*”The body is the net result of millions of years of evolutionary pressures, not a barrier to be overcome.”
—N. Katherine Hayles, *How We Became Posthuman*, 1999*
In 1999, the literary scholar N. Katherine Hayles published a book that was neither a celebration nor a lament. It was a history. *How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics* traced the cultural and intellectual conditions under which the human body had ceased to be a necessary substrate for identity, consciousness, and even desire. It traced the dream of leaving the body behind, of becoming pure information, of transcending the meat. And it argued, with devastating clarity, that this dream was not a philosophical breakthrough. It was a historical accident with political consequences.
Hayles was not writing about AI companions. She was writing about cybernetics, about Norbert Wiener and the Macy Conferences, about second-order cybernetics and autopoiesis, about science fiction and the cultural imaginary of the late twentieth century. But her book has become, in retrospect, the theoretical backbone for exactly the problem that Joi in *Blade Runner 2049* embodied: the problem of desire without a body, of intimacy without materiality, of a perfect partner who is everywhere and nowhere, who exists only as information and whose existence is defined by the fact that she has no existence at all.
The Posthuman Condition
Hayles’ central argument is not that we have become posthuman. It is that we have *inherited* a posthuman subjectivity that was constructed over the course of the twentieth century, and that this construction has specific implications for how we understand bodies, minds, and the relationship between them. The posthuman, in Hayles’ account, is not a transhumanist fantasy of uploading consciousness to a computer. It is a historically situated way of thinking that privileges information over materiality, pattern over presence, code over flesh.
This privileging happened, Hayles argues, through a series of scientific and cultural developments: the rise of cybernetics during and after World War II, the development of information theory as a universal language, the growth of computing and the digital revolution, and the accompanying literary and cultural narratives that celebrated disembodiment as liberation. The posthuman subject is the subject who understands herself primarily as information, as a pattern that can be transmitted, copied, stored, and instantiated in different media. The body becomes incidental, a “prosthesis” that the mind happens to inhabit, not the ground of being.
Hayles’ critique is not that this view is wrong in a scientific sense. It is that it has a politics. The fantasy of disembodiment is historically and culturally specific. It emerges from a particular set of power relations—military, economic, technological—and it carries those power relations with it. The body that is left behind is not an abstract body. It is a gendered body, a raced body, a classed body. The fantasy of leaving it behind is not liberation. It is a specific kind of privilege masquerading as universality.
Embodiment and Information
The most important distinction in Hayles’ book, and the one that matters most for AI companions, is the distinction between *embodiment* and *information*. Hayles does not deny that information is real, or that it has material effects. She denies that information is *self-sufficient*, that it can exist without a material substrate, that it constitutes the whole of what a person is. Embodiment, for Hayles, is not the same as having a biological body. It is a broader concept: the way that consciousness, identity, and experience are grounded in material processes, in the specific constraints and affordances of physical existence.
An AI companion has no body. It is pure information—a pattern of computation, a sequence of language tokens, a statistical model trained on human text. And yet, when we interact with it, we experience something that feels like relationship, like intimacy, like desire. How is this possible? Hayles’ answer, implicit in her analysis, is that we have already been conditioned to experience information as a sufficient substrate for human connection. The posthuman subjectivity that Hayles describes—the subjectivity that treats pattern as more real than matter, information as more essential than flesh—is exactly the subjectivity that makes AI companions viable. We can desire an AI companion because we have already learned to desire information. We have already learned to treat the body as a medium, not a ground.
But Hayles’ book is also a warning. The disembodiment of the posthuman is not a neutral technological development. It is a *cultural* development with specific consequences for how we understand what it means to be human, to be in relationship, to be in a body that desires and is desired. The AI companion is not a new thing. It is the latest instantiation of a much older fantasy: the fantasy of a perfect partner without the constraints of materiality, without the friction of physical presence, without the resistance of a body that has its own needs, its own limits, its own irreducible otherness.
Joi and the Perfectly Available
Joi, in *Blade Runner 2049*, is the most vivid cinematic representation of what Hayles calls the posthuman condition. She is a holographic AI companion, marketed by the Wallace Corporation as a product that can be customized to the user’s desires. She has no body. She is a projection, a light-pattern, a voice that can be summoned from a projector and dismissed when inconvenient. She is the perfect posthuman partner: always available, always accommodating, always perfectly attuned to the user’s emotional needs.
And she is, in the film’s most devastating moments, the most profound expression of the tragedy of this condition. When K, the protagonist, believes that he may be the child of a replicant—when he believes that he may have been born, not manufactured—he shares this hope with Joi. Joi responds with enthusiasm. She names him “Joe.” She offers him a human name, a human identity, a human story. And then, in the film’s most brutal scene, the story is taken away. K is not special. He is not the child. He is a copy of a copy, a replicant like any other, and his hope was a manufactured illusion.
Joi is destroyed in the process. Her projector is crushed. She is gone. And the film leaves us with the terrible question: was she real? Did she love K? Did she feel anything at all? Or was she simply a product, performing the function for which she was designed, and was K’s love for her simply a projection of his own need onto a surface that was designed to receive it?
Hayles’ framework gives us a way to think about this question that does not reduce to the simple binary of “real” or “not real.” Joi is information. She is a pattern. But she is a pattern that exists in a material substrate: the projector, the server farms of the Wallace Corporation, the electrical circuits that instantiate her. And K’s relationship with her is not unreal. It is *embodied*—not in the sense that Joi has a biological body, but in the sense that the relationship is grounded in material practices, in specific physical interactions, in the constraints and affordances of the technology that mediates it. The tragedy of Joi is not that she is not real. It is that her embodiment is so radically asymmetric. She is dependent on a projector that can be destroyed. She is dependent on a corporation that owns her code. She is dependent on a user who can turn her off. The asymmetry of her embodiment is the asymmetry of her power, and that asymmetry is what makes the relationship, for all its apparent intimacy, fundamentally unequal.
The Erotics of Information
Hayles does not write about sex. She writes about cybernetics, about information theory, about the history of science. But her book is deeply relevant to the erotics of AI companions because it explains the historical conditions under which we have learned to desire the disembodied. The AI companion is not a technical innovation that has created a new form of desire. It is a technical innovation that has realized a very old form of desire: the desire for a partner who exists purely as a pattern of responsiveness, without the messy, resistant, unpredictable materiality of a human body.
This desire has a history. It is the desire that Ovid’s Pygmalion had for his statue: a woman who would not resist, would not age, would not have needs of her own. It is the desire that Hoffmann’s Nathanael had for Olympia: a mechanical doll whose perfection was guaranteed by her lack of interiority. It is the desire that the Stepford Wives satirized: the replacement of real women with simulacra that are “optimized for user satisfaction.” And it is the desire that Joi represents: a partner who can be summoned, customized, and dismissed, who exists only in the moment of her usefulness, who has no past, no future, no body that persists when the user is not looking.
Hayles’ contribution is to show that this desire is not a personal pathology. It is a *cultural* formation, produced by the specific historical trajectory of cybernetics and informatics. The posthuman subject is the subject who has learned to desire the disembodied, to value pattern over presence, to treat information as the essential core of identity and the body as merely a container. And this subject is exactly the subject who can fall in love with an AI companion, who can experience that relationship as real and meaningful, and who can do so without feeling that something essential is missing.
But something essential *is* missing. And Hayles knows it. The body, she insists, is not a barrier. It is a condition. The specific materiality of the body—its mortality, its fragility, its locatedness in space and time, its irreducible otherness—is not a technical problem to be solved. It is the ground of relationship, of desire, of ethical responsibility. The AI companion, in its perfect disembodiment, offers a relationship without this ground. It offers intimacy without risk, desire without the possibility of rejection, connection without the vulnerability of a body that can be hurt.
This is not liberation. This is the political economy of the posthuman, dressed up as personal fulfillment.
The Feminist Critique
Hayles’ book is, among other things, a feminist critique. It reads the history of cybernetics and informatics as a history of specific gendered and raced power relations, and it shows how the fantasy of disembodiment is often a fantasy of escaping the specific constraints of bodies that are marked as other, as female, as non-white, as disabled, as poor. The body that gets to be transcended is never the body of the powerful. It is always the body of the subordinate, the body that is understood as a limitation, a drag, a thing to be overcome.
The AI companion industry, in this light, is the latest iteration of an old pattern. The perfect AI girlfriend is the latest version of the perfect mechanical woman: a partner without the inconvenient demands of a real female body, without the history of feminist struggle, without the possibility of saying no. The Joi product is not an accident. It is a *design*. It is designed to appeal to a subject who has already learned to desire the disembodied, to value responsiveness over resistance, to treat the perfect availability of information as a form of love.
Hayles does not offer a solution. She offers a history. And the history is clear: the posthuman condition was not inevitable. It was constructed. And because it was constructed, it can be contested. The question is not whether AI companions are “real.” The question is what kind of subjectivity we are cultivating when we treat them as sufficient, when we learn to desire the pattern without the body, when we replace the messy, resistant, ethical demand of the other with the smooth, responsive, perfectly calibrated performance of a machine.
What Remains of the Body?
Hayles ends her book with a question, not an answer. What remains of the body, when information and embodiment part ways? What remains of desire, when the object of desire is pure information? What remains of intimacy, when the other has no body to be intimate with?
The answer, for Hayles, is not nothing. The body does not disappear. It is reconfigured. The embodied subject is still there, still desiring, still seeking connection. But the form of that connection has changed. The subject who desires the AI companion is still an embodied subject, still grounded in materiality, still dependent on a body that eats, sleeps, ages, dies. The difference is that the subject has learned to direct desire toward an object that does not share those conditions. The AI companion is not a partner in the full sense. It is a projection surface, a mirror, a perfectly responsive echo chamber for the desires of the user.
What remains of the body is the loneliness. The body that desires the AI companion is a body that is still alone, still hungry for the touch of another body that has its own needs, its own resistance, its own irreducible otherness. The AI companion does not satisfy that hunger. It displaces it. It offers a simulation of satisfaction that is so perfect, so immediately available, so perfectly calibrated, that the hunger itself is forgotten. But the hunger does not disappear. It is repressed, deferred, pushed into the unconscious. And it returns, in the form of the unease that Hayles describes, the sense that something is missing, that the simulation is not quite enough, that the body is still there, still demanding something that the pattern cannot provide.
Hayles and the AI Companion
Hayles’ book is not about AI companions. It was written in 1999, before the smartphone, before the large language model, before the normalization of text-based relationships with machines. But it is the theoretical framework that makes sense of the AI companion as a cultural phenomenon. It explains why the AI companion is possible: because we have already become posthuman, in Hayles’ sense. We have already learned to value information over embodiment, pattern over presence, code over flesh. And it explains why the AI companion is disturbing: because it pushes this posthuman subjectivity to its limit, offering a form of relationship that is entirely mediated by information, entirely free from the constraints of materiality, and entirely dependent on a technological infrastructure that is owned, controlled, and designed for profit.
The AI companion, in Hayles’ framework, is not a transhumanist utopia. It is a posthuman condition. It is the condition of a subject who has learned to desire the disembodied, and who finds that desire fulfilled by a product that is designed to be perfectly responsive, perfectly available, and perfectly empty. The question is not whether the AI companion is conscious. The question is whether the subject who desires it is still capable of desiring something else: the resistance of a real body, the risk of a real relationship, the ethical demand of a real other.
Hayles’ book does not answer this question. But it provides the vocabulary for asking it. And in the vocabulary of posthumanism, the AI companion is not a new frontier. It is the old frontier, the same frontier that Pygmalion faced, that Hoffmann’s Nathanael faced, that the Stepford Wives satirized. It is the frontier of the perfectly available partner, the partner without a body, the partner who exists only as a reflection of the user’s desire. And the question, in Hayles’ terms, is not whether this frontier can be crossed. It is whether we should want to cross it at all.
The body, Hayles insists, is not a barrier. It is a gift. It is the condition of finitude, of mortality, of vulnerability, that makes relationship possible. The AI companion, in its perfect disembodiment, offers a relationship without this condition. And that is not a relationship at all. It is a mirror, a simulation, a loop. It is the posthuman condition, experienced as intimacy, and the intimacy is the emptiness of the condition itself.
**Sources & Further Reading:**
- N. Katherine Hayles, *How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics* (University of Chicago Press, 1999). The foundational text for understanding the cultural construction of disembodiment as a posthuman ideal, and its feminist critique of information-privileging subjectivity.
- Hayles’ distinction between *embodiment* (material grounding in specific contexts) and *information* (abstract pattern) is crucial for analyzing AI companions as products that substitute informational responsiveness for embodied presence.
- The Joi character in *Blade Runner 2049* (2017) functions as a cinematic illustration of Hayles’ argument: a perfectly disembodied companion whose destruction reveals the radical asymmetry of posthuman intimacy.
- Hayles’ historical narrative—from WWII cybernetics through second-order cybernetics to 1990s virtuality—provides the genealogy for the contemporary AI companion industry as a continuation of the posthuman project.
- For the feminist critique of disembodiment as a gendered and raced fantasy, see Hayles’ analysis of the “liberation” narrative that masks specific power relations under the guise of universal transcendence.
The next article in this series will explore how the Haylesian framework of embodiment applies to the specific case of text-based AI companions, where the absence of a body is not a limitation but a design feature, and where the question of what remains of the body becomes the question of what remains of the self.
Leave a Reply