60 theory
If understood according to the relational and interactive logic of techno-
scientific interfacing, thinking and acting “subjects” are never wholly self-
contained or self-identical, to the degree that they realize themselves in and
through the various technological prostheses that always already extend sub-
jective intelligence and agency “beyond” the subject, or embody the apparently
“subjective” in the apparently “objective”; and likewise, as constituted relation-
ally within technoscientific networks, “objects” are never simply or only “ob-
jects” insofar as they themselves come to act with their own kind of intelli-
gence—which does not simplyextendbut also, at the same time, reshapes or
transforms the subjective itself. As Taylor emphasizes, “this relationship is
always two-way: as the body and mind extrude into the world, world intrudes
into body and mind.”^36 by means of technological prostheses and the infor-
mational currents flowing through them. Our technologies, then, act or even
think on and through us just as much as we act or think on and through
them—and in such a way that “the networks extruding from and into our
bodies and minds form something like atechnological unconscious, which, like
conscious mental processes, screens information.”^37 In other words, we think
and act through technological and informational systems—and they through
us—without our being wholly conscious or in control of such thought and
action. Much as Sigmund Freud argued that the operations of psychic life as
a whole are far more complex and extensive than the relatively limited sphere
of the conscious ego’s awareness and command, so Taylor argues that the
individual subject of network culture never thinks and acts as a purely self-
contained or self-determining entity but rather thinks and acts only by means
of complex and evolving systems, networks of distributed intelligence and
agency over the whole of which no subject could ever claim comprehension or
mastery.
What Taylor understands here in terms of nodular subjectivity and the
technological unconscious has also been taken recently by theorist N. Kather-
ine Hayles to signal the emergence of a “posthuman” subjectivity that would
render untenable modern models of the subject as a self-contained, self-
possessed, or self-determining individual.^38 Whereas modern Western thought,
especially in its liberal humanist forms, would tend to presuppose an auton-
omous, independent subject who might seek to assume responsibility for tech-
nological mastery over its world by means of conscious agency, the posthuman
perspective that Hayles elaborates would insist that “conscious agency has
never been ‘in control.’...Mastery through the exercise of autonomous will
is merely the story consciousness tells itself to explain results that actually
come about through chaotic dynamics and emergent structures.”^39 Along with
feminist critics of science like Donna Haraway and Sandra Harding, and ech-
oing the Heideggerian analysis of science that we noted above, Hayles high-
lights the intimate ties “among the desire for mastery, an objectivist account
of science, and the imperialist project of subduing nature”^40 —and she will seek