Flatline constructs

Mark Fisher (1999)

• Introduction
• Part 1 - Screams_Screens_Flatlines: Cybernetics, Postmodernism, and the Gothic
  • 1.1 How An Android Must Feel
    • Isn’t it strange the way the wind makes inanimate objects move? Doesn’t it look odd when things which usually just lie there lifeless suddenly start fluttering. Don’t you agree? I remember once looking out onto an empty square, watching huge scraps of paper whirling angrily round and round, chasing one another as if each had sworn to kill the others; and I couldn’t feel the wind at all since I was standing in the lee of a house. A moment later they seemed to have calmed down, but then once again they were seized with an insane fury and raced all over the square in a mindless rage, crowding into a corner then scattering again as some new madness came over them, until finally they disappeared round a corner. There was just one thick newspaper that couldn’t keep up with the rest. It lay there on the cobbles, full of spite and flapping spasmodically, as if it were out of breath and gasping for air.
    • As I watched, I was filled with an ominous foreboding. What if, after all, we living beings were nothing more than such scraps of paper? Could there not be a similar unseeable, unfathomable ‘wind’ blowing us from place to place and determining our actions, whilst we, in our simplicity, believe we are driven by free will? What if the life within us were nothing more than some mysterious whirlwind? The wind whereof it says in the Bible, ‘Thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh and whither it goeth’? Do we not sometimes dream we have plunged our hands into deep water and caught silvery fish, when all that has happened is that our hands have been caught in a cold draught?
    • Today’s children […] are comfortable with the idea that inanimate objects can both think and have a personality. But they no longer worry if the machine is alive. They know it is not. The issue of aliveness has moved into the background as though it is settled. But the notion of the machine has been expanded to include having a psychology. In retaining the psychological mode as the preferred way of talking about computers, children allow computational machines to retain an animistic trace, a mark of having passed through a stage where the issue of the computer’s aliveness is a focus of intense consideration.
    • what if we are as "dead" as the machines?
    • “our machines are disturbingly lively, while we ourselves are frightening inert.”
    • The Gothic flatline designates a zone of radical immanence. And to theorize this flatline demands a new approach, one committed to the theorization of immanence. This thesis calls that approach Gothic Materialism.
    • As Iain Hamilton Grant puts it, “the Terminator has been there before, distributing microchips to accelerate its advent and fuel the primitives’ fears.”
    • Standing at the demetaphorized terminal of this trajectory, Baudrillard’s work frequently amounts to what is, in effect, a negativized Gothic, which “takes the Guy Debord/J.G. Ballard fascination with ‘the virtual commodification or crystallization of organic life towards total extinction’ further, towards narrating a technological triumph of the inanimate – a negative eschatology, the nullity of all opposition, the dissolution of history, the neutralization of difference and the erasure of any possible configuration of alternate actuality.”
    • But this study will want to take Baudrillard’s claim very seriously and approach fictional texts, not simply as literary texts awaiting theoretical “readings”, but as themselves already intensely-theoretical.
    • In arguments reconstructed by Deleuze-Guattari in Anti-Oedipus, Butler shows that the fact that human beings are involved in the reproduction – or replication – of machines does not mean that they lack a reproductive system: on the contrary, human beings form part of such a system
  • 1.2 Cybernetics, Postmodernism, Fiction
    • Deckard: “Replicants weren’t supposed to have feelings. Neither were Blade Run- ners.”
    • “Man […] a prosthetic God.”
    • Lyotard, to call ‘intensities’ – are now free-floating and impersonal and tend to be dominated by a peculiar kind of euphoria.” (PCLLC, 16) This “peculiar kind of euphoria” – feeling floating free from any qualification by the personal – is what Baudrillard has called ecstasy.
    • For Gothic Materialism, the sublime still belongs to a human(ist) aesthetics of representation (precisely because it fixes what lies beyond representation as the unrepresentable).
    • While anthropo-Marx-ism still posits a transcendent and authentic human agent which could overcome capital, Gothic Materialism takes it for granted that real materialism must involve total immanentization; one of its chief resources, therefore, is the philosopher whose whole work was devoted to developing a rigorously immanent account of agency: Spinoza.
    • The haecceity is the entity as event (and the event as entity); it occurs when things “cease to be subjects to become events” (TP 262).
    • Yet this is still to buy into the story the cowboys tell themselves, a story which the narratives they are embedded in refuse to maintain; it is to treat “the body” as the container for/ of a Self which will ultimately escape it (in techno-transcendence).
    • These enhancements and retrofits were technotoys that the boys had always dreamed of having, but they were also body-altering and castrating in ways that boys always had nightmares about.” (152-3)
    • For Baudrillard, as we have seen, castration fear has become reversed; media implicitly “feminize”, not cutting man off, but “penetrating without resistance.”
    • The terror, for Gibson’s characters, and for Cronenberg’s, is not just, or even primarily, that the interior of their bodies will be invaded, but that they do not have any insides.
    • To begin to see what the androids could see in Munch’s painting, is to realise that, for them, it must show not the inevitability of solitary interiority, but its impossibility; the painting’s “loops and spirals” diagramming now not the projection of a subjective state outwards, but the enormous pressure – “inwards” – of an exteriority “which touches, invests and penetrates without resistance”, and which produces the subject, as Deleuze-Guattari would want to say, as a residuum or side-effect.
    • the opinion poll, which, according to Baudrillard, doesn’t represent or even “manipulate” public opinion, but substitutes for it.
    • Dressed up in the apparently cynical garb of ideology critique or the hermeneutics of suspicion, such theories nevertheless credulously assume a certain stock of reality that can be metaphorensically analysed and distinguished from its supposedly merely phenomenal counterfeits, not grasping that, since industrialism, Reality has been produced – Baudrillard would want to say simulated – as artifice.
  • 1.3 Flatlines
  • 1.4 Constructs
    • Gothic Materialism, Second Principle: There are no subjects, there is only sub- ject-Matter. “Selves are no more immaterial than electronic packets.
    • cyberpunk fiction’s working assumptions: synthesize the conditions and you produce the experience.
    • Embodiment does not underwrite subjectivity; far from it. Gross organic persistence is no guarantee of continuing identity, as Spinoza, in a moment of pure cyberpunk, establishes. “It sometimes happens that a man undergoes such changes that I would not be prepared to say that he is the same person. I have heard tell of a certain Spanish poet who was seized with sickness, and although he recovered, he remained so unconscious of his past life that he did not believe that the stories and tragedies he had written were his own.” (ETH IV, Prop 38, Sch: 177). It’s possible to forget who you are, or, as in the case of Blade Runner, to remember who you are not.
    • Consciousness, like memory and habit, is always a reflection on – which is to say, after – the unconscious processes which produce it. The attempt by a subject to grasp the moment will only ever produce a Mis-en abyme of auto-monitoring neurosis (always too late): the postmodern bad infinity of self-consciousness , crippling activity whilst not achieving transparency.
    • Becoming-replicant is therefore not a matter of identifying oneself as a technical machine; it is not a question of identification at all, but of recognising all iden- tity as construction. It is to decode the false memory chips of anthropocentrist Oedipalism, to recognise that because everything has been produced, nothing is given.
  • 1.5 Second Naturalism
    • Starting with these two lines of research Worringer asked what the emotional correlate of the abstract, geometrical art was. In asking this question he assumed the answer was not empathy. His answer was essentially ‘alienation and denial of the world’. The great bulk of fiction still being written is retrospective in character; it’s concerned with the origins of experience, behaviour, development of character over a great span of years; it interprets the present in terms of the past, and it uses a narrative technique, by and large the linear narrative, in which events are shown in more-or-less chronological sequence, which is suited to it. But when you turn to the present […] I feel that what one needs is a non-linear technique, simply because our lives today are not conducted in linear terms. They are much more quantified; a whole stream of random events is taking place.”
    • Cyberpunks “can’t help themselves,” Csicsery-Ronay writes. “[L]ike near-addicts of amphetamines and hallucinogens, [they] write as if they are both victims of a life-negating system and the heroic adventurers of thrill.”
    • The proletarian, the lumpen, and their cousins the urban criminal (male) and prostitute (female) – those secure characterizations of the older bourgeois and naturalist imaginary representations of society – have today, in postmodernity and cyberpunk, given way to a youth culture in which the urban punks are merely the opposite numbers to the business yuppies […] There is now a circulation and recirculation possible between the underworld and the overworld of high rent condos and lofts: falling from the latter into the former is no longer so absolute and irrevocable a disaster, above all since, offering a knowledge of what used to be called the streets, it can be useful for survival in the unimaginable spaces of corporate and bureaucratic decision.
  • “Whenever we find a new phenomenon which to partakes to some degree of the nature of those which we have already termed ‘living phenomena,’ but does not conform to the term ‘life,’” Wiener points out, “we are faced with the problem whether to enlarge the word ‘life’ so as to include them, or to define it in a more restrictive way so as to exclude them. We have encountered this problem in the past in considering viruses, which show some of the tendencies of life – to persist, to multiply, and to organize – but do not express these tendencies in a fully-developed form […] It is in my opinion, therefore, best to avoid all question-begging epithets such as ‘life’, ‘soul’, ‘vitalism’ and the like […]” (HUHB, 31-32), partly since “even living systems are not (in all probability) living below the molecular level.”
    • sensations so new they haven't got a name yet
    • Bacon: “We nearly always live through screens – a screened existence. And I sometimes think, when people say my work looks violent, that perhaps I have from time to time been able to clear away one or two of the veils or screens.”
• Part 2 -Body Image Fading Down Corridors of Television Sky: The Media Landscape and the Schizophrenic Implosion of Subjectivity
  • 2.1 The Body Without Image
  • Csiscery-Ronay: The horror genre has always played with the violation of the body, since it adopts as its particular ‘object’ fear’ – the violent disruption of the sense of security, which precisely because it is a sense, works from within the body, the house of the senses […] Even when the same images or motifs are used as in the horror genre, they have a different value in SF because they attack not the image of the body, but the idea’ of the image of the body, the very possibility of imaging the body (to borrow a metaphor from cyber-medicine)[…] Cyberpunk is part of a trend in science fiction dealing increasingly with madness, more precisely with the most philosophically interesting phenomenon of madness: hallucination (derangement). […] So the most important sense is not fear, but dread. Hallucination is always saturated with affect. It is perception instigated by affect. […]
  • 2.2 The Body Without Organs And Intensive Qualities
    • body-image, they suggest, is an overcoding of the body by the subject, a representation of the organism rather than an expression of the body’s potential, which is always abstract and always unknowable: in Deleuze’s favourite Spinozist formula, no-one knows what a body can do. The Spinozistic body can never be correlated with an image because it is always in process, defined ultimately only by its abstraction, but an abstraction that never ceases to be utterly material.
  • 2.3 Intensive Voyages and Cyberspace
    • If Case’s body is “disconnected from its own sensory nerve-endings”, this is less because it has autistic ally imploded into interiority than because it has decoded the Freudian perceptual-consciousness system in order to access a set of (hy)perceptions belonging to a technical environment which is in no sense that of the organ- ism.’ Case’s body out on the matrix can be placed alongside the examples of Bodies without Organs given by Deleuze-Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus.
    • "It's not a place, it only feels like it is." (MLO 188)
    • The often dizzying confusion of Neuromancer’s narrative arises in large part from its hypernaturalistic description of intensive voyages.
  • 2.4 The Mediatized Body
    • This is a shift Baudrillard had also identified. “Classical science fiction,” he argued, “was that of an expanding universe, besides it forged its in the narratives of spatial exploration, counterparts to the more terrestrial forms of exploration of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.” (SS 123)
    • "the body is nothing but a medium (but for what?)
    • “With every tool man is perfecting his own organs, whether motor or senso- ry, or removing the limits to their functioning.” (PFL 12, 279)
    • Man has, as it were, become a kind of prosthetic God.” (PFL 12 280)
    • Freud asserts what Ballard calls his “profound pessimism” only in the remark that “we will not forget that present-day man will not feel happy in his Godlike character.” (PFL 12, 280)
  • 2.5 Jumping Out Of Our Skin
    • Following the Freud of Beyond the Pleasure Principle, who famously remarks that “[p]rotection against stimuli is an almost more important function for the living organism than reception of stimuli” (PFL 11, 298) McLuhan conceives of the organism as an homeostatic system whose aim is to neutralize, or disintensify, stimuli.
    • We have to numb our central nervous system when it is extended and exposed or we will die.” (UM 47)
  • 2.6 From Narcissism To Schizophrenia
    • Gibson: “’Numb,’ he said. He’d been numb a long time, years. All his nights down in Ninsei, his nights with Linda, numb in bed and numb at the cold sweating center of every drug deal.” (N 181)
    • According to McLuhan, Narcissus’ plight arises not because he falls in love with himself, but because he is unable to recognize his image as belonging to him.
    • The minimal or narcissistic self is, above all, a self uncertain of its own outlines.”
    • Burroughs, according to McLuhan, presents “a paradigm of the future where there can be no spectators but only participants […] There is no privacy and no private parts.” The effacement of the distinction between private and public will, of course, become a commonplace of postmodern theory. The “loss of public space occurs contemporaneously with the loss of private space,” Baudrillard observes. he chief characteristic of Jameson’s postmodern schizophrenia is the breakdown in the experience of sequential time, an inability “to unify the past, present, and future of our own biographical experience or psychic life” (PCLLC 27): “the schizophrenic,” Jameson writes, “is reduced to an experience […] of pure and unrelated presents in”; “the present […] engulfs the subject with indescribable vividness” (PCLLC 27)
    • “What characterizes [the schizo] is less the loss of the real, the light years of estrangement from the real, the pathos of distance and radical separation, as is commonly said, but, very much to the contrary, the absolute proximity, the total instantaneity of things, the feeling of no defense, no retreat.” (EC 133)
  • 2.7 Simulating The Gothic Body: Videodrome
    • (“we make inexpensive glasses for the third world and missile guidance systems for NATO”)
  • 2.8 Tactile Power
    • TV is a deeply unheimlich technology, a disturbing presence in the heart of the domestic scene whose apparent reassuring famil- iarity conceals its insidious destruction of that very scene 57 (and all scenes, Baudrillard will insist): “today it is the very space of habitation that’s conceived as both receiver and distributor […] the control screen and terminal […] Here we are far from the living-room and close to science fiction.” (EC 128) Or beyond science fiction, and into cyberpunk…
    • And in “The Ecstasy of Communication”, “Obscenity begins when there is no more spectacle. […]” (EC 130)
    • [O]ne can always ask of the traditional holders of power where they get their power from. Who made you duke? the king? Who made you king? God. Only God no longer answers. But to the question: who made you a psychoanalyst? the analyst can reply: You.” (SS 41) Power has completed the spectacle by making it interactive; but in doing so, it has abolished the spectacle as such, and inaugurated a new, all-inclusive, system which makes alienation – and its critique – obsolete. Immersion – so central a preoccupation of cyberpunk and its technologies – displaces spectatorship.
    • It works so much better when you want it.
    • “With TV, the viewer is the screen,” (UM 313) McLuhan pronounces, in a slogan that clearly anticipates Baudrillard, whose take-up of this motif is as predictable as it is inevitable.
    • Videodrome shows how “profoundly illiterate” (AO 240) capitalism keeps up the symbolic order only for show. 69 You don’t read Capital, Videodrome makes clear. You play it, it plays you.
  • 2.9 The Atrocity Exhibition
    • In a sense, the phrase “atrocity exhibition” is a strictly literal description of this media landscape as it emerged in the early 1960s, populated by images of Vietnam, the Kennedys, Martin Luther King and Malcolm X. The novel deals with the violence that haemorrhaged in the 1969 in which it was published: Manson, Altamont, War across the USA. But, for Ballard, the events of 1969 are merely the culmination of a decade whose guiding logic has been one of violence; a mediatized violence, where “mediatization” is a profoundly ambiguous term which doesn’t necessarily imply a disintensification. As they begin to achieve the instantaneous speed Virilio thinks characteristic of postmodern communication, media (paradoxically) immediatize trauma, making it instantly available even as they prepackage it into what will become increasingly preprogrammed stimulus-response circuitries.
  • 2.10 ATROCI-TV
    • A key trait of Ballard’s novel is a Warhol-like indifferent presentation of objects, in which banal objects that should be devoid of affect – commodities – are treated as equivalent to images which we might ordinarily expect to shock us – car crashes. But in place of Warhol’s serial repetition of objects, Ballard favours techniques of blow-up that more closely recall Oldenberg. Both of these techniques combine in the commodification of the human body, its transposition into an image that is no longer recognizable as its own image. For Jameson, such techniques are an example of the death of affect. “The waning of affect,” he says, “is […] perhaps best initially approached by way of the human figure, and it is obvious that what we have said about the commodification of objects holds as strongly for Warhol’s human subjects; stars – like Marilyn Monroe – who are themselves commodified and transformed into their own image.” (PCLLC, 11) But, bearing in mind the critique of the “death of affect” thesis we made in Chapter 1, Gothic Materialism would prefer to describe such techniques in terms of a distribution of impersonalised affect, a spread of affect beyond the confines of the emotional or psychological.
  • 2.11 Catastrophe Management
  • 2.12 Beyond The Pleasure Of The Organs
    • Which also amounts, in The Atrocity Exhibition and Crash, to the abstraction of sensation. Hence, for Baudrillard, the emergence of a generalized libidinization proper to the Body without Organs. As Baudrillard writes, in an almost valedictory mode: “Goodbye ‘erogenous zones’: everything becomes a hole to offer itself up to the discharge reflex. […] Body and technology diffracting their bewildered signs through each other. Carnal abstraction and design.” (SS 112)
• Part 3 - Xerox and Xenogenesis: Mechanical Reproduction and Gothic Propagation
  • 3.1 Let Me Tell You About My Mother
    • I understand they tell me it’s convincing if you don’t think too much about it. But if you think too much, if you reflect on what you’re doing then you cant go on. For ahem physiological reasons.’ Bending, he kissed her bare shoulder. ‘Thanks, Rick,’ she said wanly. ‘Remember, though: don’t think about it, just do it. Don’t pause and be philosophical, because from a philosophical standpoint it’s dreary. For us both.
    • Butler: “Every machine will probably have its special mechanical breeders, and all the higher ones will owe their existence to a large number of parents and not to two only.” (212)
    • "No more mother, just a matrix."
  • 3.2 The Simulacrum's Revenge
    • As he puts it as early as For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign, “man is not reproduced as man: he is simply regenerated as a survivor (a surviving productive force). If he eats, drinks, lives somewhere, reproduces himself, it is because the system requires his self-production in order to reproduce itself: it needs men. If it could function with slaves, there would be no ‘free’ workers. If it could function with asexual mechanical robots, there would be no sexual reproduction.”
    • Sorcery is “two-edged” because, like cybernetic machines, it awards power – or control – only to the degree that it demands control be given up by the individual subject; the cir- cuit, the cybernetic loop, takes over.
  • 3.3 Samuel Butler and Surplus Value of Code
    • Land: “Intelligent infections tend their hosts”
    • Downham: “The monsters we create welcome us aboard.”
    • “Is not machinery linked with animal life in an infinite va- riety of ways? The shell of a hen’s egg is made of a delicate white ware and is a machine as much as an egg-cup is: the shell is the device for holding the egg, as much as the egg-cup for holding the shell: both are phases of the same func- tion; the hen makes the shell in her inside, but it is pure pottery.
  • 3.4 Nupitals Against Nature: Sorcery and Propogation
    • Thinking desire and production together entails answering the question, “which came first, the chicken or the egg?” with the answer: the circuit.
  • 3.5 The Wasp Factory Neuromancer
  • 3.6 Capitalism and Isophrenia: Ashpool
    • “The dream, the memory, unreeled with the monotony of an unedited simstim tape. He’d missed the first wasp, when it built its paperfine gray house on the blistered part of the windowframe, but soon the nest was a fist-sized lump of fiber, insects hurtling out to hunt the alley below like miniature copters buzz- ing the rotting contents of the dumpsters. They’d each had a dozen beers the afternoon a wasp stung Marlene. ‘Kill the fuckers’, she said, her eyes dull with rage and the still heat of the room, ‘burn ‘em’ ‘In the alley,’ he approached the blackened nest. It had broken open. Singed wasps wrenched and flipped on the asphalt. He saw the thing the shell of gray paper had concealed. Horror. The spiral factory, stepped terraces of the hatching cells, blind jaws of the unborn moving ceaselessly, the staged process from egg to larva, near-wasp, wasp. In his mind’s eye, a kind of time-lapse photography took place revealing the thing as the biological equivalent of a machine-gun, hideous in its perfection. Alien. He woke with the impression of light fading, but the room was dark. Afterimages, retinal flares. In the dream, just before he’d drenched the nest with fuel, he’d seen the T-A logo of Tessier-Ashpool neatly embossed onto its side, as though the wasps themselves had worked it there.” (N 151-3)
  • 3.6 Wintermutation: Neuromancer as Sorcerous Narrative
    • Ashpool stands as a recent example of a particular’ type belonging to what we have called the negativized Gothic; figures, like Victor Frankenstein who, in their very desire to ward off death produce it, in new, simulated forms.
• Part 4 - Black Mirror: Hypernaturalism, Hyperreality, and Hyperfiction
  • 4.1 Never Mind Metaphor
    • What happens when fiction (itself) propagates, contaminating the Real?
    • “Perhaps our melancholy stems from this, for metaphor still had its beauty, it was aesthetic, playing as it did upon difference, and upon the illusion of difference. Today, metonymy – replacing the whole as well as the components, and occasioning a general commutability of terms – has built its house upon the dis-illusion of metaphor.” (TE 8)
  • 4.2 Borges Doesn't Make It Into Cyberspace
    • In an inversion Baudrillard would appreciate, it would perhaps be better to reverse the emphasis; now, actual goods function as second-order copies of the data that can be accessed raw, in cyberspace. This, after all, is the point of data- hacking – data can be treated as primary, as itself a commodity.
    • It can also be suggested that everything designated by ‘space’ within the human cultural system is implemented on weakly communicating parallel distributed processing systems under 1011 (nerve-) cells in size, which are being invasively’ digitized and loaded into cyberspace. In which case K-space is just outside (‘taking ‘outside’ in the strict [transcendental] sense.’ (Kant))”
  • 4.3 Hyperreality and Postmodern Fiction
    • It belongs to a widespread tendency, or psychopathology, in postmodern culture that might be called Metanoia. Metanoia can be defined as the interminable process by which supplementary dimensions are continually being produced but are immediately and of necessity themselves obsolesced at the very moment of their production. Infinite regress stands in place of any definitively transcendent moment, the always-deferred “end” result of a process that is interminable, driven by the simultaneous need to hunt out of a final ontological baseline while at the same time continuously displacing it.
    • Fiction is everywhere - and therefore, in a certain sense, eliminated as a specific category.
    • Where once the Dadaists and their inheritors could dream of invading the stage, disrupting what Burroughs - still very obviously a part of this heritage - calls the “reality studio” with logic bombs, now there is no stage - no scene, Baudrillard would say - to invade. For two reasons: first, because the frontier zones of hypercapital do not try to repress so much as absorb the irrational and the illogical, and, second, because the distinction between stage and offstage has been superceded by a coolly inclusive loop of fiction: Reagan’s career outstrips any attempt to ludically lampoon it, and demonstrates the increasingly pliability of the boundaries between the real and its simulations. For Baudrillard, the very attacks on “reality” mounted by groups such as the Surrealists function to keep the real alive (by providing it with a fabulous, dream world, ostensibly entirely alternative to but in effect dialectically complicit with the everyday world of the real) . “Surrealism was still in solidarity with the real it contested, but which it doubled and ruptured in the imaginary.” (SED 72)
    • But this shock is counterposed by a sense of predictability arising from the cool elegance of Ballard’s simulations. The technical tone of Ballard’s writing - its impersonality and lack of emotional inflection - perform the function of neutralizing or ormalizing the ostensibly unacceptable material. Is this simulation of the operations of Hypercontrol agencies a satire on them, or do their activities - and the whole cultural scene of which they are a part - render satire as such impossible now?’ What, after all, is the relationship between satire and simulation?
    • Parody, Jameson argues, depended upon a whole set of resources available to modernism but which have faded now: the individual subject, whose “inimitable” idosyncratic style, Jameson wryly observes, could precisely gave rise to imitations; a strong historical sense, which has its necessary obverse a confidence that there is a genuinely contemporary means of expression; and a commitment to collective projects, which could motivate writing and give it a political purpose. As these disappear, Jameson suggests, so does the space of parody. Individual style gives way to a “field of stylistic and discursive heterogeneity without a norm” (PCLLC 17), just as the belief in progress and the faith that one could describe new times in new terms wanes, to be replaced by “the imitation of dead styles, speech through all the masks and voices stored up in the imaginary museums of a new global culture” (PCLLC 18). Late capitalism’s “postliteracy”, meanwhile, points to “the absence of any great collective project.” (PCLLC 17) What results, according to Jameson, is a depthless experience, in which the past is everywhere at the same time as the historical sense fades; we have a “society bereft of all historicity” (PCLLC 18) that is simultaneously unable to present anything that is not a reheated version of the past. Pastiche displaces parody: “In this situation, parody finds itself without a vocation; it has lived, and that strange new thing pastiche comes to take its place. Pastiche is, like parody, the imitation of a peculiar or unique, idiosyncratic style, the wearing of a linguistic mask, speech in a dead language. But it is a neutral practice of such mimicry, without any of parody’s ulterior motives, amputated of the satiric impulse, devoid of laughter and of any conviction that alongside the abnormal tongue you have momentarily borrowed, some healthy linguistic normality still exists. Pastiche is thus blank parody, a statue with blind eyeballs […]” (PCLLC 17)
    • By contrast, what Ballard’s text “lacks” is any clear designs on the reader, any of Jameson’s “ulterior motives”; the parodic text always gave central importance to the parodist behind it, his implicit but flagged attitudes and opinions, but “Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan” is as coldly anonymous as the texts it imitates. Whereas we hear Burroughs’ cackling at the absurb excesses of the scientists in “The All-American Deanxietized Man”, the response of Ballard to the scientists whose work he simulates is unreadable. What does “Ballard” want the reader to feel: disgust? amusement? It is unclear, and, as Baudrillard argues in relation to Crash, it is somewhat disingenuous of Ballard the author to overcode his texts - in prefatory authorial remarks - with all the traditional baggage of “warning” that they themselves clearly elude. The mode Ballard adopts in “Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan” is not that of (satirical) exaggeration, but is a kind of (simulated) extrapolation. The very genre of the poll or the survey, as Baudrillard shows, makes the question unanswerable, undecidable.
    • What simulation in Baudrillard’s third-order sense entails is, as we have repeatedly insisted, the collapse of distance between the simulation and what is simulates. Satire, in its classical sense, we would probably want to locate as part of “First-order simulacra” - a simulation that resembles the original, but with certain tell-tale differences. Ballard simulates the simulation (the poll, the survey).
  • 4.4 Social Science/Social Science Fiction (How the True World Became a Simulation)
    • Cybernetics had always been about anticipation; in order to hit a moving target, the anti-aircraft weaponry Wiener had worked on needed to predict not where the target was at the point when the missile was launched, but where its would be at the point of impact. Hence the slogan of Control is, “Don’t strike where your enemy is, strike where it will be.” Hypercontrol tends towards the production of even tighter feedback loops; its slogan, then, would be “Never strike where your enemy will be, kill its parents.” Cybernetic anticipation is always double-edged; suggesting not only prediction, but determination: “self-fulfilling prophecy” (SED 67), as Baudrillard has it. Yet this process itself makes prophecy moot, precisely because it makes any effective delineation of causal determination impossible: “the whole traditional world of causality” with its “distinction between cause and effect, between active and passive, between subject and object, between the ends and the means” (SS 31) has been superceded by a logic of “code.” White magical capture: to be in the system is already to be processed by it. Baudrillard’s example of this is the opinion poll. The question that concerned opinion in the “political class” worries about - do polls affect voting behaviour? - is unanswerable. “Polls manipulate the undecidable. Do they affect votes? True of false? Do they yield exact photographs of reality, or of mere tendencies, or a refraction of this reality in a hyperspace of simulation whose curvature we do not know? True or false? Undecidable.” (SED 66) Code’s logic as Baudrillard delineates it is not describable in terms of cause preceding-effect; rather, its logic is one, to speak like Deleuze, of expression, in which each “effect” expresses - unfolds - a “cause” from which it is never really distinct, temporally or ontologically. Is DNA the cause of an organism? It is both more and less.
  • 4.5 The Decline of the Shadow (or, the End of the Marvelous)
  • 4.6 Mechanism and Animism (or, Gremlins in the Hyperreal)
    • The emergent mythos of demonism in Gibson’s cyberspace depends upon the notion of entities with which one can trade. “The new jockeys, they make deals with things.” (CZ 169) This emphasis on trade with an entity that is really different (not a pyschologistic projection) recapitulates, then, the relationship between Baudrillard’s “primitive double” and the shadow: it is a matter of a real relationship with something exterior.
  • 4.7 Capitalism as Toy Story: Hyperfiction, Strange Loops and Rhizomes
    • (Who cares who wrote Toy Story?)
  • 4.8 A Closing Parable: Hyperfiction and In the Mouth of Madness
    • “Do you want to know the problem with […] religion?” Cane asks Trent. “It’s never known how to convey the anatomy of Horror. Religion seeks discipline through fear. No- one’s ever believed it enough to make it real. The same can’t be said of my works.” When Trent objects that “books aren’t real”, Cane points out that his books “have sold over a billion copies. I’ve been translated into eighteen languages. More people believe in my work than believe in the Bible.”

Page last revised on: 2024-05-05