The time of affect, or bearing witness to life

Critical Inquiry

Volumn 30, Issue 3, 2004, Pages 584-626

  Hansen, Mark ^a  

^a PRINCETON UNIVERSITY   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 61249195479     PISSN: 00931896     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/421163     Document Type: Review

References (63)

1. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London, 1962), p. 433; hereafter abbreviated as PP.
2. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis, 1989), pp. 179-80.
3. See Mark Hansen, "Affect as Medium, or the 'Digital-Facial-Image, '" Journal of Visual Culture 2 (Aug. 2003): 205-28
4. and, more generally, New Philosophy for New Media (Cambridge, Mass., 2004), chap. 5 and esp. chap. 7, the conclusions of which this essay builds upon and expands.
5. Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, trans. Nancy Margaret Paul and W. Scott Palmer (New York, 1991), p. 36.
6. Quoted in Leslie Camhi, "Very Visible ... and Impossible to Find," ARTNews 98 (Summer 1999): 144.
7. Quoted in Amy Taubin, "Douglas Gordon," in Spellbound: Art and Film, ed. Philip Dodd (London, 1996), p. 70.
8. Deleuze, Cinema 2, p. 210.
9. See Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, trans. Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New York, 1994).
10. See Antonio Damasio, Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain (New York, 1994)
11. and The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness (New York, 1999);
12. Joseph LeDoux, The Emotional Brain: The Mysterious Underpinnings of Emotional Life (New York, 1996);
13. Gerald Edelman, Bright Air, Brilliant Fire: On the Matter of the Mind (New York, 1992);
14. and especially Francisco J. Varela, Principles of Biological Autonomy (New York, 1979)
15. and Varela, Eleanor Rosch, and Evan Thompson, The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience (Cambridge, Mass., 1991).
16. To date, Stiegler's corpus comprises three books and a handful of articles, as well as an important interview with Derrida. See Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time 1: The Fault of Epimetheus, trans. Richard Beardsworth and George Collins (Stanford, Calif., 1999)
17. La Technique et le temps, 3 vols. (Paris, 1994-2001)
18. "The Discrete Image," in Jacques Derrida and Steigler, Echographies of Television: Filmed Interviews, trans. Jennifer Bajorek (Cambridge, 2002)
19. and "The Time of Cinema: On the 'New World' and 'Cultural Exception,'" trans. Beardsworth, Tekhnema 4 (1998): 62-113;
20. hereafter abbreviated "T." Stiegler has also written an important article on Derrida, " Derrida and Technology: Fidelity at the Limits of Deconstruction and the Prosthesis of Faith," trans. Beardsworth, in Jacques Derrida and the Humanities: A Critical Reader, ed. Tom Cohen (Cambridge, 2001), pp. 238-70.
21. This reading is developed most explicitly in La Technique et le temps, vol. 2, chap. 4, and is usefully summarized in "T," pp. 68-76.
22. See Stiegler, "Derrida and Technology."
23. Here, Stiegler is reading Husserl through Heidegger's notion of historicity and thrownness and, even more immediately, through Derrida's own reading of the function of tradition in Husserl's The Origin of Geometry.
24. See Friedrich Kittler, introduction to Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz (Stanford, Calif., 1999), pp. 1-19.
25. For a criticism of Kittler's technical determinism, see Hansen, "Cinema beyond Cybernetics, or How to Frame the Digital Image," Configurations 10 (Winter 2002): 51-90.
26. I borrow the term "structural coupling" from autopoietic theory, where it designates the correlation of a closed autopoietic system (the living) with an environment or with other systems. Such correlation is the vehicle for the evolution of the system. See Humberto Maturana and Varela, The Tree of Knowledge: The Biological Roots of Human Understanding (Boston, 1987)
27. and Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living (Dordrecht, 1980).
28. Edmund Husserl, The Phenomenology of Inner Time Consciousness;
29. quoted in Varela, "The Specious Present: A Neurophenomenology of Time Consciousness," in Naturalizing Phenomenology: Issues in Contemporary Phenomenology and Cognitive Science, ed. Jean Petitot et al. (Stanford, Calif., 1999), p. 289.
30. On the nobility of vision and its rootedness in the embodied sensory modalities of touch and hearing, see the wonderful essay by Hans Jonas, "The Nobility of Sight: A Study in the Phenomenology of the Senses," The Phenomenon of Life: Toward a Philosophical Biology (Chicago, 1982), pp. 135-56.
31. I owe this particular understanding of the distinction between image memory and habit memory to Raymond Ruyer, "There Is No Subconscious: Embryogenesis and Memory," trans. R. Scott Walker, Diogenes 142 (Summer 1998): 24-46.
32. I discuss Ruyer's distinction, and his work more generally, in New Philosophy for New Media, chap. 2 and esp. chap. 5.
33. For an excellent account of contemporary media technology, see John Johnston, "Machinic Vision," Critical Inquiry 26 (Autumn 1999): 27-48.
34. See also Kittler, "Computer Graphics: A Semi-Technical Introduction," trans. Sara Ogger, The Grey Room, no. 2 (Winter 2001): 30-45;
35. Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media (Cambridge, Mass., 2001);
36. and Paul Virilio, The Vision-Machine, trans. Julie Rose (Bloomington, Ind., 1994).
37. David Wills advances a forceful critique of Stiegler's valorization of cinema as a valorization of the cinematic convention of realism; see David Wills, "Techneology or the Discourse of Speed," in Prosthetics: Carnal, Assembly, Extant, ed. Marquand Smith and Joanne Morra (forthcoming).
38. See Kittler, introduction to Gramophone, Film, Typewriter;
39. see also Kittler, "There Is No Software" and "Protected Mode," Literature, Media, Information Systems, ed. Johnston (Amsterdam, 1997), pp. 147-55.
40. Derrida, "Speech and Phenomena," "Speech and Phenomena" and Other Essays on Husserl's Theory of Signs, trans. David B. Allison (Evanston, Ill., 1973), p. 65. Here it is important that Derrida does not, as Stiegler does, simply conflate retention and secondary memory. His point is rather that both involve the modification of nonperception - and thus that there is no such thing as a perceptual instant or moment of full presence - but that they do so in different ways. Combined with Stiegler's insistence on the technical specificity of différance and his correlation of it with the real time mediation of our contemporary global televisual system, this distinction calls on us to identify the now with the interval specific to human synthesis and thus (in contradistinction to Stiegler's own conclusions) to distinguish retention from tertiary memory.
41. For the Derrida-Stiegler debate, see Derrida and Stiegler, "Echographies of Television." For a helpful and insightful critical commentary on this debate as a missed encounter, see Beardsworth, "Towards a Critical Culture of the Image," review of Echographies de la télévision by Derrida and Stiegler, Tekhnema 4 (Spring 1998), http://tekhnema.free.fr/4beardsworth.html
42. This, obviously, is a living now that differs from Husserl's precisely because it incorporates the technical at its very core. In this sense, today's technologies prove the validity of Derrida's deconstruction of the voice and the living present, but in a way that strips it of its bite. Indeed, as Stiegler's project maintains (following André Leroi-Gourhan), human life has always coevolved with technology, even if this only becomes strikingly apparent today; see Stiegler, Technics and Time 1.
43. Following Simondon, we can understand a transductive relation as one in which neither term exists independently of the relation; see Gilbert Simondon, "The Genesis of the Individual," in Incorporations, ed. Jonathan Crary and Sanford Kwinter (New York, 1993), pp. 296-319;
44. see also Simondon, L'Individuation psychique et collective (Paris, 1989).
45. "To analyse time is not to follow out the consequences of a pre-established conception of subjectivity, it is to gain access, through time, to its concrete structure" (PP, p. 410).
46. "Subjectivity is not in time because it takes up or lives through time, and merges with the cohesion of a life" (PP, p. 422). "Time's 'synthesis' is a transitional synthesis, the action of a life which unfolds, and there is no way of bringing it about other than by living that life, there is no seat of time; time bears itself on and launches itself afresh" (PP, p. 423). In this respect, the links between subjectivity, time, and life anticipate Merleau-Ponty's later understanding of life as the introduction of negativity into being in the La Nature lectures. Time represents the fundamental existential modality of life insofar as this latter remains constitutively incomplete. "Past and future exist only too unmistakably in the world, they exist in the present, and what being itself lacks in order to be of the temporal order, is the not-being of elsewhere, formerly and tomorrow" (PP, p. 412). "The past, therefore, is not past, nor the future future. It exists only when a subjectivity is there to disrupt the plenitude of being in itself, to adumbrate a perspective, and introduce non-being into it" (PP, p. 421). The only difference between this analysis and that of La Nature is the displacement of the term subjectivity in favor of life and the flesh. See Merleau-Ponty, La Nature, trans. Robert Vallier, ed. Dominique Séglard (Evanston, Ill., 2003).
47. I discuss Merleau-Ponty's conception of life in these lectures in Hansen, "The Embryology of the (In) Visible," in The Cambridge Companion to Merleau-Ponty, ed. Taylor Carman and Hansen (Cambridge, 2004), chap. 9.
48. See also Renaud Barbaras, "A Phenomenology of Life," in ibid.
49. But for Merleau-Ponty's criticism of Heidegger - that his privileging of the future, insofar as it relies on a decision, must, in contradistinction to his thinking, be rooted in the living present - see n. 38. With this argument, Merleau-Ponty denies the transcendence operated by historical time in Being and Time and makes good on his own claim that the "solution of all problems of transcendence" can be found in "the thickness of the pre-objective present" (PP, p. 433).
50. Varela, "The Specious Present," p. 296.
51. Simondon, L'Individuation psychique et collective, p. 108; translation mine.
52. It is precisely this reduction of subjectivity (and perception) to memory that I term technesis. See Hansen, Embodying "Technesis": Technology beyond Writing (Ann Arbor, Mich., 2000), chap. 4, for a critique of this reduction in the work of Derrida. In my current work, however, I draw the terms of the reduction differently because I now understand subjectivity as affectivity to be distinct from both memory and perception.
53. See Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York, 1981), pp. 76-77.
54. As posed by Salvatore Settis and Michael Roth of the Getty Institute, reported in John Walsh, "Emotions in Extreme Time: Bill Viola's Passions Project," in Bill Viola: The Passions, ed. Walsh (Los Angeles, 2003), p. 31; hereafter abbreviated "E."
55. Bill Viola, "A Conversation," interview with Hans Belting, in Bill Viola, p. 200; hereafter abbreviated "C."
56. Stern developed his conception on the basis of infant-parent observation, but he does extend it, in a very interesting analysis, to art and specifically to photography; see Daniel Stern, The Interpersonal World of the Infant: A View from Psychoanalysis and Developmental Psychology (New York, 1985), chap. 4.
57. At least according to Varela, who puts this threshold at 0.3 seconds. See Varela, "The Specious Present."
58. On the coevolution of the human and technology, see André Leroi-Gourhan, Gesture and Speech, trans. Anna Bostock Berger (Cambridge, Mass., 1993), esp. part 1. Leroi-Gourhan's work forms the basis for Stiegler's own argument concerning the intrinsic correlation of the human and technology in Technics and Time 1, esp. pp. 134-79.
59. Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (New York, 1999), p. 110; hereafter abbreviated RA.
60. See Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (London, 1929).
61. I borrow the notion of being out-of-phase with oneself as well as the concept of transduction from Simondon; see Simondon, L'Individu et sa genèse physico-biologique (Grenoble, 1995); the introduction to this text is available in English; see note 29.
62. See Heidegger, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, trans. Richard Taft (Bloomington, Ind., 1990).
63. Peter Sellars, "Bodies of Light," in Bill Viola, pp. 158-59.