N. Katherine Hayles: How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (1999)

“In this age of DNA computers and artificial intelligence, information is becoming disembodied even as the “bodies” that once carried it vanish into virtuality. While some marvel at these changes, envisioning consciousness downloaded into a computer or humans “beamed” Star Trek-style, others view them with horror, seeing monsters brooding in the machines. In How We Became Posthuman, N. Katherine Hayles separates hype from fact, investigating the fate of embodiment in an information age.

Hayles relates three interwoven stories: how information lost its body, that is, how it came to be conceptualized as an entity separate from the material forms that carry it; the cultural and technological construction of the cyborg; and the dismantling of the liberal humanist “subject” in cybernetic discourse, along with the emergence of the “posthuman.”

Ranging widely across the history of technology, cultural studies, and literary criticism, Hayles shows what had to be erased, forgotten, and elided to conceive of information as a disembodied entity. Thus she moves from the post-World War II Macy Conferences on cybernetics to the 1952 novel Limbo by cybernetics aficionado Bernard Wolfe; from the concept of self-making to Philip K. Dick’s literary explorations of hallucination and reality; and from artificial life to postmodern novels exploring the implications of seeing humans as cybernetic systems.

Although becoming posthuman can be nightmarish, Hayles shows how it can also be liberating. From the birth of cybernetics to artificial life, How We Became Posthuman provides an indispensable account of how we arrived in our virtual age, and of where we might go from here.”

Publisher University of Chicago Press, 1999
ISBN 0226321460, 9780226321462
350 pages

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Gordon Pask: Conversation Theory. Application in Education and Epistemology (1976)

“The argument in this book aims to apply a body of cohesive and interpretable ideas, developed over the last dozen years or so, to issues of significance in educational psychology and epistemology. The history and development of these ideas, which emerged from experiments on perceptual motor learning, group interaction and sequential choice (as well as more obviously relevant studies of learning, subject matter structuring and cognition), are described in two previous books (Pask 1961, 1975a). But the main themes are crystallised in a monograph (henceforward called ‘the previous monograph’), Pask 1975b, Conversation, Cognition and Learning, which is part of the present series. In fact, the previous monograph marks a point of departure, for the notions cling together well enough to count as an empirically supportable theory: Conversation Theory.

Ideally, perhaps, Conversation, Cognition and Learning should be read first. But there are some 600 odd pages of it, including some lengthy appendices, and provided the reader will take various statements on trust, it is quite possible to start with this book. Conversation, Cognition and Learning can be regarded, with equal legitimacy, as an essay in man/man and man/machine symbiosis or as an essay upon education, learning and the like. In contrast, the present book is an application study and is unambiguously oriented towards the areas of education, its psychology and epistemology. The Introduction provides the essential groundwork, and for those who have read Conversation, Cognition and Learning, it bridges the gap between the two volumes.” (Gordon Pask, from Preface)

Publisher Elsevier, Amsterdam-Oxford-New York, 1976
ISBN 044441424X, 9780444414243
402 pages
via pangaro.com

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Michel Serres, Bruno Latour: Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time (1990/1995)

Although elected to the prestigious French Academy in 1990, Michel Serres has long been considered a maverick–a provocative thinker whose prolific writings on culture, science and philosophy have often baffled more than they have enlightened. In these five lively interviews with sociologist Bruno Latour, this increasingly important cultural figure sheds light on the ideas that inspire his highly original, challenging, and transdisciplinary essays.

Serres begins by discussing the intellectual context and historical events– including the impact of World War II and Hiroshima, which for him marked the beginning of science’s ascendancy over the humanities–that shaped his own philosophical outlook and led him to his lifelong mission of bringing together the texts of the humanities and the conceptual revolutions of modern science. He then confronts the major difficulties encountered by his readers: his methodology, his mathematician’s fondness for “shortcuts” in argument, and his criteria for juxtaposing disparate elements from different epochs and cultures in extraordinary combinations. Finally, he discusses his ethic for the modern age–a time when scientific advances have replaced the natural necessities of disease and disaster with humankind’s frightening new responsibility for vital things formerly beyond its control.

In the course of these conversations Serres revisits and illuminates many of his themes: the chaotic nature of knowledge, the need for connections between science and the humanities, the futility of traditional criticism, and what he calls his “philosophy of prepositions”–an argument for considering prepositions, rather than the conventionally emphasized verbs and substantives, as the linguistic keys to understanding human interactions.

Originally published in French as Eclaircissements by Editions Francois Bourin 1990
Translated by Roxanne Lapidus
Publisher University of Michigan Press, 1995
Studies in Literature and Science series
ISBN 0472065483, 9780472065486
204 pages

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