Graham J. Murphy

Department of English
University of Alberta
gjmurphy@gpu.srv.ualberta.ca

 

N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1999.

 

The collection of essays forming the text of How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics is the most recent attempt by noted scholar N. Katherine Hayles to re-insert embodiment¹ into the discourses of cybernetics, cyberspace, and human evolution. To accomplish this goal, Hayles charts embodiment from the dawning of cybernetics during the Macy Conferences of the 1950s through to our contemporary age of computers and virtuality. Particularly important to her study are three story lines:

 

The first centers on how information lost its body, that is, how it came to be conceptualized as an entity separate from the material forms in which it is thought to be embedded. The second story concerns how the cyborg was created as a technological artifact and cultural icon in the years following World War II. The third, deeply implicated with the first two, is the unfolding story of how a historically specific construction called the human is giving way to a different construction called the posthuman. (2, original emphases)

 

Defining the posthuman as a point of view that has predominantly stressed information patterns over materiality, Hayles uses her advanced degrees in both chemistry and English literature to weave a coherent account of the posthuman that unites the disciplines of science and the humanities. How We Became Posthuman is a highly intelligent and lucid analysis of the posthuman condition that, by re-inserting embodiment into the equation, succeeds in offering a viable alternative to dangerous fantasies of disembodiment.

 

The impetus for this project, what Hayles calls a “six-year odyssey” (2), was her reading of Hans Moravec’s Mind Children: The Future of Robot and Human Intelligence. Struck numb by Moravec’s future vision of human consciousness extracted from the biological and downloaded into the synthetic, Hayles was disturbed to find the same message enacted in multiple venues: Norbert Wiener’s suggestion in the 1950s that “it was theoretically possible to telegraph a human being” (1); the matter transporter technology in the original Star Trek which reduced the body to atoms speeding through space; molecular biology treating “information as the essential code the body expresses” (1); Marvin Minsky’s proposition that human memories will eventually be extracted and transported onto computer disk; and, finally, the “bodiless exultation” of cyberspace popularized in William Gibson’s Neuromancer. Resisting the Moravecian rapture of disembodiment, How We Became Posthuman veers away from this fantasy by demonstrating that disembodiment was not an inevitability in the rise of cybernetics and, as a result, the current emphasis upon disembodiment is only one avenue available to the posthuman. For Hayles, this text is an attempt to address an information/materiality hierarchy that often privileges the former over the latter and to recuperate a vision of the embodied posthuman:

 

If my nightmare is a culture inhabited by posthumans who regard their bodies as fashion accessories rather than the ground of being, my dream is a version of the posthuman that embraces the possibilities of information technologies without being seduced by fantasies of unlimited power and disembodied immortality, that recognizes and celebrates finitude as a condition of human being, and that understands human life is embedded in a material world of great complexity, one on which we depend for our continued survival. (5)

 

In her analysis of the history of cybernetics, Hayles divides the development of this discourse into three waves. The first wave involves an analysis of the Josiah Macy Foundation conferences, held during the 1940s and 1950s, that gave rise to the field of cybernetics. In her analysis, she demonstrates that amidst the cacophony of voices attempting to come to terms with information theory, one important battle was taking place: homeostasis vs. reflexivity. The homeostasis “camp,” epitomized by figures such as Norbert Wiener, Claude Shannon, and John von Neumann, focused on maintaining the neutrality of the scientific observer. By removing the observer from the information system, complex mathematical equations were used to define “information” as an entity separate from any material instantiation: “[Information] would be calculated as the same value regardless of the contexts in which it was embedded, which is to say, they divorced it from meaning. In context, this was an appropriate and sensible decision. Taken out of context, the definition allowed information to be conceptualized as if it were an entity that can flow unchanged between different material substrates…” (53-54, original emphases). Donald MacKay, a British researcher, championed the importance of reflexivity and argued that the Shannon-Wiener approach was “selective information” wherein information is “calculated by considering the selection of message elements from a set” (55). MacKay’s approach, endorsed by others, was dubbed “structural information” and took into account the receiver of information: “Structural information indicates how selective information is to be understood; it is a message about how to interpret a message–that is, it is a metacommunication” (55). By incorporating an embodied presence into the system, MacKay was interested in developing an information theory that took into account the meaning of information. Bristling at Shannon’s interpretation of information as a series of “subjective probabilities” (54), MacKay’s approach to information theory was firmly grounded in embodiment; however, homeostasis received the scientific nod because of the extreme difficulty of quantifying reflexivity: “To achieve quantification, a mathematical model was needed for the changes that a message triggered in the receiver’s mind” (56). The difficulty of coming up with just such a model explains why MacKay’s approach “continued to be foundational for the British school of information theory, [while] in the United States the Shannon-Wiener definition of information, not MacKay’s, became the industry standard” (56).

 

The most prominent figure to emerge from the Macy conferences was, of course, Norbert Wiener, who became known as the father of cybernetics. Remapping the human body as an informational pattern, Wiener, according to Hayles, still sought to retain liberal humanist control. Consequently, Hayles underlines a fundamental tension as Wiener’s version of cybernetics, expanded beyond the scientific disciplines, threatened to position the subject as a powerless by-product of intricate micro- and macrosystems. Should cybernetics be expanded beyond the scientific disciplines, it could reduce “the individual to a connective membrane with no control over desires and with no ability to derive pleasure from them” (111). Wiener’s insistence that cybernetics not be used in non-scientific disciplines demonstrates to Hayles that he was fully aware of the tragic implications for the liberal humanist subject of a cybernetics taken too far. Although he did his best to contain cybernetics, Hayles notes that this restraint was inevitably futile as not even “the father of a discipline can single-handedly control what cybernetics signifies when it propagates through the culture by all manner of promiscuous couplings” (112).

 

In the second wave of cybernetics, during the 1960s, Hayles notes a gradual mutation of ideas, not a radical break with the past. Cybernetics developed as a “seriation,” a shift wherein the old is gradually replaced with new concepts. The key motif of the first wave, homeostasis, becomes what Hayles terms a “skeumorph” for the second wave. In other words, homeostasis is no longer a key concept for the second wave but performs “the work of a gesture or an allusion used to authenticate new elements in the emerging constellation of reflexivity” (17). In this second wave, homeostasis was displaced and a fresh group of scientists, notably Heinz von Foerster, Humberto Maturana, and Francisco Varela, emerged as the principal proponents of reflexivity.

 

For Hayles, Heinz von Foerster is the transitional figure who ushered in the shift from the first wave to the second wave of cybernetics. As the editor of the Macy conference papers, von Foerster became interested in exploring manners by which the observer could be re-inserted into the cybernetic system. While von Foerster may have ushered in this next stage, Humberto Maturana and (albeit later) Francisco Varela were responsible for bringing it to maturation. Central to the reflexivity of the second wave is the notion of “autopoiesis,” theorized predominantly by Maturana. In the autopoietic view, the methods by which an individual observes a system are inevitably implicated in the system from the outset. Studying the sensory receptions of a frog, Maturana demonstrated that the reflexivity of the frog and its environment causes the frog to develop an observatory ability (e.g., ability to see flies for food) specific to the frog species; in other words, a frog sees a frog world and not a wolf world, elephant world, or human world. This construction of reality holds true for human perceptual abilities as “[w]e do not see a world ‘out there’ that exists apart from us. Rather, we see only what our systemic organization allows us to see. The environment merely triggers changes determined by the system’s own structural properties. Thus the center of interest for autopoiesis shifts from the cybernetics of the observed system to the cybernetics of the observer” (11, original emphasis). While not willing to abandon completely the homeostatic structure, Maturana reinserts embodiment into the information system by relying upon “structural coupling,” which reasons that “[a]ll living organisms must be structurally coupled to their environments to continue living: humans, for example, have to breathe air, drink water, eat food” (138).

 

Although this new phase of cybernetics brings embodiment back into the equation, Hayles is quick to point out that the key problem with Maturana’s theory is the difficulty of factoring in mutation and evolution. For Maturana, autopoiesis is a closed system that Hayles cannot fully embrace: “The very closure that gives autopoietic theory its epistemological muscle also limits the theory, so that it has a difficult time accounting for dynamic interactions that are not circular in their effects” (147). Hayles rightly questions the applicability of a theory that is unable to account for mutations; furthermore, while she supports Maturana’s re-insertion of embodiment, she questions a system that relegates consciousness to a feedback mechanism rather than the individual’s physical and linguistic interaction with other embodiments: “The grounding assumptions for individuality shift from self-possession to organizational closure and the reflexivity of a system recursively operating on its own representations” (149). Despite her support of Maturana’s attempts to factor embodiment back into the cybernetic system, Hayles is dissatisfied with the structural limitations of autopoiesis and wants to ensure that autonomy is not the price paid for embodiment.

 

The third wave of cybernetics comprises our contemporary age dominated by cyberspace, virtualities, and the competition between Artificial Intelligence and Artificial Life. Like von Foerster before him, Francisco Varela is the transitional figure from the second to the third wave. Varela’s break from Maturana and his shift into exploring the possibilities of Artificial Life indicate the move of cybernetics into the realm of virtual technologies. Departing from the historical overview of cybernetics, the last few chapters in How We Became Posthuman display the complexity of Hayles’s insights and are her finest work. “The Materiality of Informatics” is an astute analysis and is exceptional in its positioning of the posthuman on the boundary of body/embodiment. In other words, Hayles proposes that the posthuman can live in the splice separating oppositional terms rather than choosing sides. The tension between the body and embodiment comes forth in the dialectic of inscription/incorporation. Like the body, inscription is normative “and abstract, in the sense that it is usually considered as a system of signs operating independently of any particular manifestation” (198). Conversely, incorporation is a “practice such as a good-bye wave [that] cannot be separated from its embodied medium, for it exists as such only when it is instantiated in a particular hand making a particular kind of gesture” (198). Rather than choosing inscription/body vs. incorporation/embodiment, however, Hayles recognizes that both sets of “being” are not mutually exclusive but, on the contrary, interdependent. Living in the splice enables new configurations of the posthuman that offer the alternative to the Moravecian disembodiment that Hayles finds so unappealing and dangerous: “The recursivities that entangle inscription with incorporation, the body with embodiment, invite us to see these polarities not as static concepts but as mutating surfaces that transform one another…. Starting from a model emphasizing polarities, then, we have moved toward a vision of interactions both pleasurable and dangerous, creatively dynamic and explosively transformative” (220).

 

As I noted earlier, Hayles possesses advanced degrees in both chemistry and English literature; she offsets each wave of cybernetics with specific novels from the science fiction (SF) repertoire. “The scientific texts,” she writes, “often reveal, as literature cannot, the foundational assumptions that gave theoretical scope and artifactual efficacy to a particular approach. The literary texts often reveal, as scientific work cannot, the complex cultural, social, and representational issues tied up with conceptual shifts and technological innovations” (24). Bernard Wolfe’s Limbo (1952) is the literary parallel for the first wave of cybernetics and it explores the implications for the body that cybernetics heralds. “Limbo,” writes Hayles, “is a staging of the complex dynamics between cyborg and literary bodies. As such, it demonstrates that neither body will remain unchanged by the encounter” (130).The analysis of Limbo is quite thorough in its exploration of the anxieties that parallel Wolfe and Wiener. Wolfe’s novel touches on amputations, prosthetics, warfare, gender, and sexual politics, and Hayles links these diverse issues to cybernetics with some success. The first half of the chapter flows from Wiener to Wolfe with relatively minimal effort. Midway through, however, as Hayles begins to address gender, the chapter loses its focus somewhat and comes across as stylistically choppy; it is almost as if Hayles has taken two essays on Limbo and amalgamated them into one.

 

Hayles chooses several of Philip K. Dick’s novels as representative texts for the second wave of cybernetics. Like the reflexivity scientists, Dick chose to take into full account the position of the observer and, by modifying the information system, the boundaries of “human,” “body,” “subjectivity,” and “reality” are all called into question. His 1969 novel Ubik brilliantly explores this problematic as Dick never completely identifies for the reader just who is and who is not in the system. Reality in Ubik is, as Hayles’s chapter title indicates, turned inside out. Complicating this question of reality, however, is the interrogation of the nature of humanity illustrated in the gender politics running through several of his novels. “Dick,” Hayles writes, “is drawn to cybernetic themes because he understands that cybernetics radically destabilizes the ontological foundations of what counts as human. The gender politics he writes into his novels illustrate the potent connections between cybernetics and contemporary understandings of race, gender, and sexuality” (24). The roles of the “schizoid android” (161) and the “dark-haired girl” become central to a deeper understanding of how Dick engaged gender issues in his novels and how he saw cybernetics testing the ontological boundaries of reality. In Hayles’s reading, the gender politics of Dick’s work are more structurally coherent than those in Wolfe’s. The reason that this essay is more coherent may have to do with the number of texts available to Hayles for her analysis. Unlike the chapter on Limbo which was confined to one novel, this section moves through a variety of Dick’s texts. This multiple sampling from one of the most prolific (SF) authors of English literature gives the reader a better sense of cybernetics in the 1960s and gives the chapter a much stronger impact than the one on Limbo.

 

Hayles hits her stride in the shift from Dick to the cyberpunk/post-cyberpunk phase of her study. The growth and ubiquity of cyberspace and virtuality owe a great deal to Gibson’s seminal 1984 novel Neuromancer. The novel introduced two important concepts: a disembodied point-of-view (which Hayles calls the “pov”) that allows the user to circulate in the computer matrix without the constraints of a physical shell; second, the matrix itself, cyberspace, which is defined in Neuromancer as a “consensual hallucination” (51) but misquoted by Hayles as a “consensual illusion” (36). Since Neuromancer,² the possibilities of this new form of technological (dis)embodiment have opened the door to new expressions of subjectivity. Especially important is replacing the “floating signifier” with the new “flickering signifier”: “[Information technologies] fundamentally alter the relation of signified to signifier. Carrying the instabilities in Lacanian floating signifiers one step further, information technologies created what I will call flickering signifiers, characterized by their tendency toward unexpected metamorphoses, attenuations, and dispersions. Flickering signifiers signal an important shift in the plate tectonics of language” (30, original emphasis). The flickering signifier is a conceptual framework rife with possibilities for exploring the subjectivities that virtuality engenders and, as the world becomes increasingly on-line, will no doubt play an important role in future configurations of embodiment/body and inscription/incorporation.

 

While her analysis of Neuromancer may be left wanting (see Endnote [2]), Hayles succeeds better in her use of SF to demonstrate that posthumanism should be more appropriately termed posthumanisms. In this respect her arguments are both engaging and astute. Using the semiotics of virtuality to explore the plurality of posthumanism, Hayles constructs a semiotic square of presence/absence and randomness/pattern upon which four key novels are placed: Blood Music (Greg Bear),[3] Galatea 2.2 (Richard Powers), Terminal Games (Cole Perriman), and Snow Crash (Neal Stephenson). On one axis, “Blood Music asks, ‘What if humans were taken over by their component parts, functioning now as conscious entities themselves?’ Terminal Games asks the complementary question, ‘What if humans were made to function as if they were components of another entity?'” (251). Similarly, on a separate axis, Galatea 2.2 asks “‘What if a computer behaved like a person?'” while Snow Crash contemplates “‘What if people were made to behave like computers?'” (251). In a nutshell, all four books struggle with the same question: “when the human meets the posthuman, will the encounter be for better or for worse?” (281). Working her way through the codings in these novels, Hayles demonstrates that it is “evident that there is no consensus on what the posthuman portends, in part because how the posthuman is constructed and imagined varies so widely. What the topology [reveals] is not so much an answer to a deep question of how the human and the posthuman should be articulated together as the complexity of the contexts within which that question is being posed” (251).

 

The only major difficulty with How We Became Posthuman concerns the issue of political agency. While Hayles does succeed in re-addressing embodiment, the term itself remains fairly isolated. Put another way, embodiment is a concept that Hayles identifies as parallelling the body; yet, it remains distanced throughout this text from the signification of bodily markers such as race or gender. While the embodied posthuman prompts new modes of thinking about humans and technology, there is minimal in-depth exploration of the gendered or racially embodied posthuman. While Hayles does an excellent job in exploring cybernetics, bodily markers remain conspicuously beneath the surface.[4] The reader may ask, “Now that embodiment is back in the picture, where does posthumanism go regarding gender issues? race issues?” Hayles seems content to leave the future of the posthuman in the hands of SF authors (all male in this text) whose novels demonstrate some blind spots towards these self-same questions. While some may argue that Hayles has laid the groundwork and it is now up to successive generations of scholars to plot the course of posthumanism, this fallback position feels inadequate. How We Became Posthuman contains a large portion of revamped and expanded essays that have appeared in earlier incarnations from 1990 onwards. While this is certainly normal in academic publishing (and not to be balked at), it would have been helpful and thought-provoking to see her project her hopeful vision of the posthuman in addition to expanding it.

 

Inaccuracies regarding the SF literature aside, How We Became Posthuman is an insightful, thought-provoking, and important work in the ongoing development of the posthuman; it succeeds in displacing the fantasy of disembodiment of the “Moravecians” by re-inserting embodiment into the posthuman condition. The posthuman, as Hayles defines it at the beginning of the text, is a point of view (as opposed to the disembodied pov of Neuromancer) that, “grounded in embodied actuality rather than disembodied information… [,] offers resources for rethinking the articulation of humans with intelligent machines” (287). While it leaves the issue of political agency relatively untapped, How We Became Posthuman redefines the terms of the posthuman debate. Hayles presents her dream to oppose the Moravecian nightmare. She demonstrates that the anti-human vision of the posthuman is not an always already entity and, as such, “we can craft others that will be conducive to the long-range survival of humans and of the other life-forms, biological and artificial, with whom we share the planet and ourselves” (291).

 

Notes

 

1. Embodiment is not to be confused with the body as Hayles makes a concerted effort to distinguish the two terms. The body for Hayles is a construct that “is always normative relative to some set of criteria” (196) whereas embodiment is “contextual, enmeshed within the specifics of place, time, physiology, and culture, which together compose enactment. Embodiment never coincides exactly with ‘the body,’ however that normalized concept is understood” (196). In fact, embodiment is a disruptive condition that is in perpetual tension with the body:

 

Experiences of embodiment, far from existing apart from culture, are always already imbricated within it. Yet because embodiment is individually articulated, there is also at least an incipient tension between it and hegemonic cultural constructs. Embodiment is thus inherently destabilizing with respect to the body, for at any time this tension can widen into a perceived disparity. (197)

 

2. While the pov and cyberspace certainly evoke the sense of disembodiment, critical discussion of Neuromancer, including that of Hayles in this text, may overlook the ambivalence Gibson expresses regarding the notion of disembodiment. While this is not the place to begin an analysis of Neuromancer, it should be noted that Gibson does not wholeheartedly advocate disembodiment. Case makes the decision to forgo techno-transcendental utopia with Linda Lee in favor of the “meat” at the terminal. Similarly, the Dixie Flatline, a personality construct, is bothered that nothing bothers him/it and requests techno-euthanasia: “‘This scam of yours, when it’s over, you erase this goddam thing'” (107).

 

3. Although Hayles does weave together a taut semiotic square, she does demonstrate some carelessness regarding her literary texts. Aside from the Neuromancer misquote, she incorrectly summarizes the plot of Blood Music when she states that Virgil Ulam swallows his biochips (252), whereas he actually injects them into his bloodstream (Bear 24).

 

4. The first overt appearance of gender takes place in a wonderful, albeit brief, mention of Janet Freed, the woman responsible for transcribing the Macy Conferences into journal format: “On a level beyond words, beyond theories and equations, in her body and her arms and her fingers and her aching back, Janet Freed knows that information is never disembodied, that messages don’t flow by themselves, and that epistemology isn’t a word floating through the thin, thin air until it is connected up with incorporating practices” (83).

 

Works Cited

 

• Bear, Greg. Blood Music. New York: ACE Books, 1986.
• Gibson, William. Neuromancer. New York: ACE Books, 1984.
• Hayles, N. Katherine. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1999.