connecting literature and science, Weiner contextualized, posthuman gender

Katherine Hayles’ How We Became Posthuman is most successful in its effort to historicize and contextualize the three major movements in cybernetics and its conceptual evolution from “homeostasis” to “reflexivity” to “emergence.” In particular, Hayles’ discussions of Weiner’s Human Use of Human Beings provides a helpful perspective from which to understand the connections between Weiner’s ideas, popular culture, and theories of language and semiotics. One connection that I found particularly cogent was that between Ferdinand de Saussure’s conceptualization of “la langue” and weiner’s assertion of the probabilistic nature of communication. For Saussure, the selection of a specific sign is marked by a choice between numerous signs in an expansive field; the choice of a specific word to communicate an idea, then, is ultimately the choice not to use all of the other signs in the field. Each sign derives its meaning from its relation to other signs in that field, not from a direct reference to an external “reality.” Weiner’s conception of communication as a fundamentally probabilistic act also relies on the notion that messages derive their meaning relationally, not referentially. As Hayles concludes on page 98, “For Weiner no less than Saussure, signification is about relation, not about the world as a thing-in-itself.”

 Another interesting if unrelated question lies in Hayles’ discussion of human beings as informational patterns. If humanness is constituted as an informational pattern rather than an embodied enaction, is the human body—the corporeal proof of humanness—evacuated of meaning? When bionic cyborgs merge human flesh and machine intelligence, is gender reduced to an antiquated organizational feature, a mere vestige of an embodiment once central in the formation of individual identities and gendered subjectivities?

I’m lastly interested in the critical intersections between cybernetic theory, information science, and cyberpunk literature that rachel alluded to in her post “narrative, subjectivity, signification.”

Rachel says:

Within the context of this project, [Hayles] is also interested in how culture and science circulate through each other, such that literary texts both embody scientific assumptions and enable further research in certain directions (21).

I wonder specifically about the extent to which literary images of “futuristic” cyborgs have impacted the ways in which scientists and engineers have themselves conceived of the forms and functions of their cyborg creations. Literature has certainly followed the evolution of cybernetic science; have fictional texts reciprocally spawned cybernetic imaginations or influenced the science itself? Where are the boundaries between the two, or do they, as Rachel asserts, “circulate through one another?” A feedback loop, perhaps?