| Popis: |
The cultural and academic debates about the status of the human subject in an increasingly technological world may seem to have cooled slightly since the fin-de-siecle ferment of the 1990s, a time when 1980s hypotheses about cyberspace, cyborgs, and non-human intelligence could seem to be increasingly on the verge of realization.1 Nonetheless, in these first years of the twenty-first century, it has come to be increasingly accepted that, in some meaningful way, we are now in fact living in the age of the apost-humanw subject. This acceptance hardly implies unanimity, for there are still major disagreements about just what this might mean: for example, would the term "post-human" serve mostly to describe a dominant ideological configuration, or does it instead describe a realm of practical possibility and lived experience in technologically advanced, late-capitalist societies? And in either of these cases, would this post-human condition be something to be welcomed as liberating and enlightening, or to be defended against as dangerous and illusion-fostering? These are some of the issues that N. Katherine Hayles took on in her 1999 study, How We Became Posthuman. There, Hayles examined the rise of the post-human view of subjectivity and embodiment as a successor to the bounded and centered subject of liberal humanism, a formation that the intellectual historian C. B. Macpherson had analyzed through the rubric of "possessive individualism." In Hayles s view, the emergence of the posthuman subject had replaced the liberal emphasis upon possessive individualism with the centrality of information and computation: the result was a new subject seen to be "seamlessly articulated with intelligent machines" (34). As she wrote, this post-human subject typically presented itself as an |
