ENGL 668k: Digital Studies (Spring 2004)

"My Definition of Post-Human."
by Edmond Chang, Grade Six

I wanted to return to the discussion about Hayles and the notion of post-human, which seemed to give our class a great deal of consternation and discomfort. But we never really got off the ground, I don't think. As simple as this may be, I'd like to offer two possible views of the post-human.

I really don't think we are post-human quite yet. I guess I'm looking for a change signaled by bells and whistles (or beeps and whirs), a paradigm-shift of conspicuous proportion.

One way I see "us" (the pronoun needs unpacking since a great deal of post-humanity is inexorably linked to technology, cybernetics, and "information") as post-human only when technology becomes more than just a tool, when cybernetics is literally, physically, materially, biomechanically a reality. Post-human, in the first sense, is humanity blended, grafted, and symbiotically linked with technology. It is a world full of Six Million Dollar Men and Bionic Women. But it is a world where the novelty of implants, biomechanical limbs, cybernetic jacks, and nano-enhancements has worn off subsumed finally into the dominant imaginary. (Though I cannot help but think that for something to be post-human, it must always referent the human. A cyborg is half-machine and half-human, half-information and half-human, half-digital and half-analog.) I suppose the extreme of post-human, a future that Hayles does not wish to see come to materialization, is the literal disappearance of Homo sapiens. It is the world of The Terminator or The Matrix where living machines are the dominant species on the planet.

The second way I see us as headed down the data-brick road to post-human land is in the numbering of people, when bodies become nothing but data. In a sense we're already seeing this trend. "I am not a number" is shouted with raised shaking fist by students on our campus. A lot of the time, we seem to be the sum of our income taxes, driver's licenses, credit cards, credit ratings, GPAs, census info, and a whole host of other minutia. We are also a sum of other kinds of identification and information: email addresses, instant messenging nicknames, logon names, IP addresses, and URLs.

Like the human body being completely replaced by the machine body, as soon as human identity is replaced by virtual or informational identity, then we are/become post-human. An article today on the BBC's website about the release of Afghan POWs from Guantanamo Bay, Cuba says the reason the prisoners were let go was because they no longer posed a thread, they had "no intelligence value" (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/3515502.stm). While they had "intelligence value," their presence, their bodies, and I'd say their identities (as Afghans, as potential terrorists, as men) had value, had materiality and needed to be penned up. As soon as they lost that data value, they no longer had material value; their bodies didn't need to be held anymore. Again, it's not the body that's necessarily important, but what that body holds, knows, or thinks.

I suppose the nightmare version of this trend of "flesh as data, data as flesh" is the brain in a jar--no body, just mind...no wisdom, just knowledge.

Obviously, the two definitions of post-human I've sketched can and will have intersections.

I would like to keep pressing at these definitions.

ED

Hayle's Definition of Post-Human
(subtitled "Why Ed Should Read the Conclusion Before Posting")

Some quotes du jour:

p. 283 "The terror is relatively easy to understand. "Post," with its dual connotation of superseding the human and coming after it, hints that the days of the "human" may be numbered."

p. 283-4 "As I have repeatedly argued, human being is first of all embodied being, and the complexities of this embodiement mean that human awareness unfolds in ways very different from those of intelligence embodied in cybernetic machines."

p. 285 "What about the pleasures? For some people, including me, the posthuman evokes the exhilarating prospect of getting out of some of the old boxes and opening up new ways of thinking about what being human means."

p. 286 "But the posthuman does not signal the end of humanity. It signals instead the end of a certain conception of humanity, a conception that may have applied, at best, to that fraction of humanity who had the wealth, power, and leisure to conceptualize themselves as autonomous beings exercising their will through individual agency and choice."

p. 287 "...human consciousness would ride on top of a highly articulated and complex computational ecology in which many decisions, invisible to human attention, would be made by intelligent machines."

p. 288 "...for everyday we participate in systems whose total cognitive capacity exceeds our individual knowledge..."

p. 288 "Modern humans are capable of more sophisticated cognition than cavemen not because moderns are smarter...but because they have constructed smarter environments in which to work."

p. 289 "By contrast, when the human is seen as a part of a distributed system, the full expression of human capability can be seen precisely to depend on the splice rather than being imperiled by it...This vision is a potent antidote to the view that parses virtuality as a division between an inert body that is left behind and a disembodied subjectivity that inhabits a virtual realm..."

Thanks for this Ed, it's very rich in thought. The progenitor of the body-as-number and perhaps the original act of post-humanity (because information technology was such an integral part of the system) was of course the Nazi concentration camps, where numbers were tatooed onto bodies. Don Byrd, my old mentor at SUNY Albany, has written about the post-human under the guise of what he calls _statisitical reality_. The body has been rendered a mere token in a formal system. Therein lies the dark appeal, and also the great danger, of the post-human. Compare to Hayles on "virtuality": "the cultural perception that material objects are interpenetrated by information patterns" (13).