Chapter 1

Media, materiality, and the human

A conversation with N. Katherine Hayles

Conducted by Stephen B. Crofts Wiley on October 20, 2010, in Durham, North Carolina

STEVE WILEY: You argued nearly twenty years ago, in your essay on the materiality of informatics,¹ that theorists need to resist the “absorption of embodiment” into discourse, which you characterized as typical of Foucault’s analysis and other kinds of abstract studies of power. So the idea of thinking about the materiality of information is not a new question for you, but it was new to many of the presenters at the NC State symposium, “Materializing Communication and Rhetoric, Technologies, Infrastructures, and Flows.” The symposium brought together scholars from a range of perspectives in rhetoric, literature, media studies, communication, and cultural studies, to consider the materiality of communication and rhetoric. The symposium’s topic was taken up in a number of different ways. Some participants, such as Jeff Rice, Bill Balthrop, and Carole Blair,² offered rhetorical analyses of physical spaces such as monuments or urban spaces. Others focused on infrastructures and interfaces, such as Lisa Parks’ analysis of the transition to digital broadcast television in the US and Adriana de Souza e Silva and Jordan Frith’s work on mobile interfaces. Others, such as Mark Hansen and Greg Wise, asked us to consider the materiality of physiological, affective, and cognitive processes such as sensation and attention. And still others such as John Durham Peters, Ron Greene, Jeremy Packer, and Kathleen Oswald offered more holistic, historical analyses that considered the complex articulations of technical media with discursive formations and social practices. So, there was a broad range of understandings of materiality. Could you comment on the different ways in which materiality is being conceptualized today and incorporated as a focus of contemporary theory?

N. KATHERINE HAYLES: You did a very good job of summarizing the talks and different approaches, so I’m not sure what I can add except to high-light some of the major trends focusing on the materiality of media. I think here of people like Friedrich Kittler, for example. There were some examples of that approach in the conference as well. The idea that materiality is embodied in physical space is another important notion, although not new of course to geographers. A dominant trend now in geography is to think about physical spaces as always in tension with social practices. What a geographer like Doreen Massey might mean by social space, then, is a hybrid interaction between the possibilities offered by the physical space in relation to the interrelationships developed within that space that help to define and configure it. You mentioned materiality as a consideration of embodiment and embodied practices, and I would identify that as another important thread. In my recent work, my focus on materiality has tended toward questions about attention – attention as that property of human cognition that selects from an infinite range of physical attributes some characteristics for analysis, critique, and exploration. In that sense, materiality for me is also a hybrid. But it’s a hybrid between human cognition and physical characteristics. This is somewhat different than Kittler’s approach, because it takes a human perspective into account. It would be somewhat similar to the social space that geographers are interested in but instead of social space in general, it focuses more on media.

WILEY: At the outset of your symposium talk, you quoted from a paper about Kittler written by Sybille Kramer,³ which looked at how technical media manipulate the axis of time. One criticism Kramer had of Kittler, in another part of that same article, was that the body is left out. Is that the critique that you’re offering here of Kittler’s work?

HAYLES: Of course, I agree with Kramer’s critique of Kittler in this regard. As I remember Kramer’s quotation, her point is that media manipulate the axis of time and displace it into space, so her particular interest is in the way that time becomes space within media representation. That seems to me a quite insightful formulation of what media do to represent time. They don’t represent time directly; they represent time by transcribing it into space and then use space to regenerate a time series. In that sense, I would say Kramer’s argument is allied with the argument that Bernard Stiegler makes in “Technics in Time.”⁴ That is, he’s talking about tertiary memory as a mediated remembrance for which there’s no first-hand recall. He’s very interested in the way in which memory and time get reconstituted through media representations. That opens onto a deep problem of how to represent time as something other than spatialized measurement, and for this, bodily processing and perception are central, as Bergson recognized with his concept of duration.

WILEY: So, in order to develop a more adequate materialist understanding, we need to look not only at the materiality of technical media, but also at the embodiment of experience, sensation, attention, and cognition in relation to technical media. As some of the symposium presenters put it, we would need to look at assemblages of technical media and embodied human beings.

HAYLES: “Assemblage” seemed to be the keyword for the conference. I heard it used in presentation after presentation. I think assemblage is a convenient word precisely because it’s so vague. If we think about assemblage in a Deleuzian context, however, it has a more specific meaning which often didn’t seem to be closely related to the ways I heard it being used at the conference. My criticism of “assemblage” in this context is that it is in danger of losing any specificity at all and becoming a convenient catch-word to talk about whatever you want to talk about.

             I’d like to bring the conversation back for a moment to Kramer’s comment about spatialized time. One of the points of contestation in contemporary media theory is precisely what the relationship is between space and time. In Kramer’s formulation, time gives way to space when it is represented within media. In some of my recent work, I have been looking at spatial history. History as a field has traditionally focused on time and change over time, but in spatial history practices, because they’re using GIS and relational databases, time is difficult to represent in itself as the major parameter because such representations would work against the grain of what is easy or convenient to represent with the technology. As Richard White likes to say, if space is the question, movement is the answer.⁵ To rephrase, given techniques that are spatial in nature and emphasize space, how do you then incorporate time into your analysis? In response, Ruth Mostern,⁶ for example, has been arguing for the importance of the event for historians. An event combines both time and space; it’s temporal in nature, bounded by a discrete time interval, and located at a specific place. She argues for a shift in the technological representation within a database from static spatial references to event. Such proposals raise really interesting questions because they bear on the influence of media and the way media make certain questions easy to ask and other questions almost impossible to ask. The formative effect of relational databases, and more generally GIS and GPS technologies, in directing the course that spatial history can take is a really important issue.

WILEY: In your talk you discussed Philip Ethington’s project, which uses GIS to represent the history of Los Angeles as a series of spatial layers. You argued that, although this approach opened up possibilities by having a kind of layering of moments, events, or contexts on top of one another, there were still ways in which the temporal dimensions might be opened up further. You went on to talk about object-oriented databases, as opposed to relational databases, as opening up those possibilities. Are you suggesting that it’s time for a dialectical resolution of this time-versus-space argument of modernity – where we had our spatial turn in order to question the temporal assumptions of modernity, and now it’s time to step back and reincorporate an understanding of temporal processes as intrinsic to human life?

HAYLES: Ethington has an important article called “Placing the Past”⁷ where he essentially argues that time, in itself, does not exist. This very partial approach is nevertheless interesting because it shows the extent to which a historian is willing to negate time as the primary parameter of interest to history and go completely to a spatialization of events. My own opinion is that this is not a fruitful direction to pursue for very long. It may have an initial spark for history because, having been centrally concerned with time for so long, turning to spatialization may give historians new insight into their matters of concern. But time and space are always interrelated; you can’t suppress one of these parameters for very long before that inquiry becomes tilted and partial, to the detriment of a full-bodied understanding. Spatial history is really interesting, but I am persuaded by geographers like Ruth Mostern and Doreen Massey that spatialization alone cannot tell the whole story.

             In my talk I was arguing that it’s difficult to encode movement and time in relational databases, while object-oriented databases offer more possibilities for that. Object-oriented databases are based on the idea of defining classes and subclasses in a hierarchical order. With class as the basic entity in an object-oriented database, time can be incorporated, because classes can be objects which already imply movement and time in their construction. In that sense, object-oriented databases may be a more time-oriented approach than relational databases. The basic philosophy of relational databases is that the world consists of atomized bits of information, and if one takes that approach, it’s really hard to build time into the representation. The story is more complex than this, however, because technically there are ways to combine relational and object-oriented databases, and there are also software interfaces that allow a programmer to treat a relational database as if it were an object-oriented database. These complications notwithstanding, the general point is that time and space are deeply implicated in the technical representations of media as such, including the structure and functioning of data structures such as relational and object-oriented databases within networked and programmable machines.

WILEY: I want to come back to the question of experience. In your symposium presentation, at one point in a parenthetical comment, you said, “Setting aside a Bergsonian understanding of time as the domain of human experience …” Your talk bracketed that question and went on to focus on the ways in which different kinds of technical media spatialize time in different ways, closing off, or opening up new possibilities for representing temporal processes. I’d like to ask you how we go about developing a material understanding of experience itself? Perhaps this is what you were beginning to talk about when you mentioned your work on attention. I’m also thinking of Mark Hansen’s work, presented at the symposium, in which he talked about the neurophysiology of sensation and the way in which sensation, as a process of “prehension,” is embedded in changing technical environments and happens prior to human cognition and subject formation.⁸ Another strand that might be important here would be your work on code, in which we begin to look at the co-constitutive nature of computational code and human genetic code. These all seem to suggest an attention to physiology or to the body or perhaps to a different term which you have invoked in some work – embodiment – which I understand is more situated, particular, and less generalizable. Could you talk about what a materialist understanding of the body or embodiment requires us to attend to?

HAYLES: As far as the physiology of response is concerned, if we look at the literature on neurological response time, it’s clear that human responses evolve along a very heterogeneous spectrum. The response time required for a neuron to fire, for example, is about 100 times faster than the time required for perception to register in the brain. The time required for perception to register in the brain is many orders of magnitude faster than a conscious conclusion that one might draw. Humans embody a very complex, heterogeneous, and fractured sense of time. Daniel Dennett, in Consciousness Explained, argues that this fracturing and heterogeneity of temporal responses is smoothed over by consciousness to give the impression that time proceeds for us, physically, as a more or less unbroken and even sequence of events we can consciously register and talk about, narrate, and so forth. But this is a complete illusion; it’s a fairy tale that consciousness tells itself about what’s actually happening. The work in a variety of fields, including neurology, psychology, cognitive science and other research areas, is converging to create a picture of the “new unconscious,” as some researchers call it,⁹ or the “adaptive unconscious” in Timothy Wilson’s phrase.¹⁰ This work makes clear that the cognitive role of consciousness is being supplemented at every moment and every instant by unconscious processes. One way to think about this is that consciousness represents a drastic narrowing and funneling of cognitive events and perceptions into a very narrow bandwidth. This narrowing is crucial to consciousness being able to create the impression of a uniform stream of events. The overflow, as it were, is represented within the unconscious. Compared to what consciousness can capture and represent, the overflow is much, much more abundant – too capacious to register in consciousness. Unconscious processes, however, are able to act on this overflow to set priorities, establish goals, and so forth, so that the full cognitive response goes way beyond conscious processes and gives a more accurate reflection of the fractured temporality through which humans experience the world. With this notion of how the body actually works, we get a picture of human embodiment as a fleshly distillation of time’s heterogeneity.

             What’s under-developed and under-theorized in the contemporary environment is how a similar model might apply to objects. If we think of an object as something that is stable and moving through time as a spatially defined entity, there’s a mismatch – a radical mismatch – between the complex temporality embodied by human physiology and the simple, uneventful temporality embodied by objects. But we know that this can’t be correct; we know that objects in fact experience a complex temporality as well. Gilbert Simondon has made this argument with respect to fairly simple technical ensembles,¹¹ but to me the best technical example of the embodiment of complex temporality by objects is the networked and programmable machine. There is very fast response time at the bit level and at the level of logic gates, but if one goes up the tower of languages to a complex program, the response time is much, much longer. So we have a technical object pervasive in our environment now that embodies complex temporality in a somewhat analogous fashion to the way that the body does. Put those two together and you get a vision of interaction that is taking place at multiple time scales between human responses and computer programs and at multiple sites within the human and machine, including conscious as well as unconscious responses on the part of the human partner, and invisible as well as visible processes within the computer. Since you’re now trying to match two complex temporalities, the whole complex picture increases exponentially in complexity.

WILEY: Do we also need to consider the positioning of that complex interaction (between bodies and technical media) within the broader field of social practices and interactions? In other words, what scope of analysis is needed to understand the production of a human subject or a distributed subject that involves human–technical interaction? Should we be focusing on technical media themselves, as Kittler seems to claim? Do we need to look at the embodied human–technology interaction, as I understand you to be arguing? Or should we also be looking at larger social contexts in which both culturally specific notions of the body and culturally specific notions of technical media are also playing a role? To simplify, what should be our object of analysis if we seek to develop a holistic approach that takes material realities seriously but attends to the range of factors that are playing a role in the production of a subject?

HAYLES: Traditionally, the object of analysis for the humanities has been the human, but it seems to me that there’s a very interesting area of inquiry now which is focused on objects – not the human – within the humanities. While objects have long been the focus for fields like engineering, the idea that an object would be of interest to analysis in the humanities is relatively new. When the humanities come to analyze objects, they bring a different perspective than an engineer might bring, for example. To me, it makes perfect sense to talk about the worldview of an RFID tag. What I mean by worldview in that context is that objects have sensors that are precisely defined; they have actuators; it is therefore possible to know in considerable detail how an object perceives the world and how an object is able to act upon the world. Taking this approach would involve certain technical specification and technical knowledge, but once one has a sense of the worldview of any given object, it is then possible to think about how that object interacts with human worldviews. And of course we know worldviews are culturally and historically conditioned. For an object, that would also be true, but in addition, it is technically conditioned. To think about how the worldviews of the human and the object interact is a perspective that engineers would be unlikely to bring to the table, except perhaps in the narrow sense of marketing. So I see this as a really interesting and rich area of inquiry for the humanities. It poses certain challenges to our assumption of anthropocentric perspectives. Speculative realism is one emerging theoretical area asking these kinds of questions.¹² They put the issue squarely on the table: Is it possible to know a world devoid of humans and what is it possible to know about such a world? What is implied about even asking a question about knowing a world that is profoundly non-anthropomorphic? From my point of view, the really exciting prospect is putting the human back into a picture that doesn’t start by assuming humans from the outset.

WILEY: This idea of the worldview of an object would seem to resonate with Kittler’s focus on the ways in which technical media construct possibilities for interaction and so forth. So if I hear you correctly, it’s worth spending some time in that mode and then thinking about networks of human and non-human actors in interaction?

HAYLES: Kittler starts from a more practical perspective than speculative realism, in the sense that he assumes we can indeed know the nature of the object, specifically media objects. Speculative realism, specifically Quentin Meillassoux in After Finitude, critiques what he calls correlationalism – that is, we only know the world for us, we don’t know the world in itself. Scientists and engineers have long thought that we could know things about the world in itself, not only for us. Following this line of inquiry, if you then reintroduce human perception into that picture, you come out in a different place than if you would have begun by assuming anthropomorphism. And the place that you come out, to my mind, allows a richer understanding of what human–object interactions are really about.

WILEY: This line of conversation leads inevitably to the question of agency, and we’ll try to deal with it quickly and then move on. I’m reminded of Kittler’s provocative statement that “there may be media technologies without love, but there’s no love without media technologies.”¹³ He’s talking, in Optical Media, about the way in which human subjectivity is constructed historically as an interiority that develops in relation to the book, and the romantic novel in particular. He suggests that we need to look at agency both in relation to technical media and in historically specific ways. Similarly the notion of actor-network theory, or distributed cognition, or the broader post-human tendency you’re talking about, which moves away from anthropocentric analyses, raise this question of agency. It seems that thinkers in the actor-network tradition want to locate agency in the network as kind of emergent property of the interaction itself. Could you comment on that question of agency in general, but also in relation to the ethical questions that arise when we want to constitute a sort of agency capable of intervening in the politics of networks, of information, of media? In your work on the RFID chip and DNA databases, for example, and most recently in your commentary on the House of Lords report on surveillance,¹⁴ you develop a strong ethical and political critique of the ways in which these technologies are being regulated or not regulated. How do we think about the production of agency in the ethical sense, in a context where agency itself has been problematized and is no longer a human autonomous action?

HAYLES: Returning to my critique of the way “assemblage” was used by some of the conference presenters, let us recall that in Deleuze and Guattari, “assemblage” is meant to subvert the notion of preexisting, intact human subjectivity. Maybe non-human isn’t the correct word for this approach, but it is anti-subjectivity. It is meant to show that human action doesn’t start with subjectivity, that subjectivity is a kind of end point – and perhaps a false end point – created by consciousness. Many diverse factors are impacting, or disassembling and reassembling, an always already contingent assemblage. The notion of the assemblage as a concept is therefore a strong critique of preexisting subjectivity. The way that I heard that term being used at the conference was something like this: “We have these intact subjectivities and now we add in some technical objects and now we get an assemblage.” To my mind, this is a misuse of the idea of assemblage unless we want to say “assemblage” can mean anything, in which case it ceases to be a useful theoretical concept. In terms of assemblage and its relation to complex distributed agency, if we accept the idea that subjectivity is a late-comer to the party, and that preceding subjectivity are complex cognitive and physical forces at work within the human actor, then agency immediately becomes much more complex. This idea is of course scarcely new; Freud had already introduced the idea that human agency is much more complex than conscious decision-making would have it. What is new about current research on the unconscious¹⁵ is that, in this view, the unconscious doesn’t just deal with repressed or suppressed material. The unconscious is an ongoing, pervasive, cognitive faculty at work every minute of the day in every situation. So this view broadens, extends and really redefines the notion of what the unconscious is.

             Now, there’s no reason why agency has to be regarded as solely a function of consciousness. We may think consciousness is the sole repository of agency, but it’s clear in this current research that unconscious decisions and priority setting and so forth also have agential force. Take, for example, the notion of priming. College students who are given word lists containing references to old people immediately afterwards walk more slowly, have spottier memory recall, and move with less erect postures than usual. As social beings, we unconsciously moderate our behavior to suit the context, and so all kinds of social cues can affect our behavior below the level of consciousness. Freud’s model of suppression/repression emerges from a view of the human in the relatively narrow contexts of family history and personal relationships; if we broaden the scope to consider more dispersed contexts, then the role of the unconscious expands accordingly. The new view reconstitutes agency and subjectivity as much more complex psychic and physical functions. Agency is not being denied but rather redefined as a distributive property sensitive to a variety of contexts that emerge from situated actions, rather than solely from conscious perceptions interacting with unconscious suppressions. Ethical action then broadens its scope to be much more than conscious decision-making in tension with unconscious suppression. Rather, ethics takes on social implications that emerge from complex contexts in which information is being processed both consciously and unconsciously to create a rich picture of embodied, emplaced and enacted interactions. To see how different this version of ethics is from dominant models, consider rational action theory, which places nearly all the emphasis on a rational actor consciously considering choices. In my view, this is a more adequate vision of how agency actually works in the world and why agency is such a complex issue. It simply cannot be encapsulated within considerations of consciousness.

WILEY: As you talk about other elements that would go into the constitution of agency, I’m reminded of two things. One is that in Deleuze and Guattari, in the original French, “assemblages” are agencements, which would more literally be translated as a kind of “agencing.” Thus it seems that the concept of assemblage would be better understood as a process, rather than as a finished configuration of humans, objects, environments, and practices. It is the bringing into resonance, direction, coherence – not necessarily a logical consistency, but kind of a coherence of multiple heterogeneous elements – in such a way as to achieve an effect in the environment or in the assemblage itself. This would suggest a focus on process, a focus on heterogeneous elements, and a focus on the emergent qualities of agency. Another key element of Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of assemblage is affect, which would seem to be a neglected component of much modern theory about agency. And there I’m reminded of Larry Grossberg’s work on ethics and agency and the argument that in the 1980s, the Right was able to mobilize affect in various fields of popular culture in the United States in a way that produced agency – political, social, cultural agency, moving rightward, so to speak – without necessarily achieving a rational or logically consistent argument, about policy, about social norms, and so forth. I wonder if the notion of assemblage, as Deleuze and Guattari originally used it, has lost some of its conceptual potency in terms of both the processual character of agencement and the attention to the affective dimension. I think you’re talking about multiple other dimensions, not simply cognitive and affective, but would the concept of assemblage as used in Deleuze and Guattari better capture the understanding of agency that you are developing?

HAYLES: I’m glad you make the point that agency is already bound up with assemblage in Deleuze and Guattari. The critique that I would make of their work in this regard is their strong emphasis on desire as the motivating force that’s driving the dissolutions and reconfigurations of assemblages. They, especially Guattari, are coming out of a psychoanalytic background, and it’s understandable why they would give pride of place to desire, given that context. But, in fact, the forces driving the dissolution and reconfiguration of assemblages are much broader than desire. This is not to deny that desire plays a role, but there are all kinds of factors at work that could not adequately be captured by the notion of desire. In my view, they present an incomplete portrait of what those motive forces might be if subjectivity is not presumed and already written into the scenario. To take an example: in many species, including humans, the drive toward survival is extremely strong; you could code the drive to survive in terms of desire, but it’s really about wanting to continue one’s existence. That isn’t given much attention in their work, no doubt because the notion of survival presumes that the creature has a sense of wanting to continue as a creaturely entity, whereas they imagine creatures as assemblages that are constantly in motion, so it is not clear what “existence” could mean in that context. Who, or more accurately what, continues to exist? Atoms? Molecules? Proteins? Cells? None of these individually could account for the drive to survive; it takes a sense of an intact organism wanting to continue and extend its existence. And we could mention other kinds of psychic forces as well.

             Going back to agency and the dilution of Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of the processual nature of assemblage and the role that agency might play: yes, by all means, agency is deeply tied in with perception, and since it is perceptual, it implies a strong temporal dimension. That relates back to our earlier discussion about the role of spatialization given the handiness and the power of GIS technology in particular. What I see as the challenge for contemporary theory in this respect is to find ways to incorporate processual perspectives or temporal perspectives into spatializations in such a way as to arrive at a fuller explanation of what causes historical events, ways in which agency is exercised within historical events, and so forth.

WILEY: Could this already be taking place in the marketing strategies of companies that offer mobile social networking and media-driven opportunities for consumption, for example, or in discussions, in military and governmental planning groups, of the use of real-time surveillance by intelligence services and so forth? Are they, perhaps, already modeling a more complex, prosessual understanding of human behavior, risk, and so forth? Are humanists and social scientists late to address questions about something that’s already being developed around us, or are you talking about something different?

HAYLES: I recently heard that Twitter, which is a temporal phenomenon, is now acquiring spatialization technologies. There was already this company, Foursquare, which allowed people to identify their location as a primary parameter of conversation. Now, as I understand it, Twitter is using a comparable technology to combine the temporal aspect with spatialization and localization, and that will all obviously be tied up with locative technologies through cell phones and other mobile devices equipped with GPS technologies. I’m sure that companies like Twitter are imagining this fusion of time and space. The answer to whether humanists and social scientists have something to add to this conversation seems to me unequivocally “Yes”! For corporations, conversations about combining temporal processes with locative technologies would necessarily take place in terms of corporate profit, acquisition of companies, patenting of the technologies, priority of their product, and so forth. What the social, cultural and ethical implications of that might be are not apt to be first on the minds of those companies. So I think that humanists and social scientists definitely have something to contribute. But are they late? Yes, they’re late, because theory in this respect is lagging behind the technology and what technology companies are already doing. The technology is changing so quickly, it is almost impossible not to be in a catch-up position.

WILEY: We’ve been talking a bit about spatialization, and recently about the role of mobile locative technologies in particular. In that context, I want to ask you about the “mobilities turn” in social theory, if you acknowledge that there has been an awakening to mobility in some recent social analysis.¹⁶ This mobilities turn may have been catalyzed, initially, by the proliferation of mobile technologies such as cell phones and GPS devices and so forth. But I think attention to mobile technologies, mobile devices, mobile media, has evolved more recently to a more radical critique of what Tim Cresswell calls the “sedentarist” assumptions of theory.¹⁷ So in addition to the need to think about the ways in which technical media spatialize time, perhaps we also need to incorporate mobility, which of course entails both temporal and spatial changes. One thing I find interesting about the mobilities turn is the argument that much or our social theory is grounded in the conflation of culture and place, so that people are seen as belonging to places which have culture. The traditional anthropological mode is to go to those places, study them, and then come back to talk about their culture. But the mobilities turn suggests that place itself is a much more dynamically constructed phenomenon – that it might be more accurate to think of placings rather than sedentary, or static, places. So I want to ask how, or if, this move toward attention to mobility and mobile technologies has shaped your work. More broadly, would you agree that our understandings of the logics of spatialization and temporalization need to be rethought in light of this questioning of the older anthropological sedentarist understanding of place?

HAYLES: I have recently been very interested in these questions but I’d like to broaden the perspective beyond mobile technologies as such. As you no doubt know, in 1977 Yi-Fu Tuan published Space and Place¹⁸ and catalyzed the development of what is called humanistic geography. Humanistic geography does assume priority of place over space in general and tends to privilege place as the rooted expression of human culture and human subjectivity, whereas space is seen as more abstract and not as rooted in the individual experience. That approach has been critiqued within geography; one of the limitations of that approach is that it’s hard to find any place on Earth now that hasn’t been affected by globalization. If you begin by privileging a rootedness in place, you really have no way to take globalization into account except as a late add-on to the picture. Doreen Massey in her article “A Global Sense of Place”¹⁹ argues that the place approach is fatally flawed, and that the beginning point for theorization and empirical research should be the notion of interrelationality. Even though people are rooted in specific places, their emerging stories come about through interactions with regional and global economies, concerns, decisions, policies, and so forth. If you begin with the notion of interrelationality, you have a way to accommodate rootedness in place, while also recognizing that place doesn’t assume the sedentary and nostalgic value of rootedness; rather, this approach sees rootedness as always in dynamic interplay with larger regional, national, and international influences.

             Allow me to add a cautionary note about the sedentary bias of theory. I wouldn’t want us to throw out of consideration the fact that mobile technologies all rely on located technical infrastructure. Whether that technical infrastructure is a repeating tower for a cell phone, whether it’s a satellite transmission somewhere that’s going down into a cloud-computing type of facility or whatever, mobile phones only work because there is located infrastructure. If we focus only on the fact that we can move GPS devices and mobile telephones around, we’re ignoring half of the picture that is equally as important as the mobile half. Whether you can get cell phone reception, how fast your signal can be processed, whether a call gets dropped – all that is dependent on located, that is to say relatively sedentary – infrastructure. It seems to me that the issue here should be the interrelationship of mobile technology with located infrastructure, and that’s why I’m a little resistant to the notion of sedentarian interest. Yes, we need to take mobility into account, but it’s not as though these are free-standing devices. These are all dependent on some larger kind of infrastructure.

WILEY: So we would need a geography of infrastructure, which might have its own temporality, but a slower temporality, presumably, than the user, who’s carrying around the phone, and mobility takes place within these fields that are constructed by those fixed infrastructures.

HAYLES: Adding in the infrastructure gives you deeper insight into the ways in which political, and economic, and public policy factors affect the use of mobile technologies. Where the infrastructure is located, within what territorial boundaries, who owns it, who operates it – those crucial considerations enable us to see that the political considerations go way beyond the company manufacturing individual cell phones. It goes to larger political and corporate alliances between those who own and control the infrastructure and those who are developing the mobile technologies. Some recent developments within the telecommunications industry having to do with net neutrality have highlighted the importance of those alliances and their effects on our lives.

WILEY: Nevertheless, it would seem that the ability to carry around what is essentially a computer with a touch-screen visual interface, a computer that probably surpasses the computing power of most desktops of only ten years ago, is changing the environment in which we act and think and interact with others. So the notion of distributed cognition might also need to be mobilized. That is, if much work in the digital humanities has focused on human–computer interaction, and if observations about that interaction have been predicated largely on the specific technology of the desktop (on the immobile computer), doesn’t the mobility of a smartphone, tablet, or laptop now introduce new questions into our work? Does the context of the politics and economics of infrastructure and information management and the broader shift in the environment free up computational power from the fixed desktop computer? Does that raise new questions for notions of distributed cognition or the notion of complex co-constitutive agency that we were discussing earlier?

HAYLES: Absolutely it does, and one way to think about this is that human cognition now, in developed countries, rarely walks around unaided. It’s not only a matter of sitting in front of the computer as you are suggesting; it’s a matter of bringing the computational device with you into all kinds of different situations so that the human–computer interaction now becomes distributed, pervasive and environmentally mobile. Obviously, that is going to influence the way we think about human agency. The direction in which mobile technologies are taking us makes distributed agency and distributed cognition even more important and pervasive.

WILEY: … and perhaps more distributed as well …

HAYLES: Yes – more distributed and more pervasive.

WILEY: And of course, cell phones and smartphones are just the interface – the visible end-user component of a much larger network … and the component that we tend to experience directly and think about most consciously. But some of your work points out that there are many other computing devices in our environment, at the nanoscale or at the scale of an RFID chip, that are beyond conscious perception of most inhabitants of the environment. Cognition, agency, decision-making and information may be pervasive and distributed across the environment, but nevertheless, our role as a co-constitutive human agent in that environment is very different depending on our social location in the larger fields of infrastructure and information flow.

HAYLES: One of the implications of that is the extent to which machine–machine communication is an increasingly important part of the picture. As human agents, we naturally tend to foreground our own activities and frame our questions and our research in terms of those activities, but in fact, human–human communication is becoming a smaller and smaller bandwidth compared to the total machine–machine communication. There are all these invisible information flows surging around us of which we’re unconscious and unaware but that are nevertheless becoming increasingly important in the technical infrastructural and the larger picture of what’s going on.

WILEY: I have two final related questions which are not small questions but which do follow from our current topic. First, what sorts of interdisciplinary collaborations or alliances do we need to be working on in order to be able to grasp some of these developments? And second, what are some ways in which we might need to rethink methods of inquiry? Is it important now for humanists and social theorists to find ways to work more closely with designers, engineers, and policy makers, in the context of the kinds of technical developments that we’ve been talking about?

HAYLES: This is a question I’ve been thinking about a lot, specifically in terms of my home discipline of literary studies. These questions pose specific challenges for the humanities, which are traditionally printbased; this would include not only literary studies but narrative history, philosophy, etc. A huge question looming now is how the humanities are going to cope as the age of print is passing and being replaced by a more diverse media landscape. It does seem to me terribly important that traditionally print-based humanists find ways to reconceptualize their research, their practices, and so forth to take into account this transformed social reality. A field like communication studies, which bridges the humanities and social sciences in many respects, may find these questions less fraught because communication studies has always been concerned with arrays of media and locates itself within those arrays. But for the print-based humanities, this is nothing less than a crisis of identity. For these disciplines, and specifically for literary studies, a promising approach is comparative media studies. For literary studies, this would include manuscript culture, print culture, and digital culture; it would also change the emphasis from a fairly restrictive range of strategies called “reading” to a broader range of strategies that would be able to respond to digital technologies in particular. Here I’m thinking of what I call “hyper reading” and also “machine reading” – strategies that differ profoundly from the privileged icon of close reading but that would fit easily into a comparative media studies perspective. An interesting question is how such a reconfigured literature department would differ from a communication studies department; maybe they should join forces. In my view, such actions are best decided locally by individual department institutions. The one thing I’m sure of is that an exclusive focus on print is no longer a viable academic research or curricular strategy. Changes must be made in order to bring the digital into the picture. Does this mean increased collaborations with designers and engineers? I would say obviously it does, because as soon as you bring in digital technologies, there are all kinds of questions that humanists haven’t traditionally considered and which become crucial to research projects. Comparative media studies implies not only disciplinary transformation but also a much broader reconfiguration of the academic landscape. In fact, Tara McPherson at the University of Southern California does not hesitate to say this really means a reconfiguration of the way the academy does business.²⁰

WILEY: It would seem that one of the deep tensions there is the critical, reflective, analytical impulse of the humanities and social sciences in juxtaposition with the constructive, creative, impulse in engineering and design. In collaborative projects, it seems that one of the tensions would occur when humanists and social scientists attempt to move from the critical, analytical posture to a more experimental or creative posture … or perhaps when engineers and designers and policy makers are asked to pause and take the time to reflect on the ethical and cultural and social implications of the objects they’re creating in conversation with humanists and social scientists. Is this a direction we would need to go – toward a more experimental, constructive, or productive kind of approach, as opposed to a hermeneutical methodology of critical reading?

HAYLES: That is a central question. I think there has been something deeply hypocritical about the culture of critique that continues to be dominant within the humanities. What’s hypocritical about it is that the posture of critique has now become stereotypical and mainstream. And yet the posture of critique assumes that whoever is making the critique is executing a dangerous and subversive action. Within the humanistic discipline, however, it isn’t subversive at all. It’s absolutely mainstream. Nor is it resistant, for it is promulgating the dominant ideology of the discipline to those who attend to it. It might be resistant as far as the general society goes, but they are frequently not listening. It’s time that we rethink the posture of critique and recognize these contradictions. I am not suggesting that we abandon critique but rather that we combine it with constructive action that uses it as a starting point rather than a final destination. As soon as we make a critique of the culture of critique, we must recognize that we in the humanities are absolutely in league with the forces of capitalism and corporate enterprises, because humanities departments in every university in the country are largely subsidized by work that goes on in the engineering school, the medical school and the business school. On a daily basis, our research and our salaries are only possible because the university is receiving huge subsidies from these other, less critique-oriented cultures. Recognizing that as an everyday fact of life in the university automatically draws into question the culture of critique and how it positions itself in terms of its own involvement with capitalistic enterprises. Reasoning like this can lead us out of the dead end that the humanities has gotten into with the culture of critique, open up other possible responses such as productive and creative collaborations with our colleagues within and without the university, and drive us to participate from the inside in making a more just and equitable society through effective action in the world. So yes, I would really welcome this kind of rethinking and this truly subversive activity, which aims to create as well as to critique and to engage productively with profit-oriented enterprises as well as with art and non-profit institutions.

WILEY: I’m going to ask one final follow-up question, to bring the social scientists into the picture here. We talked about humanities and, on the other hand, engineering and design, as examples of cross-disciplinary collaborations. One of the tensions between humanism and social science, I think, is the question of hermeneutics and interpretivism as a method versus the allure of empirical work. Empiricism can of course be very positivist in some social science methods, but there are also versions of cultural studies, anthropology, sociology, and psychology that have a critical empirical focus. What do you see as the challenges for interdisciplinary collaborations between literary studies, rhetoric, and composition (and textual analyses within communication), on the one hand, and the attention to contexts, to human subjects, to historical contingencies and so forth that social science or cultural studies might bring to that conversation?

HAYLES: From a humanist point of view, one of the risks of undertaking empirical work is that it threatens to disenfranchise the humanities because the humanities have traditionally not been invested in empirical work or trained to understand it. There is considerable fear among humanists that turning to empirical work will have the effect of trumping interpretive work, so that humanists would be shooting themselves in the foot, so to speak, if they go that route. I understand that fear, and it is the more cogent because for some kinds of empirical work, the technical expertise required for intelligent critique would itself takes years of training and experience to acquire, which makes it simply not an option for busy professionals in the humanities. We are, for example, not trained as statisticians, a field in which quite complex formulations defeat casual attempts to gain expertise. These difficulties notwithstanding, there are a number of solutions to this kind of problem. One is collaboration with social scientists. Humanists can bring interpretive skills in contexts that are enriched by empirical research as well. The barriers to deep communication are considerable, but nevertheless can be overcome with good faith and trust on both sides. There are also ways in which empirically inflected work is appearing within the humanities. For example, in the digital humanities, the field of machine reading is becoming increasingly important. What humanists are discovering is that the interpretive work based on an individual encountering a text, reading it deeply, and so forth, can in fact be enhanced and made even more cogent by machine analysis of rhetorical, grammatical, and semantic patterns. What machine analysis contributes to understanding complex cultural texts is scope and subtlety of detecting patterns across large corpora that exceed the ability of any individual reader to encompass. So, I do think there are ways in which the humanities can engage in empirical work without forsaking its interpretive vocation and without automatically putting itself in a one-down position. As I argue in my forthcoming book How We Think: Transforming Power and Digital Technologies, if the passing of the age of print in one sense constitutes a crisis for print-based humanities, in another sense it represents the dawning of a new era of productive collaborations with empirical research, with colleagues in the quantitative and qualitative social sciences, with engineers and designers, and in general with all of the increasingly powerful ways in which machine cognition is executed within networked and programmable devices.

WILEY: Thank you very much.

HAYLES: Thank you.

Notes