Hayles - Afterword - The Human in the Posthuman

8/13/2019 Hayles - Afterword - The Human in the Posthuman

1/5

http://www.jstor.org

Afterword: The Human in the Posthuman

Author(s): N. Katherine Hayles

Source: Cultural Critique, No. 53, Posthumanism, (Winter, 2003), pp. 134-137

Published by: University of Minnesota Press

Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1354628

Accessed: 18/04/2008 02:36

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless

you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you

may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use.

Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=umnpress.

Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed

page of such transmission.

JSTOR is a not-for-profit organization founded in 1995 to build trusted digital archives for scholarship. We enable the

scholarly community to preserve their work and the materials they rely upon, and to build a common research platform that

promotes the discovery and use of these resources. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

8/13/2019 Hayles - Afterword - The Human in the Posthuman

2/5

AFTERWORDTHEHUMANN THEPOSTHUMANN. Katherine Hayles

How to tell the story of the posthuman? One way is to trace alinear trajectory from the regime of the human to the posthuman, asHans Moravec does in anticipating a postbiological future of human-ity or Ray Kurzweil in seeing intelligent machines as our evolution-ary descendents. The essays in this special issue take another route,complicating linearity by enfolding binary distinctions into more com-plex topographies. In the process, they show with clarity and insightthat the posthuman should not be depicted as an apocalyptic breakwith the past. Rather, it exists in a relation of overlapping innovationand replication, a pattern that in How We BecamePosthumanI calledseriation,borrowing the term from archaeological anthropology.

Jill Didur enfolds together the binary distinction of nature andtechnology, using the context of genetically modified organisms(GMOs) to explore the conflicting rhetorics of those who opposeGMOs and those who produce and market them. From my perspec-tive, the essential point is that humans have used technology sincethey stood upright and began fashioning tools, an event contempora-neous with the evolution of Homosapiens.Technology as a strategy ofsurvival and evolutionary fitness cannot be alien to the human. Asone of Didur's sources observes, every food that humans currentlyeat has already been the product of such technological interventionsas selective breeding. This is not to say that there are not seriousissues with GMOs, only that the natural/technological distinction can-not adequately be understood as a simple trajectoryfrom the natureof crop farming to the unnatural technologies of gene splicing andother genetic modifications.CulturalCritique53-Winter 2003-Copyright 2003 Regentsof the Universityof Minnesota

8/13/2019 Hayles - Afterword - The Human in the Posthuman

3/5

AFTERWORD 135

Neil Badmington shares with Laura Bartlett and Thomas B. Byersthe insight that posthumanist productions are folded together withhumanist assumptions. Finding his warrant in Derrida, Badmingtonshows that posthuman assumptions already inhere in such classicalhumanist sites as the distinctions Descartes draws between humansand machines. Arguing that posthumanism already occurs as acritical practice within humanism, Badmington calls for a workingthrough of humanist assumptions rather than a belief that we cansimply leave them behind. As if anticipating Badmington's argu-ment, Bartlett and Byers's deft analysis of The Matrix demonstrateshow the film reinscribes humanist beliefs even as it purports to depicta posthuman future. A somewhat different tack is taken by AnnetteBurfoot in her analysis of the possibilities and limitations in feministanalyses of the body. Taking on the dichotomy of discourse versusmateriality, she argues for a position in which the discursive con-struction of the body is folded back into its materiality, insisting thatlived experience through the body must be seen as in intrarelationwith discourse.

Equally complex is Teresa Heffernan's stunning analysis of theparadoxes that emerge in attempts to improve the human throughartificial reproduction. Beginning with research that fused a cowembryo with a human cell, Heffernan's analysis returns to Franken-stein to show that the doctor's attempt to locate the essence of thehuman by artificially creating life has just the opposite effect: thecreated human turns out to be a monster. But the ironies do not endthere, for just as the monster is shown to be humanlike, the humandoctor mirrors the monster that he abhors. As Heffernan observes,the more the essence of the human is sought, the more the linesbetween human and nonhuman blur. The alternative, she suggests,is to abandon the attempt to police the boundaries between thehuman and nonhuman and see both as enwebbed within a skein ofmutual interrelations. Although her argument focuses on the biolog-ical sciences, many of the same issues are at stake in the relationbetween human cognition and artificial intelligence. Without elidingthe differences between human and artificial intelligence, I think it isbecoming increasingly clear that cognition takes place both in carbonand in silicon creatures. The resulting crisis in what counts as humanplays out along lines similar to those Heffernan traces: the more one

8/13/2019 Hayles - Afterword - The Human in the Posthuman

4/5

136 | N. KATHERINEHAYLES

insists on absolute boundary lines between the human and non-human, the more the two become entwined in their evolutionarypresent and future. This is particularly clear in Hans Moravec's sce-nario of downloading human consciousness into a computer. Dimin-ishing human intelligence only to informational pattern, Moravecessentializes the human even as he places it in a context that wouldprofoundly alter what it means to be human.

Perhaps the most revealing essay for me is Eugene Thacker'srepositioning of biotech in the context of the dichotomy betweenmateriality and information. In How We BecamePosthuman, I arguethat the cybernetic paradigm was founded on a view of informationthat conceptualized it as distinct from the material substrate in whichit was embedded. For the scientists and researchers whose work Iinterrogated, this initial dichotomy between materiality and informa-tion played out as the belief that information captured all that wasessential about the organism-hence Hans Moravec's speculationthat it will soon be possible to download human consciousness into acomputer. Thacker,looking at the biological rather than the computersciences, reconceptualizes how the material/information dichotomyworks in the biological sciences. Unlike artificial life, where the mate-riality of the organism literally translates into information patterns,the biological sciences do not lose sight of the carbon-based material-ity in which the information is expressed. Rather, information is seenas the handle through which the materiality of the organism can bemanipulated and transformed. Change the code, Thacker observes,

and you change the body. Information here does not exclude mate-riality, as it tends to do with researchers who specialize in computersimulations; rather, materiality is seen as the site at which informa-tion patterns exert control over form and function. Concentratingon regenerative medicine, including tissue engineering, stem cell re-search, and therapeutic cloning, he sees this research as part of alarger paradigm he calls biomedia in which information producesthe body purified of errors. In this purification, the body is not onlyregenerated but actually redesigned by its informatting with infor-mational codes. The term biomedia brilliantly captures the tensionbetween the body's materiality, and the idea that materiality is essen-tially a substrate for information. Just as the pertinent aspect of anewspaper is not that it happens to be made of plant fiber but that it

8/13/2019 Hayles - Afterword - The Human in the Posthuman

5/5

AFTERWORD 137

is printed with words, so in a biomedia view flesh becomes the mate-rial carrier for the information it expresses.Thacker's analysis recalls Bruce Sterling's Holy Fire, a sciencefiction exploration of how regenerative medicine might play out in afuture in which one's medical records are a matter of public scrutinyand official morality. Medically prudent behavior is rewarded withadvanced medical treatments and aggressive interventions, whereasmedically irresponsible behavior (drinking, drug use, overeating,and so on) equates with public immorality and results in a refusal ofexpensive treatments. Mia Ziemann, a fastidiously prudent ninety-four-year-old woman who has engaged in all the right behaviors, isrewarded with an extreme regenerative treatment in which her skinis dissolved and her body remade from the inside out, transformingher from a well-preserved old woman into a twenty-year-old bodywith a ninety-four-year-old consciousness. These incongruities leadto chaos precisely because mind cannot be separated from body;flooded with a young woman's hormones and desires, the conscious-ness responds by engaging in risky behaviors utterly foreign to theold woman's habitual caution and reserve. The novel indicates thelimitations of a biotech perspective, for here changing the bodyresults in a change of (behavioral) code.

Taken as a group, these essays demonstrate that just as theposthuman is increasingly necessary to understand what counts ashuman, so understanding the posthuman requires taking the humaninto account. We do not leave our history behind but rather, likesnails, carry it around with us in the sedimented and enculturatedinstantiations of our pasts we call our bodies.