After Modernism and Postmodernism: How Can Science Fiction Theory, Hyperreality Theory, Posthumanism and Cybernetics Help Us?
Alan N. Shapiro
These were some of my notes for a lecture that I gave on April 1, 2014 at the Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine at the University of Manchester.
In my pedagogical practice at an art and design university in Germany, I am developing a curriculum for teaching computer programming and informatics to creative students who are artists, graphics designers, and humanities-oriented individuals. Mathematics and logical thinking are not necessarily their strong suits – they tend to be what are called right-brain hemisphere thinkers. One of the key names that I give to this university-level educational project is ‘creative coding’. Creative coding is also a growing movement in contemporary society. I think that the best way to teach this academic field implies not doing it the same way as how programming is taught at technical and engineering universities. There are aspects of that standard computer science curriculum, however, which it is essential to appropriate. One thing that I believe about creative coding is that it necessitates an approach where theory and practice are unified rather than separated. Theory is an important part of this innovative and experimental curriculum. By theory I mean philosophy, sociology, social theory, media theory, art history, cultural theory, etc.
In the age that we are living in now of so-called new media, new technologies, and the information society, we find ourselves to be in a very new situation in our social, individual and technological existence. As opposed to the historical periods of modernity/modernism and postmodernity/postmodernism, I call this new historical situation hypermodernity or hypermodernism. The continued use of the term ‘historical’ could as well be placed into question, but it still seems to have partial validity. Throughout my intellectual biography, I have been keenly interested in the German ‘Frankfurt School’ Critical Theory of Society thinkers like Max Horkheimer, Theodor W. Adorno, Erich Fromm, Walter Benjamin and Herbert Marcuse. I have also been keenly interested in the French existentialist-Marxist thinkers like Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, André Gorz, Claude Lefort and Cornelius Castoriadis, and in the French so-called postmodernist and deconstructionist thinkers of the 1968 generation such as Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Jean-François Lyotard, Jean Baudrillard and Gilles Deleuze. But all three of these groups of thinkers developed their systems of thinking a long time ago.
We need a new reflection on our contemporary situation, which includes so-called new media and new technologies, a perspective that also encompasses an awareness that we are in something like a ‘post-history’. This new reflection needs to be a set of theories that are embedded in practice, and which are combined with the cultivation of highly advanced competencies in practical skills and areas. We can see that many things have changed – in effect, the changes have piled one on top of the other over the past several decades – and we need new concepts for dealing with the new circumstances. As Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari wrote in their book What Is Philosophy?, philosophy is about the inventing of new concepts.
Nowadays, the very assumption that we know what ’reality’ is does not hold up. We are on shaky ground here and we need new ideas (in the context of practice, of course). What is reality? What is the relationship between reality and mediality? Between reality and virtuality? Between reality and simulations? We need new terms, new words, for describing, understanding and experiencing these dimensions of things. And the assumption that we know what space and time are does not hold up well either. We are on shaky ground here too, and we need new ideas and new practices, new terms and words for even thinking about space and time. What is ‘here’ and what is ‘there’? Quantum entanglement in physics and remote telepresence via digital technologies have undermined the supposed familiarity and self-evident meaning of physical distances. And what is the present, the past and the future? It is as if weird things about spacetime that were perceived to occur under extreme physical circumstances by the quantum mechanics and special and general relativity theories of physics are now happening in our own immediate experiences in the social world and in everyday life.
What I am interested in asking is this question: Which cultural and sociological theories from the past can help us to understand our present situation in the information society? In this lecture at the University of Manchester, Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine, I will consider the current state of four theoretical approaches: science fiction theory, hyperreality theory, posthumanism and cybernetics.
Science Fiction Theory I
What is science fiction theory? I don’t know. It is not the same thing as science fiction studies. Science fiction studies is a part of media studies, since it considers films and TV shows. And it is a part of literature studies, since it considers science fiction novels and short stories. Science fiction theory is something even more specific and esoteric than that. What I can say, with all due modesty, is that I have some credentials as a leading so-called ‘science fiction theorist’. In 2004, I published a 350-page book called Star Trek: Technologies of Disappearance. Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Jr., the editor-in-chief of the academic journal Science Fiction Studies, wrote a lengthy review-essay of my book, and he called it “one of the most original works of science fiction theory since Scott Bukatman’s Terminal Identity (1993).” If you haven’t read Terminal Identity, I recommend reading it, because Terminal Identity is indeed a great book. Bukatman surveys the changing nature of human identity as portrayed in many science fictional narratives.
The noted neo-Marxist thinker Fredric Jameson published an essay in Science Fiction Studies in 1987 called “Shifting Contexts of Science Fiction Theory,” but nowhere in that essay does Jameson offer a definition of what he means by ‘science fiction theory’. In his 1979 essay in Science Fiction Studies called “The State of the Art in Science Fiction Theory: Determining and Delimiting the Genre,” the noted literary scholar Darko Suvin credits the Polish writer Stanislaw Lem’s 1970 book Fantasy and Futurology as being the landmark moment when “science fiction theory came of age.” The English-language Wikipedia article on the British-Australian cultural theorist Andrew Milner says that Milner’s 2012 book Locating Science Fiction is a major paradigm-shifting work of ‘science fiction theory’ that moves the genre away from “the prescriptively abstract dialectics of cognition and estrangement associated with Fredric Jameson and Darko Suvin” and towards a ‘cultural materialism’ deeply influenced by the Welsh neo-Marxist critic Raymond Williams. Perusing this literature, one arrives quickly at the conclusion that what Jameson, Suvin and Milner mean by the term ‘science fiction theory’ is really the literary criticism of science fictional texts, and not what books like Bukatman’s Terminal Identity and my book on Star Trek stories and technologies tried to practice.
I said a few minutes ago that I don’t know what science fiction theory is, and I will stick by that statement. I think that science fiction theory is something parallel to media theory, social theory, art theory or film theory: theory is a set of ideas or a conceptual framework for understanding a given field of study, a speculative and generalizing reflection on the essence of the field’s object of inquiry, and the relationship of those objects to viewers, to society, and to the ongoing evolution of what we call ‘reality’. I think that the most important piece written about science fiction theory in the sense that I understand the term was another essay published by Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Jr. in the academic journal Science Fiction Studies. It is called “The SF of Theory: Baudrillard and Haraway,” and it appeared in 1991. Csicsery-Ronay argues that two very significant cultural thinkers – Jean Baudrillard and Donna Haraway – are indeed ‘science fiction theorists’. So in this 1991 essay, Csicsery-Ronay went beyond giving that title to Scott Bukatman and myself, and gave it to Baudrillard and Haraway. Those two thinkers are engaged, according to Csicsery-Ronay, in the ‘science fictionalization’ of theory, in the transformation or crossover of science fiction into a discursive theoretical practice. I will outline the details of Csicsery-Ronay’s important argument in a few moments, and then use it as a starting point for laying out a description of the state of science fiction theory today.
Hyperreality Theory I
Hyperreality theory is, of course, also associated primarily with the work of Jean Baudrillard. In his famous 1981 work Simulacra and Simulation, Baudrillard writes: “Today abstraction is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror, or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being, or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal. The territory no longer precedes the map, nor does it survive it. It is nevertheless the map that precedes the territory – precession of simulacra – that engenders the territory.” … “A hyperreal henceforth sheltered from the imaginary, and from any distinction between the real and the imaginary, leaving room only for the orbital recurrence of models and for the simulated generation of differences.”
In his well-known essay “The Precession of Simulacra,” in the book Simulacra and Simulation, Baudrillard says that the model precedes the territory, the map precedes the real. In other words, the nearly universal assumption that the widespread creation of models of reality is going to leave as it is physical reality is naïve. Models are not only tools for assisting the real, they act upon the real, they transform the real, they become themselves a major part of the real.
Baudrillard’s concern was that the ‘late capitalist’ landscape of ‘American’ consumerist-business culture has become a simulated hyper-pseudo-reality where all experiences and social-technological procedures are pre-programmed according to a known-in-advance set of behavorial and commodified codes, models, and formulae. Hardly anything is spontaneous, creative, original, truly alive, truly existential or authentic.
In “The Precession of Simulacra,” Baudrillard famously writes about Disneyland: “Disneyland exists in order to hide that it is the ‘real’ country, all of ‘real’ America that is Disneyland (a bit like prisons are there to hide that it is the social in its entirety, in its banal omnipresence, that is carceral). Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, whereas all of Los Angeles and the America that surrounds it are no longer real, but belong to the hyperreal order and to the order of simulation. It is no longer a question of a false representation of reality (ideology) but of concealing the fact that the real is no longer real, and thus of saving the reality principle. The imaginary of Disneyland is neither true nor false, it is a deterrence machine set up in order to rejuvenate the fiction of the real in the opposite camp.”
By emphasizing the fictionalist aspect of any act of creativity – that facet of the expression which, to a greater or lesser degree, maintains a cognizance of the difference between reality and its representation – a privilege is granted to science fiction as a paradigm for grasping our contemporary situation. According to misleading popular belief, science fiction is about the representation of science in an imaginary space or story. Once that spurious assumption is made, it becomes important to talk about a so-called ‘representation’ like Star Trek in terms of the accuracy of the supposed ‘representation’. It becomes possible and desirable to write books with subtitles like A Trek From Science Fiction to Science Fact (a 2002 book by William Shatner), focusing on the alleged journey from representation to ‘reality’. With respect to the original invention of Star Trek, constant reference is made in the literature to the fact that Gene Roddenberry consulted real scientists when elaborating The Original Series.
The problem with the presumption that science fiction is about the representation of science is that, in our hypermodern culture, there is no representation any more. The media institutes its own reality, which is our only reality. In an electronic media culture dominated by images, statistical models, video processing, screenal hyperlinks, discourses without author, and endless reduplication and recombination, the fundamental difference between original and copy that is necessary for representation to take place evanesces. The sign is substituted for the referent. The signs of the real are substituted for the real itself. Signs and images refer principally to other signs and images, not to some verifiable outside reality.
Posthumanism I
The term ‘posthumanism’ has several different meanings associated with several different authors. I like the book How We Became Posthuman by N. Katherine Hayles. Published in 1999, the book has the subtitle: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. I also learned a lot about the history of cybernetics from reading Hayles’ book. She distinguishes among three successive waves or orders of cybernetics. Another excellent book on the intellectual history of cybernetics is Andrew Pickering’s The Cybernetic Brain: Sketches of Another Future, published in 2010. Terminal Identity by Scott Bukatmann, as previously mentioned, is also about posthumanism. And I want to also mention a very beautiful book by Ann Weinstein called Avatar Bodies: A Tantra for Posthumanism, published in 2004.
Cybernetics I
Donna J. Haraway, author of the seminal 1985 essay “A Cyborg Manifesto,” has emphasized the importance of using the term ‘cyborg’ specifically for techno-scientific entities that became possible in the historical conjuncture around 1960. “Pushing the reality of the cyborg harder” with situated knowledge means examining its entanglement in a definite matrix of cybernetic communications theories, ideas about humans as information processing devices, Cold War militarization, and behavioral and psycho-pharmacological research.
The farther-reaching intellectual background to the 1960s NASA scientists’ enthusiastic figuration of the astronautical cyborg was the cybernetic science of control, command and communication in humans, animals, machines, and living-nature elaborated by mathematician Norbert Wiener of MIT in the years just after World War II. First-wave cybernetics emphasizes message feedback loops and information transfer as organizational forces in the study and mastering of complex systems. The term cybernetics derives from the Greek kybernetics, denoting steering or governance. By underlining the importance of informatics and statistics in a systems context, Wiener and his colleague Arturo Rosenblueth of the Harvard Medical School contributed to unifying the conceptualization of techno-scientific knowledge objects which had been divided into the separate categories of the living and the non-living.
The computer science paradigm coinciding with first-wave cybernetics is that of procedural programming languages like C; top-down analysis of logic problems; if-then decision trees; and rule-driven AI. The prevalent image of the first-wave computing paradigm is one of cold, unfeeling calculation machines which have difficulty understanding or even simulating human behavior and emotions.
The epic outcome of Wiener’s work in cybernetics was that “humans were to be seen primarily as information-processing entities who are essentially similar to intelligent machines.” What allowed Wiener to include ‘transformed humans’ and ‘beyond mechanical’ machines that were enriched by feedback in the same heuristic category was their shared “ability to use probabilistic methods to control randomness.”(N. Katherine Hayles)
In How We Became Posthuman, N. Katherine Hayles stresses the importance of science fiction stories for tracking the cyborg through the three successive waves of cybernetics. “Cyborgs are simultaneously living beings and narrative constructions,” she writes. The conjunction of technology and discourse is crucial.”
Posthumanism II
This would be my definition of posthumanism: In high-tech culture, the boundaries that construct the human – between human and machine, human and animal, living and nonliving, artificial and natural, informatics and biology, technical and cultural, reality and fiction, truth and illusion, science and the humanities – have been disrupted and are no longer tenable. As Haraway wrote in “A Cyborg Manifesto,” there needs to be a “slightly perverse shift of perspective,” starting out on a subversive quest for an own ‘identity’. But it should be an ‘identity’ that is non-essentialist and willingly accepts contradictions.
Cybernetics II
A step beyond the dissolving of boundaries between man and machine or living and non-living characteristic of first-wave cybernetics is the breaking down of rigid oppositions between categories of techno-scientific inquiry made possible in second-wave cybernetics by the conversion of all objects of knowledge into information.
Just as the cyborg is associated with first-order cybernetics, I associate the android in science fictional narratives with second-order cybernetics. I have written extensively about the android data on Star Trek: The Next Generation, and about the replicant androids in the iconic science fiction film Blade Runner.
The computer science paradigm coinciding with second-wave cybernetics is that of object-oriented programming languages like Java and C++, diagrammatic OO analysis and design notational languages like the Unified Modeling Language, distributed object technologies like Enterprise JavaBeans, and multi-tier application architectures.
In How We Became Posthuman, N. Katherine Hayles discerns a “crucial crossing point” to second-wave cybernetics in the conceptualization of information theorist Claude Shannon. Shannon differed from Norbert Wiener, his fellow participant in the ‘Macy Conferences on Cybernetics’ (1943-54), by identifying information and entropy in positive correlation, rather than in a polarized relationship of mutual opposition. Shannon’s appreciation of noise was an opening for entropy to be rethought as the ‘thermodynamic motor’ driving a system to self-organization, instead of as the enemy of information and command logic, as in Wiener’s view. It afforded an early glimpse of dissipation and chaos being affirmatively valued as fecund sources of “increasing complexity and new life.” Hayles finds an elective affinity between second-order cybernetics and the science fictional literary achievement of Philip K. Dick. She associates the second wave with the theory of the autopoiesis (self-making) of ‘living organization’ elaborated by Chilean neuroscientists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela in studies published around 1980. What Hayles regards as significant in Maturana and Varela’s work is their stress on the structural coupling or reflexivity of including the observer as an integral part of the system observed.
For autopoietic systems, reality itself comes to be through the system’s self-organizing perceptions. These apprehensions help the system to attain its only, and endlessly self-referential, goal of the continuing production of its autopoiesis.
Modernism, Postmodernism and Hypermodernism
In the context of this lecture, what I mean by modernism is the historical period of a certain kind of society characterized by capitalism, industrialization, rationalization, etc., and not modernism as an early 20th century movement in art, literature and philosophy. What I am today calling modernism is more often called modernity or modernization. Historians often divide the historical epoch of modernity into the three phases of ‘early modernity’ (after the Middle Ages, from the mid-15th century to the French revolution of 1789; ‘classical modernity’ (from the French revolution to 1914 or the beginning of World War I); and ‘late modernity’, which perhaps ended sometime between the pivotal year 1960 when television first played a major role in deciding the U.S. Presidential election, and the pivotal year of the Prague Spring and the student uprisings in Paris and New York of 1968.
In a similar way, in the context of this lecture, what I mean by postmodernism is the historical period that began in the 1960s, or perhaps earlier, with the rise of media culture and the consumer society, and not postmodernism as a late 20th century movement in art, architecture, philosophy, literature and film. What I am today calling postmodernism is more often called postmodernity or the postmodern condition. In his 1979 book, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, Jean-François Lyotard writes that the postmodern society is characterized by the disappearance of the ‘grand narratives’ or ‘metanarratives’ of modernism, such as Marxism or the belief in the Enlightenment project of linear progress, that tended toward ‘teleological determinism’ and totalitarianism. There is also, in postmodernism, a turn towards linguistic and symbolic production, and the prevalence of ‘language games’ as a replacement of grand narratives.
As a reference for the term ‘hypermodernism’, I will quote from John Armitage, who wrote already the following in 1999 in his ‘Editorial Introduction’ to a special issue of the journal Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities called “Machinic Modulations: New Cultural Theory and Technopolitics”: “A number of contemporary cultural theorists of technology are presently engaged not so much in advancing forms of theoretical inquiry that seek to survey the ruins of modernism or postmodernism but in accelerating methods of exploration that endeavour to unearth the foundations of … ‘hypermodernism’.” As I [Alan N. Shapiro] have already said, I associate hypermodernism with so-called new media and new technologies, and with those conditions of virtual and online life which have disrupted classical, modernist and even postmodernist assumptions about and experiences of spacetime. Elsewhere I have written about media virtuality as having the property of complex intricate paradoxical topology. It is the ‘non-Euclidean’ spacetime of multiple refracting waves in an enigmatic hyperspace beyond any classical geometry. To understand the complex non-Euclidean informational space, we need a new mathematics, a new unconventional metric space. In mathematics, a metric space is a set where a specific concept of distance between elements of the set is defined and implemented. Three-dimensional Euclidean space – a way of thinking about space that belongs to the Western metaphysical ‘construction of reality’ as it was originated by the Ancient Greek thinkers – corresponds to our ‘intuitive understanding’ of space.
Science Fiction Theory II
Let us now return briefly to the topic of science fiction theory. In his 1991 essay “The SF of Theory: Baudrillard and Haraway,” Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Jr. calls science fiction a mode of awareness of two gaps: (1) the gap between the conception of future scientific-technological transformations of the world and their actual realization. (2) the gap between belief in the realization of futuristic technologies and concerns about the ethical, socio-cultural and spiritual implications of these technoscientific advances. Science fiction, for Csicsery-Ronay, is “a complex hesitation about the relationship between imaginary conceptions and historical reality unfolding into the future.”
Jean Baudrillard and Donna Haraway, according to Csicsery-Ronay, both take the view that science is a discursive field rather than the field of discovery of eternal and objective truths, both assert that communications technologies have transformed all of social life into a cybernetic control model, and both write about the information age in the literary form of a radical irony that is a kind of science fiction theorizing.
In “A Cyborg Manifesto,” Haraway writes that “the boundary between science fiction and social reality is an optical illusion.”
It is clear that science fiction has already been realized in the present, in our way of life, in our society. Therefore, any ideas of science fiction being a model of predictions about the future are now off the table. So, in a significant way, I think that science fiction is over. Its major works are complete. We can review them and revisit them with great benefits.
Yet, the best time of our lives as science fiction fans still lies ahead. Aware as we are of the many powerful science fiction narratives that have been written, and aware that society has indeed descended in many ways into the dystopia that these narratives predicted, we can now live science fiction, we can live it as a form of resistance. And let us be very aware about what fiction is: fiction is a very powerful force, if we have a strong cognizance of it, a strong knowledge about it. Fiction is an essential element of the creative act. Fiction should be taught at arts universities. Science fiction, literature studies. Fiction is the awareness of the difference between reality and its representation, in direct contrast to the loss of the awareness of that difference that is nearly universal in the media-consumer culture of hyperreality.
Baudrillard already said something like this in his 1981 essay “Simulacra and Science Fiction” (in the book Simulacra and Simulation): “The good old imaginary of science fiction is dead and something else is in the process of emerging.” This is what he writes about J.G. Ballard’s 1973 novel Crash: “Crash is our world, nothing in it is ‘invented’: everything in it is hyper-functional, both the circulation and the accident, technique and death, sex and photographic lens, everything in it is like a giant, synchronous, simulated machine: that is to say the acceleration of our own models, of all models that surround us, blended and hyperoperational in the void. This is what distinguishes Crash from almost all science fiction, which mostly still revolves around the old (mechanical and mechanistic) couple function/dysfunction, which it projects into the future along the same lines of force and the same finalities that are those of the ‘normal’ universe. Fiction in that universe might surpass reality (or the opposite: that is more subtle) but it still plays by the same rules. In Crash, there is neither fiction nor reality anymore – hyperreality abolishes both… In fact, science fiction in this sense is no longer anywhere, and it is everywhere, in the circulation of models, here and now, in the very principle of the surrounding simulation.”
In his 1985 essay “Pataphysics of the Year 2000” (in the book The Illusion of the End), Baudrillard writes: “No need for science fiction here: already, here and now – in the shape of our computers, circuits and networks – we have the particle accelerator which has smashed the referential orbit of things once and for all.”
Hyperreality Theory II
Let us now return briefly to the topic of hyperreality theory. Hyperreality theory has a great future. Invest in it. The works of Jean Baudrillard are becoming more and more important. More and more scholars are recognizing that Baudrillard was a great thinker and they are investigating his relevance to our contemporary situation. The film The Matrix (1999), brought together the theme of Baudrillard’s hyperreality with the theme of the construction of and resistance to an omnipresent hyper-virtual-reality through software codes. This is the beginning of the direction that we need to go in. How is hyperreality generated through software codes? How can alternative projects of creative coding transform what software code is and bring about an embodied resistance to hyperreality?
Posthumanism III
Let us now return briefly to the topic of posthumanism. An excellent work that is representative of the current state of posthumanist studies in cultural theory is a book published in 2012 by Manchester University Press called Representations of the Post/Human: Monsters, Aliens and Others in Popular Culture by Elaine L. Graham. The Introduction to Graham’s book is entitled “Mapping the Post/Human,” the forward slash insightfully indicating the hybrid situation of humanism and posthumanism, the fact that any reflection on the changing circumstances of the human condition in the era of advanced technologies is at the same time a return to humanist commitments. Any serious reflection on hypermodernism has as prerequisite a rigorous engagement with the modern and the postmodern. Graham’s book is about “what it means to be human.”
“It is an examination,” writes Graham, “of the impact of 21st century technologies – digital, cybernetic and biomedical – upon our very understanding of what it means to be human. I will argue that some of the most definitive and authoritative representations of human identity in a digital and biotechnological age are to be found within two key discourses: Western technoscience (such as the Human Genome Project) and popular culture (such as science fiction).” In exploring the subject of how new technologies have complicated the question of what it means to be human, Graham considers the topics of the “technologization of nature,” the “blurring of species boundaries,” the “technologization of human bodies and minds,” the “creation of new personal and social worlds,” and “tools, bodies and environments.”
Regarding the question of “enslavement or liberation?” in the human/posthuman condition, Graham broaches the topics of “disenchantment” (a key term in thinkers like Max Weber, Jacques Ellul, and Martin Heidegger); “totalitarianism” (concerns that advanced technologies could be a danger to democracy, for example in Albert Borgmann and Jürgen Habermas); futuristic “technocratic” optimism (exemplified by Michio Kaku, Ray Kurzweil and Howard Rheingold); the “transhumanism” which celebrates technology as liberation from nature (Hans Moravic); and “re-enchantment” (the “rhetoric of cyberspace as sacred space” in Margaret Wertheim and Michael Heim, the “technologization of the ineffable” in Michael Lieb, and “an inherent human desire for ‘transcendence’” in David Noble).
Cybernetics III
Let us now return briefly to the topic of cybernetics. A number of theorists have located the essential elements of the third wave of cybernetics in the bio-informatic movement of Artificial Life; the ‘female’ flows, intensities, and turbulence of cyber-capitalism and the post-disciplinary ‘society of control’ (Deleuze); or the fractal and viral stage of ‘fourth order simulacra (Baudrillard) where ‘values’ radiate in all directions with a cancerous virulence. In How We Became Posthuman, N. Katherine Hayles identifies the transition from the second to the third wave of cybernetics in the surpassing of the principle of self-organization to that of evolutionary processes in lab-created unicellular life, robotic entities, or computer software ‘digital organisms’ that lead to the sudden leap forward or surprises of emergence and mutation. The new life-form as a whole has properties neither calculable by summing its parts nor predictable by the steps in an automatic process.
Artificial Life is a computational paradigm for biology and a biological paradigm for software engineering. The bio-informatic professional might be qualified in areas like immune system computing and genome programming. Self-replicating computer programs are said to be ‘alive’, according to Hayles, through the rhetoric of biological analogies regarding complex behavior, diversity regulation mechanisms, and their abundance of ‘interacting adaptive agents’. With Artificial Intelligence, human beings were still the measure for the techno-scientific project, since the stated goal was to build machines emulating human qualities. With Artificial Life, the goal is to “evolve intelligence within the machine through pathways found by the ‘creatures’ themselves.” (Hayles)
Posthumanism IV
For N. Katherine Hayles, a crucial component of the contemporary techno-cultural paradigm shift is the machine becoming the model for understanding who we are, thus transfiguring the human into the posthuman.
Cybernetics IV
Associated with the third wave of cybernetics is a new computing paradigm of Artificial Life or complex adaptive systems. Software is architected and designed in relation to organic principles of self-organization and evolution rather than non-organic structures and hierarchies. These life-based systems emphasize autonomous agents without a directing layer, strange attractors, and the appearance of emergent behaviors. They have the features of unpredictability, mutability, nonlinearity, rule diversity, fuzzy functionality, and chaotic instability. They tend to operate in a state of non-equilibrium that is ‘at the edge of chaos’. Data storage structures have non-discrete holistic forms and connections. Programming languages acquire self-modifying capabilities. Computing systems coinciding with the third order of cybernetics have properties affiliated with genetic algorithms, cellular automata, and neural networks. The hyper-dynamic software makes leaps to new ‘attractor structures’ that can in turn mutate into yet further configurations.
The future of cybernetics is in a project of creative coding: a recursive cybernetic epistemology like Gregory Bateson against the cybernetic control models which currently dominate our social an individual lives.
Software development is currently divided between the rigorous practice of mainstream object-oriented tools which are used to build great software, but within a strictly engineering and not-so-creative paradigm and without social-political awareness that it is control models which are getting implemented, and the creative coding movement of artist-programmers who use great tools like Processing, vvvv, and Max/MSP, who are more creative and socially-politically aware, but who do not yet have the rigourous commitment to object-oriented concepts and processes that millions of mainstream programmers around the world have. The next step is to combine these two worlds in an intelligent way, to get the best of both of these worlds.
