I recently finished two books by two incredible
writers/thinkers: How We Think: Digital
Media and Contemporary Technogensis by N. Katherine Hayles and A Counter-History of Composition: Toward
Methodologies of Complexity by Byron Hawk. Hayles and Hawk, although they
are writing for slightly different fields, nonetheless converge at crucial
points related to the exigency of mapping the bio-ideological constitution of
posthuman subjectivities. Although Hayles work (with which I am more familiar)
is valuable for its typically impressive ability to synthesize various
theoretical and empirical approaches to digital media, I ultimately found the
implications of Hawk’s analysis more compelling due to what I saw as a greater
emphasis on bio-ideological mapping in order to actively produce constellations
of subjectivity rather than mapping bio-ideologies in order to consume and/or resist
them.
In her most theoretical chapter, “Tech-TOC: Complex
Temporalities and Contemporary Technogenesis,” Hayles foregrounds her
methodology in a cartographic rhetoric, writing that she aims to “explore the
coordinated epigenetic dynamic between humans and technics” (85). Throughout
the chapter, she collates snippets of various thinkers working in the
philosophy and sociology of technology, such as Mark Hansen, Bernard Steigler,
and Bruno Latour, arguing that technology is the manifestation of a “complex
temporality” which she defines most intriguingly as “temporary coalescences in
fields of conflicting and cooperating forces” (86). In this move, Hayles
collapses the constitutive distinction between human and non-human entities, a distinction
which she challenges in greater detail in How
we Became Posthuman. Hayles argues that in the same way that a technical
object is a synchronic constellation of “conflicting and cooperating forces” of
socio-cultural desires, so too is human subjectivity. Although not as pertinent
to my uses here, Hayles concludes her chapter with an illuminating analysis of
the interactive electronic novel TOC,
illuminating its critique of the effects of computer technology on human
perceptions of time.
Where I tend to depart from Hayles is in her move to what I
see as an overly reductive model concerning the influence of technology on
human cognition. Her central binary is conscious/non-conscious cognition, with
external factors of one’s environment such as technology and language providing
the majority of non-conscious forces upon one’s cognitive state. Although the neurological and psychological
research she draws from is compelling, it seems to set up a unidirectional flow
of forces from exterior forces to interior unconscious that subordinates the
role of human agency in meaningfully intervening in this process.
Essentially, Hayles fails to consider how our non-conscious
states are also influenced by our conscious states which are then fed
back into the non-conscious (both exterior and interior) realm. Although she
uses the term “reciprocal causality” throughout this chapter, this term is primarily
confined to the intertwined relationship between humans, technology, and
society. However, the two cognitive states she prescribed (conscious/non-conscious)
are also interrelated to such an extent that it seems pointless to privilege
the influence of external factors in determining one (non-conscious) more than
the other (conscious).
Referencing her previous work on the attentional shift
taking place from deep to hyper attention in younger generations, Hayles
focuses in on the neurological effects of digital media and begins to veer into
the realm of bio-technological determinism (99-102). Much like her initial
article in ADE, Hayles privileges the neurological principles of
“synaptogenesis” and “neuroplasticity” in effecting epigenetic changes in cognitive
structures which then presumably lead to changes in other psychological
processes. As is increasingly becoming the case in reductive models of human
consciousness, the complexity of thought is subordinated to neurology.
Reacting to these external factors of posthuman
consciousness formation, Hayles posits her technologically assisted solution by
distinguishing it from neuro-philosopher Catherine Malabou’s implications in The New Unconscious. Malabou’s guiding
claim is that the structure of human consciousness is beginning to mirror the
structure of global capitalism. Because Malabou does not offer a
technologically assisted method for resisting the neurological effects of one’s
economic system, Hayles denigrates Malabou’s implicit assumption that neural
plasticity can be monitored by nothing more than conscious awareness of the
plasticity of unconscious influence.
Conversely, Hayles proposes that we utilize the same
technologies that are affecting these neuropsychological changes to map their
influence on cognitive functioning. She writes, “Another possibility, implicit
in the concept of technogenesis, is to use digital media to intervene in the
cycles of continuous reciprocal causality so that one is not simply passively
responding to the pressures of accelerating information flow but using for
different ends the very technologies applying the pressure” (102). Hayles
briefly mentions two such mapping technologies: the sociometer, created by Alex
Petland of MIT, which can sense subtle, unconscious movements such as
influence, mimicry, activity, and consistency; and the somameter, a device
developed by Mark Hansen at Duke which reports unconscious biological states to
the user.
Hayles interprets all of these technological influences
through a focus on attention. Building off her thesis in a previous article concerning
the value of both hyper and deep attention, Hayles mostly wants to map the
effects of technics on human consciousness in order to redirect our collective
cognitive trajectory away from complete hyper attention and towards a more
balanced emphasis on both hyper and deep attention.
However, I don’t think I am as quick to part with Malabou’s
ideological resistance in favor of Hayles’ technophilic cartography. Although
technologically assisted mapping may be valuable to a certain extent, it should
not be privileged over conceptual entities such as ideological and political
structures.
From Mapping as
Resistance to Mapping as Invention
Byron Hawk makes a compelling case in A Counter-History of Composition: Toward Methodologies of Complexity for
a renewed emphasis on the role of invention within composition pedagogies. I
say “pedagogies” because I agree with Hawk that one of the fundamental
difficulties of teaching writing is creating a generalizable link from local,
classroom specific techniques, ideas, and assignments to a global theory or method.
Indeed, with his emphasis on Ulmerean heuretics in his pedagogy chapter, Hawk
explicitly supports a move away from “a pedagogy” of generalizable methods of
invention and towards “pedagogies” of individuated methods particular to each
student’s context: “the goal should be to learn about one’s place in the
circuitry and to invent a method particular to these circuits” (248). For Hawk,
mapping the complexity and formation of posthuman subjectivity only works by
providing individuals (students in this case) with the technology necessary to
create their own map rather than showing them the place they should end up
(Berlin’s citizen-rhetors) and then hoping they eventually get there.
Although his complex-vitalist theory of composition pedagogy
relies heavily on experimental compositionists such as Gregory Ulmer and
Cynthia Haynes, I believe that his primary theoretical underpinning rests on a binary
separating general/particular (global/local) which he builds off of Deleuze and
Guattari’s concept of the molar/molecular. Hawk privileges the molecular for its
emphasis on the local linkages, or Deluze-Gauttarian “desiring-machines,” which
intersect and create a multiplicity of subjectivities within the same
individual. Although Hawk doesn’t draw from The
Three Ecologies in his book, I think this quote from Guattari conveys the
concept: “it is important not to homogenize various levels of practice or to
make connections between them under some transcendental supervision, but
instead to engage them in processes of heterogenesis” (34, Guattari). The
translator goes on to define Guattari’s notion of heterogeneity as “an
expression of desire, of a becoming that is always in the process of adapting,
transforming and modifying itself in relation to its environment… However much
organizations attempt to homogenize desire, something always escapes or leaks
out (the ‘line of flight’)” (95).
Guattari’s move from homogeneity to heterogeneity is
connected to the pivotal concept of the body-without-organs. Organs organ-ize
and prescribe the limits of action for a particular entity, whether that be an
individual or group of individuals. Theorists attempting to map the complexity of
posthuman subjectivity have located these organs in various contexts, sometimes
including, as is the case with Hayles, actual organs (the brain). For Hawk,
although biology is included as an important factor, the predominant
organ-ization of student subjectivity for him is ideological.
Thus, drawing on experimental composition pedagogies such as
Ulmer’s mystory genre, Hawk proposes an approach to bio-ideological mapping as a
series of pedagogical tools designed to generate a multiplicity of potential subjectivities
rather than as a means for preventing undesirable states of future subjectivity
(such as Hayles’ hyper attention).
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