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Prosthetic Culture: Photography, Memory and Identity. By Celia Lury. London and New York: Routledge, 1998. 248 pp.
Prosthetic Culture: Photography Memory and Identity asks: What happens to identity in an age of digital imaging? Advancing this question, author Celia Lury observes that self-identity is now not merely considered a possession of the individual but a property subject to endless processes of assessment and speculation, remodeling and renovation. Ultimately Prosthetic Culture argues the technological facilitation of "experimental individualism." The book takes the position that recent transformations in photo-based technologies and practices have contributed to a literalization of the liberal-humanist concept of the individual as a self-possessed and self-possessing, self- determined and self-determining entity. Insofar as "vision and self- knowledge have become inextricably and productively intertwined in modern Euro-American societies," self-identity must now be seen as obtained in relation to a widening range of visualization techniques, based in or derived from "seeing photographically" (p.2).
In Lury's account "seeing photographically" is both a historically specific mode of cognition and a mnemonic technique that affects "configurations of self-and collective identity, experience and information" (p. 148). Both perceptual and memorial functions are defined by the paradoxical status of the photograph in representation. While the photograph, as a form of language, severs the subject from its material referent in the world, its indexical status invites consideration of, and therefore a return to, its source-however qualified or limited that return may be. In Lury's discussion, the advent of photography promoted the possibility of an "experimental" subjectivity predicated on the same principles. Here Lury turns to Roland Barthes to explain "the experimental individual" in relation to the operation of the photographic portrait scenario, as a split subject, a self conceived as self and other, private and public simultaneously. In Camera Lucida, Barthes suggested that the processes of self-representation involved in posing for a photographic portrait facilitated what he called "a micro- version of death." In front of the camera one experiences: "that very subtle moment when, to tell the truth, I am neither subject nor object but a subject who feels he is becoming an object: I then experience a micro-version of death (of parenthesis): I am truly becoming a specter" (Barthes, 1981, p. 15, quoted p. 86).
Key to Lury's notion of...