While Hayles work has been critiqued by some for not engaging sufficiently with the political (especially the political economy of post-industrial cognitive capitalism), it does offer political theology a non-teleological theory of human-machine co-evolution that points toward new conceptions of power and authority conceptions that challenge the dominant narrative of Western Enlightenment and, by extension, the theo-political structures and concepts used historically to think about the political. N. Katherine Hayles Professor, Department of English UCLA Presentation Embodiment and Cognition: Implications for Gender. April 8, 2011, Comparative Media Studies: A New Paradigm for the Humanities. Chaos and Order: Complex Dynamics in Literature and Science. "Barbara Warnick, Argumentation and Advocacy. September 20, 2013, Speculative Gaming and Temporality. Turing's later embroilment with the police and court system over the question of his homosexuality played out, in a different key, the assumptions embodied in the Turing test. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984. 10. New Media Soc. [26] As Pickering wrote, Hayles' promotion of an "embodied posthumanism" challenges cybernetics' "equation of human-ness with disembodied information" for being "another male trick to feminists tired of the devaluation of women's bodily labor. Hayles then switched fields and received her M.A. Amelia Jones of University of Southern California describes Hayles' work as reacting to the misogynistic discourse of the field of cybernetics. , Hayles, N. K., Patrick Jagoda, and Patrick LeMieux. Andrew Hodges, Alan Turing: The Enigma of Intelligence (London: Unwin, 1985), pp. 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. Susanne E. Langer Award for Outstanding Scholarship in the Ecology of Symbolic Form, awarded by the Media Ecology Association to Writing Machines, 2002. What [Henrys] oeuvre offers political theology is a reimagining of what constitutes life togetheran attention to Life and thereby, spirituality. Hayles relates three interwoven stories: how information lost its body, that is, how it came to be conceptualized as an entity separate from the material forms that carry it; the cultural and technological . March 28, 2013, Flash Crashes and Critical Finance Studies. January 5, 2013, Hyper and Deep Attention: Implications and Consequences. His/her/its best strategy, Turing suggested, may be to answer your questions truthfully. By Ada Jaarsma March 16, 2021 Isabelle Stengers This idea of the posthuman also ties in with cybernetics in the creation of the feedback loop that allows humans to interact with technology through a blackbox, linking the human and the machine as one. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Sharday Mosurinjohn is Assistant Professor in the School of Religion at Queens University, Kingston, Ontario. The project of articulating a type of affirmative posthumanism would become the focus of her two later monographs. Narrative: Raw Shark Texts. 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. "[4][5] Hayles has taught at UCLA, University of Iowa, University of MissouriRolla, the California Institute of Technology, and Dartmouth College. She is a literary theorist at the University of California at Los Angeles who also holds an advanced degree in chemistry. December 15, 2009, Digital Humanities 2.0,. The late public intellectual Stuart Hall, with his concept of the conjuncture, assists political theology in analyzing our current moment and potential interventions. 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 . Weiss describes Hayles' work as challenging the simplistic dichotomy of human and post-human subjects in order to "rethink the relationship between human beings and intelligent machines," however suggests that in her attempt to set her vision of the posthuman apart from the "realist, objectivist epistemology characteristic of first-wave cybernetics", she too, falls back on universalist discourse, premised this time on how cognitive science is able to reveal the "true nature of the self. 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. Unthought: The Power of the Cognitive Nonconscious, Comparative Textual Media: Transforming the Humanities in the Postprint Era, How We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis, Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary, My Mother Was a Computer: Digital Subjects and Literary Texts, Nanoculture: Implications of the New Technoscience, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics, Chaos and Order: Complex Dynamics in Literature and Science, Chaos Bound: Orderly Disorder in Contemporary Literature and Science, The Cosmic Web: Scientific Field Models and Literary Strategies in the Twentieth Century, APPROXIMATING ALGORITHMS: FROM DISCRIMINATING DATA TO TALKING WITH AN AI, Creativity and Nonconscious Cognition: A Conversation with Mary Zournazi and N. Katherine Hayles, Microbiomimesis: Bacteria, our cognitive collaborators, Textual and real-life spaces: expanding theoretical frameworks. Using this text, Hayles shows the richness that can be appreciated in cognition and information even when it is asemic. In his thoughtful and perceptive intellectual biography of Turing, Andrew Hodges suggests that Turing's predilection was always to deal with the world as if it were a formal puzzle.2 To a remarkable extent, Hodges says, Turing was blind to the distinction between saying and doing. Ren Wellek Prize. English Reading Room October 14, 2013, The Materiality of Experimental Literature. Hayles recent works (Speculative Aesthetics and Object-Oriented Inquiry 2014; Unthought 2017) abstract her method of reading science fiction as a way of narratively materializing existing cognitive assemblages, and reframe the method in terms of a speculative aesthetic inquiry. This method depends on bridging between evidentiary accounts of objects that emerge from the resistances and engagements they offer to human inquiry, and imaginative projections into what these imply for a given objects way of being in the world (2014, 172). How We Became Posthuman is essentially the story of informations divorce from materiality, as people have increasingly imagined the human mind as separable from the body and forgotten the material objects involved in producing information in its digital forms. You are the cyborg, and the cyborg is you. Why does gender appear in this primal scene of humans meeting their evolutionary successors, intelligent machines? How We Became Posthuman He/she/it will try to reproduce through the words that appear on your terminal the characteristics of the other entity. 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? December 15, 2011, tenure review evaluator : Tenure Review, Cynthia Lawson. 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. algorithms), bacteria and academics. She is currently embarking on a Tri-Agency-funded study of existential, social, and political concerns involved in a medical AI diagnostic tool called the digital cancer twin, including how we think ourselves through time with predictive AI. Studying objects in this way reveals ways that we can engage our nonconscious cognition aesthetically. It reflects Hans rethinking of Benthams panopticon and Foucaults biopower as disciplinary society transitioned into a digital achievement society that defines our contemporary neoliberal globalized world. 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. 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? , Hayles, N Katherine, and James J. Pulizzi. Taubess thought revolves around two poles, philosophy of history and political theology, with the aim of inverting the Schmittian position and thinking a new form of community by means of an innovative return to Paul of Tarsus and Walter Benjamin. January 5, 2013, Comparative Media as a Theoretical Framework. , Hayles, N. K., Fred C. Anson, Nancy Rathjen, and Robert D. Frisbee. A pseudo-autobiographical exploration of the artistic and cultural impact of the transformation of the print book to its electronic incarnations. October 28, 2010, Narrative and Database: Steven Hall's Raw Shark Texts". 62 ratings8 reviews. May 21, 2011, Artificial Nature: Rethinking the Natural. October 15, 2011, Tenure review evaluator : Tenure Review, Fabian Winkler. How We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis, University of Chicago Press, 2012. 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. 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). This gives reason for taking diverse modes of agency and subjectivity seriously. |
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. Clear rating. Fellowships for University Teachers. November 19, 2008, How We Think: The Transforming Power of Digital Technologies. OOO is a noncorrelationist, flat ontology premised on the notion of withdrawal: that is, OOO sees all things in terms of objects, which have existences independent of human observation, and which are never fully knowable by humans. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002. According to N. Katherine Hayles, what is hypercognition? What embodiment secures is not the distinction between male and female or between humans who can think and machines which cannot. According to Hayles the posthuman view privileges information over materiality, considers consciousness as an epiphenomenon and imagines the body as a prosthesis for the mind. Gender depended on facts which were not reducible to sequences of symbols" (p. 415). The questions Hayles raises about the nature of the post/human are the fundamental ones framed in the exigencies of todays political economy. Disability Resources January 5, 2013, Speculative Aesthetics: Object Oriented Inquiry (OOI). Modeling and Simulation . Within the field of Posthuman Studies, Hayles' How We Became Posthuman is considered "the key text which brought posthumanism to broad international attention". January 5, 2013, Flash Crashes and Algorithmic Trading. National Endowment for the Humanities. But air does not forget us. N. Katherine Hayles is Professor of English and Design/Media Arts at the University of California at Los Angeles. 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. December 4, 2008, Spatializing Time: The Influence of Google Earth, Google Maps. November 12, 2011, Narrative Storyworlds and Experimental Fiction. Alan M. Turing, "Computing Machinery and Intelligence," Mind 54 (1950): 433-57. October 11, 2013, The Cognitive Nonconscious: Implications for the Humanities. This problem has been solved! October 7, 2011, Distributed Cognition and Attention. April 17, 2013, Daniel Suarez's Daemon: Imagining the Financial Future. You use the terminals to communicate with two entities in another room, whom you cannot see. One thing that is certain, however, is that intelligent machines will take increasingly active roles in constructing and filtering information for human users. The Cosmic Web: Scientific Field Models and Literary Strategies in the Twentieth Century. October 23, 2013, The Cognitive Nonconscious: Implications for the Humanities. In, Flesh and Metal: Reconfiguring the Mindbody in Virtual Environments. Hayles conceptual toolkit allows users to define the human with technologies, as transhumanists would, and against technologies, when it is politically expedient to do so. Rather, the important intervention comes much earlier, when the test puts you into a cybernetic circuit that splices your will, desire, and perception into a distributed cognitive system in which represented bodies are joined with enacted bodies through mutating and flexible machine interfaces. She received her B.S. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. 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. Franklin Humanities Institute. Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Hayles examines the evolution of the field from the traditional humanities and how the digital humanities are changing academic scholarship, research, teaching, and publication. But symbiosis always entails mutual risk exposure. October 15, 2010, Posthuman Reading (and Writing). June 26, 2013, Technogenesis: The Role of the Digital Companion. John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. For instance, N. Katherine Hayles regularly brings up Media-Specific Analysis (MSA) in her body of works, 45 an analytical method which relies on drawing attention to the medium of a given work . If you cannot tell the intelligent machine from the intelligent human, your failure proves, Turing argued, that machines can think. Fellowship. Hayles uses posthuman as a heuristic term for evoking this story. Marshalling fresh insights from neuroscience, cognitive science, cognitive biology, and . Relying solely on their responses to your questions, you must decide which is the man, which the woman. October 28, 2011, Cryptographic Grilles and Contemporary Literature. 1999, 338 pages, 5 line drawings 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. Humanities Division, UCLA His conviction and the court-ordered hormone treatments for his homosexuality tragically demonstrated the importance of doing over saying in the coercive order of a homophobic society with the power to enforce its will upon the bodies of its citizens. February 29, 2008, Bass Connections Faculty Team Member . Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002. 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 Invisible Committee may be productively, albeit counterintuitively, understood as Gnostic, a perspective that will put into question some of the assumptions behind the way the political and the theological are demarcated from and related to each other in contemporary debates. [11] In the liberal humanist view, cognition takes precedence over the body, which is narrated as an object to possess and master. "[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. One way to frame these mysteries is to see them as attempts to transgress and reinforce the boundaries of the subject, respectively.
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