In Mark Hansen’s “Ubiquitous Sensation: Toward an Atmospheric, Collective, and Microtemporal Model of Media,” I found the concept of “depresencing” quite difficult to understand. But while talking with Ashleigh, Dana, Gabe, and Michael on Tuesday, I realized that the game mechanics of Braid might a helpful way of approaching this concept. With Braid as my heuristic, I’m going to try to lay out how I understand depresencing.
First, I’ll gloss my understanding of what Hansen means by depresencing. Hansen takes this concept from Eugene Fink, a student of Edmund Husserl. Husserl is the point of departure for the lineage of phenomenology within and against which Hansen defines depresencing. We can think of phenomenology as the study of experience—our being in time—that, starting with Husserl, has a focus that broadens from perception alone to eventually encompass sensation. In other words, this study of experience progresses from the study of ego-time—how we perceive time—to the study of this ego-time as it is embedded in world-time, which we cannot perceive and can only sense. World-time is “subperceptual sensation,” and “depresencing” is the concept Hansen gives us to understand this sensory embeddedness of ego-time in world-time (74).
It’s important to note that phenomenology’s broadening of focus from perception to sensation is not simply a function of theory-minded people achieving a better understanding of how experience works for us and therefore developing a more capacious theoretical model. That’s only half the story. The minds of these theory people are coupled with technics that determine their experience of time and accordingly constrain their theorization of this experience. Bernard Stiegler’s concept of technics understands media to shape our conscious perception of time, and this time-consciousness to simultaneously shape the emergence of our media in a recursive process Hansen calls “technogenesis.” So, Husserl couldn’t have objectively theorized what Hansen theorizes in 2012—subperceptual sensation and depresencing and all this—because the technics Husserl lived with and through are different than those that shape our contemporary world.
Stiegler, following Derrida, gave us the inaugural “deconstructive paradigm” of technics. This paradigm understands media to be technological supplements to memory and therefore limits the effect of technics to the field of perception—consciousness, thought, etc. However, Hansen argues that when ubiquitous computing (ubicomp) comes onto the scene, this paradigm of technics and time-consciousness is no longer adequate. Why? Because in ubicomp environments sensation, not only perception, shapes our experience of time. We experience this shift “simply by being and acting in space and time,” Hansen tells us, because ubicomp’s media environment offers us information peripherally: so diffusely and at a rate so fast that it flickers at the edges of our perception and, indeed, beneath our perception in the field of our sensation (72-73). Ubicomp “makes the microtemporal sensuous” (74), and Hansen’s concept of depresencing tries to makes this sensuousness thinkable.
“Depresencing” is a tricky word. It threw me off immediately because its gerundive form suggests that it’s something I should or must do. This is the opposite of what Hansen means. The gerundive form signifies depresencing’s ongoingness not as something I do but rather as something that affects me. It affects me in the precise sense that it effects me—is at the root of my experience—but is not perceptually present to me; it’s below my perception: subperceptual. Depresencing is the concept that lets us think the shift from perception to sensation that for Hansen defines our contemporary media environment of ubiquitous computing.
Now, As we turn to Braid to make depresencing more concrete, let’s loop back to the idea of world-time that I introduced earlier. World-time is the source or originary ground of our perception of time—our time-consciousness—that ubicomp makes sensuous. More precisely, ubicomp makes sensuously accessible to us the embeddedness of our perception of time—ego-time—within this broader field of world-time. Since sensation is like the raw data of perception, world-time is the condition of possibility of ego-time.
In Braid, ego-time is made particularly concrete for us through the game’s rewind function. This function makes us grasp time as spacetime. When time runs back, objects move backward in space. Time gains a tangibility when we rewind—it’s no longer just an ordinary ongoingness (like water is to a fish). However, beginning in World 3, objects with a green glow refuse to cooperate with our ego-time; they continue to move when we rewind as if they belong to a spacetime of their own. We can think of these objects with a green glow as belonging to world-time. These objects are not subject to what we do with our ego-time—rewinding it our letting it run forward—we can only perceive them. So, our heuristic approach to depresencing through Braid looks like this:
In Braid, ego-time is what we do, world-time is what we can only perceive.
In our ubicomp IRL, ego-time is what we perceive, and world-time is what we can only feel.
So, my heuristic involves us reading Braid as an abstraction of ubicomp time-experience that renders perceivable the world-time that IRL is only available to us as sensation. The table below illustrates this abstraction:
Depresencing is the relation between our perceivable ego-time and a world-time rendered sensuous by ubicomp. While world-time affects our experience of time, we can’t perceive it. World-time is recalcitrantly peripheral: experienced but never able to come into focus in our consciousness. In Braid, we can heuristically—indeed, procedurally—understand this recalcitrant relationship in our ludic struggle to relate the immediacy of the “ego-time” we can control with the “world-time” of green-glowing objects we can’t control. Whenever we use Braid’s rewind function, time becomes more tangible to us than it is IRL. No longer a ghostly ongoingness, time becomes a present/presence that we can pull back and forth like a reel of film. But when green-glowing objects impinge on this ego-time, they perform a kind of depresenting/depresencing. Like a bug crawling on our computer screen, these objects force us to realize that the present of our manipulable time is not the end-all. There’s a deeper temporality—a world-time—out there that contains and contaminates the control we exert over our immediately present time. While in Braid we can heuristically perceive this world-time and its effect of depresencing, in our ubicomp IRL this deeper temporality is unthinkable. We can only feel it. As Hansen puts it, “Presencing and depresencing… characterize what are at bottom categorically different levels—one on this side of being and time, the other on the hither side” (79).
(All this depresencing has me thinking about Mikhail Bakhtin's chronotope and the "chrono-topos" [spacetime as manifold] that's often used as a heuristic to illustrate Einstein's law of General Relativity... [see image at top of blog post])