Not so much a creature of the world this weekend; I've been trapped inside How We Became Posthuman, by Kate Hayles. HWBP essentially traces what Hayles describes as three distinct waves of cybernetic theory that led to what she sees as a contemporary (circa 1996) posthuman ontology. As I'm writing this, I've moved from her analysis of Norbert Wiener's The Human Use of Human Beings directly to Wiener's text itself (written in 1950). HUHB's got a very wither-goest-we conclusion, which among other things, inveighs against the Inquisition. Good fun. Here's a slice:
"I have said before that man's future on earth will not be long unless man rises to the full level of his inborn powers. For us, to be less than a man is to be less than alive. Those who are not fully alive do not live long even in their world of shadows. I have said, moreover, that for man to be alive is for him to participate in a world-wide scheme of communication. It is to have the liberty to test new opinions and find which of them point somewhere, and which of them simply confuse us. It is to have the variability to fit into the world in more places than one, the variability which may lead us to have soldiers when we need soldiers but which also leads us to have saints when we need saints. It is precisely this variability and this communicative integrity of man which I find to be violated and crippled by the present tendency to huddle together according to a comprehensive prearranged plan, which is handed to us from above. We must cease to kiss the whip which lashes us."
Classic Wiener: cybernetic theory suggests that we shouldn't be anxious about the breakdown of the material boundaries of silicon and flesh, but rather focuses instead on the more abstract problem he roughly configures as an information bottleneck, facilitated by the inflexibility of any cybernetic system. Rigidity in any system, man, machine, or social, leads to entropy; entropy, for Wiener is the impossibility of information. Information is negentropy.
But a world-wide scheme of communication? In a historically specific denoument, Wiener eventually concludes that the primary barrier to the global village is communism - not just because he finds it to be the consumate inflexible machine, but because it actively PRODUCES its antithesis, the equally rigid conservativism of the United States.
What does any of this have to do with how we became posthuman? Hayles uses Wiener to discuss "how information lost its body:" in other words, how Wieners description of human and machines systems as identical in their effort to achieve homeostasis through negative feedback elides the substantial material differences between each. Her book's a rallying cry for the re-attachment of body and information, for an increased understanding of the embodiment intrinsic to knowing and doing.
Which might lead us to consider, what exactly does information that wants to be free want to be free from, anyhow? Anyhow, got to go kiss the whip...
4:44:54 PM 
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