How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics

Citation

Land, C. (2001), "How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics", Information Technology & People, Vol. 14 No. 1, pp. 109-113. https://doi.org/10.1108/itp.2001.14.1.109.1

How did we get to the point where academics at MIT can seriously suggest we are only years away from being able to download our consciousness into a computer and achieve immortality? In How We Became Posthuman, Katherine Hayles questions some of the more extreme discourses of the information revolution revolving around notions of the posthuman, virtual reality and cybernetics. On the way she addresses three main questions, each of which has relevance for the readers of this journal: How did information lose its body? How did the cyborg emerge from post‐Second World War science? And is the human giving way to the posthuman? Of course, these questions are interconnected, and in answering them Hayles weaves together a complex story that includes the development of cognitive science, the founding of cybernetics, the physiology of frogs’ perception, artificial life and science fiction from the early 1950s to the late 1990s and cyberpunk. Indeed, perhaps Hayles’ greatest achievement in this book is her ability to combine literary and cultural studies with science studies in order to provide a more complete picture of the changes that the human is undergoing at the turn of the millennium. That she manages to do so without simplistically conflating science fiction, social science and physical science makes her achievement all the more noteworthy.

Hayles’ story develops along a series of seriations, a term borrowed from archaeological anthropology, or waves of development in cybernetics. The first wave is the subject of chapters three and four which respectively focus on the Macy conferences on cybernetics and the writings of Norbert Wiener. These chapters contain a wealth of empirical material on the debates that took place during the formation of cybernetics as a discipline including discussions of psychoanalysis and the unconscious not normally associated with cybernetics. Although the history of the first wave of cybernetics has been dealt with at length in other places (e.g. Heims, 1991), the originality of Hayles’ contribution lies in the ways that she connects the emergent science to the social and cultural conditions within which they appeared and draws attention to the contradictions between the liberal‐humanist ideology espoused by Wiener and others, and the often dehumanising, material effects of cybernetic practice. In the sphere of culture, Hayles works through the implications of these contradictions as they are played out in Bernard Wolfe’s dystopian novel Limbo.

Particularly relevant for those readers interested in information technology is the argument over the definition of information between the Americans, Shannon and Wiener, and the British researcher Donald MacKay. While MacKay attempted to include the semantic level of meaning in his definitions of information, Claude Shannon, inspired by problems in engineering, was concerned only with the effective transmission of messages, not what those messages mean. As Shannon’s definition is now the industry standard, Hayles’ account of these debates sheds light on the current difficulties that information systems theorists are facing when it comes to reincorporating the semantic and pragmatic dimensions of communication back into their definitions of information (Mingers, 1996).

For Hayles, however, the most interesting problems lie elsewhere. The separation of information from meaning and embodied communication and its subsequent abstraction from material instantiation has served to further perpetuate the Cartesian separation of mind and body. Once separated out as a thinking thing, the self is dematerialised, leading to Descartes’ own difficulties in theorising the interaction of mind and matter via the pineal gland. The relationship between a distinct mind and body, where the self sides with immaterial mind, resolves itself into possessive individualism where a body is something that one has, not what one is. Hayles notes that cybernetics’ interest in systems, posits the human as a component of a system and in doing so opens up the boundaries of the human. In the extreme, this boundary transgression replaces the human with the cyborg: a hybrid creature that is the subject of both military inspired, techno‐scientific research and contemporary feminist and cultural studies. This boundary problematization caused difficulties for Wiener, whose liberal‐humanist politics, led him to defend the traditional proscriptions of possessive individualism and has created lasting difficulties for developing a cybernetic theory of the self.

The second wave of cybernetics revolves around the work of Humberto Maturana and Fransico Varela and the concept of self‐organization, or autopoiesis. As with the first wave, Hayles considers the political implications of conceptualising biology as self‐organization and even extends her analysis to question the use of autopoiesis to understand social systems. As well as providing a valuable overview of autopoiesis and a wealth of historical information, this section of the book also traces the different ways in which Maturana and Varela have developed their thinking. In doing so, she pays particular attention to the ideological conservatism that the concept of organizational closure implies in relation to human subjectivity. Given that most attention has focused on the ways in which autopoiesis presents a radical challenge to epistemology, this chapter should prove most informative for those readers concerned with the relations between information systems, systems thinking, human experience and politics.

Alongside this discussion of autopoiesis runs an analysis of the mid‐1960s science‐fiction novels of Philip K. Dick. In these texts the figure of the cyborg, found in Wolfe’s Limbo, gives way to the android and its relationship with the authentic human. Along the way we are treated to a consideration of the ways in which capitalism produces schizophrenic and paranoid subjectivities as part of its normal functioning, an argument quite in line with the post‐structuralist, post‐Marxist thinking of Deleuze and Guattari and one that provides a platform from which we can once again consider the boundaries around the human and their permeability. Whereas in the consideration of first order cybernetics, this porosity focused mainly on the transgressive potential of things and the cyborg’s prosthetic extensions, Hayles’ discussion of Dick enables her to expand on the relations between words and things and the concept of writing as primary pros(e)thesis. This shifting emphasis is articulated through a consideration of the performative nature of language and the difficult relationship between external reality and internal representations of reality. Following the discussion of autopoiesis, this is connected to the relationship between observer and observed and the reflexivity implied in that relationship. Ultimately, Hayles argues, both autopoiesis and Dick’s novels share an extreme systems perspective that brings the inside/outside distinction into such radical doubt that they risk disappearing into an infinitely regressive reflexivity.

The third wave of cybernetics culminates in the idea of artificial life, an idea already foreshadowed by autopoietic definitions of life, but before considering this most recent development, chapter eight considers what is left out of the abstract conceptions of information promulgated by cybernetics: bodies and embodiment. By considering the distinction between “the body” and “embodiment” as homologous to the distinction between inscription and incorporation, this chapter develops an embodied conception of learning that is relevant for rethinking both the relationship between materiality and semiotics, and the currently fashionable distinction between tacit and explicit knowledge (Nonaka and Takeuchi, 1995). Considering writers as diverse as Michel Foucault, Pierre Bourdieu and Maurice Merleau‐Ponty, Hayles develops a radical inversion of the Cartesian dualism that has serious implications for theorising both human subjectivity and epistemology. In the sphere of literature, this inversion is connected to technological forms of inscription such as magnetic tape recording and William S. Burroughs’ “cut‐up” novel, The Ticket That Exploded. In this book, Burroughs develops his concept of the word‐virus: the interior monologue that colonises our entire consciousness and gives rise to stable and continuous, narrative sense of self. By utilising methods such as literary and magnetic‐tape “cut‐ups” Burroughs hoped to succeed in breaking the illusion of linear time and narrative identity. In doing so, he de‐naturalises language and demonstrates that it is always, already cut‐up. The implications for epistemology and subjectivity are serious. Observers can no longer stand outside of the systems they observe, and the liberal‐humanist self loses its independence to be absorbed into the infinite splices of a cybernetic system: and … and … and …

If Philip K. Dick, William Burroughs and Katherine Hayles’ own analysis invert the Cartesian dualism, then the third wave of cybernetics reinstates it at a new level, privileging once again, form over matter. Unfortunately, despite offering some interesting insights into the legacy of platonic idealism for contemporary thinking in artificial intelligence and robotics, the argument that AL represents a third wave of cybernetics is Hayles’ least convincing. The more general extension of cybernetic thinking into complexity theory would seem both a more natural candidate for this title, and the more useful topic for readers of this journal, as the rhetoric of complex adaptive systems is increasingly popular in the study of social systems (Marion, 1999). Instead, Hayles treats complexity theory as a mere adjunct to AL. That said, the discussion of AL as a kind of hylomorphism does keep the book focused on the relationships between information and embodiment and the impossibility of disembodied, posthuman existence. To explore the posthuman in the realm of literature, Hayles draws on four main texts: Richard Powers’ Galatea 2.2, Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash, Greg Bear’s Blood Music and Cole Perriman’s Terminal Game. Each of these texts explores a different question relating to the posthuman, respectively: What if a computer behaved like a person? What if people were made to behave like computers?; What if humans were taken over by their component parts, functioning now as conscious entities themselves? What if humans were made to function as if they were components of another entity?

Ultimately, Hayles remains unconvinced by the rhetoric of posthumanism so long as it remains located in relation to a liberal‐humanist conception of the self, as in Hans Moravec’s dream of downloading an unmodified human consciousness into a cybernetic machine. In concluding her book Hayles holds out a more hopeful vision in which the contingencies and divisions that enabled such a conception of the human are recognised. In this version of posthumanism, we are forced to recognise that “we have never been human”, to paraphrase Bruno Latour (1993), but rather than being terminal or apocalyptic, such this realisation opens up new possibilities for articulating the relations of humans and their machines as distributed networks. This account has serious implications for the ways in which we study humans, technologies and their interactions within a systems framework and needs to be taken seriously. At its best, this book challenges the most fundamental assumptions that many researchers in the field of information technologies hold dear. That it is both challenging in its ideas and its mobilisation of unusual resources such as science‐fiction should not deter the interested reader. Nor should the often unwarranted oversimplifications of Hayles’ arguments I have had to present in this review.