Response Essay After shocks: Posthuman ambivalence

N. Katherine Hayles Program in Literature, Duke University, North Carolina.

postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies (2010) 1, 262–271. doi:10.1057/pmed.2010.28

When I began writing How We Became Posthuman (1999), I was drawn to the topic in part because of the intense ambivalence I felt toward the idea of the posthuman. I thought, no doubt naively, that writing would help me resolve it. Far from overcoming mixed feelings, the writing intensified my emotions by bringing the issues into sharper focus. As David Gary Shaw rightly observes, the book is drenched in feelings – feelings of dread, possibility and hope. More than a decade later, my ambivalence remains unresolved. I do not doubt that coming decades will see us plunging deeper into what I have elsewhere called the regime of computation, creating more intelligent machines and more pervasive data systems that, having already transformed the meaning of ‘human,’ will continue to do so with increasing urgency and momentum. What are we to make of this trajectory, and what are the possibilities for constructive interventions? While I have not escaped dread in contemplating these questions, I want to focus in this inaugural issue of postmedieval on what posthumanism can offer to premodern studies, and what premodern studies can offer to posthumanism. In my view, we cannot prevent the regime of computation from continuing to expand, but we have an opportunity to interpret it in ways that may help to maximize its positive potential and minimize its risks. With this objective in mind, I want to focus on three areas that seem to me particularly promising, richly explored in the essays in this collection: futurity, non-human others and distributed cognition. r 2010 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 2040-5960 postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies Vol. 1, 1/2, 262–271 www.palgrave-journals.com/pmed/ Posthuman ambivalence

Futurity in posthumanism finds its most extreme version in , the philosophy articulated and embraced by an international movement that holds human evolution is not complete and that it is our duty – to ourselves, our ancestors and our descendants – to further human evolution to its ‘postbiological’ phase, when the human species will be technically able to escape the limitations of 1 embodiment, particularly mortality. Although transhumanism comes in several 1 See www. flavors, one of its principal ideas is the notion of the ‘singularity,’ a concept first humanityplus.org proposed by Vernon Vinge and taken up by Ray Kurzweil and others (Vinge, for the Humanity þ 1993; Kurzweil, 2006). ‘Singularity’ here alludes to its cosmological meaning of organization, aruptureinthefabricofspacetimethatcreatesablackhole,withagravitational formerly the World field so extreme nothing can escape being sucked into it once the event horizon Transhumanist has been passed. For transhumanism, this translates to a transformation in the Association. conditions of human life so extreme as to constitute a radical break from all previous . The posthuman singularity shares aspects with premodern versions of , along with significant differences. Like the apocalypse, not everyone will advance to the next level; only those right-thinking individuals with access to high technology will make the transition successfully. Transhumanism consequently emphasizes the individual, especially the extraordinary person with the foresight and resources to prepare for the singularity and with the will and determination to help bring it about. Ray Kurzweil recently founded ‘Singularity University’ (http://singularityu.org/) with the proclaimed goal of preparing its elite students for the coming transformation. Unlike the apocalypse, however, the singularity does not consist of absolute and infallible (divine) judgment but rather a concatenation of technological, political, economic and social factors. If we grant for the moment the premise of a singularity, those ‘left behind’ will undoubtedly include the poor and disenfranchised of every country, as well as citizens of under-developed nations struggling to feed their populations, much less push them toward immortality. As a metaphor, the singularity both reveals and conceals crucial aspects of the contemporary global situation. Already visible are systemic differences in life outcomes so huge as to seem like a rupture in human history. One of the possibilities that transhumanism embraces, for example, is life extension – Kurzweil, a devout believer in life extension as a palliative measure until death is technologically conquered, is said to take over 250 pills and injections per day; he is determined, in his words, to ‘live long enough to live forever’ (Kurzweil and Grossman, 2005), which will be quite a challenge for a person over 60. Kurzweil’s obsessions aside, life extension is already a site at which inequalities are dramatically manifest. Some African countries, devastated by HIV/AIDS, have life expectancies in the low 40s, whereas most developed countries enjoy life expectancies in the 70s and 80s. Transhumanism espouses a philosophy of enlightenment, but in its emphasis on the extraordinary

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individual, it also largely ignores questions of equity, allocation of resources, and national and class conflicts between the haves and the have-nots. Premodern studies can provide resourcesforunderstandingthepolitical, economic, social and cultural implications of the contemporary clash between radically different expectations: a privileged elite who look to much extended lifetimes (and in the extreme case, immortality) while assuming they will be able to avail themselves of the resourcesnecessarytoachieveit,andothers whom Thomas Pynchon refers to as the ‘preterite,’ those who have no chance to enjoy the benefits of advanced technology and the ‘long now’ that transhumanism predicts for its adherents. Meanwhile, of course, the same nations in which transhumanism flourishes are disproportionally depleting the ’s natural resources and causing irreparable harm to the global environment. An example of the perspective that premodern studies can bring to contemporary concerns about the future is Karl Steel’s ‘Woofing and Weeping with Animals in the Last Days,’ a poignant evocation of the cries of animals when they realize that life on earth is ending and they have no possibility of being among the elect, since they putatively lack reason and so cannot participate in the . By destabilizing the category of the human, as Julian Yates points out, posthumanism can demonstrate once again how negotiable is the boundary of what counts as human; throughout history, some populations have been labeled as ‘animals’ or ‘sub-human’ to justify all kinds of atrocities and genocides. Another example is Jen Boyle’s concept of ‘transtime,’ a complex configuration in which past, present and future are compounded, with temporal trajectories tracing forward, backward and sideways. Such a concept helps to deconstruct the temporal linearity of the ‘singularity,’ in which time is conceptualized as moving irrevocably toward a unitary event that will presumably happen everywhere all at once. Short of worldwide nuclear holocaust or catastrophic asteroid strike, however, events do not proceed in this way. Rather, they are compounded of many local variations and speeds, some moving quickly, others slowly, and still others barely affected. Moreover, they do not all point in the same direction. Even with globally scaled events such as , local variations and different adaptation strategies yield a wide variety of outcomes. In addition, premodern studies can offer counter-examples in which it is not the prospect of a future rupture that undoes existing social orders but other configurations of time; a case in point is Jonathan Gil Harris’s study of the ‘volatile now’ in Romeo and Juliet that sucks in the protagonists and subverts the order of children who carry on the patrimony of the fathers. Whereas premodern studies can complicate and diversify posthuman futurity, with influence flowing mostly forward in time from past cultural productions to the present, the dynamics are more reciprocal when it comes to non-human others. Destabilizing the category of the human, posthumanism is closely allied

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2 with such fields as animal studies and disability studies. Questions about the 2 See, for status of animals and plants, philosophical arguments that ground rights on example, Wolfe something other than human species-ism, debates on the ethics associated with (2009). stem cell research, and the possibility of human cloning are exemplary areas energized by posthumanism. These kinds of projects are well represented in the essays assembled here, with non-human others variously understood as including animals, plants, Paleolithic people, the dead and even stones. Here premodern studies serve to expand the category of the non-human, while simultaneously historicizing the ways in which humans and non-humans interact and co-constitute each other as categories. A related but distinct project is the exploration of the co-constitution of humans and tools. Technogenesis (sometimes called originary technicity), the idea that from the dawn of the species humans have co-evolved with tools (a claim largely accepted by anthropologists), has in the humanities been explored by thinkers as diverse as Gilbert Simondon (1989), Adrian MacKenzie (2002), Bernard Stiegler (1998) and Bruno Latour (1993, 1999, 2004). When Latour calls for a ‘Parliament of Things’ (Latour, 1993, 144–145), he imagines a discourse community comprised of diverse stakeholders, including both humans and non-human agents. For Simondon, the diversity of contexts used to fabricate tools continues to exist in a technical element (that is, an individual tool) when it is extracted from the technical assemblage and transported into different contexts, with a consequent folding of time analogous to Jen Boyle’s ‘transtime.’ In these models, the emphasis tends to fall on the networks through which tools and humans circulate as they engage in feedback and feedforward loops. Yet another kind of project is the speculative realism explored by Quentin Meillassoux (2010), Graham Harman (2002) and Ray Brassier (2007), among others. The attempt here is to try to imagine what tools are in themselves, apart from how they appear from a human perspective. (With such projects, ‘nonhuman others’ is a misnomer similar to calling a woman a ‘non-man’; while ‘non-man’ ignores the particularity of women and fatally skews the analysis toward a patriarchal perspective, calling a tool ‘non- human’ skews the analysis toward an anthropomorphic perspective.) Although Harman and others frequently use simple tools such as hammers in their analyses, it seems clear to me that speculative realism emerges from a context in which intelligent machines are essential to contemporary human society, from the computers that manage air traffic at Chicago’s O’Hare airport, to the sensors, actuators and computerized systems that regulate water flow and purification in New York City, to the vehicular traffic management systems in Los Angeles. Without such massive integrated systems, along with networked and programmable machines tied into large databases, ubiquitous computing systems, and locally situated devices such as microwaves, watches, automobile ignition systems and so on, human

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societies simply could not exist in the numbers and locations they now inhabit, especially in densely populated urban centers. Moreover, as machines are integrated with increasingly sophisticated sensors and actuators, they can legitimately be said to possess worldviews. Information about the world comes to them through their sensors, and based on this information and their programming, they hold certain beliefs about the world and act accordingly. For example, a radio frequency identification (RFID) tag connected to a sensor that detects infrared radiation senses living bodies in a building collapsed by an earthquake and reports back to a database, which integrates the information with Global Positioning System data from satellites as well as reports from other sensors; accordingly, the system activates a robot designed to excavate debris at the appropriate location. Such a system can be said to hold the view that people are alive at a certain location and that excavation is possible. Other examples include automatic systems, flight computers that control aerodynamically unstable aircraft such as the F-16, robots that locate and detonate land mines, and a host of other military, industrial, commercial and personal machines that gather information, analyze it and initiate actions. Understanding how the world looks to them constitutes, in Ian Bogost’s (2009) memorable phrase, alien phenomenology. In a similar vein to cultural anthropologists who rigorously train to put aside their cultural mindsets (to the extent possible) and gather information about other cultures to understand how the world looks from their points of view, so alien pheno- menologists gather information about tools to understand them not as accessories to human culture but as subjects that perceive and act in the world. This approach obviously goes beyond situating human and non-human actors in co-constituitive networks to the attempt to understand, as Graham Harman (2002) puts it, ‘tool-being’ in its own right. Some scholars in premodern studies are taking note of this approach. As Michael Witmore astutely observes, when speculative realism introduces the inhuman ‘into our traffic with the world, y language is demoted somewhat, in part because it is associated with a certain kind of species narcissism that makes all problems human-mediated-language problems.’ Without abandoning language or texts, Julian Yates argues that the ‘call of the posthuman’ means ‘configuring the textual traces [of the past] as an archive or contact zone that may offer occluded or discarded ways of being that configure persons and world in ways other than those currently on offer.’ Musing on general purpose versus specific tools, Henry S. Turner posits a performative relation that envisions humans using old tools in new ways; he thus conceptualizes the tool (following Norbert Wiener’s notion of a tool that can adapt, change and reproduce itself) not as a pre-existent object used only for one specific purpose but a set of relations intimately bound up with its own as well as human agency. In this he parallels Bill Brown’s (2001) claim that things are not so much objects as embodied social relations. This way of thinking leads to Turner’s Latourian

266 r 2010 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 2040-5960 postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies Vol. 1, 1/2, 262–271 Posthuman ambivalence claim that there ‘literally is no collective of any kind that is not an assemblage of people and tools, some of which are living and some of which are not, and that any notion of ethics and politics worth the name will be of the posthuman variety, toward which Wiener’s own work points us.’ Some of the most important tools in shaping literate humans, of course, have been inscription technologies. Enriched by many important studies of the shift from manuscript to book culture, premodern studies are in a strong position to contribute to Comparative Media Studies, illuminating through contrast and comparison contemporarymediatheoriesthatanalyzeeffects associated with the transition from print to digital media. Contemporary media theory, for its part, can re-territorialize premodern studies by re-configuring traditional associationsbetweeninscriptionpracticesandthe construction of the ‘human.’ W.B. Worthen, for example, envisions that the ‘radiant textuality’ (Jerome McGann’s [2004] term) of digital media can break the binary between written text and performance, subverting a sense of performance as writing’s ‘other’ and inaugurating a ‘revolution in the instrumentality of writing itself, in the ways we make it perform, and make ourselves through performing with it.’ While the print revolution parallels the advent of digital media in many ways, it also provides illuminating contrasts. One of the striking differences between digital media and print is the ability of computational devices to move into the environment, invisibly, ubiquitously and pervasively. While print is designed to be manufactured and read at the macro-scale of human vision, computational devices function at micro-scales unreadable by unaided eyesight. Across a wide range of devices, computational media are increasingly illegible without appropriate code detectors, sensors and specialized devices such as RFID readers 3 that can detect and decode radio frequency waves. While studies of print media 3 See Hayles (2009) have understandably focused on macro-scale phenomena, including economic, for a discussion of political and cognitive issues such as dissemination, legibility, literacy and so on, the implications of RFID. computational media interact with the human brain/body at a variety of scales and with diverse modalities, including what Nigel Thrift (2004) calls the ‘technological unconscious,’ that is, dispositions, gestures, postures and patterns of embodied action that inform human cognition below the level of conscious awareness. As technological infrastructures change, so too does what Bordieu calls the ‘habitus,’ and with it the ‘structuring structures’ that help to form, guide and support conscious actions. This view of computational media effects gains traction through recent work in cognitive science that emphasizes the flexibility of the ‘new unconscious’ (Hassin et al, 2005), or what Timothy Wilson (2002) calls the ‘adaptive unconscious,’ especially its ability to participate in cognitive activities formerly seen as the exclusive province of the conscious mind, including making decisions, establishing priorities, setting goals and arriving at judgments. Mediating between conscious awareness and technological infrastructures,

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the adaptive unconscious acts as a conduit through which digital technologies inform cognition on a variety of levels. Whereas the Freudian unconscious was seen to consist largely of suppressed/repressed material and thus to act as a reservoir of negatively encoded feelings and emotions, the adaptive unconscious plays a more constructive role, interacting with contemporary technologies adaptively to guide interactions in new directions and tune conscious awareness to new possibilities presented by the technologies. This view strongly contrasts with premodern views that saw conscious awareness as the whole of thinking. Moreover, it opens new possibilities for understanding the role of rituals, school disciplines, military exercises, furniture designs, and a wide range of other embodied practices in supporting and extending human cognition. Unlike a Foucaultian episteme, such practices are not necessarily part of a macro-scale shift but rather are initiated at diverse locales and varying effects having to do with the requirements for cognition in particular settings. W.B. Worthen, for example, seeks to re-position perfor- mance studies when he notes that stage instructions arise ‘in the dense texture of aesthetic, practical, embodied, proxemic conventions that structure the event. Without this technology, what precisely would the text of any play tell anyone to do?’ Typically for these essays (with the exception of the essay by Ruth Evans), Worthen does not use the language of distributed cognition. Since distributed cognition remains largely outside the scope of reference, it may be important to emphasize the kind of contributions it may make to understanding the relation between conscious awareness, technological infrastructure and the adaptive unconscious. Distributed cognition may be parsed through three different yet overlapping frameworks.Embodiedcognition,representedby the work of Antonio Damasio (2005), Francisco Varela et al (1992), Evan Thompson (2007) and others, argues that cognition happens not only in the neocortex but throughout the body, with complex feedback loops linking the cortex and the central and peripheral nervous systems, as well as organs such as the viscera. This view of cognition meshes well with ideas about the adaptive unconscious, since most of the neuronal and endocrinal feedback loops happen below conscious awareness. Another version of distributed cognition, associated with anthropologist Edwin Hutchins (1996), argues for the role of material objects in supporting human cognition through scaffoldings in which human actors participate in systemic articulations that make appropriate actions seem ‘natural.’ A homey example is the computer mouse, tailored so that one doesn’t need to think about how to hold it or how to click the appropriate buttons. This variety can be called embedded cognition. A different version, associated with philosopher Andy Clark (2008), is extended cognition. Clark argues that human cognition is not just supported by technological infrastructures but enrolled into larger adaptive cognitive systems, so that humans become actors in distributed

268 r 2010 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 2040-5960 postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies Vol. 1, 1/2, 262–271 Posthuman ambivalence cognitive systems that include non-human actors as well. Whether embodied, embedded, or extended, these models emphasize inter-relations between human and non-human agents, and between conscious awareness and a variety of other cognitive faculties. Distributed cognitive approaches, as Evans’s essay demonstrates here, can open new avenues of research in premodern studies by locating human action in technological landscapes that differ significantly from contemporary technologies in their effects and consequently in their influences on subjectivity, agency and conscious and unconscious thought. For those who wonder if juxtaposing posthumanism and premodern studies invites anachronism, I would remind them that ‘human’ is a historically specific construction that has changed over time, and that the function of ‘posthuman’ is not so much to denominate a particular configuration as to open areas of contestation in which one or more qualities associated with the ‘human’ come under challenge. If we have never been modern, as Latour (1993) suggests, we have never not been posthuman, as Michael Witmore claims in his essay title (in a somewhat different formulation). Having said that, I acknowledge that some of the meanings of ‘posthuman’ mentioned in this response are contemporary, and here the juxtaposition might legitimately be called anachronistic. Yet these versions of the posthuman largely concern the ways in which human cognition works. Although these views are rooted in the contemporary period, to the extent they are valid now, they must necessarily have been true of cognition in the premodern period as well (with the caveat that when they deal with the content of such concepts as the adaptive unconscious, adjustments must be made to take into account historical specificities). Perhaps the most exciting aspect of the posthuman- ism/premodern juxtaposition for me is the idea that influence can flow in both directions: that posthuman studies can learn as much from premodern explorations as premodern can from posthuman studies. The insights that can result from this two-way traffic have thepotentialtounsettle,aswellexpand, both fields of inquiry.

About the Author

N. Katherine Hayles is Professor of Literature at Duke University, where she teaches and writes on the relations of science, technology and literature in the 20th and 21st centuries. Her book How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (Chicago, 1999) won the Rene Wellek Prize for the Best Book in Literary Theory for 1998–1999, and her book Writing Machines (MIT, 2002) won the Suzanne Langer Award for Outstanding Scholarship. She is currently at work on a book entitled

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‘How We Think: The Transforming Power of Digital Technologies’ (E-mail: [email protected]).

References

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