Registration as Intervention: Performativity and Dominant Strains of Technological Posthumanism

A question that is often asked about technological posthumanism—and about virtuality, simulation, and a host of other developments that connect critical theory to digitality—is whether its subjects are something new or simply something that is newly understood. In this book, I have shown that there is no single answer to this question: Hansen, for example, argues that contemporary technologies offer new types of access to a (transcendental and) primordial subjectivity; Dyens, conversely, argues the reverse, maintaining that a fundamental shift takes place in the migration of evolutionary processes from genes to memes; and Hayles, for her part, occupies both positions, believing that “we have always been posthuman”1 but also that new forms of life (and new subjectivities) emerge in contemporary intermediations of humans and machines. Clearly, then, the question of technological posthumanism’s novelty is entangled with the particular construction of it that is being mobilized: presuming that a questioner already has a sense of what technological posthumanism is, for the questioner, any answer to this query would confirm or deny this construction as much as it would address the question per se.

For myself, this question is unanswerable for another reason, though, not only because of a perspectival bias that always inhabits binary decisions but also because it necessarily involves so many terms, which slide into one another. As a result, posing the question coherently requires precise and autonomous definitions of virtuality, technology, subjectivity, embodiment, life, reproduction, and the myriad other terms that obtain in this study. Simply put, such definitions are impossible to maintain, because doing so disregards the disciplinary contingency, inherent relationality, and simple creativity of their nominations; that is, doing so neglects terminology’s status as “the poetic moment of thought.”2 More than nominating an undecidability of the human, then, technological posthumanism might foremost mark an (un)askability of the human, where the parenthesis indicates a necessity of asking that is put into play in and as the question’s impossibility.

However, if the question of technological posthumanism’s novelty cannot be coherently answered, the challenge that it implies—a demand to offer, or at least to gesture toward, something that cannot be neatly captured within existing analog terminology—has nonetheless been convincingly met. In fact, we might even say that the challenge is met precisely because the question remains unanswerable, in the sense that technological posthumanism has thus far refused the sedimentation of a unified discourse.3 In this context, if a central task of a given strain of technological posthumanism has been (and continues to be) to register the changing relations of humans and technologies—or, more broadly, the complex interactions “between individuals as living beings and the historical element”4—this book has continually insisted that such registration is not (and cannot be) neutral. In particular, I have shown how three dominant strains of technological posthumanism each naturalize the process through which their articulation of the problematic takes place, thereby sublimating the ideology that they perform. Even the most skeptical critic—and skepticism toward the term abounds5—must agree that technological posthumanism, if nothing else, reinforces the extent to which humans are simultaneously object, subject, site, and actor of such performances. In this sense, technological posthumanism in general might be considered—following Hansen—as humanesis: a putting-into-discourse of the human. A crucial caveat in this formulation, though, is a reflexive quality that inheres in it: technological posthumanism is a putting-into-discourse that reveals that which is “put in” to have always already been discursively constituted.

Thus, although it is important to insist on the critical limits that obtain in the discourse of technological posthumanism, in the preceding chapters, I have additionally articulated what, in particular, is performed by setting these limits in the first place: for each of the three theorists considered, I have not only shown the trace of ambivalence that grounds his or her discourse but also how each theorist’s “leaps of faith” into sensibility take flight to advocate ethically and politically—among other consequences, Dyens’s denial of embodied reality produces a disavowed ontology of death; Hayles’s emphasis on registering machinic code renders it subsidiary to (decidedly liberal) humanist values; and Hansen’s willful misreading of grammatology produces a body whose linguistic contingency is redoubled. In each case, by emphasizing moments in which these strains of posthumanist theory turn back on themselves, I have articulated these logical gaps in their positive dimensions, showing their effects. In so doing, I have neither directly objected to the author nor posited an alternative position but have rather teased out the operations that make each version of posthumanism tick. Indeed, the intervening analyses of media artworks (in chapters 2, 4, and 6) are staged in this spirit and are thus intended to probe the particular theorist in question more concretely rather than to oppose him or her per se; that is, these chapters listen to the theoretical chapters, in the full (differential, parasitic, multiplicitous, and resonant) sense.

In this sense, I have interrogated the particular “technologies of selfhood” that Dyens, Hayles, and Hansen each perform, where each of the three holds in tension the enhancements, reversals, obsolescences, and retrievals of a particular configuration of humans and machines. And yet, if these three posthumanisms each mobilize a particular worldview (to use Hayles’s reluctant term), they also interact with one another—both in and out of the confines of this book—to form a discourse of technological posthumanism. Thus, to the extent that this book coalesces this discursive activity into something meaningful, I myself am implicated in it because I have authored the boundaries of this discourse (as it is presented here). The point is that my description of these three technologies of posthumanism performs a fourth, a “discursive technological posthumanism” that can itself be considered through McLuhan’s tetrad. Thus, via an analysis of Hayles, the values that human embodiment expresses are enhanced in human–technology relations, where all aspects of embodied human reality are indissociable from questions of technology but are not overdetermined by them. In this heightening, previous accounts of meaning-formation are lent new urgency and intensity. By contrast, we witness through Dyens the obsolescence of a scientific–evolutionary understanding of the posthuman such that the overdeterminations of the latter’s empirical mechanisms are replaced by the type of intermediating feedback loops that Hayles so elegantly de- and in-scribes. Simultaneously, we are taken with Hansen into the deep time of technosubjectivity, where an iconic selfhood—preexisting the division of technics and embodiment—retrieves the urgency of deconstruction’s scholarly intervention. And finally, from the coupling of my own narration of these scholars to sound-informed media art interventions, the reversal potentials of technological posthumanisms are desublimated as the politically charged assumptions that necessarily underwrite them. Taken together, then, the discursive technological posthumanism of this study is itself a technology of posthumanism, and each of its claims is necessarily contingent on the other three of McLuhan’s fourfold intensities.

This fourth perspective (which is my own but is objectively inaccessible to me as a result) bears emphasis, if only because scholarly convention has precluded attending to it thus far in the book. That is, this book itself—or rather, the writing of this book—constitutes a Deleuzian assemblage of technological posthumanism, a rhizomatic multiplicity where (by definition) “any point of the rhizome can be connected to any other.”6 Because “determinations, magnitudes, and dimensions . . . cannot increase in number without the multiplicity changing in nature,”7 it is understood that the conclusions of this project represent tracings that must be “put back on the map.”8 That is, the alliances traced here—be they similarities or points of diversion—occupy a plateau of the multiplicity “technological posthumanism,” a “continuous, self-vibrating region of intensities whose development avoids any orientation towards a culmination point or external end.”9 Consequently, the subjects of this study are not presented toward a grand narrative of technological posthumanism that they either align with or not but are instead directly allied in the particular construction of technological posthumanism—the critical discourse of technological posthumanism—that is presented here.

What does this mean? It means that this book has used a narrow selection of thinkers to examine an indeterminate concept within provisional categories to elucidate a specific discourse that is brought into being through this process of description. What is offered in this book, then, fails to be Technological Posthumanism as it becomes a technological posthumanism, and nothing more. As Derrida has said, “it is between different things that one can think difference. But this difference-between may be understood in two ways: as another difference or as access to nondifference.”10 Though each of the theoretical chapters presented here has, in a sense, chosen the latter understanding, this book as a whole chooses the former.

Indeed, this multiplicitous nature is suggested by the artistic chapters presented in the study, which each take flight from the (seemingly) linear narrative of the book to suggest alternate readings that are not taken up further because they are beyond the latter’s purview, though they certainly inform it. As these interventionist chapters suggest, then, there is simply no way around the contingency that haunts each construction of technological posthumanism so that it would be both futile and ill-conceived to attempt to definitively conclude this, or any, account of the discourse. Indeed, one of the predicates of this study is an understanding of language that avows its material effects, so such a conclusion would, by definition, undermine itself. Instead, this conclusion aims to reiterate the provisional status of the study, not in an apologetic sense of refusing to stand behind the claims that I have made, but rather as a simple statement of factual fiction—in the flavor of what Blanchot has called “fictive theory”11—intended to invigorate the granitic territory of a discourse described.

It is a truism that art functions, at least in part, to create conditions in which audience members may “begin to question their own habitual perceptions and assumptions about being in the world.”12 This role is amplified in the case of media art because its very materials slide so nebulously between the worlds of aesthetics, capital, and politics. In this context, efforts to “explore how the medium/technology can deautonomize perception”13 take on added importance: as we saw in Hayles’s analysis of the Regime of Computation, naturalized technologies create metaphoric structures that dramatically condition thoughts, feelings, and actions and thereby directly affect our decision making. Ultimately, recognition of this contingency is a primary tenet of technological posthumanism in the sense that it marks the entrance of a human–technology coupling into discourse.

In the artistic practices discussed in this book, though, this role is taken up in a slightly different direction. Rather than attempting to access a prediscursive embodied Real, these pieces instead insist on the profound co-implication of discourse and embodiment by accepting it and even celebrating it. As a result, reversibility abounds so that we are continually reminded that language itself is captured within a paradoxical presence–absence that is, in a sense, embodiment. Thus it isn’t that Hayles, for example, is wrong to insist on the impossibility of separating information from its embodiment but rather that this emphasis constructs—in the rhetoric of human values—the very separation that it opposes by acting as though disembodiment is a danger (and is thus possible). In contrast, this book insists that the question of embodiment is beyond the pale, not because it is outside of language (as Hansen argues), but rather because it is a paradoxical becoming of linguistic ambivalence.

Indeed, this active ambivalence is an especially necessary position to insist on today, as we move further into what IBM is calling “the decade of smart.” I introduced this project by highlighting the ubiquity of technology and suggesting that we are in an era when understanding our relations to digital technologies in particular is a key component to addressing the question of agency in its contemporary appearance. This need is now all the more immanent, given that companies like IBM claim to have already answered it and are acting accordingly. Consider the following excerpt from a recent press release by the latter, promoting new “smart” technologies:

Trillions of digital devices, connected through the Internet, [are] producing a vast ocean of data [that can be] turned into knowledge. [Today, forward-thinking leaders are] finding the hidden treasures buried in data. Data is . . . revealing everything from large and systemic patterns . . . to the location, temperature, security, and condition of every item in a global supply chain. . . . That’s a lot of data, but data itself isn’t useful . . . unless you can extract value from it. And now we can.14

The point is that whether or not we are aware of it, we are implicated in this process of “value extraction” so that understanding this implication as a problematic—that is, as something that is simultaneously objective and subjective15—becomes paramount to any claims to agency we might make. Each of the artists and theorists of this study offers an idea of what this relation has been, is, and may become; one wager of this book is that understanding the connections, rents, and overlaps between these worldviews may shed light on the discursive movements they describe so that we may begin to swim through—and, perhaps, against—the dataverse with “smart” technologies of our own.