Interview with N. Katherine Hayles

PREPARING THE HUMANITIES FOR THE POST HUMAN:
Don Solomon interviews N. Katherine Hayles at the National Humanities Center

N. KATHERINE HAYLES (ASC Senior Fellow) is one of the country’s foremost authorities on digital media and literary theory that encompasses new technologies. The Hillis Professor of Literature, Distinguished Professor in the Departments of English and Design/Media Arts at the University of California, Los Angeles, Hayles’s books How We Became Posthuman and My Mother was a Computer have been hailed as cornerstones of this emerging field of literary studies. As one of this year’s ASC Fellows, she has worked on two new books, an anthology of digital fiction and a new text on the teaching and incorporation of digital media into the literature classroom. She also served as the keynote speaker at the inaugural conference on “The Human and the Humanities.” In a recent interview she described her approach to this emerging field, the importance of understanding how new technologies are affecting human beings, and the role of the humanities in coping with the “posthuman.”

As an emergent field, the study of digital texts is so protean. How are you able to obtain perspective and then maintain it on subject matter that is changing at such an incredible pace?

It’s always a problem when you’re working in an emerging field to get a sense of that field, because the change is rapid, and the judgment is still out on what counts and what’s going to be totally ephemeral. But to me that is the exciting part of scholarship. I’ve always tried to work in areas that were emerging, where everything was still up in the air, and that’s really very exciting for me, so—how do you do it? Well, you take a deep breath and plunge in, knowing that anything you’re going to say is going to be tentative and provisional and likely to be revised, but my hope is to open up new areas of discourse, and when you work in that way, you know that being definitive is out of the question; that’s not the kind of ballgame that it is. What I hope to do is to open up conversations, open up areas of inquiry.

Well, your work has been not only groundbreaking, but it is cited as “definitive” as much as anyone’s in this field; why do you think that is? What are the approaches that you took that have proven so useful?

When I first started working in an emergent field called Literature and Science, the methodologies were very undeveloped and unsophisticated, and they existed mostly in the form of influence studies. For example, Alexander Pope was influenced by Newton. And the pioneers in that area did some very good work, but it’s an extremely limited model because you have to show of course that a given poet or writer knew and responded to the work of a given scientist, so it privileges science as the source of the knowledge, and then literature is always put in second place as the interpreter or reactor to that. I felt there were many more opportunities for thinking about crosscurrents between literature and science, and in my early work I was struggling to devise a methodology that would say something like this: that literature and science are both part of a cultural context and both the kinds of questions that the scientists are interested in, and the kinds of challenges that writers are responding to, are coming out of that larger cultural context, and are deeply tied in with it.

Now, of course, there is a scientific tradition; scientists are responding to previous work in their fields, why science takes a particular direction at a particular time, and to fully understand that issue I think you have to know something about the whole complex fabric of the culture at that moment that’s making certain questions seem interesting to pursue and other questions not so interesting. And in the same way that scientists are responding to those issues, writers are as well, although with very different methods and coming to very different conclusions.

Given that vision, the problem is, how do you make that specific? How do you make that persuasive? And I struggled with that question unsuccessfully for several years, making a run at it, not being satisfied with what came out of that, but making some progress, making a run at it again, so I regard my books as a series of partial failures, as well as partial successes. But each subsequent project sort of grew out of my dissatisfaction with the previous project, and at the same time, science studies was emerging, and very interesting work was being done there, and so by the time I came to write How We Became Posthuman, which I started in the mid 1990s, science studies had developed to the point where there were some very interesting methodologies I felt I could use.

Speaking of your book How We Became Posthuman, does the notion of a “posthuman” suggest a “posthumanities”? And if so, what are the potential lines of inquiry and challenges for these emerging “posthumanists”?

Well, I think the humanities have always been concerned with shifting definitions of the human; you can look at highly influential figures like, say, Rousseau. Rousseau had a different idea of what the human might be that proliferated out and had enormous implications for the culture. Or, you could compare his work with LaMettriere, who had a completely different opinion of what the human was. So, the human has always been a kind of contested term, but for me what the idea of the posthuman evokes that is not unique to the 20th century but became much more highly energized in the 20th century, is the idea that technology has progressed to the point where it has the capability of fundamentally transforming the conditions of human life. To take an example, many people in the medical field now feel it’s quite possible to imagine life extension techniques that could change the human lifetime to something like 150 years. And where one could expect to be robust to 135 or 140, that is an immense change in the way the trajectory of a human lifetime is viewed. Now, a reproductive period of 40 years, instead of seeming to be most of a human lifetime as it still is in countries like Africa that have a life expectancy of say 48 or something, it becomes a mere prelude to an active 100-year-and-beyond reproductive span, so it totally changes the way one would think about reproductive tasks like raising children. That now is relegated to your youth. But beyond that, you’ve got this huge stretch of time, so you can see how that change really changes so many things about what it would mean to be human. And that’s only one example. We could imagine a lot of other examples that would change the conditions of humanity even more, and so the posthuman I think is gesturing toward those kinds of changes, where some sort of change so radical is now within technological possibility, that many things about a human lifetime begin to change.

In technologically informed areas such as this many people are not as conversant with the key influences and important factors. And, given the pace of change, it’s even possible for those who are conversant to be quickly outpaced. Does this lead to many misconceptions?

Well, what you say is perfectly true, that one of the deep ideas of the humanities is that the past is an enduring reservoir of value, and that it pays us rich dividends to know the past, study the past, to immerse ourselves in the past, and so people of that orientation tend to want to take the attitude that there’s nothing that has happened or could happen that has not already happened in the past, and I frequently find myself in discussions with people of that mindset, whereas I’m trying to say, no, there are some things that have never happened before in human history. This is new; we’ve never had the possibility for manipulating our own genome in a generation as opposed to 150 generations. We never had the possibility for individually manipulating atoms as in nanotechnology, and so forth. And so these people will hunt up some obscure allusion in pre-Socratic philosophy— and say, “Oh, look, Democritus had this idea!” But to me, that’s not really dealing with the question, because even if some obscure or famous philosopher had this idea, the technological means to implement it was not there, and so its full consequences could not possibly be dealt with and entertained. So that’s one of the misconceptions, this continuing dialogue between “some things are new” and “no things are new.”

Now, I understand that you have completed the first fully electronic project by a Fellow while you’ve been here. What is the nature of it?

That project is called the Electronic Literature Collection, and it is a CD—and it’s also available on the Web—of 60 recent and new works of electronic literature, and that’s a collaborative project between me and three other people; Nick Montfort, Scott Rettberg, and Stephanie Strickland. It is the first attempt to create an anthology of electronic literature, and the idea behind the project is to compile in one place a group of interesting and high quality works that someone could use in a classroom setting if they were interested in teaching electronic literature but they didn’t know enough about the field to go out there and find it in the vast sea of the Web.

So this was an attempt to create in one handy place a whole variety of works in different genres that could be used primarily for teaching purposes but study purposes as well, and we think of this as quite a forward-looking project because, first of all, it’s programmed so that it will play on both PC and Mac formats; it’s cross platform. It has author notes, it has introductory notes to each work, it has a keyword index that’s searchable, and all the works are licensed under a creative commons license. That means they can be freely disseminated as long as they’re not modified, so anyone can download these works, can distribute them to their students free. We made no money off creating this anthology even though hundreds and hundreds of person-hours went into it. It’s a kind of gift to the emerging community of literary scholars who are interested in electronic literature but only beginning to know about the field. Its part of a large project I’m engaged in, to create the field of electronic literature, and of course that has to be a community project, so if we go back to the beginning of the 20th century, you’ll remember that there was a titanic struggle to introduce modern literature into the classroom. We’re undergoing a similar challenge now where in my view the fate of literary studies really hangs in the balance, and the kind of struggle that’s going on is whether literature will continue to be defined as print literature, or if literature will be understood in broader terms as works of literary interest in any medium, including the digital medium. And to my way of thinking, the latter position is much, much more attractive than the former, because I believe if literature doesn’t change as the culture changes, it’s doomed to the fate of classics, which is to say it will be seen as the conservatory of a great tradition but really peripheral to the main business of the university, and so I see this as an issue of great importance to people interested in literary studies.

You’ve been at the Center at the inauguration of its ambitious ASC initiative. What are your thoughts about ASC as it is beginning to take shape, and how has it influenced your own scholarship and thinking?

The ASC project is immensely exciting and important and necessary. Almost my whole career I’ve been engaged in the project of building a discourse community between humanists and scientists, and clearly both of these communities as well as others have to be involved in this question of how the human is changing and being reassessed in contemporary culture. I also have a stake in wanting the humanities to come into this conversation as a full partner, not as simply responding to scientific discoveries. So I want the humanities to enter as a discipline capable of producing genuine insight and knowledge. We all understand that science produces genuine new knowledge, and few people would really want to contest that, but it’s a harder claim to say that the humanities are not just about entertainment. They’re about the production of knowledge. And they’re not only about the preservation and conservation of knowledge, which of course is part of the task of the humanities, but they’re also about the creation of new knowledge, and making that claim, especially in conversation with scientists, in my view is what really is the precondition for a deep conversation, and to begin to make claims that the humanities can produce knowledge, that this knowledge is worthwhile and consequential, and that moreover, this knowledge moves in complex ways and synchrony with new scientific knowledge. That to me is the most interesting kind of conversation, and in our first conference we had a lot of exciting presentations about the new knowledge that the sciences were producing. We had very little about the new knowledge that the humanities were producing, and that’s not surprising, because that’s the most difficult part of that conversation to get started. But to me, it’s absolutely essential, and I think this project has the potential to create the grounds for that kind of conversation. To my mind, as we move forward, it’s really important to keep at the forefront of the project the capability of the humanities to produce new knowledge, and to make that claim, and then to really initiate conversations on that basis.

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