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Deconstructing Affect: Posthumanism and Mark Hansen's Media Theory (2011)
Complete text available in Theory, Culture, and Society. Vol. 28, no. 5 (September, 2011), 3-33. Please email me if you require access.
In the context of the highly contested discourse of posthumanism, this essay examines Mark B.N. Hansen's attempt to give a robust account of technology in its extra-linguistic dimension by evincing an "'originary' coupling of the human and the technical" that grounds experience as such. Specifically, I argue that Hansen's perspective is haunted by the representational logic that it moves against. In this, I do not repudiate Hansen's argument as such, but rather reject one of its central underlying implications: that the extra-discursive materiality of technology might be accessed, linguistically, without attaching a meaning to it that is foreign to this materiality. To this end, the essay begins with an examination of technesis as it is initially developed by Hansen, demonstrating the necessity from which it sprang, the contribution that Hansen's reading makes, and its ultimate limitations. From here, the essay articulates Hansen's argument for an affective topology of the senses, corroborating the increased importance of digital technologies in this perspective through a brief comparison of Roberto Lazzarini's skulls (as read by Hansen) and my own piece Sound. Finally, this comparison pivots the essay towards a critical analysis of Hansen's account of primary tactility that demonstrates its dependence on the (representational) logic of language. In closing, then, I argue that what is accomplished by Hansen's putting-into-discourse of technesis is, paradoxically, a re-staging of the constitutive ambivalence of deconstruction that reinvigorates the posthumanist elements of that discourse.
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Derrida and Luhmann in a Theatre of Posthumanism, review of
What is Posthumanism? by Cary Wolfe (2010)
Click title to download a printable version of the complete text (3 pages).
What is Posthumanism? begins from the observation, via Foucault, that "humanism is its own dogma" (xiv) in the sense that the term "human" always naturalizes the distinctions that constitute it. In this light, Cary Wolfe"s posthumanism intervenes both prior to and after humanism: on one hand, it is anterior in that "it names the embodiment and embeddedness of the human being" (xv) in biological and technical worlds; on the other hand, posthumanism also names a contemporary historical moment in which it is increasingly impossible to ignore the decentering that is worked on the human through "its imbrication in technical, medical, informatic, and economic networks" (xv). In this sense, then, the endeavour that Wolfe shoulders in WIP is not simply to contribute to a "thematics of the decentering of the human" (xvi), but—more importantly—to explore "what thought has to become in the face of" the challenges posed by that decentering (xvi).
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Response to Harry Lehmann's "Digitization and Concept" (2010)
Click title to download a printable version of the complete text (2 pages), which is also available here.
The article to which this review responds is available here.
[...] And isn't this the point? Rather than fortifying the borders of New Music—a practice that inevitably leads to a reciprocal celebration of the hybridity that comes with these borders' transgression, which has its own problems—why not place New Music and digital technologies in a feedback relationship that isn't concerned with categorization? From this perspective, we might begin to learn something from the myriad practices of digital sound that already obtain, ranging from Second Life performance ensembles to tactile musical interfaces for the deaf to medical, military and advertising sound technologies such as "sound bombs" and ultra-/infra-sound [which Aden Evens has argued might actually inform the affective dimension of our listening more than our conscious aural perceptions, and which Steve Goodman has recently connected to a general "(sub)politics of frequency"]. Indeed, why not similarly probe digitization in search of the ways that it supplements the normalizing force of the "finite number of intrinsic aesthetic values in human perception" with the infinite variability of (post)human embodiment? In this, the goal would be to develop new concepts that are open to at least the possibility that digitization might bring with it new modes of sensation, perception, and movement.
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| skulls Roberto Lazzarini, 2000 |
Posthumanism(s) [Dissertation Introduction] (2009)
Click title to download a printable version of the complete text (22 pages).
Today, the signs of technological posthumanism have become so ubiquitous that most of us, on most occasions, have ceased to take notice. Indeed, our navigations through diverse realities and our negotiations with aggressive technological couplings are no longer even really remarkable: email and video-chats, certainly, but also genetically modified foods, text-messaging, online university classes, virtual exercise routines, and complex relational databases are all part of our daily lives. As a result, our perceptive apparatuses are constantly tuned to diverse and often contradictory frequencies, but in a way that tends to play out any incongruities as part of what and who we are as humans. Indeed, many of us are more likely to feel the absence of these technologies than their presence: for example, I myself have frequently felt a visceral frustration at not having Internet access while driving; a question pops into my head and—before becoming aware of my physical situation—I can feel my body reaching for the Internet to answer it. What feels incongruent is not having the Internet available, as it forces me back into the confines of a body that I no longer identify as being the sum total of my self. Indeed, even as I feel this bodily re-containment as a reductive violence played out on my consciousness, I nonetheless continue to hurtle along the highway at a speed that insists that it is I who am propelled, not my automobile.
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| Self-Portrait Fictions: Giants #3 Ted Hiebert, 2007-08 |
Dark Matters [Ghosting Judith Butler] (2009)
Click title to download a printable version of the complete text (2 pages).
Reading again Žižek’s account of the Real, I am reminded of 'dark matter,' that undetectable hypothetical substance that is said by some to structure the entire universe. Eluding the ubiquitous pull of electromagnetic force, this dark matter is visible only through its invisibility, through its gravitational pull on visibility itself. Darkness, it seems, is what we are really perceiving when we see the spectacular explosions of charged atoms that constitutes, equally, the atrocities of Guantanamo and the click of a mouse, the underground activity of the Large Hadron Collider and its full spectrum realization in the language of digital media. History itself, dark matter would suggest, can only be a phantasmatic relation to the real gravitational pull of darkness.
And so we can hear the ambivalence that is performed in, by, and through dark matter. On one hand, dark matter is the outside of special relativity theory, that which is excluded from electromagnetic force, that which exceeds the speed of light; on the other hand, dark matter is included in special relativity as its constitutive outside, as that which is necessary for electromagnetism to be intelligible as a force, as that which has no speed.
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Music and Catachresis: Lachenmann’s …zwei Gefühle… in the Theatre of Judith Butler (2009)
Click title to download a printable version of the complete text (9 pages, plus examples).
This paper was presented at the CUMS/CSA joint panel of Congress 2009, and was a finalist for the George Proctor Prize for best paper presented by a graduate student (CUMS).
This presentation considers Helmut Lachenmann’s …zwei Gefühle… (zG) as a radically citational work, the citationality of which can be understood through the rhetorical figure of ‘catachresis.’ Drawing on the methodology of Judith Butler’s critique of the materiality of sex (from Bodies That Matter, wherein she attempts to write the sex of materiality), I argue that zG performs a deconstruction of the sound-music opposition that is implicit in musical discourses.
In this sense, zG remains a strictly ‘musical’ performance, even as it refuses musicality. That is, zG remains a musical question; one that traces sound as the site at which a certain drama of musical difference plays itself out. The construction of ‘event-ness’ implicit in this claim elides with elements of the composer’s own reading of his work, but also speaks to Lachenmann’s implicit awareness of the doubled character of musical discourse: on the one hand, it deprives sound of its soundness; on the other hand, it constructs sound as always already being the sound of music. Ultimately, this position suggests that zG is performative of the claim that sound itself cannot be said to be anything, to participate in musical ontology at all. That is, sounds—eluding grammar—are the disfigurations that emerge at the boundaries of music and, precisely as such, can never be music.
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Video Interview with Ollivier Dyens
(with Émile Fromet de Rosnay)
Click image to view video, or click here for audio only.
What does it mean to be human when technology tells us that no such thing exists? Ollivier Dyens, author of La Condition inhumaine, essai sur l'effroi technoloque (Flammarion) and Metal and Flesh (MIT), founder and webmaster of Metal and Flesh (1998-2003), Continent X (www.continentx.uqam.ca), and a Google Earth based project mapping the posthuman (www.theinhumancondition.org), discusses his notion the inhuman condition, which is our inability to define what we mean by humanity.
This 90 minute interview was conducted on 13 March 2009, following Dyens' Lansdowne address at the University of Victoria, Canada.
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Melancholy and the Territory of Digital Performance
Click title to download the complete printable version (14 pages).
This chapter is published in Collision: Interarts Practice and Research (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008)
In a time when interdisciplinary artworks are becoming ubiquitous, the
question of how to utilize the critical discourse of specific disciplines
without refusing a particular work’s broader cultural relevance has become
increasingly pertinent. Where works of art have traditionally been
assigned to one or another conventional disciplinary field, interdisciplinary
practices (particularly of the last sixty years) have convincingly
dramatized the fact that cultural influence defines an artwork at least as
much as disciplinary status. In this context, the recent proliferation of
artworks involving digital technology (i.e. contemporary "media art")
serves to at once reveal and challenge the ways in which conventional
disciplinary vocabularies limit how we can talk about works of art and,
consequently, the possibilities for understanding their larger cultural
relevance. Simply put, contemporary media demands a new theoretical
framework. I will argue that this framework must necessarily connect to
the constitutive subjective ambivalence that Judith Butler (supplementing
Foucault and Lacan) has theorized under the rubric of power. Taking
account of how paradox structures the debate of subjectivity—always
culminating "in displays of ambivalence" (1997, 10)—Butler's account
offers a model from which to address digital art performance’s constitutive
ambivalence as determinant of and determined by culture; that is, through
insisting that the territory of digital performance is the problematic of the
subject, I will also argue that contemporary art practices must first and
foremost be considered as ethical practices. That is, any “work” that is
accomplished in contemporary media art is achieved within the
problematic of a code of practices that is itself grounded in the subject’s
relation to the social (a relation that is always under erasure) rather in than
artistic production. With this territory laid out, then, I will conclude the
chapter by suggesting that the performance of media art is a performance
of the ambivalence that is constitutive of subjectivity, and thus feeds back
as a politicizing performance of Butler’s critique of unilateral narratives.
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Sounding the Hyperlink: Skewed Remote Musical Performance and the Virtual Subject (2007)
Click title to download a printable version of the complete text (26 pages).
This article is published in Mosaic: a Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature (Vol. 42/1, 2009).
This essay contributes to the decentering of vision in the Western sensorium that has been the project of much recent scholarship. Accepting Derrida’s argument, in Of Grammatology, that the sound of the voice is not a sounding of presence, this article nonetheless argues that sound itself remains active as the invisible ground that figures ‘sounds’. Sound is thus presented here as a ‘field-mosaic’ in McLuhan’s sense of the term, indicating a relational ontology wherein this relationality is taken as pre-existent to the terms related. Sound, in this article, thus represents an attempt to grasp the “fieldness” of this ontology precisely by refusing to give sonic instantiations ('sounds') primary status, instead thinking of them in the technological terms of McLuhan’s tetrad. However, if sound is thus understood (in the technological sense) as an extension of the human, and the ‘fieldness’ of sound prevents us from registering the term ‘human’ as prior to its relational status, then sound as it is here mobilized suggests an understanding of human subjectivity as decentered in the technological field (which has no centre) such that subjectivity itself is now understood as a technology, a notion that has been often and variously discussed under the term of ‘posthuman’. Ultimately, then, this article explores sound’s relation to this new subjectivity through an analysis of a practice called ‘Skewed Remote Musical Performance’ (SRMP). The thesis resulting from this exploration is the suggestion that posthuman subjectivity has always been everywhere present (sic) as sound itself; that is, the 'zero-level' of the technology of subjectivity–the zero-level of the posthuman subject—is the field-mosaic that is sound.
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Music and Simulation [Ghosting Jean Baudrillard] (2006)
Click title to download a printable version of the complete text (2 pages).
Writing alongside Baudrillard, it is possible to think (in the realm of music) of 'performance' as 'simulation'. Since "to simulate is to feign to have what one hasnÕt", to perform is to feign the 'reality' of music, a reality which is never 'real' outside of the play of simulation. In the presence of musical composition (which is always already there), there is no longer music. Indeed, with the emergence of sound (which is always already there), there is no longer music. Remaining with Baudrillard: the 'western art music' performance is no longer that of a 'piece of music'. Instead, the performance is hypermusic: the generation by musical techniques derived from music that is not musical. The 'piece of music' (embodied in the composition) no longer precedes its performance, nor survives it. Since the performed precedes the piece of music, the difference between the 'piece of music' and its sonic realization disappears. What disappears with performance is the sonic realization's musicality (as well as its composition), without which the music itself disappears. The sound of a performance no longer has to be musical, then, since it is no longer measured against the forms of 'western art music'. In fact, since it is no longer placed within a musical canon, it is no longer music at all. It is hypermusic: the product of a synthesis of musical techniques in a canon without history.
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Detritus from (or a Meditation on) Content, Context, and Art (2006)
Click title to download a printable version of the complete text (27 pages).
Prelude
A different paper preceded this one. The thesis of that paper was that formal and ritual changes effected by an artwork are at their core political. Towards an exploration of the particular aesthetic and political implications of that position I employed the metaphor of 'vagrancy'. This employment allowed me to migrate between disciplines and argue by analogy, a useful allowance in the context of the normalizing and depoliticizing disciplinarization of the arts (in western institutions, especially). 'Vagrancy' related to the body of that paper in a loosely analogous way to Butler's relation of gender and the human body; it was "the repeated stylization of the body [of the paper], a set of repeated acts within a highly rigid regulatory frame that congeal[ed] over time to produce the appearance of substance" (Butler, 91). That paper appeared to be substantially 'vagrant', then, even as it performed untenable philosophical reductions from the fixed monolithic frame of an assumed Real.
The previous paper 'failed' in the way that every dialectic fails: the very thing that constituted its core flipped into its inverse. In this case, the inversion occurred first on the site of the vagrant/fixed binary, so that vagrancy seeped into the very essence of the paper, undermining its most provisional (vagrant) claims by reversing them into fixed Truth statements. This process simultaneously pushed the (previously invisible) fixed assumptions on which these claims rested to the surface of vagrancy. From this first inversion followed multiples of others, the most extensive of which was the disintegration (whether through ecstatic multiplication or an internal aporia, it is not clear) of a context/content distinction. This current paper is a farriginous meditation on this disintegration. It is not an attack on Enlightenment thinking; such an attack would be impossible because that battle has already been waged and won. Rather, this paper represents the soldiers' wading through the wreckage of what was the battlefield, recounting stories from the battle even as they pursue the impossible task of 'cleaning things up'. The paper inhabits and is inhabited by this landscape, and if, periodically, a critique emerges, it is nothing but an indeterminate side-effect of this cohabitation. Perhaps this is too gloomy, though. Perhaps I, as soldier, have been too jaded by the violence of creating this paper to be able to celebrate its completion. Perhaps what has finally emerged in this second paper can be trumpeted as having the (non)form of a nomadic multiplicity, a rhyzomatic (non)structure of meditations that are not organized into a single Meditation. However...
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vagrant(ana)music: Three (four) Plateaus of a Contingent Music (2006)
Click title to download a printable version of the complete text (28 pages), or click here to view the complete text as published in the online journal Radical Musicology.
In the body of this paper exist two essays, two efforts, articulated simultaneously. The first, titled Vagrantana Music, posits an idea of Music, however contingent, that is developed from a collection of writing selected through the vagrant scholarship that necessarily emerges in interdisciplinary studies. To this end, the essay employs Music as a site on which to intersect a selection of ideas from Baudrillard, Derrida, and Adorno. In particular, these ideas are explored within the frames of cosmology, ecology, and sociality. Here, 'vagrancy' is understood for its nomadic quality, suggesting that these thinkers have wandered into the scope of the essay on their own, rather than being conjured forth in the service of a thesis. The thinkers are not chosen for their centrality, their ability to reduce the field of Music to their thought, but for their singularity. In this essay, Music is a conceptually malleable site rather than a material entity, so that its analysis allows these thinkers to be positioned relative to one another without creating an environment of rational (Enlightenment) antagonism. Instead, this perspective mirrors a pedagogical model, where we 'learn what we can' from each perspective without casting out the others.
The second essay found here, coextensive to the first, is titled Vagrant Anamusic. This essay traces the wandering of music itself into the discourses of these thinkers, the wanderings of a music that is not Music. Here, 'vagrancy' is invoked for its connotations of a lack of home or employment, its allusion to a weight that is borne by society. On the plane of the social, this Anamusic hides the aporia that is the condition of its existence (Lacan's 'Thing'), from which springs its subjective polyvalence. That is, through a paradoxical singularity, Music becomes a concept (even under erasure) from which meanings can emerge. However, in the realm of cosmology, this Anamusic assumes its full potential in the form of hypermusic, proving to be the negation that masks the absence of Music; indeed, masks the absence of the Real.
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