Cover of Unthought
Unthought The Power of the Cognitive Nonconscious
by N. Katherine Hayles
University of Chicago Press, 2017
Cloth: 978-0-226-44774-2 | Paper: 978-0-226-44788-9 | Electronic: 978-0-226-44791-9
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226447919.001.0001

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ABOUT THIS BOOKAUTHOR BIOGRAPHYREVIEWSTABLE OF CONTENTS

ABOUT THIS BOOK

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.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

N. Katherine Hayles is the James B. Duke Professor of Literature at Duke University. She is the author of many books, including, most recently, How We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis, also published by the University of Chicago Press.

REVIEWS

“Traditionally, we have associated cognition with consciousness and hence only with human beings. Unthought provides evidence from neuroscience, literary studies, economics, urban planning, robotics, computer science, and other fields to demonstrate that this narrow view is not only restrictive but dangerous. Hayles shows that if we think of cognition as pattern recognition and the capacity to respond to environmental changes, then most living things and many technical devices are cognizers. This cutting-edge, one-of-a-kind book offers a model of how to mediate between science and philosophy in an intelligent and respectful way.”
— Laura Otis, author of Rethinking Thought: Inside the Minds of Creative Scientists and Artists

“No one has done more to integrate the two cultures than Katherine Hayles, and this volume is truly a signature achievement. Here she rethinks cognition, building an intricate theoretical assemblage that includes the new materialisms, neuroscience, and cognitive biology and opens up her recent analyses of ‘how we think’ to an entire planetary cognitive ecology that is as expansive as it is technically precise. It is also, importantly, deeply ethical, at a moment when the stakes for the humanities, and the world, are particularly high. Unthought marks a brilliant addition to Hayles’s astonishing corpus—and it is surely destined to become part of our conscious and critical thought.”
— Rita Raley, author of Tactical Media

“Hayles breaks with anthropocentric views of cognition with a framework that enmeshes biological and technical cognition. On offer here is a paradigm shift in how we think in relation to planetary cognitive ecologies, how we analyze the operations and ethical implications of human-technical assemblages, and how we imagine the role that the humanities can and should play in assessing these effects.”
— Tim Lenoir, coauthor of The Military-Entertainment Complex

"Hayles draws from her vast knowledge of both the humanities and the sciences to create this unique book…and explores a broad range of interdisciplinary theories and research findings in a continuous, seamless fashion…Expansive thought is evident throughout this small volume, with endless topics for future exploration. This text is a suitable companion volume to the author’s other works, interdisciplinary collections, and consciousness studies collections…Highly recommended.”
— Choice

"The book compellingly suggests that many domains of science and society can be better understood—and more effectively engaged—by attending to the distributed systems of cognition that are already right there but not yet fully in the line of sight...But more than just filling in what has been omitted, Hayles proposes a reorientation or re-cognition, a revitalized outlook on what has so far been unthought in these fields...As Hayles demonstrates in her vivid technical discussions and bold theoretical formulations, the conditions for this radically altered way of understanding are already here."
— Science Fiction Studies

"Unthought presents readers with a technically and theoretically rigorous take on what many new materialists refer to as distributed agency. . . . Readers familiar with Hayles’ work will recognize in Unthought a resumption of her interest in the significance of human or posthuman embodiment in the face of technological forces that seem to dematerialize subjectivity."
— Studia Neophilologica

"A remarkable, ambitious and far-reaching book...of the utmost importance for literary scholars interested in interdisciplinary thought."
— Modern Philology

TABLE OF CONTENTS


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226447919.003.0001
[human cognition;planetary cognitive ecology;global scale consequences]
Most human cognition happens outside of consciousness/unconsciousness; cognition extends through the entire biological spectrum (including animals and plants); technical devices cognize (and in so doing, profoundly influence human complex systems); and we live in an era when the planetary cognitive ecology is undergoing a rapid transformation, urgently requiring us to rethink cognition, and to re-envision its consequences on a global scale.


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226447919.003.0002
[nonconscious cognition;material processes;actors;agents;advantages of cognition;cognitive assemblages;ethics;assemblages]
This chapter explains the importance of non-conscious cognition in humans and other biological lifeforms. It shows why cognitive technologies, primarily computational media, also possess nonconscious cognition.Illustrating how different modes interact, the chapter constructs a tripartite pyramidal framework consisting of modes of awareness at the top (consciousness and unconscious awareness), non-conscious cognition in the middle, and material processes at the bottom.Material processes are the basis from which all cognition emerges, but unlike cognitive processes, they do not make choices or perform interpretations. To discriminate between cognitive and material processes, the chapter suggests that cognitive entities be understood as actors, and material processes as agents.The chapter argues that all biological organisms have some cognitive capacities, including plants and unicellular organisms.Cognitive processes bestow the specific advantages of flexibility, adaptation, and evolvability.When humans and cognitive technical systems interact, they form cognitive assemblages; in developed societies, cognitive assemblages are ubiquitous, essential for virtually all aspects of everyday life.The conclusion argues that ethical theories based on free will are not adequate for the complexities of cognitive assemblages; instead it suggests that ethical considerations should be based on making choices and performing interpretations.


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226447919.003.0003
[nonconscious cognition;visual masking;re-representation;modal simulations;global workspace;Stanislas Dehaene;Antonio Damasio;Gerald Edelman;Dreyfus-McDowell debate]
This chapter discusses empirical evidence (primarily visual masking experiments) demonstrating the existence of non-conscious cognition in human subjects; its functions are delineated; and its relation to consciousness explained.Antonio Damasio’s and Gerald Edelman’s theories about the relation of nonconscious cognition to consciousness are explored.A special emphasis on re-representation occurs in both neuroscientists, a formulation that requires a site where representation first occurs, prior to its re-representation in consciousness. This site, the chapter argues, is the cognitive nonconscious.These theories are compared to Stanislas Dehaene’s model of “ignition of the global workspace.”Dehaene and colleagues give a convincing explanation for how consciousness is able to attain this durable state through its interactions with nonconscious cognition, specifically through a combination of “bottom-up signals” from nonconscious processes and “top-down” reinforcements from the frontal cortex and thalamocortical system.The relation of nonconscious cognition to modal simulations is explored through the work of Lawrence Barsalou and others; the chapter argues for the efficacy of this embodied and embedded view compared to the mentalism of the cognitivist paradigm. To contextualize these arguments within the humanities, the Dreyfus-McDowell philosophical debate is interrogated, and the overlaps and divergences with object-oriented ontology and mindfulness are explored.


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226447919.003.0004
[feminist new materials;evolution;Deleuzian;force;ontology;survival;transformation]
This chapter critically engages with writers classified as “ feminist new materialists,” including Karen Barad, Jussi Parikki, Luciana Parisi, Rosi Braidotti, Jane Bennett, and ElizabethGrosz. While sympathetic with the decentering projects of these writers as they shift the focus from human-centered discourses to engagements with nonhuman lifeforms and material processes, the chapter also explores flaws and opacities in their arguments that could be strengthened by engaging with the framework of the cognitive nonconscious.In particular, the new materialist emphasis on “vibrant matter” occludes the distinction between agency, which material processes have, and intentional actions, which only cognitive entities can enact. There is also a tendency, following Deleuze, to emphasize flows, intensities, lines of flight, and so forth over stabilities, equilibrium, and organismic coherence.The results are sometimes one-sided accounts of dynamic processes, imbalances that distort the complexities of scientific discourses, or arguments that reify nebulous ideas of a generalized “force.”The chapter advances its argument through examining the central tropes of ontology, evolution, survival, force, and transformation.The intervention’s purpose is not to debunk the new materialisms but rather to show how the framework of the cognitive nonconscious can do productive work within these contexts.


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226447919.003.0005
[cognitive nonconscious;evolution;Tom McCarthy;Remainder;Peter Watts;Blindsight;scramblers;re-enactments]
As the cognitive non-conscious receives more recognition, the traditionally central role that consciousness plays in human life is being reassessed and repositioned as only one part of a larger cognitive system.The limitations of consciousness, especially its insistence on maintaining coherence, its tendency to confabulate, and its reification of the self, have also come under scrutiny. Two contemporary novels, Tom McCarthy’s Remainder and Peter Watts’s Blindsight, critique the idea that human consciousness represents a unique evolutionary achievement and by itself constitutes the essence of human being. In Remainder, an unnamed narrator has an accident that apparently damages his nonconscious, leaving consciousness alone to guide the ship.As it swells to grotesque proportions, the tragic results show how distorted human life would be if the cognitive nonconscious were lost. In Blindsight, a group of highly modified humans—and one vampire—launch a mission to contact an alien civilization that has been revealed through its surveillance of earth.The aliens, dubbed “scramblers,” have developed technologies far superior to Earth’s; slowly the humans understand that the aliens accomplished this without ever developing consciousness. The text therefore challenges the idea that human consciousness represents the pinnacle of cognitive achievement.


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226447919.003.0006
[cognitive assemblage;traffic control;digital assistant;sociometer;autonomous drones;autonomous drone swarms;ethics of warfare]
This chapter develops the concept of cognitive assemblages as flexible systems through which information, choices, and interpretations circulate between human and technical actors.The cognitive assemblage is compared and contrasted with assemblage as used by Bruno Latour and Deleuze and Guattari.Examples discussed include the Los Angeles traffic control center, the advanced personal assistant VIV, the sociometer (a device to measure somatic and other variables), and a simulation called the MeMachine.At issue are human-computational interactions that affect the patterns of everyday life and, as a corollary, the neural synaptic networks of humans.As technical systems grow more pervasive and complex, the regions within which they act autonomously, without direct interventions by humans, expand accordingly.The examples of autonomous drones and drone swarms are used to explore the ethical implications of cognitive assemblages.A distinction is drawn between ethical actors, which include human and cognitive technical systems, and ethical responsibility, which resides with the humans who design, implement, and maintain the systems. Autonomous weapons such as warrior robots and drone swarms provide the final example, the latter interrogated through Daniel Suarez’s novel Kill Decision, which illustrates the global threat that drone swarm proliferation poses to the contemporary world.


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226447919.003.0007
[high frequency algorithms;market crashes;derivatives;temporal disparity;technical autonomy;batch auction;investor exchange;future anterior;Donald McKenzie]
This chapter explores cognitive assemblages through high-frequency trading algorithms (HFT), now the major form of trading in finance capital.It characterizes the complex temporalities that derivatives enact as the future anterior, showing how derivatives enfold present, past, and future together in ways that destabilize their referential basis. It explores two cases where derivatives played important roles in market crashes, the October 1987 market crash and the August 1998 crash initiated by the bankruptcy of Long Term Capital Management, concluding that in both cases, the breakdowns were caused by feedback loops in derivative trading that spiraled out of control. By the 2008 crash, the derivative market had expanded exponentially, and computerized trading had created a huge temporal disparity between the microseconds of HFT and the minutes required for human comprehension.HFT algorithms, once set in motion, necessarily proceed autonomously. They thus pose the question of how far technical autonomy should be allowed to proceed.To correct the instabilities HFT introduced into the global economic system, two solutions are discussed that re-engineer the systemic dynamics, the IEX exchange that slows down trades, and the batch auction idea, which treats time not as a continuum but as quantized intervals.


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226447919.003.0008
[cognitive assemblages;Colson Whitehead;The Intuitionist;limits of computation;Alan Turing;finite machine;randomness;error;Luciana Parisi;Gregory Chaitin]
This chapter develops implications of cognitive assemblages as they widen into racial, social, and economic issues.The tutor text is Colson Whitehead’s The Intuitionist and its depiction of Lila Mae Watson, the city’s first African-American female elevator inspector.After an elevator she inspected experiences a catastrophic accident, she is jolted out of her routine and searches for causes, including industrial sabotage, rivalry between two factions in the Elevator Guild, and mob interventions. Eventually she realizes that the cause will never be found. This conclusion, the chapter argues, can be interpreted by recognizing that the elevator is a finite state machine and therefore a vertical version of the abstract computer that Alan Turing proposed in his foundational essay on computation. Recent work by Luciana Parisi and Gregory Chaitin on the limits of computation show that theoretical mathematics, long regarded as the bastion of rigorous logical thought, is riddled with randomness, noise, and error. The chapter explains how this opening into the unknowable provides the novel with its climax.The chapter also asks what novels contribute to our understanding of cognitive assemblages that is unique to them and lists several attributes, illustrated through scenes in The Intuitionist.


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226447919.003.0009
[digital humanities;nonconscious cognition;cognitive assemblage;planetary cognitive ecology;humanities;computational media]
This chapter turns to the digital humanities to consider how debates about its role in the humanities looks from the perspective of cognitive assemblages.This perspective impliesthat theflow of information between human cognizers and technical systems includes meaning-making practices and interpretations that recursively cycle through cognitive assemblages, expanding the scope and power of human and technical cognizers as they interact. The chapter argues this perspective does an end-run around the misleading binary of description-interpretation, in which technical cognizers are assigned to description and humans to interpretation.On the contrary, opening interpretation and meaning to nonconscious cognition leads to much more fruitful collaborations between humanists on the one hand, and scientists, engineers, and other disciplinary practitioners on the other.It also can energize utopian perspectives that, avoiding the anthropocentric bias in which humans are seen as the only important cognizers, instead locates our current situation in the context of a flexible, expanding, and dynamic planetary cognitive ecology.An important starting point for this transformation is distinguishing between thought and cognition, recognizing that cognition is a much broader process than consciousness alone; another crucial factor is recognizing that nonconscious cognition, native to human brains, now is externalized in computational media.

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