Hansen, Mark B.N. 2004. New Philosophy for New Media. Cambridge: MIT.

Working from the traditional of Hayles. Phenomenological restructuring of the digital and body. Body is central processing unit of digital image and thus even more important.

INTRODUCTION

Body as ubiquitous form of aura that actualizes data.

Working off of Bergson. Body as a filter of images which selects those images most relevant.

Affectivity Definition: “the capacity of the body to experience itself as ‘more than itself’ and thus to deploy its sensorimotor power to create the unpredictable, the experimental, the new” (7).

Critiques Deleuze. Frame cannot be seen as autonomous since its very form is dependent on embodied perception. Must reverse Deleuze’s project and move from the frame back to the body.

“Beneath anyconcrete ‘technical’ image or frame lies what I shall call the framing function of the human body qua center of indetermination” (8).

Content of image and frame no longer connected.

Digital image must be redefined as the entire process by which information is made perceivable, including the body’s involvement as the nexus of this enframing.

“When the body acts to enframe digital information—or, as I put it, to forge the digital images—what it frames in in effect itself…the act of enframing information can be said to ‘give body’ to digital data—to transform something that is unframed, disembodied, and formless into concrete embodied information intrinsically imbued with (human) meaning” (13).

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Derrida, Jacques. 2005. Paper Machine. Trans. Rachel Bowlby. 1st ed. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Some brief notes on a couple chapters.

CONNECTIONS TO HEIDEGGER: Book as gathering together (7).

Critique of Heidegger’s romanticization of the artisanal hand: “But when we write ‘by hand’ we are not in the time before technology; there is already instrumentality, regular reproduction, mechanical iterability” (20).

“For what we are dealing with is never replacements that put an end to what they replace but rather, if I might use this word today, restructurations in which the oldest form survives, and even survives endlessly, coexisting with the new form and even coming to terms with a new economy—which is also a calculation in terms of the market as well as in terms of storage, capital, and reserve” (9).

Project about a book to come. Notion of book not as a technical object but a logic, ordering, or gathering together which persists with every new technological shift.

Warns against techno-pessimism and techno-utopianism. Technical change always carries marks of the past. Fetishism, sanctifying.

IMPORTANT: Addresses freedom within digital networks. Encourages the proliferation of “wild areas” (17). This view seems naive, however, of the intricacies of the technical restraints to such unrestricted areas of the internet which is of course highly standardized and governed.

PLAYING THE ALGORITHM: “With pens and typewriters, you think you know how it works, how it ‘responds.’ Whereas with computers, even if people know how to use them up to a point, they rarely know, intuitively and without thinking—at any rate, I don’t know—how the internal demon of the apparatus operates. What rules it obeys” (23).

Worth emphasizing Derrida’s emphasis that we merely think we know how a pen operates. In this way, computer technology, in it’s overt mysteriousness, forces a recontextualization of the apparent opacity of other ostensibly simple technologies

Deleuze, Gilles. 1992. Postscript on the Societies of Control. October 59:3-7.

Disciplinary societies theorized by Foucault peak in eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Analogical models focused on enclosure and the creation and management of productive force. Ordering. Distribution. Concetration.

Replacement of sovereign society in era of Napoleon. Sovereign society characterized by taxation, ruling of death.

Control society response to the crisis of enclosure. Most powerful example would be the corporation as opposed to the factory.

WAGES > SALARY (variability)

MOLD/CAST > MODULATION (flexibility)

SCHOOL > PERPETUAL TRAINING (endlessness)

SIGNATURE > CODE/PASSWORD (access)

Individuals within mass is no longer the model. Replace with dividuals or quanitifable and calculable markets/samples/data-sets which can be reordered and recomposed as necessary.

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Foucault, Michel, and Arnold I. Davidson. 2006. Psychiatric Power: Lectures at the College de France 1973-1974. 1st ed. Palgrave Macmillan.

Notes on Chapter Twelve

Examines Charcot’s creation of the neurological body and situates it in comparison to the body of
pathological anatomy.

Pathological anatomy obsessed with surface and the reading of signs on the body (Bichat, Lännec).

Pathological anatomy: STIMULUS > EFFECT
Neurology: STIMULUS > RESPONSE

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