Flatline_Constructs 2.6 From Narcissism to Schizophrenia

Gibson: “’Numb,’ he said. He’d been numb a long time, years. All his nights down in Ninsei, his nights with Linda, numb in bed and numb at the cold sweating center of every drug deal.” (N 181)

McLuhan points out that the "the Greek word narcosis, or numbness" is the etymological root shared by the words "narcotics" and "narcissism." (UM 41) The attempt to "become a closed system” results in a freezing-out of stimuli. As McLuhan writes in the essay on Burroughs: “During the process of digestion of the old environment, man finds it expedient to anaesthetise himself as much as possible. He pays as little attention to the actions of the environment as the patient heeds the surgeon’s scalpel. The gulping or swallowing of Nature by the machine was attended by a complete change of the ground rules of both the sensory ratios of the individual nervous system and the patterns of the social world. Today, when the environment has become the extension of the entire mesh of the nervous system, anaesthesia numbs our bodies into hydraulic jacks.”[135]

In Understanding Media, McLuhan electronically reanimates the myth of Narcissus to discuss both the implosion of subjectivity and the “autoamputation” induced by the move into a fully-mediatized environment. According to McLuhan, Narcissus’ plight arises not because he falls in love with himself, but because he is unable to recognize his image as belonging to him. “The youth Narcissus mistook his own reflection in the water for another person. This extension of himself by the mirror numbed his perceptions until he became the servomechanism of his own extended or repeated image. [...] Now the point of this myth is the fact that men at once become fascinated by any extensions of themselves in any material other than themselves [...] [T]he wisdom of the Narcissus myth does not convey any idea that Narcissus fell in love with anything he regards as himself. Obviously he would have had very different feelings about the image had he known it was an extension or repetition of himself.” (UM 42) For McLuhan, the modern technical environment - Gibson’s Matrix - is continuous with the human nervous system, misrecognized as something separate because the sheer amount of stimuli cannot be dealt with except by an enormous numbing, or “autoamputation” of the (electronic) sense organs transmitting the stimuli. As McLuhan insists, “the sense of the Narcissus myth” is that “[t]he young man’s image is a self-amputation or extension induced by irritating pressures. As counter-irritant the image produces a generalized numbness or shock that declines recognition. Self-amputation forbids self-recognition [...] The principle of self-amputation as an immediate relief of strain on the central nervous system applies very readily to the origin of the media of communication from speech to computer.” (UM 43)

What differentiates later theorists such as Baudrillard, Lasch and Jameson from McLuhan is an increasing sense that the screens have failed - the organism and/ or the self is no longer able to protect itself from the slings and arrows of outrageous cybernesis. In Seduction, Baudrillard revives McLuhan’s formula: “Narcissus=narcosis (McLuhan had already made the connection.)” (S 166) He quotes Jean Querzola, who writes of an “Electronic Narcosis”, a “slip from Oedipus to Narcissus.”[136] (S 166) In part, Baudrillard’s Narcissism designates a condition in which selves collapse into their images; Baudrillard invokes a “digital narcissus, [who] is going to slide along the trajectory of a death drive and sink in his own image.” (S 166) More radically, though, Baudrillard’s Narcissism is about the inability to detach a delimited self from the circuit. Narcissistic “self”-referentiality happens at the level of the “networks’ circularity“ (S 166) not at the level of the subject, who exists only as the micro-recapitulation of its seamless integrity. With Jameson, Baudrillard declares the end of alienation, but where Jameson describes a “shift of the dynamics of cultural pathology” in which “the alienation of the subject is displaced by the latter’s fragmentation” (PCLLC, 14), Baudrillard emphasises not fragmentation but integration. The structure of “our relationships with networks and screens [...] is one of subordination, not alienation - the structure of the integrated circuit.” (TE 56) Like McLuhan and Baudrillard, Christopher Lasch theorizes capitalism’s total integration in terms of the Narcissus myth. “As the Greek legend reminds us, it is [the] confusion of the self and the not-self - not ‘egoism’ - that distinguishes the plight of Narcissus. The minimal or narcissistic self is, above all, a self uncertain of its own outlines.”[137]

For McLuhan, this is all anticipated in Burroughs’ supposed collapsing of the category of the private. Burroughs, according to McLuhan, presents “a paradigm of the future where there can be no spectators but only participants [...] There is no privacy and no private parts.”[138]The effacement of the distinction between private and public will, of course, become a commonplace of postmodern theory. The “loss of public space occurs contemporaneously with the loss of private space,” Baudrillard observes. “The one is no longer a spectacle, the other no longer a secret.” (EC 130) The disappearance of the distinction between private and public realms brings with it the concomitant disintegration of what Lasch calls “the imperial ego”, Jameson’s “bourgeois monad”, with its “conception of a unique self and private identity, a unique personality and individuality”, (PCLLC 15). For Baudrillard, as for McLuhan before him, media - particularly television - play a crucial role here, insinuating themselves into all ostensibly private zones. “TV [...] is only a screen, or better, it is a miniaturized terminal that appears in your head (you are the screen and the television is watching you), transistorizes all your neurons and passes for a magnetic tape.” (S 162) “Private” space now becomes a “terminal” whose function is to relay a “public world” that only exists at the level of simulation: as Deleuze-Guattari say, “ the whole world unfolds at home, without having to leave the TV screen.” (AO 251) Or, as McLuhan put it in the Burroughs essay, “No civilian can escape this environmental blitzkrieg, for there is, quite literally, no place to hide.”[139]

Hence the “hideous intimacy” (CZ 40) of postmodern culture; what Baudrillard terms its obscenity. The private-public “distinction is effaced in a sort of obscenity where the most intimate details of our life become the virtual feeding ground of the media [...] Inversely, the entire universe comes to unfold arbitrarily on your domestic screen (all the useless information that comes to you from the entire world, like a microscopic pornography of the universe, useless, excessive, just like the sexual close-up in a porno-film): all this explodes the scene formerly preserved by the minimal separation of public and private, the scene that was played out in a restricted space according to a secret ritual known only to the actors.” (EC 130) The obscene is defined by opposition to “the scene” which, Baudrillard says, belongs to a certain theatrics proper to what he thinks of as a superseded psychoanalytic paradigm: here, mimesis, representation, projection and mirroring all still made sense. Distance, a certain staging, was still possible. But these representational dramaturgies have now been displaced into media “circuits and networks” that are “cold and communicational, contactual and motivational” (EC 130); here, there is no reflec\tion, only interminable circulation. “The obscene is what does away with every mirror, every look , every image.” (EC 130) It is the closer-than-close[140] , so close that the subject is no longer able to distinguish itself from its surroundings. Pornography provides the model for obscene culture, but its ultra close-up techniques quickly extend beyond the mediatization of sexuality. “[I]t is not only the sexual that becomes obscene in pornography; today there is a whole pornography of information and communication; that is to say, of circuits and networks.” (EC 130)

Narcissism, as McLuhan, Baudrillard and Lasch understand it, is not about self-love, but the inability to distinguish self from other, object from subject: cybernesis. As Baudrillard’s persistent references to communication and control imply, the postmodern vertigo of the “schizophrenic” - Lasch’s “uncertainty about the outlines of the self” - is bound up with cybernetics and with what Gregory Bateson called its “new understanding of mind, self, human relationships and power.” [141]

Pursued to its most radical extremes, cybernetics obsolesces personological, subjectivist and organicist ontologies in favour of explanation at the level of systemic process. Cybernetic systems are essentially anorganic because they radically de-privilege the organism as the appropriate analytic focus - Bateson insists that “the basic unit of survival” is not the organism but organism plus environment - and make no differentiation between biotic and technical components. In Steps to an Ecology of Mind Bateson had presented a benevolent version of what Baudrillard and Lasch will characterize as the narcissistic or schizophrenic disintegration of the ego , arguing, Spinozistically, that “[t]he mental world - the mind - the world of information processing - is not limited by the skin.”[142] “[W]hen we seek to explain the behaviour of a man [sic] or any other organism” the system designated “will usually not have the same limits as the ‘self’ - as this term is commonly (and variously) understood.”[143] “[C]onsider a blind man with a stick,” Bateson goes on. “ Where does the blind man’s self begin? At the tip of the stick? At the handle of the stick? Or at some point halfway up the stick? These questions are nonsense, because the stick is a difference along which differences are transmitted under transformation, so that to draw a delimiting line across this pathway is to cut off a part of the systemic circuit which determines the blind man’s locomotion.”[144]

The concern, in postmodern theory, with schizophrenia, is, in large part, a registering of this cybernetic account of subjectivity, a sense that the self can no longer be properly distinguished from the multiplicity of circuits that traverse it. Postmodernity as Baudrillard and Jameson theorise is the seeping through of schizophrenia into capitalism. Whilst neither go so far as Deleuze-Guattari in directly correlating capitalism with schizophrenia, both turn to “schizophrenia” as an image of the postmodern meltdown of subjectivity in late capitalism. For Baudrillard, nerve rays[145] become cathode rays: ubiquitous media circuitries routinize a heightened, hallucinogenic experience, a “psychedelic giddiness” (S 162) characterized by “somnambular absence and tactile euphoria.” (S 159) In “The Ecstasy of Communication”, Baudrillard explicitly associates schizophrenia with the emergence of cybernetic networks. “If hysteria was the pathology of the exacerbated staging of the subject, a pathology of expression, of the body’s theatrical and operatic conversion; and if paranoia was the pathology of organization, of the structuration of a rigid and jealous world, with communication and information, with the immanent promiscuity of all these networks, with their continual connections, we are now in a new form of schizophrenia.” (EC 133)

Jameson, too, theorizes, postmodernity in terms of schizophrenia, deriving his account of from Lacanian psychoanalysis, and hurrying to point out that this is in no way a clinical definition . The chief characteristic of Jameson’s postmodern schizophrenia is the breakdown in the experience of sequential time, an inability “to unify the past, present, and future of our own biographical experience or psychic life” (PCLLC 27): “the schizophrenic,” Jameson writes, “is reduced to an experience [...] of pure and unrelated presents in”; “the present [...] engulfs the subject with indescribable vividness” (PCLLC 27)

Both these theorizations of schizophrenia converge with Deleuze-Guattari’s in defining the schizophrenic experience in terms of a surfeit, rather than a paucity, of reality. For Deleuze-Guattari, schizophrenia is a “harrowing, emotionally overwhelming experience, which brings the schizo as close as possible to matter, to a burning, living center of matter.” (AO 19) “How is it possible that the schizo was conceived of as the autistic rag - separated from the real and cut off from life - that he is so often thought to be?” (AO 19-20) they ask. While Jameson equivocates, arguing that the schizophrenic “charge of affect” can be “described in the negative terms of anxiety and loss of reality, but which one could just as well imagine in the positive terms of euphoria, a high, an intoxicatory or hallucinogenic intensity,” (PCLLC 27-28) Baudrillard is definitive: “What characterizes [the schizo] is less the loss of the real, the light years of estrangement from the real, the pathos of distance and radical separation, as is commonly said, but, very much to the contrary, the absolute proximity, the total instantaneity of things, the feeling of no defense, no retreat.” (EC 133)

Hence Csiscery-Ronay’s claim about the connections between cyberpunk, hallucination, dread and madness. But if it is no doubt the case that cyberpunk has a new take on schizophrenia and hallucination, these themes could hardly be said to be foreign to Horror. As even a cursory reading of Poe or Lovecraft shows, Horror is hardly a stranger to hallucination, but what differentiates cyberpunk hallucination from hallucination in Horror is essentially its technical replicability and its currency as a de-pyschologised communication medium. Artificialized hallucination stands in for a decoded socius. If the Matrix is a “consensual hallucination”, its continuing reality as an environment is not dependent upon some act of collective will any more than the persistence of capital is; the sustainability of both, according to Deleuze-Guattari, has gone over to sociotechnical machines which both interpellate human beings as subjects and integrate them as components (TP 458). Techno-capital “hallucinations” are not epistemological illusions, but cybernetic-operational feedback systems. As Csicsery-Ronay writes, in a clear nod to Baudrillard, “It is natural to expect that as technology proves more and more able to construct the world in its own image (that is, to create the simulacra to replace the ‘real’ and ‘the original’) - indeed, to restructure the operations of the multinational capitalism that enables it to exist - there will be an increasing sense of its hallucinatory nature.”[146] Yet it is to miss entirely the logic - the delirial anti-logic - of the process to assume that capitalism’s “hallucinatory nature” can be equated with “unreality.” In a certain Marxist sense, as you enter the Matrix you access what is, in effect, the most real level of Gibson’s hypercapitalism, since, in the words of the cliche, cyberspace is where your money is. Although the Matrix and capital are totally artificial, neither are epistemological commitments, beliefs you can just opt out of, in part because the artificial can be quantified: hence Deleuze-Guattari’s “fictional quantities.”

Gibson’s hallucinations differ from Poe’s because they cannot be attributed, even provisionally, to psychological dis-ease. In a canonic example of Poe-horror such as “The Tell-tale Heart”, all the mechanics of interiority can still be seen to obtain: perceptual warps arise from a guilty, internal neurosis that finds itself echoed everywhere in the outside world. In Gibson’s world, hallucination emerges as the effect of electrolibidinal affect: psychology plays no active part, functioning only as the register of events that are “neuro-electronic” in character. “The voice was just part of dying, being flatlined, some crazy bullshit your brain threw up to make you feel better, and something had happened back at the source, maybe a brownout in their part of the grid, so the ice had lost its hold on his nervous system.” (CZ 61)

Predictably, Baudrillard defines the new science fiction in terms of simulation. (Ballard’s Crash, for instance, becomes “the first great novel of the universe of simulation.” [SS 119] ) But it is the combination of simulation with stimulus in what Gibson calls simstim (“Simulated stimuli”[147]) that is in fact more characteristic of key cyberpunk texts such as Videodrome and Neuromancer. Specifically, simstim is the name Gibson gives to an ultra-advanced neuro-electronically-triggered hypermedia apparatus: something to make the soaps seem more real than real. More generally, though, the combination of simulation-stimulation underlies all the key technical developments Gibson describes - bio- (or micro-) softs (data-input devices that can be meshed directly into the nervous system) and the immersive environment of cyberspace (or the Matrix) itself. Perception has been decoded into a matter of particular set of triggerable “stims” capable of simulating any possible experience. The simulation of particular affective states by direct neuronic stimulation had been a concern of cybernetic fiction since Crichton’s The Terminal Man[148] , and it is central to Cronenberg’s Videodrome.

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[135] McLuhan, “Notes on Burroughs”, 70

[136] Baudrillard’s making of the equation narcissus=necrosis is in fact in respect of cloning technologies, something we shall deal with in the next chapter.

[137] Lasch, The Minimal Self, 19. “[L]longing,” Lasch continues, adding the inevitable moralizing gloss, “either to remake the world in its own image or to merge into its envt in blissful union.”

[138] McLuhan, “Notes on Burroughs”, 71. This implies a reversal, or part-reversal of what Deleuze-Guattari call the “vast privatization of the organs“ “undertaken” by “modern societies” (AO 142-3). For Deleuze-Guattari, although “[i]ndividual persons are social persons first of all” and “[p]rivate persons are an illusion, derivatives of derivatives” (AO 264), “[t]he person has become ‘private’ in reality, insofar as he derives from abstract quantities and becomes concrete in the becoming-concrete of these same quantities.” (AO 251) There is therefore not “a making public of the private so much as a privatization of the public.” (AO 251)

[139] McLuhan, Playboy interview, Essential McLuhan, ed. Eric McLuhan and Frank Zingrone, Concord, Ontario: House of Anansi Press, 1995: 264

[140] See also “Stereo-Porno” in Seduction.

[141] Bateson, “The Cybernetics of ‘Self’: A Thory of Alcoholism”, Steps to an Ecology of Mind, 280

[142] Bateson, “Form, Substance and Difference” in Steps to an Ecology of Mind, 429

[143] “The Cybernetics of Self: A Theory of Alcoholism”, in Steps to an Ecology of Mind, 288

[144] Bateson, “The Cybernetics of ‘Self’: A Theory of Alcoholism”, in Steps to an Ecology of Mind, 288-289. To adequately explain agency, Bateson insists, we have to make reference not to subjective motivation but to the network of relations which produce it (as epiphenomenon). A paradox - familiar to readers of Spinoza - emerges. To increase agency - to become more active in Spinoza’s terms - is to become flatter with the system, not to “dominate” it (as if) from above. Bateson’s analysis of alcoholism as a paradigmatic positive feedback process argued that the very attempt to regain self-control, to be a “captain of one’s own soul”, contributed to the escalation of the alcoholic process, which precisely depends upon a crude opposition between subject and object, drinker and bottle. While the drinker thinks of the bottle as what Spinoza calls an “external cause”, and consider themselves - as subject - capable of beating it, they will have failed to apprehend the systemic complicity so fundamental to the alcoholic assemblage.

Hence the relation between the human organism and its technical environment becomes understood not any longer in terms of organic extensions, but of dependence-circuitries. The preoccupation with addiction, or, more broadly, dependency, in cyberpunk fiction and its precursors reflects a supercession of subjectivity by cybernetics; Oedipus becoming-narcissus. What Gibson calls the intimacy of cyberpunk technical machines indicates a new level of machinic-dependency, but addiction always implies a becoming-anorganic since it involves the induction of the organism into extra-organic feedback circuits. Cyberpunk tends towards the abstraction of addiction; Gibson’s characterization of Case as a “drug addict” (N 161) seems superfluous since it is clear that the condition of the console cowboys automatically involves addiction to technically-freebased stimuli.

“ ‘I’m a drug addict, Cath.’

‘What kind?’

‘Stimulants. Central nervous system stimulants. Extremely powerful central nervous system stimulants.’” (N 161)

[145] A reference to Schreber, who famously thought communication happened through “nerve rays.”

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

[147] Burning Chrome, 210

[148] Like many of Crichton’s subsequent novels - including the Chaos-SF of Jurassic Park - The Terminal Man is an intriguing mixture of theory-fiction and airport novel, spiced with a neo-Wienerian moral warning about the danger of cybernetics. (Its semi-faked bibliography in fact includes references to Wiener). The story concerns a violent criminal who is on a pilot scheme for cybernetic control: when the criminal is about to have a psychotic episode, he receives a corrective charge from implanted electrodes. Problems start when the criminal starts becoming addicted to the supposedly corrective charges, which then induce, rather than prevent, the psychotic episodes they were designed to regulate.