HOW     WE BECAME POSTHUMAN
V i r t u a I   B o d i e s in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics
N .    K AT HER! NE HAYLES
The University of Chicago Press Chicago  &- London
IVA
x  /  A c/í n o vW e dgm e n is
bert Wiener, and the Play of Metaphor," from History of the Human Sciences 3 (1990): 212-28 (appearing in revised from as aportion of chapter 4). Johns Hopkins University Press has graciously allowed me to reprint three articles appearing in Configurations: A Journal ofLiterature, 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 Fosthuman 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 slighdy 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 slighdy revised form as chapter 6).
Finally, my greatest debt is to my family, who have listened patiendy 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 gu 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 an-
other 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 tmthfully. 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 intel-
= ligent human, your failure proves, Turing argued, that machines can think
i ^ Here, at the inaugural moment of the computer age, the erasure of em-
bodiment is performed so that "intelligence" becomes a property of the
* - formal manipulation of symbols rather than enaction in the human life-"i rJ 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, re-1"tCt searchers performed again and again the erasure of embodiment at the ■f ;"/       heart of die Turing test. All that mattered was the formal generation and
manipulation of informational patterns. Aiding this process was a deftni-||r; tion of information, formalized by Claude Shannon and Norbert Wiener, if,"        tbat conceptualized information as an entity distinct from the substrates
carrying it. From this formulation, it was a small step to drink of information \ -J|       as akind of bodiless fluid diat could flowbetween different substrates with-
out loss of meaning or form. Writing nearly four decades after Turing, Hans
x i i  / 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 showthat machines can perform the thinking 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 correctiy 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, concentratinguponthe 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 oversaving in the coercive order of ahomophobic societywith the power to enforce its will upon the bodies of its citizens.
Prologue  / niii
The perceptiveness of Hodges s biography notwithstanding, he gives a strange interpretation of Turing's inclusion of gender in the 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 diat 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 caring 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 transforming the 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 castmguishing 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 die subject into a cyborg, for the enacted and represented bodies are brought into conjunction through the technology that connects them. If you distinguish correcdy which is the man and which the woman, you in effect reunite die 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 make. 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 nonsignifying with respect to identity canbeseenasan 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 univocality 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 flunk 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 earlystage 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, the important intervention 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 e mbodied entities that you cannot see, you have already become posthuman.
57.
1. Alan M.Turing, "Computing Machinery and Intelligence," Mind 54(1950);433-
2. Andrew Hodges, Alan Turing: The Enigma of Intelligence (London: Unwin, 1985), pp. 415-25. I am indebted to Carol Wald for her insights into the relation between gender and artificial intelligence, d)e subject of her dissertation, and to her other writings on this question. 1 also owe her thanks for pointing out to me that Andrew Hodges dismisses Turing's use of gender as a logical flawin his analysis ofthe Turing text.
it t ~\
...............C.ft..a.p../..e..r.....Q..fi..e
TOWARD   EMBODIED VIRTUALITY
We need-first to understand thatthe humanform—including human desire and all its external representations—may be changing radically, and thus must be re-visioned. We need to understand that five hundred years ofhumanism may be comingtoanendas humanism transforms itself into something that we must helplessly callposl-liumanism.
Ihab Hassan, "Prometheus as Performer: Towards a Fosthumamst Culture?"
This book began with a roboticists dream that struck me as a nightmare. 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 die end ofthe operation, the cranial cavity is empty, and the patient, now inhabiting the metallic body of the computer, wakens to find his consciousness exacdythe 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 dunk 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 thepresent cultural momentis die belief thatin-formation can circulate unchanged among different material substrates. It
2 /  Chapter 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, inforrnation theory, autopoiesis, computer simulation, and cognitive science. Slowly this unrulymass of material began taking shape as tiiree 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 m aterial 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 tiiree 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 minking 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 the "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 fist 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 posdiuman 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 posthuman view considers consciousness, re-
Toward Embodied V i rt u a I i t y   / 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 posthuman 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 dmt began before we were born. Fourth, and most important, by these and other means, the posthuman view configures human being so that it can be seamlessly articulated with intelligent machines. In the posthuman, diere 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 the 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 ofothers, 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 selfisproctaced by market relations and does not in fact predate them. This paradox (as Macpherson 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 there is an agency, desire, or will belonging to the self and clearly distinguished from die "wills of odiers" is undercut in die posdiuman, for the posdiumans collective heterogeneous quality implies a distributed cognition located in disparate parts diat may be in only tenuous
4  / Chapter 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 posthuman 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 die cybernetic aspect of the posdiuman, 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 die 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 die presence of nonbiological components.
What to make of tiiis shift from the human to the posthuman, which both evolces terror and excites pleasure? The liberal humanist subject has, of course, been cogentiy 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 tiiat the erasure of embodiment is a feature common to both the liberal humanist subject and the cybernetic posthuman. Identified with die rational mind, the liberal subj ect possessed a body but was not usually represented as being a body. Only because die 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
TowardEmbadied Vi r tuatity  / 5
difference, including sex, race, and ethnicity.8 Gillian Brown, in her influ- . ential study of the relation between humanism and anorexia, shows that the anoretics struggle to "decrement" the body is possible precisely because the body is understood as an object for control and mastery rather than as an mtrinsicpart of die self. Quoting an anoretics remark—"You make out of your bodyyourvery own kingdom wbere you are 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 talcing the self-possession implied by liberal 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 die extent that the posthuman constructs embodiment as the instantiation of thought/information, it continues the liberal tradition rather than disrupts it.
In tracing diese 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 die 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 Kroker has called die "flesh-eating 90s."11 If my nightmare is a culture inhabited by posthumans who regard tiieir bodies as'fashion accessories rather tiian 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 One
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 "posthuman." Some of the historical processes leading to this transformation are documentedhere, and in this sense the book makes good on its title. Yet my argument will repeatedly demonstrate that these 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 shifting configurations that vary witii historically specific contexts. Given these complexities, the past tense in the title—"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 a posthuman collectivity, an "I" transformed into the "we" of autonomous agents operating together to make a self. The infectious power of tiiis way of thinking gives "we" a performative dimension. People become posthuman because diey think they are postiiuman. In anodier sense "we," like "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 postiiuman 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." Altiiough the progression is chronological, this book is not meant to be a history of cybernetics. Many figures not discussed here played important roles in that
Toward Embodied Virtual ity   / y
history, and I have not attempted to detail dieir contributions. Ratiier, my selection of dieories 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, tookhomeostasis as a central concept; the second, going roughly from 1960 to 1980, revolved around reflexivity; and the th i rd, stretching from 1980 to the present, highlights virtuality. Let me turn now to a brief 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 fLmctioning 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 Neumanns specialty), and a visionary who could articulate the larger implications of the cybernetic paradigm and make clear its cosmic significance (Wieners 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 to dismantie 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 ah'gning cybernetics witii liberal humanism, he was following a strain of diought that, since the Enlightenment, had argued tiiathuman beings could be trusted witii 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, not subvert it. The point was less to show that man was a machine than to demonstrate that a machine could function like a man.
Yet die cybernetic perspective had a certain inexorable logic diat, especially when fed by wartime hysteria, also worked to undermine the very lib-
fl  /  C/iapfer 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.14 Traditionally, homeostasis had been understood as the ability of living organisms to maintain steady states when they are buffeted by ficHe environments. When the temperature soars, sweat pours out of the human body so diat 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, thatthe feedback loop was expHcidy theorized as aflowofinforma-tion. Cybernetics was born when iiineteenth-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. Afewyearsagolco4aught,withaphilosopherandaphysicist, a course on reflexivity. As we discussed reflexivity in the writings of Aristode, Fichte, Kierkegaard, GodeL 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 Godel invented a method of coding that allowed statements of number dieory 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 tookdiatwhich is presumed to generate the picture—the sketching hand—and made it part of die picture it draws. When Jorge Luis Borges in "The Circular Ruins" imagines a narrator who creates a student through his dreaming only to discover diat he himself is being dreamed by another, die system generating a re ality is shown to be part of the reality it m akes. As these examples illustrate, reflexivity has subversive effects because it confuses andentangles
111
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I*
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 Latour's 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 die system being observed. Altíiough 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. Widi some exceptions, deeper formulations of the problem failed to coalesce during the M acy discussions.
The most notable exception turned out to hurt more dian it helped. Lawrence Kubie, a hard-line Freudian psychoanalyst, introduced a reflexive perspective when he argued diat every utterance is doubly encoded,
to  /  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, tiiis 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 them shying away from reflexivity, preferring to shift the conversation onto more comfortable ground. Nevertheless, die idea hung in the air, and a few key tíiinkers—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. 1960, when yon Foerster wrote die first of die essays diat 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 the 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 tie 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 tiiat 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 witii 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-
11
Toward Embodied Virtualiri/ /
ment. We do not see a world "out diere" 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 die 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 humanbe-ings, 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 thejury is still out an 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
12  /  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 diat 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 supplementarity, 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 materiality/information 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. Irreverentiy, I think of diem as the Platonic backhand and forehand.
The Platonic backhand works by inferring from the world's 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 die 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 Uius make dieir play in
ISP
Toward Embodied Virtuatity  / 13
opposite directions. The backhand goes from noisy multiplicity to reductive simplicity, whereas the forehand swings from simplicity to mulilicity. They share a common ideology—privileging the abstract as the Real and downplaying the importance of material instantiation. When diey 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 die 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.
Sanation, Skeuomorphs, and Conceptual Constellations
The foregoing leads to a strategic definition of "virtuality." Virtuality is the cidtural perception that material objects are interpenetrated by informa-
(<}  / CftapferOne
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 diat 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 andposition 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 takesplacepartlyin 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, die 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, tiiat all material objects are interpenetrated by flows of information, from DNA code to the global reach of the World Wide 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 dieory 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 virtualiiy 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 tiiat change over time. Suppose a researcher wants to construct a seriation chart for lamps. A key attribute is
Toward Embodied Virtuality / 15 the element that gives off light. The first lamps, dating from diousands of years ago, used wicks for diis element. Later, witii the discovery of electricity, wicks gave way to filaments. The figures diat customarily emerge from this kind of analysis are shaped like a tiger's iris—-narrow at the top when an attribute firs t begins to be introduced, with abulge 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 fine 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 development of cybernetics display a seriated pattern reminiscent of mate-nal changes in artifacts. Conceptual fields evolve similarly to material culture, in part because concept and artifact engage each odier in continuous feedback loops. An artifact materially expresses the concept it embodies, but the 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 seriation charts used for artifacts.
In die course of the Macy C onferences, certain ideas came to be associated with each odier. 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 partici-; pan ts 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 ape-nod; its disassembly and reconstruction signal the transition to a different period. 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.
Toward Embodied Virtuality  / 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 in 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 '93. Called the "Cadiolic Turing Test," the simulation invited the viewer to make a confession by choosing selections from the video screen; it even had a bench on winch 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 undemming 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 die new.
Iu the history of cybernetics, skeuomorphs acted as threshold devices, smoothing die transition between one conceptual constellation and an-odier. 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 inertial pull on the new elements, limiting how radically diey could transform the constellation.
A similar phenomenon appears in the transition from die second to the thud wave. Reflexivity, the key concept of the second wave, is displaced in
18   /  Chapter One
the third wave by emergence. Like homeostasis, reflexivity does not alto-gedier disappear but lingers on as an allusion that audienticates new elements. It performs a more complex role tiian mere nostalgia, however, for it also leaves its imprint on die new constellation of virtuality. The complex story formed by diese seriated changes is told in chapters 3,6, and 9, winch discuss cybernetics, autopoiesis, and artificial life, respectively.
I have already suggested tiiat living in a condition of virtuality implies we participate in the cultural perception diat 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 tiieoretic 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 diat 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 tiiat linked information widi change in a receivers mindset and tiius widi meaning.32To be workable, MacKay s definition required that psychologi-
es ■ '
p& Toward Embodied Virtuality  / 13
Ical states be quantifiable and measurable—an accomplishment diat only now appears distantly possible widi such imaging technologies as positron-errussion tomography and diat certainly was not in reach in die immediate post-World War II years. It is no mystery why Shannon's definition rather than MacKay's became die industry standard.
Shannon's approach had other advantages that turned out to incur large : v*    (and mounting) costs when his premise interacted widi certain predisposi-
Ihoris already at work within the culture. Abstracting information from a material base meant that information could become free-floating, unaf-fecled by changes in context. The technical leverage tins move gained was considerable, for by formalizing information into a mathematical function, Shannon was able to develop theorems, powerful in their generality, that hold true regardless of the medium in which the information is instantiated. Not everyone agreed this move was a good idea, however, despite its H 3="'   theoretical power. As Carolyn Marvin notes, a decontextualized constructs?",*; bon of information has important ideological implications, including in Anglo-American ethnocentrism that regards digital information as ir-i": t.more important than more context-bound analog information.33 Even in T« Shannons day, malcontents grumbled that divorcing information from p|j|~'-i context and thus from meaning had made the theory so narrowly formal-: t     : 'zed that it was not useful as a general theory of communication. Shannon
■ fafe-i'■ liunself frequendy cautioned that the theory was meant to apply only to s ji^r. certain technical situations, not to communication in general.34 In other j |fjjj&:- circumstances, the theory might have become a dead end, a victim of its ^1 Bill-" nwn excesswe formalization and decontextualization. But hot in the
*ISf^; post-World War II era. The time was ripe for theories that reified informa-
|j(||fyVhon into a free-floating, decontextualized, quantifiable entity that could , III;, serveasthemasterkeyurdocldngsecretsoflifeanddeath. i Technical artifacts help to make an information theoretic view a part of
'veryday fife. From ATMs to the Internet, from the morphing programs :. used in Terminator II to the sophisticated visualization programs used to
W&i aUide microsurgeries, information is increasingly perceived as interpene-
■ ?f! *-' Lra^gmatsrialforms.Especiallyforuserswhomaynotknowdiematerial Sftr processes involved, the impression is created that pattern is predominant
■ "        ^ver Presence- From here it is a small step to perceiving information as - S^' triore mobile, more important, more essential than material forms. When
: III*' ^ imPression becomes part of your cultural mindset, you have entered
■ SmIc     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
54
II:
If
ill :
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 syndietie plastics.35 The thirty million Americans who are plugged into the Internet increasingly engage in virtual experiences enacting a division between the material body 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 ofthe 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 willbe fought They argue diat 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 ofthe 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 ofthe embodied processes constituting the lifeworld of human beings.38 In the phrase "virtual bodies," I 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 diat one way to diink about the organization of diis book is chronologically, since it follows the three waves of seriated changes in cybernetics. In diis organization of the textual body, each of die three chronologically arranged divisions has an anchoring chapter discussing the scientific theories: on die Macy Conferences (chapter 3); on autopoiesis
■
To ward Embodied Virtuality  / 21
(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 ofthe three divisions are chapters on literary texts contemporaneous with the development of the scientific tiieories 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 Neuromancer trilogy, for example, William Gibson's vision of (cyberspace had a considerable effect on the development of three-dimensional virtual reality imaging software.39
A second way to think about the organization of How We Became i 1 Forthuman is narratively. In this arrangement, the three divisions proceed "^t-f not so mueh through chronological progression as through the narrative -   strands about the (lost) body of information, the cyborg body, and the ,3" ^ posthuman body. Here the literary texts play a central role, for they display 7 the p assageways th at enabled stories coming out of narrowly focused scien-* * tific theories to circulate more widely through the body politic. Manyofthe g^^'scientists understood very well that their negotiations involved premises Wsm broader than the formal scope of their theories stricdy allowed. Because of g^'the wedge that has been driven between science and values in U. S. culture, Is.their statements on these wider implications necessarily occupied the posi-^gtionof adhocpronouncements rather than "scientific" arguments. Shaped ^hy different conventions, the literary texts range across a spectrum of issues 'fhat the scientific texts only fitfully illuminate, including the ethical and cul-RMral implications of cybernetic technologies.40
•  Literary texts are not, of course, merely passive conduits. They actively Shape what the technologies mean and what the scientific theories signify tebi cultural contexts. They also embody assumptions similar to those that lp|ermeated the scientific theories at critical points. These assumptions in-gphided the idea that stability is a desirable social goal, diat human beings gpnd human social organizations are self-organizing structures, and that j§gf9rm is more essential than matter. The scientific dieories used these as-^J^P4*0118 35 enabling presuppositions that helped to guide inquiry and |hape research agendas. As the chapters on the scientific developments, glpill show, culture circulates through science no less than science circulates p|lrougn culture. The heart diat keeps diis circulatory system flowing is "fixative—narratives about culture, narratives within culture, narratives
22  /Chapter One
aboutscience, narratives witliin science. In my account of the scientific developments, I have sought to emphasize die role that narrative plays in articulating the posdiuman 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 liberal 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 postmodernity accept diat die postmodern condition implies an incredulity toward metanarra-tive.41 As we have seen, one way to construct virtuality is the way diat 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 far 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 tíiis 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 die 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-
m
I- _ F'. Toward Embodied Virtualiti/  / 23
- side scientific theories. In articulating die connections that run dirough t these two discursive realms, I want to entangle abstract form and material s I . particularity such that the reader will find it increasingly difficult to main-I -n tain the perception diat they are separate and discrete entities. If, for cul-[ f.. tural and historical reasons, I cannot start from a holistic perspective, I t f:.. hope to mix things up enough so that the emphasis falls not on the separa-I - ■: tion of matter and information but on their inextricably complex com-I poundings and entwinings. For this project, the literary texts with dieir '     -   fashionings of embodied particularities are crucial.
■ £ ThefirstliterarytextIdiscussmdetauisBemardWolfesLimio.42Writ--.  ten 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 B',J- sj:. have come to be regarded as signiflers of social power and influence. These
■ amputees get bored with lying around, however, so a vigorous cybernetics Jjitfp if industry has grown up to replace their missing limbs. As this brief summary
!-      suggests, Limbo is deeply influenced by cybernetics. But the technical iji-^IV 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 psycho-
I' '. V; logical issues, ranging from the perceived threat that women's active sexu-)S8$$lr aHty poses for Immob men to global East-West tensions that explode into fgjfa •' another world war at the end of the text. Aldiough it is unusually didactic, fes^ff Limbo does more than discuss cybernetics; it engages a full range of rhetor-■^'Hff ical and narrative devices that work botii with and against its explicit pro-rirc^f nouncements. The narrator seems only partially able to control his verbally '-^i-ii? | extravagant narrative. There are, I will argue, deep connections between 33$g.-' the narrators struggle to maintain control of the narrative and the threat to "natural" body boundaries posed by the cybernetic paradigm. Limbo in-.■ .■■; -   terrogates a dynamic that also appears in Norbert Wieners work—the in-■ =:' Z■': tense anxiety that erupts when the perceived boundaries of the body are ^'■f  breached. In addition, it illustrates how die body of die text gets implicated
in the processes used to represent bodies within die text, .sjjj!' ■■'      Several Philip K. Dick novels written from 1962 to 1966 (including ! ■  '.  We Can Build You, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Dr. Blood-I  money, and Ubik) provide anodier set of texts th rough which die m ultiple ; -". implicationsofdieposdiumancanbeexplored.43Chronologicallyanddie-■:. matically, Dicks novels of simulation cross die scientific dieory of au-
i topoiesis. Like Maturana, Varela, and other scientific researchers in die
24  /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 whedier a creature is android or human. For Dick, the android is deeply bound up with die 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-tLreatening 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 diat cybernetics radically destabilizes the oncological 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 virtuality by showing how the central concepts of information and materiality can be mapped onto a multilayered semiotic square. The tutor texts for this analysis, which include Snow Crash, Blood Music, Galatea 2,2, and Terminal Games, indicate the range of what counts as the posthuman in the age of virtuality, from neural nets to hackers, biologically modified humans, and entities who live only fn 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 kinds 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 tiirough scientific discourses. The scientific texts often reveal, as literature cannot, the foundational assumptions that gave theoretical scope and arufactual 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 Uian a subset of cultural studies or a minor activity in a literature department. It is a way of understanding ourselves as embodied creatures living witiiin and tiirough embodied worlds and embodied words.
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VIRTUAt BODIES AND   FLICKERING SIGNIFIERS
We might regard patterning orprcdictability as the very essence and raison d'etre of ;communication... communication is the creation of redundancy orpatterning.
■ Gregory Baresan, 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 nonfnformation 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 Lo one another. Each helps to define the other; each.contributes to the flow of information through the system.
Were tiiis 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, die interplay between pattern and randomness became a feature of everyday life. As Friedrich KiLtier 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