Flatline_Constructs 2.1 The Body without Image

Csiscery-Ronay: The horror genre has always played with the violation of the body, since it adopts as its particular ‘object’ fear - the violent disruption of the sense of security, which precisely because it is a sense, works from within the body, the house of the senses [...] Even when the same images or motifs are used as in the horror genre, they have a different value in SF because they attack not the image of the body, but the idea of the image of the body, the very possibility of imaging the body (to borrow a metaphor from cyber-medicine)[....] Cyberpunk is part of a trend in science fiction dealing increasingly with madness, more precisely with the most philosophically interesting phenomenon of madness: hallucination (derangement). [...] So the most important sense is not fear, but dread. Hallucination is always saturated with affect. It is perception instigated by affect. [ ...][79]

2.1 The Body without Image

Deleuze: Horror-story writers have understood, after Edgar Allan Poe, that death wasn’t the model for schizophrenic catatonia, but that the contrary was true, and that the catatonic was one who made of his body a body-without-organs, a decoded body, and that such a body there is a kind of nullification of the organs. On this decoded body, flows can flow under conditions where they can no longer be decoded. This is why we fear decoded flows - the deluge; because once flows have been decoded, you can no longer subtract anything or break into them, no more than you can detach segments from any code in order to dominate, orient or direct the flows. And the experience of one who has been operated on, of her body-without-organs, is that, on this body, there are literally noncodable flows which constitute a thing, an unnamable thing.[80]

Early on in Neuromancer, when Case is being operated on in order to restore his ability to use a cyberspace deck, Gibson produces describes his catatonic state in suggestive terms: “body image fading down corridors of television sky.” (N 43)

During the course of The Transparency of Evil, Baudrillard also invokes a “body without image.” Discussing the “body under the influence of psychotropic agents” he writes of a body “that is no longer subject to the perspectivist space of representation, of mirrors and discourse. A body silent, mental, already molecular (no longer specular): a body metabolized directly, without mediation of act or look.” This body, he says, is a “body not far from the absolute loss of body image, from the condition of bodies that can’t be represented at all, either for themselves, the condition of bodies enucleated of their being and meaning by virtue either of their transformation into a genetic formula or of biochemical influences.” (TE 121)

Why should cyberpunk be concerned with a body without image? How does this connect with the media - and post-media - technical systems with around which its narratives have been constructed? And how does all this connect to Csisery-Ronay’s comments about the relationship between Horror and cyberpunk? In this chapter, we shall explore these questions with reference to fiction and theory which has been concerned with the relationship between bodies, media systems and cybernetics, concluding with an analysis of two exemplary texts, Cronenberg’s Videodrome and Ballard’s The Atrocity Exhibition. But before that, we shall discuss the theorization of the body that is central to Gothic Materialism: the Deleuze-Guattari/Artaud hyperconcept of the body without organs.

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[79] Csicsery-Ronay, “Cyberpunk and Neuromanticism”, in McCaffrey ed., Storming the Reality Studio, 189.

[80] Deleuze, “The Nature of Flows”, trans. Karen Isabel Ocana, Deleuze Web, http://www.imaginet.fr/deleuze/sommaire.html