Full title 'How we became posthuman - virtual bodies in cybernetics, literature and informatics'. The book starts with Hayles reporting how Hans Moravec proposed that 'human identity' is more about internal patterns something embodied in 'us' and goes on to point out the failings and assumptions we use to distinguish between a human and a computer and relates this to gender. If we can't even work out what is computer and what is human, how do we divide up groups within the human species? E.g. Gender could not be reduced to sequences of signals. This very much interested me as I care more deeply about my species (that is, human) similarities (that is, being human, and being allowed to be) than I do about the differences. The idea that the information that is in us, does not depend on us, as such, as much of the information. Very democratic. I like the positions because it makes people think. Yet, it is kind of preaching to the converted.
Hayles states that molecular biology treats information as the 'essential code' the body expresses and posits 3 'stores / questions / scenarios about information, cyborgs and humans to get to the point of 'what is the posthuman'? She asks us to consider consciousness as a 'minor sideshow' of evolution rather than the entirety. To think of the body as an artificial we all learn to manipulate. The posthuman arranges human being to be seamlessly connected with intelligent machines. There is no difference between the body and computer simulation, robot theology & human goals. And these boundaries are constantly undergoing construction and reconstruction. Just like posthuman knowledge.
A posthuman does not have free will, not because it is unfree, but because there is no self will to identify as distinguished from an 'other will'.
Hayles strategy is to complicate the leap from embodied reality to abstract information by bringing up other researchers issues with 'the assumptions involved in this move', the point being, to make clear how much has to gotten rid of before we can get to such abstractions of bodiless information.
She talks about a 'backhand' and 'forehand' where technology informs, or reinforces perception and vice versa. And this has important implications for how historic change occurs. Culture and science are intertwined. Through narrative. And this is a way of understanding ourselves as embodied creatures living within and through embodied worlds and embodied words.
I find this hard work to read / absorb. I know this is aimed towards an academic audience, and may or may not help me in my project. Yet I am struggling with how much academia can change the racist, heteronormative, sexist, binary and down right fearful world we live in? How does this literature on knowledge, or information, get through to the people that would benefit the most from it? In general, how does scholarly literature affect contemporary society? Or does it simply reflect it?