In Walter Benjamin’s book Illuminations, you find the famous essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. This was and still is a seminal critical work, noting how the value of art corresponds to what he calls aura and how the absence of the latter, inherent in reproducibility, leads to loss of value. It’s a quintessential photographic analysis, even more pertinent in 2007, when digital methods erode even more the mystique of the image. Everyone is now a photographer, and professional work is revealed more distinctly for what it always was: a social role, which Cartier-Bresson partly suggested in his remark “photography is nothing – it’s life that interests me”.
At certain points in Illuminations, you find moments of simple observation with a startling significance. Referring to Freud, Baudelaire and Proust, he notes the difference between casual environmental impressions and those of which we are relatively conscious, and how they impact differently on memory and thus the forming of identity and intelligence. It’s an important distinction, pertaining to Id and Ego, conscious and unconscious whereby, he quotes Freud:
It would be the special characteristic of consciousness that, unlike what happens in all other psychical systems, the excitatory process does not leave behind a permanent change in its elements, but expires, as it were, in the phenomenon of being conscious…memory fragments are often most powerful and most enduring when the incident which left them behind was one that never entered consciousness…consciousness as such receives no memory traces whatever, but has another important function: protection against stimuli. For a living organism, protection against stimuli is an even more important function than the reception of stimuli; the protective shield is equipped with its own store of energy and must above all strive to preserve the special forms of conversion of energy operating in it against he effects of the excessive energies at work in the external world, effects which tend toward an equalisation of potential and hence toward destruction. The threat from these energies is one of shocks. The more readily consciousness registers these shocks, the less likely are they to have a traumatic effect (157).
I’ve only seen one other person address the idea of “shock” in this sophisticated psychological way and that’s GI Gurdjieff, from which came the further explanatory work of PD Ouspensky and others. Sufi writer Idries Shah thinks the Gurdjieff system is a variant and diluted form of Sufism. I don’t agree with that, and think the hierarchy of understanding is the reverse of what he suggests – but there is a philosophical similarity and it’s one way of describing what Gurdjieff’s ideas and intentions were. There’s an overlap with Sufism: not the organised and ritualised form of religion but the sophisticated psychology which is not confined to or even evident in the latter, of which Idries Shah is a good example.
As a human organism we have to constantly negotiate with shock, broadly related to the notion of stimulus with corresponding response. Gurdjieff and his followers, however, had an exceptionally subtle understanding of this where for example the act of breathing is itself a shock, pertaining to the overall organism. The first breath is undoubtedly a major organic change, where we are suddenly an independent organism in an environment of air rather than amniotic fluid. Hardly surprising that the baby wails and cries, at such an abrupt and fundamental shift. The awakening of sexuality is another such shock – ‘shock’ meaning a powerful change, ie in a neutral rather than derogatory or traumatising sense although it can have the quality of the latter and Benjamin, citing Freud and others, outlines how this happens and how it does not happen: if you are ‘conscious’ at the moment of experiencing it with a sense of being ‘centred’ in yourself, it doesn’t traumatise. I was in a seminar once when the lecturer said he was going to shout angrily to illustrate a point. I was unaffected, vaguely amused, but also recognised if he’d ‘meant’ it I’d have felt differently. The difference was in me, not in the external stimulus, which was a ‘shock’.
Benjamin again, this time quoting Valery:
The impressions and sense perceptions of man…actually belong in the category of surprises; they are evidence of an insufficiency in man…recollection is…an elemental phenomenon which aims at giving us the time for organising the reception of stimuli which we initially lacked (158).
Dreams are a pre-eminent way of facilitating this process and like digestion of food the unconscious processes our psychic life and – according to psychoanalytic theory – making this a more conscious process facilitates healing and self-knowledge. This is essentially a standard psychoanalytic starting point, and yet subtly and importantly different because its significance extends beyond conventional psychological interests: shock concerns us all, it concerns us for most of the time, and has ramifications for general culture. I am particularly interested in two aspects of popular, by which I mean widespread culture: the music of jazz, and photography, which I will focus on after some explanatory notes about shock, and psychology. To illustrate my own premise, I refer to Benjamin again and his remarks about poetry:
The question suggests itself how lyric poetry can have as its basis an experience for which the shock experience has become the norm. One would expect such poetry to have a large measure of consciousness (158).
Poetry, in other words, is an artistic-literary reworking of shock: the incoherent tumult of impressions get transformed into something more beautiful, meaningful and resonant. Freud himself noted this, how the practices of art parallel the organic-psychological process evident in dreaming: the organising and digestion of experience. We simply cannot cope with all that we experience, and constantly filter the myriad of sensory and psychological contact we have with an environment. This factor is probably related to the inadvisable practice of taking hallucinogenic drugs. After decades of reports, during and since the hippy era and the proselytising of people like Timothy Leary it seems clear, although there’s no definitive way of substantiating this, that LSD and the similar substances of shamanism don’t so much reveal hidden meaning as destroy an important and necessary defence. This is irresistibly attractive to a certain kind of personality, and both primitive tribes and more sophisticated people have built a faith-like ideology around it: while it may be true as a general premise that our “doors of perception” are blocked it does not follow that drugs, the particular door they offer and where they lead, have any value whatsoever. Quite the reverse: it’s now widely accepted that even relatively mild substances like marijuana have damaging effects on mental health.
Shock is both an obvious and more subtle component of human living, not confined to the experience and psychoanalytic theorising of trauma – although that does present us with pertinent examples from which useful extrapolations can be made. Emotional shocks easily damage a person for life, either in obvious or less obvious ways. But they don’t have to be massive “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune”, to quote Shakespeare who had an intuitive grasp of this subject; even the more mild shocks of normal growing up mould our subsequent lives for either good or bad. The gentle ruminations in a programme like the Radio 4 Desert Island Discs frequently show this: we hear people describe the formative experiences that led them in personal and vocational directions, in which their musical selections show significant and punctuating moments.
Benjamin continues with an examination of Baudelaire where, he says:
He speaks of a duel in which the artist, just before being beaten, screams in fright. This duel is the creative process itself…Baudelaire placed the shock experience at the very centre of his artistic work (159).
Other examples come to mind, notably in the Romantics, as with the personalities of Blake and Coleridge. The latter in particular not only dabbled in drugs – in fact was badly addicted – but also went wandering around the Lake District in search of extreme experiences and a deliberate exposure to tempestuous elements. At one notorious moment, Coleridge exulted in a life and death episode descending what is now a famously dangerous location: Broad Stand, connecting the peaks of Scafell and Scafell Pike. He was wandering half-crazed, possibly high on opium as he often was, and had no knowledge of where he was nor what lay underneath as he lowered himself down. Other people since then have suffered grave and mortal injury at Broad Stand; it’s probably the first recorded account of British rock climbing, but Coleridge was merely lucky.
Benjamin continues by quoting Engels with an account of congested city living where:
No one even bothers to spare a glance for the others. The greater the number of people that are packed into a tiny space, the more repulsive and offensive becomes the brutal indifference, the unfeeling concentration of each person on his private affairs (162).
This is more than mere unpleasantness, as you would expect from Engels:
These Londoners have had to sacrifice what is best in human nature in order to create all the wonders of civilisation…that a hundred creative faculties that lay dormant in them remain inactive (162).
Benjamin, in addition to his political slant, has a particular interest in the effect of dialectic conditions on consciousness. City workers have a dulled capacity for living, enclosed in walls of insensitivity dictated by the environment. The threat from the environment is one of shock and “the more readily consciousness registers these shocks, the less likely are they to have a traumatic effect” (157) and “the greater the share of the shock factor in particular impressions, the more constantly consciousness has to be alert as a scree against stimuli” (159).
Shock then, and the psychology related to it, is an important facet of understanding human life and our orientation to both physical and social environments:
The shock is individual, wounding, and isolating; man is no longer able to assimilate the world around him. The world changes so rapidly, and crowds man so closely, buffets him with so much information, that it constantly distracts him (148).
Shock is an inherent part of living and the increasing pace of the world – even in Benjamin’s time, more so now – creates a fractured sense of self, of meaning, when social environments and over-abundant information exceeds our capacity to deal with it. Further, shock psychology has ramifications for different aspects of cultural life. In part 2 of this essay I’ll introduce photography into the subject, and in part 3 I’ll consider the music of jazz in relation to ‘shock’.