In Graham’s chapter “In whose image?” she concentrates on how the Human Genome Project is attempting to unify the idea of a human. She argues that biology and genetic factors in particular are becoming the most important way in which to define the human. Continue reading
I find it so interesting that the “father of cybernetics” struggled with the same issues about the posthuman that we have been discussing and unpacking in our class. On one hand Weiner envisioned “powerful new ways to equate humans and machines,” yet he “also struggled to envision the cybernetic machine in the image of a humanistic self.” I often feel similarly conflicted when we are discussing the boundaries between human and machine and what “human” rights they would be entitled to if a superhuman was intergrated into our society. Hayles lays out the standard values of liberal humanism to be “a coherent, rational self, the right of that self to autonomy and freedom, and a sense of agency linked with a belief in enlightened interest,” yet many of the authors and scientists she discusses question those same rights in relation to the cyborg. Continue reading
In N. Katherine Hayles’ prologue and first chapter of How We Became Posthuman, I am very interested in her discussion of embodiment, and how posthuman and liberal humanist thought desires an erasure of embodiment. Hayles asks a question in the prologue, where she wonders “what do gendered bodies have to do with the erasure of embodiment and the subsequent merging of machine and human intelligence in the figure of the cyborg?” (Hayles xii) This question is something I grappled with as I was reading the prologue and first chapter, and I came to understand the question in context to her inclusion of liberal humanist “notorious universality” (Hayles 4). Continue reading