Some reflections on Henri Bergson: "Of the Selection of Images for Conscious Presentation. What Our Body Does" in Matter and Memory, Marc Hansen: "Introduction " and "The Affective Topology of New Media Art" in New Philosophy for New Media and Jean-Francois Lyotard: "Can Thought Go On Without the Body" in The Inhuman.
All three of this week’s articles explore the nature of thought and conscious to the body: specifically, the human body. This is especially relevant in light of the essays we’ve read by Hayes and Massumi, and in what is viewed by many as the dawning of the post-human age.
I find it intriguing that Henri Bergson’s article, written in 1908, has become so pertinent to the discussions of the new media theorists of this day. Moving away from the Kantian notion of consciousness as pure reason, Bergson conceives of thought and awareness as being relative to the body. His conceptions of the relationships between mind, body and memory were based partly on his examination of the findings of the medical science of his times about the brain. “My body is” he states, “in the aggregate of the material world, an image which acts like other images, receiving and giving back movement, with, perhaps, this difference only, that my appears to choose…the manner in which it shall restore what it receives” (p. 19). He views the correspondence between thoughts and matter as a complex and dynamic system. The thoughts we have are only relative to the actions we take.
Bergson’s viewpoint contrasts with theorist who look towards the cybernetic utopia of disembodied consciousness, which is taken to it’s extreme in Lyotard’s essay. Leotard engages in a hyperbole, posing the question about whether human thought would continue after the death of the sun sine 4.5 billion years in the future. He answers this with a resounding no. Since, in his view, human consciousness and experience is tied to our bodies, there would be no human thought after flesh & blood humans cease to be, even if our thoughts could somehow be transferred and maintained into a cyber mechanism. He also believes that difference, and the sense of incompleteness and suffering that drives our desire to continue, is essential to the human experience, and that that difference is rooted in the body experience and lost without it.
Hansen’s writing continues in this vein. He reiterates how Bergson “correlates perception with the concrete life of the body…a center of indetermination and the aggregate of images that compromises the universe as a whole”(p. 3). He moves on from this and from Deleuze’s thinking to a notion of affectivity which embraces “the capacity of the body to experience itself as ‘more than itself” and thus deploy its sensorimotor power to create the unpredictable, the experimental, the new” (p. 3). He also cites a transformation in the body’s relationship to the image in the digital age. “The 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 though embodied experience” (p.9). It is this that Hanson calls the digital image. He sees in our engagement with contemporary media art a shift from visual to haptic. In the chapter entitled “The affective topology of New Media Art”, he uses the example of Robert Lazzarini’s skulls to illustrate this phenomenon. Skulls creates a world that has been transformed by digital mediation, a world that could not exist without the transforms of data in the digital realm and which is irresolvable visually. This results in the direct experience of this artwork by the body-a felt sense, a corporeal experience. Hansen circles back to Benjamin’s understanding in the midst of a previous time of transformation of media and his understandings of the film’s visceral impact on the body. “The affective body does not so much see as feel the space of the film…what skulls presents is a radicalization of the physico-psychological experience of cinema, since the digital space …can only be felt through an internal tactility that emerges in lieu of any external contact with it” (p. 232). Thus for Hansen, rather than moving beyond or disengaging the felt experience the body, the digitally mediated images in skulls are apprehended in the body at the deepest internal levels.
twitter
flickr
facebook
Equipment
Robert