Hayles's How We Became Post-Human

Hayles's book is super hard for me to pin-down with a summary. There's a lot of stuff here that I'm not fully understanding with this book, so Gentle Reader keep that in mind as we walk through this blog together. To sum up Post-Human, Hayles writes about the ways in which "information has lost its body" (2). She goes through different mediums to illustrate her points: from science, to digital technologies, to literary criticism, Hayles leaves no stone unturned. What I liked about the first couple of chapters is how Hayles describes what posthuman is. There's a great (although too lengthy to use here) definition on pages 2-3 where she fully lays out how she's defining posthuman. I hadn't really thought about how "information [loses] its body" when it goes digital. Coupling that with what posthuman is (mostly that is to say it's more than just humans modifying their bodies), gave me a new perspective on the conversations surrounding digital humanities. So far we've covered how online spaces shape us, how we shape them, and what it means to be human within those spaces. Here, Hayles is looking at how human and machine are one, yet different.

Quotes/Compelling Issues:


"Although the 'posthuman' differs in its articulations, a common theme is the union between human and machine" (2).

This business of posthuman is, of course, essential to understanding the larger points she brings up throughout her book. When I first read the title, not knowing anything about what posthuman means, I figured it's "after-human" that Hayles would be discussing. That may be part of it, but this quote is getting closer to what I think her book is about: again, how human and machine work together, and how they differ. I'm getting closer to understanding the ideas Hayles posits, but it's still difficult for me to soundbite this back to a reader.

"[...]Haves of sentences spoken at different times can be amalgamated to let a speaker hear himself say the opposite of what he knows he said" (Roy Walker qtd. in Hayles, 210). This is regarding how record recordings, particularly on tape, can change what a person says.

What a super weird (and cool) idea! It's something anyone, with the right equipment and the right mind to do so, can create an alternate information that's separate from both the body of the person speaking, but how the technical/digital part can also be segmented apart, and put together in a different order. Hmm, that may not make much sense, so let's explore this further... What, I think, Hayles is talking about here through Walker is not how stuff can be edited to make anyone say anything, but rather differentiates how information becomes disembodied (a word she uses a lot, so riffing off of her). With this quote in particular, Hayles shows how tricky disembodies information is; that it's fluid.

"...displaces one definition of 'human' with another but also in a more disturbingly literal sense that envisions humans displaced as the dominate form of life on the planet by intelligent machines" (283). Hayles is writing about how posthuman invokes both "terror and pleasure" (283).


After reading this bit, I was skeptical about how much of this could be true. Can machines be intelligent enough on their own that they'll supersede humans? Doesn't this kind of intelligence rely on human intervention to survive (be it at the creation point, or to continue functioning)? This reminds me of T.V. Reed's book with regard to the notion that we shouldn't be super-suspicious, nor super-willing to buy into the idea that technology-in all its incarnations- will be the ruin/the saving grace for humans. This quote is straddling the line of being too suspicious of technology. No wait, I take that back. Its gone over the line and over the precipice. Now I just read the quote again. Maybe it's the case that machines have taken over in the less nefarious sense of our dependence on them makes life as we Americans know it possible. There's not a moment that goes by where I'm not using some machine to do something. Obviously I'm typing right now on a computer that's hooked up to the Internet (disembodied information).

Overall, what I found to be the most compelling about this book is how Hayles is taking the philosophical view of how we find our body, and applies that to posthumanism. It's impossible to find the body: if a person's arms are missing, it's not as if she ceases to have a body. Same applies with information in digital spaces.