Camera Consciousness

Arguing that traumas and wounds are embodied indexes of technological and cultural transformation, this dissertation historicizes media through tropes of the warrior and of the prosthetic. It focuses primarily on Europe and the United States from 1914 to 1933, when the shocking speed and power of industrial war necessitated radical revisions to interfaces, medical and social institutions, military training, and labor practices, many of which were shaped through photography and cinema. The camera is the foundation of contemporary militarized culture and technology. It enables the multiple perspectives, analytical eye, and detached stance deemed necessary for modernity. It buffers trauma, increasing and restoring sensorimotor capacities subjected to the overwhelming demands of combat. It also renders fragmentation and reflects the tics and spasms associated with wounded veterans. Exploring the ambiguously ecstatic and traumatic experience of the apparatus and combat alike, the aestheticization of politics and the politicization of aesthetics, juxtaposed by Walter Benjamin, are revealed as intertwined. Both modes index the dissolution of the autonomous individual and spur theorizations of consciousness as an imaging machine. The dissertation begins with accounts of trench warfare alongside clinical and Freudian theories of shock, emphasizing crises of agency, temporality, and identity. The subsequent chapters consider the aesthetic and prosthetic strategies that attempted to either overcome such shocks through a technological sublime, discussed through Ernst Jünger, or mobilize them for the formation of new social relationships, addressed through the "war cripple" motif and montage sensibilities of the Berlin Dada, Surrealism, and Brechtian theater. Looking at the physiology of Jules Amar, the time-motion recordings of Frank and Lillian Gilbreth, and the human-machine systems of Norbert Wiener, the dissertation considers the developments in camera studies of shell-shock, disability, and efficiency, as they parallel post-World War I prosthetic designs that emphasize mechanical function over organic form, and indicate an ontological shift from the singular, contained subject to the human as a series of systems and processes. The dissertation concludes by connecting such developments to contemporary combat videogames and prostheses in which play, training, and therapy converge, and continue to transform cognition, perception, and the sphere of war.