As shocks multiply in modernity, mechanical substitutes replace personal defense mechanisms

Evidence

For Freud, the function of consciousness is the defense of the organism against shocks from the external environment. In this sense traumas, hysterical repetitions, dreams are ways in which the incompletely assimilated shock attempts to make its way through to consciousness and hence to ultimate appeasement. In Benjamin’s hands, this idea becomes an instrument of historical description, a way of showing how in modern society, perhaps on account of the increasing number of shocks of all kinds to which the organism is now subjected, these defense mechanisms are no longer personal ones: a whole series of mechanical substitutes intervenes between consciousness and its objects, shielding us perhaps, yet at the same time depriving us of any way of assimilating what happens to us or of transforming our sensations into any genuinely personal experience. Thus, to give only one example, the newspaper acts as a shock absorber for the jolts of novelty, numbing us to events that might perhaps otherwise overwhelm us, but at the same time rendering them neutral and impersonal, transforming them into something that by definition has no common denominator with our private existences. — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 143

Categorization

• XREF: This is Benjamin’s Freudian shock-defense thesis being applied as historical-dialectical description — directly connects to Adorno’s critique of the culture industry as administered numbing, and prefigures the ‘newspaper as shock absorber’ that also appears in Jameson’s later analyses of postmodern media flattening. — connects to: Modernity turned shock into the norm of lived experience — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 861; Modern shock experiences undermine the basis of traditional lived experience — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 861; Technology can increase human weakness even as it increases power — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the…, 822 (+3 more)
• DEEPTHINKING: The move from Freud’s individual shock-defense to Benjamin’s socialized defense mechanisms — mechanical intermediaries that shield yet also foreclose genuine experience — is the paradigm case of the Frankfurt-School method of materialist-redescribing psychoanalytic categories. Dense enough to repay extended reading.

Broader Connections

• Modernity turned shock into the norm of lived experience #corroborates (0.85) — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 861
• Technology can increase human weakness even as it increases power #expands (0.85) — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 822
• Modern shock experiences undermine the basis of traditional lived experience #expands (0.80) — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 861
• In the commodity age, natural need has been replaced by artificial stimuli #corroborates (0.75) — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 197
• Post-shock disorientation has been systematically exploited to ram through elite-favoring policies #complicates (0.70) — Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, 17