Hansen and Machine Identity

In the last post I wrote that Hansen believes that “the digital does not alter us (à la Kittler) but instead extends and reflects us”. I’d like to take this post to revise this statement and investigate the status of machines in Hansen’s theories through his writings on Paul Virilio and Friedrich Kittler (who’s work I have unfortunately never read, so I will have to take Hansen’s relaying of his opinions at face value). Although I don’t think that this revision will change my argument about Hansen’s relationship to Bergson, I do think that the machine has more complicated status in his writings than I initially stated.

Kittler (according to Hansen) believes that we have entered a post-human era. This has occurred because of machines’ position in creating human perceptions through the translation of information into human stimuli. (Hansen 71-78) Humans’ received stimuli from machines constitute “the purely contingent by-product of a preparatory phase in the evolution of information toward fully autonomous circulation.” (Hansen 77) Humans passively sit, receiving the various leftovers of stimuli, which are tacked on to the endless passing on of information between machines. In response to this Hansen posits, through the writings of several theorists, that meaning and information cannot be separated. For Hansen all things contain within themselves an “equipotentiality,” an inherent element which relates to and derives meaning from that which created it. In a confusing twist though, the human seems to have escaped this chain and exerts/creates meaning for both the machine (which emerged from it) and the organic (from which it emerged). Hansen recruits Raymond Ruyer to his argument, quoting him as saying, “If the physical world and the world of machines were left completely to themselves, everything would spontaneously fall into disorder; everything would testify that there had never been true order, consistent order, in other words, that there had never been information.” (82) Unlike in Uexküll’s writings, where different meanings exist in the world for different life forms, for Hansen the world exists as chaos without the human. (As a side note, to me the use of the phrase “true order” in this quote is a perfect illustration of a post-enlightenment attempt to fill the void created by god’s absence with human agency.) Therefore, even if humans only receive a portion of the information contained within the machine, all that information is tinged with its equipotentiality, its potential use by its ultimate creator: the Human. On page 82 Hansen writes, “those, like Kittler, who posit an autonomy of the digital simply have things backward: if ‘the digital’ poses a danger, it is the danger of a false, not a real autonomy—the danger that cybernetics will forget the human (and the biological) basis of information.” This position, that the danger lies in a false autonomy of the digital, leads us to Hansen’s writings on Virilio.

Hansen frames Virilio as working within his humanist tradition. Using Virilio’s concept of the “vision machine” Hansen identifies a potential split between human and mechanical perception. On page 103 Hansen summarizes Virilio’s position as, “what we face in today’s vision-machines is the threat of total irrelevance: because our bodies cannot keep pace with the speed of (technical) vision, we literally cannot see what the machines can see, and we thus risk being left out of the perceptual loop all together.” (103) From this Hansen concludes that we must bring the machine back to the human body, or risk losing our significance. What is completely astounding to me is that this precise process, whereby the human is phased out or becomes irrelevant, is the same process that he has so firmly insisted is not taking place in his response to Kittler. One can reasonably ask how machines can both simply contain empty patterns of information waiting for human embodiment, and simultaneously be a vision-machine with its own (autonomous) non-human way of perceiving the world. We are left with two competing visions of machines, as either active agents (or combatants for Hansen) or as passive tools that extend the human perception. The digital is either a battleground in which the human fights for relevance, or a playground where the human revels in his or her own agency. I would argue that it could be one or the other, or neither, but certainly not both.

It strikes me that Virilio’s writings are much closer to Kittler’s than Hansen’s. Virilio sounds almost identical to Kittler when he writes in The Accident of Art that with digital technology “we are faced with the failure of the analogical in favor of calculation and numerology of the image. Every sensation is going to be digitized or digitalized. We are faced with the reconstruction of the phenomenology of perception according to the machine. The vision machine is not simply the camera that replaces Monet’s eye… now it’s a machine that’s reconstructing sensations pixel by pixel “(65-66). This is the state of the contemporary vision-machine for Virilio, which has effectively extended itself beyond the domain of just vision and into all sensation. In The Accident of Art Virillio argues that only through catastrophic accidents, caused by a combination of mechanic disinterest in the human, and the growing significance and might of mechanization in our society, will we ever acknowledge our own growing irrelevance.(109) Through the process of globalization and the invention of the simultaneous broadcast we are constantly hitting the refresh button on a presumed knowledge of the present at the detriment of our sense of the future and the past.(Virilio98-102) Due to our fascination with what we falsely think of as an extension of our perception, which now encompasses the entire world, we miss the fact that we are giving over our sensations to machines.

On page 105, Hansen concludes from Virilio’s writings that “If we now regularly experience a ‘pathology of immediate perception’ in which the credibility of visual images has been destroyed, isn’t the reason simply that image-processing has been dissociated from the body? And if so, what better way can there be to resist the industrialization of perception than by reinvesting the bodily basis of perception?” What Hansen misses here is that Virilio agrees with Kittler regarding the autonomy of machines. For Virilio, machines exist outside human meaning and that machines pursue different goals than those prescribed by their equipotentiality. The “right to blindness” is not a call to turn over the other sensations of the body to the machine through an emphasis on human activity in the digital, but to turn away from the digital with our limbs as well as our eyes.

-Benjamin Schultz-Figueroa

Hansen and Bergson

I started this as a comment on Ariel's post, but it sort of became its own thing. Ariel is probably right in saying that datamoshing poses the question of smoothness and immanence in the digital more than a question of time. He is also right in pointing out Hansen's desire to find the smooth space within the digital space. What I would like to argue in this post is that Hansen cannot find immanence in the digital because he fundamentally misreads (and actually inverts) Bergson's concept of perception as subtraction.

Hansen acknowledges this discrepancy between himself and Bergson but frames it as a simple update in Bergson's theories rather than a conflicting or alternate argument. On pages 10 to 11 Hansen writes, "In relation to today's electronic technosphere, however, Bergon's theorization of this process of embodied selection must be updated in at least one important respect: rather than selecting preexistent images, the body now operates by filtering information directly and, through this process, creating images" (all italics are his own). Hansen is here essentially claiming that the (human) body adds images to the world through a selection of information from the world which is gathered by machines. We see this argument reflected in his claims that: the image of virtual action exits only within the body of the perceiver on page 58, his concept of "equipotentiality," (or the ability to create meaning through selection) on page 83 and the "transpactial dimension of conciousness" (the world created by this meaning) also on page 83. This assertion should be questioned from two fronts: 1) is it possible to claim that the body can create images and leave Bergson's theories intact and 2) in what way does the "electronic technosphere" bring about this change?

Let's begin with the first question: on page 51 Hansen relates "a hightened ability to view and use the world according to one's notions, more individually, more subjectively" (quoting Peter Weibel) with "a form of selection akin to Bergson's conception of perception as subtraction." (As an aside I would like to mention my utter distaste for the term "use the world" which implies a violence I find upsetting.) It is important to question this reading of perception as subtraction. If we turn to Bergson's own writing on the subject I think we find a critique of just this idea. Discussing the materialists' and dualists' shared view that perceptions are separate and therefore added to the world Bergon writes on pages 11 and 12:

"Is it possible to conceive of our nervous system as living apart from the organism which nourishes it, from the atmosphere in which the organism breathes, from the earth which that atmosphere envelopes, from the sun round which the earth revolves? More generally, does not the fiction of an isolated material object [the brain] imply a kind of absurdity, since this object borrows its physical properties from the relations which it maintains with all others, and owes each of its determinations, and consequently its very existence, to the place which it occupies in the universe as a whole?"

Bergson does not refute the idea that the actions of the brain influence the actions of the body, but he does refute the idea that the brain, and our subjectivity with it, is separate from the world. Unlike Hansen's system where a "subjectivity" or "individual" creates their world through a selection (which Hansen erroneously equates with subtraction) of the meaningful, or the to-be-acted-upon, Bergson sees the brain, and thus our subjectivity, as a conduit through which the stimuli of the world act. As Bergson writes on pages 20 and 21, "the nervous system is in no sense an apparatus which may serve to fabricate, or even to prepare, representations. Its function is to receive stimulation, to provide motor apparatus and to present the largest possible number of these apparatuses to a given stimulus". Here Bergson radically and explicitly claims that our body does not create our perception of the world upon which it then acts, but simply provides a complicated hub for actions and reactions to intermingle and that from this subjectivity arises, not the other way around. We can see here that Hansen's concept of "equipotentiality" flips Bergson's ideas on its head and that the two are irreconcilable with each other. The body simply cannot be both a separate, outside, and added, quality to the world while simultaneously being created by and in the world.

If Hansen's ideas clash with Bergson's we should at least investigate Hansen's reason for this difference. As was mentioned above, Hansen views this difference as an updating of, not a counter-argument to, Bergson. The reason given for this update is new media technology. Considering the actual significance of these diverging arguments, that would mean that pre-digital consciousness was Bergsonian, in that it did not create images but arose from them, and that post-digital consciousness was subsequently endowed with just this ability. This is an argument that I believe Hansen cannot even agree with. What in the digital is so drastically new as to separate our consciousness from the world? Hansen himself continuously argues that no such drastic alteration exists since the digital does not alter us (à la Kittler) but instead extends and reflects us (which is another point that I take contention with, but that's for its own post). For Hansen, digital imaging allows us to expand a quality already innately existing within the body long before digital imaging was invented.

All this brings us back to immanence in the digital. If, as Hansen suggests, the digital is an extension of our subjectivity outside of the world Deleuze would undoubtedly say there is no immanence to be found there. According to this position new media only adds a level of realism to the metaphysical myth of the separate isolated personhood existing above and outside of the world. Thankfully, I don't think Hansen is correct. It seems to me that Hansen is looking for the distinctive qualities of new media in the wrong place, namely in the human. Do not the qualities of any medium arise precisely when we release it from the reflection of the human? Painting became about painting when it escaped human perception; film became about film when it escaped human action. I believe that the immanent qualities of new media do exist, but they will reveal themselves when we escape the human rather than replicate it.

http://www.thechrisrice.com/trash.html

-Benjamin Schultz-Figueroa

The Process of Becoming-Animal

For this post I wanted to briefly outline becoming-animal as a concept and how it relates to human becomings. Before entering this description I should stress that it will be an extremely truncated and perhaps incomplete reading of becoming-animal since I am still coming to terms with the specifics of this expansive subject. I think that Deleuze and Guattari’s most succinct description of becoming-animal is actually in the chapter on the rhizome when talking about the relationship between the orchid and the wasp (which we read for class). Deleuze and Guattari write (please excuse the length of this quote) that the relationship between these two beings is:

“not imitation at all but a capture of code, surplus value of code, an increase in valence, a veritable becoming, a becoming wasp of the orchid and a becoming-orchid of the wasp. Each of these becomings brings about the deterritorialization of one term and the reterritorialization of the other; the two becomings interlink and form relays in a circulation of intensities pushing the deterritorialization even further. There is neither imitation nor resemblance, only an exploding of two heterogeneous series on the line of flight composed by a common rhizome that can no longer be attributed to or subjected by anything: Rimy Chauvin expresses it well: ‘the aparallel evolution of two beings that have absolutely nothing to do with each other’" (10).

This description of two entities becoming each other is perhaps easier to grasp since the human does not enter into the equation, and along with that issues of choice and intentionality become clearer. What we have in the relationship between the orchid and the wasp is clearly not either party literally turning into the other, pretending to be the other, identifying with, sympathizing or pitying the other (which are all possible misconceptions of becoming-animal). Instead what we find is a co-establishing and transgressing of borders between to two entities, which are, themselves, constructions of other entities. The wasp exists as it exists because of the orchid, although they are still distinct from each other. Yet, despite this distinction, they both transgress their own borders: the wasp finding its inverse image in the orchid, the orchid leaving its pollen with the wasp. In this way each entity’s body is found to be porous and composite in nature, leaving parts of themselves with the other.

This process takes on a political dynamic once the human enters the picture. What we consider essential in humans is brought into question through our interspecies becomings, and once these basic assumptions are called into question so too are a whole host of secondary assumptions upon which we shape our society. Foucault clearly illustrates this towards the end of this debate with Chomsky:

I identify three main myths that are called into question through Deleuze and Guattari’s chapter on becoming-animal: those of human individuality, the basis of our social organizations, and the completeness of the human body. Individuality, our distinct status as personalities fade as we leave ourselves, or open ourselves, in pursuit of relationships outside the human. This takes up Deleuze and Guattari’s fight with Oedipal thinking and the essential narcissism of Freudian psychology (the exact same narcissism that Mark Hansen champions). Thus they argue that little Hans is having an interspecies relationship with the horse, a becoming horse, not an intra-species and introspective relationship with his own memories. Human rights, no longer restricted to the human, lose their essential and inevitable qualities. As Foucault describes in the above clip, the mechanisms of justice, education, the family, the church, the army and so on are revealed as state rather than natural human constructions. The member of the mob, the pack, or the band replaces the individual within the family, the church, or the society. This is one sense of becoming-pack; the other correlates with the concept of becoming-molecular. As the barrier between human and non-human is broken down, so too is the barrier erected by the body. The body becomes, not an independent, stable object onto itself, but a house full of doors and activity, in which outside forces are constantly entering, exiting and interacting. We stop being a body of functioning, goal-oriented organs, and become a streaming highway, a convergence of forces.

-Benjamin Schultz-Figueroa

Movement and the Digital Image

As an initial reaction to a technical detail of Mark Hansen’s argument, I’d like to talk about movement and pixilation in the digital image. On page 9 of the introduction to New Philosophy for New Media Hanson writes:

“If the digital image is an accumulation of such discontinuous fragments, [pixels] each of which can be addressed independently of the whole, there is no longer anything materially linking the content of the image with its frame, understood in its Bergsonist-Deleuzean function as a cut into the flux of the real. Rather the image becomes a merely contingent configuration of numerical values that can be subjected to ‘molecular’ modification, that lacks any motivated relation to any image-to-follow.”

According to my, admittedly limited, knowledge of video files this is, strictly speaking, untrue. A compressed video file is made up of both the change in color pixel-by-pixel, frame-by-frame (called the I-frame) and the movement within those frames through time (called the P-frame). This is what allows for the technique called datamoshing in which I-frames are deleted but P-frames are not, creating a decidedly unique effect. This technique has been used by artists such as Takeshi Murata:

And Paperrad:

How this retention of movement-in-time effects Hanson’s argument theoretically I’m unsure. In Deleuzean terms, the strictly striated space of pixel grid is smoothed over by the P-frame’s access to movement which identifies larger forms on the screen and transgresses the borders of individual pixels. For a how-to video on datamoshing and more information about the process you can watch this video:

-Benjamin Schultz-Figueroa

Speed and Politics & The Smooth and The Striated

In this post I wanted to discuss a paragraph on page 480 in The Smooth and the Striated where Deleuze references Paul Virilio’s writings. He uses this moment to briefly detail the smooth and the striated as related to power. The smooth is not a haven from what Deleuze calls “diabolical powers of organization,” mostly referencing military and authoritarian powers. In Speed and Politics, (which is the text Deleuze is referencing) Virilio outlines his concept of “dromology” whereby political speed is diverted, harnessed, or otherwise plotted out by institutions of power. His ideas are well complimented by, and become clearer in relation to Deleuze’s. The striation of the smooth or the reimparting of the smooth on top of striated can be seen throughout Speed and Politics as techniques of power. For a practical example, Virilio describes the reimpartation of smooth space on the battlefield created by the armored car. Once the battlefield had become so rigidly striated with the embedding of fronts, bombardments and dugouts, within the already striated topology of the area, which contained tactical coordinates like the high ground and cover, war came to a stand still. The armored car’s introduction onto this space neutralized the borders made by landscape and by tactics allowing for a new, smooth, form of war. As Virilio writes on page 56, “The war of attrition had, from lack of space, spread out into Time; duration was survival. All-terrain (or rather sans-terrain) assault extends war over an earth that disappears, crushed under the infinity of possible trajectories.”

Kafka envisions these same processes in The Trial and The Castle. In The Trial Kafka’s main character, Joseph K, is assailed by a smooth power which cannot be combated since it cannot be defined. K does not know who is charging him or why he is being charged. Although the general form of a trial can be made out, it is spread out and amorphous in location and form. K cannot refute a claim which is not defined. On the other hand, we could look at the Barnabas’ father in The Castle, who attempts to petition for forgiveness from the authorities at the castle. These attempts are consistently turned away or redirected since there is no offending instance on the books. The punishment enacted upon the family exists within a smooth space that the striated space of bureaucratic power can easily deny even exists. Power’s use of both the smooth and the striated are essential to our readings of the terms, and to Deleuze’s handling of them. Our relationship with power (or more aptly its relationship with us) is inherently striating, even when employing the smooth, in that power seeks to define our relations. By turning to the smooth we turn away from power, even if the smooth is then striated by the mobile power following in our wake, or by us in an attempt to construct alternative power structures and/or simply a secure space of our own.

-Benjamin Schultz-Figueroa

Postproduction After Youtube

In Postproduction, Nicolas Bourriaud discusses the process of appropriation in contemporary art. He describes postproduction as an engagement with the stages of consumption and production. Through postproduction, artists demonstrate that consumption does not mean the end of production and that these states are intertwined. For Bourriaud, the artist suggests alternative modes of living that subvert the dominant narrative of “active producer” and “passive consumer”. For the purpose of this post I would like to briefly explore how the landscape of production/consumption has changed since Postproduction was written in 2002 through the work of two contemporary artists: Oliver Laric and Michael Robinson.

With the popularization of sites such as Youtube and Flicker the idea of consumption as the end point of production has been significantly, if not fatally, wounded. Whether remixed, mashed up, or simply reposted consumers no longer keep the products of their consumption to themselves. The download culture of the Napster era is now complemented by the upload culture of the Youtube era. Through the redistribution of the means of distribution, cultural products long assumed dead-and-gone are given a second life and are projected into what often seems like an endless echo chamber of comments, remixes, reposts, and remakes. Michael Robinson and Oliver Laric explore the new forms of consumption and production that arise in this environment.

HOLD ME NOW from Michael Robinson on Vimeo.

For the sake of simplicity I would like to assign Michael Robinson’s work to the realm of Youtube consumption and Oliver Laric’s work to Youtube production, although these designations certainly bleed into each other. In an interview with Incite! Robinson describes his work as engaging and subverting ideas of nostalgia and beauty by embodying them. In works such as Hold Me Now (2008) and Light is Waiting (2007), Robinson evokes the nostalgia of instant, unimpeded access to childhood cultural products by appropriating and manipulating videos and songs from the 80s and 90s. If Jeff Koons’ work evokes the creation of desire by 80s’ advertising in order to examine it, as Bourriaud claims, then Robinson’s work evokes the creation of nostalgia (a desire for past beauty) that is created by Youtube’s endless recycling of past cultures. Robinson simultaneously evokes and alienates us from the nostalgia through which we consume Youtube videos. His mixing of the comforting and the kitschy with the strange and the mysterious creates a tension and confusion between the apprehension of the surface and a feeling of depth. (Michael Robinson’s videos can all be found online here: http://www.poisonberries.net/films.html)

If Youtube has broken down the hierarchical modes of consumption and production, Oliver Laric’s 50 50 (2007) takes a stab at redefining what has replaced them. 50 50 accumulates a range of fan-made renditions of 50 Cent’s songs that have been uploaded to Youtube. In this piece the hierarchy of past distributions of culture is brought into conflict with the shape of contemporary forms. Each contributor is given equal say, broadcasting their personal consumption of 50 Cent for all to see. What 50 50 makes abundantly clear is that consumption is no longer private, it no longer stays in the living room while watching TV, or in the gallery while viewing a painting, or in your bedroom while blasting your music. Instead, it is rebroadcast, redistributed, and reconsumed. By bringing these broadcasts together, Laric shows us the face of a new consumer, who is equally aware of their production as their consumption.

What this video also makes abundantly clear is the resilience of top down model of production and consumption. If Laric shows us the power of new technologies for rebroadcasting, 50 50 also displays the homogenization of what we choose to broadcast. The piece points to the revolutionary potential of the medium to change where and what we consume, but also the possible downfall for this potential, in which we simply rebroadcast what we receive from the top. As the name might suggest, 50 50 is equally optimistic and pessimistic about the changes in production consumption which Youtube and other new forms of online sharing can bring.

-Benjamin Schultz-Figueroa