N. Katherine Hayles’s How We Became Posthuman offers one of the most consequential critiques of cybernetic thought by demonstrating that the posthuman is not a futuristic fantasy but a historically emergent epistemic formation produced through the separation of information from material embodiment. Hayles’s central intervention is to trace how cybernetics progressively abstracted information from its material substrates, thereby enabling the fantasy that consciousness might circulate unchanged across biological and machinic media. As the chapter sequence listed in the contents page (p. 8) makes clear, this argument unfolds through a genealogy of cybernetics, informatics, literary theory, and virtuality, culminating in a redefinition of subjectivity itself. Her key claim is that the posthuman emerges when informational pattern is privileged over material instantiation, rendering the body secondary to code and recasting human identity as an informational effect rather than an embodied condition. Against this disembodying logic, Hayles insists that embodiment is not a disposable container for consciousness but the constitutive ground of cognition, agency, and perception. The prologue’s reading of the Turing Test (pp. 12–15) is exemplary: rather than treating it as a neutral test of machine intelligence, Hayles reveals it as the inaugural scene in which embodiment is strategically erased and subjectivity is reconfigured as a distributed informational system. Her formulation of the posthuman is therefore double: both diagnosis and critique. While she recognises the epistemic power of cybernetic models, she resists their reduction of human being to informational pattern alone. The result is a rigorously materialist posthumanism in which subjectivity is understood not as disembodied code, but as a dynamic entanglement of flesh, cognition, and technics—mutable, distributed, and mediated, yet irreducibly embodied.
Hayles, N.K. (1999) How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
