Just been reading Tom McCarthy's thing on Lynch and the "prosthetic imagination". It's McLuhan's "man externalises himself through technology" once again. I didn't realise Freud had written about this stuff too. Apparently he talks of man as the god with artificial limbs in Civilization and Its Discontents.
For Freud, prosthesis is the essence of technology. "With all his tools," he writes in Civilization and Its Discontents, "man improves his own organs, both motor and sensory, or clears away the barriers to their functioning." Ships, airplanes, telescopes and cameras, gramophones and telephones - all these afford man the omnipotence and omniscience he attributes to his gods, thus making him "eine Art Prosthesengott": a kind of god with artificial limbs, a prosthetic god. "When he puts on his auxiliary organs he is truly magnificent," Freud writes; "but" (he continues) "those organs have not grown on to him and they still give him much trouble at times." Man's technological appendages both enhance and diminish him. It's what Hal Foster, in his book Prosthetic Gods, calls "the double logic of the prosthesis": an addition that threatens, or marks, a subtraction.
[...]
Technology, as our prosthesis makes us godlike and less-than-human in one and the same move...
[...]
For Kleist, puppetry lays bare a complex process through which man, robbed of the pure, naive grace of a puppet by self-consciousness, might regain it by advancing so far into knowledge that he re-emerges on the other side to "appear most pure in that human form which either has no consciousness at all or possesses infinite consciousness - that is, either in a marionette or in a god" - an event, the choreographer informs the narrator, that would constitute "the last chapter in the history of the world."
For Freud, prosthesis is the essence of technology. "With all his tools," he writes in Civilization and Its Discontents, "man improves his own organs, both motor and sensory, or clears away the barriers to their functioning." Ships, airplanes, telescopes and cameras, gramophones and telephones - all these afford man the omnipotence and omniscience he attributes to his gods, thus making him "eine Art Prosthesengott": a kind of god with artificial limbs, a prosthetic god. "When he puts on his auxiliary organs he is truly magnificent," Freud writes; "but" (he continues) "those organs have not grown on to him and they still give him much trouble at times." Man's technological appendages both enhance and diminish him. It's what Hal Foster, in his book Prosthetic Gods, calls "the double logic of the prosthesis": an addition that threatens, or marks, a subtraction.
[...]
Technology, as our prosthesis makes us godlike and less-than-human in one and the same move...
[...]
For Kleist, puppetry lays bare a complex process through which man, robbed of the pure, naive grace of a puppet by self-consciousness, might regain it by advancing so far into knowledge that he re-emerges on the other side to "appear most pure in that human form which either has no consciousness at all or possesses infinite consciousness - that is, either in a marionette or in a god" - an event, the choreographer informs the narrator, that would constitute "the last chapter in the history of the world."