Stanford Humanities Center Newsletter

Former fellow Katherine Hayles (1992-93) is one of the country’s foremost experts on the relationship between literature, science, and technology. Last November, she returned to the Stanford Humanities Center for a public discussion with Ursula Heise on the study of culture in the digital age.

Hayles thrilled the audience with her utopian vision of abolishing academic departments in favor of a process of self-organization based on issues and problems, or “interdisciplinary clusters,” and fielded questions on the impact of digital technologies and the changing nature of research in the humanities.

We followed up with Hayles to look further into the future of literary studies and discover what it means to be human in this technological age.

When did you first become interested in digital media studies and how have the technological transformations (not to mention scientific discoveries) that have occurred since you started working in this area changed your thinking on the subject?

I started working in the digital humanities in the early 1990’s. In 1995 I offered an NEH Summer Seminar on Electronic Textuality attended by several people who have since become leaders in the field; in 1998 and 2001, I offered two more. The cumulative effect of these seminars was remarkable. The technology was growing at an exponential rate, and we were all struggling to understand its implications and possibilities.

Since then, of course, the explosive growth of the Web, the rise of social networking, and the movement of computer out of the box into cell phones, GPS, etc., have transformed the social landscape. I have become increasingly interested in the constraints and possibilities created when humans and intelligent machines interface with one another. In My Mother Was a Computer, I began to develop the framework of intermediation as a way to explore these transformations.

One of your most influential books focused on the “posthuman.” As a literary scholar, what do you mean by this term? What can a literary perspective bring to our understanding of what makes us human in a (bio)technological age?

As I note in my book How We Became Posthuman, I use the term “posthuman” somewhat ironically. The “human,” as I understand it, has always been a culturally embedded and historically specific concept, changing as cultural conditions and technology changes.

The modern sense of “human” has been heavily influenced by Enlightenment ideas of autonomy, rationality, agency of the individual person, and consciousness as the seat of identity. From the mid-twentieth century on, this Enlightenment constellation has been consistently and powerfully challenged by philosophical-technical-cultural developments.

My own study of the subject chose the rise of cybernetics as a particularly influential site from which these challenges emerged, progressing from there into artificial intelligence, neural nets, intelligence augmentation, artificial life, and a host of related technologies. The new vision of the human that emerges from these and related fields is so strikingly different from the Enlightenment version that “posthuman” seems appropriate to describe it, especially in view of transhumanist claims that our destiny is to leave our biological bodies behind and be uploaded into a computer.

Whenever such a far-reaching change takes place, the implications far exceed our rational grasp of the subject to include largely unpredictable social implications, transformations of presuppositions so deeply embedded we are scarcely aware of them, and emotional reactions difficult to categorize or even to articulate. For all these reasons, literary texts are essential. They project various futures for us not only through verbal descriptions but also through contexts rich with ambiguities, implications, and subtle nuances, all of which help us to explore and understand the consequences of the futures we are constructing for ourselves.

How do you see studies in cognitive science, particularly in “embodied cognition,” fitting into the “posthuman” view of consciousness?

Embodied cognition and distributed cognition are two important ways in which Enlightenment views of the subject are being transformed. Antonio Damasio, for example, has argued convincingly that emotions and feelings are essential components of thought, supplementing the rational mind with non-conscious processes crucially important to such activities as decision-making, investment in the physical world, and the ability to imagine other people as beings like ourselves.

Distributed cognition goes beyond bodily processes to consider the ways in which human cognition is embedded in systems outside the body that extend, amplify and augment embodied capacities, from something as simple as pencil and paper to the mixed reality technologies that promise to transform the landscape and the ways in which we interact with it.

Embedded within such systems, embodied processes are entrained in ways that include but also go beyond the conscious mind, including posture, intuition, proprioceptive responses, etc., as researchers such as Edwin Hutchins, Andy Clark, and Nigel Thrift have shown.

You have mentioned before that the humanities are not simply about the preservation and conservation of knowledge, but also about the creation of new knowledge. How do you define new knowledge in the humanities? What distinguishes new knowledge from new interpretations? And what is your view of the relationship between the structure of the modern university (with respect to disciplines) and the production of new knowledge in the humanities?

“New knowledge” need not only be about new areas of research and social production such as, for example, online gaming or social networking. It may also include new interpretations of facts and archival materials that had not previously received attention, had not been analyzed together as a group, or had not been located within new theoretical frameworks. I think of the work of Michel Foucault as an outstanding exemplar of this kind of new knowledge. I doubt that one could construct a firm dividing line between new knowledge and new interpretations; one slides into the other.

In my view, knowledge production in universities is both enabled and constrained by disciplinary boundaries. Disciplines offer the advantages that come from defining the boundaries of a field and coordinating research agendas on problems perceived as important or cutting-edge. By the same token, however, they also act to prevent (or at least make it more difficult) for researchers to discover what is going on in other fields that may be useful for the problems they want to address.

Disciplinary and field boundaries also delimit the kinds of questions people ask. I am always amazed, when sitting on hiring or admission committees, that the same dissertation or book topics appear over and over. Someone who follows a different line of thought stands out immediately. Imagine how much richer the pool of thought would be if the disciplines were talking to one another, or if, in my utopian vision, university structures were defined not by fields but by the resources needed to address the problems and issues that faculty and students find engaging.

Much of your current scholarship focuses on “electronic literature,” which is qualitatively different from “literature online.” As an editor of the Electronic Literature Collection (http://collection.eliterature.org/1/), do you consider electronic literature to be an adaptation of print literature to a new medium or is it a new art form? In other words, is electronic literature the future of print literature?

The Electronic Literature Organization, with which I am affiliated, distinguishes between print literature that appears online and literature that is “digital born,” created on a computer and meant to be read on one. Electronic literature, conceived from the beginning as literature performed by networked and programmable media, has roots dating back to the 1960’s. Not until the late 1980’s, however, did electronic literature become widely recognized as a new mode of literary production.

From today’s perspective, such early works as Michael Joyce’s hypertext novel afternoon look much more like print predecessors than they do like contemporary multimodal literature. Literary innovation, like technical innovation generally, works through a process that anthropologists call seriation, combining replication of existing forms with innovations that take advantage of the new conditions created by changing production and cultural environments. The canon of electronic literature is growing exponentially, and I am confident it will be an increasingly important component of twenty-first century literature.

Even so, I do not expect print literature to disappear. The print book offers certain advantages—robustness, ease of use, portability, low cost, and backward compatibility stretching over centuries—that computational media will find difficult or impossible to rival.

But print should not be seen as an entirely separate arena from electronic textuality. All but a handful of books printed this year will be thoroughly enmeshed with digital technologies, from their composition on word processing programs to compositing as electronic files to printing by computerized machines. Contemporary print books bear the mark of the digital in ways that affect how they are conceived, produced, disseminated, purchased, and read. Properly considered, print should be seen as a particular output form of electronic textuality, responsive of course to the rich traditions of the codex but also increasingly informed by digitality as well

One of the exciting possibilities offered by electronic literature, in addition to the new kinds of works produced, is the fact that it allows us to see print differently, because we now have something to compare and contrast with print. As we leave the Age of Print (by which I do not mean that books will disappear but rather that print has ceased to be the default medium of communication), we can begin to think about print as one component of a complex media ecology that includes electronic literature, digital art, and other art forms associated with networked and programmable new media.

Print changes its strategies accordingly to capitalize on what it can do best, focusing on the kinds of communications in which it excels. These changes are already well underway. Media studies, particularly a comparative approach that juxtaposes print with electronic literature as well as older forms such as manuscript production and oral culture, is in my view one of the most exciting areas in literary studies today.

I envision this as a multi-disciplinary conversation that includes art historians, digital art producers and critics, graphic designers, computer scientists and computational engineers, and a host of others. Literary studies need not and should not dominate the conversation, but it should have a place at the table. If it were absent, not only would literary studies be the poorer, but so would the evolving conversation. We in literary studies have a remarkable opportunity, and we should claim media studies are part of our rightful heritage and concern.

Katherine Hayles is the Hillis Professor of Literature in English and Media Arts at UCLA and an expert on digital media and the relationship between literature and science. Her groundbreaking book, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics (University of Chicago Press, 1999), won the Rene Wellek Prize for the Best Book in Literary Theory for 1998-1999, and Writing Machines (MIT Press, 2001) won the Suzanne Langer Award for Outstanding Scholarship.

LINKS:
Katherine Hayles' UCLA Profile:
http://www.english.ucla.edu/faculty/hayles/