Much of this study has been fully integrated into theory; however, it is useful to see the roots of the study of everyday activity.

INTRODUCTION

Not focused on individual but the network of social interactions and their accompanying activities and ways of operating.

Emphasizes that we should not just be focused on what is being watched, but how the audience uses what they watch or consume. Making and using.

Very much interested in studying the everyday as a way of documenting resistance to dominant hegemony.

de Certeau aligns himself with Foucault with a crucial difference. He sees his focus on practice as similar to Foucault’s focus on mechanisms of power. But de Certeau believes what is remarkable about the disciplinary society is that “an entire society resists being reduced to it” (xiv). Is this really true?

Critiques statistical analysis and scientific discourse for being concerned witht he material of practice but not the form.

CHAPTER ONE

Tracks shift, evidenced by Freud, where the narrator becomes the everyman. The ordinary creeps into scientific discourse.

The organizing cleavage of modernity is science set against everyday practices.

Really interesting analogy presented of the Expert vs. the Philospher.

My gloss: experts translate while philosphers complicate.

He critiques the philosopher because she seeks to rise above the everyday and its languages and thus has no place or mastery.

CHAPTER TWO

Superstition functions in native and rural communities as a way to subvert hegemony. Provides a fraamework outside dominant logics.

de Certeau addresses his debt to speech act theory (Austin).

Science cannot adequately describe the everyday because it cannot be transplanted into new spaces. It is spatially and historically specific.

de Certeau cites games as one of the sites where practice in made (22).

La Perruque is discussed. Famous example of everyday subversion, e.g. faking work, taking long lunch breaks, etc.

End of chapter presents a bunch of practical tactics for resistance.

CHAPTER THREE

Writing Styles - Ways of Operating

“the speech act is at the same time a use of language and an operation performed on it” (32).

Statistics count what is used now the ways of using.

Strategies vs. Tactics

Strategy postulates a site of power that can be claimed as one’s own.Establishment of place.

Tactics are the art of the weak in the space of the other devoid of power. Utilization of time.

I am not convinced of the use of these distinctions.

CONNECTIONS TO GAME STUDIES:

Much of game studies seems to be a technoscientific approach that is concerned with what is used rather than how it is used or what the gamer does with it.

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).

CHAPTER 1

Defends his use of “new media.”

“there occurs a displacement of the framing function of medial interfaces back onto the body from which they themselves originally sprang. It is this displacement that makes new media art ‘new’” (22).

Digitization reinvests the body as the site for preserving the differentiating function once accorded to media.

Critiques Manovich. Manovich overdetermines and overvalues cinema, situating new media as an “amplification” of cinema. This limits his theorizations.

Manovich’s historical analysis of cinema technology does not emphasize how nineteenth century pre-cinematic devices required bodily manipulation. Hansen sees this as something new media are reactivating.

Manovich sees VR as a paradox: simulated freedom and physical imprisonment. Hansen disrupts this by emphasizing what takes place, phenomenologically, within the body as a processing of action and making real.

CHAPTER 2

Virtual as a fundamentally human capacity (I think he is channeling Bergson here) to be in excess of one’s state (50-51).

Hansen so far has been issuing a pretty harsh critique of what he sees as Kittler’s vision of digitization and information being disembodied (drawing from Shannon-Weaver) and transcending the human. I am not convinced of this reading of Kittler.

Digitization reconfigures virtual as emerging from within images rather than between them as in cinema. Incorporates the virtual from within the actual. An infinite generator of images from within itself (75).

Hansen proposes a different theory of information using Donald MacKay who emphasized the context of information (Shannon reduced everything to probability and said meaning was irrelevant).

“the technical operation of a message is necessarily conditioned by the nontechnical context out of which it is selected, which is to say, the ‘range of possibile states of orientation’ of this or that particular receiver…embodiment in its entirety as the context that determines what information will be selected in a given situation” (79).

Information is essentially meaningless without a human framer. This framing must be understood as both biological and cultural contextualization.

CHAPTER 3

Uses the investigatory imaging scene from Bladerunner as an example of the digital image. Analog, two-dimensional photograph being impossibly explored and unraveled three-dimensionally.

Mitchell views digital image as a kind of manipulable photograph, Hansen sees this as reductionist.

Digital image not a referent to a real, but a data set.

Machinic vision forces a reorganization of human vision.

New media artists affectively engage and foreground the bodily dimensions of experience which arise in the face of machinic vision.

Microscope, telescope extend human vision, vision machines, however, bypass it. Is this really the case though? And what are these vision machines anyway? This chapter is definitely a bit more unclear.

Paul Virilio theorizes the possibility of technology forcing a reimagining and retooling of human perception.

New media art creates haptic space which forces us to use our bodies to see or to recognize how embodiment, spatiality, and affectivity are involved in perception.

PROBLEM: Joystick as an example of greater involvement of body (116-117), but this is not very convincing.

Prosthesis: Perception through the computer not a kind of extension of human capability but as an embodied prosthesis. “catalyst for bodily self-transformation” (121).

New media art experiment with and create new modalities through which the body can filter information.

Embodied prosthesis do not extend our senses outward but augment our own capabilities.

QUESTION: Is there really a distinction here?

PROBLEM: Hansen seems to have a rather Cartesian view of the body as ultimately just an effect of the mind. Where is the analysis of sensation?

PROBLEM 2: Where is Heidegger in all of this? Hansen is seemingly building off Heidegger’s “Question Concerning Technology” but never quite addresses how he is deploying the terminology.

PROBLEM 3: Project seems awfully ahistorical and not accounting for the rich history of production and theory around various technologies and art works that have recuperated and highlighted the body in the experiencing of various forms of media. Why is it necessary to declare that this is a “new” movement. Why not situate new media within this history?

PROBLEM 4: Perhaps this is outside of Hansen’s scope but how about power? What of institutional forms generating affective responses that are fully within and constitutive of networks of power?

PROBLEM 5: Where are the other senses? Lenoir opens the book with a foreword proclaiming Hansen as moving away from ocularcentrism, yet there is little to no interest in anything but vision.

PROBLEM 6: How is this a new philosophy if it is simply a return to Bergson?

PROBLEM 7: Hansen’s reading of Kittler seems a bit reductive. He positions Kittler as a post (anti) humanist, but post and antihumanism are two completely different things. Surely Kittler is arguing for a kind of postmedia convergence in the aftermath of digitization but he is definitely not including the human in this digitization. Hansen’s critique is that the body now becomes the medium, which is a radically different view than Kittler who would not figure the body as significant. But Kittler seems more antihumanist than posthumanist. This definitely needs clarification.

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

Biopower no longer a completely sufficient concept which can describe the way in which life is eradicated and subject to the power of death. Necropower and necropolitics terms he uses to describe how contemporary power renders life as the living dead.

State of exception is not a temporary suspension of the law, but a “permanent spatial arrangement that remains continually outside the law” (13). We are living in a state of exception.

Sovereignty has traditionally rested on the belief that the subject is autonomous. However, Mbembe’s interest is in “those figures of sovereignty whose central project is not the struggle for autonomy but the generalized instrumentalization of human existence and the material destruction of human bodies and populations” (14).

Hegel: Human negates nature and then fashions the world, in the process confronting this negativity. Human death thus becomes voluntary. The life of the spirit is the human assuming death and living with it.

Those who risk death and confront it becomes masters, others become slaves. Master is then dependent on slave. Death confronted rationally and therefore full of meaning.

Bataille: Death as absolute expenditure. Death is the principle of excess—an anti-economy. Not recuperable by rationality. Death and sexuality are taboos which the subject is formed against.

Biopower functions by dividing populations into subgroups; racism.

“Any historical account of the rise of modern terror needs to address slavery, which could be considered the first instances of biopolitical experimentation” (21).

Slave condition as triple loss: home, rights, and political status.

Slaves kept alive but in a permanent state of injury. Slave body represents a form of death-in-life (necropolitics)

Colony as state of exception where judicial order is suspended and violence is legitimized as in service of civilization. Colonial history illustrates a rationality of terror which is not an aberration but a fixture of state power.

Mbembe provides a thorough reading of the use of space in colonialism as a tool of power and domination.

War machines (30-35).

Wars of the globalization era: destruction of enemy without concern for collateral damage. Contemporary wars more similar to nomadic conflict that conflict between nation states due to quick and destructive nature and emphasis on total annihilation.

Provides adept summarization of Deleuze and Guattari war machines: complex, mutable, not totally state affiliated, appropriating, polymorphous, diffuse, capture, taxation, predation. Likens them to modern armies in Africa.

Management of the multitudes key to govermentality. “The extraction and looting of natural resources by war machines goes hand in hand with the brutal attempts to immobilize and spatially fix whole categories of people, or paradoxically, to unleash them, to force them to scatter over broad areas no longer contained by the boundaries of a territorial state” (34).

Power not so much concerned with inscribing bodies in networks of disciplinary power but engaging in massacre.

Suicide bomber as an escape of the “state of siege and occupation” (37). It is a refusal of life for everyone.

CONNECTION: Alexander Galloway and Eugene Thacker in The Exploit argue that sovereign power is characterized by “the right over death and to let live” whereas biopower is more regulative and governs “the right to make live and let die” (74). Mbembe, however, is theorizing a different articulation of biopower which is not concerned with the making and conditioning of life, but in the making of death. The difficulty is in seeing the distinction between sovereign power and necropower. Perhaps it has to do with necropower’s focus on the management of populations.

REGIMES: Sovereign Society - Disciplinary Society - State of Exception

MECHANISMS: Symbolic Violence - Biopower - Necropower

DIAGRAM: Guillotine - Prison - Colony

It seems that the historic shifts between these power paradigms has not been as clear as Foucault asserts; rather, they are indistinct and intersecting.

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.

Surfing as the sport of the control society. Emphasis not on the highly regimented system of play on the traditional football field, but the gliding and adaptive, yet restricted surfer.

“Types of machines are easily matched with each type of society—not that machines are determining, but because they express those social forms capable of generating them and using them” (6).

Interesting quote in light of Alexander Galloway’s “Allegories of Control.” Computers and games have not created the control society, but have emerged from the conditions that have been set. They were technologies perhaps designed to facilitate the function of the control society.

What then is the purpose of counter-gaming? If games embody but do not create the control society (they allegorize it), what would be the purpose of a counter-production? Certainly they create new experiences and express alternative social forms, but isn’t this not what Galloway is interested in? Counter-gaming is inevitably about installing new logics. I think the real potential however is found in the affective experience of the player not in trying to generate emancipatory algorithms. Finding the expression within the expression.

Capitalism no longer about production (which has been relegated to the Third World). Capitalism now about the product and its marketing.

PRODUCTION > PRODUCT

“what counts is not the barrier but the computer that tracks each person’s position-licit or illicit-and effects a universal modulation” (7).

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

“Neuropathology now provides the clinical instrument by which it is thought the individual can be captured at the level of this will itself” (302).

KEY POINT: Neurological apparatus not focused on giving a stimulus and observing the effects (”Lie down”, “Bend your leg”) instead it is based around instruction and injunction and then interpretation of the response with an interest in perceiving the hidden will or truth (302-305).

“responses which can be clinically deciphered at the level of the body and which one can consequently submit to a differential examination without fear of being duped by the subject who responds” (304).

Hysteria is made possible as an illness because of this shift to perceived effects rather than surface responses. Charcot pathologized hysterics.

Foucault asserts that it was the “maelstrom” and “struggle” between the medical apparatus and its subjects that “summoned” symptoms (309).

However, for hysteria to be an illness it must be stable as opposed to the unstable nature of madness (309-310).

In response Charcot develops hypnosis and suggestion.

Also, naturalized patients are needed that are not already within the medical apparatus. A “natural hysteria.” New category of the insured patient appears. “Illness is consequently intertwined with the whole economic problem of profit” (313).

Connections to religious healing in the theatricality (315).

Trauma arises as the replacement for anatomical lesion. The hidden source.

ISSUE: Foucault sees Charcot (as opposed to his student Freud) shunning any connection between sexual trauma and hysteria because it somehow undermined the or “disqualified” the process. Unclear as to why this is. Perhaps sexuality is considered psychic and not natural?

FINAL POINT: Hysteria as a form of performative resistance or “countermaneuver” in response to the “ascription of trauma.” Sexuality as a “victory cry” and not an “indecipherable remainder” (322).

Hysterics respond to the pressure of doctors and the pathologizing gaze by offering an originary source which cannot be rectified in their system. Hysterics create a new body through this discourse, the sexual body.

CONNECTION: Michael Hardt “Affective Labor” - ‘biopower from below’

Xenophanes in the sixth century first Europeans to write of the physical difference between blacks and whites. Greeks and Romans unprejudiced and did not attribute qualities to people based on skin color (27).

Chapter 4: Portuguese in the mid 15th century under Prince Henry first to really exploit the west coast of Africa and establish the Atlantic Slave Trade. Began primarily as trading for, rather than the seizing of, slaves.

Unconfirmed as to whether Columbus carried slaves with him on his first few voyages to the Caribbean, however, it is highly likely (87).

First recorded Atlantic crossing of slaves was actually west to east (89).