In discussing reflexivity’s entrance to the cybernetics universe, Hayles refers to it as a “slippery concept.”  To that, I say “exactly”–and not just about reflexivity. The entirety of her subject matter is not easily gripped.  Holding on becomes a dynamic mental process easily pictured as climbing a greased pole or catching water with open hands. 

I think I’ve got enough of a grip,though, to recognize Hayles’ contention that information and absence should not be given a superior place above materiality and presence nor should materiality and information be seen as separate (12).  In fact, she argues that “for information to exist, it must always be instantiated in a medium” (13). Even in first-world countries where the majority of power sits and which exists evermore in virtuality, she emphasizes “the importance of the embodied processes constituting the lifeworld of human beings” (20).  And yes, my quoting in this paragraph is an attempt to keep my grip on this overarching contention secure, at least for a few more paragraphs.

Though it’s been a while since I’ve read/seen, respectively, these texts, both Ernest Cline’s novel Ready Player One and the film adaptation of Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games provide narratives that help concretize some of the abstractions of Hayles’ theories and explanations.  In Cline’s novel, protagonist Wade Watts lives in a future world in which material comforts and natural resources are distant memories.  For this young man, and much of the suffering population, the virtual world OASIS offers relief, or at least distraction from the misery of the material “real” world.  When the OASIS creator dies, he leaves behind instructions for an OASIS-world scavenger hunt that will bring the winner massive wealth. While the hunt actually is a hunt, a  virtual-reality game, its existence is not fully contained in virtuality.  The embodied gamers and their respective avatars are interconnected, with their actions and the consequences of those actions flowing from one world to the other and then back again.  The material physicality of each gamer is not the totality of the player, but neither are the patterns that store the identity of his or her avatar. Wade and friends, though immersed in OASIS, did not regard their bodies as “so much ‘meat’” like Case the computer cowboy (36) nor did they necessarily seek, like Dixie Flatline to find immortality as a “personal construct within the computer” (36) after shedding the “perils of physicality” 37). 

In The Hunger Games (movie version) the distinction between virtual and material is ostensibly more apparent as humans actually play in the games, not avatars (at least not in the virtual-physical sense; players have to create identities to curry favor among an audience who could choose to help or harm them but they are still embodied humans), but the environment in which they are forced to play is manipulated virtually, which actually complicates the distinction. The intertwining of the material and informational worlds is impossible to untangle. The competitors’ bodies are not mere vessels used to sustain consciousness, like Case the cowboy again, yet they must exist within and battle to survive a world that straddles the real and the virtual–a world made of flickering signifiers, so to speak–where severe weather changes and attacks by manufactured yet still deadly creatures can occur with the push of a button.  The playing field is not level here at all. Nor are Katniss and crew like Wade Watts, who though “real,” navigated OASIS as a “virtual creature” whose body would not die if his avatar did.   

The Hunger Games, on its face, may seem to demonstrate the power information has over the material.  Yet, considered within Hayles’ discussion of her appreciation for printed texts after experiencing computers.  Just as the flickering signifiers can accomplish what the physical cannot, so can the physical accomplish what the “absent” cannot. 

I have readily admitted my only semi-potent grip on Hayles’ discussion, and “semi” is being generous. I am reflecting, though, on how much my interpretation of her arguments and the narratives I’ve described is based on my own state of “humanness.”  Though I exist in some capacities in a virtual world–social media, ATMs,online courses, etc. I am more part of “reality” than virtuality. My capacity to imagine or understand something different, something more virtual than “real” is largely reduced by this point of view.  This world and its embodiments are what I know and for me there is a serious creepiness factor that comes from imagining a world completely controlled by button pushing or a time and space where memories can be sucked from brains to exist on their own. Again, that’s the human in me; perhaps if I were a cyborg, I would see things differently.