Between Humans and Technology

- “When the self is envisioned as grounded in presence, identified with originary guarantees and teleological trajectories, associated with solid foundations and logical coherence, the posthuman is likely to be seen as antihuman because it envisions the conscious mind as a small subsystem running its program of self-construction and self-assurance while remaining ignorant of the actual dynamics of complex systems” (Hayles 266).

- “The polarities defining the end points of the axes acknowledge the historical importance of dichotomies, but the field itself is generated by the interplay between these endpoints” (Hayles 196).

 

The posthuman is not a disembodied, informational entity that is no longer subject to human conditions (ones and zeroes traversing computerized networks and utilizing bodily prosthesis when required) nor the transformation of humans to machine-like, consciousless entities, no longer possessing any individual autonomy. Nor does it adhere to any of the sci-fi narratives that Hayles deconstructs, which seem to preserve a liberal humanist view in face of a threat that’s neither here nor there. Hayles suggests an inclusive conception of the posthuman that recognizes and focuses on the dynamic and emergent interactions between humans and technology, as they continue to evolve and affect each other. She uses the dialectics of presence/absence, inscription/incorporation, body/embodiment, and pattern/randomness as a theoretical framework for exploring this conception of the posthuman.

Despite the current dominant cultural logic of disembodied information (post-modern and poststructural), Hayles reminds us that an abstract, immaterial ideology such as “the body as cultural construct” is produced out of material conditions. Overlooking such a factor is like overlooking the fact that abstraction requires a system of representation. Hayles sees embodiment - a “mode of learning, and hence of intellection, different from that deriving from cogitation alone” (201) - as a chief element of an individual’s experience/understanding of the “body.” Kinesthetic intelligence, cultivation of habits, and motor responses all attest to a bodily understanding that is separate from cognition. The mind and body never split; the cerebral cortex was an evolutionary response to environmental factors, and remains connected to its predecessor, the instinctual, reptilian brainstem.

Hayles’ dialectics of body/embodiment and inscription/incorporation, where body/inscription is discursive and embodiment/incorporation is material and/or contextual, seem almost painfully obvious; is it really possible to deny the corporeal body? Yet, she confronts a principle issue in both postmodern ideology and a philosophy of the mind in general, not just the limits of deconstructionist and dualist arguments, but the limits of intellectual abstractions that exist in a vacuum. It’s important to understand that the cultural logics of liberal humanism and postmodernism are both conditional – “Just as the metaphysics of presence required an originary plenitude to articulate a stable self, deconstruction required a metaphysics of presence to articulate the destabilization of that self” (Hayles 285). The posthuman is not just the next step in a linear and static evolution of the human subject; rather, the posthuman must be understood at the intersection of a complex set of interactions that are continually mobile and dynamic. She echoes Mcluhan by seeing new media technologies as human extensions rather than replacements, where we become more intelligent by altering our environment and where thinking is done in tandem by “human and non-human actors”.

I thought Hayles’ discussion of “randomness” is especially pertinent to ethnographic methods of research, where randomness is not a deficit in control but a “creative ground from which pattern can emerge” (286). After all, control is merely an illusion we subscribe to in order to harness the chaos into something we can understand, if only through metaphor. In that sense, nonlinear, localized, specific and temporal methods of research seem much more conducive to understanding the fluid and emergent forms of cultural development related to humans and new media technologies (than, say, a positivist model of research). The ethnographic researcher is an observer and participant, with the full recognition that she or he is constantly acting and being acted upon.

~ by glycerine517 on September 26, 2007.