Humanesis: Sound and Technological Posthumanism

Notes

NOTES 167 iNTrOdUCTiON 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” 168 notes to introduction 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, MeetingtheUniverseHalfway:QuantumPhysicsandtheEntanglement 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 notes to introduction 169 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...