N. Katherine Hayles and Humanist Technological Posthumanism

In this chapter, I discuss the humanist technological posthumanism that is proffered in the writing of N. Katherine Hayles.1 The chapter begins by situating Hayles as a coalescing figure of posthumanism, discussing her role in forming a coherent discourse around the various and scattered activities that have slowly combined to overdetermine the cybernetic landscape. In this perspective, Hayles’s insistence on the historical specificity of this discourse is considered, with special attention given to the new constructions of materiality that emerge with contemporary technologies. In particular, the chapter limns Hayles’s considerations of code, narrative, and language as well as her adhesion of a dialectic of pattern and randomness to the existing subjective dialectic of presence and absence: without making explicit reference to sound (in the sense that the term is mobilized in this book), Hayles’s project is intimately engaged with concrete relationality and with the intermediating feedback loops of disparate media. Thus, from the emphasis on embodiment that is entwined with her perspective, Hayles inscribes an ethical dimension into her posthumanism.

This inscription forms the most significant site of critique offered in the chapter, which concludes by arguing that Hayles’s construction of technological posthumanism ultimately reinscribes the humanist ethics that it purportedly moves against. Moreover, precisely because Hayles stages this inscription as a post-humanist one, its humanist grounding is sublimated in an ironic reversal of posthumanism’s basic tenet (i.e., that the human is a subject of discourse). Thus, while the politics that accompanies Hayles’s ethical comportment may be admirable, I argue that it is ultimately bound by many of the same constraints that plague the very humanist discourse she denies.

While many well-known humanities theorists (including Derrida, Lacan, Deleuze, Foucault, and Haraway) have explicitly contributed to the discourse of posthumanism, the term itself only began to take on real currency in the humanities (especially in North America) with the publication of Hayles’s How We Became Posthuman in 1999. With this book, Hayles solidified the posthuman as a meaningful way to discuss how “a historically specific construction called the human is giving way [to something else],”2 while simultaneously opening the term to the myriad instantiations that have come to characterize its use today. In relation to Hayles, these proliferations are both integral to her thought and mobilized against it: the former in the sense that she consistently emphasizes the importance of understanding meaning-formation as a continual process, and the latter in the sense that significant critical energy has been spent contesting many of her claims and crafting alternative metaphors to those that she has proposed. All told, then, Hayles is perhaps the catalyzing figure of technological posthumanism as it is found in the (digital) humanities, even when the discourse moves against her.

The irony of Hayles’s occupation of this position is that How We Became Posthuman is framed as a critical intervention into an historical discourse that had already been formed. Specifically, the text seeks to unpack “how information lost its body [and] how the cyborg was created as a technological artefact and cultural icon.”3 We might observe, then, that How We Became Posthuman retroactively constructs a unified narrative of technological posthumanism that it simultaneously multiplies. Put differently, Hayles utilizes the humanities’ powers of historical narration to demonstrate the disavowed choices that had served to naturalize the (at that point still more or less unnamed) posthuman as it was constructed by the discourses of cybernetics. Her nomination of the term itself thus participates with these sublimated decisions to constitute the type of feedback loop that is frequently found in her texts, with How We Became Posthuman produced by the very history that it constitutes as such (rather than as a series of discrete facts). In Brian Massumi’s terminology, Hayles “retroduces” posthumanism.4

Toward this end, the point that Hayles makes more forcefully (and more often) than any other in How We Became Posthuman is that we must understand information to be dynamically entwined with embodiment.5 That is, neither embodiment nor information (nor thought, for that matter) precedes the other; instead, the two are coextensive (though conceptually distinct). As such, Hayles offers Hans Moravec’s dream of downloading consciousness into a computer (among other examples) as emblematizing a conception of information that is fundamentally ideological: a reified concept of information is treated by Moravec, she argues, “as if it were fully commensurate with the complexities of human thought.”6 By contrast, Hayles does not see embodiment as a realization of information but rather as the being of the data itself.7

Importantly, Hayles notes that the dream of erasing embodiment—of which Moravec is only one inciter—is not unique to cybernetic discourse but is also a feature of liberal humanist subjectivity. Thus, for example, she remarks that it is only because the liberal humanist body is not identified with the self that it is “possible [for it to claim] its notorious universality, a claim that depends on erasing markers of bodily difference, including sex, race, and ethnicity.”8 In this respect, then, the version of posthumanism that Hayles seeks to unseat represents a continuation of liberal humanist subjectivity rather than a break from it (and thus would likely today be termed “transhumanism”). In contrast, Hayles hopes to “replace this teleology of disembodiment with historically contingent stories about contests between competing factions.”9

In accounting for the prevalence of the disembodied posthumanism that she contests, Hayles identifies three distinct waves of cybernetic research. She names the first of these waves the “Macy period,” after the Macy Conferences on Cybernetics that were held from 1943 to 1954, and situates the period as roughly spanning from 1945 to 1960. The key thinkers of this period were the participants of this conference, including such diverse luminaries as Norbert Wiener, John von Neumann, Claude Shannon, and Warren McCulloch.10 Though Hayles emphasizes the important differences between these thinkers, she also notes that they are joined by their shared interest in homeostasis. In particular, thinkers during this phase of development did not so much seek to enact specific stable actions through machines and cybernetics as to understand the conditions under which stability itself could be achieved. Put differently, these thinkers were responsible for shifting from the existing emphasis on finding solutions (characteristic of robotics) to the cybernetic goal of stating problems.11

As Hayles suggests, thinking of information as a signal–noise distinction is intimately tied up with this new accentuation but also dematerializes information and divorces it from questions of meaning. The second wave of cybernetics identified this, stated it as a problem, and attempted to offer a corrective through its emphasis on the radical epistemology of autopoietic reflexive systems.12 Spearheaded by Humberto Maturana (and stretching from 1960 to 1980), work in this period is predicated on understanding perceptive apparatuses as not so much representing reality as constructing it. To this end, Maturana’s powerful critique of objectivist epistemology concludes that although reality exists, it comes into existence for a particular organism (including humans) “only through processes determined solely by the [perceiving] organism’s own organization.”13 Because a given system thus constructs its environment through the “domain of interactions” made possible by its autopoietic organization, “what lies outside that domain does not exist for that system.”14 As a result, “the space defined by an autopoietic system . . . cannot be described by using dimensions that define another space,” but when we refer to our interactions with a concrete autopoietic system, “we project this system on the space of our manipulations and make a description of this projection.”15 As such, this period is characterized for Hayles by its reinvigoration of the specificity and concreteness of embodied processes.

Furthering her account of this “reflexive” stage of cybernetics, Hayles discusses some of the ways in which Maturana’s concept of autopoiesis was further elaborated by his one-time student Francisco Varela. As he articulated a break with his former teacher, Hayles notes, Varela pushed autopoiesis to its radical conclusion by insisting on the distinction between a symbolic description and an operational one, a distinction that ensures that informatics remains conceptually distinct from the categories of matter and energy. Put simply, Varela believes that strictly speaking, neither information nor the “laws of nature” exist.16 Ultimately, this led him to attempt to join autopoietic theory with the dynamics of self-organizing systems, with the aim of jogging the theory out of its “relentless repetitive circularity by envisioning a living organism as a fast, responsive, flexible, and self-organizing system capable of constantly reinventing itself.”17 In this respect, Varela’s extension of Maturana’s thought aligns with Hayles’s own vision of a multiple and entangled relation between life and machines.18

The final phase of cybernetic research that Hayles recounts in How We Became Posthuman—virtuality—springs precisely from this entanglement and extends from the 1980s to at least the time of the book’s publication. More precisely, this wave is the awareness that something does leap forth from complex systems (such as those made up of humans and machines) and that the exact nature of these emergent entities is constitutively unpredictable. For Hayles, this aleatoricism can be explained only through the development of a semiotics that is tailored specifically to the materiality of virtuality and therefore one that places the conventional paradigm of presence–absence in play with the informatic paradigm of pattern–randomness. Thus third-generation cybernetics furthers the discipline’s movement away from the cyborg per se, directing itself instead toward the cognisphere.19 In this light, Hayles strategically defines virtuality as “the cultural perception that material objects are interpenetrated by information patterns,”20 a definition that reconnects perceptions of virtuality with the technologies that reinforce them. Through this connection, Hayles is able to unpack the seriated processes by which cybernetics has evolved (and continues to evolve), giving particular emphasis to the ways that material and conceptual motifs overlap, extend, and undermine one another.

Ultimately, then, the phases of cybernetic research around which Hayles constructs How We Became Posthuman are neither discrete nor exclusive of one another, nor do they preclude other, equally viable narratives. Instead, Hayles insists that, for example, first-generation autopoiesis remains active as a skeuomorph even after the discourse of cybernetics has shifted to the (virtual) terrain of artificial life and that this presence plays a larger role than simple nostalgia because it inflects the direction of future research.21 Thus, echoing in advance the early-twenty-first-century “Macintosh revolution” in personal computing, Hayles is keenly attuned to the fact that our mode of interacting with a particular technology will shape its future development as much as the objective science itself does.

In many respects, the critical encounters that Hayles incites in How We Became Posthuman do not come to full maturity until the publication of My Mother Was a Computer in 2005, where she examines the concept of emergence as it is narrated through what she calls the “Regime of Computation” (RoC). This worldview shares much with the reproductive logic of Darwinian evolution discussed in chapter 1 in that both emphasize the complexity that can arise from a “parsimonious set of elements and a relatively small set of logical operations.”22 In Hayles’s view, this logic—which is computation—produces a Computational Universe, an ecology that resembles the realm of naturalized scientific privilege that Dyens performatively deconstructs. However, the two theorists confront this subject in different ways, employing different critical technologies: Dyens extends the logic of Darwinian (genetic) evolution, intensifying its underlying principles until they begin to disarticulate from their formational biology; in contrast, Hayles holds the complex dynamics of the RoC in tension, emphasizing the feedback loops that result from its working “simultaneously as means and metaphor.”23 Where Dyens emphasizes the process of Darwinian evolution to desublimate its tautologies and overdeterminations, then, Hayles’s analysis of the RoC expounds the ways in which this logic sustains a dynamic equilibrium with existing constructions of materiality.

To begin her analysis, Hayles suggests that Steven Wolfram’s Principle of Computational Equivalence best captures the RoC. In essence, this principle states that whenever behaviors in a system are not obviously simple, their sophistication corresponds to a computation of equal sophistication.24 For Hayles, this principle contains three interlocking claims: first, that all complex behavior can be simulated computationally; second, that complex behaviors are computationally irreducible, in the sense that there is no way to render the labor of computing synchronically (e.g., in contrast to an equation); and third, that the process of computation does not merely simulate the behavior of complex systems but actually generates such behavior (in everything from biological organisms to human social systems).25 The key point, for Hayles, is that the collective force of these claims lends the Principle of Computational Equivalence (and, by extension, the RoC) an ontological significance that it may not warrant.

This ground is claimed, Hayles argues, in part because of the metaphoric power of the RoC. That is, the RoC is culturally potent because its tropes tangle with social constructions of reality, resulting in “formulations that imaginatively invest computation with world-making power, even if it does not properly possess this power in itself.”26 The “in itself” of this formulation is crucial because it points to the importance of relationality to Hayles’s thought: she does not argue that the force of computation is immaterial but rather that materiality has its own forces that inform computation (even as the latter constructs materiality), an understanding that leads her to remark that materiality is “the constructions of matter that matter for human meaning.”27 In particular, then, the RoC powerfully elides with our current computationally intensive culture to reinforce the latter’s tendency to envision the universe as a giant computer, just as clockwork mechanism metaphors overdetermined the eighteenth-century European worldview.28

From this perspective, Hayles positions the RoC as a pathological metaphor—that is, as a symptom—and invokes Žižek’s argument (from Enjoy Your Symptom!) to show that it is structured by the mechanism of teleological illusion, a mechanism that involves (in Žižek’s formulation) “reasoning backward from one’s present position [to see] prior contingent events as constituting a necessary and inevitable teleological progression to that point.”29 Thus, for example, Hayles argues that a feedback loop can be traced between the ever-increasing ubiquity and potency of computer technologies and the belief that physical reality is computational in nature. By contrast, she argues, someone like Wolfram fails to register this co-implication and instead assumes that the predicates of computation—its cultural, historical, and linguistic presuppositions—are objectively true. As a result, she notes, Wolfram’s assumptions constitute a framework “within which problems are constructed and judgments are made”30 without his even knowing.

In this view, the task of the would-be (cultural) analyst is to find a perspective from which the RoC can acknowledge that its truth claims are not objectively external to it. That is (continuing from the Žižekian formulation that Hayles invokes), the cause of a symptom is not found in reality per se but results instead from the parallactic nature of the Real, because “every attempt at symbolization is an attempt to suture an original cleft that is ultimately doomed to failure.”31 As such, “the subject’s gaze is always-already inscribed into the perceived object itself”;32 one must identify with one’s symptom, then, to recognize the bias in one’s own subject position. Importantly, though, this distortion is also not objectively internal to the RoC: just as there is no “pure” object (i.e., no nonsubjective objectivity), there is also no subject without object. Thus, even when the RoC is apparently speaking only about itself (when it is speaking about specific computer technologies, for example, rather than about their ontological significance), there is an “objective, non-signifying ‘reference’” relative to which it operates.33 In this understanding, then, the RoC is paradoxically both internal and external to itself.

By thus positioning the RoC as a symptom of the perspectival limitations of an ambiguously constituted subject, Hayles offers an analysis that tries to account for the RoC as both means and metaphor.34 Thus she argues that the RoC aligns with contemporary contestations of traditional metaphysics: in the RoC, everything from God to originary Logos to the axioms of Euclidean Geometry is allegedly supplanted. She notes, though, that this metaphoric critique is accomplished by means of a minimal ontology consisting only of an “elementary distinction between something and nothing (one and zero) and a small set of logical operations.”35 In this way, the RoC claims to avoid the ambiguity of deconstruction by closing the gap between an utterance and its effects: there is, seemingly, no différance between performative and constative claims in this understanding of computation.36

All told, Hayles is ambivalent about these claims. On one hand, it is clear that she is skeptical about the “new kind of science” that underwrites the RoC and that she is mindful of the politics that its metaphors perform. On the other hand, she writes from the perspective of someone situated in the midst of a culture that has inverted the erstwhile antiauthoritarian politics of postmodernism, an inversion that has yielded precisely the disembodied understanding of information that she critiqued in How We Became Posthuman. This depoliticization, she suggests, is due to the overwhelming privilege of attention afforded to signifiers over signifieds in deconstructive discourse, despite the fact that Derrida clearly argued against any such dominion.37 Thus Hayles wages an affirmative action campaign of sorts, necessarily championing the importance of the signified to the worldview of code to correct the dematerializing tendency of signifier-laden contemporary humanities scholarship. All told, then, Hayles’s entangled argument attempts to reaffirm a play of signs by emphasizing both the ways in which the material means of computation differ from other ontologies and the metaphoric implications of registering this materiality meaningfully.

Before proceeding in this light to Hayles’s understanding of code, two important notes should be made about this method of argumentation (as she employs it): first, though Hayles is critical of the RoC, she mounts her critique against its ideology rather than its facticity; second, Hayles’s position of critique leaves space for her to articulate the specific new problems posed by contemporary technologies and also to identify emergent horizons of possibility that are not found when either means or metaphors are considered exclusively.38 From this, Hayles shows how opposed terms are implicated in one another as well as how this implication is productive of new understandings—particularly, understandings that can be attributed to the specific material conditions of computation.

This form of analysis (i.e., unpacking the co-implication of related but distinct elements) occurs frequently in Hayles’s work but is only given an adequate name when she repurposes the term intermediation in My Mother Was a Computer. Specifically, intermediation, for Hayles, names the process through which multiple causalities, complex dynamics, and emergent possibilities arise from the interaction of media effects and a human life-world.39 While intermediation in some ways resembles the notion of emergence—where discrete parts of an existing system combine unpredictably to produce a qualitatively different and more complex system—it differs from the latter by resisting the tendency to afford ontological priority to any of the actors in a system: whereas emergence tends to chart a unidirectional process characterized by an evolutionary trajectory, intermediation is figured through multidirectional and multicausal feedback loops that continually redefine their conditions of registration.40 For Hayles, then, intermediation might thus be said to function as a narrative technology that facilitates her attempts to account for dynamic processes outside of the overdetermining logic of conventional causal language.

It is precisely this context that informs Hayles’s analysis of code in My Mother Was a Computer, where she notes that the latter intermediates with the normative values of the systems that preceded it, namely, speech and writing. Thus, although she notes a “progression from speech to writing to code [wherein] each successor regime (re)interprets the system(s) that came before,”41 Hayles insists that code does not “jettison the worldviews of speech and writing”42 but instead remains in active interplay with them. However, Hayles additionally points out that in the same way that “writing exceeds speech and cannot simply be conceptualized as speech’s written form,”43 so, too, does code have its own characteristics that are not captured in either of these “legacy systems.” Specifically, Hayles argues that code’s excess to natural language is seen in the necessity of mediating between human and machine systems of meaning. That is, code is not—strictly speaking—intelligible to language since its complexity adheres in the “labor of computation that again and again calculates difference”44 rather than in its original ones and zeros or in the operation of difference as such.45 From this, Hayles insists that “code is performative in a much stronger sense than that attributed to language”46 because it is intrinsically bound to materiality in a way that language is not.47

Put differently, the materiality of code means that it is site specific in its very syntax so that it is less vulnerable to the abstracting tendencies that frequently haunt language. This is the case, for Hayles, because code tends to be rendered unintelligible when it is transported to a different context.48 That is, the context of a particular sequence of code is determined precisely by the level and nature of the code: the code and its context are often literally inseparable. As a result, she argues that code is not iterable in the Derridean sense in that it does not “carry with it a sign that breaks with its context.”49 Thus, although bits can be physically transported, their meaning cannot be, so that taking Derridean iterability to this level (which would correspond with the level of individual letters in language) would trivialize Derrida’s argument more than it would say anything about code.50

Code’s unique materiality is also observed by Hayles in the qualitative difference between the arbitrariness that it displays and that which Saussure attributed to the relation between the signifier and the signified. Here again, Hayles notes, “rules governing the transformations of encoding and decoding”51 precisely specify the relation of the signifier and signified so that they act as material constraints that limit the range within which coded signs “can operate meaningfully and acquire significance.”52 However, this does not mean that a coded message is transmitted without deviation, for physical processes (and their concomitant aleatoricism) are still in play. Instead, Hayles’s point is simply that these irregularities do not testify to the unavoidable undecidability that a deconstructionist reading would yield but rather to the inevitable presence of noise in the system.53 As such, there is a shift in the conceptualization of the sign that “signals a change of emphasis from the limitations of language in producing meaning to the limitations of code in transmitting messages accurately.”54 Thus the material difference between language and code speaks, for Hayles, to an ontological difference: “the arbitrariness of language implies the inability of language to ground itself in originary meaning, [whereas] the arbitrariness of code leads to multiple sites for intervention” in the process of coding, transmitting, and decoding information.55

Through this distinction (and others), Hayles concludes that the ontology of code ushers in a posthuman collective of encoders and decoders that displaces the unstable subject that existed with the age of writing, which itself shifted from the authority of a speaking subject.56 Indeed, we might say that the collectiveness of this posthuman is intermediation in its (humanly) embodied form: paradoxically, by emphasizing that the machine is the final arbiter of computational intelligibility—“independent of what humans think of a piece of code”57—Hayles desublimates the interpenetration of language and code that is constitutive of each. By charting the commingled linguistic practices of humans and machines, she thus seeks after the specificities of each.

For example, Hayles interrogates the accretion of code and language in the relation between narrative and (relational) database.58 Specifically, the dynamic character of relational databases—which, in the context of literal computation, have obsolesced their hierarchical predecessors—means that they operate asyntactically, in the sense that elements refer only to one another rather than to something external.59 The flip side of this characterization, though, is that a database is limited to speaking only “that which can explicitly be spoken.”60 That is, not only does a database not refer beyond its own parameters but these parameters are the data themselves (rather than a predefined category into which the data are inserted). As is the case with code, then, the materiality of a given database is specific to its contents, which is to say that what a database signifies cannot be extricated from how it signifies.61 In this sense, code and database are inextricable from one another and are formally interchangeable.

From this, Lev Manovich has (influentially) argued that narrative and database are “natural enemies” and has even expressed surprise that the former persists in the contemporary mediascape.62 For Manovich, the database’s ontological priority is evidenced by its ability to convert “sound, image, text, and their associated media [into its] digital code”63 so that an object “consists of one or more interfaces to a database of multimedia material.”64 In this view, then, the database is paradigmatic but also material and real, whereas narrative is syntagmatic and dematerialized.65 As such, Manovich views conventional linear narrative “as a particular case of hypernarrative,”66 where the latter is not properly a type of narrative at all but rather an asignifying machinic process. Manovich, then, espouses a variant of the Computational Universe discussed earlier, positioning narrative as a subset of code wherein the latter is self-similar to the computational process that it performs (and that performs it).

By contrast, Hayles tacitly criticizes Manovich for falling into the structuralist trap of imposing a hierarchy based on formal operations and instead describes narrative and database as “symbionts” that, “like bird and water buffalo,”67 together generate a complex ecology. Hayles’s position manifests in the soft claim that databases require ordering to register outside of a machine, a point that also reiterates her argument for conceiving of information as always-already embodied. Additionally, though, understanding database and narrative as symbionts includes the strong claim that “narratives gesture towards the inexplicable, the unspeakable, the ineffable” and thus signal “more than can be indicated by a table of contents or a list of chapter contents.”68 That is, narratives always perform the inarticulable conditions of the causality that they claim, conditions that are always-already present in any causal relation. As such, narrative represents (for Hayles) the condition by which the database evades the overdetermining logic of simulation: precisely because narrative and database differ in their ontologies, purposes, and histories,69 their complex intermediating ecology can emerge. Indeed, this perspective not only highlights the persistence of narration in contemporary database technologies but also emphasizes the database-like contingency of pre- and nondigital narratives.

Through her descriptions of the intermediating materialities of machine and flesh, Hayles’s ultimate goal is to construct a version of posthumanism that is both intellectually and ethically tenable. As we have seen, this task requires her to reject the “nefarious” form of the posthuman that is “constructed as an informational pattern that [only] happens to be instantiated in a biological substrate,”70 a vision that is shared by both Wolfram and Manovich (among many others), despite their very different worldviews. In place of this dematerializing logic, then, Hayles insists that computational processes always exist in relation to a human “legacy system.”

And yet, if Hayles rejects technological determinism, she is also strongly motivated against liberal humanism (and, particularly, possessive individualism), which she sees as aggressively limiting the range of intelligible subject positions. That is, the liberal humanist subject views “human essence” as a form of self-possession that manifests as freedom from the wills of others.71 As such, this subject operates in and as an economy of scarcity, privileging a form of possession that is situated—as Hayles and others have frequently noted—in and as a dialectic of presence and absence.72 Ultimately, Hayles argues, this dialectic constructs boundaries that it then naturalizes—including subject–object, male– female, mind–body, and human–machine, to name only a few—resulting in the myriad exclusions and omissions that much of poststructuralism has sought to rectify. At the center of these binaries, though, Hayles sees a centered vision of the human as a unified force (i.e., human rather than nonhuman) that both preexists and persists beyond the distinctions that spring up around it: specifically, in the economy of scarcity that coincides with possessive individualism, materiality itself is restricted relative to the “full presence” of human agents.

As discussed earlier, though, contemporary information technologies do not “operate according to the same constraints that govern matter and energy.”73 As a result, Hayles is compelled to reject the human as an a priori and transcendental category: since it is no longer reasonable to sustain conventional conceptions of human agency, the (political) assumptions that underwrite “the human” are now visible whenever the category is called on. Thus Hayles’s posthumanism is first a recognition of the historicity of the “human” so that her analyses all participate in a collective rethinking of it as an epiphenomenon. In this perspective, as in Derridean deconstruction, the liberal humanist subject is obsolesced because it is constitutively ahistorical: its very self-possession speaks to a part of that same self that evades possession and transcends history. In place of this subject, Hayles offers a posthuman that still engages the terms of subjectivity (including agency, consciousness, and will), but with a reflexive turn that avows the complexity of its dual status.

More accurately, this “dual status” is actually multiple because Hayles’s posthuman subject is “an amalgam [that undergoes] continuous construction and reconstruction”74 such that its autonomy is always undercut. As a result, Hayles emphasizes that (posthuman) cognition is distributed between “disparate parts that may be in only tenuous communication with one another.”75 If code and language are complexly entangled, for example, then thinking consciously in language implies a usually nonconscious thought that is externalized in machinic code. Importantly, this externalization is not simply metaphorical because thought itself is understood by Hayles as an embodied process so that our physical interactions with machines are literally conjoined with the machinations of our thoughts, which is to say our cognitive processes.76

In its most basic form, one can understand this observation intuitively. I might, for example, forget the numbers that are stored in my telephone’s memory because I need only press the appropriate memory key to dial them. In this case, the telephone remembers the numbers for me; indeed, it is now a cultural truism that we forget a piece of information the moment that we enter it into a digital device that is designed to recall it for us at the appropriate time, be it a mobile phone, electronic address book, or digital calendar. In these scenarios, then, memory functions as a metaphor for the intermediating cognitive processes of humans and machines rather than referring to a recollection per se. That is, it isn’t just that the device stores the given information—which, Bill Viola notes, has been accomplished by artificial memory devices for centuries77—it also reconceptualizes it in such a way that changes what counts as information in the first place.

That this is a shift in human cognition becomes clear when this tendency is contrasted with the long-observed pedagogical belief that writing something down enhances our ability to recall it: on one hand, written information is appended to a conscious thought as an enhancement device and is (in this sense) an autonomous and inanimate tool. By contrast, computationally distributed information is conjoined with conscious thought as a nonconscious memory that animates itself through its relations to other cognitive processes rather than predominantly through conscious commands. That is, as contemporary technologies combine and recombine to produce increasingly large and complex networks, it becomes less and less possible to convincingly promulgate a worldview that would posit a single human actor (or even human actors in general) at the center of these activities. Simply put, it is no longer possible to unplug from computer networks so that large networks (such as the Internet) have become bona fide ecologies in the fullest sense.78

Thus, though the example of digital organizational technologies is apt, it does not fully capture what is at stake in Hayles’s approach; indeed, the fact that this example does not convincingly capture the distribution of causality that is implied by distributed cognition79 speaks as strongly to our tendency to conceptualize causality relative to a human scale as it does to a deficiency in the example itself. This is the doubled ruse of digital consumer technologies: it is not only that these technologies are misrepresented as existing to fill certain human needs, whereas profit making is actually their raison d’être; although this is likely true, it is also the case that these technologies create needs in the first place. While this is the case for products of advertising in general—where advertising is typically understood to be an industry of need creation rather than fulfillment—the situation is amplified in the case of digital technologies because the generated need is a material one that exists in and as a causal nexus that cannot be reproduced metaphorically. The needs generated by new digitally synchronized technologies are not unreal in the same sense as, for example, those of a new miracle kitchen device. Instead, they are hyperreal in the sense that they are literally necessary to sustain the social fabric on which our subjectivity depends. Thus, for example, France’s constitutional council recently struck down a “new law which would have allowed the state to cut off the Internet connections of illegal file-sharers for up to a year,” noting that “‘free access’ to online communications services is a human right.”80 Stated in the language that we will encounter with Mark Hansen in chapter 5, the point (which is also Hayles’s point) is that the body’s coupling to its external environment, while always potentially technical, “can increasingly be actualized only with the explicit aid of technics,”81 and this explicitness constitutes an important material change. In short, the distributed cognition of contemporary culture means that we live in an ontology of distributed causality so that to recapture digital technologies in a language of linear causality (of which advertising is an example) is a fundamentally conservative ideological gesture. Simply put, the needs—and the accompanying obsolescences—generated by digital technologies are material rather than primarily materialistic.

Hayles’s insistence on this multicausality lies at the heart of her dispute with psychoanalysis. Specifically, Hayles criticizes Žižek for investing everything in “a theory of the unconscious based on [our conventional] physical and mental structures”82 and thus failing to recognize that human action is “coordinated with complex virtual/actual environments characterized by flows and relations between many different agents—including non-human ones—tied together through distributed cognitive networks.”83 This is presumptuous of Žižek, Hayles insists, because it “holds the entire span of the far future hostage”84 to present local conditions, which include the (embodied) cognitive processes that accompany our movements through the world. Simply put, Hayles finds Žižek’s psychoanalytic approach to be dependent on an ahistoricized vision of the human that is constrained by analog (and anthropocentric) constructions of causality.85

The most significant such construal of causality that Hayles finds in Žižek (and Lacanian psychoanalysis in general) is the dialectic of presence and absence. For Hayles, understanding subjectivity through this lens dooms psychoanalysis to recapitulating the predicates of possessive individualism, even though it is clearly motivated against the latter’s claims (i.e., claims to self-possession and, by extension, to full presence). That is, Hayles’s perspective demonstrates that while Žižek succeeds in articulating the radical contingency of (human) agency, he nonetheless situates this contingency within the material and temporal scales of analog human cognition. Citing Guattari, Hayles suggests that this neglects the heterogeneity of machines, which refuse to be “orchestrated by universal temporalizations.”86 In so doing, Žižek is seen (by Hayles) to be locked into a particular way of thinking that profoundly disavows nonhuman actors as well as relativizing what is radically nonhuman in “human” actors. The “human” that is thus privileged takes on the status of an alibi, then, appearing to be neutral while actually acting as a metaphor for a construction of the human—a territorialized assemblage—that reinscribes the formational logic of the possessive individual.

For example, consider Žižek’s understanding of Lacanian “forced choice,” which “consists of the fact that the subject must freely choose the community to which he already belongs, independent of his choice.”87 We can understand Hayles’s departure from this perspective by considering the specific situation of the paradox in this formulation. For Žižek, the paradox comes about through the impossibility of epistemologically encountering the ontological Real, where the latter “has no positive-substantial consistency [and] is just the gap between the multitude of perspectives on it.”88 By contrast, Hayles’s worldview sees the community (or, more accurately, the communing) and the subject’s choosing acting together so that the paradox speaks to the complexity of their interactions. In Hayles’s perspective, then, Žižek neglects the subject’s implication in communities that bear no relation to her choosing, which is to say that he ignores the fact that communities consist of intermediating materialities, temporalities, embodiments, and so on. Whereas Žižek characterizes the Real as a paradoxical series of incommensurable relations, then, Hayles views it as a commingling of qualitatively different elements.

In this context, pattern–randomness operates in Hayles’s thought as a means of thinking distributed cognition, an achievement that would not be possible within the collection of overdeterminingly analog metaphors that drives the presence–absence dialectic. Following Guattari, Hayles argues that “semiotics has falsified the workings of language by interpreting it through structuralist oppositions that covertly smuggle in anthropomorphic thinking characteristic of [a conscious human] mind.”89 Since our inscription as actors in distributed cognitive environments renders us hybrid entities “whose distinctive properties emerge through our interactions with other cognizers within the environment,”90 introducing pattern–randomness as a term in the discourse begins to account for the currently underrepresented specificities of information, specifically, its emphasis of access over possession.91 By invoking machinic operations (through pattern–randomness), then, Hayles makes available “a materialistic level of signification in which representation is intertwined with material processes.”92 Here again, the important element is the complex interactions that emerge from and within these dialectics rather than the (seemingly) discrete actors that partake in them.

In particular, what emerges from Hayles’s account of cognitive distribution is an evolved notion of machine agency, which is not rendered in the sci-fi terms of machines gaining consciousness and overtaking the world but rather in the sense of machines making choices, expressing intentions, and performing actions.93 In this, Hayles argues that “if the posthuman implies distributed cognition, then it must imply distributed agency as well, for multiplying the sites at which cognizing can take place also multiplies the entities who can count as agents.”94 In the case of machines, these agencies are often expressed in the scale and syntax of code so that they are translated (in the full sense of the term) when perceived by humans.95 As such, machines are both agential in their own right and in the assemblages that they form with human subjects, and these two intensities are discrete symbionts. In the fullest sense possible, then, Hayles’s technological posthumanism “does not require the subject to be a literal cyborg” for it to be deeply interpellated by digital technologies.96 Furthermore, even literal contact with the technologies themselves is not entirely necessary to register a cybernetic shift in human subjectivity since human actors are continually subject to the secondary effects of machine actions. In this view, agency—long identified with free will and a rational mind—becomes “partial in its efficacy, distributed in its location, mechanistic in its origin, and bound up at least as much with code as with natural language.”97

Indeed, Hayles notes that cybernetic discourse had a profound historical influence on (and was influenced by) numerous key poststructuralist thinkers, including Lacan, Deleuze, and Guattari, who all “use automata to challenge human agency.”98 Moreover, these thinkers (each in his own way) articulate what Hayles calls a “crisis of agency,” showing that the challenges posed by machines to humans flow both ways, configuring automata as agents. Summarizing this position, Hayles notes in My Mother Was a Computer that “if, on the one hand, humans are like machines, . . . then agency cannot be securely located in the conscious mind. If, on the other hand, machines are like biological organisms, then they must possess the effects of agency even though they are not conscious.”99 In particular, she notes that Deleuze and Guattari envision the unconscious as a program rather than as a dark mirror, a shift that “can scarcely be overstated, for it locates the hidden springs of action in the brute machinic operations of code”:100 mechanistic, computational, and nonconscious operations that “nevertheless display complex patterns that appear to evolve, grow, invade new territories, or decay and die out.”101 In light of these claims, then, we might presume that the contemporary technological posthuman emerges not only from the interaction of machines and humans but also from the intermediations of their respective discourses.

Hayles’s technological posthuman is “post” not because it is unfree from the “wills of others” but because there is “no a priori way to identify a self-will that can be clearly distinguished from an other-will.”102 That is, Hayles’s reading of technological posthumanism seeks to counterbalance the liberal humanist subject that it is mobilized against, transforming the latter’s locatable cognition and untrammeled free will “into a recognition that agency [and cognition are] always relational and distributed.”103 Clearly this shift is motivated by Hayles’s ethical and political concerns and constitutes an attempt to situate technological posthumanism outside of the computationally dematerializing language of technological determinism while also registering the material specificities of contemporary technologies. To simply oppose the two ontologies—human and machine—would only be to reveal “a ghost facing a skeleton.”104 Instead, Hayles both aims to uncover the “software ideology”105 of the RoC and to be cognizant of the nefarious market relations that permeate the discourse of possessive individualism;106 however, she is most interested in the specific processes through which they interact. For Hayles, then, an essential component of coming to terms with the ethical and political implications of contemporary technologies is recognizing the codependence of humans and machines as well as the extent to which each is involved in making the other.107

However, although articulating an ethical version of technological posthumanism is purportedly one of Hayles’s fundamental projects (and informs every aspect of her writing), what precisely this ethics consists in remains unclear. That is, although the reader can infer a certain set of ethical beliefs from Hayles’s writing, she is left to deduce on her own how these notions combine to give an account of ethics itself. This absence is notable because it is difficult to imagine how ethics might be articulated without prioritizing the human in a way that Hayles’s posthumanism otherwise resists.

Of course, there do exist nuanced notions of ethics that might reasonably apply to Hayles’s worldview, many of which involve a responsibility to the Other. Derrida, for example, stages ethics (a term he uses reluctantly) as “a product of deferring, and of being forever open to possibilities rather than taking a definitive position.”108 However, I would suggest that Hayles’s insistence on the positive dimension of intermediation (i.e., on the joining of means to metaphor) at the very least troubles the reader’s ability to assume that this is the kind of ethics she has in mind: to the extent that machines and machinic processes are attributed agency, what constitutes the Otherness to which they bear responsibility? That is, what is radically heterogeneous to the worldview of intermediation?

In fact, Hayles does not address these questions, and her decision not to do so points to another sense in which the desire to articulate an ethical version of technological posthumanism drives her thought: rather than pushing through on the strength of her (machinic) convictions, she instead withdraws to an assumed (and therefore uninterrogated) ethical ground. Specifically, this ground consists in many of the assumptions to which Hayles otherwise objects: while she distances herself from the liberal subject (which, as mentioned earlier, often includes the Lacanian subject in her reading), her thought continues to be haunted by a notion of humanity that is heavily influenced by the precepts of liberalism. That is, isn’t it the case that an untroubled notion of human individuality continues to provide the basis from which Hayles evaluates posthumanism, even while she stages the latter as a deconstruction of human centrism?

In fact, this appraisal actually mirrors a form of critique that Hayles frequently directs at others in her writing. For example, when calling dominant approaches to literary criticism print centric, she notes that print provides the baseline for critique, even though the critiques are postulated as including other media as well.109 Thus, though Hayles is alive to the incommensurable materialities of humans and machines (as well as to the permeability of the border that separates the two), this does not necessarily translate into a nonanthropocentric ethical project: simply broadening the scope of what might be considered agential does not necessarily move Hayles beyond the pale of human centrism (nor does it describe what such a “beyond” would entail). In fact, the reverse may even be the case in that Wolfe has noted that one of the hallmarks of humanism (and especially liberalism) is its “penchant for that kind of pluralism in which the sphere of attention and consideration (intellectual or ethical) is broadened and extended to previously marginalized groups [without destabilizing] the schema of the human who undertakes such pluralization.”110

As a further—and more concrete—example of how humanism continues to inform Hayles’s ethical worldview, consider the ambiguity of the term meaning in her writing. Curious about this, after a public lecture I asked her what nominates it as a privileged term and what that privilege might foreclose.111 In a thoughtful and detailed response, she agreed that “meaning obviously occupies a privileged place in [her] thought” and even suggested that humans might be defined as meaning-seeking—and often meaning-constructing—animals. However, she continued by saying that there are distinct differences between the various versions of meaning and that she “wants to break the hegemony of consciousness’s grip on meaning, [which exists as though it] were the only site at which meaning-making can take place.”112 Thus it is important to Hayles that the term meaning does not specify what the context is in which meaning can be acquired, which is to say that (for her) meaning can register independent of humans. Nonetheless, that meaning making does in fact occur is one of Hayles’s “fundamental beliefs” and is part of her view of who she is and of what humanity is.113 In short, then, Hayles effaces meaning as a linguistic actor but nonetheless relies on it in her texts’ performance.114

If meaning making is privileged, even in the indeterminate terms that Hayles offers, the question obtains, what does this privileging work in service of? In most cases, the answer to this question points back to the argument that Hayles remains more ensnared in the language of humanism than she allows. For example, consider again her claim that narrative and code are symbionts, involved in a complex relation (in the full sense) where each is of equal importance: if this were literally true, then encountering code in its own terms would be to render it immaterial—given her argument that binds materiality to human meaning115—and this immateriality would fold back into the human in the same way that automata are configured as agents in an environment of distributed cognition. That is, contrary to Hayles’s stated objectives, this view constructs code as a force of dematerialization. The point, then, is that privileging meaning means that the term means something when it is privileged, in this case signifying a hegemony that flows from the human.

In contrast, if we assume that the human has an (unspoken) ethical priority in Hayles’s thought, her claims resonate much more sympathetically with one another. For example, she suggests that “our narratives about . . . virtual creatures can be considered devices that suture together the analog subjects we still are, as we move in the three-dimensional spaces in which our biological ancestors evolved, with the digital subjects we are becoming as we interact with virtual environments and digital technologies.”116 In the notion that narrative acts as a suture, the human itself is given ontological precedence: remembering that narrative is a human mode of signification for Hayles, the general conditions of human meaning (narrative) are necessitated by the gap between particular narratives and the databases on which they draw. In short, the “intermediation” of narrative and database is grounded in a human narrative, which grounding constructs the perspective from which the intermediants are viewed. In a sense, Hayles’s own critique of Manovich—her argument against his hierarchical structuring of narrative as a subset of database—turns back on her in its inverse form; thus flipped, the logic of the critique still obtains because it reveals that Hayles has imposed a structural hierarchy where a symbiotic relation was promised.

This is further exemplified by Hayles’s proposal in My Mother Was a Computer to “regard the transformation of a print document into an electronic text as a form of translation,” a task that includes rigorously specifying what is gained and lost, what these gains and losses entail, and “especially what they reveal about presuppositions underlying reading and writing.”117 Here again, the questions arise: specify from what perspective? Are there simply “changes” to the text, or does the notion of change itself need to be brought into play? The simple fact is that Hayles’s resistance to full-blown constructivism necessarily results in her having to choose a scale and perspective in which the “physical characteristics” that interact with signifying structures to produce materiality118 can be registered as such. Since this “choice” is constitutively irrational, inexplicable, and beyond the grasp of her subjectivity (because it grounds her subject position and because it is not supported by any original claim), it ultimately consists in a claim to authority that is masked by the fact that it “makes sense.”119

Similarly, Hayles’s discussion of morphological resemblance (i.e., similarity of form) also gains traction through the prerogative that she grants to anthropocentric meaning. Specifically, she argues that the analog function of morphological resemblance is “the principal and indeed (so far as [she knows]) the only way to convey information from one instantiated entity to a differently instantiated entity.”120 Here again, a preexistent notion of meaning frames the argument, indicating what constitutes an “instantiated entity.” If, for example, we took her constructivist definition of materiality without its hegemonized notion of meaning, then this claim about morphological resemblance could be debunked simply through reference to the imagination (or hallucination): one imagined entity can communicate with another without referring beyond the closed circuit of communication. Instead, morphology enters into the picture precisely because meaning, for Hayles, includes an unacknowledged privilege that is afforded to the (normative) reality-scale of individual humans. Thus, when she suggests that whenever “narratives cannot be constructed, the result is . . . a world of inexplicable occurrences,”121 we can note that explication—an unfolding of meaning—presumes its own necessity in her thought. Simply put, meaning is an instance of teleological illusion and is thus (by her own reasoning, as discussed earlier) symptomatic of a deeper conflict. That is, remembering that différance is always operative in and as analog reality, the fact that analog resemblance is the “dynamic that mediates between the noise of embodiment and the clarity of form”122 signifies an injunction to mean that, at the human level, operates as the condition of registering meaning in general. The argument that materiality is “the constructions of matter that matter for human meaning” thus flows both ways; if analog reality is both the form of mediation and that which is mediated, then that which is inexplicable to it can only be registered through a process of violent reduction (i.e., the act of registration itself).

To be clear, while an abstract human individual manifests in the metrics that obtain in Hayles’s work, it is to her great credit that this is much less the case at a local level. That is, I do not wish to discount the extent to which Hayles does succeed in repositioning meaning in her attempt to account for the feedback between humans and machines. As she insists, meaning remains operative, but it is appropriated for a “much broader view of cognitive and sub-cognitive processes.”123 What this view entails, importantly, is the possibility of claiming that cognition is computational—in the sense that it generates a subatomic level—“even while conceding differences in embodiment and the integral relation between embodiment and human cognition.”124 Hayles’s point, then, is ultimately a political one, couched as it is in a language of analysis; scilicet, her work might be summarized as performing the dual insistence that the ubiquity of computational processes is a fait accompli manifested at every conceivable level of reality but also that this computational omnipresence need not produce the particular political configuration assumed by the RoC.

Ultimately, Hayles’s thought is whipsawed by the challenge of radical thought that Baudrillard posed, the challenge to make the world, which is given to us in unintelligibility, “more unintelligible, more enigmatic, more fabulous.”125 On one hand, this is clearly where her ambitions lie: her insistence on the indeterminacy of intermediation, the incommensurability of code and language, and the impossibility of abstractly registering embodied processes (i.e., turning them into data) speaks to this comportment. And yet radical thought ultimately remains beyond her because she will not (and perhaps should not, for that matter) cede a presumed ethics that is formational to her project. As such, her thought remains within the human values that she seeks to replace: there is no denying, for example, the principles of computational reality and structures of computational exchange that she claims, but she is unable to accept that computationality itself—taken overall—cannot be exchanged for anything human. Hayles recognizes this unintelligibility of code in its specific, embodied exchanges with language, but she nonetheless exchanges code itself for human (narrative) value. That is, the radicality of code—its collapsed space and time, its immediacy, the fact that it constitutively does not lack or desire— disappears into Hayles’s (humanist) ethics, where it becomes an object of a choosing subject. In short, though Hayles understands embodiment as a radically dynamic process that is inclusive of—and also, in a sense, driven by—technologically distributed cognition, the subject (perhaps posthuman but also importantly human) nonetheless continues to act as the ultimate ethical arbiter in her schema.

This, in itself, is not a bad thing, and it is difficult (and perhaps undesirable) to argue against a politics that seeks to give voice to those who have long been denied one. For example, autistic people, in Hayles’s view, are given an intellectual cachet that could not be registered without understanding the interplay of code and narrative.126 Clearly this is a real and consequential shift in humanist discourse, one that extends the values of inclusivity that most readers—and I—generally hold in high esteem.

Moreover, Hayles’s technological posthumanism tempers the psychic and physical pains that can accompany human reliance on computation by bringing the anfractuosities of narrative to bear on problems that were previously thought computationally. For example, she discusses the experiences of a software engineer designing a system to help deliver information to AIDS patients: by meeting the patients for whom the software is designed, the engineer realizes the extent to which the representation of information in the program reduces the material concerns of the patients. Thus, for example, the programmer recognizes that what is for her a data set of tuberculosis symptoms represents for her clients the “complicated biological urgency” entailed in the “fear of sitting in a small, poorly ventilated room” with someone who has a medication-resistant disease. In turn, this recognition allows her to redesign the software with this in mind.127 Ultimately, then, Hayles’s analysis wagers that an adequate representation of the problem (i.e., understanding it as symptomatic of the contrast between the worldviews of code and human language) will allow other people working at the intersection of humans and machines to learn from the software designer’s experience.

That said, though, Hayles is unable to represent this same problem within the ethical scheme of her construction of technological posthumanism so that, couched as it is in a language of analysis, this ethics is naturalized. As a result, Hayles’s “goodness”—the general admirability of her project—is situated in and as her blind spot, simultaneously validating and limiting the arguments that she mounts. If it is clear that a particular understanding of meaning is at the center of Hayles’s notion of the human, then, it is also clear that via this understanding the human is installed at the center of her construction of technological posthumanism. That is, at the very least, the human serves as a baseline for Hayles’s definition of the posthuman so that, for example, she is not moving toward the genetic stratum as the basis for an ethical comportment (as Dawkins does).

In this context, consider that the crucial question of My Mother Was a Computer is “how the ‘new kind of science’ that underwrites the Regime of Computation can serve to deepen our understanding of what it means to be in the world rather than apart from it, comaker rather than dominator”;128 in this formulation, who are “we” if not humanity, in the most conventional sense? No longer naturalized under the sign of the human, Hayles’s technological posthumanism marks the point where the human loses its originary status and becomes a subject of discourse, but also—paradoxically—the point where human meaning authorizes itself by forming the ground of this same discourse. In this sense, then, Hayles reinscribes the human in her technology of the posthuman: she forecloses the “radical material exteriority” of technology in favor of a “merely relative exteriority.”129

In fact, the uninterrogated political bent of Hayles’s own thought is conveyed in its means, in the way that it gains traction. After all, what is at stake in the shift in Hayles’s attitude toward post–World War II continental theory that takes place between How We Became Posthuman and My Mother Was a Computer? While her early, often scathing, analyses of Foucault, Lacan, and Derrida are usually (if not always) convincing, what does Hayles gain by citing these thinkers, specifically, in a problematic conflation of possessive individualism, liberalism, and Lacanian psychoanalysis? Moreover, is there something gained that she does not then give up when, in My Mother Was a Computer, she retracts much of her criticism and once again disarticulates these thinkers from one another? If the human naturalizes a certain conservatism in Hayles’s ethical and political assumptions, might this shift in her thought act as a twin movement that overemphasizes the radicality of her position?

Truthfully, there is no way of knowing the answers to these questions because they point to the machinations—the means—of discourse itself, which displays its own logic of distributed causality. And yet it does bear noting that Hayles gains traction in How We Became Posthuman based on the appearance of a radical politics that would resist the (masculinist) overdetermination of technological discourse not just from a feminist perspective but also from the perspective of machines themselves. In her account of Janet Freed–Freud, for example, Hayles emphasizes the coupling that takes place between the conference assistant and the transcription technologies that she uses, noting that even though Freed has no voice in the transcripts, “the transcripts have a voice that we can only read because of her.”130 From this, Hayles draws a connection between the erasure of Freed’s embodied activities (as an amanuensis) and the dematerialized vision of materiality that the conferences helped to disseminate. The mistake, in Hayles’s view, is the abstract, idealized understanding of technology that this suggests. Thus Hayles’s analysis includes the corollary claim that understanding the material processes of the technologies in play in a given situation—in this case understanding that information technologies, typewriters, and human actors cooperate—offers an opportunity for a politics of equality and inclusivity. This perspective, in turn, is supposed to be radical in that it is staged as a departure from the disembodiment in which Hayles believes poststructuralist thought (in the broadest sense) participates, despite its claims to the contrary.

This departure is resituated, though, when Hayles emphasizes the role of many of these same thinkers in the development of cybernetic discourse. If the move in How We Became Posthuman is to inject the materiality of machines into the (purportedly humanist) discourses of subjectivity emblematized by Deleuze, Guattari, and Lacan, then My Mother Was a Computer’s resituating of all three as thinkers of a posthuman subject “in which consciousness, far from being the seat of agency, is left to speculate why she acts as she does” would seem to alter retroactively the significance of the initial thrust.131 My own intention here is neither to agree nor to disagree with either of these analyses; instead, I only want to note that Hayles retains the claim to radicality of her initial encounter with these thinkers, but this radical aspect is detached from the content that originally defined it. As a result, what remains is by definition a simulated politics of change that perhaps reinscribes the values against which it is aimed, this time with the added authority of having killed its theoretical father. In a different sense than was suggested with respect to “cultural bodies” in chapter 1, then, the humanist technological posthuman might be considered hyperhuman: not born through the detachment of genetic processes from their biology but rather as the turning back on itself of human meaning. The reversal potential of Hayles’s recalcitrant insistence on the specificity of embodiment, then, may be the disembodied abstraction that haunts human meaning as its necessary formal component.

In her movements away from both possessive individualism and technological determinism, Hayles succeeds in revealing their implication in one another. Both perspectives dematerialize, decontextualize, and disembody while simultaneously naturalizing visions of materiality, and Hayles’s oeuvre provides a long overdue corrective to these tendencies. Moreover, her mobilization of intermediation—replete with a robust theoretical lexicon and wide-ranging disciplinary influences—offers an important response to the challenge of thinking subjectivity in the contemporary media ecology. Revealing the presuppositions of technophilia and technophobia alike, Hayles’s humanist technological posthumanism is tuned to the privileges, exclusions, and prejudices that haunt contemporary technologies and shape the everyday activities of a flesh-world that is increasingly difficult to extract from them.

As such, humanist technological posthumanism is fundamentally a revision of human identity that presumes that such revisions are possible and, indeed, inevitable. Moreover, these texts are infused with the de facto belief that there is a better and worse way to proceed in this respect and that these events are subject to ethical, political, material, and intellectual will. Hayles repeatedly insists that “what we make and what (we think) we are coevolve,” noting that “the parenthesis in the aphorism marks a crucial ambiguity, a doubleness indicating that changes in cultural attitudes, in the physical and technological makeup of humans and machines, and in the material conditions of existence develop in tandem.”132 Clearly Hayles aims to effect such a change.

This pursuit is of no small consequence. In what is often regarded as a culture of completed capitalism, material specificity of the type that Hayles advocates reverses the flow of universal exchange, the reduction of bodies to data, and the sanitization of events rendered in the language of probability. Against these tendencies as they are found in certain readings of (first-generation) systems theory, then, Hayles offers narrative as a “more embodied form of discourse.”133 However, the fact remains: since values are always symbionts with their material instantiations and since Hayles’s values coincide with those of specifically human meaning, then we can only presume that the metric of embodiment in Hayles’s writing boils down to an abstract human body, a body that Hayles herself has shown to reduce normatively the definitions of who can speak and what can be said. Whether this can also be the site of a progressive politics, as Hayles hopes, remains to be seen. If this is the case, though, it will be accomplished through a posthuman politics that is first and foremost a restaging of humanist values. As such, the resulting human recombinant will necessarily be faced with the challenges that have dominated discourses of subjectivity ranging from liberal humanism to Lacanian psychoanalysis to cybernetics, so that its political gains will also necessarily place restrictions on who—and what—is granted the privilege of pursuing such lofty goals.134