But symbiosis always entails mutual risk exposure. Consequently, we will need to design new political responses appropriate to the complex posthuman syncopation between conscious and unconscious perceptions for humans and the interactions of surface displays and algorithmic procedures for machines (2012, 13). According to Hayles the posthuman view privileges information over materiality, considers consciousness as an epiphenomenon and imagines the body as a prosthesis for the mind. Vega focuses on three Robinsonian concepts that are useful for political theology: racial capitalism, Black radical tradition, and African metaphysics. The Cosmic Web: Scientific Field Models and Literary Strategies in the Twentieth Century. 2014. 2011, Co-Editor : Electronic Mediations Series, University of Minnesota Press. "[25] Brigham describes Hayles' attempt to connect autopoietic circularity to "an inadequacy in Maturana's attempt to account for evolutionary change" as unjustified. Since the 1970s, N. Katherine Hayles has been exploring the zones of contact between the cultural formations of technology and the technological basis of culture, working between what C. P. Snow called "the two cultures" of humanists and scientists. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Hayles posthuman model requires us to appreciate that the human exists only symbiotically. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. As the age of print passes and new technologies appear every day, this proposition has become far more complicated, particularly for the traditionally print-based disciplines in the humanities and qualitative social sciences. [26] As Pickering wrote, Hayles' promotion of an "embodied posthumanism" challenges cybernetics' "equation of human-ness with disembodied information" for being "another male trick to feminists tired of the devaluation of women's bodily labor. Hannah Arendt argued that interreligious difference and Christian theology are steady influences on political movements, action, and thought. I recommend it highly. Paperback 9780262582155 Published: November 8, 2002 Publisher: The MIT Press $29.95 Hardcover 9780262083119 Stitching together past and present, this study identifies a persistent struggle to make sense of how humans touch and feel machines, with questions about user agency, labor, individuality, and authentic engagement coming to the fore. Chen suggests that Western political theologians should incorporate more resources from local knowledgesuch as popular culture, literature, films, and musicin order to notice resistance in daily life. October 21, 2010, How We Read: Close, Hyper, Machine. This interview with N. Katherine Hayles, one of the foremost theorists of the posthuman, explores the concerns that led to her seminal book How We Became Posthuman (1999), the key arguments expounded in that book, and the changes in technology and culture in the ten years since its publication. Within the field of Posthuman Studies, Hayles' How We Became Posthuman is considered "the key text which brought posthumanism to broad international attention". "[23] Dennis Weiss of York College of Pennsylvania accuses Hayles of "unnecessarily complicat[ing] her framework for thinking about the body", for example by using terms such as "body" and "embodiment" ambiguously. the post-World War II Macy Conferences on cybernetics), cultural studies (e.g. In, Flesh and Metal: Reconfiguring the Mindbody in Virtual Environments. Nancy Katherine Hayles (born December 16, 1943) is an American postmodern literary critic, most notable for her contribution to the fields of literature and science, electronic literature, and American literature. The author is well positioned to bring informed critical engines to bear on a subject that will increasingly permeate our media and our minds. , Duke Announces 2015 Distinguished Professors, Two Faculty Elected to American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Hayles to Deliver Inaugural Humanities Lecture in Indiana, Katherine Hayles: The expansion of video games, In a Duke Lab, a Spy's Tools of the Trade, Movin' Out: Duke's First Humanities Labs Close Up Shop. The major concept in this book is nonconscious cognition, by which Hayles means cognitive capacity as it resides in human consciousness, as well as in brain processes of which we are unaware, and, crucially, in other life forms and complex technical systems as well (2017, 9). They offer provocative responses to both the threats to and possibilities of human embodiment in an age where information and attention are the most valuable resources. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. To pose the question of "what can think" inevitably also changes, in a reverse feedback loop, the terms of "who can think.". Moreover, posthumanism has religious significance in and of itself. Science Fiction Research Associates. January 5, 2013, Machine and Close Reading: Convergent Strategies. In weaving the literary and the historical, Hayles desire is to show the complex interplays between embodied forms of subjectivity and arguments for disembodiment throughout the cybernetic tradition (1999, 7). YouTube. N. Katherine Hayles is Professor of English and Design/Media Arts at the University of California at Los Angeles. N. Katherine Hayles How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics 1st Edition by N. Katherine Hayles (Author) 74 ratings See all formats and editions Kindle $16.49 Read with Our Free App Hardcover $54.00 Other used and collectible from $19.45 Paperback $17.21 - $22.50 Other new, used and collectible from $6.10 Campus Safety / Website Support, Courses for the American Literature & Culture Major, Visual Culture / Media Studies / Digital Humanities. June 26, 2013, Technogenesis: The Role of the Digital Companion. Meillassouxs thinking of post-Copernican cosmic immanence and cosmic delegitimation constitutes a challenge to political theology as still predominantly Ptolemaic in its assumptions and focus. It also refers to sci-fi imaginaries of the cybernetic human as essentially a container for information. [12] Drawing on diverse examples, such as Turing's imitation game, Gibson's Neuromancer and cybernetic theory, Hayles traces the history of what she calls "the cultural perception that information and materiality are conceptually distinct and that information is in some sense more essential, more important and more fundamental than materiality. December 15, 2009, Plenary: Digital Art and Culture and the Humanities: Challenges and Opportunities,. Fellowship. January 5, 2013, Re-Thinking the Humanities Curriculum. November 8, 2013, The Cognitive Nonconscious: Implications for Thinking in the Digital Age. Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. 1991. 62 ratings8 reviews. of Chicago Press, 2017) and How We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis (Univ. "[23] Stephanie Turner of Purdue University also described Hayles' work as an opportunity to challenge prevailing concepts of the human subject which assumed the body was white, male, and European, but suggested Hayles' dialectic method may have taken too many interpretive risks, leaving some questions open about "which interventions promise the best directions to take. Thankfully, N. Katherine Hayles's How We Became Posthuman provides a rigorous and historical framework for grappling with the cyborg, which Hayles replaces with the more all-purpose 'posthuman. As Have Tirosh-Samuelson writes, the transition from the human condition to the posthuman condition will be facilitated by transhumanism, a project of human enhancement that she argues should be seen as a secularist faith (2012, 710). The major concept in this essay is object oriented inquiry, by which Hayles means adapting the framework of object oriented ontology (OOO) to move beyond ontological questions within the relatively narrow boundaries of speculative philosophy, to epistemological, social, cultural and political issues (2014, 170). Prologue. Franklin Humanities Institute. Science fiction is a methodological touchstone for Hayles because of the way it inherently combines thinking about technology and our relation to it. Like all good magic tricks, the test relies on getting you to accept at an early stage assumptions that will determine how you interpret what you see later. The subject in posthumanist theory: Retained rather than dethroned In Unthought , she once again bridges disciplines by revealing how we think without thinkinghow we use cognitive processes that are inaccessible to consciousness yet necessary for it to function. December 4, 2008, Spatializing Time: The Influence of Google Earth, Google Maps. Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary. by N. Katherine Hayles Winner of the 2003 Susanne K. Langer Award for Outstanding Scholarship in the Ecology of Symbolic Form presented by the Media Ecology Association (MEA) $29.95 Paperback Hardcover 144 pp., 6 x 8 in, 56 b&w illus. Taubess thought revolves around two poles, philosophy of history and political theology, with the aim of inverting the Schmittian position and thinking a new form of community by means of an innovative return to Paul of Tarsus and Walter Benjamin. Postprint: Books and Becoming Computational. Expanding our notions of what and who counts as political actors, allowing us to resist theologies of dominion and stewardship, or, in fact, any metaphysics that depends on the uniqueness of the human and the conscious integrity of human intentionality. Narrating Bits: Encounters between Humans and Intelligent Machines, This page was last edited on 16 April 2023, at 11:26. It is a process of change that is sometimes joyful, sometimes painful. October 28, 2011, Cryptographic Grilles and Contemporary Literature. December 15, 2009, Vinge and the Micropolitics of Global Spatialization". Twitter 2017. "Margaret Wertheim, New Scientist, "Hayles's book continues to be widely praised and frequently cited. We might forget air, we might forget that we breathe, or how to breathe. This gives reason for taking diverse modes of agency and subjectivity seriously. N. Katherine Hayles humanist inquiry centers on the relations of literature, science and technology in the 20th and 21st centuries and digitally mediated cultural contexts of the U.S. With a background as a scientist, having trained in chemistry in the 1960s before retraining in English literature in the 1970s, Hayles interdisciplinary thinking produced the career-defining concept of the posthuman. Emerging from this nexus of Hayles work, the posthuman reimagines the concept of the human as embodied in ecological relation to other beings, whether biological life, artificial life, or nonlife. the cyborg feminism of Donna Haraway), and literary criticism (20th century novels exploring the human in relation to cybernetics and artificial life). In Unthought, she once again bridges disciplines by revealing how we think without thinkinghow we use cognitive processes that are inaccessible to consciousness yet necessary for it to function. Scholars and activists cannot rely on fact-checking or dry reason in this political climate. If you distinguish correctly which is the man and which the woman, you in effect reunite the enacted and the represented bodies into a single gender identity. January 5, 2013, tenure evaluator Aden Evens, Dartmouth College : Tenure Evaluation, Aden Evens. Linda Brigham of Kansas State University claims that Hayles manages to lead the text "across diverse, historically contentious terrain by means of a carefully crafted and deliberate organizational structure. Website Support Chicago: University of Chicago Press. His conviction and the court-ordered hormone treatments for his homosexuality tragically demonstrated the importance of doing over saying in the coercive order of a homophobic society with the power to enforce its will upon the bodies of its citizens. Critical Theory for Political Theology: Theorists, Critical Theory for Political Theology: Keywords, Critical Theory for Political Theology 2.0, critiqued by some for not engaging sufficiently with the political, frameworks that seek to put humans at the center of AI. Deepening our understanding of the extraordinary transformative powers digital technologies have placed in the hands of humanists. Humanities Division, UCLA Posthumanism casts questions of, for instance, the moral status of non-human beings, in terms of how agency is distributed through what Hayles calls cognitive assemblages, which are therefore also political assemblages. She worked as a research chemist in 1966 at Xerox Corporation and as a chemical research consultant Beckman Instrument Company from 1968 to 1970. The Invisible Committee may be productively, albeit counterintuitively, understood as Gnostic, a perspective that will put into question some of the assumptions behind the way the political and the theological are demarcated from and related to each other in contemporary debates. Books by N. Katherine Hayles - Goodreads Her scholarship primarily focuses on the "relations between science, literature, and technology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017. Aiding this process was a definition of information, formalized by Claude Shannon and Norbert Wiener, that conceptualized information as an entity distinct from the substrates carrying it. Hayles replaces the concept of withdrawal with that of resistance. With this move, the sidesteps the hermeneutic solipsism for which OOO circles have been critiqued, and stands with the relationality of politically engaged feminist speculative realisms. January 5, 2013, Designing Speculation: An Alternate Reality Game. October 10, 2008, Pervasive Computing: Literature, Art, Environment. You are alone in the room, except for two computer terminals flickering in the dim light. Want to Read. May 30, 2008, Software Studies and Electronic Literature. November 19, 2008, How We Think: The Transforming Power of Digital Technologies. Her books have won several prizes, including The Rene Wellek Award for the Best Book in Literary Theory for How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Literature, Cybernetics and Informatics, and the Suzanne Langer Award for Writing Machines. In Unthought: the power of the cognitive nonconscious, she describes thinking: "Thinking, as I use the term, refers to high-level mental operations such as reasoning abstractly, creating and using verbal languages, constructing mathematical theorems, composing music, and the like, operations associated with higher consciousness. October 11, 2013, The Cognitive Nonconscious: Implications for the Humanities. Honorary Phi Beta Kappa Membership, 2001. How We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis, The Comparative Method of Language Acquisition Research, 1427 E. 60th Street Chicago, IL 60637 USA. March 15, 2013, Apophenia: Patterns in Electronic Literature. January 5, 2013, Speculative Aesthetics: Object Oriented Inquiry (OOI). December 15, 2011, tenure review evaluator : Tenure Review, Cynthia Lawson. The Materiality of Informatics | Semantic Scholar Hayles conceptual toolkit allows users to define the human with technologies, as transhumanists would, and against technologies, when it is politically expedient to do so. Chicago Manual of Style Stanford Humanities Center. theorist N. Katherine Hayles' oeuvre at the intersection of literature and computational science and technology. Director of Graduate Studies in the Program in Literature, Scholarly, Clinical, & Service Activities. Lyotards thought as it appears in Le Diffrend describes a linguistic state that evades speech, and the ways in which justice could be done to it, or not. December 15, 2009, Telegraph Code Books as Historical Resource and Linguistic Practice". On this view, Hodges's reading of the gender test as nonsignifying with respect to identity can be seen as an attempt to safeguard the boundaries of the subject from precisely this kind of transformation, to insist that the existence of thinking machines will not necessarily affect what being human means. [full text] "Waking up to the Surveillance Society," Surveillance and Society6.3 (29). A reflection on the political implications of N. Katherine Hayles critical aesthetic inquiry into the ecological relationships between the human and the technological, thought and cognition, and information and materiality. October 15, 2011, Tenure review evaluator : Tenure Review, Fabian Winkler. TLDR. Subscribe for news and events, UCLA [3] She was the faculty director of the Electronic Literature Organization from 2001 to 2006. (Our About page explains how this works.) Her research focuses on new religious movements, as well as aesthetic and ontological questions raised by new media and technology. However, rather than being disturbed by the fact that most cognition necessarily involves no conscious awareness at all, Hayles appreciates that an accurate view of human cognitive ecology opens it to comparison with other biological cognizers on the one hand and on the other to the cognitive capabilities of technical systems (2017, 11). Hayles relates three interwoven stories: how information lost its body, that is, how it came to be conceptualized as an entity separate from the material forms that carry it; the cultural and technological . Novel Corona: Posthuman Virus | Critical Inquiry: Vol 47, No S2 Althaus-Reids work asks whether Political Theology is capable of accounting for the power of sex, a power that comes to the fore if the theologian focuses on queer bodies. Crucially, then, cognitive assemblages are inherently politicalThey are infused with social-technological-cultural-economic practices that instantiate and negotiate between different kinds of powers, stakeholders, and modes of cognition (Hayles 2017, 178). Rachel Plotnick. This work raises many challenges to precepts about nature, human nature, and human destiny that are imbricated in political thinking and derived from theological traditions. If you cannot tell the intelligent machine from the intelligent human, your failure proves, Turing argued, that machines can think. N. Katherine Hayles is known for breaking new ground at the intersection of the sciences and the humanities. How do we think? N. Katherine Hayles poses this question at the beginning of this bracing exploration of the idea that we think through, with, and alongside media. If you have the misfortune to live in an interesting era, run. This construction necessarily makes the subject into a cyborg, for the enacted and represented bodies are brought into conjunction through the technology that connects them. She is the author of The Cosmic Web: Scientific Field Models and Literary Strategies in the Twentieth Century (1984) and Chaos Bound: Orderly Disorder in Contemporary Literature and Science You use the terminals to communicate with two entities in another room, whom you cannot see. Society for Literature, Science and the Arts. December 15, 2009, Plenary: Rethinking the Humanities in a Digital Age". The very existence of the test, however, implies that you may also make the wrong choice. On this view, orchids, thermostats, squirrels, and humans are all cognitive beings. Privacy Policies N. Katherine Hayles - Social Sciences We launched this series to make available theoretical resources that keep pace with the concerns raised by those working with political theology today, whose interests are increasingly tied not only to questions of genealogy, speculation, and political modernity, but also to questions of race, colonialism, gender, sexuality, disability, ecology, labor, finance capitalism, and economies of affect. The ethical imperative of such a move is made apparent as Hayles mines speculative fiction such as The Silent History (Horowitz, Derby, Moffett 2014) for resources that value the human for its embodied cognitive capacities, and not just its supposedly definitive power to do thinking in symbolic language. 2011. N. Katherine Hayles is the Distinguished Research Professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the James B. Duke Professor Emerita from Duke University. Perhaps it would mean focusing on underappreciated aspects of the Christian tradition, and other religious traditions, particularly those developed by womens intellectual labor. 2017. How We Think makes a strong case for the role of the humanities in the digital age. November 15, 2008, Spatializing Time: The Influence of Google Earth, Google Maps. N. Katherine Hayles is the Distinguished Research Professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the James B. Duke Professor Emerita from Duke University. in chemistry from the Rochester Institute of Technology in 1966, and her M.S. What would it mean for scholarship in political theology to claim monstrosity? In How We Became Posthuman, N. Katherine Hayles separates hype from fact, investigating the fate of embodiment in an information age. November 12, 2011, Narrative Storyworlds and Experimental Fiction. In this volume, fourteen theorists explore the significance for literary and . Although the cognitive capacity that exists beyond consciousness goes by various names, I call it nonconscious cognition."[20]. According to Hayles, most human cognition happens outside of consciousness/unconsciousness; cognition extends through the entire biological spectrum, including animals and plants; technical devices cognize, and in doing so profoundly influence human complex systems. All that mattered was the formal generation and manipulation of informational patterns. What the Turing test "proves" is that the overlay between the enacted and the represented bodies is no longer a natural inevitability but a contingent production, mediated by a technology that has become so entwined with the production of identity that it can no longer meaningfully be separated from the human subject. Why does gender appear in this primal scene of humans meeting their evolutionary successors, intelligent machines? Winner of the Crystal Book Award of Excellence, Scholarly Reference, Chicago Book Clinic and Media Show 2008. Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics in Electronic Literature". Quijano reimagines the long-lasting and contemporary status of colonialism seen through the lenses of race, modernity/rationality, and economic exploitation, encouraging us to produce theological and political critiques from the ever-enduring nature of coloniality. A cyber/bio/semiotic perspective, Human and machine cultures of reading: A cognitive-assemblage approach, Cognitive assemblages: Technical agency and human interactions, The cognitive nonconscious: Enlarging the mind of the humanities, The affectual distinctiveness of big books, Brain imaging and the epistemology of vision: Daniel Suarez's daemon and freedom, Greg Egan's Quarantine and Teranesia: Contributions to the Millennial Reassessment of Consciousness and the Cognitive Nonconscious, Speculation: Financial Games and Derivative Worlding in a Transmedia Era, Cognition Everywhere: The Rise of the Cognitive Nonconscious and the Costs of Consciousness, Speculative Aesthetics and Object Oriented Inquiry (OOI), Stanisaw Lem's "Summa Technologiae": Mirror text to "The Cyberiad", Rewiring Literary Criticism (Review of Mark C. Taylor's "Rewiring the Real: Conversations with William Gaddis, Richard Powers, Mark Danielewski, and Don DeLillo"), Combining close and distant reading: Jonathan Safran Foer's Tree of Codes and the aesthetic of bookishness, Review of Braden R. Allenby and Daniel Sarewitz's "The Techno-Human Condition", Remixed Up (Review of Mark Amerika's "Remix the Book" and Alex Goody's "Technology, Literature and Culture"), Tech-TOC: Complex Temporalities in Living and Technical Beings, Material Entanglements: Steven Halls "The Raw Shark Texts" as Slipstream Novel, 'How We Became Posthuman': Ten Years On (An Interview with N. Katherine Hayles), Sleepwalking into the Surveillance Society, RFID: Human Agency and Meaning in Information-Intensive Environments, Narrative and Database: Natural Symbionts (Response to Ed Folsom's "Database as Genre, The Epic Transformation of Archives"), Revealing and Transforming: How Electronic Literature Re-Values Computational Practice, Unfinished Work: From Cyborg to Cognisphere, Narrating Bits: Encounters between Humans and Intelligent Machines, Attacking the Borg of Corporate Knowledge Work: The Achivement of Alan Liu's "The Laws of Cool", Visiting Wonderland (A Riposte to Diana Lobb's "The Emperor's New Clothes"), The Slipstream of Mixed Reality: Unstable Ontologies and Semiotic Markers in "The Thirteenth Floor," "Dark City," and "Mulholland Drive", Print Is Flat, Code Is Deep: The Importance of Media-Specific Analysis, Translating Media: Why We Should Rethink Textuality, Deeper into the Machine: Learning to Speak Digital, Saving the Subject: Remediation in "House of Leaves", Prognosticating the Present (Review of "Edging into the Future: Science Fiction and Contemporary Cultural Transformation"), Flesh and Metal: Reconfiguring the Mindbody in Virtual Environments, Review of Stefan Helmreich's "Silicon Second Nature", Metaphoric Networks in "Lexia to Perplexia", Metaphoric Networks in Lexia to Perplexia, The Materiality of the Medium: Hypertext Narrative in Print and New Media, Desiring Agency: Limiting Metaphors and Enabling Constraints in Dawkins and Deleuze/Guattari, The Invention of Copyright and the Birth of Monsters: Flickering Connectivities in Shelley Jackson's "Patchwork Girl", Cognition on a Desert Island (Commentary on Edwin Hutchins' "Cognition in the Wild"), Simulating Narratives: What Virtual Creatures Can Teach Us, Review of Brian Richardson's "Unlikely Stories: Causality and the Nature of Modern Narrative", The Illusion of Autonomy and the Fact of Recursivity: Virtual Ecologies, Entertainment, and "Infinite Jest", Hot List: N. Katherine Hayles on Byte Lit, Corporeal Anxiety in "Dictionary of the Khazars": What Books Talk About in the Late Age of Print When They Talk About Losing Their Bodies, The Posthuman Body: Inscription and Incorporation in "Galatea 2.2" and "Snow Crash", Interrogating the Posthuman Body (Review of Anne Balsamo's "Technologies of the Gendered Body: Reading Cyborg Women" and Judith Halberstam and Ira Livingston's "Posthuman Bodies"), Situating Narrative in an Ecology of New Media, Walking in Water (Review of Michael Joyce's "Of Two Minds: Hypertext Poetics and Pedagogy"), Engineering Cyborg Ideology (Review of Diane Greco's "Cyborg: Engineering the Body Electric"), Making the Cut: The Interplay of Narrative and System, or What System Theory Can't See, From Transylvania to Transgender (Review of Allucquere Roseanne Stone's "The War Between Desire and Technology at the Close of the Mechanical Age), Theory of a Different Order: A Conversation with Niklas Luhmann and Katherine Hayles, Review of Ronald Schleifer, Robert Con Davis, and Nancy Mergler's "Culture and Cognition: The Boundaries of Literary Scientific Inquiry", Boundary Disputes: Homeostasis, Reflexivity, and the Foundations of Cybernetics, The Embodiment of Meaning (Response to Herbert Simon), Particles and Paste (Review of Kathryn Hume's "Calvino's Fictions: Cogito Cosmos"), Trusting the Material (Review of Steve Heims' "The Cybernetics Group"), The Rip Van Winkle Syndrome (Review of Lorelei Cederstrom's "Fine-Tuning the Feminine Psyche: Jungian Patterns in the Novels of Doris Lessing"), World Without Ground (Review of Francisco Valera, Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch's "The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience"), Gender Encoding in Fluid Mechanics: Masculine Channels and Feminine Flows, The Borders of Madness (Response to Jean Baudrillard), Constrained Constructivism: Locating Scientific Inquiry in the Theater of Representation, 'Who was Saved?