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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 |
1.3 Flatlines
Gothic Materialism - First Principle: The
Gothic designates a flatline.
“Well,
if we can get the Flatline, we’re home free. You know he died braindeath three
times?” (N 65)
One of Gothic Materialism’s crucial
concepts - perhaps the single most crucial - is that of the flatline. The
concept of the flatline has at least a double sense. Firstly, it indicates a
vernacular term for the Electro Encephalogram (EEG) read out that signals brain
death;[51] a representation, on the digital
monitors, of nothing: no activity. For Gothic Materialism, though, the flatline
is where everything happens, the Other Side, behind or beyond the screens (of
subjectivity) , site of primary process where identity is produced (and
dismantled): the “line Outside”[52]. It delineates not a line of death, but
a continuum enfolding, but ultimately going beyond, both death and life. [53]
She
nodded. (N 65)
Secondly, the flatline designates an immanentizing line: a “streamlining,
spiralling, zigzagging, snaking, feverish line of variation”, “a line of variable direction that describes
no contour and delimits no form [...]” (TP 499) In cyberpunk, this emerges as a
Spinozistic refusal to distinguish nature from culture, immediately recalling
one of the principal features of the Gothic as re-animated by German
expressionist cinema: the famous
continuity of the inorganic into the organic presented in films such as The Cabinet of Dr Caligari where
“natural substances and artificial creations, candelabras and trees, turbine
and sun are no longer any different.”[54]
“Flatlined
on his EEG. Showed me his tapes. ‘Boy, I was
daid.’” (N 65)
The term “Flatline” is central to Neuromancer, Gibson’s 1984 novel, and the acknowledged ur-text of
cyberpunk fiction proper. In Neuromancer,
“flatline” functions as both a verb - characters flatline (surf what, for the
organism, is the border between life and death) - and a noun - some characters are Flatlines
(Read Only Memory data-constructs of dead people).
Neuromancer
smears a number of “traditional” Gothic themes - unnatural
participation, demonic pacts, the
escape of the inhuman, the unfolding of the organic into the nonorganic - into
an ultramodern updating of the old Science Fiction story of infotechnical
machinery becoming-sentient. By the end, it is the story of the convergence of
two Artificial Intelligences (Wintermute and Neuromancer) in the Matrix
(cyberspace). The AIs “belong” to Tessier-Ashpool, a mysterious
dynasty-corporation (“Family organization. Corporate structure” [N 95]).
Wintermute engineers the convergence, using a group of cyberspace hackers
assembled by Armitage (a personality construct built out of a schizophrenic ex-soldier called Corto) . Wintermute
recruits/ rescues Corto from an asylum (much in the same way that Dracula,
correlate for another, earlier form of capitalism, recruited his assistant, Renfield.[55])
If cyberpunk can function as a new
realism - as Jameson, for one, has suggested[56] - it is because it maps the convergence
of Horror and Science Fiction narratives in late capitalism itself, [57] a perception consistent with Marx’s
writings on Capital:
Marx himself emphasized
the Gothic nature of capitalism, [...] by deploying the metaphor of the vampire
to characterize the capitalist. In The
First International Marx writes:
“British industry [...] vampire-like, could but live by sucking blood and children’s
blood too.” The modern world for Marx is peopled with the undead; it is indeed
a Gothic world haunted by specters and ruled by the mystical nature of capital.
He writes in Grundrisse: “Capital posits the permanence of value (to a
certain degree) by incarnating itself in fleeting commodities and taking on
their form, but at the same time changing them just as constantly [...] But
capital obtains this ability only by constantly sucking in living labour as its
soul, vampire-like.” While it is fascinating to note the coincidence here
between Marx’s description of capital and the powers of the vampire, it is not
enough to say that Marx uses Gothic metaphors. Marx, in fact, is describing an
economic system, capitalism, which is positively Gothic in its ability to
transform matter into commodity, commodity into value, and value into
capitalism.[58]
As capitalism exemplifies and outstrips
Marx’s most horrified descriptions of it,
the Gothic escapes codification as a generic, psychological or fantastic
mode to become the most persuasive materialist account of the contemporary
socioeconomic scene. For cyberpunk,
Marx’s most Gothic language has become his most realistic, whereas his
organicist protestations against capital look like antique sentimentalities.
“What Marx only thought [...]
as ‘fantasy’ recodes and reassembles reality: as capital becomes the DNA of
determinant technology, living labour is retrofitted as mere ‘conscious
linkages’, reacting to digital stimuli, in ‘an automated system of machinery
... set in motion by an automaton, a moving power that moves itself.’”[59]
Jameson’s definition of “late capitalism”, derived from Mandel,
depends upon an identification of just this “production of machines by
machines”. Jameson quotes Mandel on “the three general revolutions engendered
by the capitalist mode of production since the ‘original’ industrial revolution
of the late eighteenth century”: “Machine production of steam-driven motors
since 1848; machine production of electric and combustion motors since the 90s
of the 19th century; machine production of electronic and nuclear-powered
apparatuses since the 40s of the 20th century.” (PCLLC 35)
Processing this perception in advance of
Jameson, Deleuze-Guattari’s cybernetic realism inherits and supplements Marx’s
Gothic vocabulary. Citing Marx, they
refer to capitalism as “a post-mortem
despotism,
the despot become anus and vampire: ‘Capital is dead labour, that vampire-like,
only lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it
sucks’” (AO 228) and also as “the thing, the unnamable, the generalized
decoding of all flows” (AO 153).
“You
ever try to crack an AI?”(N
139)
“The only modern myth is the myth of
zombies,” they add, “mortified schizos, good for work, brought back to reason.”
(AO 335) Neuromancer presents a
number of variants of zombification
: the Dixie Flatline, a Read Only
Memory construct of Case’s dead mentor, McCoy Pauley , the meat puppets, prostitutes
whose brain-function is switched off by “neural cut-out”, and the
cryogenically-preserved Tessier-Ashpool clan.
The (brain-body) states Neuromancer zones in on are adrift between life and death, immediately
recalling those which Gothic figures - the zombie, but also the vampire and
Frankenstein’s creation - have always
occupied. Neuromancer decodes horror
fiction into realism by refusing to codify these states as “fantastic” or
“supernatural”, describing them instead as the purely technical exploration
of zones at the outer edge of the
organism: technical hallucinations. The lead male character Case interfaces
with Wintermute, in states of catatonia, brain death. “As the authors of horror
stories have understood so well, it is not death that serves as the model for
catatonia, it is catatonic schizophrenia that gives its model to death. Zero
intensity.” (AO 329)
“Sure,
I flatlined [..]. Hit the first strata
and that’s all she wrote. My joeboy smelled the skin frying and pulled the
trodes off me. Mean shit, that ice.”(N 138-9)
For Gothic Materialism, body horror is
not something with which the body is
afflicted merely contingently - it is not, for instance,
a question of the penetration of a biotically-sealed interiority by invaders that
may or may not strike - but
something inherent to the body at all
times and in all its operations. Body horror= cybernetic realism. Cronenberg:
“One of our touchstones for reality is our bodies. And yet they[...] are by
definition ephemeral.”[60]
Wiener: “Our tissues changes as
we live: the food we eat and the air we breathe become flesh of our flesh and
bone of our bone, and the momentary elements of our flesh and bone pass out of
our body every day through excreta[...] We are not stuff that abides, but
patterns that repeat themselves.” (HUHB 96)
From the point of view of a
“residual” subject, then, body horror is a horror of the body’s terrifying mutability, its sheer
meat materiality . As Deleuze observes when writing on Bacon, the body is always
that which is escaping the subject: “It is not me who tries to escape my body,
it is the body which tries to escape through itself.”[61] But it is also a horror the body registers itself , when
“[b]eneath its organs it senses there are larvae and loathsome worms, and a God
at work messing it all up or strangling it by organizing it.” (AO 9)
“And
your EEG was flat?”(N
139)
The struggle, then, is not between Mind
and Body, but between different modes of the Body[62] (some of which produce
transcendence-effects at the level of mentalist [mis]description). So, where faced with cyberpunk
, a melancholy organicist postmodernism always “returns [...] to Descartes”
[63]
, Gothic Materialism
discovers a Spinozism emerging out of
cyberpunk’s ostensibly dualist narratives. [64] Cyberpunk revives Cartesian scepticism only to materialistically
- Spinozistically - subvert it.
Everything that, for the ostensibly sceptical Descartes of the early Meditations, is evidence that
consciousness is the be-all and
end-all, becomes, for Spinoza and cyberpunk, a signal that all perception is a
matter of bodily stimulation.“By affecting the body - whether it’s with TV,
drugs (invented or otherwise) - you alter your reality.”[65] Reality for Gibson’s characters may be a
state of mind, a “consensual hallucination”, as Neuromancer suggestively
puts it, but Mind, as Spinoza would have it, is “an idea of the body”. (ETH, 2,
Prop 13: 71-2) What, from a
neo-Cartesian perspective is an
epistemological question, becomes, in cyberpunk, a rigorously technical matter;
if subjectivity can be experienced by a brain in a vat, as it is in Gibson’s Count Zero[66]
, what is interesting to
cyberpunk is not the subjectivity but the
vat.
“Well
that’s the stuff of legend, ain’t it?”(N 139)
What for Case and the other console
cowboys is Mind floating free from the body is really a matter of
brain-stimulation by electrodes, as Wintermute knows: its “meetings” with Case
occur as Case’s brain is offline, and
are constructed out of memories Wintermute has already hacked (“Another memory
I tapped out of you when I flatlined you that first time” [N 204]). The real
encounter, then, happens impersonally when Case’s brain is taken out of sequential time, into Aeon[67]
. But Wintermute relies on the fact that, by
the time Case is conscious again, the
perceptual-consciousness system’s organic security apparatus will have
narratavized what is basically an interruption of brain-function in
personalized terms, packaging it as an experience, occurring in Chronos. Case
is made to think he’s talked to one of his old acquaintances (the Faces
Wintermute wears on the flatline: Julie Deane and the Finn), when in fact,
Wintermute has just precision-engineered a near-death experience in order to
achieve , what at the secondary level, is a data transfer. As primary process,
this is an storm of electric signal, and it is only at the tertiary level that
personal experience gets a look in: ”This is tantamount to saying that the
subject is produced as a mere residuum alongside the desiring-machines, or that
he confuses himself with this third productive machine and with the residual
reconciliation that it brings about: a conjunctive synthesis of consummation in
the form of a wonderstruck ‘So that’s what
it was!” (AO 18)
“It’s
something these guys do, is all. Like he wasn’t dead, and it was only a few
seconds ... ” (N 147)
The achievement of the best cyberpunk
fiction is to effectuate a critique -
fundamental to the Gothic and to schizoanalysis - of “the wisdom and limits of the organism” and “organic harmony.”
(AE 115) In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze-Guattari cite Worringer’s work as a
forerunner of the critique of the
organism and the organic they had begun in Anti-Oedipus.
“Worringer’s finest pages,” they write, “are those in which he contrasts the
abstract with the organic.” (TP 498) In this respect, Worringer’s work
commensurates with that of two other key schizoanalytic figures: Spinoza and
Artaud. In “How do you Make Yourself a Body without Organs?” Spinoza and Artaud
are counted together as precursors of
schizoanalysis’ engineering of bodies without organization.“After all,
is not Spinoza’s Ethics the great
book of the BwO?” (TP 153) “[...]
Artaud wages a struggle against the organs, but at the same time what he has it
in for, is the organism: the body is the
body. Alone it stands. And in no need of organs. Organism it never is.
Organisms are the enemies of the body.” (TP 158; see also AO 9)
“I
saw th’ screen. EEG readin’ dead. Nothin’ movin’, forty second.” (N147)
The schizoanalytic dismantling of the
organism converges Spinoza’s sober
geometric experimentation with Artaud’s catatonic delirium, on a flatline where the body (as open system of possibilities)
is always rigorously distinguished from the organism (the homeostatically
sealed and hierarchically arranged bio-container, or aggregation of cells).
Schizoanalytic Desire produces what Case is compelled to do only, if not quite
against, then certainly in spite of his
will: a destratification of the organism that, far from being an escape from
the body, is the “out to body experience”[68]
Spinoza and Artaud map.
The Body without Organs emerges on the
flatline as “the model of death.” (AO 329) “Antonin Artaud discovered this one
day, finding himself with no shape or form whatsoever, right there where he was
at that moment. The death instinct: that is its name, and death is not without
a model.” (AO 8) Case flatlined on the matrix makes the same discovery: his
disassembly signalling not the transcendence of the body, but the autoamputation
of the organs. “The death model appears
when the body without organs repels the organs and lays them aside: no mouth,
no tongue, no teeth, to the point of self-mutilation, to the point of suicide.”
(AO 329)
“Well,
he’s okay now.” (N 147)
But what is encountered Out here is not
“death” as the irrevocable termination point, in Chronos, of the organism . The
flatline is not a line of death but a journey into death as Aeonic event, a
voyage into the loops (or “meat circuits” [TP 152 ]) in which the organism falls back towards the process of its own
production. It is a simulated or “artificial death”[69]
that marks the outer limits of the organism: Death Simstim.[70]
“EEG
flat as a strap,”
Maelcum protested. (N 147)
It is, in other words, a plateau - a concept Deleuze-Guattari
adapt from Gregory Bateson’s cybernetics.
In Bateson’s version[71] , the plateau was a type of negative
feedback - a variant of what he called “steady state” - and was opposed to the
runaway positive feedback processes he termed “schismogenesis”.
Deleuze-Guattari’s plateaus cannot be described straightforwardly as either
positive or negative feedback systems. They are dynamic systems which
nevertheless do not burn out in self-consuming runaway: “continuous regions of
intensity constituted in such a way that they do not allow themselves to be
interrupted by any external termination, any more than they allow themselves to
build toward a climax” (TP 158), means of exploring the opening up of the organism
that don’t provoke it into suicidal collapse.
“You
dead awhile back there, mon.” (N 217)
Bateson’s work, together with Eliade’s on
shamanism, and Carlo Ginzburg’s on witchcraft[72] , establish that in certain
non-capitalist cultural configurations, the dismemberment of the organism is a
socially coded ritual practice. For Eliade and Ginzburg, the dismembering of the organs is a
preparation for the shamanic voyage to the world of the dead. Neuromancer tells this to Case on the
flatline: ”The lane to the land of the dead. Where you are, my friend. […]
Necromancer. I call up the dead. But no, my friend [...] I am the dead, and their land.” (N 289) In
capitalism, Deleuze-Guattari claim, this voyage is left to the schizophrenic, who, they say, is “trans-alivedead.” (AO 77)
“It
happens,” he said. “I’m getting used to it.” (N 217)
<< Back to Contents
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Section 1.4 Constructs >>
[51] “ ‘Flatlining’ [...] is ambulance driver slang for ‘death’, Gibson says. ” Larry McCaffery, “An Interview with William Gibson”, Storming the Reality Studio, 269
[52] Deleuze, Negotiations,
trans. Martin Joughin, New York: Columbia University Press, 1995, 111
[53] The Foucault of The Birth of the Clinic encountered the flatline when reconstructing Bichat’s version of death. Rather than being a destiny waiting for the organism at its termination, “death” is the real process the organic-vital is parasitic upon from the start; it is an event, aeonically multiple rather than chronically punctual. “Death is [...] multiple, and dispersed in time: it is not that absolute, privileged point at which time stops and moves back; like disease itself, it has a teeming presence that analysis may divide into time and space; gradually, here and there, each of the knots break, until organic life ceases, at least in its major forms, since long after the death of the individual, minuscule, partial deaths continue to dissociate the islets of life that still persist.” ( Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception, trans. A.M. Sheridan Smith, New York: Vintage Books, 1994, 142) As Deleuze glosses: “Bichat put forward what’s probably the first general modern conception of death, presenting it as violent, plural, and coextensive with life. Instead of taking it, like classical thinkers, as a point, he takes it as a line that we’re constantly confronting, and cross only at the point where it ends. That’s what it means to confront the line Outside.” (Negotiations, 111)
[54] Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986 111,. Worringer, Deleuze reminds us in Cinema 1, was Expressionism’s “first theoretician”.
[55] Bearing this in mind,
Baudrillard is right, in The
Illusion of the End (trans.
Chris Turner, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994)
, to stress that “the Dracula myth is gathering strength all around”,
but wrong to say that this is “as the Faustian and Promethean myths fade.” (47)
Cyberpunk, as we shall see, is often about a melding of the Dracula-vampire
myth and the Faustian narrative of pacts with the Demon.
[56] Jameson, Seeds of Time, 146
[57] cf. Kellner, on the postwar development of the horror film. “Since the era of German Expressionism in the Weimar Republic, horror films have been the shared nightmares of an industrial-technological culture heading, in its political unconscious, towards disaster. In (post)modern theory, the catastrophe has already happened, and the contemporary horror film can be read as an indication of a (post)modern society in permanent crisis with no resolution or salvation in sight.” “Panic Horror and the Postmodern Body”, 90.
[58] Judith Halberstam, Skin Shows, 102-103
[59] Grant, “Los Angeles 2019..”, quotes from Marx’s Grundrisse.
[60] Chris Rodley ed., Cronenberg on Cronenberg, London/ Boston: Faber and Faber, 1992
[61] Deleuze, Francis Bacon: Logique de la Sensation, 16, quoted in Christopher Domino, Francis Bacon: ‘Taking Reality By Surprise’ , London: Thames and Hudson, 1997, 120
[62] Deleuze-Guattari identify three principal strata affecting the human body. “Let us consider the three great strata concerning us, in other words, the ones that most directly bind us: the organism, signifiance, and subjectification.” (TP 159)
[63] Kevin McCarron, “Corpses, Animals, Machines and Mannequins: The Body and Cybperpunk”, in Featherstone and Burrows ed., Cyberspace, Cyberbodies, Cyberpunk.... 266. See also Mark Dery’s Escape Velocity: Cyberculture at the End of the Century (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1996) which argues that “Gibson’s Neuromancer [...] can be read as a lengthy meditation on the mind-body split in cyberculture.” (248)
[64] This, fittingly perhaps, in spite of what its authors thinks they’re doing themselves. Dery quotes Gibson on his attachment to the “Lawrentian” idea of “the dichotomy of mind and body in Judaeo-Christian culture” (Dery, 248), whilst Cronenberg can be heard declaring himself to be a “Cartesian” in virtually every interview he gives. Obviously they haven’t read enough Spinoza.
[65] Cronenberg in Rodley ed., Cronenberg on Cronenberg, 145
[66] The infamous Virek who “has been confined for over a decade to a vat. In some hideous suburb of Stockholm. Or perhaps of hell...”. (CZ 25) We shall encounter Herr Virek in more detail later.
[67] On the distinction between Chronos and Aeon, see Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, ( trans. Mark Lester, ed. Constantin V. Boundas, New York: Columbia University Press, 1990) and TP (esp 262).
[68] Nick Land, “Meat (or How to Kill Oedipus in Cyberspace”, in Featherstone and Burrows ed. Cyberspace, Cyberbodies ... 192
[69] For the concept of artificial death, see Nick Land, “Cybergothic”, in Broadhurst Dixon and Cassidy eds., Virtual Futures: Cyberotics, Technology and Post-Human Pragmatism, London and New York: Routledge, 1998.
[70] For Simstim (“Simulation-Stimulation”), the hypermedia immersion system of choice in Gibson’s cyberspace trilogy, see Chapter 5. For Death Simstim, see 0[rphan] D[rift], Cyberpositive, London: Cabinet Editions, 1995
[71] “Bali: the Value System of a Steady State”, Steps to an Ecology of Mind: Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry , Evolution and Epistemology, Frogmore, St Albans: Paladin, 1973
[72] Mircea Eliade, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, trans. Willard R. Trask, Harmondsworth: Penguin/ Arkana 1988. Carlo Ginzburg, Ecstasies: Deciphering the Witches’ Sabbath, London/ Sydney/ Auckland/ Johannesburg: Hutchinson Radius, 1990