Category: Theory

Crazy Cameras, Discorrelated Images, and the Post-Perceptual Mediation of Post-Cinematic Affect

[UPDATE March 7, 2013: Full text of the talk now posted here.]

Following our recent roundtable discussion in La Furia Umana (alternative link here), Therese Grisham, Julia Leyda, Steven Shaviro, and I have submitted a panel proposal on the topic of post-cinematic affect for next year’s conference of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies. If the proposal is accepted, I hope to develop in a more systematic way some of the thoughts I put forward in the roundtable discussion, particularly with regard to the role of the “irrational” camera. Here is the proposal I submitted for my contribution to the panel:

Crazy Cameras, Discorrelated Images, and the Post-Perceptual Mediation of Post-Cinematic Affect

Shane Denson

Post-millennial films are full of strangely irrational cameras – physical and virtual imaging apparatuses that seem not to know their place with respect to diegetic and nondiegetic realities, and that therefore fail to situate viewers in a coherently designated spectating-position. While analyses ranging from David Bordwell’s diagnosis of “intensified continuity” to Matthias Stork’s recent condemnation of “chaos cinema” have tended to emphasize matters of editing and formal construction as the site of a break with classical film style, it is equally important to focus on the camera as a site of material, phenomenological relation between viewers and contemporary images. Thus, I aim to update Vivian Sobchack’s film-theoretical application of Don Ihde’s groundbreaking phenomenology of mediating apparatuses to reflect the recent shift to what Steven Shaviro has identified as a regime of “post-cinematic affect.” By setting a phenomenological focus on contemporary cameras in relation both to Shaviro’s work and to Mark B. N. Hansen’s recent work on “21st century media,” I will show that many of the images in today’s films are effectively “discorrelated” from the embodied interests, perspectives, and phenomenological capacities of human agents – pointing to the rise of a fundamentally post-perceptual media regime, in which “contents” serve algorithmic functions in a broader financialization of human activities and relations.

Drawing on films such as District 9, Melancholia, WALL-E, or Transformers, the presentation sets out from a phenomenological analysis of contemporary cameras’ “irrationality.” For example, virtual cameras paradoxically conjure “realism” effects not by disappearing to produce the illusion of perceptual immediacy, but by emulating the physical presence of nondiegetic cameras in the scenes of their simulated “filming.” At the same time, real (non-virtual) cameras are today inspired by ubiquitous, aesthetically disinterested cameras that – in smartphones, surveillance cams, satellite imagery, automated vision systems, etc. – increasingly populate and transform our lifeworlds; accordingly, they fail to stand apart from their objects and to distinguish clearly between diegetic/nondiegetic, fictional/factual, or real/virtual realms. Contemporary cameras, in short, are deeply enmeshed in an expanded, indiscriminately articulated plenum of images that exceed capture in the form of photographic or perceptual “objects.” These cameras, and the films that utilize them, as I shall argue in a second step, mediate a nonhuman ontology of computational image production, processing, and circulation – leading to a thoroughgoing discorrelation of contemporary images from human perceptibility. In conclusion, I will relate my findings to recent theorizations of media’s broader shift toward an expanded (no longer visual or even perceptual) field of material affect.

Bibliography:

Bordwell, David. “Intensified Continuity: Visual Style in Contemporary American Film.” Film Quarterly 55.3 (2002): 16-28.

Hansen, Mark B. N. Feed-Forward: The “Future” of 21st Century Media. Unpublished manuscript, forthcoming 2013/2014.

Ihde, Don. Technology and the Lifeworld: From Garden to Earth. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 1990.

Shaviro, Steven. Post-Cinematic Affect. Winchester: Zer0 Books, 2010.

Sobchack, Vivian. The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1992.

(PS: The crazy mobile camera collection pictured above, the “cameravan,” belongs to one Harrod Blank, whose website is here. The image itself was taken from a website (here) licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.)

Ludic Serialities and the “Parergodicity” of Game Studies as Media Studies — #Flow12

Here’s my position paper for the “Game Studies as Media Studies” panel at the FLOW Conference 2012 in Austin, Texas (November 1-3).

Ludic Serialities and the “Parergodicity” of Game Studies as Media Studies

Shane Denson, Leibniz Universität Hannover

The topic of this panel, “Game Studies as Media Studies,” challenges us to stipulate relations (however tentatively) between two fields of study that are themselves in many ways intersectional, cross-disciplinary, and thus to a certain extent undefined. Indeed, by broaching this topic we are returned to the (self-proclaimed) inaugural moment of game studies: to the debates raging as Espen Aarseth famously announced, in 2001’s premiere issue of the online journal Game Studies, “Year One” of computer game studies. In his attempt to stake out the terrain for “a new discipline” and protect it from “colonising efforts” from film and literary studies, Aarseth declared games’ independence from “old mass media, such as theatre, movies, TV shows and novels.” Already eleven years ago, then, Aarseth rejected the idea of game studies as media studies, writing: “Some would argue that the obvious place for game studies is in a media department, but given the strong focus there on mass media and the visual aesthetics, the fundamentally unique aspects of the games could easily be lost.”

The background, of course, was the so-called narratology-versus-ludology debate. And though that debate has since subsided (to the point, even, that some question whether it ever took place at all; cf. Frasca 2003), many of the central points of contention inevitably arise again when we undertake to reassess the relations between game studies and media studies. The crux, of course, is the ludological idea that the defining feature of games as a medium, and hence the core concern of game studies, is the interactive or, in Aarseth’s (1997) term, “ergodic” situation of gameplay – where ergodics combines the Greek ergon (work) and hodos (path), thus positing nontrivial labor as the aesthetic mode of players’ engagement with games. From a ludological perspective, narrative then appears as marginal, subordinate, or at best supplementary or parallel to gameplay – hence para- or “parergodic,” as I propose calling it. And not just narrative, but many of the aspects that might interest media scholars occupy this marginal or framing field of parergodics: from visual forms on screen, for example, to the social and cultural formations they give rise to in the wider world, outside the games themselves.

But parergodicity, a term which combines Aarseth’s “ergodics” with Derrida’s (1987) “parergon,” is not clearly distinguishable from the core of ergodics; on the contrary, the parergodic enacts a logic of supplementarity, a multistable oscillation such as Derrida ascribes to the picture frame: standing outside the work and serving as its background, the frame can also shift and become part of the figure when seen against the background of the wall. Parergodicity, I propose, defines a broad space for media studies research on games, allowing us more generally to rethink the relations between media studies and game studies so as to avoid both extremes of incommensurability and of colonization: “game studies as media studies,” conceived as a field of parergodic inquiry, aims at once to acknowledge the medial specificity of games, their resistance to paradigms established by studying dominant media like film and TV, without thereby ignoring the many empirical and conceptual points of contact that exist.

A key field of parergodic phenomena that demonstrates this potential is the widespread but undertheorized seriality that characterizes games at virtually every level of their material, cultural, and intermedial expression. While the serialization practices that generate ever new iterations of Mario, Zelda, or Lara Croft might seem to be clearly extraneous to the ergodic activity of gameplay, this is far from obvious. In the context of a joint project entitled “Digital Seriality: The Serial Aesthetics and Practice of Digital Games,” Andreas Jahn-Sudmann and I have identified three levels across which seriality can be seen to resonate. Most basically, seriality informs gameplay directly through formal-algorithmic structures of repetition/variation and the intra-ludic seriality of progressive game “levels” (which often repeat, and vary, the basic representational but also actional structures established in earlier levels, thus establishing both episodic closure and continuation). Sequels, remakes, and other explicit serialization practices constitute inter-ludic serialities that are operative between games, but not without consequence or relation to gameplay proper and its infrastructure (the modularity of game engines promotes inter-ludic serialization, for example, essentially repeating the serial patterning of intra-game levels). Moreover, fan practices and transmedial phenomena beyond the games themselves instantiate extra- or para-ludic serialities, which tie gameplay into larger networks of media consumption and exchange. As parergodic phenomena, ludic serialities therefore cut across the divisions that were taken to separate narratological and ludological positions. Finally, then, these serial structures offer both a broad basis for cross-media comparisons (from dime novels, film serials, TV series, etc.), as well as the means for identifying salient differences of digital interactivity, thus articulating a field of parergodics as the site of overlap, complementarity, and mutual advantage for game studies and media studies.

Works cited:

Aarseth, Espen J. 1997. Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP.

Aarseth, Espen J. 2001. “Computer Game Studies, Year One.” Game Studies 1.1 (July 2001): <http://www.gamestudies.org/0101/editorial.html>.

Derrida, Jacques. 1987. The Truth in Painting. Trans. Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod. Chicago: U of Chicago P.

Frasca, Gonzalo. 2003. “Ludologists love stories, too: Notes from a debate that never took place.” Level Up Conference Proceedings. Utrecht: University of Utrecht. 92-99. <http://www.digra.org/dl/db/05163.01125>.

Serial Figures and (the) Television

The new issue of Zeitschrift für Medienwissenschaft is out now. It’s a special issue on “The Series,” edited by Daniela Wentz, Lorenz Engell, Jens Schröter, Herbert Schwaab, and Benjamin Beil, and among a great set of articles it includes a piece I co-authored with Ruth Mayer, entitled: “Bildstörung: Serielle Figuren und der Fernseher” [roughly: Image Interference: Serial Figures and the Television]. Here’s the abstract:

This article investigates the logic and aesthetics of popular seriality by looking at several exemplary moments of medial recursivity – which we identify as a ‘motor’ of serial narration and proliferation. Our focus is on the medial development of serial figures – figures that are firmly established in the popular imagination and which have undergone multiple media changes in the course of their careers. In their serial reenactments, these figures are able to shed light on the ways in which the structures of a medial memory are established and updated, and how medial acts of forgetting are operationalized in this context. Exploring three case studies – the figures of Fu Manchu, Fantômas, and Batman – this article in particular reflects on the function of television with respect to its influence on the medial positionings and self-conceptions of other serial entertainment formats (the novel, film). We set out from the hypothesis that television is in many respects privileged in this role as a medium of reference. Not only its propensity for serial forms distinguishes it in this regard, but also its contradictory attributes of immateriality (television viewing) and apparatic presence (the television set) contribute to making the medium of television appear as both the epitome of serial sequentiality and as a disruptive factor or instrument for arresting the flow of serial figures’ stagings – thus covering a broad spectrum of medial reference functions.

And in German:

Dieser Aufsatz untersucht die Logik und Ästhetik populärer Serialität im exemplarischen Bezug auf das Moment der medialen Rekursivität, das hier als ‚Motor’ der seriellen Narration und Proliferation  ausgemacht wird. Der Fokus liegt auf der medialen Entfaltung von seriellen Figuren – also Figuren, die in der populären Imagination fest etabliert sind und im Laufe ihrer Karriere mehrere Medienwechsel unterlaufen. In ihrer seriellen Fortschreibung vermögen solche Figuren Aufschluss darüber zu geben, wie Strukturen eines medialen Gedächtnisses etabliert und fortgeschrieben werden und wie mediales Vergessen in diesem Zusammenhang operationalisiert wird. Anhand dreier Fallbeispiele – der Figuren Fu Manchu, Fantômas und Batman – erkundet der Aufsatz insbesondere die Funktion des Leitmediums Fernsehen in seiner Wirkmacht für die mediale Selbstverortung und das Selbstverständnis anderer serieller Unterhaltungsformate (Roman, Spielfilm). Er geht von der Hypothese aus, dass das Fernsehen in vieler Hinsicht für diese Rolle als Referenzmedium privilegiert ist. Nicht nur sein serialitätsaffiner Charakter zeichnet es hierfür aus, sondern auch seine widersprüchlichen Attribute der Immaterialität (Fernsehen) und Apparathaftigkeit (Fernseher) tragen dazu bei, dass dieses Medium gleichermaßen als Inbegriff der seriellen Sequenzialität und als Störfaktor oder Instrument der Arretierung im Fluss der seriellen Figureninszenierung erscheinen kann – und damit ein breites Spektrum an Referenzfunktionen abdeckt.

Post-Cinematic Affect: Post-Continuity, the Irrational Camera, Thoughts on 3D

[UPDATE: It appears that La Furia Umana is down right now. In the meantime, you can find the roundtable discussion here as well: http://www.academia.edu/1993403/_Post-Cinematic_Affect_Post-Continuity_the_Irrational_Camera_Thoughts_on_3D_]

Issue #14 of La Furia Umana just came out, and in it you’ll find a roundtable discussion between Therese Grisham, Julia Leyda, and myself on the topic of “post-cinematic affect” — Steven Shaviro’s term for the contemporary media environment, following cinema’s displacement as the twentieth century’s dominant medium. This is the second roundtable discussion on the topic, the first (involving Julia Leyda, Nicholas Rombes, Steven Shaviro, and Therese Grisham) having also appeared in La Furia Umana (here). While the first roundtable focused on the first two Paranormal Activity films, the discussion this time around touches on District 9, Melancholia, and Hugo, among others, and reflects on “post-continuity,” the “irrationality” of contemporary cameras, and the uses and abuses of 3D. In my own responses, I also connect these things to the topic of plurimedial seriality. Originally, Steven Shaviro was also scheduled to participate in the discussion, but he unfortunately had to withdraw due to other commitments (you can get a feel for how busy he’s been lately from his recent blog posts). Nevertheless, I think the discussion worked out quite nicely, and a further collaboration between Shaviro, Grisham, Leyda, and me is in the works. More on that soon…

Out Now: Popular Seriality

Just got my copy in the mail today: Populäre Serialität: Narration — Evolution — Distinktion. Zum seriellen Erzählen seit dem 19. Jahrhundert, edited by Frank Kelleter and with contributions from members of the DFG Research Unit “Popular Seriality — Aesthetics and Practice” and others, including Jason Mittell, Oliver Fahle, Lorenz Engell, and more!

“…where everything is marginal or contiguous to everything else…”

[UPDATE: You can find the complete text of the roundtable discussion here.]

Currently, I am engaged in a roundtable discussion with Therese Grisham, Julia Leyda, and Steven Shaviro on the topic of the post-cinematic. The discussion, organized and moderated by Therese, is to appear in the excellent online journal La Furia Umana, where it will follow an earlier discussion of the topic (which focused on the first two Paranormal Activity films). I don’t want to give away too much right now, but I thought I’d offer a short preview here. What follows is the crux — and in this context, “the crux” is synonymous with “some marginal snippets” — of my answer to an excellent question posed by Therese. You’ll have to wait, though, to find out what the question was…

***

…whereas the characters in classical cinema provided the central focus and occasions for dramatic interest in a story-world that unfolds according to its own internally defined logics, and whereas the camera served alternately to disclose this world in the manner of a transparent window or, more exceptionally, to announce its own presence as an (uncanny or self-reflexive) object of perception, the radically indeterminate cameras of post-cinematic filmmaking serve … to displace the characters, to take them out of the center of perceptual attention and instead situate them marginally with respect to a total environment of inhuman image production, processing, and circulation – and to situate us as viewers accordingly.

…there is a reversible relation between the post-cinematic diegesis and the nondiegetic ecology of our post-cinematic world, and it is occasioned precisely by a camera that no longer situates us as subjects vis-à-vis the film-as-object, but instead institutes a pervasive relation of marginality, where everything is marginal or contiguous to everything else. This corresponds to a specifically post-cinematic mode of address: the camera no longer frames actions, emotions, and events in a given world, but instead provides the color, look, and feel of the film qua material component or aspect of the world – of our world…

The post-cinematic camera, in short, modulates the affective character of the wider world; it does not bracket that world out or substitute one of its own making – for it remains indeterminately contiguous to every level of the contemporary real, including the physical, the imaginary, and the virtual.

WALL-E vs. Chaos (Cinema)

Tonight was the last night of our film series, “Chaos Cinema?” Here are the notes for my presentation on WALL-E:

WALL-E vs. Chaos (Cinema)

Shane Denson, 19 July 2012

Not long ago, I argued for a reconceptualization of recent cinema in terms of the rise of what I called “discorrelated images”—images that announce a certain amount of autonomy from human perceptual consciousness and that therefore resist being yoked or, to speak in the terms of the speculative realists, “correlated” completely to the subject of classical phenomenology.

My argument, which took Michael Bay’s Transformers (2007) as its central case study, was directed against Matthias Stork’s intriguing but ultimately limited conception of “chaos cinema,” which tends to see the frenetic filmmaking of the type that Bay is known for as basically sloppy in its disregard for the rules of classical continuity editing. Following the lead of Steven Shaviro, with his conception of “post-continuity” as an aspect of a broader regime of “post-cinematic affect,” I argued that the breaks with continuity singled out by Stork as the hallmark of chaos cinema are in fact merely symptomatic of a much larger shift in our media culture—signs, in fact, of an uncertain transition that we are still undergoing and that concerns a major overhaul of the place of the human in the cosmos, of our affective interface with material reality, or of our sensorium as a historically conditioned aspect of our embodied contact with the environment.

Concretely, I argued that the “operational aesthetic” expressed or elicited in scenes of Transformers’ transformations demonstrate that there’s more at stake than a simple break with continuity; for these images need not involve any violation of the 180° rule, the 30° rule, or any other convention regulating the editing practices of classical Hollywood film. Clearly, the chase scenes highlighted by Stork do involve such violations, but it seems somewhat arbitrary to single out such phenomena as definitive of a style or even an entire era of cinema, while the transformation scenes are clearly the centerpiece visual spectacles of the Transformers films and must therefore be accorded a central position in the aesthetic appeal of these particular films (if not in the aesthetic appeal of post-millennial popular cinema as a whole).

Taken together, a very different image emerges: we find then not just continuity violations but a more general discorrelation of images from the spatial and temporal parameters of “normal” human subjectivity. The transformation scenes, with their incredibly detailed displays of minutely articulated and perfectly synchronized processes, embody a sort of information overload: they are too much for us to take in at once, too fast for our eyes or even our perceptual imaginations. This fact is of course related to the digital technologies that are responsible for their production; computational processing divorces images in their materiality from the hitherto reigning analogies between eye and camera. More centrally still, these images are severed from the historical correlation between the perceptual subject of vision and the medial apparatuses that cater to (and condition) that subjectivity. The result of discorrelation must indeed seem like “chaos,” because it signals a certain superfluousness of consciousness, a displacement of the constituted subject and of the properly human—a displacement that we feel today in the face of semi-autonomous finance markets and, crucially, the chaos of environmental change and catastrophe as well.

WALL-E, I want to suggest, displays an acute awareness of these displacements. Its very medium, digital animation, is implicated materially in the discorrelation of human perception, as it is in this medium that, following arguments made by Mark Hansen, the image ceases to be an object (of either a perceiving subject or of an apparatic analog medium) and instead becomes fully processual (both with respect to the microtemporal processes of its technical, i.e. computational, generation, and with respect to its microtemporal neural processing, which in bypassing conscious awareness must be regarded as a completely affective form of sensory reception). Digital animation is therefore the pinnacle of what, in an effort to further specify the conditions of contemporary cinema and to move beyond the simplifying label of “chaos” cinema, I would like to call “hyper-informatic cinema.”

This label is meant to highlight two related aspects of contemporary cinema, or of an important tendency in recent film: 1) Hyper-informatic cinema is based on a profusion of informatic (i.e. digital) technologies, both diegetic and non-diegetic—an overabundance of computers in the production of contemporary films (which rely heavily on CGI and digital compositing techniques), and of computational agencies in the films so produced (which feature robots, transformers, and cybernetically enhanced aliens, but also humans seeking to master or simply navigate the computational environments in which we already live today). 2) Such films are hyper-informatic in the sense I referenced above: they exploit scenarios of information overload, either as spectacle or as (at once narrative and affective) dilemma. In these scenarios, there is simply too much information, thrown at us far too fast for us to process it in full. The “intensification” of continuity that Bordwell speaks of can in large measure be traced back to this aspect of hyper-informatic speed, and the breakdowns that Stork labels “chaos” result from the mismatch between computational microtemporalities and the macrotemporality of the consciousnesses they challenge.

But rather than exacerbating the perceptual mismatch of digital discorrelation, WALL-E instead effects a reduction of informational content, without thereby denying its self-awareness of the fascinations of its informatic medium. There is a lack of talk, and a lack of speed, but there is no lack of visual spectacle and of inter-medial comparisons that highlight (and historicize) the film’s own digital substrate: thus, WALL-E is a fan of the film Hello, Dolly!, a relic of a bygone (human) era which he consumes through an assemblage of antiquated technologies, including cassette recorders, iPods, and magnifying glasses. WALL-E marks, indeed embodies, a discorrelation of the image from human perception, but the film need not flaunt it in the style of Michael Bay. Instead, WALL-E would seem to offer a measured response to it, one that places it in close connection to the “chaos” that characterizes not only our cinema at present but our estrangement from an environment marked by post-industrial carelessness, pollution, and e-waste. Reading the hopeful story of ecological recovery in medially self-reflexive terms, perhaps we could say that WALL-E’s quest to clean up the earth is less a battle to restore the human to a position of centrality, autonomy, and mastery over nature, as instead a far more limited, but also far less utopian, struggle to accept discorrelation and to effect a cinematic recalibration: an attunement of sensory capacities and images qua informatic processes.

Mediate. Discorrelate. Recalibrate.

Besides giving lectures and workshops, Mark Hansen has been taking his visit here as an opportunity to see a good deal of art. Last week I accompanied him to the documenta in Kassel, which is really excellent this time around. Lots of opportunities to aesthetically discorrelate and recalibrate — which happens to have been the subject of my “response” (partly synoptic, partly associative, and certainly highly inconclusive) to an article called “Ubiquitous Sensation” that we discussed at the workshop last Friday. Here are the notes I was working with:

Mediate. Discorrelate. Recalibrate. Or: How to Enjoy Impersonal Sensation. Or Yet Again: Having the Time of Your Life and Then Some.

A Response to Mark B. N. Hansen.

Shane Denson, Hannover, 6 July 2012

Mark Hansen’s “Ubiquitous Sensation or the Autonomy of the Peripheral” (forthcoming in Ulrik Ekman’s edited volume, Throughout: Art and Culture Emerging with Ubiquitous Computing) seeks to make sense of the sensory impacts occasioned by computational technologies operating on microtemporal scales – and thus outside the scales proper to subjective perception. Ubiquitous computing, or ubicomp, materially articulates this question, as it is by design “invisible” – which is to say, phenomenally and physically removed from the field of our perceptual attention. And yet, as Hansen shows by way of an exploratory engagement with several artworks, such technologies continue to exert an influence from a position that is radically and resolutely peripheral to perception. Against the claims of early ubicomp visionaries, who imagined this peripherality and invisibility as always ultimately serving the centered (perceptual) subjectivity of deliberate human action, Hansen maintains that because the microtemporal operations enacted by these technologies are categorically beyond or below the threshold of our perception, ubicomp must be seen as instantiating a level of material autonomy, the “autonomy of the peripheral,” that requires us to rethink media and their relation to human experience.

At stake, then, on one level, is a new conception of media, one that breaks with a long-standing tendency to correlate media with human sensory ratios, and to see media as vehicles for storing and reproducing human perceptual experience. Centrally, this tendency is related to Western thought’s privileging of the visual register, which itself can be seen as an exemplary means of constituting media as objects, locating them squarely in the purview of our subjective gazes, and thereby neutralizing any fundamental transformative potential that they might have if accorded autonomy from our perceptual control. It might be helpful here to recall Bruno Latour’s distinction between “intermediaries” and “mediators.” Intermediaries serve as channels that more or less transparently relay information or experiential content from point A to point B. Assuming that those points are people, or subjects, media as intermediaries offer perceptual objects that, because their contents are isomorphic with the contents of natural perception, can circulate in such a way as to expand the power (and life-span or historical longevity) of visual or other perceptual experience without thereby challenging or undermining the foundational stability and centrality of the subject. Mediators, on the other hand, are radically transformative; unlike intermediaries, they are not objects that pass neutrally between subjects but are instead what Latour calls hybrid “quasi-objects,” which articulate the very distinctions and relations obtaining between subjects and objects. By asserting the autonomy of the peripheral, by disconnecting ubicomp and related technologies from the narrow bandwidth of subjectively defined instrumentality, and more generally by discorrelating media from human perception, Hansen similarly breaks with the view of media as intermediaries, and – by positioning media as environmental factors – he shows them to be like Latour’s mediators in their ability to impact us materially, impersonally, and prior to the articulation of subjectivity.

This only works, though, if the discorrelation of media from perception does not imply their complete removal from the domain of sensation. In other words, sensation itself must be seen as occurring outside of perceptual subjectivity, and this impersonal sensation will be the site of our primary, pre-personal interaction with technics. Through discorrelation, in other words, the impact of media is not at all diminished; on the contrary, its directness in fact becomes apparent for the first time. Moreover, perceptually discorrelated media do not remain disconnected but operate precisely by effecting various means and forms of recalibration. Thus, the central experiential impact of invisible computing is constituted by its capacity to recalibrate our microsensory (and thus sub-personal, unconscious) capacities with an environment transformed by the introduction of technologies operating on microtemporal scales – and indeed embodying, operationally, microsensations of their own. In comparison to Hansen’s insistence, in earlier writings, on the relative privilege of the human, here we see a flattening of the difference between humans and computational technics: not, certainly, the crude sort of flattening that posits our brains are “like” computers or, even more extremely, that proposes uploading consciousness into computer networks and leaving our bodies behind. Instead, the analogy between the microtemporal processing of the brain and the microtemporal processing of digital technologies is based, somewhat paradoxically, on a radical naturalization of sensation, one which corresponds to a recognition of our material existence and evolution as embodied organisms in the world, prior to our development of subjectivity. Quite simply put, this priority of the physical – which is both a logical and a temporal priority – requires a radical revision of subject-centered phenomenological accounts of time-constitution. If we are to take seriously the idea of a natural continuum that links the human with nonhuman animals and inanimate materiality as a fact of our embodiment, we must assume that time is in the world before it is in us. Temporal experience therefore arises from a domain of impersonal sensation, and it is here that brains and processors interface directly, materially, and microtemporally, to generate new forms of macroconscious experience, reflecting a new correlation of media and sensation.

It is only on the basis of seeing ourselves as part of the broader – independently temporal and impersonally sensory – world that we are able to appreciate the radical impact of technics outside our subjective experience. More difficult, though, than the theoretical grounding of such an appreciation is the question of how such impersonal sensation can be opened to experience in practice; or, as Hansen puts it more precisely, “how embodied human mind-bodies can enjoy such impersonal sensation” (81). I highlight this formulation because I want to pursue briefly the double meaning of our enjoyment of the impersonal and the microtemporal – not just how we partake of it and participate in it, but how we enjoy it in the sense of our contemporary entertainment industries, which are all highly dependent on the microtemporal processes of digital technologies. Contemporary cinema utilizes CGI both invisibly and spectacularly, and at times it seems to produce “discorrelated images” – images that insist on their excess with respect to viewers’ capacities to capture and process them perceptually. Perhaps more radically, the processual temporality of video games completely resists assimilation to Stiegler’s model of the industrial temporal object, as the medium’s defining interactivity works to ensure a future-oriented openness that is the very antithesis of media as tertiary memory. Moreover, as Andreas Jahn-Sudmann and I have begun to explore, practical and formal experimentation with temporal processes in video games – ranging from user-initiated speedruns to computationally anchored phenomena like the ability to switch to a “bullet time” perspective – might offer a form of aesthetic mediation of impersonal, microtemporal sensation not unlike the artworks that Hansen mentions in his paper. As a popular negotiation of digital microtemporality, it would seem that this is how we “enjoy” impersonal sensation today.

And finally, here are some more (discorrelated/discorrelating) pictures from the documenta, featuring bees as sculpture and painted dogs. Enjoy!

Mark Hansen in Hannover

Here are a few images from Mark Hansen’s talks on July 2 and 3.

The first two were taken Monday, at a very inspiring talk called “Feed-Forward, or the ‘Future’ of 21st Century Media.”

Above, a picture taken Tuesday, at the talk given in the context of my media theory seminar: “The End of Pharmacology?: Historicizing 21st Century Media.”

And a picture taken over the weekend, during an exciting game of “Vikinger-Schach”!

Finally, here is the text of my introduction to the Monday night talk:

First of all, I’d like to say that I am very honored, and I am very happy, to introduce Mark Hansen to you today. Mark is Professor in the Literature Program at Duke University, where he is also affiliated with a range of departments, programs, and interdisciplinary centers, including the department of Art, Art History, and Visual Studies, the Program in the Arts of the Moving Image, the Visual Studies Initiative, and the Program in Information Science + Information Studies. Before going to Duke in 2008, Mark served as Professor of English, Visual Arts, and Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Chicago, prior to which he held positions in the English Department at Princeton. Over the past decade or so, he has established himself as one of the leading media theorists in America and the world, a reputation built on a steady stream of equally demanding and rewarding publications, including three monographs to date. His book Embodying Technesis: Technology Beyond Writing, which was published in 2000, set the stage for much of his subsequent work by arguing for a robustly material conception of technologies and their relations to and impacts on experiencing bodies. Identifying the ways that many of the master thinkers of twentieth century high theory, including Freud, Heidegger, Derrida, Deleuze and Guattari, had struggled with but ultimately perpetuated a reduction of the technical to the narrow frames of discourse and subjective thought, thus obscuring technology’s more diffuse impacts and its role as infrastructure for thought and experience, the book cleared the ground for a more positive engagement with changes in this infrastructure, especially as occasioned by the advent of computational media. Thus, New Philosophy for New Media, published in 2004, undertook a careful analysis of the digital image, which was shown with the help of resources updated from Henri Bergson to be far less fixed and visually concentrated than one might assume; instead, digital images turned out to be highly processual and dispersed across a network of materially embodied agents — processors, flickering pixels, and above all human bodies that filter and select the relevant forms, providing the very frame for computationally generated images. Mark’s next book, Bodies in Code: Interfaces with New Media, from 2006, continued this focus on our affective engagement with the world, and on the modulation of that engagement through media that articulate an ongoing coevolution of humans and technics. Mark has also co-edited several important volumes, including The Cambridge Companion to Merleau-Ponty (co-edited with Taylor Carman), Emergence and Embodiment: New Essays on Second-Order Systems Theory (with Bruce Clarke), and Critical Terms for Media Studies (with William J. T. Mitchell). He is currently wrapping up a book project entitled Feed-Forward: The “Future” of 21st Century Media, and this, I presume, is the basis of what he’ll be talking about today.

So, conventionally, this is where I would say “and now, without further ado,” but in fact I do want to subject you to just a little bit more “ado.” If the list of professorships, books, and ideas that I’ve been recounting here can be said to constitute an official “text” of Mark Hansen’s career as a world-class media theorist, there’s also a little-known subtext, or perhaps paratext, through which he has been connected with Hannover and exerted here a subtle but definite influence over the years. Most recently, I have had my students reading his thoughts on “New Media” this semester, while our Film & TV Reading Group also met to discuss an important article called, simply, “Media Theory.” These are texts that have been very important to me personally, and they played a key role in challenging me to articulate some of the foundational ideas in my dissertation. As some of you may know, Mark served as the second examiner for that project, and some of the people here today were also present at my thesis defense in December 2010, when Mark joined us, quite fittingly, as a digital image, by way of video-conferencing technology. But the intellectual and personal connections with Hannover run deeper and are older than that. What many people don’t know is that this is Mark’s second — real-life, corporeal — visit to the English Department at the University of Hannover. The first one was exactly 15 years ago, in the summer of 1997. Few people know this, because it was before most of the current faculty, staff, and students had ever set foot in this building. Well, not to brag or anything, but: I was there. In fact, it was my very first trip to Germany, an exchange trip headed by Mark, who in those almost prehistoric days — prior to Duke, Chicago, and Princeton — was employed at a place called Southwest Texas State University (which, incidentally, is a name that has since lost its power of designation, as that university is now called something else). Anyway, it was there, and here (back then), that Mark planted many of the seeds that would come to fruition much later in my own work, and that have quietly informed my teaching practice here for over a decade. I am grateful, then, to the Fulbright Program and to our university’s Gastwissenschaftler-Programm for making it possible to bring Mark back once again after all these years. Above all, though, and this is what I’ve been trying to get at with this excavation of a “Hannover connection,” I wish to express my gratitude to Mark both as a mentor and as a friend. Thank you. And now, I am very proud to present to you Mark Hansen.

Abstracts for Mark Hansen’s Talks

Here are the abstracts for Mark Hansen’s talks next week:

Feed-Forward, or the “Future” of 21st Century Media (Monday, July 2, 6pm, room 615)

21st century media designates media following its shift from a past-directed recording platform to a data-driven anticipation of the future.  In my talk,  I shall focus on the experiential challenges posed by this shift, shall sketch a post-phenomenological account of sensation, and shall explore the privilege of sound as a medium for slowing down microtemporal sensibility.

The End of Pharmacology?: Historicizing 21st Century Media (Tuesday, July 3, 10am, room 615)

Pharmacology designates the double operation of media which simultaneously threaten human modes of experience and provide remedies for their threat.  In my talk, I shall explore the history of media pharmacology from writing onwards and shall focus on the “perversion” of pharmacology in the contemporary media environment.  Taking Facebook as my prime example, I shall ask what happens when the operationality of a media platform – the gathering of data traces of user activity – is wholly divorced from its function as entertainment/content.