From Affect to Affectivity: Mark B. N. Hansen’s Organismic Posthumanism

This chapter examines Mark B. N. Hansen’s organismic construction of technological posthumanism, particularly as it is presented in his three key texts, Embodying Technesis, New Philosophy for New Media, and Bodies in Code.1 While the subject matter of these texts frequently overlaps, the primary focus of each nonetheless unfolds distinct components of Hansen’s expanding argument for a view of the technological posthuman that simultaneously avows the radical (as opposed to the relative) exteriority of technology and the primacy of embodiment: Embodying Technesis unpacks the “putting-into-discourse” of technology as it has taken place across otherwise divergent strains of contemporary theory, showing how this action disavows technology’s material specificity; New Philosophy for New Media insists that there is an affective topology of human perception that is fundamentally tactile, encompassing vision such that the latter relates to a primordial “haptics” that grounds it; and Bodies in Code synthesizes these perspectives, insisting more strongly than either previous book that technology is bound up in human embodiment itself and that we can thus best understand human technogenesis through a rereading of the operational perspective invoked by certain theorists of autopoiesis. Collectively, then, Hansen’s oeuvre seeks to give “a robust account of technology in its irreducible materiality that exists beyond discourse and representation,”2 while also evincing an “‘originary’ coupling of the human and the technical” that grounds experience as such and that “can only be known through its effects.”3

Put simply, I argue in this chapter that Hansen’s perspective is ultimately haunted by the very representational logic that it moves against. In this, I do not repudiate Hansen’s argument as such but rather reject one of its central underlying implications, namely, that the extradiscursive materiality of technology might be accessed, linguistically, without attaching a meaning to it that is fundamentally foreign to this materiality. Such access, then, generates a bias that is naturalized through the notion of technology per se because the latter masks its contingency. In particular, I argue that this bias is already nascent in Embodying Technesis as the concept of technesis itself and that it reaches full maturity in the organismic perspective that grounds the title term of Bodies in Code. To this end, the chapter begins with an examination of technesis as it is initially developed by Hansen, demonstrating the necessity from which it sprang, the contribution that Hansen’s reading makes, and its ultimate limitations. From here, the chapter articulates Hansen’s argument for an affective topology of the senses, corroborating the increased importance of digital technologies in this perspective through a brief comparison of Robert Lazzarini’s skulls (as read by Hansen) and my own piece Sound. Finally, this comparison pivots the chapter toward a critical analysis of Hansen’s robust account of primary tactility, an analysis that concludes the chapter by agreeing with most of Hansen’s assertions but also by insisting that they remain within the (representational) logic of language. In closing, I argue that what is accomplished by Hansen’s putting-into-discourse of technesis is, paradoxically, a restaging of the constitutive ambivalence of deconstruction that shows the latter to be a promising premise for specifying the relation between humans and technology.

Embodying Technesis came into print in the midst of what Hansen identifies as a shift in science and technology studies, moving toward a paradigm that gives precedence to concrete experiential effects over abstract theoretical significance. This change was necessitated by the dramatic disjunction existing between technologists and theorists of technology, aptly summarized by N. Katherine Hayles:

From the point of view of the technologist, the critical theorist knows nothing about the workings of technology and demonstrates it by talking in terms so abstract that material objects are vaporized into mere words; from the point of view of the theorist, the technologist is so stuck on nuts and bolts that he remains oblivious of the fact that these objects are never simply present in themselves, being always already enframed by cultural assumptions and mediated by discursive practices.4

Thus, with the aim of conjoining material practice with theoretical sophistication, the conventional “top-down ‘diffusion’ model” of analysis has been increasingly replaced by translative approaches that attend to the minutiae of everyday activity.5 As emblematic of this perspective, Hansen cites Isaac Asimov’s famous suggestion that the lived experience of modern man has been more dramatically shaped by practical inventions, such as the automobile, than it has by more (discursively) consequential shifts in scientific knowledge, such as Einstein’s theory of relativity. What is most important to attend to, in this view, are thus not the major events, ruptures, or characteristics that are readily available as objective knowledge in a historical macronarrative but rather the complex relations that contextualize these events and compose the ground for the narrative itself.6

In principle, this is a shift that Hansen agrees with wholeheartedly so that the task he finds currently at hand is to specify, precisely, the ways that everyday technologies profoundly impact our lives, rather than simply insisting that they do so. However, in the case of technology, this is not so simply accomplished because (for Hansen) “technologies underlie and inform our basic ‘ways of seeing’ the world”:7 the ways in which our daily activities presuppose technology function to foreclose the possibility of analyzing them in isolation. As a result, Hansen insists that “despite its irreducible concreteness, technology’s experiential impact must accordingly be considered to be first and foremost indirect and holist.”8 In short, to the extent that technologies structure perception, they also elude it, resulting in the tremendous difficulty—perhaps even the impossibility—of thinking technology in its own terms.

For Hansen, this evasion not only explains the tendency to think technology abstractly but also (in a related way) leads to what he calls the “culturalist assimilation of technology.”9 In the case of the latter, Hansen insists that all too frequently, the (in his view, true) observation that technologies cannot exist outside social systems is conflated with the (in his view, false) claim that they can “be captured by the interpretive tools germane to such systems.”10 Thus Hansen does not take issue with the culturalist position that understands technology to be part of a complex social network, but he is resolute that technology is also more than this, and radically so.

Indeed, it is precisely this radicality that is at stake in Hansen’s overall project, as one of the motivating factors in his writing is the claim that twentieth-century theorists—“from Freud and Heidegger to Lacan, Derrida, and Deleuze and Guattari”11—relativize the exteriority of technology, subordinating it to the more central overriding theoretical purposes of each of their intellectual projects. In this, these theorists interpret the “host of concrete materializations through which technologies impact our practices . . . according to ‘logics’ that are strongly posthermeneutical,” ignoring the fact that technology influences our embodied lives “at a level below the ‘threshold’ of representation.”12 In so doing, Hansen argues that technology is rendered an object of knowledge and is thus exchangeable for other objects within this logic of representation. Simply put, so long as technology is taken to be grounded in representation, its (for Hansen, innate) potential to intervene from outside of this system is effaced. In the context of manifold cultural, discursive, and linguistic “turns,” Hansen echoes Karen Barad’s observation that “there is an important sense in which the only thing that does not seem to matter anymore is matter.”13

Hansen uses the term technesis to account for this representationalist reduction, defining it first as the “putting-into-discourse” of technology.14 In this, Hansen traces an explicit link to Alice Jardine’s analyses of gynesis, where she points out that the entrance of “woman” into discourse frequently yields situations where “woman” may “become intrinsic to entire conceptual systems [that are nonetheless not] ‘about’ women, much less feminism.”15 Though both technesis and gynesis thus indicate an abstraction into language, however, Hansen emphasizes that the two reductions nonetheless perform different strategies: whereas gynesis perpetuates a reductive use of “woman” in service of expanding our understanding of textuality, technesis valorizes the text as a model for understanding technology so that its primary function is to translate technology into a textual analog. Thus, although technesis employs a logic that is similar to gynesis (and other structural modes of analysis), the reduction that it enacts is, for Hansen, far more violent: technesis not only reduces technology by underspecifying it but it actually alters the materiality of technology by respecifying it differently. Simply put, “technology itself” disappears in technesis, except in the form of alibi. In Hansen’s reading, the representation of technology through technesis bears about as much similarity to the actual material specificity of technology as a bank robber wearing a Richard Nixon mask bears to the former president: in both cases, the contents of the mask (i.e., technology and Nixon’s facial features) are subjugated to the logic of the events in which they are staged (i.e., language and a bank robbery).

In Embodying Technesis, Hansen offers numerous ways in which this representationalist reduction is enacted, emphasizing the particular disciplinary agenda that is put to work in each case. For example, he points out that systems theory functions “by bracketing out all constraint the real might impose [on a system]”16 such that materiality “receives a purely abstract determination as that which resists translation per se.”17 Similarly, he accuses cultural studies of being generally “restricted to the effects [technology] has on our capacity to constitute ourselves as subjects, to represent ourselves to ourselves, . . . [so that] whatever exteriority is thereby broached [can only be] a relative exteriority, a point of resistance internal to the representational space of thought.”18 In both cases, technology is abstracted into the disciplinary logic that discursively precedes it, ignoring the fact (for Hansen) that technology exists in its own right, within a stratum of reality that is fundamentally prediscursive.

Importantly, then, both these examples (as well as others) flow from Hansen’s broader, and more scathing, critique of Derrida’s deconstructive grammatology in Embodying Technesis, particularly the former’s claim—in Hansen’s view—for language as “the exclusive or privileged faculty of experience.”19 Via a critique of grammatology, then, Hansen mounts his thesis that technesis employs technology as an abstract cipher for an internal otherness that, while constitutive of texts, does not pertain to technology per se. In turn, this criticism feeds back to the other examples that he offers, demonstrating how, in each case, linguistic logocentrism—despite manifold claims to the contrary—continues to dominate the various ways in which technology has been engaged within (at least Western) philosophical discourse.

However, this critique of Derrida merits further consideration. Hansen’s specific argument notes that within Derrida’s hugely influential work, technology is consistently restricted to a “model of the text as machine.”20 In particular, he sees in Derrida (as in other twentieth-century poststructuralist theorists) an inversion of the machine metaphor as it had developed since at least the seventeenth century (predominantly in the form of the clock), wherein machines were “consistently employed as a heuristic for conceptualizing what is proper to the human.”21 Through this inversion, a machinic ontology of textuality is produced in which “language assumes the role of a machine that runs independently of the phenomenal and rhetorical categories governing lived experience”22 such that “for the first time, the machine is actually deployed as a metaphor for technology itself.”23 In this, Hansen argues, technology is domesticated by Derridean textuality such that it is dependent on the movement of différance to the same extent that writing (in the restricted sense) is. As such, it is not a site of inquiry in its own right but is rather restricted to a “doubly derivative status” that simply lends support to “the totalizing grasp of [Derrida’s] ontology of différance.”24

The merit of this critique of Derrida is that it articulates, constatively and performatively, the tremendous difficulty of the task that Hansen has set himself in trying to account for technology “in its own terms.” Its drawback, though, is that it rests on a fundamental misreading of Derrida’s grammatology. Emphatically, Derrida does not idealistically reduce everything to language when he insists (in Of Grammatology) that “there is no outside-text”:25 as has frequently been noted, the popularized translation of “Il n’y a pas de hors-texte” as “there is nothing outside the text” is both incorrect and misleading in that it suggests an ontological understanding of language (where language would, in theory, be capable of total description). Instead, Derrida’s point is that “what opens meaning and language is writing as the disappearance of natural presence,”26 in the sense that language is a condition of legibility, even if it always renders its objects paradoxical and incomplete. Importantly, then, the term open indicates that Derrida does not suggest a claim for language as “the exclusive or privileged faculty of experience,”27 as Hansen’s argument requires. Instead, Derrida’s formulation insists simply that insofar as there is meaning (i.e., signification, sense, an interpreted goal, etc.), this meaning is contingent on the instability and ambiguity inherent in language. Thus it is resolutely not Derrida’s belief that language determines bodily experience per se but rather that it is the technology through which experience is registered as such, and that this registration reveals that both language and experience are always-already both present and absent in their relation. For example, my digestive system might well behave extralinguistically, but my experience of it as a functional operation (i.e., a system that digests my food) is linguistic; I can say neither that my digestive system preexists, for me, its meaning (which would be to say that it preexists itself) nor that the meaning of my digestive system preexists it (because I can only know it insofar as I can experience it).28 For Derrida, the same is the case for technology.

Put simply, then, the object of Derrida’s critique is not experience, as Hansen would have it, but rather our knowledge of it. That is, to the extent that the machine appears in Derrida as a metaphor for technology itself, it does so as a metaphor, which is to say, as a substitution for the impossible necessity of technology, for its paradoxical presence–absence. Indeed, this ambiguity is even exemplified in a passage from Derrida that Hansen cites in his argument. Consider the following:

A certain sort of question about the meaning and origin of writing precedes, or at least merges with, a certain type of question about the meaning and origin of technics. That is why the notion of technique can never simply clarify the notion of writing.29

For Hansen, this passage exemplifies the machine’s “foundation in différance”30 for Derrida, a view that positions grammatology as an identifiable ontology. However, this neglects the crucial hesitation in Derrida’s writing: in his parenthetical “or at least merges with,” Derrida gestures to the paradoxical temporality at the core of deconstruction, the radical impossibility of answering questions of “meaning and unknowability.” In Of Grammatology, this impossibility is figured as a trace (or arche-trace), a mark that “was never constituted except by a non-origin . . . which thus becomes the origin of the origin” and which cannot be marked by empiricism.31 Clearly, then, Hansen’s implication that Derrida submits technology to a structural logic only tells half the story and misses the explicitly strategic aspect of Derrida’s writing: to the extent that Derrida positions writing as preceding technology, he does so keenly aware (as Spivak notes) that he is operating “according to the very vocabulary of the thing he delimits.”32 Indeed, this is why the notion of technique can never simply clarify the notion of writing; they are all bound together in a paradoxical linguistic logic (a notionality?) that always performs something supplementary to its claims.

Thus, to say that technology is reduced by grammatology is problematic on two counts: first, it ignores the fact that this statement is in complete agreement with grammatology, to the extent that it consists in the claim that technology can never be fully represented—can never be fully present—in language; second, and more egregiously, it assumes that such full presence is in fact possible, in the sense that language might reduce technology rather than ambiguously constitute it. Thus Hansen’s claim that grammatology reduces the exteriority of technology rests on a translation of grammatology into a totalizing structural system of meaning, neglecting that all writing (in the broad sense that grammatology promotes) must “be capable of functioning in the radical absence of every empirically determined receiver in general.”33 Moreover, this reduction allows Hansen to naturalize technology outside of language, while nonetheless operating its force within it: if technology is truly radically exterior to language in the sense that Hansen indicates, how could it possibly interact with the linguistic paradigm that characterizes the type of meaning that Hansen requires?

Hansen is certainly aware of these quandaries but believes that they are symptomatic of a “culturally ingrained logocentrism that compels us . . . to translate technological materiality into discourse.”34 In contrast, then, Hansen turns to Bourdieu’s account of mimeticism to develop a notion of a bodily hermeneutic that avoids “translation or delegation into language [by requiring us] to learn to use our mimetic bodily ‘sense.’”35 This “practical mimesis” takes place below the threshold of knowledge as it is staged in representation and thus yields embodied “knowledge” that can “only be experienced through mimetic reproduction, never through translation into language,”36 a necessity that (Hansen notes) Bourdieu suggests is “particularly clear in non-literate societies, where inherited knowledge can only survive in the incorporated state.”37 For Hansen, then, developing this mimetic bodily sense is a promising method for unshackling our ability to experience our bodies from what he sees as the profoundly restrictive dependence on representation (and cognition) that grammatology imposes.

However, this raises the question, isn’t cognition included in embodiment? That is, it is at least possible that the “mimetic faculty” that Hansen suggests already exists as cognition, as the body’s way of representing itself to itself. Indeed, Hansen gestures toward this in his frequent invocation in Bodies in Code of the later Merleau-Ponty’s notion of a primordial écart, an internal fissure that is “the fundamental dehiscence that explains the body’s need for the world”38 and that acts as a transducer “between embodiment and specularity.”39 However, whereas Merleau-Ponty mobilizes the écart in embodiment to describe the flesh as an “intertwining [and reversibility] of the sensate and the sensible . . . [that] directly problematizes the concept of intentionality,”40 Hansen maintains that the écart occupies the “cusp between the biological and the psychic prior to their actual differentiation.”41 As a result, embodied alterity is, for Hansen, “simply a primary condition of the being of the body”42 so that Merleau-Ponty’s understanding of the flesh is folded back into Hansen’s concept of the primordial body.

Thus Hansen’s objection to the suggestion that cognition might constitute a “mimetic faculty” might be that embodiment remains subjected to representation in this reading, but such a claim would neglect (as shown earlier) the profound avowal of that which is erased in this same understanding of representation. Moreover, to the extent that grammatology recognizes a materiality of language, does this not indicate the kind of sensory retraining that he is suggesting? It is a slippery point, but I would suggest that this is so not only because—as Hansen insists—there is a logic of embodiment that is external to language (which may be true, though to what extent the two might interact remains in question) but also because identifying the problematic of embodied knowledge as distinct from that of language depends on a (provisional, at least) separation of mind and body that has by now been so thoroughly and routinely deconstructed that—for most contemporary readers—the separation of the two cannot be sustained. In this sense, Hansen falls into the trap that Hayles describes in her differentiation of embodiment from the body in that he (implicitly) posits the body as a primordial blank slate abstracted from any context. That is, Hansen produces a normative “body” that is not connected to any particular embodiment, thereby taking the body as a given.43

Thus, to the extent that Hansen critiques the (reductive) identities produced by representation, he is perfectly in agreement with a deconstructive approach. Where he differs is in the belief that we can intentionally develop faculties that are—and forever remain—fundamentally foreign to intention but that are still meaningful. If we were to really take seriously his call to develop a bodily sense that is not subject to language, then, we would have to do so without having set out, intentionally, to accomplish this. Not only is this impossible, but it is an impossibility that is structured according to the very paradoxical logic of language that Derrida’s grammatology writes.44

Of course, Hansen is not unaware of this paradox. Indeed, the final pages of Embodying Technesis turn to Benjamin as a means of pointing “beyond the impasse of technesis [by] refusing to collapse the technological real into representation and by linking it to embodiment.”45 Again, though, this reinforces more than undermines Derrida’s account.46 Moreover, how precisely we can “make sense of technology’s diffuse, amorphous corporeal impact without filtering it through language” remains decidedly underdetermined in Hansen’s text.47 Or rather, perhaps it is performatively overdetermined, which is to say that Embodying Technesis performs a leap of faith—a leap into impossibility—that it cannot avow. What Hansen accomplishes, then, might be not so much a movement beyond language to technology as a technological restaging of the dramatic and paradoxical ambivalence that language performs.48

If Hansen’s notion of technesis does not convincingly refute—or even sidestep—the textual logic of Derrida’s grammatology, it nonetheless remains a powerful analytical tool for specifying the interaction of language, embodiment, and technology. For Hansen, this interaction is embodiment in the broad sense, which is to say that he insists that “any system involving ‘information’ requires an interpreter, and that interpreter is the material human body grounded in the wetware of our sensorimotor systems.”49 As a result, there is (for Hansen, in Barad’s words) a strong “sense in which historical forces are always already biological.”50 Importantly, then, Hansen mobilizes an affective understanding of embodiment that accords it not only ontological priority (as suggested in the preceding statement) but also perceptual precedence. For Hansen, the body exists in its affective dimension prior to its articulation in the senses; furthermore, it actually serves as the frame through which these senses come to be understood as such. As Lenoir aptly summarizes, in Hansen’s account, “the affective body is the ‘glue’ that underpins consciousness and connects it with subperceptual sensorimotor processes.”51

Hansen’s specific articulation of this presubjective affectivity, especially in the mature form that it takes in Bodies in Code, is considered in greater detail later. Here I would like to emphasize the relation of vision to embodiment that this perspective entails and particularly how this relation is revealed in and through contemporary technologies. Understanding Hansen’s account of vision will help to contextualize his views on perception in general, which in turn will elucidate the precise sense in which the body, for Hansen, exists as a unified field that precedes—logically, if not chronologically or developmentally—the differentiation of the senses.52 Simply put, Hansen understands vision to be a figuration of embodied process rather than an abstract power that informs it. In this, vision is not (strictly speaking) a medium but is instead a technological extension of the medium of embodiment.

Hansen illustrates this through an analysis of Robert Lazzarini’s installation skulls (2000). First exhibited at the Whitney Museum of Modern Art, skulls consists of four sculpted skulls, each mounted at approximately eye level in the center of a different wall of a small, well-lit, clean, and bright four-walled room.53 As described in the exhibition documentation, Lazzarini created each of the skulls by digitizing an actual skull into a digital three-dimensional geometry, where it was subsequently subjected to compound mathematical distortions. The results of these distortions were forwarded to a rapid prototyping machine that output a plastic prototype that served as a production model from which a rubber mold was made. A final version of the skulls was then cast in bonded bone: a mixture of resin, bone, and pigment.54

In effect, skulls translates literal and digital three-dimensionality into one another. This conflation “creates an unsettling spatial paradox [in which the skulls] appear to expand and contract as [the viewer’s] vantage point shifts, suggesting something both static and moving.”55 As a result, skulls can never be entirely resolved in perspectival space in two senses: first, the “proper” viewing perspective is different for all four skulls arrayed around the room so that the visual solidity of one coincides with a liminal position in the others; second, and more important, because the skulls are modeled using mathematical—rather than sculptural—distortion techniques, the depth of the individual sculptural objects “interferes with the illusionary resolution of perspectival distortion.”56 As a result, the “perceptual experience of the work yields an oscillation or leveling of the figure-ground distinction.”57

For Hansen, this ambivalence forecloses the possibility of visually mastering the work. In this, he notes that skulls differs from the icons of anamorphosis that it clearly references: rather than resolving into a “normal” image when viewed from a particular angle, it instead confronts the viewer “with the projection of a warped space that refuses to map onto her habitual [visually based] spatial schematizing.”58 In this sense, although skulls is visually perceived, the content of this perception is not visual per se in that it displays a logic that is fundamentally at odds with that of vision.

In fact, Hansen argues that what is seen in skulls is not even really a perception at all in the conventional sense but rather the disjunction that exists between human perception and digital technologies. In this respect, we don’t so much see the installation as we do feel—affectively—the inaccessibility of its digital material to our senses. That is, skulls presents a “realignment of human experience from the visual register of perception (be it in an ‘optical’ or ‘haptic’ mode) to a properly bodily register of affectivity in which vision, losing its long-standing predominance, becomes a mere trigger for a nonvisual haptic apprehension.”59 Thus, although the installation does not afford “a direct apprehension of an alien space that is digital, [it does yield a] bodily apprehension of just how radically alien the formal field of the computer is from the perspective of the phenomenal modes of embodied spatial experience.”60 In so doing, skulls manifests (for Hansen) the radical exteriority of digital technology to the logic of vision but also how visuality (which includes, for Hansen, figurations of the other senses) is shaped in terms of “more visceral” bodily elements.

Importantly, then, Lazzarini’s warped skulls institute a warped space that is sensibly felt by the viewer, even if only as a disjunction between digital materiality and the physical laws to which we are accustomed. The point, then, is that “the body continues to be the active framer of the image, even in a digital regime.”61 That is, Hansen argues that the spatial disjunction experienced in skulls is situated in and as the viewer: rather than being a gap between internal and external sensation, this disjunction is an interval within the viewer’s body, a “bodily spacing” that indicates the precedence of an embodied organism over its sensory perceptions. Put differently, by rendering the spatial activity of the participant’s vision useless (because the participant is unable to delineate her distance from the skulls through a conventional geometric perspective), skulls initiates a shift to an “alternate mode of perception rooted in our bodily faculty of proprioception.”62 In this way, the work functions by catalyzing an embodied sense of the skulls’ form (i.e., an “affective process of embodied form-giving”63) that creates a place within our bodies that, in its creation, gives us a “sense of the ‘weirdness’ of digital topology.”64

For the time being, the key part of this reading of skulls in New Philosophy for New Media is that, for Hansen, it positions skulls as exemplary of the potential of media art: rather than citing digitality as an abstract placeholder figured through arbitrary metaphors (i.e., the various visual images that we have come to associate with cyberspace), skulls “presents us with actual artefacts from the digital realm”65 that are not “channeled through the coordinates of an image designed for interface with (human) vision.”66 As a result, the installation acts as a “cipher or index of a process fundamentally heterogeneous to our constitutive perceptual ratios”:67 the experience of the piece takes place as an affective response in the body of the spectator—it takes place “as the production of place within the body”68—that correlates to the work’s digital topology, while nonetheless remaining radically discontinuous with it. In the experience of skulls (and other exemplary works of media art), then, Hansen believes that we can bodily access a material specificity of technology—or rather, we can appreciate the radicality of a particular technology’s inaccessibility—without reducing it to language.

It bears emphasizing that to the extent that this is the case, it is accomplished via a movement of vision into the body that Hansen describes under the auspices of a bodily affective topology. With this in mind, consider as a counterexample the piece Sound (2001), a piano performance that consists of a combination of piano preparations; extended techniques; and loud, low, and quickly repeated notes played with the piano’s sustain pedal depressed.69 First presented in the context of a contemporary music recital, Sound utilizes microphones that are placed inside the piano, routed through a computer featuring sound-processing software, and plugged into loudspeakers. Despite this setup, though, the computer is not powered on so that the physical sound of the piano is in no way altered by the digital technology that is present: the piece, then, is simply a piece for piano . . . and yet it isn’t.

Somewhat predictably, audience members often hear effects generated by the microphone–speaker–computer setup, despite the fact that no such sounds are literally present. What is more remarkable, though, is that this tendency obtains even in the context of highly trained listeners, for whom the sound-world of the piece is by no means novel.70 Moreover, these skilled listeners—and I am not using the term skilled ironically—have even, in a number of cases, been able to specify the particular effects that they have heard: audience members have attested to hearing various equalization filters (e.g., high-pass, shelving, and parametric), delays, and shifts in synthesized reverb and dynamics. In fact, I have anecdotally noticed that the more sophisticated a listener is—the more she is able to specify what she’s heard in a given piece—the more likely she is to have had highly complex and specified hallucinations during Sound’s performance.71

Emphatically, Sound is not a sonic hoax because it does not ultimately deceive the listener’s ears.72 That is, the sounds that the listener identifies as digitally produced are nonetheless audible and even properly identifiable in the sense that the listener is able to specify (via the terminology of digital technology) the particular sounds that she is hearing.73 Moreover, it is plausible that the digital technologies presented on-stage actually serve to increase the audibility of the nuances of the piece in the sense that they signal a mastery of timbre that is often neglected in acoustic instruments (i.e., they suggest that the piano might be deinstrumentalized as a fixed medium through which piano notation passes, pointing instead to a particularity that is singular to a given instance of piano playing, and they additionally reinforce the fact that each of the piano’s pitches articulates multiple frequencies). The digital technologies presented on-stage in Sound are not so much a hoax, then, as they are a rubric or cipher for the sound-world of the piece.

What is of interest here, though, is how this rubric actually functions. The point is that, in effect, the technology (not) used in Sound is more familiar (i.e., more accessible to our senses) than the acoustic phenomena from which it was developed: we tend to intuit (technological) mediation more readily than the claim to authenticity implied in conventional instrumentality. In this sense, the piece employs a simulation in which representations—the sounds of particular effects—are detached from any necessary or particular acoustic provenance. As a result, it is not only the case that the digital technologies offer a visual point of entry into the sound-world of the piece but also that they offer a point of departure from the linear causality—the instrumentality—of the acoustic instrument present (i.e., the piano, as the sounding mechanism of an original score or musical intention). In a mixed-reality context such as that suggested by the technologies presented on-stage, then, the physics of the performance—the question of what, materially, causes a given sound event—subtly shifts into a kind of pataphysics in which an imaginary sonic reality precedes its cause.74 Simply put, the computer functions as an alibi for limitless representational manipulation so that the listener accepts that the sound events are not completely constrained by a recognizable causality. That is, the computer creates an illusion of a certain type of music—live electronic manipulation of acoustic instruments—that presents itself as music without illusions.75

Indeed, this “limitlessness” is the flip side of the tendency of listeners to project specific technical manipulations onto the piece: listeners’ (mis)recognition of the processing is frequently accompanied by questions about other aspects of the sound-world of Sound. Often, these questions come from a lack of second-order identification of the phantom processes: for example, a phantom EQ might be heard as one that is regularly deployed in the program MaxMSP, which would lead to questions about other (phantom) manipulations that the listener did not recognize as being conventional in that programming environment.76 Thus a series of questions are asked (e.g., “Is another software program being run in parallel?” or “Was that accomplished by misappropriating such and such ‘object’ in Max?”) that not only presume the event but also understand it to be a technical fait accompli. Rather than creating disjunction in the listener—that is, rather than causing her to question whether things really are as they seem—these questions are invariably couched not only in the certainty that they took place but moreover with the assuredness that they took place as identifiable, predictable, and repeatable technical manipulations within the computer.77 With the presence of the computer, the de facto assumption is that anything that can be registered sonically by the listener can also be registered within the computer and that with this registration comes a potential for manipulation that is virtually unconstrained. As Paul Théberge (among others) has noted, “a computer is both a machine and a social relation”;78 in Sound, the machine–computer is extended through the technology of the piano, which empties it of its instrumentality to feed it back as a paradoxical relationality. Sound, then, is virtual music par excellence, where the “boundlessness” of virtuality is acted under the alibi of computer technology that it does not otherwise employ.

This is notable in the context of this chapter because it is the opposite of what Hansen finds in skulls. Whereas Hansen demonstrates that skulls renders techno-logic visceral because it cannot be represented by the senses, Sound offers a “pure representation” of technology that instead captures viscerality in its exchange. In Sound, a “boundlessness” of the virtual is acted precisely through the way it opens the senses to its pataphysics, to a willingness to accept seemingly unconstrained causality without giving up the notion of causality itself (i.e., without leaving the realm of conventional representation). Thus, if skulls catalyzes a (disjunctive) perception of the grounding of vision in presensory embodiment, Sound suggests that the reverse also takes place. That is, in Sound, the affective body partakes in a logic of (non)representation in which the body itself moves into the object of its senses, feeling—“presensorily”—its profound complicity with the noncausal causality of grammatology. Simply put, the grounded and constrained physics of the body is evacuated into a play of representation.

Indeed, this understanding is coded into Hansen’s claim—discussed in further detail later—that virtuality resides in and as analog subjectivity, which includes as its corollary the disarticulation of virtuality from digital technologies. That is, although virtuality has an affinity with digitality, it nonetheless (for Hansen) “stretches back to the proto-origin of the human.”79 In this respect, then, virtuality denotes the possibility for things being other than what they are, for the complex reorganizations that constitute human technogenesis.80 Put bluntly, the virtual is (for Hansen) the space into which technics externalizes the body.

The difference with Sound, though, is that the body proper is not externalized in the piece but is rather translated (or reembodied) into a visual representation.81 Moreover, this process feeds back to reinsist that the initial body is subject to representation: to the extent that the listener feels the piece, she does so within the logic that is suggested by its representations rather than via a spacing that would ground this logic.82 To the extent that the body is externalized into virtual space, then, it is also revealed as always-already virtual.83

This does not in any way undermine Hansen’s reading of skulls. However, as was the case in his critique of Derrida, what Sound does demonstrate is the leap of faith that Hansen must make to move from his perceptually and cognitively based reading of skulls to his positing of the body as primordial (and thus precognitive and preconceptual). Without this leap, for example, we would be forced to ask why vision is not accorded the radicality that technology is. That is, if vision takes place at an ontological level that is different from the embodiment that grounds it, doesn’t this mean that there is a part of vision, however small, that is not accounted for in embodiment? As such, doesn’t Hansen reduce vision to the affective logic of the body that he expounds? If so, what is accomplished in this reduction?

What i have attempted in this chapter thus far is a simple recontextualization of Hansen’s thought: rather than accepting his cogent analyses as proof positive of the structure of subjectivity that he advocates, I have demonstrated that his writing necessarily performs a gap that its content covers over. As a result, I have suggested that rather than an affective body preceding the senses, as Hansen would have it, the two necessarily exist in tension with one another. However, in insisting on this tension, I am emphatically not suggesting that affectivity is antecedent to the senses either but am rather importuning the impossibility of establishing a hierarchy in their relation. Put differently, though Hansen’s perspective cannot be unequivocally true in the way that he hopes, it nonetheless performs an important intervention into the potentially stagnant discourse of deconstruction: if contemporary theorists have become comfortable with the paradoxical play of presence and absence brought to the fore in deconstruction, Hansen’s writing serves a decisive role in reintroducing embodiment as a site of discursive discomfort. Thus, if Derrida’s work was necessitated by a historical context that presumed presence, Hansen writes in a time that has perhaps—at least with respect to the humanities as they exist in academic institutions—moved too far the other way.

With this in mind, I offer in what follows a closer consideration of Hansen’s account of affectivity, presented in an effort to specify Hansen’s organismic construction of technological posthumanism as the twin presence of the manifold absences that have been made manifest in humanities scholarship over the past forty years. Hansen’s posthumanism is perhaps uniquely suited to articulate this perspective because, of the three strains of technological posthumanism considered in this book, his perspective is in a sense most avowedly humanist: whereas Hayles, as I demonstrated in chapter 3, insinuates humanist values into the ground of her claims for expanded understandings of embodiment, materiality, and meaning, Hansen restages these expansions within the internal spacing of presensory human affectivity. Accordingly, Hansen acknowledges that it is specifically human embodiment that “takes on a truly unprecedented responsibility [at this particularly crucial moment in our coevolution with technology]: the responsibility of constraining and thereby specifying the process through which information ‘objects’—images, space, events—are actually generated.”84 This distinction between Hansen and Hayles is crucial because it relates directly to how value—broadly construed to include meaning, ethics, and politics—operates in the schema. For Hayles (and, to a lesser extent, for Butler) value appears as an injunction to mean so that the exciting possibility opened by new technologies is their affordance of new modes of represented individual agency: value is external in this reading, in the sense that it is a crucial motivating principle in Hayles’s thought. For Hansen, in contrast, value is produced via the body’s internal spacing so that what is exposed by virtual technologies is “the violence exerted on bodily life by generic categories of social intelligibility and the politics of recognition.”85 Thus, if Hayles’s technological posthumanism ultimately reinscribes the human, Hansen’s does so doubly, but with a key difference inhering in how they position their interventions in the discourse of technological posthumanism: whereas Hayles figures her thought as unwinding embodiment outward into intermediating machinic materialities (that themselves feed back into bodies), Hansen works in the inverse direction, folding new technologies—including new modes of perception—back into the primary tactility of embodied subjects. The point, then, is that Hansen is not interested in new technologies for their potential to reconfigure what value is but rather for their potential to reconfigure how value acts.86 This shift, for Hansen, is the shift from affect to affectivity.

To grapple with this shift, it is first necessary to exfoliate the particular understanding of technology that is at the core of Hansen’s thought and that exists in contradistinction to the notion of technesis discussed earlier. Fundamentally, and in accordance with both Dyens and Hayles (as well as numerous others), Hansen considers technology to be intimately bound up with human embodiment. Quite simply, Hansen argues that every technology exists in relation to human embodiment and speaks to “the body’s role as an ‘invariant,’ a fundamental access onto the world.”87 Although technologies may “refunctionalize”88 the body, then, they do not institute any ontological shift that would threaten phenomenological accounts of embodiment. Instead, Hansen understands technicity, in its broadest sense, to be a process of “exteriorization.”

Importantly, though, Hansen does not consider this relation to exteriority to be something “merely added on to some ‘natural’ core of embodied life” but rather takes technicity to be “a constitutive dimension of embodiment from the start.”89 In this respect, Hansen echoes Butler in registering a “turn” at the core of our subjective relations, for Hansen hinging on technology: technologies extend our interface with the environment, but the reconfiguration that this performs points back to the body as its source. In this sense, then, a technical element “has always inhabited and mediated our embodied coupling with the world.”90 Whereas Butler—as discussed in chapter 4—understands this coupling to be the continual and reiterative process of subject formation, though, Hansen understands it as the exteriorization of an anterior subjectivity. That is, because Hansen takes the body to be “invariant,” he is able to mobilize a topological analysis of it. In so doing, he figures a gap that is fundamentally different from the deconstructive gap: where the former is a spatial separation, the latter is both a performative gap and a disidentification (hence différance’s etymology in both “difference” and “deferment”).

What is notable in this configuration is the conflation of technical and embodied reality that it enacts. Simply put, the distinction between virtual reality and so-called flesh reality is effaced, for Hansen, so that “all reality is ‘mixed reality.’”91 In short, “there can be no difference in kind demarcating virtual reality (in its narrow, technicist sense) from the rest of experience”92 because all experience pertains first to an embodied subject. As such, virtual reality is not so much something that is produced by technology as it is a “biologically grounded adaptation to the newly acquired technological extensions provided by new media.”93 Virtuality, then, is not only interpreted by analog bodies but is actually included in the constitution of these bodies as such.

In this context, Hansen insists on the cultural significance of virtual reality as “our culture’s privileged pathway for . . . exposing the technical element that lies at the heart of embodiment”:94 paradoxically, the value of virtual reality (again, in its narrow sense) is not found in the purported new freedoms that it offers but rather in the way that its physical latitudes lay bare “the enabling constraints of the body”;95 virtual reality articulates the body’s necessity. Here again, it is precisely because technics is included within a primordial notion of embodiment that we can comprehend virtual reality as a reality at all, which is to say, as having enactive capacities rather than simply representational or simulational ones. In a sense, then, Hansen is simply staging a performance of deconstruction in and as embodiment.

In this context, Hansen argues in Bodies in Code that mixed reality is a transcendental condition for human experience. That is, mixed reality designates an “‘originary’ coupling of the human and the technical” that grounds experience as such and that “can only be known through its effects”;96 whereas new technologies, specific historical realities, and evolved biologies all play a part in determining modes and meanings of perception that are absolutely unique to a given individual, the fact of human perception itself—or human “information processing,” as Hansen sometimes terms it—nonetheless always grounds this specificity. Put simply, though information processing may radically transform the instance of embodiment to which it points, the fact that it must be directed at an embodied reality always remains. Moreover, Hansen’s conceptualization of “mixed reality” includes the assertion that this works both ways so that an instance of embodiment—a human, for example—necessarily operates (in the broadest possible sense) relative to its surroundings.97 This omnipresent bivalent coupling, then, is precisely what Hansen designates with the term mixed reality, effecting a passage “from the axiom that all virtual reality is mixed reality to the more general axiom that all reality is mixed reality.”98

This persistence of an embodied relation to technics (which is to say, of embodiment) is the sense in which mixed reality is both transcendental and omnipresent for Hansen. Moreover, this status means that the effect of technological innovation is not to create new realities but rather to alter the relationship between our perceptual apparatuses and the technoembodied reality that grounds them. In this, Hansen marks a crucial departure from both the scientific–evolutionary technological posthumanism of Dyens and from the humanist technological posthumanism of Hayles. That is, in contrast to the former, Hansen does not understand alternate strata of reality—genetic reproduction, macrobiological swarming, microcomputer processing, and so on—to possess an otherness that is fundamentally inaccessible to us but rather takes them as emblematic of an otherness that is constitutive of human embodiment: incompatible realities are not incompatible with our conventional perceptions because they are inaccessibly distant (for Hansen) but rather because they are too close, they are the ground of perception. In this sense, contemporary technologies create different points of contact—quantitatively different in scope but to such an extent that a qualitative difference emerges—between humans and nonhumans that thereby shift the ground of perception to give the effect of new strata of reality. In addition, then, Hansen also does not accept Hayles’s suggestion that fundamentally new realities emerge from the intermediations of humans and machines: though, epistemologically, Hansen characterizes the historical evolution of humans technogenetically (as Hayles does), he nonetheless insists on an ahistorical mechanism underlying this process that grounds epistemological accounts of subject positions in an ontology of primary subjectivity. Thus, though both technology and embodiment are—to an extent—taken to be extradiscursive by both Hansen and Hayles, for Hansen, this extradiscursivity is specifically pre-discursive. Relative to both Dyens and Hayles, then, Hansen’s position performs the crucial shift of acknowledging the particular worldview that undergirds the entrance of humans and technology into a joint discourse.

In this respect, our “age of total technical mediation”99 is, for Hansen, the age in which the mixedness of reality is exposed. That is, reality has always been a mixture of virtuality and actuality, but contemporary technologies dramatize this fact in a way that has not previously occurred. In Hansen’s (beautifully tenebrous) prose, the present historicotechnical moment is thus dubbed the “becoming-empirical . . . of mixed reality as the transcendental-empirical” such that contemporary technologies empirically manifest “the condition for the empirical as such.”100 Paradoxically, then, Hansen insists that the disembodying tendencies of digital technologies serve to make perceptible the embodied reality—which includes technicity—on which they depend.101 As such, the shift to mixed reality effected in and by contemporary technoculture is a paradigmatic—rather than ontological—one.

If Hansen insists that mixed reality transcends local technological conditions, he does not by this intend to diminish the importance of the latter. Indeed, by making mixed reality perceptible, and widely so, digital technologies bring “an opportunity to revalue the meaning and role accorded the body within the accepted conceptual frameworks of our philosophical tradition.”102 Thus Hansen notes that today’s exemplary mixed-reality situations—“interrupting a meeting to get data from a digital database, comparing a two-dimensional architectural drawing with a real-time three-dimensional visualization, acquiring an image of oneself through the social prosthesis of common sense that is contemporary television”103—are not intended to produce an “immersive” experience, in the sense of simulating reality. Instead—as we saw in his reading of skulls—Hansen argues that these situations each utilize the “capacity of our embodied form of life to create reality through motor activity”;104 the important thing is that, prior to the exposure of mixed reality through digital technologies, this capacity was entirely unremarkable. Thus, by moving perceptual experience beyond a single experiential frame, the question of “what makes . . . passage from one realm to another so seamless”105 can be asked.

In the context of the discussion being presented here, the point is that Hansen’s understanding of embodiment and technicity (as being constitutively linked) necessarily reconceptualizes embodiment in a way that avows their connection, while still retaining embodiment’s primacy as the ground on which this conflation takes place. I have already argued that this understanding is more complicit with deconstruction than Hansen suggests, but it bears noting that what is thus at stake is not only a prelinguistic body but also an articulation of the “spacing” that comprises an organism’s embodiment and ultimately provides a framework for shifting from a theory of affection to one of affectivity. In this, Hansen promotes an understanding of the body that is based in its operational perspective.

This rendering of embodiment is implicitly underwritten by an emerging (and still contested) cognitive theory of conceptual integration called double-scope blending. In essence, this theory argues that humans are the only species capable of thinking and feeling beyond the scale of their biological configuration and that this is accomplished through the ability to use our human scale as a scaffold (“a cognitively congenial basis”) from which to reach out, manage, manipulate, transform, develop, and handle vast conceptual networks. Importantly, this “network scale” can be vast, even though the human scale is not, because it is anchored in a human scale. In turn, “these new human scale blends become second nature for us, and blending is recursive: packed, human scale blends become inputs to new networks [so that] what was once beyond human scale is now packed to human scale.”106 In this way, double-scope blending supports Hansen’s operational approach by suggesting that “basic structures already present in our sensory-motor processing can be recruited for abstract thought without presupposing separate systems allegedly unrelated to our bodily engagement with our environment.”107 In short, this view holds that we are organismically configured to produce representations, but as a result, these representations remain grounded in our operations as a biological organism.108

Hansen explicitly draws the logic of this operational perspective from contemporary autopoietic theories of cognition. In particular, the “enactive” approach promulgated by Varela is apt, as it is based on situated, embodied agents. As Varela explains, this approach to cognition “comprises two complementary aspects: (1) the ongoing coupling of the cognitive agent, a permanent coping that is fundamentally mediated by sensorimotor activities; and (2) the autonomous activities of the agent whose identity is based on emerging, endogenous configurations (or self-organizing patterns) of neuronal activity.”109 For Hansen, then, considering embodiment in this way offers the opportunity to consider a body as a bounded entity that is coupled with technics, without falling into the reductive binary logic of (non)identity: the body is coupled with technics in precisely the sense that all life “necessarily involves a ‘structural coupling’ of an organism and an environment.”110 In this approach, it is movement, rather than identity, that “takes center stage as the act which, in any specific context, correlates, articulates, or mediates between space and time.”111 From this, Hansen turns to operationality to provide a means of articulating the body as an “originary condition of real experience.”112

And yet (once again), Hansen’s insistence on the term origin bears further reflection: what is the body’s “originary technicity” if not precisely an example of “origin-heterogeneous,” as described by Derrida?113 Indeed, in showing that the body’s movement “speaks to a modality of life that lies between and conjoins—that composes—space and time,”114 Hansen would seem to be reinforcing the Derridean truism that every identity—in fact, every term—is necessarily infected by others that it cannot register: technics itself, for Hansen, is placed “neither on the side of consciousness, nor on the side of matter, but rather as their mediation, the transduction to which they owe both their coupling and their proper existence.”115 I raise this concern again because Hansen’s response to this critique shifts in Bodies in Code: whereas Embodying Technesis focuses on specifying what, precisely, technology is, Bodies in Code’s operational emphasis attempts instead to specify how embodiment—as the coupling of a body and technicity—produces the effects it does. That is, Hansen is less interested at this point in what humans and their embodiments are (as categories) than he is in what is entailed by these constructions. In this light, claiming an originary status for a (subjective) body amounts to naming it as an enabling constraint for the enactive approach that Hansen undertakes. Whereas a deconstructive sensibility prevents us from agreeing with the definition of a presubjective body that Hansen mounts in Embodying Technesis, Hansen’s shift in emphasis might permit him to sidestep these concerns because he is no longer delineating a fully present body per se.

Indeed, Cary Wolfe convincingly argues in What Is Posthumanism? for a view of systems theory (specifically that of Luhmann) as the “reconstruction of deconstruction,”116 noting that Derridean deconstruction and Luhmann’s systems theory each approaches a similar problem from opposite directions. Specifically, he cites Schwanitz to note that both approaches

make difference their basic category, both temporalize difference and reconstruct meaning as a temporally organized context of displacement and deferment. Both regard their fundamental operation (i.e., writing or communication, respectively) as an independent process that constitutes the subject rather than lets itself be constituted by it.117

This is not to efface the difference between the two approaches—Wolfe argues that systems theory links deconstructive dynamics “to their biological, social, and historical conditions of emergence and transformation”118—but only to point out that Derrida is not necessarily opposed to the operational logic that Hansen espouses.

However, this line of argumentation does not ultimately obtain in Hansen’s case because he continually extends the import of his thought beyond this constraint, which is to say, beyond a deconstructive reading that would understand embodiment’s operational “originality” to also indicate its nonoriginality.119 Specifically, Hansen’s shift toward an analysis of effects depends on the possibility of extralinguistic meaning from which it moves away so that his disavowal of grammatology might be considered a “meta” enabling constraint that allows constraint to mean something. In this context, then, one wonders if the term origin doesn’t thus function as a rhetorical bivalence in the text, at once indicating Hansen’s insistence on following through on a specific, organismically organized account of technological posthumanism, while simultaneously acknowledging— rhetorically—the limitations of doing so. Whether this is a conscious tactic on Hansen’s part is, perhaps, irrelevant: instead, the ambivalent rhetoric of the text points to an opening in it that suspends, if not extinguishes, a deconstructive line of critique.

Indeed, the operational emphasis that becomes increasingly prominent in Hansen’s work moves his thought ever closer to the linguistic ambivalence with which he continues to hold it in contradistinction. Perhaps most telling, in this respect, is his conception of “bodies in code” as a designation of the way that embodiment “is necessarily distributed beyond the skin in the context of contemporary technics.”120 Thus a body in code is not a computational body in the sense that Hayles’s position critiques, nor is it a simulational body in the sense that Dyens’s scientific technological posthumanism (ambivalently) performs. Instead, a body in code is “a body submitted to and constituted by an unavoidable and empowering technical deterritorialization.”121 As with mixed reality, then, all bodies are “bodies in code” because coding indicates the (technical) process through which bodies are coupled with their environment.

Here again, though, the ambivalence of this deterritorialization is crucial because its “technical” aspect indicates the constraining role that technology plays in addition to its more regularly cited extending capacities. Indeed, as Hayles notes, this insistence on the constraints that remain active in digital bodies is at the heart of one of Hansen’s significant points of divergence from Deleuze, his frequent interlocutor. Summarizing Hansen’s argument, Hayles notes that Deleuze and Guattari serve their own philosophical commitments at the expense of reality, doing away with all constraints whatsoever by refusing to recognize the constraints built into self-organization when it takes place in a biological domain.122 In contrast, Hansen suggests bodies in code as a means to understand these constraints not only as enabling individual embodiments but also as part and parcel of the complexity—in the full, evolutionary sense of the term—from which emerges the new organizations and distributions of the senses that suggest technology’s importance in the first place.

Hansen thus argues that through coded interactions with the environment a body takes on an agency that is at once constrained and distributed. To elucidate how this is the case, he refers to Merleau-Ponty’s distinction between the “body schema” and the “body image,” each of which offers a mutually exclusive way of conceptualizing the body: whereas the latter pertains to an apprehension of the body as an external object, the former privileges the (autopoietic) operational perspective that Hansen suggests is paramount.123 Importantly, Hansen emphasizes that “body image” is somewhat of a misnomer, as his argumentation (if not his argument per se) hinges on its referring to something “much richer . . . than a mere representation,”124 acting instead as the object of intentional consciousness such that—put simply—to the extent that we apprehend ourselves, we do so through a body image.125 In contrast, the body schema refers to that which grounds experience as such, in the sense that it refers to the particular configuration of the body through which phenomena are made sensible. Put differently, the body image emanates from the body, extending it, whereas the body schema is “a kind of infraempirical or sensible-transcendental basis for intentional operation.”126 Though both refer to the body, then, they do so from “opposite sides of the intentional relation [such that the body schema involves] an extra-intentional operation carried out prior to or outside of intentional awareness.”127

And yet, though the body image and body schema do not overlap, they are also not of equal ontological importance for Hansen. That is, the operational perspective of the body schema means that, by definition, it relates to its environment: here again, Hansen’s autopoietic conformation dictates that organisms react to environmental perturbations by modifying themselves in a way that preserves the distinction between their identity and their environment, in the sense that an autopoietic system is one that “continuously produces the components that specify it, while at the same time realizing it [i.e., the system] as a concrete unity in space and time [that] makes the network of production of components possible.”128 As an autopoietic system, then, the body schema includes the technics of the body image as the process through which it is exteriorized such that, in an important sense, the body image is a derivative emanation from the body schema. Thus Hansen’s understanding aligns with Varela’s observation that reproduction “must be considered as an added complexification superimposed on a more basic identity, that of an autopoietic unity, . . . [because] only when there is an identity can a unit reproduce.”129 The point for Hansen, again, is that the separation of the body from itself that takes place as the body image requires a preexisting body that is identifiable in its own right. Here again, then, Hansen’s departure from Hayles is marked: for Hayles, the body schema would intersect with the body image according to her revised version of the semiotic square130 and thus would remain within the realm of signification as such; for Hansen, by contrast, the body image feeds back to construct novel points and means of access to the body schema but does not challenge the latter’s ontological priority.

If i have shown that Hansen only tells half the story, his argument for an organismic understanding of technological posthumanism nonetheless remains an important specification—still within the play of linguistic representation—of embodiment. In this, the critical thing to note is how Hansen has shifted the mark. It is true that he—to a certain extent—has successfully articulated embodiment from an (organismically posthumanist) operational perspective, but it is not clear how the bounds of the human are delineated, except from an anthropocentric perspective that is constructed linguistically. That is, Hansen succeeds in accounting for technology’s relation to the human sensorium, but in so doing, he sets aside the question of how this sensorium accrues an economy of meaning beyond simply maintaining its operational integrity.

With this in mind, I will conclude this chapter by considering the most explicitly political moment in Hansen’s oeuvre to date, chapter 3 of Bodies in Code (titled “Digitizing the Racialized Body, or the Politics of Common Impropriety”), in which Hansen argues that all humans are bound by a common impropriety that can be understood as a form of resistance to the reductive classification of people relative to categories of social visibility. In particular, Hansen’s analysis of “Internet passing”131 is illustrative of the pure body-in-code: because online self-invention yields an identity that is “an imitation of an imitation [i.e., an imitation of culturally sanctioned signifiers],” he insists, these identities are “purely disembodied simulacr[a].”132 Precisely because of this status, though, Hansen argues that, for example, in the case of racialization, “a certain indetermination in the correlation between racialization and the image [is introduced, suspending] the ‘overdetermination’ of the black body ‘from without’ and thereby position[ing] the image as a static fixation of individuation.”133 In short, then, Internet passing catalyzes an experience of failed interpellation—of an incongruity with oneself—that is definitive of affectivity (i.e., of primary embodiment as the grounding space, or “spacing,” of perception). Thus, as Jennifer Gonzalez notes, Hansen presents a pedagogical vision of cyberspace in which the transcendence of visibility teaches those who are engaged in online passing the “bankruptcy of categories of identity.”134

The properly political dimension of Hansen’s reading of digitality, then, obtains in the fact that “online interpellation submits everyone—not just a particular subgroup—to the condition of having to pass; the generalization of the condition means in effect that the resulting abjection of the lived body from the space of intelligibility (visibility) can no longer be limited to certain subjects, but rather becomes a problem for all.”135 And this, Hansen argues, points to the shortcomings of existing theories of interpellation: in Butler, for example, performative practices “function by making the bodily residue [or representation] culturally intelligible”136 and thereby build the radicality of embodiment into the scene of interpellation and thus deny it any standing outside the interpellative act. By contrast, the shared experience of Internet passing means for Hansen that

we all must live the erasure of our lived bodies, [so that] what is most significant about the transcendence of visibility in online interpellation is less the possibility it affords for new modes of represented agency than its exposure of the violence exerted on bodily life by generic categories of social intelligibility and by the politics of recognition—identity politics—that it subtends.137

In short, then, Hansen argues that Internet passing does not so much open new avenues for self-expression as it rearticulates the bodily constraints that condition such expression in the first place.

Clearly Hansen’s analysis of Internet passing restages his argument against “linguistic reduction” in a political dimension. Here again, then, it merits note that the meaning that Hansen ascribes to this politics remains contingent on the (representational) process of meaning-formation that he seeks to subjugate. However, we (like Hansen) can further specify this objection in its political aspect by considering his assertion that digitality makes intelligibility “a problem for all.” Bypassing the obvious objection that would insist that, in fact, access to the Internet is not uniform or ubiquitous but is instead subject to its own complex social economy,138 we might ask what the term problem means in this instance. That is, why does the body require this linguistic intelligibility such that it constitutes a problematic in the first place?

In fact, given Hansen’s larger project of freeing embodiment from linguistic interpretation, it would seem that just the opposite would be desirable in a bodily economy: to the extent that Hansen argues that bodily specificity (including its technical element) is violently reduced by technesis, it is not at all clear why this entrance into discourse—the condition of intelligibility—is politically desirable. That is, what mechanism (other than language) allows bodily concerns to migrate from the level of a technobiological organism to that of a political organism without abstracting the contents of these strata into the logic of the body? In short, if an operational perspective constructs an organism in relation to its environment, how is the material specificity of that environment registered in its own right (i.e., as an extralinguistic radical exteriority), while simultaneously being related to its constitutive organisms in their own right? That is, how do we register the material specificity of performativity, since it is clear that “not all forms of performance are equal, nor do they have equal effects.”139 In the context of grammatology, this paradox is recognized to be constitutively irresolvable and is acknowledged through the (hyper)mediating role afforded arche-writing. If Hansen shifts the site of this mediating role to the practices of bodies, though, it is not clear how intersubjective and interstrata political agencies can take hold without abstracting bodies into a discourse that (according to Hansen) does not register their specificity.

Further to this, then, we can conclude that the embodied excess to social intelligibility that Hansen explicates robs that intelligibility of that which makes it, literally, desirable. That is, if the conventional engine of interpellation is desire (which is predicated on a fundamental and radical lack that is articulated in and as the linguistic dimension), then the politics of Hansen’s organismic technological posthumanism comes to its crux: on one hand, Hansen cannot follow Deleuze and Guattari (for example) in refiguring desire as a line of flight that attaches to real objects because this would preclude the technobiological constraints that ground affectivity and that motivated his intervention in the first place; on the other hand, Hansen cannot maintain these constraints without invoking a notion of desire predicated on a lack that is linguistically inscribed by the Law. In the absence of either perspective, then, it remains unclear how political agency can come to be registered as a problem in the first place.

Thus the politics of Hansen’s organismic posthumanism do not spring from the primordial subjectivity that he claims but rather from the claiming itself: in the case of political agency, Hansen’s writing performs the wrangling that has come to characterize the relation between the discourses of desire alluded to earlier. Indeed, this orients us toward a broader observation about Hansen’s understanding of affectivity, one that points back to the problem with which this chapter (and Hansen’s theoretical oeuvre) started: in figuring a prediscursive body, Hansen in fact figures the discursive rent between technologists and cultural theorists that he seeks to address. Thus, because he fails to take the discourse of technology beyond the pale of linguistic analysis, Hansen succeeds in articulating the necessity of continuing to think deconstruction in its most radical dimensions. That is, the rifts opened by Hansen’s insistence on the primacy of affectivity remind us that the categories that language produces (such as race and gender, in the case of Internet passing) cannot simply be “moved beyond” because they are not properties of individuals but rather “relations of public encounter.”140 In this, a paradox takes hold: precisely because theoretical concerns do, necessarily, subjugate practical ones with respect to generating a meaningful understanding of technological posthumanism, they themselves are also subjugated by a profound co-implication of practice and research that precludes in advance the possibility of either practice or theory keeping what it wins from the other. This paradox is that of deconstruction and is precisely what is foreclosed by the misreading of Derrida that allows Hansen to clear the ground he then claims. By showing the ambivalence that grounds Hansen’s thought, then, I hope to reveal the “leaps of faith” into sensibility that take flight to redouble linguistic contingency under the auspices of eliminating it.

In addition to what I have offered previously, the challenge that deconstruction poses today is also one of comportment. That is, if I have taken some pains to insist that Hansen hasn’t simply misread Derrida but actually performs the ambivalence that deconstruction diagnoses, this is partially to buttress my argument against the notion that I am trying to execute a conservative gesture of “taking Hansen back to Derrida.” To think deconstruction in its full radicality would involve, equally, a sense of deconstruction moving forward through Hansen; the renewed urgency that Hansen lends the discourse is, after all, no small matter when one acknowledges that Derridean deconstruction—like any discourse—morphs, coalesces, accelerates, and slows according to forces in addition to those of reason.