Hayles starts out with a very helpful discussion of material and the body. In this discussion Hayles discusses the crucial shifts and evolutions we have made towards the posthuman., suggesting now that we have in fact already "become" posthuman. In her discussion of this evolution to the posthuman, Hayles summarizes the stages in the following passage, "The first centers on how information lost its body, that is, how it came to be conceptual as an entity separate from the material forms in which it is thought to be embedded. The second story concerns how the cyborg was created as a technological artifact and cultural icon in the years following World War II. The third, deeply implicated with the first two, is the unfolding story of how a historically specific construction called the human is giving way to a different construction called the posthuman" (2). In thinking about the book as a whole, Hayles takes us through these stories and applies them culturally, through conversations that are projected within many platforms, whether that be conversationally and then in research in academic spaces such as the Macy Conference or the interview with Catherine Bates where there is a critical lens on gender as it pertains to the posthuman, or through media and literature as discussed in Limbo and other representations. The main argument Hayles wants her readers to consider is that "the posthuman view privileges informational pattern over material instantiation, so that embodiment in a biological substrate is seen as an accident of history rather than an inevitability of life" (2). I struggle with this concept because I think that information and material are interconnected and cannot be separate. Within chapter 8, Hayles quotes Dreyfus, stating "embodiment means that humans have available to them a mode of learning, and hence of intellection, different from that deriving from cognition alone" (201). Wouldn't this constitute that biological substrate is indeed not an accident? Hayles argues that "the body produces culture at the same time culture produces the body" (200). It seems to me that there is a disconnect between some of the foundational arguments and the discussions that make up the bulk of the book.
One contradiction I found within the text is Hayles argument in the beginning of her book and the one she makes at the end. In chapter one, Hayles discusses the posthuman stating, "This paradox is resolved in the posthuman by doing away with the 'natural' self. The posthuman subject is an amalgam, a collection of heterogeneous components, a material-informational entity whose boundaries undergo continuous construction and reconstruction" (3). At the end of the book, Hayles discusses that the posthuman is not an apocalyptic end of human salvation, but rather the AI and AL presence within society is meant to serve as an integration, living side by side of humans, not replacing them. Jumping back to the beginning of the text, we grapple with this debate about information and the body, where Hayles argues "when information loses its body, equating humans and computers is especially easy, for the materiality in which the thinking mind is instantiated appears incidental to its essential nature" (2). Do we want to equate them? Understanding our infusion of how cyborg and dependent we are on machines is important, however, this doesn't resonate with the ending of the book, where Hayles attempts to make important distinctions between the human and machine.
Once we move post establishing the central arguments and and historical connotations of human and machine, Hayles begins to take us through the cultural conversations that have been (and are still currently happening) that were crucial to developing perspectives and depictions of the relationships humans have with technology. We're introduced to scientists such as Wierner, McCulloch, and Maturana which discuss the scientific evolution of our dependency and relationship with machine. Chapters 3,4, and 5 were especially difficult for me to unpack due to the scientific theory and biological connotations that Hayles introduces as an attempt to provide a plethora of perspective and theory as it pertains to the posthuman. I did however find the conversations at the Macy Conference fascinating as they began to talk about the transcriptionist and how her position served as a metaphor for the machine and the observer. This conversation takes place near the end of chapter three, Where Janet Freed is noticed in a photo of the Macy Conference, with her back to the camera. In her ability to articulate her needs from those present at the Macy Conference, in that they need to provide some type of document detailing their contributions to the conference, Hayles gets into a discussion of Freed as the observer stating "Rarely do we see her directly; we glimpse her largely through her reflections in the speech of others. More than anyone else, she qualifies as the outside observer who watches a system that she constructs through the marks she makes on paper, although the system that she constructs itself has a great deal of trouble including her within the name of those people who are authorized to speak and make meaning" (82). Thus begins the slight nod to gender as it relates to these conversations of the posthuman, which I feel is a sort of second main point within the book that Hayles could have addressed further. I'm hanging on to this passage to put in conversation for next week as we explore gender and its implications on technology and the posthuman. We are also given an in-depth discussion of gender as it pertains to amputees in Limbo. To be honest, as I was reading this synopsis, I was really pissed. Although in some ways I felt as though Hayles was dancing around the notion that in this sexual relationship, females are given some type of power in their ability to dictate how the movement of the sex is conducted, there is still a strong rape connotation, indicating that females are somehow 'deserving' or 'wanting' this barbaric rape in which their the ones with the power to facilitate. I began to think of cultural examples of amputees that are somehow infused with machine and how they have a power struggle that is both sexual and violent and I immediately thought of the character Merle in AMC's The Walking Dead.
Another important topic that Hayles discusses are the AI and the AL machines and he differences between them. Everything that Hayles discusses in the book centers around this discussion of narrative and how through stories, conversations, and cultural examples, we're able to understand what it really means to be posthuman. There is an important distinction between the AL and the AI lifeforms, as Hayles quotes Ray in which he states, "The object of an AL instantiation is to introduce the natural form and process of life into an artificial medium" (224). For Ray as Hayles notes, "creatures become natural forms of life; only the medium is artificial (224). To me this really emphasizes the relevance of embodiment, and that there is an important distinction between AL and human. In contrast, Hayles discusses the notion of AI and how the initial goals were to "build, inside a machine, an intelligence comparable to that of a human. The human was the measure; the machine was the attempt at instantiation in a different medium" (238). However, if we refer to Rays argument, this is not something that accessible for the machine. The AL paradigm is much more attainable within our society because as Hayles notes, "Whereas the AI dreamed of creating consciousness inside a machine, AL sees human consciousness, understood as an epiphenomenon, perching on top of the machinelike functions that distributed systems carry out. In the AL paradigm, the machine becomes the model for understanding the human. Thus the human is transfigured into the posthuman" (239).
The last multimedia cultural reference I'd like to include is an article that Kevin brought to my attention. The main attraction towards this article (aside from the creepy pictures) is this nod that the language makes towards our dependency for technology, and how the body can biologically serve as a fuel to keep this dependency going. I think such a invention would have merit at the Macy Conference and would be especially interesting to Wierner.
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