Flatline_Constructs 3.1 Let Me Tell You About My Mother

‘Is it a loss?’ Rachael repeated. ‘I don’t really know; I have no way to tell. How does it feel to be born, for that matter? We’re not born; we don’t grow up; instead of dying from illness or old age we wear out like ants. Ants again; that’s what we are.[200] Not you: I mean me. Chitinous reflex-machines who aren’t really alive.’ She twisted her head to one side, said loudly, ‘I’m not alive! You’re not going to bed with a woman. Don’t be disappointed; okay. Have you ever made love to an android before?’

‘No,’ he said, taking off his shirt and tie.

‘I understand – they tell me – it’s convincing if you don’t think too much about it. But if you think too much, if you reflect on what you’re doing – then you can’t go on. For ahem physiological reasons.’

Bending, he kissed her bare shoulder.

‘Thanks, Rick,’ she said wanly. ‘Remember, though: don’t think about it, just do it. Don’t pause and be philosophical, because from a philosophical standpoint it’s dreary. For us both.’[201]

Baudrillard:“Cloning is […] last stage in the history of the modeling of the body – the stage at which the individual, having been reduced to his abstract and genetic formula, is destined for serial propagation. It is worth recalling in this context what Walter Benjamin had to say about the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction. What is lost when a work is massively reproduced is that work’s ‘aura,’ its unique here and now quality, its aesthetic form […] What is lost is the original – which only a history that is itself nostalgic and retrospective can restore in its ‘authenticity’. The most advanced, most modern form of this development – which Benjamin described in connection with contemporary cinema, photography and mass media – is that form where the original no longer even exists, because the objects in question are conceived of from the outset in terms of their limitless reproduction. (TE 118)

Butler: Every machine will probably have its special mechanical breeders, and all the higher ones will owe their existence to a large number of parents and not to two only. (212)

Deleuze-Guattari: We oppose epidemic to filiation, contagion to heredity, peopling by contagion to sexual reproduction, sexual production […] Propagation by epidemic, by contagion has nothing to do with filiation by heredity, even if the two themes intermingle and require each other. The vampire does not filiate, it infects. (TP 241-242)

3.1 Let me tell you about my mother

Max’s invagination in Videodrome might serve as a startling literalization of McLuhan’s notorious claim, in Understanding Media, that human beings have become the “sex organs of the machine world” (UM 46); a claim famously echoed by Manuel De Landa when he describes technology as “an independent species of machine-flowers that simply did not possess its own reproductive organs during a segment of its evolution.” [202] The “grotesquely sexual nightmare images” of Videodrome bring us to one of the abiding preoccupations of Science Fiction and Horror: the displacement, or deterritorialization, of sexual reproduction. Is it the case, as Scott Bukatman suggests, that Max Renn become “part of [a] massive system of reproductive technology”?[203] Or is it the case that, in the world of Videodrome and of cyberpunk in general, nonorganic replication has escaped the net of “filiative” reproduction?

Both Deleuze-Guattari and Baudrillard offer theorizations of reproduction, but whereas Baudrillard continues to take sexual reproduction as the paradigm, critiquing simulated-reproduction for its deviation from the sexual model, Deleuze-Guattari oppose all reproduction (sexual or otherwise) to a model of “contagion”, a non (or hyper)sexual mode of replication which takes its cue from vampirism, lycanthropy and disease. So where Baudrillard’s “negativized Gothic” proceeds by way of identifying an increasing perfection in the techniques of artifical reproduction (leading, in his view, to a triumph of a post-sexual necrotic culture), Deleuze-Guattari follow the Gothic line in identifying modes of replication that cut across organic reproduction altogether. Instead of identifying, as Baudrillard does, the escape from (sexual) reproduction with an increase in sameness, Deleuze-Guattari argue that “anorganic propagation” is a feature of multiplicity. Blade Runner, once again, provides an exemplary case-study for the crosshatching of these two approaches, as Iain Hamilton Grant establishes in his commentary on its opening scene:

When replicant Leon responds to bladerunner Holden’s question ‘let me tell you about my mother ... [shots propel Holden through the plate glass window into the street many floors below]’, the bullets may not offer stories of his mother, but the unmistakable technological phenotype of their impact etches Leon’s military-industrial genealogy in scar tissue over Holden’s damaged body. The point is that, qua organism, the replicant is an orphan, or what amounts to the same thing, has no exclusivist claim to, no biunivocal bit-map of his progeniture, issuing instead from an institutional-techincal matrix and not a couple. Like Artaud, Leon ‘got no pappa-mommy.’ Leon has no mother, only a matrix of industrial-military technologies .” [204]

Grant here deliberately echoes both Deleuze-Guattari – whose invocation of Artaud’s claim that he had “no pappa-mommy” operates as an important slogan early on in Anti-Oedipus – and the Baudrillard of Seduction, and his appalled cry: “No more mother, just a matrix” (S 169) Baudrillard’s speculations on the “wealth of plant-like branchings that dissolve Oedipal sexuality in favour of a ‘non-human’ sex” (S 169)[205] stand as a horrified anticipation of the scenario Blade Runner presents. We will now look in more detail at Baudrillard’s position, before turning to Deleuze-Guattari’s account of Gothic propagation. Both will be cashed out, at the end of the chapter, in terms of an analysis of Gibson’s Neuromancer.

For Baudrillard, the re-engineering of sex “at the fractal, micrological and non-human level” results “in the disappearance of sexual difference and hence of sexuality itself.” (TE 3) This is the culmination of a cultural process in which mechanical reproduction extends beyond the production of objects to reconfigure even the tiniest interstices of biological vivisystems. Cyberneticization – the gradual but implacable translation of all of nature/culture into information, or code - replaces sex with a simulated death; not the “tragic” form of death, which remains “sexed” since it is associated with “higher mammals” and their mode of reproduction, but an “asexual form” of death, “a recessive stage which harks back to the molecular and protozoan stage of living beings, to their unceremonious obliteration, leaving them no other form of destiny.”[206] “Is there a form of death drive that pushes sexed beings towards a form of reproduction anterior to the acquisition of sexual identities,” Baudrillard asks in Seduction , adding that “this fissiparous form, this proliferation by contiguity conjure[s] up in the deepest recesses of our imaginary as something that denies sexuality and seeks to annihilate it.” (S 168-169) “Today’s technological beings,” he elaborates in The Transparency of Evil, “– machines, clones, replacement body parts – all tend towards this kind of reproduction, and little by little they are imparting the same process to those beings that are supposedly human, and sexed.” (TE 7) In addition to annihilating sex, this – deathly - form of reproduction also annihilates (or ex-terminates[207]) organic death; “an individual product on the conveyor belt” has “not been sexually engendered” and is therefore “unacquainted with death.” (TE 116)

The spread of this undiffentiation or homogenization across all levels of culture – sexual, political, aesthetic[208] – amounts, then, to a “denial of all alterity” that is simultaneously immortalist and necrotic. Immortalist, since the code achieves a kind of infinitely perpetuated “sur-vival”, but necrotic because this “form of immortal life, this nostalgia for a pure contiguity of life and its molecular sequentiality” was what “Freud associated [with] the death instinct.” [209]

According to Baudrillard, what McLuhan and Benjamin grasp - and what Marx fails to - is “technology as a medium rather than a ‘productive force.’”(SED 56) Both, Baudrillard insists, understood that the “mere fact” of reproducibility engenders what he - surely misleadingly - descibes as “an entirely new generation of meaning.” (SED 56) Evidently, meaning - whether new or not - is precisely not the issue; what issues in fact is radically asignifying technologies of “reproduction” which are their own message. Contrary to Marx’s hermeneutics of suspicion, technology does not conceal or distort a message; it is itself a message.

Baudrillard derives from Benjamin’s The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction the key insight into the sheer fact of reproducibility. Cleverly transposing Benjamin’s arguments from art objects to biological life, Baudrillard discusses the disappearance of the “aura”, which no longer designates the unique qualities of the work of art, as it did for Benjamin, but of the individual organism itself. Whereas, according to Baudrillard, meiotic sex – involving what he quaintly terms “otherness”[210] – inevitably allows the possibility of heterogeneity, mechanical reproduction implies the ever more perfect production of exact copies: “the Hell of the same” (TE 113-124). “Xerox and infinity.” (TE 51-59) Properly speaking, we might say, sexual reproduction is not reproduction at all; true reproduction – the production of copies supposedly identical in every respect – is possible only via the intervention of technical machines. As Benjamin had understood, mass production – the avatar of Baudrillard’s second order – introduces this possibility, but, for Baudrillard, its technologies are merely a pale anticipation of the horrors of homogeneity made available by contemporary biotechnology. “Benjamin was writing in the industrial era: by then technology was a gigantic prosthesis governing the generation of identical objects and images which there was no longer any way of distinguishing from one another, but it was as yet impossible to foresee the technological sophistication of our own era, which has made it possible to generate identical beings, without any means of returning to an original.”(TE 119) In the labs of the Tyrell corporation, with Grant-Monod’s “molecular cybernetics” at its disposal, biotech achieves an industrialization of bio-reproduction far beyond anything industrial machines could achieve.

As the ultimate exemplars of simulation-culture, the replicants recapitulate the four orders of the simulacra, rerunning, at the same time, their ficto-genealogy in the history of Science Fiction. Insofar as they resemble humans and are confused with them, the replicants are the automata of the first phase (copies of the human). Yet, as Nexus-6 models, the replicants have been (mass) produced serially, from templates. At the Second Order, the technical machine and its operators become equivalent; these are the robots of Kapek’s RUR, whose name, famously means slave (as Roy Batty tells Deckard: “Quite an experience to live in fear, isn’t it? That’s what it is to be a slave.”) “The mere fact that any given thing can simply be reproduced is already a revolution: one need only think of the stupefaction of the Black boy seeing two identical books together for the first time. That these two technical products are equivalent under the sign of necessary social labour power is less important in the long-term than the serial repetition of the same object (which is also the serial repetition of individuals as labour power).” (SED 56) But the second-order slips, almost immediately, into the third; unlike Kapek’s robots the replicants haven’t been constructed simply as replacements of some already-existing quanta of labour power: they have been “conceived according to their very reproducibility”. The difference between the second and the third order is subtle – which is why the one always fades so quickly into the third – but decisive, and is a matter of the temporality of (re)production. Whereas the stage of mass production begins with single objects that are only subsequently mass-(re)produced, the “objects” of the third order are (re)produced in the first instance with mass (re)production in mind; indeed, they are only manufactured because they can be so (re)produced “Moreover, the stage of serial reproduction (that of the industrial mechanism, the production line, the growth of reproduction, etc.) is ephemeral. As soon as dead labour gains the upper hand over living labour [...], serial reproduction gives way to generation through models. In this case it is a matter of a reversal of origin and end, since all forms change from the moment that they are no longer mechanically reproduced, but conceived according to their very reproducibility, their diffraction from a generative core called a ‘model’.” (SED 56)

This process culminates in what Baudrillard, according to Gane, Baudrillard will call the “fourth phase of simulacra”[211]: a phase exemplified, it would seem, by such phenomena as cloning and the hologram – “objects” that display a complete self-similarity, in which the whole can be reconstituted from any part, whether it be a cell in the case of the clone, or a fragment of image in the case of the hologram.

What is crucial, for Baudrillard, is the drift away from empirical difference towards a sameness deriving from the abstract; abstract, because any apparently unique feature is now seen as (merely) an instantiation of a pre-existent – and manipulable – grid: code. Baudrillard’s own favoured example here, repeatedly invoked, is DNA, but the process he describes is perhaps better exemplified by digitization. In Seduction, Baudrillard decries the sterile perfection of hi-fidelity recordings (“ ‘high fidelity,’ which is just as obsessive and puritanical as the other, conjugal, fidelity.” [S 30]) These, though, are as nothing compared to the digital recording, the – at least in its idealized accounts – perfect copy. Since a digital document is simply a matter of an arrangement of binary (on/off) switches, a recapitulation of the same pattern could either be seen as the most perfect copy imaginable, or not really a “copy” at all. “So-called intelligent machines […] [break] linguistic, sexual or cognitive acts down into their simplest elements and digitiz[e] them so that they can be resynthesized according to models. They can generate all the possibilities of a program or of a potential object.” (TE 52)

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[200] Cf Mark Downham. “Philip K. Dick was influential on Cyber-Punk, in that his novel A Scanner Darkly touched on what is crucial in Baudrillard’s disintegration into neurosis: ‘Biological life goes on, everything else is dead. A reflex, machine-like, like some insect repeating doomed patterns over and over. A single pattern. The failed codes of an escape combination. But how can you truly escape yourself?’” (“Cyberpunk”, 42).

[201] Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, 146

[202] Manuel De Landa, War in the Age of Intelligent Machines, New York: Zone Books, 1991, 3

[205] Cf. the (ironically) virtually identical repetition of the passage in The Transparency of Evil’s “The Hell of the Same”, 115-116. Is Baudrillard cloning his own writing?

[206] Baudrillard, The Illusion of the End, 98

[207] cf Baudrillard’s discussion of “ ‘tele’ space” in which there are “[o]nly terminals in a position of ex-termination.” (S 165)

[208] A process which does not only happen at every level, but to every level, as, all distinctions become increasingly unstable. “Everything is sexual. Everything is political. Evertyhing is aesthetic. […] Each category is generalized to the greatest possible extent, so that it eventually loses all specificity and reabsorbed by all the other categories.” (TE 9)

[209] The Illusion of the End, 98. “Today, we no longer believe we are immortal, yet it is precisely now that we are becoming so, becoming quietly immortal without knowing it, without wishing it, without believing it, by the mere fact of the confusion of the limits of life and death. No longer immortal in terms of the soul, which has disappeared, nor even, the body, which is disappearing, but in terms of the formula, immortal in terms of the code.” , 99

[210] Whereas the “cellular dream of schizogenesis […] allows one to bypass the other, and to go from the same to the same.” (S 168)

[211] Mike Gane, “Radical Theory: Baudrillard and Vulnerability”, Theory, Culture & Society, London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi – Sage, Vol 12 (1995), 120