Perverts and Prosthetics: Alison Landsberg on Memory, Imagination and Cinema

Historically, film theory has understood cinema as a kind of pervert art that, in the words of Slavoj Zizek in his moderately successful The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema, “doesn’t give you what you desire [but]  tells you how to desire (The Pervert’s Guide to the Cinema, directed by Sophie Fiennes, P Guide Ltd., 2006, opening scene.)” Understood in this way, cinema functions as an ideological apparatus exerting a shaping force upon culture through imagistic discourse. More recent scholarship has pushed this analysis in an ethical direction by suggesting that cinema functions as a prosthetic memory where previously unknown experiences of others become part of the viewer’s experiential archive. However, memory, at its most fundamental level, is image-dependent and therefore cinema can also be understood as a prosthetic imagination. Cinema is after all, a technology of representation where the camera inserts itself between reality and our gaze.

Alison Landsberg has highlighted the way modern technologies of mass culture, like film, function as prosthetic memories (Landsberg, Alison, Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture, New York: Columbia University Press, 2004, 1.) According to Landsberg, “the unprecedented movement of peoples brought about by modernity” and “the emergence of mass culture” provided the foundations for the commodification of mass culture through technologies like film (Ibid., 2.) As a consequence, memory became transportable through the “circulation of images and narratives about the past (Ibid., 2.)” This emerging form of memory prostheticized in cinematic technology offered the possibility of an “interface between a person and a historical narrative about the past, at an experiential site (Ibid., 2.)” This new form of memory challenges the notion of memory as historically or culturally specific and gives rise to a transcultural and transhistorical understanding of memory. For Landsberg, the emergence of prosthetic memory, far from being simply a vehicle of ideology, bears the ethical, social and political potential for “unexpected alliances across chasms of difference (Ibid., 3.)”

She compares the use of prosthetic memories to the practice of memorizing texts in the Middle Ages where a person “was to digest, ruminate on, and ultimately incorporate the text’s meanings into his or her own archive of experience (Ibid., 4.)” Texts became a source for ethical development. In a similar way, prosthetic memory, in technologies of mass culture like film have the ethical potential “to encourage people to feel connected to, while recognizing the alterity, of the ‘other (Ibid., 9.)” How is this possible given the obvious physical, historical, social, and cultural disengagements? Landsberg explains her understanding of the way prosthetic memories function in the following way:

With prosthetic memory, as with earlier forms of remembrance, people are invited to take on memories of a past through which they did not live. Some of the strategies and techniques for acquiring memories are similar, too. Memory remains sensuous phenomenon experienced by the body, and it continues to derive much of its power through affect. But unlike its precursors, prosthetic memory has the ability to challenge the essentialist logic of many group identities. Mass culture makes particular memories more widely available, so that people who have no “natural” claim to them might nevertheless incorporate them into their own archive of experience (Ibid., 8-9.)

Memories, prostheticized in the cinematic apparatus and mediated through images, are experienced bodily through sight and sound. As such, it is possible to conceive of cinema as “a site in which people experience a bodily, mimetic encounter with a past that was not actually theirs” and where “spectators suture themselves to history, to develop prosthetic memories (Ibid., 14.)” The process of suturing an audience to historical experiences suggests the ethical dangers and potentials of cinematic representations. What aspects of the historical experience will be concealed and what aspects will be preserved? What impact will these representational decisions have on the audience?

Landsberg’s construal of film as a prosthetic memory recognizes that there is an imagistic grammar in the filmic discourse operating in the cinematic apparatus, which as a determinative technology,  shapes culture and positions the spectator ideologically. But Landsberg also views the spectator as an individual, communally situated within the cinematic apparatus and is therefore able to argue that films function as prosthetic memories at the intersection of the individual and the community. She explains:

Prosthetic memories are neither purely individual nor entirely collective but emerge at the interface of individual and collective experience. They are privately felt public memories that develop after an encounter with a mass cultural representation of the past, when new images and ideas come into contact with a person’s own archive of experience (Ibid., 19.)”

Understood in this way, films are not “capsules of meaning that spectators swallow wholesale but are the grounds on which social meanings are negotiated, contested and sometimes constructed (Ibid., 21.)” Cinema is not a pervert art but rather a mimetic art that functions prosthetically. Films as prosthetic memories can therefore become the “basis for mediated collective identification and the production of potentially counter hegemonic public spheres,” which serves as “a powerful corrective to identity politics (Ibid., 21.)”

Landsberg does extend her analysis in an interesting direction by characterizing cinema as a prosthetic imagination; however, her treatment of this characterization is minimal. She argues that American cinema has functioned as a prosthetic imagination for immigrants by allowing them to imagine themselves as “typical Americans” by suturing themselves to the representations of America’s past represented in film (Ibid., 56.) While Landsberg recognizes how film can function as a medium for imagining new social identities, she fails to note the connection between memory and imagination. Memory is after all, image-dependent at its most fundamental level and therefore can be understood as a re-presentation, involving a reimaging of the past and therefore imagination. Cinema as a prosthetic apparatus is primarily imaginative and only secondarily mimetic.