FCJ-172 Posthumanism, Technogenesis, and Digital Technologies: A Conversation with N. Katherine Hayles

Holger Pötzsch UiT Tromsø N. Katherine Hayles Duke University Holger Pötzsch: Katherine Hayles, your idea of posthumanism is inspired by cybernetics and by a new attentiveness to the body and materiality? N. Katherine Hayles: Posthumanism as I define it in my book How We Became Posthuman (1999) was in part about the deconstruction of the liberal humanist subject and the attributes normally associated with it such as autonomy, free will, self determination and so forth. What I saw happening in the 1980s and 1990s was the rise of a new way of thinking about human beings that was in flat contradiction to all these attributes; that was what I called posthumanism. One of its manifestations was the idea that if you capture the informational patterns of the human brain, you could then upload it to a computer and achieve effective immortality. To me this seemed absolutely wrong, even pernicious, because […]