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FLATLINE CONSTRUCTS GOTHIC MATERIALISM AND CYBERNETIC THEORY-FICTION |
1. SCREAMS_ SCREENS_ FLATLINES: CYBERNETICS, POSTMODERNISM AND THE GOTHIC
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1. SCREAMS_ SCREENS_ FLATLINES: CYBERNETICS, POSTMODERNISM AND THE GOTHIC_____________________________ |
1.1 How an Android Must
Feel 1.2 Cybernetics, Postmodernism, Fiction 1.3 Flatlines
1.4 Constructs |
1.1 How
an Android Must Feel
Deckard: “Replicants weren't supposed to have
feelings. Neither were Blade Runners.” [9]
There’s
an intriguing scene in the middle of Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric
Sheep?, a novel best known now as the source of Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982). Rick Deckard and Phil Resch, two bounty
hunters whose prey is not human beings but androids, have pursued a target to a
museum where a Munch exhibition is
showing. Pausing in front of what is evidently The Scream - “[t]wisted
ripples of the creature’s torment, echoes of its cry, flooded out into the air
surrounding it; the man or woman, whatever it was, had become contained by its
own howl” - Resch comments, “I think [...] this is how an andy must feel.” [10]
To
anyone acquainted with Fredric Jameson’s analyses, the connection Resch makes
should raise a number of questions. For Jameson, “The Scream is a canonical expression of the great modernist thematics of
alienation, anomie, solitude, isolation, a virtually programmatic emblem of
what used to be called the age of anxiety” (PCLLC 11), whereas Dick’s novel,
and Blade
Runner, have been held up (not least by Jameson himself [11])
as quintessentially postmodern. If The
Scream does really communicate the
”alienation, anomie, solitude” appropriate to a melancholy human(ist)
subjectivity, as Jameson suggests, how can an android - nonhuman simulacrum of the human - have any
affinity with it? Is there something to
account for the appearance of expressionist imagery and thematics in Blade Runner other than the notorious “pastiche” effect? What does an android feel, any way?
To
begin to answer these questions is to start to pick apart the theoretical
approaches that have dominated commentary on
Blade Runner and
Dick. This will involve, initially, weaving a few more strands in the
already-existing rhizome theory has run
around, and through, Blade Runner. Much
commentary has already made the connection between Scott’s film and the
almost directly contemporary “cyberpunk” fiction of William Gibson, thereby
clicking onto a literary genealogy that includes Burroughs and Ballard as well as Dick. Parallels have also been
made with the films of David Cronenberg[12] .
Critical reception of these authors has been dominated by debates on
“postmodernism” and “postmodernity”;
theorists with a variety of responses to postmodernism - negative
(Christopher Lasch[13]), ambivalent
(Kellner[14] and Jameson), and neutral (McHale[15])
- have
cited one or all of them as exemplars of postmodern practice. Jameson famously goes so far as to call
cyberpunk “the supreme literary
expression, if not of postmodernism then of late capitalism itself.” (PCLLC 38)
What
follows will not reject these postmodernist approaches so much as it will
envelop them, as it will envelop cyberpunk fiction, into what it will call Gothic Materialism. To suggest that many
of Gothic Materialism’s principal
resources come from Deleuze-Guattari’s Capitalism and Schizophrenia is not to imply that it is
in some sense a transcendent deployment (or application) of
Deleuze-Guattari’s work, in part because whatever Gothic Materialism can use, it becomes. So when it emerges, Gothic
materialism describes Deleuze-Guattari (not the other way around), their work
appearing now as a clicking together of Gothic authors whose names are
legion: Lovecraft, Artaud, Freud, Marx,
Schreber, Worringer...
In
part, then, what follows will present a materialist critique of postmodernism .
The kind of postmodernist theorists Gothic Materialism interfaces with is are
those it already haunts - not thinkers who process reality through a
textualist or linguistic grid, but theorists who understand “postmodernity” as
an essentially material phenomenon,
describing its effects primarily in terms of the impact that new
telecommercial configurations have on the human nervous system: Jameson,
certainly, but also Baudrillard, and one of his key antecedents, Marshall McLuhan.
Prompted
by what, at first sight, appears to be an invasion of the human body by
technology, McLuhan and Baudrillard’s work follows the metapsychological Freud
in describing a becoming-technical of
the organism. As we shall see in more detail in the next chapter, this reverses
the idea of “extensions of man”
McLuhan develops in Understanding
Media. The concept of media as extensions of the human body is a
direct echo of the organicist
confidence Freud had displayed in Civilization and its Discontents when he
wrote of technology making “Man [...] a prosthetic God.”[16] What Baudrillard picks up on is the other
side of Freud (and the other side of McLuhan): a side that doesn’t stress the
extension of an organic interiority, or its invasion, but the folding Out
of interiority into a pure exteriority,
registered by the subject as shock or trauma.
For
Baudrillard, then, the cultural reconfigurations that Jameson identifies do not
mark the end of the age of anxiety, as Jameson thinks; rather, they usher in
another, new, era of anxiety. The characteristics of this new age of anxiety
had already been delineated by McLuhan. Whereas “[m]odernist anxiety is founded
on the inescapability of individual freedom; its themes are individual
solitude, social fragmentation, and alienation.” By contrast, “McLuhan’s
anxiety”, in anticipation of Baudrillard’s, “is exactly contrary: it has its
origins in a social disalienation and the denial (or penetration by the media,
and so by everyone else) of any margins of solitude or alienation. Modernist
anxiety involves the withdrawal to an imaginary identity resistant to immersion
in the forms of modernization. McLuhan’s postmodern anxiety has given up this
resistant identity, and has no anchorage in individual thought or feeling.”[17]
Which
brings us back to Munch, to Dick, and
to Jameson, who comes across The Scream during the course of his celebrated discussion of the “waning of
affect”. In positing a “waning of affect”, Jameson does not want to argue, he
insists, “that the cultural products of the postmodern era are utterly devoid
of feeling, but rather that such feelings - which it may be better and more
accurate, following J.F. 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. Ecstasy - which has an ostensibly inverse but effectively indistinguishable state,
dread - arises when the subject is jacked into late capitalism’s network of
cybernetic communications. Plugged into the network , traversed by it,
Baudrillard’s Terminal Man knows that
retreat into private space is no longer an option, and this awareness generates a new sense of terror - for
Baudrillard “the state of terror proper to the schizophrenic: too great a
proximity of everything, the unclean promiscuity of everything which touches,
invests and penetrates without resistance, with no halo of private projection
to protect him anymore.”[18]
Both
dread and ecstasy arise from a loss of
the sense of self as a delimitable entity: a white- or black-out of identity
that can just as easily be experienced as terror or euphoria “(dread is a kind
of jouissance-in-negative, a slow subsidence into uncontrol and panic).”[19]
Following Lyotard through
his rerouting of Kantian aesthetics, Jameson
calls this “simultaneous apprehension of ecstasy and dread” the postmodern
sublime.
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). Gothic
Materialism’s aesthetic theory, as we shall see below, derives not from Burke
and Kant (nor from some postmodern reinvention of their theories), but from
Wilhelm Worringer, whose two treatises on “barbarian art”, Form in Gothic and Abstraction
and Empathy - both re-animated by Deleuze-Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus - oppose
representation not to the unrepresentable, but to the abstract . Gothic
Materialism is above all an abstract materialism, distinguished from other
types of materialism, (including what Baudrillard disparagingly refers to as
“anthropo-Marxism” [SED 140), and from every sort of idealism, by its focussing
principally on the organ grinder - the
nonorganic processes of stratification that produce the organism - rather than the monkey - anthropoid
consciousness as manifested in an experience of subjectivity screened through
the (Freudian) perceptual-consciousness-system. Such processes have agents, but they are not human, humanistic,
or subjectivist; they are “Abstract
Machines.”[20]
In
other words, Gothic Materialism takes literally what “Marx critically denounced
as the ‘fantasy’ of capital as ‘an
automatic system of machinery ... set in motion by an automaton, a moving power
that moves itself’.”[21]
It assumes, with Deleuze-Guattari’s schizoanalysis, that the possibility of
transcendently critiquing capitalism , kept alive in a mournful kind of way by
Jameson, ostensibly abandoned but effectively retained by Baudrillard, has
always been dysfunctional, for the simple reason that “[c]apitalism defines a
field of immanence and never ceases to occupy this field.” (AO 250) While
anthropo-Marxism 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.
For
Spinoza, there is agency everywhere but this never belongs to human subjects. The Ethics, therefore, does not identify subjects (or
objects); rather it entifies. Spinoza
disontologises all subjective, generic and species distinctions into a single
Gothic classification: the Entity.
“[W]e are wont to classify all the individuals in Nature under one
genus, namely, the notion of Entity, which pertains to all individuals in
Nature without exception.” (ETH, IV, Pref: 153) Bodies are defined, not by form
or function, but as processes; in other words, “True Entities are events.” [22]
Crucial
in this respect is Deleuze-Guattari’s concept of the haecceity. The haecceity
can be defined briefly as non-subjectified individuation. It is
individuation as intensive
multiplicity, not extensive address. For Deleuze-Guattari (“Memories of a
Haecceity” [TP 260-265]), the haecceity
“is a mode of individuation very different from that of a person, subject,
thing or substance. [...] A season, a winter, summer, an hour, a date have a
perfect individuality lacking nothing, even though this individuality is different
from that of a thing or a subject.” (TP 261) 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). “It should
not be thought that a haecceity consists simply of a decor or backdrop that
situates subjects, or of appendages that hold things and people to the ground,”
Deleuze-Guattari warn. “It is the entire assemblage in its individuated
aggregate that is a haecceity.” (TP 262) The Gothic has an affinity with the concept of the haecceity because it refuses to
distinguish human figures from backgrounds; “the ‘Gothic or Northern’
decorative line” is “a broken line which forms no contour by which form and
background might be distinguished.”[23]
You can’t enter such zones
without entering into composition with them.
Haecceities,
Deleuze-Guattari say, find expression in a “particular semiotic”: “This
semiotic is composed above all of
proper names, verbs in the infinitive and indefinite articles or pronouns. Indefinite article + proper name + infinitive verb constitutes the basic chain of
expression […] of a semiotic that has freed itself from both formal
signifiances and personal subjectifications.” (TP 263) Deleuze-Guattari’s vindication of this semiotic - a positivization of the indefinite
- is simultaneously a theory of Horror,
a critique of psychoanalysis and a program for cyberotics. Whereas psychoanalysis, Deleuze-Guattari
argue, always seeks to reduce the indefinite to the definite - “When the child
says ‘a belly’, ‘a horse’, ‘how do people grow
up?’ ‘someone is beating a child’, the psychoanalyst hears ‘my
belly,’ ‘the father,’ will I grow up to be like daddy?’” (TP 264) -
rhizomatics understands that desire operates through the indefinite: "Flat multiplicities [...] are designated
by indefinite articles, or rather by partitives (some couchgrass, some of
a rhizome)." (TP, 9) The Gothic use of
such terms as “the unnamable”,
“the Thing”, “the nameless” - favoured by Deleuze-Guattari themselves - implies
a modification of this model: here,
indefinite adverb-nouns function to de-definitize definite articles.
Gothic
Materialism is flat with its material; it names both the
mode of analysis and what is to be analysed. It does not arbitrarily conjoin materialism
with the Gothic, but insists that all effective materialism must lead Out towards a non-organic
(dis)continuum. Amongst other things,
the Gothic can serve as a proper name for this continuum[24] ; and cyberpunk is the registering of its
arrival on the terminals of a wired humanity.
Whilst an organicist Left social criticism finds in cyberpunk the quietist collapse of transformative
political projects into a “hardboiled” “survivalist” hyper-nihilism[25], Gothic Materialism locates in Baudrillard’s
ecstatic communication, Gibson’s Cyberspace, Jameson’s total flow and
Cronenberg’s Videodrome the map of a hypermediatized capitalism that is decoding privatized subjectivity.
Organicist
postmodern theory has tended to read cyberpunk as the apogee of Cartesianism, the story - now told, in part,
ironically - of the triumph of disembodied Mind over docile body (this
latter referred to by Gibson’s
cybserspace cowboys as “meat”). Told this way, the story has inevitable gender
implications: it is a re-run of the old narrative of the hylomorphic domination
of Nature by Man. For Andrew Ross, for instance, “Cyberpunk male bodies [...
are] spare, lean, and temporary bodies whose social functionality could only be
maintained through the reconstructive aid of a whole range of genetic overhauls
and cybernetic enhancements - boosterware, biochip wetware, cyberoptics,
bioplastic surgery, designer drugs, nerve amplifiers, prosthetic limbs and
organs, memoryware, neural interface plugs and the like.” 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). Ross is aware
that cyberpunk is much more ambivalent than this; that it also tells of the
invasion of the (male) organism by technical machines. Deliberately echoing the
Baudrillard of “The Ecstasy of Communication”, he describes the cyberpunk “body
as a switching system with no purely organic integrity to defend or advance,
and only further enhancements of technological ‘edge’ to gain in the struggle
for technological advantage. 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)
Yet,
as we have already seen, to oppose invasion of the organism with its extension
is still not to process the materialist critique cyberpunk presents: the Spinozistic/
cybernetic unravelling of the organism back into its environment. Ross always
recodes cyberpunk sensations in terms of a psychopathology and a politics - an
affective range - whose continuing
purchase on contemporary reality the very existence of cyberpunk radically
questions. Despite sharing some of Ross’s attachment to transcendent social
criticism, Jameson nevertheless
recognises that the new cultural configurations cannot be theorised using this
old (psychoanalytical) language. What he calls the decline of affect is signalled in part by a liberation “ from the older anomie of the centered
subject”, an ambiguous “liberation” which “ may also mean a liberation from
every other kind of feeling as well, since there is no longer a self present to
do the feeling” (PCLLC, 16). Jameson’s analysis here parallels that of
Baudrillard in suggesting that “the end of the bourgeois ego, or monad” brings
with it a concomitant “end of the
pyschopathologies of that ego” (PCLLC,
16) (“No more hysteria, no more projective paranoia,” Baudrillard announces in “The Ecstasy of Communication” (EC
132]).
If,
as Baudrillard says, there is no more hysteria, then - contra Ross - there is
no more castration either. For Baudrillard, as we have seen, castration fear
has become reversed; media implicitly “feminize”, not cutting man off, but
“penetrating without resistance.” The dread here corresponds to the masculine
terror Klaus Theweleit describes in Male Fantasies: it is a terror of being inundated, overwhelmed by what Jameson
calls the “total flow” (PCLLC 70, 76-78, 86, 90) of hyperconnected cybernetic
culture . Cyberpunk registers a trauma that Ross, apparently secure in his
organic interiority, still thinks can be commented upon from the point of view
of an unproblematic humanist transcendence. 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.
This
dread gives rise to the startling images of Cronenberg’s Videodrome. Infamously, at
one point in the film, the lead character Max Renn’s “body literally opens up - his stomach develops a massive,
vaginal slit - to accommodate a new videocassette ‘programme’. Image addiction
and image virus reduce the subject to the status of a videotape player/
recorder; the human body mutates to become a part of the massive system of
reproductive technology.”[26] This is a new type of dread, emerging in theory and fiction
simultaneously.
As
a registering of this new horror, Videodrome,
like Baudrillard’s “Ecstasy of Communication”[27],
is a kind of cyberpunk sequel to Freud’s (anti) Gothic tale, “The Uncanny.”
There Freud keeps Gothic terror at bay by attributing the feelings of “dread
and anxiety” to a fear of castration. By the time of Baudrillard and Videodrome, the phallic visual scene
Freud sought to erect has collapsed
into a terrible, cloying tactile intimacy: what Baudrillard’s calls
the obscene.
The equation Freud makes between the eye and the penis is no longer relevant in
conditions where there is no distance (specular or otherwise): you can’t touch
without being touched. You can’t penetrate what already envelops you. Gibson:
“The matrix folds around me like an origami trick.”[28]
To
simulate the POV of the androids in Dick’s novel is to be drawn to where you -
as subject - are turned inside Out. 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.
(“[T]he subject [is] produced as residuum alongside the machines, as an
appendix, or as a spare part adjacent to the machine.” [AO 16-22]) For Gothic Materialism this, as much as the
more familiar inventory of modernist angst-states, is what Munch and the rest
of Expressionism was always getting at.
So
it will be argued here that cybernetic capitalism does not engender what
Ballard has followed Jameson in identifying as a “death of affect.” Those switched on to Spinozism by
Deleuze-Guattari might suspect the reverse; that what defines the “postmodern”
is in fact the amplification of affect. Brian Massumi suggests that the
theorization of “intensity” Jameson calls for is to be achieved precisely by
paying renewed attention to the phenomenon of affect and to Spinoza as its
principal theorist. “It is crucial,” Massumi argues, “to theorize the
difference between emotion and affect.” “An emotion is a subjective content,
the socio-linguistic fixing of the quality of an experience which is from that
point on defined as personal. Emotion is qualified intensity, the conventional,
consensual point of insertion of intensity into semantically formed
progressions, into narrativizable action-reaction circuits, into function and
meaning. It is intensity owned and recognised [...] If some have the impression that affect has waned, it is
because affect is unqualified.”[29]
To
account for these abstract feelings (“abstract is a word for sensations so new
they don’t have a name yet”[30]), demands a new affective register, and a new
type of “realism” - not any more the “empirical realism” described and
delimited by Kant in the name of transcendental philosophy and echoed in the
conventions of the bourgeois realist
novel, but a cybernetic realism[31]:
a theory-fiction for an artificial reality.
Bacon: “The more artificial you can make it, the
greater the chance of its looking real.”[32]
<< Back to Contents
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Section 1.2
Cybernetics, Postmodernism, Fiction >>
[9] From the Blade Runner script. Here, as with all the right-justified quotations in the thesis, italics have been added.
[10] Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?,
London: HarperCollins, 1993, 100
[11] As we shall see below: see especially The Seeds of Time, New
York: Columbia University Press, 1994, 146-149, and The Geopolitical Aesthetic:
Cinema and Space in the World System, Bloomington and Indiana/ London:
Indiana University Press/ BFI publishing, 1992 , 12
[12] Scott Bukatman’s Terminal Identity: the Virtual Subject in Postmodern Science Fiction (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1991) makes a somewhat unsatisfactory attempt to connect all these figures. Jameson, meanwhile, has written at length on Gibson (Seeds of Time 146-149), Ballard (PCLLC 55-80), Dick (PCLLC 279-287) and Cronenberg (Geopolitical Aesthetic 22-32).
[13] See Lasch, The Minimal Self: Psychic Survival in Troubled Times, London: Pan, 1984, especially the chapter, “The Minimalist Aesthetic: Art and Literature in an Age of Extremity”, which discusses Burroughs and Ballard.
[14] See Douglas Kellner, “David Cronenberg: Panic Horror and the Postmodern Body”, Canadian Journal of Political and Social Theory, vol 13, 3, 1989
[15] See Brian McHale, Postmodernist Fiction, New York and London: Methuen, 1987, which discusses Ballard, Burroughs and Dick, and “POSTcyberMODERNpunkISM”, ( in Larry McCaffrey, ed., Storming the Reality Studio: A Casebook of Cyberpunk and Postmodern Fiction), Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1991, which discusses all of the above, plus Gibson.
[16] “With every tool man is perfecting his own organs, whether motory or sensory, or is removing the limits to their functioning,” Freud writes there. “Man has, as it were, become a kind of prosthetic God. When he puts on all his auxiliary organs he is truly magnificent; but these organs have not grown on to him and they still give him trouble at times.” “Civilization and its Discontents” in Penguin Freud Library, Volume 12, Civilization, Society and Religion, 279, 280
[17] Wilmott, McLuhan, or
Modernism in Reverse, Toronto-Buffalo- London: University of Toronto
Press, 1996, 170
[18] Baudrillard, “The Ecstasy
of Communication”, in The
Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, ed. Hal Foster, Port
Townsend: Washington Bay Press,
1983, 132
[19] Simon Reynolds, Blissed Out: The Raptures of Rock, London: Serpent’s Tail, 1991, 169
[20] The concept of abstract machines is an important one for Deleuze-Guattari. It is important to stress that abstract machines “[are] opposed to the abstract in the ordinary sense.” (TP 511) “There is no abstract machines, or machines, in the sense of a Platonic Idea, transcendent, universal, eternal. Abstract machines operate within concrete assemblages.” (TP 510) Abstract machines are the principle of operation immanent to the workings of any machine. They “know nothing of forms and substances. This is what makes them abstract.” (TP 511) “Abstract, singular, and creative, here and now, real yet nonconcrete, actual yet noneffectuated - that is why abstract machines are dated and named (the Einstein abstract machine, the Webern abstract machine)” (TP 511) One example of an abstract machine Deleuze-Guattari give is Foucault’s diagram of discipline. (TP 66-67) What Foucault makes possible, they point out, is an abstract description of ostensibly disparate empirical phenomena: prisons, schools, hospitals. These institutions instantiate a single abstract machine of discipline, but this is to be explained as an emergent phenomena, arriving bottom-up, rather than as the top-down imposition of a macro-subjective will.
[21] Iain Hamilton Grant, “Los Angeles 2019: Demopathy and Xenogenesis (Some Realist Notes on Blade Runner and the Postmodern Condition),” unpublished paper, 1997, no page refs. Quotation from Marx’s Grundrisse.
[22] Deleuze and Parnet, Dialogues, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam, New York: Columbia University Press, 1987, 66. To make the Gothic link explicit, Deleuze and Parnet go on to refer to Lovecraft’s Randolph Carter (also discussed in TP 240) “ENTITY= EVENT, it is terror, but also great joy. Becoming an entity, an infinitive, as Lovecraft spoke of it, the horrific and luminous story of Carter: animal-becoming, molecular-becoming, imperceptible-becoming.” (66)
[23] Deleuze, Cinema 1, 111
[24] Much of what follows will be an attempt to rigorise a definition of the Gothic, which, like the cyber- prefix, has often been used imprecisely or in a way that is unhelpfully general. (This may account for the widespread failure to perceive the connection between cyberpunk and the Gothic.) Judith Halberstam’s “definition” of the Gothic as “the rhetorical style and narrative structure designed to produce fear and desire in the reader” (Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters, Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1995, 2) for instance, is emblematic of these failings. Whilst the version of the Gothic that will be employed in this study cannot be put in a nutshell - in part because it designates something “’teeming, seething, swelling, foaming, spreading like an infectious disease, [...] [a] nameless horror ‘”(TP 245) - it does have a number of specific features which will be delineated. It is not a vague synonym for everything transgressive or morbid (as it seems to be, for instance, for Christopher Grunenberg [“Unsolved Mysteries: Gothic Tales from Frankenstein to the Hair Eating Doll” in Gothic:Transmutations of Horror in Late Twentieth Century Art , Cambridge Mass./ London: the MIT Press 1997]). As should quickly become apparent, Gothic Materialism has little in common with what Jameson (PCLLC 289-291) calls “modern gothic”. Jameson’s modern gothic, which concerns the bolstering of a social and individual identity by means of the construction/ projection of an Other, bears more relation to what James Donald terms “the vulgar sublime.” Donald (‘What’s at Stake in Vampire Films? The Pedagogy of Monsters” in Sentimental Education: Schooling, Popular Culture and the Regulation of Liberty, London: Verso 1992) makes a connection between pulp fictions - Gothic, melodrama - and the high theory of Lyotard and Kristeva. But Donald’s vulgar sublime is ultimately contained within the problematics of representation: the boundaries of the subject are disturbed (in discourse) rather than, as with Gothic Materialism, materially dismantled (in practice). One problem with these approaches is that they maintain a distinction between texts and theory; theorists are still given the role of reading/ interpreting the (political) unconscious of/ for texts. Gothic Materialism, meanwhile, treats “texts” as already intensely theoretical.
[25] Ross, Andrew, “Cyberpunk in Boystown”, Strange Weather: Culture, Science and Technology in the Age of Limits, London/ New York: Verso, 1991, 153
[26] Bukatman, “Who Programs
You: The Science Fiction of the Spectacle?”, in Annette Kuhn ed., Alien Zone: Cultural Theory and Contemporary
Science Fiction Cinema , London: Verso, 1990, 206
[27] Bukatman’s “Who Programs You” offers an extensive comparison of Videodrome and Baudrillard.
[28] Gibson, Burning Chrome, London: Grafton, 1986
[29] Brian
Massumi, “The Autonomy of Affect”,
unpublished paper, 7
[30] Kodwo Eshun, “Motion Capture (Interview)”, Abstract Culture 2, winter 97
[31] This term comes from Grant “Los Angeles 2019”.
[32] David Sylvester, The Brutality of Fact : Interviews with Francis Bacon, London: Thames and Hudson 1987, 148