David Beer interviews N. Katherine Hayles about her first book, The Cosmic Web, and its influence on the rest of her career. Find the full transcript and the following excerpts further below:

• On writing
• On planning a book
• On reading
• On cognitive assemblage and the umwelt
• On recursivity
• On hyper reading and hyper writing (?)
• On using theory
  

Transcript

David Beer: Just to introduce myself, I’m Dave Beer. I’m Professor of Sociology at University of York. I’m very delighted to be interviewing N. Katherine Hayles, who’s Distinguished Professor of English at the University of California, L.A., and James B. Duke Professor Emerita at Duke University; and the interview’s being conducted for the Media Theory journal in support of articles that myself and Kate have written for the journal. I wrote about Kate’s first book, The Cosmic Web from 1984, and Kate’s written a response to that for the journal. So, the interview though, we’re going to cover quite a bit of different ground, I think, to the things that are covered in those articles. And, Kate: I just wanted to actually start with writing because that seemed to me to be so important to what you do, and the type of work that you’ve done, and I just wondered if you could perhaps start by just telling us a little bit about your writing practices, routines, your writing desk. I think you may be in your office there. Could you tell us about that?

N. Katherine Hayles: Sure. Well, I’m a morning person, and I think best in the morning.

David Beer: Alright.

N. Katherine Hayles: So, I usually start the day off early. Sit down and try to get right to work. I don’t seem to have much problems writing once I have figured out what I want to say and, of course, in the course of writing, you always discover things that are lurking there, and somewhere in the background, but may not be in front of mind but I have another part of my writing practice that I’ve tried to talk about with my graduate students— and they look at me with great puzzlement—and this part of my writing practice occurs late at night. So, when I’m in bed, I try to put in my mind a question that I’m working on, and then, sometime during the night, I will wake up and, immediately, there will appear, in my mind, the answer. And I tell my graduate students that every good idea I’ve ever had in my life has happened in this way, and I suggest that the unconscious has a marvelous way of synthesizing what we’re puzzling over, pulling out information and formulating the answer if we only let it. I don’t think I’ve managed to convince a single person of this, but it is an intrinsic part of my writing practice too and, often, when I come to a naughty part of the writing, where I don’t exactly know how to proceed, I’ll stop at that point because I know I’ll figure it out in the night and, invariably, that’s what happens.

David Beer: So it’s like the non-conscious cognition—

N. Katherine Hayles: Yes, exactly!

David Beer: —of your own writing, practices.

Katherine Hayles: I draw very heavily on that. I count on it

David Beer: Yeah, so do you set kind of any kind of word lengths? Or do you just write through until you hit one of those problems and then switch off until—

Katherine Hayles: I don’t try to set a word length. It varies sometimes I’ll rework a passage over and over and over, you know, may take me four hours on a single paragraph, but I more or less write continuously until I finish the essay or chapter, whatever it is, I’m working on.

David Beer: Right. And what about when you when you’re planning one of your books? Okay, how? How would you go about planning that? At what point does it kind of solidify into a book? Or do you work with a plan over a long period of time for a book? How does that work?

Katherine Hayles: It takes me approximately 5 years to go from start to finish, and often, in fact, usually my books are revised heavily, so it never takes final form in the same shape that I originally imagined it. So, my books are all written around a central idea. And as you point out in your essay. These ideas have a connection with one another, one book from another book, so I don’t necessarily intend it that way. But clearly there’s a kind of through line in my books that that one can tease out if you think about it.

David Beer: Right. And so through that 5 years, would you know that you were working on a book, even if you weren’t quite sure what form it would take?

Katherine Hayles: Usually know when I’m ready to start a book, and I usually know what the general question will be. But of course all the specifics remain to be worked out, and it often transforms radically in its form, but usually the idea, the central idea, remains central.

David Beer: Right. And so then if we take your most recent book, Bacteria to AI. Then that emerged over time, the title, that central idea, was there a walk there? Was it—

Katherine Hayles: Yeah, but it it took a lot of revision, and that that’s typical of me. I’ll revise extensively. Usually.

David Beer: Right. And I mean the other thing that’s central to what you do. Kind of alongside the writing is the reading, and the way that you work with texts, which is, I’ve always found, really interesting. The way that you do that. And you’re often working across different types of text, fiction, literary text, scientific texts.

Katherine Hayles: That’s right.

David Beer: That’s true.

Katherine Hayles: My work has been interdisciplinary in that sense.

David Beer: And I just wondered, how do you…the challenge of how you find the books you’re going to read? How do you select the things that you’re going to read from there. Yeah, very many sources you could turn to. I just wonder how that happens for you in your work?

Katherine Hayles: Well, that often changes as well. So sometimes I’ll start with a book, and then I write what I think might be a chapter on it. But then it turns out it doesn’t exactly fit. So typically what I’ll do is then publish that as an essay, not in the book, but obviously related in some way. So I typically do a lot of reading, both in literature and in science to, I’ll have an idea. Typically it’ll be something that emerges from some recent scientific studies, and then I’ll pursue that.

David Beer: Right. And so if we, if we kind of turn to your recent book, there was something I wanted to ask you about the notion of the cognitive assemblage which, going back to the 2017 book on unthought and reemerges in your the recent bacteria to AI. And I’ve just been wondering about the relationship between the cognitive assemblage idea and the the umwelt, the kind of world horizons and the relationship between those two concepts. I was wondering about how they work together, because it seemed to me that there’s a potential there for the umwelt to be part of kind of giving the cognitive assembly some temporality or a sense of direction or purpose potentially. But I just wondered if you got any thoughts about how they, those 2 concepts, work together

Katherine Hayles: The umwelt, which is a German word, was coined, as you know, by Jakob Vanoxkel, and von Uxkel’s idea was that every species constructs its own version of the world through its physical capabilities, its neurological capabilities, and so forth. So every species…lives in a world of its own construction, including humans. So if you talk about a cognitive assemblage, you’re talking about the different ways that cognizing entities interact with each other. So the umwelt is a way to specify what kind of construction the participating entities engage in. So the is a way of making specific, how a given entity enters into a cognitive assemblage, because they enter into it through their cognizing capabilities. So in particular, AI has its own umwelt, which overlaps with, but is not identical to, the human umwelt. And when we interpret texts from AIs, it’s crucial to bear in mind what the what those differences are. So that’s an example of how we in working with AI are participating in a cognitive assemblage. We’re each communicating in what appears to be natural language. But the meaning of those terms is determined by the umwelt in which they’re said. To give an example, say an American and a Russian are sitting down at a table, and both use the word peace. Well, that might have very different meanings for the Russian than it does for the American, and so they both are human, and to that extent they participate in the same umwelt. But even so, there are significant differences in their interpretation. When you’re talking about a non-human entity like an AI or a dolphin or a dog. Those differences become systematic. That is, a human thinks as a human, a dog like a dog and an AI like an AI. So the young adult is a way of beginning to understand what is the viewpoint, what is the standpoint of the entity in the cognitive assemblage.

David Beer: Hmm. And that actually, that relates to the kind of second question I got about the cognitive assemblage which is thinking back to some of the earlier work that you did, and you got the relationship between order and disorder in your first two books, which I cover a little bit in the in the article, and it made me think about imagining this. The cognitive assemblage, which is a concept that, as you just described it, deals with those connections, and it was how you imagine a disorder within a cognitive assemblage. So because the concept itself feels could be seen as providing a kind of sense of order, and I just wonder about the kind of disorder or chaos within a cognitive—

Katherine Hayles: That’s right.

David Beer: Now that’s—

Katherine Hayles: So there was a lot of work in the eighties and in the nineties exploring that relationship between order and disorder. And I did as you mentioned, write a book about that, and the basic idea is coming from thermodynamics. And it’s as we all know, the second law of thermodynamics says, that in a closed system entropy always tends to increase. So that means in a closed system things spontaneously move from ordered States to disordered states. For example, if you stir cream into coffee when it’s in the cream container, it’s all cream, but as you stir it into coffee it becomes dispersed into the coffee, so its integrity as a self-contained substance begins to mix with the coffee and create a disordered state as far as the cream is concerned, or if you pour water out of a glass onto the ground, it immediately soaks into the ground. So that’s another movement where you go from a lower energy state to a higher energy state to a lower energy state. So the basic rule is, you’re always going from high energy to low energy dissipation of heat in a steam engine, for example, and so on, and so forth. So it takes a lot of work to move from low energy to high energy. For example, a steam engine. You have to have some fuel source like coal or wood in order to get that steam to perform work. So if the universe in general is moving from a low entropic state to a high entropic state from order to disorder. How do you explain the fact that on earth, for example, we see myriad instances of exactly the opposite moving from disorder to order. Well, one way to understand that is that we’re not a closed system. We’re getting massive energy input every day from the sun. But more specifically that the work in the 80 s. And nineties showed that if you have a system which is generating a lot of entropy that you can have a portion of that system that’s, in fact, going from disorder to order. This system as a whole validates. The second law of thermodynamics is becoming more disordered, but there are pockets in that system that are moving in the opposite direction. So, in a certain sense, a high volume of disorder allows some portion of that system to go in the opposite direction and still satisfy the second law of thermodynamics. So Gene and Stingers wrote a very important book called Order Out of Disorder. And that’s exactly that idea. Have highly dissipative systems spewing a lot of entropy; it can actually generate the rise of order. And that explains a lot of systems that seem spontaneously to become ordered out of disorder; and anytime you have a biological entity, that entity is absorbing energy, eating, etc. So think of the growth of a fetus in in a woman’s womb. Well, that’s a very clear case of where you’re going from high disorder into an astonishingly amazing form of order. That is, you’re bringing into life a new being, but that can only happen because the second law of thermodynamics is still at work. That woman is eating. She’s ingesting food. She’s generating energy, and that explains how that fetus can grow.

David Beer: And I mean going back to 2005. I realize it’s the 20th anniversary of My Mother Was a Computer. And your book on the regimes of computation is one of the ideas that you build in that. But it relating to your last answer a little bit is a theme that I think runs through quite a bit of the work that you’ve done is, which is about is on recursivity systems which reemerge in different ways a little bit. I don’t know if it’s there before my mother was a computer, it may be, but it’s certainly a central theme in that book and then onwards, I think. And I just wondered if you got any observations about how the role of recursivity in these type of assemblages in the way you’ve described. But also if there’s a sense really of how recursivity is changing across the research that you’ve done, the types of recursivity or its intensities or the forms it’s taking in these changing, cognitive assemblages as well

Katherine Hayles: Yeah. Well, one thing I should have added to your previous question is that that zone where you’re getting the conversion of disorder into order is. Particularly associated with a high degree of creativity. So growth of a fetus would be an example of that. But in general, that zone, as they say at the edge of order, or you could say at the edge of disorder generally, is extremely creative. So how do you get to? How do you get to increased order? Really, the book My Mother was a Comptuer was about evolutionary dynamics trying to explain how you can go from a low level of complexity to increasingly high, higher and higher orders of complexity and recursivity is absolutely central to that process. So one of the central ideas of my mother was a computer. Is that? How do you go from atoms to molecules, for example? Well, the general pattern here is that the elements at the level of atoms lock into higher units of molecules. And that lock, in effect, where you’re changing from one medium to another, you’re going from the atomic level to the molecular level you now lock in the complexities of the dynamics at the lower level. And that allows you then to begin to initiate a more complex level of dynamics. Molecules lock together to form proteins, proteins, lock together to form cells, and so on and so forth. So at each level you have a different medium. Molecular dynamics are different from atomic dynamics. Protein dynamics are different from molecular dynamics, but you lock in that complexity by making the elements of one level become the units of the next level. So you go from atoms to molecules on up. And this, of course, is not a new idea. So biologists who study complexity have known about this for a long, long time, but the general dynamics of that process heavily depend on recursive dynamics. You iterate, but you iterate with a difference, and that iteration is what allows complexity to emerge

David Beer: And the recursivity we’ve seen in kind of computational media and around generative AI, the role of algorithms in the social world. I wonder if, thinking through to your Bacteria to AI, I wonder if there’s any observations? And if any observations okay about the the nature of that form of recursivity

Katherine Hayles: Well, with AI, especially the transformer architectures, what you have basically is an analog system that’s instantiated in digital form. So there are characteristics of the transformer architecture which are analog rather than digital. The fact that the parameters for the parameters which are the coefficients of the different neurons change continuously and they change dynamically. So they are not a digital step-by-step process. The way an algorithm is, but rather a more complex dynamic based on analog continuities, and in other ways. The architecture is also analog or continuous rather than digital and discrete, even though it’s implemented in a discrete fashion on a digital computer. So that play between analog and digital is quite important. And it ties in with the notion of embodiment. So embodiment has been an important component of my writing, at least since the how we think book back in 2015. So here, here’s the basic notion. When you’re dealing with digital computation, you start with an abstraction. So you start with abstracting whatever components you’re interested in into a binary language, it’s either one or zero, or at any at any rate, a small, discrete set of symbols. And you build a model using those abstractions. But with analog computing, you’re operating with a model that uses the physical variables directly. So for a simple example, your speedometer on your car is an analog device, and it’s an analog device which is tied in with the rotation of the drive shaft, and in building a model that allows your speedometer to rate your speed. The drive shaft is interacting directly with the device that converts that drive shaft rotation into another variable. So it’s not an abstraction. It’s a model which is dealing directly with the physical variables. That means it can operate continuously. And it’s embodied in a way that digital computation is never embodied. Digital computation also has to be instantiated to exist in the world. But it’s instantiated in a profoundly different way that starts with abstraction. Analog computation starts with a physical model, and because it starts with a physical model. The variables are interacting directly with one another. Now, that’s very important. Because if you begin to consider analog computation, almost all biological systems operate by analog computation, not digital computation. So for example, if you consider the forest as an analog computer, there are lots of variables in that computation, including nutrient level. You know, water, level space of neighbors, root, growth, etc., etc. But all those computations see physical variables interacting directly with each other. And that’s true of analog computation in general, whether it’s a biological system or a human created system in any. In any case, the model is built directly using the physical variables, not using abstractions. So there’s this fundamental divide between the analog and the digital between abstraction and physical embodiment.

David Beer: And you mentioned in in your answer there, Kate, about your book, How We Think from 2015. And I was. I just wanted to go to that book, actually think about some of these issues in relation to going back to reading and writing and in the in that book you mentioned. I think you call it hyper reading, which you contrast with close reading. It’s the way we kind of piece together bits of information as we’re reading quickly through lots of lots of materials that we’re surrounded by, and just as when I was reflecting on that because I use that when I’m teaching some of my first year students. But I was wondering if, with the generative AI writing of text which I know you’ve reflected on a lot in your in your recent book, and also how we might respond critically to those texts. But I wonder if, with generative AI. We’ve got a kind of hyper writing that’s comparable in some way with that hyper reading that you mentioned in how we think so. I just wondered if you think that might be in some way accurate or not.

Katherine Hayles: Well, that’s a really interesting comparison. Because when I wrote how we think generative AI was not yet on the scene. So generative AI is a great example of hyper reading. I mean, they met, you know, ingest billions of text. You get an enormous amount of data there, but going to the other possibility. So you have close reading, and you have hyper reading. Close reading is where you slow your space. Way down you look, you look at individual passages, individual specific words, and so forth. So the predecessor of generative AI, which was the digital humanities, coined the phrase distant reading, and it was coined specifically to contrast it with close reading. So distant reading is a kind of reading that relies on statistical analysis of one kind or another, not on specific passages, much less on specific words. So you can say that generative AI certainly does distant reading, but what it does, something else that digital humanities could not do, which is close reading by a non-human entity. Generative AI is, of course capable of all these statistical inferences, but it is also capable of looking at a specific passage and interpreting specific words within that passage. So that’s something that was not done in the digital humanities. But now can be done with AI generated analyses.

David Beer: Yes. And I mean going back to I mean this. The interview that we’re doing here is for the journal Media Theory. So I wanted to ask you about your use of your use of theory in your work, and what part you see theory is playing, because your books often develop like those central concepts as you’ve mentioned. I just wonder about how theory feeds into what you’re doing or how you’re you’re producing those concepts at the same time

Katherine Hayles: Well, I would say that the most important influences on me have been what’s happening in contemporary science.

David Beer: Yeah.

Katherine Hayles: As well as what’s happening in contemporary literature. And because I began my professional career in the sciences, bachelor’s, and then a master’s in chemistry. I developed a kind of skepticism toward a lot of ideas from literature, because I’m always kind of thinking about how that would look from a scientific viewpoint. And so, a lot of literary theory look skeptically upon, even as I draw upon it. So the more extreme literary theories I often tend to temper and take a more nuanced view of it. New materialism would be an example of that. So I think new materialism.

David Beer: Our new materialists have a very valid point when they talk about the agency of physical processes.

Katherine Hayles: Sure, that’s true, but I still think there’s a big difference between living systems which have intentions and physical processes which do not have intentions. So that’s an example of how I might take a theory that began in literature, you know, with Jane Bennett and Elizabeth Gross, and so forth, and I grant their point, but I still want to modify it in a certain way.

David Beer: Yeah. And so active kind of use of those concepts drawing. So you join some, because sometimes you draw your concepts in from science and then rework them for the—

Katherine Hayles: Yeah, that’s right.

David Beer: Developing, don’t you? Yeah.

Katherine Hayles: And I have the same kind of skepticism towards scientific theories as well. So as we know science is immersed in culture. It’s part of culture. It’s not outside of culture, and that means it’s influenced by whatever the main ideas of the culture are at the time. So during the 19 nineties, when the so-called science wars were active that presented a real conundrum to me. I wasn’t sure how to reconcile the idea that scientific knowledge is robust and reliable with the idea that science could also be deeply influenced by the culture. And as I wrote in the essay accompanying my piece, you know, I did finally come to my own view on how that could be reconciled, and it essentially had to do with the fact that we never construct models of reality. As such we construct models of the reality we experience. So again, the notion of the umwelt enters, that is, that we live within the human umwelt. We cannot escape the human umwelt. It is how we think and how we see everything. So we’re always dealing with our experience of reality, never reality as such, and that sounds like a small qualification, but it’s a small qualification, with immense consequences.

David Beer: I suppose we’re going back to the kind of interdisciplinary work that you’re doing there, because you mentioned about the kind of skepticism to the different positions across sciences and literature that you develop in there. And I did want to ask you about your experiences of working across disciplines and working in such a genuinely interdisciplinary space that you’ve created for yourself. I’ve wondered what that’s been like, and whether you have found yourself kind of falling in the gaps between disciplines or into these spaces where it’s been more difficult to operate. Just wondered what your experience of that kind of interdisciplinary working was in practice.

Katherine Hayles: Well, it has definitely been difficult when you have to interface within institutions or institutions which have siloed curricula, siloed disciplines and so forth. So you never quite know what you where you fit. You don’t exactly fit in a scientific discipline. You don’t exactly fit in a literary discipline. So that’s been a difficult and challenging way to approach one’s career. But, on the other hand, for me, it’s a source of great creativity, because when you’re at the margins of a discipline. You can often see things that are opaque to people who are solidly in the discipline. So that kind of slanted perspective, I think, is an opportunity for a lot of creative insights.

David Beer: To that slanted perspective. He described it then, as provides opening of spaces that you can work in then is that the kind of approach you’re taking to it.

Katherine Hayles: Yes, absolutely so. Part of my work is about making scientific concepts that seem complex or opaque to people in the humanities legible to them, because I can translate them into terms that literary people or humanistic people will understand. On the other hand, I can also use some of the work that’s being done in the humanities to illuminate these scientific concepts in a different way as well. So yeah. So working in the interstices, I think, is a is a very challenging but also potentially very powerful position.

David Beer: Yeah, and that seems like a good place to conclude the interview. Then, Kate, thank you ever so much for answering my questions and also for responding to the article in the first place, with your written essay.

On Writing

On Planning A Book

On Reading

On Cognitive Assemblage and the UmWelt

On recursivity

On Hyper Reading and Hyper Writing (?)

On using theory

Music

Title: Steppin’ In (https://freemusicarchive.org/music/Podington_Bear/Liquid_Gold_Box_Set_Disc_2/Steppin_In_1127/)
Artist: Podington Bear (https://freemusicarchive.org/music/Podington_Bear/)
Source: https://freemusicarchive.org/
License: Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 International License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/)

Title: Climbing the Mountain (https://freemusicarchive.org/music/Podington_Bear/Meet_Podington_Bear_Box_Set_Disc_1/09_Climbing_The_Mountain/)
Artist: Podington Bear (https://freemusicarchive.org/music/Podington_Bear/)
Source: https://freemusicarchive.org/
License: Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 International License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/)

Title: Wavy Glass (https://freemusicarchive.org/music/Podington_Bear/Meet_Podington_Bear/12_Wavy_Glass)
Artist: Podington Bear (https://freemusicarchive.org/music/Podington_Bear/)
Source: https://freemusicarchive.org/
License: Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 International License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/)

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