Andrés Vaccari

HOW WE BECAME POSTHUMAN
By N. Katherine Hayles

(Abaddon 2, Autumn 1999)

“I don’t particularly like people. Never have. Man to my mind is about the nastiest, most destructive of all the animals. I don’t see any reason, if he can evolve machines that can have more fun than he himself can, why they shouldn’t take over, enslave us, quite happily. They might have a lot more fun. Invent better games than we ever did.”

This is Warren McCulloch, a neurophysiologist who elaborated one of the most influential models of the workings of the neuron. McCulloch was also one of the leading figures in the seminal Macy Conferences on Cybernetics, a post-war interdisciplinary meeting that, for decades to come, would shape the way we think about biological and automated systems. To me, this statement clearly encapsulates the driving force behind many of the contemporary myths about technology: the deep distaste of the flesh and the yearning for a infinite realm in which some kind of immortality can be achieved. More recently, Hans Moravec, roboticist and author of Mind Children: the Future of Robot and Human Intelligence (1988) has articulated this wish most brazenly, with his assertion that downloading our consciousness into machines will be the next step in human evolution; a project that he considers not only possible, but, strangely enough, desirable. It’s a new version of an old dream, an enduring and intimate dream that is often tainted with the nihilistic, flagellant attitude that Nietzsche (writing more than a hundred years ago) denounced in the “haters of the body”, the belief in an afterworld more pure than the flesh.

N. K. Hayles, at the beginning of this excellent book, describes Moravec’s grand delusion as a “dream that struck me as a nightmare.” One of the questions she tries to explore is “how did information become disembodied?” Is there an “essence” to information or knowledge, even to reality itself, that can be divorced from its material substrate? To Hayles, this is one of the founding myths of the Digital Age, one made possible by an epistemic shift that favored pattern/randomness over presence/absence. Hayles offers a well-balanced historical overview of the ways in which machines and humans have entered the discourses of science, cybernetics and science fiction. She uses these texts as symptoms, or sites of conflict, picking their anxieties and contradictions. Reading the proceeds of the Macy Conferences, Hayles traces the origins of the first cybernetic model that established comparisons between humans and machines. Firstly, when discussing the structure of a system, cybernetics shifted the emphasis from energy (as in the thermodynamic model) to information. Secondly, it followed behaviorism in that it bracketed content and focused exclusively on output. The Turing test echoes this premise, since the observer must decide who is human and who is a computer by vocal responses alone. Thus, for cybernetics, humans, machines and, indeed, all biological entities are informational systems. We must remember that the scientific discourse of the day (1940’s and 1950’s) swas grappling with questions of boundaries between organism and environment, the Uncertainty Principle and how to delimit the scientific experiment and the role of the observer. Norbert Wiener’s model (the foundation of the cybernetic view) offered some solutions, since it reduced organism and environment to a set of informational processes and fluid interactions, thus “disembodying” the human.

Hayles’ reading of the Macy Conferences is exhaustive and her perspective original. She sees this moment as a struggle between many contesting theories, and we get a good sense of the players involved and the role their personalities played in the outcome. In an effective move, Hayles turns her attention to the physical process of transcription of the Conferences, where the same philosophical problems are embodied and reflected. Here, the practical problems of information and cognition are revealed in all their messy everydayness, as we follow the movement from a chaotic gathering of rambling, talking bodies to the final transcript and the abstracted cleanliness of theory.

The fourth chapter deals exclusively with the theories of Wiener, the founding father of cybernetics. Hayles regards Wiener’s role as pivotal in continuing the separation of form and content, body and knowledge. One of the founding tenets of cybernetics is that information can circulate unchanged among different material strata. For Wiener, analogy was the driving force behind science, language and perception. Perception, for example, is a process that is about pattern rather than content. Yet, for all its complicity, cybernetics was also prophetic of the dissolution of bodily frontiers that becomes so acute with the advent of modern technological and virtual environments–a symbiosis epitomized in the figure of the cyborg. Cybernetics, according to Hayles, also displayed remarkable similarities with Saussarean linguistics, where communication and meaning are constructed not out of discrete and present terms but “through selection from a field of possible alternatives.”

From here on, Hayles takes the reader through the successive developments of these questions, covering areas of informatics, philosophy, semiotics, artificial intelligence, science fiction, artificial life, virtual reality and cyborg theory.

Despite the book’s ambitious breadth and the dizzying array of subjects covered, Hayles never loses grip on her subject. She offers insightful readings of Donna Haraway’s cyborg manifestos, Gibson’s Neuromancer, Foucault’s reading of the Panopticon, Burroughs’ The Ticket That Exploded, and Greg Bear’s Blood Music, among others. Bernard Wolfe’s Limbo and the novels of Philip K. Dick receive a chapter each. Her extensive reading of Dick recapitulates some common places (i.e. the “destabilizing” figure of the android and Dick’s alleged misogyny) and contributes some novel perspectives.

It is clear that information and VR technologies are demanding a reinterpretation of the body and a rethinking of its boundaries. Our organs of cognition have dispersed, threatening the model of individual agency. Coupled with the products of technology in an increasingly direct and aggressive manner, it is also clear that our bodies (whether we want it or not) can no longer be thought of as delimited by an epidermic frontier. Is the “human” a historical construction soon to go the way of the pneuma and the bodily humors? To be succeeded by, well, the post-human?

Acting both as a historical overview and as an argument supporting the inseparability of information, material substrate, body and consciousness, Hayles’ position is refreshingly skeptical and compellingly expressed. And this is all the more unusual for a writer coming from a high postmodernist perspective, and who avails herself of many recognizable post-structuralist tactics.

She denounces as absurd the postmodern “ideology that the body’s materiality is secondary to the logical or semiotic structures it encodes”, and she has few kind things to say about certain developments in theory that regard the subject essentially as a virtual entity, or a dream of discourse. This has been the focus of much post-modern effort to reconceptualize and ‘disperse’ the contemporary subject.

Another thing that deserves mention is Hayles’ authoritative grasp of scientific theory, which often steers into murky technical waters but without losing the reader. A great deal of debate has flared recently over the Sokal/Social Text prank that gave birth to the book Intellectual Impostures: Postmodern Philosophers’ Abuse of Science (1998). (Alan Sokal, a renowned physicist, set out to ridicule the humanities establishment by sending a parodical essay to a respected journal. The essay, which denounces scientific discourse as chauvinist, was taken seriously and published.) In this context, it is imperative that academics in the area of humanities offering critiques or overviews of science pay attention to the way it operates and are conversant with the theory behind scientific procedure. It is true that, although it purports to offer wide ranging critiques of Western knowledge and the structure of the scientific eye, the languages of criticism, semiotics and the humanities have completely lost touch with the realities of scientific practice, and seldom bother examining too closely their object of enquiry—more often than not to an embarrassing, risible extent. Nonetheless, Hayles achieves this balance very well, effortlessly bridging the gap between science, literature and the humanities and establishing not only a dialogue but also a form of synthesis.

In short, this book is complex, challenging, rewarding, and lucidly and engagingly written. Those interested in the philosophy of technology are recommended to read it immediately. And for those who would like to know more, this book acts as an excellent introduction.