This is a little long, but I thought others might be interested in it as
well. It is from another discussion list, as noted. Amy
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Date: Wed, 27 Sep 2000 17:13:20 -0400
From: H-Net Reviews <books@h-net.msu.edu>
H-NET BOOK REVIEW
Published by H-Ideas@h-net.msu.edu (September, 2000)
N. Katherine Hayles. _How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in
Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics_. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1999. xiv + 350 pp. Notes and index. $49.00 (cloth),
ISBN 0-226-32145-2; $18.00 (paper), ISBN 0-226-32146-0.
Reviewed for H-Ideas by Craig Keating <ckeating@sfu.ca>, Department
of History, Simon Fraser University
The Condition of Virtuality
Some twenty years ago Ihab Hassan spoke of an imminent epochal
shift. After 500 years, he argued, "humanism may be coming to an
end as humanism transforms itself into something one must helplessly
call posthumanism" (247). Katherine Hayles has taken seriously
Hassan's prediction. _How We Became Posthuman_ is a fascinating
account, truly encyclopaedic in its scope, of the developments in
science, technology and literature which lend credence to the idea
of the posthuman. More than this, it is an attempt to come to terms
with how we are being constituted in discourse and in practice as
posthuman subjects in an age of "informatics," that is, an age
characterized by a "capitalist mode of flexible accumulation," the
merging of telecommunications with computer technology, the
increasing importance of databanks of information and instant data
transmission to patterns of every day life, and the "reconfiguring"
of physical habits to mesh with new information technologies (p.
313, note 4). It is also an attempt to deal with some of the
important political and philosophical consequences of these
developments. In this latter regard the book is not entirely
successful. Nonetheless, as a work of great intellectual scope and
courage, it is destined to be an indispensable resource for
contemporary historians, intellectual and otherwise.
For Hayles, the posthuman consists in the linked notions that
consciousness is merely "informational pattern" (2) owing nothing
importantly to its embeddedness in the human body or broader
discursive contexts and that the seamless articulation of humans and
machines or the invention of intellegent machines (information
processors not importantly different from humans) are both equally
possible. The broad purpose of the book is to follow the emergence
of these notions both in three "waves" of cybernetics (both as
discourse and technology) and in literary texts that partake of
cybernetic theory. Assuming that many readers of this review may be
as benighted in matters cybernetic as I and because the chapters on
cybernetic theory anchor three distinct sections in the book, it is
worthwhile to summarize in more detail the ideas behind these three
waves.
The first wave of cybernetics, Hayles argues, coincides with what
have become known retrospectively as the Macy Conferences. Out of
these meetings, held between 1945 and 1954 and clearly focussed on
the prospect of inventing intelligent machines, grew a model of
cybernetics predicated on the notion of homeostasis. This concept,
familiar to biologists as the capacity of living organisms to
maintain steady states regardless of environmental changes, is
extended in the Macy Conferences to machines through the concept of
an informational feedback loop. Several theoretical moves as
regards both information and humans are implied here. First,
following the work of the Claude Shannon, whose binary theory of
information helped launch the computer revolution, information is
reduced to a quantifiable choice, regardless of context.
This innovation becomes important in the development also of some of
the artifacts of the first wave of cybernetics, such as an
"intelligent" electronic "rat," a machine which, through information
feedback in terms of choice from among a given quantifiable set of
options, could find its way through a maze. The second, more
significant move here is the theoretical construction of humans and
machines as fundamentally similar. Both are taken to be, in their
essence, information processors. Human consciousness, with its
ability to understand the world reflexively in terms of
contextualized meaning and not only in terms of information, is
dispensed with. As such, human and machine were brought into an
"equivalence" that "shaped the kinds of stories that [Conference]
participants would tell about the meaning of this equivalence" (63).
Importantly, it would also inform the "stories" of human-machine
relations in the culture at large.
Second-wave cybernetics arises out of the central lacuna of its
earlier cousin--which is to say out of questions concerning
reflexivity. Even during the Macy Conferences the question of how
to take into account observers as part of the system being observed
was an issue. But it is largely ignored in favour of notions which,
in reifiying information, simplistically resolved problems of
engineering cybernetic devices. Yet some participants, among whom
Gregory Bateson is arguably the most well known, would not let the
question lie. The upshot was the notion of autopoiesis, whose
progenitors were Francisco Varela and Humberto Maturana.
Autopoiesis goes beyond homeostasis in arguing that organisms
respond to their environments not in any objective way (i.e. on the
basis of what is observed "out there") but in ways encoded and
polarized to the needs of the organism as a living system. This was
most famously substantiated in Varela's and Maturana's experiment of
implanting receptors in the visual cortex of a frog. From this they
discovered that the frogs could only see rapid movement of small
objects like flies. The conclusion they drew was that the frog does
not observe reality but constructs it. Autopoiesis is important to
second-wave cybernetic theory to the extent that the theoretical
focus shifts to how the component elements of a given system work
together to replicate that system.
These advances set the stage for third-wave cybernetics whose
concern was not simply with how systems, including machines,
replicated themselves, but with how the tendency of systems to
reproduce themselves could serve as the "springboard to emergence"
(11), which is to say, how systems, even non-human ones, evolve.
This brings us to the computer generated world of virtual reality
and Artificial Life. Artificial Life is the research program
devoted to the construction of disembodied "organisms." Some of
these organisms are computer programs which feedback output as input
and use the opportunity of deviations within this looping process to
"evolve" in new and unpredictable ways. One such program is Tierra,
devised by Thomas S. Ray of the Santa Fe Institute (a center devoted
to the study of Artificial Life), who has programmed in deviations
which allow the program to develop on its own.
Another such "organism" is Genghis, a six-legged robot designed by
MIT researcher Rodney Brooks. Moving beyond the electronic rat of
the first-wave of cybernetics and incorporating elements of the
autopoietic thrust of second-wave cybernetics, each leg of Genghis
is "programmed to stabilize itself in an environment which includes
the other five" (237). No particular movement is programmed in
advance. There is no direct or indirect external control. At least
theoretically, Genghis is a machine that can both think for itself
and do without humans. The idea that to this extent Genghis might
be considered a living organism not importantly different that a
human being is substantiated in the comments of a leading Artificial
Life researcher, Christopher Langton: "The p[r]inciple [sic]
assumption made in Artificial Life is that the 'logical form' of an
organism can be separated from its material basis of construction,
and that 'aliveness' will be found to be a property of the former,
not of the latter" (231).
And it is this proposition--that what is essentially characteristic
of human beings is consciousness taken to be a form of information
not importantly connected to its carbon-based or silicon-based
substrates--that for Hayles, remains a disturbing constant
throughout the three waves of cybernetics and the basis of her
reflections on the political and philosophical consequences of the
posthuman. Arguably more disturbing for Hayles are the literary
texts which are grounded in cybernetics and which have allowed "the
stories coming out of narrowly focused scientific theories to
circulate more widely through the body politic" (21). It is through
these works that the posthuman subject is constructed in an arguably
more effective way. For as we become, according to Hayles, more
like "cyborgs" in our everyday existence (i.e. in the way that we
interact with intelligent machines and in the way that humans are
actually articulated in physical way with intelligent machines like
artificial joints or electronic pacemakers), cybernetic notions at
play in popular culture (through novels like Philip K. Dick's _Do
Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?_, its cinematic adaptation, Ridley
Scott's _Blade Runner_, or even such sanitized popular fare as _The
Six Million Dollar Man_) structure our experience the world and
ourselves in a thoroughly posthuman way.
But Hayles does not see the rise of the posthuman as a necessarily
negative development. If the disembodiment of information, the
constitution of human consciousness as alike to information, and the
fundamental similarity between machines and humans all "evoke. .
.terror" by calling forth fears of our gradual dehumanization and
the conquest of humans by machines, the notion of the posthuman also
"excites pleasure" (4), she argues, insofar as it is fecund with the
possibility of radical political change. The posthuman of
cybernetics deconstructs the subject of liberal humanism by
disrupting the notion of a self (as identity, will and agency) that
is self-identical ("owing nothing to society" (3), in C. B.
MacPherson's phrase) by reducing consciousness to information having
no important relation to its material instantiation. For Hayles,
the terrifying aspects of the posthuman derive from this notion.
But as she compelling argues, this notion is made possible in large
part by the sharp distinction made within the liberal humanist
tradition between mind and body. The exciting possibilities
inherent in the posthuman are those that speak to overcoming the
disembodiment of knowledge in both posthumanism and humanism. For
Hayles, we must accept the posthumanist and anti-humanist notion
that we are not in possession of our consciousness, but that this is
so precisely because consciousness is embodied. Following the
arguments of evolutionary psychologists Jerome Barkow, Leda
Cosmides, and John Tooby, she argues for the "holistic nature of
human experience" (245). This fact is manifested in emotions or
"feelings," which, she argues, "are how the body communicates to the
mind information about its structures and continuously varying
states" (245). Indeed, she goes further, following Antonio Damasio,
in arguing that the "'basic topic'" of representations in the mind
are those of "'an organism anchored in the body'" and that therefore
"[h]uman mind without human body is not human mind" (246).
For Hayles, posthumanism leads us to the conclusion that the human
is inevitably situated within the "emergent processes through which
consciousness, the organism and the environment are constituted"
and is not simply a consciouness "in control." This latter notion,
of the "liberal humanist subject's manifest destiny to dominate and
control nature" (288), is a myth that promoted the social dominance
of elites in history. If there is something pleasurable deriving
from the posthuman, it is its demystification of this central pillar
of established power.
The intellectual odyssey that Hayles charts in bringing the reader
to this conclusion is veritably Homeric and, as I suggested at the
outset, it is this amazing scope of her book and the fascinating
world of our contemporaries in the science of cybernetics that is
here disclosed that recommends it. It seems to me, however, that
the strength of some of the book's central claims may well need
critical examination. This is particularly true of the claim that
"we" have "become" posthuman. This claim is grounded in a
post-structuralist approach that sees discourse as constitutive of
subjectivity. It is an approach to which this reviewer is very
sympathetic. However, in _How We Became Posthuman_ the constitutive
effects of the discourses under discussion are taken virtually as
given with very little effort to show that they actually apply in
this case. And some work as to be done here. For while many of us
will have heard of some of the movies and novels she looks at, many
others are, by her own admission, phenomena of literary
undergrounds. Thus one wonders whether they actually serve the
function she wants them to play as the conduit by which cybernetic
ideas can come to circulate more broadly.
Similarly, the proportion of the world's population that actually
uses computers (let alone telephones or faxes) is, also, by her own
admission, very small. With limited access both to the literary
discourse of the posthuman and to the kind of human-machine
interactions these discourses putatively structure in a posthuman
way, Hayles' insistence that we nonetheless not underestimate the
importance of the experience of virtuality seems without
justification. And even in those instances where she wants to talk
more specifically about the people who use newer technologies and
read the scientific and literary works she does, her evidence seems
to be largely anecdotal in character. This seems to reduce the
notion, central to post-structuralism, of the constitutive effects
of discourse into a pat formula rather than one that can be
demonstrably shown to apply in this instance. Similarly, the
"informatics" of the book's title (conditions very similar in nature
to the postmodern conditions whose rise David Harvey and Frederic
Jameson lament) are asserted to be the important conditions in which
the posthuman emerges. Yet there is little attempt to substantiate
these claims.
But it is in regard to Hayles' attempts to vindicate the notion of
the embodied character of human consciousness (surely one of her
central concerns) that her book is at its weakest. For the reader
is given no good reason to support this proposition. We are only
presented with a very brief passage that outlines the arguments of
the aforementioned evolutionary psychologists, arguments which make
this reviewer almost as nervous as those of cyberneticists. This
being said, one cannot but recommend this book to anyone who takes
seriously the task of understanding in-depth our own times and the
ways in which our technologically advanced, modern (or is it
postmodern?) condition is being altered by the stories we tell
ourselves.
Copyright (c) 2000 by H-Net, all rights reserved. This work
may be copied for non-profit educational use if proper credit
is given to the author and the list. For other permission,
please contact H-Net@h-net.msu.edu.
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