Jussi Parikka at Machinology is reporting on media theorist Mark Hansen’s move from a focus on media objects to a Whiteheadian focus on media processes.
A few quotes:
“Well known are the Whitehead writings of Massumi and Manning in Montreal, and of course the recent Whitehead writings of Steven Shaviro, the debates around object oriented philosophy that take a lot aboard from Whitehead, and naturally the ideas of such pioneers as Isabelle Stengers and Bruno Latour. So Hansen as well has joined this crew enthusiastic about the superject instead of subject, and the distributed field of prehensions instead of the primacy of the human body and sensory system as the focal point in aesthetics.” [. . .]
“When Shaviro asked the question of how would contemporary cultural theory look like if we had focused more on Whitehead, instead of Heidegger as the 20th century philosopher, Hansen seems to ask: how could we bend Whitehead into a media theorist? [. . .] For Hansen, the key point is how Whitehead’s perspective affords us to think about nonperceptual sensation. It gives agency to the environment instead of the focal subject effected and affected by that environment, and offers the perspective of the superject for media theory: how the individual is the end result of the environmental datum prehended by this focal point.”
While I deal more with cinema and less with trans-media networks (etc.), my use of Whitehead in Ecologies of the Moving Image is very consistent with this shift. Glad to be sharing this train with so much respectable company.
This film reminds me of my relationship to the mayas. It is a film about living in a tribe in a perfect nature with love and respect to the earth and all kind of life. Thank you for this wonderful pictures and music!
Curious to know, if you’ve read Hansen’s “Feed-Forward” (2015), what do you make of his revisioning of Whitehead’s ontology? After thoroughly critiquing the privilege W supposedly gives to concrescence and his account of perception, and dispensing all together with eternal objects (explicitly) and the divine function (implicitly, since God’s role as conveyor of relevant novelty is never mentioned directly in Hansen’s text), I’m not sure there is much Whitehead left in Hansen’s Whiteheadian media theory. Which is fine. Hansen is doing really interesting and important work in this text in an attempt to theorize 21st century media in the context of the world’s self-sensing. But it seems to me Hansen ends up just using different terms to play the role already assigned by Whitehead to eternal objects and God.
Hi Matt – I’ve browsed Hansen’s book, but not enough to know what I think just yet… I’m not wedded to Whitehead’s own language in P&R, and I also have some difficulty with “eternal objects,” so in principle I’m open to Hansen’s project. But not sure. Thanks for your thoughts, though.