Turner and Hooch Hayles: Counter-culture in a Posthuman World
These readings came at a perfect time for me, as I spent a bit of the break reading up on some futurist theories, from the likes of Ray Kurzweil and this fun site. There's a lot of similarities between those and Hayles' discussion on Posthuman cybernetics.
Basically, and this became more apparent as the Hayle text progressed, we're rocketing closer and closer towards a world with little need for human form everyday. Person-to-person interaction is becoming increasingly less needed as digital alternatives to everyday communications and commercial tasks present themselves. I think an argument could already be made that the idea of consciousness no longer represents itself in the brain but in the fingertips as they frantically pound keys to transfer thoughts to the web.
Although pure Posthumanist life in a cyber-world may be more of a technological inevitability than the cyber-fantasy of decades past, let's ignore that for a moment and focus on the present. As the title, and later the text, or Turner's work declares, counter-culture is now cyber-culture. And it makes sense. Counter-cultures tend to be youth-driven and thrive on platforms that tend to go against the norm. The French student revolts of the 60s, for example, that seem to pop up all the time in this course. Using street posters and hand made signs gave the students a unique voice and a feeling of connectedness within their group.
The balance is beginning to tip, but cyberspace has been a welcome home to counter-culture for the last couple decades. One of the great initial possibilities it provided was a voice for anyone to say anything. Given the state of mainstream media at the time of the rise of cyber-culture, this was huge. The movement has only continued to grow and expand, through popular groups of today such as Anonymous and Wikileaks.
But there's the tipping point. If it's popular and the majority of people are getting involved, is it still counter-culture, or just culture in general? What becomes of counter-culture and we move closer and closer towards a Posthuman society?
Hayle touches on the idea of interventions being made to change or halt the disembodiment process. I think that's where future of counter-culture lies. As the general public begins its gradual shift to a home on the digital range, movements may arise about just what it means to be human. Can we still be considered human if we shed our bodies and upload our consciousness, and if so, what do we consider those who opt not to?
The image of transferring our consciousness though out fingertips and the keyboard is very powerful and could have quite some truth to it. Especially because we seem to believe that we have these moments of genius when we write that we pour out, never to return again unless we read the words.
ReplyDeleteYour thoughts about counter culture being encompassed into a posthuman society are also very valid. I think Turner spoke to this subject when he emphasized the elitism of most of the groups that were trying to transform society to bring about what Hayles would consider posthuman thought. Although they were all about equality and meshing our own consciousness with technology, all of the groups he mentioned were in some way extremely elitist in their life style.
Right. One of the things that came out during our discussion of Turner's book yesterday was the idea that the counter-culture of the 60s, or at least that element that touched upon Brand's personal history, was both a radical alternative to the mainstream and elitist at the same time. The same could be said of early Internet culture. It was mostly restricted to university campuses or to social groups with lots of what we would call cultural or symbolic capital (and maybe lots of the old-fashioned economic capital as well). But it was a fascinating, highly innovative sphere of discourse. As the Internet has become more popular (ie., democratic), some of that atmosphere seems to have washed out of it. There are of course still pockets of innovation and alternative ideas, but the digital culture as a whole is no longer alternative. It is simply the new mainstream, the very thing against which so many early Internet screeds were directed.
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