Flatline_Constructs 4.3 Hyperreality and Postmodernist Fiction

Baudrillard’s obsessively repeated claims about “the end of the Real” have often invited misinterpretation – and derision, typically from critics like Douglas Kellner, who hold onto a social[ist-realist empistemology - but his theses fundamentally concern what Jameson calls the “wholesale transformation” of “the objects of our object-world” “into instruments of communication”[267]: generalized cybernesis. In the age of cybernetic communication, everything connects. Your picture of reality is processed through media, but media are not out of the picture any more than you are. There are no spectators, and no spectacle. You participate whether you like it or not. Nothing is outside the loop.

It is important to remember that the hyperreal is characterized not as the surreal or the unreal, but as the more real than real. In hyperreality, it is the relationship between the real and its simulations, the map and the territory, that has been (fatally) disturbed. Classically, Baudrillard suggests, resemblance had, in effect, inoculated reality by faking - or counterfeiting - it; the criteria for the success of such first-order simulacra would be mimetic fidelity (if not to the empirical real, then to some inner Truth, or transcendent Form) . But even if the first-order simulation perfectly resembles what it simulates, it still keeps alive the distinction between original and copy: “The first-order simulacrum [...] presupposes the dispute always in evidence between the simulacrum and the real.” (SED 54). Far from troubling the distinction between real and copy, the first order simulacrum’s (near-perfect) resemblance to the original actually sustains it, precisely by retaining an emphasis on resemblance. With the second-order and what follows it, resemblance is displaced by operative/ operational equivalence. In Baudrillard’s own well-known example, “[t]he robot no longer questions apearances, its only truth is in its mechanical efficiency. It no longer needs to resemble man, to whom it is inevitably compared.” (SED 54) As we drift into the third (and fourth) order simulacra, mapping and modeling systems increasingly anticipate, forestall and precede the territory they supposedly describe.

Contrary to a widespread misapprehension, then, the logic of simulation as Baudrillard constructs it concludes with the observation that it is fakery - not reality as such - that is impossible now. “Simulate a robbery in a large store: how to persuade security that it is a simulated robbery? There is no ‘objective’ difference: the gestures, the signs are the same as for a real robbery.” (SS 21) Simulation, as Baudrillard shows, is not dissimulation. Fakery depends upon an authentic and authorised reality from which it can be separated[268], whereas third-order simulacra (“the simulation of simulation”) have fatally collapsed this distinction, not epistemologically but functionally: simulations operate as (if) real.

For Baudrillard, as for Ballard, the mirror is replaced by television[269], by media apparatuses and cybernetic modeling systems that do not represent or reflect a primary world, but smear the distinction between themselves and it . In hyperreality - or “hype-reality” in Mark Downham’s excellent reformulation – “reality” is constituted by mediamatic simulation machineries such as advertising. Ballard calls "J. Walter Thompson the world's largest advertising agency and its greatest producer of fiction."[270]"We live in a world ruled by fictions of every kind," he elaborates in his 1995 Introduction to Crash. "- mass merchandising, advertising, politics conducted as a branch of advertising, the preempting of any original experience by the television screen."[271] In these conditions ,as we have already seen, Ballard insists that "it is clear that Freud's classic distinction between the manifest and latent content of the inner world of the psyche now has to be applied to the outer world of reality. " (AE 111-112)

Borges’ works, of course, have often been taken to be the very epitome of postmodernism. In his essay on Crash, Baudrillard places Borges as “the first great novel[ist] of simulation.” [SS 119]), while in his Postmodernist Fiction, Brian McHale grants central importance to Borges’ techniques and thematics. According to McHale, modernist works were those with an “epistemological” dominant (concerned with such questions as: “How can I interpret this world of which I am a part?”) whilst postmodernist fictions are those with an “ontological” dominant (concerned with such questions as: “Which world is this?”[272] ). Literature passes from a concern with unreliable narrators and partial perspectives, to a thematics that centres upon fiction itself and its ability to construct worlds: “What is a world? [...] What is the mode of existence of a text, and what is the mode of existence of the world (or worlds) it projects?” (PF 10)Whilst an author like Faulkner exemplified the first, “modernist” mode, McHale takes Borges to be a exemplary of the second, “postmodernist” approach, in particular because of his foregrounding of the problems (and paradoxes) of fictionalizing worlds. “The paradigm [...] is the fiction of Borges.” (PF 10)

The fiction McHale discusses is motivated by a crisis in representation, a recognition that literature in no way straightforwardly reflects the world; if literature is a mirror to the world, these texts insist, it is a misleading one, and many concentrate on showing ways in which fiction structures - and therefore, it is implied, distorts - the world. Crucial to McHale’s account is Douglas Hofstadter’s pioneering work of theory-fiction, Godel, Escher, Bach : Hofstadter’s discussion of “nested” narrative structures is of particular importance. [273] McHale’s analysis draws also upon, and parallels, Linda Hutcheon’s analyses of meta-fiction. Like Hutcheon, McHale describes texts seeking – and inevitably failing – to achieve what Douglas Hofstadter calls the condition of “self-transcendence”: the attempt to “jump out of oneself.” Self-transcendence, Hofstadter shows, is strictly impossible, in human beings as much as in computer programs. While both can cybernetically reflect on themselves and their own behaviour, this is not to say, Hofstadter insists, that they can evade their own programming – this is the “distinction between perceiving oneself and transcending oneself.” “A computer program can modify itself but it cannot violate its own instructions – it can at best change some parts of itself by obeying its own instructions. This is reminiscent of the humorous paradoxical question, ‘Can God make a stone so heavy that he can lift it?’[274] We might be reminded , again, of Weiner’s reflections on this same problematic in God and Golem (see last chapter). The “problem” for machinic xenogenesis we encountered in the previous chapter might be restated as: how to escape the box given the impossibility of (self)transcendence? Symbiosis and contagion, rather than meta-reflection, are the effective lines of flight, Deleuze-Guattari would insist.

In the texts McHale discusses, the attempt to gain self-transcendence often takes the form of a problematization of the role of authorship. No longer towering over the text, or lurking behind it, offstage, paring his fingernails like Joyce’s famous modernist creator-artist, the postmodernist author, McHale shows, enters into the text; or – and this amounts to the same thing – seeks to exit it. “Authors” become “characters” in their own texts. McHale, for instance, cites one Borges text in which “[t]he author [...] has ceased to believe in the reality of his own character, and his sustaining belief having broken down, the character and his world flicker [...] out of existence.” (PF 104) The figure of the mis-en-abyme recurs frequently; characters keep discovering “authors” who themselves become characters who in turn discover further “authors”.

As McHale establishes, one of the best examples of this procedure is provided by Beckett’s The Unnamable. “The Unnamable not only imagines characters, he also tries to imagine himself as the character of someone else. But who? First, he can only imagine an undifferentiated they, a chorus of voices constituting the discourse that he transmits to us, and that makes them exist for us; but then he speculates that surely they, in their turn, must be determined by some being ontologically superior even to them, whom he calls the master; but surely, the master too, in his turn, must be determined by some still more superior being, some ‘everlasting third party.’” Each supplementary dimension the Unnamable adds automatically and instantaneously entails the production of a further dimension, which itself automatically and instantaneously entails the production of yet another dimension, etc. This “grotesque parody of St Anselm’s so-called ‘ontological argument’” establishes that “[t]here is an absolute ontological ‘ceiling’ above the Unnamble’s head which retreats as he approaches it.” (PF 13)

It might be tempting to read such metafiction as an immanentization of fiction, but, as the meta- suggests, metafiction constitutes another case of imploded transcendence in which the book no longer reflects the world, but only because the world has been absorbed into it, meta-textualised. It belongs to a widespread tendency, or psychopathology, in postmodern culture that might be called Metanoia. Metanoia can be defined as the interminable process by which supplementary dimensions are continually being produced but are immediately and of necessity themselves obsolesced at the very moment of their production. Infinite regress stands in place of any definitively transcendent moment, the always-deferred “end” result of a process that is interminable, driven by the simultaneous need to hunt out of a final ontological baseline while at the same time continuously displacing it.

Like McHale and Hofstadter, Baudrillard is obsessed with such recursive processes. Indeed, perhaps his greatest value as a cultural observer is his identification of the way in which contemporary culture has become just such an enormous system of imploded self-reference. But where McHale remains interested almost solely in the literary aspects of this process, Baudrillard is immediately also drawn to consider its theoretical, biological and social aspects. Indeed, if cybernetic culture demands that the theoretical, the biological and the social be thought together, it is because it places everything under the sign of the fictional (which automatically and immediately changes the status of “fiction”.) By contrast, the problem with McHale’s in many ways exemplary textual analysis is precisely its (exclusivist) textualism, its concern with the putative relative autonomy of postmodernist fiction rather than with the relationship between fiction and postmodern culture (the great value of the Hofstadter text upon which McHale depends so heavily, by contrast, is that it always insists on the crosshatching mesh of [hyper]recursive processes as they crosshatch fiction, biotics, philosophy and numeric systems). Many of McHale’s privileged examples of postmodernist fiction - Coover, Barth - construct, as McHale says, worlds of discourse; ultimately going so far as to construct the world (itself) as - merely - discourse. Similarly, although McHale’s subsequent discussion of cyberpunk usefully describes “the ever-tightening feedback loop between SF ‘genre’ fiction and state-of-the-art mainstream fiction”[275], it remains textualist, never touching on what is the most important kind of feedback: between the fictions and the reality that “surrounds” and ultimately smears into them. It is this feedback loop - between a reality whose tendency is to become-fiction and a fiction whose tendency is to become-real - that fascinates Baudrillard, a fascination which indicates that, despite a certain amount of crossover, there are important distinction between McHale’s theorizations of (postmodernist) fiction and Baudrillard’s. Baudrillard’s favoured examples of “the fiction of third order simulacra” - Dick and Ballard - feature in Postmodernist Fiction , but not necessarily always comfortably. Dick and Ballard’s ficto-schizophrenizations of reality are not solely or even primarily textualist in nature - even if, particularly in the case of Ballard’s The Atrocity Exhibition - they involve substantial textual innovation.[276] Where McHale’s analyses revive what he calls, after Barth, “the old analogy between the author and God”, The Atrocity Exhibition anonymises fiction-production through the use and simulation of “invisible literature” (the literary equivalent of found objects: manuals, advertising, etc.); as Baudrillard says, here “nothing [...] is ‘invented.”[277]

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[267] Jameson, Geopolitical Aesthetic , 11

[268] Just as, Baudrillard insists, the authentic original depends upon counterfeits against which it can define itself.

[269] Literally, in the arrangement of domestic space Baudrillard describes. In The System of Objects, Baudrillard writes of the “disappearance” of mirrors. “There is no place in the [post-bourgeois] functional ensemble for reflection for its own sake. The mirror still exists, but its place is in the bathroom, unframed. There, dedicated to the fastidious care of the appearances that social intercourse demands, it is liberated from the graces and glories of domestic subjectivity. By the same token other objects are in turn liberated from mirrors; hence, they are no longer tempted to exist in a closed circuit with their own images.” (23) By the time of “The Ecstasy of Communication”, as we have already seen, television has assumed the role not of reflecting a domestic scene but of circulating images of domesticity, which “real” life increasingly tends to copy (rather than the reverse)

[270] Ballard, "Fictions of Every Kind", Re/Search: J.G. Ballard, 99

[271] Crash, London: Vintage, 1995, 4

[272] These two questions were formulated not by McHale himself, but by Dick Higgins. McHale uses them as part of the epigraph to Postmodernist Fiction. 1

[273] But, as we shall see below, what McHale leaves out of account is the importance of cybernetics in Hofstadter’s work. Hofstadter’s delineation of particular “embedding” or implex structures is not simply a matter of his typologizing particular narrative structures (although this is one of its surplus values, reaped very successfully in McHale’s engaging study); it is also an attempt to demonstrate the properties of certain – mathematical and computational – systems. One of the great virtues of Hofstadter’s book is the way it consistently thinks against and across the two cultures split, paralleling mathematics with fiction and the study of artificial intelligence. This last theme – perhaps the most important one in the book, necessarily doubling the closely related theme of the nature of consciousness – indicates ways in which Godel, Escher, Bach is shadowed by Gothic Materialist concerns.

[274] Godel, Escher, Bach, 478

[275] “POSTcyberMODERNpunkISM”, 124

[276] McHale’s reading of Ballard, whilst not exactly inaccurate, is in fact peculiarly unpersuasive. For McHale, Ballard’s work can be seen as typical of the shift from modernist to postmodernist fiction, a shift exemplified, according to McHale, by the difference between Ballard’s appropriation of Conrad’s “modernist poetics” in early novels such as The Drowned World and his later freeing up of “his ontological projections from their epistemological constraints” in The Atrocity Exhibition. While The Atrocity Exnibition does indeed move beyond the “perspective” of a “single observer”, it is not clear that it does so in order to explore a “characteristically postmodernist ontological confrontation between the text and the world that it projects.” PF 69-70

[277] Let’s turn to a specific example from The Atrocity Exhibition to demonstrate this – positive – “lack of invention”. At the 1980 Republican Convention in San Francisco, pranksters reproduced and distributed the section of The Atrocity Exhibition called “Why I want to Fuck Ronald Reagan”, without the title and adorned with the Republican Party seal. “I’m told,” Ballard reports, “that it was accepted for what it resembled, a psychological position paper on the candidate’s subliminal appeal, commissioned from some maverick think tank.” (AEn 121) What does this neo-Dadaist act of would-be subversion tell us? In one sense, it has to be hailed as the perfect act of subversion. But, viewed another way, it shows that subversion is impossible now. The fate of a whole tradition of ludic intervention - passing from the Dadaists into the Surrealists and the Situationists - seems to hang in the balance. Where once the Dadaists and their inheritors could dream of invading the stage, disrupting what Burroughs - still very obviously a part of this heritage - calls the “reality studio” with logic bombs, now there is no stage - no scene, Baudrillard would say - to invade. For two reasons: first, because the frontier zones of hypercapital do not try to repress so much as absorb the irrational and the illogical, and, second, because the distinction between stage and offstage has been superceded by a coolly inclusive loop of fiction: Reagan’s career outstrips any attempt to ludically lampoon it, and demonstrates the increasingly pliability of the boundaries between the real and its simulations. For Baudrillard, the very attacks on “reality” mounted by groups such as the Surrealists function to keep the real alive (by providing it with a fabulous, dream world, ostensibly entirely alternative to but in effect dialectically complicit with the everyday world of the real) . “Surrealism was still in solidarity with the real it contested, but which it doubled and ruptured in the imaginary.” (SED 72) In conditions of third (and fourth-order) simulacra, the giddy vertigo of hyperreality banalizes a coolly hallucinogenic ambience, absorbing all reality into simulation. Fiction is everywhere - and therefore, in a certain sense, eliminated as a specific category. Where once Reagan’s own role as actor-president seemed “novel” (AEn 119), his subsequent career, in which moments from film history become montaged - in Reagan’s own hazy memory and in media accounts - with Reagan’s role in particular movies. The ludic becomes the ludicrous.

The apparent acceptance, by the Republican delegates, of the genuineness of the “Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan” text, is both shocking and oddly predictable, and both responses are in fact a testament to the power of Ballard’s fictions, which resides no more in their ability to mimetically reflect a pre-existing social reality than it does in their capacity to imaginatively overturn it. What Ballard achieves, rather, is what Iain Hamilton-Grant calls “realism about the hyperreal”, a homeopatic participation in the media-cybernetization of reality in late capitalism. The shock comes when we remind ourselves of (what would seem to be) the radical abberance of Ballard’s material. “Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan”, like many of the sections of The Atrocity Exhibition, particularly in the latter part of the novel, is presented as a report on experiments into audience responses to prepared media stimuli.

Ronald Reagan and the conceptual auto-disaster. Numerous studies have been conducted upon patients in terminal paresis (G.P.I.), placing Reagan in a series of simulated auto-crashes, e.g. multiple pile-ups, head on collisions, motorcade attacks (fantasies of Presidential assassinations remained a continuing preoccupation, subjects showing a marked polymorphic fixation on windshields an rear-trunk assemblies). Powerful erotic fantasies of an anal-sadistic character surrounded the image of the Presidential contender. (AE 119)

But this shock is counterposed by a sense of predictability arising from the cool elegance of Ballard’s simulations. The technical tone of Ballard’s writing - its impersonality and lack of emotional inflection - perform the function of neutralizing or normalizing the ostensibly unacceptable material. Is this simulation of the operations of Hypercontrol agencies a satire on them, or do their activities - and the whole cultural scene of which they are a part - render satire as such impossible now? What, after all, is the relationship between satire and simulation? To begin to answer that question we need to compare Ballard’s text with other, more definitively “satirical” texts. Before that, though, we need to bear in mind Jameson’s comments on the eclipse of parody by pastiche, which we shall examine, briefly, now.

This is not the place to interrogate the differences between parody and satire; we shall proceed on the assumption that, whatever differences there are between parody and satire, they share enough in common so as to be jointly subject to Jameson’s analyses. Parody, Jameson argues, depended upon a whole set of resources available to modernism but which have faded now: the individual subject, whose “inimitable” idosyncratic style, Jameson wryly observes, could precisely gave rise to imitations; a strong historical sense, which has its necessary obverse a confidence that there is a genuinely contemporary means of expression; and a commitment to collective projects, which could motivate writing and give it a political purpose. As these disappear, Jameson suggests, so does the space of parody. Individual style gives way to a “field of stylistic and discursive heterogeneity without a norm” (PCLLC 17), just as the belief in progress and the faith that one could describe new times in new terms wanes, to be replaced by “the imitation of dead styles, speech through all the masks and voices stored up in the imaginary museums of a new global culture” (PCLLC 18). Late capitalism’s “postliteracy”, meanwhile, points to “the absence of any great collective project.” (PCLLC 17) What results, according to Jameson, is a depthless experience, in which the past is everywhere at the same time as the historical sense fades; we have a “society bereft of all historicity” (PCLLC 18) that is simultaneously unable to present anything that is not a reheated version of the past. Pastiche displaces parody:

In this situation, parody finds itself without a vocation; it has lived, and that strange new thing pastiche comes to take its place. Pastiche is, like parody, the imitation of a peculiar or unique, idiosyncratic style, the wearing of a linguistic mask, speech in a dead language. But it is a neutral practice of such mimicry, without any of parody’s ulterior motives, amputated of the satiric impulse, devoid of laughter and of any conviction that alongside the abnormal tongue you have momentarily borrowed, some healthy linguistic normality still exists. Pastiche is thus blank parody, a statue with blind eyeballs [...] (PCLLC 17)

Despite what Jameson himself writes on Ballard, one of the important difference between the Ballard text and pastiche as Jameson describes it is the absence of “nostalgia” or the “nostalgia mode” - an insistent presence in other postmodernist science fiction texts, as Jameson shows- in Ballard’s work. Indeed, Ballard’s commitment to striking textual innovations - as evidenced in the layout of the pages themselves in The Atrocity Exhibition - mark him as something of an anomaly in Jameson’s terms; in this sense, at least, Ballard seems to be continuous with modernism as Jameson understands it. Yet in certain other respects - specifically, in terms of the collapse of individual subjectivity and the failure of collective political action - Ballard is emblematic of Jameson’s postmodernity. But, unlike Jameson’s pastiche, Ballard does not imitate “a peculiar or unique idiosyncratic style.” The style that Ballard simulates in “Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan” - a style towards which the whole of The Atrocity Exhibition tends - is precisely lacking in any personality: if there any idiosyncracies, they belong to the tehnical register of (pseudo)scienfitic reportage, not to the characteristics of an individual subject. The fact that the text concerns a political leader draws attention to the lack of any explicit - or, more importantly when discussing satire or pardody, implicit - political teleology in Ballard’s writing. It is in this sense that “Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan”, like Jameson’s pastiche, is “without any of parody’s ulterior motives.”

Certainly, this is one way in which “Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan” differs greatly from a classical work of satire such as Swift’s Modest Proposal. A Modest Proposal is a paradigmatic work of what Joyce called “kinetic” art, produced in particular political and cultural circumstances with a particular aim, to sway an audience into action. Swift’s political purpose - his disparaging of the cruelty of certain English responses to the Irish potato famine - is marked by a certain stylistic and thematic excess (an excess that famously bypassed altogether certain of Swift’s readers, who were able to take the text at face value), whereas Ballard’s text - which emerged, no less than Swift’s, from a very particular sociocultural situation - can be defined by its flatness. This marks a move on, (even) from Burroughs. For all their linguistic inventiveness, Burroughs’ humorous “routines” such as “The All-American Deanxietized Man” remain in a classical tradition of satire through their use of exaggeration and their clear political agenda: using a series of excessive tropes, Burroughs mocks the amoral mores of American technoscience. By contrast, what Ballard’s text “lacks” is any clear designs on the reader, any of Jameson’s “ulterior motives”; the parodic text always gave central importance to the parodist behind it, his implicit but flagged attitudes and opinions, but “Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan” is as coldly anonymous as the texts it imitates. Whereas we hear Burroughs’ cackling at the absurb excesses of the scientists in “The All-American Deanxietized Man”, the response of Ballard to the scientists whose work he simulates is unreadable. What does “Ballard” want the reader to feel: disgust? amusement? It is unclear, and, as Baudrillard argues in relation to Crash, it is somewhat disingenuous of Ballard the author to overcode his texts - in prefatory authorial remarks - with all the traditional baggage of “warning” that they themselves clearly elude. The mode Ballard adopts in “Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan” is not that of (satirical) exaggeration, but is a kind of (simulated) extrapolation. The very genre of the poll or the survey, as Baudrillard shows, makes the question unanswerable, undecidable.

Despite what Ballard himself suggests, (see above), what matters is less the (possible) resemblance of “Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan” to (possible) reports than the circulation of simulation to which such reports already contribute. Writing on pastiche, Jameson comes upon the concept of simulation, but attributes it to Plato rather than referring - here at least - to Baudrillard’s reinvention of it. (PCLLC 18) Yet Jameson’s intuition about the relationship between pastiche and simulation is important. We could perhaps suggest a correlation between Baudrillard’s third order simulacra and Jameson’s pastiche, on the one hand, and Ballard’s text on the other. What simulation in Baudrillard’s third-order sense entails is, as we have repeatedly insisted, the collapse of distance between the simulation and what is simulates. Satire, in its classical sense, we would probably want to locate as part of “First-order simulacra” - a simulation that resembles the original, but with certain tell-tale differences. Ballard simulates the simulation (the poll, the survey).