Prosthetic Culture: Photography, Memory and Identity

Downloaded by [Central Uni Library Bucharest] at 05:58 21 September 2013 PROSTHETIC CULTURE The power of the photographic image to redefine the relations between consciousness, the body and memories is such as to produce a prosthetic culture. The manipulation of photographic images and ways of seeing make it possible for memories to be implanted in the individual while others are stored in ‘banks’; advertising imagery holds open the moment of exposure for personal experimentation; and the powers of cartoon super heroes promise not only an inhuman extension of physical capability in space but also the ability to outwit time itself. From photographic events and seeing photographically thus emerges a self-identity that is no longer simply defined by the edict ‘I think therefore I am’ but by an extended agency of the body in prostheses both mechanical and perceptual. In this technological enhancement of ‘potential’, the self is defined by the relation ‘I can therefore I am’. In prosthetic culture, what have previously been seen as relatively fixed social and natural attributes of self-identity are reconstituted as modifiable by deliberate transformation, opening up new spheres of decision-making and choice. At the same time, however, apparently voluntary actions are redefined as the effect of previously invisible determinations, thus offering new grounds for the denial of individual responsibility, posing new ethical dilemmas. In this redrawing of the line between character and personality, questions of gender continue to prove troublesome. Photo-therapy, family albums, Benetton advertising, the phenomenon of false memory syndrome and the lives of cartoon characters illustrate how the ‘eyes’ made available by contemporary visual technologies involve not only simply specific ways of seeing but also ways of life. Downloaded by [Central Uni Library Bucharest] at 05:58 21 September 2013 Celia Lury is a Lecturer in Sociology at Goldsmiths College, University of London. Downloaded by [Central Uni Library Bucharest] at 05:58 21 September 2013 PROSTHETIC CULTURE Photography, memory and identity CELIA LURY Downloaded by [Central Uni Library Bucharest] at 05:58 21 September 2013 LONDON AND NEW YORK First published 1998 by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2004. Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 © 1998 Celia Lury All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record has been requested for this title ISBN 0-203-42525-1 Master e-book ISBN ISBN 0-203-73349-5 (Adobe eReader Format) ISBN 0-415-10293-6 (hbk) ISBN 0-415-10294-4 (pbk) Downloaded by [Central Uni Library Bucharest] at 05:58 21 September 2013 CONTENTS List of figures vii Acknowledgements viii 1 IDENTITY AND PROSTHETIC CULTURE 1 2 THE EXPERIMENTAL INDIVIDUAL 7 3 THE FAMILY OF MAN 41 4 BECOME WHAT YOU ARE 76 5 REMEMBER ME 105 6 SEEING YOU, SEEING ME, SEEING PHOTOGRAPHICALLY 134 7 MOVEMENT AND THE BODY OF PHOTOGRAPHY 156 8 HUMANS, NON-HUMANS AND HEROES 184 9 THE ETHICS OF SEEING PHOTOGRAPHICALLY 218 Bibliography 228 Index 239 Downloaded by [Central Uni Library Bucharest] at 05:58 21 September 2013 Downloaded by [Central Uni Library Bucharest] at 05:58 21 September 2013 FIGURES 2.1 The two functions of feedback 26 2.2 ‘We’ve included your brain in our System…’ 28 3.1 Composite portraiture by Sir Francis Galton 54 3.2 ‘…and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes’ 62–3 3.3 ‘Who is the slayer, who the victim? Speak’ 66–7 3.4 United Colors of Benetton: spelling out global danger 69 3.5 United Colors of Benetton: the art of estrangement 71 5.1 Thurston County Sheriff’s Office: the formal investigation of ritual abuse 125 8.1 Superman or the tree of eyes 195 Downloaded by [Central Uni Library Bucharest] at 05:58 21 September 2013 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank the very many people who have contributed to this book. Chris Rojek gave me the opportunity to explore these issues, and encouraged me to follow up on the idea of experimental individualism, while Mari Shullaw had sufficient confidence in the project to make me hand over the manuscript. Lisa Adkins, Heather d’Cruz, Jeanette Edwards, Sarah Franklin, Penny Harvey, John Law, Stephanie Lawler, Rebecca Leach, Rolland Munro, Lynne Pearce, Peter Rush, Rob Shields, Jackie Stacey, John Urry and Alison Young all offered criticism, encouragement and ideas, while Mariam Fraser, Liz Greenhalgh, Scott Lash, Karen Lury, Stephen Pope and Beverley Skeggs helped me out when it mattered most. I am grateful to them all. The author and publisher wish to thank the copyright holders for their kind permission to reproduce illustrations. Figure 2.1 The two functions of feedback © Jossey-Bass, Inc., Publishers; Figure 2.2 ‘We’ve included your brain in our System…’ © Hasselblad (UK) Limited; Figure 3.4 Aids Faces and Figure 3.5 The Twins © United Colors of Benetton; Figure 5.1 Thurston County Sheriff’s Office: the formal investigation of ritual abuse © Alfred A.Knopf, first published in The New Yorker, Figure 8.1 Superman or the tree of eyes © Keystone View Co., London. Every effort has been made to obtain permission to reproduce copyright material. If any proper acknowledgement has not been made, we would invite copyright holders to inform us of the oversight. Downloaded by [Central Uni Library Bucharest] at 05:58 21 September 2013 1 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 Downloaded by [Central Uni Library Bucharest] at 05:58 21 September 2013 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 1 See, for example, Macpherson (1962); MacFarlane (1978, 1994); Abercrombie et al. (1986); Pateman (1988); Butler (1993); Diprose (1994). IDENTITY AND PROSTHETIC CULTURE / 2 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.

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