Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: Each Word of Skin
- 1 Writing Bodies: Hustvedt's Textual Skin
- 2 Expeausition: Ondaatje's Skin-Effects
- 3 The Law of Tact: Freud and H.D.
- 4 So Close: Writing that Touches
- 5 Dis-tanz: 29 Tangos
- 6 Hand Delivered: From A to X
- 7 Digital Technologies and Prosthetic Possibilities
- 8 Phantom Limbs: Bowen's ‘Hand in Glove’
- Bibliography
- Index
7 - Digital Technologies and Prosthetic Possibilities
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 September 2017
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: Each Word of Skin
- 1 Writing Bodies: Hustvedt's Textual Skin
- 2 Expeausition: Ondaatje's Skin-Effects
- 3 The Law of Tact: Freud and H.D.
- 4 So Close: Writing that Touches
- 5 Dis-tanz: 29 Tangos
- 6 Hand Delivered: From A to X
- 7 Digital Technologies and Prosthetic Possibilities
- 8 Phantom Limbs: Bowen's ‘Hand in Glove’
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
‘Hence the hand, and the fingers – and we are coming to them,’ writes Derrida in On Touching. Yes, the hand, and the fingers: we are always coming to them, picking them up, pointing, holding and handing them over. And this chapter examines the hands that feature throughout Fritz Lang's 1927 film, Metropolis: ‘It was their hands that built this city of ours, Father. But where do the hands belong in your scheme?’ asks Freder to Joh Frederson, the founder of Metropolis and head of the city of subterranean workers. Although the protagonist's father is liable to dismiss the manual workers, the viewer is continually reminded of the hand's presence. Not only is manus, the hand, embedded within the manual worker, but young Freder's passion for the hand-of-man overrides his father's will to turn a blind eye to the hardships his regime inflicts. An immediate example of the hand's deciding role in Metropolis comes early in the film, when Freder departs from the Eternal Gardens to venture underground. Here, he watches a man whose impossible task – with his two hands – is to align three hands on a clock face so that they touch at intermittently flashing lights. The worker, it seems, is missing a limb – that is, until Freder rushes to give him a helping hand. It is, for Freder, a call to arms.
But this isn't the only hand. Their sheer number invests them with a certain monstrosity (see Figure 7.1). The viewer is repeatedly presented with such images – hands extending, hands raised in terror, hands waving, hands grasping, hands writing, hands on hearts and of course the handshake that concludes the film (see Figure 7.2). Although the director, Lang, came to reject this signifying handshake, describing it in interviews as ‘embarrassingly naive’, Derrida's discussion of the hand cannot help but shake up established readings of the film.
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- Tactile PoeticsTouch and Contemporary Writing, pp. 120 - 139Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2015