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.

Why I Don’t Swear: An Argument for Decent Language

Let me begin by saying “I don’t swear.” That is to say, I am not accustomed to using the common vulgarities that serve to punctuate modern social discourse. This might seem to be a morally pretentious statement, but I would argue that it is grounded on a fundamental philosophical insight given by Aristotle in a passage from his Politics. The passage is worth quoting in its entirety:

Now, that man is more of a political animal than bees or any other gregarious animals is evident. Nature, as we often say, makes nothing in vain, and man is the only animal who has the gift of speech. And where as voice is but an indication of pleasure or pain, and is therefore found in other animals (for their nature attains to the perception of pleasure and pain and intimation of them to one another, and no further), the power of speech is intended to set forth the expedient and inexpedient, and therefore likewise the just and unjust. And it is a characteristic of man that he alone has any sense of good and evil, of just and unjust, and the like and the association of living beings who have this sense makes a family and a state (Aristotle, Politics, Book I, 1253a.1-19 – Emphasis mine.)

Aristotle made a distinction between voice and language. A voice is merely sound indicating pleasure or pain, but language has political and ethical dimensions. Language is a means by which human beings make distinctions between good and evil, just and unjust. “Language”, as my professor Dr. Robert E. Wood likes to say, “is reason laying down its tracks in a system of signs.” Reason cannot fully articulate itself in the sound of a voice. It needs the more refined mode of signs, in the form of letters that form words which can be strung together in meaningful patterns or sentences, which can be multiplied endlessly to create discourse.

The problem with swearing is that it is more voice than language, more animal than human. Swear words are not chosen for the meaning they convey, but rather for their impact. Swearing is used to punctuate and emphasize discourse in the same way that exclamation marks function. Swearing is a base form of communication that indicates “perception of pleasure and pain.” It is akin to the barking of a dog, the howling of a wolf, or the crowing of a rooster. Swearing isn’t meant to mean anything. It is simply meant to make an impression. The swearing that passes for language in modern social discourse is essentially a counterfeit language that heralds a de-volution of the human subject to a more animal state. After all, as Aristotle points out, human beings have language but animals have only voice. The reliance on swear words to punctuate and emphasize discourse reveals an undeveloped vocabulary and the failure of human reason and this failure has political and ethical ramifications.

Later in the Politics, Aristotle connects indecent speech to indecent action and gives his most virulent opposition to its practice:

Indeed, there is nothing which the legislator should be more careful to drive away than indecency of speech; for the light of utterance of shameful words leads soon to shameful actions. The young especially should never be allowed to repeat or hear anything of the sort. A freemen who is found saying or doing what is forbidden, if he be too young as yet to have the privilege of reclining at he public tables, should be disgraced and beaten, and an elder person degraded as his slavish conduct deserves (Aristotle, Politics, Book VIII, 1336b.14-11 Emphasis mine.)

While Aristotle’s suggestion of penalties for those uttering “shameful words” is hardly defensible in a modern context, his point is clear and instructive: the language we use creates an ethical framework for action. Isn’t it clear, that thought takes form in language and language becomes an environment in which human activity takes place? One example of this might be the way “hate speech” functions to create unsafe environments for “outsiders” and cultivates animosity towards them in those who employ this type of speech. Swearing is similar. Using swear words to communicate in sound what cannot be articulated in language can lead to behavior that is fueled by passion rather than reason. One need only consider how often unethical behavior is preceded by “F- it!”, or something similar, which serves to cut-off the psychic disturbances of fear, anxiety or guilt.

Now, I anticipate that some of my readers will argue that placing limitations on language is tantamount to censorship and cultural tyranny, and I sympathize with the underlying sentiment in this objection. However, I am also persuaded with Slavoj Zizek, that “Our freedom of choice effectively often functions as a mere formal gesture of consent to our own oppression and exploitation (Zizek, Violence: Six Sideways Reflections, 147.)” The descent of the human subject from language to voice in the act of swearing is a consent to limitations, not a freedom from them. To shout obscenities in public, or season regular discourse with generous “f-bombs”, reveals one’s limitations, not one’s freedom. To have a command of language and to choose among the many words and patterns available to the rational being, is an exercise in freedom. To bark expletives rather than searching for the most appropriate word to express what one is thinking is an exercise in intellectual laziness that is the first symptom of the fall of man.

Zizek’s Retreat

Slavoj Zizek’s response to subjective and objective violence is critical disengagement. That is to say, Zizek advocates withdrawing from the global arena of violence in order to think about and study the why before deciding on a how. He writes:

A critical analysis of the present global constellation – one which offers no clear solution, no “practical” advice on what to do, and provides no light at the end of the tunnel, since one is well aware that this light might belong to a train crashing towards us – usually meets with the reproach: “Do you mean we should do nothing? Just sit and wait?” One should gather the courage to answer: “YES, precisely that!” There are situations when the only truly “practical” thing to do is to resist the temptation to engage immediately and to “wait and see” by means of patient, critical analysis (Zizek, Slavoj, Violence, 7.)

Zizek’s response to the global apparatus of violence, while philosophically appealing, is ethically reprehensible. Wasn’t this the approach of the Allies in World War II? Didn’t the U.S. want to conduct a more complete study of claims that the Nazi’s were utilizing trains to transport millions of people to Polish death camps for extermination? The Allies did “wait and see” and what they saw when they finally decided to act was the horrific scrawl of genocide writ large. The apparatus that orients and determines subjective and objective violence must be dismantled, not subjected to critical analysis. The luxury of an intellectual retreat is afforded only to the one whose neck is free from the boot of the oppressor.

To Zizek’s credit, he does offer hope of arriving at a solution to violence at some point. His retreat is not eternal, but merely indefinite. However, in the interim, people will suffer and die from monstrous violence at the hands of human agents and oppressive systems. Perhaps, Zizek can live with the stacks of corpses and mass graves that accumulate from “waiting to see,” I cannot. Edmund Burke offers a poignant warning for Zizek: The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.

I invite your comments and corrections.

Der Muselmanner: Witness of the Lacuna

Giorgio Agamben has suggested der Muselmanner as an ethical cipher for the concentration camps of Nazi Germany. He refers to the concentration camps as an extreme situation; using the juridical sense of the term where a judge uses an extreme situation or state of exception “for the foundation and definition of the normal legal order (Agamben, Giorgio, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, 1999, 48).” The concentration camps can therefore serve as a determinative paradigm for what his inhuman and what is human, and the Muselmann is the cipher for this determination. The Muselmann (the Muslim), so called because in his stooped and folded posture he resembled a Muslim at prayer, but also because the Arabic word muslim means “the one who submits unconditionally to the will of God (Agamben, 45)” were inmates in the camps who had given up. They had submitted to the will of the Nazis and become “the living dead” who were certain candidates for the gas chambers (Agamben, 51). They were walking symbols of the fate of every inmate and therefore the pariah of the camps. Some were so close to death that they no longer responded to the hunger impulse while others did not even respond to beatings given by the guards (Agamben, 42). Most inmates avoided the Muselmann and held them in disdain because what was at stake in the camps was to survive unchanged as a person and the Muselmann, by giving up, had “marked the moving threshold in which man passed into non-man (Agamben, 47).” And yet the Muselmann is an enigma standing on the border between life and death, a third realm between the human and the inhuman (Agamben, 48). It is precisely for this reason that the Muselmann are for Agamben, the “complete witness” of the camps (Agamben, 47). It is impossible to give an account of the horror of the camps. Only the dead can bear witness to this extreme situation. The survivors claim only to testify in their stead (Agamben, 34).

Drawing upon Agamben’s treatment of the Muselmann as the “complete witness” Slavoj Zizek argues that the Muselmann is “a kind of absolute/impossible witness… the only one who fully witnessed the horror of the concentration camp, and for that reason, is not able to bear witness (Zizek, Slavoj, “Neighbors and Other Monsters: A Plea for Ethical Violence.” in The Neighbor:Three Inquiries into Political Theology, 2005, 160).” Contrary to Emmanuel Levinas’ claim that the capacity to say “Here I am!” is intrinsic to the ethical subject, Zizek argues that the Muselmann can no longer say “Here I am!” because of his enigmatic status. This inability, Zizek suggests, constitutes a failure by Lévinas to account for the “inhuman Other” that is in inherent in the paradoxical figure of the Muselmann (Zizek, 160). Zizek writes:

Consequently, is the paradox of the Muselmann not that this figure is simultaneously a zero-level, a total reduction to life, and a name for the pure excess as such, excess deprived of its “normal base”? This is why the figure of the Muselmann signals the limitation of Lévinas: when describing it Primo Levi repeatedly uses the predicate faceless, and this term should be given its full Lévinasian weight. When confronted with a Muselmann, one cannot discern in his face the trace of the abyss of the Other in his/her vulnerability, addressing us with the infinite call of our responsibility. What one gets instead is a kind of blind wall, lack of depth (Zizek, 161).

But, the Muselmann is not simply inhuman, but also human. It is his paradoxical nature that is so terrifying. Zizek fails to see that the Muselmann has a face precisely in his facelessness. The face of the Muselmann, even in its facelessness still confronts us with the question “human or inhuman?” It is precisely here that the Muselmann calls us into question so that we become vulnerable to the enigma of the facelessness, and consequently are called to a work of justice that does not finally resolve the question “human or inhuman?” Instead, we stare into the facelessness of the Muselmann without retreating from the terrifying paradox he confronts us with. We cannot, and we must not, ever answer the question. It is a liturgy of justice that moves into the abyss of the Muselmann never to return. It is a vulnerability to the silence of the impossible testimony in the midst of the ethical lacuna of the concentration camps.