Body as an Affective Biomediated State: Fifty Shades of a Digital Canvas

Following Michel Henry’s notion of “auto-affection”, this text deals with a conscious biomediated state — a body which is a subject to the affective state. Affect is a feeling of a feeling, it is self-knowledge and self-awareness, that is absolutely primordial, yet also infinitely emerging. I will discuss how in the metamodern[1] state the affective body is always influenced by the digital, and how post-internet and digital art is an integral of the affective body.

Using Michel Henry’s text Material Phenomenology (2008) as a base and inspiration for this text, I will link it with Patricia T. Clough’s The Affective Turn: Political Economy, Biomedia, and Bodies, and later with a text by Michael Connor, Post-Internet: What It Is and What It Was and a text by Jesse Darling, Post-Whatever #usermilitia. I will use the selected texts in order to talk about two art works — Dries Verhoeven’s Wanna Play? (2014) and Hito Steyerl’s How Not To Be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational .Mov File (2013).

One of Michel Henry’s key principles is a complete rejection of a traditional phenomenological notion of “intentionality” — most famously discussed by Edmund Husserl. Husserl argues that consciousness in always intentional and that every act of thinking involves a process of so-called “mental representation”. Henry decides to fully abandon this notion, which is directly linked with phenomenology, and looks towards immanence — a certain primordial state, which is infinitely inseparable from the absolute core of the subject. Immanence is an antipode of transcendence — it is internal, it is dealing with paradoxes of immateriality of the soul. Immanence is linked with feeling — self-feeling, self-awareness, and self-affectiveness.

For Henry, affect is something that goes back before any kind of sensation. It is a primordial state, beyond any kind of explanation; it comes far before consciousness, self-awareness or self-revelation. Henry writes that art, and particularly painting, comes from the purest form of understanding — the affective. “Painting does not use language.”[2] Henry writes a lot about suffering — suffering as a purest form of feeling, a purest form of life.

“Suffering constitutes the tissue of existence, it is the place where life becomes living, the reality and the phenomenological effectivity of this gradual change.”[3]

Such artists as Mark Rothko, Agnes Martin or Jackson Pollock are perfect examples of what Henry means by “painting does not use language”. What these artists are trying to transcend should be perceived on a completely metaphysical level that asks for no interpretations or explanations. These artists work with a purest form of affect.

With a dislocation of the object, or a lack of intentional relationship with that object, the indescribable and unexplainable frustration appears. This frustration, unexpected waves of emotions, fear: feelings that are almost abstract; that is the purest form of affect.

In her text The Affective Turn: Political Economy, Biomedia and Bodies, Patricia T. Clough focuses on the biomediated body.

“…the biomediated body exposes how digital technologies, such as biomedia and new media, attach to and expand the informational substrate of bodily matter and matter generally…”[4]

According to Clough, biomedia “makes possible the mass production of genetic material and ‘new media’ where digitization makes possible a profound technical expansion of the senses.”[5] In her understanding of word affect, Clough is looking at Brian Massumi who, as a translator of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari book A Thousand Plateaus, writes –

“AFFECT/AFFECTION. Neither word denotes a personal feeling (sentiment in Deleuze and Guattari). L’affect (Spinoza’s affectus) is an ability to affect and be affected. It is a prepersonal intensity corresponding to the passage from one experiential state of the body to another and implying an augmentation or diminution in that body’s capacity to act. L’affection (Spinoza’s affectio) is each such state considered as an encounter between the affected body and a second, affecting, body (with body taken in its broadest possible sense to include “mental” or ideal bodies)”[6] .

Above Massumi uses words “prepersonal intensity”, which by Clough is translated as “bodily responses, autonomic responses”.[7] Clough also uses word visceral, by which she almost turns affect into a savage, hungry response.

Clough looks at Mark Hansen, who argues, “digitization engages bodily affect, inviting it to give information a body.”[8] Clough mentions that for Hanson, the image became a process. This, indeed, perfectly describes the relationship between a spectator and digital arts — including social media, where image contains much more information that a mixture of pixels. An image is both — a result and a start point. Digitalization, a possibility to become a biomediated body, a chance to transform and develop the affective is a path that is being explored within the contemporary arts. Information, the purest kind of information, which is technical and programmed information, is becoming a body. When looking at Dries Verhoeven’s digital performance called Wanna Play?, even the innocent and distant spectators feel a sickening anxiety — which most definitely is the strongest part of affective form.

Wanna Play? (Love in the time of Grindr), 2014 was a digital performance by Dries Verhoeve who, for ten days in a row, was supposed to be isolated from the outside by locking himself in a glass room that was placed in the center of Berlin, in Kreuzberg. The only method of communication that Verhoeven allowed himself for the chosen period of time was through an online application called “Grindr”, which is a dating app advertised for gay or bisexual men only. Initially, whilst preparing for the performance, Verhoeven wanted to observe and analyse everyday dangers and overwhelming potentials of the app.

Dries Verhoeven, Wanna play? (Love in the time of Grindr), 2014.

For ten days, Verhoeven stayed inside the glass container, doing nothing but messaging men through Grindr. All the conversations that the artist was involved in during these ten days were projected onto a large screen that was placed at the back of a see-through container. Even though Verhoeven blurred profile pictures of the men he was talking to, their names, basic information and vague silhouette of the profile picture remained clear to all the people who passed the very popular and busy square during day and night.

Initially, Verhoeven planned to only contact other users with non-sexual suggestions. “He proposes, for example, to wash their hair, to sing together in the shower, or to hold hands for an hour.”[9] Verhoeven is trying to debate questionable nature of Grindr app — which is very much different from other dating apps and has a reputation of connecting men who want to get involved in sexual relations only. Indeed, his initial plan was too idealistic — most men using the app are hoping to find an easy way to have a sexual relationship with no strings attached.

By using a large screen, which is giving out all possible intimate information about users who want to believe they are using the app privately, Verhoeven is giving a body to the digital. Above, I mentioned Mark Hanson, who argued that digitization is giving the information a body — and this is the clearest example of that.

A soulless app that a user is only connected to through soulless taps and phone vibrations has a direct connection to the rest of the body. A soulless app is capable of seducing and arousing as well as disappointing and letting down. By making one step further, by putting all the conversations up on the screen the artist is dealing with questions of affect and anxiety.

The performance, the artist himself and HAU Hebbel am Ufer, who commissioned the project, were all accused of an intentional outing of closeted homosexuals, as well as violation of privacy through a decision to project the most intimate images and conversations onto a screen. This is the worst kind of anxiety — knowing that you are never safe — however safe you might feel with your own phone in your own hands, managing your own personal dating app account, carrying out conversations that you wish were never seen.

To think about this performance is to always think about anxiety inside the digital spaces. A infamous notion of FOMO — Fear of Missing Out — when your phone is suddenly out of battery, and you have no clue what time it is, who called you, and what is happening out there without you. The information that a user often feels so attached to often has no value — but one is still anxious about missing something important between endless photographs of avocados, street fashion, or memes. Yet, this is nothing new, really. Think about a famous film scene from Bernardo Bertolucci’s film The Dreamers (2003), where a group of young people always did their best to sit in the front row of the cinema auditorium, so that they could almost be the first people to perceive the image, first people to see and understand a film. The same happens today — we buy Netflix subscription to watch Orange is The New Black on the night of the premiere; we subscribe to Tidal to listen to Beyoncé’s Lemonade just in order to be able to talk about it before many others will even hear about it. We stand in a line for something that we might not even want to see — we were standing to see whatever — just because everybody before us decided to see it too. The ultimate illness, FOMO is gradually turning technology into a natural extension of the body — prosthesis, which seems to be almost vital.

The more advanced way of communications was meant to make digital conversations more convenient, rapid, inexpensive and relaxed. It is called “Chat” — as in something you would have over a cup of coffee with your old friend. Yet, there is nothing more anxious within a digital space, than seeing this:

An anxiety of waiting for the answer. A fear of the answer, which one can easily re-write hundreds of times. Imagine asking someone for a favour, and expecting a quick “yes” or “no” as an answer, but just seeing these three dots for seconds and seconds. At some point, everything you have and everything you do almost depends on this graphic symbol.

In the essay Post-Internet: What It Is and What It Was, Michael Connor clearly distinguishes difference between two notions — ‘post-internet’ and ‘after-internet’. He writes, that ‘post-internet’ is something that was majorly influenced by Internet and digital processes; whilst ‘after-internet’ means that

“…we live in a time subsequent to the internet’s saturation of most of the world’s surface area and human population, and of our individual consciousness.”[10]

Later in the text, he writes:

“… it no longer makes sense for artists to attempt to come to terms with ‘internet culture’, because not ‘internet culture’ is increasingly just ‘culture’.”[11]

Ultimately, ‘post-internet’ and ‘after-internet’ are too phrases that are completely unnecessary in the culture that we are currently occupying — the use of these phrases is a certain tautology, something that comes naturally. Every single living artist is an artist who works in both — ‘after-internet’ time: periodically and physically in time and space; and ‘post-internet’ time: because to live today is to be constantly influenced by digitalities. Jesse Darling writes — “every artist working today is a post-internet artist.”[12]

To occupy this culture is to be infinitely surveilled, is to be infinitely under control. Binoy Kampark writes that social networks remind him of Bentham’s panopticon — a type of surveillance building where every single inmate, locked inside the panopticon, is always observed, without the inmate being able to tell whether they are watched or not.[13] This model of a perfect jail describes the mode of ‘internet-culture’. In their book Black Transparency, Dutch duo Metahaven are exploring ways, in which a member of public is always positioned to be under the influenced of the government. The chapter “All Tomorrow’s Clouds” begins with these words:

“The internet began as a place too complicated for governments to understand. It ended up, in the second decade of the twenty-first century, as a place that only governments seem to understand.”[14]

Nobody is alone online. There are no places to hide — and no ways to really stay anonymous.

Holly Herndon is a sound artist, who works with experimental electronic music. Her sounds are built on hundreds of different layers — just like a Photoshop-ed image. Her music performances would be impossible without use of software. In a song and video called “Home”, which was directed by Metahaven, Herndon is talking about NSA and artist’s invisible audience. She sings: “I know that you know me better than I know me.”[15]

That is exactly what Hito Steyerl, a German artist, is looking at in her 2013 video art work How Not To Be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV File. The name that is taken from a famous Monty Python video sketch is supposed to be an ironic instruction on how to avoid being seen. A digitally programmed male voice narrates these instructions and Hito Steyerl herself is performing and demonstrating “how not to be seen”. She is using iconic iPhone swiping/zooming/erasing gestures to state that the world that was once thought to be virtual is now becoming more and more physical.

Hito Steyerl. HOW NOT TO BE SEEN: A Fucking Didactic Educational .Mov File. 2013

The actual question — “How Not To Be Seen” reminds a spectator of beauty magazine headlines, or questions that are often typed into Google — “how to lose weight quickly”, “how to have perfect skin”. The questions that we ask instead of actually seeking for answers. Google often works as a certain bullet-proof glass. It is a protection. You can always ask Google, “how to come out to your parents”, “how to write 3000 words in one night”. Digital space is supposed to be indifferent. It has no right to judge. Internet is your best friend who will always be there for you.

The artist implies, that technology or resolution determines visibility, and whatever is not captured by revolution is invisible. Therefore, whatever is not online does not exist. Steyerl suggests that there are few ways of staying completely invisible — for instance, “to pretend you are not there”; “to camouflage”, “to disguise”, “to become smaller or equal of one pixel”, “being a superhero”, “owning an invisibility cloak”, “being female and over 50”, “being eliminated/liquidated/dissimulated”.[16]

At some point, Steyerl narrates “Today most important things want to remain invisible. Love is invisible. War is invisible. Capital is invisible.”[17] Indeed — as well as surveillance is invisible, government is invisible, internet is invisible. Affect is invisible too.

In How Not To Be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV File, Hito Steyerl is suggesting that power is invisible, and you are not. The culture we occupy is a panopticon. We never see the watchmen — just as we never see the affective, or the government, or actual currency; but they always observe us.

Indeed, working in both ‘after-internet’ and ‘post-internet’ spaces is a chance for artists to expand their techniques, methods, and audience too. Such famous curators and critics and Hans-Ulrich Obrist, Klaus Biesenbach, or Jerry Saltz use social networks fanatically, and there is always a chance to be accidentally “discovered” by one of them. Digital spaces open new perspectives and make the work process much more vivid and organic. Yet, an excessive amount of information, and excessive powers of Internet users are questioning traditional notions of authorship, attribution and copyright. Is anything you put online really yours? If you are an artist who decides to put his or her works online, using for instance Tumblr or Instagram, how can you be sure that no one steals it?

Such revolutionary companies as ascribe offer a simple solution. “ascribe is a fundamentally new way for you to claim attribution, create limited digital editions and transfer rights.”[18] ascribe offers digital creators to use their web application as a registration of their work, in order to always preserve copyright and build up a unique digital provenance. This indeed is a revolutionary idea, as it offers to make all the processes visible. Once you upload your work onto the web app, you are able to loan it, share it or sell it. Whichever action you choose to proceed with, you will always see where your own work was and where it is now. ascribe is fighting for recognition of attribution and for right of the creators. Such services, that let a user track their personal data are reassuring and are indeed reducing the anxiety caused by ignorance.

There is one other type of anxiety cause by the digital spaces. This anxiety is described by Jesse Darling in Post-Whatever #usermilitia —

“Current anxiety that the internet may be making us stupid (or lonely, or sexually aberrant, or socially dysfunctional) echo Plato’s worry that the widespread practice of writing would destroy oral literacy and the ability to create new memories.”[19]

Darling is using such words as “zombie-like”, “addicted”, “narcissism” and “alienation” to depict that anxiety of looking stupid. Darling writes, that each and every one of us says that we are different, that we are not influenced by a senseless swarm that is driven by the digital space. This is why I chose to include a title of a famous book and film Fifty Shades of Grey into the title of this essay. Nobody wants to be known for reading or watching Fifty Shades of Grey, just as nobody wants to be seen taking a selfie. The after-internet crowd is a set of people who are endlessly erasing their browsing history. As a matter of fact, this is exactly what we do online — we always look for ways to disappear and hide our digital footprints. Less is more, more is less.

An affective biomediated state is in itself an infinite anxiety — fear of being seen and surveilled; shame for something you are doing right now, or did in the past. Dating apps, sexting, “QWERTY12345” password protected online diaries — nobody is safe and alone online. This is what the affective biomediated state is — an inability to hide, an inability to disappear, an inability to stop being seen. Digital space is a cradle of self-awareness and the affective. Everything here is supposed to make you feel unique. Your personalized profile picture, your nickname, your self-curated Instagram feed and a set of Facebook friends. You are desperately trying to stand out, to be easily distinguished from other users. But, by acknowledging that you are personalizing your profiles in order to stand out, you are only confirming the ultimate surveillance behind a digital curtain. Hide. You better hide.

List of Images

Dries Verhoeven, Wanna play? (Love in the time of Grindr), 2014.

Hito Steyerl. HOW NOT TO BE SEEN: A Fucking Didactic Educational .Mov File. 2013

Bibliography

ascribe website, https://www.ascribe.io. last accessed 03/11/2015

Clough, Patricia T. . “The Affective Turn: Political Economy, Biomedia and Bodies”, Theory, Culture & Society 25 (1). January 1, 2008.

Connor, Michael.“Post-Internet: What It Is and What It Was”, in Omar Kholeif’s You Are Here: Art after the Internet. United Kingdom: Cornerhouse Publications. 2013.

Darling, Jesse. “Post-Whatever #usermilitia”, in Omar Kholeif’s You Are Here: Art after the Internet. United Kingdom: Cornerhouse Publications. 2013.

Deleuze ,Gilles. Guattari, Felix. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 1987.

Henry, Michel. Davidson, Scott. Seeing the Invisible: On Kandinsky. London: Continuum, 2009.

Henry, Michel. The Essence of Manifestation. The Hague: Kluwer Academic Pulishers, 1973.

Herndon, Holly. “Home”. http://www.metrolyrics.com/home-lyrics-holly-herndon.html. last accessed 03/11/2015

Kampark, Binoy.“Giving Good Face”, Counterpunch, 7 August 2007. http://www.counterpunch.org/2007/08/07/giving-good-face/. last accessed 2/10/2015

Metahaven. Black Transparency. The Right to Know in the Age of Mass Surveillance. United States: Sternberg Press. 2014.

Steyerl, Hito. How Not to be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV File, 2013. http://artforum.com/video/id=51651&mode=large&page_id=0. last accessed 04/11/2015

Turner, Luke. Metamodernist // Manifesto, 2011. http://www.metamodernism.org. last accessed 03/11/2015

Verhoeven, Dries. http://driesverhoeven.com/en/project/wanna-play/ . accessed 3/11/2015.

[1] Luke Turner, Metamodernist // Manifesto, 2011. http://www.metamodernism.org. last accessed 03/11/2015

[2] Michel Henry, Scott Davidson, Seeing the Invisible: On Kandinsky. London: Continuum, 2009. p.72

[3] Michel Henry, The Essence of Manifestation. The Hague: Kluwer Academic Pulishers, 1973. p. 70

[4] Patricia T. Clough, “The Affective Turn: Political Economy, Biomedia and Bodies”, Theory, Culture & Society 25 (1). January 1, 2008. p.2

[5] Ibid.

[6] Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 1987. p. xvi

[7] Patricia T. Clough, “The Affective Turn: Political Economy, Biomedia and Bodies”, Theory, Culture & Society 25 (1). January 1, 2008. p.3

[8] Ibid, p. 5

[9] Dries Verhoeven website, http://driesverhoeven.com/en/project/wanna-play/ . accessed 3/11/2015.

[10] Michael Connor, “Post-Internet: What It Is and What It Was”, in Omar Kholeif’s You Are Here: Art after the Internet. United Kingdom: Cornerhouse Publications. 2013. p. 57

[11] Ibid., p. 61

[12] Jesse Darling, “Post-Whatever #usermilitia”, in Omar Kholeif’s You Are Here: Art after the Internet. United Kingdom: Cornerhouse Publications. 2013. p. 137

[13] Binoy Kampark, “Giving Good Face”, Counterpunch, 7 August 2007. http://www.counterpunch.org/2007/08/07/giving-good-face/. last accessed 2/10/2015

[14] Metahaven, Black Transparency. The Right to Know in the Age of Mass Surveillance. United States: Sternberg Press. 2014. p. 117

[15] Holly Herndon, “Home”. http://www.metrolyrics.com/home-lyrics-holly-herndon.html. last accessed 03/11/2015

[16] Hito Steyerl video, How Not to be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV File, 2013. http://artforum.com/video/id=51651&mode=large&page_id=0. last accessed 04/11/2015

[17] Ibid.

[18] ascribe website, https://www.ascribe.io. last accessed 03/11/2015

[19] Jesse Darling, “Post-Whatever #usermilitia”, in Omar Kholeif’s You Are Here: Art after the Internet. United Kingdom: Cornerhouse Publications. 2013. p. 138