anthropotechnical interface – Page 2

Video: Post-Cinematic Interfaces with a Postnatural World

There’s something fitting about the fact that the audio recording of my “3 Theses” on postnaturalism and post-cinema — which I presented at the 2014 annual conference of the DGfA, “America After Nature” — is overrun by the nonhuman voices of nameless birds calling to one another, blissfully indifferent to my theoretical speculations. What at first presented itself to me as something of a disappointment, viz. the generally poor quality of the recording and the occasional difficulty of discerning spoken words in particular, seemed on second thought a nice illustration — or better: enactment — of some of the ideas I put forward about the distributed agency of affect’s environmental mediation: here the human voice competes with “natural” and “cultural” forces ranging from songbirds to smartphones, failing to command their attentions but contributing to an improbable concert for a sufficiently non- or posthuman ear immersed in an ecology of material interaction.

Looking at it (or listening to it) from this angle, and getting over my initial disappointment, I decided to add some video of the various postnatural landscapes I encountered while in Germany on my recent trip. The result is another of what I have begun referring to as “metabolic images” — where the computational capture and processing of moving images, along with their temporal (and microtemporal) modulation, point to the subpersonal effects (and affects) of our embodied interfaces with a post-cinematic media environment. (See here, here, or here for more…)

(For the full effect, be sure to view the video in HD on vimeo. And finally, if you happen to have a more humanly inflected interest in the discursive “contents” put forward here, you can find the full text of my presentation here.)

Postnaturalism: Cover Design

Here’s the cover for my forthcoming book, which is set to appear this July with Transcript-Verlag. Click on the image (or here) to see the publisher’s announcement for the book.

Postnaturalism, with a Foreword by Mark B. N. Hansen: Forthcoming 2014

Having hinted at it before, I am pleased now to announce officially that my book Postnaturalism: Frankenstein, Film, and the Anthropotechnical Interface will be appearing later this year (around Fall 2014) with the excellent German publisher Transcript, with US distribution through Columbia University Press.

I am also very excited that Mark B. N. Hansen has contributed a wonderful foreword to the book. Here is a blurb-worthy excerpt in which he identifies the philosophical and media-philosophical stakes of the book:

Shane Denson’s Postnaturalism develops [an] ambitious, wide-ranging, and deeply compelling argument concerning the originary operation of media in a way that sketches out a much-needed alternative to destructive developments which, expanding the darker strains of poststructuralist anti-humanism, have pitted the human against the material in some kind of cosmological endgame. Postnaturalism will provide a very powerful and timely addition to the literature on posthuman, cosmological technogenesis. Perhaps more clearly than any other account, it reconciles the irreducibility of phenomenality and the imperative to move beyond anthropocentrism as we seek to fathom the postnatural techno-material “revolutions” that have repeatedly remade – and that will no doubt continue to remake – the environments from which we emerge and to which “we” belong before we become and as a condition of becoming human subjects.

Now, as I put the finishing touches on the manuscript and prepare for it to leave my control — to go forth, monstrously, and (who knows?) prosper — I can only hope that the book will live up to Hansen’s estimation of it and, above all, that it will make a worthy contribution to the debates over nonhuman agency and human-technological co-evolution that have recently defined some of the more exciting strands in media theory, science studies, and speculative realism, among others.

Philosophy of Science De-Naturalized: Notes towards a Postnatural Philosophy of Media (full text)

As I recently announced, I was invited to give the keynote address at the 17th annual Texas State University Philosophy Symposium. Here, now, is the full text of my talk:

Philosophy of Science De-Naturalized: Notes towards a Postnatural Philosophy of Media

Shane Denson

The title of my talk contains several oddities (and perhaps not a few extravagances), so I’ll start by looking at these one by one. First (or last) of all, “philosophy of media” is likely to sound unusual in an American context, but it denotes an emerging field of inquiry in Europe, where a small handful of people have started referring to themselves as philosophers of media, and where there is even a limited amount of institutional recognition of such appellations. In Germany, for example, Lorenz Engell has held the chair of media philosophy at the Bauhaus University in Weimar since 2001. He lists as one of his research interests “film and television as philosophical apparatuses and agencies” – which, whatever that might mean, clearly signals something very different from anything that might conventionally be treated under the heading of “media studies” in the US. On this European model, media philosophy is related to the more familiar “philosophy of film,” but it typically broadens the scope of what might be thought of as media (following provocations from thinkers like Niklas Luhmann, who treated everything from film and television to money, acoustics, meaning, art, time, and space as media). More to the point, media philosophy aims to think more generally about media as a philosophical topic, and not as mere carriers for philosophical themes and representations – which means going beyond empirical determinations of media and beyond concentrations on media “contents” in order to think about ontological and epistemological issues raised by media themselves. Often, these discussions channel the philosophy of science and of technology, and this strategy will indeed build the bridge in my own talk between the predominantly European idea of “media philosophy” and the context of Anglo-American philosophy.

OK, but if the idea of a philosophy of media isn’t weird enough, I’ve added this weird epithet: “postnatural.” The meaning of this term is really the crux of my talk, but I’m only going to offer a few “notes towards” a postnatural theory, as it’s also the crux of a big, unwieldy book that I have coming out later this year, in which I devote some 400 pages to explaining and exploring the idea of postnaturalism. As a first approach, though, I can describe the general trajectory through a series of three heuristic (if oversimplifying) slogans.

First, in response to debates over the alleged postmodernity of (Western) societies at the end of the twentieth century, French sociologist and science studies pioneer Bruno Latour, most famous for his association with so-called actor-network theory, claimed in his 1991 book of the same title that “We have never been modern.” What he meant, centrally, was that the division of nature and culture, nonhuman and human, that had structured the idea of modernity (and of scientific progress), could not only be seen crumbling in contemporary phenomena such as global warming and biotechnology – humanly created phenomena that become forces of nature in their own right – but that the division was in fact an illusion all along. We have never been modern, accordingly, because modern scientific instruments like the air pump, for example, were simultaneously natural, social, and discursive phenomena. The idea of modernity, according to Latour, depends upon acts of purification that reinforce the nature/culture divide, but an array of hybrids constantly mix these realms. In terms of a philosophy of media, one of the most important conceptual contributions made by Latour in this context is the distinction between “intermediaries” and “mediators.” The former are seen as neutral carriers of information and intentionalities: instruments that expand the cognitive and practical reach of humans in the natural world while leaving the essence of the human untouched. Mediators, on the other hand, are seen to decenter subjectivities and to unsettle the human/nonhuman divide itself as they participate in an uncertain negotiation of these boundaries.

The NRA, with their slogan “guns don’t kill people, people kill people,” would have us believe that handguns are mere intermediaries, neutral tools for good or evil; Latour, on the other hand, argues that the handgun, as a non-neutral mediator, transforms the very agency of the human who wields it. That person takes up a very different sort of comportment towards the world, and the transformation is at once social, discursive, phenomenological, and material in nature.

With Donna Haraway, we could say that the human + handgun configuration describes something on the order of a cyborg, neither purely human nor nonhuman. And Haraway, building on Latour’s “we have never been modern,” ups the ante and provides us with the second slogan: “We have never been human.” In other words, it’s not just in the age of prosthetics, implants, biotech, and “smart” computational devices that the integrity of the human breaks down, but already at the proverbial dawn of humankind – for the human has co-evolved with other organisms (like the dog, who domesticated the human just as much as the other way around). From an ecological as much as an ideological perspective, the human fails to describe anything like a stable, well-defined, or self-sufficient category.

Now the third slogan, which is my own, doesn’t so much try to outdo Latour and Haraway as to refocus some of the themes that are inherent in these discussions. Postnaturalism, in a nutshell, is the idea not that we are now living beyond nature, whatever that might mean, but that “we have never been natural” (and neither has nature, for that matter). Human and nonhuman, natural and unnatural agencies are products of mediations and symbioses from the very start, I contend. In order to argue for these claims I take a broadly ecological view and focus not on discrete individuals but on what I call the anthropotechnical interface (the phenomenal and sub-phenomenal realm of mediation between human and technical agencies, where each impinges upon and defines the other in a broad space or ecology of material interaction). This view, which I develop at length in my book, allows us to see media not only as empirical objects, but as infra-empirical constraints and enablers of agency such that media may be described, following Mark Hansen, as the “environment for life” itself. Accordingly, media-technical innovation translates into ecological change, transforming the parameters of life in a way that outstrips our ability to think about or capture such change cognitively – for at stake in such change is the very infrastructural basis of cognition and subjective being. So postnaturalism, as a philosophy of media and mediation, tries to think about the conditions of anthropotechnical evolution, conceived as the process that links transformations in the realm of concrete, apparatic media (such as film and TV) with more global transformations at a quasi-transcendental level. Operating on both empirical and infra-empirical levels, media might be seen, on this view, as something like articulators of the phenomenal-noumenal interface itself.

So the more I unpack this thing, the weirder it gets, right? Well, let me approach it from a different angle. Here’s where the first part of my title comes into play: “Philosophy of Science De-Naturalized.” Now, I mentioned before that postnaturalism does not postulate that we are living “after” nature; what I want to emphasize now is that it also remains largely continuous with naturalism, conceived broadly as the idea that the cosmos is governed by material principles which are the object, in turn, of natural science. And, more to the point, the first step in the derivation of a properly postnatural theory, which never breaks with the idea of a materially evolving nature, is to work through a naturalized epistemology, in the sense famously articulated by Willard V. O. Quine, but to locate within it the problematic role of technological mediation. By proceeding in this manner, I want to avoid the impression that a postnatural theory is based on a merely discursive “deconstruction” of nature as a concept. Against the general thrust of broadly postmodernist philosophies, which might show that our ideas of nature and its opposites are incoherent, mine is meant to be a thoroughly materialist account of mediation as a transformative force. So the “Philosophy of Science De-Naturalized,” as I put it here, marks a particular trajectory that takes off from what Ronald Giere has called “Philosophy of Science Naturalized” and works its way towards a properly postnatural philosophy of media.

Giere’s naturalized philosophy of science is of interest to me because it aims to coordinate evolutionary naturalism (in the sense of Darwin) with revolutionary science (in the sense of Thomas Kuhn). In other words, it aims to reconcile the materialism of naturalized epistemology with the possibility of radical transformation, which Kuhn sees taking place with scientific paradigm shifts, and which I want to attribute to media-technical changes. Taking empirical science as its model, and taking it seriously as an engagement with a mind-independent reality, an “evolutionary epistemology” posits a strong, causal link between the material world and our beliefs about it, seeing knowledge as the product of our biological evolution. Knowledge (and, at the limit, science) is accordingly both instrumental or praxis-oriented and firmly anchored in “the real world.” As a means of survival, it is inherently instrumental, but in order for this instrumentality to be effective – and/or as the simplest explanation of such effectivity – the majority of our beliefs must actually correspond to the reality of which they form part. But, according to Kuhn’s view of paradigm shifts, “after a revolution scientists work in a different world” (Structure of Scientific Revolutions 135). This implies a strong incommensurability thesis that, according to critics like Donald Davidson, falls into the trap of idealism, along with its attendant consequences; i.e. if paradigms structure our experience, revolution implies radical relativism or else skepticism. So how can revolutionary transformation be squared with the evolutionary perspective?

Convinced that it contains important cues for a theory of media qua anthropotechnical interfacing, I would like to look at Giere’s answer in some detail. Asserting that “[h]uman perceptual and other cognitive capacities have evolved along with human bodies” (384), Giere’s is a starkly biology-based naturalism. Evolutionary theory posits mind-independent matter as the source of a matter-dependent mind, and unless epistemologists follow suit, according to Giere, they remain open to global arguments from theory underdetermination and phenomenal equivalence: since the world would appear the same to us whether it were really made of matter or of mind-stuff, how do we know that idealism is not correct? And because idealism contradicts the materialist bias of physical science, how do we know that scientific knowledge is sound? According to Giere, we can confidently ignore these questions once the philosophy of science has itself opted for a scientific worldview. Of course, the skeptic will counter that naturalism’s methodologically self-reflexive relation to empirical science renders its argumentation circular at root, but Giere turns the tables on skeptical challenges, arguing that they are “equally question-begging” (385). Given the compelling explanatory power and track record of modern science and evolutionary biology in particular, it is merely a feigned doubt that would question the thesis that “our capacities for operating in the world are highly adapted to that world” (385); knowledge of the world is necessary for the survival of complex biological organisms such as we are. But because this is essentially a transcendental argument, it does not break the circle in which the skeptic sees the naturalist moving; instead, it asserts that circularity is an inescapable consequence of our place in nature. In large part, this is because “we possess built-in mechanisms for quite direct interaction with aspects of our environment. The operations of these mechanisms largely bypass our conscious experience and linguistic or conceptual abilities” (385).

So much for the evolutionary perspective, but where does revolutionary science fit into the picture? To answer this question, Giere turns to the case of the geophysical revolution of the 1960s, when a long established model of the earth as a once much warmer body that had cooled and contracted, leaving the oceans and continents more or less fixed in their present positions, was rapidly overturned by the continental drift model that set the stage for the now prevalent plate tectonics theory (391-94). The matching coastlines of Africa and South America had long suggested the possibility of movement, and drift models had been developed in the early twentieth century but were left, by and large, unpursued; it was not just academic protectionism that preserved the old model but a lack of hard evidence capable of challenging accepted wisdom – accepted because it “worked” well enough to explain a large range of phenomena.

The discovery in the 1950s of north-south ocean ridges suggested, however, a plausible mechanism for continental drift: if the ridges were formed, as Harry Hess suggested, by volcanism, then “sea floor spreading” should be the result, and the continents would be gradually pushed apart by its action. The discovery, also in the 1950s, of large-scale magnetic field reversals provided the model with empirically testable consequences (the Vine-Matthews-Morley hypothesis): if the field reversals were indeed global and if the sea floor was spreading, then irregularly patterned stripes running parallel to the ridges should match the patterns observed in geological formations on land. Until this prediction was corroborated, there was still little impetus to overthrow the dominant theory, but magnetic soundings of the Pacific-Antarctic Ridge in 1966, along with sea-floor core samples, revealed the expected polarity patterns and led, within the space of a year, to a near complete acceptance of drift hypotheses among earth scientists.

According to Giere, naturalism can avoid idealistic talk of researchers living “in different worlds” and explain the sudden revolution in geology by appealing only to a few very plausible assumptions about human psychology and social interaction – assumptions that are fully compatible with physicalism. These concern what he calls the “payoff matrix” for accepting one of the competing theories (393). Abandoning a pet theory is seldom satisfying, and the rejection of a widely held model is likely to upset many researchers, revealing their previous work as no longer relevant. Resistance to change is all too easily explained. However, humans also take satisfaction in being right, and scientists hope to be objectively right about those aspects of the world they investigate. This interest, as Giere points out, does not have to be considered “an intrinsic positive value” among scientists, for it is tempered by psychosocial considerations (393) such as the fear of being ostracized and the promise of rewards. The geo-theoretical options became clear – or emerged as vital rather than merely logical alternatives – with the articulation of a drift model with clearly testable consequences. We may surmise that researchers began weighing their options at this time, though it is not necessary to consider this a transparently conscious act of deliberation. What was essential was the wide agreement among researchers that the predictions regarding magnetic profiles, if verified, would be extremely difficult to square with a static earth model and compellingly simple to explain if drift really occurred. Sharing this basic assumption, the choice was easy when the relevant data came in (394).

But the really interesting thing about this case, in my opinion, is the central role that technology played in structuring theoretical options and forcing a decision, which Giere notes but only in passing. The developing model first became truly relevant through the availability of technologies capable of confirming its predictions: technologies for conducting magnetic soundings of the ocean floor and for retrieving core samples from the deep. Indeed, the Vine-Matthews-Morley hypothesis depended on technology not only for its verification, but for its initial formulation as well: ocean ridges could not have been discovered without instruments capable of sounding the ocean floor, and the discovery of magnetic field reversals depended on a similarly advanced technological infrastructure. A reliance on mediating technologies is central to the practice of science, and Giere suggests that an appreciation of this fact helps distinguish naturalism from “methodological foundationism” or the notion that justified beliefs must recur ultimately to a firm basis in immediate experience (394). His account of the geological paradigm shift therefore “assumes agreement that the technology for measuring magnetic profiles is reliable. The Duhem-Quine problem [i.e. the problem that it is logically possible to salvage empirically disconfirmed theories by ad hoc augmentation] is set aside by the fact that one can build, or often purchase commercially, the relevant measuring technology. The background knowledge (or auxiliary hypotheses) are embodied in proven technology” (394). In other words, the actual practice of science (or technoscience) does not require ultimate justificational grounding, and the agreement on technological reliability ensures, according to Giere and contra Kuhn, that disagreeing parties still operate in the same world.

But while I agree that Giere’s description of the way technology is implemented by scientists is a plausible account of actual practice and its underlying assumptions, I question his extrapolation from the practical to the theoretical plane. With regard to technology, I contend, the circle problem resurfaces with a vengeance. As posed by the skeptic, Giere is right, in my opinion, to reject the circle argument as invalidating naturalism’s methodologically self-reflexive application of scientific theories to the theory of science. Our evolutionary history, I agree, genuinely militates against the skeptic’s requirement that we be able to provide grounds for all our beliefs; our survival depends upon an embodied knowledge that is presupposed by, and therefore not wholly explicatable to, our conscious selves. But as extensions of embodiment, the workings of our technologies are equally opaque to subjective experience, even – or especially – when they seem perfectly transparent channels of contact with the world. Indeed, Giere seems to recognize this when he says that “background knowledge (or auxiliary hypotheses) are embodied by proven technology” (394, emphasis added). In other words, scientists invest technology with a range of assumptions concerning “reliability” or, more generally, about the relations of a technological infrastructure to the natural world; their agreement on these assumptions is the enabling condition for technology to yield clear-cut decision-making consequences. Appearing neutral to all parties involved, the technology is in fact loaded, subordinated to human aims as a tool. Some such subordinating process seems, from a naturalistic perspective, unavoidable for embodied humans. However, agreement on technological utility – on both whether and how a technology is useful – is not guaranteed in every case. Moreover, it is not just a set of cognitive, theoretical assumptions (“auxiliary hypotheses”) with which scientists entrust technologies, but also aspects of their pre-theoretically embodied, sensorimotor competencies. Especially at this level, mediating technologies are open to what Don Ihde calls an experiential “multistability” – capable, that is, of instantiating to differently situated subjectivities radically divergent ways of relating to the world. But it is precisely the consensual stability of technologies that is the key to Giere’s contextualist rebuttal of “foundationism.”

Downplaying multistability is the condition for a general avoidance of the circle argument, for a pragmatic avoidance of idealism and/or skepticism. This, I believe, is most certainly the way things work in actual practice; (psycho)social-institutional pressures work to ensure consensus on technological utility. But does naturalism, self-reflexively endorsing science as the basis of its own theorization, then necessarily reproduce these pressures? Feminists in particular may protest on these grounds that the “nature” in naturalism in fact encodes the white male perspective historically privileged by science because embodied by the majority of practicing scientists. What I am suggesting is that the tacit, largely unquestioned processes by which technological multistability is tamed in practice form a locus for the inscription of social norms directly into the physical world; for in making technologies the material bearers of consensual values (whether political, epistemic, psychological, or even the animalistically basic preferability of pleasure over pain) scientific practice encourages certain modes of embodied relations to the world – not just psychic but material relations themselves embodied in technologies. It goes without saying that this can only occur at the expense of other modes of being-embodied.

More generally stated, the real problem with naturalism’s self-reflexivity is not that it fails to take skeptical challenges seriously or that it provides a false picture of actual scientific practice, but that in extrapolating from practice it locks certain assumptions about technological reliability into theory, embracing them as its own. While it is contextually – indeed physically – necessary that assumptions be made, and that they be embodied or exteriorized in technologies, the particular assumptions are contingent and non-neutral. This may be seen as a political problem, which it is, but it also more than that. It is, moreover, an ontological problem of the instability of nature itself – not just of nature as a construct but of the material co-constitution of real, flesh-and-blood organisms and their environments. Once we enter the naturalist circle – and I believe we have good reason to do so – we accept that evolution dislodges the primacy of place traditionally accorded human beings. At the same time, we accept that the technologies with which science has demonstrated the non-essentiality of human/animal boundaries are reliable, that they show us what reality is really, objectively like. This step depends, however, on a bracketing of technological multistability. If we question this bracketing, as I do, we seem to lose our footing in material objectivity. Nevertheless convinced that it would be wrong to concede defeat to the skeptic, we point out that adaptive knowledge’s circularity or contextualist holism is a necessary requirement of human survival, that it follows directly from embodiment and the fact that the underlying biological mechanisms “largely bypass our conscious experience and linguistic or conceptual abilities” (Giere 385). But if we admit that technological multistability really obtains as a fact of our phenomenal relations to the world, this holism seems to lead us back precisely to Kuhn’s idealist suggestion that researchers (or humans generally) may occupy incommensurably “different worlds.” If we don’t want to abandon materialism, then we have to find an interpretation of this idea that is compatible with physicalism.

Indeed, it is the great merit of naturalism that it provides us with the means for doing so; however, it is the great failure of the theory that it neglects these resources. The failure, which consists in reproducing science’s subordination of technology to thought – in fact compounding the reduction, as contextually practiced, by subordinating it to an overarching (i.e. supra-contextual) theory of science – is truly necessary for naturalism, for to rectify its oversight of multistability is to admit the breakdown of a continuous nature itself. To consistently acknowledge the indeterminacy of human-technology-world relations and simultaneously maintain materialism requires, to begin with, that we extend Giere’s insight about biological mechanisms to specifically technological mechanisms of embodied relation to the world: they too “bypass our conscious experience and linguistic or conceptual abilities.” If we take the implications seriously, this means that technologies resist full conceptualization and are therefore potentially non-compliant with human (or scientific) aims; reliance on technology is not categorically different in kind from reliance on our bodies: both ground our practice and knowledge in the material world, but neither is fully recuperable to thought. Extending naturalism in this way means recognizing that not only human/animal but also human/technology distinctions are porous and non-absolute. But whereas naturalism tacitly assumes that the investment of technology with cognitive aims is only “natural” and therefore beyond question, the multistability of non-cognitive investments of corporeal capacities implies that there is more to the idea of “different worlds” than naturalism is willing or able to admit: on a materialistic reading, it is nature itself, and not just human thought or science, that is historically and contextually multiple, non-coherently splintered, and subject to revolutionary change. Serious consideration of technology leads us, that is, to embrace a denatured naturalism, a techno-evolutionary epistemology, and a material rather than social constructivism. This, then, is the basis for a postnatural philosophy of media.

Philosophy of Science De-Naturalized: Notes towards a Postnatural Philosophy of Media

I am very honored to have been invited to hold a keynote address at the Texas State University Philosophy Department’s annual philosophy symposium on April 4, 2014. Having studied as an undergraduate at Texas State (which back then was known as Southwest Texas State University, or SWT for short), this will be something of a homecoming for me, and I’m very excited about it!

In fact, one of the first talks I ever delivered was at the 1997 philosophy symposium — the very first year it was held. My talk back then, titled “Skepticism and the Cultural Critical Project,” sought to bridge the divide between, on the one hand, the analytical epistemology and philosophy of science that I was studying under the supervision of Prof. Peter Hutcheson and, on the other hand, the Continental-inspired literary and cultural theory to which I was being exposed by a young assistant professor of English, Mark B. N. Hansen (before he went off to Princeton, then University of Chicago, and now Duke University).

In a way, my effort back then to mediate between these two very different traditions has proved emblematic for my further academic career. For example, my dissertation looked at Frankenstein films as an index for ongoing changes in the human-technological relations that, I contend, continually shape and re-fashion us at a deeply material, pre-subjective, and extra-discursive level of our being. The cultural realm of monster movies was therefore linked to the metaphysical realm of what I call the anthropotechnical interface, and my argument was mounted by way of a lengthy “techno-scientific interlude” in which I revisited many of the topics in Anglo-American epistemology and philosophy of science that I had first thought about as an undergrad in Texas.

Thus, without my knowing it (and it’s really only now becoming clear to me), my talk back in 1997 marked out a trajectory that it seems I’ve been following ever since. And now it feels like a lot of things are coming full circle: A book based upon my dissertation, for which Mark Hansen served as reader, is set to appear later this year (but more on that and a proper announcement later…). In addition, as I announced here recently, I will be moving to North Carolina this summer to commence a 2-year postdoctoral fellowship at Duke, where I will be working closely with Hansen. Now, before that project gets underway, I have the honor to return to the philosophy symposium in San Marcos, Texas and, in a sense, to revisit the place where it all started.

I thought it would be appropriate, therefore, if I delivered a talk that continued along the trajectory I embarked upon there 17 years ago (wow, that makes me feel old…). My talk, titled “Philosophy of Science De-Naturalized: Notes towards a Postnatural Philosophy of Media,” takes a cue from Ronald N. Giere’s “Philosophy of Science Naturalized” — which sought to reconcile Thomas Kuhn’s idea of revolutionary paradigm shifts in the history of science with W. V. O. Quine’s notion of “Epistemology Naturalized,” i.e. a theory of knowledge based more in the material practice and findings of natural science (especially evolutionary biology) than in the “rational reconstruction” of ideal grounds for justified true belief. As I will show, my own “postnaturalism” — which is ultimately a philosophy of media rather than of knowledge or science — represents not so much a break with such naturalism as a particular manner of thinking through issues of technological mediation that emerge in that context, issues that I then subject to phenomenological scrutiny and ultimately post-phenomenological transformations in order to arrive at a theory of anthropotechnical interfacing and change.

“What if the camera / really do / take your soul?”

If the medium is the message, as Marshall McLuhan famously claimed, then the so-called “selfie” may be less about the face that constitutes the recognizable content of such an image, and more about a deeper, less obvious form of material-aesthetic mediation with respect to the transformation of “self” in an age of ubiquitous post-cinematic cameras.

Clearly, such acts of mediation have many levels. On the one hand, we “stage” or “perform” our selves for ourselves and for our friends (and, of course, for our Facebook “friends”); at the same time, though, we do so with an awareness of the machinery of geolocated surveillance and algorithmic facial recognition systems that we feed and help to optimize with the offering of our selfies (and the metadata they contain). Is this a self-destructive tendency or an act of defiance? Do we taunt and shake our fists at the invisible all-seeing God of Hyperinformatic Imagery (or the NSA), heroically though baselessly asserting our autonomy despite our knowledge of its baselessness? Or is it just that we have resigned ourselves to the new “situation,” in which Berkeley’s maxim esse est percipi has been made a reality through a media-technical dispositif that renders superfluous the whole apparatus of angelic and divine perceptions that Bishop Berkeley still needed to keep his system from falling apart?

But the post-cinematic camera is a post-perceptual camera. Esse is now post-percipi in the sense that networks of digital and increasingly “smart” cameras are not just collecting images of “you” or “me” but instituting radical changes in the fine-grained, “molecular” scale of temporal becoming that subtends subjective (or “molar”) perception. As I have been arguing recently (see here, for example), post-cinematic cameras produce “metabolic images” — images that operate outside of visual or perceptual registers and modulate our pre-personal relations to the environment, directly influencing us at the level of our metabolic processing of duration and relation through which our embodied agencies are defined. This has to do with (among other things) the sheer speed of computational processes, which outstrip our own cognitive and perceptual processing abilities. But it also has to do with the affective density that post-cinematic cameras themselves accrue by virtue of the gap — what Bergson would call a “center of indeterminacy,” or simply a body — that these cameras install between the input and output of images, in the space of their microtemporal computational processing. On this basis, a synchronization of human and technical temporalities is made possible at the micro-level. And perhaps this is the hidden message of the medium: the selfie is not just a paradoxical performance of self (in the way that, say, reality shows problematize authenticity), it is in fact the product of a whole new ecology of agency, an ecology of anthropotechnically co-ordinated metabolisms invisibly subtending the visible images by which we seek to represent our “selves.”

With every selfie, we experiment with this interplay of visible manifestation and invisible infrastructure. Who can we be, now, and in relation to an environment filled with rapidly proliferating digital images, where everything is in flux, nothing apparently stable? Perhaps we encounter here, and try to dispel, an old fear in a new guise: that the camera is capable of stealing our souls — both through integration into systems of surveillance, and in the dissolution of our former agencies when set in relation to the molecular, metabolic processes embodied by the post-cinematic camera. In the words of Montreal-based indie rock band Arcade Fire:

What if the camera
Really do
Take your soul?
Oh no...

Hit me with your flashbulb eyes!
Hit me with your flashbulb eyes!
You know I've got nothing to hide
You know I got nothing
No I got ... nothing

Above, my own mixed-media “reflections” on the problem of the selfie in the age of metabolic modulation. Featuring artworks by Thomas Böing (Ohne Titel [Museum König], 2006), currently on display at the impressive Kolumba — Art Museum of the Archdiocese of Cologne as part of the exhibition “show cover hide. Shrine. An exhibition on the aesthetics of the invisible,” which runs until August 25, 2014.

Mediatization and Serialization

The very first thing I posted on this blog (in May 2011) was the above flyer, announcing a talk I was giving on the connections between “mediatization” and “serialization.” While sorting through some papers, I came across the text of the talk again and realized I still haven’t gotten around to doing anything with it. In the end, I have to admit that the concept of mediatization, as defined by the media sociologists and communications theorists I discuss in the talk, doesn’t really appeal to me that much. For one thing, I am much less concerned than they are to guard against charges of technological determinism; mediatization theory often seems preoccupied with keeping the human, or the social, in control (on some general problems with this preoccupation, see McKenzie Wark’s recent essay “Against Social Determinism”). However, a large part of the theoretical appeal of the notion of mediatization — as a process of change closely linked with processes like modernization and globalization — lies in its description of an apparent loss of autonomy, a ceding of human agency to the technical. And I think there’s something to be said for this: the past two-hundred some-odd years have witnessed an explosion of technical actants, placing us in ever more complex and opaque feedback loops with them and the environment they mediate to us: welcome to the anthropocene…

So this is not my problem with mediatization theory. Rather, my problem is with the insinuation that human agency was free of the taint of media or technics some two or three hundred (or however many) years ago, and that it only gradually became “mediatized.” My own notion of postnaturalism, summed up in the Latourian paraphrase that “we have never been natural,” is based on the idea of an essential and indissoluble (though by no means static) “anthropotechnical interface” that connects human and technical agencies in a transductive relation — there simply is no human agency without technical agencies, and vice versa. Still, it is necessary to take note of the empirical changes that take place against this cosmological horizon, and perhaps the notion of mediatization can be of service in this regard after all. If we set aside the worries over determinism, that is, and train our focus at a medium level of abstraction — somewhere between the cosmological and the phenomenologically/technically concrete and individual: at the level of supra-personal but not quite geological temporality or history — perhaps then an engagement with the concept of “mediatization” can help us think through the qualitative changes in agency that have taken place with the advent of the steam press, photography, film, radio, television, and digital media.

My talk on “Mediatization & Serialization” certainly does no more than scratch the surface in this regard, but in the hopes that it at least manages to do that, I have decided to reproduce the text here. As always, I am grateful for any comments!

Mediatization & Serialization

Shane Denson

(Note: This is a rough script of the talk I held at Leibniz Universität Hannover on May 18, 2011. Bibliographical info is missing, and footnotes are just placeholders.)

[Intro]

What I hope to do is to bring the concept of mediatization, which I’ll explain shortly, into dialogue with that of serialization, especially as it pertains to the seriality of modern popular entertainment (as exhibited in film and television series, for example). Most generally, the basis for this dialogue derives from the fact that both mediatization and serialization are, or so I contend, characteristically modern processes, perhaps even central to modernity itself. Mediatization, according to the term’s usage in recent communications theory and media sociology, is related to the fact that the modern world is witness to a consistent increase in the sheer number of technical media. These, in turn, are seen to be increasingly central to the shape and structure of sociocultural reality, so that it becomes increasingly untenable to think of media as a separate institution, exerting pressure on the others from outside. Instead, the situation shifts to one in which we find genuinely “mediatized” institutions, institutions transformed by media as an increasingly integral framing structure. So it no longer makes sense to speak of “the media and education” or “the media and the family,” as in traditional mass communications studies, but instead of thoroughly mediatized education, family, and so forth. Mediatization, according to Friedrich Krotz, is a “meta-process,” not itself empirically observable but, like the meta-processes of individualization, commercialization, and globalization, marking a real trajectory in the modern world and a force that qualitatively conditions the realm of empirically observable phenomena. In some respects, this view of mediatization as a meta-process might be compared to Friedrich Kittler’s idea of “media a priori,” but (against this association) it is constantly emphasized in these discussions that mediatization is to be seen as a non-deterministic process. As for serialization, this refers, like I said, to the popular seriality that explodes onto the scene in the nineteenth century with the advent of new media technologies (like the steam press, which enabled the rapid production of printed periodicals, including story papers, penny dreadfuls, and dime novels). Since then, serialized narrative forms have continued to proliferate alongside and in the media that would seem to have changed our worlds into properly mediatized worlds: in film, radio, television, and now digital media. The serialization of entertainment cannot, it would seem, be thought in isolation from the processes described by the concept of mediatization, and serialization may be thought of as a special case of the mediatization of leisure time, specifically as relates to media-inflected transformations of popular narrative. On the other hand, though, serialization is a truly special case of mediatization, in that it is a highly self-reflexive process: serial narratives observe changes in mediation, track them over time, and thus offer images of mediatization processes as they unfold—in “real time,” so to speak. Careful attention to serialization promises therefore to shed light on mediatization—and vice versa. What I call “techno-phenomenology,” and which I will come back to shortly, will help uncover the bidirectional communication between the two processes.

[Framing mediatization through serialization]

But first, to start making these connections concrete, I turn to some ideas and observations put forward by Frank Kelleter in a recent issue of Psychologie Heute. Kelleter notes that the evolution of TV sitcoms from the 1950s to today displays a continuous movement from the intact family as the site and occasion for humor, by way of the dysfunctional units of All in the Family or Married…with Children, to more recent sitcoms that revolve around a group of unrelated friends (as in Seinfeld, Friends, or Sex and the City). As Kelleter remarks, this development can be seen as a result of, and a reflection of, the increasing individualization of modern Western societies. Individualization, you recall, is one of the central meta-processes that, according to Friedrich Krotz, define modernity, along with the interrelated meta-processes of commercialization, globalization, and mediatization. And surely we can see these other processes reflected just as clearly in the globally syndicated, made-for-profit series that dominate TV screens today. But, as Kelleter recognizes, the reflection of social reality is only the beginning, and it would be shortsighted to reduce the link between serialization and mediatization to a passive commentary function that series can assume with respect to social developments.

On the contrary, serialized television actively frames our experience of the world: the week is punctuated at regular intervals by our favorite series, and our relations at home and on the job are perceived—though not uncritically—through the lenses of television drama, sitcoms, soaps, news, and police procedurals. Just as we judge series as either realistic or unrealistic, we inevitably compare reality and the people we encounter in the “real world” with the models we have met and occasionally become intimate with in the serialized world of television. In this respect, we can speak of a relatively direct (though hardly simple[1]) link between serialization and mediatization, as the serialized entertainment of TV transformatively reframes our interpersonal relations and behavioral expectations. Moreover, this activity of framing and reframing is itself increasingly the object of serial entertainment. The serial production and distribution of still incomplete narrative constructs opens a space for what Henry Jenkins calls “participatory culture,” and new social relations are created in the feedback loops between producers and consumers—social relations that are not only transformed but in fact generated through mediatization. And the media processes upon which these novel relations depend are increasingly the topic not only of fans’ discourses with one another but also of the serial productions themselves, which in the era of so-called Quality TV are aware of the existence of a well-informed, highly networked, and hardly passive fan base. Fans know how series are structured, and series’ producers know that fans know how they’re structured, and so the series themselves become increasingly complex and self-reflexive in response. The result is that the serialized communication that takes place in the inherently mediatized networks of producers and consumers of serial forms continues to proliferate in the manner of a self-serialization that takes as its object the serial maintenance of mediatized relations and communications in and through series. (And that only approximates the complex self-reflexive processes set in motion by a series like Lost.)

But while I’ve concentrated on recent television here, the link between serialization and mediatization is much broader. A moment ago, I invoked the figure of the frame to describe the work of regularly consumed TV series in organizing and transforming our experience, and I want to extend this to serial forms in other media as well. The figure of the frame has cropped up before in discussions of mediatization, often in connection with the idea of an overarching “media logic” (as the “orientation frame” or “processual framework” that increasingly structures social action).[2] But whereas this notion of media logic raises worries of determinism and is seen by some to cast mediatization as an implausibly linear process,[3] the sort of framing I have in mind is inherently reversible, volatile, and polyvocal—expressive of the non-neutral Prägkraft or “moulding forces” that communications scholar Andreas Hepp sees at work in media, while also compatible with his call (following David Morley) for a non-media-centric media theory capable of countenancing a central paradox of mediatization: capable, namely, of accounting for the increasingly central role of media in shaping our experience without thereby attributing the central or determinative causal agency of this development to media as a unified force. Divorced from the idea of a singular, teleological media logic, the figure of the frame illustrates what I call a process of “de/centering,” which Derrida exposes in a text ostensibly about painting. As he shows, frames are never simple or singular but highly unstable and phenomenally reversible entities. On the one hand, they stand outside the work, providing a background against which the framed content can emerge as a figure. On the other hand, though, the frame becomes part of the figure when seen against the background of the wall. Oscillating between ground and figure, the frame as margin or passepartout both centers and decenters the work: it enacts the multistable logic of de/centering that I propose explains the non-passive but non-deterministic framing function of media as revealed by a techno-phenomenological take on mediatization and serialization.

[Techno-phenomenology]

Techno-phenomenology is my term for an approach developed by American philosopher Don Ihde, following leads from the early Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, among others. Generally speaking, techno-phenomenology looks at technologies neither as passive artifacts nor as determinative global systems, but instead as constituent parts of the relations that human agents maintain with their environments in concretely embodied, practical situations. What Ihde calls “mediating technologies” may occupy a variety of positions within the intentional relations of subjects to objects. For example, when one looks through a telescope, the device itself ideally disappears; it is, so to speak, “absorbed” into the perceiving subject’s sensorial apparatus to reveal far-away objects that couldn’t be seen with the naked eye. Prosthetically extending the embodied subject, the telescope occupies what Ihde calls an “embodiment relation.” In contrast to this, a radio telescope cannot be looked through in this direct manner; instead, its output must be looked at and interpreted, “read” as a sign of an objective reality that cannot be perceived directly. This type of technology instantiates a “hermeneutic relation”—occupying a semi-objective position as something to be looked at rather than through. But it is important to note that technologies, on this view, do not inevitably and irrevocably instantiate one or the other type of relation. As Heidegger’s famous hammer illustrates, an embodiment relation can always break down. And Don Ihde goes further to illustrate that breakage is not the only source of such reversal. Decontextualization, simple inexperience, or intentional aesthetic estrangement, for example, can all cause transformation, because techno-phenomenal relations are embedded in contexts of practice, which are in turn conditioned by social and cultural forces. The fact remains, though, that a “telic inclination,” as Ihde puts it, may inhere in a technology, predisposing a given technology to certain means of use and relation and not to others. Material factors exert pressures on praxis that push optical and radio telescopes, for example, to opposite ends of the spectrum of subject-object relations, while still allowing for non-typical forms of use or appropriation.

What goes for Ihde’s “mediating technologies” applies to media in a narrower sense as well. On a very general level, for example, we might say that textual media tend, for obvious reasons, towards hermeneutic relations, while the television screen tends to be looked through, rather than at, as a quasi-transparent window on the world. These are telic inclinations of the media—differential media logics in the plural, if you like—quite comparable to the non-absolute “tendencies” or “pressures” that Hepp terms the “moulding forces” of media. These forces, looked at from a techno-phenomenological perspective, can be seen to frame the perceptual and actional agencies of media users, but never in a univocal, absolute, or determinative manner. Significantly, contextual reversals remain a live possibility, as is demonstrated by the paradigmatic difference between early and so-called classical film. In the early years of the cinema, which Tom Gunning has defined as a “cinema of attractions” (1895-1905), the cinema itself was the main attraction; people went to see projection apparatuses, not films. But the display of cinematic magic and trick effects for their own sake came to be subordinated to narration, and the classical Hollywood style, which took shape by around 1917, worked to ensure the invisibility of narrative construction, rendering the apparatus of film a transparent window onto fictional worlds. Importantly, though, narrative serialization—in the form of film serials such as The Perils of Pauline, The Hazards of Helen, or The Exploits of Elaine—arose in the 1910s as a means of navigating the uncertain transitional phase between the early and classical paradigms. Staging neither the pure media spectacles of early attractions-style cinema nor the self-enclosed diegetic universes of classical film, these serialized story films vacillated between medial transparency and opacity, between narrative closure and an openness onto the non-diegetic conditions of their storytelling—both due to the incompleteness of the weekly episodes, which were segmented by cliffhangers and interrupted by the rhythms of the work week, and due to self-reflexive tendencies by which the serials ostentatiously demonstrated the medial means of an emerging form of narrative construction.[4]

[The nexus]

This brings me to the nexus that, as I see it, binds popular seriality and mediality. By mediality, I mean the fact and specific character or quality of a given process of mediation. Roger Hagedorn points to a special relation between seriality and mediality when he observes that serial narratives often “serve to promote the medium in which they appear” (5). Medial self-reflexivity is, then, in a sense a natural facet of the serial form’s role in helping “to develop the commercial exploitation of a specific medium” (5). The serialized novels of the nineteenth century feuilleton helped sell newspapers, and color comic strips advertised newly developed four-color printing processes. Early radio and television series served to attract consumers to the new media, to induce them to purchase expensive devices, and then to hook them with ongoing stories and recurring entertainments. Popular seriality is thus closely linked with the development of modern media, or with a media modernity characterized by constant pressure towards media-technological innovation. Serialization is correlated, that is, with the quantitative and qualitative changes which lay the very groundwork for the meta-process of mediatization. Concerned with their own medial forms, as well as the transformation of the media landscape implied by the emergence of new, competing media, series probe, expose, demonstrate, and experiment with their own mediality and compare various media with one another; moreover, because series unfold over time, they are capable of tracking the medial processes and changes upon which the meta-process of mediatization depends or supervenes.

Especially at transitional moments of media change, a techno-phenomenological perspective on seriality reveals a privileged view of the processes that are basic to mediatization; conversely, the concept of mediatization illuminates the lower-level work of serialization in the broader perspective of modernity. For example, late nineteenth century dime novels can be approached as medially inconspicuous channels through which simple, formulaic stories of frontier heroes, urban detectives, and young inventors were told; but when we see these tales in relation to the innovations in print technologies that made their production possible, to the transcontinental rail systems upon which their distribution relied, and to the increasingly urbanized settings in which their readers lived and worked, then the serially implemented locomotives, telegraphs, and other communication and transportation technologies that fill the pages of these stories seem to belong less to their narrative worlds than to the extra-diegetic machinery of their mediation and consumption. In techno-phenomenological terms, we find here a radical ambivalence between the transparency of embodiment relations and the medial opacity of hermeneutic relations. The serial form, which oscillates formally between repetition and variation, stages lifeworld changes in this unstable or “de/centered” manner and discloses thereby the underlying mechanics of mediatization in the process of its occurrence.

And because the specific periodicity of serialized forms can vary widely, ranging from daily to weekly to longer-term intervals, the perspective that series offer on mediatization varies accordingly. In addition to linear or episodic series that unfold within a single medium over a short period of time, there are also plurimedial series that may be staged over the course of decades. A serially staged figure such as Frankenstein’s monster constitutes such a series: originating in a novel, appearing numerous times on theater stages, achieving iconic form on film, and continuing to proliferate in comics, on TV, and in video games, the monster tracks virtually the entire course of modern media history. And it thrives particularly at moments of media change, such as the sound-film transition that ironically gave birth to Karloff’s mute monster. Robbed of the articulate speech acquired by the monster of the novel, the monster of the movies briefly served to highlight the fact and the eerie quality of sound film’s novel mediality, exemplifying the reversible logic of the frame by foregrounding the medial infrastructure over the mediated narrative. This reversal of figure and ground operated on the basis of the monster’s serial staging, on the basis of a preexisting familiarity and recognizability rendered strange in the new medium. With the habituation of sound film, the strangeness wore off and the iconic monster came to serve as the baseline for an ongoing serialization process. Here, if we look carefully, we can see the procession of major and minor media transformations that have made our world a properly mediatized one.

Finally, we might recognize here a meta-serial development, a historical shift in the constitution of serial forms, which provides a sort of wide-angle view of mediatization, as if through the wrong end of a telescope. In the procession from linear storytelling in a single medium, to the serialized proliferation of narratives repeated and varied in a fragmented plurimedial frame (such as is embodied by Frankenstein’s monster), to the recent advent of transmedial storytelling in the wake of a digitally induced media convergence, we see a long-term transformation of serial forms that speaks to an experience of progressive deterritorialization. Serially recurrent characters became dislodged from their material ecospheres, i.e. from the media in which they were born, through the proliferation of competing medial forms that vie for our attention. Likewise, we have been uprooted or liberated (depending on your perspective) from our immediate surroundings and, through these very media, been put in touch with distant, spatially nonlocal, communities. But a de/centered view of this development is neither linear nor certain in its assessment of the outcome. Transmedial storytelling continues the trend of displacement with respect to a singular or stable medial framework, but it reverses the diegetic fragmentation exemplified by Frankenstein’s monster and other serial icons of the twentieth century. Today, in series that span the media of television, film, print, and digital media, we find new tendencies toward reterritorialization, staged, though, as a complex and hardly straightforward affair. There is a renewed interest in creating unified diegetic worlds, in spite of or precisely because of the multiplicity of medial frames somewhat euphemistically united in talk of convergence. It is unclear what this says about us and our contemporary serialized experience of mediatization, but I think we can rule out the idea that today’s transmedial series simply “reflect” social reality. Instead, they frame our experience in a de/centered manner that both displays and enacts a central paradox of our mediatized worlds: media are increasingly central in structuring our experience, but there is a reversible margin from which these structures remain open to negotiation. As I have tried to show, this reversibility is essential to the process of serialization, thus ensuring the continued importance of popular seriality as a site of the non-deterministic production of a mediatized modernity.

[1] Indeed, complexification is central to Kelleter’s argument, which is also sensitive to the self-reflexive functions of serialization which I exploit in this paper. See also Jason Mittell on “narrative complexity.”

[2] The notion of the frame, popular of late in a variety of discourses and disciplines, also crops up regularly in discussions of mediatization, and I think a great deal hinges on our understanding and use of the concept. For example, in an essay that approaches mediatization in terms of the “institutionalization of media logic” (42), Andrea Schrott invokes the figure of the frame to explain this media logic, which she describes as an “orientation frame” (48) that is non-neutral with respect to content. This accords with Altheide and Snow’s own description of media logic, in their 1979 book of that title, as “a processual framework through which social action occurs” (15). Similarly, Norm Friesen and Theo Hug invoke the notion of “framing” to signal the “epistemological orientation” increasingly provided by media (80), or what they call “the role of the mediatic a priori” (79).

[3] Nick Couldry’s worry.

[4] Moreover, formal changes are coupled with social changes (gender, class), and these are highly relevant to a study of the mediatization of entertainment or of leisure time, as well as (and correlated with) a mediatization of identity or social identification. With respect to the specific example of transitional-era film serials (and serial-queen melodramas), see my “The Logic of the Line Segment: Continuity and Discontinuity in the Serial-Queen Melodrama” (forthcoming in Serialization in Popular Culture, edited by Robert Allen and Thijs van den Berg, New York: Routledge, 2014).

Shane Denson, “On NOT Imagining Media Change”

Abstract for Shane Denson’s talk at the symposium “Imagining Media Change” (June 13, 2013, Leibniz Universität Hannover):

On NOT Imagining Media Change

Shane Denson

There are many ways in which we imagine media change and technological transformation; foremost among them, in the modern era, are popular and commercial visions of the future – from science-fiction narratives to advertisements for the latest gadget guaranteed to change your life. However, if we suppose that human agencies are inextricably tied to, and in part enabled by, the material infrastructure of a media-technological environment, then our imaginations – as they are focused, reflected, or courted in representational media – must be seen to lag behind infrastructural shifts, which would sweep our imagining subjectivities along with them. If, that is, our capacity to imagine media change is itself mediated through a changing media-technological environment, then certain aspects of media change must be categorically immune to imagination.

In this presentation, I will focus on this phenomenon of NOT imagining media change. I will outline a theoretical model according to which media change pertains not only to empirically determinate transformations in media-technical apparatuses and systems, but more broadly to the environmental substrate of discursive and phenomenological subjectivities. I will argue that a pre-reflective “anthropotechnical interface,” based in proprioceptive and visceral sensibilities, constitutes the primary site of media change. Accordingly, the embodied parameters of our imaginative faculties are themselves subject to radical transformation, such that both spectacular and unobtrusive changes in the media environment can occasion deep changes in our experiential frameworks – changes that elude representation and imagination.

Techno-Phenomenology, Medium as Interface, and the Metaphysics of Change

On June 17, 2013, I will be presenting a paper at the conference “Conditions of Mediation: Phenomenological Approaches to Media, Technology and Communication” at Birkbeck, University of London. There’s a diverse and interesting group of keynote speakers, including David Berry, Nick Couldry, Graham Harman, Shaun Moores, Lisa Parks, and Paddy Scannell, and a list of other presenters — among whom I am proud to be counted — has also gone online now.

Below is the abstract for my modest contribution:

Techno-Phenomenology, Medium as Interface, and the Metaphysics of Change

Shane Denson, Leibniz Universität Hannover

Walter Benjamin famously argued that the emergence of modern media of technical reproducibility (photography, film) corresponded to sweeping changes in the organization of what he calls the “medium” of sense perception. To a skeptic like film scholar David Bordwell, Benjamin’s “modernity thesis” (along with Tom Gunning’s related arguments about the “culture of shock”) is pure hyperbole, for cognitive structures are subject to the slow processes of biological evolution while impervious to rapid technological change. The debate has tended to reach impasses over questions of the causal agencies and effects of media change—e.g. whether they concern the broad cultural domain of discourse and signification or the “hard-wiring” of the brain itself. In this presentation, I argue that a “techno-phenomenological” approach—which (following cues from Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Don Ihde, among others) focuses on the embodied interfaces in which human intentionalities are variously mediated by technologies—enables us to see media change as involving experiential transformations that are at once robustly material, and hence not restricted to cultural or psycho-semiotic domains, while still compatible with the long durations of biological evolution. An “anthropotechnical interface,” based in proprioceptive and visceral sensibilities, will be shown to constitute the primary site of media change.

Presidential Politics and the Anthropotechnical Interface

Watching election night coverage last night, I was struck by how commonplace a variety of presentation, visualization, and interfacing technologies have become in comparison to the last election four years ago, when many of these things were introduced and foregrounded — often somewhat awkwardly, as the videos here demonstrate. The shift has a great deal to do with much broader processes of habitualization through which touchscreen devices such as smartphones and tablet computers have been domesticated, de-exoticized, and rendered unspectacular in the intervening years. Taken for granted now as so much furniture of the lifeworld, it’s easy to lose sight of how fast these processes transpire, and of how differently things looked just a few years ago. In the interest, then, of cultivating a sort of media-archaeological awareness of the inherent transitionality and instability of our experiential and affective relations to the media-technical infrastructure of our lives, I’m posting here some glimpses from another world — several relevant video clips from the last presidential election night, along with some observations I originally posted the day after, on November 5, 2008:

America’s biggest media events, the Superbowl and the presidential election, are not simply mediated events but, centrally, events of mediation: showcases for new media technologies. This is a wonderful example. If I didn’t have a dissertation to write [update 2012: glad I’m done with that!], I’d be writing an article about CNN’s Virtual View (which is self-consciously placed “in the tradition of Princess Leia”). Watch them navigate between an ostensible story and a heightened awareness of the state-of-the-art special-effects. This is sci-fi, and not just because the “hologram” looks like something from Star Wars or because it seems to “beam” the correspondent in the style of Star Trek. This is sci-fi in a richer sense, because it perfectly utilizes the sci-fi film’s basic self-reflexive appeal to the technologies used to mediate its highly conventionalized story about technology.

Of course, the appearance of CNN’s holograph is not an isolated phenomenon. It partakes of a larger science-fiction context. The report of astronauts voting is a good example. Not only is outer space the traditional setting, the astronaut an established character, and the spaceship a central iconographic element in sci-fi; more importantly, the report provokes the question, as I asked last evening, how exactly did they cast their votes? With what kind of apparatus, via what channel of communication, and with what security measures in place? These are the same questions that one can ask about one’s local voting station: how do these new voting machines work, how do they communicate with one another, and are they trustworthy? The astronauts casting their votes are not interesting in themselves. Instead, they are an invitation to regard the apparently more mundane situation of earthbound voting from a technophilic, science-fiction perspective.

Meanwhile, the other networks foregrounded gigantic touchscreens, double ticker text lines, made-for-HDTV special features, and parallel online supplements in their bids to captivate viewers (see here for more). Since I couldn’t stay awake for it, I’ll be loading Obama’s victory speech (and maybe McCain’s concession of defeat while I’m at it) onto my iPod. Watching it there will in some way consummate the message of the medium, and I anticipate that it will also speak to a level at which consummation is eternally deferred: Now if I only had an iPhone or an iPod touch to match the tactile response, if not the scale, of those giant touchscreens [update 2012: the iPad had not been released yet…]. Isn’t that what this election was all about?