Posthuman sounds

It might be something of a truism to observe that sound entangles us with technology … and that technology entangles us with sound. But to propose, as David Cecchetto does in his introduction to Humanesis, that sound somehow ‘threatens’ a technological posthumanism aimed at theorizing these entanglements might be quite another matter (9).

Reckoning a 1980–1990s historical moment, when ‘the decentering of the human by its imbrication in technical, medical, informatic, and economic networks became impossible to ignore’, Cecchetto grasps posthumanism, broadly, as humanesis: ‘a recognition that the static term human has entered into discourse, where it flows, mutates, exchanges and propagates according to the paradoxical logics of language’¹ (8).

With this emphasis on critical discourse analysis, Cecchetto aims to expose how recalcitrant humanist biases trouble Ollivier Dyens’, N. Katherine Hayles’ and Mark B. N. Hansen’s theorizations of human–technological coupling. For Cecchetto, it is precisely sound’s conspicuous absence in posthumanist discourse that makes it such a suggestive topos for pursuing the ethical and political ramifications of these aporias: herein lies its ‘threat’. Furthermore, with three media art practices that differently emphasize the twinned problematics of sound and aurality, Cecchetto intensifies each thinker’s humanist bias in order to consider how making those biases explicit and explicity audible propounds new ways to narrate, theorize, and hear technological posthumanism. The descriptions that follow aim to capture the deconstructive texture of Humanesis while highlighting the aspects of Cecchetto’s theoretical close-readings upon which he poises sound to intervene.

In Part I, Cecchetto confronts Ollivier Dyens’ argument, in Metal and Flesh (2001), that biological bodies have been absorbed into ‘political, informational and cultural systems’ and superseded by ‘cultural bodies’ themselves propagated not by genes, but memes detached from any conventional conceptualization of materiality.² For Cecchetto, Dyens’ transposition of evolutionary processes from biology onto culture poses the ‘cultural body’ as not only the product of a human–technology nexus (as Dyens argues) but also a ‘scene of language’ (that Dyens performs) (41). This interchange, in other words, performs evolutionary theory as an ‘unfalsifiable logic’ whose explanatory power exceeds material constraints to ‘obtain in any discursive setting’ (38). For Dyens’, the cultural body reinscribes nothing more (or less) than the unmarked authority of scientific reasoning itself (59).

With a shift in tone, in Chapter Two, Cecchetto poses Dyens’ posthumanism as haunted by the ‘uninterrogated presupposition’ of its own scientific authority and figures this haunting as sound … itself haunted by its recalcitrant interimplication with vision (59). For Cecchetto, William Brent’s False Ruminations and Ellen Moffat’s Basement Suite convey status as ‘sound works’ in both visual and aural registers, only to set ‘visible sound’ into ambivalent and antagonistic relation with ‘sounding sound’.³ Against the memetic replication of cultural bodies, sounding sound at once corroborates and forecloses a ‘world of sound we hear with our eyes’ posing hearing as a ‘jarring disjunction’ between sound and vision, that neither, individually, can contain (57).

Part II probes N. Katherine Hayles’ claims to a posthuman ethics drawn from her stringent critique of a late twentieth century cybernetic dream of transforming bodies into information or ‘non-matter’.⁴ With Western humanism, Hayles argues, this discourse both claims and propagates a ‘universality dependent on erasing markers of bodily difference’ (quoted in Cecchetto, 65). Her posthumanism, in contrast, emphasizes a mutually constitutive relation of embodiment to information based in the commingled practices of humans and machines. When speech and writing become entangled with code, however, ‘cognition is distributed between disparate parts that may only be in tenuous communication with one another’ as code remains unintelligible in our embodied exchanges with language (quoted in Cecchetto, 76; italics added). Cecchetto argues that Hayles retains a conception of meaning that cannot register precisely the ‘disparate parts’ that drive her account of distributed cognition, much less an embodied posthumanism that eschews any ‘a priori way to identify a self-will that can be clearly distinguished from an other-will’ (quoted in Cecchetto, 81).

Considering Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s 1995 telepresence work, The Trace, Cecchetto rethinks Hayles’ distributed cognition through Judith Butler’s theorization of melancholic subjectivity. Specifically, Cecchetto connects Hayles’ notion of the posthuman ‘other-will’ with the ambiguous composition of self and Other that constitutes subjectivity for Butler (100). In The Trace, two participants (one remote, one local) negotiate whether or not to coincide (or ‘tele-embody’) in telepresence (91). This negotiation is at once staged and disciplined by four media (light, sound, and statistics in two and three dimensions) that distribute seemingly discrete bodily actions as a ‘multiplicity of incompatible actions’ within the piece’s ‘reduced perspectival field’ (94). The Trace may disarticulate its participants’ bodies but in the manner of melancholic incorporation also sustains those bodies in and as precisely their vulnerability to the piece’s reduced ‘codes of interaction’ (102). By inducing this ambivalent embodiment in and through ‘medial disjunction’, Cecchetto concludes, The Trace reconfigures the ‘disparate parts’ of Hayles’ distributed cognition as relations (perhaps) of vulnerability.⁵

In Part III, Mark B. N. Hansen’s Embodying Technesis (2000) and Bodies in Code (2006) hold Cecchetto’s focus on embodiment in technological posthumanism. For Hansen, the body’s ‘fundamental access onto the world’ poses technicity as constitutive of human embodiment (quoted in Cecchetto, 132). Technology that would expand that access points back to ‘the body as its source’ and does so, no less, for Hansen, below the registers of language and representation – a gambit that Cecchetto seizes for strenuous deconstructive critique. Refusing linguistic determination, after all, admits language as an ‘enabling constraint’ (137). Moreover, in claiming embodiment’s connection with technics as originary, Cecchetto argues, Hansen both concedes and suppresses an originary heterogeneity consistent with the deconstructive views he eschews.

In Chapter Six, Cecchetto’s 2007 telematic practice, Skewed Remote Musical Performance (henceforth SRMP), continues pressing this aporia. In SRMP, a central ‘skewing’ mechanism guarantees unpredictably different sounds for two (remote) performers whose interaction depends on hearing sound in one location as a kind of alibi for sound that may or may not actually sound in another. Put differently, SRMP’s ‘skewed’ sounds figure a sonic relationality to which they cannot positively correspond. In this, Cecchetto would have SRMP project the ambivalence roiling Hansen’s posthuman embodiment into a sonic register: by making explicit the ‘gap between literal sounds and the sonic ontology in which they exist’, SRMP performs the ‘illogic’ of presuming one’s precedence over the other (154).

Beyond its ‘threatening’ gambit, sound’s role as a critical asset, in Humanesis, warrants close attention. On the one hand, Cecchetto enlists sound to intensify the political stakes for each thinker’s (constitutive) humanist exclusions but does not offer precise criteria for thinking the political stakes of this intensification. According to what criteria, in other words, does Eidola’s challenge to scientific authority, in Dyens, constitute an expressly political intervention? On the other hand, Cecchetto defers questions regarding how the ‘Sound’ of Humanesis’ title ought to be understood such that it could deliver on this strong initial claim (3). As a ‘potent means for accessing the world’, in Douglas Kahn’s words, sound’s propensity to ‘lead away from itself’ nonetheless makes of it a ‘nebulous methodology’.⁶ For Cecchetto, however, sound vivifies theoretical impasses most effective precisely in this ‘leading away’: the sound, of both Eidola and SKRP, remains inextricable from attention to how its audibility is also foreclosed. Perhaps Cecchetto need not be so oblique about sound’s role in Humanesis, where (borrowing from Akira Lippit) sound could be said to function as both ‘feature and figure’: sound features each thinker’s constitutive aporia but does so by precisely effacing itself in sounding, thus figuring the centrality of deconstruction to Cecchetto’s argument about humanist bias.⁷

Humanesis sits comfortably within Jonathan Sterne’s (broad) assessment of sound studies as a ‘reaction to changes in culture and technology’, but Cecchetto sidelines historiographic and genealogical methods for a critical discourse analysis that poses sound as, itself, a methodological asset.⁸ Opposing ‘music’s (hegemonic) disciplinary politics’ inserts Humanesis into ongoing debates regarding the relation of music to sound art while sound’s (critical) play between ‘feature and figure’ moves against more recent enjoinders for a philosophy adequate to ‘sound’s true nature’.⁹ Humanesis offers a robust introduction to the work of Dyens, Hayles, and Hansen that might be of particular interest, for its detailed treatment of posthuman embodiment(s), to scholars engaged with embodied practice within and beyond media studies. By modelling media art practice as a kind of pressure on theoretical knowledge, more broadly, Humanesis encourages and energizes practice-based and practice-led research in sound, new media, and other areas. Beyond Humanesis, however, contemporary articulations of the posthuman also emphasize humans’ imbrication with animals and the environment. While this expanded field evokes practices well outside Cecchetto’s purview, Humanesis makes a demanding, suggestive wager on the capacity, perhaps, of field recording and other environmental sound practices, to (continue to) play out posthumanism’s biases, assets, and impasses in sound.

Notes on contributor

Amy Cimini is Assistant Professor of Music at University of California San Diego. Her research engages twentieth century philosophy and political thought with an emphasis on the body. She has published work drawn from this research in Contemporary Music Review, GAMUT, and a number of edited volumes. As a violist, she plays with Anthony Braxton’s Tri-Centric Orchestra and her improvising duo Architeuthis Walks on Land released their third record, The Surveyors, on the Carrier imprint.

Amy M. Cimini
Music, University of California San Diego, La Jolla, CA, USA
[email protected]
© 2016 Amy M. Cimini
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/20551940.2015.1079977

Notes

1. Wolfe, What is Posthumanism?, xvi.

2. Dyens, Metal and Flesh, 3.

3. Cecchetto curated Eidola with Ted Heibert in 2009 at Open Space, Victoria BC, Canada.

4. Miah, “Posthumanism,” 7.

5. Ritts, “Humanesis by David Cecchetto,” 2.

6. Cited in Sterne, “Sonic Imaginations,” 6.

7. Lippit, Electric Animal, 26.

8. Sterne, “Sonic Imaginations,” 3.

9. Cox, “Beyond Representation and Signification,” 154.