Interview with N. Katherine Hayles, continued

LG: Yes, what about the future. I'm sure you've noticed the press that Francis Fukuyama's new book is getting, which uses "posthuman" in its title. Can you reflect on the "legs" your work has and is having? What do you make of where it turns up and how?

NKH: The first time I heard the word "posthuman," I thought, "This is a viral term for sure!" I knew it would replicate quickly, and I wanted to have some input on how it was interpreted and constructed. As you know, in How We Became Posthuman I argue that there has been a tradition of erasing embodiment in cybernetics, artificial intelligence, and artificial life. How We Became Posthuman shows where some of these erasures occurred, demonstrates their consequences, and argues that embodiment should be written back into picture.

I wrote the book in part to try to come to terms with my own ambivalences about posthuman developments. In a broad sense, these can be divided between the biological (genetic engineering, etc.) and cybernetic (artificial life, robotics, etc), although from the beginning there have been strong connections between these two strands, and hybrid entities are becoming increasingly important, such as silicon chips combined with biological substrates. Posthuman is located within a much broader landscape that includes scientists, engineers, artificial life researchers and cognitive scientists as well as cultural and literary critics. There are many stakeholders, of which I count myself one, but since I deal mostly with the cybernetic strand, my work is relatively more distant from the biological strand, about which many others have written more directly. I am in the process of reading Fukuyama's book now, so I cannot speak about it with authority. Nevertheless, it is clear that he is more concerned with the biological strand than I was in Posthuman.
I think it's fair to say his view is probably more dystopian than mine, but I share many of his concerns and also worry about the cultural implications of recent developments in cloning and other areas of biomedicine. Eugene Thacker has recently written about some of the biomedical developments as biomedia, a wonderful term that stresses the confluence of information theory with molecular biology. Studies like his, located at the crossroads of information theory, cybernetics, biology, and media, indicate how the entangled these fields have become and consequently how far-reaching their confluence is for many sectors of society.

As for the influence that Posthuman has had, it seems to be part of discussions in Europe and especially in Scandinavia as well as in the U.S. I wrote the book to bring certain issues into current conversations about the posthuman, and to this extent, I think it has succeeded. I am less concerned with whether others agree or disagree with me than I am with wanting the issues to be examined, discussed, and debated.

LG: Where do you see your work going from here?

NKH: The implications of cybernetics continue to concern me, especially the interactions of humans with intelligent machines. Another current project is a book called Coding the Signifier: Rethinking Semiosis from the Telegraph to the Computer, under contract to the University of Chicago Press. It argues that coding technologies like the telegraph and the computer have distinctive characteristics that are unlike print and that should be theorized in their own right. Coding the Signifier I see as a theoretical companion to Writing Machines, extending the argument that literary criticism and theory are shot through with assumptions specific to print, though largely unrecognized as such. I evaluate current theories of semiotics and argue that they do not take materiality sufficiently in account.

What would it mean to have a theoretical discourse that can talk about materiality and meaning together? That connects the embodiment of texts to the embodiment of readers/users who respond kinesthetically and proprioceptively as well as intellectually? Literature, I argue, was never only words, never only disembodied verbal constructs. Texts have bodies, readers and users have bodies, and meaning emerges from material engagements with the rich resources of a physically vibrant world as it is crafted through artistic practices and instantiated in artifactual objects and processes. To settle for anything else than a fully embodied and material practice of literary theory and criticism is to risk impoverishing our understanding of the meaning-making practices through which we engage the world.

There was never been a better time than now, when the long hegemony of print is giving way to the dynamic interactions of contemporary media ecology, to rethink the assumptions of both print and electronic literature.

This does not mean, in my view, that print books are about to become obsolete. Print technology is far too robust, durable and flexible for that. Far from going the way of the dinosaur, books are going the way of the human, changing as we change, mutating as we continue to modify our ideas about who we are and what makes us tick. However posthuman we style ourselves, we are going to writing and reading books for a long time to come.

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