Body Drift: Butler, Hayles, Haraway

3. Complexities: The Posthuman Subject of Katherine Hayles

comPLExiTiES: THE PoSTHUmAn SUBjEcT of kATHERinE HAYLES 3 63 With the writings of Katherine Hayles, complexity theory is transformed from its origins in the scientific epistēmē, becoming the basis of a worldview that not only grounds the study of electronic textuality in a “new materialism” but also transforms the concept of complexity itself into the essence of a more comprehensive vision of culture, society, and the body. Refusing to honor traditional divisions between science and literature, Hayles’ thought does that which is more difficult, yet ultimately more insightful. Her theoretical analysis actually folds the very latest configurations in the new science of complexity together with literature (both print and electronic) to the delirious point where “information loses its body.” But for all that, the new body that emerges—the posthuman body—discovers in the accelerated rhythms of scientific discovery an improved vocabulary for understanding what is happening to its subjectivity, perception, and memory as it is fast-processed through the digital matrix. By all accounts, Hayles should be yet just another theorist following the pilgrim’s journey of the virtual body, but there is something recalcitrant, deeply scientific, even bodily in her perspective that refuses easy closure. Indeed, her thought always performs at the edge of incommensurability, theorizing the logic of virtuality as a sign of a newly emergent materialism. With this, a new universe of living and nonliving matter surfaces in her writings—a fluid 64 coMpLexities world of inscriptions, supplementarity, fast traces, folded histories, and paradoxical perspectives. Methodologically, she can do this because she has made of her own thought a field of instability. What she has theorized in The Cosmic Web—namely, understanding the force fields of science as key to interpreting the new literature of Nabokov and Pynchon—what she has meticulously researched in How We Became Posthuman, what she has visualized in My Mother Was a Computer and Writing Machines, she has first done to her own theoretical perception. A force field accelerating across the space-time spectrum of digital reality, the theoretical imagination of Katherine Hayles, with its alliances with science fiction, linguistic theory, and chaotics, is perhaps the closest approximation we have yet experienced concerning how digital reality chooses to disclose itself today. chaos, catastrophe, complexity, crash For over sixty years, complexity theory has generated a persistent line of scientific questioning that, focusing intently on the question of change, has sought to analyze those elusive moments in which the real world of computation—the world of bifurcations, dissipative structures, broken boundaries, fractals, and fluidities—undergoes a dramatic morphological change of state. In its earlier formulation by the Swiss theorist René Thom, attention to instantly morphological changes of state was eloquently captured by the emblematic vision of chaos theory. Here, rejecting the binary divisions of normal science having to do with science and code, analysis focused on those almost undetectable, but momentous, pattern changes in the nature of things whereby supposedly solid matter suddenly dissolved into dynamic process and beautifully chaotic fractures opened up in the deep structures of everyday life. While this prescient European formulation of complexity theory was ultimately doomed to have its creative vision concerning the dynamic complexity of living and nonliving beings flatlined by later, more romanticized visions of chaotics, its focus on the fluidity of all matter, the mutability of all coMpLexities 65 patterns, and the order within chaos succeeded in being passed on in later iterations of cybernetic theory. In a general sense, the terms are interchangeable—chaos, catastrophe, complexity, crash— but the basic sensibility that informs this intellectual insurgency remains the same, namely, that so-called structures of regularity and patterns of order are only aesthetic mise-en-scènes distracting attention from the self-organizing, self-energizing deep currents of chaotics as the legacy norms of all living and nonliving matter. Like an intellectual virus, some variation of complexity theory has always represented the hauntology of modern, postmodern, and now posthuman theory. In an almost biblical sense, chaos theory begets catastrophe theory; catastrophe theory begets complexity theory; and crash is always the word made flesh. Whether chaotic changes of state, “punctuated catastrophes,” or the “intermediations” of complexity theory, the reality of computation has required a theory of morphological changes of state capable of explaining the newly emergent realities of digital culture, including the meaning of human subjectivity as it is caught up in a web of “relational processing” and “ubiquitous computing.” When code...