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II
M'.
Parker, B. (1992) Tunnels Through Time: Relativity and Time Travel', Astronomy June: 2B-35. Penley, C. (1990) Time Travel, Prima! Scene and the Critical Dystopia', in A. Kuhn (ed.) Alien Zoríéň
Cultural Theory & Contemporary Science Fiction Cinema, London and New York: Verso. !-j>j Pomsh, D. (1985) The Soft Machine: Cybernetic Fiction. Cambridge: Methuen. Js? Pyle, Forest (1993) 'Making Cyborgs, Making Humans: Of Terminators and Blade Runners', in J. Collins
etal. (eds} Film Theory Goes to the Movies. London: Roudedge. Sardar, 2. (1990) 'Surviving the Terminator: The Postmodern Mental Condition', Futures 22:203-10. J Sellers, S. (1991) Language & Sexual Difference: Feminist Writing in France. London: Maonillan. Springer, C. (1991) The Pleasure of the Interface', Screen 32(3):3u3-23. Tasker, Y.(Wi) Spectacular Bodies: Gender, Genre and the Action Cinema. London: Roudedge. Telotte, J.P. (1988)-The Ghost in the Machine: Consciousness and the Science.Fiction Film", Western:
Humanities-Review 42(3): 249-57. Telotte, J.P. (1991) 'TheTremuious Public Body: Robots, Change and the Science Fiction Film', Journal .   of Popular Film and Television 19(1): 14-23.
Telotte, J.P. (1992) 'The Terminator, Terminator 2, and the Exposed Body1, Journal ofPopular Film and Television 20(2): 26-34.
Samantha Holland teaches Rhetoric at the University of Iowa, where she is in the Film Studies graduate program. This article is a shortened version of her Philosophy MA dissertation from the University of Aberdeen; it has also been presented in audiovisual form at the Virtual Features Conference at the University of Warwick.
prosthetic Memory: Total Recall mi Made Runner
-Alison landsberg
J <S. vLo^je-C TSLOrv-ouj-S.
*In the 190S Edison film The Thieving Hani, a wealthy passer-by takes pity on an armless beggar and buys him a prosthetic arm. As the beggar soon discovers, ^however, the arm has memories of its own. Because the arm remembers its own ithieving, it snatches people's possessions as they walk by, Dismayed, the beggar sells his arm at a pawnshop. But the arm sidles out of the shop, finds the beggar out
-on the street, and reattaches itself to him. The beggar's victims, meanwhile, have
I contacted a police oEcer who finds the beggar and carts him off to jail. In the jail . iccll, the arm finds its rightful owner - the 'proper' thieving body - a one-armed criminal, and attaches itself to him,
This moment in early cinema anticipates dramatically a preoccupation in more ^contemporary science fiction with what I would like to call 'prosthetic memories', ifly prosthetic memories I mean memories which do not come from a person's lived experience in any strict sense. These are implanted memories, and the unsettled boundaries between real and simulated ones are frequently accompanied by
^another disruption: of the human body, its flesh, its subjective autonomy, its
I difference fromboth the animal and the technological,
Furthermore, through the prosthetic arm the beggar's body manifests memories of actions that it, or he, never actually committed. In fact, his memories are radically divorced from lived experience and yet they motivate his actions. Because the 'hand's memories - which the beggar himself wears - prescribe actions in the
I present, they make a beggar into a thief. In other words, it is precisely the memories of thieving which construct an identity for him, We might say then that the film
- underscores the way in which memory is constitutive of identity. This in itself is not
: surprising. What is surprising is the position the film takes on the relationship
* between memory, experience and identity.
176 ■ Cyberspace/Cyberbodies/Cyberpunk '
What might the 'otherness' of prosthetic memory that The Thieving Hanu * displays tell us about how persons come ordinarily to feel that they possess, rathe I than are possessed by, their memories? "We rely on our memories to validate ou experiences. The experience of memory actually becomes the index of experience: i J we have the memory, we must have had the experience it represents. But what about | the armless beggar? He has the memory without having lived the experience. I- | memory is the precondition for identity or individuality - if what we claim as ou memories defines who we are - then the idea of a prosthetic memory problematize1; any concept of memory that posits it as essential, stable or organically grounded. In I addition, it makes impossible the wish that a person owns her/his memories a inalienable property. § As it happens, we don't know anything about the beggar's real past. Memories, ii } seems, are the domain of the present. The beggar's prosthetic memories offer him; | course of action to live by. Surprisingly enough, memories are less abou t validatin| or authenticating the past than they are about organizing the present an< i constructing strategies with which one might imagine a livable future. Memory, tb\ | essay will argue, is not a means for closure- is not a strategy for closing or finishinj the past - but on the contrary, memory emerges as a generative force, a force whicl j propels us not backward but forwards. J But in the case of The Thieving Hand, the slippage the film opens up with the 4 prosthetic hand - the rupture between experience, memory and identity - get i sealed up at the end of the film, in jail, when the thieving hand reattaches Itself t( » what we are meant to recognize as the real or authentic thieving body, th § one-armed criminal. In other words, despite the film's flirtation with the idea tha | memories might be permanently transportable, The Thieving Hand ends h\ | rejecting that possibility, in that the hand itself chooses to be with its proper owner I I have begun with The Thieving Hand to demonstrate that, as with all mediated | forms of knowledge, prosthetic memory has a history. Although memory migh. | always have been prosthetic, the mass media - technologies which structure ami | circumscribe experience - bring the texture and contours of prosthetic memory into | dramatic relief. Because the mass media fundamentally alter our notion of what} counts as experience, they might be a privileged arena for the production and | circulation of prosthetic memories. The cinema, in particular, as an institution g which makes available images for mass consumption, has long been aware of ft' | ability to generate experiences and to install memories of them - memories which i become experiences that film consumers both possess and feel.possessed by. W | might then read these films which thematize prosthetic memories as an allegory f° the power of the mass media to create experiences and to implant memories, th-experience of which we have never lived. Because the mass media are a privilege
Prosthetic Memory ■ 177
: site for the production of such memories, they might be an undertheorized force in the production of identities. If a film like The Thieving Hand eventually insists that bodily memories have rightful owners, more recent science fiction texts like Blade Runner and Total Recall have begun to imagine otherwise.
.In Paul Verhoeven's film Total Recall (1990), Douglas Quade (Arnold Schwarzenegger) purchases a set of implanted memories of a trip to Mars. Not only might he buy the memories for a trip he has never taken, but he might elect to go on the trip as someone other than himself. Quade has an urge to go to Mars as a secret agent - or rather, to remember having gone as a secret agent. But the implant procedure does not go smoothly, While strapped in his seat memories begin to
i break through - memories, we learn, that have been layered over by 'the Agency',
\ As it turns out, Quade is not an 'authentic identity', but one based on memories
T-implanted by the intelligence agency on Mars.
It 1 In Ridley Scott's Blade Runner (director's cut, 1993), Deckard (Harrison Ford) is ^member of a special police squad - a blade runner unit - and has been called in to Pry to capture and 'retire' a group of replicants recently landed on earth. Replicants, advanced robots created by the Tyrell Corporation as slave labor for the off-world polonies, are 'being[s] virtually identical to humanjs]'. The most advanced Replicants, like Rachel (Sean Young), an employee at the Tyrell Corporation who eventually falls for Deckard, are designed so that they don't know they are feplicants. As Mr Tyrell explains to Deckard, 'If we give them a past we create a |ushion for their emotions and consequently we can control them better,' [Memories', Deckard responds incredulously, 'you're talking about memories.' ioth of these films, as we shall see, offer provocative examples of individuals who pentify with memories which are not their own.
Sthe idea of prosthetic memory complicates the relationship between memory and Iperience, then we might use films that literalize prosthetic memory to disrupt l§me postmodernist assumptions about experience. With postmodernity, Fredric Wmeson asserts, we see 'the waning of our historicity, of our lived possibility of
%)eriencing history in some active way' (1991:21). He claims......that.in. post-.
fodernity, experience is dead. 'Nostalgia films', he suggests, invoke a sense of jptness' instead of engaging with 'real history'. He therefore finds a fundamental ^compatibility of a postmodernist nostalgia and language with genuine his-jlpcity' (1991:19). Not only does his account participate in a nostalgia of its own-IgStalgia for that prelapsarian moment when we all actually experienced history in s§Tie real way - but, as I will argue, it offers a rather narrow version of experience. peVflipside of Jameson's point is Jean Baudrillard's (1983) claim that the
proliferation of different media and mediations - simulations - which have permeated many aspects of contemporary society, have dissolved the dichotomy between the real and the simulacrum, between the authentic and the inauthentic. He argues that with the proliferation of different forms of media in the 20th century, people's actual relationship to events - what we are to understand as authentic experience - has become so mediated, that we can no longer distinguish between the real - something mappable - and what he calls the hyperreal - 'the generation by models of a real without origin' (Baudrillard, 1983:2). For Baud-rillard, we live in a world of simulation, a world hopelessly detached from the 'real'. Or, to put It another way, postmodern society is characterized by an absence of 'real' experience. But Baudrillard's argument clings tenaciously to a real; he desperately needs a real to recognize that we are in a land of simulation-Both assumptions unwittingly betray a nostalgia for a prelapsarian moment when there was a real. But the real has always been mediated through information cultures and through narrative. What does it mean for memories to be 'real'? Were they ever 'real1? This paper refuses such a categorization, but also shows the costs of such a refusal.
I would like to set this notion of the death of the real - particularly the death of real experience - against what I perceive as a veritable explosion of, or popular obsession with, experience of the real. From the hugely attended D-Day re-enactments of 1994 to what I would like to call 'experiential museums', like the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, it seems to me that the experiential real is anything but dead. In fact, the popularity of these experiential events bespeaks a popular longing to experience history in a personal and even bodily way. They offer strategies for making history into personal memories. They provide individuals with the collective opportunity of having an experiential relationship to a collective or cultural past they either did or did not experience. I would like to suggest that what we have embarked upon in the postmodern is a new relationship to experience which relies less on categories like the authentic and sympathy than on categories like responsibility and empathy.
This postmodern relationship to experience has significant political ramifications. If this fascination with the experiential might be imagined as an act of prosthesis - of prosthetically appropriating memories of a cultural or collective past - then these particular histories or pasts might be available for consumption across existing stratifications of race, class and gender. These prosthetic memories, .-then, might become the grounds for political alliances. As Donna Haraway (1991) has powerfully argued with her articulation of cyborg identity, we need to construct political alliances that are not based on natural or essential affinities-Cyborg identity recognizes the complicated process of identity formation, that we
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l'rosttieuc Memory ■ 17V
are multiply hailed subjects, and thus embraces the idea of 'partial identities'. The pasts that we claim and 'use' are part of this process.
If the real has always been mediated through collecrivized forms of identity, why then, does the sensual in the cinema - the experiential nature of the spectator's engagement with the image - differ from other aesthetic experiences which might also be the scene of the production of sensual memory, like reading (see Miller, 1988)? Concern about the power of the visual sensorium - specifically, an awareness of the cinema's ability to produce memories in its spectators - has a lengthy history of its own. In 1928, William H. Short, the Executive Director of the Motion Picture Research Council, asked a group of researchers - mostly university psychologists and sociologists - to discuss the possibility of assessing the effects of motion pictures on children. These investigations he initiated - the Payne Studies -are significant not so much in their immediate findings, but rather in what they imply about the popular anxiety about the ways in which motion pictures actually affect - in an experiential way - individual bodies. In a set of studies conducted by Herbert Blumer, college-aged individuals were asked 'to relate or write as carefully as possible their experiences with motion pictures' (1933:xi). What Blumer finds is that 'imaginative identification' is quite common, and that 'while witnessing a picture one not infrequendy projects oneself into the role of hero or heroine' ,(1933:67). Superficially, this account sounds much like arguments made in contemporary film theory about spectatorship and about the power of the filmic apparatus tand narrative to position the subject (see, for example, Baudry, 1974-5; Comolii, p986). However, Blumer's claims - and their ramifications - are somewhat different. Blumer refers to identification as 'emotional possession' positing that 'the andividual identifies himself so thoroughly with the plot or loses himself so much in "the picture that he is carried away from the usual trend of conduct' (1933:74). There s,' m fact, n o telling just how long this possession will last, for 'in certain individuals |t may become fixed and last for a long time' (1933:84). In fact,
; In a state of emotional possession impulses, motives and thoughts are likely to lose their fixed form and become malleable instead. There may emerge from this 'molten state' a new stable organiz-h ition directed towards a different line of conduct The individual, as a resuit of witnessing a particularly emotional picture, may come to a decision to have certain kinds of experience and to jlive a kind of life different from his prior career. (Blumer, 1933:1 16)
1 woman explains that when she saw The Sheik for the first time she recalls 'coming tome that night and dreaming the entire picture over again; myself as the heroine, tejag carried over the burning sands by an equally burning lover. I could feel myself being kissed in the way the Sheik had kissed the girl' (Blumer, 1933:70). What Individuals see might affect them so significantly that the images actually become ■tort of their own personal archive of experience.
180 ■ Cyberspace/Cyberbodies/Cyberpunk
Because the movie experience decenters lived experience, it, too, might alter or construct identity. Emotional possession has implications for both the future and the-past of the individual under its sway. It has the potential to alter one's actions in the future in that under its hold an individual 'is transported out of his normal conduct and is completely subjugated by his impulses' (Blumer, 1933:94). A nineteen-year-old woman writes,
After having seen a movie of pioneer days 1 am very unreconciled to the fact that I live to-day instead of the romantic days of fifty years ago. But to offset this poignant and useless longing I have dreamed of going to war. I stated previously that through the movies I have become aware of the awfulness, the futility of it, etc. But as this side has been impressed upon me, there has been awakened in me at the same time the desire to go to the 'front' during the next war. The excitement - shall I say glamour? - of the war has always appealed to me from the screen. Often I have pictured myself as a truck driver, nurse, HEROINE. (Blumer, 1933; 63)
What this suggests is that the experience within the movie theater and the memories that the cinema affords-despite the fact that the spectator did not live through them -might be as significant in constructing, or deconstructing, the spectator's identity as any experience that s/he actually lived through.
Many of the Payne Studies tests were designed to measure quantitatively the extent to which film affects the physical bodies of its spectators. The investigators used a galvanometer which, like a lie detector, 'measurefd] galvanic responses', electrical impulses, in skin, and a pneumo-cardiograph 'to measure changes in the circulatory system' (Charters, 1933:25), like respiratory pulse and blood pressure. This sensitive technology might pick up physiological disturbances and changes that would go unseen by the naked eye. These studies thus presumed that the body might give evidence of physiological symptoms caused by a kind of technological intervention into subjectivity - an intervention which is part and parcel of the cinematic experience. The call for a technology of detection registers a fear that we might no longer be able to distinguish prosthetic or 'unnatural' memories from 'real' ones.
At the same historical moment, European cultural critics of the 1920s -specifically Walter Benjamin and Siegfried Kracauer - began to theorize the experiential nature of the cinema. They attempted to theorize the way in which movies might actually extend the sensual memory of the human body. By 1940 Kracauer believed that film actually addresses its viewer as a' "corporeal-material being"; itseizes the "human being with skin and hair": "The material elements that present themselves in film directly stimulate the materiallayers of the human being: his nerves, his senses, his entiTephysiological substance"' (1993:458).The cinematic experience has an individual, bodily component at the same time that it is circumscribed by its collectivity; the domain of the cinema is public and collective.
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Prosthetic Memory ■ 181
Benjamin's notion of 'innervation' is an attempt to imagine an engaged experiential relationship with technology and the cinema.2 It is precisely the interplay of individual bodily experience with the publicity of the cinema which might make possible new forms of collectivity - political and otherwise.
More recently, Steven Shaviro (1993) has emphasized the visceral, bodily component of film spectatorship. He argues that psychoanalytic film theory studiously ignores the experiential component of spectatorship. In his account, psychoanalytic film theory has attempted 'to destroy the power of images' (1993:16),] and that what those theorists fear is not the lack, 'not the emptiness of the image, but its weird fullness; not its impotence so much as its power' (Shaviro, 1993:-17). We might say that the portability of cinematic images - the way we are invited to wear them prosthetically, the way we might experience them in a bodily ■■ fashion - is both the crisis and the allure. As if to emphasize this experiential, bodily aspect of spectatorship, Shaviro sets forth as his guiding principle that 'cinematic images are not representations, but events' (1993:24).
I would like to turn to a scene in Total Recall which dramatically illustrates the way in which mass mediated images intervene in the production of subjectivity. The notion of authenticity- and our desire to privilege it-is constantly undermined by Total Recall's obsessive rendering of mediated images. In many instances we see, simultaneously, a person and their mediated representation on a video screen. When Quade first goes toRekal to meet with Mr McClane, the sales representative, we see McClane simultaneously through a window over his secretary's shoulder, and as an image on her video phone as she calls him to let him know that Quade has arrived. In Total Recall the proliferation of mediated images - and of video screens -fo rces us to question the very notion of an authentic or an originary presence. Video monitors appear on subway cars with advertisements (like the one for Rekal), and all telephones are video phones; even the walls of Quade's house are enormous television screens. Quade's identity, too, as we will see, is mediated by video images. When he learns from his wife that she's not his wife, that she 'never saw him before six weeks ago', that their 'marriage is just a memory implant', that the Agency 'erased his identity and implanted a new one' - basically that 'his whole life is just a dream' - any sense he has of a unified self, of a stable subjectivity, is shattered. When memories might be separable from lived experience, issues of identity - and upon what identity is constructed - take on radical importance.
The question of his identity- and how his Identity is predicated upon a particular set of memories which may or may not be properly his own - surfaces most dramatically when he confronts his own face in a video monitor. That he sees his
loi ■ ^yucrspace/^yDerDoaies/uyoerpunK
Prosthetic Memory ■ 183
face on a portable video screen - one that he has been carrying around in a suitcase which was handed to him by a 'buddy from the Agency' - literalizes the film's account of the portability of memory and identity. Quade confronts his own face in a video screen, but finds there a different person. The face on the screen says,
'Howdy stranger, this is Hauser____Get ready for the big surprise____You are not
you. You are me.' We might be tempted to read this scene as an instance of Freud's (1959) notion of the 'uncanny'. The sensation of the 'uncanny', as Freud articulates it, is produced by an encounter with something which is simultaneously familiar and unfamiliar; the sensation of the uncanny comes from the 'return of the repressed'. The experience of seeing one's double is therefore the height of uncanny.4 But Quade's experience is not that way at all. The face he confronts is explicitly not his face; it does not correspond to his identity. Since the film rejects the idea that there is an authentic, or more authentic, self underneath the layers of identity, there is no place for the uncanny. For Quade, the memories of Hauser seem never to have existed. In fact, he encounters Hauser with a kind of disinterest, not as someone he once knew or was, but rather as a total stranger.
In this way, the encounter seems to disrupt the Lacanian notion of the 'mirror stage'. According to Jacques Lacan, the mirror stage is initiated when a child first sees himself reflected as an autonomous individual, as a unified and bounded subject. As Lacan describes, the 'jubilant assumption of his specular image1 (1977:2) gives the child an illusion of wholeness, which is vastly different from the child1 s own sense of himself as a fragmentary bundle of undifferentiated drives. For Quade, the experience is exactly the opposite. In fact, we might say that the encounter with the face in the monitor, which looks like his face but is not the one he owns, disrupts any sense of a unified, stable and bounded subjectivity. Instead of consolidating his identity, the video screen further fragments it. This encounter undermines as well the assumption that a particular memory has a rightful owner, a proper body to adhere to.
This encounter with Hauser-who professes to be the real possessor of the body - becomes a microcosm for the film's larger critique of the preeminence of the 'real'. That we meet Quade first - and identify with him - makes us question whether Hauser is the true or more worthy identity for the body. If we are to believe that Hauser's identity is in some ways more 'real' than Quade's - because his memories are based on lived experience rather than memory implants - the question then becomes is realer necessarily better? At the climax of the film, Quade claims his own identity instead of going back to being Hauser. In his final exchange with Cohagen, Cohagen says, 'I wanted Häuser back. You had to be Quade.' 'I am Quade', he responds. Although Quade is an identity based on implanted memories, it is no less viable than Hauser - and arguably more so. Quade remains the primary object of
our spectatorial investment and engagement throughout the film. His simulated identity is more responsible, compassionate and productive than the 'real' one. That Quade experiences himself as 'real' gives the lie to the Baudrillardian and Jamesonian assumption that the real and the authentic are synonymous.
Part of what claiming this identity means is saving the Mutants on Mars from oxygen deprivation. The Mutants are the socio-economic group on Mars who are most oppressed by the tyrannical Cohagen; Cohagen regulates their access to oxygen. Quade refuses to go back to being Hauser because he feels that he has a mission to carry out. His sense of moral responsibility outweighs any claims on his actions exerted by the pull of an 'authentic' identity. By choosing to start the reactor at the pyramid mines - and thereby produce enough oxygen to make the atmosphere on Mars habitable - Quade is able tD liberate the Mutants from Cohagen's grip.
Surprisingly enough, memories are less about authenticating the past, than about generating possible courses of action in the present. The Mutant resistance leader, Quato, tells Quade that 'A man is defined by his actions, not his memories.' We ; might revise his statement to say that a man is defined by his actions, but whether ', those actions are made possible by prosthetic memories or memories based on lived ^experience makes little difference. Any kind of distinction between 'real' memories and prosthetic memories-memories which might be technologically disseminated by the mass media and worn by its consumers - might ultimately be unintelligible. Total Recall underscores the way in which memories are always already public, the way in which memories always circulate and interpellate individuals, but can never get back to an authentic owner, to a proper body- or as we will see in the case of Blade Runner, to a proper photograph.
Although Blade Runner is based on the 1968 Philip K. Dick novel Do Androids 'Dream of Electric Sheep?, its points of departure from the novel are instructive. In Dick's novel, the presence of empathy is what allows the bounty hunters to distinguish the androids from the humans. In fact, empathy is imagined to be the ^uniquely human trait, Deckard wonders 'precisely why an android bounced so helplessly about when confronted by an empathy measuring test. Empathy, evidently, existed only within the human community ...' (Dick, 1968:26).
What exposes the replicants in the film, however, is not the lack of empathy as much as the lack of a past - the lack of memories. Ridley Scott's film foregrounds this point in the opening sequence. The film begins with a Voight-Kampf test, This ^test is designed to identify a replicant by measuring physical, bodily responses to a. series of questions which are designed to provoke an emotional response. Technological instruments are used to measure pupil dilation and the blush reflex to determine the effect the questions have on the subject. In this opening scene, Mr
ins
184 ■ Cyberspace/Cyberbodies/Cyberpunk
Holden, a 'blade runner', questions Leon, his subject. As Mr Holden explain questions are 'designed to provoke an emotional response1 and that 'reaction t important'. Leon, however, slows down the test by interrupting with ques When Mr Holden says, 'You're in a desert walking along the sand. You tortoise', Leon asks, 'What's a tortoise?' Seeing that his line of enquiry is nowhere, Mr Holden says, 'Describe in single words the good.things about mother'. Leon stands up, pulls out a gun, says, 'Let me tell you about my mc and then shoots Holden. In this primal scene, what 'catches' the replicant ism absence of empathy, but rather the absence of a past, the absence of memories, cannot describe his mother, cannot produce a genealogy, because he has no pa memories.
This scene, then, attempts to establish memory as the locus of humanity. C of the film have tended to focus on the fact that replicants lack a past in ore underscore the lack of 'real history1 in postmodernity. David Harvey, for cxan argues that 'history for everyone has become reduced to the evidence of a pi graph' (1989:313). In Harvey's account, that replicants lack a past illustrate lack of depth - and the emphasis on surface-which characterizes postmodei Giuliana Bruno claims that the photograph 'represents the trace of an origin thus a personal identity, the proof of having existed and therefore having theuigu to exist' (1987:71). Certainly the relationship between photography and memorff central to this film. However, both Bruno and Harvey presume that photograph has the ability to anchor a referent; they presume that the photograph maintain|g indexical link to 'reality'. The film, I would argue, claims just tie opposittrAfiL Deckard has determined that Rachel is a replicant she shows up at his apartmM with photographs- in particular a photograph depicting her and her mother, l think I'm a replicant, don't you?', she asks. 'Look, it's me with my mother,1 Th? photograph, she hopes, will both validate her memory and authenticate heiapasc Instead of reasserting the referent, however, the photograph further confoun 'p Instead of accepting Rachel's photograph as truth, Deckard begins to recall for ha one of her memories: 'You remember the spider that lived in the bush outside) oi window... watched her work, building a web all summer. Then one day then * a big egg in it.' Rachel continues, 'The egg hatched and 100 baby spiders came °\
and they ate her----' Deckard looks at her. 'Implants', he says. 'Those ai en't_ ';
memories, they're someone else's. They're Tyrell's niece's.' The photograph ig? Blade Runner, like the photograph of the grandmother in Kracauer's 1927 £ •■ ; 'Photography', is 'reduced to the sum of its details' (1993:430). With the passage time the image 'necessarily disintegrates into its particulars' (Kracauer, 1993:4-9)* The photograph can no more be a fixed locus of memory than the body can in 1 Recall. The photograph, it seems has proved nothing.
Prosthetic Memory ■ 185 .
must not, however, lose sight of the fact that Rachel's photograph does lyrcspond to the memories she has. And those memories are what allow her to go W'exist as she does, and eventually fall in love with Deckard. We might say that ffiile the photograph has no relationship to 'reality', it helps her to produce her 111 narrative. While it fails to authenticate her past, it does authenticate her pent. The power of photography, in Kracauer's account, is its ability to 'disclose ^previously unexamined foundation of nature' (1993:435-6) and derives not |ph its ability to fix, but rather from its ability to reconfigure. Photography, for Mealier, precisely because it loses its indexical link to the world, has The capacity far up the elements of nature' (1993:436). For Rachel, the photograph does not ^respond to a lived experience and yet it provides her with a springboard for her tflh memories. In a particularly powerful scene Rachel sits down at the piano in fekard's apartment, takes her hair down, and begins to play. Deckard joins her at ppiajio. 'I remember lessons', she says. 'I don't know if it's me or Tyrell's niece.' fad of focusing on that ambiguity, Deckard says, 'You play beautifully'. At this fit-Dcckard, in effect, rejects the distinction between 'real' and prosthetic tiHem'ories. Her memory of lessons allows her to play beautifully, so it matters little sther she lived through the lessons or not.
leause the director's cut raises the possibility that Deckard himself is a 'leant, it' takes a giant step toward erasing the intelligibility of the distinction een the real and the simulated, the human and the replicant. Early on in the film ikard sits down at his piano and glances at the old photographs that he has layed upon it, Then there is cut to a unicorn racing through a field, which we are keas a daydream - or a memory. Obviously it cannot be a 'real' memory, a ttporyof a lived experience. Later, at the very end of the film, when Deckard is gtsto flee with Rachel, he sees an origami unicorn lying on the floor outside of door. When Deckard picks up the unicorn, which we recognize as the work of a [Qclothes officer who has been making origami figures throughout the film, we £an echo of his earlier statement to Deckard about Rachel - 'It's too bad she g'tlive, but then again who does?' The ending suggests that the cop knows about kard's memory of a unicorn, in the same way that Deckard knows about iei!:5 memory of the spider. It suggests that his memories, too, are implants -|hey are prosthetic. At this moment we do not know whether Deckard is a 'leant or not. Unlike the earlier version of the film, the director's cut refuses to |£'a clear distinction for us between replicant and human, between real and thetic memory. There is no safe position, like the one Baudrillard implicitly ~9ses, from which we might recognize such a distinction. The ending of Blade her, then, registers the pleasure and the threat of portability- that we might not e to distinguish between our own memories and prosthetic ones. Deckard is
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ľrósthenc Memory ■ 187
an empathic person who is even able to have compassion for a replicant. More importantly, he is a character 'real enough' to gain our spectatorial identification. Ultimately the film makes us call into question our own relationship to memory, and to recognize the way in which we always assume that our memories are real. Memories are central to our identity- to our sense of who we are and what we might become - but as this film suggests, whether those memories come from lived expe rience or whether they are prosthetic seems to make very little difference. Either way, we use them to construct narratives for ourselves, visions for our future.
Wes Craven's New Nightmare (1994) begins with an uncanny allusion to The Thieving Hand. The film opens on a movie set, where an electrical version of the Freddie Kruger hand- a hand with razor hlades in the placeof fingers -comes to life, as it were, remembering its prior activity of killing. While this hand is not the hand from the old movie, but rather an electrical prosthesis, it nevertheless possesses the Kruger hand's memories. After this prosthetic hand slices op en several people on the movie set, we realize that this scene is 'just' a dream based on the main character's memories of working on theNightmare on Elm Street films. Gradually, however, the film begins to undermine or question that notion of'just'. What might itmean to say that those memories are 'just' from a movie? Does it mean, for example, that they are not real ? Do es it mean that those memories are less real? No, would be Wes Craven's answer. In fact, memories of the earlier Nightmare on Elm Street movies - and/ram the movies - become her memories. And as the film radically demonstrates, this is a life and death matter. In the course of the movie, memories from the earlier movies begin to break through. Those memories are not from events she lived, but rather from events she lived cinematically. The film actually thematiz.es the way in which film memories become prosthetic memories. Her memories, prosthetic or not, she experiences as real, for they affect her in a life and death way, profoundly informing the decisions she has to make, -All three of these films gradually undermine the value of the distinction between real and simulation, between authentic and prosthetic memory - and in Blad$ Rimner, the value of the distinction between human and replicant. In Blade Runner, even empathy ultimately fails as a litmus test for humanity. In fact, the replicants -Rachel and Roy (Rutger Hauer), not to mention Deckard - become increasingly empathic in the course of the film. The word empathy, unlike sympathy which has been in use since the 16th century, makes its first appearance at the beginning of this century. While sympathy presupposes an initial likeness between subjects ('Sympathy', OED, 1989),5 empathy presupposes an initial difference between subjects. Empathy, then, is 'The power of projecting one's personality into.. •tne
■object of contemplation' (OED, 1989). We might say that empathy depends less on 'natural' affinity than sympathy, less on some kind of essential underlying connection between the two subjects. While sympathy, therefore, relies upon an essentialism of identification, empathy recognizes the alterity of identification.. Emp^hy, then, is about the lack of identity between subjects, about negotiating ^distances. It might be the case that it is precisely this distance which is constitutive fof the desire and passion to remember. That the distinction between 'real' and íprosthetic memory is virtually undecidable makes the call for an ethics of L personhood both frightening and necessary - an ethics based not on ä pluralistic siorm of humanism or essentialism of identification, but rather on a recognition of fdifference.6 An ethics of personhood might be constructed upon a practice of ^empathy and would take seriously its goal of respecting the fragmentary, the fhybrid, the different.
i_ Both Blade Runner and TotalRecall-and even Wes Craven's New Nightmare-|re about characters who understand themselves through a variety of alienated Experiences and narratives which they take to be their own, and which they pubsequently make their own through use. My narrative is thus a counter-argument go the 'consciousness industry', or 'culture industry' (Horkheimer and Adorno, 1991) one. What I hope to have demonstrated is that it is not appropriate to dismiss jpmerely prosthetic these experiences that define personhood and identity. At the Same time, however, memories cannot be counted on to provide narratives of self-continuity - as Total Recall clearly points out. I would like to end by leaving ||pen the possibility of what I would like to call 'breakthrough memories'. When ||uade is at Rekal Incorporated planning his memory package, he has an urge to go pa secret agent. In other words, memories from an earlier identity- not in any way histrue or essential identity, but one of the many layers that have constructed him -|eem to break through. It thus might be the case that identity is palimpsestic, that jjt layers of identity that came before are never successfully erased. It would be all pp;easy to dismiss such an identity as merely a relation of surfaces, as many fflSPrists of the postmodern have done, but to do so would be to ignore what gorges in both texts as an insistent drive to remember. What both films seem to Jggest is not that we should never forget, but rather that we should never stop generating memory. The particular desire to place oneself in history through a 5jirrative:of memories is a desire to be a social, historical being. We might say that it ^precisely such a 'surface' experience of history which gives people personhood, Éi.ch brings them into the public. What the drive to remember expresses, then, is a raising desire to reexperience history - not to unquestioningly validate the past, íft;to put into play the vital, indigestible material of history, reminding us of the inevitability of the present tense.
188 ■ Cyherspace/Cyberbodies/Cyberpunk
Prosthetic Memory ■ 189
Notes
1. See Donna J. Haraway (1991). A cyborg world, she suggests, 'might be about lived social and bodily realities in which people are not afraid of their joint kinship with animals and machines, not afraid of permanent partial identities and contradictory standpoints'{1991:154).
2. As Hansen (1993:460) notes, 'the term innervation was used by Benjamin for conceptualizing historical transformation as a process of convening images into somatic and collective reality'.
3. Shaviro (1993) offers a clear articulation of a shifting emphasis in film theory from a psychoanalytic paradigm to one that attempts to account for the power of the image to engage the spectator's body. Also • see Linda Williams (1991); Murray Smith (1994).
4. In his famous footnote, Freud describes the following scene: 'I was sitting alone in my wagon-ht compartment when a more than usually violent jerk of the train swung back the door in the adjoining washing-cabinet, and an elderly gentleman in a dressing-gown and traveling cap came in. I assumed that he had been about to leave the washing-cabinet which divides the two compartments, and had taken the wrong direction and had come into my compartment by mistake. Jumping up with the intention of putting him right, I at Dnce realized to my dismay that the intruder was nothing but my own reflection in the looking-glass of the open door, I can sriil recollect that I thoroughly disliked his appearance" (1959:403).
5. According tD the OED, sympathy is 'A (real or supposed) affinity between certain things, by virtue ofwhich they are similarly or correspondingly affected by the same influence.'
6. Such an ethics would borrow insights from Subaltern and Post-Colonial Studies. See Jonathan Rutherford and Homi Bhabha (1990); Stuart Hall (199Q); Iris Marion Young (1990).
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Alison Landsberg is a PhD candidate at the University of Chicago and a lecturer for the course "Reading Cultures'.