Flatline_Constructs 2.4 The Mediatized Body

Gothic Materialism understands cyberpunk not as the dialectical fusion of Horror and Science Fiction, but as the materialist critique of Science Fiction from hypernaturalist horror. What is at stake is a - new- account of the body, abstract, cybernetic and denaturalized[121]. Ironically perhaps, given all the discourse of disembodiment that often surrounds the technical apparatus with which cyberpunk texts have typically been obsessed - Virtual Reality machines, simulators, cyberspace decks - cyberpunk constitutes an earthing of SF’s “traditional” ideal, or non-physical, body. But the outlines of the body it emphasises are not defined by the limits of the organism.

Cyberpunk - or “imploded science fiction” - Csiscery-Ronay observes, “finds the scene of SF problematics not in imperial adventures among the stars, but in the body-physical/body-social and a drastic ambivalence about the body’s traditional - and terrifyingly uncertain - integrity.” [122] This is a shift Baudrillard had also identified. “Classical science fiction,” he argued, “was that of an expanding universe, besides it forged its in the narratives of spatial exploration, counterparts to the more terrestrial forms of exploration of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.” (SS 123)

This - “classical” - science fiction corresponds with what Baudrillard, in his essay on Ballard’s Crash, calls a “classical” account of technology:

From a classical (even cybernetic)[123] perspective, technology is an extension of the body. It is the functional sophistication of a human organism that permits it to be equal to nature and to invest triumphally in nature. From Marx to McLuhan, the same functionalist vision of machines and language: they are relays, extensions, media mediators of nature ideally destined to become the organic body of man. In this “rational” perspective the body itself is nothing but a medium. (SS 111)

As we can see, by the end of the paragraph the classical perspective on technology has (also) become a story about the body. In fact, the two are indivisible. The classical or “functional” paradigm defines everything prosthetically. As Baudrillard realises, the logic of this position ends up defining the body , not as an organic originicity awaiting technical supplements, but as itself a prosthesis - “the body is nothing but a medium” (but for what?[124] )

As someone alive to the implications of cybernetics, Baudrillard has repeatedly refused the idea that media are themselves “mediators” as such. It is not as if the media are signifying apparatuses, a network of transmitters and receivers, which “mediatize” extrinsic input. Rather, media are anorganic intensity-circuits, not translating a “message”, but transforming all input - including the organic bodies that function as intrinsic component pieces of the assemblage - into “code”. “The medium/ message confusion is certainly a corollary of that between the sender and the receiver, thus sealing the disappearance of all dual, polar structures [...] That discourse ‘circulates’ is to be taken literally: that is, it no longer goes from one pole to another, but it traverses a cycle that without distinction includes the positions of transmitter and receiver, now unlocatable as such.” (SS 41)

As the theorist who did most to pioneer a non-representational approach to media analysis, McLuhan - whose notorious formula, “the medium is the message” is referenced above by Baudrillard - is a pivotal and ambiguous figure here, if only because his most provocative pronunciations always concerned the relationship between the body and the emergent technical environment. McLuhan’s organicist leanings - his well-known contention that technics in general and media in particular are “extensions of man”- was always haunted by a set of propositions more susceptible to Gothic Materialism, and it is this - darker - side that Scott Bukatman fails to process when he dismisses McLuhan. Bukatman’s contention that “[b]y electing to ignore the psychosexual and sociopolitical realities which govern the use of technologies, McLuhan’s prognostications become science fiction (and not very good science fiction at that, recalling the liberal-Utopian voyages of the contemporary Star Trek)”[125] places McLuhan firmly on the side of traditional SF, ignoring ways in which he anticipates cyberpunk. Interestingly, Bukatman quotes Ballard’s unfavourable comparison of McLuhan with Freud, from the introduction to Crash, here. “Despite McLuhan’s delight in high-speed information mosaics we are still reminded of Freud’s profound pessimism in Civilization and its Discontents,”[126] As we shall see, there is a lineage from Freud to McLuhan, a continuity of both Science Fictional and the most Gothic Materialist thematics. Ironically, though, the most Science Fictional side of McLuhan’s theories can be read precisely as an inheritance from Freud’s Civilization and its Discontents. Ballard seems to forget that the grand, tragic thematics of Freud’s essay are offset by an extraordinary technological optimism. In a direct anticipation of McLuhan, Freud describes technical machines as extensions of the organs. “With every tool man is perfecting his own organs, whether motor or sensory, or removing the limits to their functioning.” (PFL 12, 279) [127] Technology soups up the “feeble organism” (PFL 12, 280) to the extent that it can achieve what had once been a “fairy-tale wish”: “Man has, as it were, become a kind or prosthetic God.” (PFL 12 280) “When he puts on all his auxiliary organs he is truly magnificent,” Freud adds, qualifying this overblown technoptimism only with the enormously understated disclaimer that “those organs have not grown onto him and they still give him much trouble at times.” (PFL 12, 280) Whilst positing still further improvements on the road to techno-utopia - “Future ages will bring with them new and probably unimaginably great advances in the field of civilization and will increase man’s likeness to God still more” (PFL 12, 280) - Freud asserts what Ballard calls his “profound pessimism” only in the remark that “we will not forget that present-day man will not feel happy in his Godlike character.” (PFL 12, 280) Yet McLuhan’s doubleness, as we shall see, is anticipated by Freud’s; if the “extensions of man” narrative is an inheritance from Freud, then so is the anorganic emphasis on autoamputation ; but the lineage can be traced back here not to Civilization and its Discontents, but to the more materialist metapsychology, especially as developed in Beyond the Pleasure Principle.

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[121] Where “natural” is understood in opposition to the cultural, of course.

[122] Csicsery-Ronay, “Cyberpunk and Neuromanticism”, Storming the Reality Studio, 188

[123] Baudrillard’s hesitation in respect of cybernetics - the “(even cybernetic)”- is interesting here; it is as if Baudrillard is recognizing that the theoretical implications of cybernetics point to a dismantling of the extensionalist paradigm, even as its rhetoric keeps it alive.

[124] Baudrillard offers a provisional answer to this question in Symbolic Exchange and Death. In “The Double and the Split”, a discussion we shall consider at more length in Chapter 4 , Baudrillard suggests that “There comes a moment, in fact, when the things closest to us, such as our own bodies, the body itself, our voice and appearance, are separated from us to the precise extent that we internalize the soul (or any other equivalent agency or abstraction) as the ideal principle of subjectivity.” (SED 142) The body, that is to say, becomes a prosthesis of the soul.

[125] Bukatman, Terminal Identity, 71

[126] Ballard, “Introduction to Crash, French edition” in Andrew Vale ed, Re:Search: J.G. Ballard, New York: Re/Search, 1984, 96; qtd Bukatman, Terminal Identity, 71

[127] Freud goes on to enumerate a series of examples. “Motor power places gigantic forces at his disposal, which, like his muscles, he can employ in any direction; thanks to ships and aircraft neither water nor air can hinder his movements; by means of spectacles he corrects defects in the lens of his own eye; by means of the telescope he sees into the far distance; and by means of the microscope he overcomes the limits of visibility set by the strucures of his retina. In the photographic camera he has created an instrument which retains the fleeting visual impressions, just as a gramophone disc retains the equally fleeting auditory ones; both are at bottom materializations of the power he possesses of recollection, his memory. With the help of the telephone he can hear at distances which would be respected as unattainable even in a fairy tale. Writing was in its origin the voice of an absent person; and the dwelling-house was a substitute for the mother’s womb, the first lodging, for which in all likelihood man still longs, and in which he was safe and felt at ease.” (PFL 12 279)