Next Tuesday, October 5, 2021 (12pm Pacific), I will be giving a talk in Stanford’s German Studies Lecture Series titled “Media Philosophy in the Flesh.” See here for more information and Zoom registration.
On Saturday, October 2, 2021, at 1pm Eastern / 10am Pacific, I will be participating along with Hannah Zeavin, Casey Boyle, and Hank Gerba in a panel on “DeepFake Energies” at the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts (SLSA) conference (via Zoom).
The panel thinks about the energies invested and expended in DeepFake phenomena: the embodied, cognitive, emotional, inventive, and other energies associated with creating and consuming machine-learning enabled media (video, text, etc.) that simulate human expression, re-create dead persons, or place living people into fake situations. Drawing on resources from phenomenology, psychoanalysis, media theory, and computational exploration, panelists trace the ways that the generative energies at the heart of these AI-powered media transform subjective and collective experiences, with significant consequences for gender, race, and other determinants of political existence in the age of DeepFakes.
Here are the abstracts:
On the Embodied Phenomenology of DeepFakes (Shane Denson, Stanford)
DeepFake videos pose significant challenges to conventional modes of viewing. Indeed, the use of machine learning algorithms in these videos’ production complicates not only traditional forms of moving-image media but also deeply anchored phenomenological categories and structures. By paying close attention to the exchange of energies around these videos, including the consumption of energy in their production but especially the investment of energy on the part of the viewer struggling to discern the provenance and veracity of such images, we discover a mode of viewing that both recalls pre-cinematic forms of fascination while relocating them in a decisively post-cinematic field. The human perceiver no longer stands clearly opposite the image object but instead interfaces with the spectacle at a pre-subjective level that approximates the nonhuman processing of visual information known as machine vision. While the depth referenced in the name “DeepFake” is that of “deep learning,” the aesthetic engagement with these videos implicates an intervention in the depths of embodied sensibility—at the level of what Merleau-Ponty referred to as the “inner diaphragm” that precedes stimulus and response or the distinction of subject and intentional object. While the overt visual thematics of these videos is often highly gendered (their most prominent examples being involuntary synthetic pornography targeting mostly women), viewers are also subject to a”ective syntheses and pre-subjective blurrings that, beyond the level of representation, open their bodies to fleshly “ungenderings” (Hortense Spillers) and re-typifications with far-reaching consequences for both race and gender.
No More Dying (Hannah Zeavin, UC Berkeley)
“No More Dying” concerns itself with the status of DeepFakes in psychic life on the grounds of DeepFakes that reprise the dead. In order to think about whether DeepFakes as surrogates constitute an attempt at eluding pain—a psychotic technology—or are a new form of an ancient capacity to symbolize pain for oneself (Bion 1962), I will return to the status of objects as melancholic media and what this digital partial-revivification might do to and for a psyche. Is creating a virtual agent in the likeness of a lost object a new terrain (a new expression of omnipotent fantasy) or is it more akin to the wish fulfillment at the center of transitional phenomena and dreaming? Does a literal enactment and acting out lead to, as Freud would have it, a mastery and working through—or does the concrete nature of gaming trauma lead to a melancholic preservation of an internal object via an investment in the mediatized external object? Beyond the psychical implications of this form of reviving the dead, the paper troubles the assumptions and politics of this nascent practice by asking whose dead, and whose trauma, are remediated and remedied this way. More simply, which dead are eligible for reliving and, recalling Judith Butler’s question—which lives are grievable?
Low Fidelity in High Definition (Casey Boyle, UT Austin)
When thinking about DeepFakes, it is easy to also think about theorist Jean Baudrillard. It was Baudrillard who, early and often, rang alarm bells regarding the propensity of images and/as information to become unmoored from any direct referent. DeepFakes seem to render literal the general unease with the ongoing mediatization that Baudrillard traced. However, the uncertainty about a “real” is not only because of this severing real from fake, but is also because of a prior condition of media since, as Baudrillard claims, “… a completely new species of uncertainty results not from the lack of information but from information itself and even from an excess of information” (Baudrillard, 1985). The excessive overload of mediatization enables DeepFakes to persist as a threat because the energy and e”ort required to validate any given piece of media is an unsustainable practice when there are so many to verify. It seems then the only response to overload is to generate…more. This presentation reports on an ongoing project to re-energize Baudrillard by computationally generating new texts. Using an instance of GPT-3 machine learning—one trained on Baudrillard’s texts—the presenter will rely on “new” primary texts to comment on the rise of DeepFakes, Post-Truth, and Fake News. Ultimately, this presentation, relying on “new” primary work from Baudrillard, argues that we are not entering an era of Post- Truth but of Post-Piety, which is an era in which we have failed to spend energy building agreement and commonplace.
A Gestural Technics of Individuation as Descent (Hank Gerba)
Googling “What is a DeepFake?” returns a vertiginous list of results detailing the technical processes involved in their production. Operational images par excellence, DeepFakes have spawned an industry of verification practices meant to buttress the epistemological doubt their existence sows. It would seem then that to be concerned with DeepFakes is to be concerned with veridicality, but, as this presentation argues, this problematic is derivative of, and entangled with, an aesthetic encounter. What if we approach DeepFakes otherwise, arriving at, rather than departing from, a causal understanding of their technicity? When a DeepFake “works,” it succeeds in satisfactorily producing gestures characteristic of the person it has “learned” to perform—through these gestures it means them, and only them. The question DeepFakes pose, then, is no longer simply “Is this video a true representation of X?” but “Is this performance true to X?” Gestures therefore plunge us into the aesthetics of personhood; they are, as Vilém Flusser argues, that which mediate personhood by bringing it into the social manifold of meaning. By linking Flusser’s theory of gesture with Gilbert Simondon’s theory of individuation, this presentation concludes by arguing that DeepFakes are a gestural technics of individuation—machinic operations which enfold personhood within the topological logic of gradient descent.
Julia Leyda and I were interviewed about the new translation of (selected essays from) our edited collection Post-Cinema: Theorizing 21st-Century Film. The interview, in Turkish, is now up at Gazete Duvar. For those of you who don’t speak Turkish (like me), here’s the original English:
You assert that “rather than positing a clear break with the past, the term post-cinema asks us more forcefully than the notion of ‘new media’ for example, to think about the relation (rather than mere distinction) between older and newer media regimes”. With the prefix ‘post’, you’re not indicating the death of cinema or an era that is after the cinematic but you talk about the space where the cinematic meets the digital, the computational. Could you please expand more on your understanding of the term ‘post-cinema’?
Julia Leyda: The digital is an important aspect of post-cinema, absolutely. Yet I also still see a film like Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story (1987) as post-cinematic, in that it was seen primarily via bootleg VHS tapes for several decades before appearing on video sharing sites like YouTube. The cable and satellite TV boom and the almost total saturation of home video technology in the late 20th century also fed into what we now call post-cinema, in the decentering of the viewing space and the proliferation of the “poor image” even before the digital copies that Hito Steyerl describes so eloquently.
Shane Denson: Yes, I agree completely. The prefix post- isn’t supposed to mark a simple before and after. We think the digital marks a clear difference from celluloid-based cinema, but it’s one that builds on transformations connected with television, analog video, and early computational technologies, among others. Steve Shaviro somewhere remarks that it’s less about the newness of post-cinema, and more about the fact that these changes, which have been building for over fifty years, finally reached a critical mass in the twenty-first century, and that it no longer makes sense to pretend that the media regime we live in is adequately described by theories of the cinema—which is not to say that cinema-centric approaches are suddenly rendered useless, but they have to be resituated in a broader context, which we call post-cinema.
Reading your introduction, I also noticed that my meeting with cinema was indeed post-cinematic. In my childhood, I watched many films not at the theaters but in my house from the DVDs, connected to the tv screen. So I guess for a long time now, we are in the ‘post-cinematic’ age, with or without recognising it. Maybe the term just helped us to assign meaning, enabled us to discuss our experience?
JL: Precisely. The post in our usage of post-cinema is not meant to be stand for a hard break, but a gradual shift in which old and new technologies and social practices exist at the same time. In this sense, the dominant, emergent, and residual cultural forms overlap, much as earlier media theorists like Raymond Williams and Stuart Hall observed.
SD: And we don’t really know where things are going, either. Post-cinema is very much in flux, as the rise of streaming services and their recent proliferation (and some demises) attest. The pandemic really shook things up, of course, bringing new moving-image platforms into our lives and, at least temporarily, displacing traditional cinematic screenings (which haven’t actually been very “traditional” for quite some time). I think this was a good reminder that media are always in transition, and post-cinema doesn’t describe a fixed state but precisely this flux and transitionality that marks moving-image media technologies and cultures alike.
I would like to echo a question asked by Steven Shaviro in his blog ‘The Pinocchio Theory’. He says “what is the role or position of cinema when it is no longer what Fredric Jameson calls a ‘cultural dominant,’ when it has been ‘surpassed’ by digital and computer-based media? So what’s the position of cinema in the 21st century?
SD: I think this depends on what aspects of the cinema we are emphasizing—whether we are thinking primarily of screening venues, industries, experiences, or images, for example. The industries that produced “cinema” aren’t gone, and many of them are more powerful than ever. But their consolidation into global multimedia conglomerates has also transformed them, so that they are more closely bound up with the data and financial sectors. And the latter, where the dominant power resides, have very little to do with images—but everything to do with our experience.
JL: One position the cinema has come to occupy in 2020-21 during the pandemic is a place of nostalgia. As the aesthetics of “films” were already more tailored to the home screen where they will likely be viewed on a streaming service, the sudden shutdown of collective exhibition venues has exacerbated my awareness of the limitations of my living room screening options. I have sympathized with many of my cinephile colleagues and friends experiencing grief over the loss of the moviegoing experience at this time, although my own tendencies in recent years had already leaned more toward home viewing.
You brought many different (and sometimes contradicting) authors together in this volume. Is this because the term ‘post-cinema’ itself includes various and sometimes contradicting meanings in itself?
JL: Absolutely. We felt it was very important to balance the book with contributions from the many approaches within film and media studies: philosophy, history, technology, as well as feminist, cultural studies, and environmental approaches. In particular, we tried to avoid producing a volume that would replicate what Racquel Gates and Michael Gillespie remind us about in their manifesto: the historic dominance of white men in film theory, in terms of practitioners and of objects of research, that still endures.
SD: Exactly. Again, the one thing we wanted to avoid is the impression that post-cinema is a single, fixed thing. It remains in flux, as the shifting site of negotiations between experience and culture, on the one hand, and changing environments and infrastructures. And questions of power and perspective are central to any attempt to account for these changes.
If you were to write and edit the book today, which discussions would you include/exclude in your edition?
JL: We definitely would need to discuss this! To name a couple of new developments I would want to include, there has been a lot more interesting work in eco-media studies, and I would also be very interested in including chapters that look at trans aesthetics and affects as interventions in the way we produce, perceive, and consume film and television. And of course the pandemic, as an abrupt change in social practices around cinema, television, and mobile video.
SD: I totally agree. Of course, the technological and industrial contexts have continued to change over the past couple of years, even before the pandemic. And who knows what the world will look like in a year or two? Even more importantly, our political realities have shifted in the past five years, with fascist and quasi-fascist movements on the rise around the world, but also major uprisings, such as took place in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, caught on a smartphone and circulated around the world.
What particular messages would you like to give your readers living in Turkey who are enthusiastically waiting to read your book in their native language?
JL/SD: Welcome to the book and please enjoy it! We are so delighted to share it!
A couple of weeks ago, I was interviewed by Roger Whitson and Christian Haines for the Gamers with Glasses podcast. I don’t wear glasses, and I’m honestly not much of a gamer these days, but we still found lots of things to talk about, like:
what the Transformers movies might teach us about philosophy, how streaming has transformed how we literally see things, the appeal of vinyl records, and how Netflix and Hulu might just be responsible for the end of the world!
We also talked a little about my book Discorrelated Images (which is currently 50% off during Duke University Press’s Fall Sale with code FALL21). Check it out!
Under the title Post-Sinema – 21. Yüzyıl Sinemasının Kuramsallaştırılması, select essays from the open-access collection Post-Cinema: Theorizing 21st-Century Film have now been translated into Turkish and published by NotaBene Yayınları.
Here is the table of contents:
The book can be purchased directly from the publisher, here.
Recently, at long last, the 2020 edition of Eludamos: Journal for Computer Game Culture, a special issue “On the Philosophy of Computer Games,” came out — followed immediately by the 2021 issue, so you might have missed it!
Included, among other things, is my article “Gaming and the ‘Parergodic’ Work of Seriality in Interactive Digital Environments,” which begins the work of reading seriality in a double register, as both a medial and a social phenomenon (following Sartre’s late work in the Critique of Dialectical Reason, among others).
Be sure also to check out Doug Stark’s excellent “Training for the Military? Some Historical Considerations Towards a Media Philosophical Computer Game Philosophy”!