Proxemics and Prosthetics
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Distance overcome by technological devices.
The same headline could cover the very different
stories Marshall McLuhan and Walter Benjamin tell about
media effects. McLuhan tells the tale of an
emerging global village enmeshed in the participatory
mystique of acoustic space. Benjamin, however, is no
prophet of returning neotribalism. For him,
optical technologies bring objects closer to
viewers and thus undermine the embrace of auratic art
(n1).
Attached to these narratives are meditations on the power of tropes.
McLuhan praises metaphor; Benjamin attacks symbol. Out of his critique
of the symbol, Benjamin develops a typology of modes
of experience. The less phenomenologically
astute McLuhan opts for empirical reduction. For
McLuhan, technology is a play of hypertrophy and atrophy of
bodily extensions. The play is sealed in a
cycle when he reifies metaphor as the motor of
reversals. Benjamin would find this quite
undialectical. Whatever contrary political
positions they may take, both thinkers, however,
depend upon the cultural investments grafted onto a
dichotomous division of the senses, the same
cultural investments that celebrate or demonize a
putatively primitive past. Surprisingly or not, Jung
will prove to be the key to liquidating those
investments in both Benjamin and McLuhan (and to rewriting
headlines).
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McLuhan himself catalogues the effects of his most
favoured tropes. In his frequent conflation
of communication media and attitudes towards them,
two tropes are employed. They are
hendiadys and
chiasmus. He devotes a
section
of From Cliché to Archetype to
doublets yoked by conjunction (hendiadys).
Eye
and ear, hot and cool, print and tribal, are some
examples of pairings invoked and explored by
McLuhan.
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He opens the section by claiming that L.P. Smith's
Words and Idioms "draws
attention to a
mysterious property of language, namely, the
ineradicable power of doublets" (Cliché
108).
Smith is documenting habit. Therein may lie
the
secret of power. He certainly does not
ascribe to
words themselves any mysterious properties or
ineradicable powers. Smith in
lexicographical
spirit lists as so many odds and ends, habitual
doublets of the English language. He also
categorizes them according to emphatic usage by
repetition (again and again), by alliteration
(humming
and hawing) or by rhyme (by hook or by
crook).
His final lists consist of doublets formed by
contrast
of two alternatives (heads or tails) and two
alternatives joined to make an inclusive phrase
(the
long and the short of it) (Words
and Idioms 174-175).
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McLuhan stresses only disjunctive
conjunction.
His eye and ear represents a now-and-then or a
here-
and-there. Never a here-and-
now. Heterogeneity is kept at bay as the
dichotomy
is mapped onto historical periods or onto
geopolitical
divisions. Furthermore, the temporal and
spatial
disjunction is necessary for the pairing to become
set
in a chiasmic structure. McLuhan accords
this
trope ontological status as a process of human
history
(Gutenberg
Galaxy
277).
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In McLuhan's use of chiasmus to explain exchanges
in
sensory domination between eye and ear, the
sequential
element is elided and temporality
foreshortened:
one knows as one perceives. This allows
tropes to
be used to explain history. Barrington
Nevitt
exemplifies the expanded application of the
rhetorical
term. He claims "[A]ny process pushed
to the
extreme of its potential will break down or
metamorphose or reverse its original effects by
chiasmus" (Nevitt
157). One can read
Nevitt as
providing three
options: breakdown, metamorphosis or
reversal. McLuhan insists on continuous
reversal. For him breakdown is always
breakthrough.
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Faith in tropes never meets failure of fiat.
Throughout the McLuhan corpus rhetoric is
reified. Doublets and chiasmus not only
describe
reality; they are taken for real.
Whether
operating from a realist or nominalist position
McLuhan, the rhetorician, would have perhaps
benefitted
from the discipline targeted for diatribe in his
Laws of Media, that is dialectic or
logic.
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A more serene appraisal of the contributions of
dialectic to human communication or its relation
to
grammar and rhetoric, the other arts of the
trivium,
might have led McLuhan to greater care in the
creation
and manipulation of his categories (n2).
Informed by dialectic, his rhetorical analysis
might
have turned more critically to the devices of his
own
discourse. For example McLuhan might have
commented upon the tendency of his doublets to
classify
sensory phenomena and communication media in a
dichotomous fashion. Hendiadys, doublets
coupled
by conjunction, underscore the complementary
nature of
the relation between two classes. Each is a
unit
of a whole. The coordination of pairs
through
conjunction hints at, without explicitly exposing
it to
scrutiny, a complementarity. Thus McLuhan's
description fosters his explanations in terms of
the
play of hot and cool media as well as his
insistence on
switches in eye and ear domination.
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A connection between discourse and discovery need
not
lead in every case to a conflation of explanation
with
description. A drive to certitude does risk
such
a collapse. McLuhan's emphatic and vatic
style,
full of bold assertions, lacking in qualifications
or
concern for nuance, displays such a drive.
Yet it
is an insufficient condition. The tangle of
description and explanation results from more than
the
unexamined lodging of symmetries in McLuhan's
exposition.
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For McLuhan certitude, an attitude towards knowledge, is joined with a narrative construction, closure, which for him is indispensable. It leads to completion of a successful and pleasurable act of perception by restoring an organism to equilibrium. What is stated in a speculative fashion and without reference to sensory extension in J.Z. Young, his source, McLuhan restates in a universalizing affirmation: The inevitable drive for "closure," "completion," or equilibrium occurs both with the suppression and the extension of human sense or function. (Gutenberg Galaxy 4)
Any disturbance, suppression or extension, leads
to
attempts to reinstall homeostasis. McLuhan's
rhetoric enshrines a physiological phenomenon as
an
endorsement for a cyclical view of history.
It is
recourse to chiasmus that endows such a
descriptive
statement with explicative force.
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Chiasmus will dramatize the descriptive doublets
so
that a medium is always paired with another in an
agonistic relation and any redistribution of
sensory
ratio is a reversal. However, narratives of
domination are not necessarily entailed by
chiasmus. Chiasmus equally serves narratives
of
sensory coordination and collaboration. For
McLuhan the trope yields only one story.
Perfect
predictability ensues; McLuhan's model is
overdetermined and foreclosed.
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Favoured tropes may not always be the
preconditions for
original experiential insights. For McLuhan
they
are. As he states without chiasmus, without
hendiadys, "rhetoric, the open hand;
dialectic,
the closed fist" (Cliché
160).
In Erasmian fashion, the sceptic responds that the
open
hand can slap and the closed fist hold a
seed.
And if the avowal that discursive habits shape and
are
shaped by conceptual commitments be framed in an
interrogative mood, it provides the space for
other
dialectics.
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What do McLuhan's charged remarks concerning
dialectic
signal? Turning from the dialectic of the
trivium against which McLuhan rails to that of
German
idealism about which he, in his writings on
communication, is silent and which "extended
the
notion of contradiction in the course of
discussion or
dispute to a notion of contradictions in
reality"
(n3). One
notes, a pattern structurally akin to McLuhan's
"chiasmus". In McLuhan there is
found
the three elements of a classic idealist
dialectic. All three are connected to his
notion
of extension. There is the transformation of
quantity into quality in that the pivotal notion
of
extension starts as the repeated use of certain
technologies and ends as a predisposition of the
human
sensorium. There is an identification of
opposites as extension becomes amputation (Understanding
Media
45). The
claim that
the
content of a new
medium is the previous medium expresses the
negation of
negation, the third element of the
dialectic.
This negation of negation is generalized after the
collapse of media and message in the turn to
language
as the ultimate human extension.
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From this comparison McLuhan emerges as a crypto-
Hegelian substituting "technology" for
the
Spirit of History (n4). If one is not oneself to
replace
Spirit by "return of the repressed,"
one
must turn to the moment when extension is not
conveyed
by chiasmus, not yet captured by dichotomies and
not
yet applied universally. The moment is pre-
McLuhan. It is in his sources. It is
also
post-McLuhan: in a reading of his reading
of his
sources.
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The further probing and questioning of McLuhan's
reading habits retraces three elaborations of his
extension hypothesis. The first formulation
of
the notion occurs in The Gutenberg
Galaxy. Given his appeal to
authorities in
this initial elaboration, McLuhan's handling of
his
sources warrants scrutiny. Later, in
From
Cliché to Archetype, extension is
largely
applied to language. In this subsequent
elaboration McLuhan further advances his concept
of
acoustic space. Finally in Laws of
Media extension is expressed in the form of
the
tetrad: enhancement, reversal, retrieval
and
obsolescence. It is here that McLuhan's
commitment to a historical frame of eternal return
becomes clear.
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The striking feature of acoustic space as he
formulates
it, its simultaneity, allows a transcendental
moment to
occur, the eternal return to be tamed.
However,
the simultaneous aspect of acoustic space operates
so
successfully in McLuhan's discursive universe only
because the distinction between the instantaneous
and
the immediate is not taken into account, a
distinction
that threatens to undo the famous conflation of
message
and medium.
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\
It is the notion of extension that permits the
medium-
message conflation. Donald Theall critiques
McLuhan's lack of distinction between primary
extensions such as housing and secondary or
tertiary
extensions such as print media
(Rear View
Mirror 82-
84). Theall also
exposes an
absence of
articulation between closure and extension, one
being a
brain activity, the other, a motor activity.
Finally, Theall's reading draws attention to the
addition of a third authority, Leslie A.
White. A
citation from White's The Science of
Culture is meant to underwrite McLuhan's
adoption of a definition of language as
tool. The
combination of elements from Hall, Young and White
allows McLuhan "to treat print and phonetic
writing as extensions affecting sensory
balance"
(Rear View
Mirror
84).
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Theall's objections are here directed at the
syntagmatic aspects of McLuhan's discourse, at how
he
threads together his authorities. Simply,
there
are too many missing links in the citational
collage. Furthermore, beyond these
objections,
the connection between citation and McLuhan
paraphrase
is tenuously forged. Only highly altered
sources
fit the McLuhan mosaic.
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Prior to being strung, the citations are produced by a series of choices. For example, three passages in Edward T. Hall's The Silent Language refer to extension. McLuhan in the prologue of The Gutenberg Galaxy cites one, the one least likely to challenge the consonance of his own formulation. The first mention of extension occurs in passing. It is a passage where Hall enumerates the contents of the book: The next chapters (Five through Eight) specify and deal with the communication spectrum. Little is said about mass- communication media such as the press, radio, and television, which are the instruments used to extend man's senses. Rather these chapters are focused on one main aspect of communication, the ways in which man reads meaning into what other men do. (Hall 51)
There is no matching of a specific sense with a
particular medium. Media are instruments for
achieving extension not extensions in
themselves.
A simple assertion by Hall cannot persuasively
underwrite a more complex assertion by McLuhan.
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In an other passage Hall refers to skis as an
extension
of the foot. He is illustrating different
learning environments. He uses an observer-
dependent simile: "When one watched these
people
move about it was as though the skis were an
actual
extension of the foot, a highly adapted organ for
locomotion" (Hall
87).
From this observation, extension cannot be taken
as a
universal nor as an automatic process.
Furthermore the link in Hall between extension and
skill which implies cognitive awareness would
cripple
McLuhan's assertion that changes in the human
sensorium
caused by technological extension happen
unbeknownst to
the human participants of the process.
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The passage McLuhan does cite on page four of The Gutenberg Galaxy reads: Today man has developed extensions for practically everything he used to do with his body. The evolution of weapons begins with the teeth and the fist and ends with the atom bomb. Clothes and houses are extensions of man's biological temperature- control mechanisms. Furniture takes the place of squatting and sitting on the ground. Power tools, glasses, TV, telephones, and books which carry the voice across both time and space are examples of material extensions. Money is a way of extending and storing labor. Our transportation networks now do what we used to do with our feet and backs. In fact, all man-made material things can be treated as extensions of what man once did with his body or some specialized part of his body. (Hall 79) In a preceding paragraph McLuhan prepares his particular reading of Hall with the statement that: Man the tool-making animal, whether in speech or in writing or in radio, has long been engaged in extending one or another of his sense organs in such a manner as to disturb all of his other senses and faculties. (Gutenberg Galaxy 4)
Before McLuhan turns to cite Hall, disturbance is
grafted onto the notion of extension. As
well
extension becomes centred on sense organs.
The
other faculties recede. McLuhan's total
attention
is on parts.
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Based on the quotation from Hall, tools can be
considered as extensions from two possible
loci.
They are extensions of "what man once did
with his
body [or part of his body]" or
extension
of "some specialized part of his
body."
McLuhan chooses the latter parsing. He does
not
analyse the crucial category of doing.
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In all instances of The Silent
Language
including the one McLuhan cites, Hall's focus is
upon
the temporality of extension not its prosthetic
dimension. Hall treats extension in terms of
continuity of activity. What was once done
by one
means is now done by another. McLuhan in
grafting
disturbance on extension posits a shift not in
duration
but in kind of activity. Extension is
narrowed to
synonymity with prosthesis (n5).
As
well it is construed as irritation through its
association with disturbance. This
combination,
prosthetic disturbance, is erected upon a strict
impermeability of sensory modalities.
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The strict separation establishes a sensorium
devoid of
devices for self-regulation. Environment
determines all. Sensory modalities and types
of
action exist in a one-to-one correspondence.
His
stimulus-response model positions some senses as
tending to inertia, others, to motion. Sight
pinpoints, takes up a point of view,
stabilizes.
Sound surrounds, penetrates, perturbs. For
McLuhan, one is the sense of rational detached
print
culture; the other, excitable tribal
involvement.
Just as he argues some times from effects of the
sense
organ (sight) and at other times from those of the
percept (sound), the parallel piling of sundry
elements, so necessary for McLuhan's evaluative
statements and chiasmic substitutions, reiterates
the
founding tautology. Disturbance and
extension are
not only the marks of change; they are also its
motors. Change leads to change. The
world
as perpetual motion machine offers endless chains
of
causation which in McLuhan's case is really
mimesis: sense imitating what is sensed.
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Causation becomes more complex and predictability is impaired, if one turns to the identification of disturbances in a universal flux. Such metacritical questions are foregrounded in the authority on disturbance cited in full by McLuhan, J.Z. Young:
In Young's "speculative suggestion"
stimulations disturb not limbs or sense organs but
"unison of action". As in Hall,
activity in its temporal dimensions is the
category of
analysis. The citation culled by McLuhan is
in
Young sandwiched between discussions of the
learning
child. As intersubjective process, learning
takes
place in the presence of parents or peers and is
characterized as gradual, incremental and
open.
Such a scheme is alien to McLuhan. As
mentioned
above, "closure" and
"completion"
are terms he introduces. Furthermore what he
characterizes as an inevitable drive towards
equilibrium between self and environment is in
Young a
tendency not a necessity: "we tend to
fit
ourselves to the world and the world to
ourselves." This tentative telos is
consonant
with
the intersubjective core of Young's discourse (n6).
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Pace McLuhan, Young offers dialectical formulations. In his model, rhythmic pattern is both recognized and established. Even within a biological process such as brain function, the confirmation of recognition permits the establishment of pattern. One person can do both but not at the same time. The two distinct procedures are what Young calls doubt and certainty. They govern knowledge production: The brain is continually searching for fresh information about the rhythm and regularity of what goes on around us. This is the process that I call doubting, seeking for significant new resemblances. Once they are found they provide us with our system of law, of certainty. We decide that this is what the world is like and proceed to talk about it in those terms. Then sooner or later someone comes along who doubts, someone who tries to make a new comparison; when he is successful, mankind learns to communicate better and to see more. ( Doubt and Certainty 11)
Proper use of analogies, for Young, serves
learning and
serves progress. Assured of its power to
improve
communication and produce knowledge, he privileges
resemblance seeking. As implied by the
metacritical accent heard if but sub
voce in the hiatus between recognition
and
establishment, the identification of resemblance
is but
part of reasoning by analogy.
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McLuhan makes analogies. He finds
resemblances. However, to test an argument
by
analogy one also examines the terms of the
comparison
according to their unshared properties. That
is
one seeks differences. Unmaking analogies is
not
a McLuhan activity.
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Analogies lead to laws of media. Their legitimation is founded upon the generative powers McLuhan grants metaphors. He equates them with technologies. The principle of extension is central to this process: [A]ll human artefacts are extensions of man, outerings or utterings of the human body or psyche, private or corporate. That is to say, they are speech, and they are translations of us, the users, from one form into another form: metaphors. (Laws of Media 116)
The relation between technology and metaphor is
itself
a metaphor but not one of substitution, either
species
for genus or vice versa. For McLuhan,
"all
metaphors have four components in analogical
ratio" (28). The four
terms in McLuhan's formulation are technology,
metaphor, extension and translation. How are
they
to stand in relation to each other? The
succinct
declaration "technologies, like words, are
metaphors" (Global
Village
8) suggests the
terms,
technology and
metaphor, belong to separate ratios of the
proportional
equation and the analogy is to be read as:
artefact is to extension as metaphor is to
translation.
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If the analogy were to stand alone, his project,
the
translation of artefacts (into media into senses)
through the extension of metaphor would be obliged
to
contend with a counter-motion: the
restriction
of metaphor. The analogy as
artefact
stands to extension so does metaphor to
translation
can not be read back into the
relation of
artefact to extension. Analogy (or metaphor)
is
not an artefact. As a ratio, it is a
relation.
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Etymology comes to the rescue. Relying on
the
Latin term translatio, McLuhan
insists
that it is in the nature of metaphor to move and
metaphor is unavoidable (n7) and likewise, is constant
extension.
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Bolstered by etymology, McLuhan's conception of
metaphor tends to tautology: an extension
is a
translation is a metaphor is an artefact is an
extension. McLuhan does characterize the
arena of
technological development as a closed system (Gutenberg
Galaxy
5).
The constraining circularity confirms the implied
determinism. Since it locks the domain of
techne into that of
logos, it also can vouchsafe the
privileged position of the artist. In
particular,
poets as wordsmiths offer vis-a-vis new
technologies
emulatable attitudes. As McLuhan explains in
From Cliché to Archetype, in
their
capacity as technicians of the word, poets are
capable
of recuperating and refurbishing old means and
meanings.
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By combining a cyclical view of technological
extension
with an expressive theory of language, McLuhan
deflects
the difficulties posed by any consideration of the
role
social organization plays in the mediation between
language and technology. This is
particularly
evident when the extension analogy is accompanied
by
the onomatopoeia
"outering/uttering".
Technology like speech arises magically,
inevitably. In McLuhan's universe discursive
dilation is akin to technological expansion.
However the kinship does not explain the premise
of an
uncontrollable urge to speech.
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Again, rhetorical analysis explains much in
McLuhan's
moves. Puns, etymologies and their similar
operations are examined by Jean Paulhan who
outlines
the generation of proof by etymology as
follows:
attention to sound without regard to
meaning;
discovery of a neglected meaning;
projection of
discovered meaning as the origin and the common
bond of
words so processed (La
Preuve 72-73).
Ironically McLuhan
confounds etymology with aetiology (n8).
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Outering and uttering bespeak another pair:
transformation and transmission. The play of
prefixes and the implicit etymologies involved
affirm a
link subtending McLuhan's notion of extension, a
link
between communication and creation. In
Understanding Media, he writes
"just
as a metaphor transforms and transmits experience
so do
the media" (59).
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The storage function of language, McLuhan derives from Leslie A. White. Its power to alter reality is a commonplace that he himself refigures. Discontinuity (n9), speed (n10), competition (n11), mark McLuhan's thinking about the transformation of experience. None of these concepts are in the passage from White that McLuhan draws upon. Indeed in White experience implies sharing and continuity. Like J.Z. Young he narrates the evolution from trial and error learning to reasoning: Man began his career as an anthropoid who was just learning to talk. He was distinguished from all other animal species by the faculty of articulate speech. It was this faculty which transformed the discontinuous, non-accumulative, non- progressive process of tool-using among the anthropoids into a continuous, cumulative and progressive process in the human species. Articulate speech transformed also, the social organization of this gifted primate, and by the inauguration of co- operation as a way of life and security, opened the door to virtually unlimited social evolution. And, finally, language and speech made it possible for man to accumulate experience and knowledge in a form that made easy transmission and maximum use possible. [our emphasis] (White 240)
Prefacing it by a remark about language as tool
McLuhan
incorporates only the portion italicized above
into his
discourse on transformation and transmission.
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Through language all things are possible, for
McLuhan. Transformation is but the
alternation of
storage and retrieval hence transmission is
transformation. Humans are said to
"possess
an apparatus of transmission and transformation
based
on [their] power to store
experience. And
[their] power to store, as in language
itself,
is also a means of transformation of
experience"
(Gutenburg
Galaxy
x).
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From Cliché to Archetype is devoted to this dynamic. Just as the dynamic of storage and retrieval rings the tones of Augustine's solution to the problem of free will and determination, so the omnipotence accorded language echoes the mystery of a word made flesh (n12): Language is a technology which extends all of the human senses simultaneously. All the other human artifacts are, by comparison, specialist extensions of our physical and mental faculties. Written language at once specializes speech by limiting words to one of the senses. Written speech is an example of such specialism, but the spoken word resonates, involving all the senses. (Cliché 20-21) |
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Like Donne, Traherne and Herbert, authors treated
in
Rosalie Colie's work on Renaissance paradox, a
work
upon which McLuhan relies extensively for
From
Cliché to Archetype, he comes close
to
identifying creator with created. The
paradoxes
of negative theology figured in the English poetic
tradition inform McLuhan's understanding of
acoustic
space in (Laws of
Media
102).
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He states his argument most clearly in an interview with Bruce Powers: The imagination is most creative in acoustic space. Acoustic space has the basic character of a sphere whose focus or "center" is simultaneously everywhere and whose margin is nowhere. A proper place for the birth of metamorphosis. (Global Village 134)
What undoes McLuhan is not the terms but the
argument. He contrasts Euclidean (script and
print) space with acoustic (oral) space. In
McLuhan's principle source on the properties of
acoustic space the term itself does not
appear.
Indeed, F.M. Cornford in "The Invention of
Space" writes "the essential property of
Euclidean space is that it had no centre and no
circumference" (Cornford
219). The
infinite space of
Euclidean
geometry is very like a paradox of negative
theology.
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1.38 |
However no centre is not a centre everywhere. Acoustic space for McLuhan is finite. Where McLuhan goes astray is in his gloss on his quotation from Cornford's remarks on Parmenides's sphere of being: We naturally ask, what is outside this finite sphere of being? Parmenides does not raise the question; apparently it did not occur to him that such a question could be asked. (Cornford 228) McLuhan strongly suggests that Parmenides ear-dominated oral culture did not allow him to ask. "There is no infinity: to the ear faculty, the question is unintelligible" (Laws of Media 35). However, the silence of Parmenides may be scripturally induced rather than determined by oral context. Plato, the recorder, might have a hand in it. Paradoxically, though not uncharacteristically, McLuhan maintains a muteness concerning alternative explanations, in particular that of his authority on paradox, Colie: But not even Parmenides, as Plato's dialogue so ironically suggests, could legislate about speculative subjects: for minds of the dialectical habit, once "being" had been postulated, "not-being" and "nothing" inevitably came to attention. (Colie 220) |
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|
1.39 |
As unasked questions rattle about the perimeter of McLuhan's acoustic space, at its epicentre clinks a masked question. McLuhan brings metaphor into the ambit of acoustic space with the statement that "while common-sense acoustic space held sway, the cosmos was perceived as a resonant and metaphoric structure informed by logos" (Laws of Media 37). To say metaphor's terms are discontinuous yet in ratio to each other is equivalent for McLuhan to saying "that the basic mode of metaphor is resonance and interval the audile-tactile" (Global Village 29). McLuhan cites a passage from De Anima to claim Aristotle pointed out this discontinuity: It follows that the soul is analogous to the hand; for as the hand is a tool of tools, so the mind is the form of forms and sense the form of sensible things. (De Anima III, viii, 432a) The same Aristotelian passage in From Cliché to Archetype "points to the analogy between art and knowledge" and McLuhan adds:
The Aristotelian text does read "The soul is
in a
way all existing things." However, it
continues for several clauses and concludes
"in
what way we must inquire"
(431b).
The answer is not things in
themselves but their forms. Only then,
follows
the hand-soul analogy. However doctored,
Aristotle cannot be made to mention
extension.
That a tool is an extension is a McLuhan
axiom.
He introduces it as he says "by way of
resonance
and repetition". Of course, he cannot
say
his way includes an invisible silence. He
admits
no disappearance nor indicates with suspension
marks,
ellipsis.
|
1.39 |
|
1.40 |
Since McLuhan mixes an anti-visual with an anti- rational bias, the basis for his reification of resonance is the repression of conceptual work. (Global Village 187, n. 14; Cliché 82) In particular McLuhan's reading of quantum mechanics elides the role of abstraction. He ignores the fact that mathematical representations of resonating vibrations are abstractions applicable to either visual or acoustic media. He invokes the technical term "harmonic oscillators" as proof positive of the primordial centrality of sound. He attributes to Linus Pauling the insight of "acoustic and mimetic resonance as the essential structure of matter" (Global Village 187). McLuhan skips a page from the history of science that wave function equations build upon the Hamiltonian analogy between optics and dynamics. Furthermore he neglects the warnings against empirical reduction given by Pauling who writes in The Nature of the Chemical Bond, "It has become conventional to speak of a system as resonating between structures" (10) and he is very clear as to the ontological status of these structures: A substance showing resonance between two or more valence-bond structures does not contain molecules with the configurations and properties usually associated with these structures. The constituent structures of the resonance hybrid do not have reality in this sense. [emphasis in original] (408) |
1.40 |
|
1.41 |
To document more of McLuhan's silent cuts risks
redundancy. Only two other cases require
comment. Both, again, in regard to
extension. Unlike McLuhan's treatment of the
Pauling text, they do not operate on a principle
of
empirical reduction. The following
authorities,
Hass and Emerson, constructed by McLuhan's
citational
practice, operate in his discourse less to
establish
the validity of the concept of extension than to
dress
a pedigree for it.
|
1.41 |
|
1.42 |
What bits and pieces (Laws of
Media 94, 97)
McLuhan quotes
sometimes
indicating ellipsis, sometimes not, from Ralph
Waldo
Emerson's essay "Works and Days" do lend
some
credence to the claim that "the notion is of
respectable age." The title of the
essay, an
allusion to Hesiod, certainly adds to the
impression of
antiquity. However, the figure of Hesiod
does not
function in Emerson's essay to justify work and
tool
use as the primordial essence of human nature but
to
reawaken forgotten appreciation for days, to
harken to
a golden pre-industrial past. Emerson writes
"you must treat the days respectfully, you
must be
a day yourself" (Emerson
180). Each day,
each human
is to be
special. This celebration of the uniqueness
of
the moment and of the individual points to the
possibility of extending holidays rather than
technologies, increasing the time of being human
over
the duration of toiling in order to achieve a
finer
equilibrium between labour and leisure.
|
1.42 |
|
1.43 |
The emancipatory dimension is evident in the
opening
paragraph. It figures a constellation of
Aristotelian notions somewhat differently than
McLuhan's reading of the philosopher's text on the
soul. Drawing on a commonplace in regards to
the
measure of all things, Emerson does consider the
human
body as the template for the development of
tools. He cites the passage from De
Anima referring to the hand as the
instrument of
instruments and the mind as the form of
forms.
However, unlike McLuhan, he treats extension
strictly
analogically. The creation cannot usurp the
creator, in whole or in part. "Machines
can
only second, not supply, his [man's]
unaided
senses" (167). McLuhan
stops short of quoting this sentence. In
his
subsequent reference to Emerson, he omits "If
you
do not use tools, they use you" and fails to
indicate the ellipsis. Where he does
indicate the
ellipsis, the restoration of Emerson's sentence
("The political economist thinks 't [sic] is
doubtful if all the mechanical inventions that
ever
existed have lightened the day's toil of one human
being") challenges not only the utopian tone
of
McLuhan's formulations but also his presumption of
the
natural inevitable drive to technological
innovation.
|
1.43 |
|
1.44 |
Whether or not for McLuhan all tool use is work,
he can
not draw attention to Emerson's separation of work
from
days as the separation addresses the issue of the
control of technology in a fashion diametrically
opposed to his own. Emerson puts technology
in
the sphere of human control; McLuhan,
outside. If in Emerson humans compel others
to
use tools, in McLuhan the compulsion and its
attendant
negative connotations are interiorized.
"To
put it briefly, man cannot trust himself when
using his
own artefacts" (Laws of
Media 95).
|
1.44 |
|
1.45 |
The singular universal human being, lacking the
grace
of control, is figured as incapable of inhibiting
unwanted aggression. In this particular
instance, McLuhan aligns his tale in order to
appropriate into his discourse Konrad Lorenz who
in
On Aggression speculates that human
aggression is a product of the ability, through
tools,
to act at a distance and thus not suffer the
consequences of body to body contact. For
Lorenz
distance is the prerequisite of desensitization
which
enables uncontrolled aggression.
|
1.45 |
|
1.46 |
What McLuhan forgets even as he cites his own
authority
to this effect (Laws
of
Media 96) is that
Lorenz does
supply a
control mechanism. McLuhan does not
distance
himself from the Lorenz statement that
"inventions
and responsibility are both the achievements of
the
same specifically human faculty of asking
questions." Asking questions sounds a
lot
like the activity of dialectic. However
McLuhan
collects authorities rather than asks
questions.
McLuhan does not investigate where or when this
capacity to ask questions, this power of
dialectic, can
be inhibited. Unless, one is to conclude,
as
McLuhan wishes, that technological innovation
itself
triggers an atrophy of reasoning and questioning.
|
1.46 |
|
1.47 |
Despite Lorenz who posits an innate human ability to ask questions, the evolutionary epic as told by McLuhan leads to the disappearance of this very faculty. Such a plot allows McLuhan to state about another of his authorities: One thing Hass overlooks is the absence of biological or psychological means of coping with the effects of our own technical ingenuity. (Laws of Media 95)
Hans Hass in The Human Animal sets
the
beginning of the development of what he terms
"artificial organs" in a prehistoric
anthropoid past. With Emerson, McLuhan
garners
in his terms "a respectable age"
for
the concept of extension itself and with Hass he
gains
an immense temporal span for the phenomenon to
which
the concept refers. It is no coincidence
that
the 19th century Emerson bridge to the ancient
Hesiod
is discussed in a footnote just prior to the
introduction in the body of the text of the 20th
century Hass bridge to the prehistoric.
However,
what McLuhan in his economical clipping fails to
reap
from either Emerson or Hass is precisely what he
claims
Hass overlooks: means of coping.
|
1.47 |
|
1.48 |
Hass indicates in The Human Animal
that
control is acquired and it rests partly with the
brain
(107).
The ability to produce
tools and the control of this ability hinge on
experience (108). Experience
is built out of the temporary nature of
extensions. Since possession of
artificial
organs may be temporary" (106),
the possibility of a comparative judgement
exists. It is this temporariness that
enables
experience to be built up, shared and
judged.
Experience is comprised of a before, an after and
a
during. This triangulation escapes
McLuhan. It is far too akin to a dialectic
for
his dichotomous formulations to accommodate it
well.
|
1.48 |
|
1.49 |
Experience is dialectically structured from out of
moments whiled away with tools and those, without
tools. Furthermore it lives in
expression:
experience communicates the differences between
moments. It mediates between the body and
the
mind. It remains the great untheorized
category
in McLuhan's body of work.
|
1.49 |
|
1.50 |
For Hass we are "the creature with artificial
organs. Our intellect was crucial to this
peculiarity,
but so were our hands, our power of imagination,
and
our persistent curiosity. Only the combined
effects of all these enabled us to transcend the
limitations imposed on our bodily organs" (108).
This statement implies that
mere unconscious physical extension cannot by
itself
repeat the feat of this magnificent
combination.
If transcendence of the limitations of parts of
the
body (note not the body itself) lies by way of
this
particular combination, it is noteworthy that this
combination is taken up reflexively by humans as
experience. Given the temporal
discontinuities
and the complexity involved in the combination,
the
chances of repeating the combination seem
slight.
Since Hass with his emphasis on combination is
tending
towards an ecological and systems theory
framework, it
is but a short step to introduce feedback (a term
and
concept alien though available to McLuhan) to
explain,
as Gregory Bateson does in Steps to an
Ecology of
Mind, social and psychological
development. This leads us to establish an
axiom: experience may not be repeatable but
it
is reapplicable. Experience permits
conscious
reproduction.
|
1.50 |
|
1.51 |
If the combination at the core of human evolution
is
not by substitution equatable to experience or by
some
means accessible to experience, then McLuhan's
antirational pronouncements stand. McLuhan's
setting
the irrational at the heart of the human condition
is
perhaps clearest in his statements on biological
reproduction.
|
1.51 |
|
1.52 |
Theall reads the statements about sexuality and
procreation, in particular about the pill, as
instances
where McLuhan's conservative Catholicism appears
(Theall 44, 60, 226). Although a
technological product, the pill, a synthetic
hormonal
agent, poses problems for McLuhan's
characterization of
the extension of organs as the sine qua non of
technological evolution.
|
1.52 |
|
1.53 |
Catholicism aside, McLuhan's schema copes with a human product that is ingested rather than extended by reading the pill as a regression. It is a technology, for him, that makes man into a 19th century machine (Culture is Our Business 176). Earlier in a 1969 Dewline newsletter he is adamant: The pill promises to turn all people into precise machines, absolutely guaranteed and determined. It is not only a mechanizing force of 19th century intent, but promises to deprive us of one of our few remaining vestiges of humanity. (Dewline 17) He was more ambivalent in 1967 when he discussed the pill in terms of its consequences for women. He claimed that the pill made women into bombs: Just as the Bomb instantly wipes out all the separating boundaries essential to conventional war, the Pill erases the old sexual boundaries in a flash. The Pill makes woman a Bomb. She creates a new kind of fragmentation, separating sexual intercourse from procreation. She also explodes old barriers between the sexes, bringing them closer together. Watch for traditions to fall. (Look 58)
The angst is cathected to a "new kind of
fragmentation". Syntagmatically in
this
text, fragmentation of sex in terms of erotic
activity
leads to the collapse of sexual boundaries in
terms of
gender. The story could be told the other
way: challenges to gender result in a
redefining
of sexual activity.
|
1.53 |
|
1.54 |
Whatever the direction of the narrative, this
erasure
of boundaries should be recuperated by McLuhan's
usual
rhetorical topoi as a return to a putatively
primitive
stage of society. However, despite his
knowledge
of such anthropological works as Mead's Male
and
Female displayed as early as The
Mechanical
Bride (62), McLuhan in his
neotribalism advocates in not so many words the
maintenance of sex-role stereotypes. The
story
he weaves is flawed. He can not foresee the
collapse of boundaries as a moment preceding the
realization of greater and more equal unity and an
overcoming of old fragmentation (gender roles).
|
1.54 |
|
1.55 |
Although one may disagree with his initial
description
and the route his narrative takes, his stance is
not
internally contradictory. It is traditions
that
fall. It is tradition that cements the
aural
tribal culture. It is tradition that 19th
century machines threaten to undo, to fragment.
|
1.55 |
|
1.56 |
The archetype of the fall is echoed in a stated personal inclination for homeostasis: I am not by temperament or conviction, a revolutionary; I would prefer a stable, changeless environment of modest services and human scale. (Playboy interview cited by Theall 45)
If McLuhan's hankering for tradition has
antecedents,
there are no direct citations to prove a link
between
McLuhan and Jung, between the former's conception
of a
rag-and-bone shop of clichés and archetypes
and
the latter's collective unconscious.
|
1.56 |
|
1.57 |
However the rapprochement is to be made in the homologous structure of hypertrophy and retrenchment that both men describe, one in physical, the other in psychic terms. McLuhan claims that an overinvestment of time and attention in one sensory modality leads to its extension and to unbalance that is rectified through amputation: Any invention or technology is an extension or self-amputation of our physical bodies, and such extension also demands new ratios or new equilibriums among the other organs and extensions of the body. (Understanding Media 45) Likewise Jung posits balanced equal development as a desideratum and considers that overinvestment of time and attention in one psychological function requires compensation. The form this takes is amputation: In so far then as every man, as a relatively stable being, possesses all the basic psychological functions, it would be a psychological necessity with a view to perfect adaptation that he should also employ them in equal measure. [...] Through a one-sided (typical) attitude there remains a deficit in the resulting psychological adaptation, which accumulates during the course of life; from this deficiency a derangement of adaptation develops, which forces the subject towards a compensation. But the compensation can be obtained only by means of amputation (sacrifice) of the hitherto one-sided attitude. [emphasis in original] (Psychological Types 28)
Furthermore McLuhan's simultaneous acoustic tribal
space possesses the features of the archaic time
when
there was no individuality, that time Jung
describes
when he often turns to Lévy-Bruhl to claim
that
the effacement of ego boundaries is no new
phenomenon
and that it is related to participation mystique
evinced in "our own barbarian element with
its
primitive collective mentality" (Psychological
Types
106). Accord the
aboriginal
some form of
rationality or remove the stable unchanging female
principle, Jung's and McLuhan's systems of
rigorous
dichotomies and reversals disintegrate. At
stake
is the value of dialectic, in the materialist
sense of
history and in the rhetorical sense of dialogue,
dialectic as explanation and practice.
|
1.57 |
|
1.58 |
Both Jung and McLuhan encourage an aesthetic
depoliticized response to historical change.
Both manage the combined spectre of the primitive
and
of woman, conventional markers of the irrational
and
the uncontrollable, by situating these in the
realm of
the timeless and the unchanging. This
conjunction of a fetish for the irrational and a
fascination for participation mystique is the very
target of a sustained critique by Walter Benjamin,
a
critique essential for Benjamin's meditations on
the
nexus of technology, perception and reproduction.
|
1.58 |
|
1.59 |
In McLuhan's embrace of the participatory
mystique,
technologies appealing to an aural modality reduce
distance. In Benjamin's approach to auratic
art,
technologies that bring artefacts closer to
viewers
undermine participation and enhance critical
distance. In their accounts, the eye-ear
contrast is inflected differently. McLuhan
works
the contrast over an oral-scriptural divide of the
verbal. Benjamin contrasts the pictorial
and the
verbal. Benjamin values the disintegrating
allegorical mode of the word over the symbol as
engrossing image that assembles and unites.
Despite the different histories they construct,
for
both thinkers the historiographic text pivots on
an
iconoclastic test. As well, sexual politics
affect the manner in which the sensory mapping is
applied to historic periodization.
|
1.59 |
|
1.60 |
Benjamin, unlike McLuhan, does not engage in
admiration
for the blessedness of the past. McLuhan's
celebration of oral tribalism is of a piece with
his
ascription of pre-pill sexual relations to a
pre-mechanized world (n13). Benjamin was working well
before
the advent of mass-manufactured oral
contraceptives. However, the division
between
sexuality and procreation that McLuhan in the
1960s
trumpets as a new phenomenon is in the 1930s
endowed by
Benjamin with a reasonable age. Benjamin
during
this period is working on 19th century Paris
the very century condemned by McLuhan
for
what he claims is a move toward mindless
mechanization.
|
1.60 |
|
1.61 |
Sexual politics are intricately meshed with
Benjamin's
refinement of the question of
"experience" in
an environment saturated by the technological
development of media. These considerations
are
interwoven in Benjamin's critique of the auratic
art
object which is in part a polemic against Jung or
rather ideas generally in circulation and
rearticulated
in Jung for Benjamin never completed his intended
critique of the Swiss psychologist (n14).
Benjamin's notion of experience will hinge upon
the
relation of reason (mind) and ecstasy (body)
specifically in the production of knowledge.
As
well he tackles the analogy between the function
of the
symbol as container and woman (soul) as vessel.
|
1.61 |
|
1.62 |
In mining the collection of citations and commentary that is Benjamin's Passagen-Werk to find a passage to juxtapose with Jung's appropriation of Marianism for a universal structure of the psyche (Psychological Types 287) one turns in spirit of contrariness to seek a Magdalene figure in Konvolut O, the file pertaining to prostitution and gambling and one finds there a citation from a pamphlet by Emmanuel Berl: As if the laws of nature, to which love is subjected, were not more tyrannical and more odious than those of society! The metaphysical meaning of sadism is [found in] the hope that human revolt will take on such intensity that it will cast nature into the position of changing its laws that women no longer willing to tolerate the travails of pregnancy, the risks and pain of childbirth, and of abortion, nature will be compelled to invent some other means for man to perpetuate himself on earth (Passagen-Werk O.2.3. 616-617) Note an intervention like abortion is located well within the sphere of nature. Berl does not set nature over and against society. Human suffering is not ennobled by its source. A similar sentiment is detected in the call for sexual and social responsibility in Benjamin's comment: Indeed, the sexual revolt against love, rises up not only from fanatic obsessive sexual desire, it also is intent on making nature submissive and adequate for that [desire]. (Passagen-Werk O.2.3. 617)
For Benjamin these tensions are even clearer in
the
case of prostitution especially when its cynical
turn-
of-the-century Parisian form is viewed "less
as
antithesis than as the decay of love"
(weniger als
Gegensatz denn als Verfall der Liebe).
Benjamin
keeps in tension desire and its
consequences.
Neither is relegated to unconscious process.
In
the background here is the anarcho-feminist
equation of
marriage with prostitution.
|
1.62 |
|
1.63 |
Jung's erotics are quite different. Jung builds
his
Psychological Types upon a basic
dichotomy
between extrovert and introvert. The
reification
of these two postures towards the world into types
leads to atemporal and hence antithetical
formulations. The play of opposites
structures
the psyche. Their union signals
health.
Consequently tension is resolved in the form of a
symbol or mythic image. In Jung, rational
considerations (the consequences of desire) and
bodily
urges (desire) are placed in an antagonistic
relation. Their interaction threatens the
psyche
which itself is construed as a unifying
symbol.
The resolution by union may be patterned on
marriage as
institution for channelling disruptive forces
since
Jung casts the narrative of coming into being of
the
balanced psyche as the withdrawal of libido from
erotic
wish and its direction to social task (282).
|
1.63 |
|
1.64 |
Body and intellect are held in check. The psyche becomes a container, a passive receptacle. It is telling that Jung concludes a discussion of realism and nominalism as respective examples of extroverted and introverted attitudes with the image of a middle way that holds the balance: To the "esse in intellectu" tangible reality is lacking; to the "esse in re" the mind. Idea and thing come together, however, in the psyche of man which holds the balance between them. What would the idea amount to if the psyche did not provide its living value? What would the objective thing be worth if the psyche withheld from it the determining force of the sense impression? What indeed is reality if it is not a reality in ourselves, an "esse in anima"? Living reality is the exclusive product neither of the actual, objective behaviour of things, nor of the formulated idea; rather does it come through the gathering up of both in the living psychological process, through the "esse in anima." Only through the specific vital activity of the psyche does the sense-perception attain that intensity, and the idea that effective force, which are the two indispensable constituents of living reality. (Psychological Types 68)
In his call to intensity, an animating interiority
is
to infuse life into objects be they ideal or
material. The mechanism of the middle way
is
placed "in ourselves". Out of the
mingling of
idea and thing in this place images come into
being.
|
1.64 |
|
1.65 |
Images for Jung are like containers. He devotes much attention to vessel-symbols which are invariably associated with the feminine and edification: This symbolization by means of a mysterious image must be interpreted as a spiritualization of the erotic motive evoked by the service of woman. (291) Like a romance tale, Jung's imperative, the achievement of balance, reads unidirectionally: Against the power and temptation of the temporal, therefore, he must set the joy of the eternal, and against the passion of the sexual, the ecstasy of the spiritual. (280)
The temptation of the temporal is also that of the
relentless movement of thought, asking questions,
refusing contemplation as mystical union.
|
1.65 |
|
1.66 |
Faced with either an introverted movement towards ideas or an extroverted movement towards things, the structure of Jung's symbols or mythic images remains fragile: An effective symbol, therefore, must have a nature that is unimpeachable. It must be the best possible expression of the existing world-philosophy, a container of meaning which cannot be surpassed; its form must also be sufficiently remote from comprehension as to frustrate every attempt of the critical intellect to give any satisfactory account of it; and, finally, its aesthetic appearance must have such a convincing appeal to feeling that no sort of argument can be raised against it on that score. (291)
The symbol's vulnerability results in a dual
task. It must resist intellectual scrutiny
and
exert physical fascination.
|
1.66 |
|
1.67 |
Keeping the body in and the mind out, the image,
the
living symbol, is not only a seductive idol it
also is
inadequate to the symbolization of a psyche that
gathers into itself, in the same psychological
process,
both esse in re and esse
in
intellectu. If one is to be in and
the
other out, there is no gathering together.
|
1.67 |
|
1.68 |
On similar grounds, Benjamin from his Trauerspiel
study
onwards challenged the transcendental claims of
the
symbol. What further distinguishes Jung's
anti-
intellectual attitude to myth from Benjamin's
"quasi-magical cognitive attitude to
historical
matter" is a temporal opposition, as Susan
Buck-
Morss expresses it, between allegorical expression
(eternal passing) and symbolic expression
(fleeting
eternity) (Dialectics of
Seeing 13;19). The
latter is
mute. Citing Creuzer's treatment of symbol
and
mythology, Benjamin explains that in the wake of
the
symbol "all that remains is speechless
wonder" (Trauerspiel
164).
|
1.68 |
|
1.69 |
The arrest of time. The absence of
language. Death hovers here. The
vessel may
be a tomb. In a 1934 essay on Bachofen,
Benjamin
suggests that the structure of the symbol is
related to
matriarchal notions. He stresses that
Bachofen
came to his study of mother-right through that of
funerary symbols. He says that "what
led
Bachofen onto the path from which he would not
stray
were neither his studies nor his acquaintances but
a
turning point in his life as a solitary
traveller"
("Bachofen 36). He
then cites Bachofen on the subject of the latter's
first contacts with ancient tombs. All the
markers of mythic mystery are found: immutable
stability, plenitude, the insufficiency of speech
and
total reliance on the symbol to express
experience.
|
1.69 |
|
1.70 |
Benjamin links such mystical aspects to fascism
("Bachofen" 38). He credits Alfred
Schuler with this appropriation. Schuler
introduced Ludwig Klages to the mother-right
material. Klages adopted the chthonic
elements to
a fascist ideology.
|
1.70 |
|
1.71 |
This is how Benjamin in the Bachofen essay characterizes the work of Klages: In reconstituting the mythic substance of life, the philosopher empowers "originary images" (Urbilder) by saving them from condemnation to oblivion. These images while laying claim to the exterior world are however different from representations. Representations are mixed with the utilitarian perspective and usurpatory claims of mind or feeling [esprit]. Whereas the image exclusively addresses the soul which embracing [the image] in a purely receptive fashion enriches itself through the image's symbolic content. ("Bachofen" 38-39)
Benjamin often pairs the names of Klages and
Jung. Unlike their predecessor Bachofen,
Klages
and Jung sever the chthonic realm of mystery,
source of
mythic images, from the order of culture.
True to
the derivations of mystery, they seal lips.
Silence marks the hiatus between eternal nature
and
passing culture. Language, particularly in
its
interrogative form, is a foe. It is a non-
receptive mode of apprehension. It
seizes.
Destroys. Deactivates.
|
1.71 |
|
1.72 |
In this destructive guise, language is the
instrument
of an awakening. It is an instrument of
allegory. It expresses eternal
passing. In
Benjamin's reading of Bachofen, death is the key
to all
knowledge. Benjamin describes Bachofen as a
prudent mediator between nature and history.
Death is the point where the natural crosses over
into
history and the historical into nature.
|
1.72 |
|
1.73 |
In such a dialectical conception, the alignment
through
the figure of the vessel of the life-giving
feminine
with nature cannot hold. In Benjamin there
is no
marriage of alternating opposites, no silent
partnership. The vessels are broken.
Woman
is not inert. She walks. She is of
history. In his texts relating to the
decline of
the aura, female figures signal elusiveness.
Because they are fleeting, they provoke curiosity
rather than contemplation.
|
1.73 |
|
1.74 |
In his discourse, Benjamin's encounter with photographs of women trigger the elaboration of his musings on aura. In "A Small History of Photography" two descriptions precede the text's statement regarding the discovery of an "optical unconscious" (242-243). They are of photographs. Benjamin contrasts painted pictures with photography. He writes of the urge to narrate, to tell the story of the subjects: this is "something new and strange" that is encountered more in the viewing of photographs than that of paintings. With painted pictures interest in the subject fades and "if they [the paintings] last, they do so only as testimony to the art of the painter" ("Small History" 242). Whether such a distinction can be sustained by a formalist appeal to the medium or more readily ascribed to the hermeneutical orientation of the beholder matters little since for Benjamin either route would lead to this other nature, this optical unconscious. For it is another nature that speaks to the camera than to the eye: other in the sense that a space informed by human consciousness gives way to a space informed by the unconscious. ("Small History" 243)
The ekphrasis that sets in place this conclusion,
this
revelation of another nature, is that of two
photographs of female subjects. What one
glimpses
in this 1931 essay, as well as in the 1934
Bachofen
piece and the early entries in the Passagen-
Werk (n15)
such as the citation from Berl are the
organizational outlines of material which will
permit a
reformulation of the category of experience in
more
materialist terms contra Klages and Jung.
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The 1931 text "A Small History of Photography" cannot be read as response to Jung and company except in the manner Benjamin himself reads photographs. He is not seeking the silence of the symbol but "the inconspicuous spot where in the immediacy of that long-forgotten moment the future subsists so eloquently" ("Small History" 243). The first function of the female figure in Jung's account is to trigger erotic stirrings. Similarly, Benjamin sees the Newhaven fishwife's "seductive modesty" as "something that cannot be silenced, that fills you with an unruly desire to know" ("Small History" 242). It is the name and the live woman, he wants to know. Both Jung and Benjamin universalize this desire. However, if for Jung this desire is caught up by the vessel-symbol which is the second function of the figure and through which the happy ending of conducting sexual energy to social task ensues, this is not so in Benjamin. His second subject recalls the catastrophe that awaits real historical subjects if the erotic, that fanatic obsessive sexual desire, faces an unmodified nature. That which cannot be silenced is the catastrophe: Or you turn up the picture of Dauthendey the photographer, the father of the poet, from the time of his engagement to that woman whom he found one day, shortly after the birth of her sixth child, lying in the bedroom of his Moscow house with her arteries severed. Here she can be seen with him, he seems to be holding her; but her gaze passes him by, absorbed in an ominous distance. ("Small History" 243) |
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For Benjamin, unlike Jung, there is no eternal
Mother. There is no bosom enfolding timeless
moments. Just as in the mind of the
photograph
viewer the represented couple cannot hold together
in
an unnegated unity so too the relation between
viewer
and photograph is dialectical. The apparatus
mediates that relation.
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Benjamin's gesture is one of interpretive
mimesis. His approach recreates the workings
of
the technical apparatus under scrutiny. The
photograph enlarges segments of reality.
Cinematic slow motion even segments reality into
hitherto unnoticed parts. They bring reality
closer. Likewise to restore time to the
photograph is to bring it closer.
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It is perhaps more appropriate to characterize
this
play of proxemics in terms of unlocking time or
cutting
time free since in this essay Benjamin in his
definition of aura sees time as strangely woven
into
space to create the appearance of distance.
Whatever the characterization, it is movement
through
space that destroys the timeless aspect of aura
("Small History" 250).
Aura arises out of observer immersion in the
phenomenon. Later in the Artwork essay (n16)
Benjamin will stress the role of cultic practices
in
maintaining the contemplation necessary to sustain
aura. However here in A Small History
of
Photography" he accentuates the
atmosphere-like
quality; aura is breathed in (250).
This quality is related to
the factor of enfolded time the
moment or
hour becoming part of the appearance.
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How aura as atmosphere can be related to enfolded
time
is not at all clear from Benjamin's text. In
later essays, he drops from the discussion all
direct
mention of these two elements. The
correlation
between time and atmosphere passes through a
mechanism
of identification similar to the vessel-symbol of
the
Jungian soul. Whether Benjamin had read Jung
at
this point, it is clear that the auratic fusion of
viewer and object places his discussion in the
orbit of
exponents of mythic images like Klages.
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The Artwork essay is marked by the traces of the
work
on Bachofen and mother-right. Benjamin
compares
early photography to the cult of remembrance of
the
dead ("Artwork" 226).
As well, although without reference to grave
robbing,
he refers to the destruction of aura when objects
are
pried from their shell ("Artwork" 223). These
passing references evoke less Bachofen's narrative
of
his first experiences upon encountering ancient
graves
than Schuler's story of his own first encounter
with
unearthed artefacts.
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Schuler observing objects lifted from an
archaeological
excavation notes that as they come to light they
loose
their aura (der Hauch). It evaporates.
Schuler claimed that a fluid, a film of life
matter,
was possessed not only by relics and cult objects
but
also by all ancient objects (Fuld
361-362). Benjamin
could not
refer to a
written source for Schuler's lectures and
fragments
were published posthumously by Klages in
1940.
However, it is the type of material that would
circulate widely as anecdote. The evidence
is
compelling that Benjamin observed carefully the
Munich
circle around poet Stefan George of which Alfred
Schuler was a celebrated part (Fuld
360). Indeed in the
Bachofen
essay Benjamin
refers to George's dedication of Porta
Nigra to Schuler ("Bachofen" 38).
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The Schuler story perhaps did not influence
Benjamin
directly. Its key element, however, the
fragility
of the aura in the context of unearthing the past
anticipates Benjamin's insistence on displacement
in
the destruction of aura. It also illuminates
the
perplexing combination of aura's source in ritual
and
in natural phenomena. It is upon the cult of
the
dead that mythic claims to a people's belonging to
the
land are founded. Without symbols such a
cult is
endangered. It is unable to envelop the
departed,
those now belonging to nature, and those belonging
to
history, the living, into one cognitive
space.
The past is not one with the present.
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Likewise, estrangement disarms myth. It
disrupts
the link between human beings and their
surroundings. (Small
History" 251).
Benjamin
points to the
photographs of Atget. They are of deserted
streets and locales. They are void of any
human
figures. Benjamin notes that this makes them
unlikely to provoke mythic or auratic
phenomena.
Identification appears to be the key for the
production
of aura. Furthermore the success of the
identificatory movement relies on the suppression
of
consciousness.
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The question of consciousness will gain importance
in
Benjamin's later essays that broach the topic of
aura
after he has been called upon to distinguish his
position from that of Jung. The Swiss
psychologist defines the soul in two ways:
as a
relation to the unconscious and as a
personification of
the contents of the unconscious (Psychological
Types
306). The privileged
personifications are
feminine. For Jung the earth in the mythic
form
of the mother is the source of all power (302). He
also claims that phantasy
is the mother of all (69).
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Upon viewing photographs, especially those of
female
subjects, Benjamin's stress is on the desire for
narration which arguably can slip if not into
personification proper then into
identification.
Of course as a new and strange optical unconscious
is
opened up by the camera there is nothing inherent
in
the apparatus to prevent personification, however
muted, to drive the storytelling. The
pregnant
pause of the still shot, especially read as
continuing
past and future, does not envelop but does
capture, in
Benjamin's case mesmerize, the viewer.
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Adorno's critique comes to mind. A 1935
letter
from Adorno critiques Benjamin's use in the
Arcades
project proposal of a concept of collective
unconscious. Adorno not only holds that it
is
difficult to distinguish such a concept from a
similar
one in Jung but also that such a move ignores the
role
of commodity production in the shaping of
dialectical,
as opposed to mythic, images (n17).
Benjamin will reformulate the category of
experience in
more materialist terms. Such a move is
accompanied by the eclipse of female figures in
his
discourse.
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In a later essay Benjamin acknowledges that
"experience of the aura thus rests on the
transposition of a response common to human
relationships to the relationships between the
inanimate or natural object and man"
("Motifs" 188). It is in this
transposability that Benjamin grounds a
distinction
between types of experience, between
Erlebnis and
Erfahrung. He sets as
contrary
impulses the opposite movements of the
transposition: the inclination to objectify
the
human against that of anthropomorphising the
world. Benjamin's investigation comes to
rest in
this dichotomy. To go beyond would be to
examine
and confront transposability itself.
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A similar move is discernible in the Artwork essay
where the aura of historical objects is explained
using
the same examples from the realm of nature
(mountain
range and shadow of a branch) as found in "A
Small
History of Photography" but the factor of
enfolded
time is now absent ("Artwork" 222-223).
Distance is the
only operative term
to remain. Also absent a
possible
effect of Adorno's critique of Benjamin's
similarity to
Jung are female figures.
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They will reappear after the personification-
objectification problematic has been displaced by
the
Erfahrung-Erlebnis dichotomy. Woman is a
striking
figure of the uncontrollable in Benjamin's
Baudelaire
essays. For example, the figure appears in a
single sonnet as the "vase de
tristesse", the
fleeing one, the ornament of the poet's
nights.
Benjamin reads the figure as a challenge to love
"sated with the experience of the aura"
("Motifs" 189). However
this description is oddly like the figure of woman
taken up by mythographers like Klages and Jung for
whom
it is both natural object and human being and in
this
combination outside rational grasp. The
difference lies in the ascription of
function.
For the one position such figures are the markers
of
the shocks served by life in a modern
metropolis;
for the other, the potential to cushion them.
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Shock is the point of departure for Benjamin's
distinction between Erlebnis and Erfahrung ("Motifs"
163). Erfahrung
is experience as part of the self. Like aura
in
an age of technical reproduction it is
waning. It
is related to practice in artisan
manufacture. This is contrasted with greater
emphasis on drill in mechanized
work
settings. Erlebnis, as experience
disconnected
from the self, experience lived through, is a
response
to modern urban conditions as thematized by the
jostling crowd.
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Experiential modes constrained by conditions of
perception in the sphere of productive activity
can be
aligned with those modes created by
consumption.
To render the relation between self and world,
cultural
consumption in Benjaminian discourse employs its
own
vocabulary: distraction and concentration.
|
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At the conclusion of the Artwork essay the
absorption
of the viewer by the object is expressed in terms
of
the concentration of the gaze. Distraction
is the
alternative mode. To explain it, Benjamin
turns
to the perception of architecture and haptic habit
where the object is absorbed. In this
discourse
optical perception cannot be habitual as it may be
in
older ray theories of vision. It is not
clear
whether the assumption of the untranslatability of
sensory modes grounds itself in the distinction of
modes of experience or vice versa.
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The unbridgeable gap between sensory modes
maintains
the undialectical treatment of the problematic of
absorption. It radically dichotomizes the
relation between human self and environment.
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When determinism and dichotomy are discursive
partners, the truism that experience is made and
it is
affected by environment can lead to accounts of
the
relation of technology to perception where mimetic
response is the sum total of experience.
However,
humans have the capacity to change their
environments
and themselves. Both Benjamin and McLuhan
recognize this. At times they both forget
it. The points where the sexual politics of
biological and social reproduction surface in
their
work offer places from which to begin to judge how
fully each integrates this intuition concerning
the
dialectical relation of nature and history into
theory
making.
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Furthermore the absence of that elusive conversion device for sensory modalities hinders theorizing about interaction. Be it transposability of personification-objectification in Benjamin's play of proxemics or McLuhan's prosthetic metaphor recycling and chiasmic reversals, in limiting the possibility of sensory transcoding, both thinkers approach movement and change in a dichotomous fashion. The division between the temporal and spatial arts stands unmoved. So too, remain unchallenged the sensory biases at work in the dyadic models of reproductive politic. |
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