from Embodying Technesis: Technology Beyond Writing (Michigan, May 2000).
Chapter 9
On Some
Motifs in Benjamin (Re)Embodying Technology as Erlebnis or the Postlinguistic Afterlife of
Mimesis
Now that we have grasped the dead end of the systemic semiotic perspective, it remains
for me to lay out the model of corporeal mimesis that I propose in its place.
To do so, I shall return to the still resonant work of Germany's most important
twentieth century literary and cultural critic, Walter Benjamin. By thinking
through and beyond Benjamin on the topic of experience and technology, contemporary
technocultural critics can, I suggest, begin to disabuse themselves of their
ingrained textualist biases in ways that facilitate a fundamental reconceptualization
of technology's experiential impact beyond technesis.
Pried loose from its own irreducibly political moment and coordinated
with the technologies of our postmodern age, Benjamin's rehabilitation of
lived experience (Erlebnis) acquires a basic anthro‚pological
function: as a hinge articulating embodiment with technologies that facilitate
collective experience, Erlebnis forms
the medium for our interface with the ever more fragmented and autonomous
material world.
More
than any other twentieth century critic, Benjamin must be credited with problematizing
the tyranny of discursive‑representationalist reason and insisting on
the irreducibility of an embodied experiential domain. In his work on the
nexus linking technology to the structure of experience‚ and particularly
in his 1939 essay "On Some Motifs in Baudelaire"óBenjamin refuses
to subordinate Erlebnis (literally,
"living through), to memorial reflective experience proper (Erfahrung). In appropriating Benjamin's
category of Erlebnis as the basis
for a theory of experience in the postmodern age, I shall emphasize an aspect
of his thought that diverges from his sustained (and well‑excavated)
concern with historical redemption‑what one recent critic refers to
as his interest in diagnosing our "more equivocal contact with contemporary
reality" Cohen 1993, 205). Rather than continuing to focus on Benjamin's
peculiar, admittedly fascinating historical moment, I want to ask what Benjamin
can offer us in our effort to reconcile experience
with the infrastructure of the emergent posthuman world.[1]
By articulating
the increased centrality of Erlebnis
in the modern age with a historical account of what he calls "the
mimetic faculty," Benjamin develops an aspect of embodiment absolutely
fundamental to my claims concerning technology's molecular impact.Ý In contrast to Bourdieu, whose structural account
of mimeticism remains abstract, Benjamin employs mimesis first and foremost
as a historical category a category capable of describing the relationship
between embodied human beings and the ever charging material domain. This
historical conception of mimesis broadens and 'sharpens Hayles's dialectical
account of the correlation between tech‚nological change and shifts in embodiment;
specifically, Benjamin positions modern technology as the agent behind the fundamental shift
in the domi‚nant mode of experience characteristic of modernity‑the
shift from Erfahrung to Erlebnis.
To appropriate
Erlebnis as the basis for a robust
account of technological change, we must supplement Benjamin's history of
mimesis by introducing a third stage in its evolutionóone in which image replaces
text as the basic, medium of experience. Such supplementation in turn requires
us to emphasize those aspects of his doctrine of mimesis that depart from
his totalizing and hermetic linguistic ontology. By distinguishing a properly
lin‚guistIc form of our contact with the material world from a primitive,
prelinguistic and embodied one, Benjamin bistoricizes the linguistic (textualist) model of the cosmos as specific
to a particular (if particularly long and important) phase in human existence.
Viewed in the broader context thus secured, language appears as one vehicle
among others for our contact with the cosmos and one whose sway is by no means
necessarily infinite. The structural open endedness of his mimetic history
leaves room for the introduction of a distinct postlinguistic form of mimesis that would
restore a cru‚cial dimension of sensuousity
a practical, embodied basis to our contact with the material world.[2]
This
possibility speaks directly to our contemporary cultural moment. By providing a
model for conceptualizing embodied experience without mea‚suring it through an
account of metaphoric change or otherwise reducing it to discourse, Benjamin's
mimetic theory of experience can guide our efforts to think through two central
aspects of the imagistic turn currently
under‚way in our culture. In the first place, it furnishes a compelling account
of the key experiential consequence of this shift the decline in
language's tradi‚tional hermeneutic and ontological function that results from
the increasing autonomy of the material world as producer of our contemporary
imaginary. In this way, Benjamin's theory fills out the experiential side of
the pic‚ture painted by those media and technology critics who stress the
autonomy of technological modes of reproduction with respect to the long reigning
tyranny of the literary; in particular, Benjamin helps us construct the expe‚riential
correlate to what Wlad Godzich, summarizing the work of critics like
Baudrillard and Virilio, incisively describes as our culture's incipient return
to a curious posthistorical form of preliteracy.
Despite
the vast acceleration of image circulation in the historical interval
separating Benjamin's moment from ours, his effort to grapple with the material
impact of similar autonomous images remains exemplary: it com‚prises an
indispensable model that can guide us in our efforts to forge connections with
our alienating, postimaginary material world.
With its (at least virtual) call for a shift from
semiosis to mimesis as the dominant mode governing our contact
with the world, Benjamin's theory helps
us to fathom a second aspect of the imagistic turn. By distinguishing between instrumental and representationalist uses
of language, Benjamin clarifies how it is that we can, at the same time, speak
nonreductively about what is literally unspeakable and avoid reducing technology
to an abstrac‚tion indistinguishable from everything else that resists representation.
Once we grasp the mimetic basis of our
experience of the autonomous, worldly imaginary, the risk of reducing embodiment to
language simply falls away; the passage to a mimetic model of experience introduces
a more inclusive notion of environment,
one in which language loses its categorical privilege and takes up a more humble role as one modality among others of our
con‚ tact with the material domain. Affirming
the mimetic basis of our experience thus involves both gain and loss: while
we acquire the capacity to val‚orize explicitly an experiential domain that
can only be bracketed out on any logocentric
approach, we must abandon our commitment to a concep‚ tual and/or semiotic mastery of our experienceóits
complete translation into languageówhether this takes the form of traditional
philosophical foundationalism or of the quasi foundational discursive constructivism
cen‚tral to so much of contemporary cultural studies. With John Dewey (fol‚lowing
philosopher Richard Shusterman's recent reconstruction), we must embrace the
nondiscursive or better, mimetic) basis of our experience, not as the foundation
of our conscious knowledge, but as a never fully explica‚ble background whose
importance is primarily aesthetic, in the broad sense of conditioning
our immediate "felt quality of living" (Shusterman 1994, 136) Such
a task, Shusterman makes clear, does not amount to a turn away from
language as such but involves a far less grandiose break with the tyranny
that discursivity has exercised in twentieth century literary and cultural
criticism and in Western philosophy more generally.[3]Ý While language loses its ontological status
as a "general equivalent" that sets the boundaries of the interpretable
as such (Goux 1990), it acquires a more concrete and humble practical role
as one (perhaps locally privileged) means among oth‚ers for our never exhaustive
understanding of our lived, somatic, and hence properly unrepresentable experience.
Not surprisingly, the two central
aspects that distinguish Beniamin's account of technology from Deleuze and
Guattari's also explain his value as a guide for the contemporary
technocultural critic. With his view of tech‚nology as a material force of natural
history and his exploration of agency in the technological world on mimetic
grounds, Benjamin furnishes what Deleuze and Guattari could not: (1) an account
of the real that recognizes the presocial role of technology as agent of
material complexification and (2) a (correlative account of becoming (what
Benjamin calls "innervation") that foregrounds corporeal or
physiological adaptation to the alien rhythms of the contemporary
mechanosphere.
By embracing Lukacs's notion of "second nature"
well beyond its histor‚ical, praxis directed, Hegelian focus, Benjamin articulates
a conception of technology that anticipates the function it has acquired (following
the analyses of contemporary critics like Lyotard) in the process of material
complexification.Ý As Susan Buck Morss argues, while technology
trans‚forms nature through social and historical activity, the resulting second
nature cannot be reduced, as it is by Lukacs, to an "alienated and reified
subjectivity, a world created by humans who did not recognize it as their
own"li, (Buck Morss 1989, 70). Rather, explains Buck Morss, material
nature for Benjamin ìwas ëotherí
than the subject, and this remained true no matter how much human labor had
been invested in itî (70). For Benjamin then, as for Lyotard, a specifically
technological form of what (for want of a better term) I shall call alienation
must be distinguished from the alien‚ation emphasized by our centuryís
most significant Hegelian readers of Marx (Lukacs, Adorno, and, more
recently, Slavoj Zizek).[4]Ý What fuels such alienation, as I have just
argued in the preceding interlude, precisely what Deleuze and Guattari refuse
to accept: the technical contamination of mol‚ecular agency or desire itself.
Rather than an instrumentalist or socially pro‚grammed axiomatic reducible
to capitalism, technology embodies the very contact between humankind and
the world on which societal forms are themselves constructed. It thus conditions
the movement of desire itself.Ý Accordingly,
Benjamin stands at the farthest extreme from Heidegger and the entire
tradition of technesis; for Benjamin,
technology names the modern form of physis
itself , not simply its ontic degradation: ìtechnology is not the mastery
of nature but of the relation between nature and man .... In technology a
physis is being organized through which mankindís contact with the
cosmos takes a new and different form from that which it had in nations and
familiesî (Benjamin 1996, 487). Expanding technology's direct link to physis, Buck Morss acutely discerns a bipartite model of natural
history at work in Benjamin's understanding of technology: for Benjamin, she
contends, "[t]here have been . . . two epochs of nature." She explains,
ìThe first evolved slowly over millions of years; the second, our own, began
with the industrial revolution, and changes its face dailyî (1989, 70).
Benjamin's
historical account of mimetic practice forms an experiential correlate to his
strongly technological conception of natural history.[5]
In a swerve from the Aristotelian tradition as he understood it, Benjamin
situates mimesis not as an imitation (or supplement) of nature but as an
irreducible, material element of nature itself. "Nature creates
similarities," Benjamin contends, citing mimicry as an example. He argues
that the human capacity for producing similarities is, however, higher than
nature's, since it is rooted in practice and specifically in the practice of
becoming-other: "[The human] gift of seeing resemblances is nothing other
than a rudiment of the powerful compulsion in former times to become and behave like something else [”hn‚lich zu werden and sick
zu verhalten]" (Benjamin 1986b, 331). The sensu‚ous correspondences
that formerly governed nature find their true impor‚tance in human beings,
whose gift for mimesis they are said by Benjamin to "stimulate and
awaken." Consequently, according to Benjamin, the mimetic faculty is a
deeply historical human product, one that ìhas changed with historical
developmentî (331).
Both
essays on the mimetic faculty concentrate on the transitional moment in the
history of mmimesisóa moment of rupture when the experi‚ence of sensuous
correspondences passed over into the experience of non‚sensuous ones. This
rupture brings the mimetic capacity of language to the fore and, with it, a
certain diminution in our practical command as materi‚ally embodied and
situated beings. Benjamin explains: ì. . . our existence no longer includes
what once made it possible to speak of this kind of similar‚ity [the
nonsensuous]: above all, the ability to
produce it. Nevertheless we, too, possess a canon [Kanon] according to which the meaning of nonsensu‚ous similarity
can be at least partly clarified. And this canon is languageî (334). According
to Benjamin, since language has been informed, "from time immemorial,"
by the mimetic faculty, the rupture responsible for its modern reign might best
be understood as a transformation, one that brings out the latent potentialóand
priorityóof language as mimetic medium: "language," Benjamin concludes,
"may be seen as the highest level of mimetic behavior and the most
complete archive of nonsensuous similarity: a medium into which the earlier
powers of mimetic production and com‚prehension have passed without residue" (336; emphasis
added).
ÝÝÝ Correlative to his increasing interest in
technological modernity during the 1930s, the focus of Benjaminís search for
correspondences shifted from language to images and ultimately to image
technology itself. Together with the major essays of the decade, Benjamin's
monumental, unfinished study of modernity, the so called Arcades Project,
marks a distinct movement away from his youthful theologically grounded notion
of natural correspondence and toward a synthetic notion of correspondence
materialized initially as the phantasmagoria of technological culture and later
through reproductive technologies functioning as the exteriorized (and
collective) embodiments of memory. The postlinguistic, postarchival stage with
which I suggest we sup‚plement Benjamin's history of mimesis functions
precisely to bring his mimetic account of experience into line with his mature
work on techno‚logical modernity. Within this expanded historical frame, the
eclipse of lan‚guage as the reigning vehicle of mimesis effectively serves as a
prerequisite for the displacement of semiotics heralding the advent of what
Gumbrecht (following Bergson) calls the "materialization of the
spirit" (1996, 590). Just as technological modernization produces a shift
in the mode of experi‚ence, from Erfahrung (typified for Benjamin by the
great memorial project of Proust) to Erlebnis
(anticipated by the corporeal poetics of
Baudelaire), it also brokers a shift in the medium
of experience, from nonsensuous linguis‚tic correspondences to embodied and
practical mimetic activityówhat one
recent
critic aptly calls "contact sensuosity" (Taussig 1993).
ÝÝÝÝÝ Supplemented to address the contemporary prelogical, imaginary world, Benjamin's
account of mimesis would thus appear to provide the basis for a model of
becoming that satisfies the current critical imperative for some positive form
of agency, while simultaneously eschewing the machine reduc‚tion of technology
in any form, including technesis. Whereas
theorists from Aristotle to Heidegger, Lacan, Derrida, and even Deleuze and
Guattari can only localize technology (however it is construed) as a supplement to nature (or society),
Benjamin not only welcomes technology's modern role as agent of material complexification but also embraces the
technological contami‚nation that is its experiential correlate. Applied to our
contemporary cultural predicament, Benjamin's account helps us to grasp how
technology permeates presubjectified agency as an immediately sensu‚ous force
independently of and prior to the subjectifications that are gener‚ated as
structural effects of the semiotic system(s) constitutive of late capi‚talism.
Erlebnis and Erfahrung
Though critics have overwhelmingly
tended to view Benjamin as a funda‚mentally nostalgic thinker, his account of
the shift from Erfahrung to Erleb‚nis reveals him (also) to be a
sober minded material realist. Far from the tragic and irreparable loss
it is so often taken to be, the dissolution of memorial, auratic experience
holds a profoundly ambivalent status
for Ben‚jamin. If the narrowing of the domain of reflective experience (Erfahrung) in technological modernity
is inevitable, as Benjamin often suggests it is, the increased prominence he
accords Erlebnis would appear to
constitute some form of compensation. Insofar as it absorbs infelicitous or
alien stimuli that can only be integrated into experience as something lived
through rather than reflected on, Erlebnis
comprises the experiential modality most
appro‚priate for a world in which the experience of shock has become the
norm. It renders possible a more robust and pluridimensional form of
experience, one that eschews the privilege of mediated interiority in favor of
sensory and corporeal immediacy.
Given this promise of Erlebnis, it
is surprising to find it all but universally dismissed in the critical
literature as a degraded mode that must be redeemed, whether historically or
messianically, through some resurrection of
Erfabrung.[6]
A case in point is furnished by Rainer Rochlitz, who simply effaces all
traces of Benjamin's ambivalence in order better to promote a blanket dismissal
of Erlebnis as, effectively, a fall
from grace.
[Benjamin]
is not unaware that his model of intact experience belongs to an age that has
passed. Between this model and the contemporary era, no medi‚ation is possible.
Only a messianic perspectiveóaÝ
confirmation of the gap existing between the present and a reconciled
futureóallows us to imagine a restoration of integral experience. Without
ritual and its ceremonies, experi‚er1ce can present itself only in the degraded form of "lived experience" (Erlebnis) which
art alone, through a heroic effort, can transform into a true experience (Erfahrung), now confined to literature.
(Rochlitz 1996, 210)
In the face of such a blanket
dismissal, our effort to reconstruct Benjamin's account of Erlebnis calls on us to protect its wholly secular and future ori‚ented
perspective from the omnivorous grasp of his earlier formulated meta‚physico theological
conception of experience. Far from merely extending and refining an already
complete theory of experience, as it is so often taken to do, "On Some
Motifs" represents a fundamental turning point in Ben‚jamin's articulation
of technology with experience. Read against the grain of Benjamin's famous
Artwork essay ("Art in the Age of Mechanical Repro‚duction") and the
majority of the secondary literature on it, "On Some Motifs" exposes
a startlingly pragmatic Benjaminóone who sees the neces‚sity of accepting the
decline of Erfahrung as the
precondition for a new and more appropriate conception of experience (Erlebnis) to emerge mimetically from
ourÝ sensuous contact with the modern
material mechanosphere.
The
fundamental philosophical refunctionalization to which Benjamin submits the
concept of Erlebnis testifies to the
specificity of its function in "On Some Motifs." In appropriating Erlebnis as the crux of his inchoate
mimetic theory of experience, Benjamin wrests it from the nineteenth cen‚tury
hermeneutic tradition out of which it stems; whereas Wilhelm Dilthey employs Erlebnis to expose the narrowness of the
neo Kantian and posi‚tivist concept of sensation, Benjamin deploys it
against the cognitive monopoly characteristic of Romantic and post Romantic
thought. Never‚theless, a profound continuity with certain key elements of the
hermeneutic tradition lies behind his critical refunctionalization of the term.
In particu‚lar, Benjamin follows Dilthey in drawing on the richness of Erlebnis as a
nonconceptual account of experience. Consequently, when he invokes it in
"On Some Motifs," Benjamin explicitly means to draw on its potential
as a vehicle for broadening the bounds of experience.
ÝÝÝÝ Writing on Dilthey in Truth and Method, Gadamer highlights the robust notion of the given
developed by Lebensphilosopie.. ìWhat
Dilthey tries to grasp, with the concept of ëexperienceí [Erlebnis] is the special nature of the given in the human sciences
. . . . Dilthey circumscribes the ideal of con‚structing knowledge from atoms
of sensation and offers instead a more sharply defined version of the concept
of the given. The unity of experience (and not the psychic elements into which
it can be analyzed) represents the true unity of what is givenî (Gadamer 1989,
65 66). Gadamer explains that as a name for this robust concept of
the given, Erlebnis resists conceptual
determination: "Experience [Erlebnis]
has a definite immediacy which eludes every opinion about its meaning ....
What we call an Erlebnis in [the]
emphatic sense thus means something unforgettable and irreplaceable, something
whose meaning cannot be exhausted by conceptual determina‚tion" (67). Erlebnis, Dilthey clarifies, marks the
irreducibility of life to lan‚guage, of experience to meaning: it "is a
qualitative being, i.e., a reality that cannot be defined through one's inward
being, but also reaches down into what is
not possessed in a differentiated state."[7]
While he draws on this tradition to resist the
cognitive monopoly char‚acteristic of modernity, Benjamin nonetheless manages
to turn Erlebnis back on itself
in the process of refunctionalizing it for the twentieth cen‚tury.[8]
By exploiting the division between corporeal experience and the experience
of consciousness, Benjamin reinterprets Erlebnis
against its Romantic and post Romantic determination as what Gadamer
calls a "protest against modern industrial society" (63). Rather
than a means of escape from the realities of a mechanistic society, for Benjamin
Erlebnis designates the new mode of experience
that is itself correlative with
the growth of industrial‚ism. The paradigm for such shock experience experience
that fails to leave any cognitive tracesóis, of course, the worker on the
assembly line. Like the gambler and the flaneur, the worker lives a life of
empty, nondifferential repetition.
Benjamin explains: "The jolt in the movement of a machine is like the',
so called coup in a game of chance. The manipulation of the worker
at the machine has no connection with the preceding operation for the very
reason that it is its exact repetition .... [E]ach
operation at the machine is just as (screened off from the preceding operation
as a coup in a game of chance is from the one that preceded it"
(Benjamin 1968, 177). By correlat‚ing it with technology's vastly expanded
role in structuring the modern life‚ world, Benjamin fundamentally modifies
the tenor of Erlebnis. Far from
naming what is most enduring in cognitive, memorial experience (as it does
for Dilthey), Erlebnis is
made to designate what is most fleeting and transi‚toryóthose shocks that
impact us immediately and corporeally without entering the psyche, leaving
traces, or producing representations. If such shocks: nevertheless stay with
us indefinitely, it is not because they are cog‚nitively or psychically unforgettable but rather because they impact
us at the deepest level of our embodied experience, prior to the mediation
of mem‚ory.
In "On Some Motifs in
Baudelaire," Benjamin (1968) links the shift in the economy of experience
from Erfahrung to Erlebnis to the modern decline in the
role played by interiorizing, or "involuntary," memory (Erinnerung or, in Benjamin's
translation, Eingedenken, "being mindful of")
and the cor‚relative expansion of technical, or "voluntary," memory (Ged”chtnis). Through a critical
reconstruction of the historical evolution of Erlebnis from Dilthey via Bergson and Proust to Freud, Benjamin
exposes its mater‚ial connection with the technological exteriorization of
memory: just as Erlebnis betokens a
displacement of reflective thought as the privileged locus of experience,
technological reproducibility marks the eclipse of inte‚rior, associational
memory as the privileged mode of storing experience.
To liberate
voluntary, technically exteriorized memory for its modern role, Benjamin carries
out a sustained critique of interiority that should lay to rest doubts concerning
his alleged nostalgia, at least as concerns this aspect of his theory of experience.
The main target of this critique is the ahistoricism and abstraction of Lebensphilosophie,
its deluded effort to discover the "true" experience hidden
enea tE~he sur ace of life. Not surpris‚ingly, the first stage of Benjamin's
argument takes aim at the abstraction of Dilthey's notion of the given and
his focus on poetry: Dilthey's "point of departure," Benjamin argues,
"was not man's life in society. What [it] invoked was poetry, preferably
nature, and, most recently, the age of myths" (Benjamin 1968, 156). Insofar
as he resituates Lebensphilosophie on
a firm empirical ground, Bergson marks a second stage in Benjamin's reconstruction.
Benjamin writes that Bergson's Matter
and Memory "is ori‚ented toward biology." He continues:
ìÖit regards the structure of mem‚ory as decisive for the philosophical pattern
of experience. Experience is indeed a matter of tradition, in collective existence
as well as private life. It is less the product of facts firmly anchored in
memory than of a convergence in memory of accumulated and frequently unconscious
dataî (157). With Bergson, the analysis of lived experience discovers an entirely
new topic‚ósocialÝ memory. For this reason, Bergson's work promises
to restore solidar‚ity between individual experience and collective life.
Divested of its private character, memory is transformed into a locus where
diverse fragments of external experience come together; it brings the individual
into immediate or material contact with the external world, independently
of any private memorial synthesis. With his collective and materialist conception
of mem‚ory, Bergson takes a first step against the determination of the given
in Lebensphilosophie as a given
for a (private, individual) consciousness.
ÝÝÝ While Bergson's work posits a continuum of
mind and matter that is essential to Benjamin's corporeal refunctionalization
of Erlebnis, it nonethe‚less inherits
one major flaw from Diltheyóabstractness. Benjamin argues that because Bergson
"rejects any historical determination of memory," his theory must be
historicized (in a third critical stage) . Such a task, Benjamin contends,
falls to the "poet": "Proust's work A la Recherche du temps perdu may be regarded as an attempt to
produce experience synthetically, as Bergson imagines it, under today's
conditions, for there is less and less hope that it will come into being
naturally" (157). In the process of "put[ting] Bergson's theory of
experience to the test," Proust carries out what Ben‚jamin calls an
"immanent critique": he rejects the pragmatic voluntarism implicit in
Bergson's conception of action. Benjamin argues that in the "inhospitable,
blinding age of big scale industrialism," the solidification of
matter from out of the continuous flow of things is no longer solely the pre‚rogative
of human agents but ever more frequently a result of the workings of sheer
chanceóof external, predominately technological forces.
Proust . .
. does not evade the question [of the contemporary conditions for experience]
.... He even introduces a new factor, one that involves an imma‚nent critique
of Bergson. Bergson emphasized the antagonism between the vita activa and the specific vita
contemplativa which arises from memory. But he leads us to believe that
turning to the contemplative actualization of the stream of life is a matter of free choice. From the
start Proust indicates his divergent view terminologically. To him, the memoire pure of Bergson's the‚ory
becomes a memoire involuntaire. (157 58;
emphasis added)
By recasting Bergson's voluntarist
memory as something that can only be triggered by chance (as the taste of the
madeleine famously triggers Marcel's memory of Combray in Proust's novel),
Proust confronts what Bergson could not the change in the lifeworld
ensuing from large scale industrial‚ism. In a world ever increasingly
dominated by the inhuman rhythm of things, the faculty of interiorizing memory (Erinnerung) has lost its privi‚lege. Memory now stands at the mercy of
chance and finds its home not in the depths of psychic interiority but in the
brute materiality of physical things: the past, Proust claims, is
"somewhere beyond the reach of the intel‚lect, and unmistakably present in
some material object."[9]
To account
for the alienation thus produced, Proust introduces the fun‚damental shift in
the economy of memory that has taken place with indus‚trialization: as
Bergson's mÈmoire pure has become
involuntary and ever more marginal as a means of producing experience, what
Proust calls "vol‚untary memory" comes to the fore. Benjamin claims
that voluntary memory differs from mÈmoire
pure on two counts: it is strictly in the service of the intellect, and the
information it gives about the past retains no trace of it (158). If
involuntary mÈmoire pure involves the
recollection of experience that has been safely preserved, voluntary memory
links us with the past in a way that does not depend on the faculty of
interiorizing thoughtóthat bypasses psychic mediation as such. Consequently,
Benjamin concludes, voluntary memory cannot lead to "experience [Erfahrung] in the strict sense of the
wordî (159).
In the
process of expanding the scope and function of voluntary memory beyond the
terms of Proust's bourgeois aestheticism, Benjamin recurs to the radical
disjunction between memory and materiality explored in my reading of de Man in
chapter 5. While Benjamin's two forms of memory coincide conceptually with
Hegel's, they expand the purport of the disjunction de Maul installs between
them. Involuntary memory (Erinnerung or
Einge‚denken) mirrors the
symbolic, since the trace of the past that it preserves is not arbitrary (unwillk¸rlich) but natural; voluntary
memory (Gedachtnis), however, has
only a fleeting and arbitrary (willkurlicb)
connection with e past and thus falls on the side of the sign.[10]
Insofar as it suspends the syn‚thetic function of (textual) memory, the
disjunction between these two forms opens a nonsubjective, material mode of
memory (akin to Lacan's notion of materialist consciousness) that forms the
theoretical core for Ben‚jamin's alignment of memory with technological
reproducibility.[11]
While de
Man helped to lay out the theoretical stakes of the disjunction, it thus falls
to Benjamin to work out its experiential dimension. In stark con‚trast to de
Man's rigid formalism, the rationale Benjamin provides to account for the
disjunction is irreducibly and concretely historical: whereas de an focuses
exclusively on the abstract antihermeneutic consequences stemming from the
logical incompatibility of Erinnerung and
Ged”chtnis, Benjamin attends above
all to the impact of the disjunction (together with its antihermeneutic
consequences) on the concrete material conditions of lived experience. When
voluntary memory eclipses involuntary memory, it betokens not the definitive
self contradiction of theory as such but rather the fundamental
alteration of our lived relation to the world.
By
historicizing memory in this way, Benjamin manages to deploy the disjunction
outside of de Man's narrow textualist framework without at the same time
falling into Derrida's trap of rehabilitating the thinking subject.[12]
Rather than introducing a supplementary juncture
that subsumes techno‚logical exteriority (back) into thinking memory,
Benjamin assesses the expe‚riential significance
of the material shift in the economy
of memory. Here we a counter the Bergsonist foundation of his conception of
memory: echo‚ing the functionalist distinction between pure matter and pure
memory, Benjamin treats involuntary and voluntary memory as two modes through
which internal duration either aligns itself or is aligned with external
duration.Ý For Benjamin, therefore, the
disjunction demarcates two antithetical types of experience: one centered
around a reflective, psychic subject whose powers have been markedly diminished
with the advent of modernity (Erfahrung); another around a corporeal
agency sensitive to the inhuman rhythms of the mechanosphere (Erlebnis).Ý Since voluntary memory takes its standard
directly from the rhythm of external duration, of the commodity world itself,
its predominance in the modern world yields a fundamental deterritorialization,
we cannot confine our critical task to lamentation but must follow the
sober-minded Benjamin in attempting to reconceptualize experience as the
correlate of the new material reality.
My
proposal to supplement Benjamin's history of mimesis finds its most sustained
textual support in what, with Harold Bloom, we might call his "strong
misreading" of Freud (1973). While Beyond
the Pleasure Principle had
already historicized the cortical layer as an adaptation to modern technology,
Benjamin's (Bergsonist) rewriting of Beyond
in "On Some Motifs " liberates the cortical layer from its narrow
psychic function, reconceiving it as a new experiential faculty correlative to Erlebnis.[13]
ÝÝÝ Benjamin initially turns to Freud to
radicalize the disjunction of voluntary and involuntary memory beyond the
framework of Proust's account, to develop a ìmore substantial definition of
what appears in Proust's mÈmoire de
intelligenceî (1968, 160). By pressuring Freud's distinction between
conscious memory and the unconscious, Benjamin discovers theoretical sup‚port
for a dissociation of voluntary memory from the domain of the psyche. With his
strong misreading, Benjamin thus sets in motion the archaeological process I
sketched in my account of Freud the excavation of a model of corporeal
agency, of physical and somatic experience, rooted in the protec‚tive function
of the dead cortical layer. Moreover, by correlating such agency with
voluntary, technologically exteriorized memory, Benjamin inaugurates a
practical use of technological reproducibility; rather than simply mapping or
capturing theoretically the inhuman rhythms of the mechanosphere that escape our ken (as
Lyotard proposes), technological reproducibility is enlisted as an aid in the
corporeal retraining that our sen‚sory modalities must undergo if we are to
adapt ourselves to our ever more materialized lifeworld. Not only does Benjamin
thereby help us to (re)con‚ceive agency in terms appropriate to our
increasingly inhuman world, but he also gives us a practical recipe for
adaptation that allows us to preserve our human perspective just at that moment
when we might most fear our total marginalization in the face of autonomous
cosmological complexification.
Benjamin
orients his rewriting of Freud around what he calls Freud's
"fundamental thought": that "consciousness comes into being in
place of the memory trace." By generalizing the
"fruitfulness" of this relation to "situations far removed from
those which Freud had in mind when he wrote," Benjamin is able to
correlate Proust's distinction with Freud's: "only what has not been
experienced explicitly and consciously [was
nicht ausdr¸cklich and mit Bewusstsein ist ëerlebtí worden], what has not
hap‚pened to the subject as experience [was dem Subjekt nicht als ëErlebnisí widerfahren ist], can become a
component of the mÈmoire
involuntaire" (1601). This same relation of the unconscious to
involuntary memory also serves to highlight the singularity of consciousness
and to expose its kinship with voluntary memory. Just as it establishes the
functionalist homology of involuntary memory and the unconscious, Benjamin's
com‚parision of Freud and Proust implies a homology between their respective
conceptual pairings: like consciousness, voluntary memory functions to pro‚tect
the psyche from shock stimuli.
For all of
its centrality to Benjamin's theory, the scope of this important homology is
limited by an important point of divergence that will mark ever aspect of
Benjamin's subsequent discussion of Freud: while voluntary memory is, by
definition, located outside the
individual psychic system , ness on Freud's account is securely contained
within such a system. To resolve this
divergence, Benjamin revises Freud's account of the dead cortical layer in an
altogether striking way.
The
acceptance of shocks is facilitated by training in coping with stimuli .... As
a rule,... this training devolves upon the wakeful consciousness, located
in a part of the cortex which is "so blown out by the effect of the
stimulus" that it offers the most favorable situation for the reception of
stimuli. That the shock is thus cushioned [abgefangen],
parried by consciousness [vom
Bewusstsein parriert], would lend the incident that occasions it the
character of having been lived in the fullest sense [den Charakter des Erlebnisses im pr”gnanten Sinn]. If it were
incorporated directly in the registry of conscious memory [unmittelbar der Registratur der bewussten Erinnerung ibn einver‚leibend],
it would sterilize this incident for poetic experience. (162)
In thin extremely enigmatic
passage, Benjamin appears to reproduce the very same tripartite distinction
toward which Freud inchoately gestured in his 1895 Project for a
Scientific Psychology. He differentiates two types of con‚sciousness: one (Bewusstsein) that "cushions"
or "parries" shock stimuli and another (bewussten Erinnerung) that "incorporates" (vereinleiben) and thereby
"sterilizes" such shock. With this key distinction, Benjamin would
seem to correlate the introduction of a third experiential agency (perceptual
consciousness) with the unprecedented demands of technological moder‚nity:
unlike (representational) consciousness and the unconscious, this form of
agency is specifically intended to register the corporeal dimension of tech‚nology's experiential impact.
As a means
of redeeming the unrealized potential of Freud's theory, Ben‚jamin's seemingly
ad hoc distinction liberates a corporeal agency of experi‚ence against the
imperialism of the psychoanalytic model of experience.[14]
>From the outset, Benjamin aligns consciousness proper the "registry
of conscious memory" with unconscious memory and dreamwork. Since
both consciousness and the unconscious aim to neutralize or sterilize stim‚uli,
both belong to a single psycbic system:
both are modes of "recollection" (Erinnerung),
whose function is, in the words of Paul Valery, to give us "the time
for organizing the reception of stimuli which we initially lacked."[15]
On Benjamin's account, the Freudian agencies that enable psychic activity (Erinnerung) and constitute experience
in the strict sense (Erfabrung) appear
to bring about a rarefication of experience: they neutralize immedi‚ate lived
experiences (Erlebnisse) by
assimilating them into the (linguistic) medium of the psyche, into the space of
interior memory (Erinnerung).[16]
With its
call for a certain constitutive passivity, Benjamin's refashioning of Freud's
cortical layer into a presubjective form of agency corresponds to the shift in
the economy of experience from Erfahrung to
Erlebnis. By vastly expanding the
anthropological basis of the dead cortical
layer Freud had conceived it, mimetic corporeal agency emerges as our means of
adapting to the technologized mechanosphere of modernity and postmodernity.[17]
Long before we acquire the ability to engage in any affirmative becoming ý
la Deleuze and Guattari, we must train our corporeal, mimetic faculty to reg‚ister
the subrepresentational, molecular rhythms of the lifeworld; only in that way
will we successfully open the basic contact with the domain of embodiment that
forms the prerequisite for any effort to ameliorate or, as Benjamin would put
it, to redeem our robust lived
experience.[18]
Benjamin's own willingness to
embrace the experiential consequences of modernization, even in their negative
aspects, overdetermines his selection of Baudelaire as exemplary modern agent.
A poet whose mission it was to live through his own shock experience to the
fullest extent and without recourse to psychic accommodation, Baudelaire
literally forced himself to experience
the inhuman rhythm of the modern industrial mechanosphere. By sacrificing his
own internal subjective rhythm, Baudelaire inaugurated the corporeal form of
mimetic agency that, I claim, forms such a central component of Benjamin's
mature theory of experience.
In his
first Baudelaire essay, "The Paris of the Second Empire in Baude‚laire,"
Benjamin cites the experience of the flaneur as an example of passive
adaptation to the materiality of exchange capitalism. Submitting himself to a
process of becoming beyond his control, the flaneur takes on the social
position of the commodity: "The flaneur
is someone abandoned in the crowd. In this he shares the situation of the
commodity. He is not aware of this
special situation, but this does not diminish its effect on him and it per‚meates
him blissfully like a narcotic that
can compensate him for many humiliations. The intoxication to which the flaneur
surrenders is the intox‚ication of
the commodity around which surges the stream of customers" (Benjamin 1973,
55; emphasis added). Benjamin noted that the poet (Baudelaire undergoes a
similar becoming, emptying himself out to attain the chameleonlike possibility
of embodying the commodity's infinite reflectiveness: ìíThe poet enjoys the
incomparable privilege of being himself and someone else as he sees fit. Like a
roving soul in search of a body, he enters another person whenever he wishes.
For him alone, all is open; if cer‚tain places seem closed to him, it is
because in his view they are not worth inspecting.í The commodity itself is the
speaker here" (55, citing Baude‚laire). Both flaneur and poet forge a
compromise with the commodity that differs significantly from the experience of
the "poor wretch" who, passing "a slop window containing
beautiful and expensive things", confronts that prototypical experience of
postauratic, technological modernityóthe fail‚ure of the object to return his
gaze. Both flaneur and poet live the
break‚down in the aura directly, if in divergent ways. Mistakenly interpreting
the protean reflective capacity of the commodity as empathy, the flaneur gives
himself over to nihilistic abandon; the less mystified poet assumes the com‚modity's
cynical attitude, scrutinizing reality just as the commodity does, with biting
disdain.
This
affiliation of poet and flaneur underlies the constitutive passivity Benjamin
ascribes to poetic practice. Role playing, Benjamin suggests, involves a
certain antiheroism, cannily appropriate to the fragmentation of identity
characteristic not only of technological modernity but of our post‚modernity as
well: "Unlike Gautier, Baudelaire found nothing to like about his time,
and unlike Leconte de Lisle he was unable to deceive himself about it ....
Because he did not have any convictions, he assumed ever new forms himself.
Flaneur, apache, dandy and ragpicker
were so many roles to him. For the modern hero is no hero; he acts heroes.
Heroic modernism turns out to be a tragedy [Trauerspiel]
in which the hero's part is available" (97). With this striking
refunctionalization of Keatsian negative capability, Ben‚jamin formulates the
crux of the mimetic theory of becoming that he artic‚ulates more fully in
"On Some Motifs." Understood as passively experi‚enced necessity
dictated by the rhythm of the lifeworld, such role playing underscores
the shift in the mode of experience at stake in technological modernizationóthe
shift from semiotics to mimetics. In Buck Morss's suc‚cinct formulation,
the "mastery" of our irreducibly technological relation to nature
demands "being receptive to the expressive power of matter, a mimetic, not an instrumental skill" (1989, 70). Only a fundamental invest‚ment in
our mimetic faculty will equip us for the kind of passive adaptation
Baudelaire's role playing exemplifies; such an investment, Benjamin sug‚gests,
makes Baudelaire's experience relevant for humanity's modern (and, we might
add, postmodern) predicament.
ÝÝÝÝ Not surprisingly, the training of our
mimetic faculty is precisely what is at stake in the tactile model of filmic
reception Benjamin elaborates in "On Some Motifs." If the mimetic
faculty essays place a strong emphasis on lan‚guage's reign as the repository
for nonsensuous similarities, Benjamin's tac‚tile model of experience suggests
a postlinguistic afterlife of
mimesis.[19]
In what amounts to a (partial) return to primitive mimesis, this model dis‚places
the distinctly theological and scriptural correspondence with nature in favor
of a technologically embodied sensuous contact with (a now dis‚tinctly second) nature.[20]
Flattening the distance intrinsic to any semiotic, contemporary mimesis places
the embodied agent in immediate sensory contact with the rhythmic flux of the
mechanosphere. In the aftermath of this shift, what is important, as
anthropologist Michael Taussig insists in an inspired reading of Benjamin's One Way Street, is "not what
the neon says, but the fiery pool reflecting it in the asphalt; not language, but image; and not just the image
but its tactility and the new magic thereof with the trans‚formation of roadway
parking lot bitumen into legendary lakes of fire‚ ringed prophecy."
Taussig continues: "It is not a question, therefore, of whether or not we
can follow de Certeau and combat strategies with every‚ day tactics that fill
with personal matter the empty signifiers of postmoder‚nity, because the everyday is a question not of
universal semiotics but of capitalist mimetics" (Taussig 1992, 147).
The task of affirming such a mimetics requires a break from Benjamin's own
conjunction of mimesis with the scriptural aspect of language: "the
mimetic element in language can, like a flame, manifest itself only through a
kind of bearer. This bearer is the semiotic element. Thus the coherence of
words or sentences is the bearer through which, like a flash, similarity appears"
(Benjamin 19866, 335). We must bypass the mediation performed by the
"semiotic element" of a word or an image in order to engage
physically with it. We must treat words and images not as "bearers"
for the experience of mimesis but as sources inaugurating mimetic processes of
embodiment. By displacing this semiotic bearer in favor of another bearer our
own embodied reception of the image as shockówe open a new world, what we might
call a tactile unconscious, in which
our embodied being in the world itself becomes the ‚material
support, the medium, for the "contact sensuousity" restored by modern
mimetic machines and, in particular, by the "mimetic powers striven for in
the advertising image" (Taussig 1993, 23).
The
importance of Baudelaire's poetic practice as an exemplar of mod‚ern, molecular
agency stems from his unwavering embrace of such mimetic attunement; through
it, argues Benjamin, he becomes the lyric
poet whose work has "as its basis an experience Erfahrung] for which shock experience [Chockerlebnis] has become the norm." What differentiates
Baudelaire from the poor wretch in the street is not some essential quality, as Heideg‚ger might have wished, but a certain bodily capacityóhis higher degree of
olerance for shock. Benjamin attributes this capacity to Baudelaire's intense
"spiritual and physical" engagement, his mind body integration:
because of his bodily attunement, he is simply more able than the rest of us to
live the shocks of modern life without recourse to psychological processing.[21]
"Baudelaire," Benjamin explains, "made it his business to parry
the shocks, no matter where they might come from, with his spiritual and physical self" (Benjamin 1968,
163; emphasis added). Because he parries shocks corpore‚ally, rather than
registering them in consciousness or letting them occasion a psychic defense
against trauma, Baudelaire manages to transform
their corporeal impact into the raw material for his poetry.
Indeed, in
his role as mimetic shock absorber, Baudelaire furnishes a striking
illustration not only of the economic principle of experience that Benjamin
appropriates from Freud but of the redemptive possibilities it affords.
The greater the share of the shock factor in particular
impressions, the more constantly consciousness [or more exactly, the dead
cortical layer] has to be alert as a protection against stimuli [Reizschutz]; the more efficiently it
does so; the less do these impressions enter experience [Erfahrung], tending to remain in the sphere of lived experience
proper [more precisely, "to fulfill the concept of Erlebnis" (erfuellen sie den Begriff des Erlebnisses)]. Perhaps
the special achievement of shock defense may be seen in its function of
assigning to an incident a precise temporal point [Zeitstelle] in consciousness at the cost of the integrity of its
contents. (Benjamin 1968, 163; translation
modified)
By appropriating Freud's model of
shock processing as the basis for his the‚ory of modern experience, Benjamin is
able to open a divide in the concep‚tual field of Erlebnis. While the protective function mostly occasions a neu‚tralization
of the force impressions derive from their content a neutralization that
makes them into already processed, irrevocably past lived experiences it
can also function to free their quantitative force from its hitherto necessary
correlation with representational/ideational content, in the process
transforming it into an energy source for practical "innerva‚tion."
Benjamin discerns just such a possibility in Baudelaire's embrace of fright. By
leaving himself constantly exposed to stimuli that produce fright, Baudelaire
short circuits the reflective neutralization of shock; rather than
blocking out the shock stimuli of the external world, he confronts it like a
challenger in a duel. Without neutralization, Benjamin suggests, one experi‚ences
"nothing but a sudden start, usually the sensation of fright which,
according to Freud, confirms the failure of the shock defense." He contin‚ues:
"Baudelaire has portrayed this condition in a harsh image. He speaks of a
duel in which the artist, just before being beaten, screams in fright. This
duel is the creative process itself" (163).
Rather than translating an incident into an empty, purely formal past
moment (a Zeitstelle) of
consciousness, the failure of the shock defense in Baudelaire triggers a frenzy
of creative activity that transforms the poet's body into a medium. Through his
corpo‚real engagement, Baudelaire inaugurates a new sense of Erlebnis as the channeling of the energy
of shock into mimetic, physiologically rooted cre‚ative activity.[22]
Using
Bergson's terminology, we might say that Baudelaire engages in a combat with
the external world that does not begin by imposing the rhythm of human duration
on the rhythm of things. In his creative struggle, Baude‚laire sacrifices the
informing power of his psychic duration in order to let himself be infiltrated by worldly duration.
. . .
Baudelaire battled the crowd with the impotent rage of someone fight‚ing
the rain or the wind. This is the nature of something lived through [Erlebnis
to which Baudelaire has given the weight of an experience [Erfahrun ]. He indicated the price for which the sensation of the
modern age [ die Sensation der
Moderne] may be had: the disintegration of the aura in the experi‚ence of
shock He paid dearly for consenting to this disintegrationóbut it is the law of
his poetry.... (Benjamin 1968, 193 94)
Itself a reaction to the vast
expansion in the corporeal dimension of experi‚ence, Baudelaire's
sacrifice anticipates the sweeping incorporation of tech‚nology into the fabric
of the lifeworld that our century has witnessed. By employing his body as a
mimetic shock absorber, he inaugurates a mode of experience that only attains
normative status much later, in the age of full‚blown technical
reproducibility. His experience of a crowd that, machine‚like, refused to
return is gaze prefigures the still more inanimate camera "eye" that
we face daily in the age of technological reproducibility.[23]
Through his sacrifice, Baudelaire thus reveals the historical correlation
between corporeal mimesis and the ever increasing materialization of vol‚untary
memory in technologies of reproduction: insofar as shock replaces reflection as
the dominant mode of experience, the physiological aspects of aesthetic
reception come to the fore. By operating a progressive exterioriza‚tion of
voluntary memory from the human body to the machine, technolog‚ical
reproducibility makes this physiological dimension into the object of
collective experience. Understood as a homeopathic antidote to the inhu‚manity
technology progressively introduces, this exteriorization offers rec‚ompense
for the waning of Erfahrung.[24]
The mimetic correspondences gen‚erated through technical reproducibility
not only provide the raw material for our sensory retraining but also lend a
collective dimension to that process; by increasing our physiological
receptivity to the expressive power of matter, they open a new space of
collective action and, with it, hope that we might gain some control against
"the monopoly" that "mediums and the media" hold over
"[h]ow we all in our different ways and different walks of life are used
today by . . . mimetic excess" (Taussig 1993, 255).
Like the situation from which it arises, this hope
is unprecedented in the history of human experience. The technologically
mediated reinvention of experience does not simply restore what was shattered
by modernization, as critics so often suggest. On the contrary, it produces an
entirely new form of experience for the technological age and calls for a
correlative rearticulation of the task of theory. Accordingly, if we are to
capitalize on the noncogni‚tive, mimetic dimension of experience central to
modernity and (still more so) to postmodernity, we must embrace technological
reproducibility beyond the scope of traditional representationalism. On such a
model, film constitutes the site not for a reflective experience of the impact
of industrial production but for a tactile experience that functions as an
aesthetic ana‚logue to the corporeal impact of the assembly line and the urban
crowd, a homeopathic, "virtual experiential space where we can adapt
ourselves to the recedented demands of our technologized lifeworld. By
soliciting our embodied adaptation to the alien rhythms of montage, film opens
a new nature to our experience, what Benjamin calls an "optical
unconscious": ìÖit is a different nature that speaks to the camera than to
the naked eye‚ different above all because an unconsciously permeated space
substitutes for one that is infused with human consciousness [an die Stelle eines vom Men‚schen mit
Bewusstsein durchwirkten Raums ein unbewusst durchwirkter tritt]" (1968,
236 37; translation modified). The seductive analogy with Freud
notwithstanding, what Benjamin has in mind here is anything but an augmentation
of the (Freudian) unconscious; on his model film brokers an expansion of
consciousness, a broadening of the empirical (mimetic) faculty that puts us
into sensory contact with our world. An earlier text (on which the Artwork
essay draws quite heavily) makes just this point: "Film actually gives
rise to a new region of consciousness. It
is, in a word, the only prism through which man's immediate environment the
space in which he lives, conducts his business and takes his leisure readily,
meaningfully, and pas‚sionately presents itself to him [sich . . . auseinanderlegen]."[25] The new world opened by film is not
an inner, unconscious world, but the very same material world under very
different sensory conditions. By "exploding [our] prison world with
the dynamite of one tenth seconds," as the Artwork essay puts it,
film introduces us into a world formerly untouched by our activity (Benjamin 1968, 236; translation modified). Rather
than merely opening yet another new space for further conscious (or
unconscious) colo‚nization, it creates an entirely new form of consciousness, a
new perceptual faculty that taps into hitherto unexplored mimetic dimensions of
experi‚ence. Ý By expanding the scope of
voluntary memory well beyond the point of detaching it from the individual
psyche, technological reproduction generates a vast fund of mimetically charged
collective images that furnish the raw material for our efforts to retrain our
sensory capacities: "The tech‚niques basedÝÝÝÝÝÝÝÝÝÝÝ on
the use of the camera and of subsequent analogous mechan‚ical devices extend
the range of the mÈmoire volontaire;Öthese
devicesÖmake it possible for an event at any time to be permanently recorded in
terms of sound and sight" (Benjamin 1968, 186). This
deterritorialization of memory introduces a fundamental shift in its function;
following its meta‚morphosis into reproducibility, memory no longer serves to
translate lived experience into the privacy of psychic interiority but
mobilizes for collective consumption, in the material, exteriorized form of
images, the very rhythm of the mechanosphere itself. Through this collective
exteriorization of mem‚ory, technologies of reproduction generate an extensive
technical contami‚nation of agency, an infiltration of desiring production
unthinkable by Deleuze and Guattari, that truly merits the designation becoming tecbno‚logical.
Benjamin
traces memory's metamorphosis into reproduction to the "cri‚sis in
perception itself" brought on by technological modernization (1968, 187).
Unlike previous perceptual crises, such as the introduction of perspec‚tive in
the Renaissance, this crisis stems not from a shift in representational form
but from the eclipse of representation itself. Accordingly, the retrain‚ing it
calls for cannot pursue the goal of cognitive adaptation ý la Jameson but must
provide a schooling in passive corporeal becoming, a crash course in how to use
our protective cortex in a habitual, nonintentional, and nonpsychic mode.
Because it bypasses our normal psychological means of processing external
stimuli, such retraining involves our mimetic faculty in the radical corporeal
sense I have introduced: the retraining Benjamin has in mind comprises a
mimetically instilled formation of embodied habitual response. Grasping this
point is crucial if we are to understand the basic refunctionalization film
undergoes in "On Some Motifs"; no longer a privi‚leged site for the
experience of dialectical images, film instead comes to mark the culminating
point in Benjamin's progressive account of the tech‚nological exteriorization
of memory.[26]
A touch of
the [photographer's] finger now sufficed to fix an event [Ereignis] for an unlimited period of time. The camera gave the
moment a posthumous shock, as it were. Haptic experiences [Erfahrungen] of this kind were joined by optic ones, such as are
supplied by the advertising pages of a newspaper or the traffic of a big city.
Moving through such traffic submits the individual to a series of shocks and
collisions [bedingt f¸r den einzelnen
eine Folge von Chocks and von Kollisionen]. At dangerous intersections,
nervous impulses [lnnervationen] flow
through him in rapid succession, like shocks [St–sse] from a battery. Thus technology has subjected the human
sensorium to a complex kind of training [einem
Training]. There came a day when a new and urgent need for stimuli [Reizbed¸rfnis] was met by the film. In
a film, perception in the form of shocks [die
chockf–rmige Wahrnehmung]
was established as a formal principle. That which determines the rhythm of pro‚duction
on a conveyor belt is the basis of the rhythm of reception in the film. (175;
translation modified)
Refunctionalized as the privileged vehicle of a purely tactile, physiological experience, technological reproducibility allows us collectively to share Baudelaire's experience of facing the urban crowd: by depriving us of the abili to reflect, by confronting us with the shock of mimetic excess, our reproductive technologies force us to live through external stimuli without neutralizing them.
While' the
majority of those (few) critics who actually do appreciate Ben‚jaminís
unequivocal affirmation of film's tactile dimension view it as an unfortunate
break with his earlier, more activistist understanding of film,[27]
to my mind it marks a fundamental and empowering turn in his effort
to yoke technology to human practice. By abandoning the intrinsic link between
technology and artistic revolution central to the political agenda of the
Artwork essay, Benjamin's account in "On Some Motifs" re poses
the question concerning humanity's relation to technology along different,
vastly more humble lines.[28]
Rather than continuing to ask how film can underwrite a revolutionary
politicization of aesthetics, he gives voice to a more basic, and arguably more
central, concern of his anthropological materialism: how is humanity to
establish and maintain (nondestructive) contact with the ever complexifying,
technologically driven cosmos?
ÝÝÝ In a move that garners critical distance
from the Artwork essay, the model of technology Benjamin develops in "On
Some Motifs" recurs to an earlier cosmological conception of technology he
lays out in "To the Plane‚tarium," the final section of One Way Street (1928). There Benjamin
reads World War I as the harbinger of a "new barbarism"óa return of
sorts to the communal, ecstatic contact with the cosmos experienced by the
ancients.[29] In stark
antithesis to Heidegger's later understanding of World
War II as
the triumph of instrumental, technical reason, Benjamin actually welcomes World
War I as a wake up call to humanity, a reminder of its pro‚foundly, even
essentially, technological predicament.[30]
Through the sheer horror' of its unprecedented destruction, the war forces
humanity to recog‚nize its',, "dangerous error" the error of
dismissing the collective experience of the 'cosmos as "unimportant and
avoidable" and of "consign[ing] it to the individual as the poetic
rapture of starry nights" (Benjamin 1996, 486). In a striking anticipation
of Lyotard's momentous coupling of technology and cosmological complexificat
Benjamin construes the war as a deed of
Nature itself; like Lyotard, he employs the passive voice to suggest an agency' on the part of the
technologically infused cosmos.
[The
collective experience of the cosmos] is not [unimportant and avoidable]; its
hour strikes again and again, and then neither nations nor generations can
escape it, as was made terribly clear by the last war, which was an attempt at
new and unprecedented commingling with the cosmic powers. Human mul‚titudes,
gases, electrical forces were hurled [wurden
. . . geworfen] into the open country, high frequency currents
coursed through the landscape, new constellations rose in the sky, aerial space
and ocean depths thundered with propellers, and everywhere sacrificial shafts
were dug in Mother earth. This immense wooing of the cosmos was enacted for the
first time on a planetary scale that is, in the spirit of technology.
(486 87)
While Benjamin proceeds to
interpret this unprecedented destruction through the narrow lens of his
revolutionary political program, ascribing it to the perverting force of
capitalism,[31] his
analysis nonetheless announces, in no uncertain terms, the urgent issue of his mature theory of technology: mankind's need
to establish a felicitous (nondestructive) form of collective communion with
the cosmos.[32]
ÝÝÝ Benjamin initially takes up this issue in
his surrealism essay of 1929, where he develops the notion of a
"collective innervation" of mankind's body through technology. Here
Benjamin again invokes the new physis that
was being organized for mankind by technology and emphasizes the sensu‚ous
nature of our collective contact with it: "Only when in technology body
and image space [Bildraum] so interpenetrate
[so tief durchdringen] that all
revolutionary tension becomes bodily collective innervation, and all bodily
innervations of the collective become revolutionary discharge, will reality
have surpassed itself [sich selbst ¸bertroffen]
to the extent demanded by the Communist
Manifesto" (Benjamin 1986b, 192; translation modified). The operative
vehicles of such innervation are precisely those reproductive tech‚nologies
that Benjamin would come to focus on in the 1930s: photography, radio,
gramophone, and especially film the very technologies that, as Miriam
Hansen puts it, "participate in the historical proliferation of the shock
experience and thus escalate the spiral of sensory alienation, phantas‚magoria,
and violence" (Hansen 1993, 38). Whatever hope Benjamin saw for
establishing a (nondestructive) sensuous mimetic contact with the cos‚mos
as second nature had to come from the experiential possibilities that such
reproductive technologies facilitated.
ÝÝÝÝ Precisely this curious no ion of homeopathic redemption lies behind the privilege Benjamin grants film as the principle agent of the adaptation at issue in his anthropological materialism. Entirely independent of its function as a representational medium (and also as a space for the cognitive processing of dialectical images), film comprises a training ground for a physi‚ological becoming-technological on the cosmological scale: "Film serves to drill [dient . . . xu ¸ben] man in those new apperceptions and reactions caused by interaction with an apparatus [mit einer Apparatur] whose role in his life increases almost daily. To make the tremendous [ungebeuer] techni‚cal apparatus of our time into an object of human innervationóthat is the historical task in whose service film has its true meaning" (Benjamin 1972 89, 1:445).[33] In seeking to unpack this highly provocative claimóand the peculiar mimetic mobilization of film it lays outówe will have to take seriously its profound antihermeneutic consequences. What is ultimately at stake in Benjamin's claim for the tactile dimension of film is the basic nature, as it were, of film's appeal to us. Benjamin's work compels us to ask whether film is a reflective art form that, like art of the past, engages us cognitively or if, rather, it marks a watershed moment in aesthetic history: the advent of a predominately corporeal form of art.
Given the
profound appeal of his political commitments, it is hardly sur‚prising that
Benjamin's critics have consistently emphasized the cognitive dimension of his
theory, both within his larger critical project as a whole and within the more
general context of film theory. Nonetheless, in adapt‚ing Benjamin's work to
analyze contemporary technoculture, we must ask whether and at what cost such
an emphasis can be maintained: Has the con‚temporary information revolution so
changed the material status of the image that we are forced, as it were, to
alter the way we look at Benjamin?[34]
ÝÝÝÝ As one of the key catalysts responsible for
(re)opening critical interest in Benjamin's conception of innervation, Miriam
Hansen's recent work on the topic can serve as a test case to carry out such an
interrogation. In her sug‚gestive interpretation of Benjamin's previously cited
claim for the tactility of film, Hansen stresses the political stakes of the
link Benjamin establishes between innervation and film in order to impose a
criterion for adjudicating between the cognitive and the physiological (1993,
38ff.). On her reading, Benjamin's affirmation of the tactile dimension of film
flirts with a danger‚ous instability: by insisting on the physiological
dimension of our mimetic contact with technology, Hansen argues, Benjamin would
seem to license effects that cannot be contained by nor channeled through
cognition. To neutralize this risk or, rather, to insulate Benjamin from
itóHansen asserts the priority within Benjamin's oeuvre of a cognitive,
emancipatory form of innervation over a purely physiological, merely reactive
one. In sup‚port, she cites Benjamin's invocation of Mickey Mouse in the
Artwork essay; under Benjamin's critical eye, Mickey Mouse is transformed into
a cognitively dissonant "figure" for a "historical
imbrication of nature and technology" that points to the "utopian
potential of technology for reorga‚nizing the relations between human beings
and nature."[35]
The priority Hansen claims for the cognitive function of innervation itself depends on a closely related understanding of shock as a fundamentally inert force, one that depends on some external element for its determina‚tion. Hansen explains that technology can be alternatively destructive and empowering, depending on how it converts shock into innervation: ". . . Benjamin indeed envisioned the process of innervation, like the notion of shock, in rather neurological, electrodynamic terms. In that sense, the para‚lyzing and destructive effects of technology are only the flip side of tensions, currents, and forces which, under different relations of production and reception, could have a mobilizing and empowering effect" (38 39). Despite this seemingly explicit acknowledgment of its root physiological reality, Hansen proceeds immediately to subordinate innervation to the social. By expanding this reciprocity into a full fledged distinction between two forms of innervationóa "defensive adaptation to technology" and a "mimetic, cognitive one" (38)óHansen effectively asserts the categorical priority of social construction over technology and its contamination of (presubjectified) agency. Not unlike Deleuze and Guattari, her ultimate aim is to enlist technological innervation inn tie service of social emancipation: by rendering innervation a function of "relations of production and recep‚tion," Hansen subordinates it in a way that guarantees at least poten‚tially its redeployment toward affirmative social ends.
To grasp
what is at stake in this reading and in the more general decision to privilege
the cognitive, we need to open a larger issue that I suggest is nec‚essarily raised by Benjamin's
introduction of the tactile dimension of film: the possibility that the
physiological basis of innervation might actually resist all efforts to bind it
to the content of a dialectical
image. The claims Benjamin makes for film require us to pose questions that
Miriam Hansen does not find it necessary to ask. Can we really account for
innervation as the effect of a figure that acquires its redemptive function by
placing nature and technology into jarring, indeed cognitively dissonant,
juxtaposition? Or is the alignment of innervation with image content the
hallmark of Ben‚jamin's surrealist phase ultimately irreconcilable with
his mature under‚standing of shock, with his apparent valorization, in "On
Some Motifs," of a physiological model of shock over a dialectical,
cognitive one?
These questions
broach the profound ambivalence that inhabits Ben‚jamin's understanding of
shock. Benjamin, it would seem, has two largely antithetical theories of shock
that come to the fore, alternately, as a function of critical context. In the
context of arguments focusing on the task of his‚torico political
redemption, he employs shock to name the cognitive
experi‚ence of dissonance that dialectical images provoke; in the context
of argu‚ments focusing on the shift in the economy of experience, by contrast, he
uses shock to designate the corporeal impact
of a vastly accelerated life‚ world on the physiology and neurology of
individuals. Despite the clearóand, I suggest, decisiveódistinction between
them, these two notions of shock happen to remain mutually consistent as long
as Benjamin's approach to technological reproducibility stays focused onóand
contained withinóthe image. When he shifts his sights to the aesthetic
properties of the medium itself, however, his use of shock loses its
dialectical basis and its cognitive content. Once he turns from a photographic
to a filmic aesthetic, Benjamin begins to employ shock exclusively to designate
a purely physio‚logical, sensuous, and (in the broad sense) aesthetic response to mechanical
stimuli, a response that can no longer make common cause with his earlier
dialectical and image centered conception.
In moving
from a cognitive to a purely physiological model of shock, Benjamin effectively
submits his basic understanding of technological repro‚ducibility to a fundamental
revision; leaving behind all traces of his earlier, surrealist inspired
program of dialectical awakening, he chooses to focus instead on technology's
mediating role in the more basic task of forging a root sensuous contact
between the alienated human individual and the con‚stantly complexifying
cosmos. In accord with the shift in his understanding of shock, the model of
film presented in "On Some Motifs" loses the ambivalence that had
characterized it in "The Work of Art"; in the later essay, film assumes
its consummate role as the catalyst for a type of inner‚vation aimed at
restoring our basic mimetic contact with the external world. Such innervation
results not from the cognitive processing of dialectical dis‚sonance but rather
from the purely physiological absorption of mechanical shocks.[36]
As Susan Buck Morss has recently suggested, it involves a reori‚entation
of perception from the perceived object to the perceptual process itself, a
turning back of perception on itself: ìIn this situation of `crisis in
perception,' it is no longer a question of educating the crude ear to hear
music, but of giving it back hearing. It is no longer a question of training
the eye to see beauty, but of restoring ëperceptibilityíî (Buck Morss
1992, 18). As the aesthetic analogue to the shock rhythm of the lifeworld, film
is what makes such a reorientation possible.
Appreciating
this shift in focus is, I think, absolutely crucial for our con‚temporary
efforts to profit from Benjamin's example. Given the vast increase in
humankind's technological alienation in the sixty years that have elapsed since
his death, the task of securing contact with the cosmos has become all the more
urgent. With the ever increasing importance of tech‚nologies as what orient us
in the practical lifeworld, our extensive depen‚dence on them has never been
more central or more deserving of sustained critical attention. Indeed, since
this dependence forms the very basis for our agency in the technologically
mediated lifeworld, developing some under‚standing of and command over it forms
the prerequisite for any subsequent practical project and must accordingly be
considered the central concern of contemporary technocultural criticism.
ÝÝÝ With this in mind, we can now clearly grasp the reduction that Hansen's reading imposes; bluntly put, it reflects a deeply rootedóand, I suggest, fundamentally defensiveócritical desire to retain control over the physiological force unleashed by technological shock stimuli, even at the cost of bracket‚ing out some indeed a large part of technology's impact. In asking how to "distinguish . . . a film practice that `breaks through the numbing shield of consciousness' [from] one that ëmerely provides a "drill" for the strength of its defenses"' (1993, 38, citing Buck Morss), Hansen follows Buck‚-Morss in homogenizing shock, rendering it a neutral, purely quantitative effect that can be qualified Ýin better and worse ways.[37] This critical alle‚giance allows her to foreground the content of film as the key determinant of how shock will be deployed and, more specifically, to construe as the embodiment of a utopian possibility for collective innervation the particular "historical, cultural and political place" that Benjamin assigns Mickey Mouse (Hansen 1993, 39). By opening a third realm where humankindís body and technology can meet, beyond the subjective and the objective, Mickey Mouse performs what Hansen describes as a collective version of the "profane illumination" championed by the surrealists: ". . . Mickey Mouse prefigures the utopian interpenetration of body and image space which Benjamin delineates at the end of his essay on surrealism. What the surrealists have understood on an individual basis, Mickey accomplishes in the arena of mass reception: by generating in the sphere of the image, through techniques of ëprofane illumination,í the reality of a ëcollective physisí (Kollektivleib)" (46). In line with the general tenor of the Artwork essay, the figure of Mickey Mouse owes its force as a dialectical image to a certain flexibilityóMickeyís capacity for bodily metamorphosisóthat facil‚itates the presentation of alternate, hidden possibilities for the social con‚struction of humankind's relation with technology.[38] Just as the Artwork essay ascribes an intrinsic emancipatory potential to technological repro‚ducibility, a potential to denaturalize particular ideological configurations by opening an "optical unconscious," the Mickey Mouse fragments show us
how we can live our self alienation
in the face of technology in a productive way, one that need not coincide with
the fascist hardening of the body so prevalent as a theme of cultural criticism
and art in the interwar period. Hansen argues that by engaging technology as
the internal principle of their own construction, as what she tellingly calls a
"hidden figure," the Mickey
Mouse films "hyperbolize the historical imbrication of nature and
technology through humor and parody," allowing us to experience collec‚tive
innervation in the form of an "aesthetic self sublation" that
loosens technology's bonds to actual society and frees it for emancipatory uses
(42).[39]
By mapping
the two types of film practice onto the distinction between a collective
profane illumination centered on the figure of Mickey Mouse and a fascist
hardening of the body, Hansen makes a strong case that shock experience
requires cognitive redemption if it is to yield anything affirma‚tive. Her
account suggests, in no uncertain terms, that our best (and only?) hope of
avoiding (techno)fascism consists in embracing a surrealist inspired
politicization of the aesthetic: an aesthetic mobilization of shock experience
toward an emancipatory end. The analogy with surrealism suggests, more‚over, an
allegiance of "mimetic, cognitive" film practice with a restoration
of Erfahrung.[40]
Just as the surrealists sought to mobilize shock in order to open a third
domain capable of restoring the unity of experience in a new form, a domain of
"inconceivable analogies and connections between events" (Benjamin
1986b, 183),[41] in Hansen's
account film marshals shock toward a similar opening a revolutionary
moment of dialectical awaken‚ing in which Erfahrung
would be restored, again in a new form, as the col‚lective innervation
linking humans with the cosmos.[42]
A Plea for the Autonomy of
the Physiological
However strong its appeal, such an
aesthetico political program is substan‚tially undercut by the concrete
realities of our contemporary situation and specifically, as postmodern critics
have persuasively demonstrated, by the dissolution of any monological form of
culture together with the market's neutralization of the aesthetic avant garde
(see, e.g., Huyssen 1986). In the wake of these concrete realities, whatever
hopes we may indeed have of establishing and maintaining mimetic contact with
an ever increasingly technological second nature would seem to require us to
follow something like Benjamin's own obscure and halting trajectory from a
theory of profane illumination to one of physiological mimesis. If we hope to
adapt Benjamin's project to our world, we must refuse to compromise the
fundamen‚tal heterogeneity he maintains between the root physiological reality
of innervation and the (secondary) cognitive grounding he gives it in the
Artwork and Surrealism essays. Only in this way, I suggest, will we be able to
avoid subordinating the physiological basis of shock to a (narrow) social
circumscription of it, a circumscription that ultimately reproduces the very
same (sociological) version of the machine reduction we discovered in Deleuze
and Guattari.
ÝÝÝ To fathom and adapt to our culture's ever
expanding commitment to the image, we need in particular to embrace four key
elements of Benjamin's position in "On Some Motifs" that demarcate it
from his earlier work: (1) his insistence on the tactile dimension of film, (2)
his effort to disarticulate the physiological dimension of shock from any
discursive and/or dialectical content, (3) his shift of focus from image
content to medium as the locus of the image's mimetic impact; and (4) his affirmation
of Erlebnis as an autonomous and
potentially empowering mode of experience. Articulated together, these motifs
furnish the theoretical rudiments of a model of cor‚poreal mimesis capable
ofÝ locating technology's impact at the
level of ourembodied experience and of undoing the long standing
tendency, on the part of Benjamin's readers and of technocultural critics more
generally, to collapse such embodied impact into the discursive. By rooting the
notion of mimetic innervation in the irreducibly physiological experience of
tactile shock stimulated by film, "On Some Motifs" posits a
posthermeneutic ana‚lytical model that not only refuses to contain the
physiological dimension of shock within the dialectical space of the image [Bildraum]óto reduce it to the content of a dialectical imageóbut also
positively insists on grappling with the conversion of the imagistic into the
affective. In "On Some Motifs," in short, Benjamin proposes a
fundamental refunctionalization of his theory of the image that can help us
adapt it to the digital age.[43]
In suggesting that Benjamin's tactile model of film involves a certain turn away from the image, Norbert Bolz grasps the fundamental tenet of this refunctionalization.
. . .
film's methods of technical reproduction simply no longer produce images in the
strict sense. In film, the sequence of what has already happened determines the
assimilation of the following frames, and through the shock effect created by
the succession of images [Bildfolgen] the
predominance of tactility over filmic opticality comes to light. With the
shocks from its onslaught of images [Bilderst–sse],
film corresponds to a pressing demand of modernity: to blast open all
developmental continuity and to tear apart homogeneous becoming....The modern
machine world prepares the human sensorium for film. As the five senses are
trained, opticality loses its priority to tactility. In the cinema, man learns
to parry discontinuities in a mode of deconcentration. Reception has come to
mean the routinizing of shocks. (Bolz 1990, 87)
Reading
Benjamin as an interface between the Guttenberg galaxy and the new media age,
Bolz here suggests an inversion in the trajectory of the image: rather than tie
ultimate point of convergence that sparks, by means of cognitive shock, a
profane illumination, the filmic image comprises the initial point in a process
of embodied receptionóof reception as
embodi‚mentóthat culminates in a nonrepresentational
experience of embodied physiological sensation.
ÝÝÝÝ Within the history of technology, the
crucial moment informing this reversal in the image's trajectory is the shift
from photography to cinema, from the static to the (mechanically) moving image.
If Benjamin's work on photography chips away at the linguistic subordination of
the image char‚acteristic of the Guttenberg galaxy, it nevertheless retains the
general prior‚ity of opticality and the image's specifically literary function
of "letting man read what was never written."[44]
With his turn to film, by contrast, Ben‚jamin's understanding of the image
crosses the threshold into the informa‚tion age. As Bolz puts it, Benjamin's
media technical understanding refunc‚tionalizes language, transforming it from
a bearer of experience [Erfahrungstr”ger]
into an instrument of communication [Verkehrsmittel]"
(71). Expanding Bolz, we can ascribe the singularity of filmic tactility to
its radical postsemiotic openness:
while the photographic linguistic model fetishizes the image's internal
articulation as a form capable of capturing our contact with the cosmos, film's
extraction of the shock impact of images institutes an open ended circuit
of communication that, in moving from image to affect, effectively produces
this contact as physiological innerva‚tion.
ÝÝÝÝ Through its emphasis on the tactile dimension
of film, a media technical interpretation thus brings out what is
truly singular and remarkable about Benjamin's position in "On Some
Motifs": his refusal to subordinate the lived experience (Erlebnis) of technology to any semiotic
of experience, including the visual semiotic of the dialectical (photographic)
image. By reorienting the trajectory of the image toward a culminating
production of physiological shock, the media technical interpretation
furnishes a sketch of how corporeal mimesis functions: as the bearer of the
mimetic magic of images, technological shocks become embodied through a process
of mimetic absorption that yields a purely physiological innervation with no
directly corresponding cognitive or representational content. True in this respect
to its psychoanalytic heritage,[45]
such innervation fulfills the task of Benjamin's theory of technology as he
first proposed it in One Way Street: it
enacts a sensuous (if no longer ecstatic) contact with the cosmos that
functions homeopathically, as it were, as our best means of insuring against a
repetition of world destruction on the order of our century's great and hor‚rible
world wars.
ÝÝÝ Without calling for the abolition of
(bourgeois) culture as such pre‚cisely the goal of the "new
barbarism" of "Experience and Poverty"ócorporeal mimeticism
promotes a form of embodiment centeres in the "tiny, fragile human body.
"[46]
As a mode of adaptation that embraces the
frag‚menting and alienating impact of technology, corporeal mimeticism remains
profoundly antithetical to the fascist hardening of the body; rather than
defensively rejecting the "tripartite splitting of experience" into
agency, object, and observer that underlies fascist subjectification (Buck Morss
1992, 30ff.), it responds to this splitting by adjusting our experiential capac‚ities
to address the material realities of our technological lifeworld. And though it
eschews the project of formulating a viable "cognitive discourse" on
experience, corporeal mimesis does not simply amount to "a behaviorist
adaptation to the present";[47]
rather, it calls for a fundamental revaluation of our priorities as cultural
critics and as embodied practical
agents. If we hope to fathom the technological becoming that we are
always in the process of undergoing, we will simply have to face the reality of
our desire for embodied contact with the cosmos. Precisely such contact forms
the object of the mimetic sensuousity imparted by our now miniaturized and
thoroughly commodified technologies and the desire motivating it is what gives
late capitalismóand ultimately culture itselfóits power over us. Whatever hope
we might have of negotiating change in our cultural com‚mitments, even those as
basic as our collective addiction to violence and the confusion of death and
play characteristic of contemporary popular enter‚tainment, can only come
through a deepening of our mimetic command over this properly unrepresentable
and noncognitive experiential dimen‚sion. Ultimately, then, if we are to follow
the Benjamin of "On Some Motifs," we must subordinate all "self reflective,
anamnestic, and figura‚tive" efforts to "politicize the aesthetics of
technology" (Hansen 1993, 41, 54) to the more basic task of establishing
contact with our ever increasingly autonomous, automatized, and (in Godzich's
sense) "imaginary" world. In calling on us to tailor our critical
ambitions to the contemporary realities of cosmological complexification,
Benjamin's example helps us recognize precisely bottom line: that to increase
our command over the very medium of capitalism's extensive mimetic poweróits
ministration to our basic desire for cosmological contactówe have to abandon
the long standing cognitive privilege that, in the process of (allegedly)
protecting us from capitulation to a new barbarism of technological inhumanity,
has blinded us to the reality of our dependence on technologies.
By
answering the question concerning technology with a sensuous mimetic
account of presubjective embodied agency, Benjamin opens a path that can help
technocultural critics dispel their residual (and, as I have argued, largely
unthematized) commitment to representationalism. His example can help us
develop more concrete, locally attuned deployments of reproductive technologies
as mimetic vehicles to make our lived experience in the post‚modern age more
bearable, if not, in some significant sense, more empowered. In a word,
Benjamin points us beyond the impasse of technesis.
By refusing to collapse the technological real into representation and by
linking it to embodiment, he shows us that we can make sense of technology's
dif‚fuse, amorphous corporeal impact without filtering it through language,
without linking it to changes in our discursive practices. And he urges us to
focus on our own embodiment as the material siteóthe beareróof technol‚ogy's
otherwise wholly inhuman impact. Accordingly, Benjamin's example can help us
construct the analytical tools we will need to resist the seduc‚tions of
disembodiment projected by contemporary reproductive and virtual technologies,
and in so doing, can guide us in investigating the experien‚tial changes that
are currently revolutionizing our culture. If we can succeed in emulating
Benjamin's sober responsibility to the technological real, we will begin the
crucial task of (re)claiming a distinctly human perspective in the face of
material and technological forces that for so many today portend the inevitable
dawn of a new, radically posthuman epoch.
[1] Accordingly, my intention is not to present a full
picture of Benjamin's star‚tlingly complex and sophisticated career or even to
focus primarily on an exegesis of a particular dimension of Benjamin's thought.
For that, I urge you to consult the many admirable studies of Benjamin's work
as a whole, including Eagleton 1981, Rochlitz 1996, Scholem 1981, Witte 1991,
and Wolin 1994, and also more focused studies, including Buck Morss 1989,
Cadava 1997, Cohen 1993, Jennings 1987, and Nagele 1991.
[2] In my opinion, then, Benjamin's critics are too
hasty in their assimilation of the mimetic faculty essays to the earlier
theory of language he develops in such essays as ìOn the Language as Such and
on the Language of Man" (1916) and "The Task of the
Translator" (1 21). Though it is not without a certain degree of textual
support, such assimilation has the stifling effect of effacing all of the
ambivalence and tension animating Benjamin's shift to the concept of mimesis ambivalence
and tension that must, ultimately, be situated in the context of Benjamin's
evolving thought and that concerns the divide between his earlier hermetic
linguistic theory of the cosmos and his emergent materialist convictions. For
examples of this assimila‚tion, see Cadava 1997, 26 28; Cohen 1993,
39ff.; Wolin 1994, 244ff.
[3] See Shusterman's account of the role language plays in
clarifying and focus‚ing conscious attention in ways that can improve
"qualitative" (i.e., unconscious) nondiscursive experience:
"Such an improved habit, even if it functions uncon‚sciously, can also
enhance our conscious thought, since better breathing can mean better awareness
and more steady concentration. We must recall, however, that conscious
attention was required to improve this unconscious functioning; and so, by the way, is language as
a means for designating body parts, movements, and feel‚ings on
which we are instructed to concentrate" (1994, 138; emphasis added).
ÝÝÝÝÝ [4]
To reflect the stress Benjamin places on the material impact of technology,
Buck Morss suggests the term new
nature in place of the Marxist term productive
forces: "Benjamin meant by [productive forces] not just industrial
technology but the entire world of matter (including human beings) as it has
been transformed by that technology" (1989, 70).Ý Adorno's meditations on technology, by contrast, are marked by a
profound resistance to the breakdown of the nature technology
divide.Ý His notion of mimesis requires
a concept of the primordial, the uncontaminatedóin short,Ý a concept of nature that can be
dialectically opposed to the instrumental ratio‚nality of modern capitalist society.
[5] Benjamin addresses the mimetic faculty in two essays
from 1933, "On the Mimetic Faculty" and "Die Lehre von
Ahnlichkeit" (The doctrine of the similar). An English translation of the
former is contained in Benjamin 1986b; the German of both texts can be found in
Benjamin 1972 89, II, 210 13 and 204 10, respectively.
[6] Very fewóif anyóof Benjamin's critics have focused
any positive attention on the motif of Erlebnis.
Accounts that do more than simply dismiss it include Buck‚-Morss 1992 and
Nagele 1996. For a general discussion of the various senses of expe‚rience in
Benjamin, see L–wy 1983, 632ff.
[7] Dilthey, Gessammelte
Werke, Musarios ed., VII, 230, cited in Gadamer 1989, 67 n. 126.
[8] For a further account of this inversion, see Nagele
1996, 122 24.
[9] Proust, Combray,
cited in Benjamin 1968, 158.
ÝÝÝÝ [10]
The terminological distinctions I have followed are complicated on at least two
counts: first, Theodor Reik, on whom Benjamin draws, inverts the standard ter‚minological
uses, employing Ged”chtnis for
interiorizing memory and Erinnerung for
artificial memory; second, Benjamin himself uses the term Eingedenken (ìbeing mindful
of," "bearing in mind," as in being mindful of the dead) rather
than Erin‚nerung to capture how
Proustian involuntary memory is "closer to forgetting than to what is
usually called memory" (1968, 202). See McCole 1993, 266ff., for an
evaluation of Eingedenken as a
translation for Proust's memoire pure; see
also Wohlfarth 1978, 164ff.
[11] Bolz (1990, 72) draws a link between Lacan's notion
of materialist con‚sciousness (from Seminar
11) and Benjamin's theory of technological reproducibility.
[12] In a mesmerizing meditation on the interrelation of
Benjamin's understand‚ing of history with photography, Eduardo Cadava makes a
strong case for a Der‚ridean interpretation of Benjamin as a critic keenly
attuned to the technical dimen‚sion of thought. In the process, Cadava
foregrounds the very link of thought with memory (mÈmoire involuntaire) against which I have argued so strongly:
"[The phrase ëTheses on the Photography of History'] calls forth what
Benjamin under‚stands to be the technical dimension of thought. Indicating the
convergence of a thinking of history and a thinking of photography, it suggests
an irreducible link between thought as memory and the technical dimension of
memorization, the techniques of material inscription" (Cadava 1997,
xviii). Insofar as photography (and technology more generally) is deployed as
the precondition for the emergence of a thinking of history, such an allegiance
cannot be avoided, as Cadava concludes ("That photographic technology
belongs to the physiognomy of historical thought means that there can be no
thinking of history that is not at the same time a think‚ing of
photography" [xviii]). If, however, it is taken as the basis for a theory
of tech‚nology (rather than a theory of history) in Benjamin, it cannot but
appear reductive, for the figuration of technology as the relative exteriority
of thought obscures just that material dimension that Benjamin introduces in
his distinction of cinema from photography. For an account of the importance of
this distinction in Benjamin's the‚ory of technology, see Bolz 1990, 95ff. I
address Bolz's argument later in this chap‚ter.
[13] My commitment to Benjamin as a keen critic of Freud
pits me against two camps of critics: those who reject Benjamin's appeal to
Freud as a weak and mis‚guided move and those who fail to appreciate Benjamin's
significant departure from Freud. Rodney Livingstone, Perry Anderson, and Francis
Mulhern illustrate the first position; in their presentation of the Adorno Benjamin
debate in Aesthetics and Pol‚itics (Bloch
et al. 1977), they single out Benjamin's recourse to Freud in "On Some
Motifs" as indicative of a general falling off from the earlier
Baudelaire essay: ". . . Freud was centrally introduced [in "On Some
Motifs"] through extensive adoption of his notion of ëshock' from Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Unfortunately,
this was to select one of the least successful of Freud's later metapsychological
works, and Benjamin's use of it resulted only in a thinner and weaker variant
of the original manuscript" (105). In his account of Benjamin's
"materialist theory of experience," Richard Wolin exemplifies the
second position. After correctly identifying the importance of Benjamin's
reference to Freud, Wolin entirely fails to distinguish reception from
protection. Ultimately, this leads him to claim reductively, by my
reading that the protective function of the cortical layer (to parry
shocks) broadens the role of conscious registration: ". . . in modern
life, . . . the matter of fact
preser‚vation of memory traces has given way to their disintegration in consciousness in order for them to be
assimilated by consciousness and thus stored .... Only by virtue of this
mutilating process of censorship and preformation can experience register in
consciousness and thus in the strict sense be said to have been ëlived"'
(1994, 228 29). Other critics who discuss Benjamin's Freud reading
include Buck Morss (1992), Eagleton (1981), and Nagele (1991, 1996).
ÝÝÝÝÝ [14]
Because he retools the cortex as an opening to
the outside or, equivalently, as a radical exteriorization of the psyche, Benjamin's revision differs
fundamentally from superficially similar refunctionalizations that, for all
their radicality, do not dis‚turb the priority Freud grants the psychic system.
Psychoanalyst Nicolas Abraham's "transphenomenal" or
"anasemic" account of the psyche furnishes a case in point. By
rooting his theory of the anasemic construction of the psyche in the relation
between two psychic structuresóthe shell (Ècorce)
and the kernel (noyau)óAbraham dissociates the cortex from
consciousness in a manner that appears to parallel Benjamin's own inchoate
interpretation of it as a third corporeal agency. Specifically, Abraham's
concept of the shell appears to recognize the important dis‚tinction between
the protective and receptive functions of the cortex. Abraham pre‚sents
"the image of the Ego fighting on two fronts: turned toward the outside,
mod‚erating appeals and assaults, turned toward the inside, channeling
excessive and incongruous impulses." He argues that "Freud conceived
of this agency as a protec‚tive layer, an ectoderm, a cerebral cortex, a shell." In actual fact, however,
Abraham foregrounds the dependence of the shell (cortex) on the kernel and thus
privileges the endogenous function of the system: "the shell," he
observes, is "itself . . . marked by what it shelters; that which it
encloses is disclosed within it" (1979,
17). Since Abra‚ham introduces
the cortex level experience of the external world only insofar as it
enters into the nucleic peripheral levels of the psyche, he reproduces
Freud's bias: he, too, treats the cortex essentially as a filtering or
screening mechanism.
[15] Paul Valery, Analecta,
cited in Benjamin 1968, 161 62.
[16] In connecting the protective function to modernity's
destruction of auratic experience, Terry Eagleton points toward an overcoming
of Freudian psychism: "Living an event with full awareness, parrying the
shocks of stimuli rather than allowing them to penetrate, is therefore inimical
to the aura .... Freud's theory of memory traces allows Benjamin to press the
scandal of the Trauerspiel, in which
ëexperience' is subordinated to the ecriture
of emblem, to even greater lengths for now writing has rudely invaded
the inmost sanctum of experience itself, whose pro‚ductive mechanism lies
exposed as nothing more than a set of inscriptions" (1981, 35).
[17] In his work on body techniques Richard Shusterman
suggests a kind of logic to the contemporary value placed on the body: as an
antidote to the ephemerality and fragmentation of media images of (false)
unity, the body furnishes a strong site for the investment of contemporary
selfhood. The merit of Shusterman's work as contrasted with the majority
of work by contemporary cultural critics who focus on the body (e.g., Anne
Balsamo's work on body building and cosmetic surgery) is its refusal to
collapse the bodily back into the representational. Indeed, when he speaks of
"muscle memory," Shusterman strikes a very Benjaminian tone:
"The muscle memory of bodily habit provides an organic enduring presence
that outlasts the frag‚mentary moments of media bytes and cannot be erased as
easily as a data file" (1997b, 43).
[18]
Through his creative expansion of Freud,
Benjamin is able to exteriorize agency in a manner far more radical than what
is envisioned by contemporary crit‚ics of postmodernity. While the likes of
Jameson, Baudrillard, and David Harvey gesture toward the corporeal dimension
of experience correlative to the "space time compression" of
postmodernity (Harvey 1990), none is
willing as is Benjamin to accept the fundamental shift in the
economy of experience it involves: the ensuing eclipse of representation as the
tribunal for experience A case in point is furnished by Jameson, who
provocatively suggests that postmodern hyperspace "has finally
succeeded in transcending the capacities of the individual human body to locate
itself" but who then invokes, by way of solution, what amounts to the
restoration of some form of cognitive command over the real what he
famously calls "cognitive mapping" (1991, 38).
[19]
While several critics have noted the debt of
"On Some Motifs" to the earlier essays on the mimetic faculty,
they have done so predominately to underscore the metaphysical subtext of the
later essay. Thus, for example, Richard Wolin cites the mimetic faculty
essay as the "germ cell" behind the correspondences developed under
the tutelage of mÈmoire involuntaire in
"On Some Motifs" (Wolin 1994). Such a reading ignores the centrality
accorded voluntary memory in that essay, a centrality that requires the very
supplementation of the history of the mimetic fac‚ulty that I propose.
ÝÝÝÝ [20]
Several of Benjamin's critics have made
gestures toward recognizing a basic break between linguistic and postsignifying
mimesis, though none (with the possible exception of Taussig and, at certain
moments, Bolz) has developed it in terms of a distinction between an
intellectualist mimetic redemption and a corporeal mimetic becoming. Buck Morss
furnishes a case in point: "Benjamin suggests that what appears in the
ësignworId (Merkwelt) of modern man'
to be the ëdecay of this capac‚ity' of mimesis, may be, rather, a new stage in
ëits transformation.' He holds open the possibility of a future development of
mimetic expression, the potentialities for which are far from exhausted. Nor
are they limited to verbal language as the new technologies of camera and
film clearly demonstrate" (1989, 267).
[21]
This point raises a potential confusion that we
must guard against: despite what my language sometimes suggests, the
representation embodiment distinction must absolutely not be conflated
with that of mind and body. My notion of corpo‚real mimesis as a faculty
distinct from psychic consciousness does not imagine the body to be separable
from the mind; rather, following Varela, Thompson, and Rosch's (1991) notion of
the embodied mind, it is meant to designate our irreducible embodiment an
experiential dimension that cannot be separated from the mental, even if it is
strongly nonpsychic (in the specifically Freudian sense of the term).
ÝÝÝÝÝ [22]
The corporeal dimension of Baudelaire's poetic
production can be discerned most clearly, Beniamin suggests, in his own self portrait.
As if to confirm the mimetic relation involved, Benjamin describes the
physiognomic and corporeal impact of shock with the metaphor of contagion:
"Since he is himself exposed to fright, it is not unusual for Baudelaire
to occasion fright. Valles tells us about his eccentric gri‚maces; . . .
Pontmartin establishes Baudelaire's alarming appearance; Claudel stresses the
cutting quality he could give to his speech; Gautier speaks of the italiciz‚ing
Baudelaire indulged in when reciting poetry; Nadar describes his jerky
gait" (1968, 163). The causal trigger linking Baudelaire's shock
experience to his phys‚iognomy is, like the automatic reaction of the
pedestrian or machine worker, irre‚ducibly physiological. Correlative
with the corporeality of his self portrait, Baude‚laire understands
creative activity not as a process of reflectively drawing forth images from a
mental storehouse but, on the contrary, as a physical struggle for imagesóa
struggle he has brought to life with the figure of the fencer (in his poem
"Le Soleil"). In Baudelaire's self depiction as fencer,
Benjamin discerns a hidden connection between shock experience and the poetic
process: the creative duel shares a common background with shock experience.
Just as the fencer battles the crowd, parrying its blows, so, too, the poet
combats language: Baudelaire struggles with what Benjamin calls "the
phantom crowd of the words, the fragments, the begin‚nings of fines from which
the poet, in the deserted streets, wrests the poetic booty" (165). For
Baudelaire, poetic elements (words, poetic lines, images, etc.) possess more
than semiotic significance; they are so shot through with experience (Erlebnis) that they acquire mimetic
content the "booty" that can only be wrested from them by the
dueling poet. Only by cutting through their semiotic connections the seam‚less
interconnection so central to the symbolist ideology of metaphorical expan‚sion can
the poet encounter their mimetic content as the experience of shock.
[24]
In understanding technological reproducibility
as a form of recompense for the alienation technology brings, I am anticipated
by certain of Benjamin's critics. In her own coupling of mimesis and mechanical
reproduction, for example, Buck‚Morss
argues that technological reproduction compensates for the effects of techno‚logical production: ".
. . technological reproduction gives back to humanity that capacity for
experience which technological production
threatens to take away." In contrast to my emphasis on the tactile
dimension of this compensating role played by film (especially in "On Some
Motifs"), Buck Morss stresses its cognitive dimen‚sion, arguing that
whereas the industrialization of production accelerates time and fragments
space, film "shows a healing potential by slowing down time and, through
montage, constructing ësynthetic realities' as new spatio temporal orders
wherein the `fragmented images' are brought together ëaccording to a new
law."' On Buck-‚Morss's model, film thus furnishes a "new capacity to
study . . . reflectively" the shift to a corporeal form of mimetic
experience; Buck Morss argues that film not only teaches us how to use
the mimetic faculty effectively as a "defense against the trauma of
industrialization" but, more importantly, provides a "means of
reconstructing the capacity for experience that had been shattered by the
process" (1989, 268).
[25] . "Erwiderung an Oscar A. H. Schmitz," in
Benjamin 1972 89, 11.2, 752. I owe this reference to Miriam Hansen
(1993).
[26] It does so, moreover, through its difference from
previous forms of techno‚logical reproducibility, specifically from
photography.
[27]
Cf., for example, Rochlitz's evaluation of
"On Some Motifs": "Benjamin attributes the return to barbarism
to modern technology and, among other things, to those techniques of
reproduction such as photography and film that he had earlier celebrated as
factors favoring the secularization of the aura and as the means allow‚ing for
the satisfaction of the legitimate aspirations of the masses .... In `The Work
of Art,' [the] acceleration due to the development of reproduction techniques
appears as a salutary exercise allowing modern humanity to adapt to a dangerous
environment. Benjamin's new evaluation of technology leads him to underscore
only the aspect that is destructive, deadly, to experience in general"
(1996, 212). Rochlitz goes on to read Benjamin's references to ritual in
"On Some Motifs" as advocating a return to the aura. Such a reading
misconstrues what Benjamin literally says, namely, that Baudelaire's contact
with a now archaic ritual domain is what allows him to discern so clearly the
shift in the economy of experience (see Benjamin 1968, 181 82). It is
also extremely hard to reconcile with the conclusion of Benjamin's essay: that
Baudelaire embraced the "disintegration of the aura in the experience of
shock" (194). Wolin (1994, 225) makes a similar claim in his reading of
the essay. The prevalence of this position among recent critics attests to the
enormous influence of Adorno's criticism of Benjamin (see Bloch et al. 1977,
100 141).
[28] Wolin gives an account of this shift: ". . . in
`The Storyteller' (as well as his 1939 work, `On Some Motifs in Baudelaire')
Benjamin rejects the position of `The Work of Art' essay insofar as he comes to
realize that the application of technologi‚cal advances to the sphere of art
will not necessarily in and of itself result in the transformation of art along
progressive and emancipatory lines" (1994, 225).
[29]
Several critics view this "new
barbarism" the explicit topic of Benjamin's "Experience and
Poverty" (1933) as the crux of Benjamin's efforts to grapple with
technology in the 1930s. See Hansen 1993, 40ff.; Bolz 1990, 100ff.; Lindner
1978.
ÝÝÝÝÝ [30]
Unlike Heidegger, Benjamin views technology as
antithetical to the modern scientific attitude. The communal embrace of the
cosmos, itself possible only through technology, represents a break with modern
astronomy's "exclusive empha‚sis on an optical connection to the universe"
and more generally with the detached stance of modernÝ science/instrumental reason (Benjamin 1996, 486). On this point,
see Bolz 1990, 100. For comparisons of Benjamin with Heidegger, see A. Benjamin
1994; Caygill 1994; Weber 1996.
[31]
Benjamin writes, "because the lust for
profit of the ruling class sought satis‚faction through it, technology betrayed
man and turned the bridal bed into a blood‚bath" (1996, 487).
[32]
In his commentary on this passage, Bolz
describes this task in similar terms: "what alone can save us from the
frenzy of annihilation [Vernichtungstaumel]
would be a successful cosmic communication through the technical
organization of humanity's collective body [in
der technischen Organisation des Menschheitsleibes]î (1990, 100).
[33]
This is a passage from the first version of
Benjamin's Artwork essay, in which Benjamin more clearly develops the theme of
innervation (Benjamin 1972 89, 1.2, 431 69). The German text on
which the standard English translation is based is the second version of the
essay (Benjamin 1972 89,1.2, 471 S08). A corrected form of this
second version appears in Benjamin 1972 89, VIL1, 350 84. See
Hansen 1993, 29 30, and the editorial apparatus in Benjamin 1972 89,
VII.2, for a discussion of the various versions of the Artwork essay.
[34]
Nichols 1988 begins the process of
reconsidering Benjamin's contribution within a digital environment.
[35]
Focusing on references to Mickey Mouse in
Benjamin's work (and especially in the various versions of the Artwork essay),
Hansen develops a utopian dimension of innervation ". . . Mickey Mouse
does not fully merge with the ëdestructive char‚acter,' but retains some of
fairy tale appeal that Benjamin had noted in 1931 (ëthe motif of one who
set out to learn fear'). To people ëtired' of experience, ëfed up' with ëKulturí and ëthe human
being,' the existence of Mickey Mouse is `a dream that compensates for the
sadness and discouragement of the day' and shows them that `simple and quite
magnificent existence which waking they lack the energy to real‚ize.' . . .
Benjamin reads [the bodily metamorphoses of Mickey Mouse] as figures of
innervation, anticipating an emancipatory incorporation of technology ....
[T]he Mickey Mouse films engage technology not as an external force, in a
literal or for‚mal rendering of `mechanization,' but as a `hidden figure': they
hyperbolize the his‚torical imbrication of nature and technology through humor
and parody .... This aesthetic self sublation of technology not only
condenses the supplementary, home‚opathic relation between the technical media
and other technologies; it also prefigures the utopian potential of technology
for reorganizing the relations between human beings and nature" (1993, 41 42).
ÝÝÝÝÝ [36]
This physiological function of film was already
present in the Artwork essay, where it was explicitly connected to the
technology of the cinematic medium: "By means of its technical structure [technische Strukture], the film has
taken the physi‚cal shock effect out of the wrappers [Emballage] in which Dadaism has, as it were, kept it inside the
moral shock effect" (Benjamin 1968, 238; in the German version, the entire
passage is in italics [1972 89,1.2, 503]).
ÝÝÝÝÝ [37]
To legitimate the subordination of the
neurological to the social, Hansen explicitly follows Susan Buck Morss's
recent effort to utilize Benjamin's Freud read‚ing in order to distinguish a proper
sense of innervationóìa mimetic reception of the external world . . . that is
empowering" from a purely defensive mimetic capac‚ity, a form of
mimesis as "defensive reflex" (Buck Morss 1992, 17). Yet in
doing so, Hansen also perpetuates the collapse of the two distinct senses of
shock that Buck‚-Morss's reading operates: to insure the emanctpatory potential
of innervation, both Hansen and Buck Morss put physiological shock into
the (exclusive) service of image generated, cognitive shock. Since it
develops an opposition between good and bad mimetic modalities that hinges on
the deployment of shock, the
distinction Buck Morss foregrounds relies on a thoroughly homogenous notion
of shock: as a neutral, purely quantitative effect that can be qualified in better and worse ways,
shock possesses no autonomy whatsoever from the social construction of experi‚ence.
By enlisting Freud's theory of shock experience as the exemplar of a negative
deployment of shock for purely defensive purposes, moreover, Buck Morss
miscon‚strues the role Freud plays for Benjamin. From her perspective, Benjamin
appropri‚ates Freud's theory of shock defense solely in order to describe the
(entirely negative) shift in aesthetic experience witnessed by our modernity:
as she understands it, the Freudian cortical layer forms an organic counterpart
to a larger cultural shift from aesthetics to "anaesthetics,î from a
robust sensory contact with the world to a gen‚eral numbness and withdrawal
from it. Buck Morss thereby narrows the value of Freud's insight and of
Benjamin's fruitful misreading of it. Rather than forming the basis for an
entirely new mode of experience, the dead cortical layer simply com‚pounds the
waning of experience so often lamented by (the nostalgic) Benjamin; more
precisely, it serves as the negative counterpoint to what Buck Morss
conceives of as Benjamin's positive conception of an empowering mimetic
adaptation ("inner‚vation" proper).
[38]
See, on this point, Hansen's comparison of
Mickey Mouse with Haraway's mythic figure of the cyborg (Hansen 1993, 50 51).
[39]
This understanding of technology as a
"hidden figure" leads Hansen to posit a representationalist account
of the redemptive or curative potential
of reproductive technolgies: "the aesthetic self sublation of
technology," as she puts it, "condenses the supplementary,
homeopathic relation between the technical media and other technologies"
(1993, 42). Hansen understands this redemptive function of repro‚ductive
technologies as a restoration of our cognitive handle on technology, as a sal‚vation
of the "discourse of experience" in the sense of Erfahrung:
"The expropria‚tion of the human senses that culminates in Imperialist
warfare and fascism can be countered only on the terrain of technology itself,
by means of perceptual technolo‚gies that allow for a figurative, mimetic
engagement with technology at large, as a productive force and social reality.
In other words, the technical media would have to set into play their metonymic
relationship with other technologies, so as to func‚tion as a supplement
or pharmakon to the latter, to provide a discourse of experience
that would allow for a collective adaptation of and to technology" (38;
emphasis added).
ÝÝÝÝ [40]
Correlative to her reduction of the
physiological dimension of shock, Buck-Morss likewise retains a distinct
investment in the cognitive dimension of experience and the restoration of its proper sense as Erfahrung.
To interpret the redemptive, empowering dimension of mimesis as something
categorically distinct from its merely adaptive dimension, Buck Morss
must accord to the former a qualitative and representational cognitive
dimension (a content) that is lacking in the latter: Buck‚-Morss argues that if
mere adaptation "destroys the human organism's power to respond
politically," it does so because it substitutes a blocking out of reality
for "a cognitive mode of being ëin touch' with it" (1992, 18). As we
discovered earlier, however, Benjamin's strong misreading expunges precisely
such a binarism from Freud's text: his Bergsonist refunctionalization of the
cortical layer as an emergent experiential faculty shows us that we do not need
a cognitive representational medi‚ation to establish and maintain contact
with material reality that, in other words, perception without psychic
content (in the Freudian sense) opens an entirely new and empowering arena for
experience. By thus uncovering a qualitative dimension to sensory perception
that is neither cognitively mediated nor representational and that is not
merely defensive, Benjamin's refunctionalization of Freud establishes the
mimetic capability facilitating our adaptation to the "conditions of
modern shock" that, as Buck Morss herself suggests, have made
"response to stimuli without think‚ing . . . necessary for survival"
(16).
ÝÝÝÝÝ [41]
For a reading of surrealist practice as a
restoration of Erfahrung, see Cohen 1993, 186 95.
ÝÝÝÝÝ [42]
Samuel Weber reads this restorative drive as
the crux of the fascist use of film to offer the masses an integral form of
self expression. See Weber 1996, 102ff. By transforming aura into an
intrinsic function of presentation as such, Weber, as it were, builds into
Benjamin's theory a protection against fascism's fantasy of unification.
". . . the ëdecline' or ëfall'óderÝ
Verfallóof the aura would not be something that simply befalls it,
as it were, from without. The aura would from the start be marked by an
irreducible element of taking leave,
of departure, of separation. Were this to be the case, however, then the
narrative, sequential, `historical' aspect of the aura, expressed in a movement
of decline and fall, might well turn out to be part and parcel of its mode of
being. So understood, aura would name the unde‚pictable de piction of distancing and separation" (86 87).
By attributing the shift in the artwork's relation to its environment
exclusively to the work itself (and to the system of presentation it
instantiates), such an interpretation trivializes the opening to environment
and to technological materiality that comprises such an important aspect of
Benjamin's theory of experience.
ÝÝÝÝÝ [43]
For an interesting updating of Benjamin's
Artwork essay along somewhat different lines, see Nichols 1988.
ÝÝÝÝÝ [44]
Bolz 1990, 87. In a similar vein, Haverkamp
aligns the dialectical image with the text: 'Dialectical images become readable
at a critical moment; legibility is their dialectical qualification at that
moment. For only insofar and inasmuch as the image is read (ëgelesenes Bild'),
the dialectic renders what is read as an ëimage' in the strong sense (ëechtes
Bild'). ëLegibility' is what cuts it off from mere imagerie and mere imagination and turns it, dialectically, from
what it contains, fossil like, into the schema of what this fossil, flash like,
reveals. What it shows . . . is textual evidence of a complicated sort. The dialectical image is a text and depends
in all its ëdialecti‚calí as well as ëschematicí qualifications on the
readability of texts, even if those texts eventually come as pictures"
(1992, 74; emphasis added). For a different reading of the dialectical image
that stresses the role of fascination, see Abbas 1989. Cadava expands the
textual function of the image to the domain of the photographic as such when he
interprets the photographic image as the very condition of possibility for the
appearance of the event: "Rather than reproducing, faithfully and
perfectly, the photographed as such, the photographic image conjures up its
death . . . . Read against the grain of a certain faith in the mimetic capacity
of photography, the pho‚tographic event reproduces, according to its own
faithful and rigorous deathbring‚ing manner, the posthumous character of our
lived experience" (1997, 7 8).
[45]
As Hansen notes (following Laplanche and
Pontalis), the term innervation is a
psychoanalytic one designating a " ëphysiological process: the
transmission, enes ally in an efferent direction, of energy along a nerve pathway,'
possibly produced by the `conversion of psychical into nervous energy"'
(1993, xxx n. 24, citing Laplanche and Pontalis, The Language of Psychoanalysis [1973]). Reformulated by Benjamin,
the term innervation describes the
conversion of an image content or an image series into a physiological effect
As Hansen puts it, Benjamin "must have found [the term innervation] useful for
conceptualizing historical transformation as a process of converting images
into somatic and collective reality" (loc. cit.).
[46]
These are the terms with which Benjamin
describes man's encounter with technology in World War I (See "Erfahrung
and Armut," in Benjamin 1972 89, 11.1:215 18).
[47]
The citation is from Hansen 1993. Working with
the opposition between a content laden, cognitive form of innervation and
a purely physiological one, Hansen can only understand such a shift in the
economy of experience as capitulation to sheer behaviorism. Reading Benjamin's
work of the 1930s (including "On Some Motifs") as an attempt "to
keep both irrevocable disintegration and the need for a refiguration of
experience in view," Hansen allies the abandonment of Erfahrung with a capitulation to fascism: ". . . fascism had
brought home the vulnerability of a collective lacking a discourse on
technological modernization, lacking a public hori‚zon that would enable human beings
to recognize and negotiate the effects of his‚torical fragmentation, rupture
and loss, of collective yet privatized self alienation. Without the self reflective,
anamnestic, and figurative dimension of experience, Ben‚jamin knew, collective
innervation would mean nothing but a behaviorist adaptation to the
present" (41).