Autumn 1999
Volume 26, Number 1

What kind of subject am I as I stand musing before this installation? I certainly am not the autonomous liberal self who located identity in consciousness and rooted it in my ability, first and foremost, to possess my own body. Rather, as I think about my connection to virtual creatures, I am tempted to fashion myself in their images, seeing myself as a distributed cognitive system comprised of multiple agents running the programs from which consciousness emerges, even though consciousness remains blissfully unaware of them. I am one kind of material embodiment, the virtual creatures are another, but we are connected through dynamic processes that weave us together in a web of jointly articulated cognitive activities. I think, therefore I connect with all the other cognizers in my environment, human and nonhuman, including the dynamic processes that are running right now as you decode these letters and all the dynamic processes that have run in the past and congealed to create this paper, this ink, this old language made of nouns and verbs that I am trying to fashion to new purposes that will allow you to see my body, your body, the bodies of the virtual creatures, not as nouns that enact verbs, but first and foremost as dynamic processes that weave together the embodied materialities of diverse life forms to create richly complex distributed cognitions. That is what virtual creatures can teach us.

N. Katherine Hayles, professor of English at University of California, Los Angeles, writes and teaches on literature and science of the twentieth century. Her most recent book is How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. She is currently at work on two books about electronic textuality, Linking Bodies: Hypertext Fiction in Print and New Media, and Coding the Signifier: Rethinking Semiosis from the Telegraph to the Computer.