Page 39 - Critical Theories of Mass Media

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24 Then
the quantitative shift between its two poles turned into a
qualitative transformation of its nature.
(Essay: Section V)
Benjamin’s analysis of aura prefigures certain elements of McLuhan’s
thinking. Although Benjamin does not read media history as a grand
narrative of the human body’s externalization in quite the same way,
his thesis that mechanical reproduction results in fundamental and
traumatic derangement of the senses anticipates certain aspects of
McLuhan’s idea that media technologies constitute new extensions
of the sensory organs of man – outerings of the body. In addition,
Benjamin’s emphasis upon qualitative social changes stemming from
technologically inspired quantitative increases prefigures a crucial
aspect of McLuhan’s work – his argument that the major effects of a
medium are ‘the change of scale or pace or pattern that it
introduces into human affairs’ (McLuhan [1964] 1995: 8). From
Benjamin’s earlier perspective, the human sensorium is not a
trans-historical, unchanging structure but, rather, it is historically
determined and delimited by a combination of social and technical
constraints that are also subject to radical overhaul when new
innovations arise. In keeping with his Essay’s opening exhortation,
Benjamin builds upon Marx’s observation that ‘the forming of the
five senses is a labour of the entire history of the world down to the
present’ (Marx 1988: 108) by considering the contribution of his
particular historical moment to this ongoing project of the senses
and their development. Benjamin shows that it is in photography
that the nature of a profound shift in our mediated sense of the
world around us finds its first expression, before its yet further and
fuller realization with the advent of cinema. Photography initiates a
radical alteration in the scale of perception, it reveals a new realm of
novel images, previously too fleeting, above or below the spectrum of
a perception unaided by artificial means, a new realm that Benjamin
terms the optical unconscious.
The optical unconscious describes those aspects of the natural world
inaccessible to the naked eye and which the camera allows us to see
for the first time. Examples include the corona of drops that can be
seen rising up from the surface of a liquid that is broken and filmed
in slow motion, the exact manner in which a horse’s hooves move
over the ground when it is running at full speed, bird’s-eye views of
cities, and so on: ‘photography, and later film, revealed an entire
realm, thus the latter destroyed the world of ordinary perception
with ‘the dynamite of the tenth of a second’ (Section XIII). It
parallels Freud’s discoveries about the mind’s unconscious nature to
the extent that:
Fifty years ago, a slip of the tongue passed more or less
unnoticed. Only exceptionally may such a slip have revealed

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