Hayle’s view on posthumanism makes me feel somewhat more relaxed about the future. She describes the posthuman condition as something that is not only here, but something that will continue to evolve (spiraling) further. She furthermore sees the body as a necessary entity, so perhaps my brain won’t end up in a jar after all.
The emphasis on the body is important. Hayles spends a bit of time discussing habit: “By their nature, habits do not occupy conscious thought; they are habitual precisely because they are done more or less automatically…” (204). Therefore, it makes sense that “when a new regime takes over, it attacks old habits vigorously, for this is when the most refractory resistance to change will be met” (204). The habit is an element of the (post)human that sometimes doesn’t seem to contain much, but when harnessed, can be used to change an entire person’s personality. For example, when Julius Caesar conquered certain places, he would require all the men to be shaved. This seems like a small concession—what’s the big deal about a little shearing? But this could have major implications for how the newly conquered citizens felt, and how they identified. Because habit is not conscious, it has a direct connection to the unconscious, and perhaps a change to daily ritual and such could have profound impacts on the unconscious mind of the individual. Acting like this “extorts the essential while seeming to demand the insignificant: in obtaining the respect for form and forms of respect which constitute the most visible and at the same time the best-hidden (because most ‘natural’) manifestation of submission to the established order… The concession of politeness always contains political concessions” (204).
I was also intrigued by Hayles’ discussion of Ray’s Tierra project. Currently, SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) uses the system Ray had proposed—distributing their data to various computers. People can go to the website, sign up for the program, and without doing any work, they can sit back and let their computer crunch some numbers and data for SETI. Also, this happens when the computer is not being used so much (I think it might function as a screensaver?). However, it brings up the curious question of responsibility if any sort of radio signal from space should be found. Should the researchers at SETI be congratulated? The person who downloaded the software? Or the computer?
Also, I was really fascinated by her analysis of the various works of science fiction. It was interesting to see her critically analyze works which much of the public consider to be strange, too fantastical, or really not that important. Terminal Games had a lot of cross-over with Second Life, but I’ll explore that more in my meditation. ~Samantha
I LOVE Hayles' discussion of Burroughs' The Ticket That Exploded, both because I love Burroughs and his strange conception of an "other-human" world or era, and because allegedly it's Iggy Pop's favorite book. I'm interested in the idea that "what we see is dictated by what we hear" (219), especially in terms of last week's questions about the significance of mind over body, thought over physical experience an internet self as more comfortable than a material self. I've been thinking alot about this, and throughout the week hypothesized that perhaps an internet persona a la Second Life is more comfortable to us because it provides us with a high degree of agency and control. This week we see how language and mind thoughts become more powerful and significant than physicality as "one's sense of selfhood is maintained through an internal monologue, which is nothing other than the story the self tells itself to assure itself it exists" (211), or in other words, one may control his perception of existence and life by way of manipulation of language. However, if, as Hayles says, "Burroughs envisions incorporating practices that can produce inscriptions without the mediation of consciousness," (216) are language and thought more life affirming because they allow us to find comfort in being out of control? If "language has encoded in it... the presupposition of a human actor" (252), does language not only affirm life as a soul existence but also embodiment and the reality of skin?
Again, Hayles rules! I'm eager to read the chapters we won't get to in class and her latest book, "My Mother was a Computer."
By drawing our attention to the ‘habitus’—that which is “learned perpetuated, and changed through embodied experience,” Hayles offers a method of exploring our experiences of embodiment that we are not conscious of. In examining our ‘natural’ everyday habits we enter territory where 'the familiar becomes strange and the strange becomes familiar.' As a bit of a spooky exercise, we can reevaluate 'incorporating practices' directly by looking where our old habits resist change.
Immediately (drawing from a personal example), I think of my current struggle of learning Karate. Having never been involved in a team sport, dance, or activity requiring coordination or bodily awareness, I was struck by the discord between what my everyday habits of movement had been and where I was trying to take them.
When my instructor says to me, “Block upward,” I think and ‘Block upward.’ Of course, 'upward' is a relative term, and my understanding of it was more of an awkward sideways motion. What I realized is that it really didn’t matter how many times the instructor explained in words how to move my arms until he actually came over and physically adjusted them. Hayles would call my instructors words an 'inscribing practice' which 'corrects and modulates' by working together with 'incorporating practices' --'action encoded into bodily memory by repeated performances until it becomes habitual.' Here is where Hayles observation that, “Habit is a knowledge and a remembering in the hands and in the body; and in the cultivation of habit it is our body which ‘understands’ (200) rings especially true. In my case, my hands have been in the habit of ‘remembering’ actions like typing, folding laundry, waving hello. Basically, which aim to avoid physical exertion (asthmatic), and synchronous movement with others. No matter how many times I hear new commands or corrections,there's likely to be no change until the actions are 'sedimented' into my body. On a slightly deeper level, the tension highlighted by the difficulty of forming new habits calls attention to a greater self-inflicted divide between the body and the mind. Where the mind is privileged, integration with the body becomes secondary and all of this is reinforced by time spent sitting at the computer.
On a different note, I was also fascinated by her discussion of Morevec's 'blindspot," and where she discusses the body as 'the net result of thousands of years of of sedimented evolutionary history,' and how this history affects our everyday actions. (284)I wish we could see 'em debate!
I really enjoyed Hayles’ discussion between inscription and incorporation. At times it really reminded me of Marcel Mauss’ Techniques of the Body. In discussing inscribing and incorporating practices Hayles writes, “The body is enculturated through both kinds of practices. …Moreover, culture not only flows from the environment into the body but also emanates from the body into the environment. The body produces culture at the same time that culture produces the body” (200). I thought that this statement really sums up how humans affect culture and at the same time culture affects humans.
Also, I understood Hayles as really articulating that when one incorporates a movement into a bodily practice that this becomes an embodiment of the context (or culture) and it cannot be abstracted. But the sign or the inscription can be abstracted and become an embodied gesture in a different context… like on a computer screen. For example, navigating in Second Life I was amazed to see my incorporated (cultural) practice of my fingers typing in the medium of the keyboard and this inscription was in turn abstracted as my avatar represented a similar embodiment in a different context. This to me really points to the notion that much of our incorporated embodied practices are unconscious, for example, when one inquires how you arrived at a given location the response is: “I walked.” You don’t know say HOW (i.e. I bent my knee and placed my foot on the ground as I swung my arms and continued in this motion…) you walked, as there are so many actions what we do consciously with the underlying of unconscious thought that HOW we move around is an embodiment of our culture. And I think that this applies to posthumansim because our incorporated practices are a continuing manifestation with an extension of technology or the machine as part of the human body. Moreover, this technological extension is conscious but yet unconsciously done. That is, we are not of aware of it but at the same time on some level we are and sometimes that awareness is articulated when a technological object is displaced (i.e. a lost cell phone or i-pod)…perhaps
on another note, I was really interested by her discussion with science fiction literature. It really put her theories in context in a fun and entertaining manner.
orange is kathryn! haha i was confused that my post came up under that name.. and then i remembered that created a blog in attempt to familiarize myself in the blogging sphere...
Among the most useful discussion topics of the last few chapters of How We Became Posthuman, I found the discussions of evolution and mutation to be particularly intriguing. In previous readings, I was not faced with the evolution question in a way that I could process. However, Hayles’ discussion of mutation as the key to evolution in regards to postumanism made more sense to me than other theories suggesting that a posthuman world has arisen out of a formation process outside of evolution. Evolution should be looked at as a malleable force; it occurs not just within the body, but also in relation to the environment and the extra-somatic tools that both result from and propel forward the “human.” It is here that Hayles is so cautious in addressing the vision of a terrifying apocalyptic future for the human. Rather, she suggests that the posthuman image should include the same type of randomness from which we originated.
Hayles also suggests a reworking of the notion of reality; that is to say, we should be looking at “programs like Tierra not as models or simulations but as “life itself.” (233) Perhaps before we try and define human, it would be useful to at least attempt to define life. If a machine assists a living person’s breathing, that person is still very much alive. His dependency on the machine does not make him less alive than the next person.
Another question I had while reading has to do with the notion of co-existence; do cyborgs stand at a moment of transition, slowly taking over until humanity as we know it dies out completely? Or will they coexist forever, with changing relationships but neither one overtaking the other?
Having just finished the highly inspirational conclusion of hayles' magnificent work, I'd like to take a stab at Perri's last question- a question that I considered quite a bit and am still dealing with- "do cyborgs stand at a moment of transition, slowly taking over until humanity as we know it dies out completely? Or will they coexist forever, with changing relationships but neither one overtaking the other?"
Yes, cyborgs- we as cyborgs- stand at a moment of transition... of seriation. For whether we are 'human' or 'posthuman' depends on our notions of ourselves, yes? And as Hayles showed us, we are shifting "in a pattern of overlapping replication and innovation" (14) towards virtuality- essentially into the posthuman. Cyborgs are not exactly taking over humanity because, well, we are cyborgs and we are humanity. They are one in the same.
As far as artificial life taking over? Sure. It's absolutely plausible that one day life will exist, not with a carbon base but with a base of silicon. But how far away will this be? Far off enough that we don't really have to worry about it, I think. Hayles comments that "Whether we decide to fight them or join them by becoming computers ourselves, the days of the human race are numbered. The problem here does not lie in the choice between these options; rather, it lies in the framework constructed so as to make these options the only two available." (244) In her conclusion, the word 'share' seems to pop up more. We are sharing our environment that we built WITH the environment that we built- this includes artificial life and computers that might be smarter than us in many respects. However- it is not a matter of life or death of humanity. The words used in this conversation should be 'enhancement' and 'expanded capacities.' We must recognize that "every day we participate in systems whose total cognitive capacity exceeds our individual knowledge." (289)and this is a wonderful, brilliant thing. One major thing that this text helped me think about was not sharing my sacred humanity when distributing my personhood, but sharing my capacities, my cognition. Its not a loss, but a symbiotic gain.
The Artificial Life chapter was my absolute favorite. Finally! An explanation of all the jazz that makes sense to me!! I kept thinking of Godelier and the way that people make themselves into subhumans through the crafting of the superhuman... and what this has to do with our own acts of "creationism"... We are creating life from scratch, privileging ourselves in a very interesting way. What we are creating is clearly not human so it doesn't force us to shift into superhuman realms... but perhaps into some sort of "superlife"? When we humans someday live side by side and mix with the AL that we crafted, will we privilege ourselves for our organic origin? Verrrry very far in the future but perhaps worth a moment of consideration
I also loved Hayles’ analysis of The Ticket That Exploded by Burroughs. I haven’t read that work but now I want to and now I'll be able to read a lot more into it with Hayles' explanation in mind. “For Burroughs,” Hayles explains, “the emphasis remains on subversion and disruption rather than creative rearticulation.” Subversion and disruption are not unproblematic, though: “Even subversion risks being co-opted and taken over by the viral word; it can succeed only by continuing to disrupt everything, including its own prior writing.”
As someone who feels passionate about literature and writing and words in general, I was initially off-put at the characterization that “the word is a virus”. It makes sense, though: Hayles isn’t condemning words, but rather she is joining Burroughs in pointing to the limits of the written word and of language itself – limits which are often forgotten and thus compromise the message that words might convey.
The shift from the historical moment when voice indicated the real-time presence of another person to when voice could be "inscribed and erased" and captured to be replayed without the person present made me think about my preference for forms of communication where I'm not called upon in real-time... I have a decided preference for technology-mediated communication like email, text messages, even letters, where I can take my time phrasing things and organizing my thoughts. Applying Hayles' analysis to that preference would suggest that I'm trying to get around the embodiment that comes along with real-time "bodily enactment" of communication. I'm not sure what that means, though... maybe that being more cyborgian is more comfortable to me?
The youtube link about autism and Second Life was fascinating, by the way - thanks.
As always, I am apologetic for not having more coherent things to post about. This concept of reflexivity is forever racking my brain-body-entity.
One of Hayles's big things in this book is the feedback loops between the environment and the human body, which completely speaks to my reading of reflexivity in chapter 6. I appreciate that she discusses the diachronism of the concept and how it affects the transition of the first wave of cybernetics to the second (Maturana and Foerster's critiquing of objectivist epistemology), but (and maybe this is because I haven't properly gone through the text) I have a hard time bringing this back into current, concrete terms.
This is probably exactly the type of confusion or shaken understanding which Hayles is trying to get at while presenting the text to her readers. The imprecise "we" is pretty much something that is meant to confuse me, in all my singularly humanist grounding. I am as yet unsure of whether I am meant to even grasp a more secure sense of the posthuman and reach a cybernetician level.
I was really stuck by Hayles' discussion of consciousness. "Consciousness is, as Brooks likes to say a 'cheap trick,' that is, an emergent property that increases the functionality of the system but is not part of the system's essential architecture. Consciousness does not need to be, and in fact is not, representational." (238). This was, at first, a tough pill for me to swallow, as consciousness has always seemed to me to be an essential human characteristic. It represents the capacity for self-reflection, and thus separates "us" from "them." However, the more I thought about it, the less it seemed to matter. The article Sev passed around in class that week about robot spouses at first seemed pretty ridiculous to me, but in a certain way, the consciousness of others doesn't really impact the relationship we have with them. I was brought back to Gell's discussion of a girl and her doll, and I realized that the fact that the doll has no consciousness is completely insignificant to the relationship the girl has with the doll. There is a debate about whether it is appropriate to judge someone by his or her intentions. This debate is often resolved with adages such as "actions speak louder than words" or "the road to hell is paved with good intentions" - in other words, while intentions may matter, ultimately actions are deemed more important. In the case of a robot spouse or even a child's doll or stuffed toy, if the "actions" are there (comfort, companionship, being a good listener, etc) what's to say that that relationship is any less legitimate than one between two "humans"?
On a similar note, this discussion reminded me of the lyrics to "Coin Operated Boy" by the Dresden Dolls:
"and if I had a star to wish on / for my life I can't imagine / any flesh and blood would be his match / I can even take him in the bath / coin operated boy / he may not be real experienced with girls / but I know he feels like a boy should feel / isn't that the point? that is why I want a coin operated boy / with a pretty coin operated voice / saying that he loves me, that he's thinking of me / straight and to the point, that is why I want a coin operated boy"
In the same way, the "coin operated boy" fulfills the singer's requirements for a partner, and the fact that there is no consciousness there is irrelevant.
14 comments:
Hayle’s view on posthumanism makes me feel somewhat more relaxed about the future. She describes the posthuman condition as something that is not only here, but something that will continue to evolve (spiraling) further. She furthermore sees the body as a necessary entity, so perhaps my brain won’t end up in a jar after all.
The emphasis on the body is important. Hayles spends a bit of time discussing habit: “By their nature, habits do not occupy conscious thought; they are habitual precisely because they are done more or less automatically…” (204). Therefore, it makes sense that “when a new regime takes over, it attacks old habits vigorously, for this is when the most refractory resistance to change will be met” (204). The habit is an element of the (post)human that sometimes doesn’t seem to contain much, but when harnessed, can be used to change an entire person’s personality. For example, when Julius Caesar conquered certain places, he would require all the men to be shaved. This seems like a small concession—what’s the big deal about a little shearing? But this could have major implications for how the newly conquered citizens felt, and how they identified. Because habit is not conscious, it has a direct connection to the unconscious, and perhaps a change to daily ritual and such could have profound impacts on the unconscious mind of the individual. Acting like this “extorts the essential while seeming to demand the insignificant: in obtaining the respect for form and forms of respect which constitute the most visible and at the same time the best-hidden (because most ‘natural’) manifestation of submission to the established order… The concession of politeness always contains political concessions” (204).
I was also intrigued by Hayles’ discussion of Ray’s Tierra project. Currently, SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) uses the system Ray had proposed—distributing their data to various computers. People can go to the website, sign up for the program, and without doing any work, they can sit back and let their computer crunch some numbers and data for SETI. Also, this happens when the computer is not being used so much (I think it might function as a screensaver?). However, it brings up the curious question of responsibility if any sort of radio signal from space should be found. Should the researchers at SETI be congratulated? The person who downloaded the software? Or the computer?
Also, I was really fascinated by her analysis of the various works of science fiction. It was interesting to see her critically analyze works which much of the public consider to be strange, too fantastical, or really not that important. Terminal Games had a lot of cross-over with Second Life, but I’ll explore that more in my meditation.
~Samantha
I LOVE Hayles' discussion of Burroughs' The Ticket That Exploded, both because I love Burroughs and his strange conception of an "other-human" world or era, and because allegedly it's Iggy Pop's favorite book. I'm interested in the idea that "what we see is dictated by what we hear" (219), especially in terms of last week's questions about the significance of mind over body, thought over physical experience an internet self as more comfortable than a material self. I've been thinking alot about this, and throughout the week hypothesized that perhaps an internet persona a la Second Life is more comfortable to us because it provides us with a high degree of agency and control. This week we see how language and mind thoughts become more powerful and significant than physicality as "one's sense of selfhood is maintained through an internal monologue, which is nothing other than the story the self tells itself to assure itself it exists" (211), or in other words, one may control his perception of existence and life by way of manipulation of language. However, if, as Hayles says, "Burroughs envisions incorporating practices that can produce inscriptions without the mediation of consciousness," (216) are language and thought more life affirming because they allow us to find comfort in being out of control? If "language has encoded in it... the presupposition of a human actor" (252), does language not only affirm life as a soul existence but also embodiment and the reality of skin?
Again, Hayles rules! I'm eager to read the chapters we won't get to in class and her latest book, "My Mother was a Computer."
By drawing our attention to the ‘habitus’—that which is “learned perpetuated, and changed through embodied experience,” Hayles offers a method of exploring our experiences of embodiment that we are not conscious of. In examining our ‘natural’ everyday habits we enter territory where 'the familiar becomes strange and the strange becomes familiar.' As a bit of a spooky exercise, we can reevaluate 'incorporating practices' directly by looking where our old habits resist change.
Immediately (drawing from a personal example), I think of my current struggle of learning Karate. Having never been involved in a team sport, dance, or activity requiring coordination or bodily awareness, I was struck by the discord between what my everyday habits of movement had been and where I was trying to take them.
When my instructor says to me, “Block upward,” I think and ‘Block upward.’ Of course, 'upward' is a relative term, and my understanding of it was more of an awkward sideways motion. What I realized is that it really didn’t matter how many times the instructor explained in words how to move my arms until he actually came over and physically adjusted them. Hayles would call my instructors words an 'inscribing practice' which 'corrects and modulates' by working together with 'incorporating practices' --'action encoded into bodily memory by repeated performances until it becomes habitual.' Here is where Hayles observation that, “Habit is a knowledge and a remembering in the hands and in the body; and in the cultivation of habit it is our body which ‘understands’ (200) rings especially true. In my case, my hands have been in the habit of ‘remembering’ actions like typing, folding laundry, waving hello. Basically, which aim to avoid physical exertion (asthmatic), and synchronous movement with others. No matter how many times I hear new commands or corrections,there's likely to be no change until the actions are 'sedimented' into my body. On a slightly deeper level, the tension highlighted by the difficulty of forming new habits calls attention to a greater self-inflicted divide between the body and the mind. Where the mind is privileged, integration with the body becomes secondary and all of this is reinforced by time spent sitting at the computer.
On a different note, I was also fascinated by her discussion of Morevec's 'blindspot," and where she discusses the body as 'the net result of thousands of years of of sedimented evolutionary history,' and how this history affects our everyday actions. (284)I wish we could see 'em debate!
I really enjoyed Hayles’ discussion between inscription and incorporation. At times it really reminded me of Marcel Mauss’ Techniques of the Body. In discussing inscribing and incorporating practices Hayles writes, “The body is enculturated through both kinds of practices. …Moreover, culture not only flows from the environment into the body but also emanates from the body into the environment. The body produces culture at the same time that culture produces the body” (200). I thought that this statement really sums up how humans affect culture and at the same time culture affects humans.
Also, I understood Hayles as really articulating that when one incorporates a movement into a bodily practice that this becomes an embodiment of the context (or culture) and it cannot be abstracted. But the sign or the inscription can be abstracted and become an embodied gesture in a different context… like on a computer screen. For example, navigating in Second Life I was amazed to see my incorporated (cultural) practice of my fingers typing in the medium of the keyboard and this inscription was in turn abstracted as my avatar represented a similar embodiment in a different context. This to me really points to the notion that much of our incorporated embodied practices are unconscious, for example, when one inquires how you arrived at a given location the response is: “I walked.” You don’t know say HOW (i.e. I bent my knee and placed my foot on the ground as I swung my arms and continued in this motion…) you walked, as there are so many actions what we do consciously with the underlying of unconscious thought that HOW we move around is an embodiment of our culture. And I think that this applies to posthumansim because our incorporated practices are a continuing manifestation with an extension of technology or the machine as part of the human body. Moreover, this technological extension is conscious but yet unconsciously done. That is, we are not of aware of it but at the same time on some level we are and sometimes that awareness is articulated when a technological object is displaced (i.e. a lost cell phone or i-pod)…perhaps
on another note, I was really interested by her discussion with science fiction literature. It really put her theories in context in a fun and entertaining manner.
orange is kathryn! haha i was confused that my post came up under that name.. and then i remembered that created a blog in attempt to familiarize myself in the blogging sphere...
one more thing.. this was an interesting thing about Second Life and Autism
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pmTXGQ2BhUA&feature=related
Among the most useful discussion topics of the last few chapters of How We Became Posthuman, I found the discussions of evolution and mutation to be particularly intriguing. In previous readings, I was not faced with the evolution question in a way that I could process. However, Hayles’ discussion of mutation as the key to evolution in regards to postumanism made more sense to me than other theories suggesting that a posthuman world has arisen out of a formation process outside of evolution. Evolution should be looked at as a malleable force; it occurs not just within the body, but also in relation to the environment and the extra-somatic tools that both result from and propel forward the “human.” It is here that Hayles is so cautious in addressing the vision of a terrifying apocalyptic future for the human. Rather, she suggests that the posthuman image should include the same type of randomness from which we originated.
Hayles also suggests a reworking of the notion of reality; that is to say, we should be looking at “programs like Tierra not as models or simulations but as “life itself.” (233) Perhaps before we try and define human, it would be useful to at least attempt to define life. If a machine assists a living person’s breathing, that person is still very much alive. His dependency on the machine does not make him less alive than the next person.
Another question I had while reading has to do with the notion of co-existence; do cyborgs stand at a moment of transition, slowly taking over until humanity as we know it dies out completely? Or will they coexist forever, with changing relationships but neither one overtaking the other?
Having just finished the highly inspirational conclusion of hayles' magnificent work, I'd like to take a stab at Perri's last question- a question that I considered quite a bit and am still dealing with- "do cyborgs stand at a moment of transition, slowly taking over until humanity as we know it dies out completely? Or will they coexist forever, with changing relationships but neither one overtaking the other?"
Yes, cyborgs- we as cyborgs- stand at a moment of transition... of seriation. For whether we are 'human' or 'posthuman' depends on our notions of ourselves, yes? And as Hayles showed us, we are shifting "in a pattern of overlapping replication and innovation" (14) towards virtuality- essentially into the posthuman. Cyborgs are not exactly taking over humanity because, well, we are cyborgs and we are humanity. They are one in the same.
As far as artificial life taking over? Sure. It's absolutely plausible that one day life will exist, not with a carbon base but with a base of silicon. But how far away will this be? Far off enough that we don't really have to worry about it, I think. Hayles comments that "Whether we decide to fight them or join them by becoming computers ourselves, the days of the human race are numbered. The problem here does not lie in the choice between these options; rather, it lies in the framework constructed so as to make these options the only two available." (244) In her conclusion, the word 'share' seems to pop up more. We are sharing our environment that we built WITH the environment that we built- this includes artificial life and computers that might be smarter than us in many respects. However- it is not a matter of life or death of humanity. The words used in this conversation should be 'enhancement' and 'expanded capacities.' We must recognize that "every day we participate in systems whose total cognitive capacity exceeds our individual knowledge." (289)and this is a wonderful, brilliant thing. One major thing that this text helped me think about was not sharing my sacred humanity when distributing my personhood, but sharing my capacities, my cognition. Its not a loss, but a symbiotic gain.
The Artificial Life chapter was my absolute favorite. Finally! An explanation of all the jazz that makes sense to me!! I kept thinking of Godelier and the way that people make themselves into subhumans through the crafting of the superhuman... and what this has to do with our own acts of "creationism"... We are creating life from scratch, privileging ourselves in a very interesting way. What we are creating is clearly not human so it doesn't force us to shift into superhuman realms... but perhaps into some sort of "superlife"? When we humans someday live side by side and mix with the AL that we crafted, will we privilege ourselves for our organic origin? Verrrry very far in the future but perhaps worth a moment of consideration
MEGAN
I also loved Hayles’ analysis of The Ticket That Exploded by Burroughs. I haven’t read that work but now I want to and now I'll be able to read a lot more into it with Hayles' explanation in mind. “For Burroughs,” Hayles explains, “the emphasis remains on subversion and disruption rather than creative rearticulation.” Subversion and disruption are not unproblematic, though: “Even subversion risks being co-opted and taken over by the viral word; it can succeed only by continuing to disrupt everything, including its own prior writing.”
As someone who feels passionate about literature and writing and words in general, I was initially off-put at the characterization that “the word is a virus”. It makes sense, though: Hayles isn’t condemning words, but rather she is joining Burroughs in pointing to the limits of the written word and of language itself – limits which are often forgotten and thus compromise the message that words might convey.
The shift from the historical moment when voice indicated the real-time presence of another person to when voice could be "inscribed and erased" and captured to be replayed without the person present made me think about my preference for forms of communication where I'm not called upon in real-time... I have a decided preference for technology-mediated communication like email, text messages, even letters, where I can take my time phrasing things and organizing my thoughts. Applying Hayles' analysis to that preference would suggest that I'm trying to get around the embodiment that comes along with real-time "bodily enactment" of communication. I'm not sure what that means, though... maybe that being more cyborgian is more comfortable to me?
The youtube link about autism and Second Life was fascinating, by the way - thanks.
- Hannah Schmidt
...in your subvocalization of my above comment, please un-italicize the words "by Burroughs" in the second line. Thank you.
As always, I am apologetic for not having more coherent things to post about. This concept of reflexivity is forever racking my brain-body-entity.
One of Hayles's big things in this book is the feedback loops between the environment and the human body, which completely speaks to my reading of reflexivity in chapter 6. I appreciate that she discusses the diachronism of the concept and how it affects the transition of the first wave of cybernetics to the second (Maturana and Foerster's critiquing of objectivist epistemology), but (and maybe this is because I haven't properly gone through the text) I have a hard time bringing this back into current, concrete terms.
This is probably exactly the type of confusion or shaken understanding which Hayles is trying to get at while presenting the text to her readers. The imprecise "we" is pretty much something that is meant to confuse me, in all my singularly humanist grounding. I am as yet unsure of whether I am meant to even grasp a more secure sense of the posthuman and reach a cybernetician level.
I was really stuck by Hayles' discussion of consciousness. "Consciousness is, as Brooks likes to say a 'cheap trick,' that is, an emergent property that increases the functionality of the system but is not part of the system's essential architecture. Consciousness does not need to be, and in fact is not, representational." (238). This was, at first, a tough pill for me to swallow, as consciousness has always seemed to me to be an essential human characteristic. It represents the capacity for self-reflection, and thus separates "us" from "them." However, the more I thought about it, the less it seemed to matter. The article Sev passed around in class that week about robot spouses at first seemed pretty ridiculous to me, but in a certain way, the consciousness of others doesn't really impact the relationship we have with them. I was brought back to Gell's discussion of a girl and her doll, and I realized that the fact that the doll has no consciousness is completely insignificant to the relationship the girl has with the doll. There is a debate about whether it is appropriate to judge someone by his or her intentions. This debate is often resolved with adages such as "actions speak louder than words" or "the road to hell is paved with good intentions" - in other words, while intentions may matter, ultimately actions are deemed more important. In the case of a robot spouse or even a child's doll or stuffed toy, if the "actions" are there (comfort, companionship, being a good listener, etc) what's to say that that relationship is any less legitimate than one between two "humans"?
On a similar note, this discussion reminded me of the lyrics to "Coin Operated Boy" by the Dresden Dolls:
"and if I had a star to wish on / for my life I can't imagine / any flesh and blood would be his match / I can even take him in the bath / coin operated boy / he may not be real experienced with girls / but I know he feels like a boy should feel / isn't that the point? that is why I want a coin operated boy / with a pretty coin operated voice / saying that he loves me, that he's thinking of me / straight and to the point, that is why I want a coin operated boy"
In the same way, the "coin operated boy" fulfills the singer's requirements for a partner, and the fact that there is no consciousness there is irrelevant.
Here's a video about the conjoined twins I was talking about last night. I tried to find a clip of them on the computer, but I couldn't.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BkKWApOAG2g
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