Keywords algorithms, cognition, ethics, N. Katherine Hayles, technology A New Paradigm for the Humanities: Comparative Textual Media (co-authored with Jessica Pressman), forthcoming University of Minnesota Press, 2013. Turing fundamentally did not understand that "questions involving sex, society, politics or secrets would demonstrate how what it was possible for people to say might be limited not by puzzle-solving intelligence but by the restrictions on what might be done" (pp. May 14, 2013, Speculation and its Observer Effects. November 15, 2008, Spatializing Time: The Influence of Google Earth, Google Maps. Modeling and Simulation . Bridging the chasm between C. P. Snow's 'two cultures' with effortless grace, she has been for the past decade a leading writer on the interplay between science and literature.The basis of this scrupulously researched work is a history of the cybernetic and informatic sciences, and the evolution of the concept of 'information' as something ontologically separate from any material substrate. May 21, 2008, Electronic Literature: Theorizing the New. Prologue. "Margaret Wertheim, New Scientist, "Hayles's book continues to be widely praised and frequently cited. John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. in English literature from Michigan State University in 1970, and her Ph.D. in English literature from the University of Rochester in 1977. Meditating on Eduardo Kac's Transgenic Art, Computing the Human (in German) Fuelle der Combination, Flesh and Metal: Reconfiguring the Mindbody in Virtual Environments, Escape and Constraint: Three Fictions Dream of Moving from Energy to Information, Schizoid Android: Cybernetics and the Mid-Sixties Novels of Philip K. Dick, The Life Cycle of Cyborgs: Writing the Posthuman, From Self-Organization to Emergence: Aesthetic Implications of Shifting Ideas of Organization, Voices Out of Bodies and Bodies Out of Voices, How Cyberspace Signifies: Taking Immortality Literally, Simulated Nature and Natural Simulations: Rethinking the Relation Between the Beholder and the World, Embodied Virtuality: Or How to Put Bodies Back into the Picture, Deciphering the Rules of Unruly Disciplines: A Modest Proposal for Literature and Science, Narratives of Evolution and the Evolution of Narratives, The Paradoxes of John Cage: Chaos, Time, and Irreversible Art, The Life Cycle of Cyborgs: Writing and the Posthuman, 'Who Was Saved? Stanford Humanities Center. Deepening our understanding of the extraordinary transformative powers digital technologies have placed in the hands of humanists. Some information on this profile has been compiled automatically from Duke databases and external sources. The critical tools we can glean from Hayles thus speak particularly to contemporary cultures in developed societies presently undergoing systemic transformations that are profoundly changing planetary cognitive ecologies (2017, 216). If you see a problem with the information, please write to Scholars@Duke and let us know. Reading N. Katherine Hayles's latest work reminded me of the advice implicit in an ancient Chinese curse. 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. Hayles replaces the concept of withdrawal with that of resistance. With this move, the sidesteps the hermeneutic solipsism for which OOO circles have been critiqued, and stands with the relationality of politically engaged feminist speculative realisms. Hayles defines cognition as any process involving choices about interpreting information in a context that connects it with meaning. In, Flesh and Metal: Reconfiguring the Mindbody in Virtual Environments. January 5, 2013, Constructing the Future: 'Speculation' Computer Game. Expert Answer 100% (2 ratings) The correct answe View the full answer Her twelve print books include Postprint: Books and Becoming Computational (Columbia, 2021), Unthought: The Power of the Cognitive Nonconscious (Univ. 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. When the University of Chicago Press published my print book, How We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis in spring 2012, I had in hand certain digital assets that I had developed for the analyses of some of the chapters, yet whose scope far exceeded what could be included in the print book. The book examines close reading, hyper reading (skimming hyperlinked texts on screens), and machine reading (applying computer algorithms to a volume of text too vast to be read by a single person [Hayles 2012, 72]). | Institute for Advanced Studies, University of Durham. Wilderson doesnt use the term zombies in his work. [full text] "Waking up to the Surveillance Society," Surveillance and Society6.3 (29). She received her B.S. In addition to illustrating what a comparative media perspective entails, Hayles explores the technogenesis spiral in its full complexity. How We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis, The Comparative Method of Language Acquisition Research, 1427 E. 60th Street Chicago, IL 60637 USA. Critical Theory For information on purchasing the bookfrom bookstores or here onlineplease go to the webpage for How We Became Posthuman. They offer provocative responses to both the threats to and possibilities of human embodiment in an age where information and attention are the most valuable resources. What [Henrys] oeuvre offers political theology is a reimagining of what constitutes life togetheran attention to Life and thereby, spirituality. Art. An excerpt from [full text] N. Katherine Hayles and Todd Gannon, "Virtual Architecture, Actual Media."[full text] Tel 310 825 4173 Expanding our notions of what and who counts as political actors, allowing us to resist theologies of dominion and stewardship, or, in fact, any metaphysics that depends on the uniqueness of the human and the conscious integrity of human intentionality. The Cosmic Web: Scientific Field Models and Literary Strategies in the Twentieth Century. You are alone in the room, except for two computer terminals flickering in the dim light. Accompanying website at http://newhorizons.eliterature.org. All that mattered was the formal generation and manipulation of informational patterns. It also refers to sci-fi imaginaries of the cybernetic human as essentially a container for information. 2012, Language and Linguistics: October 10, 2008, Pervasive Computing: Literature, Art, Environment. I hope to share that rigor and urgency here, particularly as it relates to global capitalism, Christianity, and ontology. August 2014 - July 2015, Program Review, Critical Theory Program, Mount Holyoke College. [1] She is the James B. Duke Distinguished Professor Emerita of Literature, Literature, Trinity College of Arts & Sciences at Duke University.[2]. "Barbara Warnick, Argumentation and Advocacy. Chen suggests that Western political theologians should incorporate more resources from local knowledgesuch as popular culture, literature, films, and musicin order to notice resistance in daily life. Imploding boundaries in Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age, Bodies of Texts, Bodies of Subjects: Metaphoric Networks in New Media, Performative Code and Figurative Language: Neal Stephenson's "Cryptonomicon", From Utopia to Mutopia: Recursive Complexity and the Nanospatiality of "The Diamond Age", Computing the Human (Fuelle der Combination), Performative Code and Figurative Language: Neal Stephensons Cryptonomicon, Timely Art: Hybridity in New Cinema and Electronic Poetry, Supersensual Chaos and Catherine Richards' "Excitable Tissues", Who Is In Control Here? The major concept in this book, which set the stage for posthuman studies, is the posthuman. This concept signifies the human in dynamic relationship with cognitive machines. So, reasoning about the posthuman condition is always already part of the religious, secular, and hybrid sense-making of the postsecular public sphere, especially as it grapples with technological change. Box 951530 How We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis. He/she/it will try to reproduce through the words that appear on your terminal the characteristics of the other entity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Instead of bootstrapping with values and ideologies and laddering up from there, initializing from a posthuman ecological cognition yields responses that deal with the whole embodied phenomenon of political and theological life. Each of the invited papers was presented at a workshop at Durham University in 2015, held with Hayles, and focused on her work in the context of contemporary debates 6 Theory, Culture & Society 36(2) '[Hayles] has written a deeply insightful and significant investigation of how cybernetics gradually reshaped the boundaries of the human. October 31, 2008, Digital Humanities: Its Challenges to the Traditional Humanities. She goes on to depict the neurological consequences of working in digital media, where skimming and scanning, or hyper reading, and analysis through machine algorithms are forms of reading as valid as close reading once was. 2011. "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. In this way, Hayles speculative aesthetic inquiry joins projects like Jane Bennetts political ecology of vibrant matter and other secular metaphysics that hope to combat the anthropocentrism and narcissism for which the human species is notorious (2014, 177). 2017. Hayles, N. K. " Escape and Constraint: Three Fictions Dream of Moving from Energy to Information .". However, rather than being disturbed by the fact that most cognition necessarily involves no conscious awareness at all, Hayles appreciates that an accurate view of human cognitive ecology opens it to comparison with other biological cognizers on the one hand and on the other to the cognitive capabilities of technical systems (2017, 11). Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. It would also necessarily bring into question other characteristics of the liberal subject, for it made the crucial move of distinguishing between the enacted body, present in the flesh on one side of the computer screen, and the represented body, produced through the verbal and semiotic markers constituting it in an electronic environment. July 27, 2013, Technogenesis and Science Studies. 2008, Member of LIterary Advisory Board : Electronic Literature Organization. N. Katherine Hayles. David Kline introduces the systems theory of Niklas Luhmann for political theology and reflects on how it might think about its own limits of observation. Within the field of Posthuman Studies, Hayles' How We Became Posthuman is considered "the key text which brought posthumanism to broad international attention". [22] Weiss suggests that she makes the mistake of "adhering too closely to the realist, objectivist discourse of the sciences," the same mistake she criticizes Weiner and Maturana for committing. in chemistry from the Rochester Institute of Technology in 1966, and her M.S. October 22, 2010, Telegraph Code Books: The Place of the Human. April 17, 2013, Daniel Suarez's Daemon: Imagining the Financial Future. Hayles, N Katherine, and Jessica Pressman, eds. Meanwhile, popular conceptions of the cybernetic posthuman imagine the body as merely a container for information and code. New Media Soc. This gives reason for taking diverse modes of agency and subjectivity seriously. What would it mean for scholarship in political theology to claim monstrosity? November 21, 2013, Speculation: Playing the in Participation Gap. My Mother Was a Computer: Digital Subjects and Literary Texts. University of California December 15, 2009, Distributed Cognition: Implications for the Humanities". Moreover, most of . March 15, 2013, Apophenia: Patterns in Electronic Literature. Disability Resources I am indebted to Carol Wald for her insights into the relation between gender and artificial intelligence, the subject of her dissertation, and to her other writings on this question. by N. Katherine Hayles. December 15, 2009, Plenary: Critical Theory in the Digital Age. of Chicago Press, 2017) and How We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis (Univ. April 21, 2011, Rethinking the Humanities. February 29, 2008, Bass Connections Faculty Team Member . December 15, 2009, Vinge and the Micropolitics of Global Spatialization". In the paper itself, however, nowhere does Turing suggest that gender is meant as a counterexample; instead, he makes the two cases rhetorically parallel, indicating through symmetry, if nothing else, that the gender and the human/machine examples are meant to prove the same thing. It is a way of explaining how systems come into existence that performs two tasks at once: it describes the generation of systems, and it also constructs the world as it appears from the viewpoint of systems theory . YouTube. "[22] Some scholars found her prose difficult to read or over-complicated. Reading science fiction situates these issues in embodied narrative. Whereas How We Think examined how intelligent machines are influencing humans as thinkers (with conscious operations like verbal language, abstract reasoning, mathematics, music), Unthought shows how humans are part of a much broader assemblage of cognizers. Andrew Hodges, Alan Turing: The Enigma of Intelligence (London: Unwin, 1985), pp. Her research focuses on new religious movements, as well as aesthetic and ontological questions raised by new media and technology. This interview with N. Katherine Hayles, one of the foremost theorists of the posthuman, explores the concerns that led to her seminal book How We Became Posthuman (1999), the key arguments expounded in that book, and the changes in technology and culture in the ten years since its publication. 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. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017. In Unthought, she once again bridges disciplines by revealing how we think without thinkinghow we use cognitive processes that are inaccessible to consciousness yet necessary for it to function. Her research focuses on the relations of literature, science and technology in the 20th and 21 st centuries. algorithms), bacteria and academics. December 15, 2009, Plenary: Rethinking the Humanities in a Digital Age". "Susan Duhig, Chicago Tribune Books, "This is an incisive meditation on a major, often misunderstood aspect of the avant-garde in science fiction: the machine/human interface in all its unsettling, technicolor glories. December 15, 2009, Plenary: Digital Art and Culture and the Humanities: Challenges and Opportunities,. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. 41860 [11035]Hayles,Katherine [1388]Invited Lectures Apophenia: Patterns (?) Los Angeles, CA 90095-1530 You use the terminals to communicate with two entities in another room, whom you cannot see. We launched this series to make available theoretical resources that keep pace with the concerns raised by those working with political theology today, whose interests are increasingly tied not only to questions of genealogy, speculation, and political modernity, but also to questions of race, colonialism, gender, sexuality, disability, ecology, labor, finance capitalism, and economies of affect. Language and Law, Literature and Literary Criticism: October 21, 2010, How We Read: Close, Hyper, Machine. Duke University Why does Turing include gender, and why does Hodges want to read this inclusion as indicating that, so far as gender is concerned, verbal performance cannot be equated with embodied reality? 40 ratings3 reviews. She worked as a research chemist in 1966 at Xerox Corporation and as a chemical research consultant Beckman Instrument Company from 1968 to 1970. They are in radical symbiosis with each other, going beyond the biological and organic by way of homology between human and other cognition. The major concept in this book is technogenesis, meaning the co-evolution of humans and their technics. You use the terminals to communicate with two entities in another room, whom you cannot see. Andrew Pickering describes the book as "hard going" and lacking of "straightforward presentation. On this view, Hodges's reading of the gender test as nonsignifying with respect to identity can be seen as an attempt to safeguard the boundaries of the subject from precisely this kind of transformation, to insist that the existence of thinking machines will not necessarily affect what being human means. Jones argued that reality is rather "determined in and through the way we view, articulate, and understand the world". Anidjars major contribution to modern political theology lies in responding to this lacuna. A pseudo-autobiographical exploration of the artistic and cultural impact of the transformation of the print book to its electronic incarnations. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. 72 N. Katherine Hayles It is no accident that this story has a mythopoetic quality, for it is a mythology as much as a description. Nevertheless, her overall aim is to provide a theoretical method that can better inform human decision making in an increasingly complex world. Lifetime Achievement Award. Motens prophecy bespeaks aesthetic registers in ordinary (Black) life, but he denies that the aesthetic is redemptive. What do gendered bodies have to do with the erasure of embodiment and the subsequent merging of machine and human intelligence in the figure of the cyborg? Publication List. by. That Hodges's reading is a misreading indicates he is willing to practice violence upon the text to wrench meaning away from the direction toward which the Turing test points, back to safer ground where embodiment secures the univocality of gender. Chicago. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. How We Became Posthuman. of Chicago Press 2015), in addition to over 100 peer-reviewed articles. Hayles investigation into how our nonconscious mechanisms work shows that, while a key job of the cognitive nonconscious is to filter inputs so as to prevent cognitive overload, this system did not evolve to deal with todays information ecology; new methods are needed to deal with the overload. , Hayles, N Katherine, and James J. Pulizzi. In Unthought , she once again bridges disciplines by revealing how we think without thinkinghow we use cognitive processes that are inaccessible to consciousness yet necessary for it to function. The very existence of the test, however, implies that you may also make the wrong choice. But air does not forget us. [12] Drawing on diverse examples, such as Turing's imitation game, Gibson's Neuromancer and cybernetic theory, Hayles traces the history of what she calls "the cultural perception that information and materiality are conceptually distinct and that information is in some sense more essential, more important and more fundamental than materiality. 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. August 15, 2011, DGS : Organizer and co-organizer of workshop at Duke .. 2011, Open Humanities Press Advisory Board. 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. 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). Honorary Phi Beta Kappa Membership, 2001. Read an interview/dialogue with N. Katherine Hayles and Albert Borgmann, author of Holding On to Reality: The Nature of Information at the Turn of the Millennium. As you gaze at the flickering signifiers scrolling down the computer screens, no matter what identifications you assign to the embodied entities that you cannot see, you have already become posthuman. You are the cyborg, and the cyborg is you. Aiding this process was a definition of information, formalized by Claude Shannon and Norbert Wiener, that conceptualized information as an entity distinct from the substrates carrying it. Her books have won several prizes, including The Rene Wellek Award for the Best Book in Literary Theory for How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Literature, Cybernetics and Informatics, and the Suzanne Langer Award for Writing Machines. New York: Columbia University Press, 2021. January 5, 2013, Comparative Textual Media: A Proposal. Lyotards thought as it appears in Le Diffrend describes a linguistic state that evades speech, and the ways in which justice could be done to it, or not. Often forgotten is the first example Turing offered of distinguishing between a man and a woman. General Criticism and Critical Theory. His/her/its best strategy, Turing suggested, may be to answer your questions truthfully. Narrating Bits: Encounters between Humans and Intelligent Machines, This page was last edited on 16 April 2023, at 11:26. If your failure to distinguish correctly between human and machine proves that machines can think, what does it prove if you fail to distinguish woman from man? Althaus-Reids work asks whether Political Theology is capable of accounting for the power of sex, a power that comes to the fore if the theologian focuses on queer bodies. theorist N. Katherine Hayles' oeuvre at the intersection of literature and computational science and technology. N. Katherine Hayles How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics 1st Edition by N. Katherine Hayles (Author) 74 ratings See all formats and editions Kindle $16.49 Read with Our Free App Hardcover $54.00 Other used and collectible from $19.45 Paperback $17.21 - $22.50 Other new, used and collectible from $6.10 Achille Mbembes work excavates the legacies of colonial reason and violence shaping the powers of death in the world today. If you cannot tell the intelligent machine from the intelligent human, your failure proves, Turing argued, that machines can think. Bibliovault March 28, 2013, Flash Crashes and Critical Finance Studies. Is this simply bad writing, as Hodges argues, an inability to express an intended opposition between the construction of gender and the construction of thought? 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars. Get the latest updates on new releases, special offers, and media highlights when you subscribe to our email lists! 2008. How We Became Posthuman is a history of the perception of the dualism of virtuality/information vs. materiality/technology. Her affirmative posthumanism can help expose the latent theologies of any number of anthropocentric theories, but especially traditional liberal humanism and forms of capitalism. Rafael Vizcano offers a biographical introduction to the philosophical work of Enrique Dussel, a major figure of the decolonial turn. ': Families, Snitches, and Recuperation in Pynchon's Vineland, Turbulence in Literature and Science: Questions of Influence, Space for Writing: Stanislaw Lem and the Dialectic 'That Guides My Pen, 'A Metaphor of God Knew How Many Parts': The Engine that Drives "The Crying of Lot 49", Self-Reflexive Metaphors in Maxwell's Demon and Shannon's Choice: Finding the Passages, Information or Noise? "Too often the pressing implications of tomorrow's technologically enhanced human beings have been buried beneath an impenetrable haze of theory-babble and leather-clad posturing. We have to feel our way toward change. January 5, 2013, Re-Thinking the Humanities Curriculum. Her writing demands change from her readers if they are to follow her on that adventure. Humanities Division, UCLA The late public intellectual Stuart Hall, with his concept of the conjuncture, assists political theology in analyzing our current moment and potential interventions. saving. Why does gender appear in this primal scene of humans meeting their evolutionary successors, intelligent machines?

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