shane denson, post cinematic bodies – reading
shane denson, post-cinematic bodies
2,676 wordsbam! so it's actually a sociological theory and not a phenomenal one?
entry kittler → merleau-ponty · passage glitch → correlative possibility → mediality · afterimage sociological theory / phenomenal theory.
denson says that kittler the main german philosopher of technology used foucaults concept of the archive which is about how certain ways of saying something overdetermine the possible mode of interpretation of any cultural period ("the sayable"), "hence kittler’s broadening of it to other forms of mediation, such that it is no longer the condition only of the sayable but also the condition of the sensible itself across its various modalities." (p.92)
that kittler applied foucault's critique to the sensible realm and botched it in the process, essentially taking it away from an open discourse and into a negative determination of the history of technology as something stuck in a process whereby the digital can only interfere with our sensations if it masks the processes underneath, or in his words through mersch as "giving way to an apocalyptic end of history in the computer".
this supposed contrivance leads kittler to say that all forms of digital media are "eyewash" or basically that they obscure the hardware/computationalism underneath any piece of media, and denson starts having a problem with this, naturally, due to the way it overly demystifies the process of vision, perspective or integrated involvement inherent in our interaction with digital media.
denson responds with the idea that kittler creates a fully "positive" (overdefined) theory of technology in regards to aesthetics and that if he only read merleau-ponty instead he wouldve devised a theory where the flesh of the subject itself is constantly phenomenologically incomplete at experience itself and that technology augmenting the body only happens only because of our own (eternally) incomplete relation to it, and that calling digital media aesthetically superficial instead of something that mediates our experience is then not very useful for the history of philosophy of tech in germany, and that also, the schism between the visual and tactile is therefore technical, and a key to our body's self-exteriorization.
then he ties what ponty says (p.96) about us being unable to simultaneously experience our own actions on our body and the felt action of our own actions on our body as a glitch that reveals our own subjectivity's indetermination and that technology comes in to basically mediate that relationship forever. he even extends this to deepfakes and has this whole line about how even if they are a form of gender-generating but also gender-dominating violence that theres an aspect of them that produces a re-engineering of the body within newly socially typified visuals.
he goes on this slightly irrelevant and somewhat distracting but maybe for him necessary tangent trying to prove that this isnt a form of racialized violence where the white skin is the central modus around which the critique is oriented. i believe part of the reason why he's doing this is because the term "flesh" has a lot of history that needs to be contextualized, if not of course for the fact that it is used instead of other terms partially due to how the concept itself needs to explain how it is partially an augment for a technical substratum, rather than a racialized tissue through which the world is metastized.
the focus of this reading, primarily and above all is to figure out whether his idea of the glitch, and with it, this earlier mentioned "sensible-transcendental ground for exteriorization as such" serves as a substantial theory for mediated interfacing within a digital realm or whether it serves mostly as a backhanded analogy for "anything that the digital medium contains that somehow apriori alters experience but mostly can be recognized as a pretty lame and predictable fundamental aspect of said medium that doesn't actually do much outside of having itself be a particular way" (spoiler: it's mostly the latter because he never gives us a phenomenal theory of glitchhood on its own)
starting off the reading with "the body here experiences a glitch of its own", so for him corporeality has an apriori technical principle already ingrained in it, as mentioned earlier, and here it shows up as an actual physiological layer.
"while a few bits out of place here or there may not derail the postcinematic apparatus altogether, its images are everywhere threatened with glitches and other malfunctions—many of which will not be perceived but may still be operative in terms of materially shaping our correlative possibilities." (p.32)
denson has a very hard time forming this theory because on the one hand it has to be invisible to every operation so that it contains a transcendent form and actually encounter a horizon within phenomenology aka to act as a force the way denson wants it to, but on the other hand, denson suffers from having to turn this concept into something both legible as an actual mark on the sensible and even worse, operational as a theory, as in, when you fuze it with the algorithm or the network, you get changes in "correlative possibility" as prefaced in the intro, aka, "seemingly unquestionable alignments of subjects and objects that sit between a calculated confusion of statistical and phenomenological [experiences]" or (paraphrased) "grafts that change the underlying metabolic pathways of the environments that we experience as intentional" (p.35)
so the point is, denson needs glitches to exist concretely, and here's how he conceives of that: "disorientations of digital lens flares or deepfake videos" vs for him the loss of old aesthetic forms "flicker film", but then also needs them to be ways that they shape our phenomenology. problem is, in chapter two where this theory mostly makes headway, he doesn't connect what glitches are with what they do, he just lays them out separately. the problem is twofold, first, he uses mersch's negative media theory to argue that mediality is about encountering a moment where a malfunction can re-configure an object and reveal parts of it (and thus in a sense, degrading what it already was, or only ever showing that it was nothing other than this search?
both conclusions seem a bit annoying). anyhow, this use then obscures the way he solves it through ponty's "i can never both feel myself touching myself and feel touched by myself when i feel myself having touched myself (really botched paraphrase here by me)" sequence, because as an analogy it does explain the "schism" part of this, but not the "glitch" part of it. of course, denson's secret mission the whole time is to explain how augmentivity and changes in sensibility through seeking out a negative form of mediality is actually productive towards subjectivity and that's kind of the whole hinge of everything he's doing, but without a categorical deployment of every phenomenological way this happens, he never manages to extract what this theory could be.
a short experimental hinge to nudge in this direction without ruining the reading format: a real glitch in the tactility of the body is its inability to look outside itself:
imagine if every human body had actual third person mode like in a video game) but then this would alienate the body from its own experience of its own senses. then, imagine a "glitch" where sometimes the vision of the body starts to interfere with our own embodiment and we lose, say, the ability to feel pain temporarily, or start to feel the enviornment around the spectator's "eyes" as if it was ghost-tactality. now, imagine algorithms come in to mess with this experience.
the question is: when did the glitch arrive, in the body's ability to go spectator mode, in it's assumed inability to go spectator mode, in our ability to make spectator mode a reality, in the phantom-limb of the spectator, or in the algorithm that turns small phenomenal experiences into intentional microcalibrations? or wait, but doesnt denson have one more algorithmic theory, that of course being, that the real glitches arrive in the micro-correspondences "within" the existing sense-interface that already exists at the last instance (the one say where full algorithmic possibilities already reshape our enviornment and intentions? bam! so it's actually a sociological theory and not a phenomenal one?
denson could have had a good theory if he allowed himself to transcendentalize what glitches are supposed to do, after already phenomenologizing only the aspect of it that is already present within a basic media epistemology, or in other words, if encountering a glitch is a part of the way that for him technology is built, but isn't really something that has degrees or limits or intensities or nuances or developments within actually interacting with media, or if those developments are empirical substrata of cultural developments like deepfakes, then his analysis depends on an empirical stratum that largely dictates what glitches are supposed to do, whilst pulling what they already are outside of existing literature, so he isn't honing in on all possible contradictions.
"while the glitch’s visual appearance effects a deformation of the spatial categories of figure and ground, it does so on the basis of a temporal mis match between human perception and algorithmic processing. the latter, operating at a scale measured in nanoseconds, by far outstrips the window of perception and subjectivity, so that by the time the subject shows up to perceive the glitch, the “object“ (so to speak) has already acted upon our presubjective sensibilities and moved on."
it's funny because, on the one hand he points out how the whole job of a glitch is to apparently move past the immediate recognizable and to create presubjective correlative possibility, but then on another hand, apparently even if glitches create a suspension between expected objects and subjects, figure and ground, motion and space, maybe even possibility and reality, a part of how they (in this context, deepfakes) work is by intentional suspension of the "error-side" of a glitch (that is, recognition that as a glitch it participates in our roleplay that it isnt one, yet our awareness that it is one?):
"there’s something telling about the formulation, which hinges the success of the deepfake not on a suspension of disbelief—a suppression of active resistance— but on a suspension of belief—seemingly, a more casual form of affirmation—whereby the flickering reversals of figure and ground, or of subject and object, are flattened out into a smooth indifference" to further point to this dilemma, he then compares glitches to lens flares as "something both to be noticed and avoided", clearly in line with his argument about intentionality, but clearly distracting from the premise of a negative image of mediality, even if very much in the spirit of what a medium is supposed to do.
theres also this other bit about mediums that happen early on, the idea that the term media comes from medium as in spirit medium, and that it originally referred to how something inaccessible can actually cause access or change perception, and that medium as a concept should extend far more than to just a computer but has been collapsed in this mode where the digital fundamentally encompasses everything mediatic today (not to say mediating, since denson warns us we're focusing on the "whatness" of media and not the "thisness", so then mediatic would be "spirit mediums + what technology has done to the concept + "what is non-mediating about a medium that makes it a medium anyways?").
so therefore, one would think, that a glitch is both predictable (it does these things and we know what things its messing with) yet unknowable (we literally cannot realize exactly where its messing with us, not even after it does it), yet it actually appears that historically spirit mediums were much the opposite, for example in the case of helen duncan where the british military feared her "spirit guides" would leak classified state secrets about the upcoming d-day invasion, after she allegedly revealed the sinking of a british battleship before it was officially announced, through some type of "ectoplasmic interference" (that allows spiritual forces to extend through physical matter). of course, not literally that her knowledge or manifestation of the knowledge of the sinking is or isnt definitively related to her spirit work or any particular mediality, but then again, it doesn't really matter and that's part of the point. (also, isn't it curious that he never goes down the spirit medium line when he's trying to argue a superior theory of mediality through the apparent existence of a broader theory of mediality?)
it's funny, because the likeliest explanation of duncan's "leak" was ordinary social transmission — families of the dead had been privately notified before the public announcement, so she got hunted down because she had faster transmission, not a superior kind of transmission (much like algorithms, wouldnt you say denson?)
there is one other point where a problem occurs, and that is in t**he figure/ground argument.** denson says that in cinema you could shift attention among figures, and from figures to the ground — screen, projector, the apparatus enabling them, yet a digital glitch refuses to be either because it stands out figurally *as the appearance of the substrate itself*. of course, this is true about computer, but thats partially because it obscures labour, or as schaffer says, "claims that certain systems can mimic, or even exhibit, intelligence are sustained by social hierarchies of head and hand. minds are known because these social conventions are known.", and of course, the labour of processing and calculating are hidden, or in the case of ai, literally reintroduced as a simulated bubble where you have the choice to feel re-integrated into the computation as if it is an optional segment of labour.
but away from politics and towards epistemology, the "integration" of the post-cinematic could reveal a re-integration of hardware, or a despectacularization. take the ai-bubble, then imagine a future speculative phone, made of glass, that, if you want, could point to which pieces of its hardware are working at which point. say you're running a heavy application, it can point to, signal, color the processor. sure, it's an aesthetic experience, right? (of course, i'm not saying that it reveals labour, that was the point with ai-code bubbles too, its another spectacularization)
of course, there are other aspects to this critique too. the other one is that neural networks change the enviornment around how they are perceived, so that at another level, a future instance of a technology is also your ability to see it (for example, an advertisement now mediates how you see faces), and denson of course makes this argument plenty of times. this however seems largely disconnected from whether glitches coincide with the integration of the sensible-interfaced layer, and more to do with how things are organized. he does, however, have an answer for this too: "discorrelated images are not even bound to appear to us as visual phenomena in the first place in order to exert a material force on us." (p.109). the point is that images are *continuously* under threat of malfunction, and that he glitch isn't an accident that befalls the digital image but rather, an availability-to-glitch is its normal condition.
moving on from chapter 2 and straight into 5 (otherwise done for a lack of glitch-related discourses, except for this detour in chapter 4 where a body makes a "glitch" by misstepping and correcting a step whereas a robot contains a lack of a glitch by efficiently optimizing its routing - making a curious but dubious appearance given we've largely been talking about digital media so switching to corporeality and cybernetics would be unnecessary), there is only one real final mention of glitching and that happens on page 207: "it is important to note that the techniques and technologies of metabolic capitalism are constantly being refined, and the gaps and seams I have noted are subject to closure—which is to say that the image economy’s captivation and capitalization of metabolic energy can and will be made more efficient, possibly even immune to critical registration."
not only does denson not give us an interesting enough theory of glitches, but he also basically says that corporations will optimize away whatever remainder of mediality they could offer us. great!