Worldly Sensibility Digital Media

Five years after its publication, Mark Hansen's Feed Forward may seem dated; the tone of his treatment of digital media and computational technologies is far from the alarming tone sounded in more recent takes on social media, the Internet, and what he has called "datafication." With more and more criticisms aimed at the oversized power of social media and the Internet and the amassing of data collected in ways that are easy to keep out of consciousness, if not impossible ever to bring to consciousness, Hansen nonetheless treats digital media and computational technologies as pharmakon—not only poison but cure as well. Focusing specifically on the data mining of social media, tracking devices, biometric and environmental passive microsensors, all sorts of mobile devices, and the full analytic capacities of computational technologies, Hansen proposes that the pharmacological recompense of datafication is not in supplementing its very displacement of human capacities as all other media technologies have done. Instead, datafication initiates a reconfiguration of human experience in relationship to what he describes as "worldly sensibility." As he explains: "twenty-first-century media impact human experience not 'in-itself' or directly—as has been the case (at least predominately) with media up to now—but precisely and only insofar as they open up modulate and channel the power of worldly sensibility itself" (2015a, 226).

In this sense, Feed Forward was written at a certain time, a time when Heidegger's well-known comment about "the essence of technology by no means being anything technological" no longer presided over media studies scholarship, especially if the comment is taken to mean that the specificity of any given technology is irrelevant to the question of technology. The philosopher to whom media studies scholars have been turning instead is Alfred North Whitehead. Steven Shaviro, for one, even wondered what media studies scholarship might have been if Whitehead instead of Heidegger had dominated studies of science and technology. Heidegger, Shaviro proposed, "flees the challenges of the present in horror. Whitehead urges us to work with these challenges, to negotiate them" (2009, x). It is in this manner of working with and negotiating the present challenge of twenty-first-century digital media and computational technologies that Hansen turns to Whitehead, while nonetheless proposing that it is these very media/technologies that make a reworking of Whitehead necessary in order to understand experience other than that which is saturated with human consciousness and bodily based perception.

For Hansen this means moving away from the French- or Deleuzian-inflected reading of Whitehead more commonly circulated in cultural and media criticism, which Hansen admits is perhaps closer to Whitehead's own statement of his philosophy. So Feed Forward is not so much a correction of an incorrect reading of Whitehead: it is rather a reworking of Whitehead's philosophy, a philosophical radicalization of Whitehead's thinking in terms of what twenty-first-century digital media have made possible: that is, the displacement of human consciousness as "the stable, substantial hub of experience," while reembedding it "in a far richer context of the causally efficacious lineages that have produced it" (9). What his reworking of Whitehead's philosophy allows Hansen to develop is a post-phenomenological phenomenology that, while decentering human subjectivity, nonetheless returns to a subjectivity and experience attributed by Whitehead to all entities of the universe or ranging across all scales of matter accessed in the operation of twenty-first-century media. It is in his reworking of Whitehead's understanding of subjectivity and experience that Hansen imagines he is providing the philosophical framing for more fully elaborating the political, economic, and social conditions and effects of datafication, or what my coauthors and I have called "the datalogical turn," a matter to which I will return (Clough et al. 2015).

What is striking about Hansen's return to subjectivity and experience through Whitehead's philosophy is that it requires him to move away not only from the Deleuzian inflected reading of Whitehead but also from his...