Page 134 - Cyberculture and New Media

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geometric space of visual perception.” This work, therefore, opens a non-
representational and non-visual space that fosters the affective and
proprioceptive experience of the body and, as such, compromises a new form
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of ‘affection-image’ - “a digital affection-image that unfolds in and as the
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viewer-participants’s bodily intuition of the sheer alienness of these forms.”
Hansen turns to the work of new biologists such as Hans Jonas to
show how the force-experience of touch and proprioception are “reality-
generating” elements:

Of particular interest will be the resonance between this
deployment and philosophical and scientific work that has
shown how vision is grounded upon touch. This resonance
will serve to underwrite a neo-Bergsonist claim that virtual
reality realizes an aesthetic function insofar as it couples
new perceptual domains with the ‘reality-conferring’
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experience of touch (or what Bergson calls ‘affection’).

Jonas’ work on vision and touch approximates, says Hansen,
Bergson’s on perception and affection in that vision, like perception, is
defined by a certain detachment from its objects. “Likewise, as ‘real action,’
affection approximates touch, since in both cases what is at stake is some
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kind of ‘force-experience.’” What Jonas then adds, according to Hansen, to
the Bergsonist understanding is “a clarification of how touch-affection
functions as the ‘understructure’ of vision-perception.” And, as an
understructure, allows us to account for the way in which it’s potential “for
generating ‘reality’ can be ‘lent’ to the most schematic artificial
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environments,” thus constituting the post-visual topography of new media
art. In order to develop Bergson’s insights he again turns to the world of
science (to argue with Dorion Sagan that recent psychoanalytic and
phenomenological critiques of mind fail to disturb the “monolithic notion of
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‘the’ body” ) and to the early phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty to explore
the concept of “body schema” outside of the projective understanding - that
is, of body image - derived from theorists such as Jacques Lacan, Judith
Butler, and Elizabeth Grosz (which, he argues, is, in turn, derived from a
Freudian source).
For Hansen, body-schema, “Far from being a mediator between the
subject and the environment that would condition bodily activity,” (and far
from being an image as it is for Lacan, Butler and Grosz), “is cosubstantial
with the activity of the body,” and, as such, “is dynamically constitutive of
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the spatiality of the world.” Merleau-Ponty, argues Hansen, accords to
spatiality a constitutive role in bodily experience. It is not simply an effect of
representations, even bodily representations, as it is generative of space as
well as the body.