Hayles' and the politics of artifacts

Historical context is a crucial organizing principle to Hayles. She writes at a particular moment, one she deems as "a critical juncture when interventions might be made to keep disembodiment from being rewritten, once again, into prevailing concepts of subjectivity." (5) This act is a performance according to Hayles, as people behave like posthuman subjects when they perceive themselves to be as such. It is a stylized transformation that occurs through the interplay of cybernetic action through numerous sites: academic conventions, literature, and action in popular culture situated around cybernetic technologies. What Hayles fears most is the destruction of the material, or relinquishing of embodiment that is taking place through the inculcation of posthuman thought. (49)

I find issue with this pessimistic view of the effect of posthumanity. Throughout the parts of the text assigned, "liberal humanism" is (if we take Hayles' assessment of posthumanity to be true) a piece of community nostalgia constantly re-dreamed by the author and presented as a worldview that needs to be preserved, as it acts on the premise of possessive individualism which would not endanger the material. It became most apparent that the author was making an arguement for the virtues of liberal humanism during Chapter 4, entiteled "Liberal Subjectivity Imperiled," (itself implying a sense of danger for something that needs to be saved) where she discusses the "anxiety" of the father of cybernetics Norbert Wiener. In this chapter Hayles goes into length discussing the frustrations and fears she believes Wiener contended with during his development of cybernetic theory, particularly throughout the Macy conferences. (108-112) Hayles certianly makes clear in the beginning of her work that she aims to preserve a space for the material body in future worldviews, but her particular attachment to the idea of liberal humanism is sometimes baffling. To further drive home her point, she employs several arguments to the effect the future being technologically determined. Following Paul Virilio, Hayles states that "[g]iven market forces already at work, it is virtually... certain that we will increasingly live, work, and play in environments that construct us as embodied virtualities." (48) I do not contest the apparent validity of the last statement, more how it is held to be absolutely prophetic, and that this condition necessitates a danger to materiality.

To go off of this point a bit, I believe the more pressing danger would be not be the potential for the dissolution of the material body, but rather the abuse of technological artifacts to the detriment of human bodies. Hayles does a fantastic job in her work of showing that technology and technological design (such as cybernetic theory) are the products of interested human decisions. In a way, the (human) material body has always been at issue, but it has been through using technology as a instrument of enacting power over these bodies moreso than the endangering of materiality in general.