11.20
This week was largely devoted to the readings by Dona Haraway (“A Cyborg Manifesto”) and N. Katherine Hayles (“Towards embodied virtuality” and “Unfinished Work: From Cyborg to Cognisphere”) and to philosophical questions on what being posthuman is.
I can’t say I became a fan of Haraway; her much-praised (and much-criticised) article now shows its age and was too dense for me. I had to turn to a number of summaries and interpretations by other scholars in order to make it accessible.
And while Haraway convincingly argues that the power of the cyborg as a metaphor cannot be fully seen in the limiting context of utopic/dystopic binaries and that it lies in the transgression of boundaries, Hayles shockingly states that the cyborg is out-of-date. Hayles places the cyborg in the mythological pantheon that contains the centaur and other “augmented human” fantasies or scenarios. In a world where even your tea-kettle will soon have wi-fi, the cyborg is “not networked enough”.
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Cyberspace, on the other hand, has certainly not died but has evolved (or is that mutated?) into the cognisphere (or “noosphere” from the Greek word νους, i.e. noesis, intellect), which has “[e]xpanded to include not only the Internet but also networked and programmable systems that feed into it, including wired and wireless data flows across the electromagnetic spectrum”. The cognisphere, a sort of Cyberspace 2.0 with a hint of The Matrix, “gives a name and shape to the globally interconnected cognitive systems in which humans are increasingly embedded. As the name implies, humans are not the only actors within this system; machine cognizers are crucial players as well.”
It is certainly an indication of profound change when powerful popular metaphors mutate or become obsolete. But while we’re busy observing how the material and digital worlds around us evolve every day, perhaps we should take a moment to consider a couple of philosophical questions: If embodiment is not essential to human being and consciousness is just an epiphenomenon, as Hayles mentions, are we just informational processes? And if yes, doesn’t this mean that we’re not just actors within the cognisphere but also mere props, mere “data flows” in a stream of myriads? Finally, if “‘human’ and ‘posthuman’ coexist in shifting configurations”, is this co-existence symbiotic or parasitic?
* Haraway, D. (2000). A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late 20th Century. in D Bell and A Kennedy, The Cybercultures Reader. Routledge.
* Hayles, N.K. (1999). Toward embodied virtuality, chapter 1 of How we became posthuman: virtual bodies in cybernetics, literature and informatics. Chicago, University of Chicago Press. pp1-25.
* Hayles, N.K. (2006). Unfinished Work: From Cyborg to Cognisphere. Theory Culture Society, 23/7-8.
A great series of questions. But doesn’t Hayles answer them in the way she talks about the need to put embodiment ‘back in the picture’? Her ‘dream’ remember is one which isn’t seduced by fantasies of ‘disembodied immortality’ but one that ‘understands and celebrates finitude’ and the embodied nature of being human…
I agree with Hayles, whose texts I really enjoyed. All I was trying to point out with my questions is that laying too much emphasis on the “post” might make us forget there’s also a “human” in the posthuman student.