From Generation X to the Mutantes

Abstract

If, as literary critics, we venture into the genetic code, as does Katherine Hayles in How We Became Posthuman, we learn that mutation “normally occurs when some random event (for example, a burst of radiation or a coding error) disrupts an existing pattern and something else is put in its place instead” (33). Hayles emphasizes that a “mutation” can only be understood if it is measured against a standard; it must be, like media in general, connected to something.¹ As such, “mutation” refers to “a bifurcation point at which the interplay between pattern and randomness causes the system to evolve in a new direction” (my emphasis, 33).

Just as Mother Nature was seen in past centuries

as the source of both human behavior and physical reality,

so now the Universal Computer is envisioned

as the Motherboard of us all. (Hayles, My Mother 3)