Flatline_Constructs 2.8 Tactile Power

Deleuze: “Clockwork automata, but also motor automata, in short automata of movement, gave way to a new computer and cybernetic race, automata of computation and thought, automata with controls and feedback. The configuration of power was also inverted, and, instead of converging on a single, mysterious leader, inspirer of dreams, commander of actions, power was diluted in an information network where decision-makers managed control, processing and stock across intersections of insomniacs and seers.”[160]

Videodrome operates as a hypercommentary on Horror and its capacity to stimulate - and therefore transform - the body (and therefore reality). Running alongside the history of Horror cinema is a discourse of censorship and control which has posited a body capable of terrifying transformation; a body that it at once a passive recording surface and a violently libidinized maw, hungry for stimulus. (Baudrillard’s In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities, with its hyperparodic invocation of a pliable body, subject to the influence of media might even be the ironic postscript to this tradition.).Meanwhile, somnambulism, mesmerism and manipulation have been themes in Gothic cinema since The Cabinet of Dr Caligari. What Videodrome adds to this Gothic account of power, of course, is an emphasis on the production of somnambulist desire by media itself, revealing the complicity of certain discourses about media with the language of Horror.

What is at stake in Videodrome - and what makes it fit so closely with Baudrillard’s theorizations - is an account of how the body is an intrinsic component part of new machineries of control and manipulation, which are no longer spectacular, but tactile. Videodrome shares with Baudrillard an inheritance from McLuhan that amounts to a critique of spectacular-optical culture, emerging in an emphasis on the non- or post-optical functioning of new media. Although obsessed with optics, Cronenberg’s film ultimately concurs with McLuhan’s claim that “electric technology has meant for Western man a considerable drop in the visual component of his experience, and a corresponding increase in the activity of his other senses.” [161] McLuhan’s thesis that TV is a tactile medium, outlined in some of the most haunting and enigmatic passages in his writing, is repeatedly referenced in some of Videodrome’s most powerful images, in particular those in which we see Max seduced by the Nicki Brand-Videodrome composite. As Max “approaches the set […] the screen bulges outward to meet his touch, literalizing the notion of the screen as breast. His face sinks in, his hands fondle the panels and knobs of the set as the lips continue their panting invitation.”[162] Here, the medium is indeed the massage. But this interactivity is always immanent to television’s operations, McLuhan suggests. “The TV image requires each instant that we ‘close’ the spaces in the mesh by a convulsive sensuous participation that is profoundly kinetic and tactile, because tactility is the interplay of the senses, rather than the isolated contact of skin and object.” (UM 314) Baudrillard will cite this formulation in Symbolic Exchange and Death, (65) as part of an analysis that simultaneously ironizes McLuhan’s position while extending it. “So we can understand why McLuhan saw an era of tactile communication in the era of electronic mass-media. In this we are closer in effect to the tactile than we are to the visual universe, where there is greater distance, and reflection is always possible.” (SED 65) The tactile becomes part of a contactual/ tactical “universe of communication” whose obscene closeness no longer allows the space for “response” while always ostensibly soliciting it.

Videodrome delineates the stealthy intercession into, and deletion of, private space by television described by both McLuhan and Baudrillard. “It is well known,” Baudrillard writes in “The Ecstasy of Communication”, “how the simple presence of the television changes the rest of the habitat into a kind of archaic envelope, a vestige of human relations whose very survival remains perplexing. As soon as this scene is no longer haunted by its actors and their fantasies, as soon as behaviour is crystallized on certain screens and operational terminals, what’s left appears only as a large useless body, deserted and condemned.” (EC 129) TV is a deeply unheimlich[163] technology, a disturbing presence in the heart of the domestic scene whose apparent reassuring familiarity conceals its insidious destruction of that very scene[164] (and all scenes, Baudrillard will insist): “today it is the very space of habitation that’s conceived as both receiver and distributor [...] the control screen and terminal [...] Here we are far from the living-room and close to science fiction.” (EC 128) Or beyond science fiction, and into cyberpunk....

As “the most recent and spectacular electric extension of our central nervous system” (UM 317) , television, McLuhan suggests, is “a complex gestalt of data gathered almost at random” (UM 317), “a flat two-dimensional mosaic” (UM 313). TV, according to McLuhan, exerts an ambient dominance, subtly but completely altering the domestic environment as soon as it enters it. “Television demands participation and involvement in depth of the whole being. It will not work as background. “ [165] You don’t watch TV, McLuhan urges, you scan it, you follow it. “The mode of the TV image has nothing in common with film or photo, except that it offers also a new nonverbal gestalt or posture of forms [...] The TV image is not a still shot. It is not a photo in any sense, but a ceaselessly forming contour of things limned by the scanning-finger. The resulting plastic contour appears by light through, not light on, and the image so formed has the quality of sculpture and icon, rather than of picture.” (UM 313) Television cyberneticizes the environment. While film and photography leave in place the dichotomy between subject and object - film is projected over the heads of the audience; photos are constituted as spatially delimitable- TV cannot simply be looked at by a spectator who retains a distance from it. “You have to be ‘with it’[...] It engages you. Perhaps this is why so many people feel that their identity has been threatened.” [166]

Given his emphasis on the closeness of Cronenberg’s film to Baudrillard’s work, Scott Bukatman’s theorization of Videodrome as part of the “science fiction of the spectacle”, then, is oddly misleading. Despite arguing that “Videodrome seems to be a film which hypostatizes Baudrillard’s own polemic”[167], Bukatman fails to process Baudrillard’s critique of situationist theory. Similarly, Bukatman’s hasty dismissal of McLuhan is puzzling, given that Baudrillard’s theory of power - insofar as he still recognizes the continuing validity of the term - is very much indebted - explicitly so - to McLuhan’s formulations. An important footnote to Precession of Simulacra uses a gloss on what Baudrillard thinks is McLuhan’s most significant formula - the medium is the message - as a means of exploring the new power networks. Baudrillard is happy here to classify the new configurations as power, but distinguishes this new delocalized mode of power from “power in its classical definition” (SS 41), which is at an “end” (SS 41). Since the “medium/ message confusion” has now collapsed “thus sealing the disappearance of all dual, polar structures [...], there is no instance of power, no instance of transmission - power is something that circulates and whose source can no longer be located.” (SS 41)

The passage is one of a number of occasions in which Baudrillard makes an explicit point of differentiating his own position from that of the situationists. Baudrillard could not be clearer. “We are witnessing the end of perspectival and panoptic space [...] and thus to the very abolition of the spectacular ,” he proclaims in “Precession of Simulacra.” “Television, for example [...] is no longer a spectacular medium. We are no longer in the society of the spectacle of which the situationists spoke, nor in the specific kinds of alienation and repression that it implied. The medium itself is no longer identifiable as such and the confusion of the medium and the message is the first great formula of this new era.” (SS 30) And in “The Ecstasy of Communication”, “Obscenity begins when there is no more spectacle.[...]” (EC 130)

The implicit critique of situationist theory Baudrillard presents concerns its continuing assumption of a distinction between power and its objects, between the spectacle and what it conceals. Ultimately, Baudrillard suggests, the situationists are committed to an appearance/ reality distinction that is no longer sustainable. Everything circulates now, Baudrillard insists. Nothing is concealed; indeed, everything is hyper-visible. There is nothing and no-one behind appearances that could be exposed, just as there is no alienation from which one can be liberated. Insofar as there is a source of power it is you. Psychoanalysis provides the model for these decentred circuitries of “manipulation”. “[O]ne can always ask of the traditional holders of power where they get their power from. Who made you duke? the king? Who made you king? God. Only God no longer answers. But to the question: who made you a psychoanalyst? the analyst can reply: You.” (SS 41) Power has completed the spectacle by making it interactive; but in doing so, it has abolished the spectacle as such, and inaugurated a new, all-inclusive, system which makes alienation - and its critique - obsolete. Immersion - so central a preoccupation of cyberpunk and its technologies - displaces spectatorship.

Videodrome’s neo-McLuhanite emphasis on interactivity follows Burroughs and Foucault[168] in suggesting that capitalism increasingly functions not by repressing the body but by plugging it into positive feedback excitation circuitries. In Videodrome, the Burroughs’ theme of image-addiction and McLuhan’s theories of habituation to media come together in the O’Blivion’s Cathode Ray Mission, a kind of updated soup kitchen in which TV addicts can get “patched back into the world’s mixing board.” Addiction, already a becoming-inorganic of the organism, is transferred over onto the technical machines, as part of a production of artificial desire (=machinic dependency). “The spectacular videodrome generates subliminal over-stimulation and this hype leads to a craving for stimulation for its own sake[...]The Videodrome through the television screen (in words, sound, vision, visual imagery) releases spores, pheromones which make us gorge ourselves on it, always wanting more, whether it’s tactile, sexual, phenomenal, social, material or emotional...”[169]

For Videodrome, media and addiction converge in a pornography that is not concerned straightforwardly with a stimulation of the organism by the represent ion of a naturalized body. Instead, bodies are mutated as part of the operations of a nonorganic circuit which denaturalizes sexuality at the same time as it effectuates a hyper-eroticism of the environment: the videodrome signal, as we have seen, makes the scene obscene, swarming with unnatural intensities. In terms of the cybernetic systems Videodrome describes, pornography and addiction are interlocking machineries of bodily manipulation and, in both cases, what is crucial is the participatory or interactive relationship between the Control technology and the body it is manipulating. It works so much better when you want it.

It is Burroughs who is a crucial figure here. As Scott Bukatman has noted, Videodrome is saturated with Burroughs’ thematics and imagery. But it is perhaps his role as a theorist of a deterritorialized pornography as a control apparatus that he is most important in Videodrome. Alongside drug addiction, pornography serves as one of Burroughs’ chief examples of a control process. Pornography assumes a privileged position in Burroughs’ cut-up texts because it exemplifies the process he calls “image addiction”, exposing the mechanisms by which desire is simultaneously artificialized and channelled. What Burroughs derives from psychoanalysis - and his study of scientology[170] - is principally the idea of the subject as a recording - and recorded - system. The “reprogramming” of the human nervous system - the major theme, as McLuhan says, of Burroughs’ Nova Express - is a neo-Spinozist model of the production of sad passions. Like addiction, pornography is an ostensibly participatory process which commensurates the organism to exogenous - and arbitrary - stimuli. For Burroughs, the consumer of pornography, like the addict, is ultimately himself consumed, locked into ever-more predictable circuits of dead affect; desire learns to love its own repression by allowing itself to be looped into the desolate repetition of mechanical stimulus-response patterns.

Needless to say, Burroughs makes no distinction between pornography and “ordinary” sexuality; on the contrary, for Burroughs, all sexuality needs to be understood on the model of pornography. Sex is a recording, to be re-cut, spliced together and replayed. It is all purely technical, a question of habituation to stimuli that could be anything; the body is slaved into idiot compulsive-repetitive behaviours by the triggering of what Burroughs calls “images”. The “image”, for Burroughs is essentially a particular neuronic stimuli, around which associations cluster. Repeat the image and you repeat whatsoever is associated with it. Where Freud privileges one particular image, or set of images - what Deleuze-Guattari call the family photo - so as to freeze desire into familial representations , Burroughs realises that, in principle, any image can function to capture desire. Sexuality operates in Burroughs less as a primary instinct than as a reprogrammable stimulus-response circuitry. “You see sex is an electrical charge that can be turned on and off if you know the electromagnetic switchboard.” (NE 140) Burroughs’ work endlessly insists that pornography operates not as a representation of sex, but as its deterritorialization (out onto the technical machines), and complementary capture. Sex escapes into recording technologies that sample and loop repetition-compulsions before feeding them back into bio-behaviour that increasingly functions as their idiotic replay. As with Spinoza, Burroughs presents a version of behaviourism that operates through rudimentary techniques of associationism:

The operation is very technical - Look at photomontage - It makes a statement in flexible picture language - Let us take the statement made by a given photomontage X - We can use X words X colors X odors X images and so forth to define the various aspects of X - Now we feed X into the calculating machine and X scans out related colors, juxtapositions, affect-charged images and so forth we can attenuate or concentrate X by taking out or adding elements and feeding back into the machine elements we wish to concentrate - A Technician learns to think and write in association blocks which can then be manipulated according to the laws of association and juxtaposition - The basic law of association and conditioning is known to college students even in America: Any object, feeling, odor, word, image in juxtaposition with any other object, feeling, odor, word or image will be associated with it - Our technicians learn to read newspapers and magazines for juxtaposition statements rather than alleged content - We express these statements in Juxtaposition Formulae - The Formulae of course control populations of the world - [171]

Association is not a cognitive process, but something physical; all cognitive narrativization is always derivative from a more primary zone of bodily affect. But rather than all stimulus being ultimately attributable to bio-sexuality - as a certain crude psychoanalytic reductionism would insist - Burroughs shows that associationist collaging can flash-cut any random image into a neuronic series and libidinize it. “Flash from words to colors on the association screen - Associate silently from colors to the act - Substitute other factors for the words - Arab drum music - Musty smell of erections in outhouses- Feel of orgasm- Color-music-smell-fell to the million sex acts all time place -”[172] The body, then, emerges as a set of nonorganic recordings, triggers and replays.

For the Cronenberg of Videodrome, pornography functions as a cybernetic (re)engineering of the body, rather than a simple matter of optical stimulation. Videodrome draws out the way in which the achievement of the pornographic ideal would precisely not be matter of improving visual resolution (guaranteeing psychic/ physical integrity and maintaining specular distance) but of facilitating bodily immersion (compromising all boundaries and doing away with all distance). As William Bogard explains: “The practical problem in the production of telematic porn is how the simulated body onscreen can become a surrogate for, and a prosthetic of, the real body, more attuned to the user’s fantasies and pleasures. And also the reverse, how the ‘real body’ of the observer can become more integrated into the apparatus of simulation. [...] [T]his translates into a question not so much of vision, nor even exactly of the gaze (surveillance technology), but of tactility (McLuhan saw this in relation to television years ago).” (156) Bogard here closely echoes Baudrillard, who argues that “the spiralling effect of the shifting of power, the effect of circularity in which power is lost, is dissolved, is resolved into perfect manipulation (it is no longer of the order of directive power and of the gaze, but of the order of tactility and commutation).” (SS 41-42) Tactility, as Baudrillard takes it up, indicates less the sensory or inter-sensory - “touching loses its sensory, sensual value for us”, he says (SED 64) - than a “participatory” circuit. Whenever Baudrillard writes of participation there are always implicit inverted commas around the word; not because he thinks that the discourses of tactility and participation are ideological mystifications, but because participation implies the possibility of distance, of separation, whereas the circuits he describes are so complete that there is nothing “outside” them; participation is impossible, because you have always been included. Response is screened out in advance.

“With TV, the viewer is the screen,” (UM 313) McLuhan pronounces, in a slogan that clearly anticipates Baudrillard, whose take-up of this motif is as predictable as it is inevitable. Prime component in the ecstasy of communication (and its correlate, control), TV is fundamentally cybernetic, operating by drawing the “viewer” into a circuit.[173] Thus the tapes in Videodrome which induce Max’s hallucinations are not entirely pre-recorded. They merely “set the tone”, as O’Blivion puts it, interacting with the specific nervous system they are targeting like intelligent viruses. But pre-recording is nevertheless an important element, since what Videodrome is about is the - postmodern - fusion of television and video (one of whose effects is the displacement of live broadcasting in favour of prerecorded footage).[174] Thus Max is reconfigured as a video player (a cybernetic component on which power is recorded, erased and re-recorded, not a tabula rasa on which power is inscribed, once and for all). “The axiomatic does not need to write on bare flesh, to mark bodies and organs, nor does it need to fashion a memory for men.” (AO 250)[175] Videodrome shows how “profoundly illiterate” (AO 240) capitalism keeps up the symbolic order only for show.[176] You don’t read Capital, Videodrome makes clear. You play it, it plays you.

A logic of contagion - of contact and infection[177] - replaces any strategy of ideological persuasion. Simply to have contact with the videodrome signal is to be infected by it. Jameson comes close to this perception when he writes of the “fear of the subliminal” in Videodrome. “Primary here is no doubt the fear of the subliminal itself; the television screen as part of the eye; that sense of incorporating unclean or harmful substances that runs all the way from yesterday’s phobias about fluorinated water and what it can do to our ‘precious bodily fluids’ back into the deep witchcraft and envy of the village and tribal societies. [...T]he putative subliminal signals of the Videodrome image can be seen to be intensifications of Bunuel’s inaugural assault on the viewer’s eyeball (with a straight razor), while the deeper fantasy about the lethal properties of commodity consumption runs at least from the legendary coke in Coca-Cola.” (GA, 29-30) The body subject to such assault is not in any sense a sealed organism, but a body capable of mutation, of fusion with capital and its commodities, a Gothic body: a Body without Organs. And in the end, Videodrome is far more ambivalent about the extent of cybernetic control than is Baudrillard: Max’s assassination of Spectacular Optical’s Barry Convex and his final transformation into New Flesh suggest that, as a true Gothic technology, the infection - the Burroughsian image-virus - may not remain loyal to its masters. The tactile, then, registers not only as a power mechanism, but as a new, post-optical, desiring-trajectory: Cronenberg’s point is that the two - desire and power - become increasingly interfused in Deleuze’s Societies of Control.

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[160] Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image , trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta, London: The Athlone Press, 1989, 265

[161] McLuhan, The Medium is the Massage, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967, 125

[162] Bukatman, Terminal Identity, 90

[163] Note McLuhan’s comments on the intimacy of TV, its disturbing familiarity (to paraphrase Freud). "Newscasters and actors alike report the frequency with which they are approached by people who feel they've met them before. Joanne Woodward in an interview was asked what was the difference between being a movie star and a TV actress. She replied: 'When I was in the movies I heard people say, 'There goes Joanne Woodward.' Now they say, 'There goes somebody I think I know.' ' " (UM 318) The age of the cinema - a “hot”, which is to say non-participatory, medium - gives way to the “cool” interactivity of TV, bringing an end to the giganticism of the star system. "It is no accident that such major movie stars as Rita Hayworth, Liz Taylor, and Marilyn Monroe ran into troubled waters in the new TV age. They ran into an age that questioned all the 'hot' media values of the pre-TV consumer days." (UM 320)

[164] “When I observe the most intimate details of the Other onscreen [...],” William Bogard glosses, “it is only the mis-en-scene of intimacy that I am given, a disenchanted, sterile (but not lost!) intimacy derived not so much from witnessing something hitherto unobserved or private as from plugging into a system where nothing is private and everything is, where the secret does not exist and everything is secret at the same time - all this in the form of an ecstasy of orbitalization and dissolution, a mass mediatized extravagance.” Simulation of Surveillance, 151

[165] McLuhan, The Medium is the Massage, 125

[166] McLuhan, The Medium is the Massage, 125

[167] Bukatman, “Who Programs You...” , 203

[168] Deleuze, in the essay “Postscript on Societies of Control”, makes a parallel between Burroughs and Foucault as cartographers of systems of “continuous control and instant communication.” (Negotiations, 175)

[169] Downham, “Videodrome”, 189

[170] Burroughs derives the idea of Reactive Mind from Hubbard’s theory-fictions. The Reactive Mind (or RM) is a set of recordings - or engrams - which induce the organism to respond in pre-directed ways.

[171] Nova Express, New York: Grove Press, 1964, 78

[172] Nova Express, 140 The cut-up and fold-in techniques of aleatory composition - utilized by Burroughs to most sustained effect in the “Nova” trilogy of The Soft Machine , The Ticket that Exploded and Nova Express - are supposed to break up these pre-set word-association lines, disrupting autonomic reaction-response patterns with random elements. Textual montage acts against the neural montage that is the controlled nervous system. But see Deleuze-Guattari’s critique of the cut-up in A Thousand Plateaus, where they argue that “”implies a supplementary dimension to that of the texts under consideration. In this supplementary dimension, unity continues its spiritual labour.” (TP 6)

[173] Not for nothing do Deleuze-Guattari cite television as an example of cybernetic power. “[O]ne is subjected to TV insofar as one uses and consumes it, in the particular situation of a subject of the statement that more or less mistakes itself for a subject of enunciation (‘you, dear television viewers, who make TV what it is ...’); the technical machine is the medium between two subjects. But one is enslaved by TV as a human machine insofar as the viewers are no longer consumers or users, nor even subjects who supposedly ‘make’ it, but intrinsic component pieces, ‘input’ and ‘output,’ feedback or recurrences that are no longer connected to the machines in such a way as to produce or use it.” (TP 458)

[174] For Jameson, video is the “postmodern medium” par excellence, the medium of “total flow” (See PCLLC, Chapter 3).

[175] This is by contrast with the primitive socius, whose mnemotechnical methods of tattooing and inscription are described in the section of Anti-Oedipus called “Territorial Representation”, 184-192. But, as Jameson suggests, in conditions of total flow, memory is no longer an option: “memory seems to play no role in television, commerical or otherwise (or, I am tempted to say, in postmodernism itself): nothing here haunts the mind or leaves its afterimages in the manner of the great moments of film.” (PCLLC 71)

[176] For Deleuze-Guattari, “capitalist representation” has left signification and writing behind. The value of McLuhan’s theories, they say, is to make this clear. “This seems to us to be the significance of McLuhan's analyses: to have shown what a language of decoded flows is, as opposed to a signifier that strangles and overcodes the flows [...] [F]or nonsignifying language anything will do: whether it be phonic, graphic, gestural, etc., no flow is privileged in this language, which remains indifferent to its substance or its support, inasmuch as the latter is an amorphous continuum." (AO 240)

[177] We might be reminded here of Deleuze’s claim that “viral contagion.” is “the passive danger” presented by “information technology and computers” which are the “third generation of machines” belonging to “control societies.” (Negotiations, 180)