Stone, Jade, Medium: A Neocybernetic New Story of the Stone (1905–1906)

While modern and contemporary narratives of human-machine hybridity have welcomed cybernetic and media-theoretical readings, mythic and premodern tales of human-nonhuman metamorphosis, seen as less technologically inspired precursors, are excluded from such interdisciplinary discussions. Yet, the concept of the posthuman can learn a few things from non-Western literary traditions where premodern myths inform human-machine couplings. This essay examines how Wu Jianren's (1866-1910) New Story of the Stone [新石頭記 Xin shitouj] (1905-1906), in recording its protagonist's recursive transformation from being an observer of media technologies in turn-of-the-century China to being also the medium of the narrative itself, enacts second-order or neocybernetic systemic operations in which living systems interpenetrate with nonliving, communicative technologies.