Notes

1. Brenda Laurel, as cited in Frances Dyson, Sounding New Media: Immersion and Embodiment in the Arts and Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 140.

2. Aden Evens, Sound Ideas: Music, Machines, and Experience (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), 1.

3. Indeed, I think this difficulty in placing sounds is—in part—why we can still note the dearth of studies that focus on sound, even at a time when sound studies has both proliferated as an important element of disciplines such as film studies, media studies, and communications and had found traction as a discipline in its own right. I comment further on this distinction later in the introduction.

4. Cary Wolfe, What Is Posthumanism? (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 132.

5. Ibid., 196.

6. Eugene Thacker, The Global Genome: Biotechnology, Politics, and Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2005), 310.

7. Mark B. N. Hansen, Bodies in Code: Interfaces with Digital Media (New York: Routledge, 2006), 8.

8. Matthew G. Kirschenbaum, “‘So the Colors Cover the Wires’: Interface, Aesthetics, and Usability,” in A Companion to Digital Humanities, ed. S. Schreibman, R. Siemens, and J. Unsworth (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), http://www.digitalhumanities.org/companion/.

9. Lev Manovich, “Database as Symbolic Form,” in Database Aesthetics: Art in the Age of Information, ed. Victoria Vesna (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 39.

10. In the context of this formulation, in What Is an Apparatus? and Other Essays (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2009), 14, Agamben takes the subject to be “that which results from the relation and, so to speak, from the relentless fight between living beings and apparatuses.”

11. N. Katherine Hayles, My Mother Was a Computer: Digital Subjects and Literary Texts (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 2.

12. Crucially, McLuhan (with his son Eric) indicates in Laws of Media (Toronto, Ont.: University of Toronto Press, 1988), 9, that these laws are “scientific” in that they are testable, universally applicable, and yield repeatable results. Framed as questions, and intended to be asked simultaneously, the tetrad is: What does the artifact enhance, intensify, make possible, or accelerate? What is obsolesced by the artifact? What older, previously obsolesced ground is brought back and inheres in the new form? And finally, what will the new form reverse into when pushed to its extreme?

13. Ibid., 3.

14. D. Harlan Wilson, Technologized Desire: Selfhood and the Body in Postcapitalist Science Fiction (Hyattsville, Md.: Guide Dog Books, 2009).

15. Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2007), 136.

16. Mark Poster, “The Information Empire,” Comparative Literature Studies 41, no. 3 (2004): 318.

17. S. Herbrechter and I. Callus, “What’s Wrong with Posthumanism?” Rhizomes 7 (2003), http://www.rhizomes.net/issue7/callus.htm.

18. Neil Badmington, “Introduction: Approaching Posthumanism,” in Posthumanism, ed. Neil Badmington (New York: Palgrave, 2000), 9.

19. N. Katherine Hayles, Writing Machines (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2002), 303.

20. McLuhan is again notable in this respect.

21. Johanna Drucker and Bethany Nowviskie, “Speculative Computing: Aesthetic Provocations in Humanities Computing,” in A Companion to Digital Humanities, ed. S. Schreibman, R. Siemens, and J. Unsworth (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), http://www.digitalhumanities.org/companion/; emphasis added.

22. Following Hansen’s definition in Bodies in Code, 22, the adjective medial here marks “the specificity of analyses concerned with the materiality of the medium and of media generally.”

23. Charles Mudede, “The Turntable,” CTheory (2003), http://www.ctheory.net/articles/aspx?id=382.

24. To be clear, I mention this point to highlight a key difference between Mudede’s project and my own rather than to mount a critique of his argumentation.

25. Antoine Hennion, “Music and Mediation: Toward a New Sociology of Music,” in The Cultural Study of Music: A Critical Introduction, ed. M. Clayton, T. Herbert, and R. Middleton (London: Routledge, 2003), 84.

26. I use the term praxis in the sense that Agamben does in What Is an Apparatus?, 9—to indicate “a practical activity that must face a problem and a particular situation each and every time.” Here the term indicates that though posthumanism serves as a dominant critical lens through which I critique the artistic practices in question, the reverse is also the case.

27. Niklas Luhmann, as cited in Wolfe, What Is Posthumanism?, 231.

28. Bruno Latour, “Morality and Technology: The End of the Means,” Theory, Culture, and Society 19, nos. 5–6 (2002): 248.

29. Dyens’s theoretical work exists in the context of his notable efforts to compile (and creatively present) existing theories of posthumanism (often under other names, including “inhumanism,” “transhumanism,” and “humachinism”). These efforts doubly nominate him as a key figure of posthumanism.

30. Ollivier Dyens, Metal and Flesh: The Evolution of Man: Technology Takes Over (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2001), 82. Note that cyborgs also function in Dyens’s thought as literal instantiations of the “cultural bodies” that we all today possess. The cyborg metaphor does not, for Dyens, employ future technological advances (i.e., “brain cameras” and supersensitive hearing) to show where humans are heading but rather employs now obsolesced technologies (i.e., human flesh) to elucidate what we no longer are. Dyens’s cyborg metaphor is, strictly, spoken from the perspective of a postcyborg.

31. For a distilled version of the type of advocacy for technological extensions of the human that characterizes transhumanism, see the World Transhumanist Association’s “Transhumanist Declaration,” available from http://transhumanism.org/index.php/WTA/declaration/.

32. Dyens, Metal and Flesh, 20.

33. As one example, Dyens argues in Metal and Flesh, 19–21, that standards of female beauty have remained fixed in proportion throughout our species’s history and that this points to certain primal biological desires. What makes this assertion specifically scientific is not its subject (beauty) but the presumption that beauty constitutes a unified, testable, and falsifiable object of study, thus satisfying the criteria for scientific laws that McLuhan explains in Laws of Media, 3.

34. Judith Butler, “Competing Universalities,” in Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left, ed. J. Butler, E. Laclau, and S. Žižek (New York: Verso, 2000), 157.

35. Hayles, My Mother Was a Computer, 3.

36. Cited in Stephen Ross, introduction to Modernism and Theory (New York: Routledge, 2009), 3.

37. Judith Butler, Antigone’s Claim: Kinship between Life and Death (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000).

38. Hansen, Bodies in Code, 9.

39. The quality of “fieldness” is frequently found in McLuhan’s accounts of acoustic space, where it refers to a space created by a set of relations (rather than being a physical container of relations). Richard Cavell cites McCaffery in McLuhan in Space: A Cultural Geography (Toronto, Ont.: University of Toronto Press, 2003), who notes that the dominant logic in such spaces is one of “event rather than . . . Euclidean [spatial geometry]” (157). This quality is often cited as a connection between acoustic space (as theorized by McLuhan) and contemporary theories of virtuality.

1. In this chapter, the term scientific is used nominally. Emphatically, it is not intended to lumpenly reify all of science within the scope of this critique and should not be understood to refer to a universal “science.” Instead, the term points back at the specific strains of scientific and evolutionary discourse that produce it in the sense that it is presented here.

2. Ollivier Dyens, The Inhuman Continent: A Knowledge Interface (2006), http://www.laconditioninhumaine.org/.

3. Ollivier Dyens, Continent X (1993), http://www.continentx.uqam.ca/.

4. John Doris, “Do You Know What You’re Doing?” in On the Human, http://onthehuman.org/.

5. Ibid. Interestingly, Baudrillard seems to have anticipated these findings in Paroxysm: Interviews with Phillippe Petit (New York: Verso, 1998), 46, by arguing that “the will is always retrospective, [coming only] to sanction something that has already taken place. . . . You do something, and retrospectively, you conceive the plan.”

6. Jacques Lacan, The Seminar, Book XI, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, trans. Alan Sheridan (1964; London: Hogarth Press and Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1977), 232.

7. Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), 20.

8. While Dawkins’s insistence on the relative importance—in Darwinian evolution—of genetic processes over those of individual species seems an obvious one, it is worth noting that it is a point that still today remains astonishingly unconsidered in popular North American culture, so completely ingrained is the notion of species mutation. Philosopher and aesthetician Denis Dutton, for example, is currently receiving significant acclaim for his book The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure, and Human Evolution (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2009), which includes a reading of Darwin that places sexual selection alongside (rather than subsidiary to) natural selection, an argument that Dutton deems necessary to explain seemingly nonevolutionary decisions of humans. Although—as will become clear—I agree that the narrative of genetic evolution underdetermines certain excessive behaviors, the excessive character of these behaviors is precisely what precludes Dutton’s teleological account. For a discussion of how this relates to artistic production, see the third chapter of Elizabeth Grosz’s Chaos, Territory, Art: Deleuze and the Framing of the Earth (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008).

9. Dawkins, Selfish Gene, 190.

10. Ibid., 192.

11. Ibid., 193.

12. Ibid., 192. Ironically, the term meme has itself become a meme and today popularly signifies an idea or idiom that enters into common Internet usage. For example, idioms such as “ttyl” (meaning “talk to you later”) are memes, as are popular stories, as are Internet actions such as “Rick-rolling” someone (wherein a hyperlink is posted to an Internet message forum that appears to direct to a topical item but actually sends the user to a Rick Astley video on YouTube).

13. Ibid.

14. Joel Slayton, foreword to Dyens, Metal and Flesh.

15. Dyens is not, of course, alone in this observation. As Mark Hansen notes in “Media Theory,” Theory, Culture, and Society 23, nos. 2–3: 299, for example, Bernard Stiegler follows paleontologist André Leroi-Gourhan in contending that human beings “evolve by passing on their knowledge through culture [such that they] are ‘essentially’ technical and have been so from their very ‘origin.’ In order to differentiate it from strictly zoological evolution, Stiegler thus defines human evolution as irreducibly both biological and cultural; it occurs as a process that he dubs ‘epiphylogenesis,’ evolution through means other than life, [such that] the logic of the living [is contaminated] with the distinct and always concrete operation of technics.”

In a different vein, Donna Haraway has also consistently and notably advocated for understanding semiotics and materiality as two aspects of the same thing, insisting in “Morphing in the Order: Flexible Strategies, Feminist Science Studies, and Primate Revisions,” in Primate Encounters, ed. Shirley Strum and Linda Fedigan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 400, that “material-semiotic is one word for [her].” Finally, the notion of artificial life, a term coined by Christopher Langton, is predicated on this understanding, with M. Mitchell Waldrop quoting Langton, in Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992), 321, as noting that “evolution hasn’t stopped. It’s still going on, exhibiting many of the same phenomena it did in biological history—except that now it’s taking place on the social-cultural plane.”

16. Dyens, Metal and Flesh, 15.

17. Ibid.

18. In How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 6, N. Katherine Hayles half-jokingly describes her “sleep agent” as competing with her “food agent” to dictate her next activity.

19. Dyens, Metal and Flesh, 10.

20. Arthur Kroker, The Possessed Individual: Technology and the French Postmodern, CultureTexts (Montreal, Quebec: New World Perspectives, 1992). Reversing Kroker’s metaphor but amounting to a similar thing, Baudrillard argued in Paroxysm, 19, that “today, whether it be groups, nations or individuals, people are no longer fighting alienation but a kind of total dispossession.”

21. Langdon Winner, The Whale and the Reactor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988).

22. Dyens, Metal and Flesh, 18. In the glossary of Metal and Flesh, 110, Dyens defines technological society as follows: “The era in which we currently live and within whose framework we conceive of technology as the ultimate idea, or the norm by which everything is defined, judged, and evaluated.” He notes further that this connects to Neil Postman’s definition of technopoly as a state of culture (and also a state of mind) that “consists in the deification of technology, which means that the culture seeks its authorization in technology, finds its satisfaction in technology, and takes its orders from technology” (110).

23. Ibid., 18.

24. Ibid., 10.

25. Ibid., 88–89.

26. Dyens thinks this question with greater nuance than this simplistic rendering suggests, specifically in Metal and Flesh, 45–46, when he considers Doyne Farmer’s criteria for life. However, the specter of tautology remains active in his assertion that “living beings must be able to manipulate representations, for this is how they protect their biological integrity” (46). From this claim, for example, Dyens argues that viruses are included on the continuum of life, which contravenes the more conventional view—as Stephen Luper relates in The Philosophy of Death (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009)—that viruses are not “living things since they are neither organisms nor components of organisms” (14).

27. Stevan Harnad, “On Fodor on Darwin on Evolution,” draft published under Creative Commons Attribution No Derivatives (2009), 2. Fodor’s lecture was given as part of the Hugh LeBlanc Lecture Series at the Université du Québec à Montréal, where Harnad serves as Canada Research Chair in cognitive sciences.

28. Ibid., 3.

29. Ibid., 2.

30. Dawkins, Selfish Gene, 4; emphasis mine.

31. This characterization draws on Baudrillard’s description of the orders of simulation in Simulations (Los Angeles, Calif.: Semiotext(e), 1983), 83–92.

32. Arjun Appadurai, “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy,” Theory, Culture, and Society 7, nos. 2–3 (1990): 216–54.

33. Mark Poster, What’s the Matter with the Internet? (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001). Poster charts the coevolution of certain cultural norms and print technologies. McLuhan also discussed this issue extensively throughout his oeuvre; see also “Flickering Connectivities in Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl,” in Hayles, My Mother Was a Computer, 143–67.

34. E.g., governments do not prohibit telepathic voyeurism because the laws of physics presumably preclude the need for them. Here again, McLuhan showed remarkable foresight in his prediction that electric communications would lead to a “discarnate man” that is constitutively immoral because he has no “natural law,” in contrast to, for example, the “natural” laws of embodiment.

35. Especially in technologies of vision, which have dominated the medical and biotech industries (i.e., detailed medical exams, DNA analysis, synthetic biology).

36. Dyens, Metal and Flesh, 33.

37. Ibid.

38. Ibid., 19.

39. This problem can also be stated as follows: memes represent a detachment of processes of reproduction from biology, but biology is constitutive of these processes in the sense that it provides the lens through which a link between reproduction and survival is evinced. Thus memes require the very notion of genetic biology that they obsolesce.

40. To be clear, just because a technology is obsolesced does not mean that it ceases to be active. In fact, most cases of obsolescence simultaneously enhance an aspect of the technology that was not previously figured. Thus, for example, e-mail might be said to obsolesce letter writing as a form of communication, but this obsolescence endows letter writing with an increased quality of intimacy (and, often, formality) that it did not previously possess. Thus, whereas certain technologies of letter writing are obsolesced by e-mail, others are (necessarily) enhanced; letter writing itself does not exist—technologically—except as a means of designating a field of relations that these other technologies enact.

41. Kroker, Possessed Individual, 13.

42. David Cecchetto and Émile Fromet de Rosnay, Video Interview with Ollivier Dyens (2009), http://davidcecchetto.net/research.html.

43. Transhumanists advocate for the technological extension of human capabilities. As such, the movement’s symbol is H+, standing for “human enhancement,” and might thereby be thought—as Cary Wolfe has suggested in What Is Posthumanism?, xv—as an intensification of humanism’s predicates. Indeed, Nick Bostrom (a recognized leader of the movement) explicitly states that transhumanism “has its roots in secular humanism” in the official declaration of transhumanist values. See http://humanityplus.org/.

44. Dyens, Metal and Flesh, 19.

45. Ibid., 21.

46. Dyens cites Helena Cronin, a noted Darwinian philosopher and rationalist, who argued that standards of beauty are controlled by organic needs, noting that a waist that is 70 percent of the size of the hips is (1) a historically consistent standard of beauty and (2) a sign of optimal reproductive health (with respect to the subject’s immune system and estrogen levels).

47. An analogous situation continues to play itself out in the field of cognitive psychology, where the discipline has frequently responded to P. J. Rushton’s argument in “Race Differences in Behavior: A Review and Evolutionary Analysis,” Personality and Individual Differences 9, no. 6 (1988): 1009–24, that race is a genetic determinant of IQ by critiquing his statistical data. See also Richard Nisbitt, Intelligence and How to Get It: Why Schools and Cultures Count (New York: W. W. Norton, 2009). Framed in this way, though, the debate neglects the possibility that IQ may actually measure a cultural construction of “whiteness” (for example) rather than (or in addition to) an “objective” value of intelligence (the quotation marks indicating, of course, that this objectivity has its own constitutive biases). If this were the case, then IQ tests would not yield measurements of an objective feature (such as intelligence) but would instead continually remake intelligence in the image of (culturally constructed and constantly shifting) racial boundaries.

48. This is not peculiar to Dawkins. As Simone de Beauvoir notes in The Second Sex, trans. H. M. Parshley (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1952), 10, “all physiologists and biologists use more or less finalistic language, if only because they ascribe meaning to vital phenomena.”

49. Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York: Routledge, 1993), 10.

50. Numerous spiritual perspectives disagree with this assumption: for example, a belief in reincarnation would at least reorient the discussion, as would many conceptions of an afterlife. In an entirely different register, the Derridean “trace” also poses significant challenges to the direct equation of survival and reproduction, as does Hayles’s emphasis on pattern– randomness as supplemental to presence–absence (see chapter 3).

51. N. Katherine Hayles, “Unfinished Work: From Cyborg to Cognisphere,” Theory, Culture, and Society 23, nos. 7–8 (2006): 163.

52. Dyens, Metal and Flesh, 52.

53. Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (New York: Verso, 1989), 32–33.

54. For an extended discussion of this understanding of ideological fantasy, see Slavoj Žižek’s “How Did Marx Invent the Symptom,” in Sublime Object of Ideology, 11–54.

55. Additional evidence that there is something at work in evolutionary theory that has not been accounted for can be found in the political history of the theory itself: what nominated evolution as the challenge to Christian values that it has today become (especially in the United States)? Geologists, after all, had already concluded a hundred years before The Origin of Species that the time scale of Genesis was wrong. This was the case not only in terms of when creation is alleged to have occurred but also with respect to the order and speed at which it occurred. And yet geology is hardly considered a controversial subject in the way that evolution is, suggesting an ideological—rather than a simply factual—difference between heritable genetic traits and a valued notion of evolution.

56. Isabelle Stengers gestures toward this point, arguing in The Invention of Modern Science (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 40, that “the actors in the history of the sciences are not humans ‘in the service of truth,’ if this truth must be defined by criteria that escape history, but humans ‘in the service of history,’ whose problem is to transform history, and to transform it in such a way that their colleagues, but also those who, after them, will write history, are constrained to speak of their invention as a ‘discovery’ that others could have made. The truth, then, is what succeeds in making history in accordance with this constraint.”

57. “Badly analyzed composite” is a Bergsonian term that Gilles Deleuze takes up in Bergsonism (New York: Zone Books, 1988), 86, to claim that science is incapable of understanding the difference between multiplicity and the multiple and thus constitutively spatializes time. In this case, the claim is that scientific analysis collects qualitatively different concepts under a single (quantitative) lens; specific to evolution, Deleuze cites Bergson to claim that its mistake “is to conceive of vital variations as so many actual determinations that should then combine on a single line” (99), in this case, survival.

58. Bruno Latour has convincingly made this point in numerous contexts. For example, he recently noted in “‘It’s Development Stupid!’ Or: How to Modernize Modernization,” RETHINK: Contemporary Art and Climate Change (2009), http://www.rethinkclimate.org/, that, in the traditional narrative of “Progress,” “Science (capital S) is the shibboleth that defines the right direction of the arrow of time because it, and it only, is able to cut into two well separated parts what had remained in the past hopelessly confused: a morass of ideology, emotions and values on the one hand, and, on the other, stark and naked matters of fact.” The point, for Latour, is that science has thus tended to detach the entangled entities of this imbroglio, thereby producing its narrative of emancipation; this point is also well made in Bruno Latour, Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999).

59. Dyens, Metal and Flesh, 62.

60. Ibid., 88.

61. As Hayles notes in My Mother Was a Computer, 26–27, the arrow of emergence in complex systems tends to move in a single direction.

62. In this light, it is notable that complexity only really started to bear fruit for scientists once it was measurable via a “power law distribution,” which indicates that the likelihood of a given event is inversely proportional to the size of its disruption to the system. Prior to this, it was not clear how one could tell, precisely, what was simple and what was complex. As Waldrop, Complexity, 308, notes, though, with power law distributions, “you can tell that a system is at the critical state and/or the edge of chaos [i.e., where emergence takes place] if it shows waves of change and upheaval on all scales and if the size of the changes follows a power law” (emphasis mine). Notably, these power laws were themselves drawn from existing notions of organization and disruption—initially, earthquake fault lines—where the distinction between organization and chaos is more clearly related to empirical evidence than it is in Dyens’s application.

63. Dyens, Metal and Flesh, 27.

64. Kroker, Possessed Individual, 120.

65. To be clear, conflation here does not mean “misrepresentation” or “misattribution.”

66. Philip Mirowski, “Book Review: ‘Metal and Flesh,’ by Ollivier Dyens,” The Information Society 20, no. 65 (2004): 65.

67. Mirowski, ISIS 91, no. 3 (2000): 639–40, offers a more qualified, but no less scathing, review of Hayles’s How We Became Posthuman, similarly citing a lack of substantial scientific knowledge. In Hayles’s case, her significant (but relatively understated) scientific training further suggests that critiques that are grounded in claims to disciplinary privilege (such as Mirowski’s) may belie other unspoken agendas and presumptions.

68. Wolfe, What Is Posthumanism?, 43.

69. Dawkins, Selfish Gene, ix.

70. N. Katherine Hayles, “Desiring Agency: Limiting Metaphors and Enabling Constraints in Dawkins and Deleuze/Guattari,” in SubStance 30, nos. 1–2 (2001): 144.

71. Nicholas Maxwell asks this question (under the alibi of a relatively conservative call for “wisdom” in science) in Is Science Neurotic? (London: Imperial College Press, 2004), arguing that empiricism acts as a metaphysical assumption of scientific inquiry that ultimately leads to irrationality.

72. In this context, it is a useful corrective to note—as Stephen J. Gould does in Rocks of Ages: Science and Religion in the Fullness of Life (New York: Ballantine Books, 1999)—that no fewer than three popes have acknowledged evolution, each insisting that it does not pose a theological problem for Roman Catholicism.

73. In chapter 5, I argue that this remains the case even in Hansen’s reading of autopoietic theory, through which he attempts to structure the viewer’s contingency into his claims.

74. Luhmann, as cited in Wolfe, What Is Posthumanism?, 122. All this points to a more general question with respect to Dyens’s thought: is it that acquisition of knowledge—in this case scientific knowledge—makes visible a broader portion of a spectrum that exists independent of its perception, or is it instead that the perspective from which knowledge appears constitutes not only the knowledge but also the particular spectrum that that knowledge exists within? It is telling that Dyens seems to occupy both answers: on one hand, his insistence on multiply constituted realities bearing no relation to an extradiscursive Real claims the latter; and yet, when asked this very question in an interview, Dyens identifies himself as a “profoundly materialist” person who, for practical purposes, believes the former. See Cecchetto and Fromet de Rosnay, Video Interview with Ollivier Dyens.

75. Similarly, Dyens’s most recent book, La Condition inhumaine, essai sur l’effoi technologique (Paris: Flammarion, 2008), not yet translated, is published by perhaps the leading French intellectual press.

76. Ollivier Dyens, Living in the Inhuman Condition: The World Is Technology, Lansdowne Lecture Series (Victoria, B.C.: University of Victoria, 2009).

77. Dyens offered statistical evidence of the remarkable effectiveness of joining behavioral predictors with marketing techniques in ibid.

78. Marshall McLuhan, “Myth and Mass Media,” Daedalus 88, no. 2 (1959): 340.

79. Ibid., 346.

80. Negative replicators follow from the positive definition of life that I have been unpacking. In essence, Dawkins, Selfish Gene, notes that any gene that does not express a particular characteristic can be described as a gene that expresses not having that characteristic. Thus, for example, most cats share the gene for not being polydactyl (90).

81. Baudrillard, Paroxysm, 25–38.

82. Ibid., 65.

83. Ray Kurzweil predicts in The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology (New York: Penguin, 2006) that, by 2040, the rate of medical technologies’ development will exceed the rate of human deterioration due to aging and disease, which is to say that life expectancy will increase beyond a 1:1 ratio with time. As a result, although individual humans will not be immortal, they will be able to expect to live forever.

84. Indeed, this is not only the case genetically but also with respect to claims to reasoning. As Sarah Blaffer Hrdy has recently argued in a post titled “How Humans Became Such Other-Regarding Apes” (2009) in the “On the Human” forum, “our closest relatives among the other apes, chimpanzees and bonobos, with whom we last shared common ancestors some seven million years ago, and still share nearly 99% of DNA sequences, also descend from highly social, manipulative ancestors and possess similar cognitive capacities, yet they are far more single-mindedly self-serving. In this respect, other apes are far more nearly ‘rational actors’ than humans are.”

1. This is a theme that is raised throughout McLuhan’s writing. Visual space is characterized by such features as rationalism, specialism, objectivity, and the detachment of figures from their ground. See Laws of Media, 204–5, for two of McLuhan’s “visual space” tetrads.

2. In The Parasite (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 38, Serres notes that to play the position is to have a relation “with the relation itself” rather than to contents as “sources of relations.” This chapter of the book seeks in part to unpack this assertion as it relates to sound; see also chapter 6.

3. Limited documentation—including images, an audio sample, links to artists’ and curators’ talks, and the exhibition monograph—is available via http://www.davidcecchetto.net/artistic.html.

4. Cary Wolfe, “‘Bring the Noise’: The Parasite and the Multiple Genealogies of Posthumanism,” in Serres, Parasite, xxiii.

5. Serres, Parasite, 79. Wolfe notes this passage, and provides a larger context for it, in his introduction to the new edition of Parasite, xii–xiv.

6. A number of children attended the exhibit, many of whom were shorter than the height of the suspended panels, adding a slightly grotesque perspective to the reading I am offering, namely, children trapped in a basement that unilaterally frames their experience. In this, conventional “childish” fears of ghosts manifest precisely as a foreclosure of haunting, the ultimate horror of inevitability.

7. Mark B. N. Hansen, New Philosophy for New Media (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2004), 299.

8. Hayles, “Desiring Agency,” 148.

9. Ibid., 150.

10. Ibid., 151.

11. See chapter 1 for a more extended discussion of Dawkins’s selfish gene theory.

12. Wolfe, What Is Posthumanism?, 133.

13. The syntax of this paragraph, though not its content, is borrowed from the introduction to Butler’s Bodies That Matter.

14. For a discussion of autonomic consciousness, see Ted Hiebert, In Praise of Nonsense: Aesthetics, Uncertainty, and Postmodern Identity (Montreal: McGill Queens University Press, 2012), 156–60.

1. Though I arrived at the term independently, my reading aligns with the notion of “humanist posthumanism” developed by Wolfe in What Is Posthumanism?, indicating an “internal disciplinarity [that remains] humanist through and through,” despite a theorist “taking seriously the existence of nonhuman subjects” in her conception of a “discipline’s external relations to its larger environment” (123–24).

2. Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, 2.

3. Ibid.

4. In Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2002), 10, Massumi speaks of retroduction as “a production, by feedback, of new movements [such that] a dynamic unity has been retrospectively captured and qualitatively converted. [For example] space itself is a retroduction, by means of the standardization of measurement.”

5. Importantly, Hayles differentiates the specificity of embodiment from the normatively operative notion of “the body.” See, for example, her discussion of Foucault in chapter 8 of How We Became Posthuman. The importance of this differentiation is unpacked more fully in chapter 5 of this book.

6. Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, 54.

7. As we will see later, the presence–absence of this being exists symbiotically with the pattern–randomness of information.

8. Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, 4–5.

9. Ibid., 22.

10. Ibid., 7.

11. Ibid., 66.

12. “Autopoietic reflexive systems” are systems that self-generate independent of any conscious will.

13. Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, 136.

14. Ibid.

15. Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living (Dordecht, Netherlands: D. Reidel, 1980), 80.

16. Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, 155.

17. Ibid., 158.

18. Though Hayles and Varela are both proponents of “embodied philosophy,” their projects—that is, what they mobilize their perspectives in service of—remain quite different. Because the critique that I offer of Hayles in this chapter focuses primarily on her philosophical project, it is not intended to extend to a critique of Varela.

19. N. Katherine Hayles, “Unfinished Work: From Cyborg to Cognisphere,” Theory, Culture, and Society 23, nos. 7–8 (2006): 165.

20. Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, 13–14.

21. Hayles, ibid., 17, defines a skeuomorph as “a design feature that is no longer functional in itself but that refers back to a feature that was functional at an earlier time.”

22. Hayles, My Mother Was a Computer, 18.

23. Ibid., 4.

24. Cited in ibid., 19.

25. Ibid.

26. Ibid., 20.

27. Ibid., 3.

28. Hayles, “Unfinished Work,” 163. Interestingly, many of the predicates of the RoC can be found (without the significant cultural support of ubiquitous computers) much earlier. As Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind (New York: Harcourt, 1971), 59, notes, for example, the “conviction that mathematical reasoning should serve as a paradigm for all thought is probably as old as Pythagoras; at any rate we find it in Plato’s refusal to admit anyone to philosophy who has not been trained in mathematics.” For Arendt, this conviction (combined with premodern events such as the reformation, the discovery of the “New World,” and the development of the telescope) is part and parcel of “world alienation” (i.e., where the world is viewed from a transcendent—specifically scientistic or mathematically based—perspective), an argument that in many ways prefigures Hayles’s perspective.

29. Hayles, My Mother Was a Computer, 219.

30. Ibid.

31. Žižek, Sublime Object, 6.

32. Slavoj Žižek, The Parallax View (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press), 17.

33. Žižek, Sublime Object, 158. The mark of this nonsignifying reference is the objet petit à, “the original lost object which in a way coincides with its own loss.” Ibid.

34. Hayles positions this in contrast to Žižek, but it is arguable whether she actually attains the distance from him that she claims. For example, her analysis, in My Mother Was a Computer, of the novel Permutation City concludes that the narrative “implies that computation has been transformed from a metaphor into the means by which reality is generated, a means that includes the illusions of those,” such as Žižek, in Hayles’s reading, who think the UC is (only) a metaphor (224). This may not be an accurate reading of Žižek, though, as he frequently emphasizes that ideology is precisely not metaphoric but rather operates as the material instantiation of the deep-seated trauma that is the Real. This disputation bears noting because it exemplifies Hayles’s broader tendency—especially in her earlier work—to gain political traction for a perspective by working it against a questionable reading of an established theorist. This tendency is discussed further at the close of this chapter.

35. Hayles, My Mother Was a Computer, 23.

36. Vis-à-vis McLuhan, computation might be said to resemble nonphonetic language in this respect.

37. In My Mother Was a Computer, 47, Hayles ventures to guess that, in contemporary critical theory, signifier is used thousands of times more than signified. Moreover, despite Derrida’s insistence on their co-implication, numerous critics have followed Bruno Latour’s insistence in We Have Never Been Modern (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993), 6, that deconstruction grasps the specificities of practice “as badly as possible.”

38. Again, this is key to deconstruction in general. Derrida’s project was not only to dismantle metaphysics by showing its absent center but also to begin to write the ghostly presences—the hauntologies—of metaphysics that are beyond the pale of positivistic language.

39. Hayles, My Mother Was a Computer, 7.

40. The contrast between emergence and intermediation is a finer one than is suggested here, notably because the former does include both initial and emergent agents in subsequent orders of emergence. The distinction obtains, though, because complexity continues to function as a metric in emergence so that emergent behaviors are always more complex than their provenance would suggest. Intermediation, by contrast, is not concerned with a metric of complexity but rather with the different qualities of the relations that emerge.

41. Hayles, My Mother Was a Computer, 39.

42. Ibid., 8.

43. Ibid., 40.

44. Ibid., 41.

45. John Johnston makes a related argument in “Machinic Vision,” Critical Inquiry 26 (Autumn, 2009): 27, where he positions machinic vision as presupposing “not only an environment of interacting machines and human-machine systems but a field of decoded perceptions that, whether or not produced by or issuing from these machines, assume their full intelligibility only in relation to them.”

46. Hayles, My Mother Was a Computer, 50.

47. Ibid., 44.

48. Ibid., 48.

49. Ibid.

50. Ibid., 249.

51. Ibid., 66.

52. Ibid., 43.

53. Hayles spends a significant portion of How We Became Posthuman making a similar point, showing that pattern is always infused with a degree of randomness. As with the resulting semiotic square in that account, the significance of the term noise here is that it moves from a paradoxical duality (i.e., presence–absence) to an active set of relations.

54. Hayles, My Mother Was a Computer, 68.

55. Ibid.

56. Ibid.

57. Ibid., 50.

58. This is a fitting site of analysis, considering that intermediation itself serves a narrative function for Hayles (i.e., in her writing).

59. Hereinafter, all references to “database” in this chapter refer specifically to relational databases. The novelty of relational (as opposed to hierarchical) databases is, in short, that data in a relational database can be stored, added to, or manipulated without impacting other elements in the database. Similarly, relational databases can be queried without specific prior knowledge of the databases’ content.

60. N. Katherine Hayles, “Narrative and Database: Natural Symbionts,” PMLA 122, no. 5 (2007): 1605.

61. In this respect, Dawkins’s selfish gene argument exemplifies database thinking in a biological register.

62. Hayles, “Narrative and Database,” 1603.

63. Hayles, My Mother Was a Computer, 31.

64. Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2001), 227.

65. Ibid., 231. Manovich contrasts this to language (particularly to Saussure via Barthes), where “elements in the syntagmatic dimension are related in praesentia, while elements in the paradigmatic dimension are related in absentia” (230).

66. Ibid., 227.

67. Hayles, “Narrative and Database,” 1605.

68. Ibid., 1604–5.

69. Ibid., 1603.

70. Hayles, “Unfinished Work,” 160.

71. Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, 3.

72. In this context, “economy of scarcity” refers to a unified conception of the self that can be possessed, exchanged, or dispossessed, but only through binary operations. For example, if a “self” is totally possessed by genetic forces (as in Dawkins), it cannot claim to also possess itself agentially.

73. Hayles, My Mother Was a Computer, 63.

74. Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, 3.

75. Ibid., 3–4.

76. Similarly, Hayles maintains the fundamental belief that if our bodies were differently constructed, our sense of logic would also be altered. From this, she observes that our bodies are different from one another (and from our ancestors’ bodies), from which she develops—in How We Became Posthuman, 192–221—a dialectic between the (normative) body and embodiment.

77. Bill Viola, “Will There Be Condominiums in Data Space?,” in Reasons for Knocking on an Empty House, ed. R. Violette (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1995), 123.

78. Hayles convincingly illustrates this point in a discussion of Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technologies in “RFID: Human Agency and Meaning in Information-Intensive Environments,” Theory, Culture, and Society 26, nos. 2–3: 55, where she notes that “RFID participates in a paradigm shift in which the focus shifts from present and past actions to the anticipation of future actions,” a change that limns the different temporality at play in an RFID ecology.

79. Hayles, My Mother Was a Computer, 200.

80. Richard Wray, “French Anti-filesharing Law Overturned,” The Guardian, June 10, 2009.

81. Hansen, Bodies in Code, 39; emphasis added.

82. Hayles, My Mother Was a Computer, 239.

83. Galloway, as cited in Hayles, “RFID,” 53.

84. Hayles, My Mother Was a Computer, 239.

85. In fact, it is unlikely that Žižek would disagree with this line of critique as he regularly argues that historicization has—in much of contemporary theory—gone too far in neglecting the basic ahistorical conditions of subjectivity. That is, Žižek follows Lacan in the belief that the unconscious is structured like a language and the human subject is born into systems of meaning; as a result, while the systems themselves are not fixed, Žižek asserts that being born into a system (or systems) is an ahistorical fact.

86. Guattari, as cited in Hayles, My Mother Was a Computer, 176.

87. Žižek, Sublime Object, 165.

88. Žižek, Parallax View, 7.

89. Hayles, My Mother Was a Computer, 175.

90. Ibid., 211.

91. I.e., Hayles (along with a host of thinkers ranging from technologists to theorists to policy makers) notes that privilege manifests as possession (ranging from literal ownership of goods to self-possession) in the economy of scarcity that is constitutive of analog relations (i.e., if person A owns a particular table, person B does not). By contrast, since there is no “original” in a digital economy, privilege becomes a matter of gaining access (i.e., if person A has unfettered access to the hard drive of person B, he effectively has access to the privilege afforded by that information). Clearly these worldviews are not distinct (as Hayles notes), and Benjamin’s well-known reading of film—in its predigital manifestation—in “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Selected Writings of Walter Benjamin, vol. 4, 1938–1940, ed. H. Eiland and M.W. Jennings, 251–83 (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003), is also regularly cited in this respect.

92. Hayles, My Mother Was a Computer, 175.

93. Ibid., 172.

94. Hayles, “Desiring Agency,” 147.

95. Citing Dene Grigar, Hayles proposes in My Mother Was a Computer, 89, that “the adage that something is gained as well as lost in translation applies with special force to print documents that are imported [i.e., translated] to the Web.”

96. Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, 4.

97. Hayles, My Mother Was a Computer, 192.

98. Ibid., 177. Nicholas Gane notes in “Radical Post-humanism: Friedrich Kittler and the Primacy of Technology,” Theory, Culture, and Society 22, no. 3 (2005): 25–41, the influence of Lacan on Kittler, in particular, the former’s 1954–55 seminars on “The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis.” At stake is a restaging of the information theory of Shannon and Weaver: “Lacan’s theory of the ego is formulated through direct engagement with early cybernetic theory, and makes reference to Shannon . . . and also Norbert Wiener. . . . Lacan’s writings on this subject have titles such as ‘Homeostasis and Insistence,’ ‘Freud, Hegel and the Machine,’ ‘The Circuit,’ and ‘Psychoanalysis and Cybernetics’ (the title of his lecture to the Société Française de Psychanalyse delivered on 22 June 1955)” (32).

99. Ibid.

100. Ibid., 191.

101. Ibid., 173.

102. Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, 3–4.

103. Hayles, “Unfinished Work,” 161.

104. In The Five Senses: A Philosophy of Mingled Bodies (New York: Continuum, 2008), 25, Serres evocatively states that “all dualism does is reveal a ghost facing a skeleton.”

105. In My Mother Was a Computer, 60–61, Hayles cites Wendy Hui Krong Chung, who argues that “software is ideology, instancing Althusser’s definition of ideology as ‘the representation of the subject’s imaginary relationship to his or her real conditions of existence.’”

106. Ibid., 146.

107. The relation between ethics and politics is, of course, a highly contested discourse. In Hayles’s case, I would suggest that her emphasis on intermediation promotes (or perhaps assumes) a view wherein the two are relatively continuous. The theoretical issues that stem from this are part and parcel of the critique that follows below.

108. Jack Reynolds, “Jacques Derrida (1930–2004),” in Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy: A Peer-Reviewed Academic Resource (2010), http://www.iep.utm.edu/derrida/.

109. Hayles, My Mother Was a Computer, 93.

110. Wolfe, What Is Posthumanism?, 99.

111. Video documentation of this 2008 lecture, titled “Narrating Consciousness: Language, Media, and Embodiment” (including the question-and-answer period), is available from http://www.pactac.net/pactacweb/web-content/video66.html.

112. Ibid.

113. Ibid.

114. This is ironic, coming from Hayles, because it is a line of critique that she frequently levels at other theorists. For example, in “Desiring Agency,” she argues that Deleuze and Guattari share with Dawkins “a certain effacement of the linguistic actors they rely on to perform what [their texts describe]” (156).

115. Hayles, My Mother Was a Computer, 3.

116. Ibid., 204. As is briefly discussed later, Hayles’s use of “we” in such formulations also suggests a certain ultimate autonomy that is afforded to humans in her schema.

117. Ibid., 89.

118. Ibid., 3.

119. Baudrillard makes this point well in Paroxysm, 38, noting that “the problem is how, at the heart of [the definitive indeterminacy of modern science] laws can appear and the reality effect can emerge. This is where the problem turns around. It isn’t the nothing—the other of the real, the other of rationality—which is a problem, but the real itself.” Similarly (though from a completely different theoretical perspective), Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s unfolding of the “irrationality of reason” in Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2002), is apropos to this argument.

120. Hayles, My Mother Was a Computer, 56.

121. Ibid., 197.

122. Ibid., 208.

123. Hayles, “Narrating Consciousness.”

124. Hayles, My Mother Was a Computer, 205.

125. Baudrillard, as cited in Steven Poole, “Meet the David Bowie of Philosophy,” The Guardian, March 14, 2000.

126. In My Mother Was a Computer, 197, Hayles relates autism to the superintelligence of computers, noting “autistic people have no model in their minds for how others act.” While this leads to their perceiving “most actions as inexplicable and frightening,” it also allows them to organize data at a speed that eludes non-autistic people.

127. Ibid., 48–49.

128. Ibid., 242.

129. Tim Lenoir, “(Foreword) Haptic Vision: Computation, Media, and Embodiment in Mark Hansen’s New Phenomenology,” in New Philosophy for New Media (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2004), xix.

130. Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, 81. Janet Freed was a conference assistant at the Macy Conferences who was mislabeled “Janet Freud” in a documentary photo of the events.

131. Hayles, My Mother Was a Computer, 190. It should be noted that this is not just a single occurrence. Much of How We Became Posthuman deals with the necessity of supplementing what Hayles identifies as the Lacanian dialectic of presence/absence (30) in light of the issues brought to bear by information technologies. In addition, Hayles’s reading of texts as assemblages in My Mother Was a Computer is an explicit reference to Deleuze and Guattari, a fact made even more significant to my argument here in light of her claim that Guattari understates his own theoretical proximity to Lacan (176).

132. Ibid., 216.

133. Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, 22.

134. For an examination of the governmentality of a politics of inclusion as it operates through tolerance, see Wendy Brown’s deconstruction of the discourse of tolerance in Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2006).

1. This description paraphrases that offered by Lozano-Hemmer in the video documentation for The Trace; see http://www.lozano-hemmer.com/.

2. I use the term locative here, rather than tactile or embodied, to indicate that the work’s specificity comes about through a projection of the participants’ location rather than through an attempt to address their internal biological sensations (as in, e.g., media artist Char Davies’s Osmose and Éphémère).

3. Jay Garmon notes in “Geek Trivia: First Shots Fired,” Tech Republic, May 24, 2005, http://www.techrepublic.com/article/geek-trivia-first-shots-fired/5710539?tag=content;siu-container, that the first-person shooter genre of video game, for example, rose to prominence in the early 1990s with games such as Wolfenstein 3D (1992) and Doom (1993). These games were not the earliest examples of this technology but were prominent in its dissemination. Nonetheless, it bears noting that Jeffrey Shaw’s The Legible City (1989) combined the first-person shooter graphical model with a bicycle interface and existing architectural structures prior to these games’ release.

4. Christiane Paul argues in Digital Art (New York: Thames and Hudson, 2003), 96, that “the creation of a believable world requires continuity: the environment needs to develop in a continuous way.”

5. I.e., the visual graphics literally move through space, whereas sound gives the illusion of a sound source that moves through space. In actuality, the sound itself is distributed according to relative intensities (see the introduction to this book for a short discussion of the physics of sound in this respect).

6. E.g., if the local participant moves ten centimeters across and twelve centimeters vertically, this might be graphically rendered as a ten-centimeter horizontal movement and a 1 percent vertical movement (because the graphic’s vertical space is depicted through simulated shadows). Sonically, though, the action would be rendered as a ten-centimeter horizontal and twelve-centimeter vertical movement (1 percent of the actual space rather than 1 percent of the simulated depth). In both cases, this difference is compounded by the local participant not knowing whether the remote space is precisely the same size as the local station so that he does not know to what extent the telepresent movements align with the remote participant’s actual movements in space. As a result, the relation between actions and their representations differs between media (because they use different base metrics) and potentially between locations (because they may be different sizes). Moreover, the fact that the computer treats the two stations as though they are exactly the same size (despite this being impossible to achieve perfectly) actualizes this potential difference in a way that is different from how it might be imagined by the participants.

7. In Bodies in Code, 37, Hansen notes a similar feature in Mylon Kruegers’s Videoplace, insisting that “by coupling the motile body with graphic elements that do not visually imitate or simulate it, Videoplace opens a disjunction between the body image and the body schema” that makes the latter sensible.

8. Hansen, Bodies in Code, 94.

9. This incompatibility points to the excess of code to language that was discussed, vis-à-vis Hayles, in chapter 3.

10. http://www.lozano-hemmer.com/.

11. Ibid.

12. Remembering the discussion of forced choice in chapter 3, it bears emphasis that this does not mean that the participants have full control of their actions but only that—in contrast to a liberal humanist perspective, but in total agreement with Lacan—they are born into a system of meaning that exceeds them.

13. This consciousness is “ethical” in that it pertains to the participants’ codes of relating to one another.

14. This is altogether typical of social digital media such that Mary Bryson has argued, in “Can We Play ‘Fun Gay’? Disjuncture and Difference in Millennial Queer Youth Narratives,” in Critical Digital Studies Workshop (Victoria, B.C.: University of Victoria, 2009), http://www.pactac.net/pactacweb/web-content/video77.html, that “socially networked media mitigate against the very possibility of a robust relationality of anonymous strangers. In the networked economy . . . whatever, or whomever, cannot be [identified is relegated to the periphery and deemed suspect].”

15. Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1997), 10.

16. Ibid.

17. As cited in chapter 3, Hayles argues in How We Became Posthuman, 4, that one of the shared features of most strains of posthumanism is the notion that there is “no a priori way to identify a self-will that can be clearly distinguished from an other will.”

18. Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (New York: Verso, 2006), offers the situations of Palestinian and homosexual lives in North America as an example.

19. Butler, Antigone’s Claim, 70.

20. E.g., in ibid., Butler considers the status of the father for a child of a single mother: is the father still there as a spectral “position” or “place” that remains unfilled, or is there no such “place” or “position”? To wit, she asks, “Is the father absent, or does the child have no father, no position, and no inhabitant? Is this a loss, which assumes the unfulfilled norm, or is it another configuration of primary attachment whose primary loss is not to have a language in which to articulate its terms?” (69).

21. To be clear, this critique does not point to particular instances of sexuality, gender, and desire but rather to the categories—that is, the “forms”—themselves.

22. This is particularly true with respect to the way in which ambivalence is mobilized in connection with grief in Butler, Precarious Life. That is, Butler registers grief as a certain mode of being outside oneself (one is “beside oneself” with grief) so that it necessarily involves agreeing to undergo a transformation, “the full result of which one cannot know in advance” (21). To grieve, then, is literally to make oneself vulnerable to a certain sense of destiny, to something that is larger than “one’s own knowing and choosing” (21); to grieve is to be taken hold of by something, a position that is (paradoxically) both chosen (in that we make ourselves open to grieving) and imposed (in that grieving involves the recognition that a part of oneself has already been lost in the loss being grieved).

23. Moreover, this primary vulnerability—which is foundational to the participants’ actions—suggests that their subjectivity is retroactively produced in the same sense that analog subjectivity is.

24. I owe the formulation of this sentence to Wolfe’s discussion of the character Selma in Lars von Trier’s film Dancer in the Dark in What Is Posthumanism?, 148.

25. Gane, “Radical Post-humanism,” 40.

26. In Life of the Mind, 57, Hannah Arendt differentiates cognition and reason, via Kant, as the difference between apprehension and comprehension: the former seeks to grasp what is “given to the senses,” and the latter seeks to understand its meaning.

27. Butler, Psychic Life of Power, 211.

28. Value-form here indicates the form in which an entity takes on value, which is to say—following Butler—takes on meaning (broadly construed).

29. Butler notes in Psychic Life of Power, 17–18, that the subject exceeds the law of noncontradiction but remains bound to it as the condition of its intelligibility.

30. Paul Virilio, “Big Optics,” in On Justifying the Hypothetical Nature of Art and the Non-identicality within the Object World, ed. P. Weibel (Cologne, Germany: Galerie Tanja Grunert, 1992), 93.

31. McLuhan, Laws of Media, 100.

1. Hansen’s work has garnered significant and sustained attention since the publication of New Philosophy for New Media, particularly in the North American vein of media studies and in the emerging discourses of posthumanism. Compelling in its own right, Hansen’s work is also a valuable site of inquiry because it combines frequently cited theories of affectivity and systems theory, each of which has been highly influential in the developing discourse(s) of posthumanism (as well as in the parent disciplines on which posthumanism draws).

2. N. Katherine Hayles, “Clearing the Ground (Foreword),” in Hansen, Embodying Technesis: Technology beyond Writing (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000), 7.

3. Hansen, Bodies in Code, 9.

4. Hayles, “Clearing the Ground,” v.

5. Hansen uses translation in the sense that Bruno Latour does in Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997), 132–44.

6. Hansen, Embodying Technesis, 1–2.

7. Ibid., 2–3.

8. Ibid., 2.

9. Ibid., 3.

10. Ibid.

11. Ibid., 93.

12. Ibid., 4. In this chapter, I use the term representation in the broad sense indicated by Hansen, where he notes that by a “representationalist approach [he means] any approach that legitimizes representation as its frame of reference, whether for ends either affirmative or critical, positivist or deconstructive” (ibid.).

13. Karen Barad, “Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 28, no. 3 (2003): 801.

14. Hansen, Embodying Technesis, 20.

15. Cited in ibid., 86–87.

16. Ibid., 80.

17. Ibid., 79. In particular, this criticism is directed toward the introduction of second-order cybernetics into systems theory, where the former insists that any observation that introduces a distinction is itself “unable to observe the distinction on which it bases its own observation.” Schwanitz, as cited in ibid., 79. By thus shifting the focus of analysis from a “first-order observing of objects to a second-order observation of observations,” Hansen insists that systems theory radically isolates system from environment, thereby “cutting description off from embodied reality” (79–80).

18. Ibid., 78.

19. Ibid., 14.

20. Ibid., 86.

21. Ibid., 84.

22. Ibid., 82.

23. Ibid., 83.

24. Ibid., 85.

25. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), 158.

26. Ibid., 159.

27. Hansen, Embodying Technesis, 14.

28. To be clear, the Derridean claim is not necessarily that all technical apparatuses partake of language’s instability and ambiguity but rather that our knowledge of them does (and that they come to be, for us, only through becoming objects of knowledge). As suggested earlier, though, the inverse is also true in that Derridean claims about language are predicated on language’s not being understood as a system that is closed off from the operations of technics. Thus the issue is not whether biological processes can operate independently of language but rather that extrapolating these processes into an observational register (or a predictive or categorical one, for that matter) to delve into their meaning is not a neutral endeavor: understanding digestion as a digestive process, rather than as a random or even stochastic set of events, necessarily presumes a frame of reference (i.e., an individual or a part of an individual) that is privileged linguistically.

29. Derrida, as cited in Hansen, Embodying Technesis, 85.

30. Ibid.

31. Derrida, Of Grammatology, 61.

32. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, translator’s preface to Derrida, Of Grammatology, xvii.

33. Jacques Derrida, “Signature Event Context,” in Limited Inc. (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1988), 8.

34. Hansen, Embodying Technesis, 52.

35. Ibid.

36. Ibid.

37. Cited in ibid., 51. Further to this, Bourdieu notes that “what is ‘learned by the body’ is not something that one has, like knowledge that can be brandished, but something that one is” (ibid.).

38. Hansen, Bodies in Code, 72.

39. Ibid., ix.

40. Bernard Flynn, “Maurice Merleau-Ponty,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2008), http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2008/entries/merleau-ponty/.

41. Hansen, Bodies in Code, 61.

42. Ibid., 74.

43. E.g., Jennifer Gonzalez notes in “The Face and the Public: Race, Secrecy, and Digital Art Practices,” Camera Obscura 24, no. 1 (37–65): 47–48, that Hansen turns to Agamben “to argue for digital media’s potential to produce the conditions for the emergence of an identityless, subjectless singularity.”

44. Indeed, this formulation echoes Derrida’s reading of ethics (a term he uses under erasure), which hinges on an undecidability inherent in all decision making that nonetheless demands urgency and precipitation. As he notes in the afterword to Limited Inc., 116, “a decision can only come into being in a space that exceeds the calculable program that would destroy all responsibility by transforming it into a programmable effect of determinate causes. There can be no more moral and political responsibility without this trial and this passage by way of the undecidable. [Every decision] . . . is structured by this experience and experiment of the undecidable.”

45. Hansen, Embodying Technesis, 263.

46. In fact, this description of the technological real also aligns with Lacan’s account of the Real as an impossible kernel. See, for example, Žižek’s description of the Lacanian Real in Sublime Object, 169, where he describes it as (in part) a “hard, impenetrable kernel resisting symbolization” that is nonetheless linked to the embodied reality of death.

47. Hansen, Embodying Technesis, 263; emphasis added.

48. Indeed, this relation to deconstruction marks an important difference between Hansen and Hayles: whereas Hayles’s project is, in a sense, to think past deconstruction, Hansen’s writing exists prior to it, in the sense that he attempts to recoup the body as a locus of presence. In both cases, then, deconstruction stands in for a problem that needs to be solved, with both thinkers neglecting that the problem in question is precisely what deconstruction articulates. In this sense, then, we might say that both Hayles and Hansen, from opposite sides, reify deconstruction and, in so doing, fail to account for its technological dimension.

49. Lenoir, “Foreword,” xxiii.

50. Barad, “Posthumanist Performativity,” 809.

51. Lenoir, “Foreword,” xxiv.

52. Hansen, Bodies in Code, 64.

53. My account of the literal material of skulls draws heavily from Hansen’s description in New Philosophy for New Media, 196–205.

54. Rapid-prototyping is a process in which digitally produced image-models are rendered as physical objects. As the name suggests, variations of the technology are frequently used in manufacturing to quickly produce physical prototypes of computer-generated blueprints, where the latter are often drawn in computer-aided design (CAD) programs such as QCad, ArchiCAD, and AutoCAD.

55. Robert Lazzarini, http://www.pierogi2000.com/flatfile/lazzarins.html.

56. Hansen, New Philosophy for New Media, 202.

57. Ibid.

58. Ibid., 199. An anamorphosis is a seemingly deformed image that appears normal when viewed in a particular, unconventional way. Skulls have frequently been featured in anamorphic paintings, including Hans Holbein’s famous 1533 painting The Ambassadors, in which the distorted image of a skull in the foreground resolves when viewed from a point to the right of the painting. There is ample literature on this subject, including an excellent chapter devoted to The Ambassadors in Jurgis Baltrušaitis’s Anamorphic Art (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1977); Lacan also discusses the work in Four Fundamental Concepts, in which he argues that the distorted skull is the residual trace of a species of knowledge that is inaccessible to the conscious subject and that may be approached only at the boundary of the visual–imaginary order of subjectivity. I am grateful to Terry Harpold for directing me to the latter as well as for raising the tantalizing question of what anamorphosis might sound like, and how this sound might reveal a resonant relation (of being and language) that is more ambiguous—and thereby more “fundamental”—than Hansen’s mobilization of tactility.

59. Hansen, New Philosophy for New Media, 209.

60. Ibid., 206.

61. Lenoir, “Foreword,” xviii.

62. Hansen, New Philosophy for New Media, 203.

63. Ibid., 202.

64. Ibid., 203.

65. Ibid., 204.

66. Ibid., 203.

67. Ibid., 204.

68. Ibid., 211. Hansen ultimately terms this production of place the digital any-space-whatever (ASW), arguing that, as an aesthetic mediation of the digital, it describes “the priority of affectivity and embodiment in the new ‘postvisual topology’ of the digital age” (ibid., 205). Hansen distinguishes the digital ASW from the Deleuzian cinematic ASW as follows: “The digital any-space-whatever (ASW) is both like and unlike [Deleuze’s] cinematic ASW. It is like it in that it demarcates a fundamental shift in the human experience of space, a shift from an extended, visually apprehensible space to a space that can be felt only by the body. But it differs . . . on account of the means by which it operates this shift: whereas the cinematic ASW emerges as a transfiguration of an empirical spatial experience, the digital ASW comprises a bodily response to a stimulus that is both literally unprecedented and radically heterogeneous to the form of embodied human experience. [Simply put,] because it must be forged out of a contact with a radically inhuman realm, the digital ASW lacks an ‘originary’ contact with a space of human activity [e.g., the ‘empty’ spaces of postwar Europe]—and thus any underlying analogy—from which affect can be extracted” (ibid.).

69. Sound is unscored and site specific and has been adapted and reappropriated for various instruments and settings. In every iteration, the compositional emphasis is on achieving the “pataphysical” quality discussed later, rather than on acting a prescribed aesthetic or formal program.

70. The piece uses “extended techniques” extensively so that it does not sound like conventional piano music; however, these same techniques have been so thoroughly and frequently explored within the experimental Western art music tradition that they are by no means foreign to anyone versed in the discipline.

71. These listener accounts are (admittedly) anecdotal and were not collected via any particular methodology. However, I would argue that this shortcoming does not particularly impact the argument at hand: because Sound is discussed here in its conceptual—rather than aural—particularity, any reader who doubts the veracity of my account is welcome to take the discussion in the spirit of a thought experiment (i.e., “if one were to be able to stage a piece that accomplished what I claim for Sound, what would that mean?”).

72. In “Sounding the Hyperlink,” Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature 42, no. 1 (2009): 1–18, I mount this argument more broadly, insisting that Sound is not a hoax in any sense, except to the extent that representation in general—and musical representation in particular— necessarily deals in deception. However, it also bears noting that, according to the American Heritage Dictionary, the word hoax probably comes from hocus, which in turn derives from hocus-pocus, which itself is possibly an alteration of the Latin hoc est corpus (this is [my] body), the words used in the Eucharist at the moment of transubstantiation. As a result, Sound is perhaps a hoax in the original sense of the term—meaning an alteration of material reality—but my argument still obtains with respect to the conventional use of the term (implying deception).

73. E.g., a listener who attests to hearing a low-shelf filter is saying that she hears an “unnatural” preponderance of frequencies that are higher than a certain pitch. The observation is correct, even if the reason attributed to it is not.

74. Pataphysics is a term coined by the French writer Alfred Jarry that can be defined variously, including as “the science of imaginary solutions.” As it is used here, the term also relates to Ted Hiebert’s extrapolation of Jarry in “Nonsense Interference Patterns,” in Collision: Interarts Practice and Research, ed. D. Cecchetto, N. Cuthbert, J. Lassonde, and D. Robinson, 103–20 (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008), via the notion of “pata-perception,” which “might be defined as ‘the observation of imaginary appearances’” (121).

75. I.e., the seemingly unbounded possibilities of live electronics obsolesce illusion in the sense that they perform a claim to technical overcoming in place of the conventional sleight of hand that is implied in an acoustic setting.

76. EQ (short for “equalization”) refers to frequency-specific amplitude modulation, allowing the listener to emphasize the treble, middle, or bass ranges of a frequency (the degree of specificity available for modulation depends on the number of bands). EQ presets, for example, are often found in commercial audio players, where they are designed to optimize the sound output for the style of music being listened to (an “Orchestra” preset might emphasize the mid- and high-range frequencies, for example, whereas an “R&B” preset might emphasize the treble and bass extremities). MaxMSP is a visual programming language that is commonly used for audio processing (though it also includes multimedia functionality) and includes EQ (as a very small and basic part of its robust capabilities). The software—which is developed and maintained by the software company Cycling ’74—is designed to be highly modular, with most programs (or “patches”) made by arranging and connecting “objects” (each of which has a specific function) within a two-dimensional visual canvas. An explanatory video is available from the Cycling ’74 website at http://cycling74.com/products/whatismax/.

77. Sound, on the whole, also points to the connection—beyond the purview of this discussion, but too often ignored by sound artists—between techniques for digital manipulation and the history of music. Too often, such techniques are considered only in terms of the ways in which they modulate a signal—as a kind of ahistorical sonic manipulation—at the expense of neglecting how the modulations themselves are primed by musical histories that are as much about combining aesthetic fidelities and the materiality of specific acoustic instruments (themselves selected from other options according to their fidelity to an orchestra-based understanding of music) as anything we might reasonably call “the sound itself.”

78. Paul Théberge, Any Sound You Can Imagine: Making Music/Consuming Technology (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 2007), 212.

79. Hansen, Bodies in Code, x–xi.

80. Hansen notes in “Media Theory,” 300, that “human evolution is ‘technogenesis’ in the sense that humans have always evolved in recursive correlation with the evolution of technics.”

81. Or rather, the body is both externalized and not; Sound emphasizes the latter—which is the sense in which the latter takes place—but it nonetheless remains in tension with the former (vis-à-vis the discussion of deconstruction offered earlier).

82. Importantly, this would be the case even without the computer technologies being present on stage, as the same logic applies to the physical piano as well as to the practical and conceptual architecture that binds the piece (i.e., that coalesces it as a unified object of study). In Sound, then, this process is simply desublimated by the represented technologies.

83. As suggested earlier and reiterated later, this perspective’s departure from Hansen is subtle and occurs via the degree of strength given the deconstructive “always-already.” For Hansen, this “always-already” is a soft claim that pertains to representation only rather than to the real as such.

84. Hansen, Bodies in Code, 176.

85. Ibid., 147.

86. This opposition between Hayles and Hansen is, of course, amplified by being described and is not intended to wholly contain the relation between the two. Instead, I am simply gesturing toward the implications of Hansen’s insistence on the body’s prediscursive (as opposed to extradiscursive) status as well as his tendency to figure the body as an abstract “blank slate.”

87. Hansen, Bodies in Code, 26. Specifically, Hansen understands the body to be topologically invariant in the sense that it is a constant shared by all experience.

88. Ibid.

89. Ibid., ix–x.

90. Ibid., 26.

91. Ibid., 6.

92. Ibid.

93. Lenoir, “Foreword,” xxiv.

94. Hansen, Bodies in Code, 15.

95. Ibid.

96. Ibid., 9.

97. I say “in the broadest possible sense” because, following Merleau-Ponty, Hansen differentiates between the body image and the body schema, a point that is elaborated later.

98. Hansen, Bodies in Code, 5.

99. Ibid., 12.

100. Ibid., 9.

101. This aligns with the reading of Rafael-Lozano Hemmer’s The Trace that I presented in chapter 4. From Hansen’s perspective, we might add that the bodily reduction of telepresent works such as The Trace newly reveals viscerality in that the redundancy of the term (what, after all, would fail to be visceral?) is no longer supplemental (in the conventional—rather than Derridean—sense) but is now instead detached from a generalized experience of embodiment to be perceptible in its own right.

102. Hansen, Bodies in Code, 7.

103. Ibid., 8.

104. Ibid.

105. Ibid.

106. Mark Turner, “The Scope of Human Thought,” in On the Human (2009), http://onthehuman.org/2004/08/the-scope-of-human-thought/.

107. Mark Johnson, “Reply to Mark Turner’s ‘The Scope of Human Thought,’” in On the Human (2009), http://onthehuman.org/2004/08/the-scope-of-human-thought/.

108. It bears noting that double-scope blending is subject to the form of critique aimed at Dawkins by Dyens: the “problem” of how we integrate alternate scales can only be framed as such through a prior disarticulation of cognition and biology. If this is the case, though, then it would imply an emergence of cultural bodies (à la Dyens) that, in turn, deconstructs the biological primacy that double-scope blending assumes.

109. Francisco Varela, “The Specious Present: A Neurophenomenology of Time Consciousness,” in Naturalizing Phenomenology: Issues in Contemporary Phenomenology and Cognitive Science, ed. F. Varela, J. Petitot, B. Pachoud, and J.-M. Roy (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press), 272.

110. Hansen, New Philosophy for New Media, 299.

111. Hansen, “Movement and Memory: Intuition as Virtualization in GPS Art,” Modern Language Notes 120 (2006): 1208.

112. Hansen, Bodies in Code, 9. As noted previously, this movement can only be registered as such relative to the topology—itself an identity—that Hansen presumes. Here again, then, Hansen’s disarticulation and opposition of terms is problematic (as discussed later).

113. Jacques Derrida, Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question of Technology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 107–8.

114. Hansen, “Movement and Memory,” 1211.

115. Ibid.

116. Wolfe, What Is Posthumanism?, 8.

117. Schwanitz, as cited in ibid.

118. Ibid.

119. Wolfe, ibid., xxiv, makes this point well (though in a slightly different context) when he adds to his assertion that “‘First’ there is noise, multiplicity, complexity, and the heterogeneity of the environment,” with the caveat that he “put ‘first’ in quotation marks to underscore the fact that such a statement could only arise, after all, as the observation of an autopoietic system: hence ‘first’ here means, because of the inescapable fact of the self-reference of such an observation, ‘last’; it is the environment of the system, not nature or any other given anteriority.”

120. Hansen, Bodies in Code, 10.

121. Ibid., 20.

122. Hayles, “Desiring Agency,” 155.

123. Hansen, Bodies in Code, 39.

124. Ibid., 133.

125. This insistence points to a separate line of argument, most notably in New Philosophy for New Media, in which Hansen takes issue with Deleuze’s reading of the image in Bergson. What is at stake in that argument, as here, is Hansen’s advocacy for the primacy of tactility.

126. Hansen, Bodies in Code, 39.

127. Gallagher, cited in ibid.

128. Francisco Varela, “Autopoiesis and a Biology of Intentionality,” in Autopoiesis and Perception Workshop (Dublin: Dublin City University, 1992), 5.

129. Ibid., 6.

130. Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, chapter 10.

131. Internet passing consists in passing oneself off as something other than oneself online. For example, a man may pass himself off as a woman in an Internet chat room.

132. Hansen, Bodies in Code, 146.

133. Ibid., 157.

134. Gonzalez, “Face and the Public,” 40.

135. Hansen, Bodies in Code, 147.

136. Ibid., 146.

137. Ibid., 147.

138. Indeed, not only is the Internet not universally accessible but also, when it is accessed, it is not done so through uniform technological constraints. That is, differences in speed, quality, content, and media constitute strata of access that do not necessarily parallel socioeconomic striations in the flesh-world. Simply put, the materiality of the Internet has its own historical specifications so that Gonzalez, ibid., 60, summarizes Jodi Dean’s argument that “while the Internet may indeed provide one site for democratic politics, it does not constitute a public sphere (particularly in the Habermasian sense of equal access and homogeneous participation).”

139. Ibid., 40.

140. Ibid., 56.

1. SuperCollider is a robust open source program for audio synthesis and processing: though its functionality is similar to that of MaxMSP (discussed in chapter 5), its code-based interface sacrifices some of the latter’s modularity in favor of other emphases. Limited audio documentation and a “layperson’s” expanded description of SRMP can be found at http://www.davidcecchetto.net/SRMP_description.html.

2. For those who are unfamiliar with digital signal manipulation, these signal processors behave analogously to the distortion pedal that is frequently heard in popular guitar music. For example, the signal processors that were used in the premiere performance included standard digital tools such as granular processing, reversal, and pitch and time shifting. Thus a prerecorded sample of a sound that is stored in the computer as a digital file is subjected to an algorithm that alters it in a predetermined way. In the case of granular processing, for example, the algorithm divides the sample into small pieces and scatters them according to certain principles; the resulting sound contains the same sounds as the original sample but cut up and reordered in a (seemingly) chaotic fashion.

3. SRMP is a collaboration between William Brent and David Cecchetto. Networking protocols were developed by William Brent.

4. It bears emphasis that the skewing mechanism is neither ubiquitously nor uniformly operative, so the performers can no more depend on hearing a skewed representation of the remote participant’s actions than they can on hearing a true representation.

5. SRMP performances have sometimes included the setup described here in conjunction with live performers, with the electronic component both articulating sounds on its own and processing those of the live instruments. In these cases, the skewing is redoubled: all the computer messages are relayed, but (because the network transfers code rather than a rendering of the acoustic signal) the processing of the local acoustic instrument is sent to the remote location without the resulting sound. As a result, a process such as a delay applied to a local live percussionist, for example, would be applied to a remote tuba player (giving dramatically different results).

6. This claim was anecdotally demonstrated at the 2001 OpenEars festival in Kitchener, Ontario, Canada, where a recording engineer performed a test on random audience members: blindfolded participants were unable to indicate whether a sound segment had been produced by the live saxophonist sitting five feet in front of them or by the bank of loudspeakers directly behind him.

7. While these predefined spaces are affected by the live space in which they are dispersed, a qualitative difference still obtains: we might say that the two intersect rather than interact.

8. Moreover, because the specific skewing is not recorded in either rehearsals or performances, even after the fact, there is no way of knowing precisely when or in what ways it was activated.

9. Kaja Silverman, The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), 43.

10. As I suggested in chapter 3, Hayles’s mobilization of pattern and randomness offers important new language and therefore new insights into understanding the intensities at play in a digital landscape. However, although this is the case, her approach may not amount to the radical critique of deconstruction that she sometimes implies.

11. Hansen, Bodies in Code, 49.

12. McLuhan, Laws of Media, 14.

13. In this respect, McLuhan’s analysis of the phonetic alphabet echoes in advance Hayles’s critique of information.

14. Steven Jones, “A Sense of Space: Virtual Reality, Authenticity, and the Aural,” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 10, no. 3 (1993): 245.

15. This is not just the case for recording technologies but also for sound synthesis. In the case of “pure” sine waves, for example, the sound would (usually) refer to a signification process (a particular way of rendering a given frequency) rather than to an original event at all.

16. In short, Serres argues in Parasite, 79, that since an immediate relation would not be a relation (because it would not differentiate the relata), it follows that all relation is nonrelation. As such, noise is integral to any system, including reality (where it takes the form of irrationality). See chapter 2 for a brief consideration of the “nonrelation of relation” as argued by Serres.

17. Hansen, Bodies in Code, 64.

18. See chapter 5 for an explanation and discussion of Hansen’s claims regarding infratactility.

19. Cavell, McLuhan in Space, 21.

20. To be clear, in saying that sound and tactility do not differ in content, I am not neglecting the role of media in determining content but rather acknowledging that both metaphors stand in for the sum total of sensory experience (i.e., both sound and tactility are taken to be inclusive of the other senses). Moreover, it bears noting that I borrow this claim to inclusivity from McLuhan, who frequently conflates aural space and tactile experience in Laws of Media.

21. In this last case, the separation of video and sound is less clear, and one could make the case that principles similar to SRMP’s might apply. My intention here is less to insist on a categorical difference between digital sound and video, however, than it is to show some of the ways that operational and categorical medial specificities work both with and against one another.

22. Ironically, the technology to skew animated video in real time, over distance, and without lag would likely be dependent on MIDI protocols (where MIDI is an acronym for Musical Instrument Digital Interface).

23. Baudrillard makes this point poetically in The Gulf War Did Not Take Place (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 49, saying that “at the speed of light, you lose even your shadow.”

24. In Seduction (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990), 60–66, Baudrillard describes trompe l’oeil painting as “more false than the false” because it initiates a sort of “tactile fantasy” by placing the vanishing point within the viewing subject (rather than in the painting). This contrasts the privilege afforded vision in conventional painting, which creates the illusion of perspective in the object. In a meaningful sense, then, the trompe l’oeil painting “sees” the viewer, which is to say that the subject is simulated by the object. The trompe-l’oeil is more false than the false, then, because it acts as though it is representing the false appearance of the real, even as it exposes the fact that the real is nothing other than this appearance. That is, when the object “sees” the subject, for Baudrillard, the subject is revealed as a perspectival illusion.

25. Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, “The Actual and the Virtual,” in Dialogues II (New York: Continuum, 2002), 114.

26. Ibid.

27. John Shepherd and Peter Wicke, Music and Cultural Theory (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1997), 117. Note that there is a sense in which all resonance is a-causal in that it depicts a continuous condition rather than a moment in time.

28. McLuhan, Laws of Media, 226.

29. For Hansen, this system is embodiment (broadly defined); for McLuhan, it is consciousness.

30. Cary Wolfe, Animal Rites: American Culture, the Discourse of Species, and Posthumanist Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 9.

1. Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, 4.

2. Agamben, “What Is an Apparatus?,” 1.

3. Indeed, it is telling that contemporary studies such as the present one—and major texts such as Wolfe’s What Is Posthumanism?—remain necessary more than ten years after the publication of Hayles’s How We Became Posthuman (which I have argued is a catalyzing moment in at least the humanities strains of the discourse of technological posthumanism).

4. Agamben, “What Is an Apparatus?,” 6.

5. In fact, Neil Badmington’s introduction to the influential collection Posthumanism begins with an account of his own discomfort with the term and further cites Hassan’s grudging use of this seemingly “dubious neologism” (2). Both Hayles and Dyens have similarly expressed reservations about the term itself, as a term.

6. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 7.

7. Ibid., 8.

8. Ibid., 13.

9. Ibid., 22.

10. Derrida, Of Grammatology, 223.

11. Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986), 43.

12. Char Davies, as cited in Hansen, Bodies in Code, 136.

13. Ibid.

14. IBM, “Building a Smarter Planet (1 in a Series),” The New Yorker, February 15 and 22, 2010, 5.

15. Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 63–64.