Thomas Foster
As the term implies, posthumanism defines itself relationally, as a redefinition of, or an alternative to, something construed as humanism. “Human” or “humanism” in practice names a set of sometimes overlapping, sometimes distinct objects of critique: variously, the liberal subject; romantic individualism; privatized psychic interiority (“thought” or “consciousness” considered as an exclusive property of human beings); human nature; essentialism; species‐identity, understood as the basis for claims about anthropocentric uniqueness and superiority; or an overly idealized and abstract concept of “the” human body, as ground for species‐identity and exclusionary definitions of the qualities that define the human. How do these critiques, or at least some of them, emerge out of cybernetics? Let us start by considering the history of this second key term.
Cybernetics is an interdisciplinary field of scientific inquiry emerging out of the Macy Conferences organized by Norbert Wiener at the end of World War II (between 1943 and 1954), and best represented by Wiener’s two books, Cybernetics (1948) and its popularization, The Human Use of Human Beings (1954). Wiener was largely responsible for presenting cybernetics as a synthesis of information theory, computing, mathematical logic and game theory, neuroscience, and (to a lesser extent) anthropology. The result of this synthesis is a science of communication and control; as Wiener puts it, one of the central insights of cybernetics is that “the problems of control engineering and of communication engineering were inseparable, and that they centered not around the technique of electrical engineering but around the much more fundamental notion of the message, whether this should be transmitted by electrical, mechanical, or nervous means” (Wiener 1961: 8). This early version of cybernetics focuses on how a given system maintains itself through processes of self‐correction or homeostasis, in which negative feedback loops are produced by the system’s interaction with and response to its environment. Wiener identifies such feedback processes as the basis for designing “mechanico‐electrical” devices that can perform or, more ominously, “usurp … certain human functions” (1961: 6). In this model, the term “system” signifies any entity constituted through these homeostatic processes, and this method of describing the operation of a system defines a level of abstraction at which there is no qualitative difference between organisms and machines (or human organisms and animals), just as the passage quoted above rejects distinctions between “electrical, mechanical, or nervous” systems.
This reading of cybernetics as a source domain for a functional analogy or equivalence between persons and machines can be traced back to Alan Turing’s 1950 essay on “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” best remembered for the Turing test of linguistic or discursive competence as the criterion for machine intelligence. If an interlocutor cannot distinguish statements generated by a computer from statements made by a person, then for all practical purposes we can reliably infer that the computer thinks, with this conclusion about the computer’s inner state being derived from external evidence or performance. But elsewhere, in the section of his essay devoted to philosophical objections to this position, Turing turns this scenario around, by noting that the “argument from consciousness” as a uniquely human capacity tends to imply that the only way we can know “that a man thinks is to be that particular man” (Turing 1950: 446); we have no direct access to anyone else’s inner thoughts or representations and therefore cannot directly or empirically verify that any person we interact with is actually thinking behind the surface appearance. Turing asserts: “Instead of arguing continually over this point, it is usual to have the polite convention that everyone thinks” (1950: 446), and he argues that this polite convention and the referent for “everyone” should be extended to include machines.
John Searle’s rejoinder to Turing, his Chinese room thought experiment, is equally famous for its assertion that we each, as individuals, have direct evidence of inner thought—that is, our own experience of consciousness, which Searle distinguishes from a computer’s purely formal manipulation of rules or protocols, operations that do not require consciousness, in his view. Searle posits a sealed room containing a non‐Chinese speaker, who responds to written questions in Chinese by consulting a handbook of appropriate replies, without being able to read and internally process either question or answer. Searle’s response therefore reproduces precisely the dilemma Turing rejects, the romantic problem of alienated or purely personal forms of subjectivity and inner life, and the resultant trend toward the incommunicability of those inner states. Within cognitive science, this dilemma is what David Chalmers called the “hard problem” of qualia or how to scientifically account for what it feels like to be conscious.
This turn to qualia represents one response to Turing, which emphasizes Searle’s critique, but there is an equally powerful tradition that builds on Turing’s philosophical position. Rodney Brooks 1997), for instance, argues that inner representations (what Searle means by thought) need not be imitated or formalized at the level of coding by robotic systems; intelligent machines do not need to be programmed to think, and perhaps cannot be. Instead of reproducing the distinction between inner thought and outer action, for Brooks intelligence emerges heuristically through interaction between the machine and its environment, through learning by doing. Intelligence, he argues, “is determined by the dynamics of interaction with the world” (Brooks 1997: 418); perhaps more importantly, in this model, intelligence is located in the interactive space between subject or system and world, not in the subject’s brain or psyche.
Daniel Dennett (1989) offers the most direct extension and elaboration of Turing’s insistence on the validity of functional analogies between persons and machines. Dennett redefines Turing’s polite convention as the “intentional stance,” or the inference that intelligent actions imply an intending intelligence (in literary studies, we call this the intentional structure of a text or document, as distinct from direct knowledge of the author’s intent). Dennett is quite explicit about the implications of this functional analogy. He asserts that human beings should be understood as sharing “kinship” with simple homeostatic or self‐correcting machine like thermostats, because: “There is no magic moment in the transition from a simple thermostat to a system that really has an internal representation of the world around it. The thermostat has a minimally demanding representation of the world, fancier thermostats have more demanding representations of the world, fancier robots for helping around the house would have still more demanding representations of the world. Finally you reach us” (Dennett 1989: 32; emphasis in the original). There is no qualitative distinction or “bright line” marking a reliable boundary between human and machine.
Turing’s assertion of the value of polite tolerance has often been read in relation to his own homosexuality and his later experience of its criminalization, leading to his suicide. The Turing test is developed by analogy with another kind of “imitation game,” to use the phrase Turing borrows to define both intelligence and the Turing test for it; the original imitation game is cross‐ or transgender, a test of whether we can determine a person’s gender from their response to questions, especially when the players are trying to fool their interlocutors (Turing 1950: 433–4). Katherine Hayles (1999) argues that the Turing test operates in two seemingly contradictory ways. It performs an “erasure of embodiment,” through the treatment of both processes of gendering and criteria for intelligence as a “formal puzzle” and as reducible to discourse (1999: xi–xii). However, the Turing test also undermines “the univocality of gender” or the one‐to‐one mapping of sexed bodies and gender categories, as well as the assumption that this univocality is capable of “securing human identity” in contrast to the machine (Hayles 1999: xiv). Hayles famously argues that social constructionism, or the “postmodern orthodoxy that the body is primarily, if not entirely, a linguistic and discursive construction” (1999: 192), tends to reinforce and reproduce the dismissal of embodied existence within internet culture and cybernetics, exemplified by Wiener’s claims that “the touchstone of our personal identity” is the informational “pattern” maintained through homeostatic feedback and that “a pattern is a message” that can, in principle, be detached from its original context or medium and transmitted remotely (Wiener 1954: 96).
While Hayles is therefore undoubtedly correct to emphasize how the “posthuman view privileges informational pattern over material instantiation” (Hayles 1999: 2) and imagines technological developments as intensifications or even literalizations of the Cartesian mind/body dualism and its hierarchy of value, there are significant counter‐narratives to this tendency circulating within contemporary culture.1 Asian American science fiction writer Eugie Foster’s “Whatever Skin You Wear” (2013) is a post‐cyberpunk story set in a future society dominated by augmented reality technologies and the mixing of the physical with informational overlays in the form of virtual “skins” or visual filters. This story demonstrates Hayles’s definition of “virtuality,” as the “cultural perception that material objects are interpenetrated by informational patterns,” but it also suggests that the “duality at the heart of the condition of virtuality” may not be as hierarchically organized in all visions of the posthuman as Hayles’s earlier formulation of the “posthuman view” had indicated (Hayles 1999: 13–14).
The story narrates a breakdown in the augmented reality system that is especially traumatic for one character, who depends upon it for her male‐to‐female transgender presentation. Her partner tries to comfort her by asserting that “your RL,” her “material instantiation” or physical body, “is only another skin, just a hard‐coded one” (Foster 2013: 117). This passage demonstrates precisely the danger of disembodiment that results from privileging the virtual over the “real,” tending toward what Hayles calls the “nightmare” of “a culture inhabited by posthumans who regard their bodies as fashion accessories rather than the ground of being” (Hayles 1999: 5). At the same time, the story insists that there is a critical value to this inversion of the relation of physical to virtual, a value to treating the virtual as the ground of being on which the physical is experienced, and that value is associated with transgender embodiment and performativity. This story therefore dramatizes a warning not to be too quick to dismiss possibilities for critical play and experimentation with embodiment in relation to information technologies, or to treat such possibilities as merely performing an “erasure of embodiment” that makes “the cybernetic posthuman” synonymous with “the liberal humanist subject” (Hayles 1999: 4). Allucquere Rosanne Stone (1994) argues instead that “the physical/virtual distinction is not a mind/body distinction … but rather a different way of conceptualizing a relationship to the human body” (Stone 1994: 40).2 For Stone, in the cyberspace of computer networks, “the transgendered body is the natural body,” a formulation that problematizes the distinction between natural and technological, as well as the assumption that the natural is the ground to which the technological is secondary (1994: 180).
Stone here begins to gesture toward the disarticulation of the normative from the natural as a legitimation strategy within what Hayles calls the condition of virtuality or the cybernetic episteme. Lisa Nakamura (2002) offers the best analysis of this transformation in the operation of cultural power and ideology with respect to the changing status of race within internet culture, and specifically the different status of online racial performance and gender or transgender performance. Pointing out that online social interaction involves a kind of generalized passing, since there are no “natural” or physical bodies present in the interaction, Nakamura argues that this kind of computer‐mediated communication would seem to represent the triumph of social constructionist theories, in a social setting where such theories have become normative, where biological essentialism is no longer relevant (Nakamura 2002: 38–9). Such theories presume that progressive results follow from the historicizing and demystification of social norms that we are used to seeing misrepresented as eternal and timeless, as just how things are. In contrast, online contexts seem to show the persistence of the most reductive racial stereotypes (in Nakamura’s examples of Asian representation, the proliferation of samurai and geishas) and to pre‐empt projects of racial redefinition and self‐determination. Possibilities of creative identity play become mere “identity tourism,” to use Nakamura’s term. The power of the internet to “de‐nature and de‐ontologize ‘race’” does not necessarily produce the “crisis in raciology” or the history of scientific racism, as Paul Gilroy argues in Against Race, with specific reference to new technologies of representation (Gilroy 2000: 43). The deontologization of previously biologized identity categories can result in new critical possibilities but can also empower the explicit repudiation of such possibilities and the reassertion of reductive stereotypes, even when the latter are understood to be a choice rather than a destiny; Nakamura calls the preference for such oversimplifications rather than messy nuances “cybertyping.”
One implication of this analysis is that the forms of posthumanism that emerge from cybernetics cannot be understood as having a single coherent political meaning, whether progressive or conservative, utopian or dystopian, dream or nightmare. Popular culture and speculative fiction have been especially interested in narrating these political implications. One early work of cyberpunk science fiction, Bruce Sterling’s Schismatrix (1986), used the term “posthuman” to define a conflict between different technologically denaturalized cultures, the Shapers (genetic engineers) and the Mechanists (cyborgs). One character, while observing a person transformed into an aquatic form, reflects on how such transgressions of the idea of the human require rethinking politics in terms not of solidarity or shared interests, but “fluidarity,” the capacity to tolerate change and internal differences, as well as the lack of any fixed ground of human being, political affiliation, or either biological or cultural identity (Sterling 1986: 264). In a later novel, Distraction, Sterling has a character restate this thesis in more directly cybernetic terms: “We don’t have roots. We’re network people. We have aerials” (Sterling 1998: 491).
The same question must be posed to such formulations that Mary Anne Doane once posed to Donna Haraway’s cyborg metaphor: how can the collapse of the dualistic structures organizing European modernity be liberating if the collapse of dualisms has become the norm and if oppression is no longer organized through such hierarchies and dualisms (Doane 1989: 213)? But where Doane’s question was rhetorical—since she clearly thought the cyborg offered no traction for resistance to the cultural dominants, such as cybernetics, that produced it—for posthumanist theory this question is real and urgent. To answer it requires making distinctions between different kinds of posthumanisms, as Hayles does in chapter 10 of How We Became Posthuman.
Any attempt to trace the history of the relation between cybernetics and posthumanism must therefore face the problem of where to begin. This question is already problematized by the non‐synchrony between the two, given that the philosophical tendencies on which the posthumanist critique depends considerably predate cybernetics. If posthumanism can be defined as Bart Simon does, as an ongoing critical relation to humanism rather than “a radical break” with it (2003: 8), then posthumanism can be understood as having as long a history as humanism. Hayles points in this direction by defining posthumanism’s object of critique as the liberal humanist subject and defining that subject in terms of John Locke’s theory of possessive individualism—as elaborated by C. B. McPherson, whom she quotes: “If ‘human essence is freedom from the wills of others,’ the posthuman is ‘post’ not because it is necessarily unfree but because there is no a priori way to identify a self‐will that can be clearly distinguished from an other‐will” (Hayles 1999: 4).
Given the political significance of possessive individualism within Locke’s social contract theory, Hayles presents posthumanism as an undoing of subjective interiority, the private space of the mind, which becomes less sharply distinct from external social pressures or “other‐will.” In William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984), the classic cyberpunk novel, the possibility of artificial intelligence makes this model of freedom and human essence a joke, as one character remarks when he is told that an AI [artificial intelligence] has Swiss citizenship but its “basic software and mainframe” are corporate property: “that’s a good one … Like, I own your brain and what you know, but your thoughts have Swiss citizenship” (Gibson 1984: 131).
Indeed, if humanism is taken to be synonymous with European modernity and the Enlightenment, or perhaps the continental philosophy of the subject, then it becomes possible to define non‐Western intellectual traditions as pre‐post‐human, as Ishmael Reed does, in his neo‐slave narrative Flight to Canada, when a character anachronistically defines literacy as “the most powerful thing in the pre‐technological pre‐post‐rational age” (Reed 1976: 35). The pre‐post‐rational does not mean either simply the rational nor the traditional or the primitive, but something that fits neither category, more like an indigenous or non‐Western futurism. The character of this pre‐post‐rational subjectivity is defined against modern romantic individualism when the main character, a poet, contrasts himself to Walt Whitman by remarking on how slavery bypasses the subject/object dualism that informs the romantic desire to overcome that dualism and “fuse with Nature”; instead, as a fugitive slave, this character has been made “the comrade of the inanimate, but not by choice” (Reed 1976: 63).3 He has been forced to deconstruct the subject/object dualism rather than accept his place in its dialectic. Louis Chude‐Sokei (2015) cites the Caribbean theorist Sylvia Wynter as a model for such a “pre‐posthumanism” (Sokei 2015: 179); Alexander Weheliye uses Wynter’s concept of a “demonic ground,” or state of exception and exclusion from the universally human, to define different “genres of the human” and to contest the idea that there is a single ground of being human (Weheliye 2014: 21).
Weheliye not only critiques Hayles’s dependence on the concept of the liberal humanist subject, but also her identification of cybernetics as a privileged starting point from which to undo the model of liberal subjectivity.4 “Black and critical ethnic studies,” Weheliye argues, conceptualize “how the human materializes in the worlds of those subjects habitually not thought to define or belong to this field,” transforming “the human” into a “heuristic model” rather than “an ontological fait accompli” (Weheliye 2014: 8). In effect, Weheliye uses Wynter to make the same critique of posthumanism that Phillip Brian Harper makes of postmodernism, specifically Fredric Jameson’s account of two competing versions of theoretical accounts of the “decentered subject” or the more popular rhetoric of the “death of the individual” (Harper 1994: 11; Jameson 1991: 15).5 Jameson defines a historicist version of this decentering, in which earlier forms of capitalist modernity constructed subjects as autonomous individuals, as opposed to the “more radical poststructuralist position, for which such a subject never existed in the first place but constituted something like an ideological mirage” (Jameson 1991: 15). Harper points out that these alternatives are structured around a blind spot, one that is blind to how the “historical status” of centered subjectivity for many minoritized groups, such as “people of African descent,” is “precisely that of never having existed” (Harper 1994: 11).
In the 1990 afterword to his 1984 science fiction novel, Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand, the gay African American writer Samuel R. Delany reads this same passage from Jameson in order to argue for the value of the poststructuralist position for groups that have been oppressed and othered by the centering of subjectivity in the “white western, patriarchal nuclear family.” Delany asserts that not only is the “’fragmented subject’” at “its healthiest, happiest, and most creative” when “society and economics contrive … to make questions of unity and centeredness irrelevant,” but also that “a fragmented subject” is “a ‘natural’ condition” (Delany 2004: 355–6)—that is, a more fundamental ground of being than individual autonomy. Delany’s novel sets out to normalize the historical experience of minoritized groups, as Harper defines it, and to make it the dominant social logic, in part through narrating subjectivity as a networked phenomenon.
In this way, Delany’s novel connects the decentering of subjectivity to Stone’s account of prosthetic subjectivity, in which information technology and virtual systems constitute “the next step in a progression toward the social,” beyond considering “the physical map of the body and our experience of inhabiting it as socially mediated … that is, to imagine the location of the self that inhabits the body as also socially mediated—not in the usual ways we think of subject construction in terms of position within a social field or of capacity to experience, but of the physical location of the subject, independent of the body” usually presumed to enclose subjectivity (Stone 1994: 92). As Gregory Bateson puts it, in “The Cybernetics of Self”: “The total self‐corrective unit which processes information, or, as I say, ‘thinks’ and ‘acts’ and ‘decides,’ is a system whose boundaries do not at all coincide with the boundaries either of the body or of what is popularly called the ‘self’ or ‘consciousness’” (Bateson 1972: 319). Bateson’s example is “a blind man with a stick,” and he asks: “Where does the blind man’s self begin?” (1972: 318), at the handle of the stick—that is, the boundary of the skin—or at the tip of the stick? Within the framework of the cybernetic description of homeostatic systems, such distinctions, Bateson declares, “are nonsense.”6
Delany’s Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand begins by conflating a narrative of networked subjectivity with the deconstruction of privatized interiority, within the overall context of a high‐tech revision of the fugitive slave narrative, like Reed’s Flight to Canada (1976). The first sentence of Delany’s novel is “of course, you will be a slave” (2004: 3). In a technological defamiliarization of the history of slavery, Delany’s character, Korga, becomes a slave not on the basis of biology or culture, but instead by undergoing the “RAT” or Radical Anxiety Termination procedure, an induced form of brain damage intended for therapeutic use but which actually has the effect of reducing initiative and creativity by rendering the recipient dependent on “instructions” from supervisors in order to make “new kinds of decision” (2004: 5). This technology is utilized to artificially but materially instantiate an idea or stereotype of the laborer as a mere body, without directing intelligence. The RAT procedure creates what Nakamura calls a cybertype, in which a normative claim, in this case the definition of what it means to be a manual laborer, is detached from naturalization as a legitimation strategy. That is, we know that the RATs are social constructions and not how workers actually are, but they still have the power to reproduce social hierarchies as structures of domination and oppression. The novel therefore begins with a complex commentary on the ideologies that perpetuated slavery in the United States.
The opening section of Delany’s novel in fact follows and revises the tradition of the fugitive slave novel, as Korga is stolen, or perhaps rescued, by a woman who wants to exploit him sexually. This woman attempts to reverse or mitigate the effects of the RAT procedure by providing Korga with a direct brain‐computer interface, a cognitive prosthesis intended to mimic the effects of the “General Information” technology available elsewhere in the setting of the novel. This technology works like having a Google search engine installed directly in your mind: “if you want to know something … all you have to do is think about it, and the answer pops into your head” (Delany 2004: 24). The initial effect is narrated both as the intrusion of external voices into Korga’s mind and as a liberating, rather than dystopian mode of social control and surveillance. The first effect of being directly connected to a network is that Korga becomes aware he has internalized an “unremembered childhood” voice calling him “stupid, stupid, stupid.” But suddenly a second voice, the voice of the network, “which felt and sounded and settled in his mind as if it were his own (but had to come from somewhere else)” takes that first “small voice up,” repeats it, and “on the beat” goes on to define stupidity as a “process, not a state,” specifically a process or strategy of information processing (2004: 29); then the voice of the network proceeds to deconstruct the opposition between stupidity and knowledge as arbitrary and “finally no different, in its overall form, from [the process] called stupidity” (2004: 30). It is important to note the musical metaphor of jazz improvisation implied by the phrase “on the beat,” rather than the experience of this second voice as an intrusion or invasion; this metaphor both invokes the history of black cultural performance and defines how the network changes people in ways that are not necessarily oppressive. The permanent real‐time network connection, experienced as a voice in the character’s head is not his own but still feels as if it is or should be, actually has the effect of making visible the way that Korga’s personality and inner life were already mediated by external social judgments, in this case, his characterization as stupid.
This “intrusion” of the network creates possibilities for agency and freedom that emerge in the space between the two voices fighting inside Korga’s mind. Networking subjectivity, opening the privacy of one’s own thoughts to the outside world, is narrated as liberating rather than as a form of control, precisely as a result of the novel’s rejection of alienated individuality, in which the subject exists in a state of nature prior to socialization and experiences socialization as an external intrusion. In Delany’s novel, the boundary between individual and society, inner life and outer world, was always fuzzy at best. Korga’s network access is not a prosthesis in the sense of a secondary supplementation of his mind or brain, as an organic unit; instead, network access reveals subjectivity itself to be prosthetic. The experience of this interface reveals Korga to be a “natural‐born cyborg,” to use Andy Clark’s phrase.
In a parallel to the tradition of the slave narrative, such as the 1845 Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, Korga goes on to use the interface to access the history of literature on his world, downloading the texts directly into his brain, in a revision of Douglass’s association of literacy with freedom (Delany 2004: 40–4). Korga’s experience of networked or prosthetic subjectivity is that of a mind expanded beyond the boundaries of his body but internally divided and fragmented at the same time. When Korga comments on how the interface annotates all “the words moving through his mind” and attaches them “to a bevy of written signs” (2004: 31), Delany is making connections to deconstructive hermeneutics. The novel goes on to describe this “new condition” as “not so much an alternate voice loud enough to drown the voices of childhood” but instead “a web, a text weaving endlessly about him, erupting into and falling from consciousness” (2004: 34)—that is, not drowning out or overwhelming his thoughts but interrupting and interacting with them.
Delany’s novel compares interestingly to a post‐cyberpunk touchstone for the representation of a network society or “condition,” Bruce Sterling’s 1996 story “Maneki Neko.” The story depicts a network gift society existing as a sub‐ or counter‐culture in Japan, in which the social interactions of the participants in the network are mediated through a coordinating artificial intelligence, which tells the participants what to do in order to promote the well‐being of their fellows. The main character, Tsuyoshi, asserts “I really believe computers help human beings to relate in a much more human way” (Sterling 1996: 9), a formulation that might be taken as the moral of Delany’s narrative about Korga. As Andy Clark (2003) puts it, expanding on Bateson, what’s most distinctively human about our minds is their capacity for “multiple mergers and coalitions,” the ability to incorporate “nonbiological props, scaffoldings, instruments, and resources” into a cognitive system that can therefore not be reduced to or contained within the private space of the individual mind (Clark 2003: 7, 26).
What is most distinctively human about us is the way the human is never just human, always posthuman. At the end of Sterling’s story, the main character has been captured by an agent of the government, who interprets the network gift economy in paranoid terms, as a kind of hive mind (Sterling 1996: 17). Tsuyoshi, the character who best embodies a networked state of being in the story, is described as waiting “patiently for someone to come and give him freedom” (1996: 19). This final line of the story seems designed to invoke the reader’s tendency to interpret the gift society as a dystopia that renders the participants passive or dependent on an Orwellian Big‐Brother‐type figure. But the story, in which Tsuyoshi is by far the most sympathetic character, also seems designed to make us ask ourselves whether that reading isn’t conditioned by assumptions that freedom is individual autonomy rather than interdependence. Can freedom exist outside a social context? Don’t we all have to be “given” freedom rather than “being” free? As Delany’s novel makes clearer, being “given” freedom doesn’t mean that its achievement doesn’t require work and struggle. In particular, Delany seems more interested in interpreting network technologies from the perspective of subjects relatively excluded from or marginalized within modern European concepts of the individual or liberal subject.
Delany’s novel can also be read as an intervention in contemporary debates about later developments within the history of cybernetics. The shift from early cybernetics to systems theory involved a shift from homeostatic processes of self‐correction to autopoiesis or self‐organization. This is associated with Francisco Varela and Humberto Maturana’s reworking of cybernetics from the standpoint of biology as a discipline and, subsequently, Niklas Luhmann’s reworking of Varela and Maturana to theorize social systems. This shift is central to Cary Wolfe’s definition of posthumanism as a critique of anthropocentrism and human species‐identity (Wolfe 2010: xiv–xvi).7 But early cybernetics also tended to emphasize flows of information across systemic boundaries; as Bateson (1972) puts it, “the network” or system of expanded mind “is not bounded by the skin but includes all the external pathways along which information can travel” (Bateson 1972: 319). In contrast, autopoiesis tends to emphasize the production and maintenance of precisely such boundaries. Although Wolfe is right to insist that systems theory understands these boundaries as arbitrary, or as “functional” rather than “ontological” distinctions (Wolfe 2010: xix), the act of making the distinction between system and environment constitutes what counts as internal to the system and what counts as external environment for that particular system. The resultant emphasis on the necessity of systemic boundaries might be understood as something like strategic essentialism.8
Delany’s novel dramatizes the necessity for such maintenance of boundaries and cultural identities when a character raises the threat of information overload and anxieties about maintaining social order that result from the kind of direct neural interface Korga has received. Similarly, the novel’s other main character, Korga’s lover Marq, later reflects on what the novel calls the danger of cultural fugue (Delany 2004: 24) or being overwhelmed by the sheer cultural diversity of the literally cosmo‐politan, far‐future setting of the novel and its 6000 inhabited worlds (2004: 66). Marq wonders “how many ways of life had suddenly made the transition to illusion, to mere memory, to meaning without referent?” (2004: 214).
Delany’s narrative of Korga’s subjectivity becoming networked rather than securely interiorized registers the same unease and the same desire to retain the critique of boundaries and the undoing of privatized psychic spaces that is associated with an earlier moment in the history of cybernetics, in effect resisting the progressivist narrative of autopoiesis and systems theory as a replacement for cybernetics and homeostatic processes. Delany’s novel seeks to combine these two emphases, so that we are encouraged to read Korga’s networked subjectivity as a form of decentering or interdependence alongside the redefinition of family and kinship embodied in his partner Marq’s “nurture stream.” In this alternative family model, belonging and kinship are produced artificially, through reproductive technologies, including both cloning and genetic hybridization across human and alien species, as well as through adoption, rather than what Marq insists on calling “direct egg‐and‐sperm relations,” or heterosexual intercourse (Delany 2004: 117–18). Where families traditionally “are seen to contain and enclose the children, to protect them from society, in the stream model “the children are the connection between the parents and society,” conceived as gifts from society, as gifts to society” (2004: 119). Korga’s narrative of liberation through network access and Marq’s redefinition of the limits of kinship and species are both presented as icons of posthumanism, embodying the same undoing of boundaries between self and other, public and private, inner and outer.