Feed-Forward

On the Future of Twenty-First-Century Media

Mark B. N. Hansen

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9780226199726
  9780226199696
• eBook ISBN:
  9780226199863
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism

Even as media in myriad forms increasingly saturate our lives, we nonetheless tend to describe our relationship to it in terms from the twentieth century: we are consumers of media, choosing to engage with it. In Feed-Forward, Mark B. N. Hansen shows just how outmoded that way of thinking is: media is no longer separate from us but has become an inescapable part of our very experience of the world.

Drawing on the speculative empiricism of philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, Hansen reveals how new media call into play elements of sensibility that greatly affect human selfhood without in any way belonging to the human. From social media to data-mining to new sensor technologies, media in the twenty-first century work largely outside the realm of perceptual consciousness, yet at the same time inflect our every sensation. Understanding that paradox, Hansen shows, offers us a chance to put forward a radically new vision of human becoming, one that enables us to reground the human in a non-anthropocentric view of the world and our experience in it.

1

Prehensity

The analysis of an actual entity into “prehensions” is that mode of analysis which exhibits the most concrete elements in the nature of actual entities. This mode of analysis will be termed the “division” of the actual entity in question. Each actual entity is “divisible” in an indefinite number of ways, and each way of “division” yields its definite quota of prehensions. A prehension reproduces in itself the general characteristics of an actual entity: it is referent to an external world, and in this sense will be said to have a “vector character”; it involves emotion, and purpose, and valuation, and causation. In fact, any characteristic of an actual entity is reproduced in a prehension.

Actual entities involve each other by reason of their prehensions of each other. There are thus real individual facts of the togetherness of actual entities, which are real, individual, and particular, in the same sense in which actual entities and the prehensions are real, individual, and particular.

I have adopted the term “prehension” to express the activity whereby an actual entity effects its own concretion of other things.

Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality

From Object to Objectile

Efforts to theorize the operation of media in our world today are enframed by contrasting conceptions of the “technological object” that can stand as figures for two quite distinct philosophical traditions and that provide two divergent sets of resources for accessing and assessing media’s experiential impact.

At one extreme lies contemporary French philosopher Bernard Stiegler’s understanding of the technical temporal object—exemplarily, cinema in the age of global, real-time audiovisual fluxes:

The program industries, and more precisely the media industry of radio-televised information, mass-produced temporal objects that are heard or viewed simultaneously by millions and sometimes by tens, hundreds, indeed millions of millions of “consciousnesses”: this massive temporal coincidence dictates the new structure of the event, to which correspond new forms of consciousness and of collective unconscious.1

At the other extreme lies Gilles Deleuze’s conceptualization of the technological object as “objectile”:

This new object we call objectile. As [architect] Bernard Cache has demonstrated, this is a very modern conception of the technological object: it refers neither to the beginnings of the industrial era nor to the idea of the standard that still upheld a semblance of essence and imposed a law of constancy (“the object produced by and for the masses”), but to our current state of things, where fluctuation of the norm replaces the permanence of a law; where the object assumes a place in a continuum by variation; where industrial automation or serial machineries replace stamped forms. The new status of the object no longer refers its condition to a spatial mold—in other words, to a relation of form-matter—but to a temporal modulation that implies as much the beginnings of a continuous variation of matter as a continuous development of form.2

Contracting a tradition running from Husserl (if not, indeed, from Hume) to Derrida, Stiegler’s project confronts the great Husserlian figure of time-consciousness with its necessary technical supplementation. In his exuberant rejuvenation of Husserl’s project, which simultaneously marks the limits of the latter’s analytical scope and methodological rigor, Stiegler lays bare time-consciousness’s dependence on technical objects that can neither be safely reduced to contents of consciousness (following the famous method of phenomenological epochē) nor seamlessly assimilated into Husserl’s bipartite schema for conceptualizing memory as (primary) retention and (secondary) recollection. As Stiegler sees it, technical (temporal) objects introduce a third, tertiary, layer of memory that, far from being a mere degradation of secondary recollection, in fact makes possible the very interplay between primary and secondary modes of memory. It is only once we have the possibility of experiencing the exact same temporal object more than once, Stiegler argues, that we can properly fathom the bidirectional traffic between retention and recollection. Thus, a new experience of hearing a song or seeing a film a second (or nth) time cannot but be impacted by our previous memory of hearing or seeing that same song or film; that is why, insists Stiegler, our new experience differs from our first or earlier experience. In sum, our earlier experience of hearing or seeing selectively impacts our new experience in a way that can be generalized to memory as such. Conversely, our (secondary) memory of the experience is also selectively impacted by each new experience of hearing or seeing the same technical temporal object, in a way that modifies its future impact on new experiences following a pattern that ultimately turns out to display a tightly knit recursivity.

Culminating a quite different tradition stretching from Leibniz to Whitehead and ultimately to himself, Deleuze’s conception refuses the instrumentalization of the technical object that constitutes the first step in Stiegler’s account. Far from enlisting the technological object as a surrogate capable of objectifying the immanent flow of time in consciousness for the purpose of consciousness’s reflective self-evaluation, Deleuze begins by according the object a material agency of its own. Following this reconceptualization, the object enters into a much more intimate contact with the flux of matter that it “objectifies”: rather than capturing matter in a static form, as a “spatial mold” that temporarily transcends or suspends the temporal flux, the object becomes a process that continuously indexes the material flux and, in so doing, offers a perspective on variation. The changed status of the object thus implies a “profound change” in the status of the subject:

A subject will be what comes to the point of view, or rather what remains in the point of view. That is why the transformation of the object refers to a correlative transformation of the subject: the subject is not a sub-ject but, as Whitehead says, a “superject.” Just as the object becomes objectile, the subject becomes a superject. A needed relation exists between variation and point of view: not simply because of the variety of points of view . . . , but in the first place because every point of view is a point of view on variation. The point of view is not what varies with the subject, at least in the first instance; it is, to the contrary, the condition in which an eventual subject apprehends a variation.3

It is important that we appreciate what is at issue here: far more than a simple contrast between subject- and object-centered conceptions of the technological object, Deleuze’s characterization effectively conjoins subjectivity to the broader worldly processes within which it arises. For this purpose, Deleuze’s reference to Whitehead is neither spurious nor tenuous: indeed, beyond the concrete figure of the superject, which will play a crucial role in my argument here, Whitehead’s general ontology promotes a radically environmental perspective on process. Such a perspective stands at the farthest imaginable extreme from orthodox Cartesian (and orthodox phenomenological) subjectivism. According to it, the entirety of the universe informs any and every becoming. Thus, what may look like autonomous operations of subjects are in actual fact aggregates of multiple and heterogeneous, overlapping agencies complexly imbricated with the total situation or environment at the given moment of their occurrence.

When he positions the superject as the subjective correlate of the becoming-objectile of the object, Deleuze does more than simply invoke this cross-scalar conception of subjectivity. Indeed, he correlates the operation of superjection with the process of technical modulation. In this way, he manages to attribute agency directly to the temporal modulation of the technological object. This temporal modulation operates directly on the subjectivity that inheres in the power of superjects to impact future becomings, both at the level of concrescences and at the level of events. That is why Deleuze’s attribution of agency to temporal modulation contrasts markedly with Stiegler’s embrace of the technical object’s transcendence of consciousness. It involves more than mere surrogacy (the object performing the work of consciousness); indeed, it involves nothing less than a becoming-subjective of the object. On Deleuze’s account, it is matter itself, or, more precisely, the modulation of matter introduced by the technological objectile, that calls the subject—qua point of view on a material variation—into being and, importantly, into being as an “effect” of its own materiality.

What hangs in the balance between Stiegler’s and Deleuze’s positions then is nothing less than the possibility for the technical object to exercise material agency of its own. That is why the two positions, and the two passages with which I began, define what amount to two extremities on a continuum of media. With its focus on the correlation between media objects and higher-order cognitive processes, Stiegler’s work addresses one end of the spectrum of contemporary media experience: what it means that media mediate the temporal flux of conscious experience and of life itself. With its invocation of a direct modulation of matter, Deleuze’s work begins at the other end: it seeks to explore how media might impact experience without being channeled through delimited, higher-order processes. The point of the contrast between these two positions is not, however, to proffer two options for thinking technics. Rather, they relate to one another as Newtonian to Einsteinian physics: what Stiegler demonstrates about consciousness is nothing other than a limit case of the far broader material operation of technics following Deleuze’s account. The point is not to decide between these two perspectives, as if one were simply right and the other wrong, but rather to deploy them together, though asymmetrically, with the goal of generating a more inclusive continuum that positions media’s impact on experience as the correlate of a disparate and heterogeneous, multi-scalar and expanded—indeed, properly “post-phenomenological”—phenomenology.

Twenty-First-Century Media

Precisely such a continuum is at stake in the operation and experience of what I propose to call “twenty-first-century media.” By twenty-first-century media, I mean to designate less a set of objects or processes than a tendency: the tendency for media to operate at microtemporal scales without any necessary—let alone any direct—connection to human sense perception and conscious awareness. This tendency is in large part the result of the revolution in media instigated by digital computation: today’s microsensors and smart devices allow for an unprecedented degree of direct intervention into the sensible confound. For the first time in history, media now typically affect the sensible confound independently of and prior to any more delimited impact they many come to have on human cognitive and perceptual experience.

In this sense, twenty-first-century media pose a challenge that is new. They challenge us to construct a relationship with them. On this point, they differ markedly from earlier media. Unlike the various forms of recording media typical of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, where the coupling or synchronization of media system and human sense perception formed something of a telos, if not indeed a constitutive presupposition, twenty-first-century media not only resist any form of direct synchronization but question the viability of a model of media premised on a simple and direct coupling of human and media system. Faced with the environmental effects of today’s media—effects that, by definition, occur outside our awareness—we must work to expose the complex networks through which environmental media impact experience and to construct relationships that afford some grasp of, if not indeed some distinct agency over, their operation.

While this environmental dimension has led some contemporary media theorists to characterize contemporary networked media as “inhuman” (Galloway and Thacker), I would strongly oppose any move to link the promise of new media to some fantasized transcendence of the human as a form of life and would argue instead that it introduces a massive complexification in the networks that now link not just machines with machines and humans with networked machines, but also humans with other humans. Within the hybrid domain opened by this complexification, the very possibility to rethink experience as such—and to intensify our specifically human experience—depends on our capacity to forge connections with the microtemporal processes that, despite evading the grasp of our conscious reflection and sense perception, nonetheless impact our sensory lives in significant ways.

There are, to be sure, many facets to this shift in the address of media, and we shall have occasion to explore a number of them in what follows. Let me focus for the moment on the changed and still-changing situation of human experience in the wake of the microcomputational revolution. Because they primarily and directly address the vibratory continuum that composes the world, twenty-first-century media must be said to impact experience through embodied and environmental sensory processes that are peripheral to consciousness and sense perception. More simply still, twenty-first-century media impact the environment, including our bodily environment, before impacting—and, in part, as a way to impact—our higher-order sensory and perceptual faculties. This situation is precisely what informs—and makes imperative—the claim about access to data of sensibility (CADS) introduced above: specifically, it is because the impact of media makes itself felt, as it were, prior to the constitution of “human-addressable” agents, that recourse must be made to technical operations capable of accessing and intensifying the domain of sensibility itself.

What this means, to say it yet another way, is that we can no longer take for granted the correlation of media and human experience that has informed media history up until today. Whereas the technical media characteristic of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, for example, photography and cinema, primarily address human sense perception and experiential memory (and I say “primarily” to indicate both that there is no technical necessity involved here and that there are significant exceptions), twenty-first-century media directly shape the sensory continuum out of which perception and memory arise. If they are not, as Kittler would have it, essentially or fundamentally indifferent to the human, twenty-first-century media are certainly hybrid in their address, in the sense that they operate both micro- and macrotemporally, directly on microsensory experience and, by way of various aesthetic mediations, indirectly on higher-order sense perception and consciousness.

This hybridity or double-valenced operationality of twenty-first-century media was recognized early on by the pioneers of digital media studies. In his groundbreaking study The Language of New Media, Lev Manovich makes the crucial distinction between digital simulations (or emulations) and digital syntheses, where the salient point concerns whether new media objects or processes exploit the affordances of the computational environment. In schematic terms, simulations merely reproduce the appearance of a non-digital object whereas syntheses create new objects that are concretely and often complexly anchored in their digital infrastructure. For present purposes, my interest in this distinction centers less on the materiality of new media objects than on the experiential dimensions of digital media in their contemporary techno-social configuration. What new kinds of experience do the microtemporal and microsensorial operations of digital syntheses solicit, and what resources do we require not simply to theorize them, but indeed to live them?

Today, new media do not simply nor even primarily center on “the computer,” as they arguably did when Manovich wrote his pioneering study. The period between 1999 and 2014 has witnessed the explosive growth of mobile media and the distribution of the computer into the lived environment. This is a story with which we are all intimately—and experientially—familiar. We still use computers, to be sure, but we also rely increasingly on the mobile computational devices and smart phones that we now typically carry around with us. The transition to the paradigm of mobility—and from computing as the deliberative use of a portable computer to computing on the fly in so-called ubiquitous computational networks—involves more than a shift of technical platform and the swapping of some bigger machines for other smaller ones.

More important than these material technical changes considered in isolation are the social and cultural developments with which they are inextricably connected. It is notable, for example, that we now use our computational devices not only, and perhaps not even primarily, to perform specialized activities like creating spreadsheets or word processing documents or even searching the Internet, but also to gather information on the fly and to share it with others. Our mobile technologies are currently in the process of transforming the function of recording: no longer solely or primarily a technical process for memorializing human experience, as it largely was in the cinematic age, recording now typically operates in the service of connection—to provide information that is practically oriented and useful only for a short time—and it occurs at levels of technical operation that are by definition beyond the scope of human awareness. Needless to say, this shift in our use of media is accompanied—and indeed is made possible—by a massive expansion in the interaction of machines with other machines. Thus, well before we even begin to use our smart phones in active and passive ways, the physical devices we carry with us interface in complex ways with cell towers and satellite networks; and preparatory to our using our digital devices or our laptops to communicate or to acquire information, the latter engage in complex connections with wireless routers and network hosts. In providing the infrastructural support for our use of media, this on-the-fly, or “real-time,” machine-to-machine interfacing constitutes something qualitatively new about twenty-first-century media.

To understand the experiential shift at issue here, let us focus on how the operation of recording is modified in twenty-first-century media networks. In nineteenth- and twentieth-century media, recording operates, again primarily though by no means exclusively, at the level of experiential unities and in the service of individual and cultural memory;4 typical forms of recorded media include individual photographic frames, still photographs, cinematic moving images, and continuous scanning of a video raster. In today’s media networks, by contrast, recording operates primarily at the level of sub-experiential and microtemporal unities and in the service of future-directed, often non-deliberative (or better: not traditionally deliberative) action in the present; typical forms include bits of computational data and fine-grained inscriptions of analog fluxes. Moreover, recording now operates predominately in the service of communication between machines necessary for the operation of our smart phones and other microcomputational devices.

Bluntly put, the model of recording as the durable inscri...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction: Whitehead as Media Theorist?
• 1 Prehensity
• 2 Intensity
• 3 Potentiality
• 4 Sensibility
• Conclusion: Implication
• Notes
• Index