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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 1.5 Second Naturalism |
1.5 Second
Naturalism
Tyrell:
The facts of life. To make an alteration in the evolvment of an organic life
system is fatal. A coding sequence cannot be revised once it's been
established.
In Abstraction
and Empathy and Form in Gothic, Worringer theorised the
“Gothic or Northern line” by contrast with two other lines: the organic (or
naturalistic line) and the geometrical (or mechanical) line. As Norman Fishcer
summarises: “Worringer questioned and creatively incorporated into his analysis
the results of tow types of German aesthetics of his day. The first was the art
history of Alois Riegl and others who had explored non-representational,
abstract art, often of a largely geometric nature, and largely outside the canon
of classical western painting and sculpture. Riegl, for example, had studied
late Roman crafts [...] The second line was that of Theodore Lipps, who had
suggested that the emotion of empathy (Einfuhlung)
was particularly elicited by the works of the naturalistic classical Western
canon of great painting and sculpture. 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’. Thus
Worringer saw art as either naturalistic and empathic or abstract and
life-denying […] In the extended tripartite (as opposed to dualistic), version
of the theory, there is a third possibility: an abstract art which was neither
as geometric as the art studied by Riegl, nor as naturalistic as the art
studied by Lipps, but a distorted version of natural life. Such work aroused
emotion between between anxious denial and empathic affirmation.”[79]
Deleuze-Guattari’s absorption of
Worringer proceeds by excising empathy, not extending it. “The organic does not
designate something represented but above all the form of representation, and
even the feeling that unites representation with a subject (Einfuhlung, ‘empathy’),” they write. (TP
498) The Deleuze-Guattari version of abstraction is defined by its complete
refusal of empathy (and, coterminously, the subject).
Both Do
Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and Blade Runner centrally
concern the question of empathy, a
quality that is supposedly definitionally human. “Empathy [...],” Dick writes
“only existed within the human community, whereas intelligence to some degree
could be found throughout every phylum and order including the arachnids.”[80]
The limits of the community are marked by the limits of empathy: the
bounty hunters, who become blade
runners in the film, police the
boundaries of the human community by performing an empathy test, “an exam whose
stakes are the death penalty, a register of ocular motion hair triggering a
response from an uzi.”[81] Failing the test - the Boneli test in
the novel, the Voight-Kampf test in Blade Runner - means that the android
must be destroyed, or, as the cute euphemism has it, “retired”.
For Iain Hamilton Grant, “[t]he VK test
serves [...] to retain affectivity, the last stripped down substance of the
single City, sensus communis against the pathic ravages of Integrant World
Capitalism.” (Pathic has a double connotation here: signalling both “feeling
and perception” and “disease, contagion.”) In the end, what both Dick’s novel
and Scott’s film show is the escape of
affect from personal and communal qualification and the coterminous failure of empathy to serve as an adequate
index of affectivity: a phenomenon exemplified by Blade Runner itself, whose
“nightmares” no longer support the older organic dystopias, but “are [...] on
the point of becoming celebrations of a new reality, a new reality
intensification.”[82] “Blade Runner [itself] flunks the cultural empathy test”[83] , because it deals with this “new
reality intensification”, not by representing it, but by participating in it.
Rather than “reflecting” social facts, it forms a rhizome with the decoding
capitalist socius, anticipating scenarios already immanent to its current
futures; as Mike Davis shows, the film’s ostensibly future Los Angeles setting
is already a feature of LA’s contemporary demographic policy: city planners
talk of the “Blade Runner” scenario.[84]
In these conditions, the old indices for
assessing cultural production no longer obtain. “Contra Jameson et al.,”
in Blade
Runner and Do Androids...? “the affect
has not been lost, but stolen, striking a migrant passage through the machinic
phylum that carries the affective community with it”[85] with the effect that the problem for the
bladerunners is one of “limiting transphylic affective transfer, localizing the
affect, [the geographizing] of points of intensity.”[86] The other side of blade-runner geographization
(anthropolitical delimiting of intensity) is thus the long overdue liquidation of “bourgeois realism”, the
preferred mode of expression of what
Ballard calls “retrospective culture”, by cybernetic fiction.
Criticizing what McLuhan would call
“rearview mirrorism”, Ballard spoke, in 1969, of the ways in which the
conventions of traditional narrative technique were unable to deal in any way
adequately with contemporary reality. “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.”[87]
Retrospective culture is thus triply backward-looking: (1) it explains events using a (superseded)
linear cause- and effect model (2)
it presents these events through an
outdated thematic optic and (3) it does so using obsolete formal conventions.
The sense of time assumed by both the conventional novel and Oedipal
psychoanalysis - itself a form of retrospective fiction, perhaps the most
successful - breaks down under pressure
of telematic mediatization (of which, more later - see Chapter 4). Ballard goes
on to enumerate examples of these
“quantified non-linear terms”: “we switch on television sets, switch them off
half an hour later, speak on the telephone, read magazines, dream, and so
forth.” (57)
Tyrell:
“Commerce, is our goal here at Tyrell. More human than human is our motto.”
Gothic Materialism, Second Definition: Gothic Materialism is equivalent to
Hypernaturalism.
If cyberpunk demands to be read as “a
sequel to naturalism”[88], as Jameson urges, it is because of its development
into what is, in effect, a hypernaturalism. “In choice moments,” Ross points
out, “Gibson reduces the naturalist mode to a minimalist shock strategy.
Nowhere is this more striking than when the ecosphere is presented as a
technosphere, as in the unforgettable opening line of Neuromancer - ‘The sky above the port was the color of television,
tuned to a dead channel.’ - which brazenly announces that henceforth everything
here, even the sky, the home of the weather, will be a mediated second nature.”[89]
In Edmund Wilson’s classic description,
Naturalism was a response to the Origin of the Species, a reassertion of mechanism against Romantic
organicism. “In the middle of the
nineteenth century, science made new advances, and mechanistic ideas were brought
back into fashion again. But they came this time from a different quarter - not
from physics and mathematics but from biology. It was the effect of the theory
of Evolution to reduce man from the heroic stature to which the Romantics had
tried to exalt him, to the semblance of a helpless animal, again very small in
the universe at the mercy of the forces about him. Humanity was the accidental
product of heredity and environment, and capable of being explained in terms of
these. This doctrine in literature was called Naturalism, and it was put into
practice by novelists like Zola, who believed that composing a novel was like
performing a laboratory experiment: you had only to supply your characters with
a specific environment and heredity and then watch their automatic reactions.”[90]
For Andrew Ross and Csicsery-Ronay,
cyberpunk is differentiated from Naturalism proper by its abandoning of what was always an aspect of the naturalist
project - the didactic or ideological imperative to social change. Cyberpunk
takes mechanism to an extreme, so that the subjective agency to which
Naturalism always appealed is now eliminated.
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.”[91]
In Jameson’s version, the original
Naturalist texts were those “in which the lower depths, the forbidden spaces of
the new industrial city, were disclosed to a horrified bourgeois readership in
the form of perilous journeys and accounts of the pathetic destinies of the
various underclasses, which you could read about in your comfortable armchair,
and that thereby offered the double bonus of sympathy and knowledge of the
social totality on the one hand and class reconfirmation and the satisfaction
of the bourgeois order on the other [...]” [92] With Worringer’s analysis in mind, we
might want to urge the substitution of “empathy” for “sympathy” here. Even as
it promises a connection - “the power of understanding and
imaginatively entering into another person’s feelings” - empathy implies
distance; it is also “the attribution to an object, such as a work of art, of
one’s own feelings about it.”[93]
The price of extending empathy had always been the right of bourgeois
realist conventions to represent the
underclasses, a power once guaranteed by the then operative conditions of
capitalism, where the distance - from
the streets to the boss’s office - was far greater than it is under the current
conditions of ultra-rapid circulation:
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.[94]
Cyberpunk, then, supersedes Naturalism by
registering the meltdown of the social machines which naturalism both emerged
out of and represented. In a sense, Marx himself was a Naturalist writer,
re-describing capitalism in order to protest against it; but the space for such
a protest was always dependent upon the subordination of the Gothic to an
organicist reality principle. By the time of cyberpunk, Jameson suggests,
capitalism has decoded the social and narrative basis for this subordination,
just as Naturalism has resolved into a cybernetic realism. Cybernetics, at least in the anti-personal
version Deleuze-Guattari inherit from Bateson, does not dismiss agency, any more than it announces the triumph
of mechanism; rather, it reformats
both. Pursuing technical explanations
to their limit moves far beyond crude Newtonian mechanism, just as abandoning
the subject makes possible an agency reconceived along Spinozist lines[95]. If cybernetics is a species of
mechanism, it belongs to Worringer’s Gothic “mechanism” in which “matter lives
[sic] solely on its own mechanical laws; but these laws, despite their
fundamentally abstract character, have [...] acquired expression.”[96] And in place of the supposedly delimitable
motivations of a subject, there is the
“ever growing and self-intensifying restless striving without deliverance”
(115) of a “Gothic avatar” (TP 499)
whose motives are unclear: what does
Wintermute want? ....[97]
In the move from Naturalism to hypernaturalism,
the old distinction between vitalism and mechanism - which, Wiener says, had
been rendered illegitimate by cybernetics - collapses. “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.” (GGi 46)
Freud’s metapsychology had made the same
discovery; that organic life is inextricable from the non-organic. The organic
is possible only on the basis of a nonorganic shield from which it is
indistinguishable:
The organism [...] is a
differential inserted into the cascade of powerful energies that threaten to
destroy it (before it can destroy itself in its own manner). This
differentiation is premised on an increasingly densely laminated mechanism of
exclusion, within and by means of which the psychical apparatus can operate,
binding and discharging appropriate quanta of energy. Were this protective
membrane removed, then we would be left with both energy and the proto-organism
undifferentiated and indistinguishable: in other words, undifferentiated
matter-energy. Can we say, however, whether the laminar filter is itself living or dead? Freud has it
that the envelope itself is inorganic, but it nevertheless forms part - an
essential part - of a living system thus the laminae are themselves both living
and non-living, not having the requisite depth or dimensions, in themselves, to
constitute a living dimension. In itself, it forms the inconceivable
differential from which the depth proper to systems is derived. One cannot
conceptually pin this layer to the category ‘dead’, nor to that of ‘living’;
instead, it can only be thought as matter-energy circulating endlessly in its
‘permanent revolution’. Having, as Freud puts it contra Kant, no time proper to
them, these energies neither live nor die: they are what conjoin the material
processes of life and death in a continuum so absolute as to preclude the
possibility of differentiating one from the other.[98]
Freud’s own concept of the death
drive and Deleuze-Guattari/Worringer’s
concept of non-organic life both fall
short of the radicality Freud’s description
of this continuum implies.[99] Its adequate theorisation demands a Gothic vocabulary that scrambles, rather than re-invents, the
vitalist-mechanist double pincer. As Wiener points out, with cybernetics, “Vitalism
has won to the extent that even mechanisms correspond to the time-structures of
vitalism; but .. this victory is a complete defeat, for from every point of
view which has the slightest relation to morality or religion, the new
mechanics is fully as mechanistic as the old.” (C 56) A neo-vitalism
is therefore no more satisfactory than a neo-thanatropism; what
arrives on the flatline is certainly non-organic, but it is no more alive than
it is dead. Gothic fiction offers a
ready-made term for this state of anorganic animation: undeath. In line with
Freud’s analysis of the “un” prefix in his essay on “The Uncanny”, undeath, of
course, does not designate the opposite state of death (life); rather it is
synonymous with the concept of unlife.
Following Freud again, who famously maintains that there is no negation in the
unconscious, we can think of unlife and undeath not as opposed to life - or
death - but as designating a continuum which includes, but moves beyond, the
so-called living.
Hypernaturalism or cybernetic realism
would inevitably be a matter of confronting what happens when the (non)organic
shield is unraveled, (as it is, notoriously, in the astonishing opening
paragraph of Lyotard’s Libidinal Economy).
Where postmodernism often tends to be a screening process, locked into “the Kantian
procedure whereby [...] the categories of the mind itself - normally not
conscious and inaccessible to any direct representation or to any thematizable
consciousness or reflexibilty - are flexed” (PCLLC 157), Gothic Materialism confronts abstract “lines
that go beyond knowledge (how could they be known?)”. (NEG 110) But these are
not lines of thought, as Deleuze would like; rather they are lines of affect, abstract feeling, exactly sensations
so new they haven’t got a name yet.
Deleuze’s Logique de Sensation opens up the way to seeing Bacon as the
painter of these lines. In Deleuze’s
account, the problem Bacon confronts is
Gothic Materialist: exactly a matter of registering the unnamable, the
unpaintable. “This is what Bacon means when he talks of wanting to ‘paint the
scream more than the horror’. One could set out the problem thus: either I
paint the horror and omit to paint the scream, since I am representing the
thing that is horrible; or I paint the scream, and I do not paint the visible horror,
and continue to paint the visible horror less and less, since it is as if the
scream had captured or detected an invisible force.”[100]
Realism, as Bacon rightly insists, does not have to be empirical.
Indeed, it cannot be. [101]
Bacon’s images flatten out organic experience back onto its real
material conditions as meat-becomings (“Well, of course, we are meat”[102] ). Bacon’s imagery is already propagated
across Gothic Materialist films - in
the distorted, spasmoid bodies in Cronenberg’s body horror (bodies which “splatter, burst, writhe,
pulsate, secrete”[103] ), in the torsional
metamorphoses of John Carpenter’s The
Thing (1982), in the demonic hallucinations of Adrian Lyne’s Jacob’s Ladder (1990) and in the
creatures of the Alien series.[104]
In
Libidinal Economy and Duchamp’s
Transformers[105], Lyotard suggests ways in which such body horror might be a realist description of
late capitalism. Bodies under capitalism are not “alienated”, he insists, but
machined, transformed, mutated ;
something Jameson recognises in his discussion of Cronenberg’s Videodrome
in The Geopolitical Aesthetic. But
Jameson, hung up on Adorno dialecto-melancholy, is far too quick there
when he argues that the “[c]orporeal revulsion” arising from Videodrome’s “grotesquely sexual
nightmare images, in which males are feminized by the insertion of organic
[sic] cassettes (if not revolvers) into a newly opened dripping slot below the
breast bone […] probably has the primary function of expressing fears about
activity and passivity in the complexities of late capitalism, and is only
secondarily invested with the level of gender itself [...]” (30-31) By implying that “feminization” must always
be equated with pacification, itself a second-order effect of “late capitalism”, Jameson begs all the
questions Videodrome poses in its positing of a convergent fate for sex, technology, and capital.
If the image of the “Bogart of the postmodern” (James Woods, who plays Max
Renn) becoming-VCR tells us anything, it is that capitalism establishes
increasingly tight feedback loops between technical machines and biotics,
performing its own hypernaturalist
critique of the mechanism-vitalism split. The cybernetic environment does not
start beyond the skin, just as cybernetic causality is not a question of
Newtonian mechanics (A causes B) but loops (A causes B causes A); “in a
multilinear system, everything happens at once” [TP 297 ) .
Videodrome
, then, gives us another
image of anxiety without a subject that is also the image of a body opening up.
This opening parallels Bacon’s scream:
“...[T]he scream, Bacon’s scream, is the operation through which the entire
body escapes through the mouth.” [106] Significantly, Cronenberg’s schizophrenic body is utterly
traversed by “media” systems - but media systems which no longer function as
screens. Instead, these - cybernetic - systems operate precisely to break down
the organism’s assumed interiority. It’s time now for us to take a closer look
at both the body which lies behind - or beyond - the screens; a body, according
to Deleuze-Guattari, Baudrillard, and Gibson, that is “without image.”
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.”[107]
<< Back to Contents
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Section 2.1 The Body without Image >>
[79] Norman Fischer, “Blade Runner and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? : An Ecological Critique of Human-Centered Value Systems”, Canadian Journal of Political and Social Theory, vol 13, 3, 1989 104-105
[80] Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? 28
Compare this passage from Abstraction
and Empathy. “In the Ionic temple and the architectural
development ensuing upon it the purely constructional skeleton, which is based
solely the laws of matter [...] was guided over into the more friendly and
agreeable life of the organic, and purely mechanical functions became organic
in their effect. The criterion of the organic is always the harmonious, always
the balanced, the inwardly calm into whose movement and rhythm we can without
difficulty flow with the vital sensation of our organisms. In absolute
antithesis to the Greek idea of architecture, we have the, on the other hand,
the Egyptian pyramid, which calls a halt to our empathy impulse and presents
itself to us as a purely crystalline substance. A third possibility now
confronts us in the Gothic cathedral, which indeed operates with abstract
values, but nonetheless directs an extremely strong and forcible appeal to our
capacity for empathy. Here, however, constructional relations are not illumined
by a feeling for the organic, as is the process in Greek temple building, but
purely mechanical relationships of forces are brought to view per se, and in addition these
relationships of forces are intensified to the maximum in their tendency to
movement and in their content by a power of empathy that extends to the
abstract. It is not the life of an organism which we see before us, but that of
mechanism. No organic harmony surrounds the feeling of reverence toward the
world, but an ever growing and self-intensifying restless striving without deliverance
sweeps the inwardly disharmonious psyche away with it in an extravagant
ecstasy, into fervent excelsior.” (115)
[81] Grant, “Los Angeles 2019....” (no page refs)
[82] Jameson, Seeds of Time,
150
[83] Elissa Marder, “Blade Runner’s Moving Still”, Camera Obscura, 27, September 1991
[84] “In 1988 after three years of debate, a galaxy of corporate and civic leaders submitted to Mayor Bradley a detailed strategic plan for Southern California’s future. Although most of LA 2000: A City of the Future is devoted to hyperbolic rhetoric about Los Angeles’ irresistible rise as a ‘world crossroads’, a section in the epilogue (written by historian Kevin Starr) considers what might happen if the city fails to create a new ‘dominant establishment’ to manage its extraordinary ethnic diversity. There is, of course, the Blade Runner scenario: the fusion of individual cultures into a demotic poly-glotism ominous with unresolved hostilities.” Mike Davis, “Beyond Blade Runner: Urban Control The Ecology of Fear”, Westfield NJ: Open Magazine Pamphlets, 1992, 2
[85] Grant, “Los Angeles
2019...”, (no page refs)
[86] Grant, “Burning
AutopoiOedipus”, Abstract Culture 10 (winter 97), Cybernetic Culture Research Unit,
7
[87] Ballard, "The New Science
Fiction: A Conversation between
J.G. Ballard and George MacBeth",
in Jones ed., The New SF: An
Anthology of Modern Speculative Fiction,
London: Arrow, 1969 , 53
[88] Jameson, Seeds of Time, 150
[89] Ross, “Cyberpunk in
Boystown”, 155
[90] Edmund Wilson, Axel’s Castle: A Study of the Imaginative Literature of 1870-1930, London: Flamingo/ Fontana 1979, 13
[91] Csicsery-Ronay, “Cyberpunk and Neuromanticism”, 192. See the next chapter for an examination of the relation between cyberpunk and addiction.
[92] Jameson, Seeds of Time, 150-151
[93] The New Collins Concise English Dictionary
[94] Jameson, Seeds of Time, 151-152
[95] As we shall see in more detail in Chapter 2.
[96] Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, trans. Michael Bullock, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1967, 113
[97] Needless to say, this question will recur throughout the rest of this study.
[98] Iain Hamilton-Grant, Indifferentism and Dispersal: Postcritical Philosophy and Lyotard’s Return to Kant, PhD thesis, Warwick, 1993, 192-193 (italics added)
[99] Despite their many merits, attempts to “radicalise” the death drive, such as Baudrillard’s (in SED; see esp. 148-154), Land’s (“Machinic Desire” in Textual Practice, 7 [3], 1993) and Grant’s (“At the Mountains of Madness: The Demonology of the New Earth and the Politics of Becoming” in Keith Ansell-Pearson ed., Deleuze and Philosophy: The Difference Engineer, London-New York: Routledge, 1997), end up re-inscribing the vitalist-mechanism distinction precisely by emphasising one side of it. In this last, Grant rightly criticizes Deleuze-Guattari for reterritorializing on vitalism, but Grant’s own excellent reconstruction of Freud’s nonorganic continuum (quoted above) shows why any version of thanatropism is equally illegitimate. Deleuze-Guattari’s concept of non-organic life (TP 411, 499) is partly derived from Worringer, who refers to “living mechanics”, but also shows the influence of Bergson. In the first chapter of Cybernetics, Wiener attacks Bergson for implicitly maintaining an untenable dualism between the organic and the non-organic, if only through his terminological commitment to the language of “life”. Deleuze-Guattari echo this critique in a closely-argued section of Anti-Oedipus (284-289), where they show that both vitalism and mechanism are equally illegitimate. Deleuze’s later assertion that “everything I’ve written is vitalistic” (Negotiations, 143) is therefore not only conceptually dubious, it is also factually incorrect.
[100] Deleuze, Logique de Sensation, quoted in Christopher Domino, Francis Bacon: ‘Taking Reality By Surprise’ , London: Thames and Hudson, 1997, 120. This passage is commentary on Sylvester, The Brutality of Fact, 48
[101] See Sylvester, The Brutality of Fact, esp 170-182
[102] See Sylvester, The Brutality of Fact, esp 170-182
[103] Csicsery-Ronay, “Cyberpunk and Neuromanticism”, 192
[104] In The Monster Show: A Cultural History of Horror, London: Plexus, 1993, David J, Skal parallels Bacon with Horror fiction (224).
[105] See Libidinal Economy, “The Desire Named Marx” and Duchamp’s Transformers, trans. Ian McLeod, Venice CA: Lapis, 1990, 14-19
[106] Deleuze, Logique de Sensation, 17
[107] qtd. Christopher Domino, Francis Bacon: ‘Taking Reality By Surprise’ , 49