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FLATLINE CONSTRUCTS GOTHIC MATERIALISM AND CYBERNETIC THEORY-FICTION |
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3. XEROX AND XENOGENESIS: MECHANICAL REPRODUCTION AND GOTHIC PROPAGATION |
3.1 Let
Me Tell You About My Mother 3.3 Samuel
Butler and Surplus Value of Code 3.4 Nuptials
Against Nature: Sorcery and Propagation 3.5 The Wasp Factory: Neuromancer 3.6 Capitalism and Isophrenia:
Ashpool |
3.6 Capitalism and Isophrenia: Ashpool
Ashpool:
“We cause the brain to become alergic to certain of its own neurotransmitters, resulting
in a peculiarly pliable imitation of autism […] I understand that the effect is
more easily obtained with an embedded microchip.” (N 221)
Baudrillard increasingly poses himself as the melancholy observer of
a techno-organic tendency towards self-preservation – a tendency that is bound
to go badly wrong, where the self that is being clung onto is destined to
implode into a figure that haunts Baudrillard’s later writings: autism. “Our
monsters,” writes Baudrillard, “are all manic autists.”[242] Ashpool, the mysterious cryo-zombie patriarch of Gibson’s Neuromancer is an exemplary case of what
lies at “the illusion of the end” of the melancholy line of entropic sameness
which Baudrillard’s work tracks: a blind drive towards self-preservation that
ends up in a suicidal line of abolition; what Baudrillard, in The Illusion of the End, calls
“Identitary, ipsomaniacal, isophrenic madness”, emerging in “the delirium of
genetic confusion, of the scrambling of codes and networks, of biological and
molecular anomalies, of autism.”
(109) Ashpool stands as a recent
example of a particular type belonging
to what we have called the negativized Gothic; figures, like Victor
Frankenstein who, in their very desire to ward off death produce it, in new,
simulated forms.
Ashpool not only pre-emptively freezes his body in an odd,
necrotic attempt to ward off death and perpetuate his identity, he also clones
his own daughters, whom he sleeps with. The attempt to preserve identity thus
devolves in the (implosive) direction of incest and autism. The
Tessier-Ashpool’s home, or “extended body”, Villa Straylight, is built as a
kind of autistic shrine, closed-off from the outside world, recycling itself
through its own incestuous technologies. “They built Freeside to tap the wealth
of the new islands, grew rich and eccentric, and began the construction of an
extended body in Straylight. We sealed ourselves away behind our money, growing
inward, generating a seamless universe of self.” (N 207) “We began to burrow into ourselves.” (N
271) Unlike the “sinister, man-made
Everest of the Tyrell Corporation” [243], Villa Straylight is not an erectile
structure towering above the city, but a
“Gothic folly” (N 206) whose very
“semiotics [...] bespeak a turning in, a denial of the bright void
beyond the hull.” (N 207). Villa
Straylight, the hypermodern equivalent of Citizen Kane’s Xanadu, is a
mausoleum-cum-preservation chamber-cum-nest, a technologically-protected
interiority. This Escheresque structure
(an “endless series of chambers linked by passages, by stairwells vaulted like
intestines [...] a desperate proliferation of structures, forms flowing,
interlocking, rising toward a solid core of microcircuitry, our clan’s
corporate heart, a cylinder of silicon
wormholed with narrow maintenance tunnels”
[N 206]) is “a body grown in upon itself” (N 206) ,
which, although designed as a prophylaxis against schizophrenia, serves
ultimately only to incubate its own form of madness (“T-A was crazy as the old
man had been” [N 242]): Tessier-Ashpool’s
cryogenization and turning-in-upon-itself is an attempt to escape the general trend towards anonymization
in corporate power. But, as the image Wintermute feeds Case from his own dreams
(a wasp swarm edited to include the T-A logo) shows, the Tessier-Ashpool’s
technologically-perpetuated filial line is ultimately compelled into a
becoming-swarm/swarm-becoming (of which, more below: see “Wintermutation: Neuromancer as a Sorcerous Narrative.”)
Despite his best efforts, the Outside,
Ashpool glumly observes, gets in. (N 220)
We encounter Ashpool only briefly, as he is in fact arranging his
own death. In the offworld satellite
of Villa Straylight, Molly Millions meets Ashpool, executing the final move in
what is, in effect, an elaborately organized suicide. “She crossed the room to
Ashpool’s chair. the man’s breathing was slow and ragged. She peered at the
litter of drugs and alcohol. She put his pistol down, picked up her fletcher,
dialled the barrel over to a single shot, and very carefully put a toxin dart
throught the centre of his closed left eyelid. He jerked once, breath halting
in mid-intake. His other eye, brown and fathomless, opened slowly.” (N 223)
Reflecting on this scene (which he has witnessed via his simstim
link with Molly), what Case feels,
above all, is a sense of surprise. Accustomed to the faceless impersonality of
the multinationals, Case is puzzled by the very persistence of Ashpool’s
humanity. “It seemed to Case
[...] that he’d never really thought of anyone like Ashpool, anyone as powerful
as he imagined Ashpool had been, as human [...] Case had always taken it for
granted that the real bosses, the kingpins in a given industry, would be both
more and less than people [...] He’d
always imagined it as a gradual and willing accommodation to the machine, the
system, the parent organism.” (N 242, 243) The despotic/ dynastic nature of
Ashpool’s power bewilders Case. “Power,
in Case’s world, meant corporate power.” (N 242)
Yet Ashpool’s “humanity” is only an expensively-produced
simulation, dependent upon cryonic freezing tanks in which he periodically
immerses his body. Ashpool is a strange kind of technicized zombie, not an
organism at all; just as, in a certain sense, the zaibatsus – the massive
multinational companies which dominate Gibson’s world (and ours) have achieved
a simulated organicism. The multinationals, Case muses, cannot be adequately
comprehended in terms of “old boundaries”, either national or ontological. “The
zaibatsus, the multinationals that shaped the course of human history, had
transcended old barriers. Viewed as organisms, they had attained a kind of
immortality.” (N 242) The corporation
is a meta-organic control system in
which particular human beings operate as replacable parts: “You couldn’t kill a
zaibatsu by assassinating a dozen key executives; there were others waiting to
step up the ladder, assume the vacated position, access the vast banks of
corporate memory,” (N 242) they are “hives with cybernetic memories, vast
single organisms, their DNA coded in silicon.” (N 242)
“But Tessier-Ashpool wasn’t like that [...] T-A was an atavism, a
clan.” (N 242) Tessier-Ashpool’s dynasty dates from a period prior to the mid-21st century Japanese global hegemony
Gibson projects, a period perhaps even preceding the American- dominated
twentieth century (“I’m old,” Ashpool tells Molly. “Over two hundred years, if you count the cold” [N 220].) T-A
preserve archaic power by mummifying it (just as Ashpool freezes his own body in
cryonic tanks). They withdraw from the market (“there hasn’t been a share of
Tessier-Ashpool traded on the open market in over a hundred years” [N 95]) and live-off their massive accumulation,
retreating from the risks of hyper-late capitalism into the “parasitic
structure” (N 267) of Villa Straylight.
In Ashpool, what Baudrillard calls “the immense modern enterprise of staving
off death: the ethics of accumulation and material production, sacralisation
through investment, the labour and profit collectively called the ‘spirit of
capitalism’” (SED 145) finds its techno-erotic
consummation. Here, “the individual’s
anguish of death”, arising, according to Baudrillard out of the
reciprocally-interexciting emergence of
Protestantism and capitalism, emerges as a process whereby time (as value)
“is accumulated in the phantasm of death deferred, pending the term of a linear
infinity of value.” “The identity of
capital passes into the infinity of time, [...] the irreversibility of
quantitative growth.” (SED 146) Producing his own “salvation-machine” (SED 145)
from cryogenic freezing tanks, Ashpool homeopathically absorbs death, attempting to trade eternal extinction for
small doses of troubled sleep. He hopes to reverse the formula, “life as
accumulation, death as due payment” (SED 145)
aiming to offer his accumulated wealth as payment for
perpetually-extended life.
Ashpool’s very desire to preserve human individuality involutes crazily, what,
in the terms of The Illusion of the End, would be a degeneration back into “the
subhuman”, the replicative . Baudrillard: “Are we not going back, as a result
of all our technologies, to a (clonal, metastatic) de facto eternity which was, formerly, the destiny of the inhuman?”[244]
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Section 3.7 Wintermutation: Neuromancer
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