My Mother Was A Computer

by Hayles, N. Katherine

• ISBN13: 9780226321479
• ISBN10: 0226321479
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2005-10-15
• Publisher: Univ of Chicago Pr

Summary

We live in a world, according to N. Katherine Hayles, where new languages are constantly emerging, proliferating, and fading into obsolescence. These are languages of our own making: the programming languages written in code for the intelligent machines we call computers. Hayles's latest exploration provides an exciting new way of understanding the relations between code and language and considers how their interactions have affected creative, technological, and artistic practices. My Mother Was a Computer explores how the impact of code on everyday life has become comparable to that of speech and writing: las anguage and code have grown more entangled, the lines that once separated humans from machines, analog from digital, and old technologies from new ones have become blurred. My Mother Was a Computer gives us the tools necessary to make sense of these complex relationships. Hayles argues that we live in an age of intermediation that challenges our ideas about language, subjectivity, literary objects, and textuality. This process of intermediation takes place where digital media interact with cultural practices associated with older media, and here Hayles sharply portrays such interactions: how code differs from speech; how electronic text differs from print; the effects of digital media on the idea of the self; the effects of digitality on printed books; our conceptions of computers as living beings; the possibility that human consciousness itself might be computational; and the subjective cosmology wherein humans see the universe through the lens of their own digital age. We are the children of computers in more than one sense, and no critic has done more than N. Katherine Hayles to explain how these technologies define us and our culture. Heady and provocative, My Mother Was a Computer will be judged as her best work yet.

Author Biography

N. Katherine Hayles is the Hillis Professor of Literature at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	p. ix
Prologue: Computing Kin	p. 1
Making: Language and Code
Intermediation: Textuality and the Regime of Computation	p. 15
Speech, Writing, Code: Three Worldviews	p. 39
The Dream of Information: Escape and Constraint in the Bodies of Three Fictions	p. 62
Storing: Print and Etext
Translating Media	p. 89
Performative Code and Figurative Language: Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon	p. 117
Flickering Connectivities in Shelley Jackson's Patchwork Girl	p. 143
Transmitting: Analog and Digital
(Un)masking the Agent: Stanislaw Lem's "The Mask"	p. 171
Simulating Narratives: What Virtual Creatures Can Teach Us	p. 193
Subjective Cosmology and the Regime of Computation: Intermediation in Greg Egan's Fiction	p. 214
Epilogue: Recursion and Emergence	p. 241
Notes	p. 245
Works Cited	p. 265
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