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CARSTEN STRATHAUSEN

The Relationship between Literature and Film: Patrick Sskinds Das Parfum
Abstract: The relationship between literature and film is studied both from a methodological and an interpretative point of view. The main argument is that the currently reigning semiotic and Marxist approaches should be supplemented by a physiological approach, one that (again) recognizes the bodily dimension of aesthetic criticism. The second part of the essay outlines the premises of such an aesthetic with reference to recent studies in the neurological and cognitive sciences. Finally, a comparison between Patrick Sskinds novel Das Parfum (1986) and its recent cinematic adaptation by Tom Tykwer (2006) is offered. How do book and film differ in their attempts to render the sense of smell palpable to their audience? I argue that Sskinds novel is more successful than Tykwer in representing smell, not in spite of, but because of, the sensual-semiotic poverty of words as opposed to images and sound.

I The debate concerning the relationship between literature and film is as old as the cinematic medium itself. Considered a lowlevel form of mass entertainment, early film sought to increase its cultural reputation by drawing from the already established arts such as music, theatre, and literature. Hence, cinematic adaptations of literary works or motifs became increasingly common, particularly after the bourgeoning film industry shifted its focus from documentation to narration, that is, after the end of what Noel Burch considers the primitive mode of

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representation before 1909, as opposed to the institutional mode of representation and its spectator-oriented approach thereafter (Burch 186).1 Given this constitutive intertwinement between film and literature, there have been (and continue to be) numerous studies devoted to both the empirical and the systematic analysis of the relationship between the two media. Of these the least interesting and methodologically least refined are studies that focus on narrative and plot differences between the original book and the later film version. Termed fidelity analys es by Eric Rentschler in 1986, these normative studies usually stand in the service of literary studies, more often than not forgoing cinematic specifics and slighting both historical and institutional considerations (2). Although one of the major goals of Rentschlers anthology was to break the hegemony of fidelity studies, there can be little doubt that most comparisons of film and literature today still follow what Robert Stam calls adaptation criticism. The latter, Stam argues, features an elegiac discourse of loss, lamenting what has been lost in the transition from novel to film, while ignoring what has been gained (3). Another editor of a recent collection of essays on German literature and film arrives at the same overall conclusion as Rentschler and Stam: Not surprisingly, analyses of adaptations predominantly focus on the absence and/or presence of similarities between the narrative of the novel and the film, i.e., on the fidelity of the adaptation (13), and she rightly exhorts critics to pay more attention to the technological and institutional specificity of the cinematic medium as it translates a literary narrative into a film. This is not to deny the existence of numerous studies that aim to demonstrate the influence of film upon single authors or selected literary texts. In the German context alone, we find analyses devoted to the importance of film for Hofmannsthal, Thomas Mann, Kafka, Brecht, Dblin a.o.2 Apart from presenting biographical and archival information, these studies generally focus on formal questions regarding literary style and cinematic technique, as they outline the importance of film for a particular writer/period/text. The net result is a series of disjointed close readings that strive to establish structural affinities between particular literary features (such as changes in narrative voice or flash-backs) and certain visual patterns (for

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example, montage) which are considered to be cinematic in essence and origin. Having established the link, these studies often go on to conclude that a certain author (say, Alfred Dblin or Alain Robbe-Grillet) should be considered a cinematic writer who pursues a cinematic style of writing, etc. How ever, given the biographical scope of these analyses as well as their formalist perspective, there remains a palpable lack of theoretical or methodological conclusions about the general relationship between literature and film. Instead, these authorfocused studies culminate in long enumerations of cinematic features used in literary texts (or vice versa), without ever addressing the significance of this comparison within the broader context of cultural modernity. A far more sophisticated approach toward comparing film and literature was provided by the German media theorist Friedrich Kittler in his ground-breaking work on discourse networks, published in the mid-1980s. Kittler contends that there has always been a profound media competition between the two signifying regimes, regardless of their changing narrative capabilities as outlined by Burch, Elsaesser, and other film historians. For what matters in this comparison is not the narrative coherence, but rather the visual transparency of the different sign systems under investigation. Using Foucaultian as well as Lacanian terminology, Kittler argues that literature and film belong to different historical epistemes of representation: one renders real what the other could only imagine. Media are real, he insists, they are always already beyond aesthetics (Kittler 10). In other words, cinemas actual projection of real images on the screen exposes and renders superfluous literatures old-fashioned, and far less spectacular, attempt to conjure fictional images in the mind of the reader. Thus, if sometime around 1900 literature willfully abandons its previous ambition to depict reality, and instead embraces the materiality of writingas happens in Surrealism, Dadaism and other avantgarde movementsthis is due, according to Kittler, to literatures increasing competition with the superior medium of film and the latters ability to present real rather than merely imagined pictures of the material world. Letters become numbersthat is the language crisis around 1900, as Kittler later summarizes his central idea (Kittler, Bild 83; my translation). The reason why letters become numbers is that

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the arrival of film exposes them to have been inadequate images from the very beginning. It follows that treating letters like numbers, or as obscure marks on white paper, remains the only way for literature around 1900 to defend its claim of aesthetic independence in the face of technological change.3 In spite of his trenchant critique of the history of modern signification, however, critics have aptly noted that Kittler neither discusses the historical relevance of his own work, nor reflects upon its political ramifications.4 Instead, he succumbs to a rather obvious technological determinism (WinthropYoung and Wutz xxxiv) that simply disregards any historical changes that cannot be assimilated into his epistemic model. In Kittlers early work of the 1980s, media either emerge at a particular point in time due to the ingenuity of human engineering, or are simply always already there to begin with.5 Lacking a differentiated discussion of the larger socioeconomic-political framework that informs (his own critique of) the media, Kittlers analysis, therefore, focuses mainly on analyzing the epistemic and material differences between them. In terms of the discursive networks of 1800 and 1900, this means that Kittler ultimately (mis)identifies the aesthetic nature of both film and pre-20th century literature as consisting of a shared ambition towards visual transparency. Put differently, his strong focus on semiotics prompts Kittler to short-circuit the relationship between literature and film, without grounding it in a broader, more complex historical framework. In the German context, the need to reclaim this larger ground is evident, for example, in the so-called Kino-Debatte, that is, the heated debate among German intellectuals regarding the aesthetic quality and nationalist value of cinema as it began to infringe upon the traditional domain of high culture, including literature. In Germany, film not only threatened the bourgeois model of subjectivity and its aesthetic forms of self-representation, as Anton Kaes has argued. It also undermined the constitutive myth of the German Kulturnation considered by many as a bastion against the corrosive effects of modern technology and civilization. The Kino-Debatte thus mattered not only aesthetically, but it also resonated on the socio-political level during the Weimar Republic. We need only recall that the German Ufa was founded by a consortium of

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military, industrial and political forces for the specific purpose of supporting the nationalistic-propagandistic use of film during and after WWI, meaning that German autocrats were forced, paradoxically, to embrace a modern medium as a means of defending their anti-modern views.6 Yet none of this matters in Kittlers discursive networks, where literary and cinematic signifiers collide and mutually determine each other regardless of the larger socio-political universe in which they continue to operate. So, in spite of his detailed analysis regarding the aesthetic changes that accompanied the switch from 19th-century print culture to the 20th-century society of the spectacle (Guy Debord), Kittlers intriguing media theory inadvertently endorses what I want to call the semiotic account of the relationship between literature and film. Semiotic critics frequently draw examples from the Romantic as well as the Realist period of the 19th century in order to support their central thesis that good literature always and inadvertently conjures up images in the readers mind. All good literature, in other words, anticipates the arrival of film; it is, by definition, cinematic. If you ask me to give you the most distinctive quality of good writing, Sir Herbert Read wrote in 1945, I would give it to you in this one word: VISUAL. Reduce the art of writing to its fundamentals and you come to this single aim: to convey images by means of words (Read 61). In its most radical form, this line of criticism endorses what Andr Bazin, in a short essay from 1946, called the myth of total cinema. The cinema, Bazin contends,
is an idealistic phenomenon. The concept men had of it existed so to speak fully armed in their minds, as if in some platonic heaven, and what strikes us most of all is the obstinate resistance of matter to ideas rather than of any help offered by techniques to the imagination of the researchers. [] The guiding myth, then, inspiring the invention of cinema, is the accomplishment of an integral realism, a recreation of the world in its own image. (Bazin 23; 26)

For Bazin, the art of cinema has always already existed, if only as a dream in somebodys head. Moreover, this constitutive myth of total cinema continues to be productive even today because every new technological development contributes to and thus makes a reality out of the original myth. In short,

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cinema has not yet been invented! (Bazin 27). Thus the invention of the cinematic apparatus in the year 1895 represents just one more intermediary step in a centuries-old aesthetic tradition whose goal has always been the truthful representation of reality, whether in painting, literature, the arts, or film. Although Bazins historical points of reference do not predate the modern age (i.e., the 16th century), there is nothing in principle to prevent semiotic critics from extending this myth of total cinema backward as far as Greek antiquity. This is precisely what happened in the 1970s, when Jean-Louis Baudry and other theorists of the cinematic apparatus considered Plato's cave, along with the Greek epics, and even medieval painting, to be pre-cinematic events that express humanity's ancient longing for the art of moving pictures.7 The analytical shortcomings of this abstract and overtheorized position have been exposed by a number of historically more astute critics, including Noel Carrolls blistering attack in his Mystifying Movies from 1988. Likewise, David Bordwell considers this idealist approach deeply flawed because it projects onto cinema an aesthetic essence along with a particular medium-specificity (Bordwell 31) that cannot be verified historically. Instead, Bordwell advocates a less theorized and more empirical approach toward film style, one that acknowledges the irreducible multiplicity and heterogeneity of the art of cinema, as well as its incommensurability with the other arts. Steeped in close readings of particular scenes, Bordwells astute historical analysis provides an important counterpart to the abstract semiotic approaches of the 1970s. By and large, however, Bordwells approach was precisely the route many politically interested critics did not want to take over the next decade. Instead, they went in a diametrically opposite direction, moving further away from empirical detail and toward an ever more abstract analysis of language and cinema. Many cultural critics claimed that what was missing from the semiotic approach was a more comprehensive historical-materialist account of the media relationship between film and literature. What was missing, in other words, was Marxist theory. With the rise of Marxist cultural criticism in the early 1970s (evident in the work of Fredric Jameson, Terry Eagleton, Raymond Williams, a.o.), a consensus emerged to reject as nave or positivist any straightforward empirical

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comparison between film and literature. The basic argument was that such a direct approach, regardless of whether it operates on the semiotic or the stylistic level, could not possibly do justice to what the French philosopher Louis Althusser had called the overdetermined social wholea structural field in which everything, including culture, is governed by economics in the last instance. The prevalent Marxist approach during the 1980s and early 1990s considered modernist forms of montage in both literature and film to be artistic reflections of urban shock sensations and the fragmented mode of perception imposed by capitalist societies around 1900. Instead of explaining one medium in terms of the other, cultural critics pointed to the rise of modern means of transportation, the construction of huge warehouses, and the conveyer belt as the socio-historical foundation for the cinematic perception encountered in 19 thcentury literary texts. Commenting on the psychological effect of the train ride, for example, Wolfgang Schivelbusch alludes to the new cinematic medium as the artistic correlative to this cultural experience: He [the traveler] perceives objects, landscape etc. through the apparatus with which he is moving through the world. The world outside was thus converted into a tableau, a complex of moving pictures (Schivelbusch, Railway 61).8 It follows that the so-called cinematic writers of the 20 th century did not simply copy the aesthetics of film, nor did early film-directors just transpose ancient literary-aesthetic patterns into a new medium. Rather, both cinema and literature, independently from each other, mirror the socio-cultural fragmentation and new modes of perception that characterized 20 th century modernity in general. According to Alan Spiegel, the reason for the undeniable stylistic parallels between Flaubert, Dickens and other 19th century writers, on the one hand, and film aesthetics on the other, lies primarily in the fundamental changes inaugurated by European modernity that affected (and continue to affect) our philosophical attitude and cognition (Spiegel 186). Similarl y, Joachim Paech explicitly rejects the attempt to extend the origins of cinema beyond the constitutive process of industrialization and urbanization that characterized the 19th century:

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The montage-form shared by literature and later film stems from changes that affected the life of people during the 19th century in general: with its factories, machines, railways and new metropolises, the process of industrialization has created new forms of perception that found their expression in literary and finally cinematic forms of montage. Authors belonging to 19th century bourgeois Realism used formal means of expression resembling those of filmmakers in the 20th century not because they wanted to anticipate the cinema, but because they perceived reality in comparable terms as film-directors did later on. (Paech 69; my translation)

Whereas Bazin still insisted that the myth of total cinema amounted to a complete reversal of the order of causality, which goes from the economic infrastructure to the ideological superstructure (Bazin 23), Paechs comments fully vindicate the basic principles of historical materialism, because he insists on the priority of socio-economic forces over their aesthetic effects in modern media. This Marxist model still remains the most ubiquitously accepted perspective on comparing literature and movies, for the single reason that it is based upon a socio-historical understanding of modernity commonly shared by most humanists today. This understanding of modernity includes the belief that human perception is determined culturally rather than biologically. This is to say that perception has a history, and that this history has been accelerated by the rise and fall of the bourgeoisie over the last 300 years or so. 9 The education [Bildung] of the five senses is the laborious result of all of world history so far, Karl Marx wrote in his economic-philosophical manuscripts from 1844 (Marx 191; my translation). Some fifty years later, Sigmund Freud and Georg Simmel described the psychological and behavioral processes by which the modern city dweller tries to cope with the onslaught of sensory stimulation s/he encounters in the metropolis.10 Drawing from all these sources, Walter Benjamin, in 1936, summarized the Marxist perspective on human perception in his seminal artwork essay as follows:
During long periods of history, the mode of human sense perception changes with humanitys entire mode of existence. The manner in which human sense perception is organized, the medium in which it is accomplished, is determined not only by

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nature, but by historical circumstances as well. (Benjamin, Art-Work 222)

It is difficult to disagree with this conclusion, because Benjamin avoids granting priority to either side of the nature/nurture debate. Instead, he simply posits a profound interrelation (not only, but as well) between the physiological and cultural factors that underlie human perception. Yet he did open the door for humanists increasing preoccupation with the latter at the expense of the former: everything becomes historical and thusat least potentiallysubject to deliberate socio-political change. Fredric Jamesons famous exhortationAlways historicize (9)both epitomizes and sanctions the current credo of much of contemporary criticism: where nature was, culture shall be. II Today, however, this position has become as problematic as the one it originally sought to replace. Given the amazing advances in neuroscience and gene technology, there can be little doubt that the precise relationship between biology and environment, between our neurological hard-wiring and our cultural software remains unclear, to say the least. I agree, of course, that there is no innocent eye as postulated by John Ruskin and other high modernists towards the end of the 19th century. The eye is a product of history reproduced by education, Pierre Bourdieu rightly insists (1810f.). But this is not to say that our entire perceptual apparatus is completely rewired at the physiological or neurological level every few decades or so. This is certainly not the casea fact most emphatically defended by Benjamin experts such as Susan Buck-Morss, who rightly insists that the senses maintain an uncivilized and uncivilizable trace, a core of resistance against cultural domestication because they remain a part of the biological apparatus (6). For Benjamin, of course, the biological nature of the senses remained a given; it was the very basis upon which his history-of-vision theory was formulated. It follows that the historically changing relationship between the biological and the cultural level of perception remains in questionmost obviously with regard to new media art and

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aesthetics. Why? Because digital art often deliberately works on the physiological-neurological micro-level of the body rather than on the philosophical-cognitive macro-level of the (critical, self-reflexive) subject. In order to understand many a digital work of art, it is crucial to acknowledge its unconscious, neurological effects upon the body, precisely because these effects are the major raison-dtre of this art. One of the avowed goals of many new media artists is to use digital technology as a means to manipulate these physiological effects electronically.11 New media art forces critics to refocus their attention on the physiological mechanisms that determine our affective response to art. In this sense, the arrival of new media aestheticswhat we, paraphrasing Kittler, might call the discourse network of 2000is also beginning to change the critical parameters of the century-old investigation into the relationship between film and literature, by once again emphasizing the affective (rather than the exclusively critical) dimension of aesthetic discourse. Given technologys increasing influence upon the very makeup of our bodies and our perceptual system, this affective dimension can no longernor could it everbe separated from technology. This is why media critic Mark Hansen refers to the body-in-code, by which he means a body submitted to and constituted by an unavoidable and empowering technical deterritorializationa body whose embodiment is realized, and can only be realized, in conjunction with technics (Hansen 20). Film critics, however, all too often simply repeat the Benjaminian history of vision argument without updating it to the 21st century.12 Unless we start renegotiating the relationship between the cinematic and literary representation of reality from a more body-oriented perspectiveone that includes the question of how our physiology is influenced by contemporary technologywe will remain stuck with the mere repetition of the abstract history-of-vision thesis rather than being able to scrutinize its relevance for aesthetic theory today. In practical terms, this means that we should no longer compare literature and film in semiotic and sociological terms only, but should do so in neurological-physiological terms as wellfor example, by relating the verbal and the visual to a third sense alien to both of them, namely smell. What, I would ask, are the decisive similarities and differences between books

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and films as they try to describe or conjure the most primitive and most embodied of our senses? The apparent oddity of this question quickly disappears if we approach it from a physiologicalinstead of a strictly semioticpoint of view. Film critic Laura Marks has pointed out that, even before the arrival of the talkies, film directors such as D.W. Griffith and Marcel Pagnol experimented with adding smell to the cinematic experience by burning incense during the screenings of Intolerance (1916) or Angle (1934) respectively. She also notes that the cinema viewing experience, taken as a whole, is already multisensory given the constant presenc e of food smells and perfumes in the cinema auditorium or the inadvertent physical contact with your seat neighbor, the ringing of cell phones and babies crying across the aisle etc. (Skin 212). John Waters Odorama stands out as the most deliberate and notorious attempt of cinema to move beyond its audiovisual register. In his film Polyester (1981), Waters wanted viewers to smell what they saw on the screen by using what he called "scratch and sniff" cards, that is, small strips of paper coated with an odorous substance that could be released through rubbing or scratching the papers surface. Waters Odorama had actually been inspired by a technique called Smell-OVision used only once, in William Castles Scent of Mystery (1960). The idea was to release up to 30 different smells from underneath the audiences seats at different times during the show. The release mechanism was fully automated and controlled by the films soundtrack. By contrast, Waters Odorama relied on the spectators themselves t o release the scent of individual smell cards (numbered 1-10) when instructed to do so by a flashing number on the screen. In light of this history, then, it would be unwarranted to claim that books have a more genuine connection to smell than do films. Although we do touch books and inhale the various smells (dust, mildew, cigarette smoke, etc.) that they may have absorbed over the years, a number of related sensuous experiences exist in the movie theater as wella similarity that increases if we compare books with DVDs or videos, all of which are physically handled and perceived by the viewer as material objects (as opposed to what Christian Metz called imaginary signifiers on the movie screen). A comparison of the two media with regard to their material properties alone

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thus inevitably leads to a dead end. It must be supplemented by a more detailed account of how films and books try to represent smell on the abstract level of signification, and how this signification is affectively registered by the human body. Marks, for instance, rightly points to the biologically determined cooperation between our sense of smell and our audiovisual register, citing neurological studies which prove that we are better able to remember smells when there is a linguistic or symbolic cue associated with the olfactory cue (Touch 122). Vivian Sobchack, too, insists that body and language do not simply oppose or reflect each other. Rather, they more radically in-form each other in a fundamentally nonhierarchical and reversible relationship that, in certain circumstances, manifests itself as a vacillating, ambivalent, often ambiguously undifferentiated, and thus unnamable or undecidable experience (73). Hence, our overriding goal in pursuing the literature-film comparison must be to avoid the epistemological fallacy of reducing both words and images to some allegedly shared essence, be that an essence conceived in semiotic terms (i.e., their supposed striving toward visual transparency as outlined in Bazin and Kittler), or in socio-historical terms (i.e., their supposed reflection of modern shock sensations, as described by Marxist critics), or in terms of some other abstract principle of equivalence between the two media.13 For doing so would shift attention away from the affective register of human perception, and thus return our inquiry back to the very argument (over the history of vision) that we are trying to update. But there is another, less obvious assumption that must be avoided as well, namely, the belief that words and images constitute two fundamentally distinct means of artistic expression, whose relation is entirely conceptual rather than perceptual. When Lessing first published his Laocoon in 1766, he sought to delineate the allegedly exclusive perceptual registers of painting and poetry, claiming that whereas (static) images operate in space and as space, the language-based arts cannot but unfold in time and as time. Rudolf Arnheim later tried to apply Lessings approach to the new medium of film in general and to the talkies in particular. In his A New Laocoon

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from 1938, Arnheim reiterates Lessings strict perceptual separation between words and images:
Obviously, it would be senseless and inconceivable to try to fuse visual and auditory elements artistically in the same way in which one sentence is tried to the next, one motion to the other.. On this (lower) level of the sensory phenomena, an artistic connection of visual and auditory phenomena is not possible. (One cannot put a sound in a painting!). Such a connection can be made only at a second, higher level, namely, at the level of the so-called expressive qualities. A dark red wine can have the same expression as the dark sound of a violoncello, but no formal connection can be established between the red and the sound as purely perceptual phenomena. At the second level, then, a compounding of elements that derive from disparate sensory realms becomes possibly artistically. (Arnheim 203)

Art, in other words, succeeds in combining on a conceptual (that is, structural or expressive) level that which must remain complete, closed, and strictly segregated at the lower or primary level of immediate visual perception (Arnheim 204). On the basis of this alleged ontological incommensurability of words and images, film critics such as Dudley Andrew have concluded that a meaningful comparison between literature and film must take place on the level of narration, rather than that of signification or perception: The analysis of adaptation [of literature to film] then must point to the achievement of equivalent narrative units in the absolutely different semiotic systems of film and literature. Narrative itself is a semiotic system available to both and derivable from both (103; my emphasis). Andrews point is clearly shared by most proponents of fidelity studies today, who continue to argue that narrative remains the only viable means of comparison between otherwise incompatible semiotic systems. However, it is precisely this absolute distinction between images and words, between (lower) forms of perception and (higher) forms of cognition that has been called into question by much of recent neuroscience and cognitive studies. In a seminal paper, entitled What the Frogs Eye tells the Frogs Brain, a group of scientists, including the renowned Argentine neurologist Humberto Maturana, concluded after a series of experiments that the eye speaks to the brain in a language

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already highly organized and interpreted, instead of transmitting some more or less accurate copy of the distribution of light on the receptors (Lettvin et al, 254f.). This means that each group (sheet or layer) of neurons charged with a particular operationfor example, to observe the movement of edges in a given retinal imageprovides the brain not just with a digital array of spatial points and numerical values; instead, each group projects a congruent space that maps the entire retinal image according to the specific operation it is programmed to record. It follows that every point is seen in definite contexts. The character of these contexts, genetically built-in, is the physiological synthetic a priori (Lettvin et al, 257). One important consequence of this research is that Arnheims and Andrews crucial distinction between perception and cognition becomes questionable, since the process of image processing is spread out over the entire visual system and does not only take place at one central location. In modification of Descartes famous dictum, we might say that it is both the mind and the eye that sees.14 For there are at least 32 distinct regions of the brain that contribute to visual perception, meaning that there is no absolute center, no Grand Demeaner or Cartesian Theater that authorizes meaning, as the philosopher and cognitive scientist Daniel Dennett puts it. Rather, Dennett argues, at any point in time, there are multiple drafts or narrative fragments at various stages of editing in various places in the brain (Dennett 113). Since there is no single place or time at which this material becomes bundled and conscious, we are faced with a multitrack process [that] occurs over hundreds of milli-seconds, during which time various additions, incorporations, emendations, and overwritings of content can occur, in various orders (Dennett 135). The same holds true for our other senses as well. As Marks point out, smell depends even more on the lower functions of our cognitive systems than do sights or sounds, because the olfactory bulb is already thinking when smells activate certain receptors at the very beginning of the perceptual process (Marks, Touch 119). This means that our classical aesthetic distinctions (between words and images, between perception and cognition, between affect and sense) are arbitrary and conventional rather than

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absolute. For, at the neurological level, all of our sense perceptions break down to a complex array of electrical impulses across a interconnected field of dendrites and axons, at which point it makes no difference anymore whether the original stimulus was a sight, or a sound, or a smell. Although Arnheim was right to argue that one cannot put a sound in a painting, he was wrong to conclude that we can establish a relation between the senses only on the cognitive level of abstract thought. On the contrary, this relation is always already present at the neurological level of human perception. And this, in turn, gives us license to pursue more daring comparisons between diverse media and different senses, comparisons that deliberately violate Arnheims common-sensical exhortation to respect the natural or ontological boundaries that allegedly separate them. Let me be clear: all boundaries are constructions and thus arbitrary. But the need to construct such boundaries is not. Although culture (i.e., technology) can intervene at any single point of a given boundary and thus change its nature (by using various chemical, electronic, or behavioral techniques), it cannot instantaneously alter the present configuration of an entire system, nor can it eradicate the epistemological necessity of creating distinctions and boundaries in the first place. For this is precisely what cybernetics and systems theory which were themselves were influenced by the neurological scienceshave taught us:15 regardless of where exactly one draws the boundary (between culture and nature, between film and literature, between analog and digital media), the crucial point is that one cannot not draw one, because no thought is all-encompassing. There simply is no thinking without distinctions. To return to our comparison of film and literature, my overall goal is simply to be mindful both of the arbitrariness of distinctions, and of their inevitability. Which is to say that Jamesons mottoAlways historicize!must be supplemented by Spencer Browns maxim: Draw a distinction! The reason why I emphasize the affective dimension of aesthetics is not in order to reintroduce some fixed (i.e., ontological or ahistorical) human quality ostensibly impervious to rational critique, as postmodern or deconstructive critics often charge. Rather, my goal is simply to augment contemporary cultural criticism by

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showing how the various levels of (semiotic, socio-economic, and physiological) criticism outlined in the first two parts of this essay interact, or supplement each other, when applied to specific texts and films. The film version of Perfume provides an excellent opportunity to pursue this approach. III Tykwers film attempts to stay very close to Sskinds original novelmost notably by introducing a narrative voice-over that quotes verbatim from the text. Still, there exist a number of differences between the two: the film cuts out the entire episode concerning Marquis de la Taillade-Espinasse and his fluidum lethale theory; and, instead of being a repulsive, disfigured misanthrope, Tykwers Grenouille (played by Ben Whishaw) is a handsome young man whose first victim succumbs to an unfortunate accident rather than to a carefully executed murder. During the great orgy that replaces what should have been his execution, Grenouille even sheds tears on her behalf, while fantasizing about what might have been had he not accidentally killed her. Whereas Sskind repeatedly compares Grenouille (French for frog) to vermin, such as a tick, a bacterium, a maggot, a roly-poly, a spider, etc., the film depicts his overall behavior, and his obsession, as being distinctly humanin fact, Tykwer refers to him as a tragic hero of loneliness who personifies the myth of the unrecognized genius (Tykwer in Arte; my translation). For Tykwer, Grenouille deserves sympathy rather than condemnation. On the other hand, the book and the film share a number of important stylistic characteristics that are most evident in their postmodern playfulness with respect to earlier aesthetic patterns. Regarding genre, for example, Sskinds story brings us back to the early 19th century form of the Novelle (from Latin novus, meaning new) in Goethes sense of the term, that is, the unerhrte Begebenheit that found some of its finest literary expression in the work of Heinrich von Kleist. Indeed, the parallels between Sskinds Das Parfum and Kleists Das Erdbeben in Chile (1807) on the level of plot (in this case, the dissolution and reestablishment of a class-based society) are as obvious as Perfumes connection to the central theme of E.T.A. Hoffmans detective story Das Frulein von Scuderie: in both cases, a murderer is depicted as a special kind of artist.

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Stylistically, however, Sskind updates this history of the novella by using a kind of rhetoric of excess and repetition reminiscent of Thomas Bernhard. Here is an excerpt from the first page:
Zu der Zeit, von der wir reden, herrschte in den Stdten ein fr uns moderne Menschen kaum vorstellbarer Gestank. Es stanken die Straen nach Mist, es stanken die Hinterhfe nach Urin, es stanken die Treppenhuser nach fauligem Holz und nach Rattendreck, die Kchen nach verdorbenem Kohl und Hammelfett; die ungelfteten Stuben stanken nach muffigem Staub, die Schlafzimmer nach fettigen Laken, nach feuchten Federbetten und nach dem stechend sen Duft der Nachttpfe. Aus den Kaminen stank der Schwefel, aus den Gerbereien stanken die tzenden Laugen, aus den Schlachthfen stank das geronnene Blut. Die Menschen stanken nach Schwei und nach ungewaschenen Kleidern; aus ihrem Mund stanken sie nach verrotteten Zhnen, aus ihren Mgen nach Zwiebelsaft und an den Krpern, wenn sie nicht mehr ganz jung waren, nach altem Kse und nach saurer Milch und nach Geschwulstkrankheiten. Es stanken die Flsse, es stanken die Pltze, der Handwerkgeselle sowie die Meistersfrau, es stank der gesamte Adel, ja sogar der Knig stank, wie ein Raubtier stank er, und die Knigin wie eine alte Ziege, sommers wie winters (Sskind 5f.)

Neither Goethe nor Kleist or Hoffmann could possibly have written in this hyperbolic, postmodern style. The same plethora of thematic connections and stylistic quotes is present in Tykwers film, meaning that the latter is as intervisual as the former is intertextual. For example, the scene in which Laura and Grenouille gaze at each other beyond the edge of the frame [1:44:40] is reminiscent of a key scene in Friedrich Murnaus Nosferatu: Hutters feverish wife calls out for him in despair, but succeeds only in attracting Nosferatus attention a few thousand miles away, as he looks up from his victim and turns in her direction. This exchange of glances continues to be hailed as a seminal moment in film history, one whose ingenuity rivals that of Griffiths parallel and Eisensteins dia lectical montage. Similarly to Murnaus, Tykwers montage establishes an almost metaphysical connection between the two protagoniststhis time, however, insinuating the olfactory rather than the acoustic sense. In another scene, Grenouille

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relinquishes his fragrant handkerchief and lets it sail above a sea of outstretched arms and hands trying to catch it. This appears to be a direct quote from Fritz Langs 1927 film Metropolis (i.e., the scene when Maria steadily beats the alarm in the flooded city while hundreds of children stretch their arms trying to reach her). In addition to this shared intertextuality (or intervisuality), both film and novel share the basic overall theme, which is to provide not just a colorful picture of 18th century life in France, but also to depict French society during a period of profound socio-economic change that led to the great revolution of 1789: the utter disregard of the ruling class for the lives and wellbeing of the poor; the clash between the ancien rgimes belief in a divinely consecrated cosmic order (represented by Baldini) and the social mobility caused by the rising influence of enlightened entrepreneurs and small shop owners (represented by Richis and Madame Arnulfi respectively). Indeed, all of the novels major characters are defined by their selfish economic interests as well as by their rational calculation of how to pursue this interest most effectively, and all of them exploit Grenouilles remarkable skill and physical endurance in order to further their selfish economic interests. Yet, in the end, many of them (i.e., Grenouilles mother, Grimili, Baldini, the Marquis, and Richis) are either killed, or suffer a severe loss, because of their intimate contact with Grenouille. In the book, the people who survive are precisely those who trusted their gut instinct (i.e., their nose) and who forgo potential monetary gain, preferring instead to get rid of Grenouille (for example, the midwife Jeanne Bussie, and the monk Terrier). The reason why Grenouille upsets the socio-economic order is because, in contrast to everybody else, he harbors absolutely no monetary or materialistic motives of his ownexcept, of course, for his effort to sample and store in his memory each and every smell he has ever encountered in his life. But smell is the most fleeting of our senses, which means that Grenouille is in fact trying to materialize and preserve precisely that which altogether defies materiality and preservation. Thus, Grenouilles actions are both paradigmatic for and subversive of the society in which he lives: paradigmatic in so far as he, too, seeks possession of the thing he loves (for him, it is smell; for his fellow men, it is money); but also subversive, insofar as he

19
renders this principle absolute, and thus unleashes its destructive potential. Given the intricate dynamic between economic rationality and instinctual desire at play in Sskinds novel, critics have aptly situated Perfume within the dialectic of the Enlightenment, arguing that Grenouille, with his uncanny sense of smell, symbolizes the repressed Other of modern civilization.16 This point is revealed most clearly in the scene of his failed execution. At the precise moment when the entire city of Grasse has gathered to witness the state-sanctioned restoration of social order, Grenouille unleashes a Dionysian bacchanal that not only dissolves all class distinctions, but the physical boundaries of individual bodies as well: Die Luft war schwer vom sen Schweigeruch der Lust und laut vom Geschrei, Gegrunze und Gesthn der zehntausend Menschentiere (303f.). Grenouille, the animal, has succeeded in transforming his fellow humans into animals Menschentiereas well. Tykwer, however, pictures this seminal moment very differently. Less animalistic and more angelic, the spellbound people of Grasse form an almost idyllic community that exhibits progressive (heavenly) rather than regressive (hellish) tendencies. This shift is indicative of Tykwers s ympathetic treatment of Grenouille, who appears as a proxy for, rather than representing the antithesis of, the other characters. Although Tykwer clearly retains the theme of monetary greed in his movie, he presents Grenouille as being simply a victim of the economic order and thus as deserving of our sympathy and support. Sskinds Grenouille, however, is not just a lonely in dividual in need of love, but also personifies the modern condition. This is why he lacks a personal smell and remains opaque throughout the novel. In fact, Grenouilles manifest yearning to be venerated and loved actually aims at a different goal, namely that of being able to recognize exactly who he is and how he smells. Put differently, Grenouilles most important characteristic in the book is precisely his lack of individuality the very individuality Tykwers movie simply presumes as a given. Sskinds hero, by contrast, desperately tries to develop a distinct smell (and thus a distinct personality); and, once he realizes that this ultimate goal remains unattainable, everything else becomes unimportant as well:

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Wenn er wollte, knnte er sich in Paris nicht nur von Zehn-, sondern von Hunderttausenden umjubeln lassen. Er besa die Macht dazu. Er hielt sie in der Hand. Eine Macht, die strker war als die Macht des Geldes oder die Macht des Terrors oder die Macht des Todes: die unberwindliche Macht, den Menschen Liebe einzuflen. Nur eines konnte diese Macht nicht: sie konnte ihn nicht vor sich selber riechen machen. Und mochte er auch vor der Welt durch sein Parfum erscheinen als ein Gottwenn er sich selbst nicht riechen konnte und deshalb niemals wte, wer er sei, so pfiff er drauf, auf die Welt, auf sich selbst, auf sein Parfum. (316; my emphasis)

The idiomatic sense of the German expressionda er sich selbst nicht riechen konntemeans, of course, that Grenouille does not like himselfindeed, that he cannot stand himself. And the reason for this self-abjection is the fact that he can never know who he is because he has no smell, and hence no identity. Using structuralist terminology, we might say that Sskinds Grenouille represents the empty master-signifier that both guarantees and threatens the stability of the entire social order.17 Like the empty signifier, he ceaselessly wanders about, yet in the end always returns to his place (the fish market in Paris). And it is precisely Grenouilles lack of self-identity that increases the self-assurance and self-identity of everybody else he meets. The less he seems to be there, the more he allows everybody else to feel superior to him (Baldini, the Marquis, Druot, Richis, etc.). This negative reciprocity between Grenouille and the other characters has been lost sight of in Tykwers film, since the director apparently considers Grenouilles lack of identity to be the lamentablebecause (allegedly) preventableresult of societys amorality. Indeed, Tykwer appears unwilling to recognize that this lack is societys constitutive zero point, that is, he denies that the (signifier) Grenouille of the novel represents the inevitable structural effect of any social order, and as such cannot be eliminated without at the same timehowever brieflysuspending the social order itself. This is precisely what happens at the end of the story, when Grenouille is eaten alive: cannibalism, after all, is humanitys strictest, most fundamental taboo. Either because he is unaware of this underlying dynamic, or because he refuses to accept it, Tykwer gives a humanist twist

21
to the novels structuralist insight. Although the films narrator quotes the above passage from the novel almost verbatim, he changes one crucial phrase, thereby altering the reason why Grenouille in the end abandons his own perfume: not, as posited in the novel, because of his inability to smell himself (which in turn means that he cannot recognize who he is), but simply because of the fact that there was only one thing [the perfume] could not do: it could not turn him into a person who could love and be loved like everyone else (2:13:50). In this way, any reference to the fact that Grenouilles obsession revolves around self-love [self-acceptance?] and selfrecognition [self-assertion?] is deleted, while the central problem is re-defined in terms of (the impossibility of) loving relationships between himself and others. Yet, as depicted in the novel, Grenouilles dilemma is that he cannot ever be himself, because his existence is but a structural effect of the being of others. This difference between the film and the book decisively influences how each deals with the sense of smell. To be sure, both Sskind and Tykwer deliberately highlight the contrast between the (enlightened, aloof, noble) sense of sight and the (primitive, instinctive, abject) sense of smell. The latter takes over when the former goes blind, not only for Grenouille, but for all other characters in the novel as well. There is one scene in particular that encapsulates this inverted relationship between the two senses, namely the sequence during which Baldini, who is temporarily unable to smell anything following his initial testing of Amor and Psyche, instead gazes appreciatively at the view of Paris from his open window: Frische Luft stmte ins Zimmer. Baldini schpfte Atem und merkte, wie sich die Schwellung in seiner Nase lste. Dann schlo er das Fenster. Fast im gleichen Moment wurde es Nacht, ganz pltzlich (Sskind 85). Tykwer, too, thematizes the relationship between sight and smell from the very beginning. The opening scene of the film depicts the dimly lit prison cell in which Grenouille awaits his sentence. Similarly to what Laura Marks calls haptic cinema, the lack of a clearly defined picture leaves the spectators grasping for non-visual clues in order to understand what they see.18 But whereas haptic cinema prolongs this visual uncertainty in order to force the audience to rely on other senses,

22
Tykwer quickly fills the visual vacuum with a crystal clear closeup: Grenouilles truncated nose slowly emerges out of the dark into the spotlight, flares its nostrils twice and then withdraws again, indicating to us that he has already smelled the imminent arrival of the guards who enter the room just a second later. During the sentencing that follows, Grenouilles face becomes visible, but his eyes always remain in the dark (unlike those of other characters in this scene). Throughout the film, there are numerous instances where Grenouille closes his eyes so as to heighten his sense of smell. The opposite, of course, is true for us as viewers, since Tykwer constantly needs to show us what his hero is able to smell. The question of how to do this remains at the center of the movie, and so far there is little agreement among reviewers as to whether Tykwer has succeeded in his effort to translate smell into sight.19 Tykwer himself is confident about his success; in one of his interviews, he states laconically: The book did not have a smell either (Tykwer in Berliner Zeitung; my translation). Yet most reviewers agree that the film, beginning with its opening scene, operates mainly with a baroque-like excess of the visual. It often works metonymically, trying to present the sense of smell by shining the spotlight on the organ itself: The hero of the novel sees with his nose. In the film, all we get to see is the nose of the hero, as Katja Nicodemus of Die Zeit has aptly noted. Tykwer pursues this nose-aesthetics mainly with the help of certain well-known cinematic techniques that appear again and again throughout the movie: a disorienting, extremely agile camera fully immersed in the scene it depicts; a quick succession of bold zoom shots featuring extreme close-ups, and often only partial views, of a particular object,thereby undermining its visual apprehension; zooming in and entering Grenouilles nose or another smelling (smelly) body part; a dark and gloomy setting in which Grenouille (and thus, by extension, the spectator) follows his nose in order to navigate diegetic space, etc. These visual elements are always fortified by acoustic ones. Throughout the film, Tykwer relies on different musical leitmotifs to render Grenouilles sense of smell palpable to the audience. Co-written (like the script) by Tykwer himself, the film score (performed by the Berlin Philharmonic [Orchestra] under Sir Simon Rattle) includes many minimalist

23
themes reminiscent of the ambient sound of Scandinavian composer Arvo Prtmost notably, an ethereal-sounding chorus of female voices that acoustically supports the visual representation of smell.20 Apart from music, sound in general is omnipresent in Tykwers film, whether it is barely audible (as in the opening scene of Grenouille in prison, where we hear the faint murmuring of the crowd outside) or deafeningly loud (when he is being presented to the public shortly thereafter). The scene at the fish market is paradigmatic, because it employs all the audio-visual stunts described above: the frantic swirling of the camera interspersed with the sound of Grenouilles breathing, the slicing of fish along with the sniffing and chewing, squeaking and barfing that goes on wherever the camera carries our gaze (0:06:03 to 0:06:31). Referring to this scene in particular, one critic even charged that Tykwer visually rapes the viewer (Speicher; my translation). There is some truth in this harsh verdict. For what is repulsive about these images has little to do with the smell of rotting fish. Rather, it stems from the sensory overload caused by the continuous barrage of audio-visual effects. Opulent scenes like that of the fish market occur too fast and too frequently to remain effective. Like most big-budget productions in the American style, Tykwers Perfume overfeeds, and thus ends up numbing, the audience. Adding the narrator to the audio-visual grandiosity of Tykwers film further exacerbates the problem, because it throws yet another level of signification over this already dense web of sensibility. At worst, all of these elementsthe narrator, the mobile camera, the chiascuro and intense color schemes, the leitmotif-technique along with the numerous sound effectsvie with one another for the viewers attention and thus undermine or cancel each other out (for example, during Grenouilles stay at Mme. Gs). At best, they all work together to create an intensity as rich and repugnant as too much perfume. Let us take, for example, the scene in which Baldini first smells Grenouilles freshly mixed perfume (0:44:30 until 0:45:05). As Baldini closes his eyes in bliss, the camera slowly moves around him in a 360-degree arc, during which the walls of his laboratory are transformed into a beautiful pergola with flowers gently swaying in the wind, and a gorgeous young woman approaches him from behind to give him a kiss on the

24
cheek as she whispers I love you. Although technically well done, the scene suffers from its uncanny similarity to the Nivea and Oil of Olay advertisements familiar to us via TV. And similarly to most commercials for laundry detergent, Baldinis moment of bliss is announced acoustically through the seraphic sounds of violins, childrens laughter and birds chirping, well before it is being visualized as a Garden of Eden. The scene is too richbut not in the Benjaminian sense of shocking us. Rather, it is over-coded, so to speak, because its aesthetic elements have become so habitual that they end up anaesthetizing instead of stimulating us. As if acknowledging this connection himself, Tykwer abruptly cuts from Baldinis blissful face to his hand slamming coins on the table as he buys Grenouille from Grimal a deliberate reference to Baldinis overriding economic interests, and one that, albeit unintentionally, also comments on the profound commercialization of the very images Tykwer has just presented to us. Another example is the scene right after Grenouille has left Grasse to follow Laura (1:44:18 until 1:44:48). After he has reached the top of a mountain so as to pick up her scent again, Tykwer lets the camera swoop up and whirl around him before it flies off with amazing speed and slithers through the hilly terrain. This, to be sure, is a digital gimmick intimately familiar to every sci-fi fan or video-game player. By contrast, the landing of Tykwers camera is quite innovative. As it approaches Laura, the camera slows down and hovers right above and behind her, unsure whether or not it is really she who dashes away in full gallop several feet below. But while our gaze continues to zoom in, her hat flies off, and her red curly hair flutters in the wind while she turns her head in slow motion to meet our gaze, as if to confirm her identity while sensing Grenouilles (and the audiences) eerie presence. At precisely that moment, Tykwer abruptly cuts back to Grenouille still breathing in all that red; he then immediately opens his eyes, indicating that he, too, has seen Laura through her scent. The scene worksprecisely because the camera does not get up close and into the fragrant object (i.e., Lauras hair). Instead of offering a barrage of visual excess, Tykwers camera here remains at a distance, and thus activates our imagination: it

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invites us to transfer the ambiguity of what we are seeing into the hint of what we (imagine to) smell. But scenes like this remain exceptional, which is why the overall psychological effect of Tykwers film differs sharply from that of Sskinds book. A quick survey of the publics reaction demonstrates that what remains consistently exhilarating and joyful for the reader is experienced as numbing and boring by the viewer (at least in Germany). The reason for this affective difference between literature and film is partly medial, of course, since the low-tech medium of the book is much less invasive than is the digitally enhanced, high-tech medium of film. Using the full potential of the latter is bound to have an infinitely greater effect upon the audience than the relatively meager rhetorical devices of the former. Moreover, given our visually saturated society today, it is far more intriguing to ingest a Bernhardian rant than to be force-fed on Hollywoods mass-produced audio-visual gimmicks. I say intriguing, because the issue no longer concerns the audiences ability to cope with or rehearse stimuli in order to avoid trauma or other mental problems, as Freud and Benjamin still argued in the last century. All of us today are able to cope with our visually saturated world just fine. Nor is it a question of ideology, in the sense that audiences are transformed into brainwashed fanatics ready to follow a dictator into war. Rather, it is a question of aesthetic stimulation and pleasure, occasioned by a change in what Jacques Rancire recently called the distribution of the sensible in a given society. 21 Simply put, the goal of art consists in engendering difference and in making this difference [palpable, able to be experienced], sensible. In John Deweys words from his 1931 lectures on Art and Experience: The conception that objects have fixed and unalterable values is precisely the prejudice from which art emancipates us (95). To achieve this goal, a few drops of Grenouilles perfume here and there would have been much more effective than Tykwers pouring out the whole bottle over each and every one of his opulent scenes. The reason why Tykwer cannot resist the temptation to do so, however, was not only his 50 million dollar budget. It has equally to do with his humanist understanding of Sskinds novel and the fact that, for Tykwer, the fictional character Grenouille is a lamentable victim, rather than embodying a

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structural effect of society. Given the utopian aspirations expressed in all of his films so far think of the miraculous escape of Sissi and Bodo at the end of The Princess and the Warrior (2000), or the protagonists final ascent to heaven in Heaven (2002)in the end Perfume, too, is all about redemption, reconciliation, and wholeness. And it is precisely this absence of harsh necessity that the baroque style of the film seeks to render present on the screenwhich is why so many of Tykwers scenes stylistically resemble those produced by the advertisement industry: both disavow the structural necessity of deprivation. This brings us to the final image of Tykwers film, which does not have a counterpart in Sskinds novel. It presents a close-up of the last drop of perfume about to hit the ground in that disgusting Paris fish market. The drop, of course, signals that the Enlightenment is never able to devour its primitive other without leaving a remainderreminding us that the dialectic will continue, no matter what. There is, according to Tykwer, always hope for redemption in the form of a true human communityone drop is, after all, precisely the right dosage to do the trick, as we saw earlier in the movie. And yet, this last drop of perfume carries not only a promise, but also a threatnot simply because it signifies the constant danger that the masses will be seduced by an evil genius, but also because it betrays the artificiality and unnaturalness of the total redemption to which Tykwer aspires. Like Grenouilles perfume, (our desire for) redemption is always manufactured, and thus remains subject to human treachery and guile. The only way for the threat to become a promise is if we renounce this aspiration altogether, or at least, like Sskind, recognize its potentially lethal nature. To choose life, on the other hand, is to acknowledge that its apparent fullness ultimately rests on deprivation and need. It is, basically, to acknowledge the necessity of (political, scientific, cultural) distinctions, however artificial they may turn out to be in the future.
Notes
1 Tom Gunning has proposed a somewhat different terminology to describe the same aesthetic and institutional shift. He compares the by now proverbial cinema of attraction that lasted until ca. 1906 to the reign of what he calls narrative integration after that (Gunning 56).

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2 See, for example, Belach et al (eds), Das Kino und Thomas Mann; Gersch, Film bei Brecht; Prodolliet, Das Abenteuer Kino; and Capovilla, Der Lebendige Schatten. 3 For a more comprehensive discussion of the media-competition at the turn of the century, see Strathausen, The Look of Things. 4 In one of the earliest American responses to Kittlers work, Robert Holub concluded that Kittler exhibits a remarkable lack of reflection on his o wn historical situatedness which leads him to muster only a helpless and cynical political gesture devoid of substance or political ramifications (43). For a more comprehensive and well balanced critique of Kittlers work in general, see the introduction to Gramophone, Film, Typewriter by Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz, xi-xli. 5 It deserves mention that this is not an adequate description of Kittlers later work or his oeuvre as a whole, which makes a significant contribution toward a nuanced historico-theoretical understanding of the development of (ancient, modern, and new) media. See in particular his Berlin lectures published as Optische Medien. 6 For more, see Kreimeier, Die Ufa-Story. 7 In his influential essay Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus, Baudry claims that the arrangement of the different elements projector, darkened hall, screen found in the cinemas auditorium reproduc(es) in a striking way the mise-en-scne of Platos cave (45), and he concludes that the cinema assumes the role played throughout Western history by various artistic formations (46). See also Paul Valrys comment that Platos cave is nothing but a gigantic dark chamber (qtd. in Paech 66). Other critics have expanded on the importance of the Italian Quattrocento and the re-invention of monocular perspective during the Renaissance as a crucial influence or scientific prerequisite for the invention of cinema. 8 Regarding the relationship between cinema and modernity, see also the collection of essays edited by Charney and Schwartz, Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life. 9 See Lowe, History of Bourgeois Perception. 10 See Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle; and Simmel, Metropolis and Mental Life. 11 Media artist Olafur Eliasson, for example, experiments with retinal afterimages in some of his work, his explicit goal being to turn the spectator into a projector (Olafur Eliasson 21). 12 Susan Buck-Morss otherwise intriguing essay Aesthetics and Anesthetics: Walter Benjamins Artwork Essay Reconsidered is a case in point. In Benjaminian fashion, Buck-Morss convincingly demonstrates how 19th and early 20th century technology contributed to the fragmentation and alienation of human perception. What is missing from her account, however, is any discussion of contemporary (digital) technology and its ability to increase rather than decrease our aesthetic sensibility toward our own body, as Hansen and other new media critics have recently argued. If indeed the overall goal of art is to restore the instinctual power of the human bodily senses not by avoiding the new technologies, but by passing through them, as Buck -Morss rightly

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summarizes Benjamins position (5), then we need to apply this insight to our own era and its technological capabilities. 13 In his excellent introduction to an edited volume on Literature and Film, Robert Sham rightly contends that, in fact, there can be no real equivalence between source novel and adaptation and that the widely varying formulae for adaptationbased on the novel by, inspired by, free adaptation of indirectly acknowledges the impossibility of any real equivalency (18f.). 14 In his Optics from 1637, Descartes famously claimed that (i)t is the mind, which sees, not the eye (108). 15 See von Frster, KybernEthik; and Luhmann, Soziale Systeme. 16 For a Frankfurt School inspired reading of Sskinds novel see Gray, The Dialectics of `Enscentment'; and Butterfield, Enlightenment's Other in Patrick Sskind's Das Parfum. 17 The whole structure, Gilles Deleuze contends, is being moved by this primordial third that nonetheless remains distinct from its own origin (45). This empty field or blind spot is the sine qua non of structural difference: no structuralism without this point zero (48). See also Jacques Lacans comments on petit objet a as that which lacks in its place (24). 18 According to Marks, haptic cinema enables an embodied perception and thus depends on limited visibility and the viewers lack of mastery over the image (Touch 4; 15). 19 Both Der Spiegel and Die Zeit were fairly critical of Tykwers film, claiming that Tykwer does not succeed in finding unique images for the abstruse cosmos of the nose (Hoch; my translation) and that the visualization of the act of smelling remains rather banal (Nicodemus; my translation). By contrast, the majority of American reviewers, led by Roger Ebert, reacted positively to the film, thus indicating once again the discrepancy between the European suspicion of (and the American fondness for) big-budget productions. 20 Cf. Mike Beilfus comments at http://www.cinemamusica.de/152/dasparfum-tykwer-klimek-und-heil (accessed Dec 10, 2007). 21 See Rancire, The Politics of Aesthetics. Works Cited Andrew, Dudley. Concepts in Film Theory. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1984. Arnheim, Rudolf. A New Laocoon: Artistic Composites and the Talking Film, Film as Art (Berkeley: U of California P, 1964) 199-230. Bazin, Andr. The Myth of Total Cinema. Film Theory and Criticism. 2nd ed. Ed.Gerald Mast and Marshall Cohen. New York: Oxford UP, 1979. 23-7. Baudry, Jean-Louis. Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus. Trans. Alan Williams. Film Quarterly 28/2 (Winter 1974-1975). 39-47. Belach, Helga, et al., eds. Das Kino und Thomas Mann: Eine Dokumentation. Berlin: Stiftung Deutsche Kinemathek, 1975. Benjamin, Walter. The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. Illuminations. Essays and Reflections. Ed. Hannah Arendt. Trans. Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken, 1968. Bordwell, David. On the History of Film Style. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1997.

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Buck-Morss, Susan. Aesthetics and Anesthetics: Walter Benjamins Artwork Essay Reconsidered. October 62 (Autumn 1992): 3-41. Burch, Noel. Life to those Shadows. University of California Press: Berkeley, 1990. Butterfield, Bradley. Enlightenment's Other in Patrick Sskind's Das Parfum: Adorno and the Ineffable Utopia of Modern Art. Comparative Literature Studies 32.3 (1995). 401-418. Capovilla, Andrea. Der Lebendige Schatten. Film in der Literatur bis 1938. Wien: Bohlau, 1994. Charney, Leo, and Vanessa R. Schwartz, eds. Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life. Berkeley: U of California P, 1995. Deleuze, Gilles. Woran Erkennt Man den Strukturalismus? Trans. Eva BrcknerPfaffenberger and Donald Watts Tuckwiller. Berlin, Merve, 1992. Dennett, Daniel C. Consciousness Explained. London: Penguin, 1991. Descartes, Ren. Optics. Discourse on Method, Optics, Geometry, and Meteorology. Trans. Paul J. Olscamp. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merill, 1965. 63-173. Dewey, John. Art as Experience. New York: Minton, 1931. Freud, Sigmund. Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Trans. James Strachey. New York: Liveright, 1950. Gersch, Wolfgang. Film bei Brecht. Mnchen: Hanser, 1976. Gray, Richard T. The Dialectics of `Enscentment': Patrick Sskind's Das Parfum as Critical History of Enlightenment Culture. PMLA 108 (1993). 489-505 Gunning, Tom. The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant-Garde. In Thomas Elsaesser, ed. Early Cinema: Space, Frame, Narrative. London: British Film Institute, 1990. 56-62. Grynsztejn, Madeleine, Daniel Birnbaum, and Michael Speaks, eds. Olafur Eliasson. London: Phaidon, 2002. Hansen, Mark B. N. Bodies in Code. Interfaces with Digital Media. New York: Routledge, 2006. Hoch, Jenny. Um Nasenlnge Verfehlt. Der Spiegel 12 Sept. 2006: 183. Holub, Robert. Crossing Borders: Reception Theory, Poststructuralism, Deconstruction. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1992. Jameson, Fredric. The Political Unconscious. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1982. Kaes, Andon, ed. Kino Debatte. Texte zum Verhltnis von Literatur und Film 1909 1929. Tbingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1978. Kittler, Friedrich. Discourse Networks 1800/1900. Trans. Michael Metteer. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1990. ---. Bild, Schrift, Zahl. Archiv fr MediengeschichteMediale Historiographien. Ed. Lorenz Engell und Joseph Vogt. Weimar: Universittsverlag, n.y. 83-6. ---. Optische Medien. Berliner Vorlesung 1999. Berlin: Merve, 2002. Kreimeier, Klaus. Die Ufa-Story. Geschichte eines Filmkonzerns. Frankfurt: Fischer, 2002. Lacan, Jacques. Schriften I. Ed Norbert Haas. Freiburg: Olten 1973. Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim. Laocoon. An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry. Trans. Edward Allen McCormick. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1962.

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Lettvin, J.Y., H.R. Maturana, W. S. McCulloch, and W. H. Pitts, What the frogs eye tells the frogs brain. The Mind. Biological Approaches to its Functions. Ed. William C. Corning. Martin Balaban, 1968. 233-58. Lowe, Donald. History of Bourgeois Perception. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1983. Luhmann, Niklas. Soziale SystemeGrundri einer allgemeinen Theorie. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1984 Marks, Laura U. The Skin of the Film. Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses. Duke UP, 2000. ---. Touch. Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2002. Marx, Karl. konomisch-philosophische Manuskripte. Reclam, Leizpig 1970. Metz, Christian. The Imaginary Signifier. Psychoanalysis and the Cinema. Trans. Cecilia Britton et al. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1982. Nicodemus, Katja. Ein groes Nasentheater. Die Zeit 24 Aug. 2006: F6. Prodolliet, Ernest. Das Abenteuer Kino. Der Film im Schaffen von Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Thomas Mann und Alfred Dblin. Freiburg: Universittsverlag, 1991. Rancire, Jacques. The Politics of Aesthetics. The Distribution of the Sensible. Trans. Gabriel Rockhill. London: Continuum, 2004. Schoenfeld, Christiane, ed. Processes of Transposition: German Literature and Film. Amsterdam: Radopi, 2007. Sir Read, Herbert. A Coat of Many Colours: Occasional Essays. London: Routledge, 1945. Stam, Robert, and Alessandra Raengo. Literature and Film. A Guide to the Theory and Practice of Film Adaptation. Oxford: Blackwell, 2007. Simmel, Georg. Metropolis and Mental Life. In The Nineteenth-Century Visual Culture Reader. Ed. Vanessa R. Schwartz and Jeannene M. Przyblyski. New York: Routledge, 2004. 51-55 Sobchack, Vivian. Carnal Thoughts. Embodiment and Moving Image Culture. U of California P, 2004. Speicher, Stefan. Ruchlos. Berliner Zeitung 13 Sept. 2006: 25. Spiegel, Alan. Fiction and the Camera Eye. Visual Consciousness in Film and the Modern Novel. Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 1976. Strathausen, Carsten. The Look of Things. Poetry and Vision Around 1900. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003. Sskind, Patrick. Das Parfum. Die Geschichte eines Mrders. Zrich: Diogenes, 1985. Tykwer, Tom. Lieber ein beiender Gestank als ein flchtiges Lftchen. Interview mit Helmut Ziegler. Berliner Zeitung 9 Sept. 2006: M04. ---.Interview.http://www.arte.tv/de/film/KinoNews/1317818,CmC=1317822.html (accessed 20 Feb. 2007). Von Frster, Heinz. KybernEthik. Trans. Birger Ollrogge. Berlin: Merve, 1993. Weibel, Peter. Time Slot. Geschichte und Zukunft der apparativen Wahrnehmung vom Phenakistiskop bis zum Quantenkino. Kln: Walter Knig, 2006.