Picture a chemistry lab in Southern California in 1968. Beckman Instruments, Fullerton. Fluorescent light on stainless steel. A young woman in a white coat runs analyses for a company that builds the machines other scientists use to measure the world. She holds a bachelor’s degree in chemistry from the Rochester Institute of Technology and she is finishing a master’s at Caltech, where women in the graduate chemistry program can be counted on one hand. The work is exact. The work is also narrow. She later describes her problem in the mildest terms available to her: she loved science, she loved literature, and laboratory life gave her no room for the second love. In 1970 she walks away from the bench. She enrolls in an English M.A. program at Michigan State. In the status economy of American science, this looks like failure. A Caltech-trained chemist trading instruments for novels trades hard knowledge for soft, money for penury, rigor for talk. It takes her thirty years to prove the ledger wrong.
Nancy Katherine Hayles (b. 1943) grew up in St. Louis, Missouri, the daughter of Edward and Thelma Bruns. Her surname comes from her first marriage, to William Hayles in 1969; the marriage ended in 1979 and left her with two children and the name under which she built her career. She earned the B.S. in chemistry from RIT in 1966, worked as a research chemist at Xerox, took the M.S. from Caltech in 1969, and consulted for Beckman Instruments until 1970. Then came the pivot: the M.A. in English from Michigan State in 1970 and a Ph.D. in English from the University of Rochester in 1977. On her own website she recalls the shock of the crossing through a line from Tom Stoppard‘s Arcadia: she discovered that “everything I thought I knew was wrong,” down to what counts as evidence and how one makes an argument. A chemist demonstrates learning by running the experiment. A literary scholar demonstrates learning by building a reading. Hayles spent the rest of her life refusing to choose between the two proofs.
The academic ladder she climbed tells its own story about status in the American university. Instructor, then assistant professor, at Dartmouth from 1975 to 1982. Assistant professor at the University of Missouri-Rolla, an engineering school in the Ozarks, from 1982 to 1985. Associate professor at the University of Iowa in 1985, then a named chair there, the Millington F. Carpenter Professorship, by 1989. In 1992 UCLA hired her as the Hillis Professor of Literature in English and Media Arts, a joint appointment that recognized what she had become: a literary critic whom the design and media people also claimed. In 2008 Duke made her the James B. Duke Professor of Literature, the highest rank the university confers. She now holds the emerita version of that chair alongside a Distinguished Research Professorship back at UCLA, where she returned and where she still works. A woman who started at a technical institute in Rochester, took a detour through corporate labs, and entered literary study a decade behind her cohort ended up holding chairs at two of the wealthiest research universities in the country. She did it by writing about things her colleagues did not yet know they needed to understand.
Her first two books established the method. The Cosmic Web: Scientific Field Models and Literary Strategies in the Twentieth Century (1984) traced how field theories in physics and relational models of reality surfaced in the fiction of Pynchon, Nabokov, and Borges. Chaos Bound: Orderly Disorder in Contemporary Literature and Science (1990) did the same for chaos theory and postmodern narrative. The premise sounds modest and is not. Hayles argued that scientists and novelists working in the same decades draw on the same cultural reservoir. Science does not simply discover; it also imagines, and its imagination has a period style. Literature does not simply decorate; it thinks, and its thinking sometimes runs parallel to the equations. She refused both available pieties. Against the scientists who saw literary theory as fog, she insisted that scientific models carry cultural assumptions. Against the humanists then riding high on social constructivism, she insisted that science delivers reliable knowledge about the world. She named her middle position “constrained constructivism”: theories are models of reality rather than reality, but reality pushes back and rules most models out. Her chemistry training shows here. She had run experiments. She knew nature votes.
The years around 1990 gave her a front-row seat to the science wars, and the seat was uncomfortable. She has compared the period to a child watching her parents fight. One parent was her lab training, which told her scientific method is the best instrument humans have built for reliable knowledge. The other parent was her literary training, which told her every scientist swims in a culture he cannot fully see. Most combatants picked a parent. Hayles kept both, and the books that followed are the record of a forty-year effort to hold the two loyalties in one frame.
The breakthrough came in 1999. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics opens with a scene of reading. Hayles picks up Mind Children by the Carnegie Mellon roboticist Hans Moravec (b. 1948) and finds his prediction that human consciousness will soon be downloaded into computers. Moravec presents this as a dream. Hayles receives it as a nightmare, and the book she writes in response asks how a serious scientist came to believe that a person is a pattern of information that can leave its body the way a traveler leaves a hotel.
Her answer runs through the Macy Conferences, the meetings held in New York between 1946 and 1953 where Norbert Wiener (1894-1964), Claude Shannon (1916-2001), Warren McCulloch (1898-1969), Margaret Mead (1901-1978), and a shifting cast of engineers, neurophysiologists, and social scientists built the field of cybernetics. Hayles reads the transcripts the way a novelist reads a dinner party. She watches Shannon define information as a mathematical quantity stripped of meaning, a move that made communication engineering possible and telephone networks profitable. She watches the group generalize the move, until information floats free of any body, any medium, any material substrate. The decision was practical and local. Its consequences were metaphysical and global. Once the culture learned to imagine information as bodiless, Moravec’s fantasy followed: if you are your information, the flesh is packaging, and packaging can be discarded.
How We Became Posthuman argues that this entire construction rests on an erasure. Information never exists without a body. It lives in ink, in voltage, in neurons, in air pressure. Minds do not ride in bodies; minds are what certain bodies do. Hayles attacked the disembodied posthuman while refusing to retreat into the liberal humanist subject it replaced, the autonomous, self-owning, rational individual of Enlightenment political theory. That subject, she noted, was always a fiction too, and a gated one; it described propertied European men and called the description universal. Her posthuman keeps the embodiment the cyberneticists erased and drops the sovereignty the humanists invented. The book won the René Wellek Prize for the best book in literary theory and the Eaton Award for science fiction criticism in the same cycle, a pairing that captures its reach. It became a founding text of posthumanist studies and a standard syllabus item on three continents. Graduate students who never opened a chemistry textbook learned from Hayles that the Turing test, Neuromancer, and Shannon’s channel diagrams belong to one history.
She could have spent the next twenty years administering that success. Instead she kept moving. Writing Machines (2002), a small experimental volume designed with Anne Burdick, argued that the material form of a text shapes its meaning, and proved it by making its own typography and page design part of the argument. She coined the term “technotext” for works that reflect on the technology producing them, and the book took the Suzanne Langer Award. Her concept of the “flickering signifier” gave critics a tool for digital writing: a word on a screen is not a stable mark like ink on paper but the momentary surface of code, memory, processor, and display, a signifier that flickers between visible text and invisible execution. My Mother Was a Computer (2005) pushed into code as a cultural force, examining how machine language and natural language now interpenetrate in everything from novels to subjectivity. The title comes from a time when “computer” named a job held by women who calculated by hand, a detail Hayles uses to remind readers that the history of computation is a history of bodies, many of them female.
Alongside the books she built a field. Electronic literature, the writing born digital, hypertext fiction, generative poetry, works that exist only in execution, had passionate makers and no scholarly infrastructure. Hayles supplied it. She directed NEH summer seminars on the subject starting in 1995, introducing a generation of scholars and writers to the form. She served as faculty director of the Electronic Literature Organization from 2001 to 2006 and co-edited the first Electronic Literature Collection, which gave teachers a stable canon to assign. Her 2008 book Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary surveyed and legitimated the field. Since 2014 the organization’s annual prize for criticism carries her name, which is the academic equivalent of a statue in the town square. Her championing of writers such as Mark Z. Danielewski (b. 1966), whose House of Leaves she read as a print novel remade by digital logic, helped move experimental work from cult status to dissertation topic.
In 2007 she published a short article that traveled farther than some of her books. “Hyper and Deep Attention: The Generational Divide in Cognitive Modes” distinguished deep attention, the sustained single-object focus that long novels train and reward, from hyper attention, the rapid switching among information streams that digital environments train and reward. Teachers recognized their classrooms in the distinction at once. Hayles declined the jeremiad the topic invited. She treated the shift as a change in cognitive ecology with costs and gains on both sides, and asked what pedagogy should do about it rather than which generation to blame. How We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis (2012) expanded the argument: humans and their technologies evolve together, and digital media are reorganizing attention, memory, and scholarship whether the professoriate approves or not.
Then came the late turn, the one that makes her career unusual among literary critics. Most scholars narrow with age. Hayles widened. Unthought: The Power of the Cognitive Nonconscious (2017) argued that cognition exceeds consciousness. Most of the interpretive work that keeps a human alive happens below awareness, and cognition in her definition, the interpretation of information within contexts that connect it to meaning, extends to nonhuman animals, to plants, and to technical systems. She introduced the “cognitive assemblage”: a working combination of humans and machines that senses, interprets, and decides together. Traffic systems, drone warfare, high-frequency trading. In such assemblages the interesting question is no longer whether the machine thinks like a man but how the joint system distributes interpretation, and who answers for what it decides.
Postprint: Books and Becoming Computational (2021) returned to her oldest love, the book, and refused both funeral and triumph. Print did not die; it was absorbed. Every printed book now passes through computational systems of composition, design, distribution, and marketing before it reaches a hand. The codex survives as the visible tip of a computational apparatus. And Bacteria to AI: Human Futures with Our Nonhuman Symbionts (2025), published when she was eighty-one, proposes an Integrated Cognitive Framework that places human thought on a continuum running from bacterial sensing through plant signaling and animal cognition to large language models. She argues that computational media possess something like umwelten, the world horizons that biology ascribes to organisms, while insisting on the difference between living systems, which have intentions, and physical processes, which do not. The political claim beneath the theory is blunt: the belief that humans are the only real cognizers on the planet has licensed the treatment of everything else as raw material, and the ecological results are in. She rejects the accelerationists who expect machines to save us and the reactionary humanists who want the old sovereign subject back. Her proposal is humbler and stranger: learn to live as one cognizer among many, a symbiont in systems no single mind controls.
The profession has kept score. A Guggenheim Fellowship, two NEH fellowships, a Rockefeller residency at Bellagio, the National Humanities Center. Lifetime achievement awards from the Science Fiction Research Association and the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts, a society she served as president from 1991 to 1993, back when it was small and its subject was suspect. Election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Academia Europaea in 2015. Honorary doctorates from Umeå in Sweden, the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, and, in 2024, the Royal College of Art in London. Critics have landed blows along the way. Some charged that How We Became Posthuman holds science to a constructivist standard it exempts from its own realism; others found her readings of Maturana‘s autopoiesis strained. The objections register as border disputes within a territory she mapped.
The last scene closes a sixty-year loop. May 8, 2026. Panara Theater on the campus of the Rochester Institute of Technology, the doctoral hooding ceremony. The graduates process in regalia while student performers from the National Technical Institute for the Deaf sign the national anthem. The honorary degree recipient and keynote speaker is Katherine Hayles, class of 1966, chemistry. RIT gave her a B.S. and an apprenticeship in laboratory method; she left the lab within four years. Now the institute confers on her an honorary Doctor of Letters, and its new doctors of engineering and imaging science and computing sit and listen to a literary critic in her eighties tell them about cognition, machines, and books. The chemists in the room might miss the joke. The degree is in Letters because the letters won, but she never let them win alone. Bodies matter in her account, and media, and code, and the ink this sentence would be printed in. She spent a career telling a culture in love with disembodied information that there is no such thing, and the culture, now building minds out of matrices, needs the reminder more than ever.
Notes
The opening scene in the Beckman laboratory extrapolates from documented facts. Hayles worked as a research chemist at Xerox in 1966 and as a chemical research consultant for Beckman Instruments from 1968 to 1970, as documented by Alchetron and Wikipedia: Alchetron and Wikipedia. Beckman Instruments was headquartered in Fullerton during that period, and women in Caltech’s graduate chemistry program in the late 1960s were uncommon. Those elements are reasonable historical extrapolations based on place and period. Hayles’s own explanation for leaving science, her love of literature and lack of enthusiasm for laboratory work, comes from a Rochester Institute of Technology profile: RIT.
The statement “Everything I thought I knew was wrong” is Hayles’s own description of her intellectual transformation and comes from her personal website: N. Katherine Hayles.
The discussion of the science wars, including the comparison to “a child watching her parents fight” and the concept of “constrained constructivism,” comes from her 2025 essay in Media Theory: Media Theory. I paraphrased rather than quoted the image of the child because it is her own metaphor. If you retain it, attribution would be appropriate.
The Hans Moravec scene is based on Hayles’s own account. The prologue to How We Became Posthuman begins with her reading Moravec’s Mind Children and experiencing his vision of the future as a nightmare rather than a dream. I rendered that episode without direct quotation.
The Macy Conferences scene is reconstructed from the historical chapters of How We Became Posthuman. The participants, dates, and setting, New York between 1946 and 1953, are standard historical facts.
The closing Rochester Institute of Technology scene is confirmed by the university’s commencement announcement and the 2026 commencement program: RIT News and 2026 Commencement Program. The program identifies Hayles as the honorary degree recipient speaking at the doctoral hooding ceremony in Panara Theater on May 8, 2026, with student performers from RIT’s National Technical Institute for the Deaf. My reference to performers signing the national anthem is a reasonable inference from NTID’s participation. The program itself refers only to “student performers from RIT/NTID.”
Flesh Against Pattern: The Hero System of N. Katherine Hayles
Two terrors run under this life. The first is the old one. The body fails. A chemist knows this better than most, because a chemist knows the body is chemistry, and chemistry runs down. Proteins misfold. Membranes leak. The reaction stops. The second terror is stranger and belongs to our century. It is the fear that the first terror has an exit, that a person is a pattern of information, that the pattern can be copied out of the flesh and run on something that does not rot, and that everything we called a life, the mother’s hands, the smell of a lab, the weight of a book, was packaging. N. Katherine Hayles (b. 1943) built a career on refusing the exit. She accepted the first terror to fight the second.
Start with the man who offered the exit. Hans Moravec (b. 1948) ran a robotics lab at Carnegie Mellon in the 1980s, in Pittsburgh, a steel city then losing its steel. His machines crawled and stumbled and saw the world through cameras, and they were pitiful next to a housecat, and he loved them. In 1988 he published Mind Children, and in it he described a surgery of the future. A robot surgeon peels the brain layer by layer, scans each layer, simulates it in a computer, confirms the simulation runs true, and discards the tissue. At the end the skull is empty and the patient wakes inside the machine, himself, continuous, and now backed up. Moravec presented this as deliverance. Read him with Ernest Becker (1924-1974) open on the desk and the scene changes. Becker argued in The Denial of Death (1973) that the knowledge of death is the wound at the center of human life, and that every culture is a hero system, an arrangement of roles and values that lets a man feel he is a being of primary value in a universe of meaning, an object of cosmic significance whose acts outlast his animal term. Religion did this work for millennia. Where religion thins, men build substitutes. Moravec’s surgery is a substitute. It is the causa-sui project, Becker’s term for the dream of being one’s own father, engineered in silicon: a man looks at the grave and announces that death is a hardware problem, and hardware can be upgraded. There is no reason to sneer. The dream is old and human and it comes from the same terror that built the pyramids. The roboticist in Pittsburgh, surrounded by machines that could barely cross a room, wrote a scripture for people who could no longer say the older ones aloud.
Hayles read Mind Children and could not sleep on it. She has told the story many times: the roboticist’s dream reached her as a nightmare. Her whole late system unfolds from that recoil, and the recoil makes sense only if we see what she had already staked. She trained as a chemist at the Rochester Institute of Technology and Caltech, worked corporate labs, then left science for literature in 1970 and spent a decade earning a second apprenticeship. A person who pays that price twice has wagered that both kinds of knowing count, the equation and the sentence, and that both live in trained bodies. Moravec’s surgery says the wager was foolish. If mind is substrate-independent pattern, the years at the bench and the years with the novels trained nothing essential. The nightmare was personal before it was theoretical.
So name her hero system. Call it the creed of the embodied knower. Its first commandment: there is no information without a body. Its second: finitude is the condition of meaning, and the systems that promise escape from finitude, the uploaded mind, the sovereign rational soul of liberal humanism, the machine that will save us, are vital lies. Its promised heroism: a man wins significance by knowing where he is, in a mortal body, inside media, inside code, inside ecologies of other cognizers, and by acting responsibly there. Its saints are the ones who refuse comfortable dualisms. Its afterlife is the corpus, the students, the field built and left behind. Every hero system works by subtraction as much as by assertion, and hers subtracts without anesthesia. Subtract the immortal soul. Subtract the resurrection. Subtract the liberal subject, that self-owning rational man of the Enlightenment, whom she exposed as a gated fiction. Subtract the transhumanist rapture. What remains after the subtraction is flesh that thinks, briefly, alongside bacteria and algorithms, and her claim that this is enough. Becker would ask the hard question at once: enough for what? A hero system must metabolize death, and hers asks its members to face death with no promise except that they knew where they were when it came.
Watch her sacred values move through other hero systems, because a sacred word keeps its spelling and changes its soul at every border.
Take embodiment. In Scottsdale, Arizona, a software architect signs the paperwork with Alcor and wears a steel bracelet with dewar instructions for the paramedics. For him the body is the enemy of the person. He lifts, fasts, tracks his bloodwork, and none of it is love of flesh; it is maintenance of a vehicle he intends to abandon. “Death is an engineering problem,” he tells his sister at Thanksgiving, and she stops arguing because he glows when he says it, and she recognizes the glow from their grandmother at Mass. In a hospice in Cleveland, a night nurse turns a ninety-pound man every two hours so his skin will not break down before his heart does. For her, embodiment is the final honesty. Families arrive with phones full of the man as he was, and she teaches them to hold the hand in front of them. Nothing in her work is pattern. All of it is weight, warmth, smell, the labor of breath. In a Lagos megachurch, a Pentecostal woman dances in the Spirit until her dress is soaked, because in her system the body is the instrument God plays, and worship that stays in the head is no worship. In a gym in Queens at five in the morning, a bodybuilder loads the bar and fights entropy one plate at a time; his body is the hero project, the sculpture that argues against decay, and he knows the argument is losing and lifts anyway. For Hayles, embodiment means none of these. It means the ground of knowing. Thought has a location and a metabolism. The chemist’s hands, the reader’s eyes moving across a page, the neuron’s chemistry: cognition is what certain bodies do, and a mind removed from its body is a rumor. Same word, five altars.
Take information. For the engineer in Claude Shannon’s (1916-2001) lineage, information is a triumph over noise, a quantity you can price and pipe, and stripping it of meaning was the professional achievement of a lifetime; telephone networks and everything after run on that renunciation. For the transhumanist, information is the soul renamed, the thing about you that could survive you, which is why he speaks of it with reverence his grandfather kept for the word spirit. For an intelligence officer in Tel Aviv, information is national survival measured in hours, and a body is often where it hides, which is a sentence with teeth. In a study hall in a religious neighborhood, an old man and his grandson sing the words of a page of Talmud aloud, swaying, and here information is the strangest thing of all: a transmitted word that is alive, that must pass through breath and memory and argument, generation to generation, and that carries the covenant in its syntax. The old man might agree with Hayles more than either would expect. He also believes there is no Torah without bodies to study it. Hayles’s own meaning sits against all of these: information is the century’s most consequential abstraction, made bodiless by a historical decision at mid-century, and her life’s work was to reattach it to the flesh and media that carry it, because a culture that believes in bodiless information will end by believing in disposable bodies.
Take cognition, the sacred term of her last books. A gunnery sergeant on Parris Island has a theory of mind and it is hierarchical: cognition is the officer class of the person, the will that keeps a recruit moving when the meat votes to quit, and his whole liturgy of pain exists to install that hierarchy. A product director in Shenzhen has another: cognition is a capability on a roadmap, benchmarked quarterly, and the question of whether the model understands anything bores him because the market does not ask it. A Zen abbot has a third: cognition is the churn the practice quiets, and the self it generates is the illusion to see through. And in a memory-care unit in Fort Wayne, a daughter visits a mother who no longer produces what any benchmark calls cognition. The staff speak of decline. The daughter has learned something else. “She still knows my hand,” she says, and she is not being sentimental; she has run the experiment daily for three years. Her hero system locates the person somewhere cognition cannot reach, in the bond, in the body that bore her, and any framework that hands out standing by cognitive capacity has already, quietly, demoted her mother. Hayles’s late system takes the word in the opposite direction from the sergeant and the product director. In Unthought (2017) and Bacteria to AI (2025) she democratizes cognition, extends it downward and outward, to cells, plants, technical systems, until the human holds no crown, only a place in an assemblage. The move is moral before it is technical. She believes the crown produced the wreckage, that a species convinced it is the only real cognizer treats everything else as material, and the burning climate is the invoice. Her heroism asks men to save the world by accepting demotion. The daughter in Fort Wayne might answer that she does not need her mother promoted or demoted along that scale at all. The scale is the problem.
Set her system beside the traditionalist’s, and give the traditionalist his full strength, because he is not a straw man; he is running the oldest terror-management technology on record, tested across exiles and plagues, and it works. His hero system is tribal, national, covenantal. Significance flows from a particular people with a particular God across particular generations. Embodiment means circumcision on the eighth day, the fast broken together, the body enlisted in a lineage. Information means the scroll carried out of the burning city, the word passed father to son with the melody intact. Cognition ranks below fidelity; the covenant does not test IQ. Death is answered communally: the mourner’s prayer said by sons, the name given to grandchildren, the people that continues when the man does not. Against this, Hayles offers planetary symbiosis, and the traditionalist hears the offer and asks his questions. Who sits shiva in an assemblage? Which symbiont says the prayer? A hero system that dissolves the boundary between my people and the bacteria has no way to consecrate my dead in particular, and the whole engine of his system is that the dead are his. Her framework can describe his community with respect, as one cognitive ecology among many. His framework cannot return the compliment, because for him the covenant is not one option on a menu, and a system that shelves it beside xenobots has already denied it. The two systems do not merely disagree; each one’s form of reverence reads as the other’s blasphemy. Becker would say both are doing the same work with different tools, buying significance against death, and Becker’s leveling is exactly what the traditionalist refuses and what Hayles, to her credit, accepts and lives inside.
How much does she know about her own project? More than most. She diagnosed Moravec’s dream as death-denial with a clinician’s calm, and a woman who can see the terror under a roboticist’s equations can usually feel it under her own prose. Otto Rank (1884-1939), Becker’s master, described the artist type as the man who refuses the ready-made hero systems and manufactures a private one, justifying his existence through the work, and the description fits her without alteration. Twelve books. A hundred articles. Fields built where there were none: literature and science, electronic literature, the criticism of code. Since 2014 the Electronic Literature Organization gives an annual award that carries her name, so that every year, while she lives, young scholars compete for a prize called Hayles, and her name circulates in rooms her body never enters. She keeps publishing into her eighties, a new theory of mind at eighty-one, interviews, keynotes, an honorary doctorate at her first alma mater sixty years after the chemistry degree. None of this is vanity in the cheap sense. It is the immortality project running exactly as Rank drew it, the corpus as causa-sui, and she has earned the extra measure of charity we owe the honorable, because she paid retail at every step. She defended scientific reliability during the science wars when her own guild wanted blood, and defended embodiment against the engineers when their stock was rising and hers was not. She never sold the convenient version. Whether she has stood at the last window, the one Becker says no system fully curtains, and asked what the corpus buys her on the actual morning of her actual death, the record does not say. Her books go silent at that door. They tell us how to live among cognizers. They do not tell us how she plans to die.
And here the irony arrives that a Becker reading cannot decline. Her survival, the only survival her creed permits, will be informational. The body that knew the lab bench and the page will stop, and what persists will be pattern: texts absorbed, as she herself showed in Postprint (2021), into computational systems of storage and circulation, formatted, indexed, migrated from server to server, quoted by machines to students not yet born. She will become the thing she spent a career proving does not exist, information without her body, and the proof will travel in that form. Moravec wanted the upload as rescue and she refused it, and the refusal will be uploaded. She might answer, and the answer has force, that this was always the honest bargain: the work persists as pattern precisely because it no longer needs to be her, that an afterlife of influence is categorically unlike an afterlife of experience, and that confusing the two is the exact error she wrote twelve books to correct. The corpus survives. She does not. She said so first.
The hero, then: the embodied knower, the woman who walked out of the lab and back toward it for forty years, who refused the two great anesthetics of her era, the old sovereign soul and the new uploaded one, and who asks her followers to find significance standing in the mortal middle, symbionts among symbionts, responsible and temporary. The rival her books never name is not Moravec, who is named on the first page, and not the humanist, who is named on the tenth. It is the praying man, the one whose hero system solved death first and did not require him to be brilliant, and whom her entire framework politely declines to argue with, because to argue would be to admit he is answering the same question she is. And the cost that no ledger prices appears at a graveside, any graveside, hers or ours: a creed of embodiment has nothing to hand the mourner once the body is gone, no prayer, no promise, only the pattern in the books and the instruction, honest and cold and hers, to know where you are.
Notes
The brain-transfer surgery scene comes from Hans Moravec’s Mind Children: The Future of Robot and Human Intelligence (Harvard University Press, 1988), Chapter 4. A summary is available at Wikipedia. Hayles’s account of reading the book as a nightmare rather than a dream appears in the prologue to How We Became Posthuman (University of Chicago Press, 1999).
Ernest Becker’s discussion of hero systems and the causa sui project comes from The Denial of Death (Free Press, 1973), especially Chapters 1 through 6. Becker’s treatment of Otto Rank’s artist type appears in Chapter 8 and in Rank’s Art and Artist (1932).
Alcor is headquartered in Scottsdale, Arizona, and members commonly wear medical-alert bracelets identifying their cryonics arrangements: Alcor.
The N. Katherine Hayles Award has been presented annually since 2014: Electronic Literature Organization. This is also confirmed at Wikipedia.
Hayles’s Bacteria to AI, published by the University of Chicago Press in 2025 when she was eighty-one years old, is documented here: University of Chicago Press.
Her honorary doctorate from the Rochester Institute of Technology, awarded on May 8, 2026, is documented here: RIT News.
I created several scenes that are explicitly fictional composites rather than historical reconstructions. These include the cryonicist’s Thanksgiving conversation, the daughter’s dialogue, and the other archetypal scenes. I also treated Pittsburgh’s loss of the steel industry during the 1980s, hospice protocols, and sons reciting the mourner’s Kaddish as self-evident background requiring no separate citation.
The observation that Hayles’s books become notably silent regarding her own mortality is my interpretation of her body of work rather than a documented fact.
The Hayles Set: A Portrait of the Tribe That Reads Machines
Every November a few hundred scholars check into a mid-price conference hotel for the annual meeting of the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts, and the first thing a visitor notices is the mood. The Modern Language Association convention, the great gathering of English professors, runs on dread. Ten thousand people, a collapsing job market, interview suits in the elevators. SLSA runs on cheer. The field is small, the stakes are low, the members chose marginality on purpose, and the bar fills early with physicists who read Pynchon and English professors who can explain a Turing machine. A woman with silver hair holds court at a corner table. Younger scholars approach in ones and twos, the way junior officers approach a general who won her war a long time ago. This is Kate Hayles‘s tribe. She served as its president from 1991 to 1993, when it was smaller still, and its culture bears her fingerprints the way a startup bears its founder’s.
Draw the map first. At the center sit the literature-and-science scholars and the media theorists: Hayles, Donna Haraway (b. 1944), whose 1985 cyborg manifesto gave the set its founding myth, Friedrich Kittler (1943-2011), the German who taught them that media determine our situation and who soldered his own circuits to prove he meant it, Cary Wolfe, who edits the Posthumanities series at Minnesota, Rosi Braidotti (b. 1954) in Utrecht, Karen Barad (b. 1956), the particle physicist turned feminist theorist whose “agential realism” gave the set a metaphysics, Bernard Stiegler (1952-2020) in Paris, Mark Hansen, Hayles’s colleague at Duke. A second ring holds the digital media and software people: Lev Manovich (b. 1960), Alexander Galloway, Wendy Chun, McKenzie Wark (b. 1961), Matthew Kirschenbaum, whose forensic work on hard drives made “the materiality of the digital” a career, Johanna Drucker (b. 1952) at UCLA, Rita Raley, Jessica Pressman, who co-wrote with Hayles. A third ring holds the electronic literature colony: Espen Aarseth (b. 1965) in Copenhagen, Nick Montfort at MIT, Stuart Moulthrop, Scott Rettberg and Jill Walker Rettberg in Bergen, Michael Joyce (b. 1945), whose 1987 hypertext afternoon is the set’s Dead Sea Scroll, Shelley Jackson, John Cayley, and the memory of Robert Coover (1932-2024), who ran the Brown workshops where much of it hatched. The science-studies elders sit close by: Bruno Latour (1947-2022), Isabelle Stengers (b. 1949), Andrew Pickering (b. 1948), Steven Shapin (b. 1943). The set publishes in Configurations, Critical Inquiry, New Literary History, and electronic book review, and its presses are Minnesota, Duke, MIT, and Chicago. Its shrines are the Duke Program in Literature, built by Fredric Jameson (1934-2024), UCLA Design Media Arts, MIT Comparative Media Studies, the Bergen e-lit program, and the media-archaeology basements of Berlin.
A tribe defines itself by its borders, and this one has three. To its right, in its own imagination, stands the traditional humanist, the Great Books man who thinks the computer is a typewriter and the canon is enough. The set treats him as a fossil, gently. To its left, in the direction of money, stands Silicon Valley: Ray Kurzweil (b. 1948), Nick Bostrom (b. 1973), the futurists and engineers who believe the machines they hype. The set treats them as barbarians with better funding, and needs them, because a critic of technological fantasy requires a supply of fantasists. And alongside, in the same buildings, works the analytic philosopher of mind, Daniel Dennett (1942-2024) and his descendants, who ask the same questions about cognition and consciousness and cite none of the same people. The two literatures on mind and machine pass in the hallway without nodding. Each finds the other’s vocabulary unreadable, and neither considers this a loss, which tells you these are tribes and not just methods.
What do they value? Boundary crossing, above everything. In most of the academy, staying in your lane is safety; here it is failure. The founding credential is the double life: the chemist who became a critic, the physicist who became a feminist theorist, the poet who writes code. When members introduce a speaker, they linger on the improbable resume the way other communities linger on a genealogy, because the improbable resume is the genealogy. Second, they value earliness. Status flows to whoever read the technology first: hypertext in 1990, the web in 1995, code studies in 2003, machine learning in 2015, large language models before the reporters called. A scholar who arrives at a topic after the New York Times does has already lost. Third, they value the coined term. This set mints vocabulary the way Renaissance courts minted medals: cyborg, cyberspace, technotext, ergodic literature, protocol, technogenesis, cognitive assemblage, agential realism, hyper attention. A coinage that circulates is a pension. Careers are ranked, half-consciously, by how many of a scholar’s terms other people use without citation, because uncited use means the word has entered the language, and entering the language is the local form of heaven.
That points at the hero system. Every community tells its members a story about how their work defeats insignificance, and this set tells a rescue story with two acts. Act one: the humanities are dying, budgets cut, majors fleeing to computer science, the public sneering, and the old guard proposes to die with dignity, re-reading Milton while the water rises. Act two: a remnant crosses over, learns the machines, and returns with the one thing the engineers cannot produce, an account of what computation means, and in doing so saves the humanities by making them necessary to the technological century. The hero of this story is the bridge figure, and the moral physics of the set follows from the story. Courage means technical literacy: reading the code, opening the hard drive, learning the math well enough that the engineers cannot wave you off. Cowardice comes in two flavors, and the set’s tightrope runs between them. The technophobe fails on one side, the humanist who refuses the machines. The technophile fails on the other, the convert who believes the hype and becomes a press agent for the industry. Virtue is the crossing that returns. Haraway crossed into biology and returned. Hayles crossed into cybernetics and returned. Kittler crossed into hardware and returned. The one who crosses and does not return, who goes native in the Valley, stops being cited.
The set also runs a second, quieter salvation project: the ark. Electronic literature dies with its platforms. HyperCard is gone, Storyspace barely runs, and when Adobe killed Flash on December 31, 2020, a generation of works went dark overnight. The community responded the way a religion responds to a burned library. It built the Electronic Literature Collection, funded preservation labs, taught emulation as a sacred craft, and treats the curator who resurrects a dead work as a minor saint. Hayles co-edited the first Collection, and the annual criticism prize bears her name, which means the ark and the founder are fused. A community whose art form decomposes in real time thinks about mortality more than most, and its preservation work is its burial rite and its resurrection doctrine in one.
The status games are visible at close range. Watch the demo room at an ELO conference. Folding tables, laptops, a projector with the wrong dongle. A poet-programmer shows a piece that generates verse from live weather data, and the crowd assesses on two axes at once: is the writing good, and is the code his. A work with borrowed code and fine writing ranks below a work with original code and passable writing, because the second axis carries the tribe’s identity. In the theory wing the games differ. There the flex is bilingual citation, Deleuze and Dennett in one paragraph, Heidegger and Shannon in one footnote, performed lightly, since visible strain reads as social climbing. European invitations rank high; the field’s money and reverence sit in Germany, Scandinavia, and the Low Countries, where media theory holds chairs it never won in America, and a keynote in Siegen or Bergen outranks one in Ohio. And beneath the games runs the field’s structural anxiety: almost no jobs. The set solved scarcity the way small aristocracies do, by converting scarcity into intimacy. Everyone knows everyone. Feuds are family feuds. A senior figure places her students one by one, by hand, through calls, and placement is the deepest patronage the community offers.
Then the funded cousin arrived and strained the family. Around 2009 the digital humanities boom brought Mellon money, NEH grants, labs, and lines, and it brought a different creature: the project manager scholar, the man who counts words across ten thousand novels, Franco Moretti (b. 1950) and his distant reading, Ted Underwood and his models, Alan Liu (b. 1953) trying to hold the two wings together. The theory wing looked at the spreadsheets and saw everything it had crossed over to critique: instrumental reason, deliverables, uncritical tools. The DH wing looked at the theory wing and saw people who wrote about materiality without building anything. The word “critical” became the border checkpoint. Critical making, critical code studies, critical DH: the adjective functions as a loyalty oath, a promise that the tools are handled with tongs.
Which opens the moral grammar. The set’s praise words are material, embodied, situated, entangled, emergent, recursive, generative, and, supremely, critical. Its curse words are reductive, deterministic, disembodied, universalist, instrumental, naive, and uncritical. The highest compliment a member can pay a book is that it complicates the binary. The gravest charge is that a scholar has been captured, by the industry, by the hype, by an unexamined humanism. Confession has a place in the liturgy: the speaker acknowledges her own position, her complicity in the systems she describes, before proceeding, and the acknowledgment inoculates. Certain sins are named with technical labels that carry moral charge. “Screen essentialism,” Kirschenbaum’s coinage, sounds descriptive and functions as an accusation: you mistook the display for the reality, you were fooled by surfaces, you failed the tribe’s founding test.
And here sits the set’s central contradiction, worth stating plainly because the members rarely do. Officially, the community is anti-essentialist. It was raised on construction and performativity; it holds that the human has no fixed nature, that categories are historical, that essence talk is the ancestral sin. Yet its working claims are essence claims. Media determine our situation. Materiality is constitutive of meaning. Cognition is essentially embodied. The human is essentially entangled with its tools, relational all the way down, and was never the autonomous subject liberalism described. Matter acts. These are statements about what things are by nature, delivered by people whose formal creed forbids statements about what things are by nature. The set escapes the bind through vocabulary, saying “always already” instead of “essentially,” and the substitution works socially. It also inverts the usual direction of essentialism. Where the old humanist essentialized the person and treated the tools as accidents, this set essentializes the entanglement and treats the bounded person as the accident. That is still a doctrine of essence. It has priests, heresies, and a catechism, and its normative force is the community’s real spine: you ought to attend to the substrate, you ought to decenter the human, you ought not believe your own species’ press releases. A member who violates the norms can hold the same politics, the same degrees, the same footnotes, and still feel the temperature drop.
Hayles’s standing inside this world rests on a rare feat: she satisfied both wings of its moral code for fifty years. The theory wing trusts her because she never surrendered to the engineers. The technical wing trusts her because she never faked the science; the chemistry degrees function as a permanent security clearance. She policed the tightrope the tribe walks, against the humanist who will not learn and the futurist who will not doubt, and she did the policing in books that outsiders could read. The prize with her name on it, the honorary doctorates arriving in her ninth decade, the corner table at the conference bar: these are what a small tribe gives its lawgiver while she lives. What the tribe cannot give her, or itself, is size. It shaped how two generations of scholars think about machines, and the machines were built anyway, by people who never read a word of it, which is the joke the set tells about itself at the bar, late, when the badges come off.
Notes
The opening scenes are composites. The Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts hotel bar and the Electronic Literature Organization demonstration room are reconstructed from the documented culture of those meetings rather than from a single recorded event. The contrast with the anxiety surrounding the Modern Language Association convention reflects a well-established academic culture. The Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts’ small, welcoming, interdisciplinary character is widely described by participants. See SLSA. The corner-table setting and the dialogue-free descriptive details are my own extrapolations.
The shutdown of Adobe Flash on December 31, 2020, and the resulting preservation crisis for electronic literature are well documented: Wikipedia and the preservation initiatives of the Electronic Literature Organization. Michael Joyce’s afternoon, a story (1987) is generally recognized as the foundational work of literary hypertext: Wikipedia.
The following names and claims were checked. Donna Haraway’s “A Cyborg Manifesto” first appeared in 1985 in Socialist Review: Wikipedia. Friedrich Kittler’s statement that “media determine our situation” is the opening sentence of Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (1986, English translation 1999), and his reputation for building electronic circuits and programming computers is well established: Wikipedia. Cary Wolfe edits the Posthumanities series at the University of Minnesota Press: University of Minnesota Press. Karen Barad’s background in physics and the concept of agential realism are documented at Wikipedia. Matthew Kirschenbaum’s concepts of “screen essentialism” and forensic materiality come from Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination (MIT Press, 2008). Robert Coover’s electronic writing workshops at Brown University are documented here: Wikipedia. Hayles’s presidency of the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts from 1991 to 1993 and the annual Hayles Award beginning in 2014 were documented in the earlier biography. The growth of digital humanities funding around 2009, including the creation of the National Endowment for the Humanities Office of Digital Humanities in 2008 and major Mellon Foundation investments, is well documented. Franco Moretti’s work on distant reading is associated with the Stanford Literary Lab.
Several interpretive claims are my own rather than established scholarly consensus. The image of a field positioned between traditional humanism, Silicon Valley, and analytic philosophy of mind is my framework. The limited citation between media theory and analytic philosophy of mind is a real and verifiable pattern, although Hayles is an important exception because she frequently engages scientists directly. The hallway metaphor is mine. Likewise, the discussion of an official anti-essentialism resting on substantive claims about media, embodiment, and entanglement is my synthesis. Critics within the field have made related observations, including Martin Paul Eve’s discussion of realism and the criticism attributed to Jason Weiss in the Alchetron entry referenced earlier, but my broader formulation should be read as an argument rather than as a consensus view. The interpretations of theoretical coinages as professional capital and academic placement as patronage are extrapolations from the sociology of small scholarly fields. The closing line about machines being built by people who never read the field is my own self-deprecating construction rather than a quotation. It reflects a sentiment often expressed informally within the field, but no one is quoted as saying it.
I limited Fredric Jameson to a single mention in his role as a builder of the Duke program. His Marxist approach regards much of this scholarship as insufficiently political, but I left that tension aside to keep the portrait focused.
If John J. Mearsheimer’s anthropology is right, it reinforces Hayles’s core critique of the posthuman fantasy while completely reinterpreting the threat she describes.
Hayles argues that the liberal humanist tradition treated the body as a possession rather than an intrinsic part of the self, a mistake that allowed early cybernetic theorists to imagine a clean separation between information and matter. She insists that our cognitive processes are shaped entirely by our physical embodiment.
Mearsheimer’s framework gives this insistence a sociological and evolutionary anchor. He notes that the main reason for our social nature is that the best way for a person to survive is to be embedded in a society. This embedding requires a long, physical childhood where helpless biological infants are protected, nurtured, and intensely socialized by families.
If Mearsheimer is right, human cognition is not just embodied in a generic physical organism; it is embodied in an animal specifically optimized for face-to-face, localized tribal survival. The “value infusion” that shapes human identity occurs through visceral, physical, and emotional interactions during early development. You cannot upload a human mind into a computer or abstract it into pure information because human thought is structurally bound to the biological setup of a social primate.
Hayles traces how political liberalism historical coupled the concept of the autonomous individual with the market and technological progress, leading to a posthuman subject that views the self as a malleable informational construct.
Mearsheimer aligns with Hayles’s skepticism of this liberal autonomy. He argues that liberalism downplays the social nature of human beings to the point of almost ignoring it, falsely treating people as atomistic actors. If Mearsheimer’s anthropology is correct, the highly flexible, self-authoring, posthuman individual that worries Hayles is a complete illusion. Human beings do not become liberated, independent informational nodes when placed in high-tech environments. Instead, they remain profoundly social and tribal beings. The introduction of digital networks does not dissolve human nature; it simply provides a faster system for the tribal animal to seek out its group and defend its collective identity.
In her later work, such as How We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis, Hayles explores how digital media changes our cognitive habits, shifting us from deep attention to hyper-attention. She looks at how humans and intelligent machines codevelop.
If Mearsheimer is right, this codevelopment will always be bounded by our tribal core. Technogenesis — the transformation of human capability through technological tools — will not lead to a borderless, universal digital consciousness. Because reason is the least important of the ways we determine our preferences, human beings will use intelligent machines and digital protocols primarily to weaponize their existing tribal animosities and solidify group boundaries.
Hayles fears that technology might strip us of our material humanity, but Mearsheimer’s anthropology implies that human biology and its social imperatives are far too stubborn to be dissolved by informatics. The posthuman era will not be defined by a clean, detached realm of pure information; it will be defined by the ancient, tribal human animal using advanced digital tools to fight the same territorial and collective battles it has fought since the dawn of the species.
To David Pinsof, Hayles constructs a sophisticated version of the intellectual’s core myth. Instead of diagnosing a standard political or social misunderstanding, she diagnoses a metaphysical one. In her framework, western civilization has spent centuries operating under a massive conceptual error—the delusion of liberal humanism and human exceptionalism. Her career rests on correcting this philosophical mistake. She treats the tendency to separate human thoughts from technological media as a flaw in our self-awareness. If only humanity could transcend its outdated anthropocentric illusions and realize it is posthuman, it could build an ethical framework suitable for the digital age.
Pinsof offers a colder alternative. Humans do not act like autonomous, self-contained agents because they fell for a bad enlightenment narrative or misunderstood their relationship with computers. They act that way because natural selection designed them to operate as competitive, self-interested animals.
From this perspective, the insistence on human boundaries and localized control is not a philosophical miscalculation. It is a savvy strategy. Humans do not care about distributed cognition or nonhuman symbiosis; they care about their families, their status, and their allies. The human mind did not evolve to view itself as a node in a giant cosmic network of machine intelligence. It evolved to win local arguments, accumulate status, and defend its coalition against rivals.
Hayles frames her project as an objective, posthumanist intervention meant to expand critical theory and prepare humanity for its computational future. Pinsof invites an examination of the actual motives behind this academic posture. Championing a radical shift in how we define the human body and mind is a powerful device in the elite university marketplace. It confers immense prestige within humanities departments by signaling a superior level of theoretical insight that ordinary people, occupied with material survival, find irrelevant. It allows the credentialed academic elite to look down on the masses not as competitors, but as primitive, unreflective creatures stuck in an outdated human paradigm.
The social and political conflicts surrounding technology do not persist because people have a flawed conceptual framework regarding algorithms or cybernetics. They persist because human coalitions have conflicting material motives over resources, power, and state control. The only misunderstanding in posthumanist theory is the belief that a fundamental conflict over human power can be resolved by changing the definition of what it means to be human.