November 21, 2008, Architecture as Medium. This practical urgency is what impels Hayles to use speculative aesthetics not just to think about far futures but to play out the political implications of how we are organizing cognitive assemblages in the present; for instance, in the governance of technical systems like artificial intelligence, even or especially in frameworks that seek to put humans at the center of AI. Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics.
Reactions to Hayles' writing style, general organization, and scope of the book have been mixed. Writing nearly four decades after Turing, Hans Moravec proposed that human identity is essentially an informational pattern rather than an embodied enaction. January 5, 2013, Finance Capital and Daniel Suarez's 'Daemon'. Anidjars major contribution to modern political theology lies in responding to this lacuna. Perhaps it would mean focusing on underappreciated aspects of the Christian tradition, and other religious traditions, particularly those developed by womens intellectual labor. Duke University May 14, 2013, Speculation and its Observer Effects. Saba Mahmood (1962-2018) was a pioneering anthropologist of Islam and secularism, a feminist theorist of gender and religion, and a critic of liberal certainties. Since the 1970s, N. Katherine Hayles has been exploring the zones of contact between the cultural formations of technology and the technological basis of culture, working between what C. P. Snow called "the two cultures" of humanists and scientists. She worked as a research chemist in 1966 at Xerox Corporation and as a chemical research consultant Beckman Instrument Company from 1968 to 1970. Separate from his theology, Dussels philosophy of liberation offers crucial reflections for contemporary political theology. We have to feel our way toward change. Hayles employs the concept of technogenesis to explain the synergistic analytical and aesthetic possibilities between these forms of reading for texts to come. October 11, 2013, The Cognitive Nonconscious: Implications for the Humanities.
Print Is Flat, Code Is Deep: The Importance of Media - ResearchGate Isabelle Stengers, continental philosopher of science, offers pragmatic resources for animating thinking with interest and passion, affirming heresy over conformity and undercutting the all-too-common binaries of religion/science and science/fiction. In 1999 How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics became the first book-length study defining posthumanism as a vision of the human where embodiment and subjectivity are co-articulated with technology. With a rift growing between digital scholarship and its print-based counterpart, Hayles argues for contemporary technogenesisthe belief that humans and technics are coevolvingand advocates for what she calls comparative media studies, a new approach to locating digital work within print traditions and vice versa. General Criticism and Critical Theory. As with Darwinian evolution, evolution by technogenesis is not about progress and offers no guarantees that the dynamic transformations taking place between humans and technics are moving in a positive direction (2012, 81). N. Katherine Hayles, the James B. Duke Professor of Literature Emerita at Duke University and Distinguished Research Professor of English at the University of California, Los Angles, teaches and writes on the relations of literature, science, and technology in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.She has published ten books and over one hundred peer-reviewed articles, and she is a . "[15] Hayles differentiates "embodiment" from the concept of "the body" because "in contrast to the body, embodiment is contextual, enmeshed within the specifics of place, time, physiology, and culture, which together compose enactment. As such, close reading justifies the discipline's con- 1999. Bibliovault [24] Craig Keating of Langara College on the contrary argues that the obscurity of some texts questions their ability to function as the conduit for scientific ideas. N. Katherine Hayles is Professor of English and Design/Media Arts at the University of California at Los Angeles. May 30, 2008, Software Studies and Electronic Literature. "Gregory Benford, author of Timescape and Cosm, "At a time when fallout from the 'science wars' continues to cast a pall over the American intellectual landscape, Hayles is a rare and welcome voice. November 8, 2013, The Cognitive Nonconscious: Implications for Thinking in the Digital Age. The result of this reframing of thinking and cognition relocates the human as one among many players in an extended, flexible, and self-organizing cognitive system. Popular culture seems to confirm Jean Baudrillard's contention that it is no longer . January 5, 2013, Electronic Literature and Distributed Cognition. December 15, 2009, Telegraph Code Books as Historical Resource and Linguistic Practice". Chaos and Order: Complex Dynamics in Literature and Science. The very existence of the test, however, implies that you may also make the wrong choice. If you see a problem with the information, please write to Scholars@Duke and let us know. In addition to illustrating what a comparative media perspective entails, Hayles explores the technogenesis spiral in its full complexity. Science Fiction Research Associates. January 9, 2011, Storyworlds in New Media. April 8, 2011, Comparative Media Studies: A New Paradigm for the Humanities. Hayles traces the development of this vision through three distinct stages, beginning with the famous Macy conferences of the 1940s and 1950s (with participants such as Claude Shannon and Norbert Weiner), through the ideas of Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela about 'autopoietic' self-organising systems, and on to more recent conceptions of virtual (or purely informatic) 'creatures,' 'agents' and human beings. N. KATHERINE HAYLES is professor of English atthe University of California, Los Angeles. "[13] By tracing the emergence of such thinking, and by looking at the manner in which literary and scientific texts came to imagine, for example, the possibility of downloading human consciousness into a computer, Hayles attempts to trouble the information/material separation and in her words, "put back into the picture the flesh that continues to be erased in contemporary discussions about cybernetic subjects.[14] In this regard, the posthuman subject under the condition of virtuality is an "amalgam, a collection of heterogeneous components, a material-informational entity whose boundaries undergo continuous construction and reconstruction. With a rift growing between digital scholarship and its print-based counterpart, Hayles argues for contemporary technogenesisthe belief that humans and technics are coevolvingand advocates for what she calls comparative media studies, a new approach to locating digital work within print traditions and vice versa. January 5, 2013, Re-Thinking the Humanities Curriculum. We will reply promptly. She is well known for her research and understanding of the terms "human" and "posthuman" as concepts emerging from our historical . In many ways, Blochs work inverts the classic dictum of political theology advanced by Carl Schmitt, that all significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts. For Bloch, theological concepts are intimations of the freedom of the secular and revolutionary socialist society. The major concept in this book is nonconscious cognition, by which Hayles means cognitive capacity as it resides in human consciousness, as well as in brain processes of which we are unaware, and, crucially, in other life forms and complex technical systems as well (2017, 9). Pilgrim Lifetime Achievement Award. The questions Hayles raises about the nature of the post/human are the fundamental ones framed in the exigencies of todays political economy. I also owe her thanks for pointing out to me that Andrew Hodges dismisses Turing's use of gender as a logical flaw in his analysis of the Turing text. This problem has been solved! The major concept in this essay is object oriented inquiry, by which Hayles means adapting the framework of object oriented ontology (OOO) to move beyond ontological questions within the relatively narrow boundaries of speculative philosophy, to epistemological, social, cultural and political issues (2014, 170). They are all part of cognitive assemblages that develop through biological evolution by natural selection as well as technogenesis. Disability Resources Her affirmative posthumanism can help expose the latent theologies of any number of anthropocentric theories, but especially traditional liberal humanism and forms of capitalism. October 21, 2010, How We Read: Close, Hyper, Machine. Keywords algorithms, cognition, ethics, N. Katherine Hayles, technology Interest Areas She is the author of The Cosmic Web: Scientific Field Models and Literary Strategies in the Twentieth Century (1984) and Chaos Bound: Orderly Disorder in Contemporary Literature and Science Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Director of Graduate Studies in the Program in Literature, Scholarly, Clinical, & Service Activities. Powered by VIVO, James B. Duke Distinguished Professor Emerita of Literature, Digital Humanities; Electronic Literature; Literature, Science, and Technology; Science Fiction; Critical Theory. Rather, embodiment makes clear that thought is a much broader cognitive function depending for its specificities on the embodied form enacting it. Here, at the inaugural moment of the computer age, the erasure of embodiment is performed so that "intelligence" becomes a property of the formal manipulation of symbols rather than enaction in the human lifeworld. Kristevas psychoanalytic approach and practice shed light on the unconscious, affective, and bodily formation(s) of religious and political discourses and systems. She considers the effects of early databases such as telegraph code books and confronts our changing perceptions of time and space in the digital age, illustrating this through three innovative digital productionsSteve Tomasulas electronic novel. 9 quotes from N. Katherine Hayles: 'If my nightmare is a culture inhabited by posthumans who regard their bodies as fashion accessories rather than the ground of being, my dream is a version of the posthuman that embraces the possibilities of information technologies without being seduced by fantasies of unlimited power and disembodied immortality, that recognizes and celebrates finitude as a . The whole point of this game was that a successful imitation of a woman's responses by a man would not prove anything. This work raises many challenges to precepts about nature, human nature, and human destiny that are imbricated in political thinking and derived from theological traditions. January 5, 2013, Constructing the Future: 'Speculation' Computer Game. 296 pages
Hayles coins the term 'nonconscious cognition' in order to pinpoint the cognitive action taking place beyond consciousness (Hayles, 2017, p. 9). A pseudo-autobiographical exploration of the artistic and cultural impact of the transformation of the print book to its electronic incarnations. One thing that is certain, however, is that intelligent machines will take increasingly active roles in constructing and filtering information for human users. January 5, 2013, Comparative Media as a Theoretical Framework. External Faculty Fellowship. October 31, 2008, Digital Humanities: Its Challenges to the Traditional Humanities. [9] Conversely, posthuman does away with the notion of a "natural" self and emerges when human intelligence is conceptualized as being co-produced with intelligent machines. Like all good magic tricks, the test relies on getting you to accept at an early stage assumptions that will determine how you interpret what you see later. , Hayles, N Katherine, and Kathryn Rindskoff. October 24, 2008, Electronic Literature Collection. Hayles, Katherine, Patrick Jagoda, and Patrick LeMieux. Subscribe for news and events, UCLA Box 951530 A cyber/bio/semiotic perspective, Human and machine cultures of reading: A cognitive-assemblage approach, Cognitive assemblages: Technical agency and human interactions, The cognitive nonconscious: Enlarging the mind of the humanities, The affectual distinctiveness of big books, Brain imaging and the epistemology of vision: Daniel Suarez's daemon and freedom, Greg Egan's
Quarantine and
Teranesia: Contributions to the Millennial Reassessment of Consciousness and the Cognitive Nonconscious, Speculation: Financial Games and Derivative Worlding in a Transmedia Era, Cognition Everywhere: The Rise of the Cognitive Nonconscious and the Costs of Consciousness, Speculative Aesthetics and Object Oriented Inquiry (OOI), Stanisaw Lem's "Summa Technologiae": Mirror text to "The Cyberiad", Rewiring Literary Criticism (Review of Mark C. Taylor's "Rewiring the Real: Conversations with William Gaddis, Richard Powers, Mark Danielewski, and Don DeLillo"), Combining close and distant reading: Jonathan Safran Foer's Tree of Codes and the aesthetic of bookishness, Review of Braden R. Allenby and Daniel Sarewitz's "The Techno-Human Condition", Remixed Up (Review of Mark Amerika's "Remix the Book" and Alex Goody's "Technology, Literature and Culture"), Tech-TOC: Complex Temporalities in Living and Technical Beings, Material Entanglements: Steven Halls "The Raw Shark Texts" as Slipstream Novel, 'How We Became Posthuman': Ten Years On (An Interview with N. Katherine Hayles), Sleepwalking into the Surveillance Society, RFID: Human Agency and Meaning in Information-Intensive Environments, Narrative and Database: Natural Symbionts (Response to Ed Folsom's "Database as Genre, The Epic Transformation of Archives"), Revealing and Transforming: How Electronic Literature Re-Values Computational Practice, Unfinished Work: From Cyborg to Cognisphere, Narrating Bits: Encounters between Humans and Intelligent Machines, Attacking the Borg of Corporate Knowledge Work: The Achivement of Alan Liu's "The Laws of Cool", Visiting Wonderland (A Riposte to Diana Lobb's "The Emperor's New Clothes"), The Slipstream of Mixed Reality: Unstable Ontologies and Semiotic Markers in "The Thirteenth Floor," "Dark City," and "Mulholland Drive", Print Is Flat, Code Is Deep: The Importance of Media-Specific Analysis, Translating Media: Why We Should Rethink Textuality, Deeper into the Machine: Learning to Speak Digital, Saving the Subject: Remediation in "House of Leaves", Prognosticating the Present (Review of "Edging into the Future: Science Fiction and Contemporary Cultural Transformation"), Flesh and Metal: Reconfiguring the Mindbody in Virtual Environments, Review of Stefan Helmreich's "Silicon Second Nature", Metaphoric Networks in "Lexia to Perplexia", Metaphoric Networks in Lexia to Perplexia, The Materiality of the Medium: Hypertext Narrative in Print and New Media, Desiring Agency: Limiting Metaphors and Enabling Constraints in Dawkins and Deleuze/Guattari, The Invention of Copyright and the Birth of Monsters: Flickering Connectivities in Shelley Jackson's "Patchwork Girl", Cognition on a Desert Island (Commentary on Edwin Hutchins' "Cognition in the Wild"), Simulating Narratives: What Virtual Creatures Can Teach Us, Review of Brian Richardson's "Unlikely Stories: Causality and the Nature of Modern Narrative", The Illusion of Autonomy and the Fact of Recursivity: Virtual Ecologies, Entertainment, and "Infinite Jest", Hot List: N. Katherine Hayles on Byte Lit, Corporeal Anxiety in "Dictionary of the Khazars": What Books Talk About in the Late Age of Print When They Talk About Losing Their Bodies, The Posthuman Body: Inscription and Incorporation in "Galatea 2.2" and "Snow Crash", Interrogating the Posthuman Body (Review of Anne Balsamo's "Technologies of the Gendered Body: Reading Cyborg Women" and Judith Halberstam and Ira Livingston's "Posthuman Bodies"), Situating Narrative in an Ecology of New Media, Walking in Water (Review of Michael Joyce's "Of Two Minds: Hypertext Poetics and Pedagogy"), Engineering Cyborg Ideology (Review of Diane Greco's "Cyborg: Engineering the Body Electric"), Making the Cut: The Interplay of Narrative and System, or What System Theory Can't See, From Transylvania to Transgender (Review of Allucquere Roseanne Stone's "The War Between Desire and Technology at the Close of the Mechanical Age), Theory of a Different Order: A Conversation with Niklas Luhmann and Katherine Hayles, Review of Ronald Schleifer, Robert Con Davis, and Nancy Mergler's "Culture and Cognition: The Boundaries of Literary Scientific Inquiry", Boundary Disputes: Homeostasis, Reflexivity, and the Foundations of Cybernetics, The Embodiment of Meaning (Response to Herbert Simon), Particles and Paste (Review of Kathryn Hume's "Calvino's Fictions: Cogito Cosmos"), Trusting the Material (Review of Steve Heims' "The Cybernetics Group"), The Rip Van Winkle Syndrome (Review of Lorelei Cederstrom's "Fine-Tuning the Feminine Psyche: Jungian Patterns in the Novels of Doris Lessing"), World Without Ground (Review of Francisco Valera, Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch's "The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience"), Gender Encoding in Fluid Mechanics: Masculine Channels and Feminine Flows, The Borders of Madness (Response to Jean Baudrillard), Constrained Constructivism: Locating Scientific Inquiry in the Theater of Representation, 'Who was Saved?