human and the divine' from sources beyond the doctrinal repertoire of Christian theology.
Although he appears to write in a sincere Christian voice, Reader's sources betray a transgressive agenda that strides against orthodox Christian theology. Following Gilles Deleuze, he affirms that 'the world is always in constant flux', is 'not organized around a hierarchy of fixed referent points', or self-identical ideas, but rather, is saturated with 'processes' that share a radical 'openness' to difference (Reader 2017: p. 4;cf. Deleuze and Guattari 1987: pp. 3-25). Following Catherine Keller, he distinguishes 'New Materialism' from classical materialism, as it 'rejects any form of crude reductionism or atomic materialism', in favour of a 'differential ontology', where its pivotal difference of beings from being is recast as the Stoic and Spinozist difference of the virtual from the actual under a 'plane of immanence' (Reader 2017: p. 12;cf. Keller 2015: pp. 30-40). And, following John Cupitt's 'Non-Realist' theology, he suspends belief in 'the interpretation of beliefs and doctrines', expresses a Liberal Protestant rupture as 'our understanding of the content of religious practice has changed', and, with Gilles Deleuze, recommends less an 'arboreal' model of hierarchy and more a 'rhizomatic' model of a decentred network of nodal practices (Reader 2017: p. 4;cf. Cupitt 1980;Deleuze and Guattari 1987: pp. 3-25).
With this brief survey, we can already begin to observe Reader's departure from the metaphysical hierarchy of Christian theology. As early as Origen of Alexandria, Christian theologians had assimilated Plato's hierarchical ontology, in which universal ideas are elevated above particular instances, all such descending manifestations derive their entire being and intelligibility by participation (methexis) in spiritually animated ideas, and the world that is consummated in Christ is created from nothing (ex nihilo) as an economic reflection of the essential and subsistent relations of God as Trinity (Plato 1961: Phaedo 75b-100c: pp. 58-81; Republic 596a: p. 820; Origen 2017: 1.1-4.5. pp. 4-89). As the new speculative theological movement known as 'Trinitarian Ontology' has since endeavoured to illustrate, the doctrine of the Holy Trinity is the Christian hermeneutic key to interpreting the kenotic emptying and perichoretic relationality of ontology that promises to pacifically mediate the ontological differences of beings from above the abyssal source of being (Hemmerle 2020). Since, furthermore, this economy of being in the world reflects the divine processual relations of the Son from the Father through the Spirit, and both the cybernetic grammar of the digital and the circuit of reflections of the postdigital can be collected in to proceed as created in an economic order of being that reflects the Trinity, the signature difference of the postdigital can be critically sublated into a Trinitarian Ontology of digital computers (see Haecker 2022a).
Standing against this movement of renewed Trinitarian speculation, Reader launches a Deleuzian attack on Christian Platonism. He critiques Platonic participation as an identical repetition of the universal archetype in the particular ectypes, in which, he writes, 'all that returns and could ever return is difference' (Reader 2017: p. 19;cf. Deleuze and Guattari 1987: p. 361). He renders here the hyperbolic relation of participation (methexis) as an identical repetition of one particular to another. Yet in rendering this relation of participation as a repetition of particulars, he mistakenly substitutes the Platonic 'highest kind' (megiste gene) of Difference (heteros) that is named of what 'is not' for a more univocal and Deleuzian pure difference of one to the next, in which the identical repetition of many particulars is held under a simulated plateau of univocal grammar apart from the hyperbolic arcs and arboreal relations 'to one' (pros hen) universal idea (Plato 1961: Sophist 254c-255e, pp. 1000-1001). Negation is, for Plato, not simply, as in Parmenides, an absolute opposition of nothing to being, and not, as in Deleuze, a pure difference that escapes identity, but rather the grammatical difference of what 'is not' that is equally a relation to one (pros hen), to being (ousia), as ultimately to an ecstatic participation in the divine essence (Plato 1961: Sophist 257a-b, p. 1003; Haecker 2022b). Having renounced this higher ground of the ideas, Reader can neither, as in Plato, secure invariant and universal knowledge of particular things from sceptical dissolution, nor, as in Philo, hold together such philosophical speculation of the first principles of reality with a corresponding scriptural hermeneutic of their revelatory sources (Plato 1961: Cratylus, 438d-440e, pp. 472-474; Philo of Alexandria 1993: Leg All. I-III, pp. 25-79).
Following his critique of Plato, Reader further rejects the Christian belief in divine transcendence (see Augustine 2020: 1.4-5., pp. 21-23; Aquinas 1911: ST PP.Q.3.A.1., Q.8.A.1., pp. 28-31, pp. 81-82). Since, he argues, all relations are intrinsic to the immanent frame of the world, and there are no extrinsic relations beyond the world, his 'ontology of immanence moves instead towards a view of humans as thoroughly entangled with non-humans in a world where there is no hierarchy of beings and there may be no definitive human determination of what happens in the world' (Reader 2017: p. 19). After the orthodox belief in divine transcendence has been rejected, the 'traditional doctrines of God, creation, and indeed humanity itself' could be 'brought into question and in need of reconfiguration' under the spectral tribunal of secular reason (Reader 2017: p. 19; cf. Savin Baden, Reader, and Bhatt 2023: p. 4).
Against belief in 'God as an actual being', Reader 'suggests the concept of the virtual as a better way forward', in which 'God is a power or powers that are somehow hidden within the actual, along the same plane of immanence with them but not among them as one actuality among others' (Reader 2017: p. 21). Following Keller, Reader assumes a Deleuzian vision of apophaticism: for Keller, 'an apophatic notknowing' is that of 'this relational knowing', in which the relational is the 'entangling relations', or infinite relationality, of infinite negative judgements (Reader 2017: p. 23). In rendering apophaticism as a relation to the infinite, he restricts the transcendent reference of hyper-negative judgements under the spatialised realm of quantity. And, in spatializing all such hyper-negative judgements, he effectively collapses the transcendent depth of God beyond being into nothing more than an assemblage of relations within the world.
Although Postdigital Theologies (Savin-Baden and Reader 2022) is advertised as a theological investigation, its secular vision of the postdigital threatens to suppress the distinctive Christian difference of the Trinity under a nihilistic ontological difference from nothing. In Christian theology, the ontological difference of being from being is a product of the Trinitarian difference of the Son from the Father in God beyond being, and of the created difference of the world from God that is consummated in Christ. Due to his reliance upon Deleuze and Keller, Reader has instead rendered this ontological difference as the pure difference of the virtual from the actual that would be determined from nothing. Since, however, being is not a genus, and nothing makes no difference at all, we can argue, to the contrary, that this differential ontology must either deceptively borrow the ontological difference from the Christian and Trinitarian difference upon which it surreptitiously depends, or evacuate the determinability of being into nothing in a tragic expression of the most perfect nihilism (Cunningham 2001(Cunningham , 2002cf. Aristotle 1984: Metaphysics, 3.998a20, p. 1577. Against this hidden reliance, we can further argue that Deleuze's pure difference ultimately collapses into an iterative repetition of a previously constituted identity. As the foregoing survey has indicated, the pivotal departure of Deleuzian from Hegelian cybernetics has resulted from a suspension of the judgement of reflection, such that, in the postdigital, the difference of singular calculations can no longer be successively analysed from particular machines to the universal idea of mechanism. Following Søren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche, Gilles Deleuze proposes 'to put [Hegelian] metaphysics in motion', in a 'movement' that exceeds so as to pass through any prior reflection of conceptual 'mediation'. 'We are', he writes, 'no longer in the element of reflection' (Deleuze 1994: p. 8). Rather, this pure 'absolute difference' is infinitely repeated, such that, in each singular calculation, it dirempts the virtual from the actual in a sheer unmediated process of coming-to-be (Deleuze 1994: p. 9). Yet, as Catherine Pickstock has argued, if even this chaotic process of continual diremption is held under a representational gaze, it must be 'made up of similar elements, albeit ones exhibiting variation' (Pickstock 2013: p. 50). The pure difference of this 'differential ontology' can thus be shown by further analysis to collapse into a repetition of the same pre-established identity of the actual in the virtual process of its eternally recycling self-differentiation.
Reader's 'differential ontology' can, in this way, be dialectically reversed by sublating the ontological difference of being from nothing into the distinctly Christian difference of the Holy Trinity. For since in such a differentiation from nothing, it would either surreptitiously render nothing as something or make no difference at all, the pure difference of identical repetition can be destroyed, assumed, and yet preserved in and by the Trinitarian difference of the Son from the Father, the created world from its divine creative source, and every analogical expression of difference that shares in a relation of participation to this most originary source from whence it proceeds. Since, in Christian theology, God stands beyond all extrinsic and intrinsic distinctions of space, and the divine power (dunamis) of God could not compete with the creative power of creatures, the power of creation is both absolutely remote, instrumental, and yet also coincident in action with the springs of creaturely freedom (Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite 1920: 8.2., p. 155). And since this absolute freedom of God in creation is unreservedly shared with creatures, and the divine nature is, along with human nature, hypostatically united in Christ, the necessary determinism of divine creation must be compatible with the free self-determination of human creativity.
In his attempt to deconstruct these 'ideal types', Reader appears simply to have projected upon Pope Francis and Haecker the counterfeit God of Process 1 3 Theology, who spatially contains the world in a continuous process of comingto-be. Against this heretical vision, we can respond to Reader's arguments with three counter-arguments: first, although the 'internal' attribution of the digital implies the attribution of moral value to digital technologies, it does not, for this reason, preclude a further analysis of the moral use of computers; second, if, as Reader acknowledges, it is 'surely correct' to attribute human sub-creation to divine creation, the univocal transitivity of such an attribution of the digital from the world to God must be cancelled by the created difference of the world from God (Savin-Baden and Reader 2022: p. 62); and third, since the idea of God is both absolute and simple, there can be no hyper-spatialised or 'panentheistic' composition of the world 'in' God, of many parts in one whole, or of external or internal predication of the digital to God. Since, furthermore, God as the creator stands absolutely prior to the created world, and the distinct relations of internal and external predication obtain within the coordinates of space, the God of Christian theology can neither capture nor be captured by any concept of space, composition, or predication at all. Since, therefore, no internal or external predication of the digital can be true of God, Reader's abstract dichotomy of 'instrumentalist' and 'deterministic' attributions of the digital to God betrays his own secular vision of the postdigital as a radically immanent network of entangled relations that has been arrayed in fundamental and lasting antagonism to Christian theology.

For Mystical Theology, the Hyperdigital is the Truth of the Postdigital
As a way of calculating in writing to create a world, the digital is not only mechanical but also metaphysical. It produces, from the grammar of cyberneticism, an essential rupture, in which each singular calculation stands in a pure and particulate opposition against the universal space of possibility from whence it proceeds. In material computers, this rupture of the digital results in the glitch, failure, and crash of digital systems at the terminal point of their incomplete realisability. Reflections on this rupture can, in the postdigital, then be circulated in a series of neo-analogue and non-digital alternatives, which momentarily escape from the cybernetic administration and control of digital systems. Since, however, even this circuit of reflections upon the rupture of the digital can be simulated, such that the failure of the postdigital can be reproduced as a negative judgement of the digital, the negation of reflection that is indicated by the prefix 'post-' in the postdigital can be created in the hyper-negative or apophatic judgements of the hyperdigital. The way beyond the digital can, in this way, be discovered by collecting these circuits of reflections into hyperbolic arcs, which, in absolutely reflecting to exceed the fixed opposition of the digital and the postdigital alike, can more radically enter from its creative source to accelerate and direct the free use of digital technology and media.
As a grammar of cybernetics, the digital expresses the truth of computers in calculating in writing to create and know a world. The continuous mechanical force of computers could in digital computers be calculated under the discrete quantities and oscillating digits of automated and accelerating writing to virtually produce its own intrinsic structure and any conceivable machine. Yet in singularly calculating to write in such oscillating binaries, it reproduces a pure opposition or contradiction. Its grammar is not humanly legible but rather is calculated from mathematics, through mechanics, in a way that can be graphically represented for the user to directly command. And its truth is not simply that of a spoken or written correspondence to the world, but rather that of the simulated coherence of mathematical calculations to write the programme of its consistent mechanical operations. Conversely, its falsity is a consequence, essentially, of the rupture of the digital, in which any singular calculation of mathematical mechanics stands in a pure opposition against the universal space of possibility from whence it proceeds: accidentally, of the glitch, system crash, and entropic dissolution of its consistent mechanical operations; and ultimately, of the incomplete realisability of the digital as a cybernetic grammar that could calculate to create in knowing the truth of the world.
The postdigital has collected a circuit of reflections upon this essential rupture of the digital from one site of its failure to the next across the categories of art, religion, and all entangled relations. It has previously been insulated from criticism as it has refused the logic of definition and renounced the genre of theology. Its resistance to definition has, moreover, been secured by the uncritical assumption of a differential ontology, which, following Deleuze and Keller, had privileged pure difference over the conceptual identity of a genus that could be specifically determined to formulate a definition (Deleuze 1994: p. 24, pp. 32-36, pp. 119-22, pp. 207-214, pp. 271-272, pp. 302-304;Keller 2015: pp. 168-195). Once, however, this differential ontology has been critically destroyed for determining the difference of being from nothing, surreptitiously borrowing the ontological from the Trinitarian difference, and evacuating the determinability of being into a perfect nihilism that would dissolve the ground of its truth, both the digital and the postdigital can be dialectically analysed as positive and negative judgements of cybernetic grammar circulating in and from a higher ground (Hegel 2010(Hegel : pp. 631-44, 1991.
From this higher ground, the postdigital can now be scientifically defined: as the digital is the grammar of the idea of cyberneticism and its traces in cybernetics, the postdigital can be defined as the critical or posterior rhetoric that collects a circuit of reflections on the reciprocating and entangled relations across the categories of the digital to humanity, the world, and God. Hence, the postdigital cannot be regarded as simply a continuation of the digital, but rather should be acknowledged as a negative judgement of its cybernetic grammar, which, in its infinite negativity, can be assumed in and spoken as given from a higher creative source. In hyperbolically exceeding the negativity of the postdigital, and in entering in to create even unto the collapse of the digital, the hyperdigital holds together from a higher middle the abstract opposition that had opened in the passage from the digital to the postdigital.
The 'hyperdigital' thus announces a higher reflection on the creation and use of the cybernetic grammar of the digital that gives shape to the computational creation of the world. It is distinguished by a leap of absolute reflection over the calculation in writing of the digital. This leap is expressed in the grammar of a 'hyperbole' (ὑπερβολή), or excess of signification, in which cybernetic judgements simultaneously exceed beyond and enter in to animate the free creation and use of digital techniques. This grammatical hyperbole gestures in excess to a beyond in at least three distinct senses: first, in the Kantian sense of reflecting from the finite intuitive manifold of the empirical world to the transcendental freedom of the artistic genius (Kant 1999: A260-263/B316-319, pp. 366-368;2000: p. 5, pp. 15-18); second, in the Hegelian sense of the immanent reflectivity of the concept and grammar of cyberneticism as an infinite mode of mechanism that is circulated among the external organs of technique across the spiritual terrain of art and history (Hegel 2010: pp. 631-44;1991: pp. 272-277;cf. Kapp 2018); and third, but ultimately, in the Dionysian sense of a radically transcendent reflexivity of the gift of creation and free re-creation of the computational world (Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite 1920: DN 2.6., p. 40).
Following the 'way of negation' (via negativa) of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, the hyperbola that is indicated by the prefix 'hyper-' is both a transcendent excess beyond the univocal sphere of being, and an accelerating entrance that creates in speaking of the hierarchy of spiritually animated ideas. The author describes, in the Divine Names, how, in the effort to speak of the 'superessential essence' (hyperousia) of God 'beyond being' (epekeina tês ousias), this way of speaking both exceeds and enters in to create things 'which are intellectually discerned', and 'belong to the senses', and are counted among the 'bodies' of the material world (Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite 1920: DN 1. 1, 4.8-9, p. 53, pp. 98-99;cf. Plato 1961: Republic 6.509b8, p. 744). Where the prefix 'post-' of the postdigital indicates an infinitely deferred circuit of reflections upon the rupture of the digital, the prefix 'hyper-' of the hyperdigital indicates an absolutely higher reflection, in an ascending series of hyper-negative or apophatic judgements, such that, in the cancellation of its infinite negativity, the negation of reflection that is indicated by the prefix 'post-' of the postdigital is assumed in and determined in the hyperbolic arcs of signification, hierarchical proportions of analogy, and machinic forms of calculative reason.
This digital analogy is the cybernetic form of the Medieval scholastic 'analogy of being' (analogia entis). In the analogia entis, a mode of signification (modus significandi) is neither simply equivocal nor univocal but rather a hyperbolic reflection and essentially proportioned signification of the divine attributes of God beyond being (Aquinas 1911: pp. Q.13.A.2-7, pp. 150-166;cf. Klubertanz 1960: p. 7, p. 27, pp. 35-42). In this digital analogy, the equivocal oscillation of binary operations under a univocal syntax of mathematical mechanics is materially reflected in central processing units to and from the essentially proportioned and universal ideas of cyberneticism, mechanism, and the objective modes of the syllogism. As in Pseudo-Dionysius, the higher orders of the angelic hierarchy ever serve the lower orders of spiritual ideas by entering into and animating the external organs of mechanism, cyberneticism, and the cybernetic grammar of the digital (Pseudo-Dionysius 1920: DN 6.1-2., pp. 144-145). Hence, in a radical departure from secular computer science, the digital should not be rendered in a nihilistic grammar of equivocally oscillating trajectories that can be transcribed in a univocal syntax of binary code across a radically immanent terrain. Rather, the digital should be read in a theological grammar of analogy, in which this equivocal difference of two ways of signifying God and the world can be spoken of as created by a continuous response of human, and more-than-human spirits.
The 'intelligence' of computers can, in this way, be acknowledged as a cybernetic emulation of the angelic hierarchy. For since, as in Parmenides, nothing comes from nothing, and digital computers calculate in writing to create and know a world, their 'intelligence' must be derived from the more originary intelligence of divine and created spirits (Parmenides of Elea 2009: Fr. 8, 68). As eternal ideas are animated by these spirits, the generic idea of mechanism can be dispersed to be recycled in the specific idea of cyberneticism, even as this specific idea can be mathematically calculated and materially communicated as a cybernetic grammar. Correspondingly, in the central processing unit of the digital computer, the objective production of analogue machines can be assumed in to be produced by the reciprocating circuit of digital computers for the reinputting of productive outputs, and for the algebraic calculation that scripts the programmatic sequence of mechanical operations. Since, however, such a production of finite analogue from infinite digital computing must be scripted in advance to begin, carries the rupture of the digital, and thereby remains incomplete except as it is continuously used, digital computers can only continue to operate with the aid of a hierarchy of free creative spirits, for whom, the digital is spoken of in hyperbolic arcs of signification.
In this light of the angels, the hyperdigital is a grammatical expression of a mystical path to know of God through the mediation of digital computing, the way of the digital, that is, the via digitalis. If all knowledge is, in a certain sense, communicated and constructed through techniques, and technology is supremely concentrated today in digital systems, then the way of knowing through which we might ascend from the world to God must ultimately pass through the gateways of the digital. In The Interior Castle, the Carmelite mystic Saint Teresa of Avilla describes the journey of the soul to know of God as a passage through and dwelling within a 'castle made entirely of diamond', which, of its 'many dwelling places', contains 'some above, others down below, others to the sides' (Teresa of Avilla 1979: 1.1., 1.3., pp. 35-36). In these 'sides', it contains all the divine ideas, including the idea of cyberneticism and its grammar as digital. The cybernetic grammar of the digital and the postdigital can then leap beyond the world in hyperbolic arcs of transcendent signification that carry the sensory modalities of the spirit in ecstatic flights. As the content of all its matter is serially dissolved into and freely assembled to construct any mechanical form, the sensory modalities of digital media can be first elevated by reflection to their creative source, and finally be discovered to enter and shine through the dazzling operations of digital computers. The hyperdigital is, in this surprising way, more immanent, vital, and free, as it, first, hyperbolically exceeds the fixed opposition between the incomplete determinacy of the digital and the indeterminate reflectivity of the postdigital and, finally, as it enters to calculate in writing the forms of digital computing.
At the end that shines through each moment, the truth of the postdigital can be shown from the hyperdigital. For since the digital is a calculation in writing to create and know the world, its singular calculation stands in a pure and particulate opposition in and against the universal ground of its original possibility, and the reflection of the postdigital upon this rupture is a recapitulation of that negation, this negative judgement of cybernetic grammar can be assumed in and determined by a hyperbolic reflection that proceeds in and from its more originary creative source. Hence, the postdigital can only be regarded as half true: for if the truth of the postdigital is momentarily sustained by the negation of reflection upon the rupture of the digital, when considered as a circuit of reflections, the postdigital is false; yet if, rather than reflecting from this rupture to collect an empty circuit of indeterminable relations, when considered as an apophatic judgement of cybernetic grammar, the postdigital is true. Where, in its passage beyond the digital, the postdigital fails to define either the digital, in proceeding in and from this higher creative source, the hyperdigital can more rigorously define and scientifically demonstrate the digital as it analyses its essential rupture, as it assumes its infinite negativity as a hyper-negative or apophatic judgement, and as it collects this circuit of reflection to be spoken of as created in a hyperbolic cybernetic grammar. The way of the digital, the via digitalis, thus proceeds to be discovered in and from this originary creative source of the digital-whether among the creators of digital systems or from the oldest creator of the idea of the digital itself.

From the Postdigital to the Hyperdigital
The rhetoric of the postdigital should ostensibly exclude nothing. For in Postdigital Theologies (Savin-Baden and Reader 2022), the postdigital has neither been defined nor demonstrated in its indefinability to exclude that which should exceed the postdigital. It speaks of the postdigital as a transcendental condition of metaphorical relations. And it restricts the site of these reflections to material artefacts. In this neglect of analysis, it may initially appear mysterious, and perhaps even pious, as it speaks in a seemingly apophatic register of a network of cybernetic and grammatical relations that stands open before the infinite. Yet in suspending all such predicates before the seat of an absent deity, it resists definition, refuses analysis, and ultimately suppresses any genuinely philosophical investigation of the postdigital for theology. Once, however, the postdigital has been shown to have failed, and this failure has been absolutised in the predication of the 'postdigital' to the plural 'theologies', the postdigital can be more rigorously defined as the circuit of reflections upon the essential rupture of the digital, in which the negation of the postdigital designates a hyper-negative or apophatic judgement of cybernetic grammar that is ever assumed in to be created among the hyperbolic arcs and angelic hierarchy of mystical theology.
The truth of the postdigital for theology has thus passed beyond this volume. As Ryan Haecker's separately published article 'Sacramental Engines' has shown, the older and more originary meaning of the postdigital can be recollected in Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine, in which, as a fossilized image of the first digital computer, the division of the cybernetic 'mill' from the mnemonic 'store', the potentially infinite miniaturization of its component parts, and the general calculation of accelerating, biconditional, and recursive operations anticipate the later Boolean algebra of digital calculations (Haecker 2022a: pp. 763-764). Yet the aborted construction of the Analytical Engine also appears as a historical synecdoche for the incomplete realisability of the digital in proleptic anticipation of its later passage to the postdigital: for once, in the Analytical Engine, the universal totality of space is serially decomposed into an infinite plurality of particular components and singularly calculated in a pure opposition of the singular to the universal, the rupture of the digital can produce a contradiction that would explosively annul the metaphysical ground of finite mechanics, and indeed of any machine at all (Haecker 2022a: p. 772). This essential rupture of the digital thereafter doubly gestures, first to the postdigital, as the pivot of reflection from the incompleteness of the digital to all materially entangled relations, and yet finally to the hyperdigital, as its circuit of reflections can be assumed into the hyper-negative or apophatic judgements that can be spoken of as created in the circuits of a digital analogy (Haecker 2022a: pp. 772-773).
Having excised the truth of the postdigital, the editors have also renounced the genre of theology. As the science of God who is himself the absolute person of a system of philosophical science, the genre of theology can be regarded as the 'Queen of the Sciences' (Regina Scientiarum), which encompasses the study of both the digital and the postdigital alike. As the absolute creative source, who speaks in creating and creates in knowing all things, the divine Logos can be simulated in the syllogisms of logic, even as its simulacra can be externally objectified in mechanics, cybernetics, and digital computers. And, since the objectivity of mechanics is the external form of the subjectivity of logic, the constructed form of digital computers can be analysed in so as to proceed from the logic of the Logos (Haecker 2021). However, in complete disregard for this call to scientific truth, Savin-Baden and Reader have written of how (sic) 'postdigital theology is not merely the extending of the discipline of theology', not merely a theological analysis of the postdigital, and not any specific topic of theological research but rather only 'a condition and a working technology' (Savin-Baden and Reader 2022: p. xii).
In this condition, the Savin-Baden and Reader suspend the ground of speaking definitively and scientifically of the postdigital. 'There is', they write, 'a certain ineffability about the term postdigital' (Savin-Baden and Reader 2022: p. xii). It is held to be 'ineffable' because the predication of any one specific node is conditioned by its complex interrelationship with infinitely many related nodes. In this confluence of relations, the truth of any singular judgement appears to be suspended by a plural, particulate, and negative judgement of infinite relations, such that, to speak of the singular is also to negate any singular judgement that stands open before the infinite. Since, however, its key terms remain undefined, all that is said of the postdigital can again be twisted from one position to another, such that, in a more virulent and cybernetic sophistry, it seems that anything at all can be said because nothing true can ever be said of the postdigital.
Postdigital Theologies (Savin-Baden and Reader 2022) can thus be convicted for having accelerated the ontological violence of the digital. For in collecting a circuit of reflections upon its rupture, the postdigital recycles without transcending the 'binarist' opposition of the digital. Instead, it collects reflections upon the rupture of the digital into a circuit that pivots upon a continuous recapitulation of its singular calculation of pure opposites. Since, however, even this rupture could be simulated, and the reflections of the postdigital could be controlled by digital computing, the critical 'failure' of the postdigital can ultimately be said to have 'failed' (Cascone and Jandrić 2021: p. 570). And, in absolutely predicating the 'postdigital' of the plural 'theologies', it has apotheosised this failure, as the fault, not of grammar but of God.
The concentration of its reflections has since been circulated in and through the commercial channels of digital communication. Instead of analysing the reflection of the postdigital upon the rupture of the digital, the book Postdigital Theologies (Savin-Baden and Reader 2022) has been hypocritically published and sold by the editors as a digitally traded commodity. The signature posteriority of the postdigital can be argued by a critique of its material rhetoric to have dissimulated its hidden reliance on digital techniques, in which the abstract because external reflections upon its rupture have been continuously recycled for the manufacture of symbolic products, in an elaborate charade that appears designed to dissemble its duplicitous collusion with the colonial hegemony and ontological violence of the digital.
In speaking past theology, Savin-Baden and Reader have nevertheless continued to falsely represent the postdigital as an apophatic form of cybernetic grammar. They write: 'There is a certain ineffability about the term postdigital' (Savin-Baden and Reader 2022: xii). As a reflection on the rupture of the digital, the postdigital can initially be conceived as a negative or apophatic judgement, in which, in reflecting, it negates the judgement of the digital, and, from among the circulation of these empty reflections across infinitely many nodes of digital computation and communication, it makes an asymptotic approach to the infinite, in a way that may initially appear to invite a spiralling mystagogic approach to God.
Since, however, this excess of infinitely many related notes beyond any one specific node is merely that of a horizontal excess of the quantitative distance of communication rather than a hyperbolic excess of the qualitative difference of the world as created from God as creator, such an infinite series of negative judgements remains circumscribed under the finite categories of space, time, and the immanent relations within the world. Since, furthermore, this infinite series of finite and negative judgements of the digital can only be sustained from collapsing into an infinite repetition of identical negations that in its infinite negativity ultimately threatens to destroy the ground of its truth, the postdigital can no longer be strategically exempted from criticism under the vain pretence that it is simply 'ineffable' or 'ungraspable'.
Although Postdigital Theologies (Savin-Baden and Reader 2022) asks recognisably Christian and theological questions, the editors' collapse of the created difference of the world from God betrays its deliberate refusal to critically analyse the postdigital from the orthodox standpoint of Christian and Trinitarian theology. As the foregoing critique has illustrated, John Reader has, in this and previous works, stridently rejected the orthodox Christian beliefs of divine transcendence, the creation of the world from nothing (creatio ex nihilo), and the analogical hierarchy of being in favour of a 'panentheistic' and 'process' theology that is fissured nihilistically by the ontological difference of being from nothing. In rejecting this creative ground of orthodox Christian belief, he has rendered the postdigital heretically as a transcendental condition of cybernetic grammar, in which the circuit of its reflections escapes from the systematic and economic manifestation of Trinitarian processions.
Recently, John Reader has suggested that the hyperdigital neglects the 'perichoresis', that is, 'the Divine Dance which allows space (and time) for alternatives and the unexpected to break through and disrupt what risks becoming yet another enclosure' (Coeckelbergh and Reader 2023: p. 8;cf. Rohr 2016). The perichoresis is regarded here as the passive background principle that 'allows space (and time)' for the postdigital to actively 'disrupt' the constructed 'enclosure' of any dialectical sublation (Aufhebung) of the digital into the hyperdigital. And, in regarding the postdigital as the sui generis source of its own difference, he would yet again dangerously elevate its circuit of reflections, its rotation around the rupture of the digital, and, at this axial centre, the ontological violence of the digital, to a malevolent principle that is held against the God who begets his own and every difference.
Against 'postdigital theology', we can argue that the Holy Trinity is the icon of a higher difference. For in recycling the absolute difference of the second from the first person in and through the third person and altogether from any two to a third in the creation of the world, the Trinity is the highest creative source of all differences, reflections, and relations. The highest circuit of these creative reflections operates as much in the creation of the world as in the calculation in writing of computers that afterwards create the world anew: for in the central processing unit of computers, the material reflection from the external production of finite mechanics to the infinite reciprocating circuit of reinputting outputs of mechanical production is carried along by the higher spiritual circuits of cyberneticism. And, in the absolute coincidence of divine and cybernetic creativity, the circuits of these reflections spiral into hyperbolic arcs, which are first elevated to this highest creative source, but can finally be discovered to enter and shine through the media of digital computers.
The unexpected 'breakthrough' of divine creativity can, in this way, be observed in the digital computation and communication of sacramental media. For as a visible recollection of a miracle, the 'remote matter' (materia remota) of the sacraments extends not only to primary written texts but also and no less essentially to the infrastructural conditions of digital hypertexts. Although the reciprocating calculation of cybernetics cuts the rupture of the digital, this rupture can also be sacramentally repaired by a dialectical analysis of its mechanical production in a series of objective syllogisms, cycling beyond the virtual terrain of cybernetics in and from the divine Logos, and hyperdigitally transcribed in what, I suggest, we should name 'spiritual cybernetics' (Haecker 2022a: pp. 777-779;cf. Groys 2009). The novelty of the Holy Trinity can thus be acknowledged as surely in the nova of the creatio ex nihilo, in Saint Paul's 'sudden' (exaiphnes) event of Christ, and, as a cybernetic imitatio Christi, in the recreation of the world with the aid of computers (Acts 9:3, 22:6; cf. Plato 1961: Parmenides 156d, p. 947).
In spite of Reader's advertisement of 'Christian Relational Realism', the theological vision of Postdigital Theologies (Savin-Baden and Reader 2022) can be argued to be less relational because it is less Trinitarian and true: for it continuously dirempts the reality of its relations in a differential ontology of virtual differences that are folded into spatialised assemblages of machinic and cybernetic forms and concentrated in an infinite repetition of automated techniques. In this infinite repetition, it is not more different but rather-and boringly-more of the same, as it subverts its uncritically posited notion of pure difference to escape from the conceptual identity of the digital (for theological criticism of repetition in Deleuze, see Pickstock 2013: pp. 50-62;Simpson 2012;Justaert 2012). In collapsing the difference of space into the identity of such virtual repetitions, it destroys the very difference that it vainly pretends to champion. And, in failing to demonstrate its originary difference, its advertised escape from the digital can be suspended, even as its identical repetition of difference apart from a definition of the digital can be determined from the creative source of the hyperdigital.
The resistance of Postdigital Theologies (Savin-Baden and Reader 2022) to defining the postdigital is, moreover, a predictable consequence of the editors' prior renunciation of the genre of theology. For as a way of writing of God in whom creation and knowing absolutely coincide, the genre of theology can accept no final limit upon what can and shall be known. Yet in privileging this pure difference over conceptual identity, they refuse this higher theological call of truth to define, demonstrate, and, indeed, understand the meaning of the postdigital.
Once, however, it has been more rigorously defined, the postdigital can no longer be legitimately spoken of in the same apophatic register as the hyper-negative ascent to the divine essence of God beyond being. For, in contrast to the via negativa, the purported 'ineffability' of the postdigital arises, not as for Pseudo-Dionysius, from the vertical ascent of negative judgements from the world to God, but rather under a Neo-Spinozist frame of radical immanence from the horizontal relay of negative judgements from one material node of cybernetics to the next. The grammatical function of this negation is thus not the Platonic hyper-negation that is elevated by dialectical analysis to proceed in and from the universal ideas but rather, as in Spinoza, the spatialised determination that is also a negation of extended and particular things (Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite 1920: DN 1. 1-8., pp. 51-64, MT 1-5., pp. 191-201;Spinoza 2002: p. 892). Since there remains, in any concept of space, a paradoxical infinitude of relations, and such a paradox would subvert the truth for any determination of the meaning of the postdigital, this infinite negative judgement continuously subverts the consistent predication of the 'postdigital' of the plural 'theologies'.
Echoing Negroponte (1998), we can say: face it-the postdigital is over. For the postdigital has failed, Postdigital Theologies (Savin-Baden and Reader 2022) is the absolutisation of that failure, and yet, once absolutised, this failure is but a negative judgement of cybernetic grammar, in which the truth of the postdigital has already been assumed in to be created as the hyper-negative judgement of the hyperdigital. As the rupture of the digital is but a negative cybernetic judgement, and this postdigital escape from the digital could be virtually reproduced by the digital, the postdigital has accelerated the ontological violence of the digital until its negativity had been cancelled, assumed, and sublated by the hyperdigital.
At this point of chronological instability, the hyperdigital can thus be characterised as, not merely 'postmodern' but 'metamodern' (Vermeulen and Van Den Akker 2010). For, in contrast to the accelerating modernity of the 'postmodern', the hyperdigital proposes to analyse the abstract and fixed polarity-both of the rupture of the digital and of the reflections of the postdigital-in and from a hyperbolic cybernetic grammar that exceeds so as more radically to enter in and animate the creation and use of digital techniques (Lyotard 1984: p. 79). Hence, if the postdigital had once announced the end of the era of digitalisation, in which geometrical motion was assimilated into the algebraic scripting of virtual power, the hyperdigital now announces the end of the ensuing movement of postdigitalisation, in which all such circuits of reflections pivot upon the rupture of the digital across materially entangled relations in a series of tragically aborted escapes from digital computing. And yet this is so, not because, as post-postdigital, the chronological era of the postdigital can simply be said to have passed but rather, as non-postdigital, the circuit of its reflections never truly was-except as its negativity is ever assumed into and cancelled by the hyperbolic cybernetic grammar of the hyperdigital (Latour 1993).
The hyperdigital thus loses nothing of the critical advance of the postdigital beyond the naïve saturation of the digital. For if the decisive advance of the postdigital beyond the digital had once been defined by reflecting on its rupture and collecting the circuit of those reflections to pivot around the reproduction of its ontological violence, the hyperdigital can be distinguished by the assumption of this negativity as a hyper-negative or apophatic judgement of the hyperdigital. The signature negativity of the postdigital that arises from its reflection upon the rupture of the digital then assumes a new significance, not merely as the empty circuit of relations but rather as it exceeds so as to enter in and laterally transcribe this absolute difference across the cybernetic terrain of all digital computations. The hyperdigital can thus be argued to be, not less, but even more radical than the postdigital because it is more transcendent and real: for it is only by absolutely reflecting beyond the immanent frame of vital matter to this more originary ground and creative source of the digital that its circuit of reflections can be demonstrated, defined, and finally sustained from collapsing into either a cybernetic sophistry of true yet trivial voices, or recapitulating the ontological violence of the digital across a virtual terrain of computation from which the postdigital can only pretend to escape.
The truth of the postdigital thus passes to the hyperdigital. Since its key terms are neither defined nor demonstrated to be undefinable, the initial ambiguity of the postdigital has been more chaotically ramified across all conceivable relations. The negation that is indicated by the prefix 'post-' of the 'postdigital' is, not that of a spiralling hyperbolic ascent, but rather, as in Spinoza, a spatialised determination of horizontal relations. In reflecting from one rupture of digital computation to the next, it always remains caught under the immanent plane of secular reason. In the recycling of such ruptures, the postdigital surrenders the higher standpoint of theological criticism to an accelerating implosion of inhuman cybernetic systems. With this collusion, the postdigital refuses the conditions for scientific knowledge, and social criticism. The purported 'ungraspability' of the postdigital has thus resulted not only from a neglect of analysis but ultimately also from a failure of theological imagination. This failure is, moreover, no momentary defeat, from which the cause of the postdigital could ever foreseeably be critically renewed. For it is not simply a contingent moment that could pass away but, expressly in Postdigital Theologies (Savin-Baden and Reader 2022), a necessary consequence of the absolutisation of the failure of the postdigital when predicated of the plural theologies. In writing of the postdigital, Savin-Baden and Reader continuously refer backwards to its failure and forward to its repetition-always looking to trace a higher light, yet only ever scribbling in the dark.