Body Drift: Butler, Hayles, Haraway

Epilogue: Bodies and Power

EPiLogUE: BodiES And PoWER 137 What is the future of the body in a society inscribed by the regime of computation, mobilized by increasingly phantasmagoric visions of the war on terror, and resistant to the perspective of companion species? The writings of Butler, Hayles, and Haraway are at the epicenter of contemporary political debate. Not only have they explored in theoretical detail the framework of contemporary subjectivity, whether cast in the language of gender, computation, or genomic biology, but they have done so in a way that has produced key visions of contemporary society. What is most evident in the intellectual trajectories traced by these three theorists is that in each instance, there has been a decided shift in their respective pathways of thought. While each writer may have begun with a specific problematic—gender construction for Butler, the entwinement of cybernetics and feminism for Haraway, and the paradoxical status of order and chaos for Hayles—the thematics of all three have increasingly converged on critical analysis of different bodily inflections in contemporary society. Breaking with her previous engagement with “bodies that matter ” and “gender trouble,” Butler has refocused her thought on the problem of grievability, or, more to the point, absence of grievability, in contemporary subjectivity. Here the dark politics of the global war on terror seems to have inspired on Butler’s part an internal shift in her thinking, away from a preoccupation with the signifying regimes of heterosexual normativity to a deeper reflection on a 138 epiLogue society that wrestles anew with the challenge of Antigone, namely, the question of love and grief in a state of unjust laws. With The Psychic Life of Power, Precarious Life, and Frames of War, Butler has in effect written the companion volume to Antigone’s Claim. It’s the very same with Hayles. She might have begun with a systematic exposition on the genealogy of computation, but increasingly, her work has focused on the complex interpellation of software code as its passes through the dense force fields of literature, society, and the multiple bodies of “writing machines.” Refusing to settle for a form of cybernetic thought that takes up the project of positivism by digitizing the humanities, Hayles does something very different. Her overall project is not to adapt the humanities to the digital imperative but, in the way of all critical intellectuality, to actually humanize the digital. Hayles is insistent in her claim that beyond speech, writing, and gesture, the new language of the twenty-first century will be the critical study of codes. Particularly when the regime of computation is combined with emergent developments in neuroscience, the language of codes no longer remains external to the human sensorium but is effectively on the verge of interpolating the human brain. Consequently, Hayles can be so insistent about drilling the critical study of code into the literary cortex because of a larger cultural anxiety on her part concerning the fate of the body when code literally comes alive in the form of the “intelligent life” promised by genetic engineering. So, then, with Butler and Hayles, we have two very critical images of the public situation, with Butler’s focus on grief and terror matched by Hayles’ equally public concern with the lack of cultural awareness in the age of computation. While Butler’s eloquent reflections on grief in the age of terror most certainly circle back to classical reflections on power, injustice, and the rites of kinship as addressed in the intense brilliance that is Antigone’s Claim, Hayles’ appeal for cultural awareness of the yet unknown implications of the software culture finds resonance in a longer tradition of civil humanism. For contemporary subjectivity, the politics of terror epiLogue 139 and the regime of computation are the living space and time of the real world of globalization. Definitely not separate, the war on terror, with its surveillance apparatus, laws authorizing indefinite detention and preemptive arrest, and data mining focused on the body of the citizenry, is enabled by the regime of computation. At the same moment, the penetration of the regime of computation into the skin of humanity, including its order of perception, affect, social networks, and most intimate activities, carries with it something of what Jean Baudrillard once described as the “terrorism of the code.” Could it be that what is really disowned, excluded, and repressed by the regime of computation is the possibility of a more...