User:Andre Castro/Annotation/Hayles-VirtualBodies

Annotation on Katherine Hayles' Virtual Bodies and Flickering Signifiers

Katherine Hayles in chapter Virtual Bodies and Flickering Signifiers from her book How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics, gives an account of how information technologies are affecting both literature and our bodies.

During the essay Hayles employs repeatedly of the concepts of message and noise. According to Hayles these two concepts are taking up the space that used to belong to presence/absence dialectic. Information is defined as a pattern, while its absence - non-information - equates noise (Hayles 1999, pp.25). Presence/absence is in Hayles opinion no longer useful dualism when comes to information technology and virtual reality, since in what concerns virtual reality we are at both times inside and outside the computer screen as we are both in and out the physical-world (ibid pp.26-27).

Hayles interprets the current pressure, felt mainly in societies heavily dependent on information technologies, to dematerialization as a shift from the presence/absence paradigm towards the pattern/noise paradigm, which is being felt both on human and literary text bodies, at a material level and on their message [human??](ibid, pp.29).

Under this scenario new flickering signifiers emerge, meaning that a signifier is no longer understood as a single symbol, but as constantly changing between signifier and signified. "A signifier on one level becomes a signified on the next-higher level". For example the key stroke of the key mark with "q" on my computer keyboard does not directly equate the signified "q", it goes through a series of stages where it itself also has to interpreted, to result in the character "q" that appears in the screen. If I simply changed the language of my computer, I am also changing the signified of the key. Instead of a q I will end up with an й (in Russian) or a ौ (in Hindi).

Hayles argues the shift from presence/absence dialectic toward pattern/randomness can be felt in contemporary literature through "its interpenetration with randomness and its implicit challenge to physicality"(pp.35). To illustrate her argument Hayles uses examples from William Gibson, Don DeLillo and Italo Calvino novels. One could ask why have the author chosen literary texts to approach this shift of dialectic. She answers by stating that the way human bodies are represented in literature is deeply related to the changes by which textural bodies are encoded by information media. Besides, both of them relate in complex ways to the human bodies as these interact with information technologies (ibid, pp.29)

Hayles also mentions that flickering signifiers extend from literature towards the technologies that produce the text, and the bodies of those who read them, therefore producing a new kind of reader. She illustrate such condition by frustration and impatience some readers currently feel when confronted with printed text where no is given to interact with it, as it would happen within a computer screen. "The computer molds the human even as the human builds the computer"(pp.47)

BIBLIOGRAPHY Hayles, K. (1999) How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. London:The University of Chicago

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NOTES: "Data are thus humanized and subjectivity is computerized" (pp.39)