In How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics, N. Katherine Hayles articulates the ways in which emerging digital technologies have transformed the shape and scope of knowledge and information to the extent that the very foundation of what constitutes and comprises "subjective human experience" has become something else altogether. This "something else" might be referred to as the posthuman, a significant cultural and intellectual position through which human beings assume the role of an "informational pattern" of sorts, a codified husk unmoored from materiality writ large.
For Hayles, the emergence of the posthuman represents a signigicant discursive shift, one that clearly cordons off information from materiality, bringing forth an age in which "it is no longer possible to distinguish meaningfully between the biological organism and the informational circuits in which the organism is enmeshed" (35). Ultimately, these distinctions re-route discourses around the material and intellectual contexts that human beings navigate from questions of "presence/absence" to questions of "pattern/randomness."
By locating these discourses within the realm of "pattern/randomness," Hayles places an emphasis on information and code as the metrics of sorts through which the posthuman inherits, understands, and embodies a particular iteration of reality. However, throughout How We Became Posthuman, she seeks to problematize this iteration of reality, perpetually challenging assumptions about its purported "organic wholeness" (160). In Hayles' estimation, theories, institutions, and/or metrics of information, particularly those introduced by Claude Shannon, in the age of the posthuman generally contain a "conservative bias that privileges stasis over change" (63), a bias that therefore also "privileges exactness over meaning" (67). In this sense, information serves as a stable, intelligible, and normative framework for constituting reality as a self-evident "pattern," a "pattern" that human beings merely simulate and reify as predictable "manipulators of code" (46) as opposed to creative or autonomous agents of change and "randomness."
While the age of the posthuman might expose the ways in which "conscious agency has never been 'in control'" (288), Hayles' analysis of the role that human beings play in internalizing and perpetuating this systematic thinking seems to suggest at least the prospect for other alternatives and/or some form of resistance. Indeed, if human beings in the age of the posthuman are in many ways "placed in the middle of the circuit, where [their] output and input are already spliced into an existing loop" (68), and if "the observer cannot stand apart from the systems being observed" (221), Hayles seems to really struggle to locate subversive and contrarian potential within practices and performances of embodiment that challenge and destabilize prevailing ideas about what comprises information, "pattern," and normativity. She does this in part by juxtaposing the "human body" against "embodiment." In Hayles' estimation, the "human body" is "naturalized within a culture" (198) to the extent that all material practices and performances are measured against a normative and idealized conceptualization of the "human body." Embodiment, on the other hand, is more individuated and "improvisational" in nature, "becom[ing] naturalized only secondarily through its interactions with concepts of the body" (198). As a material performance of the body, embodiment therefore represents a more elusive and flexible practice, one that might, on the one hand, automatically incorporate into "bodily memory" those norms and mores inscribed within the "pattern" of the "human body" (199); or, on the other hand, engage in the sorts of "emergent behaviors" (225) that problematize the "ideological underpinnings of naturalization" (198).
Ultimately, Hayles makes these distinctions between the "human body" and embodiment in order to elucidate upon the advantages and possibilities of "the posthuman." By in effect talking back to and re-mapping "the locus of selfhood" (279), she engages in the sort of systematic thinking that celebrates and might help instantiate "an open future marked by contingency and unpredictability" (285), a future that might also shirk the vestments and restrictions of "pattern" and "disembodied information" (287). Yet while Hayles suggests that "human functionality expands because the parameters of the cognitive system it inhabits expand" (290-291), she also acknowledges that subversive embodiments in the age of the posthuman may not decisively or automatically destabilize the "pattern." Regardless, Hayles locates any semblance of subjectivity within embodiment and "randomness," and thus within the "emergent rather than [the] given" (291).
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