One key book is N. Katherine Hayles' 1999 How We Became Posthuman. This book is a critique of the very notion of "information" as somehow digitalizing all of reality, including cells and ecosystems and human bodies. She looks at Turing's test and concludes, "Here at the inaugural moment of the computer age, the erasure of embodiment is performed so that "intelligence" becomes a property of the formal manipulation of symbols rather than enaction in the human lifeworld...Aiding this process was a definition of information, formalized by Claude Shannon and Norbert Wiener, that conceptualized information as an entity distinct from the substrates carrying it" (xi). She mentions Hans Moravec - whose notions of downloading consciousness I heard her debate live at U of Washington when I was a grad student there - as the heir of the Turing Test and of this disembodiment of (a very problematic notion of) information.
How to use her? Well first she is wonderful, clear and thoughtful in her arguments. Her argument with "cyborg" as a term is that for her it signifies just this disembodiment of knowledge. When we merge machine and human into cyborg, she says, we imagine that this merge can happen as information, but this is wrong. She imagines the posthuman and the cyborg as mostly bad things, icons of an erroneous way of imagining human and telecommunicative "information."
In my dissertation I also take on this slippage of information from Shannon's reasonably constrained electrical engineering definition (in a rhetoric of WW 2 radios, noise, signal, and so on). David Porush makes this point as well; you can't move from information as it relates to radio signal strength to information in the larger sense and keep the same "hard science" elements of the initial use. You just can't. And it is intellectually sloppy to do so. Norbert Wiener does this in his book The Human Use of Human Beings, as well.
But on the other hand: something happened when we learned about the human gene, the double helix. Notice this discovery occurs at the same time period as we are thinking in terms of "information" and so the genetic process of in-forming the cell etc is seen as naturally a version of the new view of the body as simply a product of information.
There is another obvious element here: for Hayles the idea that Turing's first test was not between human and computer, but between a man and a woman, gives her a terrific way to get at some of the gender issues brought about by the notion of the posthuman and the cyborg. For her the male/female performed boundaries ARE changing, shifting, and policing these boundaries back to patriarchal values isn't going to cut it. The Enlightenment model of the human, at once putatively universal and at the same time arguably massively masculine and gender inflected and racial, is being undercut by multiple notions of embodiment and mind, the enacted body and the represented body.
She ends her introduction by imagining that the real "trick" here happens earlier than man or machine, male or female. It happens when we allow the Turing Test (or later versions of its implications that machines can think and that the human/machine boundary is porous) to take some thing embodied - your will, desire, perception - and take that "out" of embodiment and put it rather into "a distributed cognitive system in which represented bodies are joined with enacted bodies through mutating and flexible machine interfaces."
Ok yes she is writing in that language that screams academe. (Full disclosure; I do think there is a role for discipline specific vocabularies, and I don't mind using some of this philosophical and post structuralist language in the service of theory). But what she is saying is that these types of operations are being "done to us" by Others. I think when we begin to connect with others via computer mediated chains, or cell phone or social networks, we also "do" exactly that: we allow parts of ourselves to be distributed, geographically and otherwise. And we escape our "actual" and full embodiment (perhaps we are never fully aware of this embodiment, btw). And this new sense of a distributed self reminds me of a speeded up version of the Modernist novel and its sense of the fragmented and multiple self (Joyce, Woolf, Faulkner, et al).
This strikes me as a response similar to Donna Haraway's response to the cyborg. There are crucial questions of embodiment for feminists, for radicals who care about justice, and Hayles wants to make sure we emphasize the org in cyborg, the or rather, the interconnectedness of the cyb and the org. It's not that we want to go back to a past "clarity" about fixed notions of embodiment (gender, class, etc). We don't really have a choice about that. But we need to correct the overvaluation of the cybernetic half of the cyborg equation. In Chapter 3 she argues that the emphasis on information technologies is responsible for the systematic devaluation of materiality and embodiment. Information "theory" and tech values pattern/randomness over the presence/absence of a different era. Instead Hayles imagines going beyond such binaries (ie presence VS pattern as ways to read/see humans) to show how pattern and presence, digital and analogy, are complementary, that they enhance our understanding of each other.
She ends that chapter with the assertion - done forcefully and with some emotion - that information, like humanity, can't exist apart from embodiment, which is always local and specific. You can't she says bring it back when it's destroyed, and using data won't bring it back. (somehow I'm reminded of Sterling's novel Distraction, where Louisiana is the site of a genome bank where the genetic 'data' of the many extinct and almost extinct animals and plants are kept, presumably so that we can do exactly what she says we cannot: reproduce them, embody them. This is of course also the narrative arc of Jurassic Park and other "create life form from genetic information" stories.). And this is as true of the planet as it is of any particular life form; our material world is fragile and cannot be replaced, though we are distracted from this knowledge by the overvaluing of the spaces of the cyber: the net, cell phones, social networking, and so on.
Perhaps this distinction between notions of "information" would be useful to put (in everyday language) into the second, more blog-inflected book. And perhaps I could develop it even more than I do in the dissertation, emphasize it even: Hayles, Porush, Balsamo, Mirowski (esp page 16 of Machine Dreams). And certainly a politics emerges from this analysis of Hayles that she helps support, one that restores valuation to the org half of the cyb-org construction.
Finally, Hayles and Balsamo are particularly focused on role bodies and embodiment ought to play for feminist cultural studies of science and technology. And I'm interested in bringing some of this to life in my writing; that is, allowing the bodies to emerge from the overvaluation and focus on the cybernetic: cell phones, imaging technologies like ultrasound, social networking systems, and so on.
Excellent piece! Keeping writing such analytical pieces.
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