Taking a seat amid the twinkling blue lights that lined either side of the aisles in Curtin 175, I arrived at the October 5th lecture by Dr. N. Katherine Hayles expecting an encounter with material semiotics and notions of digital bodies. What I experienced was even more: a riveting discussion of symbiosis, cognitive assemblages and questions of the world to come as compared to the relationships that are.  

Reminding the audience that the idea of cognition is inherently rooted in an anthropocentric view of the world, Hayles challenged notions of what it means to be cognitive. Ultimately arguing that machines are, if we accept Jakob von Uexküll’s definition of Umwelt as the defining pillar of cognition, themselves cognitive, Dr. Hayles highlighted the distinct manner in which humanity has entered an era of “bio-techno evolution,” criticizing “the fallacy … that evolution stop[ped] with biological evolution.”  

While intriguing in its critical commentary on the human-centric focus of work both in the humanities and social sciences, I was left wondering to what extent this new argument was itself anthropocentric. Is it not somewhat self-centered to claim that homo sapiens sapiens has invented its own next step in evolution: bio-techno evolution? Is the purported end of biological evolution in our species reflected in the data and research originating out of more evolution-focused research domains such as, say, biological anthropology?  

By no means an affront to Dr. Hayles’ argument, these questions arise because I found her talk precisely the sort of productive moment I’ve come to expect from C21 events. Uniquely insightful and bold, Dr. Hayles’ question of whether or not we truly are “on a journey to symbiosis with computational media” looms large.