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iNTrOdUCTiON POSThUMaNiSM(S) 1 To hear past the historical insignificance of sounds, we need to hear more than their sonic or phonic content. DOUGLAS KAHN, NOISE, WATER, MEAT It is in the character of sound to be semiotically parasitic, to take on— and usually intensify—the systems of meaning to which it attaches. High-fidelity audio accompanying a video, for example, tends to produce the impression of higher-definition visuals, while the reverse is not the case.1 Sound is a kind of amplifier, but an invisible one, a contamination that produces something different precisely by reproducing the same. A book about sound is never just a book about sound, then, but is rather a stridulation of sound rubbing up against another set of concerns , in this case, technological posthumanism. This book palpates three dominant strains of the latter, examining each as a contingent narration of human–technology coupling. To this end, the book adopts the critical strategy of seeking after the assumptions and biases that underwrite each approach, while also taking up the tactic of playing each narration out in a topos of sound, where we might listen more particularly to their politics. The gambit of this book as a book, then, is that the coaction of these strategic and tactical approaches might produce fresh purchase on a discourse that continues to proliferate, not least because the daily practices to which it obtains become increasingly difficult to even provisionally extricate from contemporary technologies. That is, listening—in the full sense—to technological posthumanism will not only offer new insight into what has been said on the topic but will also push the conversation in a direction that is crucial to (and, to date, largely missing from) the broader posthumanist project of decentering the human. 2 introduction We can more specifically understand the challenge that aurality presents in this context by further considering three of its aspects, each of which points to the way that sound is mobilized in this book. First, sound is differential: as Aden Evens points out, “to hear is to experience air pressure changing. . . . One does not hear air pressure, but one hears it change over time [such that] to hear a pitch that does not change is to hear as constant something that is nothing but change. To hear is to hear difference.”2 The point, for Evens, is that the physics of hearing meshes perfectly with a Deleuzian language of becoming, but the inverse should also be noted, namely, that sound can only be understood as a physics insofar as it is a physics under erasure, as a physics that always performs itself and its own impossibility simultaneously. In this way, sound supplements (or perhaps tropes) the famously vexing horizontal duality of light (as both particle and wave) with a vertical duality that exists as both material (though exclusively in wave form) and immaterial. In short, sound as such calls us to think of it as a particular object that has no substance, as a kind of ideal object that nonetheless has real material effects (i.e., literal sounds). This, then, points to the difference between attending to sound in its own right and listening to sounds: despite its undeniable material effects, sound itself resists being placed within a visual ontology. Indeed, sound resists being placed at all and is in this sense as much relational as it is differential (which is the second feature I wish to highlight). Think, for example, of a light panning across a stage from right to left; if we stop the light 80 percent of the way through the pan, we can point to the exact place where the particles of light literally impact the stage. Now imagine the same scenario with sound; with contemporary technologies, we can almost as easily pinpoint where the sound “is” on stage (i.e., where we hear it coming from), but there is in fact nothing there: the placement of sound that results from an 80 percent pan is in fact produced by a relative difference in intensity between the two polarized sound-emitting loudspeakers . In short, the sound is emphatically not where it sounds like it is. Indeed, the added twist is that it also isn’t where it appears to be (i.e., coming from the loudspeakers) because it only comes to be at all through the differential act of hearing, which is the very act that would place it where it isn’t.3 Finally, sound is also multiplicitous...

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