Andrés Vaccari

New Philosophy For New Media
by Mark B. N. Hansen (MIT Press, 2004)
(Metapsychology Online, Volume 8, 26 (21/06/2004)

In his previous work, Embodying Technesis: Technology Beyond Writing (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000), Mark B. N. Hansen carried out a scrupulous critique of what he terms the “discursive-representationalist” view underlying contemporary approaches to technology. This work was an impressive feat, in that it systematically engaged the technological thought of major theorists such as Heidegger, Deleuze and Guattari, Freud, Derrida and Lacan, among others–a veritable Who’s Who of the sacred cows of post-modern philosophy and cultural studies. The influence of these thinkers’ philosophical approach in what regards technology, Hansen concludes, has been nefarious. Although this list embraces a wide variety of people who agree on very little, Hansen argues that their analyses of technology have shared a substructure in common, a set of foundational misconceptions (what he calls the technesis view) that went on to be uncritically adopted by new disciplinary approaches. To summarize, somewhat clumsily, Hansen’s nuanced and exhaustive argument, the mainstream of modern and postmodern thought has been consistently unable to engage with the complexity of technological experience, preferring instead to reduce technology to a form of discourse or textual representation, or a socially or culturally determined thing. Language, Hansen maintains, is only one modality of our contact with the world, and contemporary theory has repeatedly failed to approach technology in its own terms, to address its specific dimensions, and to grasp the fact that technology is irreducibly linked to the structure of embodied experience. In the process, the world of technics has become a phantasm, deprived of its richness, its embodied and material specificity. The postmodern dogma growing out of this work has inadequately grasped technology as a purely socio-cultural, semiotic, or discursive phenomenon. It has ignored, for example, the fact that technology has a presocial role as an agent of material complexification. Hansens says: “Rather than an instrumentalist or socially programmed axiomatic reducible to capitalism, technology embodies the very contact between humankind and the world on which societal forms are themselves constructed.”

Hansen’s new work, New Philosophy for New Media, is the next logical step in what is shaping to be an ambitious and significant philosophical project. Whereas Technesis can be seen as a mainly “negative”, critical work (with the exception of the closing chapter on Richard Benjamin), New Philosophy is a positive attempt to construct a phenomenological model of body-machine interaction through a kind of techno-aesthetics manifesto. Hansen examines here the work of prominent new media artists such as Jeffrey Shaw, Robert Lazzarini, Bill Viola, Miroslaw Rogala and a host of others.

Hansen situates his analysis in the realm of the relations between technical artefacts and the body (which is central to the posthumanist debate). He speaks of the interaction between technical artefacts and the “body-brain”, borrowing from recent cognitive science and phenomenology a model of cognition as a phenomenon extended into the world. Embodied cognition is an achievement of the body-brain, acting on, and being acted upon by, technological extensions.

Hansen’s theoretical launching pad is Henri Bergon’s notion of the body-brain as a privileged image among images, a “center of indetermination” with its own embodied capacities and specific sensorimotor basis, performing a process of selection on the acentered flux of images that is the world. Hansen finds Bergson’s philosophy appealing for a number of reasons. First and foremost, Bergson privileges the body-brain as the selector and interpreter of meaning and the locus of sensation and affectivity. Secondly (and following from the above), Bergson highlights the affective dimension as a unique modality of bodily life. As such, affectivity is distinguishable from pure perception, although the two are inextricably correlated. Hansen argues that it is this affective dimension that holds the key to understanding the brave new worlds opened up by these experimental artists. And, by extension, Hansen suggests that the models advanced here can be applied to our everyday interactions with technology, and can offer insights into our complex dealings with the posthuman mechanophere.

Bergson’s theories are also central to Gilles Deleuze’s work on cinema, which has been attracting a lot of attention in the past few years. Hansen discusses Deleuze’s work at length, although his engagement with him is mainly negative. Overall, Hansen criticizes the French philosopher for disembodying the image, for making the framing/selection process something external to the body, something technically determined by the outside apparatus. The body, for Deleuze, is a purely virtual entity, an effect of the frame. Sometimes, the reader gets the impression that Hansen could have easily done without Deleuze, although in the last two chapters Hansen draws a few positive points from his work. However, given the critical attention that the Cinema books have been receiving, it makes sense to engage with Deleuze, and to rescue Bergson from his seemingly omnipotent hold.

It would be pointless to follow the complex paths of Hansen’s argument in this short review, so I will bring up some major points. To begin with, the digital revolution has exploded the stability of the visual image. The image no longer depends on a concrete, material frame (such as the photograph or the cinema frame). Yet the image is still a process intimately bound up with the activity of the body. Although the transmission and storage of information nowadays takes place in an inhuman world beyond perceptibility, the digital image is still dependant on human perceptual rations for its materialisation, its coming into form–and ultimately, for its meaning. The body, Hansen argues, in-forms the image. Thus, rather than being restricted to a stationary, pre-existent trigger for perception, the image in fact encompasses the whole process whereby information becomes embodied form and enters the realm of human values and meaning. There is always embodied perception at the origin of every image.

Hansen argues that in many of these new media works, it is the body of the spectator in itself that furnishes the locus for the experience of the work (rather than, say, the work’s representational content). In interacting with Jeffrey Shaw’s environments, for example, the body-brain does not passively perform “cognitions”; instead, these environments engage the body-brain’s own affective and proprioceptive capacities, rooted in its sensorimotor infrastructure.

Speaking of Tamás Waliczky’s paradoxical animations, Hansen’s says that they “call into play a haptic or tactile production of space in which the body itself, deprived of ‘objective’ spatial referents, begins to space or to spatialize, that is, to create space within itself as a function of its own movement (whether this be actual physical movement or the surrogate movement facilitated by a virtual interface).” (42).

Hansen then calls for a reformulation of what we understand by “virtual”. He says there is a virtual dimension to embodied life, a quality of human and, more generally, organic life that “can only erroneously be equated with technology.” (50). He defines the virtual as “that capacity, so fundamental to human existence, to be in excess of one’s actual state.” (51). That is, the body has a quasi-autonomous capacity to “create image-events by processing inchoate information.” (52). So, the virtual is a kind of affective excess of the body, the result of a kind of self-simulation or a “total survey”. It is an added dimension in which the body-brain opens up to future possibilities and gathers together the various images that make up each moment into a meaningful whole. As I interpret it, we can speak of this virtual dimension because the body as center of indetermination exists primarily as an emergent function from the flux of images of the universe (both inner and outer). Consciousness is, then, a supplementary phenomenon, the result of this constant gathering together, selection and judgment across the body-brain’s various modalities. In Hanson’s words, the image is a trigger for “a transpatial synthesis that comprises nothing less than a virtualization of the body” (90). It follows that the virtual is not “an abstract, disembodied dimension” but a “creative dimension of human embodiment itself — an excess of the body over itself” (90).

Hansen’s philosophical orientation goes against the grain of the prevailing techno-metaphysics. In particular, Hansen singles out Friedrich Kittler’s notion of a “post-medium” condition in which the human becomes an obsolete non-entity in the wake of incorporeal, instantaneous data-flows. The digital domain, Hansen maintains, does not imply a transcendence of the human, nor does it imply the Platonic disembodiment of information. Hansen here follows up Katherine Hayles’ argument in How We Became Post-Human (albeit not explicitly), taking up the alternative model of information advanced by British cyberneticist Donald MacKay. In her work, Hayles has shown how MacKay’s theory had come head to head with Shannon’s model, and the latter (which was supplemented by Warren Weaver in what is commonly known as the Shannon-Weaver model) became the prevailing canon in cybernetics. What is noteworthy about MacKay’s model is that he considered the process of communication to have two sides: selection and construction. While the former is the focus of Shannon’s model, the latter has been ignored by mainstream cybernetics, mainly because it is difficult to quantify and model mathematically. Construction refers to the context of the reception of a message, the way in which an organism selects a response or behaviour out of what MacKay calls the “conditional probability matrix”. In other words, meaning is indispensable to information, yet meaning takes us into the realm of the non-technical, non-quantifiable, and even the existential (again, the reason why MacKay’s model fell out of favour). Different receivers will interpret the same information differently, and follow up with different responses. The orientation of an embodied receiver will determine the informational content of any given message. The receiver has an internal structure that converts incoming stimuli into “internal symbols” (79). Patterns of information, then, are the result of a “process of embodying data” (79). In a way, then, the receiver constitutes or creates information (although, of course, not in a vacuum). Information remains meaningless without a framer, and “that framing cannot be reduced to a generic observational function, but encompasses everything that goes on to make up the biological and cultural specificity of this or that singular receiver” (80).

Hansen follows his analysis of MacKay’s theories with an overview of Raymond Ruyer’s philosophical analysis of cybernetics, which complements MacKay’s model. According to Ruyer, a digital or electrical transmission is only the transmission of a pattern, “a structural order without internal unity”. Without a consciousness at the other end, this pattern would never achieve a form. It is, then, the property of consciousness to have the power of an “absolute survey”, to grasp at once information and the conditions for meaning. It follows from Ruyer’s work that informational machines are not the equivalent of living and conscious nervous systems, which will never be able to be simulated.

The last chapter, “Body Times” engages Bernard Stiegler and Deleuze on the question of memory, technical recording and the “time-image”. Most importantly, Hansen introduces a cornerstone of his thesis, a model of time-consciousness supported by the work of Francisco Varela. Varela combines the insights of phenomenology and neurobiology to determine the irreducible duration of the lived “now” of human consciousness, the cycle of retention-protention (which he calculates to be about 0.3 of a second). Below and above that threshold (at the level of the neuron, for example, or at the level of computer processing) there is a complex hierarchy of microphysical events, happening at speeds below and above this physiological threshold of awareness. Again, affectivity plays an important role here, linking “the temporal modality of ‘protention’ — the striving of the human being to maintain its mode of identity—with the embodied basis of (human) life. In sum, affectivity comprises the motivation of the (human) organism to maintain its autopoiesis [i.e., its process of self-creation] in time.” (250). Varela speaks of an “endogenous dynamics” out of which our experience of time (and of ourselves and the world) emerges. Time, then, is not a string of isolated quanta (as in the machine time of information processing) but a “horizon of integration” that is “discrete and non-linear” (250, Hansen quoting Varela). Although Varela does not speak of machine time or our interaction with technical worlds, Hansen moves on to Stiegler’s account of memory and technicity (which he criticizes at length). What is important here, Hansen argues, is to establish an “ethics of temporality: in the context of contemporary technologies that do in fact compute on the microphysical instant, it is imperative that we bring out the ‘phenomenological difference’ or singularity specific to retention … and that we identify it (in distinction to the microphysical, but also to memory) as the now, the very basis of human experience qua living.” (259-260).

New Philosophy is a brilliant and exciting work, attempting to build a phenomenological model of human-technology interaction that departs from the specificity of the lived body-brain. Hansen does this through an examination of the Bergsonist vocation of new digital art, where the confrontation between human and machine space-time is played out. I feel that Hansen leaves an important question unanswered. Throughout the analysis, the human sensorimotor apparatus is taken as a given, a fixed foundation of consciousness. But if technical and organic beings are constantly coevolving, what effects will the techno-media landscape (our intimate, continual interaction with machines and the worlds they create) ultimately have (or have already had) on the very infrastructure of consciousness itself? I guess we will have to wait for Hansen’s next book to find this out.

In the meantime, this is obligatory reading for anybody interested in the philosophy of technology and its phenomenological dimensions, as well as those interested in new media and digital aesthetics. Hansen is an engaging, lucid and provocative writer.