Avenali Lectures

N. Katherine Hayles, Avenali Chair in the Humanities 2000-2001

“How to Do Things with Codes: Rethinking Processes of Signification in Digital Media”
March 20, 2001

N. Katherine Hayles is one of the foremost scholars of the relationship between literature and science in the late 20th century. She holds advanced degrees in Chemistry and English, and since 1992 has been Professor of English at UCLA.

Hayles’ Avenali lecture comes out of work that concerns the ways that processes of signification change as we move from a culture of writing by hand or on typewriters— producing “durable marks”—to writing on computers, which generate “flickering signifiers.”

Hayles’ early work orchestrates the play of resonances between contemporary scientific paradigms and literature. Her first book, The Cosmic Web: Scientific Field Models and Literary Strategies (Cornell University Press, 1984), examines a turn toward “field” models or theories in the sciences, in which the whole constitutes more than the sum of its parts, and always includes consideration of a self-reflexive observer and the instruments of analysis (such as technology, mathematics, and language). In Hayles’ second book, Chaos Bound: Orderly Disorder in Contemporary Literature and Science (Cornell University Press, 1990), she questions what she argues is a profound epistemological shift in Western culture: a disruption in the order/disorder duality.