“In scientific fields, I believe the constructive role that
literature can play is much misunderstood,” said N. Katherine Hayles, professor of literature at Duke University in the US and author of the groundbreaking book How
We Became Posthuman (1999).
“Scientists don’t fully grasp how literature can be such a powerful resource for thinking about what is really at stake in a scientific endeavour.”
Hayles, speaking to me in an interview soon to be posted on the University of Nottingham’s website and to be published in the journal Paragraph, said that while the science fiction novelist Philip K. Dick may not have been a great writer on a “sentence-by-sentence level,” he had a profound vision of how the view of human nature implicit in cybernetics would affect the way that people saw themselves.
“What makes sense [in Dick’s work] is that what we take to be reality has certain assumptions built into it, which may turn out to be highly questionable,” she said. “It turns out that Dick was keying in on exactly the assumptions that would, in fact, turn out to be subverted in the work of cybernetics.”
The main assumption that cybernetics and writers such as Dick challenge is that people are autonomous agents who are directly responsible for their own actions. Cybernetics tends to see people enmeshed in large networks comprising humans, machines and institutions, which all interact in complex ways that are difficult to understand.
Hayles says this altered perspective “decentres” the human subject as an active agent in a world governed by simple causes and effects. In Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, for example, the central character hunts down androids that are almost indistinguishable from humans. In fact, he may even be an android himself.
“The idea that deep affective forces might be at work in something like the decentring of the human subject is implicit in the cybernetic texts, and yet because they are written in the scientific tradition, they don’t deal directly with the affect that is really at stake here,” she says. It took someone like Philip K. Dick to do so.
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