Posthumanism(s)

It is in the character of sound to be semiotically parasitic, to take on—and usually intensify—the systems of meaning to which it attaches. High-fidelity audio accompanying a video, for example, tends to produce the impression of higher-definition visuals, while the reverse is not the case.1 Sound is a kind of amplifier, but an invisible one, a contamination that produces something different precisely by reproducing the same.

A book about sound is never just a book about sound, then, but is rather a stridulation of sound rubbing up against another set of concerns, in this case, technological posthumanism. This book palpates three dominant strains of the latter, examining each as a contingent narration of human–technology coupling. To this end, the book adopts the critical strategy of seeking after the assumptions and biases that underwrite each approach, while also taking up the tactic of playing each narration out in a topos of sound, where we might listen more particularly to their politics. The gambit of this book as a book, then, is that the coaction of these strategic and tactical approaches might produce fresh purchase on a discourse that continues to proliferate, not least because the daily practices to which it obtains become increasingly difficult to even provisionally extricate from contemporary technologies. That is, listening—in the full sense—to technological posthumanism will not only offer new insight into what has been said on the topic but will also push the conversation in a direction that is crucial to (and, to date, largely missing from) the broader posthumanist project of decentering the human.

We can more specifically understand the challenge that aurality presents in this context by further considering three of its aspects, each of which points to the way that sound is mobilized in this book. First, sound is differential: as Aden Evens points out, “to hear is to experience air pressure changing. . . . One does not hear air pressure, but one hears it change over time [such that] to hear a pitch that does not change is to hear as constant something that is nothing but change. To hear is to hear difference.”2 The point, for Evens, is that the physics of hearing meshes perfectly with a Deleuzian language of becoming, but the inverse should also be noted, namely, that sound can only be understood as a physics insofar as it is a physics under erasure, as a physics that always performs itself and its own impossibility simultaneously. In this way, sound supplements (or perhaps tropes) the famously vexing horizontal duality of light (as both particle and wave) with a vertical duality that exists as both material (though exclusively in wave form) and immaterial. In short, sound as such calls us to think of it as a particular object that has no substance, as a kind of ideal object that nonetheless has real material effects (i.e., literal sounds).

This, then, points to the difference between attending to sound in its own right and listening to sounds: despite its undeniable material effects, sound itself resists being placed within a visual ontology. Indeed, sound resists being placed at all and is in this sense as much relational as it is differential (which is the second feature I wish to highlight). Think, for example, of a light panning across a stage from right to left; if we stop the light 80 percent of the way through the pan, we can point to the exact place where the particles of light literally impact the stage. Now imagine the same scenario with sound; with contemporary technologies, we can almost as easily pinpoint where the sound “is” on stage (i.e., where we hear it coming from), but there is in fact nothing there: the placement of sound that results from an 80 percent pan is in fact produced by a relative difference in intensity between the two polarized sound-emitting loudspeakers. In short, the sound is emphatically not where it sounds like it is. Indeed, the added twist is that it also isn’t where it appears to be (i.e., coming from the loudspeakers) because it only comes to be at all through the differential act of hearing, which is the very act that would place it where it isn’t.3

Finally, sound is also multiplicitous in that—in Deleuze and Guattari’s terms—any given sound consists of sounds. Thus, for example, it is in the nature of frequencies to consist in an infinite number of higher frequencies, with each successive frequency a determinable multiple of the basic frequency of the sound; it is these overtones (or “partials”) that result in the same fundamental pitch sounding different when played on a violin or a piano, for example, or that allow us to differentiate between two voices singing the same pitch. That is, the relative intensities of the invariant series of overtones produce the timbre of a sound, sometimes called its “color.” The reason why this is multiplicitous rather than simply multiple is that the infinite nature of this sequence—coupled with the environmental contingencies that are constitutive of any wave behavior—means that the original sound can never be perfectly reverse engineered from its constituent frequencies. In short, the original sound exists as a sound among other sounds rather than as a unity of its various overtones. The correlate to this is, of course, that sounds are also radically singular.

Taken together, these elements of sound mean that it’s distinctly possible that an experience of aurality proper is precluded precisely via its transformation into an object of knowledge. This, of course, is familiar to us as the problem of any relation between experience and knowledge. The question, though, is whether the operational difference that is a condition of hearing—where to hear is literally to experience as constant something that is nothing but difference—might be mobilized productively in the context of technological posthumanism. Rather than going in search of the truth of sound, then, this book asks after the diffraction patterns that arise when specific aural experiences are rubbed against specific narrations of human–technology coupling. This is the reason that sound is approached obliquely in this text: though the preceding characterizations of sound may seem simple enough, fully embracing their impact—and sustaining this embrace—requires a method that takes these declarative statements about sound seriously without treating them as true per se, that is, without knowing sound. This is not an easy task: on one hand, we have been routinely lamenting the dominance of the visual as the privileged sensory and aesthetic mode of the “human” of humanism since at least Sartre’s work on the Look in Being and Nothingness, which notes that the “core fantasy of humanism’s trope of vision is to think that perceptual space is organized around and for the looking subject”;4 on the other hand, it remains the case that we haven’t yet learned how to theorize the force of sound in its opposition to this modality, as an “undissolvable residuum” that hollows itself.5

It is precisely the forceful quality of sound that makes it an agent of modulation that can help to amplify certain elements of narratives of human–technology coupling, making them audible. This is particularly crucial today, when the signs of technological posthumanism have become so ubiquitous that most of us, on most occasions, have ceased to take notice. Indeed, our navigations through diverse realities and our negotiations with aggressive technological couplings are no longer even really remarkable: e-mail and video chats, certainly, but also genetically modified foods, text messaging, online classes, virtual exercise routines, and complex relational databases are all part of our daily lives. As a result, our perceptive apparatuses are constantly tuned to diverse and often contradictory frequencies, but in a way that tends to play out any incongruities as part of what and who we are as humans. Indeed, many of us are more likely to feel the absence of these technologies than their presence: for example, I myself have frequently felt a visceral frustration at not having Internet access while driving; a question pops into my head and—before becoming aware of my physical situation—I can feel my body reaching for the Internet to answer it. What feels incongruent is not having the Internet available, as it forces me back into the confines of a body that I no longer identify as being the sum total of my self. Moreover, even as I feel this bodily recontainment as a reductive violence played out on my consciousness, I nonetheless continue to hurtle along the highway at a speed that insists that I, too, am propelled, just as much as my automobile.

Two things are revealed in this scenario, which is a classic example of how contemporary technologies disrupt the long-held assumption that “our bodies are isomorphic or at least ‘proper’ with ourselves”:6 first, that to the extent that our subjectivity pertains to our actions in the world, we are compelled to think of ourselves through the lens of technology; second, that this has always been the case. Of course, if the second point is true, then we can safely say that the first point is not a new one. However, one feature that separates our current mixed reality—the mixed reality of digital and analog technologies—from that of the past is precisely the fact that we are able to marvel at our own ability to navigate so seamlessly from one realm to another. As Mark Hansen notes, the question of how we can accomplish this feat so fluidly “did not need to be posed so long as perceptual experience (with only atypical exceptions) remained within a single experiential frame—so long, that is, as experience typically occurred within a single perceptual world as a coupling to a single form of extension or homogeneous outside.”7

Thus, with the dramatically increasing prevalence of digital technologies in contemporary Western culture, the end of the twentieth century witnessed an important shift in the poststructuralist project of the deconstruction of the subject. The otherness of the Other that is constitutive of the modern subject, for example, is now understood to be predicated on technologies of reflection and language. Technology has entered into the discourse at the ground level. Though this is in itself not particularly novel—the linguistic turn might be understood precisely as the recognition that discourse is always-already in some sense technological—the evolved relation with technology that characterizes contemporary culture strikingly reorients the terms in question. This new cultural inclination is what is captured under Stephen Johnson’s nomination of our present historical moment as interface culture, a term he “wields to embrace not only the ubiquity of computers and electronic devices but also the way in which interface has come to function as a kind of trope or cultural organizing principle.”8 More radically, Lev Manovich has positioned the (relational) database as a symbolic form that has replaced, in contemporary Western culture, the privileging of conventional linear narrative that operated in the age of cinema. In the logic of the database, individual items are collected in such a way that “every item has the same significance as any other,”9 so that the signification processes of traditional causal sequences are severely troubled.

What has changed, then, is not simply the technologies with which we interact but our conception of technology itself. As numerous theorists from diverse disciplines have argued, technologies today can no longer be adequately thought through the lens of “extension” but must instead be understood as profoundly implicated in our being. That is, technologies are not tools that we use, nor objects in relation to which we are servomechanisms, but are rather pathways through a relational ontology (which may be another way of saying that technologies are also all those things that they are not). This is the sense in which the subject is thought as a technology in this study, where the latter indicates (like Agamben’s “apparatus”) “literally anything that has in some way the capacity to capture, orient, determine, intercept, model, control, or secure the gestures, behaviors, opinions, or discourses of living beings.”10 In short, rather than being characterized in terms of the subject’s relation to the social, today’s subject is first thought in relation to technology. As a result, N. Katherine Hayles seems to have been correct in her prediction that twenty-first-century debates “are likely to center not so much on the tension between the liberal humanist tradition and the posthuman, but on different versions of the posthuman as they continue to evolve in conjunction with intelligent machines.”11

Indeed, this recursive feedback loop is actually contained in McLuhan’s well-known tetradic reading of technology, which describes individual technologies (including “software” technologies such as languages and ideas) as nodal points in a field comprised of enhancement, obsolescence, retrieval, and reversal potential.12 E-mail, for example, might be said to enhance one-to-many communication, but pushed to its extreme, this enhancement flips into its opposite, which we know by the name of “spam.” Similarly, e-mail can be said to obsolesce letter writing in favor of the interactivity and informality that had previously been dominant in oral communication, which it retrieves in a new form (importantly, letter writing nonetheless persists precisely through its obsolescence, taking on a new quality of almost unavoidable intimacy in this new context). For McLuhan, these four “laws of media” collectively stem from the premise that “each of man’s artefacts is in fact a kind of word, a metaphor that translates experience from one form into another,”13 so that artifacts of both hardware (i.e., a table, or a stick) and software (i.e., an idea, or a preposition) nature are understood by McLuhan as extensions of a human body (which includes that body’s mind). However, the simultaneity of each vector—that is, the fact that every enhancement carries with it a simultaneous reversal potential, obsolescence, and retrieval—in combination with the present ubiquity of intelligent machines has ultimately decentered this human body, specifically by suggesting that the body itself, as well as subjectivity, is invested by technology.

If subjectivity can be understood as a particular and fluid combination of McLuhan’s four intensities, then questions of identity are replaced by (or at least supplemented with) questions of procedure. As a result, the discourse of technological posthumanism—inasmuch as the term can capture what is a diverse and often contradictory assemblage of thinkers— is not a project of redefining subjectivity, humanity, or the individual so much as it is one of considering the conditions, exclusions, and performativities of these terms. Thus my research treats a discursive wrangling around the subject—or “selfhood”14—as the first meaning of “technological posthumanism,” an approach that emphasizes “the boundary-making practices by which the ‘human’ and its others are differentially delineated and defined.”15

Whatever (technological) posthumanism may or may not suggest, it is clear that the term registers a coimplication of technology and the subject, what Mark Poster has described (using the term humachine) as an “intimate mixing of human and machine that constitutes an interface outside of the subject/object binary.”16 In thus registering the term first as a nexus of discursive relations, I take my cue from Herbrecter and Callus, who argue that

posthumanism, as the name of a discourse, suggests an episteme which comes “after” humanism (“post-humanism”) or even after the human itself (“post-human-ism”). Implicit in both these articulations is a sense of the supplanting operations wrought by time, and of the obsolescence in question affecting not simply humanism as displaced episteme but also, more radically, the notion and nature of the human as fact and idea.17

Indeed, Neil Badmington goes a step further in arguing that—in light of critical theory since at least Lacan—“humanism never manages to constitute itself [but instead] forever rewrites itself as posthumanism.”18 As a result, although the term technological posthumanism does not indicate something fixed or concrete, it nonetheless captures the relation of humans and technology in a way that allows it to act as the basis—the starting point—for further investigations in other areas. Considered in the context of the ever-increasing rate of proliferation of new technologies, this meaning may well chart the path of humanity’s futurity, declaiming the terms of registration for new ideas and new ways of thinking the limits of possibility.

All the preceding points to what is indicated by the neologism that titles this book, humanesis: the suffix -esis can indicate both a state and a process, and posthumanism in the broadest sense might be initially defined as a recognition that the static term human has entered into discourse, where it flows, mutates, amplifies, exchanges, and propagates according to the various and often paradoxical logics of language. What I am calling technological posthumanism, then, considers more specifically how the subtending discursive vectors of technology modulate these movements, altering their affordances. In this way, considering “the human” discursively is not a reduction but rather an avowal, and one that emphasizes (as I demonstrate throughout this book) deconstruction as a performative theory of media and meaning in the broadest possible sense.

As I will argue throughout this text, then, what is at stake in each of the competing versions of technological posthumanism that are considered herein is the perspective from which such changes are registered. That is, each perspective is supported by a disavowed system of values—by a specific set of assumptions—so that what must ultimately be thought are the ways in which these values are sublimated and normalized by each perspective and what is at stake in each competing strain’s emergence as a potentially dominant cultural logic.

If subjectivity is to be approached in terms of technology, then it follows that media art—art involving contemporary (usually digital) technologies—offers significant insight into the specific constitution of contemporary subject positions. Hayles supports this view, remarking,

If art not only teaches us to understand our experiences in new ways but actually changes experience itself, [new media] artworks engage us in ways that make vividly real the emergence of ideas of the body and experiences of embodiment from our interactions with increasingly information-rich environments. They teach us what it means to be posthuman in the best sense.19

Indeed, the existence of at least some minimal relation between art and subjectivity has long been established so that Hayles’s point here is basically that the tradition of studying the subject (or individual) in light of its contemporary artistic and literary output has been maintained through the transition to digital culture. What is strange, though, is that even though early characterizations of electric culture (the embryo of digital culture) regularly operated through critiques of the privilege afforded to vision in contemporary culture20—and even though the worldviews that have sprung from refocusing on haptic and sonic perceptual apparatuses have been mobilized against this hegemony—there remains a relative dearth of study that focuses specifically on the role (and constitution) of sound in media art’s performances of the subject (this despite the relatively recent emergence of sound studies as a field of inquiry unto itself). To understand the extent of this omission, consider that as recently as 2004, Johanna Drucker argued that “the idea that visual representation has the capacity to serve as a primary tool of knowledge production [was at that time] an almost foreign notion to most humanists.”21 If the digital humanities are currently only in the nascent stages of contesting the exclusion of the visual in its own right (i.e., in its extratextual mediality), the aural has been almost entirely neglected.22 Thus, although each of the theorists who acts as a nodal point in this study has devoted significant effort to reading artworks through his or her theoretical model, the works are only rarely considered in terms of their sound. This exclusion implies, to my ears, that sound in some way threatens this discourse; this book goes in search of the politics and implications of this exclusion.

There are, of course, exceptions to this omission, theoretical noises (in the best sense) often sounded by thinkers with one ear tuned to undermining the hegemonic (disciplinary) politics of music. Christoph Cox, Paul Hegarty, Douglas Kahn, Brandon Labelle, Paul D. Miller (aka DJ Spooky), Charles Mudede, and Jonathan Sterne all variously exemplify this important work. However, when Mudede (for example) thinks the turntable as “a repurposed object [that is] robbed of its initial essence [but] is soon refilled by a new essence,”23 what is being thought is not really specific to the sound of the turntable. That is, Mudede’s turntable is foremost a cultural artifact rather than a medial one in that everything ascribed to the turntable could conceivably take place without the medium of sound (though perhaps not without music).24 This difference points to a necessary clarification of my own project: my mobilization of sound in this study is not intended to intervene with musical discourse nor to claim a privileged status for sound. Instead, this book takes advantage of sound’s pronounced mediality—in the sense that sound art “has nothing but mediations to show for itself”25—to trouble the assumptions that underwrite the theorists in question. After all, sound remains (rightly or not) the test of presence, even if Derrida has taught us that this is a test that will always fail.

The body of this book is a critical discourse analysis of three strains of technological posthumanism that emphasizes the cultural–political stakes of each, the way that each instance of humanesis—the putting-into-discourse of the human—directs our understanding of human–technology coupling along different evaluative vectors. This emphasis is lent support by readings of contemporary media artworks that are intended to probe a specific (posthumanist) problematic raised with respect to each theorist and to avow the study’s own unavoidable role in constructing the discourse that it describes. To this end, these artistic analyses are attentive to the medial specificities of the works they consider and give particular emphasis to the role that sound—as introduced at the beginning of this introduction—plays in their relational networks. Taken together, then, technology is at the center of every level of this project: as the forms of selfhood that are exemplified in each strain of technological posthumanism (i.e., technologies of subjectivity); as the material conditions and (often) the aesthetic ground of the media art practices considered; and as the mode in which these considerations are collected into a unified text. Pairing the centripetal force of theoretical close readings with the (imaginary but no less visceral) centrifugal flights of artistic practice, this project introduces a new, procedural understanding of the inductive theoretical knowledge that is already in play at the junction of technology, media art, and subjectivity. In short, this approach attends to the particularities of cultural production in their own right, emphasizing not only the ways that theory is supported by cultural practices but also the ways in which the latter tend to elude theoretical discourse. This understanding not only enhances the theoretical milieu within which this study operates but also transfigures it through a rejuvenated emphasis on the praxis of meaning-formation in its inductive capacity.26

The theoretical content of this book is focused around three thinkers: Ollivier Dyens, N. Katherine Hayles, and Mark B. N. Hansen. Each of these three offers a different inflection to the study at hand, sending it in disparate directions: Dyens’s Metal and Flesh intensifies Richard Dawkins’s logic of “selfish” genetic reproduction in its cultural aspect, articulating the deterministic challenge to human agency implicitly issued by notions of scientific discourse constructed around measurability, repeatability, and falsifiability. Hayles has been a primary figure in the rise to discursive prominence of technological posthumanism, and the trajectory of her thought charts a genealogy of the future of the technological posthuman that registers the specificity of contemporary technologies in their own right. In this respect, Hayles’s attempts to think beyond what she perceives to be the limits of deconstruction are read here for the contributions that they offer to the discourse, despite her project ultimately being tethered to the humanist values that she seeks to gain traction against. Finally, Hansen’s advocacy for an extralinguistic understanding of embodiment and technics moves against deconstruction from the other side, articulating a fully present body that would precede linguistic ambivalence. Though Hansen’s analyses give an important account of how an operational perspective can inform contemporary thinking about couplings of humans and machines, I argue that the conclusions that he draws from this perspective reinforce (rather than undermine) the tenets of Derridean deconstruction.

Similarly, the artworks considered in tandem with these theorists also each offer a unique perspective. The analysis of Eidola—an exhibition featuring works by William Brent and Ellen Moffat—teases out the exhibit’s challenge to scientific (visual) logic from two sides, showing both that it is haunted by forces that are qualitatively different than those that it registers and that its very signs, pushed to the extreme, turn back on themselves to speak against the terms that conditioned them in the first place. Similarly, the analysis of Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s The Trace reads the telepresence of the piece as demonstrative of the type of complexly contingent agency that Hayles unpacks but also emphasizes (particularly when thought in tandem with Judith Butler’s theory of melancholic subjectivity) the ethical ambivalence that obtains in the performative dimension of this situation. Moreover, since The Trace is an exemplary piece of early telepresent art, studying it gives purchase on media art’s points of departure from traditional disciplinary practices as well as the ontological assumptions that are built into these practices. Finally, the analysis of Skewed Remote Musical Performance (SRMP)—a collaborative practice between William Brent and me—exemplifies the rich entanglement that Hansen deems characteristic of our present historical moment but also reiterates the extent to which meaning construction remains, even in the context of ubiquitous media, conditioned by linguistic practice. In this context, if Hansen’s thought points a digital finger back toward analog subjectivity, SRMP might be said to perform the inverse gesture, insisting on the impossibility of inscribing an originary status to either analog or digital realities.

Clearly, if the theoretical chapters of this book are aimed at thinkers whose influence in their field is—to varying degrees—self-evident, the same cannot be said of the artistic analyses found in the accompanying chapters. Although ample justification for each selection can be found—I believe—in the analyses themselves, a more general note about their selection may also be helpful: quite simply, these works were not chosen in an attempt to articulate a canon of new media art, nor because they are particularly “important” in a grand historical sense; instead, the artistic chapters of this book move in the doubled motion of lines of flight, on one hand deterritorializing the relatively linear narrative that otherwise characterizes the book, while on the other hand reterritorializing my own position in the study and thereby acknowledging my role—as a seemingly objective analyst—in constructing the facts that I seek to describe. With respect to the former movement, these works are each intended to remind the reader, in different ways, that this study does not aim to contain the discourse of technological posthumanism but rather to unpack an instance of it. Regarding the inverse trajectory, the artworks are selected in part because they are each at a different personal distance from my own artistic practice: I have a conventional objective relation with The Trace, a profoundly personal relation with SRMP (as its co-creator), and a less personal but still deeply informed relation with Eidola (as co-curator of the exhibition). By thus situating myself in multiple ways, I hope to acknowledge my own subject positions but also to open a space of indetermination within the broader narrative(s) of the book. That is, I have taken it to be a truism throughout this study that content is always context specific; in selecting works that access qualitatively different strata of knowledge (within myself), I hope that this will be all the more explicit. Put differently, these chapters support the conditions for second-order observation—or “observation of observations”27—that serve to more expressly situate them in the study, but their particularities suggest that the reverse is also true, namely, that the discourses of technological posthumanism discussed offer fresh perspectives on many of the salient concerns of media art. Thus the ambivalent relation of the artistic and theoretical chapters—themselves also internally ambivalent—ultimately also redoubles the emphasis on performativity that obtains throughout the book, thereby desublimating the “indissoluble mingling”28 of aesthetics, technology, subjectivity, and ideology that each performs.

Chapter 1, “From Genes to Memes: Ollivier Dyens and the Scientific Posthumanism of Darwinian Evolution,” reads the detachment of embodiment from biology described in the theoretical work of Ollivier Dyens.29 In Metal and Flesh, Dyens updates Richard Dawkins’s “selfish gene” argument to insist that the dominance of information in our current media-rich environment results in a human body that exceeds humanist notions of embodiment. In this context, Dyens frequently cites the cyborg as the posthuman body par excellence, claiming that the cyborg is a “living being whose identity, history, and presence are formulated by technology and defined by culture.”30 In this characterization, there is perhaps an inflection of advocacy in Dyens’s writing, eliding with the transhumanist perspective that we are evolving rather than, for example, shifting toward—or always-already implicated in—technological posthumanism.31 Indeed, the notion of evolution is central to Dyens’s thought, which argues that our species’s modus operandi—which he believes is the desire to survive and to reproduce—has shifted from a biological register to a cultural one, such that desire is now configured around seeking out “culturally fertile bodies.”32 What arises from this perspective, though, is a constitution of “life” that risks tautology: if life is defined, a priori, in terms of evolution, what is really being said when we chart evolving processes outside of the traditional domains of the living as constituting life? I argue that this looming tautology—of which Dyens is certainly aware—constitutes a primary driving force in Metal and Flesh, leading Dyens to the necessity of pointing to science as a purveyor of certain measurable truths, even as he retreats from these very claims.33 Thus this chapter treats Dyens’s understanding of life itself technologically, asking “what kind of regulatory apparatus it works in the service of”34 and what constitutions of the posthuman it might foreclose. In short, this chapter asks what privilege there is to scientific knowledge and how this privilege is written into Dyens’s technological posthumanism.

Ultimately, chapter 1 conducts a hauntology of the positivist definition of life that Dyens extrapolates from Dawkins. In chapter 2, “Dark Matters: An Eidolic Collision of Sound and Vision,” the invisible forces that this haunting suggests are further explored by considering the mixed-media exhibition Eidola in relation to two related but distinct metaphors: ghosts and dark matter. From these tropes, the chapter argues that Eidola stages an encounter between disciplinary biases of sonic and visual art practices, accentuating how both are infused with a part of the other that they cannot avow. Showing that the sound of Eidola is a blind spot in its visual observation, the chapter argues that this operates equally to trouble both the exhibit’s sonic and visual components, even as it asserts the relation between the two. Ultimately, then, sound intervenes in this reading as a dual identity that is simultaneously Other and interior to vision: whereas dark matter is visible only through its invisibility—through its gravitational pull on visibility itself—Eidola suggests that we might instead hear dark matter as a kind of sonic delirium that, rather than being a structuring principle, puts the lie to structure itself.

In a sense, both of the first two chapters revolve around a scientific means of constructing knowledge that has contributed to a contemporary understanding of “information,” with Dyens intensifying this logic and Eidola troubling the positive substantial claims that it implies. Moving this line of inquiry in a new direction, chapter 3, “N. Katherine Hayles and Humanist Technological Posthumanism,” engages the work of Hayles in its attempt to think beyond deconstruction. To this end, the chapter comprises close readings of key terms in Hayles’s popular and well-respected “posthuman trilogy” of Writing Machines, How We Became Posthuman, and My Mother Was a Computer, giving particular attention to her renderings of intermediation, distributed cognition, and embodiment as well as to the ways that her conception of materiality as an “evolving property created through dynamic interactions”35 evolves over the course of the texts. Ultimately, the chapter argues that Hayles’s enormously influential construction of technological posthumanism is best read as a recombinant humanism that more readily connects (for better and worse) to an established system of human values than it does to the operations of the media that are its subject. In this, Hayles aligns with her fellow literary critic Fredric Jameson’s belief that “narrative itself is the inevitable means by which we attempt to make sense of the Real of history: we don’t have to narrate the way we do, but we do have to narrate.”36

Chapter 4, “The Trace: Melancholy and Posthuman Ethics,” mobilizes Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s participatory telepresent installation The Trace in relation to the call for an embodied understanding of information pronounced in Hayles’s technological posthumanism. In particular, this problematic is taken up by reading The Trace with and against Judith Butler’s account of melancholic subjectivity, specifically as it is articulated in Antigone’s Claim.37 Through this lens, I argue that the subjectivity performed in The Trace unilaterally reduces the participants’ modes of relating to one another. However, rather than either authoring a dematerialized body or evincing a priority of embodiment, this reduction allows the piece to function as a critique of the unilateral narratives that it performs and also of the symbolic form of relation itself as it obtains in Butler. As a result, The Trace exists in a tension with both vectors of (de)materialization that, ultimately, positions their relation as the terrain of its posthumanist ethics. In turn, this poses a significant challenge to Hayles’s (foundational) attachment to the possibility of nonhegemonic meaning, reemphasizing the containment of her thought in a language of value.

Chapter 5, “From Affect to Affectivity: Mark B. N. Hansen’s Organismic Posthumanism,” examines a construction of technological posthumanism that, in a sense, attempts to move beyond such containment by prioritizing an operational perspective. Whereas Hayles registers the complex intermediating feedback loops that compose the relation between bodies and the world of technology, Hansen sidesteps this problematic in favor of a notion of “primary subjectivity” in which the subject is constituted through affective spatiality (or “affectivity”). In this context, the chapter investigates Hansen’s attempt to give a robust account of technology in its extralinguistic dimension by evincing an “‘originary’ coupling of the human and the technical” that grounds experience as such and that “can only be known through its effects.”38 Ultimately, the chapter finds that Hansen’s perspective remains haunted by the representational logic that it moves against. However, this observation does not repudiate Hansen’s argument as such but rather rejects one of its central underlying implications: that the extradiscursive materiality of technology might be accessed, linguistically, without biasing it in a way that is foreign to this materiality. To this end, the chapter articulates Hansen’s argument for an affective topology of the senses, corroborating the increased importance of digital technologies in this perspective through a brief comparison of Robert Lazzarini’s skulls (as read by Hansen) and my own piece Sound. From this comparison, I ultimately argue that what is accomplished by Hansen’s putting-into-discourse of technesis is, paradoxically, a restaging (and perhaps even a heightening) of the constitutive ambivalence of deconstruction that he seeks to undermine.

If the organismic posthumanism of chapter 5 performs an intensification of the paradoxical (deconstructive) causality that it disavows, chapter 6, “Skewed Remote Musical Performance: Sounding Deconstruction,” discusses an art practice that makes this performance explicit. To this end, the chapter addresses the SRMP practice that I codeveloped with William Brent, giving particular emphasis to the way that it nominates sound as a paradoxical relationality that reaches toward the “fieldness” (in McLuhan’s sense) of this relationality precisely by refusing to give sonic instantiations (i.e., sounds) primary status.39 In this context, embodied organisms do not overdetermine their representations (as Hansen would have it) but rather coexist with them via complex intermediating networks. Ultimately, then, SRMP models a way in which sound disjunctively intervenes in constructions of presence and absence, opening its practitioners to a relational play that not only moves between those two poles but also constructs them as poles (even as it is constructed by them).

Inevitably, this text falls prey in advance to the danger that it seeks to confront; namely, in the effort to reverse the flow of theory to practice, my use of (relatively) rational argumentation and conventional language as the medium of presentation renders my effort a paradoxical one. In response, I can only insist that my aim is not to construct a metaperspective from which theories of posthumanism can be considered but instead to investigate the flows and intensities that come to the surface when an effort is made to hold competing perspectives in tension with one another. To this end, the concluding chapter of this book focuses less on summarizing the text’s claims than it does on emphasizing their contingency: if the body of the text—especially the theoretical chapters—tends to account for its fields of study in descriptive language, the conclusion reiterates the extent to which the rhetoric of this approach masks its own inevitable biases. In this sense, the conclusion reminds the reader that though the text describes three technologies of posthumanism, it also performs a fourth.