I'm interested in Hayles' investment in providing a narrative that points out "what had to be elided, suppressed, and forgotten to make information lose its body" (13). Within the context of this project, she 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).
What appeals to me is the possibility of discussing subjectivity, narrative, and signification. If the liberal subject is threatened by the emergence of cybernetics, then what's at stake in Claude Shannon's definition of information as a probability function divorced from meaning? What about the flickering signifier? Also, how influential were the literary texts Hayles references (Neuromancer, White Noise, If on a Winter's Night a Traveler) in determining ideas about subjectivity and embodiment, especially where the boundaries of the human subject are concerned (narrator as textual android, for example).
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