Despite drawing out the differences between "human" and "posthuman", Hayles is careful to note that both perspectives engage in the erasure of embodiment from subjectivity. The ethical imperative of such a move is made apparent as Hayles mines speculative fiction such as The Silent History (Horowitz, Derby, Moffett 2014) for resources that value the human for its embodied cognitive capacities, and not just its supposedly definitive power to do thinking in symbolic language. Hayles, N. K. " Escape and Constraint: Three Fictions Dream of Moving from Energy to Information .". College in chemistry from the Rochester Institute of Technology in 1966, and her M.S. TLDR. Hayles experiments with a political response in her subsequent monograph, the 2017 Unthought: The Power of the Cognitive Nonconscious. If you see a problem with the information, please write to Scholars@Duke and let us know. Duke University N. Katherine Hayles According to Hayles, most human cognition happens outside of consciousness/unconsciousness; cognition extends through the entire biological spectrum, including animals and plants; technical devices cognize, and in doing so profoundly influence human complex systems. Ren Wellek Prize for Best Book in Literary Theory for 1998-99, awarded by the American Comparative Literature Association to How We Became Posthuman Eaton Award for the Best Book in Science Fiction Theory and Criticism for 1998-99, awarded to How We Became Posthuman Council of the Humanities Fellowship, Princeton University, 2000, Eby Award for Distinction in Undergraduate Teaching, UCLA, 1999, Luckman Distinguished Teaching Award, UCLA, 1999, National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, 1999, Bellagio Residential Fellowship, Rockefeller Foundation, 1999. April 8, 2011, Comparative Media Studies: A New Paradigm for the Humanities. Speculative Aesthetics and Object-Oriented Inquiry (OOI). Speculations: A Journal of Speculative Realism V: 158-179. Hayles contends that we must recognize all three types of reading and understand the limitations and possibilities of each. Turabian N. Katherine Hayles is known for breaking new ground at the intersection of the sciences and the humanities. Asemia becomes a model for imagining more broadly how humans can resist capture by the technolinguistic systems that affective capitalism and info-capitalism depend on. A short overview of Kojin Karatanis Marxist influenced focus on modes of exchange as revealing the Borromean ring of Capital-Nation-State, and the import of this ring for religion. If you have the misfortune to live in an interesting era, run. She holds degrees in both chemistry and English. Critical Theory for Political Theology: Theorists, Critical Theory for Political Theology: Keywords, Critical Theory for Political Theology 2.0, critiqued by some for not engaging sufficiently with the political, frameworks that seek to put humans at the center of AI. Art. Society for Literature, Science and the Arts. Jones argued that reality is rather "determined in and through the way we view, articulate, and understand the world". Cavareros feminist theory of nonviolence takes the biblical commandment of Thou Shall Not Kill as its starting point. in Electronic Literature". University of California It would also necessarily bring into question other characteristics of the liberal subject, for it made the crucial move of distinguishing between the enacted body, present in the flesh on one side of the computer screen, and the represented body, produced through the verbal and semiotic markers constituting it in an electronic environment. March 28, 2013, Flash Crashes and Critical Finance Studies. John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Crucially, then, cognitive assemblages are inherently politicalThey are infused with social-technological-cultural-economic practices that instantiate and negotiate between different kinds of powers, stakeholders, and modes of cognition (Hayles 2017, 178). Rather than establishing structural analogies or historical filiations between religion and politics (terms he opens to question), Talal Asad urges attention to shifts in the grammar of concepts across different situations. To tell this story, Hayles unites history of technology (e.g. It also refers to sci-fi imaginaries of the cybernetic human as essentially a container for information. Cognizing is therefore fundamentally embodied and material. Expanding our notions of what and who counts as political actors, allowing us to resist theologies of dominion and stewardship, or, in fact, any metaphysics that depends on the uniqueness of the human and the conscious integrity of human intentionality. She has been recognized by many fellowships and awards, including two NEH Fellowships, a Guggenheim, a Rockefellar Residential Fellowship at Bellagio, and two University of California Presidential Research Fellowships. His/her/its best strategy, Turing suggested, may be to answer your questions truthfully. English Reading Room In Unthought , she once again bridges disciplines by revealing how we think without thinkinghow we use cognitive processes that are inaccessible to consciousness yet necessary for it to function. The other entity wants to mislead you. This construction necessarily makes the subject into a cyborg, for the enacted and represented bodies are brought into conjunction through the technology that connects them. January 5, 2013, Machine and Close Reading: Convergent Strategies. His conviction and the court-ordered hormone treatments for his homosexuality tragically demonstrated the importance of doing over saying in the coercive order of a homophobic society with the power to enforce its will upon the bodies of its citizens. The major concept in this essay is object oriented inquiry, by which Hayles means adapting the framework of object oriented ontology (OOO) to move beyond ontological questions within the relatively narrow boundaries of speculative philosophy, to epistemological, social, cultural and political issues (2014, 170). Think of the Turing test as a magic trick. Want to Read. She received her B.S. January 5, 2013, tenure evaluator Aden Evens, Dartmouth College : Tenure Evaluation, Aden Evens. They offer provocative responses to both the threats to and possibilities of human embodiment in an age where information and attention are the most valuable resources. A New Paradigm for the Humanities: Comparative Textual Media (co-authored with Jessica Pressman), forthcoming University of Minnesota Press, 2013. Hayles was born in Saint Louis, Missouri to Edward and Thelma Bruns. Unthought: The Power of the Cognitive Nonconscious, Comparative Textual Media: Transforming the Humanities in the Postprint Era, How We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis, Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary, My Mother Was a Computer: Digital Subjects and Literary Texts, Nanoculture: Implications of the New Technoscience, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics, Chaos and Order: Complex Dynamics in Literature and Science, Chaos Bound: Orderly Disorder in Contemporary Literature and Science, The Cosmic Web: Scientific Field Models and Literary Strategies in the Twentieth Century, APPROXIMATING ALGORITHMS: FROM DISCRIMINATING DATA TO TALKING WITH AN AI, Creativity and Nonconscious Cognition: A Conversation with Mary Zournazi and N. Katherine Hayles, Microbiomimesis: Bacteria, our cognitive collaborators, Textual and real-life spaces: expanding theoretical frameworks. [3] She is a social and literary critic. saving. in chemistry from the California Institute of Technology in 1969. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017. However, rather than being disturbed by the fact that most cognition necessarily involves no conscious awareness at all, Hayles appreciates that an accurate view of human cognitive ecology opens it to comparison with other biological cognizers on the one hand and on the other to the cognitive capabilities of technical systems (2017, 11). Critical Theory Nancy Katherine Hayles (born December 16, 1943) is an American postmodern literary critic, most notable for her contribution to the fields of literature and science, electronic literature, and American literature. The proposition can be demonstrated, he suggested, by downloading human consciousness into a computer, and he imagined a scenario designed to show that this was in principle possible. 2008, Member of LIterary Advisory Board : Electronic Literature Organization. It is as productive to think with as it is to think against Claude Lefort, a revolutionary-turned-philosopher who analyzed power and the political regimes to which it gives rise. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984. But air does not forget us. This is because transhumanism secularizes traditional religious themes, concerns, and goals, while endowing technology with religious significance (2012, 710). Elected . Can computers create meanings? If you are presently teaching or practicing digital, or a traditional academic in denial, or just curious about the impact of digital technology in the humanities, By making use of the humanist and scientist vocabularies, the book represents a new model of humanist writing, one that is avowedly concerned with the material aspects of epistemological practices., 1. How We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis, University of Chicago Press, 2012. Her twelve print books include Postprint: Books and Becoming Computational (Columbia, 2021), Unthought: The Power of the Cognitive Nonconscious (Univ. 6 x 9 How We Became Posthuman. Judith Butlers work has altered the trajectories of multiple disciplines in the last thirty years; what can they teach scholars of political theology? External Faculty Fellowship. N. Katherine Hayles Professor, Department of English UCLA Presentation Embodiment and Cognition: Implications for Gender. December 15, 2009, Vinge and the Micropolitics of Global Spatialization". David Kline introduces the systems theory of Niklas Luhmann for political theology and reflects on how it might think about its own limits of observation. How We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis. On this view, orchids, thermostats, squirrels, and humans are all cognitive beings. If your failure to distinguish correctly between human and machine proves that machines can think, what does it prove if you fail to distinguish woman from man? Notes. Instead of bootstrapping with values and ideologies and laddering up from there, initializing from a posthuman ecological cognition yields responses that deal with the whole embodied phenomenon of political and theological life. January 5, 2013, Ghost in the Shell: Cognitive Hybridity Katherine Hayles University of Iowa 2013/01/05 April 12, 2012 0 65 October 21, 2010, How We Read: Close, Hyper, Machine. 2. 415-25. What the Turing test "proves" is that the overlay between the enacted and the represented bodies is no longer a natural inevitability but a contingent production, mediated by a technology that has become so entwined with the production of identity that it can no longer meaningfully be separated from the human subject. September 24, 2011, Recursive Play in Braid. Quijano reimagines the long-lasting and contemporary status of colonialism seen through the lenses of race, modernity/rationality, and economic exploitation, encouraging us to produce theological and political critiques from the ever-enduring nature of coloniality. N. Katherine Hayles and James J. Pulizzi, "Narrating Consciousness," History of the Human Sciences 21.3 (2010): 131-148. To read Catherine Malabou is to embark upon an adventure of thought. Footnotes:1. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2008. The Moravec test, if I may call it that, is the logical successor to the Turing test. The following introduction to Hayles work aims to show that in facing the type of cybernetic futures she has tracked, political theology can draw upon her profoundly ecological model of the posthuman in order to guide political theological reflection on technology and biotechnology, especially. N. Katherine Hayles A reflection on the political implications of N. Katherine Hayles' critical aesthetic inquiry into the ecological relationships between the human and the technological, thought and cognition, and information and materiality. August 2014 - July 2015, Program Review, Critical Theory Program, Mount Holyoke College. 2017. This essay will uplift Csaires anticolonial consciousness, in hopes that new directions in political theology might emerge/surface. Each of the invited papers was presented at a workshop at Durham University in 2015, held with Hayles, and focused on her work in the context of contemporary debates 6 Theory, Culture & Society 36(2) Humanities Division, UCLA [1] She is the James B. Duke Distinguished Professor Emerita of Literature, Literature, Trinity College of Arts & Sciences at Duke University.[2]. The Invisible Committee may be productively, albeit counterintuitively, understood as Gnostic, a perspective that will put into question some of the assumptions behind the way the political and the theological are demarcated from and related to each other in contemporary debates. , Duke Announces 2015 Distinguished Professors, Two Faculty Elected to American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Hayles to Deliver Inaugural Humanities Lecture in Indiana, Katherine Hayles: The expansion of video games, In a Duke Lab, a Spy's Tools of the Trade, Movin' Out: Duke's First Humanities Labs Close Up Shop. Los Angeles, CA 90095-1530 Like all good magic tricks, the test relies on getting you to accept at an early stage assumptions that will determine how you interpret what you see later. [10] Specifically Hayles suggests that in the posthuman view "there are no essential differences or absolute demarcations between bodily existence and computer simulation"[9] The posthuman thus emerges as a deconstruction of the liberal humanist notion of "human." Her books have won several prizes, including The Rene Wellek Award for the Best Book in Literary Theory for How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Literature, Cybernetics and Informatics, and the Suzanne Langer Award for Writing Machines. "[22] Some scholars found her prose difficult to read or over-complicated. We have to feel our way toward change. January 5, 2013, Designing Speculation: An Alternate Reality Game. Your job is to pose questions that can distinguish verbal performance from embodied reality. She is currently at work on Technosymbiosis: Futures of the Human. Relying solely on their responses to your questions, you must decide which is the man, which the woman. If so, now we have two mysteries instead of one. OOO is a noncorrelationist, flat ontology premised on the notion of withdrawal: that is, OOO sees all things in terms of objects, which have existences independent of human observation, and which are never fully knowable by humans. To pose the question of "what can think" inevitably also changes, in a reverse feedback loop, the terms of "who can think.". Studying objects in this way reveals ways that we can engage our nonconscious cognition aesthetically. Her first book The Spiritual Significance of Overload Boredom (2022, McGill-Queens University Press), is about boredom, heuristically framed in terms of spiritual crisis, in the age of information overload. It is a process of change that is sometimes joyful, sometimes painful. Chicago Manual of Style The whole point of this game was that a successful imitation of a woman's responses by a man would not prove anything. Consequently, we will need to design new political responses appropriate to the complex posthuman syncopation between conscious and unconscious perceptions for humans and the interactions of surface displays and algorithmic procedures for machines (2012, 13). December 15, 2009, Telegraph Code Books as Historical Resource and Linguistic Practice". Hayles recent works (Speculative Aesthetics and Object-Oriented Inquiry 2014; Unthought 2017) abstract her method of reading science fiction as a way of narratively materializing existing cognitive assemblages, and reframe the method in terms of a speculative aesthetic inquiry. This method depends on bridging between evidentiary accounts of objects that emerge from the resistances and engagements they offer to human inquiry, and imaginative projections into what these imply for a given objects way of being in the world (2014, 172). How We Think represents Hayles interest in the material production and reception of texts, and at the field level, in the digital humanities. GreaterThanGames Humanities Lab Grant. N. Katherine Hayles. April 17, 2013, Daniel Suarez's Daemon: Imagining the Financial Future. Whereas the Turing test was designed to show that machines can perform the thinking previously considered to be an exclusive capacity of the human mind, the Moravec test was designed to show that machines can become the repository of human consciousnessthat machines can, for all practical purposes, become human beings. Saba Mahmood (1962-2018) was a pioneering anthropologist of Islam and secularism, a feminist theorist of gender and religion, and a critic of liberal certainties. January 9, 2011, Storyworlds in New Media. Humanities Division Thus, Hayles links this to an overall cultural perception of virtuality and a priority on information rather than materiality. Or, on the contrary, does the writing express a parallelism too explosive and subversive for Hodges to acknowledge? Her scholarship primarily focuses on the "relations between science, literature, and technology. What do gendered bodies have to do with the erasure of embodiment and the subsequent merging of machine and human intelligence in the figure of the cyborg? This work raises many challenges to precepts about nature, human nature, and human destiny that are imbricated in political thinking and derived from theological traditions. Bearing witness to unpronounceable utterances brings about the idea of faith. January 5, 2013, Electronic Literature and Distributed Cognition. March 15, 2013, Apophenia: Patterns in Electronic Literature. Her research focuses on the relations of literature, science and technology in the 20th and 21st centuries. | Terms of Use | Chen suggests that Western political theologians should incorporate more resources from local knowledgesuch as popular culture, literature, films, and musicin order to notice resistance in daily life. Campus Safety / Website Support, Courses for the American Literature & Culture Major, Visual Culture / Media Studies / Digital Humanities. In this speculative inquiry, as in her whole corpus of work, Hayles seeks a mode of investigation potently suited to a posthuman world in which other species, objects, and artificial intelligences compete and cooperate to fashion the dynamic environments in which we all live (2014, 179). January 5, 2013, Comparative Media as a Theoretical Framework. [25], Several scholars reviewing How We Became Posthuman highlighted the strengths and shortcomings of her book vis a vis its relationship to feminism. N. Katherine Hayles humanist inquiry centers on the relations of literature, science and technology in the 20th and 21st centuries and digitally mediated cultural contexts of the U.S. With a background as a scientist, having trained in chemistry in the 1960s before retraining in English literature in the 1970s, Hayles interdisciplinary thinking produced the career-defining concept of the posthuman. Emerging from this nexus of Hayles work, the posthuman reimagines the concept of the human as embodied in ecological relation to other beings, whether biological life, artificial life, or nonlife. Morphing Intelligence: From IQ Measurement to Artificial Brains. Science Fiction Research Associates. Instead, these children communicate through an affective economy of micro facial gestures. American Academy of Arts and Sciences. May 30, 2008, Software Studies and Electronic Literature. The we of the title refers to inheritors of the liberal Enlightenment model of the human as essentially a thinking mind more than a mattering body. The very existence of the test, however, implies that you may also make the wrong choice. Paperback 9780262582155 Published: November 8, 2002 Publisher: The MIT Press $29.95 Hardcover 9780262083119 Fellowships for University Teachers. In the late 20th century with the millennium upon us, the distinction between human beings and machines is blurred. of Chicago Press, 2017) and How We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis (Univ. May 21, 2008, Electronic Literature: Theorizing the New. Website Support Kristevas psychoanalytic approach and practice shed light on the unconscious, affective, and bodily formation(s) of religious and political discourses and systems. December 4, 2008, Spatializing Time: The Influence of Google Earth, Google Maps. theorist N. Katherine Hayles' oeuvre at the intersection of literature and computational science and technology. Wilderson doesnt use the term zombies in his work. by N. Katherine Hayles Winner of the 2003 Susanne K. Langer Award for Outstanding Scholarship in the Ecology of Symbolic Form presented by the Media Ecology Association (MEA) $29.95 Paperback Hardcover 144 pp., 6 x 8 in, 56 b&w illus. October 24, 2008, Electronic Literature Collection. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990. N. Katherine Hayles is known for breaking new ground at the intersection of the sciences and the humanities. Sharday Mosurinjohn is Assistant Professor in the School of Religion at Queens University, Kingston, Ontario. With a rift growing between digital scholarship and its print-based counterpart, Hayles argues for contemporary technogenesisthe belief that humans and technics are coevolvingand advocates for what she calls comparative media studies, a new approach to locating digital work within print traditions and vice versa. Writing nearly four decades after Turing, Hans Moravec proposed that human identity is essentially an informational pattern rather than an embodied enaction. From the development of a theory of nonconsciouscognition, to the capacities of novels to enact the connections between disparatephenomena, Hayles reflects on what is at stake ethically in new human-technicalassemblages.
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