Freudian Techno-Fetishism: The Mystic iPad (and Its Discontents)
by Zoe Burke // 6.25.14
In 1925, Sigmund Freud published a short essay concerning a recent arrival upon the market, a type of writing tablet that advertised itself as an alternate method of recording notes. Called the “Mystic Writing Pad”, it consisted of a sheet of clear plastic set atop a waxed board. The user would write on it with a stylus, which pressed through the plastic and made a slight impression in the wax beneath, appearing as a dark trace on the surface. When the plastic was lifted from the surface of the tablet, the dark traces vanished; the tablet became blank again, like a chalkboard just erased. This tablet device can be observed today in its contemporary manifestation; that of a child’s toy.
Physically the “Mystic Writing Pad” could be likened to a synthesis of pen-and-paper note-taking with writing on a chalkboard. Where the pen-and-paper note-taking method falls short is that a sheet of paper has a finite amount of space which needs to be supplemented once it is filled, with more paper. The chalkboard, by contrast, is an infinitely receptive surface, but only once the previous inscriptions have been erased. These tools of recording and storing information, or as Freud describes them, “devices to aid our memory system”, are imperfect when contrasted with other technological prostheses we have manufactured to aid our bodily senses, such as glasses or hearing aides. The reason for this imperfection is that the mental apparatus can accomplish “precisely what [other bodily senses] cannot; it has an unlimited receptive capacity for new perceptions and nevertheless lays down permanent – even though not unalterable – memory-traces of them”.[1]
Freud is doubtless fond of his metaphors. As he famously attributed the figure of the vulture in the infant dreams of Da Vinci to the breast of his mother, Freud here compares this child’s toy to a model of how the perceptive conscious of the human mind passes information through to the unconscious, and creates memory.
The Mystic Pad represented to Freud an admittedly imperfect although insightful view into how the human mind itself records and stores information. Lifting away the plastic of the pad from the wax tablet beneath causes the writing to vanish, cleaning the slate and allowing new impressions to be received upon the surface. What makes the pad into a fitting analogy of memory is the fact that, upon lifting the plastic, a permanent trace of the previous recordings upon the pad is visible in the form of slight impressions upon the wax, which can even be potentially legible if examined closely. For Freud, this functions in a way that is analogous to the perception-consciousness’s reception of impressions from the external world. While the perception-consciousness remains unaffected by these external impressions, it serves the function of passing them along into the unconscious, where they exist indefinitely as subtle traces (memories) that can be recalled upon close examination.
Jacques Derrida took a particular interest in this metaphor, and used it as a frame of reference for discussing a post-Freudian critique of systems of archiving, as well as an inquiry into the future of archival technologies. All archival technologies, ranging from the sooty impressions of a human hand on a cave wall to the most elaborately networked supercomputer, Freud and Derrida would agree, are systems that humanity implements to represent the functioning of the psychic apparatus in an exterior technical model.[2] Derrida is curious about what occurs when memory is represented in Cartesian space, or when it is made exterior through the implementation of a technological object, such as Freud’s Mystic Pad. He denotes the archaism of cataloguing memory by writing by hand versus the advanced potential offered by the machine, and wonders whether, had more advanced technologies existed during Freud’s lifetime, the essentials of his discourse would have been affected.
Derrida poses the question “Is the psychic apparatus better represented or is it affected differently by all the technical mechanisms for archivization and for reproduction, for prostheses of so-called live memory, for simulacrums of living things which already are, and will increasingly be, more refined, complicated, powerful than the ‘mystic pad’ (microcomputing, electronization, computerization, etc.)?” In other words, has technology effectively helped us in our efforts to catalogue and store our thoughts? Or, has the perpetual forward motion of technology changed the structure of our mental apparatuses altogether?
This question is one that cannot be answered easily. It requires a thorough analysis of how we have shaped technology over the eons, and alternatively, how it has shaped us. Let us allow Derrida’s question to sit in the back of our minds, as a memory-trace on the ‘mystic pad’ of our consciousness, to be revisited later.
For now, we might look back to Freud’s theories on technology, and the ways in which its progress and advancement has effected society. In “Civilization and Its Discontents”, Freud traces the evolution of technology from the control over fire, the first tool employed by humanity, to the invention of motor-powered vehicles. He describes tools created by man as falling into two categories: they are either designed as efforts to perfect our organs, or to remove the limits to their functioning. [3] Every tool we create is implemented as an extension of our bodies. The telephone amplifies our voice and influence across great distances, which we can also use vehicles to cross, and we overcome the limits of our visibility as set by the structure of our retinas by use of glasses, telescopes and microscopes. It is in this way that “man has, as it were, become a kind of prosthetic God”[4], using his tools as auxiliary organs that increasingly become more and more incorporated into his being, furthering his power far past that of his feeble ancestors, as he quite literally begins to collect and attribute physical qualities to himself that eons ago would have been only attributed to the ideal, the God of his creation.
Our prosthetic bodies have only been expanding more rapidly in their godliness since Freud’s time; we’ve reached a point where our cybernetic muscles and the vast rhizomatic network of our hyperconnected minds seemingly delegate few feats left to the realm of dreams. But emotionally, we still find ourselves very much in the same place as our predecessors. Where technology has flourished forward in a way that has amplified our senses and capabilities in a way unimaginable by our progenitors, an underlying current of psychic impotence has become a fixture in 21st century society. For all of our godliness, we find ourselves enfeebled in our decadence. No longer faced with an everyday struggle for life, we have implemented new structures of necessity to keep us occupied, one of which being the pursuit of beauty, which has, by our consumerist society, been systematically consolidated into the accumulation and fetishization of objects.
Freud’s “Totem and Taboo” tells us that primeval cultures would frequently imbue objects with symbolic power, elevating them to the level of totemic deity. In ancient Egyptian culture, for instance, the sun was deified for its ability to give and take life. In a modern culture whose participants live in metropolitan cities as opposed to personally relying on the land for survival, the sun is given value based on a system of exchangeable signs in a series. It can be appreciated on the level of aesthetics when reclining on a beach during a day off, or it can be replaced entirely by a heat lamp, which might be found in a gym, which is part of the ideological system of the healthy, aestheticized body. The shift between the value placed in the totemic symbolism of an object and its semiotic value is characteristic of our modernity, and it is what engenders object fetishism within a culture that doesn’t have to toil in fields or fend off disease and wild animals in order to propagate itself.
It is this system of objects as signifiers of value and their exchange that Jean Baudrillard refers to as “consummativity”, a constituent of capitalist society, observed to be in opposition with productivity.[5] The function of a consummativistic society is to manipulate its participants, supplanting them with an ideological system of object-desire as influenced by the marketplace. Consummativity is necessary for the proliferation of a metropolitan capitalist economy, just as the regimentation and subordination of the human body was crucial for the slave-driving aristocracy of ancient Egypt.
In order to understand a society that fetishizes objects as they are proliferated through the marketplace, it might do us well to return to Freud’s “Three Essays on Sexuality”, where he offers a definition of fetish as an “unsuitable substitute for the sexual object”. In the majority of Freud’s case studies, fetishes took the form of some part of the body, such as hair or feet, which are technically unsuitable for the act of copulation. Otherwise it would take the form of an inanimate object “which bears an assignable relation to the person whom it replaces”[6], such as shoes or undergarments.
Freud’s theories about fetishism are rooted in his thoughts about the sexual researches of young children. He postulates that all young boys are subject to fear of castration; once they notice that their mothers and sisters lack penises, they develop the fear that they themselves will be castrated. The genesis of a fetish in a boy is propagated by the boy’s disbelief and shock in the female’s lack of a penis, and their desire to find a substitute for it, which later in his life develops into his fetish. Young girls, on the other hand, recognize the fact that their genitals are different from boys, and are immediately overcome by envy for the male’s genitalia, which may develop into a fetish in a similar way, by seeking a substitute for the organ they lack.[7]
Phallocentrism is the root of all fetishism according to Freud. Similarly, on an economic scale, the psychoanalytic manifestation of fetishism focuses on the dynamics of human desire for substitutive objects, or stand-ins for something human,[8] in order to replace something that is missing or lacked. This begs the question: what exactly is it that western culture fundamentally lacks at this plateau moment of our prosthetic godliness? Upon realizing what we lack, what fetish object-prosthetic can be designed and marketed to us to fill in the gap?
Mankind has recently expanded its prosthetic engineering practice into the realm of the metaphysical by creating the Internet, and thus heralding in an endlessly multidimensional network of connectivity that never could have been speculated by our ancestors. Potentially the grandest prosthetic of them all, the Internet effectively does away with the private sphere; all life on it is a spectacle, capable of being accessed by the inexorable billions who network within it daily. As alienating as pre-hyperconnected life may seem to the young adult who sleeps with their smartphone next to their pillow every night, pre-Internet culture contained the symbolic benefit of an alienation that encouraged physical and emotional self-sufficiency by implementing unavoidable separation of one from others; a lifestyle that the millennial generation can never know.
But when every aspect of life becomes a spectacle, the very worth of the constituents of the notion ‘spectacle’ become obscure, and mundane. The value of communication is what suffers when there is endless communication, and the value of the spectacle is lost. As Baudrillard says, “Obscenity begins when there is no more spectacle, no more stage, no more illusion, when everything becomes immediately transparent, visible, exposed in the raw and inexorable light of information and communication. We no longer partake of the drama of alienation, but are in the ecstasy of communication.”[9]
Following the logic of fetishism materializing in order to replace what is missing, it is natural to assume that the most fetishized objects in our consummativistic economy are those that ideologically promise to repair the damage that hyperconnectivity has done to our relationships with one another, and those that deliver us into the ecstasy of communication. It is a fetishistic paradox indeed that seeks to medicate the effects of too much communication, disclosure, and networking with devices that make all three of those things even easier, by placing them at our fingertips, or even directly fixed to our faces, as is the case with Google Glass.
The smartphone, iPad, and laptop are technological fetish objects; they are machines that mediate communication. And as Baudrillard’s semiotic discourse postulates, they are all objects that are “consumed within themselves”, objects that signify membership within communities as “tokens of integration and social legitimacy”.[10] The fetishistic veneration of these objects is enacted through systematic selective viewing, and the “apparent passivity of long hours of viewing that actually hide a laborious patience”[11]*.
While these objects themselves are doubtlessly fetishized by society, it is so much more than the slick, rounded metal and glass of an Apple product that is the sought-after object of the media technology fetishist. What is actually being pursued is the ebbing current of ever-metamorphosing communications technologies, of mediation itself. Social media is a meta-commodity that is unquestionably fetishized by its participants. By entrenching ourselves in a sea of profiles, we come across digital plinths, godlike in their precision, erected by our peers to establish their immaculately idealized personas within hyperspace. It is here that we begin to see correlations with Freud’s original definition of fetishism; a Facebook profile or Instagram feed is “an inanimate object which bears an assignable relation to the person whom it replaces”. Internet culture, born of consummativity, has made it possible for us to fetishize each other in a way that was previously impossible: by marketing ourselves online as singular lifestyle ideologies, we make each other into inanimate objects to be venerated and desired.
I should be surprised to find a clearer iteration of the Freudian notion of “wish-fulfillment” in contemporary culture than the godlike prostheses we assign ourselves through self-mediation within social media. Freud says of the inanimate objects that we fetishize that “such substitutes are with some justice likened to the fetishes in which savages believe their Gods are embodied”[12]. And what is godliness other than the imposition of self-mediation to the degree of perfection?
Making use of the psychoanalytic interpretation of fetishism, Baudrillard takes it a step further and recognizes that object fetishism on a societal level is equivocal to an infatuation with the signifier that precedes the object; a “passion for the code”[13] that the object itself represents. The underlying “code” of the fetishization of social technologies is, at the core, an infatuation with the communication and mutability represented by the technologies themselves. Baudrillard acknowledges that the system of objects that are fetishized by a culture continually shifts emphasis, as the market responds to trends and progressions in the driving aesthetic desire of a given society. It is in this way that, unlike the desire of the sexual fetishist, the desire of the object-commodity fetishist is constantly subject to redirection and revision.
Having a foothold in understanding the mutability of technology brings us into an arena of thought that we can use to finally answer Derrida’s question. I shall pose it again: has technology effectively helped us in our efforts to catalogue and store our thoughts? Or, has the perpetual forward motion of technology changed the structure of our mental apparatuses altogether?
Technology’s continuous mutability shows us that discourse networks are temporal; there have been systems that mechanize the components of sense-making, communication, and the archival of memory, since the conception of language. With each reevaluation of communications systems that happens inevitably over the course of history, new paradigms are set that determine characteristics of interaction, while obsolete elements are phased out. For a clear example of this fascinating social-evolutionary trait of humanity, one need only consider Homer, the ancient Greek blind poet who wrote the epics The Iliad and The Odyssey. Homer himself, as well as the travelling storytellers of ancient Greece, could produce thousands of lines of prose out of his own memory. Humanity has lost, or phased out that particular technology, the technology of memory, because as the use of the written word became more widespread over the course of history, writing became more suitable as a primary technology of communication.
In the same way that the written word diminished the need for memory thousands of years ago, it could be said that the advent of social media, which provides a public digital format for documentation, has drained the potency of secrecy, if not eliminated the need for it entirely. Critiques of these kinds of reevaluations of communication through mediation consider media in terms of its capacity to change, alter, and intervene in the world, as it exists. In the introduction for their book “Excommunication”, Alexander Galloway, Eugene Thacker, and McKenzie Wark note how this approach often results in a discussion of media determinacy, and promotes a rhetoric of danger.[14] It corrals discussions back towards the objects through which mediation is channeled, such as arguments favoring the book over the Kindle, or the preference of hearing someone’s voice rather than receiving a text message. The authors of Excommunication argue that this is not a progressive mode of thinking for media theorists, because of the temporality of media. Perhaps if Twitter truly does end up eliminating the need for secrecy, a new media temporality will flow in with the current, and fulfill that need for us.
Social technology has proposed itself as the architect of our intimacies, but in our naïveté, we tend to forget that the Internet is still relatively new. In eonic terms, it is very much still in it’s infancy as a communication technology. Humanity has demonstrated a remarkable capability of evolving alongside technology, reworking and revising it to better suit our interests, as it simultaneously causes us to rework and revise the way we interact with one another, and the very way we structure our mental apparatuses (to answer Derrida’s question). It is crucial to remember that the way in which technology is manifested currently is not the way that it will be eternally. Like a cladogram of evolutionary symbols, technology will branch out; our amaranthine partners in the maturation of mankind, for better or for worse. As Freud phrased it in 1929, “When he puts on all his auxiliary organs he is truly magnificent; but those organs have not grown on to him and they still give him much trouble at times. Nevertheless, he is entitled to console himself with the thought that this development will not come to an end precisely within the year 1930 AD. Future ages will bring with them new and probably unimaginably great advances in this field of civilization and will increase man’s likeliness to God still more. But … we will not forget that present-day man does not feel happy in his Godlike character.”[15]
[1] Sigmund Freud, “A Note Upon The Mystic Writing Pad”, from Freud, General Psychological Theory, Chapter XIII, 1925. (Scribner Paper Fiction; Tenth Printing edition, 1963).
[2] Jacques Derrida, “Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression,” Diacritics, Vol. 25 No. 2 ed. Eric Prenowitz (The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 15.
[3] Sigmund Freud, “Civilization and Its Discontents,” The Freud Reader, ed. Peter Gay (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1989), 737.
[4] “Civilization and Its Discontents”, 738.
[5] Tim Dant, “Fetishism and the Social Value of Objects”, Sociological Review Vol. 44 (Lancaster University, 1996), 14.
[6] Sigmund Freud, “Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality”, The Freud Reader, ed. Peter Gay (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1989), 249.
[7] “Three Essays on Sexuality”, 271.
[8] “Fetishism and the Social Value of Objects”, 17.
[9] Jean Baudrillard, “The Ecstasy of Communication”, (Semiotext[e] Foreign Agents Series, Los Angeles, 2012), 26.
[10] “Fetishism and the Social Value of Objects”, 15.
[11] Jean Baudrillard, “For A Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign", (Telos Press, St. Louis, 1981), 64.
*This analysis by Baudrillard was originally made in reference to the ‘worship’ of television, but has been reappropriated to fit my purposes.
[12] “Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality”, 249.
[13] “Fetishism and the Social Value of Objects”, 16.
[14] Alexander Galloway, Eugene Thacker, McKenzie Wark, “Excommunication”, (The University of Chicago Press, Chicago/London, 2014), 9.
[15] “Civilization and Its Discontents”, 738.
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