Humanesis: Sound and Technological Posthumanism

3. N. Katherine Hayles and Humanist Technological Posthumanism

3 N. kaThEriNE haylES aNd hUMaNiST TEChNOlOgiCal POSThUMaNiSM 63 Knowledge is always for . . . some things and not others. DONNA HARAWAY, “MORPHING IN THE ORDER” 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. 64 n. katherine hayLes and posthumanism 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 n. katherine hayLes and posthumanism 65 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...