How we became Posthuman is both a fascinating expression of cerebral gymnastics and (in my mind) a disturbing harbinger of a disembodied dystopia (even though Hayles might not agree). This is what I take to be the core message of the whole dense treatise:
“The heart that keeps this circulatory system flowing is narrative—narratives about culture, narrative within culture, narratives about science, narratives within science” (Hayles 22).
It is not the information or its instantiation, it is the story we tell ourselves about it.
Hayles suggests that fundamental to the posthuman view is the privileging of informational pattern over material instantiation (2). She writes that “virtuality implies we participate in 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 (emphasis mine)” (18).
Hayles also writes, "Implicit in nearly everything I have written here is the assumption that presence and pattern are opposites existing in antagonistic relation. The more emphasis that falls on one, the less the other is noticed and valued (48).
So why does this book read like a defense of (or at least an neutral posture toward) separating the technologies of information from the biological and cultural materials which instantiate them (definition of informatics pg. 29) when the underlying paradigm Hayles admits is operating is one of hierarchy and power over, a paradigm she implicitly rejects when she cites the feminist scholars that she does (on page 288)?
Norbert Wiener (in Hayles) claims, as a criterion for a theory of materiality, that “information is information, not matter or energy. No materialism which does not admit this can survive at the present day” (14).
In other words, matter must honor information because it cannot survive without it. But the reverse is not articulated as equally true.
Hayle’s asserts that “for information to exist, it must always be instantiated in a medium” (13). In other words, information is nothing without form. So if one is nothing without the other, why is one worth more?
So in this narrative, we have information positioned outside of the material world, waiting to be embodied by it, waiting to inform the bodies with its separated superiority.
This the Abrahamic God narrative revitalized in modern software speak: abstract power in the all-viewing perspective asking to be honored and acknowledged by the material and subordinated world. There is nothing new here. This narrative is a few thousand years old.
Hayles writes, "one of the most serious of these implications [the foregrounding of pattern/randomness over presence/absence] is a systematic devaluation of materiality and embodiment" (48). Yes, that is a pretty serious implication, but she buries the drama of those implications. Here is the powerful but dangerously short and sweet conclusion to chapter 2:
"As we rush to explore new vistas that cyberspace has made available for colonization, let us remember the fragility of a material world that cannot be replaced" (49). Yes, lets.
And why are we still colonizing stuff? Cyberspace has not made space available for colonizing (here is the rhetoric of agency again), colonizers, people stuck in the narrative of conquest, keep creating stuff that lets them play out their colonial narrative. (Anyone who plays or studies video games should not wonder about the cultural destination that such a continuously instantiated narrative of conquest ensures.)
While Hayles admits to vascilating between "terror and excitement" (283) when facing the post human future, I think Hayles should acknowledge that the two emotions have the exact same physiological manifestation-- because they are both outgrowths of FEAR.
And while I agree that her "tend and befriend" (my words) strategy for facing fear can often mitigate impending danger, sometimes when things are scary you should just run away from them. I think that Hayles is trying awfully hard to "tend and befriend" the post human future, when in reality she is cuddling up to an idea of instantiation that is more wild than a saber toothed tiger or a modern grizzly bear.
Reproduction upon reproduction of art and text in layers and layers of digital encoding will change the meaning of what it means to be human. And this fundamental alteration in the relationship of signifier to signified (30) is nothing to be taken lightly, because a change in the medium changes the message (see John Berger Ways of Seeing Youtube below). There is no pure or pristine environment of information if it changes when materialized. Information is only a potential waiting for meaning to be established by its instantiation. Hayles writes that McLuhan saw that "electronic media are capable of bringing about a reconfiguration so extensive as to change the nature of 'man'" (34).
Will this play out so that our electronic prosthetics just continue to extend and expand every organ and appendage except the human heart?
I get that Hayles thinks that if we understand the "interplays that went into creating the condition of virtuality" (20), then we can demystify it; but few people have time to understand this historical trajectory, and even fewer have the requisite education to comprehend a book like the one she has written.
And despite her impressive intellectual web of dancing signified and signifiers, presences and absences, I think Hayles is fooling herself when she says:
"If, as Donna Haraway, Sandra Harding, Evelyn Fox Keller, Carolyn Merchant, and other feminist critics of science have argued, there is a relation among the desire for mastery, an objectivist account of science, and the imperialist project of subduing nature, then the posthuman offers resources for the construction of another kind of account" (288).
I do not buy this. The work of Carolyn Merchant (The Death of Nature) is based on a narrative of immanence, the divine embodied in the material. This narrative stands in direct opposition to the narrative of information as worth more and material as worth less (worthless).
Let's not lose sight of the fact that the lost body of information Hayles refers to (21 and 24), is the body that instantiates human love (a topic she says nothing much about). It might be well argued in this work (Hayles paraphrasing Hutchins) that "modern humans are capable of more sophisticated cognition not because moderns are smarter...but because they have constructed smarter environments to work" (289), but if those environments are simply environments for the more sophisticated enslavement and destruction of human bodies, then the definition of intelligence needs to be interrogated much more thoroughly. This work makes it clear that intelligence is more about information than it is about matter, but when bodies don't matter, it doesn't matter whether they are machine bodies or flesh bodies, they are expendable. This argument can't help but be dystopian when the information-material instantiation split guarantees that physically manifested matter, compared to abstract information, is detritus (junk, junkie).
Hayles writes, "To conceptualize the human in these terms [as cybernetic cyborg, as distributed system] is not to imperil human survival but it is precisely to enhance it, for the more we understand the flexible, adaptive structures that coordinate our environments and the metaphors that we ourselves are, the better we can fashion images of ourselves that accurately reflect the complex interplays that ultimately make the entire world one system" (290).
What Hayles does not comment enough on is this: if the images that we want to fashion ourselves as are related to or interchangeable with plastic and metal and glass (sharp, hard, non-biodegradable) instantiations, as compared to the myriad of shapes, colors, textures, tastes, sounds and smells of the body of nature (as it currently still exists for us), then we agree to trade the beauty of the human experience and habitat for an austere and ugly one. To what end? The answer is clear in her quoted desire for making "the entire world one system": The goal would be to exert more control over the human experience.
How boring, how yesterday. Survival is not the ultimate goal of humanity. It's joy.
Let's have a little fun with allowing a colorful human mess to just happen.
I don't see anywhere in this Posthuman treatise that another narrative is emerging. Another instantiation might be emerging (another "body"), but the information hasn't changed (and therefore makes no change). Using Bateson's definition of information (information is any difference that makes a difference), that makes the information not information, it makes it noise.
Hayles writes, "The contrast between the body's limitations and cyberspace's power highlights the advantages of pattern over presence" (36). (The person who believes this has never met the presence of my grand-daughter. :-))
"In a world despoiled by overdevelopment, overpopulation, and time-release environmental poisons, it is comforting to think that physical forms can recover their pristine purity by being reconstituted as informational patterns in a multi-dimensional computer space"(36). Creating more space or different instantiations doesn't solve the problem because it doesn't change the story.
The problem is in a story that says if you junk up your space you just move away from it into a different space. (And Hayles writes about this junk narrative on page 42.) What about a "don't junk up your space" narrative?
Fundamental to Hayle's posthuman conversation are some of the "same old same old" questions: Who should have access to the relevant codes (43)? What are the codes of authority? Who has the authority to speak?
Cyborg world might create a different system of authority, but it is still a narrative that implies prior authorization to a select few as the ticket for entry.
When Hayles says things like this: “Though over-determined, the disembodiment of information was not inevitable, anymore than it is inevitable we continue to accept the idea that we are essentially information patterns” (22), she confuses me. Her book tells us that virtuality is a world that accepts the premise of pattern over presence, but she doesn't reject that premise. She problematizes the hell out of it (and she makes tiny squeaks of worry about it), but she doesn't reject it.
Every time I re-read her conclusion I am stalled in cognitive dissonance. On the one hand my intellect is bombarded by layers and layers of impenetrable discourse, and on the other I can see her attempting to assuage my fears with a tidy little wrap-up caveat like this one: "Although some versions of the posthuman point to the antihuman apocalyptic, we can craft others that will be conducive to the long range survival of humans and life-forms, biological and artificial, with who we share this planet" (291). How nice. Maybe I should re-read Robert Fulghum or go to Michaels and buy a glue gun.
What Hayles ignores in her cavalier conclusion is that crafting those versions depends on constructing a different power paradigm than one which frames the posthuman conversation.
"The more unlikely the event, the more information it conveys" (Hayles 32). The embodiment of miraculous information is nothing to take for granted. :-)
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