I’ll pick up where Jessica’s provocative questions leave off: Do we need to draw firm distinctions between embodiment and data flows? Is there a third way that can route us around the body/code binary? I’m not totally sure. However, I’m not entirely convinced Hayles wants us to think of embodiment as mutually exclusive with informational flows, since it seems to be the interaction of the two that, for her, constitutes human subjectivity.
Hayles’s critique is, I think, simply that Snow Crash leaves no room for non-machinic forms of human existence. For Stephenson, according to Hayles, “there must exist in humans a basic programming level, comparable to machine code in computers, at which free will and autonomy are no more in play than they are for core memory running a program” (258). The problem with Stephenson’s model is it presumes humans work like computers, and that there is a code capable of operating at the most foundational level of human consciousness, thereby fusing “inscription” and “incorporation.” In other words, executable code, a nam-shub, etc. Hayles considers this vision of humanity nightmarish, since it leaves questions of the human body — the finite body, the gendered and raced body — entirely out of the question. While I think Hayles’s insistence on embodiment is useful, I also think we should ask whether we think Hayles’s reading makes sense. Is Snow Crash’s central metaphor in fact that “humans are computers”? Do Y.T.’s resistance to the Falabala’s brainwashing or Hiro’s ingenious hacking offer possible points of resistance?
Either way, for Hayles, the stakes seem really to be about the status of the liberal subject in post-humanist discourse. “I see the deconstruction of the liberal humanist subject as an opportunity to put back into the picture the flesh that continues to be erased in contemporary discussions about cybernetic subjects” (266). Hayles’s concern is not so much with the inaccuracy of Stephenson’s human/computer conflation, but with the tendency of some post-humanist discourse (exemplified by Snow Crash) to reproduce the fantasy of a disembodied liberal subject (one who can shed its body behind a Rawlsian veil of ignorance).
On the subject of embodiment, I also think it’s worth noting again the “racist overtones” Hayles observes in her reading of the novel. I’ve found myself particularly interested in how the novel’s xenophobic imaginary (a) reflects anxieties around the AIDS crisis, especially the fear that otherness will not destroy those in power but infect and change them, making them other as well, and (b) seems to shore up Michael’s suggestion that identity, as opposed to ideology, has become the primary political concept in the post-historical era. In a post-ideological world (where there is no longer disagreement, only differences in identity) the only way to exert total control — the only way to collect people under the same identity category — is to change who they are. It’s no longer a question of either coercion or hegemony but bioengineering. In this sense, the miscegenation proposals outlined by liberal identitarians resemble the virus L. Bob Rife seeks to propagate through the population. Only physical transformation can ensure a change in belief, because belief is simply an embodied “point of view.” Scary stuff.
