In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Configurations 10.3 (2002) 373-385



[Access article in PDF]

Makeover:
Writing the Body into the Posthuman Technoscape Part Two:
Corporeal Axiomatics

Timothy Lenoir
Stanford University


The essays in Part 1 of this Configurations special issue urged that the posthuman is getting under our skin, and they offered ways of resisting interpretations of a posthuman future that depend on the notion that information is disembodied. Our discussions have attended to the distinction between practices of inscription and practices of incorporation. By "inscription practices" we mean the range of discourses and rhetorics of persuasion from computer science, biotechnology, robotics and nanotech, media studies, art, film, video games, science fiction, literary studies, philosophy, and advertising—all the things we say and write, the representations we construct; in short, the codes we circulate about information and its relation to bodies. By "practices of incorporation" we mean the norms, behaviors, skills, and schemas of physical enaction that modulate the embodiment of these culturally constructed inscriptions and the performances of actual bodies—insofar as it is possible—in terms of them. In this dynamic of material/semiotic agents, resistances of material bodies produce fissures in the various strata; feedback between these processes generates new lines of flight.

But how literally are we to understand the processes of inscription? Discussions of hybrid human-machine interactions have tended to see the material, machinic components on the other side of the cyborg interface as "enhancements," extensions, or reconfigurations of the senses; the machine extends anthropomorphically, rather than fundamentally remaking the human. By contrast, the recent developments in cellular robotics that we described may [End Page 373] suggest a more direct interpretation of inscription, where protein logic circuits are built into cellular machinery in order to engineer molecular design and assembly. Even so, human engineers and programmers will presumably continue to design the logic circuits and write the programs. More critical for the essays included here is the point that even though these processes are materially inscribed, logic assimilates them to language and discourse. Everywhere we look, nature—even machinic nature—always seems to have a human face.

This tension between the discursive and the material, and ways to think about the interface between inscriptional and incorporational practices—the capillary anastomosis suturing the material/semiotic agents of recent science studies work—form the subject of the essays in Part 2 of this special issue. The dilemma over the direction to be taken in addressing these issues is brought out in the mutually appreciative exchanges by Katherine Hayles and Mark Hansen in their recent works. 1 In How We Became Posthuman and in her essay in this volume, Hayles urges that in order to prevent the takeover of our posthuman future inspired by a technologically deterministic notion of information as disembodied, we must reshape discourse in ways that foreground embodiment. As her paper in this volume illustrates, for Hayles's initiative it is important to call attention to the ways in which language emerges from bodily and physical realities murmuring to the "mind-brain." As allies in this effort she draws on the work of cognitive scientists and psychologists such as Antonio Damasio, Andy Clark, and Edwin Hutchins, and philosophers George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, who argue for an "extended mind" model of cognition embedded in the world—a model in particular that dissolves boundaries between technical objects and the preconscious domains of cognition, and affirms the importance of emotion, proprioception, kinesthesia, and other sensations in cognition.

A second, related approach that Hayles develops is the deconstruction of the established discursive regimes surrounding our notions of information. The most salient example is her analysis, in How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics, of how information lost its body in the debates among the members of the early cybernetics movement at the annual Macy Conferences held from 1943 to 1954. She argues that the Shannon-Weaver theory,which set the agenda of those meetings, views information stochastically or probabilistically. The central notion of information in Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver's work [End Page 374] is that the information carried...

pdf

Share