A “smoking gun” is oft referred as the circumstantial evidence left in a crime scene that can be the most damning evidence of all. It is, for all intents and purposes, the intent and purpose behind the crime. For my intents and purposes, however, I will be referring to this smoking gun as the proof of a different act, on a different plane; the “gun” is now representative of the rhetorical sign, the sign that represents information fired between members of humankind. At least, it would be, but not in the posthumanist world. In that world, there is no shooter.
“Here, at the inagural moment of the computer age, the erasure of embodiment is performed so that ‘intelligence’ becomes a property of the formal manipulation of symbols rather than enaction in the human life-world” (Hayles xi).
Hayles, N. Katherine. “Prologue” and “Toward Embodied Virtuality.” How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago, 1999. xi-24
Or, at least, that reality is the goal. What Hayles suggests throughout her work is the removal of autonomous boundaries set by the individual, so all action and drive might become a single mindspace where the signs exist simultaneously as the will. The human being is stripped of their ability to shoot their gun because, once they gather the courage to do so as a participant in discourse, the signs already exist as “formal manipulation,” as patterns, and are employed automatically.
“…diversity of our opinions does not arise from the fact that some people are more reasonable than others, but solely from the fact that we lead our thoughts along different paths and do not take the same things into consideration” (Descartes 1).
Descartes, Rene. Discourse on Method and Meditations on First Philosophy. 4th Edition. Trans. by Donald A. Cress. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co, 1998. 1-44
Or, perhaps, I sing a song extreme. Perhaps the human still retains their ability, their free will, to shoot the gun. But that gun is not theirs. This is language in the posthuman world, where the human is still able to shoot, but with a weaponized voice not their own, nor belonging to any solid form whatsoever. No, the shooter of this particular gun is about as human, even about as physical, as a wispy silhouette of smoke.
Morning's Early Dark 