In network culture, technology becomes “an indispensable prosthesis through which body and mind expand. If understood according to the relational and interactive logic of techno scientific interfacing, thinking and acting “subjects” are never wholly self contained or self-identical, to the degree that they realize themselves in and
through the various technological prostheses that always already extend subjective intelligence and agency “beyond” the subject
As Taylor emphasizes, “this relationship is always two-way: as the body and mind extrude into the world, world intrudes into body and mind.”36 by means of technological prostheses and the informational currents flowing through them. Our technologies, then, act or even think on and through us just as much as we act or think on and through them—and in such a way that “the networks extruding from and into our bodies and minds form something like a technological unconscious, which, like conscious mental processes, screens information.” In other words, we think and act through technological and informational systems—and they through us—without our being wholly conscious or in control of such thought and action
N. Katherine Hayles signals the emergence of a “posthuman” subjectivity that would render untenable modern models of the subject as a self-contained, selfpossessed, or self-determining individual. Whereas modern Western thought, especially in its liberal humanist forms, would tend to presuppose an autonomous, independent subject who might seek to assume responsibility for technological mastery over its world by means of conscious agency, the posthuman perspective that Hayles elaborates would insist that “conscious agency has never been ‘in control.’... Mastery through the exercise of autonomous will is merely the story consciousness tells itself to explain results that actually come about through chaotic dynamics and emergent structures
As Taylor emphasizes, “this relationship is always two-way: as the body and mind extrude into the world, world intrudes into body and mind.”36 by means of technological prostheses and the informational currents flowing through them. Our technologies, then, act or even think on and through us just as much as we act or think on and through them—and in such a way that “the networks extruding from and into our bodies and minds form something like a technological unconscious, which, like conscious mental processes, screens information.” In other words, we think and act through technological and informational systems—and they through us—without our being wholly conscious or in control of such thought and action
N. Katherine Hayles signals the emergence of a “posthuman” subjectivity that would render untenable modern models of the subject as a self-contained, selfpossessed, or self-determining individual. Whereas modern Western thought, especially in its liberal humanist forms, would tend to presuppose an autonomous, independent subject who might seek to assume responsibility for technological mastery over its world by means of conscious agency, the posthuman perspective that Hayles elaborates would insist that “conscious agency has never been ‘in control.’... Mastery through the exercise of autonomous will is merely the story consciousness tells itself to explain results that actually come about through chaotic dynamics and emergent structures
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