1 THE DIFFERENCE THE DIGITAL MAKES: THE AFFECTIVE SYNTHESIS OF REALITY BY DIGITAL SCREEN MEDIA By Daniel Strutt Goldsmiths College, University of London PhD Media and Communications I hereby declare that this submission is my own work and that, to the best of my knowledge and belief, it contains no material previously published or written by another person nor material which has been accepted for the award of any other degree or diploma of the university or other institute of higher learning, except where due acknowledgment has been made in the text. 2 ABSTRACT Do digital screen media alter our sense of being in the world? Contained within this question are some fairly fundamental existential and metaphysical notions about what it is to be in the world, and what is it to have this sense altered? There is the complex notion of consciousness: what is it to be conscious of the world? What, indeed, is ‘the world’ – simply our phenomenal sensory awareness of reality, or some external transcendent actuality? To understand the effect of the digital on consciousness, one must consider investigating the dynamics of synaptic signals in the brain, to affection and cognition, to larger social, global and even metaphysical systems – whilst also maintaining an eye for the subtle metaphoric connections between them. In the work of new-media theorists such as Massumi, Shaviro, Pisters, Rodowick, Parisi, and Hansen, we see some of the above questions tackled through a triangulation of aesthetic theory, affect theory and philosophy of consciousness. It is amongst these theoretical perspectives that I position my research. I describe digital visual media as an extension and fruition of aesthetic impulses towards indeterminism and flux largely described by Deleuze in the Time-Image as ‘the indiscernibility of the real and the imaginary, or of the present and the past, of the actual and the virtual’, but further, through Bernard Stiegler, as a new mnemo-technical ‘grammatisation’ of vital metaphysical forces, or of existence as such. I then show by example how digitally created and inflected images, through their own vital automatism, give us new mimetic and metaphorical tools through which to affectively and conceptually think the real. I argue that the digital-image establishes itself in ways that Deleuze foreshadowed but could not quite foresee, becoming: ‘an as yet unknown aspect of the time-image’. 3 TABLE OF CONTENTS 1. INTRODUCTION 4 2. LITERATURE REVIEW 29 3. MONADISM and NOMADISM: METHODOLOGICAL CONSIDERATIONS 87 4. ‘A Digital Frontier That Will Reshape The HuMan Condition.’ 120 5. DYNAMIC SPACES, BODIES & FORCES: THE DIFFERENCE THE DIGITAL MAKES 156 6. REALITY SUTURES, SIMULATION and DIGITAL REALISM 199 7. ETHICS and AESTHETICS: META-POLITICAL IMPLICATIONS 241 8. BIBLIOGRAPHY 275 4 INTRODUCTION This project starts with a feeling: initially a corporeal stimulation, exhilaration or agitation and a sense of enjoyment and fulfilment. Secondarily, this feeling transforms into an intuition – an embodied intuition that the world is enlivened, less consistent, more likely to surprise us. Thirdly there is an intrusive thought – a conception that this feeling, as it fades, should be disowned, as it is not authentic. It is a hollow experience. I have been awed and shaken, but ultimately duped and taken for a ride. I should turn my attention to more meaningful activities. This is the conflicted feeling that I, and I would imagine many others, have had after watching some of the images that I analyse in this project – the spectacular objects of a contemporary digital screen culture.1 They are objects of a commercial entertainment culture, and as such, for reasons including the mode of attention, the space of their consumption, the industrial mode of production or the spectacular affections they afford us, they seem to have little value as objects of art. They are perceived as junk food, regularly consumed and enjoyed though we know they are bad for us. I am drawn, however, to look at them again through different eyes, as individual images, and as together forming a matrix which seems to express a distinctive shift in a ‘structure of feeling’2 or a ‘regime of the sensible’3 – more simply put, a change in ways of thinking, seeing and feeling. I aim to explore how these images might qualify as a form of artistic expression, in the process 1 This is the sentiment expressed in Sean Cubitt’s reading of contemporary digital cinema in The Cinema Effect. Cubitt, Sean. 2005 The Cinema Effect. MIT Press: Cambridge MA. 2 This phrase is used in Steven Shaviro’s sense, of which he states: ‘I am therefore concerned, in what follows, with effects more than causes, and with evocations rather than explanations. That is to say, I am not looking at Foucauldian genealogies so much as at something like what Raymond Williams called “structures of feeling” (though I am not using this term quite in the manner that Williams intended). I am interested in the ways that recent film and video works are expressive: that is to say, in the ways that they give voice (or better, give sounds and images) to a kind of ambient, free-floating sensibility that permeates our society today, although it cannot be attributed to any subject in particular.’ Shaviro, Steven. 2010 ‘Post-Cinematic Affect: On Grace Jones, Boarding Gate and Southland Tales’ in Film Philosophy 14:1. Liverpool: Open Humanities Press. 3 This is Jacques Rancière’s term. The Politics of Aesthetics. 2006. London: Continuum. 5 interrogating what social, cultural and cognitive activity ‘art’ really pertains to (in the field of aesthetics), and how and why it does this – in the fields of technology, media philosophy, neurology and cognitive theory. My research question thus simply is: do digital screen media alter our sense of being in the world? However, at stake in the asking of this question are some fairly fundamental existential and metaphysical notions about what it is to ‘be’ in the world, and what it is to have this sense altered. There is the complex notion of consciousness: what is it to be conscious of the world? What processes do our minds go through to learn about the world? What, indeed, is ‘the world’ – simply our sensory awareness of it, or some external transcendent actuality? In asking whether a specific technological shift in modes of expression and communication impacts in some way on our mode of existing in the world, we have to ask how all technologies have, in different times in history, impacted upon a dynamic human relation with nature. Having tried to understand this, I then ask what is different this time, with this change, and in this historical era? My research question, though simple, nonetheless becomes profound. In investigating ontological issues of existence and consciousness within the digital age of communication, one must seemingly go from understanding the dynamics of the most basic synaptic signals in the brain, to affection and cognition, to social, industrial and global systems of communication –while at the same time maintaining an eye for the subtle metaphoric connections between them. What I aim to ascertain is the fundamental ontological difference that the digital shift in visual technologies instigates, an area insufficiently developed in many analyses of digital interfaces and interactions. In the recent work on digital media, cultural theorists Patricia Pisters, Mark Hansen and David Rodowick stand out in noting an ontological shift, a new state of, and understanding of being and acting within a digitally mediated world.4 They describe a departure from the indexical relation of the image to reality instilled by 4 Pisters, Patricia. 2012: 32-33. The Neuro Image: A Deleuzian Film Philosophy of Digital Screen Culture. Stanford University Press; Rodowick, David. N. 2007. The Virtual Life of Film. Cambridge MA. Harvard University Press; Hansen, Mark. 2006. New Philosophy for New Media. Cambridge MA: MIT Press. 6 photographic processes, and elaborate an emergent aesthetic sensibility cultivated by the new digital arrangement of images and image components. I aim in this work to develop and extend these theories of digital visual culture through a formal, structural and thematic analysis of the images themselves as well as the dynamic processes of engagement with them. The project thus works towards yielding a fuller understanding of the subtle alterations that are currently occurring within our collective consciousness of reality due to the influence of the digital image. I position myself within the contemporary moment of technological transformation, with a critical conception of the role of digital media in sculpting thought.5 If cinema, for Deleuze, instituted an emergent ‘cine-thinking’ entailing a particular kind of thought about time and space, then what can we ascertain as a separate and distinct ‘digi-thinking’?6 The material qualities of film seem to lend themself to the manipulation of time – movement here is after all an illusion given by a sequence of still images shown in quick succession. Subsequently we ask what the relative immaterial materiality of digital data lends itself to the manipulation of when both form and force can be folded and morphed. If material filmic processes of cutting and splicing together photographic frames exposed our habits of linear temporal perception or memory’s relative elasticity, digital material/immaterial processes render all metaphysical notions, including time, as intensely plastic in a way that draws all forms of linearity into doubt. While film is perceived as primarily a temporal medium, then the digital seems to be this and more. The digital exists as a spectre within conventional film theory, creating a problematic relation of image to reality and the representation thereof. Inevitably some theorists and critics brush it to one side and see it as a continuation of the cinematic as that is simply how it looks – it exhibits a habitual continuity with the indexical processes of film such as focal 5 Specifically, the last 5 years – the period of writing this work and also around the time that Digital 3D first came into the cinematic mainstream.