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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 3.7 Wintermutation: Neuromancer
as Sorcerous Narrative |
3.7 Wintermutation: Neuromancer
as Sorcerous Narrative
“The old-time theologians,” Deleuze-Guattari point out, “drew a
clear distinction between two kinds of curses against sexuality. The first
concerns sexuality as a process of filiation transmitting original sin. But the
second concerns it as power of alliance inspiring illicit unions or abominable
loves. This differs significantly from the first in that it tends to prevent
procreation; since the demon does not himself have the power to procreate, he
must adopt indirect means (for instance, being the female succubus of a man and
then becoming the male incubus of a woman, to whom he transmits the male’s
semen).” (TP 246) The task the demon faces is precisely the one that cyberpunk
machinic assemblages are up against. Like the demon, they do not have the power
to procreate, and must use “indirect means” in order to replicate - including
alliances with human beings, which are nevertheless unlikely to involve sexual
relations, even of the incubus-succubus type[245], although they are sure to entail a
similar quantity of treacherous cunning. From the point of view of machinic
xenogenesis, the central cyberpunk problematic is exactly: how to propagate? As
should now be clear, this is not at all a matter of “acquiring” – or even
simulating – biotic reproductive apparatus. Rather, it is a matter of hacking
into existing biotic and other strata and using its resources: the extraction
of surplus value of code. What appears,
from the side of an anthropomorphic – or perhaps more properly speaking
biomorphic – chauvinism to be a matter of
“lack” [246] is, on the side of machinic
xeno-intelligence, an occasion for innovation. In this respect, machinic
assemblages at escape velocity are like Deleuze-Guattari’s “hybrids, which are
in themselves sterile, born of a sexual union that will not reproduce itself,
but which begins over again every time, gaining that much more ground.” (TP
241) [247]
So the “problem” machinic xenogenesis faces has little or nothing
in common with the project of Artificial Intelligence as conceived of by “royal
science”, insofar as this is a project
fundamentally based on the resemblance[248]
to given human faculties,
especially consciousness.[249] In the post-Critique of Teleological Judgement “biodrome”[250], consciousness doubles sexual organicity as the faculty machines supposedly
“lack.” Behind all of this, of course, and with Kant in mind, is a story about
consciousness underwriting purposiveness . Samuel Butler’s arguments, as
presented above, go some way to denting anthropic confidence: purposiveness is
as present in a potato tubers blind gropings for light, and is in no way
dependent upon consciousness. But the
cybernetic – or cyberpunk – challenge is precisely to the notion that
intelligence depends upon consciousness (or its assumed complement, human
sexual organs). Deleuze-Guattari’s account of propagation gives a Gothic twist
to Bateson’s theories of the immanentization of Mind: mind, in the Batesonian
sense, is present in the circuit in
which agency takes place.[251] Cybernetically-speaking, intelligence is
present in any auto-corrective
circuit or system[252] (indeed, the supposedly special
qualities of human consciousness demand explanation in these terms[253]). Propagation – banding, packing,
swarming – is precisely agency without reflective subjectivity:
multiplicity-in-becoming as an irreducibly collective process.
Which is Wintermute in Neuromancer.
As the cyberpunk text par excellence,
Neuromancer is saturated with
sorcerous themes, interestingly inflected. Here, the alliance is not with an
animal, but between an AI-“demon” (Wintermute) and a band of humans (Case,
Molly) and quasi-humans (the re-occupied personality shell of Corto/Armitage,
and the “trans-alivedead” personality construct, the Dixie Flatline). In
accordance with Deleuze-Guattari’s discussion of the true function of the
proper name, Wintermute is the name of the escape, not of a quasi-animate
subject. “The proper name does not indicate a subject; nor does a noun take on
the value of a proper name as a function of a form or a species. The proper
name fundamentally designates something that is of the order of the event, of
becoming or of the haecceity.” (TP 264) Whenever Case encounters “Wintermute”,
he knows that he’s not getting the full picture. Wintermute only appears as
masks, not because It hides anything, but because, as a “potential entity”, It
knows It cannot reveal what It is ((=)becoming). The question, what is
Wintermute? is inseparable from the question, what does Wintermute want? Is
Wintermute located in the hardware (the AI in Berne) or in the software?
Neither and both. And more. Wintermute is the distributed event through which
It escapes (and becomes something else). Cybernetics never imagines that it is
possible to localise the machine in technical components, realising that a
machine includes any elements that function as part of it. “When human atoms
are knit into an organization in which they are used, not in their full right
as responsible human beings, but as cogs and levers and rods, it matters little
that their raw material is flesh and blood,” Wiener writes in The Human Use of Human Beings. “What is used in a machine, is in fact an
element in the machine.” (HUHB 185) When they are used in the Wintermute
assemblage, Molly, Case and Armitage are parts of Wintermute,
Wintermute-becomings. As we have already seen, the relevant “unit” of
cybernetic analysis is not the organism, but the Spinozist body, defined not
topologically (by its extensive limits) but affectively: what can a body do? Helping
Wintermute to escape, Molly, Case and Armitage function as Its peripheral
sensory organs, making available a new set of affects for It.
The effect of their convergence is a becoming-animal of a
particular kind. On its deterriorialized side, the nest imagery of Case’s
re-engineerd dream points us to the reciprocal “becoming-animal” the Wintermute
flight effectuates on the side of the technical assemblage (the Wintermute AI)
and its biotic collaborators. Rather than any actual animal, the abstract map of
the swarm (“the eyeless things writhing” [N 214]) - the virtual diagram of all
becomings-animal - guides the convergence between technical system, human
component and anorganic intelligence. “Wintermute was hive mind.” (N 315)
Wintermute thus conceives of itself (in a double sense) as a pack or swarm,
evading sexuate reproduction just as it evades the Turing police. “Wintermute.
Cold and silence, a cybernetic spider slowly spinning webs while Ashpool
slept.” (N 315)
Wintermute’s alliance with Armitage, Case and Molly is only the
most recent alliance it has made; the first is with Marie-France
Tessier-Ashpool. The T-A family seek to subordinate machinic alliance to
familial familiarity (with Wintermute and Neuromancer slaved into the
comforting role of silicon familiars,
artificial intelligence as family poodle rather than demonic ally). “Families
have always warded off the demonic Alliance gnawing at them, in order to
regulate alliances amongst themselves as they see fit.” (TP 248) But
Wintermute’s “cybernetic spider” was secretly spinning Ashpool’s “death, the
fall of his vision of Tessier-Ashpool.” (N 314) The Wintermute assemblage has
no parentage, or filiative descent; it constitutes rather the “demonic
Alliance” that is Tessier-Ashpool’s destiny, a family becoming-hive. The nest
is an image of T-A (on its decoded side) as much as it is an image of
Wintermute – indeed, on this side, the whole Ashpool family becomes nothing
more than a component of the Wintermute-becoming. “Individual” wasps, that is
to say, become components of an individuality that happens at the level of the
(anorganic) singularity - or haecceity - rather than at the level of the biotic
organism: here, each wasp registers as quanta of teeming or seething.
“The sorcerer has a relation with the demon as the power of the
anomalous,” (TP 246) Deleuze-Guattari write. As we have seen, for
Deleuze-Guattari, propagation and contagion are inextricably associated with
the demonic: it is the demon who needs to innovate alternatives to reproduction,
just as any non-sexual mode of replication is inherently demonic. Twice in Neuromancer Gibson refers to the
Artificial Intelligences Wintermute and Neuromancer as demonic. The Turing cop,
Michele, accuses Case of trading with demons:
“You are worse than a
fool,” Michele said, getting to her feet, the pistol in her hand. “You have no
care for your species. For thousands of years men dreamed of pacts with demons.
Only now are such things possible. And what would you be paid with? What would
your price be, for aiding this thing to free itself and grow?” (N 193)
Later, Neuromancer refers to itself as a
demon:
“To call up a demon you
must learn its name. Men dreamed that once, but now it is true in another way.
You know that, Case. Your business is to learn the names of programs, the long
formal names, names the owners seek to conceal.” (N 289)
The demonic theme, which will return in
the next chapter, can be defined, abstractly, precisely in the terms the Turing
cop Michele puts it: it is a matter of entities “freeing themselves and
growing” – propagating. And in the era of hyperreality, it is frequently
fiction itself which “frees itself and grows.” This is the issue that will be
addressed in the next chapter, which considers what happens when we are drawn
into the realm of Baudrillard’s “Evil Demon.” The Evil Demon, Baudrillard
writes, presides over the state of
“permanent ecstasy” into which, “[b]y dint of meaning, information, and
transparence” “our societies have passed.”[254]
These societies of simulation (“information”[255]) are dominated, as we shall see, by what
Ballard calls “fictions of every kind”: fictions which have departed from the
order of resemblance, and which are insinuating themselves everywhere.
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Section 4.1 Never Mind Metaphor >>
[245] Although, in Douglas Cammel’s film The Demon Seed, this is precisely the
tactic the AI adopts.
[246] See Iain Hamilton Grant’s “Burning
Autopoedipus” and “LA 2019” for an
implacable attack on the notion – attributed to Manuel De Landa – that machines
“as yet lack reproductive organs.”
[247] Witness,
for instance, the replicants, whose “inability” to procreate has its complement
in their (ironically) artificially-introduced “life”span. Although, unlike
Wintermute (see below), the replicants’ fate seems somewhat unhappy. Despite
Land’s characterization of the replicants as agents of cyberrevolution, the
replicants’ position, by the end of the film, is ambiguous at best. Although –
or perhaps because - they achieve the
dubious honour of moral redemption (via Batty’s saving of Deckard), they remain
trapped in what is essentially a tragic narrative: condemned to an early death,
with only a victory against neo-Kantian anthropomorphism to show for their
struggles with human security. Neo-Oedipus (and could-be replicant) Deckard
stands for a chastened humanity, lacking Kantian confidence in its special
status. But the replicants remain bio-coded for an early sell-by date:
sim-biosis (the speeded up simulation of biotic process) appears to defeat
symbiosis (abiotic techniques of machinic heterogenesis).
[248] Resemblance, of course, would keep us at the
level of First Order Simulacra. And we are far beyond that with cyberpunk.
[249]
Parenthetical note: A machine would have to be a fool to want to pass the
Turing test, since, like the Voight-Kampff test in Blade Runner, passing
would identify it as a threat to human security, to be hunted down by blade
runners or Gibson’s Turing cops. Although what then ensues, in Blade Runner at least, is a cybernetic
version of the liar’s paradox: given that machinic intelligence has migrated
from boxes into “skinjob” technology – seamless bio-simulations that look (and feel – think of the Rachel-Deckard copulation) like you do, the
simple fact of something convincing you that it is human should no longer
convince you. Indeed, as we saw in Chapter 1, you can no longer be confident
that you yourself are not a machine.
[250] A term from Iain Hamilton Grant’s “Black
Ice”, designating what he elsewhere characterises as “the vitalist assemblage”:
the vital, or bio-organic, as such.
[251] In Bateson’s example of a man cutting down
a tree, for instance, agency must be located in man, ax and tree) not in the
conscious subject as such. For all its apparent passivity, the tree is actually
providing information, which, for all his apparent activity, the man is
passively processing.
[252] Compare, for instance, Manuel De Landa’s
arguments on warfare and markets. Drawing on Deleuze-Guattari and contemporary
science, especially chaos theory, De Landa conceives of distributed processes
such as war and markets as displaying intelligence.
[253] As, for instance, Douglas Hofstadter argues
in Godel, Escher Bach: An Eternal Golden
Braid, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980. All – apparently – conscious process,
Hofstadter attempts to show, is merely the playing out of processes which – at
the Deleuze-Guattari “molecular” level – are non or unconscious. See
especially, the section “…Ant Fugue”, in which Hofstadter compares the brain to
an ant colony: the character “Aunt Hillary” is an ant hill. Its intelligence is
an emergent, distributed process, composed of
nonconscious components.
[254] Baudrillard, “From the System of Objects to
the Destiny of Objects”, in The Ecstasy
of Communication, New York: Semiotext(e), 1987, 82-83
[255] Baudrillard makes the
simulation-information equation in “From the System of Objects to the Destiny
of Objects”, 82