Mark B. N. Hansen

Embodying technesis : technology beyond writing

Critics of contemporary culture have argued that critical theory must keep pace with technological change and, in the process, have instituted a theoretical model that restricts consideration of technologys impact on human experience to those dimensions that can be captured in language. In this wide-ranging critical study of poststructuralisms legacy to contemporary cultural studies, Mark Hansen challenges the hegemony of this model, contending that technologies fundamentally alter our sensory experience and drastically affect what it means to live as embodied human agents. Embodying Technesis examines how technological changes have rendered obsolete notions of technology as machine and as text. Voicing a sustained plea for rethinking the technological, Hansen argues that radical technological changes--from the steam engine to the internet and virtual reality--have fundamentally altered conditions of perception and, in so doing, changed the prevailing structures of modern experience. By emphasizing the dynamic interaction between technologies and bodies, between the diffuse effects of technological shifts and the collective embodied experiences of contemporary agents, Hansen opens the path for a radical revision of our understanding of the technological. Mark Hansen is Assistant Professor of English, Princeton University.

The Cambridge Companion to Merleau-Ponty

Introduction Taylor Carman and Mark B. N. Hansen 1. Merleau-Ponty and the epistemological picture Charles Taylor 2. Sensation, judgment, and the phenomenal mind Taylor Carman 3. Seeing things in Merleau-Ponty Sean Dorrance Kelly 4. Motives, reasons and causes Mark A. Wrathall 5. Merleau-Ponty and recent cognitive science Hubert L. Dreyfus 6. The silent, limping body of philosophy Richard Shusterman 7. Merleau-Ponty and the touch of Malebranche Judith Butler 8. A phenomenology of life Renaud Barbaras 9. The embryology of the (in)visible Mark B. N. Hansen 10. Merleau-Pontys existential conception of science Joseph Rouse 11. Between philosophy and art Jonathan Gilmore 12. Understanding the engaged philosopher Lydia Goehr 13. Thinking politics Claude Lefort.

Feed-forward : on the future of twenty-first-century media

Even as media in myriad forms increasingly saturate our lives, we nonetheless tend to describe our relationship to it in terms from the twentieth century: we are consumers of media, choosing to engage with it. In Feed-Forward, Mark B. N. Hansen shows just how outmoded that way of thinking is: media is no longer separate from us but has become an inescapable part of our very experience of the world. Engaging deeply with the speculative empiricism of philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, Hansen reveals how new media call into play elements of sensibility that deeply affect human selfhood without in any way belonging to the human. From social media to datamining to new sensor technologies, media in the twenty-first century work largely outside the realm of perceptual consciousness, yet at the same time inflect our every sensation. Understanding that paradox, Hansen shows, offers us a chance to put forward a radically new vision of human becoming, one that enables us to reground the human in a non-anthropocentric view of the world and our experience in it.

The Time of Affect, or Bearing Witness to Life

Upon entering the gallery, you catch sight of threewall-mountedplasma monitors, placed side-by-side, on which are displayed the faces of three middle-aged individuals: a woman on each side and in the middle, a man (fig. 1). You gradually approach this grouping of monitors until you are several feet away; you plant your feet and focus in on the face on the left, that of an Asian woman (fig. 2). You look intently at this image for perhaps a minute or so; as far as you can tell the face shows signs of some neutral emotional state, as if the woman, not quite certain of what she is looking at (is it meant to be you?), were struggling to get a fix on it. More striking than the expression itself, however, is the fact that it doesn’t seem to be changing in anyway, and, indeed, youfindyourself hard-pressed toperceive any movement whatsoever in this allegedly moving image. Somewhat befuddled, you step about a foot to the right and fix on the white, unshaven, slightly graying, male face in the middle. Like the woman you just encountered, this face displays a neutral expression; yet, in this case, it is one that indicates reflection about something personal and a certain obliviousness to its surroundings (fig. 3). Again, however, having registered the significance of the expression, you are struck by the odd stasis of the image; though it is clearly moving in time, as the occasional blink or twitch betrays, you can discern no other significant movement or change in the facial expression. Stepping still another foot to your right, you now fix on the second female face, a white, curly-haired woman (fig. 4). Not surprisingly, youundergo a similar experience, though this time you pay less attention to the neutral expression itself, to thewoman’s sideways glance and slightlypursed lips, and focus your attention ondiscerning even the slightest hintof change in the image. After intense concentration over the span of several minutes,

Merleau-Ponty and Recent Cognitive Science

In opposition to mainline cognitive science, which assumes that intelligent behavior must be based on representations in the mind or brain, Merleau-Ponty holds that the most basic sort of intelligent behavior, skillful coping, can and must be understood without recourse to any type of representation. He marshals convincing phenomenological evidence that higher primates and human beings learn to act skillfully without acquiring mental representations of the skill domain and of their goals. He also saw that no brain model available at the time he wrote could explain how this was possible. I argue that now, however, there are models of brain function that show how skills could be acquired and exercised without mind or brain representations. THE FAILURE OF REPRESENTATIONALIST MODELS OF THE MIND The cognitivist, Merleau-Ponty’s intellectualist opponent, holds that, as the learner improves through practice, he abstracts and interiorizesmore andmore sophisticated rules. There is no phenomenological or empirical evidence that convincingly supports this view, however, and, as Merleau-Ponty points out, the flexibility, transferability, and situational sensitivity of skills makes the intellectualist account implausible.

Emergence and embodiment : new essays on second-order systems theory

Emerging in the 1940s, the first cybernetics—the study of communication and control systems—was mainstreamed under the names artificial intelligence and computer science and taken up by the social sciences, the humanities, and the creative arts. In Emergence and Embodiment , Bruce Clarke and Mark B. N. Hansen focus on cybernetic developments that stem from the second-order turn in the 1970s, when the cyberneticist Heinz von Foerster catalyzed new thinking about the cognitive implications of self-referential systems. The crucial shift he inspired was from first-order cybernetics’ attention to homeostasis as a mode of autonomous self-regulation in mechanical and informatic systems, to second-order concepts of self-organization and autopoiesis in embodied and metabiotic systems. The collection opens with an interview with von Foerster and then traces the lines of neocybernetic thought that have followed from his work. In response to the apparent dissolution of boundaries at work in the contemporary technosciences of emergence, neocybernetics observes that cognitive systems are operationally bounded, semi-autonomous entities coupled with their environments and other systems. Second-order systems theory stresses the recursive complexities of observation, mediation, and communication. Focused on the neocybernetic contributions of von Foerster, Francisco Varela, and Niklas Luhmann, this collection advances theoretical debates about the cultural, philosophical, and literary uses of their ideas. In addition to the interview with von Foerster, Emergence and Embodiment includes essays by Varela and Luhmann. It engages with Humberto Maturana’s and Varela’s creation of the concept of autopoiesis, Varela’s later work on neurophenomenology, and Luhmann’s adaptations of autopoiesis to social systems theory. Taken together, these essays illuminate the shared commitments uniting the broader discourse of neocybernetics. Contributors . Linda Brigham, Bruce Clarke, Mark B. N. Hansen, Edgar Landgraf, Ira Livingston, Niklas Luhmann, Hans-Georg Moeller, John Protevi, Michael Schiltz, Evan Thompson, Francisco J. Varela, Cary Wolfe

The Silent, Limping Body of Philosophy

In the field of Western philosophy, Maurice Merleau-Ponty is something like the patron saint of the body. Although La Mettrie, Diderot, Nietzsche, and Foucault have also passionately championed the bodily dimension of human life, none can match the bulk of rigorous, systematic, and persistent argument that Merleau-Ponty provides to prove the bodys primacy in human experience and meaning. With tireless eloquence that almost seems to conquer by its massive unrelenting flow, he insists that the body is not only the crucial source of all perception and action, but also the core of our expressive capability and thus the ground of all language and meaning. Paradoxically, while celebrating the bodys role in expression, Merleau-Ponty typically characterizes it in terms of silence. The body, he writes in Phenomenology of Perception, constitutes “the tacit cogito, ” “the silent cogito, ” the “unspoken cogito .” As our “primary subjectivity,” it is “the consciousness which conditions language,” but itself remains a “silent consciousness” with an “inarticulate grasp of the world” ( PP 461-3/402-4/468-70). Forming “the background of silence” ( S 58/46) that is necessary for language to emerge, the body, as gesture, is also already “a tacit language” ( S 59/47) and the ground of all expression: “every human use of the body is already primordial expression ” ( S 84/67).

Sensation, Judgment, and the Phenomenal Field

Merleau-Pontys interconnected critiques of empiricism and intellectualism run like a double helix through the pages of Phenomenology of Perception . In the decades since its publication in 1945, philosophical and psychological theories of perception have continued to take for granted empiricist and intellectualist models and metaphors, although their respective claims to preeminence have tended to swing to and fro in unpredictable ways. As a result, although the current state of play in the philosophy of mind for us today differs widely from what it was for Merleau-Ponty in the middle of the last century, neither would he find it altogether unrecognizable. His objection to the empiricist concept of sensation (or “sense data” or “qualia”), for example, is likely to strike contemporary readers as familiar and plausible, thanks in part to arguments advanced in a roughly kindred spirit by philosophers such as Ludwig Wittgenstein, J. L. Austin, Gilbert Ryle, Wilfrid Sellars, and Thomas Kuhn. To launch an attack on intellectualism as Merleau-Ponty does, by contrast, might look more like tilting at windmills, or beating a dead rationalist horse, or perhaps just failing, understandably enough, to anticipate the cognitive revolution in linguistics and psychology that took place after his death in 1961.

Communication as Interface or Information Exchange? A Reply to Richard Rushton

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