Hyperglyphics

This has been sitting here as a draft for a month now and, in light of the fact that my students in Web writing and I were discussing Andrew Sullivan’s ideas on blogging last week, I’m going to just post it unfinished. It’s a starting point, something I can come back and revisit. I’m going to try “letting go of my writing”…

Well, my first reaction to last week’s month’s Supreme Court ruling which declared a ban on corporate political spending as an unconstitutional violation of free speech was outrage. However, I know that first reactions are not always to be trusted, especially when the issue is a complicated one with lots of legal, ethical, and moral angles, as this one certainly is. So, after my initial fury subsided, I’ve been trying to look at the majority opinion’s view with an objective eye in order to determine what I really think here. While this issue may not seem related to the topics I address on this blog (e.g., writing, narrative, technology), it does, in fact, intersect with one of my areas of interest as a scholar: posthuman theory. Since I am currently working on an essay that draws heavily on the work of such posthuman theorists as Katherine Hayles, Donna Haraway, Chris Gray, and Judith Halberstam, among others, the question of who - or what - gets to be called a person is very much top-of-mind for me right now, so the Supreme Court’s ruling was actually one of those nice moments of scholarly serendipity for me.

So, who - or what - does get to be called a person and given all the rights and responsibilities thereunto appertaining? It was this question that first started nagging at me to rethink my gut response to the ruling. Posthuman theory has long posited a notion of subjectivity that allows for multiplicity and associative forms of consciousness, something that I have found to have exciting possibilities for reframing our idea of who/what counts as a subject in the eyes of society and the law. This is a crucial question, as anyone who has more than a passing familiarity with American history ought to know. A person, a subject, is granted certain rights. A 3/5 person, as slaves were once counted, is not granted the full rights and responsibilities of the legally authorized subject, which, at the time of the Civil War, was only the white male (and the propertied white male in most places). As we’ve seen with African-Americans, with women, with the ongoing struggle by GLBTQ persons to obtain full civil rights under the law, the question of who is legally authorized as a person is of the utmost importance.

Posthuman theory has been at the forefront of rethinking what constitutes a subject, a “person,” in our increasingly technologized society that is on the verge of being able to create things that we don’t currently have solid legal definitions for - such things as AI, robots, clones, disembodied consciouness, cyborgs of all types. What posthuman theory has been successful in doing is in showing how the long history of human beings’ relationship with technology proves that we have actually been posthuman for quite a long time. In recognizing that, in our culture at least, we are not purely biological, natural entities untainted by the unnatural products of our hands and imaginations (things like medicines, prosthetics, interfaces of all kinds with machines of all types), posthumanists have been able to construct a legal and ethical ground on which to base arguments for the civil rights and legal status for emergent and yet-to-be-thought-of “beings.”

The cybernetics movement in the 1940’s and 50’s, of whom Norbert Wiener is the figurehead, is a critical moment for much posthuman thought because of the emphasis that cybernetics placed on the notion of processual systems, viewing everything from computers to electrical systems to neural networks as being constituted and reconstituting through loops of informational feedback. Add in the workings of discourse as articulated by Foucault and his theoretical heirs, and you’ve got an argument that subjects and bodies

“emerge at nodes where bodies, bodies of discourse, and discourses of bodies intersect to foreclose any easy distinction between actor and stage, between sender/receiver, channel, code, message, context”(Halberstam and Livingston 2).

So certainly there is an argument to be made that subjects are, in a sense, collectives or at least emergent from multiplicities: processes, systems, networks, discourses. And there is also an argument to be made that collectives are potentially, in some instances, unified in purpose and intent enough to be considered singular entity (I mean, just look at the way we treat collective nouns in grammar - the subject-verb agreement issues with collective nouns are legions, take it from a writing teacher!).

Associations of individuals do have certain rights and, as a free speech purist in almost every dispute on the subject, I am loathe to limit the ability of anybody - or anybodies - to voice their views, no matter how different from mine, no matter how objectionable, distasteful, repellent. So, I think to myself now, how can I deny the free speech rights of corporate entities and other associations (e.g., labor unions, political nonprofit orgs, etc.)?

This is the question I’ve been turning over in my mind for the last several days and I have finally come to a position that, interestingly, brings me full circle to my initial anti-ruling position, but with a more considered argument based on reasoning and not just on my instinctive antipathy toward Big Corporate America. The key factor here, I think, is the notion of embodiment. It’s very easy to let posthumanism take one off on sci-fi-esque flights of fancy in which individual consciousnesses are uploaded (or downloaded, depending on your preference) into a computer network, liberated from the confines of the meat of the human body and - hallelujah! - become immortal. But thoughtful posthumanists have been very adamant that subjectivity is an embodied experience, no matter what form that body may take. There’s no mind that doesn’t have a materiality, no disembodied consciousness that exists outside lived, physical realities. In How We Became Posthuman, Hayles writes:

“The very theorists who most emphatically claim that the body is disappearing also operate within material and cultural circumstances that make the claim for the body’s disappearance seem plausible. The body’s dematerialization depends in complex and highly specific ways on the embodied circumstances that an ideology of dematerialization would obscure” (193)

She notes the way inscribing and incorporating practices mirror the mind/body split that has been embedded in Western philosophical thought since Descartes, but in fact, body and mind, inscription and incorporation, are connected and the abstraction - mind, the sign - emerges from a material instantiation, but becomes separated from that materiality in the transformation into a concept. It’s significant that Hayles uses the term incorporation to describe embodied practices and knowledge. That’s what this ruling is all about, right. Businesses are incorporated in order to become legally authorized “bodies,” collectives with the power to act in a unitary fashion (i.e., as an individual)  and with specific legal rights and privileges.

To be continued…