Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

In this age of DNA computers and artificial intelligence, information is becoming disembodied even as the "bodies" that once carried it vanish into virtuality. While some marvel at these changes, envisioning consciousness downloaded into a computer or humans "beamed" Star Trek -style, others view them with horror, seeing monsters brooding in the machines. In How We Became Posthuman, N. Katherine Hayles separates hype from fact, investigating the fate of embodiment in an information age.

Hayles relates three interwoven stories: how information lost its body, that is, how it came to be conceptualized as an entity separate from the material forms that carry it; the cultural and technological construction of the cyborg; and the dismantling of the liberal humanist "subject" in cybernetic discourse, along with the emergence of the "posthuman."

Ranging widely across the history of technology, cultural studies, and literary criticism, Hayles shows what had to be erased, forgotten, and elided to conceive of information as a disembodied entity. Thus she moves from the post-World War II Macy Conferences on cybernetics to the 1952 novel Limbo by cybernetics aficionado Bernard Wolfe; from the concept of self-making to Philip K. Dick's literary explorations of hallucination and reality; and from artificial life to postmodern novels exploring the implications of seeing humans as cybernetic systems.

Although becoming posthuman can be nightmarish, Hayles shows how it can also be liberating. From the birth of cybernetics to artificial life, How We Became Posthuman provides an indispensable account of how we arrived in our virtual age, and of where we might go from here.

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• Acknowledgments
• Prologue
• 1 Toward Embodied Virtuality
• 2 Virtual Bodies and Flickering Signifiers
• 3 Contesting for the Body of Information: The Macy Conferences on Cybernetics
• 4 Liberal Subjectivity Imperiled: Norbert Wiener and Cybernetic Anxiety
• 5 From Hyphen to Splice: Cybernetics Syntax in Limbo
• 6 The Second Wave of Cybernetics: From Reflexivity to Self-Organization
• 7 Turning Reality Inside Out and Right Side Out: Boundary Work in the Mid-Sixties Novels of Philip K. Dick
• 8 The Materiality of Informatics
• 9 Narratives of Artificial Life
• 10 The Semiotics of Virtuality: Mapping the Posthuman
• 11 Conclusion: What Does It Mean to Be Posthuman?
• Notes
• Index

Reviews provided by Syndetics

CHOICE Review

Disembodiment is one of the central themes of cyberculture. Joining theorists such as Anne Balsamo (Technologies of the Gendered Body, 1996), who argue that cyberculture cannot deliver embodied reality, Hayles (English, UCLA) lays out the complex history of disembodiment as a trope in the history of information theory and cybernetics (the book thus serves as an excellent introduction to the history of information theory). Drawing on archives, interviews with scientists, literary texts concerned with information technologies--including Richard Powers's Galatea 2.2, Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash, and Philip Dick's novels--and the literature of cybernetics, information theory, computer simulation, and cognitive science, the author tells three "interrelated stories": how information came to be thought of as an entity distinct from material forms; the creation of the cyborg as both artifact and icon; and the construction of the posthuman. Hayles emphasizes that the last shares with its predecessor, the liberal humanist subject, an "emphasis on cognition rather than embodiment." However, she makes clear that her project is not to revitalize the liberal humanist subject; rather, she is attempting to "keep disembodiment from being rewritten, once again, into prevailing concepts of subjectivity." Recommended for academic libraries serving upper-division undergraduates through faculty. H. A. Booth; SUNY at Buffalo