embodiment – Page 2 – medieninitiative

Algorithmic Serialities

I recently gave a talk with the unwieldy title “Post-Cinematic Seriality and the Algorithmic Conditions of Identity and Difference” for the Center for Inter-American Studies at the University of Graz and the Austro-American Society for Styria in Austria (see the *somewhat creepy, but appropriately so, lol* flyer below); and on October 12, 2021 (at 6:30pm Central European time / 9:30am Pacific US time) I’ll be giving a related talk with the much more wieldy (possibly misleadingly simple) title “Seriality and Digital Cultures” at the University of Zurich’s English Department (see the flyer with registration info above).

Both of these talks are related to a larger project that I am developing, which will link seriality as a medial form (in both popular and artistic media) and as a social form (following the late Sartre, Iris Marion Young, Benedict Anderson, and others) in order to think about the ways that — with the shift from a broadly “cinematic” media regime (with its past-oriented, memorial, recording, retentional functions) to a “post-cinematic” one (with its future-oriented, anticipatory, predictive, protentional functions) — algorithmic media are poised to transform categories and lived realities of class, gender, and race.

On the Embodied Phenomenology of DeepFakes — Full Text of Talk from #SLSA21

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 “deep fake” 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 so-called “involuntary synthetic pornography” targeting mostly women), viewers are also subject to affective 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.

Let me try to demonstrate these claims. To begin with, DeepFake videos are a species of what I have called discorrelated images, in that they trade crucially on the incommensurable scales and temporalities of computational processing, which altogether defies capture as the object of human perception (or the “fundamental correlation between noesis and noema,” as Hussserl puts it). To be sure, DeepFakes, like many other forms of discorrelated images, still present something to us that is recognizable as an image. But in them, perception has become something of a by-product, a precipitate form or supplement to the invisible operations that occur in and through them. We can get a glimpse of such discorrelation by noticing how such images fail to conform or settle into stable forms or patterns, how they resist their own condensation into integral perceptual objects—for example, the way that they blur figure/ground distinctions.

The article widely credited with making the DeepFake phenomenon known to wider public in December 2017 notes with regard to a fake porn video featuring Gal Gadot: “a box occasionally appeared around her face where the original image peeks through, and her mouth and eyes don’t quite line up to the words the actress is saying—but if you squint a little and suspend your belief, it might as well be Gadot.” There’s something telling about the formulation, which hinges the success of the DeepFake not on the suspension of disbelief—a suppression of active resistance—but on the suspension of belief—seemingly, a more casual form of affirmation—whereby the flickering reversals of figure and ground, or of subject and object, are flattened out into a smooth indifference.

In this regard, DeepFake videos are worth comparing to another type of discorrelated image: the digital lens flare, which is both to-be-looked-at (as a virtuosic display of technical achievement) and to-be-overlooked (after all, the height of their technical achievement is reached when they can appear as transparently naturalized simulations of a physical camera’s optical properties). The tension between opacity and transparency, or objecthood and invisibility, is never fully resolved, thus undermining a clear distinction between diegetic and medial or material levels of reality. Is the virtual camera that registers the simulated lens flare to be seen as part of the world represented on screen, or as part of the machinery responsible for revealing it to us? The answer, it seems, must be both. And in this, such images embody something like what Neil Harris termed the “operational aesthetic” that characterized nineteenth-century science and technology expos, magic shows, and early cinema alike; in these contexts, spectatorial attention oscillated between the surface phenomenon, the visual spectacle of a machine or a magician in motion, and the hidden operations that made the spectacle possible.

It was such a dual or split attention that powered early film as a “cinema of attractions,” where viewers came to see the Cinematographe in action, as much as or more than they came to see images of workers leaving the factory or a train arriving at the station. And it is in light of this operational aesthetic that spectators found themselves focusing on the wind rustling in the trees or the waves lapping at the rocks—phenomena supposedly marginal to the main objects of visual interest.

DeepFakes also trade essentially on an operational aesthetic, or a dispersal of attention between visual surface and the algorithmic operation of machine learning. However, I would argue that the post-cinematic processes to whose operation DeepFakes refer our attention fundamentally transform the operational aesthetic, relocating it from the oscillations of attention that we see in the cinema to a deep, pre-attentional level that computation taps into with its microtemporal speed.

Consider the way digital glitches undo figure/ground distinctions. Whereas the cinematic image offered viewers opportunities to shift their attention from one figure to another and from these figures to the ground of the screen and projector enabling them, the digital glitch refuses to settle into the role either of figure or of ground. It is, simply, both—it stands out, figurally, as the pixely appearance of the substratal ground itself. Even more fundamentally, though, it points to the inadequacy, which is not to say dispensibility, of human perception and attention with respect to algorithmic processing. While the glitch’s visual appearance effects a deformation of the spatial categories of figure and ground, it does so on the basis of a temporal mismatch between human perception and algorithmic processing. The latter, operating at a scale measured in nanoseconds, by far outstrips the window of perception and subjectivity, so that by the time the subject shows up to perceive the glitch, the “object” (so to speak) has already acted upon our presubjective sensibilities and moved on. This is why glitches, compression artifacts, and other discorrelated images are not even bound to appear to us as visual phenomena in the first place in order to exert a material force on us. Another way to account for this is to say that the visually-subjectively delineated distinction between figure and ground itself depends on the deeper ground of presubjective embodiment, and it is the latter that defines for us our spatial situations and temporal potentialities. DeepFakes, like other discorrelated images, are able to dis-integrate coherent spatial forms so radically because they undercut the temporal window within which visual perception occurs. The operation at the heart of their operational aesthetic is itself an operationalization of the flesh, prior to its delineation into subjective and objective forms of corporeality. The seamfulness of DeepFakes—their occasional glitchy appearance or just the threat or presentiment that they might announce themselves as such—points to our fleshly imbrication with technical images today, which is to say: to the recoding not only of aesthetic form but of embodied aesthesis itself.

In other words: especially and as long as they still routinely fail to cohere as seamless suturings of viewing subjects together with visible objects, but instead retain their potential to fall apart at the seams and thus still require a suspension of belief, DeepFake videos are capable of calling attention to the ways that attention itself is bypassed, providing aesthetic form to the substratal interface between contemporary technics and embodied aesthesis. To be clear, and lest there be any mistake about it, I in no way wish to celebrate DeepFakes as a liberating media-technology, the way that the disruption of narrative by cinematic self-reflexivity was sometimes celebrated as opening a space where structuring ideologies gave way to an experience of materiality and the dissolution of the subject positions inscribed and interpellated by the apparatus. No amount of glitchy seamfulness will undo the gendered violence inflicted, mostly upon women, in involuntary synthetic pornography. Not only that, but the pleasure taken by viewers in their consumption of this violence seems to depend, at least in part, precisely on the failure or incompleteness of the spectacle: what such viewers desire is not to be tricked into actually believing that it is Gal Gadot or their ex-girlfriend that they are seeing on the screen, but precisely that it is a fake likeness or simulation, still open to glitches, upon which the operational aesthetic depends. Nevertheless, we should not look away from the paradoxical opening signaled by these viewers’ suspension of belief. The fact that they have to “squint a little” to complete the gendered fantasy of domination also means that they have to compromise, at least to a certain degree or for a short duration, their subjective mastery of the visual object, that they have to abdicate their own subjective ownership of their bodies as the bearers of experience. Though it is hard to believe that any trace of conscious awareness of it remains, much less that viewers will be reformed as a result of the experience, it seems reasonable to believe that viewers of DeepFake videos must experience at least an inkling of their own undoing as their de-subjectivized vision interfaces with the ahuman operation of machine vision.

What I am saying, then, and I am trying to be careful about how I say it, is that DeepFake videos open the door, experientially, to a highly problematic space in which our predictive technologies participate in processes of subjectivation by outpacing the subject, anticipating the subject, and intervening materially in the pre-personal realm of the flesh, out of which subjectivized and socially “typified” bodies emerge. The late Sartre, writing in the Critique of Dialectical Reason, defined commodities and the built environment in terms of the “practico-inert,” in light of the ways that “worked matter” stored past human praxis but condensed it into inert physical form. Around these objects, increasingly standardized through industrial capitalism’s serialized production processes, are arrayed alienated and impotent social collectives of interchangeable, fungible subjects. Compellingly, feminist philosopher Iris Marion Young takes Sartre’s argument as the basis for rethinking gender as a non-essentialist formation, a nascent collectivity, that is imposed on bodies materially—through architecture, clothing, and gender-specific objects that serve to enforce patriarchy and heterosexism. The practico-inert, in other words, participated in the gendered typification of the body—and we could extend the argument to racialization processes as well. But the computational infrastructures of today’s built environment are no longer adequately captured by the concept of the practico-inert. These infrastructures and objects are still the products of praxis, but they are far from inert. In their predictive and interactive operations, they are better thought of under the concept of the practico-alert—they are highly active, always on alert, and like the viewers of DeepFake videos on the lookout for a telling glitch, so are we ever and exhaustingly on the alert. In these circuits, which are located deeper than subjective attention, the standardization and typification processes I just mentioned are more fine-grained, more “personalized” or targeted, operating directly on the presubjective flesh. In this sense, the flattening of subjectivity, the suspension of belief and depersonalization of vision in DeepFake videos, points towards the contemporary “ungendering” of the flesh, as Hortense Spillers calls it in a different context, that marks a preliminary step in the computational intensification of racialized and gendered subjectivization. This is a truly insidious aesthetics of the flesh.Sartre and practico-inert — updated to practico-alert; cf. gender via Iris Marion Young: typification (or serialization) via practico-inert. Now a more direct, because immeasurably fast, operation on presubjective flesh.

Media Philosophy in the Flesh — talk in Stanford German Studies Lecture Series

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.

Video: “Post-Cinematic Bodies” (Mercator Lecture, Goethe-Universität Frankfurt)

The video of my Mercator Lecture for the Configurations of Film Graduiertenkolleg at the Goethe-Universität Frankfurt, “Post-Cinematic Bodies” (from November 23, 2020), is now online. Hope you enjoy!

Post-Cinematic Bodies — Mercator Fellow Lecture, Nov. 23, 2020

I am excited to be serving as the current Mercator Fellow at the Konfigurationen des Films Graduiertenkolleg / Configurations of Film Graduate Program at the Goethe Universität in Frankfurt — via Zoom, of course — and to deliver a talk titled “Post-Cinematic Bodies” on November 23, 2020 (6pm European time). More info about the event can be found here, with registration details coming soon.

Counterpoint: Game of Thrones, Narrative, and Affect

The Internets are all abuzz still following the kickoff this past Sunday of the third season of HBO’s flagship series Game of Thrones. There was a great deal of online anticipation in the weeks, days, and hours leading up to the season premiere, fed in part by a set of trailers (above, as well as here and here, for example) that circulated on Youtube, in the twitterverse, and beyond. And following the actual airing of the show, records were allegedly set for the most illegal downloads of a television episode, while discussions, analyses, and reviews continue to proliferate across fan sites, blogs, and news media.

(As a preliminary note to those who are either weary of reading such pieces or who are avoiding them due to spoilers — fear not: this post is neither concerned directly with the latest episode, nor will I give away anything that could ruin it for anyone who hasn’t seen it.)

Instead, I wanted to take the opportunity to comment on an aspect of the series that I’ve been thinking about (and which I recently wrote about in the more general terms of serial complexity and affect theory as applied to contemporary television). Specifically, Game of Thrones derives much of its momentum, I think, from an interplay between a continuing, complex narrative (in Jason Mittell’s sense of “narrative complexity”) and relatively discontinuous, punctuating moments of affective appeal — a directly corporeal, often visceral, sort of appeal that constitutes momentary “lines of flight” from the story’s ongoing line of development. Like much of HBO’s serial fare, these moments of affect often concern violent and/or sexualized body images which, while not completely devoid of narrative relevance, also exhibit a sort of surplus value as images. In other words, they not only serve the representational functions of depicting significant events and contributing meaningfully to characterization, etc.; over and above that, they also assert a strong presentational and extra- or para-narrational facet, the function of which is to engage the viewer’s body more than his or her interpreting, cognizing brain. Such body images — for example, in narratively gratuitous sex scenes, images of painful injury, torture, or beheading — resonate with the viewer’s own bodily sensibilities, serving to titillate or to arouse a sense of physical vulnerability, anguish, panic, or disgust.

Seen from afar (so to speak), in the overall context of a television series like Game of Thrones, the interplay between narrative development and these moments of bodily affectivity results in what I have described as a “contrapuntal” relation between the two: narrative continuity is punctuated, interrupted by body images that exceed any dramatic motivation, thus constituting more or less insular, episodic forms in the midst of the serial stream; but these islands of affect are (at least potentially) themselves elements in a serial progression that exists in parallel to that of the narrative (and following a very different temporal logic). Repetition and variation of body spectacles can thus be just as important as narrative suspense as a means of ensuring viewer attachment over the course of long serial arcs.

Of course, some series are more successful than others in their employment of such contrapuntal seriality, and there are certainly a wide variety of styles and modes of implementing the counterpoint. Some series are anything but discreet as they shift gears between narrative and body-based affective appeals (and in this regard, they resemble musicals or pornographic films as they move from one more or less self-enclosed “number” to the next). And certainly, some of this can be seen in Game of Thrones, but my overall impression of the series is that it works with a relatively tight integration of affective and corporeally self-reflexive appeals into the informationally complex storyworld and the unfolding tale of rival houses, subtle intrigue, and uncertain outcomes.

A particularly poignant example of contrapuntal integration is provided by episode 7 of season 1, “You Win or You Die,” where we see the following conversation between Jamie and Tywin Lannister:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=47MazYDnmaU

Set in any other situation, this conversation — which neatly exemplifies the informational complexity of the series — would have a completely different impact. Sarah Hughes, writing in The Guardian‘s TV & Radio Blog, sees the “skinning and disembowelling [of] a deer” here as a “heavy-handed bit of symbolism given the deer is the sign of [rival] House Baratheon,” and I think she’s right to see the visual component of the scene enacting a layer of complexity beyond the content of the verbal. It’s not only a symbolic dimension, though, that is here overlaid upon the Lannisters’ discourse; in addition, I suggest, a dimension of visceral and dermic appeal spreads itself out as the very milieu within which the characters’ words sound out materially. The innards of the deer are more than just a sign: they are matter, and their material image transmits an affective force, establishing a material relation with our own viscera. The forceful separation of the animal’s skin from its muscles emphasizes, moreover, both the stubborn durability and the ultimate finitude of the organic body, arousing a diffuse affective awareness of the corporeal basis upon which our discursive subjectivities are erected. And all the while, royal politics are being discussed in detailed, lofty, and eloquent language. The scene conveys a sense of the unconscious drives that lend momentum to conscious pursuits and political “plots,” conveys a sense of the base and physical “will to power” animating social conflict. And it communicates this “message” by way of a tight contrapuntal integration of narrative information and bodily affect, thus self-reflexively exemplifying the series’ own larger strategy of instrumentalizing affect, infusing the complex (at times, overly complex) narrative with an appeal to animal nature, and in this way crafting a form of serial complexity that partakes equally of the discursive and affective.

Serial Bodies

Below you’ll find the full text of the talk I delivered today at the “It’s Not Television” conference in Frankfurt. Unfortunately, I had to leave the conference early, so I didn’t have time to discuss the talk in any detail following the brief Q & A. I’m hoping, then, that some of those people who expressed an interest in discussing my ideas and proposals further might take the opportunity to comment here. And, of course, even if you weren’t there today, comments on this early-stage work are very welcome!

Serial Bodies: Corporeal Engagement in Long-Form Serial Television

Shane Denson

In this talk, I want to consider the possibility and the purpose of an “affective turn” in television studies. I’ll try to explain what such a “turn,” or refocusing of scholarly attention, might entail, and I’ll consider some of the grounds for making such a move.

First of all, the “affective turn” as I’m using the term describes developments going on in various disciplines, including philosophy and media and cultural theory, since about the 1990s. Following theorists such as Deleuze and Guattari, Steven Shaviro, and Brian Massumi, the “affect” in question here refers to a domain of pre-personal feelings, not subjective emotions but raw intensities that transpire below the threshold of consciousness, as functions and correlates of non-voluntary processes: for example, the not-quite-conscious sensations associated with visceral, proprioceptive, and endocrinological changes in one’s overall body-state. Thus, affects are diffuse material forces and sensations, whereas emotions are their more narrowly focused correlates; affects precede consciousness and envelop the mind, while emotions can be seen to involve the subjective “capture” of affect, the yoking of affect to consciousness, or the filtering and processing that takes place when pre-reflective affect becomes available to reflective conscious experience. Theory and criticism undertaken in the wake of an affective turn seek to uncover the material and cultural efficacy of affect prior to this filtering.

But why would television scholars want to make this turn towards a subterranean domain of pre-personal affect? Briefly, I want to propose that an affective turn would help to highlight the richly material parameters of the televisual experience, to focus attention on embodied interfaces and non-cognitive transfers, thus providing a counterpoint to the dominant celebration of cognitive effort in recent television studies. In other words, the context for an affect-oriented intervention is the tendency, widespread in popular and scholarly accounts alike of recent television, to intellectualize the medium, to focus on complex narrative structures in an effort to redeem TV from long-standing prejudices and stereotypes that cast the bulk of programming as culturally inferior trash produced for a passive, undiscriminating, and distracted mass audience. Foregrounding the emergence of a new televisual “quality,” many recent critical approaches have focused particularly on contemporary serial television’s demanding textual forms, which seek to engage viewers with complex puzzles and intricately orchestrated plot developments – thus breaking with the formulaic repetition characteristic of simple episodic programs and providing mental stimulation in exchange for viewers’ long-term investments of attention. As early as the 1980s, the advocacy group Viewers for Quality Television had defined “quality” in the following terms: “A quality series enlightens, enriches, challenges, involves and confronts. It dares to take risks, it’s honest and illuminating, it appeals to the intellect and touches the emotions. It requires concentration and attention, and it provokes thought.” In short, quality TV does what good literature is supposed to do, namely: to engage the viewer/reader and make him or her think. And popular criticism has continued to pursue this tack in the effort to make television respectable, e.g. by comparing newer series to the nineteenth century novel – The Wire, for example, has been called “a Balzac for our time”, thereby suggesting that this paradigmatically complex series distinguishes itself by a heady sort of appeal that rewards the sophisticated viewer. Steven Johnson has famously claimed that such complex television provides its viewers with what he calls a “cognitive workout.” And Jason Mittell, who has probably done more than any of these people to explore the mechanics of complexity, has noted the way complex series reward viewers who assume the role of “amateur narratologists.”

Clearly, the critical reappraisal of the medium and its implied viewer is not without foundation, as it speaks to very real changes in television programming in the wake of industrial, technological, and cultural shifts. Over the past ten years or so, there has indeed been an unprecedented flowering of programs that would seem to encourage active and intellectually engaged viewing. At the same time, though, graphic scenes of sex and violence proliferate across contemporary television series, including shows widely valued for their sophisticated cognitive demands. In particular, bodies are now routinely put on display, violated, tortured, dissected, and ripped apart in ways unimaginable on TV screens just a decade ago. I want to be clear that I don’t think this in any way invalidates theories and analyses that foreground the cognitive appeals of narratively complex TV. But this explosion of body images – including images of bodies exploding – does, I think, challenge such approaches to reconcile intellectual and more broadly affective and body-based appeals. By advocating an affective turn, a turn towards a diffuse, inarticulate field of pre-personal affect, I am not urging a turn away from consciousness or a regressive turn back to the view of an unrefined, unintellectual viewer. Instead, I am asking for more thought about how cognitive and affective appeals coexist today, and specifically about how they might be seen to work in tandem to maintain the momentum of contemporary television’s serial trajectories.

Seriality is the key word here: seriality is one of the things that’s illuminated particularly well by broadly cognitivist and narratological approaches, and it’s seriality, I think, that marks the real challenge for an affective turn in TV studies. Consider Brian Massumi’s definition of affect as “a suspension of action-reaction circuits and linear temporality in a sink of what might be called ‘passion,’ to distinguish it both from passivity and activity” (28). This conception, which Massumi associates with the thinking of Baruch Spinoza, accords also with Henri Bergson’s notion of affect as “that part or aspect of the inside of our bodies which mix with the image of external bodies” (Matter and Memory 60). And the Bergsonian image of the body as a “center of indetermination,” where affect is an intensity experienced in a state of “suspension,” outside of linear time and the empirical determinateness of forward-oriented action, corresponds to a major emphasis in film theory conducted in the wake of the affective turn – namely, a focus on privileged but fleeting moments, when narrative continuity breaks down and the images on the screen resonate materially, unthinkingly, or pre-reflectively with the viewer’s autoaffective sensations. Such moments figure prominently in what Linda Williams calls the “body genres” of melodrama, horror, and pornography – genres in which images on screen are mobilized to arouse pity, fear, or desire directly in the body of the viewer. In his now classic study, The Cinematic Body, Steven Shaviro explores extreme cases like the self-reflexive attunement between gory images of zombies dismembering and disgorging on-screen characters, on the one hand, and the embodied spectator affected viscerally by these images on the other. But these are moments of caesura, when narrative and discursive significance dissolves and gives way to an “abject” experience of material plenitude prior to its parceling out into subject-object roles and relations. These displaced or “utopic” moments, dilated experientially to allow for a poetic sort of tarrying alongside images, are of course already exceptional in narrative cinema, but they must seem even more clearly at odds with the vectors of serial continuation that pull television viewers from one episode to the next, engrossing them in a story-world and concerning them with the lives of its characters week after week, over the course of several seasons.

So if television studies is to make an affective turn, it will have to account for the medial differences between long-form serial television and closed-form film, and it will have to distinguish the role of affect in each. One place to start with this comparison might be the self-reflexive “operational aesthetic” that Jason Mittell, following Neil Harris’s work on P.T. Barnum, has attributed to contemporary serial television as one of its central mechanisms. For Mittell, the operational aesthetic is related to the cognitive operation of tracing and taking pleasure in the complexities of narrative twists. At stake is an enjoyment not only of the story told but also of the manner of its telling, and the operational aesthetic involves the viewer in what might be described as the recursive pleasure of recognizing a series’ own recognition of the complexity of its narration. But if television’s “narrative special effects,” as Mittell calls them, can be explained in terms of an operational aesthetic, it’s important to note that this mode of engagement has also been attributed to closed-form film to explain the appeal of special effects of the ordinary, primarily visual and non-narrative, sort. Tom Gunning has applied the term “operational aesthetic” to the body-gag spectacles of slapstick. In this view, Charlie Chaplin’s or Buster Keaton’s body gets implemented as a thing-like mechanism in a larger system of things, and the spectator takes pleasure in tracing the causal dynamics of the system, which is in a sense also the system of cinematic images itself; the cinema in turn reveals itself as a complex (Rube Goldberg-type) contraption for the transfer of material intensities from one body – Chaplin’s or Keaton’s – to another – my own, as the latter is affected physically and compelled to laugh. Similarly self-reflexive mechanisms are at work in sci-fi and horror films, where visual and visceral spectacles interrupt narrative flow and bedazzle or shock with an operational appeal to the body rather than the brain. Monumental explosions, monstrous sights flashed on the screen without warning, and show-stopping effects seek in part to bypass the brain and imprint themselves in the manner of the physiological Chockwirkung that Walter Benjamin took to be central to the filmic medium.

But is this corporeal sort of self-reflexivity, an operational aesthetic that arouses the body more than the brain, possible in long-form serial television? And, if so, can it be a central component of televisual seriality, a motor of serial development, or must it remain a mere side-show in a medium dependent upon the forward momentum of narrativity?

As I noted before, there is certainly no shortage of body spectacles on contemporary television, and they seem in many ways to function like the cinematic spectacles I’ve been describing. Procedural, or what might more properly be called operational, forensic shows likes CSI or Bones, for example, resemble science-fiction film in their showcasing of technological processes – processes that are anchored in diegetic techniques and technologies but that serve to foreground medial technologies of visualization. These displays serve, like the special effects of science-fiction film, more to impress the viewer than to advance the story. Significantly, such digressive forensic displays revolve around bodies and their imbrications with medial technologies: corpses are subjected to analytical methods that issue not in cognitive but in visual and media-technological spectacles, thus providing the spectator with an affectively potent – but narratively rather pointless – formula that gets repeated week after week. The technological probing of bodies onscreen thus speaks to and motivates a doubling of the viewing body’s own technological interface with the television screen – the material site of affective transfer, which is crucially at stake in these biotechnical displays. A show like Grey’s Anatomy similarly problematizes the integrity of bodies and sets them in relation to technologies, both medical and medial, in order to establish an affective circuit between bodies onscreen and off. Bodies in pain, bodies injured, impaled, injected, or incised, bones sawed, organs exposed and removed: all of these things have their place in a narrative, but they also maintain an excessive autonomy as images, establishing in this way a relay between an affective awareness of one’s own embodiment and an emotional engrossment in a melodramatic story.

And while these shows may tend toward the episodic or the formulaic, their employment of body spectacles might be seen to illuminate a range of contemporary television, including shows widely recognized as qualitatively complex. Premium cable shows like Nip/Tuck, Six Feet Under, Dexter, or Californication, for example, revolve around a variety of corporeal explorations. And a series like True Blood manages to combine all three of Linda Williams’s “body genres” into a hybrid mix of soft-porn, horror, and melodrama. The Walking Dead positively obsesses over its media-technological ability to generate graphic images of all states of bodily decay, thus offering a series of visual and visceral challenges to the viewer that run parallel to and punctuate the story’s unfolding. And even a starkly serialized and celebrated complex show like Breaking Bad activates these mechanisms when it visualizes a scene of bodily destruction like this one:

Here, there is a properly visual appeal, a showcasing of the image that involves the viewer by activating a sense of one’s own corporeal fragility – thus staging a deeply existential demonstration of physical vulnerability that culminates, and momentarily negates, all the narrative investment and development of character that has led up to this point. In other words, the affective force of this moment far exceeds its diegetic and medial temporality; with Massumi, we might say the image occasions “a suspension of action-reaction circuits and linear temporality in a sink of […] ‘passion’” or immersive involvement. But, I suggest, the scene demonstrates a synergistic or contrapuntal rather than strictly oppositional relation between narrative development and affective depth. The image of the exploded face retains a visual and affective singularity, an excess over and above the storyline in which it’s embedded, but its evocation of the viewer’s own delicate corporeality resonates as well with the series’ overall narrative focus on a protagonist whose body is under attack by cancer.

Finally, to generalize from these examples and wager a hypothesis about the contrapuntal function of such body spectacles in contemporary long-form serial television: I suggest that corporeal self-reflexivity, or the establishment of affective circuits by graphically opening up bodies for destructive, clinical, or sexual purposes, serves as a nexus for the formal hybridization of serial and episodic forms that Mittell makes central to his conception of narrative complexity. Not, of course, the nexus, but a nexus: in other words, a site where a certain sort of formal experimentation takes place, leading to an alternative form of “serially complex television” that activates an “operational aesthetic” for cognitive and corporeal means, in the process intensifying viewers’ investment in narrative developments by imbuing them with affective depth. I speak intentionally of “serial complexity” rather than “narrative complexity,” in order to account for the contrapuntal interplay between lines of narrative continuity on the one hand and moments of non-narrative affect on the other; by standing outside of series’ narrative temporalities, the latter moments punctuate continuity with discontinuity, but they also harbor the potential to establish an alternative seriality of their own, one that runs parallel to narrative development; this is an affective and corporeally registered seriality established through the repetition and variation of such poignant moments and images. Scenarios of the body-genre type serve then as fulcrum points for alternating between ongoing serial arcs and more episodically ritualistic engagements with affectively intense but narratively vacuous states of being: arousal by sexualized images, for example, or being moved to tears by highly melodramatic sequences (like the ritualized climaxes of Grey’s Anatomy, which employ music video techniques for a literally melodramatic presentation of bodily triumphs and defeats), or being shaken or disturbed by brutal violence and body horror (which can be occasioned by vampires, zombies, gladiators, serial-killers, or even health-care givers).

At stake, then, in television studies’ affective turn is the discovery of a broad, material site of serial complexity, of a nexus where shifts occur between serial and episodic forms or between repetition and variation, serially modulated through alternating appeals to cognitive effort and to bodily stimulation. By engineering self-reflexive feedback loops between onscreen body spectacles and the bodily sensitivities of offscreen viewers, contemporary series cement strong affective bonds between their viewers and the very form of complex seriality – with its shifting of gears and contrapuntal rhythms internalized at a deep, sub-cognitive level as the rhythms of one’s own body. Engagement with form thus becomes the embodiment of temporal vicissitudes that are as much those of the show as they are the flowing time of the spectator’s own affective life. At stake is a sort of serial synchronization of affective potentials, over and above (or perhaps deep below) the cognitive recognition of formal complexity. Such affective interfaces materially support and encourage mental engagements with narrative developments, but they do so by cultivating deep material resonances that, at the farthest extreme, institute a corporeal (perhaps endocrinological) need, a serially articulated demand for bodily replenishment or a weekly affective “fix.” The serialized probing of diegetic bodies is reflexively tied to a complex serialization of the viewer’s own body.

Shane Denson: “Corporeal Engagement in Long-Form Serial Television”

Abstract for Shane Denson’s talk at the conference “It’s Not Television” (Frankfurt, 22-23 February 2013). See here for talks by other members of the Initiative for Interdisciplinary Media Research.

Serial Bodies: Corporeal Engagement in Long-Form Serial Television

Shane Denson

Discussions of so-called “Quality TV” and the narrative complexity seen to characterize the best of contemporary serial television productions often trade on categories of distinction derived from comparisons with “respectable” cultural forms (e.g. the novel as a model for “serious” engagement); these discourses value an intellectually demanding, heady sort of appeal that is opposed both to the narrative simplicity supposedly characteristic of older televisual forms (strictly episodic forms, melodramatic soap operas, etc.) and to the baser appeals of contemporary “trash TV” (e.g. the basically voyeuristic interest encouraged by reality TV). Interestingly, though, graphic scenes of sex and violence proliferate across contemporary television series, including shows widely valued for their cognitive demands; today, bodies are put on display, violated, tortured, dissected, and ripped apart in ways unimaginable on TV screens just a decade ago. In this presentation, I argue that these body spectacles – which range from clinical/forensic to brutal/gory to pornographic – challenge us to rethink the basis of television studies’ formal and normative distinctions. In particular, the complex mental operations valued as correlates of narratological complexity must be seen to take place side by side with a range of more corporeal responses on the part of television viewers. Finally, I propose an alternative view of televisual complexity and serialization: appealing to the body as much as the head, contemporary television will be shown to involve a serialization of bodies (both onscreen and off) that constitutes a central affective mechanism for engaging viewers week after week in long-form serial television.

Dylan Trigg, Digital Media, and Phenomenology

Over at Figure/Ground Communication, there is a new interview up with Dylan Trigg (whose blog Side Effects you’ll find linked in the sidebar here). The whole interview is well worth your time, but especially interesting (and relevant to the focus of this blog) is the following question and answer:

Is phenomenology still relevant in this age of information and digital interactive media?

Phenomenology is especially relevant in an age of information and digital media. Despite the current post-humanist “turn” in the humanities, we remain for better or worse bodily subjects. This does not mean that we cannot think beyond the body or that the body is unchallenged in phenomenology. Phenomenology does not set a limit on our field of experience, nor is it incompatible with the age of information, less even speculative thinking about non-bodily entities and worlds. Instead, phenomenology reminds us of what we already know, though perhaps unconsciously: that our philosophical voyages begin with and are shaped by our bodily subjectivity.

It’s important to note here that phenomenology’s treatment of the body is varied and complex. It can refer to the physical materiality of the body, to the lived experience of the body, or to enigmatic way in which the body is both personal and anonymous simultaneously. In each case, the body provides the basis for how digital media, information, and post-humanity are experienced in the first place. Phenomenology’s heightened relevance, I’d say, is grounded in the sense that these contemporary artefacts of human life tend to take for granted our bodily constitution.

But phenomenology’s relevance goes beyond its privileging of the body. It has become quite fashionable to critique phenomenology as providing a solely human-centric access to the world. This, I think, is wrong. One of the reasons why I’m passionately committed to phenomenology is because it can reveal to us the fundamentally weird and strange facets of the world that we ordinarily take to be clothed in a familiar and human light. Phenomenology’s gesture of returning to things, of attending to things in their brute facticity, is an extremely powerful move. Merleau-Ponty will speak of a “hostile and alien…resolutely silent Other” lurking within with the non-human appearance of things. For me, the lure of this non-human Other is a motivational force in my own work. It reminds us that no matter how much we affiliate ourselves with the familiar human world, in the act of returning to the things themselves, those same things stand ready to alienate us.

(The image at the top of this post, by the way — and lest there be any confusion about the matter — is not a picture of Dylan Trigg but of body-augmentor extraordinaire, performance artist Stelarc.)

Judith Butler at #OccupyWallStreet

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JVpoOdz1AKQ]

I came here to lend my support to you today, to offer my solidarity, for this unprecedented display of democracy and popular will. People have asked, ‘So what are the demands? What are the demands all these people are making?’ Either they say there are no demands and that leaves your critics confused—or they say that the demands for social equality and economic justice are impossible demands. And impossible demands, they say, are just not practical.

If hope is an impossible demand, then we demand the impossible. If the right to shelter, food and employment are impossible demands, then we demand the impossible. If it is impossible to demand that those who profit from the recession redistribute their wealth and cease their greed then yes, we demand the impossible.

But it is true that there are no demands that you can submit to arbitration here because we are not just demanding economic justice and social equality, we are assembling in public, we are coming together as bodies in alliance, in the street and in the square. We’re standing here together making democracy, enacting the phrase ‘We the people!’

(Text from Verso’s blog: here)

Also, see here for John Protevi’s fascinating take on Butler’s speech in the context of an earlier talk she gave in Venice and the embodied, affective dynamics of the so-called “human microphone,” which we’ve now seen Butler, Zizek, Michael Moore, and others utilizing at Occupy Wall Street.