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.

 

© 2004 Andrés Vaccari,

 

Andrés Vaccari, PhD candidate, Department of Philosophy, Macquarie University (Sydney, Australia)

Categories: Philosophical