{"title":"Books by N. Katherine Hayles","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"9780226321486","title":"My Mother Was a Computer – Digital Subjects and Literary Texts","description":"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' 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: as language 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 our culture and us. Heady and provocative, \"My Mother Was a Computer\" will be judged as her best work yet.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56227629597045,"sku":"9780226321486","price":24.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9780226321486_235bd969-1169-4973-9556-49f91be90d81.jpg?v=1786012410"},{"product_id":"9780226321462","title":"How We Became Posthuman – Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics","description":"Separating hype from fact, this text investigates the fate of embodiment in the information age. It relates three interwoven stories: how information lost its body, that is, how it came to be conceptualized as an entity separate from the material forms that carry it; the cultural and technological constuction of the cyborg; and the dismantling of the humanist \"subject\" in cybernetic discourse, along with the emergence of the \"posthuman\". Ranging across the history of technology, cultural studies and literary criticism, the text shows what had erased, forgotten, and elided to conceive of information as a disembodied entity. The author moves from the post-World War II Macy Conferences on cybernetics to the 1952 novel \"Limbo\" by Bernard Wolfe; from the concept of self-making to Philip K. Dick's literary explorations of hallucination and reality; and from artificial life to postmodern novels exploring the implications of seeing humans as cybernetic systems.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56227816571253,"sku":"9780226321462","price":21.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9780226321462_828c483c-c6fb-4604-b6e4-6119e1482851.jpg?v=1786012409"},{"product_id":"9780226447889","title":"Unthought – The Power of the Cognitive Nonconscious","description":"N. Katherine Hayles is known for breaking new ground at the intersection of the sciences and the humanities. In Unthought, she once again bridges disciplines by revealing how we think without thinking how we use cognitive processes that are inaccessible to consciousness yet necessary for it to function. Marshalling fresh insights from neuroscience, cognitive science, cognitive biology, and literature, Hayles expands our understanding of cognition and demonstrates that it involves more than consciousness alone. Cognition, as Hayles defines it, is applicable not only to nonconscious processes in humans but to all forms of life, including unicellular organisms and plants. Startlingly, she also shows that cognition operates in the sophisticated information-processing abilities of technical systems: when humans and cognitive technical systems interact, they form \"cognitive assemblages\" as found in urban traffic control, drones, and the trading algorithms of finance capital, for instance and these assemblages are transforming life on earth.   The result is what Hayles calls a \"planetary cognitive ecology,\" which includes both human and technical actors and which poses urgent questions to humanists and social scientists alike. At a time when scientific and technological advances are bringing far-reaching aspects of cognition into the public eye, Unthought reflects deeply on our contemporary situation and moves us toward a more sustainable and flourishing environment for all beings.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56227839902069,"sku":"9780226447889","price":26.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9780226447889_7bf860c1-26c2-4c54-be0e-5b5d423671f3.jpg?v=1786012479"},{"product_id":"9780226837475","title":"Bacteria to AI – Human Futures with our Nonhuman Symbionts","description":"A new theory of mind that includes nonhuman and artificial intelligences.    The much-lauded superiority of human intelligence has not prevented us from driving the planet into ecological disaster. For N. Katherine Hayles, the climate crisis demands that we rethink basic assumptions about human and nonhuman intelligences. In Bacteria to AI, Hayles develops a new theory of mind—what she calls an integrated cognitive framework (ICF)—that includes the meaning-making practices of lifeforms from bacteria to plants, animals, humans, and some forms of artificial intelligence. Through a sweeping survey of evolutionary biology, computer science, and contemporary literature, Hayles insists that another way of life, with ICF at its core, is not only possible but necessary to safeguard our planet’s future.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56228749279605,"sku":"9780226837475","price":30.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9780226837475_093cfcdb-b50f-4c9a-97d7-bb835c00ccad.jpg?v=1786012449"},{"product_id":"9780231198257","title":"Postprint – Books and Becoming Computational","description":"Since Gutenberg’s time, every aspect of print has gradually changed. But the advent of computational media has exponentially increased the pace, transforming how books are composed, designed, edited, typeset, distributed, sold, and read. 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.   Hayles considers the ways in which print has been enmeshed in literate societies and how these are changing as some of the cognitive tasks once performed exclusively by humans are now carried out by computational media. Interpretations and meaning-making practices circulate through transindividual collectivities created by interconnections between humans and computational media, which Hayles calls cognitive assemblages. Her theoretical framework conceptualizes innovations in print technology as redistributions of cognitive capabilities between humans and machines. Humanity is becoming computational, just as computational systems are edging toward processes once thought of as distinctively human. Books in all their diversity are also in the process of becoming computational, representing a crucial site of ongoing cognitive transformations.   Hayles details the consequences for the humanities through interviews with scholars and university press professionals and considers the cultural implications in readings of two novels, The Silent History and The Word Exchange, that explore the postprint condition. Spanning fields including book studies, cultural theory, and media archeology, Postprint is a strikingly original consideration of the role of computational media in the ongoing evolution of humanity.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56229206589813,"sku":"9780231198257","price":25.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9780231198257_6c61e30f-49ec-4747-bef5-1c3e5386c363.jpg?v=1786012611"}],"url":"https:\/\/backstory.london\/collections\/author-n-katherine-hayles.oembed","provider":"Backstory","version":"1.0","type":"link"}