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 Hansens 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 Hansens
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, Hansens book
offers a unique perspective by focusing
on what is perhaps the paradigmatic new
media artifactthe 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 Hansens 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 imagea
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 embodimenteven
if to radically transform it.
These orientations lead Hansen to explore
the specific relation between new media
and the role of embodiment. But Hansens
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, Bergsons
notion of the perceiving body as a center
of indetermination is one of Hansens
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,
Hansens progressive analysis leads
to an emphasis on affectivity
that is, in a way, isomorphic with information
processing. The readings of Robert Lazzarinis
piece skulls, Douglas Gordons
video projections, and Bill Violas
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 Hansens
New Philosophy for New Media as
Cinema 3: The Digital Image,
if such a reference wasnt 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 Bergsons 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 Hansens
book is actually poised between two theoretical
traditionsphenomenology 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. Hansens 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 Hansens 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 methe 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,
evenand especiallyif
it is not simply technological?
.