Humanism continued

The exposition that Hayles gives regarding the new prime binary of pattern/randomness as, in a sense, replacing the presence/absence binary of days past appears as a continuation of the humanist project rather than an opposition to it. The post- of the posthuman is more of a meta than an after, that is, it's not new in the sense of destroying the old as much as it is an improvement on the old, going beyond its methods to achieve its goals.

The mind of Cartesian dualism was always a strange thing whose existence was ambiguous and undefined. This mind has now become information as an abstraction that can exist in any substrate whatsoever. During the primacy of the presence/absence binary this area in between was kept undefined and ambiguous but with the content abstracted from the container, everything contained in the mind (and thus the mind itself) has become separate in a more concrete and technical way than it ever was before. Things exist period; either as patterns or as randomness.

Hayles analogy between mutation and castration is thus an apt one since it foregrounds the failure of the system. In the privileged pattern, the mutation jams its perfect replication and thus its advantage.