The Posthuman Mind Uncoupled: From Bacteria to AI with N. Katherine Hayles
In this episode of See See by Ceci, N. Katherine Hayles, Distinguished Research Professor at UCLA, James B. Duke Professor Emerita at Duke, Guggenheim Fellow and member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, joins us from the rare crossroads at which she has worked for forty years: literature, science, technology and, now, artificial intelligence. Trained as a chemist at Rochester and Caltech before crossing into literary scholarship, she is a foremost authority on the relations between literature and computational media, and the author of How We Became Posthuman (1999) and, most recently, Bacteria to AI: Human Futures with our Nonhuman Symbionts (University of Chicago Press, 2025).
In this rich and demanding conversation, Hayles redefines cognition as the interpretation of information in contexts that connect with meaning, a capacity she ascribes to bacteria, plants, fungi, animals and, increasingly, AI. She walks us through her integrated cognitive framework and the SIRAL criteria (sensing, interpreting, responding adaptively, anticipating, learning); through von Uexküll’s umwelt, the world each species spins for itself; through cognitive assemblages in which humans, microbes and machines decide together; and through her sharp distinction between actors and agents. As a literary critic, she also turns her gaze on AI-produced literature, on hallucinations as imagination, and on Walter Benjamin’s aura in the age of the deep fake.
With reflections from neuroscientist John Cryan on the gut microbiome, historian Richard Bourke on the Kantian self, classicist Richard P. Martin on AI and imagination, and choreographer Alexander Whitley on embodiment.
This is an episode about the uncoupling of cognition from consciousness, Hayles’ most crucial move. About a posthuman in which the human itself is being rewritten. And about the very determined optimism of a thinker who insists that hope is not the reward at the end of the work, but the precondition for it.
N. Katherine Hayles is the author of twelve influential books, including the landmark How We Became Posthuman, widely regarded as a seminal foundation for posthumanism, My Mother Was a Computer: Digital Subjects and Literary Texts (2005), Unthought: The Power of the Cognitive Nonconscious (2017), and her latest, Bacteria to AI: Human Futures with our Nonhuman Symbionts (University of Chicago Press, 2025). A member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Rockefeller Foundation, Hayles has transformed our understanding of the digital age.
LINKS & INFO:
https://scholars.duke.edu/person/katherine.hayles
https://english.ucla.edu/people-faculty/hayles-katherine-n
Recommended Reading:
Books
Bacteria to AI: Human Futures with Our Nonhuman Symbionts. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2025. Her most recent book, developing an “integrated cognitive framework” that extends meaning-making across lifeforms from bacteria to plants, animals, humans, and some forms of artificial intelligence, framed partly as a response to ecological crisis and anthropocentrism.
Unthought: The Power of the Cognitive Nonconscious. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017. Arguably her most important later work, expanding cognition beyond conscious thought to include nonconscious processes in both humans and machines.
How We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012. Introduces her influential idea of “technogenesis” and distinguishes close, hyper, and machine reading.
Postprint: Books and Becoming Computational. New York: Columbia University Press, 2021. Drawn from her Wellek Library Lectures, it examines what books become in a computational age.
The Cosmic Web: Scientific Field Models and Literary Strategies in the Twentieth Century. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984. Chaos Bound: Orderly Disorder in Contemporary Literature and Science. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990. Her two early books, which trace scientific field models and chaos theory in twentieth-century literature and predate the digital-media work she is best known for.
Three of her most important papers
“Cognition Everywhere: The Rise of the Cognitive Nonconscious and the Costs of Consciousness” New Literary History, vol. 45, no. 2 (Spring 2014): 199–220. This is the seed essay for Unthought. It introduces the cognitive nonconscious and argues that meaning-making extends well beyond conscious thought. Freely available PDF: https://publicityreform.github.io/findbyimage/readings/hayles.pdf
“The Cognitive Nonconscious: Enlarging the Mind of the Humanities” Critical Inquiry, vol. 42, no. 4 (Summer 2016): 783–808. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1086/686950 This develops the case that the humanities need to take nonconscious cognition seriously, and is one of the central building blocks of Unthought.
“Cognitive Assemblages: Technical Agency and Human Interactions” Critical Inquiry, vol. 43, no. 1 (Autumn 2016): 32–55. This introduces her concept of the “cognitive assemblage,” the idea that cognition is distributed across humans, nonhumans, and computational media. It is the chapter-length argument that Bacteria to AI later extends into the integrated cognitive framework, so it bridges both books you focused on.
Please note that the two Critical Inquiry pieces sit behind the University of Chicago Press paywall, so listeners without institutional access may only reach the abstracts, whereas the New Literary History essay has a freely available PDF at the link above. If the episode description benefits from a fully open bridge to Bacteria to AI specifically, there is also a 2022 published conversation between Hayles and Mary Zournazi on creativity and nonconscious cognition that is openly accessible. I can track down its exact citation and link if you would like to include it.
