the reappearing body in postmodern technoculture

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The Reappearing Body in Postmodern TechnocultureHow We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics by N.Katherine HaylesReview by: Thomas FosterContemporary Literature, Vol. 42, No. 3 (Autumn, 2001), pp. 617-631Published by: University of Wisconsin PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1208998 .

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THOMAS FO S T E R

The Reappearing Body in Postmodern Technoculture

N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1999. xiv + 350 pp. $49.00; $18.00 paper.

n 1987, Arthur and Marilouise Kroker identified the "disappearing body" as a key trope defining the postmodernity of contemporary culture, and therefore a key problem for materialist analyses of that culture.1 In How We Became Post-

human: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics, N. Katherine Hayles excavates a major historical and intellectual source for this trope of disembodiment: the history of the new scientific disciplines of cybernetics and information theory, during and immediately after World War II. Especially in the mathemati- cal formulations associated with Claude Shannon, early information theory set out to systematically distinguish information from

any instantiating medium, signal from noise, in much the same

way that Ferdinand de Saussure founded modem linguistics on the distinction between the ideal system of language and particular speech acts. Hayles's book demonstrates how this foundational move within cybernetics still anachronistically informs contemporary rhetorics about new technologies of computer-mediated communication and their supposed potential for literalizing the

1. Arthur Kroker and Marilouise Kroker, "Theses on the Disappearing Body in the

Hyper-Moder Condition," Body Invaders: Panic Sex in America, ed. Arthur Kroker and Marilouise Kroker (New York: St. Martin's, 1987) 31.

THOMAS FO S T E R









THOMAS FO S T E R









THOMAS FO S T E R









Contemporary Literature XLII, 3 0010-7484/01 /0003-0617 ? 2001 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System






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Cartesian mind-body dualism and freeing us from the particularity of our various bodies, a rhetoric that dominates recent advertise- ments for Internet services, for instance.

But How We Became Posthuman offers much more than just a cri-

tique of this rhetoric, of the sort found in Hubert Dreyfus's What

Computers Still Can't Do or Virtual Realities and Their Discontents, a collection of essays to which Hayles was a contributor.2 How We Became Posthuman also defines the potential that postmoder technocultures possess for revaluing embodied experiences rather than

just fantasizing about their obsolescence. Hayles accomplishes this ambitious project in two ways. First, she turns to the history of science to show how Shannon's model of pure information (or what Hayles calls the story of how information lost its body) has been displaced by more recent developments in cybernetics. How We Became Posthuman reminds cultural critics that the early work of such figures as Shannon, Norbert Wiener, and Alan Turing was

merely the first wave of cybernetics and has been followed by two further paradigm shifts, systems theory and most recently artificial life or the algorithmic modeling of evolutionary processes. The second kind of argument Hayles makes about the continued value of embodiment in contexts where social interaction is increasingly mediated technologically centers around the concept of the "posthuman." Hayles defines this term as a form of subjectivity in which the subject's relation to him- or herself is mediated technologically, in contrast to possessive individualism, the dominant ideology of

modernity (3-4). Computer-mediated communication reveals the mediated nature of subjectivity to be a crisis within liberal human- ism rather than an external interruption, so that Hayles can argue, "the construction of the posthuman does not require the subject to be a literal cyborg" (4). It is in this sense that cybernetics reveals us to have already become posthuman, as the past tense of the book's title implies.

Most importantly, Hayles traces the way in which this posthuman condition is structured by a fundamental tension between the

2. Hubert L. Dreyfus, What Computers Still Can't Do: A Critique of Artificial Reason, rev. ed. (Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 1992); Robert Markley, ed., Virtual Realities and Their Discontents (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 1996).






























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denaturalization of an abstract concept of "the body" as a secure

ontological foundation for cultural identities and the tendency for this rejection of "the body" as ground to shade into a rejection of the determining power and meaning of embodiment in general. The conclusion Hayles draws from this analysis is that the emer-

gence of postmodern technoculture and the prominent role of

tropes of disembodiment with that culture "requires a way of talk-

ing about the body responsive to its construction as discourse/ information and yet not trapped within it" (193). In other words, postmoder technoculture offers a particulariy emphatic version of the treatment of essentialism and social constructionism as a di-

chotomy, while at the same time technocultures also promise to

productively displace the terms of that dichotomy. One of the great accomplishments of How We Became Posthuman is the new vocabu-

lary it provides for talking about this problem. Hayles's book therefore sets out to restore the tension between denaturalization of "the body" and erasure of embodiment, what she calls the tension between "incorporating" and "inscribing" practices, to both

popular rhetorics about and academic analyses of new technolo-

gies and their cultural implications, in opposition to the tendency to either celebrate or lament the supposed disappearance of "the

body." As a paradigmatic example of this tension, the book's prologue

cites the test for the successful achievement of a computational model of human intelligence, proposed by Alan Turing in 1950.3

Turing proposed a standard of imitation, based on a guessing game in which the gender of two respondents had to be inferred from their answers to various questions. Turing suggested that a similar

"game" would involve guessing whether a respondent is a com-

puter program or an actual person. Hayles argues that the Turing test challenges the ability of embodiment to secure either "the

univocality of gender" or "human identity" in general (xiv). This critical function results from the possibility that what we accept as human subjectivity can be produced through technological means. In turn, however, Hayles argues that this critique is itself only

















































3. A. M. Turing, "Computing Machinery and Intelligence," Mind: A Quarterly Review

of Psychology and Philosophy 59 (Oct. 1950): 433-60. 3. A. M. Turing, "Computing Machinery and Intelligence," Mind: A Quarterly Review



of Psychology and Philosophy 59 (Oct. 1950): 433-60.



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made possible through "the erasure of embodiment" that results from defining "intelligence" as "a property of the formal manipu- lation of symbols rather than enaction in the human life-world" (xi). The rest of How We Became Posthuman is devoted to explaining how these two tendencies became imbricated in contemporary science and culture. The erasure of embodiment has come to dominate thinking about how cybernetics blurs the boundaries between bodies and technology, as Hayles demonstrates by turning from Alan Turing's imitation game to Hans Moravec's more recent spec- ulations about the desirability of downloading human consciousness into computerized form, a transformation Moravec imagines will require the destruction of a person's physical brain in order to "read" the information it contains into a computer's memory (1).4 Hayles's book offers an important corrective to such narratives, even as How We Became Posthuman also mines the history of

cybernetic and technocultural models like Turing's, for the ways they might allow us to put "embodiment back into the picture" without returning "the body" to its ideological function as a secure

ontological ground (xiv). The two strands of Hayles's argument are developed in two dif-

ferent ways. First, Hayles complicates the association of information with disembodiment or abstraction by tracing the history of

cybernetics, along with performing close readings of specific scientific texts, primarily intended to show how the critical possibilities of the posthuman and its challenge to the autonomy of the humanist subject have been resisted or recontained through narrative

strategies. With their focus not only on Norbert Wiener's codifica- tion of cybernetics but on the primary documents of the interdisci-

plinary Macy Conferences sponsored between 1943 and 1954 by the Josiah Macy Foundation, these chapters offer a genuinely thick

description of the emergence of cybernetics, reading it as the origin of what we now call techno- or cyberculture. How We Became Post- human therefore resists the tendency to decontextualize early definitions of information, which themselves depended upon an operation of decontextualization or abstraction of message from

4. Hans P. Moravec, Mind Children: The Future of Robot and Human Intelligence (Cam- bridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1988) 109-10.






























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medium. Hayles suggests that this decontextualizing move has been unwittingly reenacted by many commentators on computer- mediated communication, cyberspace, and new information econ- omies. The result of such an operation is to privilege "informational pattern over material instantiation" (2), though Hayles also notes that the relation between pattern and its apparent opposite, randomness, is more complex than the distinction it replaces, presence and absence (26). In fact, Hayles argues, it is a mistake to understand informational patterns as being defined simply in opposition to material or physical presence. Hayles's central argument in the chapters on first-wave cybernetics (3 and 4) is that, while this

simplified dichotomy between pattern and presence survives in the

tendency for posthuman technocultures to privilege pattern over

presence, that opposition is actually an anachronism or "skeuo-

morph" (17), the persistence of an outdated scientific model in the

popular imagination. The other main argument Hayles makes about early cybernetics

has to do with the way in which it attempted to find a common

language to describe both mechanical and organic systems, thereby blurring the distinction between the human and the technological, or as Hayles puts it, "splicing" the two together. Hayles reads this

splice as a fundamental challenge to liberal humanist concepts of individual autonomy, and she takes Norbert Wiener's writings as a case study in the ambivalence this challenge produced. Specifically, Hayles notes how the concept of homeostasis or "self-regulating stability through cybernetic corrective feedback" (298n20) was em-

phasized in order to figure this instability only as an initial moment in the functioning of a system, which could persist as a system only if feedback mechanisms operated to restore the system to itself and to maintain its integrity and therefore its boundedness. In this way, the concept of homeostasis had the ideological function of re-

containing the more subversive implications of cybernetics' found-

ing insight into the potential for crossing the boundaries of the human. In chapter 4, Hayles offers specific readings of how this

repressed ambivalence returns in Wiener's text, specifically around

figures of embodied identity. Chapter 6 then turns to systems theory as initially developed in

response to first-wave cybernetics by biologists Francisco Varela
















































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and Humberto Maturana and elaborated by sociologist Niklas Luhmann (Hayles's emphasis is on Varela and Maturana's scientific work rather than Luhmann's translation of that work into so-

ciological theory). Systems theory emphasizes processes of self-

organization or "autopoiesis" that are necessarily embodied, since

they produce bodily boundaries or "organizational closure" (149) and depend upon an initial distinction between the system and its environment. This shift to the concept of self-organization involves a move away from first-wave cybernetics' functional analogy between organic and mechanical systems to a consideration of the

analogy between organic and social systems (149). In this second- wave model, systems maintain themselves through reflexivity and recursive, internal operations rather than through the corrective feedback loops of first-wave cybernetics, which emphasize the internal effects on systems of the environments in which they operate and which integrate systems into those environments. In cultural terms, the result is a highly static concept of identity, a "relentlessly repetitive circularity" (158), even less open to change than the ho- meostatic model. For this reason, Hayles devotes chapter 9 to very recent work on artificial life, which redefines self-organizing systems in terms of their evolutionary imperatives to constantly rein- vent themselves and therefore breaks more decisively with the more conservative elements of first-wave cybernetics (158). For

Hayles, then, artificial life combines the most radical aspect of first- wave cybernetics, its challenge to the autonomy of the individual self, with the monism of systems theory, its insistence that mind and body are equally important elements in the self-organization of

any system, so that to separate the two would be to fundamentally change the nature of the mind or personality (246). This insistence reveals the way in which Moravec's fantasy of downloading human consciousness into a computer storage platform implies that

identity resides only in the mind, not the body, which is relatively dispensable. This reading is persuasive, and artificial life clearly defines a major fracture line within contemporary cybernetics, one

perhaps too often ignored by technoculture critics. However, when

Hayles ends this chapter by contrasting Moravec and Marvin Min-

sky with evolutionary psychologists, I wonder if a more problem- atic side of artificial life research might not need to be addressed,





































specifically whether its use of evolutionary models brings in any of the problems associated with sociobiology. If artificial life and

evolutionary psychology resist the devaluation of the body, they may not escape the tendency to renaturalize and essentialize embodiment, in this case through a tendency to justify cultural norms as expressive of evolved and therefore inevitable biological imperatives.

At the end of this account of the historical development of cybernetics, Hayles redefines the posthuman project as one of "envi-

sioning humans as information-processing machines with fundamental similarities to other kinds of information-processing machines, especially intelligent computers" (246). She impressively demonstrates that this project can be conceptualized in two main

ways. On the one hand, this redefinition of the human as "informa-

tion-processing machine" can be understood as the abstraction of consciousness from the materiality of the body, so that the information that constitutes our identity can be imagined as translatable across different media, as in Moravec's fantasy of downloading a

personality, while still "retaining the solidity of a reified concept" (246). On the other hand, this redefinition of the human in terms of information can also be extended to bodies, as well as minds, as in the case of systems theory. So why has the first version of

posthumanism, as disembodying, come to dominate the second?

Why haven't systems theory and artificial life proven as easy to

integrate into the popular imagination as first-wave cybernetics? Hayles argues that Moravec's fantasy demonstrates the appeal of

conceptualizing information as abstract pattern, since it promises to free us from the particularities of "time and space" (13). At the same time, Moravec's fantasy indicates that the preservation of the "information/matter duality" also opens the door to the perpetua- tion of a Cartesian mind/body dualism and all the ideological bag- gage that comes with it, when mind and body are imagined to map isomorphically onto dualisms between the universal and the particular, the masculine and the feminine, white and nonwhite. This dualistic tendency within information theory then connects the two seemingly opposing characteristics of cybernetics as Hayles discusses it: its challenge to the liberal humanist subject, defined

by the universalizing ideology of possessive individualism, and








































its concurrent devaluation of embodiment, which reasserts the distinction between mind and body on which the universalized

subject of philosophical modernity depends. The privileging of abstract pattern over material embodiment then functions conser-

vatively to defuse the challenge cybernetics might pose to this humanist subject.

To foreground the importance of this material, I have extracted the narrative about the development of cybernetics that How We Became Posthuman offers. The structure of the book, however, alter- nates chapters on the history of cybernetics with chapters offering a history of literary responses to cybernetics. Hayles's book estab- lishes an important archive of cybernetic fiction, updating and ex-

tending David Porush's groundbreaking work in The Soft Machine.5 Like Porush, Hayles includes readings of postmodern metafiction, most notably William Burroughs's work (in chapter 8). She is also able to incorporate more recent authors who work within the meta- fictional tradition but whose writing makes the relation between metafiction and new technologies more explicit, such as Mark

Leyner and Richard Powers, writers whose work seems to respond to both literary postmodernism and cyberpunk science fiction. But where Porush focuses on how the self-reflexivity of metafiction cre- ates the basis for an analogy with cybernetics' interest in the func-

tioning of systems, Hayles focuses on the thematics of embodiment and the analogy between physical and textual bodies and their

shifting boundaries in this kind of writing. Hayles also considers a much wider range of texts than Porush, including science fiction

by Philip K. Dick, William Gibson, Greg Bear, and Neal Stephen- son; a techno-thriller by Cole Perriman; and Bernard Wolfe's Limbo, a generically hybrid work of speculative fiction.

How We Became Posthuman begins with two chapters introducing new terminology and defining a conceptual framework. Chapter 2 includes short commentaries on William Gibson's cyberpunk science fiction and his use of the cyberspace metaphor as a narrative

setting, in order to define a genre that Hayles calls "information narratives" (35), also represented by Don DeLillo's White Noise and a short story by Mark Leyner. Chapters 3 and 4 focus on the Macy


































5. David Porush, The Soft Machine: Cybernetic Fiction (New York: Methuen, 1985). 5. David Porush, The Soft Machine: Cybernetic Fiction (New York: Methuen, 1985). 5. David Porush, The Soft Machine: Cybernetic Fiction (New York: Methuen, 1985). 5. David Porush, The Soft Machine: Cybernetic Fiction (New York: Methuen, 1985).




conferences and first-wave cybernetics and are followed by a chapter on Bernard Wolfe's Limbo. Similarly, chapter 6 discusses systems theory and is followed by a chapter on Philip K. Dick. Chapter 8 elaborates on the topic of embodiment and the relationship between inscription and incorporation in postmodern technoculture.

Chapter 9 turns to artificial life and is followed by a chapter that offers a literary taxonomy of the different possible relations between abstract informational patterns and embodied materiality, using novels by Greg Bear, Cole Perriman, Richard Powers, and Neal Stephenson as examples.

These readings of literary and popular texts function in two main

ways. First, they are used to exemplify the historical shifts and narrative strategies within cybernetics, as well as opening up the cultural and social implications of cyberetic models. The best exam-

ples of this first function are chapter 5, on Wolfe's Limbo, and

chapter 7, on several novels by Philip K. Dick (especially The Sim- ulacra, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Dr. Bloodmoney, and Ubik). Wolfe's Limbo in part centers around a political movement that encourages men to replace their limbs with mechanical prostheses, and Hayles succeeds brilliantly in showing how this un- derread novel is one of the best examples of the ambivalence that

cybernetic ideas generated in thinkers like Norbert Wiener, especially around issues of gender, since it is through gender relations that Wolfe's cyborg characters seek to renaturalize their own bodies and subjectivities. While Limbo was published in 1952, Dick's novels from the mid-to-late 1960s are read by Hayles as pushing first-wave cybernetics (especially the concept of homeostasis) toward systems theory. Dick's interest in the instability implied by the concept of homeostasis anticipates second-wave cybernetics through an emphasis on epistemological uncertainty and on feedback loops that spiral out of control, a thematics Hayles connects with the focus in systems theory on the problem of the observer within a reflexive or recursive system. These readings therefore demonstrate how cultural logics inform scientific thinking as well as how new scientific paradigms inform cultural representations.

However, literary history and interpretation also perform a second function in How We Became Posthuman, as a means of restoring the complexity of the relationship between pattern and presence,



























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inscription and incorporation, denaturalization or erasure of embodiment and insistence upon embodiment as an indispensable context or component. This second main line of argumentation, as it is developed through literary examples, begins in the early chapters, with the readings of Gibson and Leyner, and continues

through the commentary on Burroughs in chapter 8, "The Materi-

ality of Informatics." But it reaches its fullest expression in chapter 10, "The Semiotics of Virtuality: Mapping the Posthuman." Hayles here follows Fredric Jameson in using A. J. Greimas's semiotic

square to map the the ways in which postmodern technoculture is

complexly structured by two sometimes reinforcing and sometimes conflicting dialectical oppositions: between pattern and randomness, on the one hand, and presence and absence, on the other (247-48). This model identifies four possible combinations of or interactions between these four terms. Richard Powers's Galatea 2.2, a narrative about the humanistic and specifically literary edu- cation necessary to produce a genuinely intelligent computer program, exemplifies the emphasis on "materiality" as a cultural value that results from privileging the dialectic between presence and absence over the dialectic of pattern and randomness. In contrast, Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash, a novel about the possibility of ma-

nipulating human neural structures as if they were computer pro- grams, inverts this set of values and exemplifies the emphasis on abstract "information" that results from privileging the dialectic of

pattern and randomness rather than presence and absence. Powers and Stephenson's novels then dramatize a dichotomy between ma-

teriality and informational flows, between embodiment and disembodiment. For Hayles, the key question in Powers's novel is "What if a computer behaved like a person?" while the key question in

Stephenson's novel is "What if people were made to behave as if

they were computers?" (251). This chapter goes on to disrupt that simple dualism by mapping

more complex relationships between materiality and information.

Greg Bear's Blood Music, a novel about the nanotechnological infil- tration and reformation of human bodies on the cellular level by microscopic, intelligent machines, exemplifies the paradigm of "mutation" that results from situating presence not in relation to absence but instead in relation to randomness. Cole Perriman's Ter-








































minal Games, a thriller about a murderous artificial intelligence that exists only in cyberspace, exemplifies the concept of "hyperreality" that results from situating pattern in relation to absence rather than randomness. These readings perform the remarkable feat of show-

ing how these two dualisms or dialectics mutually disrupt one another in potentially productive ways-that is, ways that allow us to reimagine and redefine both embodiment and information. It is in this way that How We Became Posthuman most successfully defines an alternative to either technophobic skepticism or naively utopian celebration of new technologies, a breath of fresh air in the current cultural climate.

Hayles turns to a range of literary examples, then, to support her theoretical argument that the seeming dominance of a concept of disembodied information-defined in terms of the pattern/randomness dialectic-over the more traditional categories of presence and absence actually results from "the material infrastructures" that this definition of information "appears to obscure" or even to eliminate (28). Those material infrastructures are, of course, new communications media and the social and cultural relations within which they are embedded. Hayles suggests replacing the term "information" with the term "informatics," drawn from Donna Haraway's famous "Cyborg Manifesto," as one way to resist the anachronistic tendency to define information as opposed to, rather than entangled with, materiality (29).6 In addition to her

reading of fictional narratives about technoculture as a source of alternatives to the tendency within cybernetics to privilege "informational pattern over material instantiation" (2), Hayles's other main weapon against this dichotomous thinking is the establish- ment of a new critical vocabulary invaluable to any student or critic of contemporary culture. Within the field of technoculture studies, the only text that comes close to How We Became Posthuman's con-

ceptual and linguistic originality is Allucquere Rosanne Stone's book on virtual systems theory.7 Specifically, Hayles offers a new

6. Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York:

Routledge, 1991) 161. 7. Allucquere Rosanne Stone, The War of Desire and Technology at the Close of the Mechan-

ical Age (Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 1995).




























set of tools for thinking about the imbrication of information and embodiment within contemporary technoculture. For instance, she notes the two sides of the posthuman coin, the "nightmare" of "a culture inhabited by posthumans who regard their bodies as fashion accessories rather than the ground of being" and the "dream" of a posthumanism "that embraces the possibilities of information technologies without being seduced by fantasies of un- limited power and disembodied immortality" (5), rewriting and

updating Haraway's definition of the cyborg as both an "ironic

political myth" for feminism and as the apotheosis of a masculinist, military-industrial dream of imposing "a grid of control on the

planet."8 This work on language appears mainly in chapter 1, "Toward

Embodied Virtuality," and chapter 8, "The Materiality of Informa- tics," titles which themselves enact the entanglement Hayles theo- rizes. In chapter 1, Hayles argues that cybernetics leaves us with a legacy of "[s]eeing the world as an interplay between information

patterns and material objects" (14), and she refers to this "cultural

perception that material objects are interpenetrated by information

patterns" as "virtuality" (13-14). This definition carefully pre- serves the ambiguity of the specific relationship signified by inter-

penetration, against the tendency to interpret that relationship as a hierarchy in which information figures "as more mobile, more

important, more essential than material forms" (19). Hayles uses the term "virtual bodies" both to dramatize "the historical separation between information and materiality" and as a reminder of "the embodied processes that resist this division" (20). In chapter 8, Hayles most fully articulates one of her main theses: the history of

cybernetics and its elaboration into a posthuman cultural condition means "not that the body has disappeared but that a certain kind of subjectivity has emerged," one formed by "the crossing of the materiality of informatics with the immateriality of information" (193). This crossing is conceptualized in terms of two analogous distinctions, understood to be heuristic rather than absolute (193). The first is the distinction between abstract or universalized cultural norms which define "the body" and diverse, particularized


































8. Haraway, Simians 149, 154. 8. Haraway, Simians 149, 154. 8. Haraway, Simians 149, 154. 8. Haraway, Simians 149, 154.




experiences of embodiment (193), or what Adrienne Rich calls the difference between saying "the body" and "my body."9 The second is the distinction between inscription and incorporation. Like the concept of "the body," inscribing practices function "as a system of signs operating independently of any particular manifesta- tion," so that bodily inscriptions function within a model of trans-

latability and perfect, frictionless reproducibility across different media or instantiations (198). In contrast, embodiment and incor-

porating practices are "contextual" and "enmeshed within the spe- cifics of place, time, physiology, and culture, which together com-

pose enactment" (196). An incorporating practice "cannot be

separated from its embodied medium" (198). Hayles's primary ex-

ample of an incorporating practice is habit, "an action that is en- coded into bodily memory by repeated performances until it be- comes habitual" (199). Though Hayles does not make this point explicitly, this definition of incorporating practices constitutes a

significant intervention in technocultural representations, such as

cyberpunk, where the term "habit" is most likely to signify drug addiction or some other form of obsessive behavior, and addiction in turn is typically used to figure the ways in which human behavior might lend itself to being cybemetically modeled in terms of feedback loops and informational flows. Despite the way in which these terms are defined as contrasts to one another, Hayles is also careful to define them as mutual contexts for one another, so that a focus on "the body" requires posing embodiment as a back-

ground out of which a concept of "the body" is abstracted, while a focus on embodiment measures its particularities against a gener- alized norm.

It is on the level of language that the difficulty of Hayles's project in this book most clearly emerges. The problem with the phrase "the body" is not just its abstraction as an idealized concept, but also the fact that this abstraction simultaneously, if illogically, functions as a naturalization of that cultural concept. In other words, the privileging of the universalized or abstract body over material bodies operates through two seemingly contradictory processes































9. Adrienne Rich, Blood, Bread, and Poetry: Selected Prose, 1979-1985 (New York: Nor- ton, 1986) 215.







which in practice reinforce one another. Hayles's book rigorously works out the implications of this analysis, which is that neither denaturalization nor the celebration of the material and natural

against the abstract can constitute adequate forms of resistance to this privilege, which in technocultural contexts takes the form of

technologized modes of disembodied communication. As Hayles puts it, it is therefore necessary to put "embodiment back into the

picture" without allowing it to secure "the univocality of gender" or identity in general (xiv). This balance, however, is difficult to achieve and maintain. When Hayles defines the nightmare version of posthumanism as reducing bodies to "fashion accessories rather than the ground of being," the dichotomies she elsewhere rejects start to reemerge, since "the body" has traditionally secured the

univocality of identities like gender precisely by functioning as an

ontological ground. Similarly, Hayles locates one of the problem- atic assumptions of posthumanism in its treatment of "embodiment in a biological substrate ... as an accident of history rather than an inevitability of life" (2), and it is easy to conclude that it would be a short step from "inevitability" to biological deter- minism.

These kinds of statements are not logical flaws; instead, I believe

they are unavoidable in a cultural context where disembodiment and abstraction seem to dominate. At most, these formulations lean toward a kind of strategic use of essentialist rhetoric, necessary in order to put embodiment back in the picture at all, and Hayles's later definitions of inscription and incorporation should be read as

displacing and qualifying any negative effects of this kind of rhetoric. I emphasize these formulations because of the questions they pose to readers of this book, questions that need further discussion. If some trace of strategic essentialism is justified by the popular circulation of fantasies of disembodiment, as Hayles convincingly argues, then isn't it also likely that a certain kind of strategic constructionism might sometimes be justified as well, to the extent that the posthuman dematerialization of the body's seemingly natural architecture has not completely replaced the naturalization of the

body as ground for identity? Hayles argues that one of the defining characteristics of "the posthuman view" is the assumption that "the body" is "the original prosthesis we all learn to manipulate,


































so that extending or replacing the body with other prostheses be- comes a continuation of a process that began before we were born"

(3). From this perspective, becoming posthuman is always located in a prior moment; it is always something we "became." Alan Tu-

ring's imitation game, with its separation of sex and gender, exem-

plifies this view of embodiment. I find myself wondering whether at least some posthuman representations that seem to privilege information over materiality might not also have this kind of more critical function. Can the body be denaturalized as an original prosthesis without denaturalization looking like dematerialization at some point in the process? How do we distinguish between denaturalization and processes of dematerialization, idealization, and universalization that reproduce familiar majoritarian logics of ex- clusion? Hayles's insistence on the mutual contextualization of in-

scription and incorporation is especially useful in answering these kinds of questions. How We Became Posthuman gives us a new set of tools for working on these problems, and an indispensable model for a more nuanced way to understand the interplay between these ways of understanding our bodies and their technological mediation. This book proves that there is a way out of these dichotomies, which remain too prevalent both in popular culture and academic discourse.

Indiana University






Indiana University






Indiana University






Indiana University



the reappearing body in postmodern technoculture

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