자동인형, 경험, 그리고 새로운 재현기술의 가능성 - 포우의 「소모된 인간」

Automaton, Experience, and the New Possibility of Representation in Poe’s “The Man That Was Used Up”

This paper attempts to examine how Poe theorizes modernity in relation to experience, knowledge, and its representational skill. Particular cultural environment reflected in Poe, Benjamin, and Baudelaire, that of a modem, technological, and crowded city, is tied up with their creativity in some sense. In Poe’s “The Man That Was Used Up” (1839), the coupling between subject and technological environments is a primary detriment to the “post-ness” of the post-human subject, producing modem experience and knowledge. Benjamin and Poe theorize modernity in relation to the idea of the city stroller, flâneur. Flâneur moves not so much of a religious world, but in that of capitalist reification. Benjamin indicates the increase of shock experience, or the overwhelming stimuli of modernity, as the cause of the decrease in Erfahrung. Therefore the act of storytelling has undergone a transformation in the form of the short story. For Poe and Benjamin, the short story is the narrative form that takes the shock-Erlebnis as its basis. Rather than connecting the reader to a continuous unconscious experience, the short story produces a petrified image of experience, an artificial Erfahrung.