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.
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.
The English Theatre Group, under the direction of Peter Bennett, will be performing Oscar Wilde’s Salome and The Fisherman and His Soul (an original dramatization of Wilde’s fairy tale) as a double-bill. Please note that there is a new venue this semester: “die hinterbuene” at Hildesheimer Str. 39A. Performances are on July 17, 18, 20, and 21 at 7:30pm. Contrary to the information on the above flyer, advance ticket sales begin on Monday, July 2, and run through Friday, July 13, in the foyer of the Conti-Hochhaus at Königsworther Platz 1.
On the occasion of our “Chaos Cinema” film series, where the topic yesterday was Michael Bay’s Transformers (2007), I gave a short talk on the notion of “discorrelated images” — an idea that percolates (though is not named as such) in my dissertation, emerging through conversation with a number of thinkers, ideas, and images: Deleuze (and Guattari) on “affection images” and “faciality,” Henri Bergson on living (and other) “images,” Brian Massumi on affect and “passion,” Mark Hansen on the “digital facial image” and “the medium as environment for life,” and others, including Boris Karloff and the iconic image of Frankenstein’s monster. All of which are left out of the picture in yesterday’s talk — which was designed to set the stage for further thinking, to be suggestive rather than definitive, and thus serves more to raise questions than to answer them. In any case, I reproduce the text (and slides) here, in case anyone is interested:
Michael Bay’s 2007 film Transformers can be seen as an interesting case of transmedial serialization in the context of what Henry Jenkins calls our “convergence culture” — interesting because, reversing the typical order of merchandising processes, Bay’s film and its sequels are part of a franchise that originates with (rather than giving rise to) a line of toys. Unlike Star Wars action figures, for example, which are extracted from narrative contexts and made available for supplementary play, Transformers are toys first, and only subsequently (though promptly) narrativized. These toys, first marketed in the US by Hasbro in 1984, but based on older Japanese toylines going by other names, spawned several comic-book series, Saturday-morning cartoons, an animated film, novelizations, video games implemented across a wide range of platforms, and the trilogy of films directed by Michael Bay with backing from Steven Spielberg.
Despite such rampant adaptation and narrativization, however, we shouldn’t lose sight of the toys, which continue to be marketed to kids today, nearly thirty years after they were first marketed to me and my elementary school friends: the toys themselves offer only the barest of narrative parameters (good guys vs. bad guys) for the generation of storified play scenarios. Transformers, in opposition to Star Wars figures, which always exist in some relation to preexistent stories, are not primarily interesting from a narrative point of view at all: Autobots and Decepticons are basically just two teams, and the play they generate need not be any more narratively complex than a soccer or football match (where tales are told, to be sure, but as a supplement to the ground rules and the moves made on their basis).
Instead, the basic attraction of Transformers is, as the name says, the operation of transformation. Transformers are therefore mechanisms first, and the attraction for children (mostly boys) growing up in the early 80s was to see how they worked. Transformers, in other words, are the perfect embodiments of an “operational aesthetic” in the original sense of the term, first introduced by Neil Harris to describe the attraction of P.T. Barnum’s showmanship against the background of nineteenth century freak shows, magic shows, World Expos, and popular exhibitions of the latest technologies. More recently, Jason Mittell has usefully employed the concept to explain the attraction of “narratively complex television,” but the operationality at issue here (i.e. in the case of the Transformers) is of a stubbornly non-narrative sort. Thus, consonant with a general trait of science-fiction film (with its narratively gratuitous displays of special effects, which often interrupt the story to show off the state of the art in visualization technologies), narrativizations of Transformers are inherently involved in competitions of interest: story vs. mechanism, diegesis vs. medium. The Transformers themselves, who are more interesting as mechanisms than as characters, are the crux of these alternations.
(On this basis we might say, riffing on Niklas Luhmann, that they embody an “operative difference between substrate and form” and thus themselves constitute the “media” of a flickering cross-medial serial proliferation. Butthat’sanotherstory…)
Let me go back to the idea of convergence culture, which I’d like to connect with this operational mediality. It’s important to keep in mind that our convergence culture, in Jenkins’s terms, is enabled by a different type of convergence with which it remains in constant communication: viz. the specifically technological convergence of the digital. Is it stretching things to say that the original toys latched onto an early eight-bit era fascination with the way electronic machines could generate interactive play? In other words, they spoke to an interest in the way machines worked — as the basic object of interactive video games — and promoted fantasies of artificial intelligences and robotic agencies that would be a match for any human subject (or gamer).
In any case, Michael Bay’s Transformers, along with the film’s sequels, would not be possible without much more advanced digital technologies; the films know it, we know it, and the films know we know it, so the role of the digital is not hidden but foregrounded and positively flaunted in the films. Typically for a transitional era of media-technological change, which, it would seem, we are still going through with respect to the digitalization of cinema (and of life more broadly), there is a fascination with medial processes that the films hook into. The result is that attentions are split between diegesis and medium, story and spectacle. The Transformers serve as a convenient fulcrum point for such oscillations, thus capitalizing on the uncertain valencies of media change while connecting phenomenological dispersal with a story that in some ways speaks to a larger decentering of human perspectives and agencies in the face of convergence and computation processes — to a feeling of contingency about the human that is related in various ways to digital technologies.
For example, there’s a sense of powerlessness with respect to digitally automated finance, which employs robotically operating algorithms to expedite the process and efficiency of transactions, splitting major operations into distributed micro-scale packet transfers that occur faster than the blink of an eye, and at truly sublime scales — both infinitesimally smaller and faster than human sensory ratios and with the potential to produce cataclysmically large results. The entire realm of human action, which exists in between these scales, is marginal at best: the machines originally meant to serve the interests of (some) humans end up serving only the algorithms of a source code — with respect to which, we are perhaps only bugs in the system. It is easy to extrapolate sci-fi fantasies: for example, the emergence of Skynet — or is it Stuxnet?
But the decentering of the human perspective through digital technology is taking place in much less fantastic manners, and in ways that do not support any kind of humans-first narratives of heroic reassertion: global warming, which is revealed to us through digital modeling simulations, points not towards our roles as victims of a pernicious technology of automation, but shows us to be the culprits in a crime the scale of which we cannot even begin to imagine. Categorically: we cannot imagine the scale, and this fact challenges us to rethink our notions of morality in ways that would at least attempt to account for all the agencies and ways of being that fall outside of narrowly human sense ratios, discourses, cultural constructions, senses of right and wrong, the true and the beautiful, the false and the ugly…. Through digital technologies, we have found ourselves in an impossible position: our technologies seem to want to live and act without us, and our world itself, ecologically speaking, would apparently be far better off without us. We are forced, in short, to try to think the world without us.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gdRC4iP6cNw
“Without us” can mean both “in our absence” or “beyond us” — outside our specific concerns, attachments, and modes of engagement with the world. The attempt to think, in this sense, “the world without us” characterizes the goal of “speculative realism,” a recent tendency in philosophy defined by its opposition to what Quentin Meillassoux calls “correlationism,” or the idea that reality is exhausted by our means of access to it. Against this notion, which correlates human thought and being on a metaphysical level, the speculative realists challenge us to think the world apart from our narrow view of it, to renounce an essentialism of the human perspective, and to escape to the “Great Outdoors.”
What does this have to do with Transformers and so-called “chaos cinema”? I’m trying to suggest something about the affective state, the structure of feeling, that produces and is (re)produced in and by our media culture today — a structure of feeling that Steven Shaviro calls “post-cinematic affect.” This broader context is largely ignored in Matthias Stork’s conception of “chaos cinema,” which is defined narrowly and technically, in terms of a break with classical continuity. These breaks do occur, and Stork has demonstrated their existence quite powerfully in his video essays, but they are only symptomatic of larger shifts. Shaviro has put forward a seemingly related notion of “post-continuity,” but he is careful to point out that continuity is not what’s centrally at stake. Post-cinematic affect is not served or expressed solely by breaking with principles of continuity editing; rather, continuity is in many instances simply beside the point in relation to a visceral awareness and communication of the affective quality of our historical moment of indeterminacy, contingency, and radical revision. The larger significance of a break with principles of classical continuity editing — rather than just sloppy filmmaking, as Stork sometimes seems to suggest, or quasi avant-garde radicalism — has instead to do with the correlation of continuity principles with the scales and ratios of human perception. Suture and engrossment in classical Hollywood works because those films structure themselves largely in accordance with the ways that a human being sees the world. (It goes without saying that this perceptual model is one that has as its touchstone a normative model of human embodiment, neurotypical cognitive functioning, and relatively unmarked racial, class, and gender types.) And while it has long been clear to feminist critics, among others, that the normative model of (unqualified, unmarked) humanity to which classical film speaks was in need of problematization, I would argue that the human itself has become a problem for us, and that “our” films have registered this in a variety of ways. The momentary breaks with continuity that Stork singles out as the defining features of chaos cinema are just one of the ways.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KeyLHPg6ft4
More generally, I suggest, we witness the rise of the discorrelated image: an image that problematizes, if not altogether escaping, the correlation of human thought and being. The teaser trailer for Transformers (also integrated into the film itself) uses nonhuman subjective shots — images seen through the eyes of a robot, the Mars rover Beagle 2 — to promote its story about an intelligent race of machines. In a somewhat different vein, The Hurt Locker opens with images mediated through the camera-eyes of a robot employed for defusing bombs from a distance. The Paranormal Activity series employs a variety of robotic or automated camera systems. Wall-E, Cars, and a host of other digital animation films are all about the perceptions, feelings, and affects of nonhuman machines. Of course, there’s nothing new about such representations, and they are highly anthropomorphic besides. But what if these are just primers, symptomatic indicators, or gentle nudges, perhaps, towards something else? (Significantly, both Jane Bennett, in the context of her notion of “vibrant matter,” and Ian Bogost, with regard to his project of “alien phenomenology,” have argued for the necessity of a “strategic anthropomorphism” in the service of a nonhuman turn.) In fact, what we find here is that the representational level in such films is coupled with, and points toward, an extra-diegetic fact about the films’ medial mode of existence: digital-era films, heavy with CGI and other computational artifacts, are themselves the products of radically nonhuman machines — machines that, unlike the movie camera, do not even share the common ground of optics with our eyes. Accordingly, the supposed “chaos” of “chaos cinema” is not about a break with continuity; rather, it’s about a break with human perception that materially conditions the cinema (and visual culture more broadly) of the early 21st century. Again, in Transformers, the process of transformation is the crux, the site where discorrelation is most prominently at stake as the object of an operational aesthetic. The spectacle of a Transformer transforming splits our attention between the story and its (digital) execution, between the diegesis and the medial conditions of its staging, which are in turn folded back into the diegesis so as to enhance and distribute a more general feeling of fascination or awe.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KbKfYrPU0CQ
What do we see when a Transformer transforms? What we don’t see, necessarily, is a break with the principles of continuity editing. Instead, we witness a discorrelation of the image by other means: we register the way in which our desire to trace the operation of the machine is categorically outstripped by the technology of digital compositing, which animates the transformation by means of algorithmic processes operating on the scale of a micro-temporality that is infinitesimally smaller and faster than any human subject’s ability to process or even imagine it. These images, I contend, are the raison d’etre of the film itself. But they are not “for us,” except in the sense that they challenge us to think our contingency, to intuit or feel that contingency on the basis of our sensory inadequacy to the technical conditions of our environments. A hopeful story, complete with adolescent love interest and other minor concerns, counters this vision of our own obsolescence. But the discorrelated image of transformation is the aesthetic crux of the film, quite possibly the only thing worth watching it for, and perhaps even the bearer of a (probably unintentional) ethical injunction, beyond the rather flimsy human-centered narrative (and the clearly conservative politics, militarism, and apparent misogynism): the discorrelated image, in which the process of transformation can only be suggested to our lagging sensory apparatuses, challenges us performatively, by confronting us with an image of our own discorrelation; viscerally, it asks us to attune ourselves to an environment that is broader than our visual capture of it, faster than our ability to register it, and more or less indifferent to our concernful perception of it. Materially, medially, and ontologically true to the 1980s tagline, the discorrelated images of Michael Bay’s Transformers are indeed “More than meets the eye!”
On Thursday, June 28 (at 6:00 pm in room 609, Conti-Hochhaus), Ulrich Blumenbach will talk about his work as German translator of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. The talk, titled “Der Übersetzer als Gärtner: Pfingstrosen, Kraut und Rüben,” will take place in the context of Florian Groß’s seminar on Infinite Jest, but everyone is welcome to come!
On the occasion of his visit to the Leibniz University of Hannover, the American Studies department / English Seminar and the Initiative for Interdisciplinary Media Research are proud to present a series of lectures and workshops with renowned media theorist Mark Hansen.
Mon, 2 July 2012, 6:00 pm: Lecture: “Feed Forward, or the ‘Future’ of 21st Century Media”
Tue, 3 July 2012, 10:00 am: Guest lecture: “The End of Pharmacology?: Historicizing 21st Century Media.”
Fri, 6 July 2012, 2:00 – 5:00 pm: Workshop on selected media-theoretical texts by Mark Hansen (to participate in the workshop, please register via email)
(All events will take place in room 615 in the “Conti-Hochhaus”: building 1502 at Königsworther Platz 1.) For further information and to register for the workshop, please contact Shane Denson.
Recently, I asked the participants in the independent studies course on “Digital Media and Humanities Research” to experiment a bit with presentation software, including the freely available Prezi — which the students running the “Profanity TV” blog did with very impressive results: here is their elaborate presentation on Quality TV. (And in case you missed it, make sure you check out their introductory “trailer” video for the site, which explains what the blog, i.e. their project for the course, is all about.)
For the independent studies course I’m directing this semester on the topic of “Digital Media and Humanities Scholarship,” three students have set up a nice looking blog, Bonfire of the Televised Profanities (or “Profanity TV” for short), which went online today. They’ve even put together a video “trailer” for the blog, which provides some context and gives a taste of what they’ll be doing there. Check it out!
An interview with me on the subject of memes, conducted by Manuel Behrens, appears in today’s Hannoversche Allgemeine Zeitung as part of a full-page spread on Boromir, Philosoraptor, Admiral Ackbar, and Rage Comics. True story! Check it out here: Was sind eigentlich Memes? (The interview, “Jeder kann mitmachen,” is at the bottom of the page.)
On Thursday, January 26, 2012, we will be screening the fifth and final film in our Bollywood Nation series: Chak De! India [Come on! India] (and not, as previously announced, Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham…). As usual, the screening will begin at 6:00 PM (room 615 in the Conti-Hochhaus). More information about the film can be found on imdb.com.
