Prosthetic Culture

Celia Lury

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781134851027
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Sociología

In a fascinating account of how technology is altering our consciousness, Celia Lury shows how the manipulation of photographic images and ways of seeing can so redefine the relation between consciousness, the body and memory as to create a 'prosthetic culture' whose capacities both extend and threaten our humanity.We live in a society in which some memories can be falsely implanted in the individual while others are stored in video archives of images, in which the powers of cartoon superheroes break through the limitations of time and space. Using the examples of photo-therapy, family albums, Benetton advertising campaigns, the phenomenon of false memory syndrome and the 'lives' of cartoon characters this book argues that the 'eyes' made available by contemporary visual technologies involve not simply specific ways of seeing, but also ways of life.

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IDENTITY AND PROSTHETIC CULTURE

Only the future has developers at its disposal that are strong enough to bring forth the image in all of its details.

(Walter Benjamin, quoted in McCole, 1993:290)

Conceptions of the person, self-identity, the individual and human nature are neither self-evident nor immutable building blocks of which societies are built (Stolcke, 1993). Moreover, there is no natural one to one correspondence between the person, self-identity and the individual. This is illustrated by Marilyn Strathern (1988), among others, who explicitly contrasts the partible, multiply constituted person of Melanesia, from whom aspects of identity may be detached, with the ideal construct of the self-determined, free-standing, integral individual of what she calls Euro-American societies. This notion of the unique, free, self-determining and responsible individual is, moreover, historically specific even within Euro-American societies, dating from the Renaissance and undergoing consolidation with the Enlightenment. Furthermore, the individual is by no means an identity that has been made available to all, even in contemporary Euro-American societies. Rather, the self-determined individual has been an enabling myth of such societies, a myth whose apparent universalism obscures its dependency upon practices of exclusion and principles of hierarchical classification.

In this book, I will consider some of the changing ways in which self-identity is constituted as a possession of the individual (and thus of some more than other people) in contemporary Euro-American societies. The idea that liberal democratic societies have encouraged a kind of possessive individualism, in which a free, self-determining and self-responsible identity is constituted as a property, is not new.¹ However, I will suggest that the terms of such self-possession are currently being renegotiated in a process of experimentation in what will be called a prosthetic culture. In the chapters that follow I argue that the adoption of experimentation as a technique of the self makes possible a relation to the individual so produced (including the previously defining characteristics of consciousness, memory and embodiment) in which aspects that have previously seemed (naturally or socially) fixed, immutable or beyond will or self-control are increasingly made sites of strategic decision-making, matters of technique or experimentation. Through experimentation, then, the previously automatic is converted into the volitional, the unconscious is brought into view, the forgotten is recalled and lack of control or responsibility over the self is converted into intentions, subject to calculation, risk-taking and the apparently never-ending exercise of will.² The tendency towards experimentation thus has widespread implications for contemporary understandings of agency, responsibility, the allocation of guilt, blame and virtue, the ascription of rights to the individual (and the exclusion of some people from this identity), and for recognitions of belonging, collective identification and exclusion. Transformations in these attributes of character and belonging both draw upon and refigure the modern category of the legal personality. Prosthetic culture thus provides a novel context for understandings of the person and of self-identity.

The focus of this analysis of prosthetic culture is photography and its subjecteffects. Photography was chosen because of a wish to redress, to some small degree at least, the extent to which the significance of the visual image for understandings of the person in Euro-American societies has been tainted by what Jay (1994) calls the ‘denigration of vision’.³ While there is a long-standing and growing literature on the subject-effects of narrative,⁴ the significance of the image for understandings of the self in modern Euro-American societies still remains somewhat under-developed, tending to become subsumed within more general discussions of postmodern culture. And this despite the recent proliferation of technologies of visualisation and the widely accepted claim that visibility is an imperative of contemporary life.⁵ However, one of the starting-points of this book is that vision and self-knowledge have become inextricably and productively intertwined in modern Euro-American societies; photography—itself not a static apparatus—thus offers one way into an exploration of the historically specific and dynamic relations between seeing and knowing.⁶ More specifically, the book asks how the photographic image may have contributed to novel configurations of personhood, self-knowledge and truth. It does so by examining specific photographs and their uses, by discussing a number of commentaries by photographers and critics, and by identifying and elaborating some of the subject-effects of seeing photographically in contemporary culture. The assumption here, then, is that the photograph, more than merely representing, has taught us a way of seeing (Ihde, 1995), and that this way of seeing has transformed contemporary self-understandings.

Chapter 2 seeks to outline a theoretical framework within which some of these transformations might be located, and introduces the idea that a prosthetic culture is beginning to emerge in Euro-American societies. The suggestion put forward here is that in this culture the subject as individual passes beyond the mirror stage of self-knowledge, of reflection of self, into that of self-extension, what Barthes calls ‘the advent of myself as other’ (1981:12). The prosthesisand it may be perceptual or mechanical—is what makes this self-extension possible. In adopting/adapting a prosthesis, the person creates (or is created by) a self-identity that is no longer defined by the edict ‘I think, therefore I am’; rather, he or she is constituted in the relation ‘I can, therefore I am’. In the mediated extension of capability that ensues, the relations between consciousness, memory and the body that had defined the possessive individual as a legal personality are experimentally dis- and re-assembled.

The photographic image plays a key role here in that it is one of the techniques that enables a refiguring of the conventional relations through which the previous self-understanding of the possessive individual had been secured. It does this through its abilities to frame, freeze and fix its objects. The framing of the image, it is argued, does not simply change the context of the object seen, but encourages a view of the object as if it could be seen from all positions at once, as if in a spatial continuum (Kracauer, 1995). This is described here as a process of outcontextualisation, as contexts are multiplied and rendered a matter of apparent choice or selective framing, while the photograph's ability to freeze and fix its objects is seen to have contributed to a process of indifferentiation, that is, the disappearance or infilling of the distance between cause and effect, object and subject. These processes have a distinctive temporality; more specifically, the freezing of time creates a dimension in which the future perfect of the photographic image—this will have been—may be suspended, manipulated and reworked to become the past perfected (Tyler, 1994). Retrodictive prophecy is thus identified as a key aspect of the power of the image in prosthetic culture. Together the processes of outcontextualisation and indifferentiation are seen to have encouraged an experimental individualism in which the subject is increasingly able to lay claim to features of the context or environment as if they were the outcome of the testing of his or her personal capacities.

Chapters 3 and 4 explore some aspects of the history of photography and raise some points about the use of the photograph in defining self-identity in general terms. They look at the ways in which the photograph has been used to map humankind, as individuals, as types or genres of humans, as well as a species. Chapter 3 focuses on a shift in portraiture from representations of human difference in terms of variety to those of diversity, ending with an analysis of the continuities and contrasts between the 1955 photographic exhibition ‘The Family of Man’ and the contemporary advertising campaigns of the fashion clothing company Benetton. Diversity, it is argued, is represented in the latter not as a form of variation within a social and/or natural type, but as the containment of difference through the alienation of type, the estrangement of genre. The privileging of diversity is thus part of what Baudrillard (1994) describes as the move from generic to genetic man and results in what has elsewhere been called the serial or substitutable individual but is described here as the transparent individual. This is the ideal of an individual without the narrative continuity of memory, lacking interiority and depth, who is instead flexibly constituted across contexts through a strategic display or performance of the effects of indifferentiation, adopting motives and claiming effects without regard for the conventional requirements of narrative coherence. In chapter 4, the notion of a prosthetic biography is introduced to describe such performative self-understandings. The photographic portrait, with its distinctive invitation to ‘become what you are’, is seen to offer an important source for such biographies. However, the chapter also suggests that at the same time that prosthetic culture encourages a belief in the individual's right to be recognised as unique (Taylor, 1989, 1992) and thus is a further stage in the consolidation of possessive individualism, the prosthetic device of the photographic image is simultaneously able to make evident ‘a kind of intractable supplement of identity’ (Barthes, 1981:109). This supplement—what Benjamin calls ‘the image's lack of appearance, its inability or refusal to shore up appearance’ (Abbas, 1989:54)—thickens and renders murky the assumed transparency of the self-identity of the possessive individual.

Chapters 5 and 6 are concerned with the phenomenon of false memory syndrome. The aim here is to explore a specific instance of how the conventional narrative techniques of the self involved in the authorship of a continuous biography—including those of memory—are currently being refigured in relation to the power of the image. False memory syndrome is thus approached as an index of the ways in which seeing photographically does not just inform the use of photographs in representations of the individual and human difference, but also informs—indirectly—transformations in self-identity that appear, at least initially, to have nothing to do with photographs or images. These transformations are explored through a comparison of the technics of anaesthetics (Buck-Morss, 1992) of the early twentieth century with the prosthetic culture that characterises its end. The goal, it is argued, is now not simply to numb the synaesthetic system (or bodily logic of sense) but simultaneously to numb and animate it anew, both to deaden the senses and also to reawaken them, to repress memory and also to recover it. Prosthetic culture is thus seen to have ambivalent implications for self-identity, disturbing relations between the body, memory and consciousness, leaving them open to multiple refigurings and redrawing the lines of sexual difference.

The impact of digitalisation on the power of the image in self-understandings is the subject of chapters 7 and 8. Through a consideration of the biographies of non-dimensional personalities, the movement of cartoon figures and the memories of cyborgs, the question of the existence of an optical unconscious (Benjamin, 1970) is addressed. The concern here is to identify whether or not the potential of prosthetic culture has been entirely recuperated with the contemporary proliferation of visual technologies. In particular, attention is focused on the capacity to intervene in the time of exposure (Virilio, 1994) offered by digitalisation and computer-aided photography. The question at issue is whether the reversal of the relations of motivation between the referent and the signifier made more persuasive by digitalisation have rendered the distinctions between the human and the inhuman, the material and the immaterial, life and art, redundant. It is argued that while this reversal facilitates outcontextualisation and indifferentiation and feeds the ambition of the signifier to replace or reincarnate the thing it represents, the outcome of the process of reversal of motivation is not always already given, and that seeing photographically continues to make possible an optical unconscious that disturbs the functioning of this reversal.

Central to the arguments in each chapter is the notion of mimesis. The term is adopted and adapted from the writings of Walter Benjamin, in which it refers to the compulsion ‘to become and behave like something else’. It is a relation of ‘making oneself similar to the environment’; the ‘nature that culture uses to create second nature, the faculty to copy, imitate, make models, explore difference’ (Taussig, 1993:xiii). The book argues that mimesis is central to the changing role of aesthetics in the shift outlined above from a technics of anaesthetics to a culture of prosthetics. More specifically, the mimesis involved in seeing photographically is understood as provoking a bodily mediation in immediacy, a mediation that is both metamorphosis and coincidence. It is a metonymic relation operating both within and outside representation, within and outside the frame, and has the potential to enable a dissociation of the senses that disturbs the coherence of the individual for it is concerned with sensation that escapes the subject of representation.

As described above, the book explores how this potential to disturb is taking shape in the context of contemporary visual technologies: as Buck-Morss notes, they provide ‘a new schooling for our mimetic powers’ (1991:267).⁷ In particular, it identifies some of the political implications for self-identity and understandings of nature and society of the emergent options of perfection-seeking homeostasis (or autopoiesis) and blind imitation. In the former, it is argued, mimesis is reduced to the imitation of versions of itse...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• 1 IDENTITY AND PROSTHETIC CULTURE
• 2 THE EXPERIMENTAL INDIVIDUAL
• 3 THE FAMILY OF MAN
• 4 BECOME WHAT YOU ARE
• 5 REMEMBER ME
• 6 SEEING YOU, SEEING ME, SEEING PHOTOGRAPHICALLY
• 7 MOVEMENT AND THE BODY OF PHOTOGRAPHY
• 8 HUMANS, NON-HUMANS AND HEROES
• 9 THE ETHICS OF SEEING PHOTOGRAPHICALLY
• Bibliography
• Index