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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_____________________________ |
1.2 Cybernetics,
Postmodernism, Fiction 1.3 Flatlines
1.4 Constructs |
1.2 Cybernetics,
Postmodernism, Fiction
Gothic Materialism, 1st
Definition: Gothic materialism is equivalent to cybernetic realism.
Written a few years ahead of key
cyberpunk texts such as Blade Runner and Neuromancer, Baudrillard’s two essays on
SF, “Simulacra and Science Fiction” and “Crash”, are stunningly prescient in
their recognition “that the good old imaginary of science fiction is dead and
that something else is in the process of emerging (not only in fiction but in
theory as well). The same wavering and indeterminate fate puts an end to
science fiction - but also to theory, as specific genres.” (SS 121) The theme
of the end of theory (and its absorption into a science fiction which is no
longer one) will be taken up more fully in Chapter 4; for now, we will
concentrate on the collapse of science fiction.
Cyberpunk conforms to Baudrillard’s
prophecies to such a degree that it threatens to go beyond them. This is more
than a question of “Neuromancer and
other novels, [providing] stunning examples of how realist, ‘extrapolative’
science fiction can operate as prefigurative social theory”[33] , although it certainly involves this;
it is a matter of fictional concepts becoming what used to be called Social
Facts - the most obvious example of this phenomenon being the migration of Gibson’s “cyberspace” from fiction out
into (post) social reality.
Baudrillard’s own examples of the “new
science fiction that is not one” are Dick and Ballard (two influences Gibson
has repeatedly acknowledged ). It is precisely Ballard and Baudrillard‘s shared
sense of immanence, their refusal - Jameson would want to say inability - to
offer any kind of social criticism that make both quintessentially “postmodern” in Jameson’s terms . Unlike Baudrillard, for whom, “SF proper”
replaces the utopian as a mode, Jameson
assumes that, in its more confident
period, science fiction was very much in the business of dealing with utopia.
According to Jameson, the critical examination of images of utopia in SF novels
such as Ursula LeGuin’s The Dispossessed meant that these fictions were capable of
exercising political responsibility in a way that the new science fiction
cannot. (PCLLC 160) (As we shall see, for the Jameson of The
Seeds of Time, Blade Runner becomes a
privileged example of this phenomenon
because it apparently exemplifies all the features of the old dystopian
fiction, yet it is clearly not dystopian.)
Scornful of the aspirations of the
leftist transformational project to which Jameson is still committed, Baudrillard
is particularly delighted by Ballard’s refusal of the binary “function/
dysfunction”, by his complete abandonment of any moral or political/critical
stance[34]. For Baudrillard, the dream of
transformation belongs to the
“productive, Promethean” era - industrialism - that cybernetics has
terminated. Like cybernetics itself,
the fictions characteristic of the new era are “immanent and thus leave no room
for any kind of imaginary transcendence.” (SS 122)
In what follows, the emphasis will be
placed on cybernetics rather than postmodernism, in part because it will be
argued that cybernetics plays a crucial part in the genealogical development of
what has been called postmodern theory. In his somewhat pompous essay “The
Postmodern Dead End”, Felix Guattari attributes all postmodern thought to “hastily developed, [and] poorly mastered [...]” references made in the immediate postwar
period to “the new communications and computer technologies.” “The secret link
that binds these various doctrines
stems, I believe, from a subterranean relationship - marked by reductionist
conceptions, and conveyed immediately after the war by information theory and
cybernetic research.” [35] Whilst not wanting
to be quite so peremptory as Guattari, it will be argued here that postmodernist
theory - in particular that of Jameson and Baudrillard - is substantially given
over to description of processes that
are often explicitly identified as “cybernetic”[36] .
Briefly, the crucial insight of
cybernetics as presented in Wiener’s 1948 Cybernetics,
or Control and Communication in the
Animal and the Machine and in the later The
Human Use of Human Beings concerned feedback: “the property of being able
to adjust future conduct by past performance.” (HUHB 33) In the Second World
War, Wiener had worked on Anti-aircraft weaponry , whose efficacy depended upon
the ability of the machines “to record the performance and non-performance of
their own tasks.” (HUHB 36) The study of feedback is immediately a study of
control and communication; control is distinguished from domination, since it
is immanent to the system - the machine corrects itself - and this
self-correcting function depends upon communication (the efficient processing
of information about what is happening both “inside” the system and “outside”
it). Two types of feedback could be distinguished: negative feedback, which
tends to maintain stability in a system, (and which can be seen to be
exemplified in simple gadgets such as thermostats), and positive feedback,
which is the tendency of a system to run out of control - as with any kind of
“vicious circle”.
Technology[37]
is therefore important to
cybernetics, but it is not, as a certain contemporary usage of the “cyber-”
prefix implies, its sole focus. Rather, technical machines are significant
precisely because their analysis (in the double sense of the analysis that can
be made of them and the analysis they make possible) demands that the
distinction between human beings, animals and machines be decoded. What Wiener characterises as the
Cartesian[38]
privileging of the human over the animal and of the organic over the
inorganic is revealed by cybernetics,
Wiener thinks, to be an arbitrary prejudice (attributable, ultimately, to
monotheistic theology). Since all
working systems can all be described, abstractly, in terms of particular
feedback processes - input and output of “information” - cybernetics is able to develop what Wiener still has to think of as a
“functional analogy” between humans and machines . Yet, as Baudrillard very
quickly realised, this very functionality - or “operationality” as he calls it
- means that the relation is always more than
merely analogical.
Evidently, and as Wiener himself had
realised, the emergence of cybernetics was not only a matter of theory. “The
problem of unemployment arising from automization is no longer conjectural, but
has become a very vital difficulty of modern society, ” (GGi vii) he notes in God and Golem, inc. His speculations on
the moral and theological implications of cybernetics as presented there and in
the earlier The Human Use of Human Beings
are prompted by a sense that
“cybernetics has made a certain social and scientific impact”, not only as a
“relatively new idea”, but as a set of
practices that are already mutating the social machines.
”Cybernetics provides the pretext for a
the mechanized control of social life, of the body itself, and all of it
through the delicate nets of nonmachine-derived mathematical formulae,”
Csicsery-Ronay writes, summarising a certain leftist social criticism’s glum perception of cybernetics. “Cybernetics
represents the hardening and exteriorization of certain vital forms of
knowledge, the crystallization of the Cartesian spirit into material objects
and commodities. Cybernetics is already a paradox: simultaneously a sublime
vision of human power over chance and a dreary augmentation of multinational
capitalism’s mechanical process of expansion - so far characterized by almost
uninterrupted positive feedback.”[39]
Deleuze-Guattari, Baudrillard and Jameson
all recognise that capitalism, which has always functioned as an adaptive,
self-compensating system, is becoming increasingly cybernetic. For
Deleuze-Guattari, capitalism has
entered a “cybernetic and informational” phase. The older power regimes of
machinic enslavement (in which human
beings function as parts of
a social-technical megamachine) and social subjection (in which human
beings are subjected to the technical
machines they use) combine in a new “aggregate which includes both subjection
and enslavement taken to extremes, as two simultaneous parts that constantly
reinforce and nourish each other ” (TP
458), a combination made possible, in
part, by the emergence of cybernetic machines such as computers. Elsewhere,
Deleuze characterizes this
formation as “Control society,” and credits Burroughs with being its
first cartographer. [40]
When, in “The Ecstasy of
Communication” Baudrillard
announces the arrival of “the ‘proteinic’ era of networks, [...] the
narcissistic and protean era of connections, contact, contiguity, feedback and
generalized interface that goes with the universe of communication” (EC 127) he
is very obviously describing an era dominated by the same “cybernetic and
informational” processes. From his first book, The System of Objects, through to For a Critique of the Political
Economy of the Sign and on into his latest work, Baudrillard has been
obsessed with cybernetics and its implications.[41]
As Scott Bukatman tirelessly
points out[42] , Baudrillard’s subject is a terminal,
both at the end of an exhausted Western line, and an input-output node on the
network, “a switching centre for all
the networks of influence.” Rather than criticizing this “self-regulating,
selfsame, self-reproducing system”[43] from the point of view of a utopia yet to come - in the
manner of dialectical Marxism - Baudrillard simulates a primitive perspective,
comparing the dull white magic of humanist technoscience with the black magics
of symbolic exchange.[44]
Broadly accepting the negative characterization of cybernetics
outlined in leftist critique but
abandoning any sense that the tendency towards total cyberneticization could be overcome by collective action of
whatever form , Baudrillard suggests that resistance and “criticism” are superseded strategies which are easily
fed back into “the system” (which any way requires them)[45]. “Cybernetic control, generation through
models, differential modulation, feedback, question/answer, etc.: this is the
new operational configuration.” (SED 57) The system doesn’t work by suppression, or repression, but through
participative processes ; an archetypal
phenomenon is the opinion poll, which, according to Baudrillard, doesn’t represent or even “manipulate”
public opinion, but substitutes for it.
“We live in a referendum mode
precisely because there is no longer any referential.” (SED 62) As we shall see in Chapter 4, for Baudrillard, these “fictions” - which
are by no means fictions in the old sense - stand in for a social scene that
has been thoroughly cybernetized. This is no longer a matter of feedback, but
of simulation-circuitries which have no referent beyond themselves.“Public
opinion is par excellence both the
medium and the message. The polls informing this opinion are the unceasing
imposition of the medium as the message. They thereby belong to the same order
of TV as the electronic media, which [...] are also a perpetual question/answer
game, an instrument of perpetual polling.” (SED 66)
Baudrillard’s description of these
flattened-out feedback processes tends to refer not to Wiener but to
McLuhan (himself a theorist clearly
strongly influenced by cybernetics), and to Monod[46], whose “molecular cybernetics” provides
Baudrillard with much of the theoretical material from which his notion of “the code” is produced. Yet Wiener appears to be a powerful, if
uncredited, influence on Baudrillard. One of the most celebrated aspects of
Baudrillard’s work, his “order of simulacra”, could almost be a gloss on
Wiener. Not only do the order of simulacra
culminate in cybernetics
(“simulacra of simulation, founded on information, the model, the
cybernetic game - total operationality, hyperreality, aim of total control” [SS
121]); the threefold distinction it relies upon itself seems to be derived from
the typology of machines Wiener outlines in
the first chapter of Cybernetics.
Arguing there that “the ability of an
artificer to produce a working simulacrum of a living organism has always
intrigued people” and claiming that the “desire to produce and to study
automata has always been expressed in terms of the living technique of the
age”, Wiener divides modern technology into three eras. “In the time of Newton,
the automaton becomes the clockwork music box, with the little effigies
pirouetting stiffly on top. In the nineteenth century, the automaton is a
glorified heat engine, burning some combustible fuel instead of the glycogen of
the human muscles. Finally, the present automaton opens doors by means of
photocells, or points guns to the place at which a radar beam picks up an
airplane, or computes the solution of differential equations.” (C 40)
The order of simulacra as Baudrillard
presents it makes the same differentiation between mechanical, thermodynamic
and cybernetic machines, expressed initially as the distinction between the
automaton (which, for Baudrillard, is
understood as a purely mechanical being) and the robot (which is an industrial creature). “A world separates these two beings […] The automaton
plays the man of the court, the socialite, it takes part in the social and
theatrical drama of pre-Revolutionary France. As for the robot, as its name
implies, it works; end of the theatre, beginning of human mechanics. The
automaton is the analgon of man and remains responsive to him (even
playing draughts with him!) The machine is the equivalent of man,
appropriating him to itself in the unity of a functional process. This sums up
the difference between first- and second- order simulacra.” (SED 52) The third-order simulacra are the
information processing systems of late capitalism which “no longer constitute either transcendence
or projection”; they are models which are “themselves an anticipation of the
real, and thus leave no room for any kind of fictional anticipation.” (SS 122)
If
“Baudrillard’s theory-fictions
of the three orders of simulacra must be taken seriously, which means: as
realism about the hyperreal, or cybernetic
realism”[47] , it
is because they have realised that, in capitalism, fiction is no longer
merely representational but has invaded the Real to the point of constituting
it. Any theory which thinks it can unmask the fictions of Capital belongs to
the second-order simulacra - the nineteenth century phase of industrial capitalism - that was anyway
always eluding it.[48] 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. Yet capitalism is the story of the successful implementation of a
quantititavely-increasing fiction, i.e. Capital itself. What Deleuze-Guattari
call “fictional quantities” (AO 153) absorb the socius into themselves in an irreversible process
of artificialization that happens at the level of “code”, the very bilological
and socio-psychic formatting protocols from which all identity is produced. Exactly like the splicing between man,
machine and insect Cronenberg shows in his version of The Fly, the merging Baudrillard describes takes place at the
“molecular” level, so that distinguishing the so-called natural from the
artificial is radically impossible. In this cybernetic age of anticipative
simulacra, fiction, to paraphrase Deleuze-Guattari, is not an image of the world. It forms a rhizome with the world,
there is an aparallel evolution of
fiction and the world. (TP 11)
The empirical as such is increasingly the mere playing out of what has
already happened, virtually, in simulation. [49]
Baudrillard is fascinated by this immanentization,
but typically tends to recode it - as in his essay, “Crash” - in semiurgic and
nostalgic terms. What Ballard points to in Crash,
Baudrillard thinks, is the limit point of the hyperrational; the point where
the system compensates, in favour not
of capitalist demystification but symbolic exchange, reverting back to the
primitive rituals whose excision from hypercapitalism Baudrillard is always
lamenting. Accepting and perpetuating the Weber-Bataille narrative of
rationalist disenchantment[50], Baudrillard sees only fleetingly what
is evident to Wiener and Gibson: the convergence of cybernetics and sorcery on the Gothic Flatline.
[33] Mike Davis, “Beyond Blade Runner: Urban Control The Ecology of Fear”, Westfield NJ: Open Magazine Pamphlets, 1992: 4
[34] Except in Ballard’s commentaries on his own fiction, which, Baudrillard complains, reinscribe the moral frameworks the novels efface. See “Crash”. For a bizarre cyborganicist polemic against this, see Vivian Sobchack “Beating the Meat/Surviving the Text, or How to Get out of this Century Alive” in Mike Featherstone and Roger Burrows ed., Cyberspace/ Cyberbodies/ Cyberpunk: Cultures of Technological Embodiment, London-Thousand Oaks-New Delhi: Sage 1995
[35] Felix Guattari, The Guattari Reader, ed. Gary Genosko, Oxford/ Cambridge Mass. : 1996, 111
[36] This is even the case with Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition - which will not be considered in any detail here - despite Lyotard actually making a point of attempting to actively differentiate the “postmodern” thought he is developing from cybernetic frameworks. According to Peter Gallison, though, “the link between” cybernetics and Lyotard’s version of the postmodern “is profound and the continuity nearly complete.”. Lyotard “nervously contended that his social analysis [...] departed from cybernetics” but, Gallison shows that the three ways in which Lyotard attempts to distinguish his own position from that of cybernetic are unconvincing. First, Lyotard attacks cybernetics for treating messages homogeneously, claiming that it fails to distinguish “denotatives, prescriptives, evaluatives, performatives, etc.” but “at least two of Lyotard’s categories (denotative and prescriptive) directly parallel Wiener’s distinction between the indicative and imperative modes of messages.” Second, Lyotard argues that “a cybernetic machine does indeed run on information, but the goals programmed in to it [leave no way] to correct in the course of its functioning [...] its own performance.” But this “self-correction is exactly what Wiener’s machines did.” Third, Lyotard’s claim that “the trivial cybernetic version of information” misses the “agonistic aspect of society” is similarly misconstrued: “it was on the agonistic field that Wiener, von Neumann, and the operational analysts were most at home. Formally, militarily, and philosophically, theirs was a universe of confrontation between opponents: Allies to Axis, monad to monad, message to message, and mechanized ‘man’ to servomechanical enemy.” “The Ontology of the Enemy: Norbert Weiner and the Cybernetic Vision”, Critical Inquiry, Autumn 1994, Volume 21, Number 1.
[37] Deleuze-Guattari call technology “technical machines”, a description that will be favoured here.
[38] See, for instance, GGi 5. “Like Descartes, we must maintain the dignity of Man by treating him on a basis entirely different from that on which we treat the lower animals. Evolution and the origin of the species are a desecration of human values [...] On no account is it permissible to mention living beings and machines in the same breath. Living beings are living beings in all their parts; while machines are made of metals and other unorganized substance, with no fine structure relevant to their purposive or quasi-purposive function.”
[39] “Cyberpunk and Neuromanticism”, in McCaffrey, ed., Storming the Reality Studio, 186
[40] See Deleuze, “Postscript on Societies of Control” in Negotiations.
[41] As early as The System of Objects (trans. James Benedict, London/ New York: Verso, 1996), originally published in 1968, Baudrillard refers to the “reign of cybernetics and electronics”. (52) For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign (trans. Charles Levin, USA: Telos Press, 1981), whose essays date from the late 60s and early 70s, has a chapter entitled “Design and Environment, or How Political Economy Escalates into Cyberblitz.” In the later The Transparency of Evil, which came out in Paris in 1990, Baudrillard is still obsessed with “the cybernetic revolution.” (24)
[42] His whole book, Terminal Identity, could be seen as an extended elaboration of this pun. Compare Wiener’s description of the “human being as a terminal machine.” (HUHB 79)
[43] Douglas Kellner, Jean Baudrillard: From Marxism to Postmodernism and Beyond, Oxford: Polity Press, 1989, 81
[44] On Baudrillard’s primitivism, see Julian Pefanis, Heterology and the Postmodern: Bataille, Baudrillard and Lyotard, Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1991.
[45] Jameson summarises thus: “It remained for Baudrillard to give the most dramatic ‘paranoiac-critical’ expression of the dilemma, in his demonstrations of the ways in which conscious ideologies of revolt, revolution, and even negative critique - far from being merely ‘co-opted’ by the system - an integral and functional part of the system’s own internal strategies.” (PCLLC 203)
[46] See esp “The Order of Simulacra”, in SED, which refers both to Monod’s Chance and Necessity, and to McLuhan’s celebrated formula “the medium is the message.”
[47] Grant, “Los Angeles 2019”, (no page refs).
[48] Baudrillard sees such theories as being themselves production of the industrial phase. This means they are unable to expose it, for at least two reasons: (1) they cannot separate themselves from the phenomenon they purport to describe and (2) this phenomenon is precisely to do with artificialization, and so it makes no sense to say that its underlying “truth” could be exposed. “Truth” belongs to the first order simulacra (and is itself inextricably connected to the counterfeit).
[49] For myriad examples of these phenomena, see William Bogard’s The Simulation of Surveillance: Hypercontrol in Telematic Societies, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1996.
[50]
For Baudrillard’s debt to Bataille in particular, see Pefanis, Heterology and the Postmodern