Prefiguring Cyberculture: An Intellectual History

Cyberculture has a history, a deeply layered and non-teleological history, a history full of surprises both good and bad, a history replete with consequences for what it means to speak of the human in ‘informatic’ or ‘post-human’ idioms. This passionate, multi-lobed conviction is the generative organ of this wonderful book. The shapes of history matter here as much as its temporalities, as much as its subjectivities. Indeed, shape, time, and subject mutually reconfigure each other in the prefigurings in fiction, science, and technology that this book explores. Prefiguring Cyberculture explores what the editors call the ‘continuous present tense.’ That is the always unfinished time in which classifications of what may count as human and nonhuman morph within lived technologies that bear the stigmata of the signifying monster called information.