_Humanesis_ critically examines central strains of posthumanism, searching out biases in the ways that human–technology coupling is explained. Specifically, it interrogates three approaches taken by posthumanist discourse: scientific, humanist, and organismic. David Cecchetto’s investigations reveal how each perspective continues to hold on to elements of the humanist tradition that it is ostensibly mobilized against. His study frontally desublimates the previously unseen presumptions that underlie each of the three thought lines and offers incisive appraisals of the work of three prominent thinkers: (...) Ollivier Dyens, Katherine Hayles, and Mark Hansen. To materially ground the problematic of posthumanism, _Humanesis_ interweaves its theoretical chapters with discussions of artworks. These highlight the topos of sound, demonstrating how aurality might produce new insights in a field that has been dominated by visualization. Cecchetto, a media artist, scrutinizes his own collaborative artistic practice in which he elucidates the variegated causal chains that compose human–technological coupling. _Humanesis_ advances the posthumanist conversation in several important ways. It proposes the term “technological posthumanism” to focus on the discourse as it relates to technology without neglecting its other disciplinary histories. It suggests that deconstruction remains relevant to the enterprise, especially with respect to the performative dimension of language. It analyzes artworks not yet considered in the light of posthumanism, with a particular emphasis on the role of aurality. And the form of the text introduces a reflexive component that exemplifies how the dialogue of posthumanism might progress without resorting to the types of unilateral narratives that the book critiques. (shrink)

This essay examines the problem of medial specificity in music and sound art, giving particular attention to Seth Kim-Cohen’s call for a non-cochlear sound art based on the notion of “expansion” that has been decisive in visual arts discourses. I argue that Kim-Cohen’s non-cochlear intervention in In the Blink of an Ear might be productively pressured towards the concept of a “sonic effect” that acknowledges the material-discursive particularity of sound without recourse to the phenomenological claims of authenticity that Kim-Cohen correctly (...) abhors. In service of this argument, the essay extensively discusses a sound and media artwork – Exurbia, created by myself and William Brent – that leverages the metaphorics of sound against existing understandings of specific forms of network communication. I argue that the conceptual and material dimensions of the project stridulate in a hum of recursive vectors for considering the constitution and consequences of networked aural interaction. Exurbia can thus be parsed in terms of medial specificity precisely because its digital aural materials are themselves discursive. (shrink)

In the context of the highly contested discourse of posthumanism, this essay examines Mark 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 (Hansen, 2006a: 9). 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. (shrink)

In _Listening in the Afterlife of Data_, David Cecchetto theorizes sound, communication, and data by analyzing them in the contexts of the practical workings of specific technologies, situations, and artworks. In a time he calls the afterlife of data—the cultural context in which data’s hegemony persists even in the absence of any belief in its validity—Cecchetto shows how data is repositioned as the latest in a long line of concepts that are at once constitutive of communication and suggestive of its (...) limits. Cecchetto points to the failures and excesses of communication by focusing on the power of listening—whether through wearable technology, internet-based artwork, or the ways in which computers process sound—to pragmatically comprehend the representational excesses that data produces. Writing at a cultural moment in which data has never been more ubiquitous or less convincing, Cecchetto elucidates the paradoxes that are constitutive of computation and communication more broadly, demonstrating that data is never quite what it seems. (shrink)