Binary oppositions – why should it always be one or the other?

Building on a comment on Thomas Reinhardt’s post during the film festival, some binary oppositions have struck me in my own thinking which I’m trying to challenge while looking over Hayles (Conclusion: What does it mean to be posthuman? in How we became posthuman: virtual bodies in cybernetics, literature, and informatics, 1999):

utopian/dystopian narrative
the responsibility lies either with the ‘human’ or the ‘machine’
the ‘human’ controls the ‘machine’, or vice versa

Hayles (1999) suggests a contrasting view with blurred boundaries, moving away from these more simplistic narratives. A few quotes in particular stuck out at me – I’m recording below while I contemplate and challenge my assumptions/thinking further…

‘In the posthuman view, by contrast, conscious agency has never been “in control”. In fact, the very illusion of control bespeaks a fundamental ignorance about the nature of the emergent processes through which consciousness, the organism, and the environment are constituted.’ (Hayles 1999: 288)

‘distributed cognition replaces autonomous will’ (Hayles 1999: 288)

‘Just as the posthuman need not be antihuman, so it also need not be apocalyptic’ (Hayles 1999: 288)

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