gcraighobbs /201 /1128

11/28 - Embodiment

Material presented for lecture -

Stelarc clips

Bjork - All Is Full Of Love (1998, Directed by Chris Cunningham)

Spatio-Temporal Video - http://www.k2.t.u-tokyo.ac.jp/members/alvaro/Khronos/

Robert Lazzarini - http://www.robertlazzarini.com

Chris Cunningham - Rubber Johnny (2006, Written and directed by Chris Cunningham)

Note: As I proposed at the end of our class session, the above clip provides an effective platform to engage with questions of embodiment, disembodiment, and morphological aspects of bodily representation, both in the physical and political sense. Rubber Johnny problematizes the notion of disembodiment. In as much as a disembodied experience can fluctuate from overwhelmingly spiritual, to horribly frightening, it seems to me that Rubber Johnny is an excellent site of engagement on matters of disembodiment. The questions of disability is brought to the fore, with an effective move toward aesthetic embrace of the grotesque. In one sense, this is a hyperbolic and synaesthetic attempt to counter presumptions of the disabled through a visual and rhythmic counterproposal of intense affection. Is it affective? Empowering? Of disabling? Only a disabled person may truly know. The original I clip I considered for the function of further problematizing this question of disembodiment is Windowlicker, also by Aphex Twin and Chris Cunningham. Windowlicker's layered problematic of race, sex, and class tied to body morphology as disembodiment seemed too intense to be addressed in a single lecture, and without adequate representation.

Henri Bergson

Henri Bergson's excerpt from Matter and Memory provides the opening salvo of an extended ontological inquiry into matter, memory, duration, intuition, perception, affect, and the body. For Bergson, the body exists distinct from all images, from perception, and from consciousness. Interspersed between perceptions received from without and processed within, leading to movement and change in the world, we find the body as a center of indetermination. The body is the recipient and processor of affective experience, and the site of affection through memory.

In the first sentence of his introduction to Matter and Memory Berson states, "This book affirms the reality of spirit and the reality of matter, and tries to determine the relation of the one to the other by the study of a definite example, that of memory." For Bergson, matter is an aggregate of "images" halfway between representation and thing (in the philosophical sense). As a matter of common sense, "the object exists in itself, and, on the other hand, the object is, in itself, pictorial, as we perceive it: image it is, but a self-existing image."

Through embodiment, we complete the philosophical circuit of phenomenological experience. Bergson writes, "The objects which surround my body reflect its possible action upon them." Thus implying the body as source of meaning and action upon material reality. Matter is the aggregate of images; perception of matter, "these same images referred to the eventual action of one particular image, my body."

In as much as a cursory reading of Bergson is possible, the text provides a basis for embodiment because the body is proposed as the medium into and from which meaning emerges from matter. The body is matter, but it is also our matter. And therefore the only known ontological substrate gifted to us in the pursuit of experience, meaning, spirit, and a means for the inquiry into "the reality of matter" itself.

Jean-Francois Lyotard

Bergson's ontology is a source of great influence to post-structuralist theorists such as Deleuze and Lyotard. Lyotard's apocalyptic treatise Can Thought go on without a Body? is like a bad LSD trip for the philosophical elite. Lyotard opens his essay as Slayer might rip open a song, "You philosophers ask questions without answers, questions that have to remain unanswered to deserve being called philosophical." The refrain? Too late, you're dead. Lyotard riffs, "But after the sun's death there won't be a thought to know that its death took place." And thus, a simultaneously nihilistic and ambient discourse proceeds on thought, matter, the body, and our inevitable endings.

Like a blissed out rastafarian, Lyotard's appears both intensely enlightened and ridiculously paranoid. But his paranoia is put to good service for the plight of civilization is indeed one of peril. Of thought, and in praise of jah, his prophesy, "In 4.5 billion years there will arrive the demise of your phenomenology and your utopian politics, and there'll be no one there to toll the death knell or hear it. It will be too late to understand that your passionate, endless questioning always depended on a 'life of mind' that will have been nothing else than a covert form of earthly life."

Unlike Slayer, Lyotard's intensity does not betray his humanity when he concludes in an ecumenical tone, "A form of life that was spiritual because human, human because earthly - coming from the earth of the most living of living things." What emerges is a call to arms - in the philosophical sense - against the autonomous mind, crystallized in the primal ooze of our earthly existence, its environment, and the body; which I am in no hurry to reveal is THE ONLY PLACE where thought can go on. Lyotard arrives at a similar conclusion.

He surveys phenomenology - Husserl, Claudel, and Merleau-Ponty - to reveal human death as a form of non-being, whereas "solar death implies an irreparabley exclusive disjunction between death and thought." Which is to say no body = no thought, no precursor to thought, no afterthought, no nothing.

Lyotard then reveals the subject of his anarchistic disdain, the vampiric technologists in their efforts to simulate human thought. The disaster in the making, "the job of simulating conditions of life and thought to make thinking remain materially possible after the change in the condition of matter," is fully underway. "This and this alone is what's at stake today in technical and scientific research in every field from dietics, neurophysiology, genetics, and tissue synthesis to particle physics, astrophysics, electronics, information science and nuclear physics." Which is to say, the desire to suspend death through the extension of consciousness into disembodied matter is the modus operandi of utopian technologies.

Lyotard utilizes the metaphor of the body as computer to reveal the inadequacy of binary systems in replicating human thought. "Our disappointment in these organs of 'bodiless thought' comes from the fact that they operate on binary logic." The body, on the other hand, produces thought analogically concurrent with our experience of perception, which differs radically from a logical progression of disembodied thought alone. The difference is that thought and the body are inseparable, "each of them is analogous to the other in its relationship with its respective (sensible, symbolic) environment."

It is clear at this point that Lyotard's theoretical proposition is answered. Then, unexpectedly, a phase-shift appears in the form of "SHE". Lyotard's mysterious SHE appears in a cloud of uncertainty, yet parallels his continuing thesis on vision, perception, and analogous relations. Another revelation appears, "Thinking and suffering overlap." This plateau, Lyotard's intended destination, is fertile... almost new age. "The body and the mind have to be free of burdens for grace to touch us." Yogi-like, he calls for, "a type of emptying of the mind, an emptying that is required if the mind is to think."

SHE opens up a new chapter in Lyotard's bodily thesis. One indebted to eastern spiritualism as much as to Bergson. Under this bodhi tree we discover, "In what we call thinking the mind isn't directed but suspended. You don't give it rules. You teach it to receive." And hence the pain and suffering of thought, the path to no thought, the 4 nobel truths, the 8-fold path, and plenty more where Lyotard is heading. To heaven? To solar death? To the gendered differend?

"So that suffering of thinking is a suffering of time, of what happens. To sum up - will your thinking-, your representing machines suffer? What will be their future if they are just memories?" And suddenly, a flashback to Blade Runner. In Deckard's apartment Rachel muses, " the egg hatched and hundreds of baby spiders came out and ate her." Is this Rachel's encoded suffering in the form of memories? Or embodied affection designed to manipulate Deckard into believe that she posses real emotions, real memories. In fact, it It does not matter. Deckard is a replicant too. And in this instance machines CAN love each other, passionately.

SHE is revealed. It is gender difference. For Lyotard, "It's an accepted proposition that sexual difference is a paradigm of an incompleteness of not just bodies, but minds too." A matter Lyotard believes out of our control, no matter how manipulable the difference in our lived realities. Sexual difference, "quite probably defines suffering in perceiving and conceiving as produced by an impossibility of unifying and completely determining the object seen." Grant Lyotard this leap of faith from object of desire to object of affection, and you are lead to desire in the form of a demand.

"Your thinking machines will have to be nourished not just on radiation but on the irremediable differend of gender." Humans exceed the most sophisticated logical machines because they possess form in body, the conduit for affective, perceptual, and sexual experience. Experience driven by difference not in some simplistic, dualistic sense but rather in the infinite complexity of pluralistic multiplicity. As infinite as possible, yet with one undeniable causative condition. That is, the ability to replicate, perpetuate, and differentiate. And so on, and so on... until solar death proves otherwise.

Lyotard's answer then is two-fold. In one aspect the human body, inseparable from intelligence, serves the very real function of hosting complex thought within an organism which can not be replicated by machines, aliens, crop circles or any one, or thing, else. A self-replicating system by design and function of thought, and existence. Secondly, this analogical function of body and mind, "is inconsequential compared to an irreparable transcendence inscribed on the body by gender difference."

"This difference makes thought go on endlessly and won't allow itself to be thought. Thought is inseparable from the phenomenological body: although gendered body is separated from thought, and launches thought." He concludes, "difference causes infinite thought - held as it is in reserve in the secrecy of our bodies and thoughts. It annihilates only the One."

And thus, Spaceship Exodus carries the One to its solar death, and perhaps, all other lurking theories of unification. Lyotard wields solar death to prevent the erasure of difference, alternately propagating multiplicities and pluralities of desires, thoughts, meanings, perceptions, bodies, and though tacit in his thesis, sex itself.

Hansen

Mark Hansen in the Introduction and The Affective Topology of New Media Art, select essays from his book New Philosophy for New Media seeks to explore the philosophical problems, create a unique nomenclature, and establish antecedents in the pursuit of meaning for "new media art". The search is illusive as it turns out. But like all of us who fear, Hansen finds comfort in old friends and new friends to guide him along the way. I am talking about Walter Benjamin, Gilles Deleuze, Henri Bergson, his old friends; and Robert Lazzarini, Craig Kalpakjian, and Friedrich A. Kittler, his new friends. We explore a fascinating and troubling space in reading Hansen.

Hansen's precursor is a healthy dose of Benjamin, or rather homage to Benjamin's "problematic of the medium" vis-a-vis technology. Hansen establishes philosophical ground compatible with Kittler, proclaiming, "digital convergence promises to render obsolete the now still crucial moment of perception." Hansen is quick to define embodiment. His embodiment is inseperable from the cognitive activity of the brain. An embodiment he authenticates in neuroscience, but which owes much more to Henri Bergson's affective temporal body.

His is a brisk tour of Bergson, intentional with wit and warp. For Hansen, "Bergson's theorization of perception as an act of subtraction installs the affective body smack in the center of the general deduction of perception." And like a software company, Hansen installs the software of his theoretical hardware into the reader. Another homage emerges, it is Deleuze. "Deleuze's great insight is to have realized that Bergson's conception of the image finds perfect instantiation in the cinema."

I would modify this statement, Delueze's great insight is to have authored a compelling history of narrative cinema in the 20th century - Cinema 1 and Cinema 2. Texts written as both art historical survey and ontological inquiry, revisting and expanding upon the philosophical foundation of matter, memory, movement, perception, intuition, body, and affect of Henri Bergson. Of course, Deleuze's greatest (my emphasis) insight is to have written Mille Plateaux along with Félix Guattari.

Hansen's affective turn reveals unrest with Deleuze. "Deleuze's neo-Bergson account of the cinema carries out the progressive disembodying of the center of indetermination." Which is to presume Deleuze can divorce perception from the body, and situate it within the cinema, or more accurately within the screen. Hansen's doubling of his own words "the universal flux of images", equating this flux, "to divorce perception entirely from (human) embodiment," is the schema of Hansen, not Deleuze.

I'll call the above parenthetical what it really is - Hansen's human: pitted against Deleuze. Coordinating voodo logic and mirrored symmetry, this textual construct folds back upon itself like an infinite mirror of the ego mind. Hansen wishes so badly to enter into a relationship with Bergson, he is willing to ridicule Deleuze through slanderous misconstrual. This is not the work of a philosopher, rather the ramblings of an anxious theorist.

Hansen's goal? Redemption. He proselytizes, "To deploy Bergson's embodied understanding of the center of indetermination as the theoretical basis for our exploration of new media art, we will have to redeem it from Deleuze's transformative appropriation." Structuralist analysis never felt so good. And this is not Hansen's only referent to redemption. The irony is that Hansen loves Deleuze like a father.

Hansen discovers for himself a few new terms. Terms such as digital image? He actually writes in 2004, "This is what I propose to call the digital image." Again, with italic force, "This is what I propose to call the digital image." And he qualifies this statement. It is no longer a matter of 2d surface, but of process made perceivable through embodied experience. Unfortunately, Hansen's digital image is nothing new.

It is not that Mark Hansen doesn't want to be a good theorist, it is that he doesn't yet know how to be a good philosopher. Perhaps he lacks wisdom, humility, and experience. I can not say. But I believe his shortcuts to affiliation appear as an inexcusable form of posturing. In the end, Hansen does produce the goods, at times however awkward.

"Indeed, contemporary media artists appear to be doing nothing else than adapting this Bergsonist vocation to the concrete demands of the information age: by placing the embodied viewer-participants into a circuit with information, the installations and environments they create function as laboratories for the conversion of information into corporeally apprehensible images." We are in fact doing much more than being Bergson's automatons. Are we to actually believe that Hansen, "aims to theorize the correlation of new media and embodiment." I do not believe that is Hansen's aim as much to embody himself as the theoretical correlate of new media. May we say, "the authoritative body of new media?" Hansen is not the first in line, RIP Lev Manovich.

I can buy embodied affection (thanks to Bergson), I can handle the ensuing shift from perception to affectivity (notably a shift decades, if not centuries away from completion), and I can accept that, "the image (as) delimited product of a complex bodily process." BUT I CAN NOT ACCEPT REDEMPTION. Again, Hansen preaches, "the philosophical redemption of Bergson's embodied theory of perception from Deleuze's transformative appropriation." Compare this to the above "redemption" statement. Notice the similarities?

Before we leave Hansen's posthumous introduction... Yes, for this reader Hansen is, in some sense, dead. We are reminded once again of, "my defense of Bergson against Deleuze." And then suddenly, important new media concepts appear such as, "continual self-production through an ongoing process of emergence to presence," and, "the embodied processing of time itself."

It is as if, using the concept Bergson shuns, Hansen has created for himself the "false problem" of Deleuze to authenticate and justify his entry into an otherwise compelling art historical and theoretical effort to categorize and expand upon the term "new media art." But there is nothing new about one-up-manship. Hansen, by equating himself as the redeemer, fails to convince this reader that his undertaking is sound. It is Lyotard's suffering of thinking, a suffering of time.

I must profess a desire to deliver Hansen's final blow through the "exemplary example" of Robert Lazzarini's skulls. I radically differ with Hansen's overblown explication of skulls. I truly wish to understand how he could be so wrong although the concept he could be "right" is a question not worth asking. Hansen, as much as he tries, can not wrench affect from perception. No matter how many times he calls up the skulls, Deleuze has already turned those dead heads into dust. Hansen has Deleuze-envy, and we must do our best to provide a safe plateau on which he can proselytize Bergson's redemption in an effort to synthesize a new philosophy for new media art, however tentative.

Wiki links of interest


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