‘How We Were Never Posthuman’: Technologies of the Embodied Voice in Pamela Z's Voci

This article analyses composer Pamela Z's work in light of critiques of posthumanism from Black studies and sound/music studies. Z's large-scale multimedia work Voci (2003), which the artist describes as a ‘polyphonic mono-opera’, consists of a series of eighteen scenes that combine vocal performance with digital video and audio processing. Z manipulates these sources using the BodySynth, an alternate controller interface that converts bodily gestures into expressive control signals. Z's work has been considered through cyborgian, Afrofuturist, and posthumanist discourses. But rather than affirm her practice as fully consonant with technological visions of the posthuman, I argue that she challenges the very liberal humanism upon which the posthuman is built. For a key tenet of liberal humanism, as Alexander G. Weheliye observes, was the racial and gendered apportionment of humanity into full humans, not-quite-humans, and non-humans. We have never been completely human, he suggests, let alone posthuman. Z uses technologies of the embodied voice to confront both the posthuman imaginary and the continued effects of its ideological preconditions in racio-colonial liberal humanism. In a Voci scene entitled ‘Voice Studies’, for instance, Z engages the problem of ‘linguistic profiling’ as it applies to housing discrimination, citing the work of Stanford linguistics researcher John Baugh. Against a backdrop of percussive vocalizations, Z explains, ‘Studies reveal that people can often infer the race of an individual based on the sound of their voice’, subsequently playing back recordings of housing applicants containing vocal signifiers of racial difference. The article then contrasts this kind of ‘aural dimension of race’ found in Jennifer Lynn Stoever's notion of the ‘sonic color line’ with Pierre Schaeffer's attempt to separate sound from the social – as well as from bodies and identities – in his practice of acousmatic reduction. With this in mind, I show how Z construes the voice as an acous(ma)tic technology of embodiment while reframing opera's humanist legacy through Voci's allegorical narration of the ‘prehuman’, ‘human’, and ‘posthuman’. Moving with and against a posthuman imaginary, Z suggests that although we have never quite been human or posthuman, we may nevertheless narrate new versions of each.

Creatures of artifice : Rodney Brooks and the bioethics of animated machines

Renowned robotics engineer Rodney Brooks has built a career engineering behaviourally intelligent machines for scientific research, military-industrial applications, and domestic service. Drawing lessons from biology and ethology, Brooks designs embodied, responsive robots that he provocatively calls "artificial creatures." He has also been vocal about the broad implications his research carries for the future, making bold predictions about a technological society increasingly shaped by ecologies of animated machines. This dissertation examines a number of popular and academic texts in which Brooks discusses his artificial creatures, his design methodology, and his futurological speculations. Focusing on key moments from these texts, I discuss how he constructs a rhetorical and narrative framework through which he ascribes a sense of "life" to his robots in order to probe the distinction between the living and the nonliving and deliberately unsettle the bounds of the biological and the technological. As he highlights the lifelike qualities of his robots that raise them to the status of creatures, he simultaneously emphasizes the machine-like qualities of human beings, leading him to charge people with "overanthropomorphizing" themselves. I argue that these contrapuntal shifts call into question models of subjectivity derived from modern liberal humanism, insofar as they destabilize traditional relations between machines, animals, and human beings. In order to develop the broader theoretical implications of Brooks' work, I engage in comparative readings that place him in dialogue with philosophers such as Martin Heidegger, Bernard Stiegler, Jacques Derrida, and René Descartes, early cyberneticists Norbert Wiener and W. Grey Walter, and an offbeat video game called Chibi Robo! These readings afford opportunities to challenge modes of thinking and acting that assume human mastery over nature and technology, and subsequently to reevaluate our intimate connections to nonhuman beings that make human life livable in the first place. Ultimately, I endeavour to lay the groundwork for a bioethics that is responsive to redefinitions of life by technological means, one that eschews anthropocentrism in order to suggest a concern for different ways of living and belonging between humans and nonhumans, rather than for the lives of human beings alone.

Creatures of artifice : Rodney Brooks and the bioethics of animated machines

Renowned robotics engineer Rodney Brooks has built a career engineering behaviourally intelligent machines for scientific research, military-industrial applications, and domestic service. Drawing lessons from biology and ethology, Brooks designs embodied, responsive robots that he provocatively calls "artificial creatures." He has also been vocal about the broad implications his research carries for the future, making bold predictions about a technological society increasingly shaped by ecologies of animated machines. This dissertation examines a number of popular and academic texts in which Brooks discusses his artificial creatures, his design methodology, and his futurological speculations. Focusing on key moments from these texts, I discuss how he constructs a rhetorical and narrative framework through which he ascribes a sense of "life" to his robots in order to probe the distinction between the living and the nonliving and deliberately unsettle the bounds of the biological and the technological. As he highlights the lifelike qualities of his robots that raise them to the status of creatures, he simultaneously emphasizes the machine-like qualities of human beings, leading him to charge people with "overanthropomorphizing" themselves. I argue that these contrapuntal shifts call into question models of subjectivity derived from modern liberal humanism, insofar as they destabilize traditional relations between machines, animals, and human beings. In order to develop the broader theoretical implications of Brooks' work, I engage in comparative readings that place him in dialogue with philosophers such as Martin Heidegger, Bernard Stiegler, Jacques Derrida, and René Descartes, early cyberneticists Norbert Wiener and W. Grey Walter, and an offbeat video game called Chibi Robo! These readings afford opportunities to challenge modes of thinking and acting that assume human mastery over nature and technology, and subsequently to reevaluate our intimate connections to nonhuman beings that make human life livable in the first place. Ultimately, I endeavour to lay the groundwork for a bioethics that is responsive to redefinitions of life by technological means, one that eschews anthropocentrism in order to suggest a concern for different ways of living and belonging between humans and nonhumans, rather than for the lives of human beings alone.

The Anthropomorphized Animal In Children’s Culture

The reliance on animals in children’s literature over the past two centuries has become a key means by which the civilizing process that children go through has been mediated by the animal body. Children are asked both implicitly and explicitly to identify with animals, but then to position themselves as distinctly human through the mode of their interactions with both lived animals and those depicted in literature and film. This core question of identity formation – child/adult, animal/human – forms the foundation of my dissertation, which investigates the overlapping, double-sided rhetorics addressing children, childhood and animals. My dissertation is organized into five areas of interest that pose complementary questions regarding the way in which relationships between animals and children inform and underscore adults’ lived relationships with both of them. Posthumanist scholarship, then, becomes a key means by which to de-prioritize a conception of an exclusively human subjectivity. Cary Wolfe in particular has recently worked to criticize liberal humanism and find ways to push cultural analysis beyond its inherent anthropocentrism in order to combat institutionalized speciesism, which continues to prioritize human beings, thereby excusing the exploitation or extermination of other species. What has been notably overlooked in posthumanism’s challenge to anthropocentric human liberalism, however, is how the human is encultured through literature geared specifically towards a child audience. By examining culturally significant and widely popular works of children’s culture through a posthumanist, or animality studies lens, I argue that Western philosophy’s objective to establish a notion of an exclusively human subjectivity is continually countered in the very texts that ostensibly work to configure human identity. Literature geared toward a child audience reflects and contributes to the cultural tensions created by the oscillation between upholding and undermining the divisions between the human and the animal. My dissertation focuses on the ways in which these works present the boundary between humans and animals as, at best, permeable and in a state of continual flux.

The Anthropomorphized Animal In Children’s Culture

The reliance on animals in children’s literature over the past two centuries has become a key means by which the civilizing process that children go through has been mediated by the animal body. Children are asked both implicitly and explicitly to identify with animals, but then to position themselves as distinctly human through the mode of their interactions with both lived animals and those depicted in literature and film. This core question of identity formation – child/adult, animal/human – forms the foundation of my dissertation, which investigates the overlapping, double-sided rhetorics addressing children, childhood and animals. My dissertation is organized into five areas of interest that pose complementary questions regarding the way in which relationships between animals and children inform and underscore adults’ lived relationships with both of them. Posthumanist scholarship, then, becomes a key means by which to de-prioritize a conception of an exclusively human subjectivity. Cary Wolfe in particular has recently worked to criticize liberal humanism and find ways to push cultural analysis beyond its inherent anthropocentrism in order to combat institutionalized speciesism, which continues to prioritize human beings, thereby excusing the exploitation or extermination of other species. What has been notably overlooked in posthumanism’s challenge to anthropocentric human liberalism, however, is how the human is encultured through literature geared specifically towards a child audience. By examining culturally significant and widely popular works of children’s culture through a posthumanist, or animality studies lens, I argue that Western philosophy’s objective to establish a notion of an exclusively human subjectivity is continually countered in the very texts that ostensibly work to configure human identity. Literature geared toward a child audience reflects and contributes to the cultural tensions created by the oscillation between upholding and undermining the divisions between the human and the animal. My dissertation focuses on the ways in which these works present the boundary between humans and animals as, at best, permeable and in a state of continual flux.

Environmental racialisation and poetics of influence in the postgenomic era: fire, soil, spirit

This article considers processes of environmental racialisation in the postgenomic era through their politics of difference and poetics of influence. Subfields like epigenetics promise to account for a plurality of possible influences on health outcomes. While this appears to present possibilities for historical reparation to communities whose epigenomes may have been chronically altered by histories of violence and trauma, the prevailing trend has been to compound processes of racialisation in the reproduction of good/bad environments. The postgenomic era has promised an epistemological transformation of ideas and values of human life, but its practices, technologies and ideology have so far prevented this. Epigenetics, rather, reproduces biomedical exclusions through imaginaries of embodied contexts, methods of occlusion and hypervisibility, and assignations of delay and deviance. This is more complex than both genetic reductionism and environmental racism: studies on epigenetics reveal a poetics of influence at work under liberal humanism complicit in the creation of death-worlds for racialised populations. Other experiments with life are possible and unfolding: Jay Bernard’s poem ‘Chemical’, set in the aftermath of London’s Grenfell Tower fire in 2017, unmoors its bodies from material environment, offering a spectral configuration of collective life. This configuration involves negotiating with the fixing of time and space on which genomic imaginaries depend.

A Race of Devils: Race-Making, Frankenstein, and The Modern Prometheus

This essay engages Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein or The Modern Prometheus as a salient intervention into modern political theory. I analyze the work as a cipher for the tensions inhabiting Euro-modernity’s stitched together fictions of racial determinism and racial dynamism legible in slavery, assimilationist projects and White fears reverberating throughout. Adapting the mythical ancient Prometheus as one who steals fire from the gods to create humans and civilization, Frankenstein dramatizes the risks and monstrous results of White imperial masculinity as a Euro-colonial Promethean project of subject formation and race-making. Viewed through the prism of the Modern Prometheus, modernity in general and liberal humanism in particular are recast as monster-making projects. The European “discovery” of Indigenous peoples amplified Promethean aspirations to create subjects through civilizational processes of religious conversion, the infusion of Enlightenment rationality, and assimilation into whiteness. Politically, the Promethean capacity to engineer humans and proto-humans using Native peoples as raw material allowed progressives to argue against outright extermination in favor of cultural genocide. Seeking to create a subserviant species, Victor Frankenstein confronts a revolting insurrection of his own making—a Creature who refuses slavery, claims mastery over his creator and demands a female companion. Yet Frankenstein’s fear of creating “a race of devils” betrays a terror of what Whites know, but refuse to acknowledge, about themselves and racial others.