New Philosophy for New Media (review)

While reading Mark B.N. Hansen's New Philosophy for New Media, I realized more and more the strangeness of a situation in which an author publishes a book under this title, with the agenda of reinstating Bergsonian bodily affection, and does that, not in the last place thanks to digital media, despite his insisting on the digital being something inhuman, alien, not accessible. From a media art point of view, it is quite a peculiar book, and being an artist, I cannot ignore that—so this response in the end defines my point of view for this review.

New Philosophy for New Media builds on previous publications by the same author, extending and deepening much of what he has published elsewhere. In this review, however, I have deliberately chosen not to go into his theoretical exploration but to look at the book from the point of view of (new) media art. The reason for this approach is that I believe Hansen has a fundamental problem with accepting anything that is digital, as I will show below, and this stance is reflected in his fairly typical choice of artworks featured in the book. This, too, I will attempt to explain below. It goes without saying that my criticism does not concern the quality of the artworks presented but rather their representational nature and, specifically, the role this choice has in the narrative.

Hansen's qualifications of the digital, combined with the type of artworks included in the book and those specifically rejected, leads to an interpretation of the book as an attempt to surface, or sur-face, the digital with—literally— a human face.

In the somewhat unfortunately titled New Philosophy For New Media, Mark Hansen sets out to "re-inject" Bergsonian bodily affection into Deleuze's reworking of Bergson's understanding of the image. To achieve this re-injection of Bergsonian affective embodiment, in Hansen's own words, he interweaves three narratives:

First: how the image comes to encompass the entire process of its own embodied formation or creation, what I shall call the digital image. Second: how the body acquires a newly specified function within the regime of the digital image, namely, the function of filtering information in order to create images. And third: how this function of the body gives rise to an affective "supplement" to the act of perceiving the image, that is, a properly haptic domain of sensation and, specifically, the sensory experience of the "warped space" of the body itself (p.12).

Hansen develops his argument, as Mark Poster describes it on the back cover of the book, "in a rigorous, systematic manner." The argument is sufficiently systematic to be put in a table at the end of the introduction, listing separate columns for "Theoretical aim," "Body," "Image" and "Artwork" on a chapter by chapter basis. Throughout the rest of the book the relevant sections of this table are repeated at the start of each chapter as if to function as road signs, guiding the reader in the right direction and reminding us of the task at hand.

In his introduction, Hansen starts by declaring the digital image free of material dependency; it is a set of information that can be rendered perceptible through various technologies and ultimately through human embodiment. He defines the digital image as an image that "finds no instantiation in a privileged technical form" but rather "demarcates the very process through which the body, in conjunction with various apparatuses for rendering information perceptible, gives form to or informs information" (p. 10).

Once the image is freed of its materiality, the bodily perception, and more specifically, affective bodily perception finds itself at the center of the digital image. Perhaps realizing that with this definition, every collection of random (digital) numerics becomes a "digital image," Hansen then confronts this "problematic of framing once the (technical) image has been exploded into a limitless flux of information" (p. 84) by bringing in British cyberneticist Donald MacKay and French...