Prosthetic Heads and the Elusiveness of Smell
I know I haven’t been updating so much lately. But see, I’ve been busy.
Busy seeing crazy people.
I’ve been shadowing as my lawyer goes to hospitals/behavioral facilities and like does these hearing things during which the client/patient is determined mentally ill.
Or not.
But usually they are.
It’s SUPER INTERESTING and today we were questioning one that made me think I was in the movie Shutter Island. No joke.
I don’t know why I’m so obsessed with the relationship of technology and literature, but somehow I am. And what better place to expound on that topic than in a blog? That’s the other part of this post.
It all started with this article.
According to Freud, as he is cited in that article, all technology is prosthesis. A camera is a prosthetic eye, for example. A telephone is a prosthetic ear. Could we extend that to include even the technology of writing? A prosthetic memory – a prosthetic hippocampus? (Plus frontal/temporal cortexes for long-term?)
What about cell phones? A prosthetic head, maybe? It has a telephone (prosthetic ear), camera (prosthetic eye), microphone (prosthetic mouth)…the only thing that it doesn’t do is smell. But it does “breathe,” sort of – with each charge of the battery? Maybe that’s a bit of a stretch. But it has an electric, “neural” network, like the neural pathways in our head.
Anyway, all this reflection on prosthetic heads and the novel’s relationship with technology got me thinking about books. Because analog books are paper books and digital books (prosthetic books??) are ebooks. And ebooks suck. A lot.
Maybe because, like cell phones, they lack the element of smell. Or touch. And if you want to get really into it, then taste as well.
The difference between the analog and the digital, the given and the prosthesis, is the same as the difference between the body and the pattern. N. Katherine Hayles compares the book to a human body:
The human body is understood…simultaneously as an expression of genetic information and as a physical structure. Similarly, the literary corpus is at once a physical object and a space of representation, a body and a message. Because they have bodies, books and humans have something to lose if they are regarded solely as informational patterns, namely the resistant materiality that has traditionally marked the durable inscription of books no less than it has marked our experiences of living as embodied creatures (Hayles, “How We Became Posthuman”).
All this is a really laborious and unnecessarily complex description of the obvious – the technology (the prosthesis) lacks the sensation of materiality.
Like the smell of books.
I’m not the only one with this idea…..Steven Moffat who wrote the Doctor Who episodes about the library (Silence in the Library/Forest of the Dead) seems to agree. So he sets up this library, right – a library with every piece of print literature ever, and it’s so big that it takes up an entire planet. And this is Doctor Who, so this library exists in the 51st century.
Why have a library at all? Wouldn’t ebooks have really caught on by then?
“By now you’ve got holovids, direct-to-brain downloads, fiction mist, but you need the smell. The smell of books,” Moffat has lovely David Tennant say.
By the way, the story arc with the library also discusses the tie between technology and melancholy, like Tom McCarthy’s article up there. I mean the whole point of technology is to bring far things close, right? Either spatially or temporally. Camera lenses and microphones render distance irrelevant, and in addition to dealing with physical distance, writing lessens the effect of time on memory – temporal distance. Even candles and lamps…lessen the effects of the distance/cycle of the sun. But there still remains that element of “losing” that comes from separating the message from the body. The prosthetic technology isn’t quite as good as the real thing.
It seems fitting, then, that we kind of use it as a last resort. There’s some technology in that episode that makes the recently dead into “Data Ghosts,” meaning that this little USB drive-looking thing preserves a sense of the dead person’s consciousness to the extent that the living can “converse” with it for a few extra minutes. But the Data Ghost very quickly gets “confused” and “dies out.” So technology’s used to give us one extra moment with the dead, which ties it to the melancholiness of trying to preserve what is gone. Same goes for any other technology, though not specifically with the dead. Technology gives us extra time with ________ despite __________ distance.
But what about a mind that’s gone, though the body stays? That is, the analog person retains the body but loses the message. Like some of the patients that I just saw declared mentally ill. Where’s the technology for that melancholy? Seems by default we can only make the body prosthetic. We can’t (yet) model the human mind accurately enough to make the message prosthetic………
…I can’t believe I think about these things even when I don’t have a paper due. This is probably poorly constructed but I’ll read it over later.
pressed words 