Flatline_Constructs 4.7 Capitalism as Toy Story: Hyperfiction, Strange Loops and Rhizomes

If, in the context of cybernetics, Freud’s dismissal of animism seems hasty, so does his confinement of children to an early stage of development. Turkle’s work reinforces the observation – which, although well-worn, is more than glib cliche - that children know more about computers than their parents; and the early encounter with such cybernetic systems pre-emptively disables much of the metaphysics the adult world seeks to impose. Children, that is to say, increasingly live in a Gothic Materialist chaosmos. “Children, instinctual animists, identify with toys and dolls, subjecting themselves to and projecting themselves onto the inanimate: every 12-year old knows that I is an other and another and another.”[303] Under capitalism, the idea that toys do not have a certain agency becomes increasingly questionable. It may be the case that children take for granted, not only a Freudian animism, but a neo-Marxian picture of “necromantic” capital. It would only be natural for children to share what, in Chapter 1, we saw Judith Halberstam characterize as Marx’s “Gothic” picture of capitalism. Blitzed with capitalist hyperstimulus, children are already participants in capitalism. In many ways, children occupy the frontier-zones of capitalism, operating as probe-heads in what, for adults, is the future. Indeed, the Freudian model of regression could be radically reversed: it might be said that the child’s universe of animist presences and animal-becomings[304] has far more purchase on capitalist (and schizophrenic) reality than adults’ continued belief in subjective interiority. “To a certain extent, we can look to children to see what we are starting to think ourselves.”[305]

Capitalism, it could be said, is giving an agency to toys far more far-reaching than was achieved by Hoffmann’s clunky automaton. Naturally, the role of fiction is absolutely central to the toy-child relation. But it is a fiction which enjoys a peculiar relation to the Real. Increasingly, children are presented with toys and fictional systems which emerge together, in a loop. Where once there was a serial trajectory – comic books – toys – films or toys – films – comic books – now toys, films, comic books (and innumerable other examples of merchandising) are issued simultaneously. The notion of the original and the copy is systematically eroded by a digital uncanny which generalizes simulation by fusing capital and fiction. Take the example of Disney’s Toy Story (cybernetic capitalism’s riposte to Freud’s “Uncanny”?) Here, in a film that was entirely generated by computer animation, digitized versions of old toys are presented next to new, “fictionalized” toys. But fictionality has a new sense here: it no longer has anything to do with a fantastic unattainability; on the contrary, the toys onscreen are available, immediately, as consumer objects, as soon as you leave the cinema. The toys really are toys. In an increasingly familiar pattern, the film functions as an advertisement for the toys, which function as an advertisement for it, in an ever-tightening spiral. The fictional is immediately real, in the most palpable sense: it can be bought. This, then, is hyperfiction: a process whereby fiction and reality are radically smeared. Unlike metafiction, hyperfiction assumes no special role for the author (or indeed for the text). On the contrary, it is only when the author and the text have become immanentized that a hyperfictional circuit is in place. (Who cares who wrote Toy Story?) What is crucial is not the representation of reality, but the feedback between fiction and the Real. (Toy Story doesn’t reflect reality, it actively intervenes in it, inducing children – via their attached servomechanisms, parents – to consume commodities.) Hyperfiction, then, can be defined as fiction which makes itself real. What connects hyperfiction with animism is precisely the escape of agency from the subject. Fiction itself gains an agency, an ability to intervene into the Real.

To elaborate the concept of hyperfiction entails taking, and deflecting a little, Baudrillard’s favourite prefix – hyper –, deterritorializing the term from its use in his work. Baudrillard, of course, characterises the hyperreal as the more real than real. We will take this to designate an intense amplification of processes of immanentization. As Baudrillard has established, to be involved in a hyper-relation is to be beyond questions of representation (as we have already seen, the hyperreal is where representation becomes impossible, in part because the map precedes the territory). Hyperfictional process is defined by an escape from the text, in particular from the mono-authored text. At least two characteristics must be in place for hyperfiction to be operating: (1) there must be a feedback relation between the fiction and the Real and (2) (closely related to the previous point) the fiction must operate to subtract supplementary dimensions. Hyperfiction escapes the text, not in the direction of transcendence (like Beckett’s Unnamable), but in the direction of radical immanence. What is inevitably destabilized is the authority of the text, and – concomitantly – the power of the reality principle. Even as it intervenes in the Real, hyperfiction subtracts the authority to represent the Real from texts. At the same time, it is directly effective upon its reader/ consumer.

The concept of hype takes us close to the abstract machinic operations of hyper-process: using what Baudrillard would call “sign value”, hype transforms (desired) end-products into potentials, which can be exploited precisely to bring about the desired end-products. Assuming the success of a commodity functions to make it successful. Radically looped into itself, feedback has become feedforward, pre-determining responses rather than being sensitive to them after the fact. It need hardly be pointed out that the economy increasingly functions in such hyper-spirals, as capital more than ever migrates from having any actual referent, towards Marx’s increasingly “fleeting” forms (futures etc). All that is solid melts into the abstract and the virtual. Marx’s analyses of exchange value anticipated Baudrillard in their recognition of the role that fictions (such as potentials) have in capitalism, but Baudrillard has given up any of Marx’s confidence that the fictional can simply be unmasked, that something “more real” lies beneath it. Deleuze-Guattari’s productively ambiguous notion of “fictional quantities” reinforces this intuition. It takes in both the idea of fiction that can be quantified, and of quantities that have to be conceived of as fictional. What is decisively broken down here is the conventional opposition between fiction and the Real: if fiction can be quantified, it belongs to the Real, but if quantities can be fictionalized, then the Real belongs to fiction. What could be more real than a quantity? Stripped of a Marxian referent like the labour theory of value, capital itself becomes exactly a fictional quantity: an entity, of course, with its own animistic agency.

The hyper must be opposed to processes with which it is often conflated: meta-processes, which, as we said above, are defined by an imploded transcendence. Baudrillard’s work is often read as if it were exclusively about the meta-, when it could more properly be seen as describing the oscillation between meta- and hyper- processes, or better yet, the (inevitable) collapse of the former into the latter. As theorists dedicated to radical immanence, Deleuze-Guattari, naturally, can be placed on the side of the hyper-process. (Even as they identify a myriad of processes which are describable in terms of imploded transcendence: capitalism itself, for instance.)

Whilst never actually posing the hyper/ meta distinction in quite the terms that it will be deployed here, Hofstadter’s Godel, Escher, Bach – and its take-up into the analysis of fiction by Brian McHale – has provided an indispensable resource for the typologization of recursive systems that follows. McHale’s valuable but partial analyses of fiction effectively concentrate on the question of recursion. Instead of mirroring the world, McHale’s postmodernist texts construct vortices which implode into themselves. But this is not the only kind of recursion there is. What Hofstadter locates, in Godel, Escher, Bach are, in effect, two types of recursion, one corresponding to what he calls “self-transcendence” (this is the kind of recursion with which McHale’s Postmodernist Fiction is principally concerned), the other corresponding to a radical immanentization. Escher’s paintings often exemplify the first type of recursion (the best example here would probably be the drawing of two hands, each drawing the other[306]). An example of the second would be Godel or Cantor’s mathematics, which show the systematic hostility of numeric systems to “axiomatic” “overcoding”. Numbers can always escape any transcendent statement made about them.

Meta-systems behave as if they “believe” in the reality of transcendent description, which is to say, in the reality of the power of framing structures to “embed”, whereas hyper-systems are hostile to any attempt to hierarchize or stratify phenomena. Hofstadter has a term for this radical implexion: the strange loop, or tangled hierarchy. At one level, the strange loop is a way of describing chicken-and-egg processes in which the product of any process is also one of its founding presuppositions. What should belong to an “embedded”, or subordinate, level of a system escapes to a “higher” level of the system.

Unlike meta-systems, which, as we have seen, are continually seeking transcendent dimensions, hyper-systems are continually seeking to eliminate any overcoding by unity. As Deleuze-Guattari write, “Unity always operates in a dimension supplementary to that of the system considered.” (TP 6) It is the rhizome “or multiplicity”, of course, that for Deleuze-Guattari, “never allows itself to be overcoded, never has available to it over and above its number of lines, that is, over above the multiplicity of numbers attached to those lines.” (TP 9) The rhizome, then, constitutes the exemplary case of what we are calling a hyper-system: a system that is inherently opposed to transcendence and unity. Rhizomes, like all hyper-systems, subtract unity, just as they will not allow the emergence of an “overcoding” supplementary dimension. “The multiple must be made, not by always adding a higher dimension, but rather in the simplest of ways, […] with the number of dimensions one already has available – always n –1 (the only way the one belongs to the multiple – always subtracted).” (TP 6) They are continually connecting up to an Outside. Think of Deleuze-Guattari’s description of the rhizomatized book: “The book only exists through the outside and on the outside.” (TP 4)

Hence the flatline, again, but in another guise. “All multiplicities are flat,” Deleuze-Guattari insist, “in the sense that they fill or occupy all their dimensions: we will therefore speak of a plane of consistency of multiplicities […] Multiplicities are defined by the outside: by the abstract line, the line of flight or deterritorialization according to which they change in nature and connect with other multiplicities. The plane of consistency (grid) is the outside of all multiplicities.” (TP 9)

The strange loop and the Deleuze-Guattari rhizome are closely related, although, interestingly, Hofstadter ultimately denies real immanence to the strange loop, arguing that any (apparent) strange loop is underpinned by what he calls an “inviolable layer.” One example he gives is of an author “Z, [who] exists only in novel by T. Likewise T exists only in a novel by E. And strangely E exists only in a novel – by Z, of course.” [307] Hofstadter says that this can happen, but only in something like a novel by author H, who remains suppelementary to – which is to say – transcendent of – the “tangled hierarchy.” Needless to say, though, Deleuze-Guattari put no limits on rhizomatic process: reality as such is constructed out of strange loops or rhizomes (which nevertheless can become “arborified”: closed down and hierarchized – the production of apparently “inviolable” layer is an effect of stratification, a Judgment of God). Which is to say: what might ultimately separate the strange loop from the rhizome is that, in the former, hierarchy is simply tangled, whereas in the latter it is radically abolished.

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[303] Kodwo Eshun, More Brilliant than the Sun: Adventures in Sonic Fiction, London: Quartet, 1998, 108

[304] The fusion of animals with human beings is an obsessive refrain in toy production, of course. Indeed, the names of many toys (Spiderman, Batman) almost sound like parodies of Freud’s case studies.

[306] See Godel.Escher, Bach, 689, “Escher’s Drawing Hands” for Hofstadter’s analysis of this picture.