HOW WE. BECAME POSTHUMAN V i r t u a í B o d i e s i n Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics N . K A T H E R 1 N E H A Y L E S The University of Chicago Press Chicago b- London l Vrt x / Ack n o wledgm en t s bert Wiener, and the Play of Metaphor," from History of the Human Sciences 3 (1990): 212-28 (appearingin revised from as aportionof chapter 4). Johns Hopkins University Press has graciously allowed me to reprint three articles appearing in Configurations: A Journal of Literature, Science, and Technology—-"The Materiality of Informatics," Configurations 1 (1993): 147-70 (appearing in revised form as a portion of chapter 8); "Boundary Disputes: Homeostasis, Reflexivity, and the Foundations of Cybernetics," ibid. 3 (1994): 441-67 (appearing in revised form as part of chapter 3); and "The Posthuman Body: Inscription and Incorporation in Galatea 2.2 and Snow Crash," ibid. 5 (1997): 241-66 (appearing as part of chapter 10). MIT Press has given permission to reprint "Virtual Bodies and Flickering Signi-fiers," from October 66 (Fall 1993): 69—91 (appearing in sUghdy revised form as chapter 2). The University of North Carolina Press has given permission to reprint a portion of "Voices Out of Bodies, Bodies Out ofVoices," from Sound States: Innovative Poetics and Acoustical Technologies, edited by Adalaide Morris, pp. 74-78,86-96, © 1997 by The University of North Carolina Press (appearing in revised form as a part of chapter 8). The Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts has given permission to reprint "Schizoid Android: Cybernetics and the Mid-60s Novels of Dick,"/FIA 8 (1997): 419-42 (appearing in slighüy revised form as chapter 6). Finally, my greatest debt is to my family, who have listened patiently to my ideas over the years, and to my husband, Nick Gessler, from whom I have learned more than I can say. P r o I o g u e You are alone in the room, except for two computer terminals flickering in the dim light. You use the terminals to communicate with two entities in another room, whom you cannot see. Relying solely on their responses to your questions, you must decide which is the man, which the woman. Or, in another version of the famous "imitation game" proposed by Alan Turing in his classic 1950 paper "Computer Machinery and Intelligence," you use the responses to decide which is the human, which the machine.1 One of the entities wants to help you guess correcdy. His/her/its best strategy, Turing suggested, may be to answer your questions truthfully. The other entity wants to mislead you. He/she/it will try to reproduce through the words that appear on your terminal the characteristics of the other entity. Your job is to pose questions that can distinguish verbal performance from embodied reality. If you cannot tell the intelligent machine from the intelligent human, your failure proves, Turing argued, that machines can think Here, at the inaugural moment of the computer age, the erasure of embodiment is performed so that "intelligence" becomes a property of the formal manipulation of symbols rather than enaction in the human life-world. The Turing test was to set the agenda for artificial intelligence for the next three decades. In the push to achieve machines that can think, researchers performed again and again the erasure of embodiment at the heart of the Turing test. All that mattered was the formal generation and manipulation of informational patterns. Aiding this process was a definition of information, formalized by Claude Shannon and Norbert Wiener, that conceptualized information as an entity distinct from the substrates carrying it. From this formulation, it was a small step to think of information as akind of bodiless fluid that could flowbetween different substrates without loss of meaning or form. Writing nearly four decades after Turing, Hans xii / Prologue Moravec proposed that human identity is essentially an informational pattern rather than an embodied enaction. 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. The Moravec test, if I may call it that, is the logical successor to the Turing test. Whereas the Turing test was designed to show that machines can perform the thinldng 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 consciousness—that machines can, for all practical purposes, become human beings. You are the cyborg, and the cyborg is you. In the progression from Turing to Moravec, the part of the Turing test that historically has been foregrounded is the distinction between thinking human and thinking machine. Often forgotten is the first example Turing offered of distinguishing between a man and a woman. 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? Why does gender appear in this primal scene of humans meeting their evolutionary successors, intelligent machines? 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? In his thoughtful and perceptive intellectual biography of Turing, Andrew Hodges suggests that Turing s predilection was always to deal with the world as if it were a formal puzzle.2 To a remarkable extent, Hodges says, Turing was blind to the distinction between saying and doing. Turing fundamentally did not understand that "questions involving sex, society, politics or secrets would demonstrate howwhat it was possible for people to say might be limited not by puzzle-solving intelligence but by the restrictions on what might be done" (pp. 423-24). In a fine insight, Hodges suggests that "the discrete state machine, communicating by teleprinter alone, was like an ideal for [Turing's ] own life, in which he would be left alone in a room of his own, to deal with the outside world solely by rational argument. It was the embodiment of a perfect}. S. Mill liberal, concentratingupon the free will and free speech of the individual" {p. 425). Turing's later embroilment with the police and court system over die question of his homosexuality played out, in a different key, the assumptions embodied in the Turing test. His conviction and die court-ordered hormone treatments for his homosexuality tragically demonstrated the importance of doing over saying in the coercive order of ahomophobic societywith the power to enforce its will upon Ure bodies of its citizens. Prologue / x i i i The perceptiveness of Plodgess biography notwithstanding, he gives a strange interpretation of Turing's inclusion of gender in die imitation game. Gender, according to Hodges, "was in fact a red herring, and one of die few passages of die paper tiiat was not expressed with perfect lucidity. The whole point of this game was Üiat a successful imitation of a woman's responses by a man would not prove anything. Gender depended on facts which were not reducible to sequences of symbols" (p. 415). In die paper itself, however, nowhere does Turing suggest that gender is meant as a counterexample; instead, he makes the two cases rhetorically parallel, indi7 eating through symmetry, if nothing else, that die gender and the human/machine examples are meant to prove the same thing. Is this simply bad writing, as Hodges argues, an inability to express an intended opposition between the construction of gender and the construction of thought? Or, on the contrary, does the writing express a parallelism too explosive and subversive for Hodges to acknowledge? If so, now we have two mysteries instead of one. Why does^Turing include gender, and why does Hodges want to read this inclusion as indicating that, so far as gender is concerned, verbal performance cannot be equated with embodied reality? One way to frame these mysteries is to see them as attempts to transgress and reinforce the boundaries of die subject, respectively. By including gender, Turing implied that renegotiating the boundary between human and machine would involve more than trans-forrningthe question of "who can think" into "what can think," 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. 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. If you distinguish correctly which is the man and which the woman, you in effect reunite the enacted and die represented bodies into a single gender identity. The very existence of the test, however, implies that you may also make die wrong choice. Thus the test functions to create the possibility of a disjunction between the enacted and the represented bodies, regardless which choice you malte. What the Turing test "proves" is that die overlay between the enacted and the represented bodies is no longer a natural inevitability but a contingent production, mediated by a technology tiiat has become so entwined with die production of identity tiiat it can no longer meaningfully be separated from die human subject. To pose die question x i v / Prologue of "what can think" inevitably also changes, in a reverse feedback loop, the terms of "who can think." On this view, Hodges's reading of the gender test as nonsignifymg with respect to identity can be seen as an attempt to safeguard the boundaries of the subject from precisely this kind of transformation, to insist that the existence of thinking machines will not necessarily affect what being human means. That Hodges's reading is a misreading indicates he is willing to practice violence upon the text to wrench meaning away from the direction toward which the Turing test points, back to safer ground where embodiment secures the univocalily of gender. I think he is wrong about embodiments securing the univocaliry of gender and wrong about its securing human identity, but right about the importance of putting embodiment back into the picture. What embodiment secures is not the distinction between male and female or between humans who can think and machines which cannot. Rather, embodiment makes clear that thought is a much broader cognitive function depending for its specificities on the embodied form enacting it. This realization, with all its exfoliating implications, is so broad in its effects and so deep in its consequences that it is transforming the liberal subject, regarded as the model of the human since the Enlightenment, into the posthuman. Think of the Turing test as a magic trick. 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. The important intervention comes not when you try to determine which is the man, the woman, or the machine. Rather, die importantintervention comes much earlier, when the test puts you into a cybernetic circuit that splices your will, desire, and perception into a distributed cognitive system in which represented bodies are joined with enacted bodies through mutating and flexible machine interfaces. As you gaze at the flickering signiflers scrolling down the computer screens, no matter what identifications you assign to the embodied entities that you cannot see, you have already become posthuman. 1, Alan M.Turing, "Computing Machinery and Intelligence," Mind 54(1950);433-57. 2. Andrew Hodges, Alan Taring: The Enigma of Intelligence (London: Unwin, 1985), pp. 415-25.1 am indebted to Carol Wald for her insights into the relation between gender and artificial intelligence, the subject of her dissertation, and to her other writings on this question. I also owe her thanks for pointing out to me that Andrew Hodges dismisses Turing's use of gender as alogical flawin his analysis of the Turing text. .................C.h..Q,.p..t..e.r.....Q..ti..e. TOWARD EMBODIED VIRTUALITY We needfirst to understand thatthe humanform—including human desire and all its external rep resentations—may be changing radically, and thus must be re-visioned. We need to understand that five hundred years ofhumanism may be camingtoanendas humanism transforms itself into something that we must helplessly call past-humanism. Ihab Hassan, "Prometheui as Performer: Towards a Fasthumanist Culture?" This book began with a roboticist's dream that struck me as a nightm are. I was reading Hans Moravec's Mind Children: The Future of Robot and Human Intelligence, enjoying the ingenious variety of his robots, when I happened upon the passage where he argues it will soon be possible to download human consciousness into a computer.1 To illustrate, he invents a fantasy scenario in which a robot surgeon purees the human brain in a kind of cranial liposuction, reading the information in each molecular layer as it is stripped away and transferring the information into a computer. At the end of the operation, the cranial cavity is empty, and the patient, now inhabiting the metallic body of the computer, wakens to find his consciousness exacüy the same as it was before. How, Tasked myself, was it possible for someone of Moravec's obvious intelligence to believe that mind could be separated from body? Even assuming such a separation was possible, how could anyone tliinlc that consciousness in an entirely different medium would remain unchanged, as if it had no connection with embodiment? Shocked into awareness, I began noticing he was far from alone. As early as the 1950s, Norbert Wiener proposed it was theoretically possible to telegraph a human being, a suggestion underlaid by the same assumptions informing Moravec's scenario.2 The producers of Star Trek operate from similar premises when they imagine that die body can be dematerialized into an informational pattern and re-materialized, without change, at a remote location. Nor is the idea confined to what Beth Loffreda has called "pulp science."3 Much of the discourse on molecular biology treats information as die essential code the body expresses, a practice that has certain affinities with Moravec's ideas.4 In fact, a defining characteristic of the present cultural mo ment is die belief that inform ation can circulate unchanged among different material substrates. It 2 / C h aprer One is not for nothing that "Beam me up, Scotty," has become a cultural icon For the global informational society. Following this thread, I was led into a maze of developments that turned into a six-year odyssey of researching archives in the history of cybernetics, interviewing scientists in computational biology and artificial life, reading cultural and literary texts concerned with information technologies, visiting laboratories engaged in research on virtual reality, and grappling with technical articles in cybernetics, information theory, autopoiesis, computer simulation, and cognitive science. Slowly this unrulymass of material began taldng shape as Üiree interrelated stories. The first centers on how information lost its body, that is, how it came to be conceptualized as an entity separate from the material forms in which it is thought to be embedded. The second story concerns how the cyborg was created as a technological artifact and cultural icon in the years following World War II. The third, deeply implicated with the first two, is the unfolding story of how a historically specific construction called the human is giving way to a different construction called the -posthuman. Interrelations between the Üiree stories are extensive. Central to the construction of the cyborg are informational pathways connecting the organic body to its prosthetic extensions. This presumes a conception of information as a (disembodied) entity that can flow between carbon-based organic components and silicon-based electronic components to make protein and silicon operate as a single system. When information loses its body, equating humans and computers is especially easy, for the materiality in which the thinking mind is instantiated appears incidental to its essential nature. Moreover, the idea of the feedback loop implies that the boundaries of the autonomous subject are up for grabs, since feedback loops can flow not only within the subject but also between the subject and the environment. From Norbert Wiener on, the flow of information through feedback loops has been associated with the deconstruction of the liberal humanist subject, the version of the "human" with which I will be concerned. Although die "posthuman" differs in its articulations, a common theme is the union of the human with the intelligent machine. What is die posthuman? Think of it as a point of view characterized by the following assumptions. (I do not mean this list to be exclusive or definitive. Rather, it names elements found at a variety of sites. It is meant to be suggestive rather than prescriptive. )5 First, the posthuman view privileges informational pattern over material instantiation, so that embodiment in a biological substrate is seen as an accident of history rather than an inevitability of life. Second, the posdiuman view considers consciousness, re- Toward Embodied Virtuality / j garded as the seat of human identity in die Western tradition long before Descartes thought he was a mind thinking, as an epiphenomenon, as an evolutionary upstart trying to claim that it is die whole show when in actuality it is only a minor sideshow. Third, the posdiuman view thinks of the body as the original prosdiesis we all learn to manipulate, so tiiat extending or replacing the body with other prostheses becomes a continuation of aprocess that began before we were born. Fourth, and most important, by these and other means, die posthuman view configures human being so that it can be seamlessly articulated with intelligent machines. In the posthuman, tiiere are no essential differences or absolute demarcations between bodily existence and computer simulation, cybernetic mechanism and biological organism, robot teleology and human goals. To elucidate the significant shift in underlying assumptions about subjectivity signaled by die posthuman, we can recall one of the definitive texts characterizing the liberal humanist subject: G. B. Macpherson s analysis of possessive individualism. "Its possessive quality is found in its conception of the individual as essentially the proprietor of his own person or capacities, owing nothing to society for them. ... The human essence is freedom from the wills of others, and freedom is a function of possession."6 The italicized phrases mark convenient points of departure for measuring the distance between the human and the posthuman. "Owing nothing to society" comes from arguments Hobbes and Locke constructed about humans in a "state of nature" before market relations arose. Because ownership of oneself is thought to predate market relations and owe nothing to them, it forms a foundation upon which those relations can be built, as when one sells ones labor for wages. As Macpherson points out, however, this imagined "state of nature" is a retrospective creation of a market society. The liberal self is produced by market relations and does not in fact predate them. This paradox (as M acpherson calls it) is resolved in the posthuman by doing away with the "natural" self. The posthuman subject is an amalgam, a collection of heterogeneous components, a material-informational entity whose boundaries undergo continuous construction and reconstruction. Consider the six-million-dollar man, aparadigmatic citizen of the posdiuman regime. As his name implies, the parts of die self are indeed owned, but they are owned precisely because they were purchased, not because ownership is a natural condition preexisting market relations. Similarly, the presumption that tiiere is an agency, desire, orwill belonging to the serf and clearly distinguished from die "wills of odiers" is undercut in die posdiuman, for the postiiumans collective heterogeneous quality implies a distributed cognition located in disparate parts that may be in only tenuous 4 / Ch apter One communication with one another. We have only to recall Robocop s memory flashes that interfere with his programmed directives to understand how die distributed cognition of the posthuman complicates individual agency. If "human essence is freedom from the wills of others," the posthu-man is "post" not because it is necessarily unfree but because there is no a priori way to identify a self-will that can be clearly distinguished from an other-will. Although these examples foreground the cybernetic aspect of the posthuman, it is important to recognize that the construction of the posthuman does not require the subject to be a literal cyborg. Whether or not interventions have been made on the body, new models of subjectivity emerging from such fields as cognitive science and artificial life imply that even a biologically unaltered Homo sapiens counts as posthuman. The defining characteristics involve the construction of subjectivity, not the presence of nonbiological components. What to make of this shift from the human to the posthuman, which both evokes terror and excites pleasure? The liberal humanist subject has, of course, been cogently criticized from a number of perspectives. Feminist theorists have pointed out that it has historically been constructed as a white European male, presuming a universality that has worked to suppress and disenfranchise women's voices; postcolonial theorists have taken issue not only with the universality of the (white male) liberal subject but also with die very idea of a unified, consistent identity, focusing instead on hybridity; and postmodern theorists such as Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari have linked it with capitalism, arguing for the liberatory potential of a dispersed subjectivity distributed among diverse desiring machines they call "body without organs."7 Although the deconstruction of the liberal humanist subj ect in cybernetics has some affinities with these perspectives, it proceeded primarily along lines that sought to understand human being as a set of informational processes. Because information had lost its body, this construction implied that embodiment is not essential to human being. Embodiment has been systematically downplayed or erased in the cybernetic construction of the posthuman in ways that have not occurred in other critiques of the liberal humanist subject, especially in feminist and postcolonial theories. Indeed, one could argue that the erasure of embodiment is a feature common to both the liberal humanist subject and the cybernetic posthu-man. Identified with the rational mind, the liberal subj ect possessed a body but was not usually represented as being a body. Only because the body is not identified with the self is it possible to claim for die liberal subject its notorious universality, a claim that depends on erasing markers of bodily TawardEmbodied Virtuatity / 5 difference, including sex, race, and ethnicity.8 Gillian Brown, in her inůu- . ential s tudy of the relation b etween humanism and anorexia, shows that the anoretic's struggle to "decrement" the body is possible precisely because the body is understood as an object for control and mastery rather than as an intrinsic part of die self. Quoting an anoretic's remark—"You make out of your bodyyourvery own kingdom where youare the tyrant, the absolute dictator"—Brown states, "Anorexia is thus a fight for self-control, a flight from the slavery food threatens; self-sustaining self-possession independent of bodily desires is the anoretic s crucial goal."9 In taking the self-possession implied by Uberal humanism to the extreme, the anoretic creates a physical image that, in its skeletal emaciation, serves as material testimony that the locus of the liberal humanist subject lies in the mind, not the body. Although in many ways the posthuman deconstructs the liberal humanist subject, it thus shares widi its predecessor an emphasis on cognition rather than embodiment. William Gibson makes the point vividly in Neuro-mancer when the narrator characterizes the posthuman body as "data made flesh. "10 To the extent that the posthuman constructs embodiment as the instantiation of thought/information, it continues the liberal tradition rather than disrupts it. In tracing these continuities and discontinuities between a "natural" self and a cybernetic posthuman, I am not trying to recuperate the liberal subject. Although I think that serious consideration needs to be given to how certain characteristics associated with the liberal subject, especially agency and choice, can be articulated within a posthuman context, I do not mourn the passing of a concept so deeply entwined with projects of domination and oppression. Rather, I view the present moment as a critical juncture when interventions might be made to keep disembodiment from being rewritten, once again, into prevailing concepts of subjectivity. I see the de-construction of the liberal humanist subject as an opportunity to put back into the picture the flesh that continues to be erased in contemporary discussions about cybernetic subjects. Hence my focus on how information lost its body, for this story is central to creating what Arthur Kioker has called die "flesh-eating 90s."11 If my nightmare is a culture inhabited by posthumans who regard their bodies as-fashion accessories rather Üian the ground of being, my dream is a version of the posthuman that embraces the possibilities of information technologies without being seduced by fantasies of unlimited power and disembodied immortality, that recognizes and celebrates finitude as a condition of human being, and that understands human life is embedded in a material world of great complexity, one on which we depend for our continued survival. 6 / Chapter Ofí£ Perhaps it will now be clear that I mean my title, How We Became Posthuman, to connote multiple ironies, which do not prevent it from also being taken seriously. Taken straight, this title points to models of subjectivity sufficiently different from the liberal subject that if one assigns the term "human" to this subject, it makes sense to call the successor "posthu-man." Some of the historical processes leading to dais transformation are documentedhere, and in this sense the book makes good on its tide. Yet my argument will repeatedly demonstrate that diese changes were never complete transformations or sharp breaks; without exception, they reinscribed traditional ideas and assumptions even as they articulated something new. The changes announced by the title thus mean something more complex than "That was then, this is now." Rather, "human" and "posthuman" coexist in shirting configurations that vary with historically specific contexts. Given these complexities, the past tense in the tide—"became"—is intended both to offer the reader die pleasurable shock of a double take arid to reference ironically apocalyptic visions such as Moravec s prediction of a "postbiological" future for the human race. Amplifying the ambiguities of the past tense are the ambiguities of the plural. In one sense, "we" refers to the readers of this book—readers who, by becoming aware of these new models of subjectivity (if they are not already familiar with them), may begin thinking of their actions in ways that have more in common with the posthuman than the human. Speaking for myself, I now find myself saying things like, "Well, my sleep agent wants to rest, but my food agent says I should go to the store," Each person who thinks this way begins to envision herself or himself as aposthuman collectivity, an "I" transformed into the "we" of autonomous agents operating together to make a self. The infectious power of Ulis way of thinking gives "we" a performative dimension. People become posthuman because diey think they are postiiuman. In anodier sense "we," Hke "became," is meant ironically, positioning itself in opposition to the techno-ecstasies found in various magazines, such as Mondo 2000, which customarily speak of the transformation into the posüiuman as if it were a universal human condition when in fact it affects only a small fraction of the worlds population-— a point to which I will return. The larger trajectory of my narrative arcs from die initial moments when cybernetics was formulated as a discipline, through a period of reformulation known as "second-order cybernetics," to contemporary debates swirling around an emerging discipline known as "artificial life." AlÜiough the progression is chronological, this book is not meant to be a history of cybernetics. Many figures not discussed here played important roles in diat Toward Embodied V i r t u a U t y / y history, and I have not attempted to detail Üieir contributions. Kadier, my selection of theories and researchers has been dictated by a desire to show the complex interplaijs between embodied forms of subjectivity and arguments for disembodiment throughout the cybernetic tradition. In broad outline, these interplays occurred in diree distinct waves of development. The first, from 1945 to 1960, tookhorneostasis as a central concept; the second, going roughly from 1960 to 1980, revolved around reflexivity; and the third, stretching from 1980 to the present, highlights virtuality. Let me turn now to abrief sketch of these three periods. During the foundational era of cybernetics, Norbert Wiener, John von Neumann, Claude Shannon, Warren McCuIloch, and dozens of other distinguished researchers met at annual conferences sponsored by the Josiah Macy Foundation to formulate the central concepts that, in their high expectations, would coalesce into a theory of communication and control applying equally to animals, humans, and machines. Retrospectively called the Macy Conferences on Cybernetics, these meetings, held from 1943 to 1954, were instrumental in forging a new paradigm.12 To succeed, they needed a theory of information (Shannon's bailiwick), a model of neural functioning that showed how neurons worked as information-processing systems (McCulloch's lifework), computers that processed binary code and that could conceivably reproduce themselves, thus reinforcing the analogy with biological systems (von Neumann's specialty), and a visionary who could articulate the larger implications of the cybernetic paradigm and make clear its cosmic significance (Wiener s contribution). The result of this breathtaking enterprise was nothing less than a new way of looking at human beings. Henceforth, humans were to be seen primarily as information-processing entities who are essentially similar to intelligent machines. The revolutionary implications of this paradigm notwithstanding, Wiener did not intend tó dismanüe the liberal humanist subject. He was less interested in seeing humans as machines than he was in fashioning human and machine alike in the image of an autonomous, self-directed individual. In aligning cybernetics with liberal humanism, he was following a strain of thought that, since the Enlightenment, had argued thathuman beings could be trusted widi freedom because they and the social structures they devised operated as self-regulating mechanisms.13 For Wiener, cybernetics was a means to extend liberal humanism, no t subvert it. The point was less to show that man was a machine than to demonstrate that a machine could function Hke a man. Yet die cybernetic perspective had a certain inexorable logic tíiat, especially when fed by wartime hysteria, also worked to undermine the very Üb- fl / Chap ter One eral subjectivity that Wiener wanted to preserve. These tensions were kept under control during the Macy period partly through a strong emphasis on homeostasis.u Traditionally, homeostasis had been understood as the ability of living organisms to maintain steady states when they are buffeted by fickle environments. When the temperature soars, sweat pours out of the human body so that its internal temperature can remain relatively stable. During the Macy period, the idea of homeostasis was extended to machines. Like animals, machines can maintain homeostasis using feedback loops. Feedback loops had long been exploited to increase the stability of mechanical systems, reaching a high level of development during the mid-to-late nineteenth century with the growing sophistication of steam engines and their accompanying control devices, such as governors. It was not until the 1930s and 1940s, however, that the feedback loop was explicitiy theorized as a flow of information. Cybernetics was born when nineteenth-century control theory joined with the nascent theory of information.15 Coined from the Greek word for "steersman," cybernetics signaled that three powerful actors—information, control, arid communication—were now operating jointly to bring about an unprecedented synthesis of the organic and the mechanical. Although the informational feedback loop was initially linked with homeostasis, it quickly led to the more threatening and subversive idea of reflexivity. A few years ago 1 co-taught, with a philosopher and a physicist, a course on reflexivity. As we discussed reflexivity in the writings of Aristotle, Fichte, Kierkegaard, Gödel, Turing, Borges, and Calvino, aided by the insightful analyses of Roger Penrose and Douglas Hofstader, I was struck not only by the concept's extraordinarily rich history but also by its tendency to mutate, so that virtually any formulation is sure to leave out some relevant instances. Instructed by the experience, I offer the following tentative definition, which I hope will prove adequate for our purposes here. Reflexivity is the movement whereby that which has been used to generate a system is made, through a changedperspective, to become part of the system it generates. When Kurt Gödel invented a method of coding that allowed statements of number Üieory also to function as statements about number theory, he entangled diat which generates the system with the system. When M. C. Escher drewtwo hands drawing each other, he tookthatwhich is presumed to generate the picture—the sketching hand—and made it part of the picture it draws. When Jorge Luis Borges in "The Circular Ruins" imagines a narrator who creates a s tuden t through his dreaming only to discover diat he himself is being dreamed by another, the system generating a re ality is shown tobepartoftherealityitm akes. As these examples illustrate, reflexivity has subversive effects because it confuses and entangles Toward Embodied Vlrtuallty / 9 the boundaries we impose on the world in order to make sense of diat world. Reflexivity tends notoriously toward infinite regress. The dreamer creates die student, but the dreamer in turn is dreamed by another, who in his turn is dreamed by someone else, and so on to infinity. This definition of reflexivity has much in common with some of the most influential and provocative recent work in critical theory, cultural studies, and the social studies of science. Typically, these works make the reflexive move of showing that an attribute previously considered to have emerged from a set of preexisting conditions is in fact used to generate the conditions. In Nancy Armstrongs Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel, for example, bourgeois femininity is shown to be constructed through the domestic fictions that represent it as already in place.16 In Michael Warners The Letters of the Republic: Publication and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth- Century America, the founding document of the United States, the Constitution", is shown to produce the very people whose existence it presupposes.17 In Bruno Latours Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society, scientific experiments are shown to produce the nature whose existence they predicate as their condition of possibility.18 It is only a slight exaggeration to say that contemporary critical theory is produced by the reflexivity that it also produces (an observation thatis, of course, also reflexive). Reflexivity entered cybernetics primarily through discussions about the observer. By and large, first-wave cybernetics followed traditional scientific protocols in considering observers to be outside the system they observe. Yet cybernetics also had implications that subverted this premise. The objectivist view sees information flowing from the system to the observers, but feedback can also loop through the observers, drawing them in to become part of the system being observed. Although participants remarked on this aspect of the cybernetic paradigm throughout the Macy transcripts, they lacked a single word to describe it. To my knowledge, the word "reflexivity" does not appear in the transcripts. This meant they had no handle with which to grasp this slippery concept, no signifierthat wouldhelp to constitute as well as to describe the changed perspective that reflexivity entails. Discussions of the idea remained diffuse. Most participants did not go beyond remarking on the shifting boundaries between observer and system that cybernetics puts into play. Witii some exceptions, deeper formulations of the problem failed to coalesce during the Macy discussions. The most notable exception turned out to hurt more tiian it helped. Lawrence Kubie, a hard-line Freudian psychoanalyst, introduced a reflexive perspective when he argued that every utterance is doubly encoded, lo / Chapter One acting both as a statement about the outside world and as a mirror reflecting die speakers psyche. If reflexivity was already a subversive concept, this interpretation made it doubly so, for it threatened to dissolve the premise of scientific objectivity shared by the physical scientists in die Macy group. Their reactions to Kubie s presentations show diem shying away from reflexivity, preferring to shift the conversation onto more comfortable ground. Nevertheless, die idea hung in the air, and a few key drinkers—especially Margaret Mead, Gregory Bateson, and Heinz von Foerster—resolved to pursue it after die Macy Conferences ran out of steam. The second wave of cybernetics grew out of attempts to incorporate reflexivity into the cybernetic paradigm at a fundamental level. The key issue was how systems are constituted as such, and die key problem was how to redefine homeostatic systems so that die observer can be taken into account. The second wave was initiated by, among odiers, Heinz von Foerster, die Austrian emigre who became coeditor of the Macy transcripts. This phase can be dated from. I960, when yon Foerster wrote die first of die essays tíiat were later collected in his influential book Observing Systems.19 As von Foerster's punning tide recognizes, the observer of systems can himself be constituted as a system to be observed. Von Foerster called the models he presented in these essays "second-order cybernetics" because they extended cybernetic principles to the cybemeticians themselves. The second wave reached its mature phase with the publication of Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varelas Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living.20 Building on Maturana s work on reflexivity in sensory processing and Varela s on the dynamics of autonomous biological systems, the two authors expanded the reflexive turn into a fully articulated epistemology that sees tie world as a set of informationally closed systems. Organisms respond to their environment in ways determined by their internal self-organization. Their one and only goal is continually to produce and reproduce the organization that defines them as systems. Hence, they not only are self-organizing but also are autopoietic, or self-making. Through Maturana and Varela's work and diat of odier influential theorists such as German sociologist Nildas Luhmann,21 cybernetics by 1980 had spun off from die idea of reflexive feedback loops a theory of autopoiesis widi sweeping epistemological implications. In a sense, autopoiesis turns die cybernetic paradigm inside out. Its central premise—diat systems are informationally closed—radically alters die idea of die informational feedback loop, for die loop no longer functions to connect a system to its environment. In the autopoietic view, no information crosses die boundary separating die system from its environ- Toward Embodied Vir t ualit y / n ment. We do not see a world "out there" that exists apart from us. Radier, we see only what our systemic organization allows us to see. The environment merely triggers changes determined by die system's own structural properties. Thus the center of interest for autopoiesis shifts from die cybernetics of die observed system to the cybernetics of the observer. Autopoiesis also changes the explanation of what circulates through die system to make it work as a system. The emphasis now is on die mutually constitutive interactions between the components of a system rather dian on message, signal, or information. Indeed, one could say either that information does not exist in this paradigm or that it has sunk so deeply into the system as to become indistinguishable from the organizational properties defining the system as such. The third wave swelled into existence when self-organization began to be understood not merely as the {reproduction of internal organization but as the springboard to emergence. In the rapidly emerging field of artificial life, computerprograms are designed to allow "creatures" (thatis, discrete packets of computer codes) to evolve spontaneously in directions the programmer may not have anticipated. The intent is to evolve the capacity to evolve. Some researchers have argued that such self-evolving programs are not merely models of life but are themselves alive. What assumptions make this claim plausible? If one sees the universe as composed essentially of information, it makes sense that these "creatures" are Iife/orms because they have the form of life, that is, an informational code. As a result, the theoretical bases used to categorize all life undergo a significant shift. As we shall see in chapters 9 and 10, when these theories are applied to human beings, Homo sapiens are so transfigured in concep tion and purpose that they can appropriately be called posthuman. The emergence of the posthuman as an informational-material entity is paralleled and reinforced by a corresponding reinterpretation of the deep structures of the physical world. Some theorists, notably Edward Fredkin and Stephen Wolfram, claim that reality is a program run on a cosmic computer.22 In this view, a universal informational code underlies the structure of matter, energy, spacetime—indeed, of everything diat exists. The code is instantiated in cellular automata, elementary units that can occupy two states: on or off. Although thejuryis still out on the cellular automata model, it may indeed prove to be a robust way to understand reality. Even now, a research team headed by Fredkin is working on showing how quantum mechanics can be derived from an underlying cellular automata model. What happens to die embodied lifeworld of humans in this paradigm? In itself, the cellular automata model is not necessarily incompatible with iz /Chapter One recognizing that humans are embodied beings, for embodiment can flow from cellular automata as easily as from atoms. No one suggests that because atoms are mosdy empty space, we can shuck die electron shells and do away with occupying space altogether. Yet the cultural contexts and technological histories in which cellular automata dieories are embedded encourage a comparable fantasy—that because we are essentially inform a-tion, we can do away with the body. Central to this argument is a conceptualization tiiat sees information and materiality as distinct entities. This separation allows the construction of a hierarchy in which information is given the dominant position and materiality runs a distant second. As though we had learned nothing from Derrida about supplementary, embodiment continues to be discussed as if it were a supplement to be purged from the dominant term of information, an accident of evolution we are now in a position to correct. It is this materialiry/informarion separation that I want to contest—not the cellular automata model, information theory, or a host of related theories in themselves. My strategy is to complicate the leap from embodied reality to abstract information by pointing to moments when the assumptions involved in this move were contested by other researchers in the field and so became especially visible. The point of highlighting such moments is to make clear how much had to be erased to arrive at such abstractions as bodiless information. Abstraction is of course an essential component in all theorizing, for no theory can account for the infinite multiplicity of our interactions with the real. But when we make moves that erase the world's multiplicity, we risk losing sight of the variegated leaves, fractal branchings, and particular bark textures that make up the forest. In the pages diat follow, I will identify two moves in particular that played important roles in constructing the information/materiality hierarchy. IrreverenÜy, I think of diem as the Platonic backhand and forehand. The Platonic backhand works by inferring from the worlds noisy multiplicity a simplified abstraction. So far so good: diis is what theorizing should do. The problem comes when the move circles around to constitute the abstraction as the originary form from which the worlds multiplicity derives. Then complexity appears as a "fuzzing up" of an essential reality rather than as a manifestation of the world's holistic nature. Whereas the Platonic backhand has a history dating back to the Greeks, the Platonic forehand is more recent. To reach fully developed form, it required die assistance of powerful computers. This move starts from simplified abstractions and, using simulation techniques such as genetic algorithms, evolves a multiplicity sufficiendy complex diat it can be seen as aworld of its own. The two moves dius make their play in Toward Embodied Vir t u ail t y / 13 opposite directions. The backhand goes from noisy multiplicity to reductive simplicity, whereas the forehand swings from simplicity to rnulilicity. They share a common ideology—privileging the abstract as the Real and downplaying the importance of material instantiation. When they work together, they lay the groundwork for a new variation on an ancient game, in which dis -embodied information becomes the ultimate Platonic Form. If we can capture the Form of ones and zeros in a nonbiological medium—say, on a computer disk—why do we need the body's superfluous flesh? Whether the enabling assumptions for this conception of information occur in information theory, cybernetics, or popular science books such as Mind Children, their appeal is clear. Information viewed as pattern and not tied to a particular instantiation is information free to travel across time and space. Hackers are not the only ones who believe that information wants to be free. The great dream and promise of information is that it can be free from the material constraints that govern the mortal world. M arvin Minsky precisely expressed this dream when, in a recent lecture, he suggested it will soon be possible to extract human memories from the brain and import them, intact and unchanged, to computer disks.23 The clear implication is that if we can become the information we have constructed, we can achieve effective immortality. In the face of such a powerful dream, it can be a shock to remember that for information to exist, it must always be instantiated in a medium, whether that medium is the page from the Bell Laboratories Journal on which Shannon's equations are printed, the computer-generated topological maps used by the Human Genome Project, or the cathode ray tube on which virtual worlds are imaged. The point is not only that abstracting information from a material base is an imaginary act but also, and more fundamentally, that conceiving of information as a thing separate from the medium instantiating it is a prior imaginary act that constructs a holistic phenomenon as an information/matter duality.24 The chapters that follow will show what had to be elided, suppressed, and forgotten to make information lose its body. This book is a "rememory" in the sense of Toni Morrisons Beloved: putting back together parts that have lost touch with one another and reaching out toward a complexity too unruly to fit into disembodied ones and zeros. Serration, Skeuomorphs, and Conceptual Constellations The foregoing leads to a strategic definition of "virtuality." VirtualUy is the cultural perception that material objects are interpenetrated by informa- <<[ / Chap t er One tion patterns. The definition plays off die duality at die heart of the condition of virtuality—materiality on the one hand, information on the odier. Normally virtuality is associated with computer simulations Üiat put die body into a feedback loop with a computer-generated image. For example,: in virtual Ping-Pong, one swings apaddle wired into a computer, which calculates from the paddle's momentum and position where the ball would go. Instead of hitting a real ball, the player makes the appropriate motions with the paddle and watches the image of the ball on acomputer monitor. Thus the game takes place partly in real life (RL) andpartly in virtual reality (VR). Virtual reality technologies are fascinating because they make visually immediate the perception that a world of information exists parallel to the "real" world, the former intersecting the latter at many points and in many ways. Hence the definition s strategic quality, strategic because it seeks to connect virtual technologies with the sense, pervasive in the late twentieth century, Üiat all material objects are interpenetrated by flows of information, from DNA code to the global reach of the Worldwide Web. Seeing the world as an interplay between informational patterns and material objects is a historically specific construction that emerged in the wake of World War II.25 By 1948, the distinction had coalesced sufficientiy for Wiener to articulate it as a criterion that any adequate Üieory of materiality would be forced to meet. "Information is information, not matter or energy. No materialism which does not admit this can survive at the pres ent day."26 Wiener knew as well as anyone else that to succeed, this conception of information required artifacts that could embody it and make it real. When I say virtualify is a cultural perception, I do not mean that it is merely a psychological phenomenon. It is instantiated in an array of powerful technologies. The perception of virtuality facilitates die development of virtual technologies, and the technologies reinforce the perception. The feedback loops that run between technologies and perceptions, artifacts and ideas, have important implications for how historical change occurs . The development of cybernetics followed neither a Kuhnian model of incommensurable paradigms nor a Foucauldian model of sharp epistemic breaks.27 In the history of cybernetics, ideas were rarely made up out of whole cloth. Radier, they were fabricated in a pattern of overlapping replication and innovation, a pattern that I call "seriation" (a term appropriated from archaeological andiropology). A brief explanation may clarify diis concept. Widiin archaeological andiropology, changes in artifacts are customarily mapped dirough seriation charts. One constructs a seriation chart by parsing an artifact as a set of attributes Üiat change over time. Supposea researcher wants to construct a seriation chart for lamps. Akey attribute is Toward Embodied Virtuality / 15 the element that gives off light. The first lamps, dating from diousands of years ago, used wicks for this element. Later, widi the discovery of electricity, wicks gave way to filaments. The figures that customarily emerge from this kind of analysis are shaped like a tiger s iris—narrow at the top when an attribute first begins to be introduced, with a bulge in the middle during the heyday of the attribute, and tapered off at the bottom as the shift to a new model is completed. On a seriation chart for lamps, a line drawn at 1890 would show die figure for wicks waxing large with die figure for filaments intersected at the narrow tip of the top end. Fifty years later, the wick figure would be tapering off, and the filament figure would be widening into its middle section. Considered as a set, the figures depicting changes in. the attributes of an artifact reveal patterns of overlapping innovatio'n and replication. Some attributes change from one model to the next, but others remain the same. As figure 1 illustrates, the conceptual shifts that took place during the de\ elopment of cybernetics display a sériatedpattern reminiscent of material changes in artifacts. Conceptual fields evolve similarly to material culture, in part because concept and artifact engage each otiier in continuous feedback loops. An artifact materially expresses the concept it embodies, but die process of its construction is far from passive. A glitch has to be fixed, a material exhibits unexpected properties, an emergent behavior surfaces—any of these challenges can give rise to a new concept, which results in another generation of artifact, which leads to the development of still odier concepts. The reasoning suggests that we should be able to trace the development of a conceptual field by using a seriation chart analogous to the se nation charts used for artifacts. In the course of the Macy Conferences, certain ideas came to be associated with each other. Through a cumulative process that continued across several years of discussions, these ideas were seen as mutually entailing each other until, like love and marriage, they were viewed by the participants as naturally going together. Such a constellation is the conceptual entity corresponding to an artifact, possessing an internal coherence that defines it as an operational unit. Its formation marks the beginning of a period; its disassembly and reconstruction signal the transition to a different penod. Indeed, periods are recognizable as such largely because constellations possess diis coherence. Rarely is a constellation discarded wholesale Rather, some of the ideas composing it are discarded, others are modified, and new ones are introduced. Like die attributes composing an artifact, the ideas in a constellation change in a patchwork pattern of old and new. i! P iljl llj. L~J T3 O ■c S3 en a o •J3 s 3 cd , EF Is O OJ 3 -c 5 To ward Embodied Vlrtualtty / 17 Here I want to introduce another term from archaeological anthropology. A skeuomorph is a design feature that is no longer functional in itself but that refers back to a feature that was functional at an earlier time. The dashboard of my Toyota Camry, for example, is covered by vinyl molded to simulate stitching. The simulated stitching alludes back to a fabric that was m fact stitched, although the vinyl "stitching" is formed by an injection mold. Skeuomorphs visibly testify to the social or psychological necessity for innovation to be tempered by replication. Like anachronisms, their pejorative first cousins, skeuomorphs are not unusual. On the contrary, they are so deeply characteristic of the evolution of concepts and artifacts that it takes a great deal of conscious effort to avoid them. At SIGGRAPH, the annual computer trade show where dealers come to hawk their wares, hard and soft, there are almost as many skeuomorphs as morphs. The complex psychological functions a skeuomorph performs can be illustrated by an installation exhibited at SIGGRAPH J93. Called the "Catholic Turing Test," the simulation invited the viewer to make a confession by choosing selections from the video screen; it even had a bench on which the viewer could kneel.28 On one level, the installation alluded to the triumph of science over religion, for the role of divinely authorized interrogation and absolution had been taken over by a machine algorithm. On another level the installation pointed to the intransigence of conditioned behavior, for the machines form and function were determined by its religious predecessor. Like a Janus figure, the skeuomorph looks to past and future, simultaneously reinforcing and undermining both. It calls into a play a psychodynamic that finds the new more acceptable when it recalls the old that it is in the process of displacing and finds the traditional more comfortable when it is presented in a context that reminds us we can escape from it into the new. In the history of cybernetics, skeuomorphs acted as threshold devices, smoothing the transition between one conceptual constellation and another. Homeostasis, a foundational concept during the first wave, functioned during the second wave as a skeuomorph. Although homeostasis remained an important concept in biology, by about 1960 it bad ceased to be an initiating premise in cybernetics. Instead, it performed the work of a gesture or an allusion used to authenticate new elements in the emerging constellation of reflexivity. At the same time, it also exerted an inertia! pull on the new elements, limiting how radically they could transform the constellation. A similar phenomenon appears in the transition from die second to the third wave. Reflexivity, the key concept of the second wave, is displaced in iS/C/jQprerOne the third wave by emergence. Like homeostasis, reflexivity does not altogether disappear but lingers on as an allusion that authenticates new elements. It performs a more complex role tiian mere nostalgia, however, for it also leaves its imprint on the new constellation of virtuality. The complex story formed by diese seriated changes is told in chapters 3,6, and 9, which discuss cybernetics, autopoiesis, and artificial life, respectively. I have already suggested that living in a condition of virtuality implies we participate in the cultural perception that information and materiality are conceptually distinct and that information is in some sense more essential, more important, and more fundamental than materiality. The preamble to "A Magna Carta for die Knowledge Age," a document coauthored by Alvin Toffler at the behest of Newt Gingrich, concisely sums up the matter by proclaiming, "The central event of the 20 th century is the overthrow of matter."29 To see how this view began to acquire momentum, let us briefly flash back to 1948 when Claude Shannon, a brilliant theorist, working at Bell Laboratories, defined a mathematical quantity he called information and proved several important theorems concerning it.30 Information Theory and Everyday Life Shannon s theory defines information as a probability function with no dimensions, no materiality, and no necessary connectionwidi meaning. It is a pattern, not a presence. {Chapter 3 talks about the development of information theory in more detail, and the relevant equations can be found there.) The theory makes a strong distinction between message and signal. Lacan to the contrary, a message does not always arrive at its destination. In information theoretic terms, no message is ever sent. What is sent is a signal. Only when die message is encoded in a signal for transmission through a medium—for example, when ink is printed on paper or when electrical pulses are sent racing along telegraph wires—does it assume material form. The very definition of "information," then, encodes the distinction between materiality and information that was also becoming important in molecular biology during this period.31 Why did Shannon define information as a pattern ? The transcripts of die Macy Conferences indicate tiiat die choice was driven by the twin engines of reliable quantification and theoretical generality. As we shall see in chap-, ter 3, Shannons formulation was not die only proposal on the table. Donald MacKay, a British researcher, argued for an alternative definition Üiat finked information with change in a receivers mindset and dius widi meaning.32To be workable, MacKay*s definition required that psychology Toward Embodied Virtuality / \ ated. Not everyone agreed this move was a good idea, however, despite its $<"' theoretical power. As Carolyn M arvin notes, a decontextualized construc-.?", tion of information has important ideological implications, including ■Jgf an Anglo-American ethnocentrism that regards digital information as more important than more context-bound analog information.33 Even in Shannons day, malcontents grumbled that divorcing information from .■f%*- context and thus from meaning had made the theory so narrowly formal-iqe? ized that it was not useful as a general theory of communication. Shannon yg|' himself frequendy cautioned that the theory was meant to apply only to 53p; certain technical situations, not to communication in general.34 In other ggjfc- circumstances, the theory might have become a dead end, a victim of its own excessive formalization and decontextualization. But hot in the post-World War II era. The time was ripe for theories that reified information into a free-floating, decontextualized, quantifiable entity that could serve as the master key unlocking secrets of life and death. Technical artifacts help to make an information theoretic view a part of everyday fife. From ATMs to the Internet, from the morphing programs used in Terminator II to the sophisticated visualization programs used to guide microsurgeries, information is increasingly perceived as interpenetrating material forms. Especially for users who may not know die material processes involved, the impression is created that pattern is predominant over presence. From here it is a small step to perceiving information as more mobile, more important, more essential than material forms. When this impression becomes part of your cultural mindset, you have entered the condition of virtuality. U.S. culture at present is in a highly heterogeneous state regarding die condition of virtuality. Some high-tech preserves (elite research centers 3" 20 / Chapter One such as Xerox Palo Alto Research Center and Bell Laboratories, most major research universities, and hundreds of corporations) have so thoroughly incorporated virtual technologies into their infrastructures that information is as much as part of the researchers' mindscapes as is electric lighting or synthetic plastics.35 The thirty million Americans who are plugged into the Internet increasingly engage in virtual experiences enacting a division between the materialbody that exits on one side of the screen and the computer simulacra that seem to create a space inside the screen.36 Yet for millions more, virtuality is not even a cloud on the horizon of their everyday worlds. Within a global context, the experience of virtuality becomes more exotic by several orders of magnitude. It is a useful corrective to remember that 70 percent of the world's population has never made a telephone call. Nevertheless, I think it is a mistake to underestimate the importance of virtuality, for it wields an influence altogether disproportionate to the number of people immersed in it. It is no accident that the condition of virtuality is most pervasive and advanced where the centers of power are most concentrated. Theorists at the Pentagon, for example, see it as the theater in which future wars willhe fought They argue that coming conflicts willbe decided not so much by overwhelming force as by "neocortical warfare," waged through the techno-sciences of information.37 If we want to contest what these technologies signify we need histories that show the erasures that went into creating the condition of virtuality, as well as visions arguing for the importance of embodiment. Once we understand the complex interplays that went into creating the condition of virtuality, we can demystify our progress toward virtuality and see it as the result of historically specific negotiations rather than of the irresistible force of technological determinism. At the same time, we can acquire resources with which to rethink the assumptions underlying virtuality, and we can recover a sense of the virtual that fully recognizes the importance of the embodied processes constituting the lifeworld of human beings.38 In the phrase "virtual bodies," 1 intend to allude to the historical separation between information and materiality and also to recall the embodied processes that resist this division. Virtuality and Contemporary Literature I have already suggeste d that one way to think about the organization of tins bookis chronologically, since it follows the three waves of seriated changes in cybernetics. In this organization of the textual body, each of die three chronologically arranged divisions has an anchoring chapter discussing the scientific theories: on the Macy Conferences (chapter 3); on autopoiesis To ward Embodied Virtuality / z I (chapter 6); and on artificial life (chapter 9), respectively. Each section also has a chapter showing specific applications of die theories: the work of Norbert Wiener (chapter 4); tape-recording technologies (chapter 8); and human-computer interactions'(chapter 10). Also included in each of the three divisions are chapters on literary texts contemporaneous with the development of the scientific theories and cybernetic technologies (chapters 5,7, and 10). I have selected literary texts that were clearly influenced by the development of cybernetics. Nevertheless, I want to resist the idea that influence flows from science into literature. The cross-currents are considerably more complex than a one-way model of influence would allow In the Neummancer trilogy, for example, William Gibson's vision of cyberspace had a considerable effect on the development of three-dimen-'«" sional virtual reality imaging software,39 A second way to think about the organization of How We Became jfliSrr Posthuman is narratively. In this arrangement, the three divisions proceed ! "^t; n°tso much through chronological progression as through the narrative fcs.* strands about the (lost) body of information, the cyborg body, and the |/5jt_ posthuman body. Here the literary texts playacentral role, for they display the p assageways th at enabled stories coming out of narrowly focused SCien- CSfc Sir tiEc theories to circulate more widely through the body politic. Manyofthe scientists understood very well that their negotiations involved premises broader than the formal scope of their theories strictly allowed. Because of the wedge that has been driven between science and values in U.S. culture, their statements on these wider implications necessarily occupied the position of ad hocpronouncements rather than "scientific" arguments. Shaped by different conventions, the literary texts range across a spectrum of issues that the scientific texts only fitfully illuminate, including the ethical and cultural implications of cybernetic technologies.40 Literary texts áre not, of course, merely passive conduits. They actively ■shape what the technologies mean and what the scientific theories signify m cultural contexts. They also embody assumptions similar to those that permeated the scientific theories at critical points. These assumptions included the idea that stability is a desirable social goal, that human beings md human social organizations are self-organizing structures, and that torm is more essential dian matter. The scientific tíieories used these assumptions as enabling presuppositions that helped to guide inquiry and shape research agendas. As the chapters on the scientific developments will show, culture circulates through science no less than science circulates through culture. The heart that keeps tins circulatory system flowing is narrative—narratives about culture, narratives within culture, narratives 2 2 / Chapter One about science, narratives witliin science. In my account of the scientific developments, I have sought to emphasize the role that narrative plays in articulating the posthuman as a technical-cultural concept. For example, chapter 4, on Wiener s scientific work, is interlaced with analyses of die narratives he tells to resolve conflicts between cybernetics and Uberal humanism, and chapter 9, on artificial life, is organized by looking at this area of research as a narrative field. What does this emphasis on narrative have to do with virtual bodies? Following Jean-Francois Lyotard, many tiieorists of postmodemity accept that die postmodern condition implies an incredulity toward metanarrative.41 As we have seen, one way to construct virtuality is the way that Moravec and Minsky do—as a metanarrative about die transformation of the human into a disembodied posthuman. I think we should be skeptical about this metanarrative. To contest it, I want to use the resources of narrative itself, particularly its resistance to various forms of abstraction and disembodiment. With its chronological thrust, polymorphous digressions, located actions, and personified agents, narrative is a more embodied form of discourse than is analytically driven systems theory. By turning the technological determinism of bodiless information, the cyborg, and the post-human into narratives about the negotiations that took place between particular people at particular times and places, I hope to replace a teleology of disembodiment with liistorically contingent stories about contests between competing factions, contests whose outcomes were fár from obvious. Many factors affected the outcomes, from the needs of emerging technologies for reliable quantification to the personalities of the people involved. Though overdeterrnined, the disembodiment of information was not inevitable, any more than it is inevitable we continue to accept the idea that we are essentially informational patterns. In this regard, the literary texts do more than explore die cultural implications of scientific theories and technological artifacts. Embedding ideas and artifacts in the situated specificities of narrative, the literary texts give these ideas and artifacts a local habitation and a name through discursive formulations whose effects are specific to diat textual body. In exploring diese effects, I want to demonstrate, on multiple levels and in many ways, that abstract pattern can never fully capture the embodied actuality, unless it is as prolix and noisy as die body itself. Shifting the emphasis from technological determinism to competing, contingent, embodied narratives about die scientific developments is one way to liberate the resources of narrative so diat diey work agains t the grain of abstraction running through die teleology of disembodiment. Anodier way is to read literary texts along- Toward Embodied. Virtuality /[23 side scientific theories. In articulating die connections that run tiirough these two discursive realms, I want to entangle abstract form and material particularity such that the reader will find it increasingly difficult to maintain the perception Üiat they are separate and discrete entities. If, for cultural and historical reasons, I cannot start from a holistic perspective, I hope to mix things up enough so that the emphasis falls not on the separation of matter and information but on their inextricably complex com-poundings and entwinings. For this project, the literary texts with Üieir fashionings of embodied particularities are crucial. The first literary text I discuss in detail is Bernard Wolfe's Limbo, ^Written in the 1950s, Limbo has become something of an underground classic. It imagines a postwar society in which an ideology, Immob, has developed; the ideology equates aggression with the ability to move. "Pacifism equals passivity," Immob slogans declare. True believers volunteer to banish their , mobility {and presumably their aggression) by having amputations, which . have come to be regarded as signifiers of social power and influence. These amputees get bored with lying around, however, so a vigorous cybernetics industry has grown up to replace their missing limbs. As this brief summary suggests, Limbo is deeply influenced by cybernetics. But the technical achievements of cybernetics are not at the center of the text. Rather, they serve as a springboard to explore a variety of social, political, and psychological issues, ranging from the perceived threat that women's active sexuality poses for Immob men to global East-West tensions that explode into : another world war at the end of the text. Aldiough it is unusually didactic, Limbo does more than discuss cybernetics; it engages a full range of rhetorical and narrative devices that work botii with and against its explicit pronouncements. The narrator seems only partially able to control his verbally extravagant narrative. There are, I will argue, deep connections between the narrator s struggle to maintain control of the narrative and the threat to "natural" body boundaries posed by the cybernetic paradigm. Limbo interrogates a dynamic that also appears in Norbert Wieners work—the intense anxiety that erupts when the perceived boundaries of the body are breached. In addition, it illustrates how die body of die text gets implicated in the processes used to represent bodies within die text. Several Philip K. Dick novels written from 1962 to 1966 (including ■We Can Build You, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Dr, Blood-money, and Ubik) provide anodier set of texts through which die multiple implications of die postiiuman can be explored.43 Chronologically and tiie-matically, Dicks novels of simulation cross die scientific theory of au-topoiesis. Like Maturana, Varela, and other scientific researchers in die 2 e, / Chapter One second wave of cybernetics, Dick is intensely concerned with epistemolog-ical questions and their relation to the cybernetic paradigm. The problem of where to locate the observer—in or out of the system being observed?— is conflated in his fiction with how to determine whether a creature is android or human. For Dick, the android is deeply bound up with the gender politics of his male protagonists' relations with female characters, who ambiguously figure either as sympathetic, life-giving "dark-haired girls" or emotionally cold, life-threatening schizoid women. Already fascinated with epistemological questions tiiat reveal how shaky our constructions of reality can be, Dick is drawn to cybernetic themes because he understands that cybernetics radically destabilizes the ontological foundations of what counts as human. The gender politics he writes into his novels illustrate the potent connections between cybernetics and contemporary understandings of race, gender, and sexuality. The chapter on contemporary speculative fictions constructs a semiotics of virtualiry by showing how the central concepts of information and materiality can be mapped onto a multilayered semiotic square. The tutor texts for this analysis, winch include Snow Crash, Blood Music, Galatea 2,2, and Terminal Games, indicate the range of what counts as the posthuman in the age of virtualiry, from neural nets to hackers, biologically modified humans, and entities who live only in computer simulations.44 In following the construction of the posthuman in these texts, I will argue that older ideas are rein-scribed as well as contested. As was the case for the scientific models, change occurs in a seriated pattern of overlapping innovation and replication. I hope that this book will demonstrate, once again, how crucial it is to recognize interrelations between different ldnds of cultural productions, specifically literature and science. The stories I tell here—how information lost its body, how the cyborg was created as a cultural icon and technological artifact, and how humans became posthumans—and the waves of historical change I chart would not have the same resonance or breadth if they had been pursued only through literary texts or only through scientific discourses. The scientific texts often reveal, as literature cannot, the foundational assumptions that gave theoretical scope and artifactual efficacy to aparticular approach. The literary texts often reveal, as scientific work cannot, the complex cultural, social, and representational issues tied up widi conceptual shifts and technological innovations. From my point of view, literature and science as an area of specialization is more timnasubset of cultural studies or a minor activity in a literature department. It is a way of understanding ourselves as embodied creatures living witiiin and through embodied worlds and embodied words. ..................C.,/)..o..p..i..e.r....r.w.o. VIRTUAL BODIES AND FLICKERING SIGNIFIERS We might regard patterning or predictability as the very essence and raison d'etre of communication,.. communication is the creation of redundancy or patterning. Gregory Bareson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind The development of information theory in the wake of World-War II left as its legacy a conundrum: even though information provides the basis for much of contemporary U.S. society, it has been constructed never to be present in itself. In information theoretic terms, as we saw in chapter 1, information is conceptually distinct from the markers that embody it, for example newsprint or electromagnetic waves. It is a pattern rather than a presence, defined by the probability distribution of the coding elements composing the message. If information is pattern, then noninformation should be the absence of pattern, that is, randomness. This commonsense expectation ran into unexpected complications when certain developments within information theory implied that information could be equated with randomness as well as with pattern.1 Identifying information with both pattern and randomness proved to be a powerful paradox, leading to the realization that in some instances, an infusion of noise into a system can cause it to reorganize at a higher level of complexity,2 Within such a system, pattern and randomness are bound together in a complex dialectic that makes them not so much opposites as complements or supplements to one another. Each helps to define the other; each.contributes to the flow of information through the system. Were this dialectical relation only an aspect of the formal theory, its impact might well be limited to the problems of maximizing channel utility and minimizing noise that concern electrical engineers. Through die development of information technologies, however, the interplay between pattern and randomness became a feature of everyday life. As Friedrich Kittler has demonstrated in Discourse Networks 1800/1900, media come into existence when technologies of inscription intervene between die hand gripping die pen or die mouth framing the sounds and the production