# **CINEMATIC CINEMATIC**

# **BODIES**

 **POST**

#### **SHANE DENSON**

# **CONFIGURATIONS**

# **OF FILM**

#### **Post-Cinematic Bodies**

# **Post-Cinematic Bodies**

**Shane Denson**

#### **Bibliographical Information of the German National Library**

The German National Library lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie (German National Bibliography); detailed bibliographic information is available online at http://dnb.d-nb.de.

Published in 2023 by meson press, Lüneburg, Germany with generous support from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft www.meson.press

Design concept: Torsten Köchlin, Silke Krieg Cover design: Mathias Bär Cover art: Karin Denson, Giant Green Anemone (2023); glitch, photomontage; 16x20 inches (detail)

ISBN (print): 978-3-95796-043-6 ISBN (PDF): 978-3-95796-044-3 DOI: 10.14619/0436

The digital edition of this publication can be downloaded freely at www.meson.press.

This publication is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 (Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International). To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by-sa/4.0/.

#### **Contents**

 **Series Foreword 7**

 **Foreword 9** Laura Laabs and Clara Podlesnigg

#### **Preface 21**

PART ONE: DIS/CORRELATING EMBODIMENT

 **Introduction to Part One 39**

PART TWO: POST- CINEMATIC BODY GENRES

 **Introduction to Part Two 117**

Coda 227 Acknowledgements 231 References 235

#### **Configurations of Film: Series Foreword**

Scalable across a variety of formats and standardized in view of global circulation, the moving image has always been both an image of movement and an image on the move. Over the last three decades, digital production technologies, communication networks and distribution platforms have taken the scalability and mobility of film to a new level. Beyond the classical *dispositif* of the cinema, new forms and knowledges of cinema and film have emerged, challenging the established approaches to the study of film. The conceptual framework of index, *dispositif* and canon, which defined cinema as photochemical image technology with a privileged bond to reality, a site of public projection, and a set of works from auteurs from specific national origins, can no longer account for the current multitude of moving images and the trajectories of their global movements. The term "post-cinema condition," which was first proposed by film theorists more than a decade ago to describe the new cultural and technological order of moving images, retained an almost melancholic attachment to that which the cinema no longer was. Moving beyond such attachments, the concept of "configurations of film" aims to account for moving images in terms of their operations, forms and formats, locations and infrastructures, expanding the field of cinematic knowledges beyond the arts and the aesthetic, while retaining a focus on film as privileged site for the production of cultural meaning, for social action and for political conflict.

The series "Configurations of Film" presents pointed interventions in this field of debate by emerging and established international scholars associated with the DFG-funded Graduate Research Training Program (Graduiertenkolleg) "Konfigurationen des Films" at Goethe University Frankfurt. The contributions to the series aim to explore and expand our understanding of configurations of film in both a contemporary and historical perspective, combining film and media theory with media history to address key problems in the development of new analytical frameworks for the moving image on the move.

*What happens to film once it leaves the cinema, and how can film studies account for the migration, and transformation of its object? — Funding Application DFG-Graduiertenkolleg 2279 "Configurations of Film"*

#### **Foreword**

#### Laura Laabs and Clara Podlesnigg

Quoted above is the inaugural research question posed by the Graduate Research Training Program (*Graduiertenkolleg*) Configurations of Film. *Post-Cinematic Bodies*, Shane Denson's contribution to the Configurations of Film book series, can be seen as rephrasing that question in an intriguing way: what happens to the *body* once film has left the cinema, and how can film studies account for the migration, transformation, and bodily situation of its viewing/addressed subjects? However, Denson offers answers to both questions at once, thinking about post-cinematic objects and the bodies that experience, live, or even work with them. In this book, he urges us time and again "to pay especial attention to the ways that the user/viewer's body is interpellated and imagined, constructed or deconstructed, engrossed or expelled how, in other words, post-cinematic bodies are subjected to the push and pull of correlative and discorrelative tendencies and forces" (Denson 2023, 117 in this volume).

In a strange coincidence, Shane Denson's Mercator Fellowship at Configurations of Film—where the idea for this book first originated—could itself serve as a case study for this book. Coming to us in November 2020, in the dark, pre-vaccine days of the pandemic, the online fellowship consisted of a string of meetings of our very own post-cinematic bodies brought together in grids on our at-home screens. Different time zones resulted in

**10** differently adjusted bodies for each of our virtual get-togethers. When we in Europe were having wine and beer to decompress after a long day, Denson was sipping coffee in California to get his day started. Even back then, he had already begun working through some of the philosophical implications of the strange, at once connected and isolated situation in which we all found ourselves (cf. Denson 2020b). Operationalizing the term "multistability," itself a thread that runs both through Denson's past works as well as *Post-Cinematic Bodies* (the concluding part of a trilogy1 ), he describes the ubiquitous but curious perceptual situation of online get-togethers with keen focus on the mediality of split screens enabling split attention on self and other, or self as other:

> The multistability of the screen now became even more apparent as we found our vision bouncing around between the many faces arrayed in grids across our screens, shifting from box to box, frame to frame, peering into each other's apartments, and quite often winding up looking at our own faces as if in a glitchy digital mirror. (Ibid., 317)

In this earlier essay, Denson describes and comes to grips with the heightened perceptual alertness, sometimes verging on alarm, provoked in connection with the pandemic situation and its demands on our bodies: situated, as they were, in a screen environment that both enabled us to enact our academic exchange and physically shielded us from each other's potentially dangerous, virus-emitting, bodily co-presence. The essay also anticipates some of the questions of embodiment in our contemporary media environment which are posed and answered in this volume.

1 The previous two parts of the trilogy are *Postnaturalism: Frankenstein, Film, and the Anthropotechnical Interface* (2014) and *Discorrelated Images* (2020a).

#### **11 Down the Rabbit Hole with** *Post-Cinematic Bodies*

In line with this focus on multistability, reading *Post-Cinematic Bodies* similarly brought us into closer contact with our bodies while also leading us away from them. This is the kind of book that immediately makes you want to put its theses and arguments to the test. Through its rich descriptions of objects and cases it elicits the almost irresistible desire to dive down rabbit holes: open tabs, look things up online, check whether your own experience of an object analyzed correlates or discorrelates with Denson's assertions. Reading along in this manner can feel like a scavenger hunt on a playground of glitchy experiential opportunities. At one point, you may find yourself pressing Q, W, O and P on your keyboard in an erratic fashion, trying to make the avatar of an Olympic runner move, but failing at every attempt of growing muscle memory. Another time, you may pick up your mobile device to check its technical specifications and find out whether a creepy-sounding camera technology has unknowingly been with you every time you picked that thing up. These are the moments when some of the central theses of this book become available to experience and make themselves felt in the reader's flesh. Denson never explicitly directs you away from his book. Even so, precisely because the book may not have every answer (nor does it pretend to), the ways in which it leads you to see and feel for yourself can be quite fun. For us, the process of reading this book started a whole chain of searches for more and more cases exemplifying momentarily felt effects or indices of dis/correlation.2 This is not only a testimony to *Post-Cinematic*

2 These are some exemplary findings of ours: "STAR WARS Tilt Brush – Spaceships Battle Paint Drawing in VR." Dong Yoon Park. January 2, 2017. Video, https://youtu.be/9Bx6nDjxC24. The creator of this video, a *Star Wars* fan, designer and creative technologist, uses Google's Tilt Brush, an application for 3D room scale painting in VR to create a battle scene featuring his favorite spaceship models from the franchise.

**12** *Bodies*' timeliness, but also to the ways in which research and knowledge transfer go hand in hand.

One of those moments of parallel ruthless rabbit holing led us to a video tour of the "Google Data Center Security: 6 Layers Deep" (Google Cloud Tech 2020). Produced by Google and shared on YouTube in June 2020, the video functions both as an advertisement for Google's self-proclaimed data storage and "privacy" protection security measures and, at the same time, a showcase of strategies for deterring potential intruders or attackers (from outside or within the company itself).

As video host Stephanie Wong enters the data center site, she acknowledges the presence of guards and cameras as visible actants of surveillance. Then, she proceeds to ask her guide Joe Kava about things she perhaps didn't or couldn't see. If the guards and cameras function as perceptible traces for Google's security measures, they also seem to suggest or imply the co-presence of imperceptible, computational surveillance technologies. Kava affirms Wong's discernment: "Yeah, there's actually a lot of technology and operations going on behind the scene. So from the time that you're on site, we know that you're here, and we're able to do correlation analysis of where you've been" (ibid., 00:01:20–00:01:30). What exactly Kava means by

"Labo VR's Secret Doodle Tools (Elephant Toy-Con)." GameXplain. April 13, 2019. Video, https://youtu.be/lZe0Dv0uAnQ. Rather than "seamlessly" integrating the player's body in a VR environment, Nintendo Labo's VR goggles plus cardboard elephant mask require them to be held in front of the face with one hand, while the other is used for creating doodles in a VR environment. The set-up quickly becomes physically tiring, calling attention to the inevitability of the body in VR media dispositifs. Sara Cwynar, *Glass Life*. 2021. https://mubi.com/films/glass-life. An experimental short film assembling digital images, video, and quotes from various

theory references that also appear throughout *Post-Cinematic Bodies*. "The Future Is a Dead Mall – Decentraland and the Metaverse." Folding Ideas. March 27, 2023. Video, https://youtu.be/EiZhdpLXZ8Q. An almost twohour long video essay about the frustrations of VR and the concept of the Metaverse explored by means of an auto-ethnographic exploration of the platform Decentraland.

"correlation analysis" remains unexplained, and so do the precise **13** methods for calculating the facility visitors' previous movements. Still, the statement implies an omniscience about its visitors' present and past physical whereabouts that unmistakably mirrors Google's data-based tracking and probabilistic calculations about Internet users' behavior. Denson's arguments in *Post-Cinematic Bodies* precisely get at this sense of a barely assessable bodily implication in, and subjectivation through, computational regimes. "At stake here," Denson posits,

is not just an algorithmic enforcement of bias, but an implantation of said biases into our embodied relations to the world—hence a norming of bodies, minds, and societies—with all of the racist, sexist, queer- and transphobic, and ableist consequences that we might expect. (Denson 2023, 34–35 in this volume)

In the virtual tour's following scene, we meet two Black security guards, Ricky Gordon and Tarik Billingsley, who are also guiding Wong, herself an Asian-American woman, over the property as she interviews them. In fact, the video's cast is predominantly people of color. Wong, Gordon, and Billingsley chat about the fencing surrounding the premises, as well as night vision and thermal cameras monitoring the area. On the one hand, Google's casting signals a sensibility for diversity and the representation of people of color in their official communications. On the other hand, when watching the video one can hardly overlook the fact that the two Black men talking about these surveillance and security tools belong to a demographic disproportionately targeted and dehumanized by technologies of datafication and image recognition. Google's former motto "Don't Be Evil" (Wikipedia 2005) seems to be reconfigured here in an attempt to frame technologies of surveillance in a positive, inclusive light, utilized purely to keep users' data safe.

Wong: Ricky, Tarik, can you tell me more about what's unique about the fencing?

**14** Gordon: This particular fence is an anti-climb fence. It's also equipped with fiber. The technology tells us if someone's near the fence or touches the fence.

> Billingsley: So we use thermal cameras and standard cameras. So we're able to see video footage at night just as clearly as we can during the day (Google Cloud Tech 2020, 00:01:40–00:02:02).

As this conversation reveals, some of the technology presented for example a fence around the perimeter—anticipates the body and its behavior without that body perceiving that it is being perceived. In other words, even if the body is by all appearances located outside of the fenced-off area, it is already included in the medial regime articulated here. This pre-subjective or unconscious inscription of the body in the technological regime of Google's multiple security layers thus regulates and organizes inclusion and exclusion through methods of anticipating, measuring, and evaluating the body and its behavior in unnoticeable but deeply consequential manners. Of course, these regimes can be subsumed under the key phrase "surveillance capitalism" (Zuboff 2019), not least because it is in Google's interest to reassure its business clients and to confirm their confidence in using Google infrastructures. Extending this lens, however, Denson seeks "to expose the ways that *bodies* are subject to unprecedented forces of surveillance, control, and modulation in the age of post-cinematic media" (2023, 227 in this volume; our emphasis). In addition to capitalist surveillance, data acquisition, and data evaluation, then, Google's "smart fence" also, and crucially, operates at the bodily levels of the micro-temporal and the imperceptible: what Denson calls the "metabolic." At stake is the implication and configuration of corporeal processes in these datafication regimes. Denson's work thus constitutes a deep, media philosophical reflection on computational media as much as a valuable reminder that the seemingly abstract processes undergirding them are, in fact, operating on the body at the level of its metabolism. It is crucial

to remember that most of these processes of dis/correlation, as **15** Denson conceptualizes them, happen at the pre-subjective level. Our aforementioned scavenger hunt for materials, inspired as it was by the book's arguments and case studies, was thus also in some strange way a search for that which is imperceptible.

#### **Mysteries of Formatting Data and Bodies**

The exploration of these forms of regulating, configuring, and "norming of bodies" (Denson 2023, 34 in this volume) by means of computational technologies is another crucial throughline of *Post-Cinematic Bodies*. Denson alerts us to the fact that "our formatted environments of digitally designed architectures, objects, and devices work directly on our bodies and materially shape the conditions of our social relations" (ibid., 41). This "formatting of space" (ibid., 70) is not to be taken metaphorically but very literally. Moving from chapter to chapter, it emerges that our bodies themselves are subject to complex, usually pre-cognitive, invisible, and intangible processes of formatting in the post-cinematic regime. Denson describes this difficult, sometimes even troubling reconfiguration in terms of "new forms of visuality and tactility that shape the environment for contemporary life," and further finds that these "operate on speeds and scales that are immune to our perception. They anticipate us, predicting our behavior, pre-visualizing our interactions, and pre-formatting our bodies and brains" (ibid., 227).

Vivian Sobchack, a prominent reference throughout *Post-Cinematic Bodies*, once wrote that "as we subjectively live both our bodies and our images, each not only informs the other, but they also often become significantly confused" (2004 [1999], 36). This observation, which Sobchack makes in relation to cinematic special effects and cosmetic surgery as entangled cultural practices, becomes especially relevant in Denson's exploration of DeepFakes throughout the book. DeepFakes are moving images that in many ways aim to confuse bodies, often in harmful **16** acts that exploit political power to manipulate who said what, or to create non-consensual pornography by digitally stitching together faces and bodies. However, DeepFakes have also become a technology of aspiration: enter Elon Musk's Chinese doppelgänger Yilong Ma. In his viral TikToks, the self-proclaimed "ardent follower and imitator" (Ma 2023) of Musk dresses in a three-piece suit and poses with a Tesla as he recites phrases about tech and money in phonetic English. This displacement of the powerful tech-billionaire, who has repeatedly sought to ban any satirical interpretations of his character (cf. Perrigo 2022; Milmo and Hern 2022), allows for both critical and affirmative interpretations. Hence, Musk somehow did not mind the online presence of Yilong Ma, and via Twitter even offered to meet him "if he is real" (Musk 2022). From the get-go, there has been suspicion about Yilong Ma potentially being a DeepFake, sending his online audiences on frustrating searches for glitches and imperfections in his very Musk-like facial features; or, in Denson's words, for signs of "seamfulness" (2023, 110 in this volume) as opposed to an (ideological) ideal of digitally constructed seamlessness. A rare video interview with a US-American content creator fluent in Yilong Ma's first language Mandarin presents another perspective on his character. Titling his video "Exposing the Chinese Elon Musk," the YouTuber sets out to reveal that Ma is in fact deepfaking his appearance. But when confronted directly, Ma simply responds: "I think it's nice to maintain an air of mystery" (Xiaomanyc小马在纽约 2023, 00:06:45–00:06:50).

Interestingly, this notion of mystery as a quality that is to be maintained also appears in Google's video about the data center's security management: the facility's sixth and final layer, an exclusive space that the fewest may access, is referred to as "mysterious" (Google Cloud Tech 2020, 00:04:30–00:04:33). Here, the cognitive unavailability of computational processes is not framed as a problem but rather as part of the fascination of engaging with the images they create. We learn that this mysterious sixth security layer is dedicated to the destruction of

physical data carriers by means of a human-operated machine. **17** Through the transparent top window of the otherwise black box, we glimpse the culled hardware on a conveyor belt, moving towards a grinder. The process of data destruction is at once visible and invisible. What we *can* see is part of an "operational aesthetic," a term Denson borrows from Neil Harris to describe the tension between opacity and transparency that makes visual spectacles possible (2023, 106–113 in this volume). It also pertains to our experience of DeepFakes:

DeepFakes also trade essentially on an operational aesthetic, or a dispersal of attention between visual surface and the algorithmic operation of machine learning. However, the post-cinematic processes to whose operation DeepFakes refer our attention fundamentally transform the operational aesthetic, relocating it from the oscillations of attention that we see in the cinema to a deep, pre-attentional level that computation taps into with its microtemporal speed. (Ibid., 109)

What is on the line in this specific case, but also in many of Denson's own case studies, is the making visible of computational processes otherwise invisible to humans. He assumes that something important for the understanding of technologies (or post-cinematic media) is hidden there. What is being secured, protected, and invisibilized, from whom, and at what/whose cost? By the end of Google's video, we learn that "getting out of the data center is arguably even harder than getting in" (Google Cloud Tech 00:05:33)—a barely veiled metaphor for the computational, post-cinematic regimes implicating and processing our bodies. All of this may seem troubling and darkly pessimistic; however, you will find that Denson, throughout his writing, is dedicated to the position that technologies and techniques of dis/ correlation are not inevitably disempowering, and he frequently turns to independent artists and critical thinkers to draw out hopeful perspectives on post-cinematic bodies. His project is, importantly, "also to ask about the material and aesthetic

**18** potentials embedded in these systems to become something else" (Denson 2023, 35 in this volume).

#### **Did He Really Say "Post-cinematic"?**

The fact that a book featuring the term "post-cinematic" in its title is now part of the Configurations of Film book series might raise an eyebrow for those who remember our suggestion to speak of "configurations" of film rather than the post-cinematic (cf. Boguska and Hediger 2019, 11). To some of us, this choice of words suggests that the cinematic dispositif had once been the norm, but no longer is. In *Post-Cinematic Bodies* (as well as his earlier books *Postnaturalism* and *Discorrelated Images*), Denson explicitly engages with the notions of presumed crises, caesuras, or paradigmatic shifts that his terminology might indicate to some readers. While Denson is clear in his position that computational technologies have fundamentally affected the way we (don't) perceive moving image media and art, he states just as clearly that moving images have always had dis/correlative potentials rather, it is the operations of dis/correlation at work that have shifted (2023, 35 in this volume)—and that post-cinematic media do not occur exclusively outside of the cinema space. In that sense, Denson does not so much oppose oldness and newness, but instead emphasizes relevant continuities while also pointing out discontinuities. The book will oftentimes ask you to consider differences of degree rather than kind: "But within this continuity, there is also a difference to be found in the speed, scope, and degree of operationalization of metabolic processes" (ibid., 32). Although framerates and photochemical reactions might thus constitute imperceptible processes in the cinematic viewing situation, they nevertheless seem more accessible to consciousness than the myriads of microtemporal operations that occur before, during, and after we watch the video tour of Google's Data Center security or scroll through the TikTok and Twitter feeds of Yilong Ma. You might take a look at the relevant advertising categories Google or Meta assign to you in order to catch an indirect glimpse of algorithmic calculations, and perhaps speculate about their **19** variables. But the actual processes of data collection and evaluation—and thus their operations at the bodily, the metabolic level—are a different matter altogether. For Denson, the relevant threshold is crossed when we try to make sense of these "invisible, microtemporal processes that are categorically outside the window of human perception" (ibid., 30).

So, what exactly happens to the body when film leaves the cinema, and how can film studies account for the migration, transformation, and bodily situation of its viewing/addressed subjects? As the present authors have read, watched, scrolled, searched, scavenged, thought, talked, and wrote, Denson's book continuously urged us to mind our bodies. Indeed, and in contrast with positions that maintain the body's absence from, or even its irrelevance to digital spaces, Denson's meticulous engagement with the body as a site on which computational technologies operate, especially as their object of interpellation and subjectivation processes, further shows that the body is far from being a stable entity. (This it shares with film studies' objects of analysis, as argued in the research program's mission statement.) The body cannot be taken for granted; instead, the body and embodied existence is re/configured all the time, whether we take notice or not. *Post-Cinematic Bodies* makes an astute case and offers media-philosophical tools as well as analytic pathways for thinking through the complicated questions of embodiment in the face of, and posed by, the complicated technologies we casually use.

#### **References**

	- Denson, Shane. 2020a. *Discorrelated Images*. Durham: Duke University Press.
	- Denson, Shane. 2020b. "'Thus isolation is a project.' Notes toward a Phenomenology of Screen-Mediated Life." In *Pandemic Media: Preliminary Notes toward an Inventory*, edited by Philipp Dominik Keidl, Laliv Melamed, Vinzenz Hediger and Antonio Somaini, 315–322. Configurations of Film Series. Lüneburg: meson press.
	- Denson, Shane. 2023. *Post-Cinematic Bodies*. Configurations of Film Series. Lüneburg: meson press.
	- Milmo, Dan, and Alex Hern. 2022. "Twitter bans comedian Kathy Griffin for impersonating Elon Musk." *The Guardian*, November 7, 2022. https://www.theguardian. com/technology/2022/nov/07/twitter-will-ban-permanently-suspend-impersonator-accounts-elon-musk-says-as-users-take-his-name. Accessed April 21, 2023.
	- Musk, Elon (@elonmusk). 2022. "I'd like to meet this guy (if he is real). Hard to tell with deepfakes these days." Twitter, May 9, 2022, 3:28pm. https://twitter.com/ elonmusk/status/1523656160699502593.
	- Perrigo, Billy. 2022. "Twitter Bans Accounts Mocking 'Free Speech Absolutist' Elon Musk." *Time*, November 7, 2022. https://time.com/6229960/twitter-bansaccounts-elon-musk-impersonators/. Accessed April 21, 2023.
	- Sobchack, Vivian. 2004 [1999]. "Scary Women: Cinema, Surgery, and Special Effects." In *Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture*, 36–52. Berkeley: University of California Press.
	- Ma, Yilong (@mayilong0). 2023. Twitter biography. https://twitter.com/mayilong0. Accessed April 20, 2023.
	- Wikipedia. 2005. "Don't Be Evil." Wikimedia Foundation. Last modified March 28, 2023. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don%27t\_be\_evil.
	- Zuboff, Shoshana. 2019. *The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power*. New York: Public Affairs.

#### **Preface**

*Post-Cinematic Bodies* is about the making, unmaking, and remaking of embodiment in contemporary media. In this book, I am concerned with a range of new modes of corporeal address: commercial, experimental, mainstream, and deviant alike. I am especially interested in the ways that artistic interventions can shed light on, or make available to embodied experience, the parameters of an emerging but already powerful system by which computational media put bodies in their place, define them, and discipline them. Between such discipline and its disruption, embodiment serves as both subject and object of postcinematic media—and oftentimes as something else: neither a well-defined subject nor an object *per se*, but the multistable ground of both. It is this embodied substratum of experience that is at stake in—and is in many ways *the fulcrum of*—the shift from cinematic to post-cinematic media; the speed, scale, and fine-grained precision of computational operations enables an unprecedented targeting of the neither-fully-subjective-norquite-objective flesh, which is by turns addressed, quantified, reified, formed, deformed, modulated, and worked over in the process of subjectivizing and/or objectifying viewers and users. Aimed at uncovering the aesthetic and political dimensions of these transformations, this is a book about the mediated situation of corporeality today.

But after decades of work on embodiment and new media, as well as the broader trend within film and media studies to valorize the body as a site of resistance and excess, do we really need another book of this sort? In recent years, there has been growing suspicion of such appeals to the body. Coupled with the turn to affect, the turn to embodiment has come to appear all too predictable, hardly the radical gesture that it once seemed to be. Moreover, opposition to this mode of theorizing is fueled not simply by an impatience with scholarly fashions that refuse to die, but by concerns that the appeal to embodiment might in

**22** fact stand in the way of other, more pressing issues. If, as some critics have suggested, it is understood as a turn *inward* and *away from ideology*, the corporeal turn threatens to obfuscate politics. If understood as a turn *away from the space of discourse and reason*, the corporeal turn appears as a refusal of critique. And if understood as a turn *toward a supposedly unimpeachable stratum of private experience*, this apolitical and post-critical corporeal turn also provides an easy way to evade the labor of analysis and interpretation, thus rendering the very point of aesthetic inquiry uncertain. Eugenie Brinkema (2014), in *The Forms of the Affects*, provides the most trenchant critique of these tendencies, arguing that the appeal to the body as the supposed seat of the affects effectively neutralizes and disables political and scholarly debate alike. In the place of a "visceral aesthetics," she provocatively offers instead a disembodied affect: "Affect, as I theorize it here, has fully shed the subject [in accordance with a familiar Deleuzean line of thinking], but my argument goes a step further and also loses for affects the body and bodies" (ibid., 25). Against the feeling body, Brinkema "regards any individual affect as a selffolding exteriority that manifests in, as, and with textual form" (ibid., 25). As an exteriority, affect is not private but inherently political and open to debate; and as a textual form, affect demands analysis, interpretation, and critique—all of which the appeal to the body foreclosed.

How, then, does this book's focus on embodiment stand in relation to such arguments? Let me note, first, that I wholeheartedly agree with Brinkema's indictment of the post-critical impulse: for both political and scholarly reasons, we simply cannot give up on close reading and the analytical engagement with aesthetic forms. And it is because of this shared conviction that I also share Brinkema's suspicion of those modes of criticism and theory that valorize the body and its affects as an unproblematic bulwark against discursive power or interpellation. The corporeal excess appealed to there is neither valuable in its own right, nor is it safely outside the space of political

strife. In fact, and this marks my divergence from Brinkema, **23** embodiment is a central site of the political conflicts indexed and addressed by aesthetic forms and the scholarly discourses with which we respond to them. If I advocate something like a "visceral aesthetics," it is not because of the flesh's inherent resistance but precisely because of its increased vulnerability to capture and cooptation. Now more than ever, due to the expansion of computational powers to bypass conscious perception and intervene directly on prepersonal embodiment, we are simply not at liberty to ignore the body in our engagements with affective and aesthetic forms.

One task of this book is to elaborate a theory of embodiment and its relations both to sensation and to power that will help us to understand the deeply political stakes of our current media-historical moment. In this endeavor, I believe, the points of agreement far outweigh any points of disagreement between Brinkema and myself. To begin with, Brinkema's opposition to embodiment is rooted in a particular understanding of the relation—what I will theorize as a "correlative" relation—between affect and the body, which I agree needs to be scrutinized, revised, and (as Brinkema puts it) "resisted" (2014, 32). In Brinkema's account of film and media studies' development over the past three decades or so, scholars turned towards embodied affect as an alternative to the supposedly disembodied and textually inscribed subjectpositions of the "apparatus theory" of the 1970s. For Brinkema, affect-oriented scholars were united not only by a suspicion of "form and ideology, meaning and sign," but by a fetishization of theorists' *personal* experiences: singular and irrefutable sensations identified with one's own body (ibid., 27, 31). Brinkema foregrounds the way that such personalization, effectively a "solipsism," stands in the way of theoretical generalization and critique (ibid., 31–33). I would add that such an approach also radically simplifies and positivizes embodiment, turning it into *my personal property* rather than the multistable ground that I have gestured towards above: neither subject nor object, but probably

**24** on balance more public than private, and hence both the nexus of a nascent, presubjective collectivity and a volatile battleground in the struggle over subjectivation and objectification. My critique of a reductively reified notion of embodiment is in fact a corollary of Brinkema's critique of affect as private, "directional," or "intentional" in the phenomenological sense (ibid., 31). "Affect is taken as always being, in the end, *for us*" (ibid., 31). For theorists who regard affects in this way, as interior states or sense-data that are open to inspection by the theorist and no one else and/ or as outwardly expressive signs of the internal lives of others, they function (as Brinkema frames it in a Husserlian vocabulary) as noematic objects bound as the correlates of intending subjects' noetic experiencing (ibid., 33). But this, as Brinkema and I both agree, is a perversion of affect, which is precisely *not* personal or correlative in this sense, but is instead "non-intentional, indifferent, and resists the given-over attributes of a teleological spectatorship with acquirable gains" (ibid., 33).

Against the stabilizing correlation of affect and embodiment, Brinkema chooses to abandon the body and revise affect. She describes "a subjectless affect, bound up in an exteriority, uncoupled from emotion, interiority, expressivity, mimesis, humanism, spectatorship, and bodies" (ibid., 45). In my own view, this "uncoupling" should be read not as a privative or exclusionary non-relation, but as a loosening or undoing of the "directional" idea that affect must necessarily be attached to or correlated with any of these terms; if understood in this way, such that couplings of this sort are optional but not impossible—on the contrary, in fact, that such affective couplings can be effective means of subjectivation and interpellation—then I am ready to endorse every aspect of Brinkema's redescription of affect, *with the exception of its disembodiment*. Both affect *and embodiment*, in my view, are non-obvious and malleable, potentially opaque to subjective experience and therefore demanding of theoretical problematization and interpretive engagement. Brinkema writes of affect, and I would extend this to embodiment as

well, that it cannot be reduced to a "model … based in and of **25** individual psychology or phenomenological experience. Rather, it inheres in material objects, takes shape in an exteriority and in formal structures" (ibid., 76). As I will argue later in this book, embodiment is indispensable not because it serves either to stabilize affect or to destabilize discursive power structures, but because it is the multistable ground upon which the binary of interior and exterior itself rests and makes sense—as well as the necessary ground for its deconstruction. To truly undo the coupling of affect with subjective interiority, we will have to undo the coupling of embodiment with private experience as well. And here, I suggest, the recently computerized culture industries are way ahead of us in their targeting and operationalization of embodiment outside the purview of subjective experience.

Brinkema warns against the dangers of "an introspective style" in mobilizations of affect "that attempt to focus on the immediate, visceral, and corporeal" (ibid., 32); in addition to the "classical interiority" that inheres in such accounts, against the wishes of affect theorists' "attempts to reject and move beyond such metaphysical frameworks," Brinkema identifies a very material and political-economic hazard: "Perhaps the greatest danger of this approach is that it emphasizes the successful *consumption* of affect and thus makes theoretical accounts of each private feeling experience complicit with the explicit marketing of feeling from the commercial side of film production" (ibid., 32). Whether this is truly the "greatest danger" is open to debate, but it is indeed worth noting a formal resemblance between the critic who would capture and neutralize affect as the object of their own experience, on the one hand, and an industry that aims to capture bodies and interpellate them as dutifully enthralled consumers on the other. What this points to, I suggest, is the way that affect, far from disrupting the system of "form and ideology, meaning and sign" at the heart of apparatus theory, is actually an integral part of that system. We are dealing, in other words, with an affective apparatus. And if that apparatus was operative already

**26** in a cinematic culture, its operation and efficiency is greatly intensified in a post-cinematic one, where sensing bodies are subject to non-stop automated tracking, ubiquitous monitoring, and minute quantification—discreetly inserted into computational feedback loops aimed at engineering an optimal user experience that would leave us feeling good about a life of consumption and the incidental value that it produces for Apple, fitbit, Sony, Peloton, Facebook, or Aetna. Webcams track our every move in department stores, while machine learning systems process our eye movements and scan our images for facial microgestures that would reveal our feelings about various products. Affective computing companies like Affectiva, with their emotion analytics software Affdex, collect and facilitate exchanges of this information to producers of consumer products and online platforms, who use it to optimize their targeting of advertisements.1 All of this happens on the basis of bodily behavior, taken as the outward sign of interior states that might or might not ever be registered by me as a subject, processed by machines operating imperceptibly at microtemporal speeds to predictively anticipate future behavior and thus mold future subjective states. In this system, the exteriority of embodied affect to subjective experience is the precondition for its effective targeting *as a vehicle for the subjectivizing or interpellating act itself*. The culture industry, we could say, understands very well the multistability of embodiment and knows how to instrumentalize it in its role as the ground and transducer of the interior/exterior divide. We, as critics of culture and aesthetic experience, need to understand it as well.

Theorizing this dimension of embodiment, which is alternately correlated and discorrelated from subjective experience, will take us to the heart of aesthetics and mediality in their sensory, technical, and political dimensions. Against the "introspective

1 For an excellent history of affective computing, from cybernetics to Affectiva, see Nagy 2022.

style" that Brinkema rightly impugns as part of the "attempt to **27** focus on the immediate, visceral, and corporeal" (ibid., 32), it will not do simply to insist on the exteriority of affect—though Brinkema's provocation is certainly a step in the right direction; beyond this necessary initial step, we need to theorize the *possibility* of exteriorization as a fact of fleshly multistability, replacing the notion of bodily immediacy with a fundamental *mediality* of the visceral and corporeal. Later, in Chapter 2, I will argue for this originary mediality of the flesh, rooted in its alternating powers of tactile interiority and specular exteriorization, as the (alienable) ground of aesthetics, technicity, and political collectivity alike. The consequence, I suggest, is that Brinkema's dislodging of affect from the body, its exteriorization as a textual and aesthetic form, should be seen as an extension of the flesh; it is possible, in other words, only because embodiment is not and cannot be restricted to the realm of the personal and the private but always stretches affectively and materially outward, beyond the empirically determinate or introspectively available body. The ability to take on external form, to separate *from* the body, is very much (owing to) a power *of* the body.

I will fill out this picture later, but first I would like to provide a bit more contextualization for this project, which concludes a trilogy of books, and to explain some of the terms that I use. As someone who uses the prefix "post-" a lot, I am often called upon to account for the apparent caesuras implied in my work and to explain the periodizations entailed therein. My first book, *Postnaturalism*, seemed to some readers to suggest that there was a kind of *before* and *after* with respect to nature, a break marked by technology and our interface with it (what I called the anthropotechnical interface). In fact, I claimed that "we have never been natural" (Denson 2014, 24), and so if there was any such break at all it was a prehistoric one, or one marking the beginning of human history or of hominization itself. Beyond that, my elaboration of postnaturalism posited that the history of human-technological interfacing was in fact full of radical

**28** transformations, not so much breaks as transitions, when virtually everything—our whole embodied and enworlded relation to the environment—was up for grabs. But because in these transitional moments the very foundations of our thought are subject to global change, these revolutions remain difficult if not impossible to survey. Traces of them would have to be sought in broadly aesthetic rather than epistemic domains. At stake, ultimately, was less a periodization of such changes than a theory of media as their crux or hinge.

Media, I argued, are "the originary correlators" of experience, where the "correlation" in question here indexes what Edmund Husserl referred to as "the fundamental correlation between noesis and noema," which more recently had come under attack from the speculative realists, under the rubric of "correlationism," as a pernicious form of anthropocentrism infecting Western philosophy more generally.2 Taking this challenge seriously, I argued that any effort to develop a non-correlationist theory of media would have to account for the special relation that media have to our embodiment, as a prepersonal substrate exceeding our intentional relation to the world but materially informing the shape of intentionality itself.

As for media in this postnatural perspective, they are no longer thought here from *within* the horizon of correlationism but, we might say, *as* that horizon—as the *very correlators* of the phenomenal, the concrete, and the empirical on the one hand and the noumenal, the abstract, and the transcendental on the other. This means that media are themselves not merely artifactual and instrumental—a correlational view of media *for us*—but are precisely media, that is, milieux *for anthropotechnical historicity* itself. (Ibid., 297)

This broadly cosmological view of media as the originary **29** correlators of experience lays the basis for much if not all of my subsequent work. But questions of media-historical breaks and periodizations were aggravated when I turned to the concept of "post-cinema" as a new media regime emerging out of computational technologies and their transformation of visual culture and media. In the collection *Post-Cinema*, which I co-edited with Julia Leyda, and in my book *Discorrelated Images*, it might have seemed that I had returned to the idea of a simple break, a before and an after, described now in terms of the "regimes" of cinema and post-cinema (Denson and Leyda 2016; Denson 2020a). To be sure, I asserted that "there is no hard break, no bright line between cinema and post-cinema; the vision of post-cinema advocated here is predicated not on cinema's 'end' but rather on its envelopment within the larger space of an environment that has been thoroughly transformed by the operation of computational processing" (Denson 2020a, 2). Thus, rather than a simple binary, I was again concerned with a media-technical and perceptual transition marked by elements both of continuity and discontinuity. However, if the cinema/post-cinema transition was to be understood as one more episode in the ongoing history of media as the variable correlators of experience, hence as a reshaping of the fundamental correlation between historically and materially situated subjects and their environments, this picture would seem to be complicated by the notion that postcinematic images and infrastructures are *discorrelated* from our experience.

One might ask—and I have been asked repeatedly—isn't it too simple to describe cinema as a correlative and post-cinema as a discorrelative media regime? There are many versions of this question, and they all bear some relation to the question of continuity and discontinuity. For example, the question might be posed in terms of novelty. Is discorrelation really new? The argument for the novelty of post-cinema, in relation to the broadly cinematic regime from which it is distinguished, rests on **30** the idea that computational images depend on invisible, microtemporal processes that are categorically outside the window of human perception. These new imaging techniques undercut and to a certain extent undo the phenomenological correlation, or the intentional relation between a perceiving subject and an image object. But while the specific technological processes might be new, we would have to admit that there have been countless techniques for discorrelation throughout the ages: certain forms of meditation, mystical practices, or experimental drug use, for example, are aimed precisely at loosening the bond or even dissolving the difference between self and world. And besides, there have always been multifarious processes subtending our conscious perception, quite independent of whether we are concerned with them as a matter of our ethical or religious practices. Clearly, computers didn't create discorrelation. But they do, I think, create new relations to the universe beyond the correlative suture, bringing this universe to bear directly on images and other objects of our attention and aesthetic interest.

The question can be extended, though: don't plenty of other aesthetic practices also do just this? Hasn't it been a major function of art to discorrelate, to undo the bonds of (conventionalized forms of) human subjectivity? From religious art that communicates the power of the divine, disorients human perspective, and deflates ideas of mastery, to avant-garde practices that look beyond the norms of bourgeois subjectivity, many forms of art seem deserving of the discorrelative title. And the same could be said of cinema: many experimental and avant-garde filmmakers have likewise sought to deform and dismantle perceptual norms—or to exteriorize affective forms. And not only that: they have done so by means of material processes—photochemical and mechanical processes—that are every bit as much outside the frame of human perception as the microtemporal operations of digital processing. But here we see that two distinct notions or dimensions of discorrelation are at play. One of them concerns *techniques for* undoing correlation, while the other concerns what

might be called *technologies of* discorrelation. Roughly, this is the **31** difference between, on the one hand, practices that aim for whatever reason to expand agencies (of perception, cognition, experience, etc.) beyond the subjective frame and, on the other hand, apparatuses that harness energies and materials that operate outside that frame. The former seeks to create discorrelative states, while the latter simply exploits discorrelated matter. As I understand it, the transition from cinema to post-cinema concerns both of these dimensions, but it will be useful to hold them apart in order to dispel potential misunderstandings and to clarify relations both of continuity and change.

Let me begin with the idea that post-cinema is defined by *technologies of discorrelation*, operating on materials outside the scope of human relation. What I mean, again, is that the perceptible phenomena (sights, sounds, etc.) generated and transmitted by computational technologies are the product of myriad processes, operating at a variety of ever more finely articulated levels of hardware and software, that are categorically immune to perceptual capture. As I have argued in *Discorrelated Images*, these largely microtemporal processes are best described as "metabolic" processes, in that they are environmental with respect to subjectivity, altering the interactive pathways or ecological exchange routes that define our material existence. Operating on our prepersonal, embodied processing of duration, post-cinematic media are thus involved in a broad, environmental shift in the conditions of life. In this way, post-cinema marks a difference of an existential sort, even though the images we view might in many respects seem continuous with those of cinema. In other words, and this is key, the discorrelative operation of post-cinematic media does not rule out the persistence of more familiar forms of perceptual-phenomenological correlation. And yet the underlying conditions of correlation have shifted, which can hardly be inconsequential from the perspective of our embodied sensibilities.

	- 3 The groundwork for the argument is laid, with reference to the Industrial Revolution and the steam engine, in Chapter 5 and extended to the cinema and media more generally in Chapter 6 of *Postnaturalism* (Denson 2014).
	- 4 See, in particular, Chapter 2, "Dividuated Images," in Denson 2020a.

This brings us to the other dimension of discorrelation, the **33** *techniques of discorrelation* invoked in aesthetic experiments and other derangements of our sensory relations to the world. Here, too, there are continuities and discontinuities to be noted. Just as various artistic media, including the cinema, could be used for purposes either of bolstering or challenging (normative forms of) subjectivity, so too can post-cinematic media be used for subject-affirming and disorienting purposes alike. In other words, the technological operationalization of discorrelated materials (compression protocols, data caches, machine learning algorithms, whatever) does not dictate a particular perceptual effect—and yet I want to claim that these processes are hardly insignificant aesthetically. Clearly, the new technologies transform aesthetic possibilities, and not only in the sense of expanding them: some new aesthetic forms (for example, those associated with the appearance of digital glitches or the disorientations of digital lens flares or DeepFake videos, to name just a few that I have looked at elsewhere) are made possible, while other older aesthetic forms (for example, the perceptual derangement enacted by the flicker film) are rendered impossible. The difference, therefore, is to be located in the overall redistribution of aesthetic potentials, where the aesthetic is understood to encompass both formaltechnical and embodied-sensory dimensions. It is above all in terms of the latter dimensions, those classically referred to under the heading of *aesthesis*, that we can indeed register a potential expansion of discorrelative techniques or possibilities for disarming or neutralizing the individualizing force of subjectivity. For computational processes enable forms of sensing that are radically distributed, both in time and space, picking out signals and patterns at scales ranging from the microscopic to the planetary and thus liberating embodied sensation from the here and now. Significantly, however, post-cinematic media most commonly neither empower nor disorient; rather, their discorrelative potentials are implicated in hegemonic subjectivation processes, whether by interpellating a normative (white cis male heterosexist etc.) subjectivity in blockbuster movies and videogames

**34** or, more subtly, by engineering users' experience via predictive algorithms and the statistical correlations at the heart of big data and AI. Accordingly, as it is deployed in post-cinematic media environments, discorrelation is not primarily an aesthetic effect or form of experience, but rather an invisible operation that can be used for various purposes, both aesthetic and political.

We are beginning, finally, to answer another question sometimes raised about the relations of correlation and discorrelation. Isn't digital discorrelation ultimately a misnomer, or at least a distraction, as it is simply the means for another, possibly more insidious, mode of correlation? In other words, it would seem that digital processes, while operationalizing extraperceptual domains, are not only engaged in engineering perceptual experience—thus forging new correlative bonds—but that they also operate primarily *by means of* correlation. Here we need to disentangle two distinct senses of correlation—statistical correlation versus phenomenological correlation—but holding them apart is only a conceptual, not a practical possibility in the twenty-first century.5 For effectively, statistical correlations whether in the form of the statistically normed protocols at the heart of video codecs or the population-scale correlations enshrined in databases exploited by social media for targeted advertisements—are being grafted into the underlying aesthetico-politico-metabolic pathways that define our environments, with the effect of re-engineering the phenomenological correlations of intentionality that are open to us. Thus, while "correlation is not causation," as the mantra goes, we might add that "discorrelation is not *not* causation." At stake here is not just an algorithmic reinforcement of bias, but an implantation of said biases into our embodied relations to the world—hence a norming of bodies, minds, and societies—with all of the racist,

5 The story of correlation in this statistical sense is of course longer, and it spans fields of inquiry and activity as diverse as insurance, eugenics, and electrical engineering. Two important recent studies of correlation in this sense are: Chun 2021; Amoore 2020.

sexist, queer- and transphobic, and ableist consequences that we **35** might expect. To ask, as I do in this book, about "post-cinematic bodies" is thus to ask about how technologies of discorrelation become techniques for correlation. But it is also to ask about the material and aesthetic potentials embedded in these systems to become something else.

Summarizing, then, discorrelation is nothing new, and yet it is implemented in new ways in a post-cinematic media regime. Correlational continuities may exist despite discontinuities wrought by media-technical discorrelation. Every discorrelation, including those effected by computational technologies, inevitably leads to a new form of correlation—a new, seemingly unquestionable alignment of subjects and objects—and these processes may be exacerbated by the calculated confusion of statistical and phenomenological correlations. Ultimately, then, it is incorrect to oppose cinema and post-cinema to one another as, respectively, a correlative versus a discorrelative regime. Rather, each of them, as an instance of media in their role of originary correlators of experience, is radically multistable, alternating between correlative and discorrelative potentials. I will often use the term "dis/correlative" to foreground this fundamental multistability, which I seek to elaborate in this book as the basis for a new phenomenological and political aesthetics of embodiment in a world of VR, AI, smartphones, and robots.

#### PART ONE: DIS/CORRELATING EMBODIMENT

#### **Introduction to Part One**

*Post-Cinematic Bodies* explores the volatile relations that people have with their bodies in a world of computational media. In this world, embodiment is both an aesthetic and a political matter—a question of deeply contested materiality. In fact, computational technologies render the body even more contestable, that is, open to fine-grained quantification, objectification, and transformation, than perhaps ever before. Many of these processes take place at spatial and temporal scales that are outside of my subjective purview, thus challenging the existential relation that "I" have to "my" body. Clearly, subjective "ownership" of one's body was never a straightforward matter—and the idea of the body as property has been implicated in a whole host of philosophical and political quagmires, from mind/body dualism to the construction of whiteness and its racialized and gendered others.1 It would be naive to think that the algorithmic processing to which our bodies are everywhere and invisibly subjected today would somehow liberate us from these pernicious forces; if anything, the computational capture, networked collation, and automated processing of biometric data renders our bodies even more vulnerable to categorization and violence. Significantly, though, these sociopolitical effects depend upon interventions in a stratum of fleshly existence that is itself resistant to easy categorization—a multistable stratum of prepersonal affect and embodied aesthesis. The wager of this book is that this stratum, where computation interfaces with flesh, just might—with great

1 The literature dealing with these questions is extensive and ranges from feminist, antiracist, and intersectional critiques of the body as property, phenomenological interrogations from Simone de Beauvoir to Frantz Fanon and Sara Ahmed, black feminist thought from bell hooks and Hortense Spillers to Saidiya Hartman, disability theorists like Rosmarie Garland-Thomson, and queer and trans theorists from Judith Butler to Gayle Salamon. See, for example, Beauvoir 1982; Fanon 2008; Ahmed 2006; hooks 1990; Spillers 2003a; Hartman 1997; Garland-Thomson 1997; Butler 1993; Salamon 2010. A useful overview of relevant discussions, including and beyond those noted here, is provided by Lennon 2019.

**40** luck and great effort—become a resource for complicating, if not dismantling, systems of bodily oppression and standardization. Towards this end, I develop a phenomenological and political aesthetics of dis/correlation—foregrounding the multistability of the flesh's correlative and discorrelative powers and potentials as the basis for rethinking our embodied relations to a computational lifeworld.

As a starting point, we might think about the deep interconnections between aesthetics, politics, and embodied multistability in terms of the following—drastically simplified—account of human-technological relations. Our bodies ground our sensory capacities and hence our aesthetic sensibilities in the world, anchoring our subjectivities in organic matter and environmental processes of exchange. In addition to their subjectively defined purposes, technologies also insert themselves into those underlying circuits, acting materially to modulate the metabolic flows that sustain, transform, and threaten us—thus potentially changing the shapes of our bodies, the forms of our sensation, our reflexive capacities to judge those sensations, and the forms of subjective and collective existence that are available to us. None of this is new. It's a story as old as humanity itself, and in many ways just as indeterminate as that uncertain signifier "humanity."2 What this materialist story points to, in other words, is the lack of essence, the existential (which is to say, historical and cultural) variability of human subjectivity and collectivity—as well as an openness, via embodiment, to forces of standardization, norming, or typification. The latter forces are exacerbated in our increasingly globalized media and material cultures, especially via computational infrastructures that elude

2 A compelling version of this story, which posits technology as co-constitutive of the human, is told by Bernard Stiegler. An interesting complication of Stiegler's version of the story might emerge through an encounter with the Black feminist thought of Sylvia Wynter, who identifies several "genres" of the human and suggests their individuation is linked to technological and artistic practices. See Stiegler 1998; Wynter and McKittrick 2015.

subjectivity altogether and intervene directly in the underlying **41** stratum of embodied and environmental metabolisms. Communications networks that span the planet depend for their interoperability on standardized protocols; microtemporal processes outstrip perception, while predictive algorithms anticipate and pave the way for subjectivities that lag behind; our formatted environments of digitally designed architectures, objects, and devices work directly on our bodies and materially shape the conditions of our social relations.3

What we see here is an interplay of indeterminacy and determination that complicates some of our usual ways of thinking about media. On the one hand, media cannot be simple tools or instruments of subjective determination (the NRA's view in which "guns don't kill people, people kill people") if those tools are reshaping the environment and thus the subjectivities that inhabit it. On the other hand, if "media determine our situation," as Friedrich Kittler claimed, then they do so by way of tapping into an indeterminate stratum of existence, a realm of Bergsonian "indetermination" (Kittler 1999, xxxix).4 What we might call *correlative capture*—combining both the phenomenological and the statistical senses of correlation to think the norming of subjectivity and collectivity—is effected via an intervention in the discorrelated matter of prepersonal embodiment. Political structures are thus seeded in the realm of affect and aesthesis, which I suggest leaves a margin of indeterminacy from which resistance might be mounted, though it is hardly guaranteed. In Part Two of this book, I look at some of the

3 An early, pre-computational line of thinking about the standardizing force of objects and environments, to which I will return often in this book, stems from Sartre's late, Marxist work. See Sartre 2004. Two thinkers who have updated this line of thought for our contemporary media environment are McKenzie Wark and Jonathan Crary. See Wark 2021; Crary 2013. Another essential perspective on the role of protocols in the contemporary mediation of power is: Galloway 2004.

4 Henri Bergson refers to the body as a "center of indetermination": Bergson 2007.

**42** ways that artists are able to avail themselves of computational techniques in order to disrupt and destabilize their usual effects of normative correlative capture. In particular, I focus on the ways that embodied aesthesis and its dis/correlative multistability is up for grabs in VR, in human-robot choreographies and related interactions with automated agents, and in devices (including EEG interfaces and smart exercise devices) that bypass subjectivity and attach themselves directly to the metabolic processes of brains and bodies.

The chapters of Part One lay the media-philosophical groundwork for these analyses, refining the question and defining the stakes of embodied dis/correlation. Chapter One begins by questioning the place of the body in relation to what I have called discorrelated images. Putting Vivian Sobchack's phenomenological perspective into dialogue with Steven Shaviro's affect-oriented view of the cinematic body, the chapter seeks to reconcile correlative and discorrelative options as twin potentials of embodiment, which are especially key to understanding postcinematic media in particular. Drawing on resources from Maurice Merleau-Ponty and others, Chapter 2 develops a theory of what I call the originary mediality of the flesh, grounding the aesthetics of dis/correlation that will be explored through concrete objects and artworks in Part Two.

# **[1] Bodies, Cinematic and Otherwise**

On the screen in front of me, a yellow puddle floats weirdly above a mostly barren landscape, casting a shadow on the beige ground a few feet below it. To judge by the size of the humanoid figures scurrying around it, the puddle is about the size of a smallish backyard swimming pool. But then again, I can't really be sure if the creatures I am comparing it to are the size of average human adults; beyond their general form and bipedal gait, they certainly don't resemble any humans I know. With somewhat enlarged heads and vaguely animalistic faces, they tend to flock close to one another, their behavior quite erratic. Some of them run excitedly toward some activity off to the side of the visible space. Others just stand in place for a while, seemingly oblivious. Occasionally, a group of them will kneel around an object, as if worshipfully. It's hard to understand what they are doing or why.

In any case, these humanoid figures (which I later learn are called Oomen) are rather peripheral figures, both narratively and optically. The shape-shifting yellow puddle is firmly at the center of things, driving both the story (if indeed there is one) and the virtual camera alike. A small bit of the digital puddle separates

[Fig. 1.1] Ian Cheng, (American, born in 1984), *Emissary Sunsets The Self*, 2017. Live simulation and story. Courtesy of the Artist, Pilar Corrias, Gladstone Gallery, Standard (Oslo). Cantor Arts Center, Stanford University. William Alden Campbell and Martha Campbell Art Acquisition Fund, 2019.200. Installation view at the Cantor Arts Center, Stanford University (Photograph by Johnna Arnold).

from the rest, and the camera tracks the liquid's movement with pixel-perfect precision as it floats away and attaches itself to one of the grey pieces of organic matter strewn about the landscape. The latter, so-called Wormleaves, seem to come alive when the liquid comes into contact with them. Then ensues a rambunctious spectacle, accompanied by loud popping noises, whistles, and rustling sounds, as the symbiotic assemblage of yellow liquid and grey matter animatedly steers around the landscape like some kind of otherworldly jalopy or semi-sentient cyborg monster, accruing more grey pieces here and there, growing in size, and knocking things over left and right (fig. 1.1).

The camera follows closely, always keeping the liquid, now sitting at the helm of the growing grey creature, squarely at the center of the screen's isometric view. The humanoid figures flail and squawk around the creature, apparently upset by it. They are hardly characters that I can "identify" with, and neither is the leaf

[Fig. 1.2] Ian Cheng, (American, born in 1984), *Emissary Sunsets The Self*, 2017. Live simulation and story. Courtesy of the Artist, Pilar Corrias, Gladstone Gallery, Standard (Oslo). Cantor Arts Center, Stanford University. William Alden Campbell and Martha Campbell Art Acquisition Fund, 2019.200. Installation view at the Cantor Arts Center, Stanford University (Photograph by Johnna Arnold).

machine. In fact, there is nothing to identify with, and—more importantly—*nowhere to identify from*. The virtual camera's POV floats strangely in its fixation on the moving creature, unsettling the viewer's relation to the computer-generated images. The screen is accordingly not a neutral window onto a world, inviting me to peer into it unseen, as in certain types of filmic works; instead, it is an active interface, its isometric perspective reminiscent of a certain type of videogame—and that is precisely what the CGI graphics signal to me: I am watching a game, one that is perhaps still in beta testing, with somewhat clunky animations, crudely pixelated representations of fire, and apparently unfinished environmental elements provided by the game engine in which it was developed. To judge by the parallel projection method used in rendering the 3D environment, this is a somewhat older game—or more likely a somewhat nostalgic indie production—its camera's perspective, looking down from

**46** a vantage fixed at roughly 30º above the horizontal plane, similar to a 1990s *Sims* game before the franchise switched over to a true 3D, quasi "Renaissance-style" perspective projection.1 Visually, then, I have a feel for the interface, even if the camera movement feels glitchy and alien.

Except that this game is not driven by a player; rather, it plays itself. We might say that the human is thereby taken out of the loop, but this isn't wholly accurate. I am still here, looking. But *where* am I? Physically, I am seated in a gallery space, looking across the room at a large, almost square-shaped screen (extending 12 feet up from the floor and with an unusual aspect ratio of 7:6) at the other end, a little over 20 feet from where I sit (fig. 1.2).2 But I am also suspended in some indeterminate relation to the images on the screen. I am not engrossed in the images of a prerecorded work of film or video art; instead I attend to the real-time generation of computational images—but my usual modes of interacting with such images, by way of a videogame controller, a keyboard, or a VR headset, have all been denied to me, foregrounding a kind of vertigo that has less to do with the sublime nature of the images (though I won't deny an element of that)3 and more to do with the unresolved place of my body, which is seemingly called upon to act, or interact, but cannot. The insistent centering of the yellow liquid suggests that this *would be* my point of interface, that my task would be to control its movement. But since I cannot, I feel more like *it* is controlling

*me*, or at least controlling my visual access to the scene, giving the **47** images and their motion a distinctly inhuman feel.

Indeed, the displacement of agency and the general disorientation I have been describing is not accidental. Media artist Ian Cheng's *Emissary Sunsets the Self* (2017) is a "live simulation" an open-ended evolutionary system driven by AI agents interacting with environmental rules encoded in the physical properties of objects and their reactive potentials.4 Produced in the popular Unity game engine (or game-authoring environment), the work is highly self-reflexive, framed in accompanying lore as an enigmatic story about a futuristic artificial intelligence, MotherAI, bored of its own disembodied existence and driven to experiment with taking on material form.5 The yellow liquid is the AI's emissary to the biotic realm, through which it is able to "drone" or take possession of the Wormleaf fauna in "an attempt to feel the sensations of incarnated life."6 Thus, a real AI plays a diegetic AI, and the videogame plays itself, thereby usurping the role of the human player now left feeling sidelined and strangely disembodied. The perspective of the viewing subject is thus defined by a virtual amputation of their interactive potential. My presence seems optional before a system that might go on forever, through endless cycles of virtual daylight and nighttime, through

**48** all the seasons, the AI never tiring of sending out probes, the camera always following its adventures in vicarious embodiment before resetting its gaze—over and over again but never twice the same—on the big yellow puddle at the center of it all. Where do I stand in relation to this system? Cheng's generative artwork poses this question forcefully, its ambiguous non/interactivity calling upon us to rethink our phenomenological relations to a variety of contemporary images. Above all, it asks us to reassess the place of the perceiving body today.7

As I argued in *Discorrelated Images*, the invisible computational processing at the heart of contemporary digital images like those in Cheng's artwork erodes the perceptual bond or correlation between viewers and the images they see. In the era of

7 For Cheng, the trilogy of works is more about the evolution of consciousness than a problematization of embodiment. Yet his approach, which draws on recent cognitive science, is one that sees these dimensions in necessary interconnection. Hence, this piece's focus on the question of what would happen if AI became embodied, rather than the usual sci-fi scenario of AI becoming sentient, can be seen also as a speculative narrativization of the dis/correlative destabilization of embodiment in post-cinematic media. Also of note is Cheng's focus on the interplay between goal-oriented narrative and open-ended simulation, which he describes as a struggle between "deterministic" and "non-deterministic" forces that he pits against one another (2018, 285). These forces are already at work in the creative process, which Cheng describes as a battle between the assertion of "a reliably humanistic vision" (ibid., 285) and the attempt to overthrow "an all-toohuman agenda" (ibid., 137). These conflicting impulses are then given free reign in the final, unpredictable work, which operates independently of its author: "Creating complexity, and living with the indeterminacy inherent in complexity, begins to feel like working a muscle that has always been there. As I write these words, versions of the *Emissaries* trilogy are humming along in multiple parallel instances on multiple computers on multiple continents" (ibid., 203). The ultimate optionality of the author (or viewer) and the "deliberate incompleteness" of the work (ibid., 205) point towards a discorrelative trajectory that is balanced, however, by the deterministic trajectory of narrative, which would serve to correlate the viewer's perception of events within an ongoing arc. Cheng's multilayered probing of multistability should not be cordoned off, I suggest, from the probing of embodiment the work initiates, both diegetically and materially.

celluloid-based cinema, that correlation had been theorized **49** in a variety of ways—for example, as a psychoanalytic bond of "suture," whereby the spectator is imaginatively inserted or inscribed into narrative and ideological structures (Dayan 1974, 22–31). In a different vein, phenomenologically oriented theorists like Vivian Sobchack argued convincingly that any such cognitive bond had to be anchored in a material, bodily relation between the viewer and the cinematic apparatus (Sobchack 1992). But if, as I believe, the post-cinematic apparatus is characterized by a discorrelation between human perception and computational processing, where does that leave the body? Cheng's work, by simultaneously proposing and withholding an embodied (interactive) relation, suggests that the answer might lie in a multistable give-and-take between correlative and discorrelative trajectories. As we shall see, these issues are not restricted to intentionally disorienting works like Cheng's; indeed, the question of the body and its relation both to images and to infrastructures is a pressing one even in relation to mainstream and mundane media experiences, including videogames, virtual reality, and digital exercise machines. Looking at these and other sites, including a range of artistic interventions that, like Cheng's, disrupt our taken-for-granted relations, I hope to account more generally for the ways in which viewing bodies are implicated today in the automated and data-intensive production and reception of images—and to shed light, ultimately, on the place of the body in a post-filmic visual culture. Before I take up these digital media objects and address the underlying question of post-cinematic bodies directly, however, it will be useful to establish a baseline of comparison by way of two different conceptions of embodiment and the role that it plays in our experience of cinematic (that is, pre-digital and non-televisual) movingimage media.

#### **50 Cinematic Bodies and Beyond**

Writing at roughly the same time, in the early 1990s, both Vivian Sobchack and Steven Shaviro turned to the body in order to offer alternatives to the still dominant psychoanalytic film theory of the day. But their accounts of embodiment and the attendant experiences of the filmic image that they describe are very different from one another: Sobchack draws on existential phenomenology and is inspired particularly by Maurice Merleau-Ponty's reflections on the body as the active base of perception, while Shaviro draws on Gilles Deleuze's work on the cinema and his ultimately Bergsonian theory of affect to theorize a passive viewing body enthralled by the image (Sobchack 1992; Shaviro 1993). Sobchack theorizes a subjective, temporal, and ultimately ethical bond of correlation between the embodied viewer and film's unfolding of visual experience, while Shaviro celebrates cinema's potential to dissolve the subject in experiences of excess and abjection. These differences—between an active and a passive body, between a perceptual or an affective body, or between the body as the seat of the subject or as the site of the abject are hardly inconsequential, but I want to foreground first of all the common recourse to corporeality, which both thinkers take to be a basic material fact of our existence and the key to understanding our relations to and experiences of cinematic moving images. Later, I will suggest that there is a more fundamental, though often overlooked, philosophical common ground between these positions as well, and that it can help us to think about post-cinematic bodies in particular.

Accordingly, it is not my intention either to downplay or to exaggerate the differences between these conceptions of the cinematic body, nor even really to reconcile them. Both Sobchack and Shaviro have been and remain huge influences on my own thinking, and I am grateful to have learned from

both of them over the years. **51** 8 For me, at least, there is simply no competition between these two thinkers, as they each articulate something necessary about our embodied relations to images. In fact, I think the necessity of *both* points of view becomes fully apparent—perhaps for the first time—when our images enter into computational systems, when they start to lose the sensuous qualities that had defined images as self-evidently visual objects up until then, and when they thus begin their discorrelation from human perception.

For the moment, however, we are focused on the cinema in its pre-digital form. For Sobchack, cinematic experience is defined in terms of a phenomenological correlation between the viewer's subjective perception and the objective presentation on screen of a perceptual act. At the heart of this conception lies a dynamization of static photographic images, through which the cinema distinguishes itself from all previous media and simultaneously effects a momentous shift in embodied and perceptual relations. Photography had already effected a revolution of sorts, making available "images of the world with an exactitude previously rivaled only by the human eye" (Sobchack 2016, 96). Thereby demoting human vision, the photograph nevertheless empowered human seers by offering "*the material control, containment, and objective possession of time and experience*" (ibid., 96). But this came at the cost of isolating a moment, snatching it from the flow of time, and rendering it an inert physical object offering only an arrested view of a frozen past that "cannot be inhabited" in the present (ibid., 99). The cinema reversed this trend, setting photographic traces of the past back in motion and making them habitable again by subjects experiencing them *now*.

Sobchack writes: "Through its objectively visible spatialization of a frozen point of view into dynamic and intentional trajectories of *self-displacing vision* and through its subjectively experienced

8 Accordingly, I could not have been more thrilled to have endorsements on the back of *Discorrelated Images* from both Sobchack and Shaviro!

**52** temporalization of an essential moment into *lived momentum*, the cinematic radically reconstitutes the photographic" (ibid., 99). This is to say that film, when actualized as a spatiotemporal phenomenon through projection, fills the intentional consciousness of the viewer, unfurling an ongoing experiential content that exceeds the inert objectivity of the photograph. Thus, "[c]inematic technology *animates* the photographic and reconstitutes its materiality, visibility, and perceptual similitude in a difference not of degree but of kind. The *moving picture* is a visible representation not of activity finished or past but of activity coming into being and being" (ibid., 101). As a temporal object in Husserl's sense, the time of the film is identical with the time of my consciousness of it.9 Furthermore, and this is the key, the moving picture is not *just* a representation: "the moving picture not only visibly represents moving objects but also—and simultaneously—presents *the very movement of vision itself*" (ibid., 101). In the cinema, we see the process of seeing itself:

> In its pre-electronic state and original materiality …, the cinema mechanically projected and made visible *for the very first time* not just the objective world but the very structure and process of subjective, embodied vision—hitherto only directly available to human beings as an invisible and private structure that each of us experiences as "our own." (Ibid., 104)

Even stronger, the cinema presents itself "as the *subject of its own vision*, as well as an *object for our vision*" (ibid., 104).

But subjective perception, in the existential phenomenological tradition to which Sobchack belongs, presupposes embodiment it relies on the rich, intentional form of embodiment that, following Merleau-Ponty, exceeds the merely physiological body as a condition of worldly perception and action (Merleau-Ponty 2002). Our perception is always anchored in a "lived body" that

9 On temporal objects, see Husserl 1964; for a media-theoretical extension, see Stiegler 2011.

encompasses our practical abilities and disabilities, our material **53** and technical interests and entanglements with the world. If cinema presents its own form of subjectivity, then film must also have a body of its own. And, as Sobchack argues at length in *The Address of the Eye*, though film's body is not identical with ours, it is homologous with it in certain respects.10 With "the camera its perceptive organ, the projector its expressive organ, the screen its discrete and material center of meaningful experience," what Sobchack calls "the cinematic lived body" is able to perambulate, perceive, and express "a concrete habitable *world*" that is commensurate with our own lifeworld (Sobchack 2016, 108, 107). And thus, the perceptual correlation between viewer and film rests on an underlying bodily correlation, where "[t]he correlation and materiality of both human subjects and their objective artifacts … suggests some commensurability and possibilities of confusion, exchange, and reversibility between them" (ibid., 94). The cinematic image, on this basis, constitutes itself as "an anonymous, mobile, embodied, and ethically invested *subject* of worldly space" (ibid., 102).

But this correlation, according to Sobchack, begins to break down with cinema's transformation through electronic and digital technologies, which radically call into question the homology between the infrastructures of visual experience (human embodiment) and those of visible images (the cinematic lived body). Because of the dependence of the perceptual on the material, the technological reorganization of the post-cinematic image challenges, in Sobchack's view, the medium's moral gravity and its ability to engage us in an exploration of the lifeworld. The "electronic world incorporates the spectator/user uniquely in a spatially decentered, weakly temporalized and quasi-disembodied (or diffusely embodied) state" (ibid., 109–110). This is because, according to Sobchack,

**54** the electronic is phenomenologically experienced not as a discrete, intentional, body-centered mediation and projection in space but rather as a simultaneous, dispersed, and insubstantial transmission across a network or web that is constituted spatially more as a materially flimsy latticework of nodal points than as the stable ground of embodied experience. (Ibid., 110–111)

In this environment, "subjectivity and affect free-float or free-fall or free-flow across a horizontal/vertical grid or, as is the case with all our electronic pocket communication devices, disappear into thin air. Subjectivity is at once decentered, dispersed, and completely extroverted" (ibid., 116).

Compare now Shaviro, who in *The Cinematic Body* celebrates precisely this dissolution, which he already finds at work in the cinema, independent of the shift to electronic or digital mediation. Advocating for a "thoroughly postmodern sensibility" that foregrounds "inescapable ambivalences and affective intensities," Shaviro revels in the cinema's ability to "dissolv[e] any notion of fixed personal identity or of an integral and self-contained subject" (1993, vii, viii). But rather than a weakening of embodiment, Shaviro credits the dissolution of subjectivity to a heightening of bodily experience in "visceral, affective responses to film," or what he identifies as "prereflective responses" and "corporeal reactions of desire and fear, pleasure and disgust, fascination and shame" (ibid., viii). Thus, Shaviro no less than Sobchack is interested in material relations that exceed the purely representational and define a space of axiological significance and struggle: "Power works in the depths and on the surfaces of the body, and not just in the disembodied realm of 'representation' or of 'discourse.' It is in the flesh first of all, far more than on some level of supposed ideological reflection, that the political is personal and the personal political" (ibid., viii). By activating this "involuntary, presubjective realm of visual fascination" and foregrounding "the materiality of affect and sensation," according to Shaviro, the cinema helps us to

understand the ways that power is materially, corporeally con **55** densed in normative subject formations, or "to discover the conflicting forces, the 'molecular' movements, that subtend and invest—and often contradict—the global, 'molar' order of phallic representation" (ibid., 19, 15, 23).

Opening up Deleuzean "lines of flight" away from a purely cognitive relation to images, the cinema collapses the distance between subjects and objects, plunging them into the space of affect as defined by Henri Bergson: a space that is in between our capacities for perception and for action, "an irreducible gap between stimulus and response" that is prior to the articulation of the subject (Shaviro 1993, 51). It is in this sense that Shaviro claims "[t]he experience of watching a film remains stubbornly concrete, immanent, and prereflective: it is devoid of depth and interiority" (ibid., 32). Subjective registration, on this model, is an afterthought: "I have already been touched and altered by these sensations, even before I have had the chance to become conscious of them" (ibid., 46). To recuperate this presubjective realm, which theory tends to occlude and obstruct through its assertion of critical distance, Shaviro asks us to submit to a "radical passivity" which negates "the realm of traditional subject/ object dualism, but also of phenomenological intentionality" as we give in to "a forced, ecstatic abjection before the image" (ibid., 48, 47, 49).

Clearly, Sobchack's and Shaviro's accounts of embodiment and its relation to the cinema are in many ways diametrically opposed. But as I stated before, my goal here is not to adjudicate between their positions. In fact, I do not even see a need to reconcile them (though I will, in a sense, do just that in a moment). Taken together, Sobchack's and Shaviro's approaches suggest that a spectrum of embodied relations exists, neither indifferent to nor unilaterally determined by media as technological and cultural forces. Sobchack argues that the cinema lends itself to a new perceptual relation (that of subjectively seeing subjective seeing), but she also insists that the embodied subject of perception is

**56** informed and reshaped by technologies and culture alike—that (in terms she borrows from philosopher of technology Don Ihde) the "microperceptual" level of immediate bodily sensation is inextricable from the "macroperceptual" level of linguistic and cultural hermeneutics (Sobchack 2016, 92–93). So there is no guarantee that the relations described by her will actually obtain in any given situation, even if the materiality of the cinematic apparatus in its relation to human embodiment strongly suggests them. Meanwhile, Shaviro's focus is neither on the micro- nor the macroperceptual level, as he seeks to open something that might more properly be labeled the *nanoperceptual* domain of prepersonal affect. Between Sobchack and Shaviro we thus find differences of method and of focus, but there is no ontological conflict: the lived body of phenomenology is not free-floating or without an infrastructure, so to speak; and its infrastructure includes not just anatomy and physiology, but also the realm of presubjective awareness or environmental responsiveness that we share in common with animals and even plants. This molecular or, as I prefer to call it, metabolic level is a constant companion to perceptual subjectivity, even if it largely remains unseen (for the simple fact that it subtends the seeing subject as a material condition of subjectivity and visuality alike). As Shaviro shows us, however, it too is an option for the sensing body at the cinema.

But there is more at stake in these conceptions than just ontology. As we have seen, Shaviro locates hope for a more liberatory politics in cinema's affective option, which would unyoke experience from the constraining force of normative subjectivities. Sobchack, on the other hand, sees cinema's embodied correlation as an ethical matter, and she warns that the perceptual, subjective option for cinematic experience is being displaced, due to the material dispersion of the image in the infrastructures of electronic and digital media. Interestingly, Deleuze would seem to concur, despite his usual championing of the presubjective; in his analysis of the so-called control

society, we find him warning that the forces of "dividuation"— **57** or the de-individualizing powers of blackboxed computing, packet-switching, networked communications, and big data, for example—operationalize (perhaps even weaponize) the infraor nanoperceptual level (Deleuze 1992, 3–7). So while Shaviro's appeal to affect is offered as a means to challenge normative subjectivities and the binary formations that undergird them, the dissolution of the subject can also lead to a more radical policing and regulation of political agencies, as the predictive operations of algorithmic culture are granted the ability to anticipate us in advance and actively modulate the process of subjectivation.

I will be returning to these political ambivalences and multistabilities, which enable either the dismantling or reinforcement of normative forms and forces of embodiment, such as those of cisheterosexist and binaristic gendering and racialization, throughout the chapters of this book. But before I get too far ahead of myself, it is important to emphasize that what Sobchack and Shaviro together demonstrate is *that cinema both exercises a correlative force and holds a discorrelative potential*; it is marked both by an integrative force that consolidates subjective perception into a body and a dissipative potential that multiplies or dis-integrates the body into a jumble of affective intensities. Recognizing that there may be contentious political and ethical consequences attached to either one of the alternatives, we can regard these first of all as cinema's twin *aesthetic options*—not in a superficial sense of "aesthetics," e.g. concerning which option we might prefer or find more pleasing, but in a deeper sense of embodied *aesthesis*; in other words, these are correlative and discorrelative options with respect to the way our bodies are sensorially attuned to the image. However, this way of framing the issue suggests we are dealing with an image that is visual and available to sensation in the first place, while it is precisely this visuality and sense-ability that is in question in a post-cinematic media regime. Artist Trevor Paglen (2016) has put the point most provocatively with his notion of "invisible images"—images

**58** produced by machines for other machines, never seen by human eyes. For example, automated drones and self-driving cars process millions of unseen images in order to detect objects and navigate in space. As I have argued in *Discorrelated Images*, similar processes are at work in the computational pre-processing also of the images that we *do* see, whether through motion-estimation processes in digital coding and decoding of digital video, realtime upscaling, or motion smoothing, among other things.11 Through these processes, images are subject to dividuation or dis-integration just like the subjectivities that Deleuze describes. And in this discorrelation or severing of the image from our perception, it is our consciousness or sensation that becomes the immediate target of dividuation.

But in order to evaluate the place of the body in post-cinema, we need to keep both Sobchack's correlative and Shaviro's discorrelative aesthetic options in mind. For computational discorrelation is largely a matter of micro- or nanotemporal operations that subtend *and enable* the subjective perception of images, sounds, and narratives. Each level, the subjective and the subperceptual, is operative simultaneously, though the temporal relations between them are hardly linear due to the incommensurability between the time-scales of computer processing and of human perception. My point, as I have already stated, is that we need to account for both scales, and hence both the correlative and the discorrelative operations, if we are to come to terms with post-cinematic embodiment. And this is where it is imperative to uncover what I have referred to as the often overlooked philosophical common ground between Sobchack's subjective, phenomenological body and Shaviro's affective body.

This common ground is articulated by Merleau-Ponty in *The Phenomenology of Perception* in terms of what he calls a "*preobjective view*" that characterizes the primordial (and equally presubjective) state of embodiment, which he elaborates as follows: "Prior to stimuli and sensory contents, we must recognize a kind **59** of inner diaphragm which determines, infinitely more than they do, what our reflexes and perceptions will be able to aim at in the world, the area of our possible operations, the scope of our life" (2002, 92). This "inner diaphragm," operative prior to the articulation of subject and object, is in no way opposed to the active, intentional body of phenomenology; rather, the latter, the lived body, supervenes on the former, which always remains operative alongside perceptual and motile subjectivity. Anticipating his later conception of the "flesh of the world" by a good decade and a half, Merleau-Ponty's "inner diaphragm" corresponds almost exactly to Bergson's conception of affect, which is similarly located prior to perception and action or stimulus and response as "that part or aspect of the inside of our bodies which mix with the image of external bodies."12 In both cases, we are dealing with a presubjective core that can *either* give rise to a correlative relation between subject and object *or* enable blurring, confusion, or material indistinction.

As for why this common ground is so often overlooked, I place the blame with Deleuze, who in his *Cinema* books strategically exaggerates the differences between phenomenology and Bergsonian metaphysics. There, Deleuze presents a sharp alternative between phenomenological intentionality, summarized in the phrase "all consciousness is consciousness *of* something," and Bergsonian thought, which he glosses as "all consciousness *is* something" (Deleuze 1986, 60). The suggestion is that this is an unbreachable gap, and that phenomenology is categorically unable to account for prepersonal intensities and other realities that are not the objects of subjective perception. But in addition to erasing the non-referential nature of the inner diaphragm (as well as other subperceptual processes invoked by thinkers in the phenomenological tradition), Deleuze's focus on

12 Bergson 2007, 60. On Merleau-Ponty's concept of "the flesh of the world," see his posthumously published *The Visible and the Invisible* (Merleau-Ponty 1968b).

**60** consciousness comes at the expense of the body, and he thus overlooks or suppresses the common ground of preconscious embodiment at the root of both philosophies.

When we restore this ground of the "inner diaphragm," which acts *alongside* the subjectivized body, we are better able to account for a range of phenomena, both cinematic and otherwise. Etymologically, a diaphragm refers to a "partition-wall" or "barrier," but rather than simply dividing an inside and an outside, it is itself characterized by an internal division. Even in its anatomical sense, according to which it refers to the septum dividing the thoracic from the abdominal cavities in mammals, the diaphragm is internally divided as "partly muscular, partly tendinous."13 In the subanatomical sense invoked by Merleau-Ponty, the inner diaphragm epitomizes this self-division by bridging stimulus and response, subject and object, in such a way as to enable reversals (such as in Merleau-Ponty's famous example of two hands touching, each of which can reversibly be touched or do the touching (1968a, 130–155)). In other words, this inner diaphragm is not a simple barrier between the subjective and objective, or between those and the presubjective, but is, more fundamentally, the multistable ground that divides itself into perceptually correlative and discorrelative forms of embodiment. Accordingly, we might rebrand this the dis/ correlative diaphragm, in order to foreground its multistability (and to deemphasize the misleading binary suggested by the term *inner diaphragm*, which lacks any straightforward *outer* or external counterpart). The utility of this concept is that it enables us to account for, without resolving, the aesthetic duality of the cinema as an arena for embodied experience—a duality that is exacerbated in computational media. Most importantly, with respect to post-cinematic experience, the dis/correlative diaphragm provides a mechanism by which to explain the impact

13 "diaphragm, n." Oxford English Dictionary Online, June 2022 (Oxford University Press): https://www.oed.com/view/Entry/52038.

of computational processes that operate largely outside our **61** perception but nevertheless exercise a material force on our bodies and our experience. In *Discorrelated Images*, I argued along these lines that digital video compression, which can give rise to perceptual objects such as compression artifacts and glitches that make us momentarily aware of its otherwise invisible operations, also and more fundamentally continues to exert such a force on our bodies *even when it remains invisible*. 14 This it does by way of microtemporal operations affecting the nanoperceptual sensitivities of the dis/correlative diaphragm, which though they escape conscious notice may nevertheless reshape our embodied habits and eventually also our higher-order perceptual sensitivities. For example, as Jordan Schonig has argued, we may become unconsciously (or nonconsciously) attuned to scenes that are computationally more challenging to process—for instance, high-bitrate scenes with lots of quick, detailed motion, which are thus more likely to produce a glitch when they encounter a processing bottleneck during their translation from encoded data to screen event.15 This attunement, which is not to say awareness, is an affective, embodied relation that accompanies and does not preclude a more intentional, subjective relation with the objects depicted *in* the images.

In the next chapter, I will further develop this dis/correlative aesthetic framework in terms of the flesh's self-division, or what Merleau-Ponty calls the *écart* or fission between tactility and specularity, that initiates what I call the originary mediality of the flesh. This will put us in a better position to understand the various modalities according to which post-cinematic media play on our multistable sensitivities and transform our bodies through intertwined processes of dis/correlation. First, however, let us stay with the issue, broached here several times, of the visual image and its shifting relation to invisibility.

15 See Schonig 2022, especially chapter 6, "Bleeding Pixels," 149–178.

#### **62 Visuality Beyond Vision**

Earlier, I referenced Trevor Paglen's notion of computation's "invisible images." This provocative concept is invaluable for any attempt to understand the transition from cinema to post-cinema and the increasing operationalization of discorrelated materials, and I have appealed to it elsewhere to argue that we are now living in what is essentially a post-visual culture (for example Denson 2020a, 67–72). But as I have been emphasizing the multistable coexistence of dis/correlative options, it is important that we also look at invisibility's flipside and ask: what becomes of the image's visuality and its correlative potentials for vision today? As we shall see, this question has significant bearing on the question of embodiment.

In his book *Uncomputable*, Alexander Galloway offers a path forward with his distinction between photographic and computational "contracts" of visuality (2021, 52). Essentially, these contracts describe the correlative potentials of different image types, framed in terms of the geometric configurations that they suggest for perceiving subjects and perceived images.

The photographic version of the contract, if it were drawn as a diagram, would resemble a cone splayed outward from an origin point, like a horn. Something of great importance occupies the spot at the tip of the horn, something important like a lens or an aperture or an eyeball or a subject. Starting at the focal point, photographic vision fans out into the world, locating objects in proximal relation to the origin. (Ibid., 52)

According to Galloway, the photographic contract is thus a subject-centric or ocularcentric correlation, which is significantly challenged by computational media and its very different geometry. As he puts it,

computational media has finally impoverished the eye …. Indeed, computational vision is also conical, but inverted,

more like a funnel with the tip facing away. Here the **63** perceiving subject is not focused into a dense, rich point at the center but diffuses itself outward toward the edge of the space …. The object, by contrast, lies at the point of the funnel, receiving all the many inputs issued to it from the perimeter. Thus, if the photographic eye is, as it were, *convex*, then the computational eye is *concave*, flanking and encompassing the world from the fringe. (Ibid., 53)

In these alternatives of concentration or densification and diffusion, we hear echoes of the correlative and discorrelative potentials outlined by Sobchack and Shaviro. Provocatively, though, in posing them as visual (and geometrically visualizable) contracts, Galloway challenges us to see both of them in terms of their correlative possibilities, each as the inverse of the other.

At the heart of this topological inversion from the photographic to the computational lies an architectural rather than optical perspective, one that emphasizes a volumetric rather than planar conception of the image: "The condition is simple: assume that objects and worlds will be viewable and manipulable from all sides in multiple dimensions" (ibid, 53). As Jacob Gaboury (2021) details in his definitive history of computer graphics, computational images are first of all modeled objects, only subsequently rendered as flat, quasi-photographic images. There is a pipeline that goes from ingesting real objects via digitization (some historically significant objects include a Volkswagen Beetle, a Melitta teapot, a man's hands, and several women's faces), abstracting them into computationally manipulable models, and then rendering them visually in a graphical interface. But beyond just pixelating our visual culture, these image objects are actively reshaping our world through the computer-aided design and standardization of new material objects and architectures, with far-reaching ramifications for our embodied relations to

**64** lived space.16 Thus, the bulk of our images are no longer flat; instead, they occupy and indeed format space whether simulated or real. Interestingly, in this context, the isometric visuals we encountered in Ian Cheng's *Emissary Sunsets the Self*, which were characteristic of an earlier moment in videogame history, represent a kind of technical compromise between the fully volumetric and the strictly planar: in arcade games from the early 1980s, for example, 2D sprites and tiles were made to look like 3D objects through parallel projection, a visualization technique that keeps objects the same size on screen regardless of their depth, thus sidestepping the complex recalculations that would be required to simulate visual perspective. Because such images are neither completely volumetric nor perspectival, they entail a significantly volatile perceptual compromise, the multistability of which Cheng's work exploits for dis/correlative purposes.

Clearly, then, the inversion of photographic visuality is not just a technical matter; the shift to visuality as a question of modeling, rather than representing, is a matter of fundamental philosophical importance. But are philosophers even aware of this momentous inversion masquerading as the mundane reality of computer modeling? "Plato, sure; Husserl, probably not," Galloway (2021, 53) quips. That is, Husserl regards the world via the subject-centric photographic contract, whereas Plato approaches things from the perspective of computational visuality, attempting to assume the role of a concave eye that wraps around all that can be seen. Such a perspective would involve a strange self-displacement, as even the philosopher's visible body would become an object of this all-seeing eye—thus turning itself and the world into a weird volumetric ouroboros. But that must be what it feels like to picture oneself from

16 Gaboury discusses several compelling instances of such standardizing effects, including "Boeing Man," a computer model of a human body used for the ergonomic design of aircraft cockpits (2021, 12–17), but also more mundane objects, like Ikea furniture, that begin their life as image objects and while radically shaping the built environment (ibid., 191–202).

the standpoint of the eternal Forms: focused and punctually **65** embodied vision dissolves into total, environmental visuality. Rather than Platonism in any strict sense, what this inversion points to is therefore the emphatic environmentality of contemporary images: "Computational vision takes it as a given that *point of view is not necessary for seeing*" (ibid., 53).

If this seems like hyperbole, consider that it is in fact a dominant vision in today's tech world, as evidenced by the imagery at play in the names of prominent Silicon Valley companies. The data analytics and surveillance company Palantir, as is well known, takes its name from the "seeing stones" that, in J. R. R. Tolkien's *The Lord of the Rings*, allowed their users (notably, the evil wizard Sauron) to see events taking place at great distances, including those in the past and future. Another company, selfdriving car systems company Argo AI, derives its name from the *Argo*, the magical ship of the Argonauts, built by Argus, son of Arestor, who happens to share a name with Argus Panoptes, an all-seeing giant with a hundred eyes; although humanists might insist on the importance of disambiguating these figures, the confusion is strategic for a company whose magical selfdriving car technologies rely centrally on a system of AI-powered cameras and LIDAR sensors that encircle the vehicle, modeling the environment from all angles in real time. If there is any doubt about how central this new visuality is to the tech industry, consider that countless other companies have adopted the name Argus to signal their strengths in surveillance, imaging, and the increasingly ubiquitous commodity called "insight": Argus HD provides live streaming and video production, including VR and 360-degree video17; Argus Cyber Security uses the new visuality to protect smart cars against cyberattacks18; Argus Advisory, a predictive analytics and data modeling company, caters to financial institutions and promises to "uncover insights that others can't"19;

**66** and Argus Media, billing itself as the "leading independent provider of energy and commodity price benchmarks," similarly offers "exclusive prices and insight" to help companies navigate the coming energy transition (or exploit climate catastrophe for profit).20 The message, in all of these cases and countless others, is clear: in today's world, you need more than eyes to see what's going on; you need nothing less than an all-seeing vision machine, capable of illuminating things (objects, images, data, environments, worlds) from all sides at once.

Somewhat jarringly, when seen in the crassly commercial (and militaristic) context of Silicon Valley, Galloway characterizes this new visual regime as an "'ethical' visuality," explaining that "the ethical is the mode in which all points and positions dissolve in favor of a single, generic claim: 'all is love'; or, here, 'there is no point of view.' Photography says *here is a view*, but computer vision says there is no point of view because *here are all of them*" (2021, 56). I suspect the provocation is intentional, and that part of Galloway's point is to highlight the way this ethics, based in the generic universal, serves to suppress or neutralize the realm of political contestation and difference. Bypassing the camera obscura and Renaissance perspective, this new visuality denies "situated knowledges" and asserts a god's eye view from everywhere and nowhere (Haraway 1988, 575–599). Nevertheless, while the singular, ocularcentric point of view disappears, Galloway asserts that "[v]isuality does not vanish. On the contrary, visuality goes metastable, appearing at any place and any time under the aegis of the 'virtual camera'" (2021, 56). This is an important point, as it foregrounds flexibility, portability, and modularity as key to the exercise of power in this new regime, but it also raises a central question: how can this paradoxical visuality, for which Plato stands fittingly as the philosophical patron saint, be a correlative option at all—and one that challenges the "correlationism" of the Husserlian-photographic alternative? I agree with Galloway

that the answer is to be found in an interface that "goes metas **67** table." Only such an interface can mediate between the Platonic and Husserlian options and establish the possibility of what is essentially a *non-correlationist correlation*. The latter is a topic that I have broached elsewhere as one of central concern for the definition of media (Denson 2014, 279–350). I believe the present context—particularly, the question of how environmental visuality can be made commensurate with embodied existence—calls for some expansion, if not modification, of my previous account.

In *Postnaturalism*, I argued that the speculative realists' anticorrelationism (their challenge to what they perceive as the refusal, in thinkers like Kant and Husserl, to think beyond "the correlation between thinking and being") comes up against a limit in media, which *as media* necessarily implicate humans (ibid., 279-350). But rather than acquiesce to a narrowly anthropocentric view of media, I posited a non-correlationist alternative: what is first required is a dissociation of media from their narrow connections to perception, cognition, and communication, allowing us to conceive of them, instead, in their broader materiality and function of mediating between embodied experience and the material environment—interceding at a metabolic level as well as the more familiar subjective one. Essentially, the non-correlationist option is to locate the very mediality of media in their function as the "originary correlators" of experience (ibid., 282-298). The philosophical payoff is not only that the abstraction of "the human" is decentered, but radical change and variation in the shape of phenomenological correlation (concretely: historical, cultural, and embodied differences) become thinkable, and it is precisely media in their metastability that are able to articulate these shifts.21

21 My argument that media articulate deformations in the "shape" of correlation might be compared to Sara Ahmed's argument that the material situations, objects, and environments that uphold social and familial arrangements have a similar role with regard to the "orientation" of correlation, including keeping it "straight" or "queering" it. See Ahmed 2006.

**68** Already in my earlier account, this metastability was connected to embodiment, but the massive expansion of the computational visual contract requires some additional focus on the way that the flesh is operationalized as a mechanism of political control. As the complement to the originary correlative function of media, there is an originary mediality of the flesh that, as I will argue at greater length in the next chapter, concerns the body in both its specular and its tactile powers, its powers of vision and of touch. The transformation of the visual contract, which dissolves ocularcentric individualism only to replace it with a generically universal ethics of imaging, therefore also implies a transformation of the body's felt relation to space and spatiality. As we have seen, the Platonism of computational vision imposes a total environmental view and formats space in advance of our embodied habitation of it.  What is missing in both visual contracts is room for collectivity and difference, which are neutralized by the absolute separation of seeing subjects from one another in the photographic contract and by the total pre-visualization and design of space in the computational contract.

The shift between these contracts occurs on the basis of what I have termed the dis/correlative diaphragm, adapting Merleau-Ponty, whose conception of the flesh actually locates a nascent sociality, and hence a basic political stratum, precisely at this presubjective level where visuality and tactility begin to divide. Briefly, in anticipation of a fuller treatment later, the self-division of the flesh into a tactile here-body and a specular there-body that exceeds the skin is grounded in a transpositional reversibility of inside and outside, self and other, that ties the very possibility of subjective identity to the body's tactile and visual presence to others. The fleshly body, according to Merleau-Ponty, is never simply "mine," as collectivity precedes subjectivation. Any intervention in the prepersonal flesh is therefore a political act. It is

precisely here that power comes into play in the establishment **69** of the new visual-tactile contract of computation. Computational visuality seeks to capture tactile spatiality itself, standardizing it from all possible angles and for all possible viewpoints; in the process it instrumentalizes the dis/correlative diaphragm for the strategic confusion of statistical and phenomenological correlation that I alluded to in the preface: statistical norms get implanted directly into the flesh, thus setting the stage for a standardization of subjective-phenomenological correlative options. To see how this process of correlative capture works, it will be useful to turn to a key site where visuality and tactility are being put to work today: in motion capture.

#### **Motility Beyond Motion**

In the course of examining the two visual contracts, Galloway briefly invokes Donna Haraway's suggestion, in the "Cyborg Manifesto," that "our best machines are made of sunshine; they are all light and clean because they are nothing but signals, electromagnetic waves, a section of a spectrum" (Haraway 2016, 13; quoted in Galloway 2021, 54). Galloway credits Haraway with capturing "the essence of computation," elaborating on her statement:

Computers are made of sunshine because they include things like fiber optic cables and photon switches. They are made of sunshine in a looser sense too because they consist of energy moving through matter. Furthermore, the discipline of computer modeling strives to simulate the behavior of light using mathematical equations, and thus is a kind of "sunshine simulator." (Galloway 2021, 56)

Of course, we know that these machines, while increasingly light, are far from clean; witness the environmental impact of Bitcoin mining, in which GPUs—sunshine simulators *par excellence* are appropriated for the very non-optical task of solving cryptographic problems, turning electricity into money and in the process producing emissions that cloud the skies and dim

**70** the sunlight. Moreover, as Haraway also knew, processing sunshine creates social burdens that are unequally distributed; right after the lines quoted by Galloway, her text continues: "these machines are eminently portable, mobile—a matter of immense human pain in Detroit and Singapore. People are nowhere so fluid, being both material and opaque" (Haraway 2016, 13). Here Haraway points to the hidden physicality of computation and to a fundamental discrepancy between its flexible modeling of light and the relative inflexibility of the human body. Computational visuality, in short, makes demands on bodies that can stretch them to the breaking point.

Galloway begins to outline the mechanisms by which sunshine simulators exert their effects on human bodies. He writes:

After all, vision is just a variable for the computer, a variable like anything else. And the typical elevations and sections inherited from architectural drafting are now as fungible as any other kind of input. Such unbridled freedom itself breeds a secondary form of regularization in which the infinity of possible views reduces to a short list of common ones. Thus architecture, the art of space and volume, is also the profession that has most efficiently disciplined vision into elevation, section, and plan. (Galloway 2021, 56)

The key terms here are fungibility, secondary regularization, and discipline. What's at stake is the formatting of space, which when transferred from the drafting program to the built environment translates into the standardization and constraint of embodied motion. This is all the more obvious when we move from the architectural bureau to the factory floor or the Amazon fulfillment station, where bodily motion is continuously monitored, optimized, and disciplined with an array of machine learning, video, and biosensing technologies.22 Welcome to the sunshine factory.

22 There are countless journalistic accounts detailing Amazon's internal surveillance systems. Particularly revealing are the documents recently

[Fig. 1.3] Hito Steyerl, *Factory of the Sun*, 2015; Single-channel HD video, environment, LE grid, beach chairs on Screen and Truss; Collection of San José Museum of Art. Purchased jointly by San José Museum of Art with funds provided by the Lipman Family Foundation, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago with funds provided by Albert A. Robin by exchange, and Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, through the Board of Overseers Acquisitions Fund, 2017.08.; Installation view from San José Museum Art, 2021. Courtesy of the Artist and Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York (Photography by J. Arnold, Impart Photography).

In her video installation *Factory of the Sun*, German media artist Hito Steyerl mounts a powerful visual-narrative critique of this new fungibility of movement, showing how its entwinement with computational visuality has far-reaching political consequences for embodied subjects around the world—consequences that by far exceed those remarked by Haraway in 1985, as they are generalized today from the factory worker to more or less every consumer of digital imagery. Steyerl focuses in particular on motion capture technology, which makes possible

obtained by *Vice* and published as: Gurley 2022. It has also been revealed that Amazon is marketing machine-learning–enabled surveillance systems to other companies: Morse 2020.

**72** the abstraction, modeling, and transfer of concretely embodied movement from one body to another. Such transfers, as she shows, are not frictionless, despite the promise of "light and clean" technology; they leave marks on bodies, and on the basis of these marks, such transfers of computationally visualized and modeled movement can be converted into lucrative financial exchanges—as well as sites of potential resistance.

The installation is set in a black box gallery marked out on all six sides—floor, ceiling, and walls—with a grid pattern of thin blue luminescent lines (fig. 1.3). There are comfy lawn chairs strewn about the darkened space and a large screen before us, enframed by a metallic construction and loudspeakers on either side.23 Upon entering, there's not much to see, just a grey screen with a subtle oval gradient effect, lighter at the center of the screen, darker around the edges. There's a countdown underway in the top right corner: NEXT ROUND IN 01:37…01:36…01:35… It feels like one of those nondescript digital "waiting rooms" that one might encounter before a scheduled telemedicine appointment. Then: A MESSAGE FROM THE SPONSOR appears, with a smaller video window (about half the size of the screen, centered vertically and offset to the left) opening up against the grey background. A digitally rendered Deutsche Bank logo assembles itself out of blocky pixels, vaguely reminiscent of Michael Bay's visualizations of Transformers doing their robotic thing.  The letters rearrange themselves again, spinning out and readjusting to form the question, "FASTER THAN LIGHT?"

Inane techno music starts playing, and the Deutsche Bank logo reappears in the top right corner of the window. A stubblebearded, blonde-haired, blue-eyed man in a suit starts running his mouth and gesticulating before a green-screened digital background: a computer-generated space with blue grid lines and an animation showing a relatively simplistic architectural model, illuminated blue from within. Over the man's shoulder, we can briefly see the name Teufelsberg—"Devil's Mountain" in German—identifying the model as a rendering of the complex of buildings that sit atop a man-made hill in the Grunewald area of Berlin. Something weird is going on here. Teufelsberg is a non-natural hill made of rubble and debris that covers the Naziera Wehrtechnische Fakultät, an unfinished military academy designed by Albert Speer. After WWII, so the story goes, Allied forces were unable to destroy the academy with explosives and thus found it easier just to bury it and build on top of it. In 1963 the American NSA erected a listening station there, complete with antenna radomes arranged in a somewhat phallic configuration, two round structures on the roof of the building, another one sitting high atop a thick column between them.

What does this fast-talking bank executive have to do with Teufelsberg? The man speaks a giddy Hochdeutsch, while sparse English subtitles appear below: "The speed of light. A big question. Can we match or even accelerate the speed of light?" Actually, a lot of the affective and even informational content has

are significant also in Steyerl's piece, as the lens flares subtly dislocate the diegetic/extradiegetic membrane, while the planetary imagery signals the global generalization of the exploitative processes detailed in the video, which depend on the confusion of spaces previously encapsulated as either diegetic or not.