Hansen Critique Part I: Em(human)bodiment

This first section, of my two-part attempt at a critique of Mark Hansen’s “New Philosophy for New Media,” stems from a confusion regarding his understanding of embodiment. In the second section, I will turn to look more deeply at how this is reflected in his critique of Deleuze. I should note that I have tried to get through his entire text 2 years ago and was unsuccessful and thoroughly confused. Upon my second reading I can now say that while certain things are a lot clearer, there are others that have become much more opaque.

It seems as though Hansen is trying to, as explicated by Tim Lenoir, “reclaim Bergson’s understanding of embodiment in an account of how the body “enframes” information.” (xx) In addition to this, he emphasizes the specifically digital nature of new media information and explains that it is because of the ‘digital nature’ of this information that it can be conceived of as so malleable and fluid. Taking from Bergson, Hansen is thus trying to formulate a conception of new media, which because of the “fluidity” of the information, places the body at the center- subsequently restoring the power and control over the “framing of the information” to the human subject; “[…] media convergence under digitality actually increases the centrality of the body as framer of information; as media lose their material specificity, the body takes on a more prominent function as selective processor in the creation of images.” (xxii)

Taking into consideration the phenomenological approach that he is employing, I nonetheless maintain that it is important to notice the humanistic kind of empowerment that his argument brings to “the body”. In his case, as I see it (and I could very well be wrong), the kind of embodiment described is one that appears to be necessarily human. Hansen seems to be saying that, in opposition to what Deleuze explicates, new media is able to restore some kind of active (affective) relationship between the “passively correlating individual” and “performed images,” in such a way that their relationship develops into one that is fully embodied and immanent (becoming)- i.e. the human body being responsible for selectively framing the fluid information.

My question though, is whether this kind of “becoming” (and this kind of “detached embodiment”) is really what Deleuze was speaking about. I am not sure if I am mixing it all up but I feel as though Deleuze was not concerned with centering the human subject as embodied controller and master framer of information and instead encouraged a less dominant role on the part of the human body (characterizing the body as that which is not only in constant relation with the media that surround it, but with the world in its entirety, and subsequently the world itself being in constant relation with the body, so much so that “the human body” loses it’s dominant position.) I am going to end with this question for now and continue on with this argument in my next post….hopefully things will become clearer.

- Vanessa Meyer

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

Snow Day Lectures (II): Nietzsche and the Over-man

As some of you already know, Nietzsche is considered an influence not only on “post-structural” philosophers, like Foucault and Deleuze, but also on the movement that came to be known as “existentialism” that precedes post-structuralism by a couple of decades. (The most recognized face of existentialism at the time was, of course, Jean-Paul Sartre.) Deleuze, for his part, would argue that existentialism does not live up to the challenge of Nietzsche’s thought, since it presumes a transcendent subject with a power to choose this or that action. In other words, existentialism remains a philosophy of transcendence. Indeed both existentialism and phenomenology can be understood as the latest developments in a legacy that begins when Descartes utters the formula cogito ergo sum. As Todd May notes, in his explication of Deleuze’s philosophy, “It is not simply a question of how we human beings might go about creating our lives, of what we might decide to make ourselves into” (2005, 23). This is Sartre's question. It is still insufficient or inadequate because it prioritizes being over becoming, identity over difference. It presupposes that there is an identity, a self, who chooses their existence. Deleuze rejects the emphasis placed in Sartre on agency, on self, and, more importantly, the emphasis placed on the human. “Deleuze,” May writes, “tries to pry us away from humanism by focusing on a difference that need not be human difference and a one that need not be a person.” Humanism is to be understood here as a form of anthropomorphism. Humanism commits the "error of believing that the proper perspective for understanding the world is centered on the viewpoint of the human subject" (2005, 24).

Humanism places man at the center of the universe, since man is its principle or exclusive concern. Deleuze places his emphasis on life; on the becoming of the entities that populate our world. These entities are not pre-determined; nor is their future known once and for all. To stop at the human would be to presume that the goal of life were the creation of man. (Which, of course, is what Christian theology says.) It would be a mistake to argue (and some have done so) that this “anti-humanism” is an expression of contempt for mankind. How could this be so since mankind is part of world? At the same time, we cannot fall into the trap of thinking too highly of ourselves. Since everything is becoming – everything is in process – so too is man. Man is becoming, in and with the world. This, Deleuze will claim, is what Nietzsche means when he coins the term übermensch (the “over-man” or “super-man”). We are in the process of overcoming ourselves, and there is no certainty that our evolution will not take us elsewhere, even beyond man. At least, man as it is known today.

As Deleuze says to his interviewer, in “On Nietzsche and the Image of Thought,” the goal of contemporary philosophy is to attempt to rethink the questions of existence without the constraints of either God or Man – which is to say, without the constraints of transcendent being. And the value of Nietzsche is that he “was trying to uncover something that was neither God nor Human…” which he called Dionysos or the over-man (2004, 139).

***

What does it mean though to say that there is no identity or self who chooses this or that existence? And how might this be squared, for example, with the thought-experiment known as the Eternal Return? (Does not the Eternal Return seem to presuppose choice?) This is where Nietzsche gets tricky. Consider here his concept of Will-to-Power, which he views as the “noblest” of values. Will-to-Power is misunderstood if we imagine an individual who exerts his or her will on another entity or thing. For Nietzsche, there is no separation between a will and what is willed. They are one and the same. There is no pre-constituted subject who wills this or that act. No, the act (what is willed) and the subject (who wills) are constituted at the same time. (The error of separating out one from the other is precisely what we find in Descartes: Descartes assumes that a thought, the act of thinking, requires a subject who performs this action. Nietzsche would deny this hierarchy or priority: the subject doesn’t precede thought but is constituted in the act of thinking.)

Put more simply, we can say that the subject is immanent to its expression. The challenge then is not to fall back on a notion of substance or install an agency at the origin of an activity or an expression of Will-to-Power. The use of terms like “object” or “thing” or “entity” is an example of how language misleads us into seeing solids (autonomous, pre-constituted beings) when there are only fluidities, only relations. The artist’s relation to their artwork is a good demonstration of this: the challenge from a Nietzschean perspective is not to be misled into seeing the artwork as an expression of the artist’s will. There is not an entity we call an “artist” who decides to will a painting into existence. Rather, the activity of painting itself is the expression of a will to power that produces both the painting and painter at the same time: the painter as such emerges through the activity of painting, and not once and for all, not through the painting of this or that painting, but over the course of years or decades and in conjunction with a body of work. What then is the difference between an artist and an oeuvre? There is none in terms of Will-to-Power: they are an expression of the same force, the same will. The artist accumulates an oeuvre and, in the process, a self.

S I-G