New Philosophy for New Media

by Mark Hansen
The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2004
333 pp. Trade, $36.00
ISBN: 0-262-08321-3.

Reviewed by Eugene Thacker
School of Literature, Communication, and Culture
Georgia Institute of Technology. Atlanta, GA. 30332-0165

eugene.thacker@lcc.gatech.edu

Reading through Mark Hansen’s book New Philosophy for New Media I was reminded of an H.P. Lovecraft story called ‘From Beyond.’ In it, an obscure occultist-engineer invents a device that enables him to glimpse other dimensions of space-time. What he sees does not fill him with wonder and awe but with a ‘cosmic terror.’ Apparently, all sorts of poly-dimensional, vaguely amphibious and formless ‘things’ populate other dimensions. And they look back at him with great menace. What terrifies the narrator of the story, however, is not the weird creatures but the fact of being shown the embodied limitations of human perception and cognition. Something nonhuman and radically other gnaws at the human-centric world of seeing and knowing, and we can neither see nor know it.

Of course, this is not to say that Hansen’s book should be read as supernatural horror (hmm…). But the questions New Philosophy for New Media raises are not dissimilar. Despite the plethora of books about new media, Hansen’s book offers a unique perspective by focusing on what is perhaps the paradigmatic new media artifact——the ‘digital image.’ But for Hansen, the digital image is neither an abstract number (a collection of bits) nor a paradoxical thingless thing (a Photoshop file). The digital image is, instead, a process, a sort of processual singularity that encompasses the process of perceiving as well. Neither ‘number’ nor ‘object,’ the digital image ‘can no longer be restricted to the level of surface appearance, but must be extended to encompass the entire process by which information is made perceivable through embodied experience’ (10). This is the core of Hansen’s approach to new media. While many studies focus on the technical details of digital artifacts, Hansen suggests that such approaches dissociate the perceiving body from the image——a process that, he argues, is constitutive of perception itself. While many studies obsess over the ontological problems raised by digital technology (in terms of simulation and so on), Hansen focuses on the co-evolution of embodied cognition (perception-as-filtering) and the ways that ‘information processing’ always points to an instance of embodiment——even if to radically transform it.

These orientations lead Hansen to explore the specific relation between new media and the role of embodiment. But Hansen’s use of the term ‘embodiment’ is complex. While he does acknowledge the rich use of the term in phenomenology, he is also equally interested in the viewpoints of cognitive science as well as the philosophy of Henri Bergson. In fact, Bergson’s notion of the perceiving body as a ‘center of indetermination’ is one of Hansen’s guiding motifs in his analyses of contemporary new media art works. This is played out in his concise and patient discussions of the works of Jeffrey Shaw, where the assumed correlation between body and image (immobile, receptive body + external object-trigger) is shown to be much more complex. In fact, Hansen’s progressive analysis leads to an emphasis on ‘affectivity’ that is, in a way, isomorphic with information processing. The readings of Robert Lazzarini’s piece skulls, Douglas Gordon’s video projections, and Bill Viola’s recent ‘digital portraits’ fleshes out this notion of affectivity: ‘the capacity of the body to experience itself as "more than itself" and thus to deploy its sensorimotor power to create the unpredictable, the experimental, the new’ (7).

I would be tempted to refer to Hansen’s New Philosophy for New Media as ‘Cinema 3: The Digital Image,’ if such a reference wasn’t going to place an undue burden and anxiety of influence on the author. And it would also be inaccurate, for, while Hansen engages deeply with Bergson’s work on perception and memory, he also reads Bergson against Deleuze. In the latter, Hansen sees a tendency to dissociate the image from the affectivity of embodiment and towards an abstract ‘time-image,’ from body to frame. In this sense Hansen’s book is actually poised between two theoretical traditions——phenomenology and structuralism, surface and structure, ‘experience’ and ‘pattern,’ flesh and number, body and algorithm, etc. Often discussions about new media fall to one side or the other of this polarization. Hansen’s book is unique in that it asks us how new media, or the ‘digital image’ challenge us to rethink embodiment in radical ways, ways that are uncannily ‘nonhuman.’ At the end of the day there is still someone watching. Even if that person watching is really actively filtering. Even if that person filtering is really engaged in the co-production of body and milieu. This is captured in Hansen’s selection of art works, all of which engage the notions of ‘computer vision’ or ‘machine time’ is a profoundly ambivalent way. There are lingering questions for me——the particular take on Deleuze, the role of the biological or neurobiological, the emphasis on the visual. But the most provocative question I draw from New Philosophy for New Media is not about art, or the image, or visual culture, but about ‘problem’ of sense. Is embodiment always ‘human,’ even——and especially——if it is not simply ‘technological’?

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