Cinematic innervation: the intuitive form of perception in the distracted perceptual field

In “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” Walter Benjamin alluded that the human perceptual field in his time would become more distracted by the intervention of technologies, and so masses’ tactility activated by distraction would be more important in the mechanized perception. Regarding this historical situation, Benjamin anticipated that the new mode of mass perception would be organized through people's collective “innervation” to technologies. This article aims to contextualize this physiological term's cultural, technical, and political implications within various discourses about perception from the late 19th century physiologies to early 20th century film theories. Benjamin considers the tactility of people's potential to reconstruct the optical scheme of perception from the “flatness of screen” in which distances between viewers and perceived objects collapse. In a similar vein, the late 19th century's physiology reconceptualized perception in its relation not so much to the transcendental division of subject/object as to the sensual condition of a retina as “a single immanent plane.” From this perspective, perception is phenomena entailed by a body's contact to a sensual environment, so how sense inputs circulate in a neural network is a determinant for explaining perceptual processes. With regard to this paradigm change, the invention of cinema in the late 19th century was significant because it radically changed the composition of the perceptual field in two directions. Cinema introduced the virtualized perceptual fields on which sense circulations were completely controlled by the operation of camera. At the same time, the mediation of projectors in theaters reorganized viewers’ neural paths for perceptual innervation. As Hugo Münsterberg and Sergei Eisenstein's theories reflect, cinematic media's intervention in the perceptual field made it possible for masses’ collective consciousness to be redrawn as a social nervous system on a neurophysiological level, so this media functioned as a social apparatus for the mechanization/modernization of humanity