Talk:N. Katherine Hayles

Wikipedia Ambassador Program assignment

This article is the subject of an educational assignment at University of Wikipedia supported by WikiProject Wikipedia and the Wikipedia Ambassador Program during the 2011 Q3 term. Further details are available on the course page.

Above message substituted from {{WAP assignment}} on 14:05, 7 January 2023 (UTC)

Key Concepts

I think this article could be improved by including more information on some of the key concepts and questions that animate Hayles' work. To this end, I'd like to include some information on "embodied virtuality", "media-specific analysis (MSA)", reflexivity, electronic literature and on cyborgs/the post human. LD 18:30, 17 October 2011 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by Lauren.dimonte (talk • contribs)

Critical/Scholarly Reception

Hello wiki-verse. Myself and User:Akkakkak are going to be doing a little work on this page by adding a section within the "key concepts" area regarding the critical and scholarly reception of N. Katherine Hayles' work, specifically of her book, How We Became Posthuman. Feel free to provide feedback for us.Sev2109 (talk) 19:28, 8 October 2015 (UTC)

CUNY Graduate Center Class discussion

This is a new discussion section for students in the ITP Core 1 Seminar who are going to be adding a few sentences to this page. --Theredproject (talk) 23:19, 20 November 2017 (UTC)

Award list

I will research the originals for these awards: https://www.ae-info.org/ae/Member/Hayles_N._Katherine

• 2015 American Academy of Arts and Sciences
• 2015 Fellowship, Institute for Advanced Study, Durham University UK
• Digital Publishing Grant, $10,000, Franklin Humanities Institute, Duke University
• GreaterThanGames Humanities Laboratory, Co-Director, $225000 grant for 2011-2014
• 2010 Honorary Doctorate, Art College of Design, Pasadena CA
• 2010 Inductee, Innovation Hall of Fame, Rochester Institute of Technology, Rochester NY
• 2007 Honorary Doctorate, Umea University, Sweden
• 2006 - 2007 Presidential Research Fellowship, University of California
• 2006 ASC Fellowship, National Humanities Center
• 2005 - 2006 Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholar
• 2005 Fulbright Senior Specialist, Moscow University
• 2002 Susanne E. Langer Award for Outstanding Scholarship in the Ecology of Symbolic Form, to Writing Machines
• 2001 Honorary Phi Beta Kappa Membership
• 2000 Council of the Humanities Fellowship, Princeton University

1999 National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship 1999 Bellagio Residential Fellowship, Rockefeller Foundation 1998 Distinguished Scholar Award, University of Rochester 1997 Medal of Honor, University of Helsinki 1997 Distinguished Scholar Award, International Association of Fantastic in the Arts LoveElectronicLiterature (talk) 04:25, 5 March 2025 (UTC)

Most of these don't sound like awards to me and a general rule of thumb about awards is that we need secondary sources as citations to demonstrate WP:WEIGHT. Academics getting grants is not generally noteworthy. SmartSE (talk) 12:08, 5 March 2025 (UTC)

Grants are extremely important in academia and measure someone's notability in the electronic literature field. However, I do see your point. I won't go into the grants discussion. What is the best way to cite this? https://web.archive.org/web/20160309035146/https://literature.duke.edu/people?Gurl=%2Faas%2FLiterature&Uil=n.hayles&subpage=profile

The citation is archived in the wayback machine, and does have her education history:

Ph.D., University of Rochester, 1977 M.A.,

Michigan State University, 1970 M.S.,

California Institute of Technology, 1969 B.S.,

Rochester Institute of Technology, 1966

thank you LoveElectronicLiterature (talk) 01:05, 7 March 2025 (UTC)

Resurrecting Key Concepts

Somewhere along the way, this whole section got lost. The article does not make sense unless you understand what Hayles original thoughts were. I am bringing back this entire section.

Key concepts

Human and posthuman

Hayles understands "human" and "posthuman" as constructions that emerge from historically specific understandings of technology, culture and embodiment; "human and "posthuman" views each produce unique models of subjectivity. Within this framework "human" is aligned with Enlightenment notions of liberal humanism, including its emphasis on the "natural self" and the freedom of the individual. Conversely, posthuman does away with the notion of a "natural" self and emerges when human intelligence is conceptualized as being co-produced with intelligent machines. According to Hayles the posthuman view privileges information over materiality, considers consciousness as an epiphenomenon and imagines the body as a prosthesis for the mind . Specifically Hayles suggests that in the posthuman view "there are no essential differences or absolute demarcations between bodily existence and computer simulation..." The posthuman thus emerges as a deconstruction of the liberal humanist notion of "human." Hayles disregards the idea of a form of immortality created through the preservation of human knowledge with computers, instead opting for a specification within the definition of posthuman that one embraces the possibilities of information technology without the imagined concepts of infinite power and immortality, tropes often associated with technology and dissociated with traditional humanity. This idea of the posthuman also ties in with cybernetics in the creation of the feedback loop that allows humans to interact with technology through a blackbox, linking the human and the machine as one. Thus, Hayles links this to an overall cultural perception of virtuality and a priority on information rather than materiality.

Embodiment and materiality

Despite drawing out the differences between "human" and "posthuman", Hayles is careful to note that both perspectives engage in the erasure of embodiment from subjectivity. In the liberal humanist view, cognition takes precedence over the body, which is narrated as an object to possess and master. Meanwhile, popular conceptions of the cybernetic posthuman imagine the body as merely a container for information and code. Noting the alignment between these two perspectives, Hayles uses How We Became Posthuman to investigate the social and cultural processes and practices that led to the conceptualization of information as separate from the material that instantiates it. Drawing on diverse examples, such as Turing's imitation game, Gibson's Neuromancer and cybernetic theory, Hayles traces the history of what she calls "the cultural perception that information and materiality are conceptually distinct and that information is in some sense more essential, more important and more fundamental than materiality." By tracing the emergence of such thinking, and by looking at the manner in which literary and scientific texts came to imagine, for example, the possibility of downloading human consciousness into a computer, Hayles attempts to trouble the information/material separation and in her words, "...put back into the picture the flesh that continues to be erased in contemporary discussions about cybernetic subjects.” In this regard, the posthuman subject under the condition of virtuality is an "amalgam, a collection of heterogeneous components, a material-informational entity whose boundaries undergo continuous construction and reconstruction." Hayles differentiates "embodiment" from the concept of "the body" because "in contrast to the body, embodiment is contextual, enmeshed within the specifics of place, time, physiology, and culture, which together compose enactment." Hayles specifically examines how various science fiction novels portray a shift in the conception of information, particularly in the dialectics of presence/absence toward pattern/randomness. She diagrams these shifts to show how ideas about abstraction and information actually have a "local habitation" and are "embodied" within the narratives. Although ideas about "information" taken out of context creates abstractions about the human "body", reading science fiction situates these same ideas in "embodied" narrative."

Nonconscious cognition

According to Hayles, most human cognition happens outside of consciousness/unconsciousness; cognition extends through the entire biological spectrum, including animals and plants; technical devices cognize, and in doing so profoundly influence human complex systems. Hayles makes a distinction between thinking and cognition. In Unthought: the power of the cognitive nonconscious, she describes thinking:

"Thinking, as I use the term, refers to high-level mental operations such as reasoning abstractly, creating and using verbal languages, constructing mathematical theorems, composing music, and the like, operations associated with higher consciousness."

She describes cognition:

"Cognition is a much broader capacity that extends far beyond consciousness into other neurological brain processes; it is also pervasive in other life forms and complex technical systems. Although the cognitive capacity that exists beyond consciousness goes by various names, I call it nonconscious cognition."

LoveElectronicLiterature (talk) 01:56, 7 March 2025 (UTC)

Some part of this would be sensible to include, if you can find reliable secondary sourcing for it. Russ Woodroofe (talk) 09:58, 7 March 2025 (UTC)

(Pinging @Theroadislong: who originally removed this section.) Russ Woodroofe (talk) 10:07, 7 March 2025 (UTC)

Yes fine to add back some of this with suitable sources but content like "In the years since this book was published, it has been both praised and critiqued by scholars who have viewed her work through a variety of lenses; including those of cybernetic history, feminism, postmodernism, cultural and literary criticism, and conversations in the popular press about humans' changing relationships to technology." was really just self promoting puffery. Theroadislong (talk) 10:17, 7 March 2025 (UTC)

Awards and honor section

The Awards section was a bit of a mess, mixing together lots of different things. I reworked. The Wellek prize is listed as a highly prestigious award by the Association of American Universities [1] and should surely be highlighted. The AAAS fellowship is also a big deal. I put these first, put the other awards into another paragraph, and had a third paragraph with honorary doctorates (which should be included as a likely pass of WP:NPROF if nothing else) and the like. Did I miss anything? Russ Woodroofe (talk) 16:46, 7 March 2025 (UTC)

original research vs summarizing viewpoints?

Hi @Russ wood I originally put this as a talk between @Theroadislong and me as I do want to understand when we can summarize a critic's theory.

@Theroadislong Thank you for your warning. I am now studying how articles for other major critics handle quoting from the critic's work. The article for Jacques Derrida does cite Derrida's original papers--is that considered original research as well? This is from Derrida's article, citing Derrida:" "He expressed his disagreement with McLuhan in regard to what Derrida called McLuhan's ideology about the end of writing. In a 1982 interview, he said: I think that there is an ideology in McLuhan's discourse that I don't agree with because he's an optimist as to the possibility of restoring an oral community which would get rid of the writing machines and so on. I think that's a very traditional myth which goes back to... let's say Plato, Rousseau... And instead of thinking that we are living at the end of writing, I think that in another sense we are living in the extension – the overwhelming extension – of writing. At least in the new sense... I don't mean the alphabetic writing down, but in the new sense of those writing machines that we're using now (e.g. the tape recorder). And this is writing too." Derrida [1982] Excuse me, but I never said exactly so: Yet Another Derridean Interview Archived April 13, 2016, at the Wayback Machine, with Paul Brennan, On the Beach (Glebe NSW, Australia). No.1/1983: p. 42.

Julie Kristeva's article does the same thing: This is a quote from the Wikipedia article and not Kristeva's work: "Upon entering the Mirror Stage, the child learns to distinguish between self and other, and enters the realm of shared cultural meaning, known as the symbolic. In Desire in Language (1980), Kristeva describes the symbolic as the space in which the development of language allows the child to become a "speaking subject," and to develop a sense of identity separate from the mother. " I can reorganize the Hayle article to showcase the work, explain why Hayles is critical in understanding the theory in electronic literature, and provide reviews. Would that help? LoveElectronicLiterature (talk) 20:32, 9 March 2025 (UTC)[reply] ^ "Humaniki". LoveElectronicLiterature (talk) 20:37, 9 March 2025 (UTC)

Not every wikipedia page is in great standing. Theroadislong is correct to remind you that WP:OTHERSTUFFEXISTS -- just because other articles are in poor shape doesn't mean that this one should be. The mostly-unsourced research section in the Kristeva article should probably be removed, and looks to be a holdover from older days of Wikipedia. It at least is less breathless in tone than what you had proposed here. The usage in the Derrida article is not comparable. Russ Woodroofe (talk) 00:56, 10 March 2025 (UTC)

Thank you both for your edits. I have extensively reviewed the reviews for Hayles and have put in the theories by using other people's reviews and used their quotes from Hayles. I hope this is what you envision for a good article. If not, could you please specify what does not work for you? LoveElectronicLiterature (talk) 21:27, 14 March 2025 (UTC)

Medal of Honor from the University of Helsinki

HI I think this was from 1997, but I can not find an independent source. Could anyone verify this? She also received the Medal of Honor from the University of Helsinki (1997), and was LoveElectronicLiterature (talk) 21:25, 14 March 2025 (UTC)

Under Awards and Honors, I sourced to Academia Europaea. I didn't succeed in sourcing to U Helsinki. I am uncertain as to whether this belongs or not -- I am taking it to be comparable to an honorary doctorate, but I am not sure this is correct. If it is not covered anywhere, then it is likely it shouldn't be in our article. Russ Woodroofe (talk) 11:05, 15 March 2025 (UTC)