N Katherine Hayles
Biographic Data
| ID | 164262 |
|---|---|
| NAME | N Katherine Hayles |
| GIVEN NAMES | N Katherine |
| FAMILY NAME | Hayles |
| SIGNATURE | HAYLES N K |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of California, Los Angeles |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-5922-1033 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 82 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 441 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 82 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1983 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 10 |
“Foreword” to Topical collection of AI and Society on critical code studies
When Your Democracy Is on Fire, It’s All Hands on Deck«
As an American academic, I have been appalled by what is happening to my country under the Trump administration.Universities have been attacked; scientific and medical research has been held hostage by a quack; media companies and law firms have been blackmailed into contributing millions to Trump's coffers; the Trump Cabinet is run by stunningly incompetent lackeys who think their first and only task is to please their boss; the Department of Ju…
My First Book and Where It Led
This essay traces my research trajectory from my first book, The Cosmic Web (1984) to my latest book, Bacteria to AI (2025a). It begins with what David Beer calls the “articulation problem,” that is, the limitations that arise when one speaks from within the field (physical, social, mathematical, theoretical) in which one is located. These include paradoxes of self-reference and the impossibility of constructing a logical system that is both true…
Don't Ban AI from Your Writing Classroom; Require It
Literary Cybernetics
Literary Cybernetics:The Point (of the Spear) N. Katherine Hayles (bio) Cybernetics and literary studies are on a collision course that will transform what it means to read, to write, and to be human. The essays on "literary cybernetics" in this issue touch on many different ways in which this phrase can be interpreted, but for all their rich variety, they do not entirely capture either the urgency of our present situation or the inevitability of…
Subversion of the Human Aura
The human aura is now being subverted by a variety of simulacra. OpenAI's language-generation program GPT-3 illustrates the challenges of interpreting algorithmic-generated texts. This article advocates interpretive strategies that recognize the profound differences (in the case of GPT-3) of language that issues from a program that has a model only of language, not of the world. Conscious robots, when and if they emerge, will have profoundly diff…
Between Page and Screen
Since the earlier twentieth century, literary genres have traveled across magnetic, wireless, and electronic planes. Literature may now be anything from acoustic poetry and oral performance to verbal–visual constellations in print and on screen, cinematic narratives, or electronic textualities that range from hypertext to Flash. New technologies have left their imprint on literature as a paper-based medium, and vice versa. This volume explores th…
Creativity and Nonconscious Cognition
In this conversation, Mary Zournazi and N. Katherine Hayles explore some of the key elements around co-evolutionary functions of human and nonhuman modes of cognition. Drawing on the wealth of N. Katherine Hayles’ work on these issues over the last thirty years, Zournazi and Hayles consider new modes of understanding and learning which are part of the rapidly changing world of digital and cognitive media technologies in the classroom and beyond. …
Inside the Mind of an AI
The advent of Transformer architectures for neural nets and the high language proficiency of programs like GPT-3 confront us with a fundamental question. How can, or should, literary criticism proceed when the text's creator is not a human but a machine? The query shakes to its core literary criticism, and indeed the entire enterprise of critical inquiry. This essay confronts the issue head-on, arguing that it does matter whether language is prod…
Approximating Algorithms
Wendy Hui Kyong Chun's Discriminating Data: Correlation, Neighborhoods, and the New Politics of Recognition offers important tools to understand and, more importantly, transform the algorithms perpetuating and intensifying discrimination in North American societies. Unpacking her work's implications, this essay offers seven approximations-ranging from eliminating bias to rethinking the symbiotic relations between humans and computational media-as…
Postprint
N. Katherine Hayles traces the emergence of what she identifies as the postprint condition, exploring how the interweaving of print and digital technologies has changed not only books but also language, authorship, and what it means to be human
Microbiomimesis
With roots in Greek drama, mimesis has recently undergone expansion into an unexpected domain: microbial resistance to viruses. Research revealed that bacteria copy portions of the DNA of attacking viruses and incorporate them into their own DNA. When a virus attacks again, the bacteria generate matching RNA sequences that, together with the Cas9 protein, enable them to recognize the virus and cut its DNA. This process satisfies the requisites fo…
Novel Corona
Previous articleNext article FreeNovel Corona: Posthuman VirusN. Katherine HaylesN. Katherine HaylesPDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMore17 April 2020The novel coronavirus is posthuman in at least two senses. First, and most obviously, because it is oblivious to human intentions, desires, and motives. In the US, this has led to the s…
Posthumanism at a Crossroads
‘The Life Cycle of Cyborgs
Intermediatsioon
.
Can Computers Create Meanings? A Cyber/Bio/Semiotic Perspective
Chaos Bound
am indebted to Phillip Holmes for drawing this incident to my attention.I
Chaos Bound
am indebted to Phillip Holmes for drawing this incident to my attention.I
Unthought
Cognitive Assemblages
The Cognitive Nonconscious
Greg Egan's Quarantine and Teranesia
Enwebbed Complexities
Writing Machines (2002), My Mother Was a Computer (2005), and How We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis (2012).What prompted this interview -which ironically had a technological breakdown -was an interest in intersectionality not only between gender and diversity studies but also between the sciences and the humanities.The interview builds on Rosi Braidotti's article "Yes, There Is No Crisis: Working Towards the Posthumanities" a…
Transmedia Frictions
Editors Marsha Kinder and Tara McPherson present an authoritative collection of essays on the continuing debates over medium specificity and the politics of the digital arts. Comparing the term "transmedia" with "transnational," they show that the movement beyond specific media or nations does not invalidate those entities but makes us look more closely at the cultural specificity of each combination. In two parts, the book stages debates across …
Chaos Bound
am indebted to Phillip Holmes for drawing this incident to my attention.I
Unfinished Work
The cyborg that Donna Haraway appropriated in 'Manifesto for Cyborgs' as a metaphor for political action and theoretical inquiry has ceased to have the potency it did 20 years ago. While Haraway has turned from a central focus on technoculture to companion species, much important cultural work remains to be done, especially in networked and programmable media. Problems with the cyborg as a metaphor include the implication that the liberal humanis…
Chaos and Order
1 Introduction: Complex Dynamics in Literature and Science N. Katherine Hayles I Chaos More Than Metaphor 2 Literature, Complexity, Interdisciplinary William Paulson 3 Fictions as Dissipative Structures: Prigogine's Theory and Postmodernism's Roadshow David Porush 4 The Chaos of Metafiction Peter Stoicheff 5 The Emplotment of Chaos: Instability and Narrative Order Kenneth J. Knoespel II Order: Revisioning Form 6 Representing Order: Natural Philos…
Print Is Flat, Code Is Deep
Lulled into somnolence by five hundred years of print, literary analysis should awaken to the importance of media-specific analysis, a mode of critical attention which recognizes that all texts are instantiated and that the nature of the medium in which they are instantiated matters. Central to repositioning critical inquiry, so it can attend to the specificity of the medium, is a more robust notion of materiality. Materiality is reconceptualized…
Virtual Bodies and Flickering Signifiers
In this last decade of the twentieth century, information circulates as the currency of the realm. Genetics, warfare, entertainment, communications, grain production, and financial markets number among the sectors of society revolutionized by the shift to an information paradigm. The shift has also profoundly affected contemporary fiction. If the effects on literature are not widely recognized, perhaps it is because they are at once pervasive and…
Rfid
RFID tags, small microchips no bigger than grains of rice, are currently being embedded in product labels, clothing, credit cards, and the environment, among other sites. Activated by the appropriate receiver, they transmit information ranging from product information such as manufacturing date, delivery route, and location where the item was purchased to (in the case of credit cards) the name, address, and credit history of the person holding th…
Cognitive Assemblages
Computing the Human
Researchers in artificial intelligence and robotics often include a timeline stretching into the future in which they predict the convergence between human and artificial intelligence. Ray Kurzweil, for example, predicts that in a mere 100 years humans and intelligent machines will become indistinguishable from one another, both ceasing to have permanent corporeal forms. This article argues that the one thing we can know for sure about the future…
The Materiality of Informatics
Configurations - Volume 1, Number 1, Winter 1993
The Cognitive Nonconscious
Cognition Everywhere
Cognition Everywhere:The Rise of the Cognitive Nonconscious and the Costs of Consciousness N. Katherine Hayles (bio) Amassive shift is underway in our intellectual and cultural formations. Many different streams of thought are contributing, coming from diverse intellectual traditions, holding various kinds of commitments, and employing divergent methodologies. The differences notwithstanding, they agree on a central tenet: the importance of nonco…
Simulating Narratives
Can Computers Create Meanings? A Cyber/Bio/Semiotic Perspective
Desiring Agency
N. Katherine Hayles, Desiring Agency: Limiting Metaphors and Enabling Constraints in Dawkins and Deleuze/Guattari, SubStance, Vol. 30, No. 1/2, Issue 94/95: Special Issue: On the Origin of Fictions: Interdisciplinary Perspectives (2001), pp. 144-159
Boundary Disputes
Configurations - Volume 2, Number 3, Fall 1994
Flesh and Metal
Dualistic thinking is as difficult to avoid as the sticky clay that passes for topsoil where I live in Topanga Canyon. When it gets even a little wet, it attacks my feet so resolutely that I look as if I am wearing snowshoes. I try to avoid it, of course, but inevitably something lures me off the beaten path and there I am again, stomping around with elephant shoes. In similar fashion I struggled to avoid the Cartesian mind-body split in my recen…
Two Voices, One Channel
Perhaps more than any other contemporary critical theorist, Michel Serres is aware of how extensive is the shift now taking place in the ground of representation. In physics its epicenter is the emerging interdisciplinary research front known as the science of chaos; in mathematics, fractal geometry; in literary theory, deconstruction.' Although these projects are all very different, they share the belief that chaos is not simply the opposite of …
Inside the Mind of an AI
The advent of Transformer architectures for neural nets and the high language proficiency of programs like GPT-3 confront us with a fundamental question. How can, or should, literary criticism proceed when the text's creator is not a human but a machine? The query shakes to its core literary criticism, and indeed the entire enterprise of critical inquiry. This essay confronts the issue head-on, arguing that it does matter whether language is prod…
Microbiomimesis
With roots in Greek drama, mimesis has recently undergone expansion into an unexpected domain: microbial resistance to viruses. Research revealed that bacteria copy portions of the DNA of attacking viruses and incorporate them into their own DNA. When a virus attacks again, the bacteria generate matching RNA sequences that, together with the Cas9 protein, enable them to recognize the virus and cut its DNA. This process satisfies the requisites fo…
Novel Corona
Previous articleNext article FreeNovel Corona: Posthuman VirusN. Katherine HaylesN. Katherine HaylesPDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMore17 April 2020The novel coronavirus is posthuman in at least two senses. First, and most obviously, because it is oblivious to human intentions, desires, and motives. In the US, this has led to the s…
Speculation
Waking Up to the Surveillance Society
In February 2009 the House of Lords Constitutional Committee in the United Kingdom published the report Surveillance: Citizens and the State. Some have hailed this as a landmark document. The following is one of four commentaries that the editors of Surveillance & Society solicited in response to the report
Intermediation
Twenty-first century literature is computational, from electronic works to print books created as digital files and printed by digital presses. To create an appropriate theoretical framework, the concept of intermediation is proposed, in which recursive feedback loops join human and digital cognizers to create emergent complexity. To illustrate, Michael Joyce's afternoon is compared and contrasted with his later Web work, Twelve Blue. Whereas aft…
The Cosmic Web
Saving the Subject
Research Article| December 01 2002 Saving the Subject: Remediation in House of Leaves N. Katherine Hayles N. Katherine Hayles Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google American Literature (2002) 74 (4): 779–806. https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-74-4-779 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation N. Katherine Hayles; Saving the Subject: Remediation in House of Leaves. American Literature 1 December 20…
The Perils of Theory
The Cosmic Web
Space for Writing
Lem’s writing is characterized by a curious division between closure and openness. His critical essays speak of literature as though it were merely the clothing used to dress up ideas, and seek closure through clear-cut, rationally justified judgment: yet his fiction is written with so little conscious planning of the ideas it will use that it gives him, Lem says, the feeling that he does not know what will happen next. The division has deep root…
Anger in Different Voices
Two Voices, One Channel
Perhaps more than any other contemporary critical theorist, Michel Serres is aware of how extensive is the shift now taking place in the ground of representation. In physics its epicenter is the emerging interdisciplinary research front known as the science of chaos; in mathematics, fractal geometry; in literary theory, deconstruction.' Although these projects are all very different, they share the belief that chaos is not simply the opposite of …
Chaos as Orderly Disorder
N. Katherine Hayles, Chaos as Orderly Disorder: Shifting Ground in Contemporary Literature and Science, New Literary History, Vol. 20, No. 2, Technology, Models, and Literary Study (Winter, 1989), pp. 305-322
Designs on the body
In Response To Jean Baudrillard
Chaos and Order
1 Introduction: Complex Dynamics in Literature and Science N. Katherine Hayles I Chaos More Than Metaphor 2 Literature, Complexity, Interdisciplinary William Paulson 3 Fictions as Dissipative Structures: Prigogine's Theory and Postmodernism's Roadshow David Porush 4 The Chaos of Metafiction Peter Stoicheff 5 The Emplotment of Chaos: Instability and Narrative Order Kenneth J. Knoespel II Order: Revisioning Form 6 Representing Order: Natural Philos…
Chaos Bound
Chaos Bound
Gender Encoding in Fluid Mechanics
Technoculture
Virtual Bodies and Flickering Signifiers
In this last decade of the twentieth century, information circulates as the currency of the realm. Genetics, warfare, entertainment, communications, grain production, and financial markets number among the sectors of society revolutionized by the shift to an information paradigm. The shift has also profoundly affected contemporary fiction. If the effects on literature are not widely recognized, perhaps it is because they are at once pervasive and…
The Materiality of Informatics
Configurations - Volume 1, Number 1, Winter 1993
Culture and Cognition
Boundary Disputes
Configurations - Volume 2, Number 3, Fall 1994
Making the Cut
T he originary moment for the creation of a system, according to Niklas Luhmann, comes when an observer makes a cut (Cognitive Program). Before the cut-before any cut-is made, only an undifferentiated complexity exists, impossible to comprehend in its noisy multifariousness. Imagine a child at the moment of birth, assaulted by a cacophony of noise, light, smells, and pressures, with few if any distinctions to guide her through this riot of inform…
The Posthuman Body
Configurations - Volume 5, Number 2, Spring 1997
How We Became Posthuman
From the Publisher: In this age of DNA computers and artificial intelligence, information is becoming disembodied even as the bodies that once carried it vanish into virtuality. While some marvel at these changes, envisioning consciousness downloaded into a computer or humans beamed Star Trek-style, others view them with horror, seeing monsters brooding in the machines. In How We Became Posthuman, N. Katherine Hayles separates hype from fact, inv…
Unlikely Stories
The Illusion of Autonomy and the Fact of Recursivity
New Literary History - Volume 30, Number 3, Summer 1999
Simulating Narratives
Flickering Connectivities in Shelley Jackson's Patchwork Girl
Postmodern Culture - Volume 10, Number 2, January 2000
Desiring Agency
N. Katherine Hayles, Desiring Agency: Limiting Metaphors and Enabling Constraints in Dawkins and Deleuze/Guattari, SubStance, Vol. 30, No. 1/2, Issue 94/95: Special Issue: On the Origin of Fictions: Interdisciplinary Perspectives (2001), pp. 144-159
Sociology (39 works) · Computer Science (38 works) · Philosophy (38 works) · Epistemology (31 works) · Art (30 works) · Psychology (25 works) · Aesthetics (20 works) · Digital Games and Media (15 works) · Cognitive science (14 works) · History (14 works)