Issue 5.

2 / 2016: 48

(image by Nina Jäger, continent.)

Mark Hansen is professor of Literature and Visual

Studies at Duke University. His work is
fundamentally and quintessentially interdisciplinary,
traversing interests in literary studies, film, media,
sensing systems, classical and continental

Mark Hansen philosophy, science studies, and cognitive

neuroscience. His primary concern in invoking
these interdisciplinary perspectives is to look at the
effects of technology, human agency and social life
A Continent. Inter-view
on one another. Exploring the relentless
technological exteriorization that characterizes the
human as a form of life on this planet, Hansen’s
research pays particular attention to the key role
played by visual art, literature, and cultural
techniques in brokering individual and collective
adaptations to specific technologies, and
technology at large, from the industrial revolution
to the digital revolution. His monographs
include Embodying Technesis: Technology Beyond
Writing (University of Michigan Press, 2000), New
Philosophy for New Media (MIT Press, 2003),
and Bodies in Code: Interfaces with Digital Media
(Routledge, 2006). He has published essays on
technology in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Deleuze
and Guattari’s biophilosophy, the viral in William
Burroughs, Char Davies’s virtual reality
environments, Robert Lazzarini’s skulls, ‘post-
photographic’ digital installations, Deleuze’s
reading of Foucault’s ‘Superman,’ the convergence
of body and space in contemporary architectural
practice and theory, and the correlation of
information and meaning in contemporary media
theory. Hansen argues for the potential of new
media technologies and practices to overcome the
performative nature of cultural identity, former
philosophical divisions between epistemology and
ontology, revealing and potentially manumitting
the corporeal body as an “instrument of capitalist
semiotics.”[1]

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Issue 5.2 / 2016: 49
cc.cc: How did you get here?
MH: I was eating a late lunch and this guy
named Jamie Allen tapped me on the shoulder
(laughter in the room)… I was invited
by Bernard Geoghegan, I am sure in conjunction
with the HKW staff, to come and give a couple of
talks at this event, and I flew here on an airplane.
And then, actually, I spent a lot of time on an
airplane because I missed two connections.
cc.cc: What technical systems are operating on us
right now?
MH: A microphone… operating on
us.... A microphone is ‘operating on me’ right now.
Certainly there are waves and stuff going through
this room, and they are probably operating on us
right now. That's what I'll point to: the air.
cc.cc: What pieces of the technosphere do you
have on you?
MH: I think everything on me is a piece of
the technosphere. The easiest answer would be the
phone in my pocket; but all of my clothing, me, my
body.[2] The core of Peter Haff’s argument
about the technosphere is that it is a systematic
process that is operating on a level of complexity
certainly higher than ours—humans and human
perception and so on—and implicated in it in
complex ways that make it difficult to respond in
simple ways.[3] As a human being I'm implicated in
the technosphere, for sure.
cc.cc: What is the technosphere?
MH: I am committed to the idea that humans have
been technical since we evolved in conjunction with
the development of tools and language, and the
means of transmission of our knowledge, and I
think that if one broadens that beyond the
human[4], the technosphere is not simply the
introduction of simple technologies, but I would
say it is part of the process of cosmological
evolution.[5] So I wouldn't say "waves", or "air",
but it's a dimension, and an element of the cosmos
that's been there all along.[6] I would take it in the
big picture.
cc.cc: Please pick one image that resonates with
your idea of the technosphere.[7]
MH: I am going to go with the fridge with food in
it. Why? Because of the relationship between
humans and food, and all of the things that have to
be done to make food, express something about
the complex mediations between natural resources
continentcontinent.cc/index.php/continent/article/view/246
a continent. inter-view
and life.
cc.cc Notes
[1] Mark B.N. Hansen. New Philosophy for New
Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), 130.
[2] EDITORS’ NOTE: The body, as an expression of
the technosphere, is systematised to determine the
extent of agency for its particular form. In his
discussion on the digitalisation of identity, Mark
Hansen writes on the performativity of the abject
body in digital environments where it may be
possible to express identity through a “prosthetic”
self that is idealised as being outside of, for
instance, racialised identity. Hansen explores the
potential of a “universality of address”:
“If we all must imitate cultural images of how
particular bodies should appear in order to acquire
agency – if we must give up our own singular
bodily experiences to occupy a constituted textual
body - then we all must live the erasure of our lived
bodies. We might say then that what is most
significant about the transcendence of visibility in
on-line interpellation is less the possibility it affords
for new modes of represented agency than its
exposure of the violence exerted on bodily life by
generic categories of social intelligibility. By
severing imitation from visual appearance on-line
passing allows cultural signifiers to appear as what
they are, social codings that have no natural
correlation to any particular body and are
profoundly reductive of bodily singularity.” Mark
B.N. Hansen. “Digitizing the Racialized Body or The
Politics of Universal Address” SubStance 33, no. 2
(2004): 114.
While recognising the contamination of this
“prosthetic” self by the violence of social systems
to which the corporeal body is bound—and the
reality of digital environments being shaped by
hegemonic, often racialised mechanisms—Hansen
considers the potential for subverting these same
constructs through imitation, or modulation of
visibility inherent in human-computer interfaces
(HCI), specifically the digital-facial image (DFI):
“As the catalyst for a dynamic re-embodiment of
the interface, the DFI reverses precisely this
Issue 5.2 / 2016: 50
process of facialization that, we can now see,
comprises the very principle of the HCI as an
instrument of capitalist semiotics. In the experience
of the DFI, that is, the face becomes the catalyst for
a reinvestment of the body as the rich source for
meaning and the precondition for communication.
The DFI thus forms the very vehicle of contact
between our bodies and the domain of information
that would otherwise remain largely without
relation to us.” Mark B.N. Hansen. “Affect as
Medium, or the ‘Digital-Facial-Image’” Journal of
Visual Culture 2, no. 2 (2003): 208.
[3] “The promise of digital interactivity is its
capacity to bring into correlation these two distinct
virtualities: new media artworks facilitate
interaction with virtual dimensions of the
technosphere precisely in order to stimulate a
virtualization of the body. By placing the body into
interactive coupling with technically expanded
virtual domains, such works not only extend
perception (i.e. the body’s virtual action); more
important still, they catalyze the production of new
affects—or better, new affective relations
(Simondon, 1989)—that virtualize contracted habits
and rhythms of the body. For this reason,
virtualization can be said to specify the virtual
dimension constitutive of human experience.” Mark
B.N. Hansen, ibid. 217-218.
[4] EDITORS’ NOTE: Afropessimist thought makes
a critical distinction between the limits of
humanness in frameworks across ethics and
ontology—and this expression through digital
identity and activism—recognising the body as
captive to negation through word as through skin.
Calvin Warren argues that the possibility for an
autonomous existence of a black self is negated in
existing ethical frameworks, but also by the
seemingly allied anti-oppressive discourse of queer
theory. Queer theory, Warren explains, provides a
language with which to express the anguish of this
negation of blackness, but it retains a cosmology of
othering. This ontological limitation of the human
entraps blackness, especially black queerness, into
“a body without the flesh,” where it may be
desired, but is denied its own desire. That-which-is-
human is the essential expression of violence, and
humanist, rational frameworks are insufficient to
address this violence:
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a continent. inter-view
“The violence that constitutes the human and
produces suffering is sustained through an
ontological antagonism. The boundaries of the
human are shored-up by this antagonism and
without it, the human, and the world within which it
lives, would cease to exist. The non-ontology of
blackness secures the boundaries of the human; it
delimits the coordinates of the human. Blackness is
an exclusion that enables ontology. In its exclusion
from the realm of ontology, blackness is
unthinkable, innominate, and paradoxical. In
essence, blackness exists to not exist—it embodies
the most perplexing paradox that sustains
ontology.” Calvin Warren. "Onticide:
Afropessimism, Queer Theory, & Ethics" Ill Will
Editions, 2015: 6-7.
In a parallel examination of Afropessimism, K.
Aarons addresses this ontological dissonance in
anti-capitalist, feminist, and queer revolutionary
theory, where each discourse is “speaking in a
voice that precisely draws its signifying power from
Black nihilation. Black and non-Black identity
politicians who nonetheless continue to pursue a
symbolic valorization of Black life (e.g. in certain
currents of the “Black Lives Matter” movement) do
so only provided they ‘structurally adjust’ or whiten
the grammar of Black suffering to suit a Human
grammar. In this way, rather than seeking a way out
of the desert, they in fact only deepen it.” K.
Aarons. "No Selves to Abolish: Afropessimism, Anti-
Politics, and the End of the World" Ill Will Editions
(2016): 13. [See also: Lucy Suchman, responsibility
in networked infrastructures, theories of power.]
In “Digitizing the Racialised Body,” Hansen
recognises the complication of the abject body as it
is expressed across digital interfaces, but
experimental forms of new media “suggest,
precisely because and insofar as they facilitate this
belonging to the improper, this process of forging
the "whatever body”, and a “reinvestment of the
body beyond the image, for an exposure of the
rootedness of life in a source, affectivity, that lies
beyond identity and individuality and thus beyond
the reach of commodification.”
As we see across the discourse around networks
and their infrastructures, it is not only language and
its contained cosmologies that exhumes colonial
violence on the racialised body, but the trauma of
racialisation is made manifest in the structural and
geographic systems that constitute these networks.
 Issue 5.2 / 2016: 51
In the case of Hansen and Suchman, whose
research examines identity creation and expression
through digital interfaces, a material violence
bursts through the ‘invisible’ [inter]faces of
“prosthetic” identities.
Hansen writes,
“Because race has always been plagued by a
certain disembodiment (the fact that race, unlike
gender, is so clearly a construction, since racial
traits are not reducible to organic, i.e., genetic,
organization), it will prove especially useful for
exposing the limitations of the internet as a new
machinic assemblage for producing selves. For this
reason, deploying the lens of race to develop our
thinking about online identification will help us to
exploit the potential offered by the new media for
experiencing community beyond identity.” Mark
B.N. Hansen, ibid. 108. [See also: Michael
O’Rourke. “Afterlives of Queer Theory”
continent. 1, no. 2 (2011): 102–116; and Mushon
Zer-Aviv in this issue on the material violence of
digital interfaces].
[5] Bruno Latour writes how the “Political
representation of nonhumans seems not only
plausible now, but necessary when the notion
would have seemed ludicrous or indecent not long
ago. We used to deride […] peoples who imagined
that a disorder in society, a Pollution, could
threaten the natural order. We no longer laugh so
heartily, as we abstain from using aerosols for fear
the sky may fall on our heads.” Bruno Latour. “On
Technical Mediation: Philosophy, Sociology,
Genealogy” Common Knowledge 3, no. 2 (1994):
55.
[6] EDITORS’ NOTE: Such a rhetoric of
interconnectivity and “revealing force” is especially
significant to Indigenous cosmologies that assume
as foundational the co-evolution, interdependence,
and complex mutual-implication of matter. Romola
Vasantha Thumbadoo describes this entanglement
as “spanning time and place in non-linear,
integrated and emergent ways, reflecting the
energy of ontogenesis and becoming.”
Thumbadoo further writes on “the contemplation
of the Indigenous assessment of technology”
through the legacy of Algonquin Elder William
Commanda, and the teachings of the Wampum
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Belts. Revitalising the rhetoric of indigeneity into
contemporary political discourse emphasises the
urgency of recognising the “ontology of
relationship with the living Earth as compared to
the headlong rush to technology and mechanism.”
Romola Vasantha Thumbadoo. “A Circle of All
Nations: Reflection on George Grant’s Lament for a
Nation.” (ca. 2015).
“This might entail embracing the shifting
relationality, complexity and circularity of
Indigenous knowledge as productive and
necessary. The situatedness and place-specific
nature of Indigenous knowledge calls for the
validation of new kinds of theorizing and new
epistemologies that can account for situated,
relational Indigenous knowledge and yet remain
engaged with broader theoretical debates within
geography. There is a danger in ghettoizing
Indigenous geographic knowledge as ‘other’ or a
curiosity, rather than engaging this knowledge in
broader efforts to actively decolonize geography,
navigating among differing power relations at the
scales of both the individual academic and the
broader discipline.” Sarah Hunt. “Ontologies of
Indigeneity: The Politics of Embodying a Concept
” Cultural Geographies 21, no. 1 (2014):
27–32. [See also: Marisol de la Cadena on
indigenous Peruvian rhetoric of resistance (Scott
Knowles, fn 1).]
[7] EDITORS’ NOTE: During the discussions,
interviewees were asked to pick from a set of
somewhat random images. This collection of
different phenomena served as a prompt for
thought on the forms of appearance and the
visuality of the technosphere. You can view the set
here
www.flickr.com/photos/57221817@N07/254113166
86/in/photostream. The discussion here refers
to
www.flickr.com/photos/57221817@N07/254110013
56/in/photostream.