The following are the two essays we are reading: Intoduction chapter 
BrianMassumi, Parables for the Virtual and N. Katherine Hayles, Virtual Bodies and Flickering Signifiers.
If you are interested in hearing Katherine Hayles speaking about How We Became Posthuman: Humanistic Implications of Recent Research into Cognitive Science and Artificial Life go here: http://online.kitp.ucsb.edu/online/colloq/hayles1/ courtesy of UCLA from 1998. In this talk she speaks of many issues she touches upon in our essay Virtual Bodies and Flickering Signifiers such as informational theory leading the argument for post-human, embodiment concerns with virtual reality and consciousness, better worked out in my opinion. The five years gave her time to tweak.
She begins the talk by setting up what it is to be human to better understand what it means to posthuman. Her definition of human is that which owns itself and therefore marketable. This came to be when people wanted to get paid for their labor.
Katherine Hayles want the idea of post-human to not be apocalyptic but instead a way to discuss the change in the question concerning what it is to be human in a post-Derrida post-modern world. One of her example concerns the question of whether a cane is a part of the blind-man? Human - No, Posthuman - Yes. Our technology and better tools have placed us in a world where the question is no longer concerns only the flesh. 15 minutes into the talk, she talks about the issue of embodiment. First she states that human identity is an informational pattern. The spectrum of answers for this question goes from Hans Moravec (she disagrees with this guy a lot) who believes that being human is essentially a pattern of information that can be entirely downloaded to a computer to Gerald Edelman who believes embodiment is linked with body and crucial to modeling neural complexity.
The word and meaning of materiality come into the picture. She uses a grid that has materiality at the top and information at the bottom. In between are the coupling of presence to absence and randomness. When presence and randomness are matched up you have mutation and when absence is coupled with pattern you have hyperreality.
Towards the end of her talk, she uses the feminist critique of science, like Donna Harraway's cyborg, to argue the relationship of desire for mastery an objectivist account of science accompanied with the imperialist project of subduing nature, then the post-human offers resources for the construction of another account. She believes in this framework emergence replaces teleology (the study of the nature of human design), reflexive epistemology (to go back on methods and limits of human knowledge) replaces objectivism (that there is mind independent reality), embodiment replaces as body seen as a support system for the mind/brain and a dynamic partnership between humans and intelligent machines replaces the manifest destiny and the liberal humanist subject to dominate and control destiny. Halleluiah!
I also investigated the meaning of "floating signifiers" to get to the understanding of Hayles "flickering signifiers". Floating signifiers are signifiers without references. For example, race is a word that doesn't point to any actual object but to an idea or concept. According to Lacan in the post-modern sense, floating signifiers can be applied to concepts when the word itself is more concrete that the concept it describes such as race. The meaning or concept associated with the word may not be stable but the word itself is stable. The word tribe comes immediately to my mind.
On a completely side note: here's an essay she wrote critiquing Donna Harraway http://www.altx.com/ebr/hayles.htm. This is a little interesting because I think Hayles like Harraway and quotes her quite a bit in her work.
My last investigation leads into a great segue for Brian Massumi's essay. The subtitle to the Introduction chapter that comes from his 2002 book Parables for the Virtual is Concrete is as concrete doesn't is a leading title. Brian is looking at the words embodiment and virtual from the liberal humanist subject side of the spectrum that the body must be a part of the meanings or taken a part of these words. He begins the chapter and the book a body moves and feels. This is a very starting point than Hayles who states her version of the word involves autonomy and Chris Graves definition "the ability for complete incorporation of the individual into market relations".
Brian intends to explore body in it's relation to cultural theory and the humanities. He wants to make sure corporeality is a part of embodiment. He tries this without falling into the linguistic trap that forces the term posthuman to be useful.
According to the Foundation Daniel Langlois website, Brian Massumi evokes the paradoxical nature of information, which is both rooted in abstract systems (language, computer code) and understood subjectively when it is physically deployed.
He teaches in the Communication Department at the Université de Montréal and focuses on the philosophies of communication, electronic art, computer-aided design, architecture and the virtual.
After reading these essays I feel I understand embodiment more than virtuality. This is my little etymological study. The word virtual was first used in computer sciences as anything simulated by a computer. Now it is applied to mean a thing that really exist and are created by or carried on by a computer. With Hayles' addition, today virtual may be used to describe a thing that has extended by or temporarily simulated by a computer.
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