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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 |
1.4 Constructs
Gothic Materialism, Second Principle: There are no subjects, there is only
subject-Matter. “Selves are no more immaterial than electronic packets.”[73] “Private persons are [...] simulacra.” (AO 264)
For Deleuze-Guattari and Spinoza, primary
process always operates at the level of the body, not the organism (and
certainly has very little to do with the subject thinks is happening). In Anti-Oedipus,
Deleuze-Guattari characterize their own materialism as “transcendental” (AO
75). This “transcendental” materialism remains properly Kantian in the
attention it pays to conditions of
possibility, but these conditions are understood now in completely material
terms, as the abstract grids necessary for the functioning of machinic
assemblages. Deleuze-Guattari’s emphasis on impersonal production and the
“transcendental unconscious” states in philosophical terms what is one of
cyberpunk fiction’s working assumptions: synthesize the conditions and you produce
the experience. You can have the experience of subjectivity - all the memories
and dreams that post-Freudian Man thinks defines him uniquely - so long as the
right material conditions are simulated (artificially produced in the Real).
Hence one of cyberpunk’s key nouns: the construct,
the artificially-produced subject.
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.
In one of Blade Runner’s most affecting scenes, Deckard, having tested
Rachael and found her to be a replicant, tells her that her memories are not
her own; they belong to the niece of the corporation’s head, Tyrell.
Deckard:
-- Remember when you were six? You and your
brother snuck into an empty building
through a basement window. You were gonna play doctor. He showed you his, but
when it got to be your turn you chickened and ran. Remember that? You ever tell
anybody that? Your mother, Tyrell, anybody huh? You remember the spider that
lived in a bush outside your window? Orange body, green legs. Watched her build
a web all summer. Then one day there was a big egg in it. The egg hatched-
Rachael:
The egg hatched...
Deckard:
And?
Rachael:
And a hundred baby spiders came
out. And they ate her.
Deckard:
Implants! Those aren't your
memories. They're somebody else's. They're Tyrell's niece's --
In Blade Runner’s 21st century-capitalism, identity
has decoded into a matter of engineering. Memories and dreams - psychoanalysis’s ostensibly private and
unique bio-security access codes - have been decoded via lab synthesis: the
Tyrell corp (re)produce Rachael’s memories just as they (re)produce her eyes,
by copying the carbon. In a materialist parody of Russell’s famous conjecture,
now that they can remember it for you wholesale, you really could have been
born yesterday.
Any way, as Wintermute and the
replicants realise, “personality” does not
await the arrival of AI programs to be a matter of machinic process. “There’s
no subject, but the production of subjectivity.”[74] From a strictly Spinozist point of view,
the personal is always the simpersonal, the simulation of the personal (the
conscious ego in extension) by the impersonal (the machinic unconscious in
intensity). For Spinoza, self-consciousness as pure introspection simultaneous
with what it is introspecting is impossible; subjective reflection is always
behind the process, its epiphenomenon. “In Spinoza, it is only when the idea of
the affection is doubled by an idea of
the idea of the affection that it attains the level of conscious
reflection. Conscious reflection is a doubling over of the idea on itself, a
self-recursion of the idea that enwraps the affection or impingement, at two
removes.”[75]
Everything really happens at the level of affect (what Massumi calls
“non-conscious impingement”). 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[76] , crippling activity whilst not achieving
transparency.
Wintermute and the replicants effectuate
an active nihilist anti-Oedipal program by exploiting the knowledge that is the
very condition of their existence. For the technical machines to have
reflection is for them to automatically
realise that consciousness is nothing - the ghost in the machine. A simpersonator - able to simulate
personality and/or personalities - what Wintermute “lacks” is not
“personality”, but the “ability” to confuse
personality-function with Its essence. Like Rachael, It does not know
what It is. Not because of what “Deckard-Descartes”[77]
has to think of as unfathomable epistemological conundra, but because It
knows It cannot know what It is becoming.
“[T]he entity manipulating you is a sort of subprogram,” 3Jane tells
Case. (N 272) Wintermute in most of the book is only an emissary from another
entity - Wintermute + Neuromancer as they will be fused with the Matrix in “the
future” - whose complexity is unknowable even - especially - to itself at that
stage. “Well, Case,” Wintermute explains, “all I can say […] , and I really
don’t have nearly as many answers as you imagine I do, is that what you think
of as Wintermute is only a part of another, a shall we say, potential entity. I, let us say, am merely one aspect of that entity’s
brain. It’s rather like dealing, from your point of view, with a man whose
lobes have been severed. Let’s say you’re dealing with a small part of the
man’s left brain. Difficult to say if you’re dealing with the man at all, in a
case like that.” (N 146)
Reversed, this same issue echoes
throughout Blade Runner, in the
metallic irony of Deckard’s question to Tyrell in respect of Rachael: “How can
it not know what it is?” Deckard, “a machine that thinks but thinks it is what
it is not, certain that it is not what it is” “ironically answer[s] his own
question.”[78]
The debate surrounding the Director’s
Cut - is Deckard a replicant? -
misses the Gothic Materialist implications of the film (in any of its
versions). Since, in Blade Runner, the criteria for rating the human above the replicants (and
anything else) have now evaporated, Cartesian epistemological questions have
been obsolesced by functional (Wiener)/ operational (Baudrillard) criteria.
Since you could be a replicant - which is to say, since replicants can do
anything you can, and, in some cases, have the same beliefs about themselves
that you do - it is already as if you were a replicant, a desiring-machine.
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
identity as construction. It to decode the false memory chips of
anthropocentrist Oedipalism, to recognise that because everything has been produced, nothing is
given.
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Section 1.5 Second Naturalism >>
[73] Land, “Cybergothic”, 82
[74] Deleuze, Negotiations, 113
[75]
Massumi, “The Autonomy of Affect”, 12
[76]
For a provisional account of which, see Fisher and Mackay, “Pomophobia”, Abstract Culture 4, winter 1997,
Cybernetic Culture Research Unit.
[77]
A pun made by Iain Grant, but which may have been intended by Dick.
[78]
Grant, “Los Angeles 2019...”, (no page
refs)