Primarily this book serves as a historiography of the field of cybernetics and, specifically, its anti-flesh / anti-embodiment theoretical bent. The book is largely an occasion to prove this thesis and, largely, does a good job (but has trouble retaining interest for anyone not specifically working on the history of cybernetics themselves).
Chiefly, the concern with the argument has to be its insistence on narrative. It seems to me that narrative has very little to do with the posthuman (or how we are becoming posthuman) and, more, seems like a clever attempt to justify the humanities’ study of science.
Reading Turing’s essay on the Turing Test, Hayles draws out the gendered implications of his Test and the manner in which scholars working on Turing have ellided these same gendered implications. She then goes on to raise the central issue of the book: how have cyberneticists been able to ignore the role embodiment plays in thought and cognition?
Hayles begins with Hans Moravec (as most arguments should) and discusses her feelings of horror about his plans to upload people into computers. She then drops into an explanation of how cybernetics has endangered the Cartesian (at least) notion of the liberal human subject and replaced it with “a collection of heterogeneous components, a material-information entity whose boundaries undergo construction and reconstruction,” called the posthuman (3). For Hayles, this process relates to subjective experiences of reality and not any specific application of a cybernetic or cyborg technology.
Hayles than explores other critiques of the liberal human subject, bringing out feminist and postcolonial discussions of the concept that reveal its whiteness and its maleness. Additionally, she suggests that D&G somehow contribute to this critique by offering a liberatory politics of posthumanity (ugh).
Interestingly enough, she then suggests “that one could argue that the erasure of embodiment is a feature common to both the liberal human subject and the cybernetic posthuman” (4). In fact, she goes so far as to say that the posthuman (as she defines it) continues the liberal subject position. At this point, I feel the need to start digressing from her book. If the posthuman continues the problematic embodiment aspects of the human, why is it post? Part of the issue with Hayles narrative is that she never really gets over explaining what is “new” about the posthuman (other than that it regards tools as part of cognition (which seems problematic b/c things like Leviathan and the Air Pump also show how this was a feature of human cognition)).
She then goes into a history of cybernetics and some (rather clunky) theoretical machinery that we won’t discuss here. There are, however, a lot of interesting ideas and this chapter should serve as an interesting bouncing off point. The major problem with the whole work, in a way, lies in her constructing the posthuman so close, defintionally, to the liberal human subject. Largely, I don’t think this Hayles fault, but I would have liked to have seen more analysis of how this transition isn’t so much a radical break as a continuation of a much older technological process.
I think books that need to be addressed to this narrative of cybernetics include Richard K. Morgan’s novels and a lot of the transhuman texts (which would have made for a much richer story). Also, while Hayles is quick to point out the fact that the liberal human subject is a construction of capitalism, she doesn’t seem to grasp the idea that a posthuman (that truly casts off the shackles of liberalism) has to be post-capital as well. In this way, we may be able to recuperate some of the post-human writings of Sterling (Schismatrix), Leary, and Robert Anton Wilson. Additionally, I would like to suggest that her reading of Neuromancer is incorrect and that the work needs to be articulated as being about the triumph of the liberal human subject. This allows us to re-view cyberpunk and view post-cyberpunk as fictions critiquing the transcendence of the human.
Another issue I have with Hayles’s argument is that she never allows herself to take any of the posthuman writers at their word. I think a lot of this would really focus her critique and settle, for me, a lot of the problems I find with it. For instance, if we take Moravec at his word (that humans wouldn’t change when uploaded into a computer), then why is this new? Wouldn’t uploading just create a human-in-a-box?