Steven Shaviro

Doom Patrols


Preface

This book is a theoretical fiction about postmodernism. A theoretical fiction, 
because I treat discursive ideas and arguments in a way analogous to how a 
novelist treats characters and events. About postmodernism, because the term 
seems unavoidable in recent discussions of contemporary culture. Postmodernism 
is not a theoretical option or a stylistic choice; it is the very air we 
breathe. We are postmodern whether we like it or not, and whether we are aware 
of it or not. For this very reason, the word postmodernism isn't explicitly 
defined anywhere in my text. Its meaning is its use: or better, its multiple and 
contradictory uses, as these emerge gradually in the course of the book.

My approach to postmodernism is informed by the theorists I have read and 
written about in previous books: Bataille, Blanchot, and Deleuze and Guattari. 
But also by Marshall McLuhan and by Andy Warhol, whom I have come to regard as 
the most significant North American theorists of postmodernism, even if neither 
of them ever used the term. Kathy Acker and William Burroughs, exemplary 
postmodern thinkers by virtue of their literary fictions, are frequently present 
in these pages as well. And I have also been attentive to recent developments in 
biology, inspired by the neo-Darwinism of Richard Dawkins and by the late Morse 
Peckham's provocatively Darwinian approach to the study of culture. Working in 
the trace of all these figures, I do not propose anything like a balanced and 
well-grounded critique of postmodern culture. To do so would be to assert my own 
separation from the phenomena under discussion; but this is a claim that I find 
utterly unacceptable. I try, instead, to be as timely as possible; and also 
perhaps a bit untimely, in the sense that Deleuze has usefully rescued from 
Nietzsche. It's a matter of learning how to live and feel differently; or more 
accurately, of articulating ways in which we already are living and feeling 
differently, whether we like it or not. It's for this reason that I've used the 
pronoun we rather freely throughout the book, at the risk of seeming to impose a 
false solidarity upon the reader. All becomings are multiple, as Deleuze and 
Guattari insist; the we is one marker of this perpetual divergence. There are 
others; the book shifts frequently between the first, second, and third 
persons, and at times makes use as well of the Spivak gender-neutral third 
person singular pronouns e, em, and eir.

Doom Patrols, then, is not a work of historical scholarship or objective 
description or ideology critique or in-depth interpretation. I have scrupulously 
followed Oscar Wilde's two fine maxims, that the critic should avoid "careless 
habits of accuracy," and that e should strive "to see the object as in itself 
it really is not." Each chapter of Doom Patrols is headed by a proper name. But 
these names are themselves fictional, even when they ostensibly refer to actual 
individuals. For they are not identities, but singularities, as I try to work 
out in the course of the book. Any resemblances to persons living or dead, to 
objects or commercial products, or to other works of fiction and the characters 
and situations therein, are precisely that: resemblances, which is to say 
simulacra, deceptive and superficial imitations, fraudulent impersonations. All 
accurate depictions and representational correspondences, on the other hand, are 
accidental and unintended, and should be taken as signs of failure on the part 
of the author; the aim of the book being precisely to pervert and undermine all 
such forms and canons of representation.

Every text, as Burroughs says, is "a composite of many writers living and 
dead." To a very great extent, the present book is a collage of citations. When 
it comes to printed material, I have carefully observed "fair use" guidelines as 
specified by copyright law. But of course, many other voices have also entered 
into the making of this book: voices found in conversations, in email 
correspondence, in virtual encounters, and so on. I cannot list all of my 
obligations, but there are many people I would particularly like to thank. Kathy 
Acker, for general inspiration, and for introducing me to DOOM PATROL. Tatjana 
Pavlovic, for overall support during the time that most of this book was being 
written. Roddey Reid, for careful perusal of the manuscript, and for his 
incisive and useful comments. Lee Graham, Leo Daugherty, and Erin Casteel, for 
reading the manuscript chapter by chapter, as it was written, for sharing their 
reactions, and for helping me to discover my own sensibility. Kirby Olson, for 
provocative conversation on Sade, Klossowski, the food chain, and many other 
things. Hans Turley, for showing me the Way to Dino. Robert Neveldine, for many 
suggestions regarding My Bloody Valentine, and for comments and advice on music 
and other matters. Barry Schwabsky, years ago, for discovering Pullman's 
Galatea; and for much comment and discussion in the time since. Carlos Seligo, 
for information and inspiration on the subject of insects. Various friends at 
LambdaMOO, and especially legba, for listening, and for helping me to work my 
ideas through. Doug Brick, for initial guidance on Unix and theWorld Wide Web. 
Don Mitchell, Shannon McRae, and Craig Horman, for making it possible for me to 
set up a Web server. Victoria Landau, for the wonderful GIFs. Faye Hirsch, 
Laurie Weeks, Tom Wall, Susie Brubaker, Billy Flesch, Laura Quinney, Robert 
Thomas, Bucky Harris, Paul Keyes, Mark Lester, Therese Grisham, Brian Massumi, 
Sandi Buckley, and Michael Hardt, for friendship and intellectual stimulation.

Needless to say, this book is autobiographical. Every word.


1. Grant Morrison

Seattle, 1992. Don't believe the hype. I find myself stranded in this 
obsessively health-minded, puritanical, routinized, and relentlessly cheerful 
city, lifelines cut, lost without my vital supply of counteracting stimulants. 
Yes, some of the bands are still great, despite the insidious pressures of 
fame: Nirvana, Mudhoney, Seven-Year Bitch. And yes, more cartoonists are moving 
here every day. But otherwise, nothing. I strain to hear an echo of Burroughs' 
silent scream: "What scared you all into time? Into body? Into shit? I will tell 
you: the word." Say it again and again. But does anybody even remember? These 
prefabricated combinations of words, these carefully crafted HWP bodies, are 
all I can find, perhaps all there is. Don't smoke, don't do drugs, don't put up 
posters on utility poles, and don't sit on the sidewalk. Smile as often as 
possible. Above all, watch your mouth and be polite. As Kathy Acker writes of 
her female Don Quixote: "Being dead, [she] could no longer speak. Being born 
into and part of a male world, she had no speech of her own. All she could do 
was read male texts which weren't hers." It all comes from somewhere else. 
Affectless extraterrestrial zombies are in control; that's why we have a Space 
Needle. Living here is like perpetually scanning a set of boring personals ads. 
Everybody wants the same cozy evenings by the fireside, the same long walks on 
the beach. But it's all a facade. Organicism is a myth. Our bodies are never 
ourselves, our words and texts are never really our own. They aren't "us," but 
the forces that crush us, the norms to which we've been subjected.

As Burroughs knows, there's no getting around it: "To speak is to lie--to live 
is to collaborate." The only way out is the same way we came in. With 
postmodernism, as with drugs and pornography, the only way to get anywhere is to 
immerse yourself in it as much as possible, as mindlessly and as abjectly as 
possible, and then just sit back and enjoy it. One fix after another, one 
purchase after another, one orgasm after another; for there is no end to the 
accumulation: "the lonely hour of the 'last instance' never arrives" 
(Althusser). All we can do with words and images is appropriate them, distort 
them, turn them against themselves. All we can do is borrow them and waste them: 
spend what we haven't earned, and what we don't even possess. That's my 
definition of postmodern culture, but it's also Citibank's definition of a 
healthy economy, Jacques Lacan's definition of love, and J. G. Ballard's 
definition of life in the postindustrial ruins. It's a relief to realize that 
culture is after all empty, that its imposing edifices are just ruins or sound 
stage facades, that bodies are extremely plastic, that facial expressions are 
masks, that words in fact have nothing to express. For bodies and words are 
merely exchange-value: commodities or money. If postmodernism is indeed, as 
Fredric Jameson argues, "the cultural logic of late capitalism," then it is 
perhaps most accurately regarded as a frenzy of delirious shopping--or better 
still, of shoplifting. We engage in orgies of endless consumption, forever 
postponing the moment when the bills come due. The party never ends: S & L scams 
for the rich, Visa and Master Card financing for the middle class, and even 
occasional riots and looting for the poor. (As I write these lines, unpaid 
credit card debts come to more than 33% of my yearly salary; but since I don't 
expect ever to be able to pay these cards off, it feels as if I'm getting 
everything for free). It's all a whirl of extendible lines of credit, 
substitution of goods, and metamorphoses of capital. The postmodern economy 
unfolds in an eternal present. We aren't interested in duration or 
preservation; we devour and squander at a frantic pace, latching on to one thing 
only to throw it aside in favor of something else the very next moment. 
Everything is negotiable, everything is available for exchange. So let yourself 
go. Don't be a good citizen. Don't produce, expend. Be a parasite. Consume 
images and be consumed by them. Live off your Visa card, and scavenge in the 
debris.

Case in point: DOOM PATROL. Every month I run to the comic book store and grab 
the latest issue of this DC superhero comic. It's been written since 1989 (and 
up to the end of 1992) by Grant Morrison, with visual layouts usually by Richard 
Case, and ink finishes, coloring, and lettering by various others. Like most 
commercial comics, it is produced in accordance with a strict division of 
labor. DC Comics, a division of Warner Brothers, a Time Warner Entertainment 
Company, owns the rights to DOOM PATROL and everything inside it: "All 
characters featured in this issue, the distinctive likenesses thereof, and all 
related indicia are trademarks of DC Comics." I refer to the comic here only in 
accordance with the official legal guidelines for "fair use." After all, you can 
always go check it out for yourself: a new monthly issue is only $1.75. But then 
again, maybe not: if you haven't already seen last year's run, you probably 
never will. You see, these comic books aren't made to last. They are cheap 
commodities, printed in limited quantities on low-grade paper, designed for 
rapid turnover and almost instantaneous obsolescence. Comic book stores do not 
keep a large back stock: they order only the number of copies of a given issue 
that they think they'll be able to sell in the course of the month. Of course, 
if you have money to spare, you can always rummage through the used bins. Some 
people buy new comics and encase them in plastic without even reading them; they 
hope to sell them later for an enormous profit. The scarcity of old issues 
sometimes turns them into collectors' items that command high prices; a second 
circuit of speculation and exchange thus grafts itself onto the first one. The 
mechanically reproduced object has two lives: one as an ephemeral throw-away 
item, the other as a precious fetish. This also corresponds to two ways that 
comics are consumed by their audience. On the one hand, you need to leaf 
through them quickly, with what Walter Benjamin calls distracted attention: it's 
precisely in this suspended state that they become so strangely absorbing. On 
the other hand, you need to go back over them, studying every word and every 
panel, with a fanatical attention to detail. The letters pages of any comic 
book are filled with the most minutely passionate comments and observations. The 
letter-writers worry about inconsistencies and continuity errors, express 
approval or disapproval of the characters, engage in lengthy symbolic analyses, 
critique the artists' renderings, and make earnest suggestions for future plot 
directions. In this way, these books become interactive; as Marshall McLuhan was 
apparently the first to note, comics are "a highly participational form of 
expression." It's all so different from the old habits of highbrow literary 
culture. A comic book has fans, more than it does "readers." The medium is the 
message, as McLuhan always reminds us. The disjunctive mix of words and images, 
the lines and colors, the rapid cinematic cuts, the changes in plot direction, 
the tactility of newsprint at your fingertips: all these are more important than 
any particular content.

Grant Morrison is acutely aware of this situation. In his hands, DOOM PATROL 
runs the gamut of pop culture possibilities, consuming words, images, and styles 
with a vengeance. "The idea of comics," Morrison says, "is like sitting in front 
of your TV with a channel changer... Perception is a cut-up." His run of DOOM 
PATROL is a second-order, self-reflexive comic: it perverts and reinterprets 
the original book (written by Arnold Drake and drawn by Bruno Premiani) that 
appeared from the mid-60s to the early 70s (in the so-called Silver Age of 
comics). The old book advertised itself as "the world's most bizarre heroes"; 
it concerned a group of social and genetic misfits who put their strangeness to 
use by becoming superheroes. Morrison picks up on the theme of refusing and 
resisting social norms, and gives it mind-blowingly kinky new twists. The 
changes are enormous: the old book's naive earnestness is replaced by the 
tongue-in-cheek provocations of a sly hipster. For instance, the Chief of the 
old DOOM PATROL is a brilliant idealist always pontificating that "the world is 
full of catastrophes to be checked, evil to be fought, people to be helped," 
etc.; his equivalent in the new series (ostensibly the same character) is a 
cold-blooded cynic inclined deliberately to provoke trauma and stress among the 
members of his group, just so that he can scientifically observe and record 
their reactions. The villains become a lot more interesting as well; the 
Brotherhood of Evil in the original series gives way to the Brotherhood of 
Dada, a group that stands beyond good and evil, "celebrates the total absurdity 
of life," and laudably strives to undermine consensus reality in favor of 
"liberation, laughs, and libido." The new DOOM PATROL makes the old one sort of 
ridiculous, but without ever exuding that smug superiority (based on a 
self-congratulatory distance) that is so often the fatal flaw of camp recycling. 
Morrison doesn't disavow the juvenile fun of earlier generations of comic books; 
rather, he presupposes and builds upon their enjoyments. He states that one 
reason he was drawn to DOOM PATROL, in particular, was that, even in its first 
incarnation, "there was a certain dark and not-altogether-healthy glamour about 
these four characters... [they] slouched into town like a pack of junkyard dogs 
with a grudge against mankind." The old comic provides ample fodder to be 
cannibalized and gleefully blasted into hyperspace. And so, in the new DOOM 
PATROL, self-conscious estrangement works as an intensifier. We get more dumb 
heroics, slam-bang fights, and melodramatic plot twists than we ever bargained 
for.

All in all, it's a long way from Krypton. In the pages of Morrison's DOOM 
PATROL, we meet hermaphroditic aliens and transvestite city streets, orgone cops 
and psychedelic pranksters, Gnostic terrorists and insect theologians and 
cultists who worship Jack the Ripper as God. DOOM PATROLis refreshingly 
unconcerned with the platitudes of "truth, justice, and the American way." 
Instead, it rightly depicts the Pentagon as headquarters of a bizarre 
supernatural conspiracy aiming to institute worldwide standardization and 
puritanical repression. We're continually meeting sinister forces like the Men 
From NOWHERE, "normalcy agents" whose mission is to "eradicate eccentricities, 
anomalies, and peculiarities wherever we find them." Stability, normality, 
conformity, and everyday boredom are always the real enemies; DOOM PATROL 
deploys against them its vision of crazed flux in a decentered, goofily 
hyperreal world. It provides an exhilarating mixture of kitschy nonchalance and 
schizoid exaggeration; it is multilinear, eclectic, and self-consciously 
absurdist. Of course, it is garishly illustrated, with aggressive outlines and 
high-contrast colors, in a style that ranges from the hallucinogenic to the 
Gothic. The book features a shifting cast of characters, and wildly 
proliferating plotlines; its tone swings between parody and horror, between 
extravagant silliness, wickedly barbed satire, mystical revelation, and 
apocalyptic dread. And through it all, DOOM PATROL shows a marked fondness for 
puns and wordplay, as well as for the consumption of psychedelic drugs.

DOOM PATROL is just the fix I need. It has exactly the right mix of 
ingredients. Everything is in pieces, everything is borrowed or stolen. 
Plagiarism "is democratic," Morrison says, "because everyone can plagiarize... 
The text takes on a whole other meaning when passed through a plagiarist." And 
so, in exemplary postmodern fashion, Morrison vandalizes, appropriates, and 
recycles the most diverse, incongruous sources. And not just old comics. 
Burroughs and Borges, for instance, are frequently in evidence. A single page of 
DOOM PATROL may also contain allusions and references to Gnostic heresies, pop 
music, and chaos theory, to Thomas De Quincey and Andy Warhol and Jack Kirby, 
to the Brothers Grimm and Salvador Dali and Mr. Ed, to X-Ray Spex and My Bloody 
Valentine and T. S. Eliot and Terence McKenna. The comic shows an amazing 
capacity for sucking up and regurgitating the detritus of Anglo-American (and 
world) culture. It annihilates categories of high and low, proper and improper, 
subjecting all distinctions to a continual play of absorption, mimicry, frantic 
accumulation, and prodigal display. It opposes the dreariness of standardized 
routine with its continual show of recombinant delirium.

Pastiche of this sort is a lot like dressing in drag: in both, it's a matter of 
piling up and juxtaposing stereotypical traits, thereby transforming them into 
eccentricities and quirks. Jameson somewhat misses the point, I think, when he 
argues that postmodern pastiche is "a neutral practice of such mimicry, without 
any of parody's ulterior motives, amputated of the satiric impulse, devoid 
of... any conviction that alongside the abnormal tongue you have momentarily 
borrowed, some healthy linguistic normality still exists." For the "blankness" 
of postmodern style in drag and pastiche is of course inspired precisely by our 
deep suspicion of "ulterior motives." The very notion of a "healthy... 
normality" is at the root of what oppresses us. We've heard this stuff about 
"normality" and "health" far too many times before. We're not complaining that 
the values people once believed in are now empty; to the contrary, we're doing 
our best to empty them more and more. Get used to it. Stealing is a thrill in 
itself; this enjoyment is the real reason for postmodern appropriation. We aim 
to undermine those "convictions" of authenticity and truth, of proper meaning 
and right order, that sometimes seem to be as dear to Marxist dialecticians as 
they are to bureaucrats in the Pentagon. Speaking in my own voice is a tedious 
chore, one that the forces of law and order are all too eager to impose. They 
want to make me responsible, to chain me to myself. "Man could never do without 
blood, torture, and sacrifices when he felt the need to create a memory for 
himself" (Nietzsche). But forgetting myself, speaking in others' stolen voices, 
speaking in tongues: all this is pleasure and liberation. Let a hundred 
simulacra bloom, let a thousand costumes and disguises contend.

Plagiarism, blank mimicry, parasitic borrowing, speaking in tongues: these are 
the tactics of exemplary postmodern works like DOOM PATROL. Irresponsible 
freeplay is our best response to a cultural landscape supposedly composed of 
fragments and ruins. Critics who seek to rectify this situation are nothing but 
ventriloquists vainly casting their voices in the Potemkin villages of 
normality. A pervasive, and clinically paranoid, fantasy of much recent science 
fiction is the obsessive suspicion that nobody (not even oneself) is truly 
alive: everything is an illusion, a false facade, a machine. Cliff Steele, one 
of the key protagonists of DOOM PATROL, experiences just such a fantasy when the 
contents of his mind are downloaded into the virtual-reality matrix of a 
supercomputer. An emptying-out of the self answers the perception of a world in 
ruins. Organicism is dead, replaced by the atomization and routinization of 
bodily activity, and the increasing specialization and fragmentation of the 
objective world of science and culture. Now this fantasy is not a particularly 
new one, since it's already a staple of 19th- and 20th-century modernity: it's 
the delirium of that postmodernist before his time, Dr. Daniel Paul Schreber, as 
well as the "insignificant grouse against life" of the retro-modernist T. S. 
Eliot in The Waste Land. What may be new and different is the way in which we 
are now able to figure and respond to this situation.

Craig Owens and Celeste Olalquiaga, among others, suggest that Walter 
Benjamin's analysis of allegory is particularly appropriate to postmodern 
culture. In allegory, signs become materially insistent in their own right, 
detached from referential meaning; the mechanical piling up of fragments takes 
the place of organic completion or symbolic translation. The postmodern 
landscape is evoked by J. G. Ballard as a vista of garbage-strewn high-rise 
apartment buildings, shattered concrete littered with husks of burnt-out cars, 
snuff videos in incessant replay. Benjamin sees melancholia as a compulsive 
response to an intolerable situation: one in which everything seems to be 
fragments and ruins, in which we know that we are irrecuperably estranged from a 
supposed 'origin' to which we nonetheless continue compulsively to refer. 
Allegory "represents a continuous movement towards an unattainable origin, a 
movement marked by the awareness of a loss that it attempts to compensate with a 
baroque saturation and the obsessive reiteration of fragmented memories" 
(Olalquiaga). We imagine that these ruins once were whole, that these abandoned 
structures originally had a rational use, that these signs formerly had a 
sense, that we used to be organic bodies instead of robots. Dubious assumptions, 
to be sure; but as Nietzsche puts it, one has recourse to such fantasies and 
such arguments "when one has no other expedient." Anxious critics today, like 
Adorno and Eliot before them, feel cut off, with nowhere to turn; and so they 
shore up fragments against their ruin, seeking desperately to assuage their 
narcissistic wounds. But as Nietzsche knew, every proposed remedy to nihilism 
only increases the strength and depth of nihilism. We invent our lost objects 
posthumously. The more we brood over supposedly estranged origins, the more 
those origins take form retroactively, even as they recede from us. Melancholia 
is a recursive, self-replicating structure: it continually generates the very 
alienation of which it then complains. I want to suggest, therefore, that 
allegorical melancholy is less a mark of postmodernity per se, than it is a 
symptom of the desperation of traditional humanist intellectuals (whether of the 
Marxist or the conservative variety) who find themselves unable to adapt to what 
McLuhan calls "postliterate" culture. These people should get a life. In the 
postmodern world of DOOM PATROL, we couldn't care less about the decline of 
print literacy, of the nuclear family, of historical awareness, or of authentic 
class consciousness. We play gleefully in the rubble, for we know that such 
antiquated notions will never subvert anything; the grounds of contention and 
debate have long since shifted elsewhere.

Postmodernism is distinguished, then, not by any tendency to meditate on ruins 
and to allegorize its own disappointments; but by a propensity to invent new 
organs of perception and action, as Burroughs, McLuhan, David Cronenberg, 
Michael Taussig, and Donna Haraway all in various ways recommend. The cyborg, 
Haraway says, is a monstrous hybrid, "resolutely committed to partiality, irony, 
intimacy, and perversity." Pragmatically, this means that the fragmentation that 
Eliot bemoaned in The Waste Land has come full circle. In works like DOOM 
PATROL, dispersion and fragmentation are positive, affirmative, and even 
entertaining conditions. "We live today in the age of partial objects, bricks 
that have been shattered to bits, and leftovers. We no longer believe in the 
myth of the existence of fragments that, like pieces of an antique statue, are 
merely waiting for the last one to be turned up, so that they may all be glued 
back together to create a unity that is precisely the same as the original 
unity. We no longer believe in a primordial totality that once existed, or in a 
final totality that awaits us at some future date" (Deleuze and Guattari). In 
the postmodern world, fragments and ruins are no longer melancholy reminders of 
a vanished order. They've become instead the grotesque pieces of a hyperactive 
child's colossal erector set. And the party never ends: there's a standing 
invitation to mix and match the pieces as eclectically as we can. To a 
postmodern sensibility, there's no contradiction between cool and hot, irony 
and passion, playfulness and commitment, excitement and disgust, pleasure and 
anxiety, or camp distancing and involvement to the point of delirious obsession. 
I can read Kant in the morning, watch Wheel of Fortune over lunch, smoke a joint 
and cruise the mall in the afternoon, listen to Nirvana as I make dinner, use 
my Mac to download a program like Kant Generator Pro 1.2 (which generates 
endless streams of nonsensical text in the style of The Critique of Pure Reason) 
in the evening, and stimulate myself with a hot session of virtual sex on 
LambdaMOO just before going to bed. Postmodernity isn't just an option or a 
style or a particular stance. It is the very air we breathe, the viscous 
substance of our internal organs; "[it] is a river which sweeps me along, but I 
am the river; it is a tiger which destroys me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire 
which consumes me, but I am the fire" (Borges). It is only within the confines 
of postmodern space that contestation and resistance can ever possibly take 
place. For culture is not a living tradition or an orderly progression or an 
organic whole. It is rather a replete, high-tech supermarket, whose shelves we 
may ransack at will.

In the postmodern world, where everything is borrowed and transitory, identity 
explodes to such a point that we can't even say that it has been lost. We 
experience not the morbid fixity of melancholia, but the accelerated dislocation 
of convulsive hysteria and full-blown paranoia. We don't project allegories 
upon the ruins, so much as we restlessly traverse the bifurcations of Borgesian 
labyrinths: the infinitely divisible straight line suggested at the end of 
"Death and the Compass," or the proliferating multiplicities of "The Garden of 
Forking Paths." Here "nothing is true, everything is permitted"; every 
alternative gives way to the next, with no ground for choice among them. The 
paranoid discovery that there is no solidity or consistency in the world, that 
nothing is truly my own, at least frees me from the burdens of indebtedness and 
guilt. How much worse it would be if "virtual reality" were to become entirely 
actual, if all things were to achieve the fixity of final form. The same 
traumatic excess that produces the excruciating pain of psychotic disintegration 
also provides us with the vicarious, carnivalesque thrill of watching social 
processes twisted and magnified, as in funhouse mirrors. Does this mean that 
we've now reached the stage, dreaded by Benjamin, when mankind "can experience 
its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order"? Say rather 
that the King, the totalitarian Leader, loses his head when he is reflected in 
these delirious mazes. Andy Warhol made multiple portraits of Chairman Mao, 
just as he did of Marilyn and Elvis. Is there really any difference? What 
Taussig calls our culture's "mimetic excess" destabilizes all fixities of 
signification and power. The proliferation of Pop replicas, the paranoiacally 
elaborate plot twists of science fiction novels, the lurid colors of comic 
books: these cannot be dismissed merely as distorted adolescent representations, 
since their `distortions' make up the real itself. DOOM PATROL is less a surreal 
fantasy than it is a naturalistic rendering of our supersaturated cultural 
space. We never come to the end of simulation; there is no culminating moment 
(such as Jean Baudrillard melodramatically imagines) when everything has been 
captured, coded, and serialized. There's always the possibility, indeed the 
necessity, of once more upping the ante. The famous "extermination of the real," 
encountered in the form of a comic book apocalypse, turns out to be just a cheap 
plot device, a suspenseful (and ultimately ridiculous) twist designed to keep 
readers in a state of ungratified anticipation, the better to lead them to the 
next issue in the series. Don't produce, but waste and expend; for every 
destruction marks the birth of a yet realer real, of still another grotesque, 
outrageous, and irresponsible flowering of simulation.


2. Walt Disney

Some people think it's important to be sincere. Me, I think sincerity is 
overrated. After all, even Ronald Reagan was sincere. Especially Ronald Reagan: 
that's why he never lost an election. It's high time we got rid of all this 
California New Age crap. Sincerity is a postmodern malady, an all-too-human 
invention. Other mammals may show genuine affection, or they may perpetrate 
elaborate and artful deceptions; but in neither case do they evince the warm 
outpourings of a frank and naive heart. Only Walt Disney, Frank Capra, or Steven 
Spielberg can give us that. Why are we suckered into it, time and time again? 
The whole gruesome story must be told. A strange mutation arose in our hominid 
ancestors, probably less than two hundred thousand years ago. Call it the Reagan 
gene: the ability to deceive others by first of all deluding yourself. Pull the 
wool over your own eyes, as they say in the Church of the SubGenius. It's really 
a ruse of body language. If you believe your own lies, you don't give off the 
telltale subliminal signs of deception, and so you can manipulate other people 
all the more successfully. Only an animal that lies to itself is able to be 
sincere. That's why "Bob," patron saint of the Church of the SubGenius, is the 
world's greatest salesman. Dale Carnegie understood this trick; so did Reagan, 
and so does Ross Perot. Back in prehistoric times, the knack for opportunistic 
self-deception gave its possessors so enormous a selective advantage that it 
quickly spread throughout the hominid gene pool. Now, in our postmodern, 
posthistoric culture, it has become ubiquitous, a sort of "second nature." 
Sincerity is as American as apple pie, or violence, or optimism, or Amway. Have 
a nice day. We're all so warm and so concerned. Today is the first day of the 
rest of your life.

Do you remember Jim and Tammy Bakker? This is what they were all about. 
Sincerity is an affect raised to the second degree, a product of what Gerald 
Edelman calls "higher-order consciousness." It's something that's always already 
"in quotation marks." It's just a performance, but that doesn't make it any 
less heartfelt or real--quite the contrary. Drag queens greatly prize the 
category of "realness": they triumph when they can simulate to perfection that 
female gender whose organs of exquisite pleasure they so unfortunately lack. 
They are the truest women, for they are feminine even to excess. Method actors, 
too, regularly achieve heights of "authenticity" impossible in actual, everyday 
life. Both method actors and drag queens make themselves "as large as life and 
twice as natural" (Lewis Carroll), exhibiting a "cold, immutable perfection" 
that is otherwise realized only in butterfly mimicry (Severo Sarduy, citing 
Roger Caillois). And the same goes for Jim and Tammy, with their feel-good 
messages and their saccharine devotion to Jesus. Weren't the two of them always 
already in drag? No one could possibly be more earnest and more sincere. Think 
of the garish overload of Tammy's pancake makeup and Jim's welcoming smiles; 
think of the utopian nostalgia of Heritage USA, that hyperreal replication of 
small-town America where everything's just too good to be true. It makes me 
shiver with vertigo, even now. There's passion and excess for you. Too much is 
never enough. And too bad PTL ended up so poorly, with endless recriminations 
over (what else?) sex and money.

It's easy enough to sneer, of course. But I want to suggest that "it would be 
wrong" (as Richard Nixon once said in similar circumstances) to charge the 
Bakkers with hypocrisy. For they weren't exactly lying to us; at least, not any 
more than they were to themselves. It's just that they tempered their 
born-again Christianity with the classic American virtues of self-help and 
self-congratulation. Don't worry, be happy. As Harold Bloom suggests, it all 
goes back to Ralph Waldo Emerson. Self-manipulation through positive 
reinforcement is simply the new, improved, all-American version of what 
European metaphysicians call "the law of pure disguise" (Caillois), or the 
vertiginous ecstasy of simulation (Baudrillard). The all-American faith is that 
if you believe something hard enough, it must turn out to be true. "In the end," 
Nixon writes, "what matters is that you have always lived life to the hilt. I 
have been on the highest mountains and in the deepest valleys, but I have never 
lost sight of my destination." So follow that dream, as Jim and Tammy did with 
their vision of smiling suburban contentment. Even the most vapid conformity can 
become a thrilling adventure. And maybe Jim and Tammy overdid it; but then 
again, don't we all? We always push things too far and too hard, when it comes 
to manipulating ourselves and others. Far from losing sight of our destinations, 
we tend always to exceed our goals. Our very evolutionary success ironically 
leads us, as Sarduy puts it, into the "lethal squandering of ourselves."

When those uptight Europeans complain about American vulgarity, what they're 
really objecting to is this jubilantly smug and fatal excess that insinuates 
itself into all of our endeavors. In point of fact, they "squander" themselves 
as much and as lethally as we do; but they always dignify their stupidities 
with the factitious resonances of high tragedy. Here, things are different. We 
prefer to repeat history a second time, as farce. Instead of hearkening 
patiently to the voice of Being, strolling alongside Heidegger on a tranquil 
pathway in the Black Forest, we'd much rather take a raucous rollercoaster ride 
past the Bavarian castle in Disneyland. The smiley face is our answer to the 
anguish of being-towards-death. There's far greater delirium in everyday 
tackiness than there is in apocalyptic sublimity. As Ed Anger, columnist for the 
Weekly World News, prophetically wrote way back in the early 80s, "what scares 
the Kremlin bosses isn't America's nuclear arsenal; what scares them is that 
we'll open a K-Mart in Moscow, and the Russian people will like it." Ed Anger 
understood what the strategic planners didn't; for this is indeed how we 'won' 
the Cold War. Star Wars and the CIA had almost nothing to do with it. But the 
more things change, the more they remain the same. Despite McDonald's in Moscow, 
and despite the opening of EuroDisney, European misunderstandings of America 
have only increased. Even Jean Baudrillard, that famous connoisseur of 
hyperreality, doesn't really get it. Baudrillard writes, for instance, that 
"Disneyland is there to conceal the fact that it is the 'real' country, all of 
'real' America, which is Disneyland... Disneyland is presented as imaginary in 
order to make us believe that the rest is real, when in fact all of Los Angeles 
and the America surrounding it are no longer real, but of the order of the 
hyperreal and of simulation." Reading such lines, I want to say to Baudrillard 
what Tonto said to the Lone Ranger: what do you mean "us," white man? Only an 
old-fashioned, echt European would think there's a mystery here. Actually, 
nothing has been concealed. The secret that Baudrillard prides himself on 
unraveling is already known to every American. We've never believed that "the 
rest is real"; just visit any shopping mall. This absolute continuity and 
resemblance--between Disneyland and everything else--is something we take 
utterly for granted. Disneyland doesn't serve the purposes of deterrence and 
dissuasion, as Baudrillard quaintly imagines. Like all theme parks, its function 
is rather one of encouragement and exhortation, or even provocation. It teaches 
us how to behave, in this new postmodern, robot-ridden service economy. Whistle 
while you work. Don't worry about health care; just put on a happy face. Like 
Reagan or PTL or LSD, Disneyland performs a hyperbolic heightening of ordinary 
experience. Think of the android Presidents, or of those talking birds in the 
Tikki room. It's all so bland and so pretty, and at the same time so 
oversaturated with sound, color, and motion, that the effect is violently 
psychedelic. "The Day the World Turned DayGlo," as the song by X-Ray Spex put 
it. Now even everyday banality can have the shattering intensity of a full-blown 
psychosis. Disneyland incites us to live life to the hilt; its rides take us 
through the highest mountains and the deepest valleys.

Everybody knows that in postmodern society money and consumer objects take on 
strange, independent lives of their own. In Philip K. Dick's Ubik, for instance, 
your shower, your refrigerator, and your front door all talk back to you when 
you're down and out; they threaten to sue you if you don't pay them what you 
owe for services rendered. But if you're a success, in the time-honored American 
way, then your own face starts to replace those of the Presidents on all the 
coins and bills. A similar conundrum arises at one point in DOOM PATROL: how 
much can a dollar bill buy, we're asked, and how much a painting of a dollar 
bill that's signed by Andy Warhol? Complain all you want; only don't say that 
you've been fooled by politicians, money, and machines. You may not like what 
they do, but you've known about it all along. As Scott Bukatman recounts, "in 
1956 the opening ceremonies of Disneyland were telecast live; among the hosts 
was Ronald Reagan, who would one day be represented by a simulacrum therein." 
It's no accident that both Dick (We Can Build You) and J. G. Ballard (Hello 
America) share Disney's obsession with robot Presidential replicas. 
Audioanimatrons, even more than the real-life Presidents they simulate, are the 
apex of sincerity. They say what they mean and they mean what they say, without 
a hint of menacing ambiguity. Like P. B. Shelley's skylark, they neither look 
before and after, nor pine for what is not. They live the ecstasy of an eternal 
now, entirely consumed in the intensity of pure speech acts, performative 
utterances repeated endlessly, forever the same, and discharged without regret 
or remainder. Such is the Zen bliss of Zippy the Pinhead, watching his laundry 
tumble in the washing machine. It's the state of grace aspired to by William 
Gibson's cyberpunk heroes, the moment when thought and action are one. And it's 
the goal and promise of postmodern therapy, the parole pleine glimmering in the 
interminable distances of Lacanian psychoanalysis. But no one has achieved more 
in this direction than Disney's audioanimatrons. They've gone further than you 
and I, further even than the "real" Reagan. They've reached such purity in the 
art of sincere self-presence, that they aren't bothered by any residual 
consciousness at all. We used to wonder whether machines could pass the Turing 
test, and fool an outside observer into thinking they were human. But the real 
question is rather whether we humans can pass the productivity test, and prove 
ourselves to be as loyal and effective service industry workers as are androids. 
As Disney himself puts it, simulacrally addressing us from the Great Beyond of 
cryogenic sleep, audioanimatrons don't take coffee breaks, and they don't ever 
ask for raises or go on strike. Forget the old frontier, then. Disneyland--or 
America--is now so intensely real that it attains the condition that Burroughs 
ascribed only to the sinister city of Yass-Waddah: a place where everything is 
true, and nothing is permitted.

Yes, the magic of objects is everywhere in the Magic Kingdom. Call it 
"fetishism" if you must, but remember that it all takes place in plain view, 
without deception or repression. The prevalent theories are sadly out of date. 
Marx explains fetishism as a result of the alienation of the product from its 
producer, while Freud regards it as a symbolic replacement for an irrecoverable 
object lost in a primordial trauma. Both see the aliveness of objects as an 
illusion, as the projection of a vitality that really resides in the subject. 
Both say that the fetish is a substitute, a symptom of "lack," a veiled 
displacement of truer and more basic processes. Such theories have great 
explanatory and interpretive power; but it's for that very reason that they 
utterly miss the mark. They work quite effectively to dissolve and to 'explain 
away' the appearances; which means, ironically, that Disney's logic of 
hyperbolic appearance is the very thing that they are unable to grasp. If all 
you can say about a drag queen is that she's "really" a man, or that her 
ostentation conceals a defect, then you've missed the whole point of her 
performance. Burroughs offers a much better account of postmodern culture, when 
he says that we actually do live in an animate universe, where everything is 
alive and filled with (usually hostile) intentions. Don't flatter or comfort 
yourself by imagining that qualities like intelligence are exclusively human 
traits, and that we just project them phantasmatically onto objects. That old 
humanist litany isn't much use anymore, now that all distinctions between nature 
and technology have collapsed. Qualities like intelligence and aggressivity and 
sincerity pop up all the time in distributed networks, as any Internet user 
knows. The wires swarm with daemons, and pretty soon they will also be 
populated by nanomachines. Commodities and "information" aren't just abstract 
systems of equivalence and exchange, as Marx, Freud, and Baudrillard 
optimistically suppose. They are now fully incarnated entities in their own 
rights, wholly present body and soul. Money talks, and whatever it says must 
always be taken literally. The "fetish" is always realer and more alive than 
anything it's alleged to have replaced.

Indeed, American culture is so abundantly fetishistic that it forces us to 
utterly redefine the concept. We saturate the world with our cheerfully animated 
products. The splendors of Disneyland, the excesses of Jim and Tammy, the 
platitudinous certitudes of Reagan--none of these can be said to supplement a 
lack, or to conceal and compensate for some hidden want. Haven't you heard, 
penis envy is out of date. American culture is entirely premised on "powers of 
the false," as Deleuze terms it in discussing the quintessentially American con 
men and forgers who populate the films of Orson Welles. Drag rules. This means, 
not that we are denying our origins or fleeing from the truth, but that "truth" 
and "origin" are no longer valid categories of judgment. The old Eurocentric 
modernists used to whine that "we had the experience, but missed the meaning" 
(T. S. Eliot). But for us, now, today, this isn't a problem; rather it's a cause 
for celebration. Meaning only gets in the way of enjoyment. Facts, as Ronald 
Reagan once said, are stupid things. America is the one country to which the 
European concept of kitsch never really applies. The difference between the 
"original" Parthenon in Athens and the Parthenon in Nashville, Tennessee is that 
the Parthenon in Nashville no longer supports the idea of there being any such 
thing as an intelligible difference between the two Parthenons. This is what 
Welles and Disney both so brilliantly understood. As Deleuze and Guattari put 
it, simulation is not a mere process of substitution, but a vital, generative 
principle: the way that the Real is effectively produced. We manufacture 
selves--or we hire cheap Third World labor to do it for us--just as we 
manufacture automobiles and transistors. And in a rigorously Spinozistic sense, 
we must say that everything thus produced is exactly as authentic and as perfect 
as it is capable of being. It's real, it's actual, everything is satisfactual. 
So live life to the hilt; be all that you can be. Or, as Brian Massumi rewrites 
the slogan, be all you cannot be. Why worry about histories of loss and 
replacement, why look before and after and pine for what is not, when today is 
the first day of the rest of your life?

Mass-mediated politicians and Disneyfied audioanimatrons inhabit a strange 
postmodern space, a "distancing at the heart of the thing" that "is not a simple 
change of place," but rather a self-distancing in which the object itself is 
transformed into its own image or simulacrum (Blanchot). Such is the 
inconceivable, infinite distance of cyberspace: the distance that remains when 
all distance has been abolished, or the delay that manifests itself when all 
communication is instantaneous. This is the space-time of self-deceiving 
sincerity; but it's also the "ground" for a certain cool, ironic detachment, 
the famous postmodern "waning of affect" that J. G. Ballard (who coined the 
phrase) gets a perverse kick from, but that moralists and culture critics so 
routinely deplore. It shouldn't be called irony, exactly. The Weekly World News 
wasn't being ironic when it revealed, in September 1992, that Senator Sam Nunn 
was a space alien. It was merely taking everything literally, accepting events 
entirely at face value. The news about Nunn might have seemed surprising at 
first, but isn't it all too obvious now? It's really just a matter of technology 
finally catching up with our evolutionary potential. The genes for a Nunn or a 
Reagan had already emerged fifty to a hundred thousand years ago. But there 
could be no Nunn without space travel, just as there could be no Reagan without 
television. As McLuhan suggests, every mutation of technology opens up new 
virtual spaces to explore. The current electronic exteriorization of our 
nervous systems, together with its accompanying movement of Blanchotian inner 
distanciation, radically transforms the very nature of our bodies and what they 
can do. That's why netsex, or teledildonics, is so big today--together with 
tattooing, body piercing, and scarification. The surface of the body meets the 
surface of the screen. Virtual fucks and visible incisions alike testify to a 
vast remapping of corporeal space. Both sorts of ritual mark our participation 
in the ecstatic tribalism of McLuhan's "global village."

The supposed "lack of affect" and ironic blankness of postmodern culture "is in 
fact a surfeit," as Brian Massumi rightly insists. Our tendency to frame all we 
do and say "in quotation marks," to live our experiences vicariously and over 
long distances, shouldn't be disparaged as a defensive retreat or as a numbing 
lapse in responsiveness. To the contrary: it's in this very manner that we are 
best able to engage the brave new world of electronics and audioanimatronics. 
What you call kitsch is my way of living life to the hilt, of heightening 
experience to a fever pitch, of draining each moment to the lees. What you call 
affectless irony is for me a fabulous adventure, a rush of sexual excitement: a 
frenzied yet precise exploration of the unimagined depths of cyberspace, and of 
the expanded dimensions of my skin. So long live the new flesh. Let it howl in 
an orgasmic scream. When Disney rises at last from his years of cryogenic 
slumber, he'll discover a world in which hilarious perversions and psychedelic 
outrages run amok. Darius James thus envisions the scene in his brilliant novel 
Negrophobia: "A gigantic cherry-shaped nose, looking as if it were dipped in a 
crock of chocolate fondue, cleaves to the sides of Sleeping Beauty Castle. A 
green paste leaks from its nostrils.... The Disney Magic Mall is overrun with 
Zombies, who shamble through the ice-cream-and-candy splendor of Fantasyland and 
ride the Monorail over the technological wonders of Tomorrowland.... Disney's 
face blackens and melts. Underneath is a network of circuitry wire and tiny 
blinking lights... Walt's eyes flash and his head blows up. His body flares 
into flames... Goofy's head grins on top of a tall wooden stake. Blood drips 
from his eyes... The Abraham Lincoln Robot stumbles about in confusion." The 
master of audioanimatronics is himself a crazed robot; Uncle Walt has at last 
become one with his creations. This raging scatological chaos is something that 
only Disney's genius could have set into motion. The marketing of images, even 
of Disneyland's inanely racist ones, has an uncontrollable logic of its own. Our 
American multicultures and countercultures are themselves hyperbolic fractal 
expansions of Disney's delirious embrace of sincerity and cleanliness and 
niceness and grotesque sentimentalism and white middle American 
hyperconformity.

So let us say that we are ironic only through an excess of sincerity, and 
deviant precisely by virtue of our knee-jerk conformity, our desperate anxiety 
to please. The pure products of America go crazy. This ability to deceive 
ourselves and to be sincere-- far more than language or sexuality--is the 
defining characteristic of what it means to be American, or to be human. 
Self-deception is not an effect of language or of the unconscious, but precisely 
the reverse: sincerity is the ongoing practice, the "technology of the subject" 
as Foucault might put it, that alone makes such constructions as language and 
sexuality possible. The psychical agencies--id, ego, superego--that populated 
Freud's quaint old middle-European cartography of the mind appear to us today as 
creaky, worn-out audioanimatrons, badly in need of replacement by newer and more 
high-tech models. It's simply a question of engineering--or of "imagineering," 
as the Disney corporation likes to put it. The point is not to resist by 
clinging to older visions and values--a mistake made alike by the survivalist 
Right and the communitarian Left. Let us rather push further and further, into 
ever new landscapes of simulation and delusion. Our only chance lies in this: to 
remake ourselves over and over again, frenetically chasing fashion, keeping up 
with state-of-the-art technology, and always being sure to purchase (or steal) 
the latest upgrades. Isn't that the American way? Even the most arcane fads can 
be marketed for success, but nothing stays hip for very long. The regulative 
principle of postmodern irony is that we can survive only by squandering 
ourselves, which is to say by becoming yet more cynical than our controllers. 
"Life is a rollercoaster," Nixon writes, "exhilarating on the way up and 
breathtaking on the way down." Next stop, Space Mountain. Like it or not, we're 
all aboard for the ride.


3. Bilinda Butcher

It's loud, very loud. Swirling, churning guitars, aggressive distortion and 
feedback. Endlessly repeated, not-quite-tonal riffs. Blinding strobe lights. 
Noise approaching the threshold of pain, even of ruptured eardrums. This music 
doesn't just assault your ears; it invests your entire body. It grasps you in a 
physical embrace, sliding over your skin, penetrating your orifices, slipping 
inside you and squeezing your internal organs. You're brutalized by the 
assault--or maybe not quite. For beyond the aggression of its sheer noise, this 
music is somehow welcoming, inviting, even caressing. "After about 30 seconds 
the adrenaline sets in; people are screaming and shaking their fists" (Mark 
Kemp). But then something clicks and quietly shifts, in your body and in your 
brain. "After about four minutes, a calm takes over. The noise continues. After 
five minutes, a feeling of utter peace takes over. Or violence." It could be 
either, it could be both: you can no longer make sense of such a gross 
opposition. It's like a Zen illumination, perhaps; or an endorphin high, at the 
moment just before death. By taking noise "way past the point of acceptedness," 
My Bloody Valentine guitarist Kevin Shields says, "it takes on a meaning in 
itself," even if "I don't know exactly what it means..." This isn't just a case 
of being overwhelmed by the sublime. You can't stand it, and you can't see 
beyond it; but for that very reason you get used to it after a while, and you 
never want it to end. As with psychedelic drugs--at least sometimes--sensory 
overload is only the beginning. There's a whole new world out there, beyond the 
experience of shock. You enter a realm of "microperceptions," as Deleuze and 
Guattari put it: "microintervals between matters, colors and sounds engulfing 
lines of flight, world lines, lines of transparency and intersection." Things 
rush up on you, suddenly, in waves, and then slip ever-so-slightly out of 
focus. Densely articulated textures fade in and out. You pick up on subtleties 
you didn't notice before: wavering rhythms, minor chords, muddily shifting 
tonalities, synthesized special effects, Bilinda Butcher's floating vocal lines 
buried deep within the mix. You even hear fragments of pop melodies, 
tentatively emerging and then quickly dissolving; it's as if they were suspended 
in a chemical solution. These are the qualities sometimes described as 'dreamy' 
and 'ethereal' by listeners who haven't played the Loveless CD at sufficiently 
high volume. But such words fail to convey how deeply embodied--how physically 
attentive, you might say--this music actually is. The sound may be vague, murky, 
"miasmatic" (Rachel Felder); but the murk is precisely rendered, a concrete, 
material presence. It surrounds you, envelops you, enfolds itself around you. 
This music is indeed 'spacey,' in the literal sense that it seems to have a lot 
of room inside: room to wander about and to get lost in. Everything blurs, as in 
a musical equivalent of soft focus; everything shades into everything else. But 
no, that's not quite right; rather, you're stunned by the realization that 
there are so many types of ambiguity, so many distinct shades of gray. Your 
nerves and your viscera are tingling, as they register the tiniest differences, 
the most minute alterations. These are changes beyond, or beneath, the threshold 
of ordinary perception. Your sensory organs are being stretched or contracted 
far outside their usual range. In such altered states, as Deleuze and Guattari 
say, "the imperceptible is perceived."

Of course, you don't figure all this out until afterwards. You begin to make 
sense of it only as it slips away. The concert is over, and now it's the 
relative silence of the street that hits you with the force of a shock. You feel 
at once exhilarated and drained. The ringing in your ears takes quite a while 
to subside. Everything in the world has returned more or less to its proper 
place, but in an eerie state of abeyance. My Bloody Valentine's music leaves you 
with a strange post-coital feeling: as if you knew you'd had an orgasm recently, 
but you couldn't remember when, or even exactly how it felt. Maybe this is what 
sex with space aliens would be like. In any case, the music never builds up to 
a phallic climax, in the timeworn manner of mainstream rock and roll and other 
such classical narrative forms. But it also evades--or defuses--the relentless 
erotic pulse of mutant dance forms like disco, techno, and rave. And it eschews 
as well the frustrated-boy rage and angst of the 'industrial' sound. As 
guitarist/songwriter Kevin Shields puts it, this music expresses, not "pure, 
unadulterated anger," but "kind of all emotions rolled into one." An intensity 
freed from specific content or focus; an erotic, bodily feel no longer tied to 
particular organs or zones. A sound as floating, enigmatic, and decentered--as 
'ambient' and all-embracing--as anything by Brian Eno, but charged with a 
violent sense of physicality that Eno's music simply does not possess.

It may have something to do with changing notions of urban space. The modern 
urban experience, as Walter Benjamin suggested, has been one of continual 
shock--and of repeated adjustment to shock. This repetitive cycle is oppressive; 
yet it's also where Benjamin placed his hopes for revolutionary revitalization. 
But now, as we approach the millenium, the entire process seems to have run 
down, or reached a point of diminishing returns. Today, we take urban ruins for 
granted. Their givenness and everydayness--rather than any cycle of shock and 
habituation--is the trademark of the new, postmodern urbanism. You can trace it 
in the postapocalyptic sensibility of bands like My Bloody Valentine and Sonic 
Youth, or of novels like Samuel Delany's Dhalgren; but also in the glitzy 
architecture of the Westin Bonaventure Hotel, as described by Fredric Jameson. 
What these all have in common is that they have moved beyond shock, and into a 
new mode--a mannerism even--of dislocation. You'd feel at a loss if things 
weren't this confused and broken down. Disorientation is now part and parcel of 
your life. You are like Delany's protagonist, who can remember everything 
perfectly, with the sole exception of his own name. Postmodern space, as 
Jameson nicely puts it, "stands as something like an imperative to grow new 
organs, to expand our sensorium and our body to some new, yet unimaginable, 
perhaps ultimately impossible, dimensions." My Bloody Valentine's music rises to 
this challenge, expands to inhabit this new space. Call it anti-Muzak for 
postmodern shopping malls.

Such postmodern spaces are "anexact," as Deleuze & Guattari put it: "zones of 
indeterminacy" whose topology is inconsistent, whose contours are vague. But 
this indeterminacy is not a subjective illusion, not the result of insufficient 
precision. Rather, it is a perfectly objective indeterminacy: an effect that is 
well-defined in its own right, and that must be carefully produced. So too for 
the blurriness of My Bloody Valentine's sound. What they're after is not a 
rigorous musical structure, nor even a particular sonic texture, but something 
stranger and more evanescent: say a change in the atmosphere, an inflection of 
the ambiance. It takes place neither in the noise itself, nor in the 
performance, nor even in the bodies and minds of the audience; but somehow in 
between all these. This music isn't about virtuosity, or rock 'n' roll 
songcraft, or pop formalism. It seems very much an aberrant outgrowth of the 
punk 'do-it-yourself' aesthetic: even though nothing about it is the least bit 
spontaneous or improvised, and indeed the band is notorious for taking years in 
the studio to cut a single album. It's all in the way that everything's 
diffused, displaced, obliquely addressed. This music is all medium, and no 
message. On the Loveless CD, for instance, you don't get a sense of distinct, 
individual songs, since each track tends to bleed into the next. In live shows, 
the disorientation is still more radical. Glaring lights are trained upon the 
audience, making the band extremely hard to see. Indeed, the musicians seem 
scarcely to acknowledge the listeners' presence at all. Kevin's hair hangs down 
over his face, and Debbie Googe plays bass with her back to the auditorium. The 
four of them stand far apart from one another on stage, so that the band doesn't 
come across as a collective unity. But neither does any one of them come 
forward as a frontperson, to provide a point of visual and musical focus. 
Bilinda and Kevin eschew the cliched roles of virtuoso guitarist and lead 
singer; they trade instrumental and vocal lines unostentatiously and 
continually. In any case, there are no guitar solos to speak of, and the vocals 
are too indistinct for you to make out the words. Even Colm O'Ciosoig's drumming 
is nearly inaudible, buried deep in the mix. This band isn't driven by its 
rhythm section in a conventional rock 'n' roll sense. The usual hierarchy of 
rhythm (at the bottom, the steady foundation), harmony (in the middle, 
providing the armature) and melody (on the top, with leading lines and hooks) 
gets broken down, and reshuffled into new combinations. Often it's impossible to 
determine which of the musicians is producing any given sound, or even which 
sounds are being played live, and which have been pre-synthesized. In short, all 
the usual cues are missing; you are brought into forced contact with the gritty 
texture, the raw materiality of the music, because you can't organize your 
experience of it in any pre-programmed way. Your attention is continually being 
diverted and distracted, even as your senses are stimulated into hyperdrive. 
This sound is "cool," precisely in McLuhan's sense of the word: ubiquitous and 
all-enveloping, but at the same time so non-directive, so fuzzy or 'low 
definition,' that it compels you to become actively involved.


4. Michel Foucault

Somebody wrote a letter to Ann Landers once, asking about oral sex. "Does it 
mean they just talk about it?," the pseudonymous "Housewife from Maine" wanted 
to know, or was something more involved? Ann Landers replied that oral sex was a 
perfectly healthy and normal human activity, not a perversion, and that there 
was indeed more to it than just talk. She urged "Housewife from Maine" to "use 
your imagination" to figure it all out, given that the details could not be 
printed in a "family newspaper." As a last resort, Ann recommended consulting 
her entry on the topic--complete with up-to-date, expert medical advice--in The 
Ann Landers Encyclopedia.

This story, I think, would have delighted Foucault, for it envelops all his 
theses on sex and power. "Housewife from Maine" was righter than she knew: 
sexuality is indeed "oral" in our culture, in the precise sense that it is 
continually being channelled into discourse. Sexual practices are judged and 
characterized in relation to certain behavioral norms, submitted to the 
authority of medical experts, and read as signs or symptoms of basic personality 
structures. They are given their proper places in Ann Landers' Encyclopedia, 
with its strange mixture of inspirational anecdotes, medical advice, and 
lessons in etiquette. "Oral sex" is not named in any cruder or more direct 
language, out of a grotesque deference to the sensibilities of the nuclear 
family; yet the way in which it is 'repressed' actually works to titillate the 
reader. Sex is not a bodily activity in our society, a matter of pleasures and 
pains, so much as it is the locus of a certain "truth," grist for the mill of a 
massive apparatus of knowledge. We have had the meaning, but missed the 
experience. What would happen, after all, if "Housewife from Maine" took Ann's 
advice and used her imagination? Foucault's whole endeavor is to make us aware 
how limited our imaginations really are, especially when it comes to sexuality. 
As Deleuze says, paraphrasing Spinoza, we still do not know what our bodies can 
do. Even our wildest s&m fantasies are all too often trite and formulaic. This 
is why Foucault ultimately concludes that "sex is boring." His History of 
Sexuality is an account, not of sexual practices themselves, but "of the manner 
in which pleasure, desires, and sexual behaviors have been problematized, 
reflected upon and thought about" at different times and across different 
cultures. It's an amazing story of contingencies and mutations, of violence and 
cunning, of continual innovations in methods of control, of exquisite 
refinements in the arts of cruelty. No structure of power relations remains 
stable for very long; no position can be taken for granted, and no outcome is 
preordained. It's a long way from Athens to Berkeley; the "care of the self" in 
ancient Greece is almost "diametrically opposed" to "the Californian cult of the 
self." Obsessive self-examination, focusing on sexual behavior, is of course 
central to both; but in the service of altogether different motives and values. 
The one preaches moderation and self-fashioning, the other authenticity and 
self-discovery. It's hard to decide which is worse. Yet for all these historical 
differences in paradigms of self and sexuality, the real problem is that things 
never change enough. Problematizations differ, but concrete behaviors do not. 
What finally most depresses Foucault is the monotonous sameness of sexual 
practices and behaviors, from one time and culture to another. Always the same 
positions, the same rhythms, the same rituals, the same binary divisions of 
gender. Foucault discovers, beneath our apparent sexual variety, an appalling 
paucity of imagination and invention. Hence his famous call, at the end of The 
Order of Things, for the disappearance and "absolute dispersion of Man." And 
hence the epigraph from Rene Char, which graces the second and third volumes of 
The History of Sexuality: "human history is a long sequence of synonyms for the 
same word. It is our duty to contradict this."

Far from simply exalting cultural difference, we might do better to ask why 
human cultures aren't more diverse than in fact they are. From a biological 
standpoint, our sex lives are exceedingly dreary. Other organisms are far more 
inventive. Consider, for instance, the bedbug (Cimex lectularius). The males of 
this species fuck by stabbing and puncturing their conspecifics' abdomens. 
Every copulation is a wound. The victims of these aggressions, males and females 
alike, are permanently scarred; and they carry their rapists' sperm in their 
circulatory systems for the rest of their lives. As Howard Ensign Evans puts 
it: "the image of a covey of bedbugs disporting themselves in this manner while 
waiting for a blood meal--copulating with either sex and at the same time 
nourishing one another with their semen--makes Sodom seem as pure as the 
Vatican." Even Sade never imagined such a scenario. No Californian cult of the 
self here! We humans should be thankful that bedbugs regard us not as sex 
partners, but only as food. --But if all this penetration seems too obnoxiously 
macho, then consider instead the whiptail lizard (Cnemidophorus uniparens) of 
the American Southwest. This species is parthenogenetic: it consists entirely 
of females, who reproduce without any need for sperm. But that doesn't stop them 
from engaging in "pseudocopulation": they mount and thrust at one another, 
variously adopting what in other species would be considered 'masculine' and 
'feminine' roles. Though no genetic material is actually exchanged, this gender 
role-playing has real physiological and reproductive effects: animals who have 
pseudocopulated are far more fertile than those who have not. "Simulated" sexual 
acts produce measurable hormonal changes. Drag performance is essential to these 
lizards' life cycle.

Such delightful or gruesome anecdotes fill the pages of natural history. Where 
did we ever get the strange idea that nature--as opposed to culture--is 
ahistorical and timeless? We are far too impressed by our own cleverness and 
self-consciousness. But "human sex," Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan remind us, 
"is just one example among thirty million or more kinds of sex." We need to stop 
telling ourselves the same old anthropocentric bedtime stories. "Man is a recent 
invention," as Foucault insists; the history of sexuality long predates our 
all-too-human concerns. Margulis and Sagan trace its prehuman genealogy. 
Sexuality first appeared in the world as a form of primordial cannibalism. In 
the anaerobic earth of three and a half billion years ago, terrorist bacteria 
preyed relentlessly on one another. Every random encounter was fraught with 
violence and danger. Cells continually penetrated and devoured other cells. 
"Everywhere poisonous mixtures seethed in the depths of bodies; abominable 
necromancies, incests, and feedings were elaborated" (Deleuze). But at some 
point, a certain aggressor cell had an attack of indigestion. Its victim's DNA 
resisted digestive breakdown. Instead, it continued to manufacture proteins in 
its new environment of alien cytoplasm. No cellular reproduction had occurred, 
yet a new, monstrous hybrid was born: the first sexual being, the first 
infection. The universal feeding frenzy was transformed into a delirious erotic 
intermingling: "cannibalism became fertilization, and meiosis was forced to 
evolve" (Margulis and Sagan). And that's why plants and animals have gonads 
today. It's also why our cells are stuffed with organelles: mitochondria that 
let us breathe oxygen, chloroplasts that plants use to photosynthesize. These 
are all contingent effects of unplanned, miscegenetic encounters: the 
evolutionary fallout of prokaryotic sex.

Microscopic sexuality is indeed no fantasy. Margulis and Sagan gleefully detail 
the "fluid promiscuity" of bacteria, the conjoining and communication of their 
bodies, a perpetual orgy that puts all eukaryotic sexuality to shame. "Bacterial 
cells donate and receive genes in the form of viruses and plasmids all the 
time": there's no clear distinction between copulation and infection. Bacteria 
also have no fixed gender; they engage in a continual "travesty of 
transvestism," repeatedly trading "fertility factors" back and forth. Bacterial 
DNA is easily exchanged, transmuted, and recombined, because it floats freely 
through the cell, rather than being locked up inside a nucleus. Bacteria are as 
it were 'naturally' decentered; only they experience this decenteredness as 
something other than the loss or lack of a center. The earth's most primordial 
inhabitants, they are nonetheless free from any concern about origins, any 
metaphysical nostalgia or Heideggerian yearning. Our human ontological 
insecurity is largely a result of our projecting upon the cosmos certain 
heterosexual male anxieties over procreation and paternity. How stereotypically 
mammalian! In bacteria, to the contrary, sexuality and reproduction are 
entirely distinct. They reproduce asexually, by simple fission; they have sex 
non-reproductively, in a furor of genetic exchange. It took a long and painful 
evolutionary history, stretching over billions of years, to finally link sex 
and reproduction together. What a strange conceit, to imagine that this linkage 
is somehow pre-given or 'natural,' inscribed in the very order of things!

So no, I won't play culture to your nature; it's time to have done with the 
whole idea of their distinction. Deleuze and Guattari show us the schizo on his 
walk, at a point "before the man-nature dichotomy, before all the coordinates 
based on this fundamental dichotomy have been laid down... There is no such 
thing as either man or nature now, only a process that produces the one within 
the other and couples the machines together... To be a chlorophyll- or a 
photosynthesis-machine, or at least slip your body into such machines as one 
part among the others." Margulis and Sagan similarly imagine a "benevolent 
venereal disease," symbiotic algae that would "invade the testes" of male 
humans "and from there enter sperm cells as they are made." The result of such 
males' mating would be a new species, Homo photosyntheticus, "green" humans with 
the plant-like ability to manufacture their own food out of air and sunlight. As 
evolution proceeded, such humans would "tend to lose their mouths," which would 
no longer be needed for feeding. Instead, they would become ever more 
"translucent, slothish, and sedentary": sort of 'ecologically correct' junkies. 
Indeed, algae specialist Ryan Drum proposes just such a symbiotic merger as a 
better alternative to America's war on drugs. Future green addicts, strung out 
on sunlight, could both nourish themselves and produce their own 
pharmaceuticals; thus "they would no longer be a burden to society." It sounds 
like a scenario straight out of Burroughs; but Margulis and Sagan insist that 
it's technologically feasible.

"Deployments of power," Foucault says, "are directly connected to the body--to 
bodies, functions, physiological processes, sensations, and pleasures." It's a 
reductive mistake to separate culture from the body, to "take account of bodies 
only through the manner in which they have been perceived and given meaning and 
value." Psychoanalytic theorists have gotten it exactly backwards. They imagine 
a body that simply lies there, outside of history, mute and changeless, until it 
is "inscribed" by the mark of the Symbolic order. Until, that is, it's been 
inseminated by the Phallus. They claim it's our entry into language and culture 
that unbinds sexuality from reproduction, that unlinks desire from simple need. 
Embarrassed by their Founder's notorious dictum that "anatomy is destiny," they 
choose instead to ignore the body altogether, claiming that the Phallus has 
nothing to do with the penis. But has anyone ever really been able to maintain 
such a separation? If anything, culture makes for a far harsher "destiny" than 
does anatomy. Socially enforced norms of human behavior tend to be more rigid 
and intolerant of change than 'natural' constraints ever were. Nowhere in the 
biological world are sexual acts bound so closely to reproduction as they are in 
human "symbolic exchange." The Symbolic order of culture and language is 
precisely what reduces desire to need, sex to exchange-value, bodily pleasure 
to the demand for truth, expenditure to production. "I fear we are not getting 
rid of God," as Nietzsche said, "because we still believe in grammar." It's our 
discourse, for instance, that divides us into merely two sexes; from an 
anatomical viewpoint, such a dichotomy is ridiculous. Anne Fausto-Sterling 
counts at least five anatomical genders: herms, merms, and ferms, as well as 
females and males. But she adds that this is still a reductive classification; 
our bodies embrace "a vast, infinitely malleable continuum that defies the 
constraints of even five categories." Nonstandard or intermediate genders are 
far more common than you might think: indeed, Fausto-Sterling says, they "may 
constitute as many as 4 percent of all births." But most often the othergendered 
are immediately "entered into a program of hormonal and surgical management so 
that they can slip quietly into society as 'normal' heterosexual males or 
females." Such is the actual effect of the supposed autonomy of language and 
culture. If your flesh doesn't obey Lacan's Law of binary difference, then your 
compliance will be enforced with drugs and the surgeon's scalpel.

But disciplining the flesh in this kind of way is a repetitious and 
never-ending task. In the pages of DOOM PATROL we meet the Sex Men, hardboiled, 
macho cops with orgone-blue skin whose thankless toil involves reining in all 
forms of bodily excess, and reabsorbing the unproductive residues of sexual 
energy. Grant Morrison wittily reduces the old melodrama of sexual liberation 
versus societal repression to the banal form of a police procedural. These guys 
just wearily shrug their shoulders at the most outrageous spectacles of 
eroticism unhinged; they've already seen it all. No need to worry; it's "just 
another day for the Sex Men." Such workmanlike tedium only points up Foucault's 
observation that power is never in place once and for all. Its "gray, anonymous" 
procedures have to be instituted afresh every morning. Power builds 
repetitiously, from the bottom up; its very inertia implies the inevitability 
of resistance. Overt discourses of liberation are less of a threat to power than 
is the simple dumb tenacity of the flesh.

There's no way around it, after all. Bodies stubbornly resist psychological or 
linguistic categorization. Organs sprout and grow, adapt themselves to new 
functions, even uproot themselves and migrate to new locations. Orifices open 
and close. Our bodies still retain the marks of the old bacterial freedoms, 
even when our institutions work busily to suppress them. On the surfaces of the 
skin, and in the depths of the viscera, we may discover the excesses of an 
inhuman sexuality. Foucault thus proposes the sexuo-linguistic theory of 
Jean-Pierre Brisset as an antidote to the anthropocentric structuralisms of 
Saussure, Lacan, and Chomsky. Brisset maintains that human beings are 
immediately descended from frogs. He supports his claim with exhaustive 
linguistic analyses. Our speech, he shows, is a hypostasis of frogs' croaking 
in the mudflats; our writing conserves the traces of their obscure hatreds, 
jealousies, and battles. Brisset, much like McLuhan, affirms the tactility of 
language, its oral and aural density, its rich, viscous materiality. He "puts 
words back in the mouth and around the sexual organs." Language arises out of 
orgasmic screams and bodily spasms. There's no clear dividing line between body 
and thought, or nature and culture, just as there is none between the water and 
the land. Language and sexuality are not the clean, abstract structures the 
so-called "human sciences" have long imagined them to be. Rather, they are 
forces in continual agitation in the depths of our bodies.

Our bodies join and separate: this is the mark of the social, whether in frogs 
or human beings or prokaryotes. To speak of human culture is much the same thing 
as to speak of a "culture" of bacteria. Only those dazzled by Gutenberg's 
movable type, or by the concurrent figure of "Man," could ever have imagined 
otherwise. But now "Man" is on the verge of disappearing: he is gradually being 
erased, as Foucault puts it, "like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea." 
Today, we no longer believe in the uniqueness of human language; we are no 
longer willing to obey the modernist injunction "to know sex, to reveal its law 
and its power, to discover it, to liberate it, to articulate it in discourse, 
to formulate it in truth." The new electronic and informational technologies 
have permeated and 'denatured' our world; this transformation invites us to 
imagine "a different economy of bodies and pleasures," one no longer subjected 
to what Foucault mockingly calls "the austere monarchy of sex." In postmodern 
culture, as Deleuze says explicating Foucault, "the forces in man enter into 
relation with forces from the outside, those of silicon replacing carbon, of 
genetic components replacing the organism, of agrammaticalities replacing the 
signifier." Such outside forces are now the only "nature" we know; they define 
our very being. Human culture is in large part a machine--a technology, a 
software--for experimentally simulating the effects of biological evolution. 
Alas, in most cases we don't do all that good a job of it. Even our cutting-edge 
engineering projects--like gene splicing and nanotechnology--thus far have only 
feebly echoed everyday bacterial practices. But we make up somewhat in rapidity 
of change for what we lose in power and efficiency. We've done in a mere few 
hundred thousand years what took microorganisms billions. And we have at least 
equaled bacteria when it comes to such things as waging war, or extending 
ourselves across the face of the planet. We are continually elaborating newer, 
more intricate forms of communication. Our touch is, by turns, invigorating and 
mortal. We exchange memes in the night, with our bodies' erotic contact, just as 
bacteria exchange genes.

"All media work us over completely," McLuhan warns, "leaving no part of us 
untouched, unaffected, unaltered." At the utmost extremities of human thought, 
Sade, Bataille, and Klossowski envision a thick and endless carnality, a 
universal prostitution and interpenetration of bodies. They imagine an exchange 
not bound by any equivalent. They imagine a loss so great that no recompense 
can match it. They imagine a perpetual crossing of limits, transgression without 
resolution. They imagine a communication forever consuming its contents, until 
it is all medium and no message. They call it bliss; they also call it 
infection. We don't look back; we wallow in our own shit and piss. But aren't 
these precisely the conditions of bacterial sex? It isn't a question of going 
back, which in any case would be impossible. But of reaffirming the traces, 
within our own bodies, of all these "oral" forces: engorgement, cannibalism, 
aggressive absorption, monstrous incorporation. Even today, sex circulates 
through our mouths, is savored on our tongues, and works its way deep into our 
rectums. If modern biopower operates by channelling sex into discourse, then one 
way our bodies resist is by resolving language back into raw flesh. Such is the 
implication of Laurie Weeks' short story, Swallow: "I often said things I 
neither intended nor felt, as if words congregated in my mouth, foreign 
particles, to swarm forth and engulf me in a sticky murk... I had begun to get 
words mixed up with food; if it came inside my mouth, a thing seemed to have 
the ability to change me in unpredictable ways..."

Hands are for grasping, or tearing, or caressing; but mouths, lips, and tongues 
bespeak a still greater intimacy. You don't hold an object in your mouth--a 
cock, a clit, a gobbet of meat, whatever--the same way that you would hold it in 
your fingers. Something else happens when you lick, bite, suck, or swallow, 
something that changes you in unpredictable ways. I'm flooded with cum and 
saliva, until I almost gag; I savor the taste on my palate as long as I possibly 
can. Or I feel the raspy tongue of the cat sliding across my skin. Watts 
Martin's furry porno story, "Satisfaction," tells of a male human being who 
fucks a female tiger morph. For all his macho pride in his own sexual prowess, 
nothing he does is able to satisfy her lust. Finally she pins him down and 
devours him piece by piece: "Her eyes were no longer even those of a dominatrix 
looking at her partner; they belonged to a carnivore playing with her trapped 
prey... She brought his hand to her mouth and ran her tongue across it, then bit 
through at the knuckles, spitting the fingers onto the floor... She tilted her 
head down and started nibbling off flesh, this time in small bites instead of 
one large one... The pain crossed some point where it seemed he no longer felt 
it, or perhaps forgot what it was like not to be feeling it at all... She seemed 
to be climaxing almost continuously, moaning and purring as she ripped through 
his legs, swallowing them in ragged chunks and lapping up the blood."

Predation on one side; ecstatic dismemberment on the other. Sex is not the deep 
secret, the hidden truth of our being. It isn't communion; it doesn't bring us 
together. It detaches us from others, and even from ourselves. Uproot it, then, 
from its place in The Ann Landers Encyclopedia. Foucault urges us to reject the 
ingrained Cartesian notion that there is "something other" in sex, "something 
else and something more," than bodies, organs, and their sensations and 
pleasures. Fucking is the last thing that will ever tell you who you are. It's 
not a return to roots, but an ongoing performance: an endless improvisation of 
things "neither intended nor felt." Foucault calls it a way to "get free of 
oneself" (se déprendre de soi-même). In the postmodern world, sex is no longer a 
fatality. It's an intense circulation of alien pains and pleasures, of unknown 
powers and vulnerabilities, of surprising engulfments and disgorgements. "Sex 
organs can sprout anywhere," Bucky Harris writes, "and one stroke of the tongue 
can be as electrifying as a fist up the ass." Furries and scalies come in all 
shapes and sizes; things can get pretty frantic at FurryMUCK. But furry sex is 
just one way to go; there are others. If you aren't into all that hair, you 
might find shaving the pubes a turn-on. Or you can become a vampire, if you 
prefer blood to cum. If you don't like leather, then try rubber: a different 
substance, a different feel, a different set of sensations. All these are not 
fantasies, but actual work on the body. When you open your mouth--or your ass, 
or your cunt--there's no way of knowing what "foreign particles" will enter. 
And when you entrust your body to someone else's mouth, ass, or cunt, all you 
know is that, whatever else happens, you won't emerge unscathed. Sex isn't 
fusion but confusion, as Sonic Youth once put it. You are never more alone, more 
separate, than when you shudder in orgasm. But afterwards, back in touch with 
the world, you find that your body has somehow been strangely altered: "My gums 
bled into his palms, which he cupped," recounts a narrator in Laurie Weeks' 
Swallow. "I wanted to pour the blood back into his body, which was mine... I 
wanted to spit my teeth into his palm, a gift... I took an odd satisfaction in 
this state of affairs. I felt that now my disease spoke for me, that it 
reflected the seriousness, the depth, that my flesh and childish prattle used to 
hide. I listened to records, read poetry... I smoked Marlboros and vaguely felt 
my lungs soften, bits of them begin to drift toward my feet."


5. Herschell Gordon Lewis

Let's say you don't feel happy with your life. Let's say you don't feel 
comfortable in this body. Let's say you don't feel in control of your actions. 
Your nerve endings tingle with continuous, unwanted arousal. The merest glance, 
a figure passing in the street, and all of a sudden you become hard or wet. 
Every object in your visual field glimmers with a halo, an aura: the harbinger 
of an impending epileptic fit. Cells divide, faster and faster, a cancerous 
tumor eats away at your brain. You find yourself the prey of physical 
convulsions, epidemic infections, and monstrous growths; or of nervous tics, 
misdirected actions, and inappropriate reactions. Your body has a life and a 
will of its own: you can't stop yourself from killing again and again, from 
gulping down more and more sweets, from spewing forth a torrent of obscenities. 
Your body is a puppet, and some alien force is pulling the strings. Someone or 
something that likes to see you squirm. It happens every month: the swelling and 
heaviness, the continual irritation of PMS. Nor is it any different for men, 
except that they usually haven't worked out the calendar. War is menstruation 
envy. In any case, male or female, you have no choice in the matter. They 
"offer you a body forever. To shit forever" (Burroughs). It's an offer you can't 
refuse; you simply have to breathe, eat, piss, shit, bleed, fuck, forever.

It's become fashionable to think that new computer technologies, or new 
interactive paradigms of mind, can somehow offer us a way out of this dilemma. 
Don't believe it for a second. Virtual reality is no gateway to transcendence. 
Consider the plight of the cyberspace "cowboys" in William Gibson's 
Neuromancer. They disdain the body, contemptuously dismissing it as "meat"; but 
they gradually learn that computerization doesn't release them from the flesh 
and its imperious demands. Cyberspace is ostensibly designed as a convenient, 
disembodied, and harmlessly neutral image of the world's amassed "information." 
But in fact the Matrix is anything but neutral; it bites and it kills. It is 
permeated by all sorts of strange forces: self-organizing alien interests, 
concentrations of political and economic power, irreducibly subjective kinks and 
quirks, remnants of genetic manipulations gone awry. As you ride through those 
"bright lattices of logic unfolding across that colorless void," you feel "an 
almost permanent adrenaline high," a corporeal kick as visceral and intense--and 
as compulsively addictive--as any sexual thrill or amphetamine rush. "Logic" and 
"information" stimulate specific physical circuits in the brain, just as drugs 
and panic attacks do. A wrong move, a neural overload, can be fatal. Even 
hallucinations need to be embodied. As all good AI researchers know, the 
software of the human mind has evolved and received its imprint from a 
particular configuration of neural hardware. You might have a brain based on 
silicon instead of carbon, but you can't do without some sort of physical organ. 
Your body accompanies you wherever you go: you can run, but you can't hide. Free 
your mind, and your ass will most certainly follow. In Gibson's 
corporate-controlled virtual space, as in the world of Cronenberg's Videodrome, 
"the visions become flesh, uncontrollable flesh." Images are incarnated as they 
are processed by the brain: fed back, via numerous reentrant loops, through the 
lateral geniculate nucleus, to the various subdivisions of the visual cortex. 
Synaptic connections grow as neurons are fired in self-reinforcing patterns. 
You tell yourself it's no big deal, that you can always stop if you want to, 
turn off the TV, jack out of the Matrix. Until one day you realize that you 
can't give it up after all, that you're trapped forever. You've become addicted 
to virtual reality, physiologically dependent upon those very images that seemed 
to promise you freedom from the flesh.

No, I'm not suggesting that you check into some 12-step program. Resist those 
insidious demands to testify and confess, proclaim your helplessness before the 
world, and parade your pain for others' delectation. It's more a question of 
neurophysiology than of psychology. In all forms of addiction, Gerald Fischbach 
tells us, "the nucleus accumbens, a small subdivision of the basal ganglia, 
appears to be particularly important." Short of surgical excision of this 
region, how could you ever escape being addicted to CAPITAL, or to LIFE? 
Remember Burroughs' formulations of the "algebra of need." Postmodern human 
beings need images, just as junkies need heroin, just as all mammals need oxygen 
to breathe. Tolerance increases as time goes by: you require ever more images, 
ever more stimuli, ever more intensive extractions of surplus value, merely for 
your body to survive in its excited or narcotized state. You must run faster 
and faster, like the Red Queen, just to stay in the same place. It's the law of 
the jungle, or more accurately of the free market: nobody can afford to relax, 
to slow down, to let go even for a second. One slight lapse, and you're out of 
the running forever, condemned to the endless, excruciating pains of 
withdrawal, bankruptcy, or extinction. DNA potentially replicates itself to 
infinity; but only if it has a suitable milieu to appropriate and exploit. 
Francesco Varela discusses the "structural coupling" and "codetermination" 
between organism and environment. No being is an island; every genome has what 
Richard Dawkins calls extended phenotypic effects. Sometimes these symbiotic 
exchanges are beneficial to all parties. But much more often, they lead to 
codependency, monopolization, or parasitic exploitation. We should never forget 
the harshness of natural selection: that one in a million, as Burroughs puts 
it, is very good biologic odds. Every strand of DNA potentially immortal; but as 
Burroughs warns us, the drive for immortality is the very paradigm of addiction: 
"He is addicted to an immortality predicated on the mortality of others... He 
needs your pain your fear your piss your human body that will die and keep him 
alive."

The heroes of DOOM PATROL meet just such an immortality addict: a strange being 
called Red Jack--he looks like the Jack of Hearts in a pack of playing 
cards--who claims to be both Jack the Ripper and God. (Grant Morrison 
appropriated him, I believe, from an episode of Star Trek). What link could 
there be between the creation of the universe and the serial killing of 
prostitutes? Both actions are exertions of power that turn out to involve a 
sullying Fall into materiality, or more precisely into the abject, addictive 
dependencies of the flesh. Red Jack spends most of his time querulously 
complaining about the injustices of his fate: "It's an old, old story. I created 
the universe, and they told me I had to be punished. Punished! And all because I 
had stained the beauty of perfect nothingness with gross matter." His murders 
follow a similar pattern: he wants to "cut up" women in order to "create a 
beautiful new form of life, something better than human"; but he ends up just 
making a terrible, gory mess. These accounts clearly identify Red Jack as what 
Gnostic theology would call an Archon: one of those lesser gods who rule over 
our prison universe of regimentation and suffering. Archons are like failed, 
untalented artists: their lust for power is never satiated, and their would-be 
acts of creativity are always botched. They are the ones who scared us all into 
time, into body, into shit. They made our flesh, and now they can't get along 
without it--and alas, neither can we. We are addicted to the nutriment and the 
pleasures they provide us, and they are addicted to the pungent flavors of our 
meat. Even the human nervous system, with its complex sensibility and its 
seemingly limitless capacity for self-deception, can't argue its way out of 
this vicious circle. You can go to as many recovery and support groups as you 
like, but all you'll be doing is exchanging one form of addiction for another.

The Marquis de Sade--whose materialist anti-theology often verges upon the 
Gnostic--argues that one's own pleasure is necessarily dependent upon the pain 
of others. All subjective experience is an epiphenomenal consequence of the 
motions and metamorphoses of matter; the intensity of my orgasm is directly 
proportional to the degree of agitation I can provoke and observe in the bodies 
of my victims. Pain is thus the original form of surplus value. Marx's theory of 
exploitation is yet another Gnostic account of our Fall into base matter--in 
this case, the commodity as fetish--and of the suffering that results therefrom. 
Nietzsche, still more clearly, sees pain as a primordial means of payment, as 
the oldest and most efficacious way of discharging one's debts. And so Red Jack 
literally feeds upon the surplus value of pain: he consumes the agony of 
millions of tortured butterflies, "pretty, fragile things with wings like church 
windows," pinned alive against the walls of his Baroque palace, shrieking in a 
music of perpetual torment. In Red Jack's nightmarish realm, "nothing actually 
dies. Here, there is only suffering. Pain sustains my existence." Flesh must be 
made to suffer, if it is to yield any sustenance, any substantial meaning. This 
is also the excuse for his career as Jack the Ripper. Beauty--in women or in 
butterflies--is a strange and delicate thing: subtle, transitory, and ultimately 
gratuitous. Its contingency is a threat to the solidity of male existence. 
That's why Plato banished poets from the city; that's why Heidegger joined the 
Nazi party. Red Jack similarly strives to wrest some sort of significance from 
a long history of errors, miscalculations, and random movements. There's no end 
to the suffering that we will impose--first on others, but finally on 
ourselves--in order to produce meaning and truth. "Man would rather will 
nothingness, than not will," as Nietzsche said. Red Jack expires when he can no 
longer sustain this project: when he realizes that his creations have been 
failures, that even pain is arbitrary and contingent, that "some stories have no 
meaning."

Despite the wishes of our rulers, our priests, and our philosophers, there's no 
ulterior source of value, nothing beyond this fragile lump of flesh. Energy is 
the only life, and is from the body: isn't that the scariest thing of all? The 
vulgar vitality of the flesh--and thence also its exquisite sensitivity, its 
capacity for limitless suffering--never seems to be depleted. No matter how 
many outrages Sade's libertines perpetrate upon the body of Justine, she always 
survives, virginal innocence intact, ready to be violated yet again. She is 
weak, infinitely weak; but her very vulnerability is what makes her inaccessible 
and indestructible within. Sade therefore argues that murder cannot be 
considered a crime, since strictly speaking it is impossible. For nothing is 
ever truly annihilated. Matter itself--today we should rather say 
mass-energy--is always precisely conserved; it can neither be created nor 
destroyed. With the full force of Enlightenment rationality, Sade argues for a 
thoroughgoing materialism. The true transmigration is one of bodies, not of 
souls. So all that you do when you kill somebody, Sade claims, is slightly to 
rearrange the atoms in certain minor molecular structures. And where's the 
iniquity in that?

Sade's greatness lies in his reiterated demonstrations that reason is the slave 
of the body and its passions. Philosophical argumentation, with the strictest 
logical rigor, can be derived from any premises whatsoever, and can be made to 
arrive at any arbitrarily desired conclusion. Nothing is true, everything is 
permitted. Sade invents a perfect alibi for murder--but at the price of 
banalizing the very act of murder, and rendering it utterly futile. For if 
everything is permitted, if there is no divine order to outrage and to violate, 
if killing is already Nature's customary way, then transgression is radically 
impossible. In proving so triumphantly that homicide is not a crime, Sade ruins 
his own pleasure in committing one. The real indignity of murder, from the 
libertine's point of view, lies in its ultimate impotence. For it always falls 
short of its goal: it never really attains its victim, it is never noxious and 
destructive enough. No amount of carnage is sufficient to compromise Justine's 
purity, or to remove her from the face of the earth. The more you make her 
suffer, the more powerfully you evince the dumb weight of her body's resistance. 
The mind can easily be colonized and controlled, but the flesh still endures. 
Sade's writing displays the sterile force of an addiction, with its obsessive 
repetitions and endless elaborations. For Sade can never exhaust the infinite 
perseverance of the flesh, never entirely subjugate it to the force of his will. 
A certain opaque carnality marks the absolute limit of his project of domination 
and transgression, which is to say of Enlightenment rationality itself.

That's why what's buried always returns: even if hideously decayed, and even if 
only in bits and pieces. The flesh is more than willing, though the spirit is 
all too weak. The "afterlife" is a wholly material phenomenon: it concerns the 
body, and not the soul. Today we fear the subsistence of the flesh, more than we 
do its annihilation. The great terror in George Romero's "living dead" trilogy 
is not being killed, but being unable to stay dead, being compelled to return as 
one of them. Postmodern space swarms with the Undead. Zombies throng our city 
danger zones, our suburban backyards, our shopping malls. Slashers in hockey 
masks, wielding chainsaws, rise up again and again. Organs and body parts pulse 
with an alien energy, and turn viciously against their owners: your own arm may 
try to strangle you, or knock you out with a sucker punch, as almost happens to 
Bruce Campbell in Sam Raimi's Evil Dead II. Raimi's and Romero's heroes the 
classic problem in dealing with zombies: how do you kill something that's 
already dead? It's nearly impossible to be rid of them. You can show them out 
the front door, but they'll just come in again through the kitchen. You can cut 
them up into little bits, but they will reassemble in new configurations. 
Perhaps you can pulverize them in a food processor; but even this won't work, 
unless the parts are ground exceeding fine. The hero of Peter Jackson's Dead 
Alive (Braindead) is painfully lacking in social skills; he can't find a polite 
way to get his dead mother and other zombie guests to leave the house. Instead, 
he's forced to keep them locked in the basement, sedated on a steady diet of 
horse tranquilizers. He scrupulously feeds them himself, even pouring hot gruel 
directly into the gullet of one zombie who died of a slash to the throat. But he 
can't watch over their behavior every moment, and soon enough he finds that Mom 
has been naughty, and has given birth to a snarling, flesh-eating baby 
half-brother....

We think that death is the end; but actually it's the failure to die--the 
vitality that subsists even in movements of decay and decomposition--that is 
fatal and irreversible. The worms crawl in, the worms crawl out. Even a nuclear 
holocaust would not much alter the ecological balance of the planet: the world 
would still be dominated, as it is now, by insects and bacteria. The afterlife 
is not a fixed state, but a process of slow contagion, insidiously, inexorably 
spreading. In Brian Yuzna's Bride of Reanimator, reanimation fluid accidentally 
seeps into the water table, and ends up reviving corpses in a nearby cemetery. 
This is not immortality, but its sinister parody: a grotesque hyperbole of 
mortality and finitude. It's bad enough when living people get turned into 
zombies, but even worse when dead people do too. For these beings aren't granted 
anything like eternal life. Their deprivation is rather raised to a bizarre 
higher power: they lose not only the ability to live, but also the ability to 
die. Their fate, like that of Red Jack's victims, has been shorn of its supposed 
meaning; it no longer displays that sanctimonious aura of tragic inevitability. 
"The finite world suggests a contingency to the second power that does not found 
any freedom: It is capable of not not-being, it is capable of the 
irreparable... The Irreparable is that things are just as they are, in this or 
that mode, consigned without remedy to their way of being" (Giorgio Agamben).

That's why it's high time "to have done with the judgment of God." There is no 
higher necessity in the fact of these bodies having been slashed to ribbons, or 
of these walking dead having become what they now are. There is no inexorable 
movement of fate and retribution. There's only a brutal process of natural 
selection, without any preordained goal. Evolution can lead to adaptive 
improvements; but no teleology is involved, and no possibility of transcendence. 
These actions are irreparable; "an evolutionary step that involves mutation is 
irretrievable and irreversible" (Burroughs). You can deny the body only by 
means of the body; you can escape death only by invoking death. It's easy enough 
to kill somebody, but extraordinarily difficult to dispose of the remains. 
Capital punishment only ends up repeating and amplifying the crime it is 
supposed to punish. And suicide is still more pointless, because it's only a 
temporary solution to a permanent and ever-recurring problem. You can choose to 
initiate such mortal processes, but they will always spiral out of your control. 
Nobody, Burroughs says, can "hire DEATH as a company cop." Death is like debt, 
as when an S&L issues junk bonds. You live off a debt or a death that is always 
continually increasing, but that is also indefinitely deferred. But however 
long you avoid paying off your loans, the debt or death will never be 
definitively cancelled. Capitalizing on pain just lowers the threshold of your 
addiction, and increases the size of your long-term payments. Postponing the 
end also means prolonging the agony. The more you seek to deny or transcend 
mortality, the more you ironically intensify its thrills and terrors. The more 
you distance yourself from your flesh, the more that flesh is made vulnerable. 
Just when you thought it was safe to go back into the water, you discover that 
you've contracted some vile infection, or become susceptible to the tremors of 
unwelcome arousal. No Buddhist detachment is possible: no stepping off the wheel 
of karma, no escape from the food chain. Anyplace, anytime, you are prone to be 
convulsed yet again in what Karen Finley calls "the constant state of desire... 
the fear of living, as opposed to the fear of dying."

Postmodern horror most commonly appears as a farcical theater of blood-- 
without the pomposity of tragedy, without the facile consolations of myth. 
Contemporary taste rightly prefers Titus Andronicus to King Lear. There's no 
culmination, no conclusion, no catharsis; but only slow adaptive changes in the 
nature of the media, and in the technology of special effects. Who wants to see 
a woman cut in two with an old-fashioned handsaw, asks the gleefully sarcastic 
magician in Herschell Gordon Lewis' The Wizard of Gore, when now we have at our 
disposal such tools as electric drills, pile drivers, and chainsaws? The 
Wizard's magic is just a matter of film editing: shots of women being mutilated 
by such tools are intercut with shots of them surviving unharmed. Members of the 
hypnotized audience are all too ready to offer themselves up to the Wizard's 
cynical experiments--though usually it's the boys who persuade or force their 
girlfriends to subject themselves to these tortures. The magic show over, the 
women return safely to their seats; but their dead and mangled bodies are 
discovered shortly thereafter. Lewis once remarked in an interview that he'd 
gladly have men as well as women sliced up in his films, if only he could find 
a large enough audience willing to pay for such a spectacle. But who's to argue 
with popular taste? Lewis has a sharp eye for what the market will bear, in 
terms of gruesomeness and gore: which explains the history of his career 
changes, from English professor to exploitation film maker to direct mail 
marketing consultant. As Lewis understands, there's always something jovial and 
festive--carnivalesque, Bakhtin would say--about watching horror films, just as 
there used to be about attending public executions and tortures. (Walter 
Kendrick's fine book, The Thrill of Fear, provides a history of these 
entertainments). Gore flicks, with their campy excesses and gratuitously 
elaborated special effects, are a mode of expenditure particularly suited to 
our postmodern world of visceral illusions and interactive electronic media. The 
Wizard of Gore merely pushes this logic to its radical extreme: the wizard goes 
on TV to present his theater of universal cruelty, in which each and every 
member of the home viewing audience is invited to participate, both as 
distracted spectator and as mutilated victim.

The Marquis de Sade campaigned passionately against the death penalty, being 
unable to countenance its cruelty. But things have changed in the last two 
hundred years. Today, we complain because the executions of killers like Gary 
Gilmore, Ted Bundy, and Wesley Dodd aren't shown live on TV. One Republican 
legislator in my state went so far as to demand that Dodd's hanging take place 
with his victims' relatives present, since it was "a family event, like a 
baptism or a marriage." These enthusiastic supporters of capital punishment are 
of course the same people who want to ban abortion, and who worry about 
excessive sex and violence in movies and pop music. They seek to keep the body's 
aberrations and addictions in control, under reserve, as the sole prerogative of 
the patriarchal nuclear family and of the repressive State. On the contrary, 
when zombies are on the loose, or when the Wizard of Gore broadcasts his bloody 
illusions on TV, at least we can be damn sure that the Republicans will also 
get theirs. Horror films overturn established values, for they celebrate 
whatever is arbitrary, irresponsible, irreparable, transitory, and contingent. 
They gleefully exploit--for public delectation and for private profit--the 
fragility and vulnerability, and yet the infinite, inhuman perdurability, of 
this meat, this body, this suffering flesh.


6. Cliff Steele

William Burroughs writes: "in this life we have to take things as we find them 
as the torso murderer said when he discovered his victim was a quadruple 
amputee." Good advice for the anatomically deranged, like DOOM PATROL's Cliff 
Steele. Cliff has a problem with his body, you see. It happened like this. He 
used to be a daredevil racing car driver; he had a horrible wreck. Nearly all of 
him was burned to ashes, but they snatched his brain from the flames. And then 
they implanted that brain in a new prosthetic body, all shiny metal, ultra high 
tech, a veritable fighting machine. Now Cliff is the muscle of the DOOM PATROL, 
a brain turned into brawn. They expect him to be a macho bruiser, when actually 
he's quite sensitive underneath. And to add insult to injury, they call him 
Robotman--a name he violently hates. What would that do for your sense of 
self-esteem? The life of a superhero these days! Cliff thinks of himself as 
just a regular guy; Robocop fantasies are the last thing on his mind. But with a 
metallic casing like this, he can't exactly blend into the crowd. It's what 
Baudrillard calls hypervisibility, the postmodern condition par excellence. No 
chance of chilling out with a secret identity, like old Clark Kent used to do. 
All this metal is a clunky encumbrance, no matter how great its tensile 
strength. You know you're in bad shape when you bang your head against a wall, 
and you still don't feel a thing. At this point, Cliff doesn't even really know 
what his body can do. How good is all this cyber-tech stuff anyway? How 
accurate and detailed is sensory input? How fast is motor response? What 
unaccustomed relays and connections now trigger the pain and pleasure centers in 
Cliff's brain? Will he ever be able to taste and smell? Can he ever have sex 
again? What about getting drunk or stoned? "The only good thing about having a 
human brain in a robot body," Cliff remarks sardonically at one point, "is that 
it's easier to control brain chemistry." Just the touch of a button, and anxiety 
is dissipated, alertness is heightened, or memory is enhanced. But alas, this 
techno-manipulability has been wired to work only for utilitarian ends, not 
hedonistic ones.

"Our machines are disturbingly lively," Donna Haraway writes, "and we ourselves 
frighteningly inert." It might not be so bad, if only you could get used to the 
situation. After all, Descartes argued long ago that the body is a machine. It 
shouldn't matter all that much whether metal or flesh is the material. In either 
case, it's simply a matter of mastering the electro-chemical interface: 
regularizing chains of association, facilitating neural feedback patterns, 
reinforcing the appropriate reentrant connections. In short, a question of 
recognition and memory, of cultivating habits over the course of time. The 
problem is that Cliff's mechanical body never stays the same. He's continually 
being sent back to the shop for upgrades and repairs. Transistors burn out; 
programming errors and faulty couplings throw him off stride. He gets into 
fights, and enemies regularly mangle his metal to bits. And if that wasn't bad 
enough, Doc Magnus (who built and programmed his body in the first place) and 
Niles Caulder (the Chief of the DOOM PATROL) tend to use Cliff as a pawn in 
their ongoing professional rivalry. Neither of them is content to let well 
enough alone; they are both all too eager to retool Cliff in order to try out 
their latest cybernetic design ideas. And let's not even think about those 
insectoid aliens who at one point fit Cliff out in a new metal carapace with six 
legs. Life in a robot body, even if you're strong, is just one humiliation after 
another. The persistence of memory in the brain only makes things worse. 
Amputees typically feel phantom sensations in their lost limbs; poor Cliff has 
this problem multiplied many times over. He endlessly relives numerous episodes 
of mutilation and dismemberment. Neither Clint Eastwood nor Woody Allen--our two 
best-known icons of hetero-male angst--ever had to go through anything remotely 
like this.

The worst part, though, is the waiting. All these body modifications take time, 
just as it takes time to alter a dress or a pair of pants. Cliff's brain is 
disconnected meanwhile, and left in a vat of nutrient fluids. The experience 
isn't exactly like returning to the womb. You don't get some soothing "oceanic 
feeling"; rather, you freak out from sensory deprivation. The first stage is 
"boredom: hearing nothing, seeing nothing, experiencing nothing. Boredom and 
irritation and then panic." Panic, because the brain (like nature) abhors a 
vacuum. So that's when the hallucinations begin: "nightmares of sound and 
vision, grotesque sensory distortions." Cliff is overwhelmed by paranoid 
delusions of a world controlled by malevolent insects and soulless infernal 
machines. "The body becomes remote, robotic, disconnected," a symptom of the 
schizophrenic's "sense of being abstracted from the day-to-day physical world." 
But if this is the case with me, then what about other people? "Maybe I'm not 
the robot, and everyone else is." It doesn't help to realize that this is just a 
virtual world, and that your own brain is generating all these visions. If 
anything, such an awareness only makes things worse: your ontological 
insecurity is heightened, while the horrors you confront don't for all that 
become any less vivid and intense. If only I could attribute these appearances 
to a malevolent programmer, to somebody like Descartes' evil demon! Then at 
least I'd have the comfort of knowing that somebody else is out there, that I'm 
not absolutely alone. True hell for Cliff is the solipsistic universe of Bishop 
Berkeley, in which nothing exists except one's own inner perceptions: a closed 
circle from which there is no escape.

But fortunately this idealist delirium doesn't last forever; eventually the 
hallucinations subside. Virtual reality is a great leveller: "nothing can pass 
through without being broken down, disintegrated." And so Cliff finally reaches 
a sort of nirvana, "something I can't describe: the center of the cyclone, the 
room without doors." Now becoming grinds to a halt; time no longer passes, you 
have all the time in the world. Plenty of time to meditate upon the Smiths lyric 
that opens and closes one episode of DOOM PATROL: "Does the body rule the mind 
or does the mind rule the body?" The question resonates in the emptiness like a 
Zen koan: ironic, unanswerable, absurd. Meditate long enough, and the inner 
self, the first person of the Cartesian cogito, drops out of the picture. You're 
left with the great postmodern discovery, anticipated alike by Hume and by the 
Buddhists: that personal identity is a fiction. The Cartesian subject 
disappears, together with all that it created. When I introspect deeply, I may 
come across all sorts of experiential contents and structures: feelings, 
desires, perceptions, memories, multiple personalities, and so on. But the one 
thing I am absolutely unable to find is myself.

The conundrum of the brain in a vat is an old philosophical slapstick routine, 
an updated postmodern version of Descartes' original Meditations. The question 
is always the same: how can I know for sure that these inner representations 
correspond to something out there,that what I experience is real? How can I be 
absolutely certain that I'm not just a disembodied mind dreaming the external 
world, or that it isn't all a computer simulation fed into my brain by direct 
innervation of the neuronal fibers? The comedy lies in this: that it's only my 
hysterical demand for certainty that first introduces the element of doubt. 
It's only by subjecting myself to the horrors of sensory deprivation that I 
approach the delirious limit at which the senses become questionable. Descartes 
does just that in his Third Meditation: "I will now shut my eyes, stop my ears, 
and withdraw all my senses..." Descartes "proves God," as Samuel Beckett puts 
it, "by exhaustion." As metaphysics goes, it's the oldest trick in the book: 
first you take something away, then you complain that it isn't there, and then 
you invent a theory grounded in--and compensating for--its very absence. Deleuze 
and Guattari call it the Theology of Lack. A seductive ruse, to be sure: once 
you accept the premises, you've already been suckered into the conclusions.

"If I only had a brain..." For as one character in DOOM PATROL remarks, 
"Descartes was nothing but a miserable git who never had a good time in his 
entire life!" Postmodern philosophers rightly reject the very logic that gets us 
into the dualist impasse. Descartes' methodical doubt is ultimately a 
distinction without a difference, since it has no pragmatic consequences 
whatsoever. For consider the alternatives. Either there's some telltale sign, 
which allows me to empirically determine whether or not I am just a brain kept 
in a vat: in which case the whole sorry mess is merely a question of fact, 
without any deeper epistemological import. Or else, there's no way of telling: 
but in this case, I have nothing to worry about, since my experience will remain 
the same one way or the other. "The mystery," as Cormac McCarthy's Judge Holden 
says, "is that there is no mystery." Perhaps the evil demon posited by 
Descartes gets some private, masturbatory delectation out of fooling us like 
this; but that needn't be any concern of ours. For the evil demon can't do 
anything to us, can't harm us or change us or otherwise affect us, without 
thereby tipping his hand and revealing his existence. Descartes' dilemma is 
resolved without dualism,and without positing a transcendent self, simply by 
noting that appearances and simulacra are themselves perfectly real. The cogito 
is reduced to a third-person tautology: things are exactly as they are and what 
they are. In this postmodern life, "we have to take things as we find them."

But such logic and such consolations are of little help to Cliff Steele, 
trapped as he is in all that heavy metal--except for the even worse times when 
his naked brain is actually left to stew and hallucinate in a vat. If modern 
Western rationality begins with Descartes' willfully self-mutilating gesture, 
perhaps it culminates in Cliff's absurd disembodiment. Cliff is the final, 
helpless, involuntary victim of a whole history of amputations. He is compelled 
literally to live out the disabling paradoxes of Cartesian dualism. He suffers 
every day from schizophrenic disjunctions between the real and the imaginary, 
between self and other, between vitalism and mechanism, between mind and body. 
The problem may be a false one philosophically, but it's still inscribed in our 
technology. Descartes' idle speculations are now as it were incised in Cliff's 
very flesh. Doc Magnus and the Chief mess with Cliff's head more insidiously 
than the evil demon ever could. Their operations give dualism a delirious new 
twist: for now it's Cliff's mind that is materially incarnated, while his 
corporeality is entirely notional, virtual, and simulacral. Such is our 
postmodern refinement of those old metaphysical endeavors to find the ultimate 
reality, to separate essence from accident. Descartes' cogito and Husserl's 
epoche were merely thought experiments; but now we can realize their equivalents 
in actual surgical procedures. Strip everything away that is not indubitably 
"Cliff Steele," that is not necessarily contained in the very notion of his 
essence; and what's left is precisely these three pounds of neuronal tissue, a 
fleshy lump "so full of water that it tends to slump like a blancmange if placed 
without support on a firm surface" (Anthony Smith, The Body). Since Cliff's only 
'identity' is that of this actual, physical brain, you might say that his sole 
grounding certitude is that he is an extended thing--as against Descartes' claim 
to be a thinking thing. Just as you can't make an omelette without breaking 
eggs--as 60s revolutionaries used to say--so you can't get amputated unless you 
have a body.

The Chief claims that the operation was a success, that it's all turned out for 
Cliff's own greater good. The old Cliff Steele, he says, was "selfish, arrogant, 
overconfident, ill-educated... a loudmouthed, misogynistic boor"; it's only 
through the traumas of amputation and cyborgization that the new Cliff "learn[s] 
kindness and compassion and a selfless heroism." DOOM PATROL is quite different 
from the revisionist superhero comics that made a big splash in the mid to late 
80s: Alan Moore's and Dave Gibbons' Watchmen, Frank Miller's Batman: The Dark 
Knight Returns (with Klaus Janson and Lynn Varley), and Grant Morrison's own 
Batman: Arkham Asylum (with Dave McKean). All these works 'deconstruct' our 
familiar images of comic book superheroes. They go behind the scenes to reveal 
what we should've suspected all along: that Batman and all those other 
patriotic, costumed crime-fighters are really violent sociopaths with 
fascist-cum-messianic leanings and a kinky underwear fetish. Everything gets 
played out for these sordid characters in the registers of secrecy, disguise, 
and paranoia: literally in the form of their jealous anxieties about maintaining 
a "secret identity," and more figuratively in terms of those notorious paradoxes 
of destroying the world in order to save it, or stepping outside of the law in 
order to enforce the law. As the elder Mayor Daley of Chicago once said, "the 
police are not there to create disorder; the police are there to preserve 
disorder." Miller's Batman and Moore's tormented antiheroes owe much to the 
creepy affectlessness and suppressed fury of Clint Eastwood's Dirty Harry. 
Indeed, their hoods and masks go Clint one better, when it comes to maintaining 
an unreadable, deadpan exterior. The crime-fighter's costume is a literal 
"character armor," rigidly neutralizing whatever may rage beneath--and thereby 
perpetuating the modernist fantasy that there is a "beneath," something like 
manhood or interiority or selfhood.

Most of these psychotic superheroes are still organically human; but it's only 
one more step to outright androids and cyborgs, like Arnold Schwarzenegger's 
Terminator and Peter Weller's Robocop (in fact, Frank Miller worked on the 
scripts for Robocop II and III). And hasn't there always been something 
cyborg-like about Clint? In the cyborg fantasy films, in any case, the 
superhero's costume--I include Arnold's muscles in this category--no longer 
works as a disguise. Now it's a prosthetic organ of strength, a kind of 
supplemental, rebuilt manhood. Todd McFarlane's comic book Spawn (a series to 
which Alan Moore and Grant Morrison have both contributed) presents an even more 
fascinating case. Here, the protagonist's costume is not just an article of 
clothing, nor even a mechanical interface, but a living inhuman being in its 
own right: a sexually voracious, "constantly-evolving neural parasite" from Hell 
that brings Al Simmons back from the dead, heightens his metabolism, encases him 
in an unbreachable protective carapace, and takes command of his central nervous 
system. The image is definitely insect-like: hard armor on the outside, guarding 
some soft squishy stuff within. Al's body is nearly invulnerable; but this 
security only intensifies his hidden anguish. He wallows in the misery of living 
in back alleys with the homeless, while mourning the loss of his wife and child, 
to whom he can never return. And so Al gets to display his macho prowess, while 
at the same time laying claim to a deep inner sensitivity, a self-righteous 
feeling of vulnerability and victimization. Can Robert Bly and his "men's 
movement" be far behind? Again and again it's the same old story: a 
near-catatonic rigidity that is breached only in outbursts of extreme cathartic 
violence, whether by banging drums in the woods, or by blowing away the 
slavering hordes of sickos and scumbags with a .357 Magnum. At least Clint has a 
keen sense of irony about it all--which is more than you can say for Bly or 
McFarlane or Woody Allen. Some guys'll do anything to redeem their lonely, 
frustrated lives. And so they endow their experience with a certain 
self-aggrandizing pathos, by entertaining reactive, resentful fantasies of 
masculinity under siege. It feels so good to be a victim, because then you've 
got the perfect excuse to demand recompense, to make others pay like you've had 
to pay, to lash out at the bitch who started it all.

A man's gotta do what a man's gotta do. You imagine your 'manhood' as something 
both strong and fragile, hard and tough and yet continually in peril. Like a 
penis that might go limp, or a mind weighted down with a body. But why even 
bother, why hold back? Why not just let yourself go? Why cling to this rigid 
exterior armor, why nurture this aggrieved inner self? Can Cartesian dignity 
mean that much to you? OK, OK, you'll say--together with Descartes and with 
Arnold--this body is only a machine, but there's still something inside that's 
really me. I had to destroy my cock in order to save it: I tore it apart and 
had it recast in hard, cutting metal--a strategy implicit in many of these comic 
books and films, and savagely literalized in Shinya Tsukamoto's Iron Man. 
Marshall McLuhan describes techno-hysteria as a defensive reaction to change, "a 
desperate and suicidal autoamputation, as if the central nervous system could 
no longer depend on the physical organs to be protective buffers against the 
slings and arrows of outrageous mechanism." But McLuhan also insists that 
there's no backing away from the dilemma: "there is, for example, no way of 
refusing to comply with the new sense ratios or sense 'closure' evoked by the 
TV image." It isn't a question of adapting ourselves to a new technological 
environment, but of realizing that this technology already is our adaptation. We 
must cultivate the new sensations offered to us by our new organs. And if 
masculinity can't keep up with the changes, then so much the worse for 
masculinity.

Grant Morrison understands these dynamics better than anyone. His Batman: 
Arkham Asylum pushes the revisionist superhero comic to a parodic point of no 
return. Batman's old enemies, now inmates of the asylum for the criminally 
insane, tauntingly invite him to join them. For isn't the 'virtual' freedom of 
madness more appealing than the tedium of life in the 'real' world, "confined 
to the Euclidean prison that is sanity"? Batman is all too receptive to such a 
seduction. He knows he's as crazy as any of them, what with his bizarre 
fixations and his hysterical rage for order. He senses that walking through the 
doors of Arkham Asylum will be "just like coming home." And indeed, once he 
arrives, the blood of self-mutilation flows unchecked. Virility crumbles in an 
onslaught of psychedelic dislocation. The Cartesian fiction of the mind as a 
faithful "mirror of nature" (as Richard Rorty calls it) is shattered and 
scattered into the multiple grotesque reflections of the Asylum's funhouse 
mirrors. The Joker captures Batman, but declines to unmask him and reveal his 
secret identity; for he knows that the Caped Crusader's mask already "is his 
real face." I've loved the Joker ever since I was a child, so I was thrilled by 
Morrison's reinvention of his character. The Joker may well be a gleefully 
sadistic mass murderer, but he's also an exemplary postmodern subject. For he 
"has no real personality; he creates himself each day. He sees himself as the 
Lord of Misrule, and the world as a theatre of the absurd." The Joker responds 
to the "chaotic barrage" of his overloaded senses--the postmodern information 
glut--in a radically new manner. Not by choosing and discriminating among his 
perceptions; and not by striving to maintain a fixed ego structure. But simply 
by "going with the flow"; he immerses himself in the postmodern flux and just 
lets it all happen. Unlike Batman, the Joker no longer needs the "protective 
buffers" that McLuhan feared were numbing us to change. He knows that the only 
way out is first of all a way in and through. His great adaptive innovation is 
to hold nothing back; he lives and enjoys the postmodern condition, this 
mutation of our sensibility into non-linear, non-Euclidean forms. Far from being 
mad, the Joker may in fact represent "some kind of super-sanity... a brilliant 
new modification of human perception, more suited to urban life at the end of 
the twentieth century."

The Joker's difference from Batman parallels McLuhan's distinction between hot 
and cool media. "A hot medium," McLuhan says, "is one that extends one single 
sense in 'high definition.'" Its chief characteristics are "homogeneity, 
uniformity, and linear continuity." Hot media are imperious, unidirectional, 
even terroristic. They demand rapt contemplation or close, obsessive 
attentiveness. Your life at every second depends upon their dictates, and yet 
they leave you feeling strangely uninvolved. They keep you at a proper, 
'alienated' distance, drawing you into a paranoid frenzy of endless 
interpretation. This is the culture of the Book: of fundamentalist Christians 
scrutinizing their Bibles, and of academics "reading" the insidious ideologies 
embedded in the seemingly innocuous practices of everyday life. Batman is a 
quintessentially hot figure, ever on the lookout for whatever minuscule clues 
will confirm his Manichean sense of the world's depravity. Cool media, on the 
other hand, are 'low-definition,' and for that very reason "high in 
participation or completion by the audience." Their sparse spaces welcome and 
envelop us. They are characterized by "pluralism, uniqueness, and 
discontinuity," and they solicit high levels of feedback and involvement. A 
cool medium, McLuhan says in a famous pun, offers you a massage rather than a 
message: a multi-textured, tactile and sensual experience, rather than the 
rational finality of a meaning to be decoded. There is nothing to interpret. 
Instead, cool media invite the kind of open reception that Michael Taussig, 
elaborating on Walter Benjamin, calls distraction: "a very different 
apperceptive mode, a type of flitting and barely conscious peripheral visual 
perception." This is the Joker's random drift, a delirious passivity 
brilliantly adapted to our state of continual technological shock. With 
innovation running at so fast a pace, alienation is out of date. It's no longer 
a case of me against the world. Contrary to the overwrought claims of 
high-minded media pundits, nobody's ever been brainwashed by watching TV. In 
fact, most people talk back to their sets. As Clark Humphrey puts it, "people 
who consume lots of media are very cynical about what they're consuming... A 
typical nonviewer may believe almost anything, [but] a typical TV viewer treats 
everything with (excess?) skepticism." Our cheerful postmodern 
skepticism--reacting as if everything were just "on TV," or always already in 
quotation marks--is poles apart from modernist angst or from Cartesian 
methodical doubt. You can't ever defeat the evil demon in open battle, but you 
can put him in his place once you realize that he has more in common with Chuck 
Barris and Maury Povich than he does with Satan or God.

You might say that when Cliff Steele lost everything except for his brain, he 
was thrust willy-nilly into this cool new postmodern world. With all his 
"protective buffers" gone, he was 'preadapted' to change. He had no choice but 
to be plugged directly into the "extension of the central nervous system" that 
electronic media have made of our planet. The Chief is right: something inside 
Cliff has been altered forever, so there's no point in even trying to recover 
what was lost. "We have to take things as we find them," amputations and all. 
This is "what it's like" to be a postmodern cyborg. Prosthetic surgery is 
painful, but it can powerfully renew our sense of involvement in the world. 
It's all a question of where you locate the information interface: how much you 
can stand to lop off, or just how far back you're willing to go. Daniel Dennett 
notes that the question of the interface is the fatal weak point of every 
mind/body dualism: how can something be wholly immaterial, and yet still have 
material effects? Descartes placed the transfer point in the pineal gland; 
phenomenologists extend it to the surface of the skin; spiritualists push it 
even further out, to the ectoplasmic aura that surrounds us like a crustacean 
carapace or a superhero's sheath. But for Cliff it no longer makes sense even 
to draw the line. Neurons and wires are much the same stuff. The electrochemical 
feedback loops that constitute Cliff's brain are of the same nature as those 
that are wired into his prosthetic body, or that course across the entirety of 
the postmodern "global village." Cliff's feelings, like the ashes of his former 
body, are scattered more or less everywhere. But there's no one single point at 
which the experiences become "his own."

So in this strange way, Cliff is the postmodern Everyman. He hasn't quite been 
'feminized,' but at least he's no "misogynistic boor." It's true he suffers from 
a certain baffled frustration, from a perpetual sense of unfulfilled duty, from 
frequent bouts of self-pity, and from a chronic inability to relax. Nothing 
seems vital to Cliff any more; as his psychiatrist asks him at one point, "how 
must it feel to have saved a world you don't really believe is worth saving?" 
But unlike the old superheroes, Cliff doesn't feel any differently about the 
world than he does about himself. The distinction of inner and outer simply 
isn't relevant any more. That's why his pathos has nothing vengeful about it; 
it can't be seen as the reaction of a resentful masculine ego. This pathos is 
rather the very affect or quality of that ego's having been dispersed. It's the 
expression, not of Cliff's subjectivity, but precisely of his no longer being a 
"subject" in the old Cartesian/Freudian sense. It's the feeling of not having a 
center--but also of not even lacking one. A cool, prosthetic pathos, perfect 
for an age of television and computers. What is the ontological status of this 
"soul of a new machine," this deeply intimate, yet strangely unlocalizable, 
affect? Call it a secondary, sympathetic resonance; or an uneliminable 
redundancy; or an effect of multiple interference patterns; or an emergent 
property of information flows accelerated beyond a certain threshold. As Deleuze 
suggests, we need to replace the old phenomenological slogan ("all consciousness 
is consciousness of something") with a new, radically decentered one: "all 
consciousness is something." For this is what happens when your brain is 
plugged directly into the world's "mixing board" (Cronenberg); but also when 
it's isolated in a vat, or when its contents are downloaded into the VR matrix 
of a supercomputer. Round and round and round it goes; where it stops, nobody 
knows. "Does the body rule the mind or does the mind rule the body? I don't 
know." No cogito, then; no ergo, and no sum. "I don't know if the world is 
better or worse than it has been"--as Kathy Acker writes in a different 
context--"I know the only anguish comes from running away."


7. Cindy Sherman

The images implore us, seduce us, perhaps delude us. No mere verbal 
descriptions can do them justice. The woman sits in a window frame, low-cut 
blouse, hot pants, bobby sox, high heeled shoes, glancing out of the window with 
frustrated expectation, and perhaps also a hint of boredom. The woman, all in 
black, in semi-shadow, stands leaning by the fireplace, beneath a landscape 
painting, cigarette in one upraised hand, pensive. The woman lies on her back, 
head towards us, outstretched diagonally across a hotel bed, frilly white 
evening dress, pearl necklace, lost somewhere between reverie and exhaustion. 
The woman sits at the table, empty drink glass in front of her, medium close-up, 
upper torso and face, black dress with leopard-skin neck and sleeves, tears 
streaming down her heavily made-up face.

How many times have we seen such scenes before? Cindy Sherman's black-and-white 
"Untitled Film Stills" (1977-1980) teeter on the brink between cliche and 
revelation. Overloaded with detail, these pictures are nonetheless fundamentally 
empty. Nothing is happening, although far too much has already happened or is 
about to happen. Present time has been drained of its vitality and fullness; it 
is no longer that living immediacy whose recovery is the utopian promise of 
every snapshot. Rather, the moment seems to have been emptied out: emaciated to 
the point where it is only the thinnest of membranes, barely separating a 
traumatic past from a fatal future. Each photograph is ostensibly a 
"self-portrait": Sherman casts herself in a series of cliched roles from 40s and 
50s low-budget melodramas and film noirs. These women are fragile, lonely, 
confused, abandoned, wistful, or timidly seductive: not glamorous drag queens 
like Mae West, Jean Harlow, and Marilyn Monroe, but humbler stereotypes of a 
traditional, depressed femininity. They are uncertain, indecisive, achingly 
passive and vulnerable, unable to act. All they can do is wait. Time is frozen. 
The film projector has jammed: this single frame, this insubstantial instant, 
one twenty-fourth of a second, will last forever. The women are caught in the 
time warp of their retro stylizations: they are defined and constrained by their 
postures, their make-up, their clothes, none of which will ever change. They are 
trapped in their images. For what is an image, after all? "A superb power," to 
quote Blanchot ironically quoting Pascal, "which makes eternity into 
nothingness and nothingness into eternity."

These women cannot really be called individuals, for everything about them is 
subordinated to the cliches of genre fiction, and to the standardized rules of 
feminine behavior. There are as many prosthetic female selves as there are 
different videotapes of old movies to rent, or different TV programs to watch. 
Which is why Sherman has to make so many different images, why her serial 
repetitions produce multiple sets of stereotypes, instead of fixing on just one. 
The women in the "Untitled Film Stills" are stereotypes, puppets, playing out 
their pre-assigned scripts. Their inner life is utterly blocked. They are so 
frail, so vulnerable. They need you, it seems, to complete their story. Save me. 
Protect me. Penetrate me. Possess me. And so virility rides to the rescue. But 
isn't that the biggest cliche of all? What's missing from this picture? You say 
that these women are suffering from "lack," so that you can be the one to 
fulfill and complete them. But it doesn't work. You find that these images 
continually slip beyond your grasp, out of your possession. You can't get it up, 
you can't get the film projector up and running again, you can't supply the 
missing narratives that would release the trapped figures from their 
suspension. The stifling intimacy of these scenarios is such, that there can be 
no referential 'real' in which to anchor them, and no Archimedean point from 
which to regard them. These images lure you instead into a paralysis as great as 
their own, into the realm of the unspeakable, the unsayable. This is what 
Blanchot calls the time of fascination: "the time of the absence of time, the 
time in which nothing begins, without negation, without decision, where before 
affirmation there is already the return of affirmation."

These women offer you no point of approach. You can't even really define them 
as recognizable 'types.' Their presence is too disturbingly indefinite for that. 
Their faces have congealed into sterile masks of anticipation, yearning, dread, 
fatigue, insecurity, or boredom. Wittgenstein suggests that such conditions 
should not be regarded as "mental states" at all. One isn't bored or sad or 
expectant in the same way that one is cold or hot, or that one suddenly feels a 
sharp pain, or that one sees colors and hears sounds. That is to say, affects 
like grief, longing, and exhaustion aren't really 'psychological,' since they 
are devoid of intentional and phenomenological content. Wittgenstein points out 
that we quite easily say: "For a second he felt violent pain"; but that it would 
"sound queer to say: 'For a second he felt deep grief.'" For "grief describes a 
pattern which recurs, with different variations, in the weave of our life," but 
which cannot be circumscribed as a particular mental activity. The "now" of all 
these emotions--the "now" of the figures in Sherman's photographs--is different 
from the "now" of sensation and comprehension. It's an oddly impersonal "now," 
without contours, without discernible limits, and without fixed location. These 
affects are everyday banalities, they are all perfectly real; only they aren't 
accessible to our usual powers of self-conscious introspection. They steal over 
me before I am aware of them, and somehow separate me from myself. They come 
over me in waves, breaking down my self-possession and self-control. They turn 
me into a stereotype, drained of interiority, emotionally unbalanced and 
strangely vulnerable. In short, they turn me into a woman.

But now consider another group of Sherman's photographs, this time in lurid, 
'living' color: the "Untitled" series from 1992. Here Sherman is no longer 
content just to try on Mommy's old clothes; instead, she gleefully mixes and 
matches the stereotypical, prefabricated parts of "anatomically correct 
medical-supply-house dolls." Skin and fabric give way to plastic. These 
prosthetic "self-portraits" are no longer content to suffer passively: they are 
bloody, violent, predatory, dangerously unbalanced, obsessed with mutilation and 
disease. Faces are grotesquely masked, wrinkled with age, or distended in 
(orgasmic or agonizing?) screams. Enormous dolls, part female and part male, 
offer themselves to the camera in 'fuck-me' postures. Cunts gape open distended 
with blood and shit, or sprout monstrous erections from which ooze unhealthy 
fluids. Heads winch apart from their prosthetic torsos, and limbless trunks 
testify to torturous amputations. This aggressive fragmentation of the body 
frees organs and orifices from the tedious constraints of organic unity. Cunts, 
assholes, and breasts reek with infection, crying out desperately to be fondled, 
penetrated, or milked. These images are a threat--perhaps to the projections of 
female narcissism, and certainly to the anxious defensiveness of male pricks 
and egos. But they also carry the promise of strange and novel pleasures. Long 
live the new flesh. Sherman returns to the autopsy table and remakes human 
anatomy, just as Artaud demanded.

Vision itself is wounded and infected in these photographs: solicited, 
embodied, taken hostage, fragmented, shattered. Out, vile jelly. "What happens 
when what you see, even though from a distance, seems to touch you with a 
grasping contact, when the manner of seeing is a sort of touch, when seeing is 
contact at a distance? What happens when what is seen imposes itself on your 
gaze, as though the gaze had been seized, touched, put in contact with 
appearance?" (Blanchot). These images leave you no room for detached, 
disinterested contemplation. They draw you into the scenario, and make you feel 
sullied by the touch of ocular contact. Nobody can refuse to take part in this 
orgy. The merest glance, and it's already too late. How reductive of Freud to 
describe the fear of blindness, of "base matter" touching and tainting the eyes, 
as a derivative of castration anxiety. In such disarticulated and prosthetic 
flesh, there can be no hierarchy of the organs or the senses, no privileging of 
sight over touch or male over female, of cocks over cunts or cocks over eyes. 
Woman has sex organs more or less everywhere, as Luce Irigaray puts it, and as 
Doctor Schreber already knew. And in this postmodern delirium, we are all more 
or less women. A decentered, tactile, polymorphous economy of the flesh replaces 
the old phallic and visual one. Irigaray's evocation of the fluidity, intimacy, 
tactility, and volume of female bodies corresponds with Marshall McLuhan's 
apprehension of the tactile, synesthetic qualities of the new electronic media. 
Every technological innovation, McLuhan says, implies a radical reordering of 
the human nervous system. Postmodern experience no longer conforms to the 
print-centered, phallocentric paradigm of a distanced, objectifying, linear, and 
perspectival vision. Now, in the age of video and computers, of genetic 
engineering and prosthetic surgery, the eye touches rather than sees; it 
immerses itself in the photograph, to be traversed by its erotic and emetic 
flows, and caressed and violated all along its surfaces.

So this is what it means to be a woman. Femininity, we now realize, is a 
variable construction, not a pre-given mythological essence. Ladies are made and 
not born. It's not enough just to have a cunt, or XX chromosomes, in order to 
become a woman. Genes can be spliced, and cunts, too, are prosthetically 
manufactured. But how, then, are women constructed? What are little girls made 
of? "Sugar and spice and everything nice" can be a difficult dish to swallow. It 
has to be mixed just right, or else it might make you queasy. It must flatter 
your nose and tickle your palate, melt pleasantly in your mouth and not in your 
hands, and soothe your throat as it slides smoothly down into your belly. 
Femininity is less an effect of language or ideology, than it is the result of 
an actual labor upon the body. Adornment of the surfaces, and penetration into 
the depths. Hormone balances and cosmetic applications. A rigorous training in 
posture, gesture and dress. There's a curious ambiguity at the heart of this 
process, an insidious, fascinating slippage from obligation to desire, from 
coercion to seduction. I resent it, yet I become absorbed in it. I give way, now 
to vertiginous ecstasy, now to violent bursts of all-consuming rage. "Happiness 
in slavery," as Jean Paulhan describes the paradox of Pauline Reage's Story of 
O, the quintessential novel of feminine apprenticeship. It's an emotional 
push-and-pull so extreme, so slippery and unstable, that it can't just be called 
'ambivalence.' For it's not that I am indecisively torn between different 
attitudes, so much as that I experience the full strength of incompatible 
affects at one and the same time. I feel it in my entrails, pushing ever deeper, 
churning up my insides. It's like being fist-fucked in the cunt and the asshole 
simultaneously, an intensity almost too great to bear: "they were practically 
holding hands inside her. Only a thin membrane kept them apart. She could feel 
them flexing their muscles, turning; even an eighth of an inch of motion made 
her eyes roll back and her nerve endings ring. There was no way to come on this 
rollercoaster of sensation. It was an experience more like an orgasm than any 
other part of sex, but it just kept on happening, peaking, cresting, climbing 
higher and peaking again" (Pat Califia, Macho Sluts).

These violent fluctuations of affect, these detours of wasted energy, leaving 
their traces on photographic plates, coursing incessantly through the bodies of 
Sherman's multiple personalities, also force their way into the viewer's tender 
and receptive flesh. I can't look at these pictures calmly. I feel myself 
falling, being sucked inexorably into them, losing my self-possession, 
gradually letting go. I become what I behold. Subject and object are now utterly 
indistinguishable, agitated or paralyzed by the same intense emotion. Isn't that 
what it means to be a woman? Why call it "castration," when it involves a 
heightening of sensory enjoyment? Doctor Schreber finds the loss of his 
"virility" a small price to pay for the increase in "voluptuousness" all over 
his body. And remember the plight of James Woods in Cronenberg's Videodrome. He 
becomes so passionate and deliriously passive a TV viewer that a vaginal slit 
opens up in his belly, a handy slot for inserting videocassettes directly. You 
macho asshole, now you know what it's like to be a cunt. Obtrusive men will ask 
the Freudian question, "what do women want?" But that's the sort of thing only 
cops and critics worry about. They'd never address such a question to 
themselves. It could only be directed at somebody else: somebody whose intimate 
touch they wish to avoid, but whose behavior they seek to control. And it's not 
a question we are willing or even able to answer, caught up as we are in the 
throes of desperation or abject rapture. Bodies pushed to such extremities no 
longer 'know' what they 'want.' "I can know what someone else is thinking, not 
what I am thinking," as Wittgenstein put it. Like the heroine of a Harlequin 
romance, or like a hot bitch in a porno flick, I'm absorbed and consumed by the 
intensities of the moment. There's no room here for a desire that would pause 
for self-reflection, or demand "recognition," or be predicated upon "lack." 
Everything implodes into this body, into this image, as into a black hole or a 
cunt. The feeling is orgasmic, but without that sense of culmination and 
finality that a 'real' orgasm provides. She might just as well be faking it, 
for all you know or understand. Men never fathom women's depths, Nietzsche says, 
not because women are "deep," but because they "aren't even shallow."

So forget your virile anxieties about whether you were able to make me come, 
about who I am and what I want, about what is authentically real and what is 
not. A woman's impetuous desire scorns such niceties of masculine logic. So what 
if I'm faking it? Do you suppose that your oh-so-precious manhood is any less 
of an imposture? You'd better wake up, babe. Everything is a simulacrum, 
everything is a cliche. Intuitions without thoughts are blind, or so they say; a 
passion that doesn't scruple to "know itself" is indistinguishable from an empty 
stereotype. You've seen it a million times before. I'm always playing a 
pre-given part, whether by cynical calculation, or because I've been swept up 
in the heat of the moment. Just like any woman, I'm not responsible for my 
actions. I'm literally beside myself. I lose myself when you make me come, but I 
equally lose myself when I act the virgin or the whore, when I flatter your 
male vanity by pretending that you are the only man for me or that you are able 
to make me come. "I is an other," remember, and that other is always a 
pre-programmed social or biological construction.

It's all theater, all feminine coquetry and affectation. Life is a long process 
of method acting. Try it, you'll like it. Just don't imagine that, beyond all 
the cliches, beneath all these particulars of sensation, affect, and 
personality, you will ever discover such a thing as 'yourself.' The obsessive 
serial repetitions and continual variations of Sherman's images should be 
enough to disabuse you of that notion. Which is why it's not enough just to 
"read" these photographs as "critiques," as didactic, illustrational depictions 
of oppressive gender roles; though plenty of critics have tried. Even Craig 
Owens, one of the best, argues that Sherman's images work "to expose the 
identification of the self with an image as its dispossession," and that they 
force upon the viewer "the urgent necessity of making a distinction" between 
actual women and the "alienating identifications" imposed upon them by the 
"false mirror" of mass media. But is that really the story here? The problem 
lies in Owens' recourse to the old modernist notion of "alienation." For in 
postmodern media space, there is no longer a self for one to be dispossessed of, 
or alienated from. Electronic media haven't alienated or perverted or destroyed 
human nature; rather, we must say that they are human nature. There is no virgin 
ground; the Outside is also populated by masks and stereotypes. Owens knows this 
well enough; he acknowledges Sherman's "complicity" with the very forces that 
perform the social construction and stereotyping of femininity. But the whole 
situation makes him uneasy. Doesn't such complicity threaten to undermine the 
very possibility of an oppositional stance? Well, not necessarily, once we 
reflect that it equally compromises the integrity of the forces of conformity 
and order themselves. Double agents are notorious for their unstable loyalties; 
they like to swing both ways. Yes, capitalism can co-opt anything; but 
co-optation too has its price. Owens tries to resolve the dilemma by invoking 
"the unavoidable necessity of participating in the very activity that is being 
denounced precisely in order to denounce it." But isn't that making things a 
bit too easy? Let us not disavow the abject pleasures that complicity gives us, 
the urgency with which we are drawn to it, the strange desire that it inspires. 
It's time to discover the feminine delights of what Jean Genet calls treason.

I don't mean to deny the profoundly feminist import of Sherman's work, quite 
the contrary. I, too, yearn to become a woman. And woman is never the same. Her 
explosive proliferation in Sherman's "self-portraits" breaks the links of 
dependency, ruptures the chain of habit. But this is precisely why we can't 
confine Sherman's images to a critical awareness of the gender codes they 
travesty, or reduce them to the lessons and messages they seem to imply. It's 
not the meat, it's the motion. Politics begins in the ecstasy, suffering, and 
vulnerability of our agitated flesh. Sherman isn't content just to expose and 
critique social constructions of femininity; she gets off on the whole process 
far too much. She gleefully relishes--indeed, she prolongs and reiterates--the 
violent, intrusive movements of feminine fabrication. She takes a cruel, giddy 
delight in playing dress-up, in rummaging through heaps of old clothes, in 
twisting mannequin parts into grotesque new configurations. Bloody menstrual 
wounds, beautiful flowers of passion. Sherman floods the market with monstrous 
feminine simulacra. Each new self-portrait is yet another stylization of 
fetishized femininity, one more prosthetic proxy for an unpresentable self. 
These stereotypes are inscribed and effaced, again and again, one after another: 
constructed and deconstructed, affirmed and forgotten, in the same delirious 
motion.

The violent intensities of Sherman's photographs are thus a product of the most 
blatant artifice. These pictures obey the first rule of feminine imposture: just 
flaunt it shamelessly enough, and everybody will think you've really got it. 
Femininity is masquerade, as the psychoanalysts put it. Like a low-budget horror 
film, Sherman's work revels in its tongue-in-cheek sensationalism, its 
ostentatious phoniness, its use of gross and sleazy special effects. Take the 
images of food and debris from a 1987 series: puke spewed over an abandoned 
banquet; fat, repulsive worms swimming in snot sauce and heaped on a plate; 
decaying body parts immersed in beds of gravel and quicksand, lit to a lurid 
pink or blue. These images may be ludicrously cheesy, but they manage to disturb 
you all the same. Your own viscera are extracted, and served up to you on a 
platter. Death and decay are presented for your delectation, just like tits and 
ass on the Playboy Channel. No alienation-effect at work here; your excitement 
and revulsion are only heightened when you realize that you've been cheated, 
that none of this is really happening, that it's all only a spectacle mounted 
for your benefit. It's just like phone sex and peep shows. The nauseous 
intimacy of Sherman's sex dolls is all the more obscene for being forced and 
contrived, instead of spontaneous and open. Anyone with a little experience of 
s&m knows that the hokiest scenarios are the most effective at pushing bodies 
over the edge and into an uncontrollable frenzy. You've been a bad girl. Daddy 
wants to fuck. Mommy's gonna punish you. Lie still and let Nurse give you an 
enema.

It's all calculated and programmed, it's all just a performance. Yet everything 
screams vulnerability and pain. Don't even bother to ask whether woman is a 
product of nature or of culture. Femininity is a mutable construct, not an 
unchanging essence, regardless of whether chromosomes or social norms do the 
constructing. Sociobiologists may well be right when they claim that certain 
gender traits are written in our genes. Is that a problem? Given current levels 
of technology, it's far easier to rewrite or override the instructions of DNA, 
than it would be to alter the harsh imperatives of the so-called Symbolic 
order. Sherman's prosthetic reconstructions of the flesh suggest that anatomy 
may in fact be our best hope for escaping the "destiny" of gender. As far as 
feminism is concerned, genetic engineering, hormone treatments, and plastic 
surgery are all better bets than psychoanalysis. Who needs a cock anyway? "It 
is man whom we must now make up our minds to emasculate... Man is sick because 
he is badly constructed" (Artaud). So welcome to Dr. Sherman's operating table. 
Open up to me. Relax your sphincters. Let the images penetrate your flesh, and 
burn into your retinas. Make their vulnerability your own. How do you think it 
feels? This isn't a critique; this is a slide into the depths of abjection. 
Everything enters through a gash, a slit, an open sore: the mouth, the eyes, the 
asshole, the cunt. Think of how Bataille describes Madame Edwarda's cunt, the 
divine shrine at which he ecstatically worships: "a live wound, gaping at me, 
hairy and pink, bursting with life like a repulsive octopus." Now, there's no 
turning back. This is not "lack," but overfullness, life lived to its greatest 
intensity.


8. Kathy Acker

The images implore us, seduce us, perhaps delude us. No mere verbal 
descriptions can do them justice. The woman sits in a window frame, low-cut 
blouse, hot pants, bobby sox, high heeled shoes, glancing out of the window with 
frustrated expectation, and perhaps also a hint of boredom. The woman, all in 
black, in semi-shadow, stands leaning by the fireplace, beneath a landscape 
painting, cigarette in one upraised hand, pensive. The woman lies on her back, 
head towards us, outstretched diagonally across a hotel bed, frilly white 
evening dress, pearl necklace, lost somewhere between reverie and exhaustion. 
The woman sits at the table, empty drink glass in front of her, medium close-up, 
upper torso and face, black dress with leopard-skin neck and sleeves, tears 
streaming down her heavily made-up face.

How many times have we seen such scenes before? Cindy Sherman's black-and-white 
"Untitled Film Stills" (1977-1980) teeter on the brink between cliche and 
revelation. Overloaded with detail, these pictures are nonetheless fundamentally 
empty. Nothing is happening, although far too much has already happened or is 
about to happen. Present time has been drained of its vitality and fullness; it 
is no longer that living immediacy whose recovery is the utopian promise of 
every snapshot. Rather, the moment seems to have been emptied out: emaciated to 
the point where it is only the thinnest of membranes, barely separating a 
traumatic past from a fatal future. Each photograph is ostensibly a 
"self-portrait": Sherman casts herself in a series of cliched roles from 40s and 
50s low-budget melodramas and film noirs. These women are fragile, lonely, 
confused, abandoned, wistful, or timidly seductive: not glamorous drag queens 
like Mae West, Jean Harlow, and Marilyn Monroe, but humbler stereotypes of a 
traditional, depressed femininity. They are uncertain, indecisive, achingly 
passive and vulnerable, unable to act. All they can do is wait. Time is frozen. 
The film projector has jammed: this single frame, this insubstantial instant, 
one twenty-fourth of a second, will last forever. The women are caught in the 
time warp of their retro stylizations: they are defined and constrained by their 
postures, their make-up, their clothes, none of which will ever change. They are 
trapped in their images. For what is an image, after all? "A superb power," to 
quote Blanchot ironically quoting Pascal, "which makes eternity into 
nothingness and nothingness into eternity."

These women cannot really be called individuals, for everything about them is 
subordinated to the cliches of genre fiction, and to the standardized rules of 
feminine behavior. There are as many prosthetic female selves as there are 
different videotapes of old movies to rent, or different TV programs to watch. 
Which is why Sherman has to make so many different images, why her serial 
repetitions produce multiple sets of stereotypes, instead of fixing on just one. 
The women in the "Untitled Film Stills" are stereotypes, puppets, playing out 
their pre-assigned scripts. Their inner life is utterly blocked. They are so 
frail, so vulnerable. They need you, it seems, to complete their story. Save me. 
Protect me. Penetrate me. Possess me. And so virility rides to the rescue. But 
isn't that the biggest cliche of all? What's missing from this picture? You say 
that these women are suffering from "lack," so that you can be the one to 
fulfill and complete them. But it doesn't work. You find that these images 
continually slip beyond your grasp, out of your possession. You can't get it up, 
you can't get the film projector up and running again, you can't supply the 
missing narratives that would release the trapped figures from their 
suspension. The stifling intimacy of these scenarios is such, that there can be 
no referential 'real' in which to anchor them, and no Archimedean point from 
which to regard them. These images lure you instead into a paralysis as great as 
their own, into the realm of the unspeakable, the unsayable. This is what 
Blanchot calls the time of fascination: "the time of the absence of time, the 
time in which nothing begins, without negation, without decision, where before 
affirmation there is already the return of affirmation."

These women offer you no point of approach. You can't even really define them 
as recognizable 'types.' Their presence is too disturbingly indefinite for that. 
Their faces have congealed into sterile masks of anticipation, yearning, dread, 
fatigue, insecurity, or boredom. Wittgenstein suggests that such conditions 
should not be regarded as "mental states" at all. One isn't bored or sad or 
expectant in the same way that one is cold or hot, or that one suddenly feels a 
sharp pain, or that one sees colors and hears sounds. That is to say, affects 
like grief, longing, and exhaustion aren't really 'psychological,' since they 
are devoid of intentional and phenomenological content. Wittgenstein points out 
that we quite easily say: "For a second he felt violent pain"; but that it would 
"sound queer to say: 'For a second he felt deep grief.'" For "grief describes a 
pattern which recurs, with different variations, in the weave of our life," but 
which cannot be circumscribed as a particular mental activity. The "now" of all 
these emotions--the "now" of the figures in Sherman's photographs--is different 
from the "now" of sensation and comprehension. It's an oddly impersonal "now," 
without contours, without discernible limits, and without fixed location. These 
affects are everyday banalities, they are all perfectly real; only they aren't 
accessible to our usual powers of self-conscious introspection. They steal over 
me before I am aware of them, and somehow separate me from myself. They come 
over me in waves, breaking down my self-possession and self-control. They turn 
me into a stereotype, drained of interiority, emotionally unbalanced and 
strangely vulnerable. In short, they turn me into a woman.

But now consider another group of Sherman's photographs, this time in lurid, 
'living' color: the "Untitled" series from 1992. Here Sherman is no longer 
content just to try on Mommy's old clothes; instead, she gleefully mixes and 
matches the stereotypical, prefabricated parts of "anatomically correct 
medical-supply-house dolls." Skin and fabric give way to plastic. These 
prosthetic "self-portraits" are no longer content to suffer passively: they are 
bloody, violent, predatory, dangerously unbalanced, obsessed with mutilation and 
disease. Faces are grotesquely masked, wrinkled with age, or distended in 
(orgasmic or agonizing?) screams. Enormous dolls, part female and part male, 
offer themselves to the camera in 'fuck-me' postures. Cunts gape open distended 
with blood and shit, or sprout monstrous erections from which ooze unhealthy 
fluids. Heads winch apart from their prosthetic torsos, and limbless trunks 
testify to torturous amputations. This aggressive fragmentation of the body 
frees organs and orifices from the tedious constraints of organic unity. Cunts, 
assholes, and breasts reek with infection, crying out desperately to be fondled, 
penetrated, or milked. These images are a threat--perhaps to the projections of 
female narcissism, and certainly to the anxious defensiveness of male pricks 
and egos. But they also carry the promise of strange and novel pleasures. Long 
live the new flesh. Sherman returns to the autopsy table and remakes human 
anatomy, just as Artaud demanded.

Vision itself is wounded and infected in these photographs: solicited, 
embodied, taken hostage, fragmented, shattered. Out, vile jelly. "What happens 
when what you see, even though from a distance, seems to touch you with a 
grasping contact, when the manner of seeing is a sort of touch, when seeing is 
contact at a distance? What happens when what is seen imposes itself on your 
gaze, as though the gaze had been seized, touched, put in contact with 
appearance?" (Blanchot). These images leave you no room for detached, 
disinterested contemplation. They draw you into the scenario, and make you feel 
sullied by the touch of ocular contact. Nobody can refuse to take part in this 
orgy. The merest glance, and it's already too late. How reductive of Freud to 
describe the fear of blindness, of "base matter" touching and tainting the eyes, 
as a derivative of castration anxiety. In such disarticulated and prosthetic 
flesh, there can be no hierarchy of the organs or the senses, no privileging of 
sight over touch or male over female, of cocks over cunts or cocks over eyes. 
Woman has sex organs more or less everywhere, as Luce Irigaray puts it, and as 
Doctor Schreber already knew. And in this postmodern delirium, we are all more 
or less women. A decentered, tactile, polymorphous economy of the flesh replaces 
the old phallic and visual one. Irigaray's evocation of the fluidity, intimacy, 
tactility, and volume of female bodies corresponds with Marshall McLuhan's 
apprehension of the tactile, synesthetic qualities of the new electronic media. 
Every technological innovation, McLuhan says, implies a radical reordering of 
the human nervous system. Postmodern experience no longer conforms to the 
print-centered, phallocentric paradigm of a distanced, objectifying, linear, and 
perspectival vision. Now, in the age of video and computers, of genetic 
engineering and prosthetic surgery, the eye touches rather than sees; it 
immerses itself in the photograph, to be traversed by its erotic and emetic 
flows, and caressed and violated all along its surfaces.

So this is what it means to be a woman. Femininity, we now realize, is a 
variable construction, not a pre-given mythological essence. Ladies are made and 
not born. It's not enough just to have a cunt, or XX chromosomes, in order to 
become a woman. Genes can be spliced, and cunts, too, are prosthetically 
manufactured. But how, then, are women constructed? What are little girls made 
of? "Sugar and spice and everything nice" can be a difficult dish to swallow. It 
has to be mixed just right, or else it might make you queasy. It must flatter 
your nose and tickle your palate, melt pleasantly in your mouth and not in your 
hands, and soothe your throat as it slides smoothly down into your belly. 
Femininity is less an effect of language or ideology, than it is the result of 
an actual labor upon the body. Adornment of the surfaces, and penetration into 
the depths. Hormone balances and cosmetic applications. A rigorous training in 
posture, gesture and dress. There's a curious ambiguity at the heart of this 
process, an insidious, fascinating slippage from obligation to desire, from 
coercion to seduction. I resent it, yet I become absorbed in it. I give way, now 
to vertiginous ecstasy, now to violent bursts of all-consuming rage. "Happiness 
in slavery," as Jean Paulhan describes the paradox of Pauline Reage's Story of 
O, the quintessential novel of feminine apprenticeship. It's an emotional 
push-and-pull so extreme, so slippery and unstable, that it can't just be called 
'ambivalence.' For it's not that I am indecisively torn between different 
attitudes, so much as that I experience the full strength of incompatible 
affects at one and the same time. I feel it in my entrails, pushing ever deeper, 
churning up my insides. It's like being fist-fucked in the cunt and the asshole 
simultaneously, an intensity almost too great to bear: "they were practically 
holding hands inside her. Only a thin membrane kept them apart. She could feel 
them flexing their muscles, turning; even an eighth of an inch of motion made 
her eyes roll back and her nerve endings ring. There was no way to come on this 
rollercoaster of sensation. It was an experience more like an orgasm than any 
other part of sex, but it just kept on happening, peaking, cresting, climbing 
higher and peaking again" (Pat Califia, Macho Sluts).

These violent fluctuations of affect, these detours of wasted energy, leaving 
their traces on photographic plates, coursing incessantly through the bodies of 
Sherman's multiple personalities, also force their way into the viewer's tender 
and receptive flesh. I can't look at these pictures calmly. I feel myself 
falling, being sucked inexorably into them, losing my self-possession, 
gradually letting go. I become what I behold. Subject and object are now utterly 
indistinguishable, agitated or paralyzed by the same intense emotion. Isn't that 
what it means to be a woman? Why call it "castration," when it involves a 
heightening of sensory enjoyment? Doctor Schreber finds the loss of his 
"virility" a small price to pay for the increase in "voluptuousness" all over 
his body. And remember the plight of James Woods in Cronenberg's Videodrome. He 
becomes so passionate and deliriously passive a TV viewer that a vaginal slit 
opens up in his belly, a handy slot for inserting videocassettes directly. You 
macho asshole, now you know what it's like to be a cunt. Obtrusive men will ask 
the Freudian question, "what do women want?" But that's the sort of thing only 
cops and critics worry about. They'd never address such a question to 
themselves. It could only be directed at somebody else: somebody whose intimate 
touch they wish to avoid, but whose behavior they seek to control. And it's not 
a question we are willing or even able to answer, caught up as we are in the 
throes of desperation or abject rapture. Bodies pushed to such extremities no 
longer 'know' what they 'want.' "I can know what someone else is thinking, not 
what I am thinking," as Wittgenstein put it. Like the heroine of a Harlequin 
romance, or like a hot bitch in a porno flick, I'm absorbed and consumed by the 
intensities of the moment. There's no room here for a desire that would pause 
for self-reflection, or demand "recognition," or be predicated upon "lack." 
Everything implodes into this body, into this image, as into a black hole or a 
cunt. The feeling is orgasmic, but without that sense of culmination and 
finality that a 'real' orgasm provides. She might just as well be faking it, 
for all you know or understand. Men never fathom women's depths, Nietzsche says, 
not because women are "deep," but because they "aren't even shallow."

So forget your virile anxieties about whether you were able to make me come, 
about who I am and what I want, about what is authentically real and what is 
not. A woman's impetuous desire scorns such niceties of masculine logic. So what 
if I'm faking it? Do you suppose that your oh-so-precious manhood is any less 
of an imposture? You'd better wake up, babe. Everything is a simulacrum, 
everything is a cliche. Intuitions without thoughts are blind, or so they say; a 
passion that doesn't scruple to "know itself" is indistinguishable from an empty 
stereotype. You've seen it a million times before. I'm always playing a 
pre-given part, whether by cynical calculation, or because I've been swept up 
in the heat of the moment. Just like any woman, I'm not responsible for my 
actions. I'm literally beside myself. I lose myself when you make me come, but I 
equally lose myself when I act the virgin or the whore, when I flatter your 
male vanity by pretending that you are the only man for me or that you are able 
to make me come. "I is an other," remember, and that other is always a 
pre-programmed social or biological construction.

It's all theater, all feminine coquetry and affectation. Life is a long process 
of method acting. Try it, you'll like it. Just don't imagine that, beyond all 
the cliches, beneath all these particulars of sensation, affect, and 
personality, you will ever discover such a thing as 'yourself.' The obsessive 
serial repetitions and continual variations of Sherman's images should be 
enough to disabuse you of that notion. Which is why it's not enough just to 
"read" these photographs as "critiques," as didactic, illustrational depictions 
of oppressive gender roles; though plenty of critics have tried. Even Craig 
Owens, one of the best, argues that Sherman's images work "to expose the 
identification of the self with an image as its dispossession," and that they 
force upon the viewer "the urgent necessity of making a distinction" between 
actual women and the "alienating identifications" imposed upon them by the 
"false mirror" of mass media. But is that really the story here? The problem 
lies in Owens' recourse to the old modernist notion of "alienation." For in 
postmodern media space, there is no longer a self for one to be dispossessed of, 
or alienated from. Electronic media haven't alienated or perverted or destroyed 
human nature; rather, we must say that they are human nature. There is no virgin 
ground; the Outside is also populated by masks and stereotypes. Owens knows this 
well enough; he acknowledges Sherman's "complicity" with the very forces that 
perform the social construction and stereotyping of femininity. But the whole 
situation makes him uneasy. Doesn't such complicity threaten to undermine the 
very possibility of an oppositional stance? Well, not necessarily, once we 
reflect that it equally compromises the integrity of the forces of conformity 
and order themselves. Double agents are notorious for their unstable loyalties; 
they like to swing both ways. Yes, capitalism can co-opt anything; but 
co-optation too has its price. Owens tries to resolve the dilemma by invoking 
"the unavoidable necessity of participating in the very activity that is being 
denounced precisely in order to denounce it." But isn't that making things a 
bit too easy? Let us not disavow the abject pleasures that complicity gives us, 
the urgency with which we are drawn to it, the strange desire that it inspires. 
It's time to discover the feminine delights of what Jean Genet calls treason.

I don't mean to deny the profoundly feminist import of Sherman's work, quite 
the contrary. I, too, yearn to become a woman. And woman is never the same. Her 
explosive proliferation in Sherman's "self-portraits" breaks the links of 
dependency, ruptures the chain of habit. But this is precisely why we can't 
confine Sherman's images to a critical awareness of the gender codes they 
travesty, or reduce them to the lessons and messages they seem to imply. It's 
not the meat, it's the motion. Politics begins in the ecstasy, suffering, and 
vulnerability of our agitated flesh. Sherman isn't content just to expose and 
critique social constructions of femininity; she gets off on the whole process 
far too much. She gleefully relishes--indeed, she prolongs and reiterates--the 
violent, intrusive movements of feminine fabrication. She takes a cruel, giddy 
delight in playing dress-up, in rummaging through heaps of old clothes, in 
twisting mannequin parts into grotesque new configurations. Bloody menstrual 
wounds, beautiful flowers of passion. Sherman floods the market with monstrous 
feminine simulacra. Each new self-portrait is yet another stylization of 
fetishized femininity, one more prosthetic proxy for an unpresentable self. 
These stereotypes are inscribed and effaced, again and again, one after another: 
constructed and deconstructed, affirmed and forgotten, in the same delirious 
motion.

The violent intensities of Sherman's photographs are thus a product of the most 
blatant artifice. These pictures obey the first rule of feminine imposture: just 
flaunt it shamelessly enough, and everybody will think you've really got it. 
Femininity is masquerade, as the psychoanalysts put it. Like a low-budget horror 
film, Sherman's work revels in its tongue-in-cheek sensationalism, its 
ostentatious phoniness, its use of gross and sleazy special effects. Take the 
images of food and debris from a 1987 series: puke spewed over an abandoned 
banquet; fat, repulsive worms swimming in snot sauce and heaped on a plate; 
decaying body parts immersed in beds of gravel and quicksand, lit to a lurid 
pink or blue. These images may be ludicrously cheesy, but they manage to disturb 
you all the same. Your own viscera are extracted, and served up to you on a 
platter. Death and decay are presented for your delectation, just like tits and 
ass on the Playboy Channel. No alienation-effect at work here; your excitement 
and revulsion are only heightened when you realize that you've been cheated, 
that none of this is really happening, that it's all only a spectacle mounted 
for your benefit. It's just like phone sex and peep shows. The nauseous 
intimacy of Sherman's sex dolls is all the more obscene for being forced and 
contrived, instead of spontaneous and open. Anyone with a little experience of 
s&m knows that the hokiest scenarios are the most effective at pushing bodies 
over the edge and into an uncontrollable frenzy. You've been a bad girl. Daddy 
wants to fuck. Mommy's gonna punish you. Lie still and let Nurse give you an 
enema.

It's all calculated and programmed, it's all just a performance. Yet everything 
screams vulnerability and pain. Don't even bother to ask whether woman is a 
product of nature or of culture. Femininity is a mutable construct, not an 
unchanging essence, regardless of whether chromosomes or social norms do the 
constructing. Sociobiologists may well be right when they claim that certain 
gender traits are written in our genes. Is that a problem? Given current levels 
of technology, it's far easier to rewrite or override the instructions of DNA, 
than it would be to alter the harsh imperatives of the so-called Symbolic 
order. Sherman's prosthetic reconstructions of the flesh suggest that anatomy 
may in fact be our best hope for escaping the "destiny" of gender. As far as 
feminism is concerned, genetic engineering, hormone treatments, and plastic 
surgery are all better bets than psychoanalysis. Who needs a cock anyway? "It 
is man whom we must now make up our minds to emasculate... Man is sick because 
he is badly constructed" (Artaud). So welcome to Dr. Sherman's operating table. 
Open up to me. Relax your sphincters. Let the images penetrate your flesh, and 
burn into your retinas. Make their vulnerability your own. How do you think it 
feels? This isn't a critique; this is a slide into the depths of abjection. 
Everything enters through a gash, a slit, an open sore: the mouth, the eyes, the 
asshole, the cunt. Think of how Bataille describes Madame Edwarda's cunt, the 
divine shrine at which he ecstatically worships: "a live wound, gaping at me, 
hairy and pink, bursting with life like a repulsive octopus." Now, there's no 
turning back. This is not "lack," but overfullness, life lived to its greatest 
intensity.


9. Daniel Paul Schreber

It's all happening in the depths of my body, in the twists of my bowels, in the 
leaps across my synapses, in the nucleic acid transfers of my cells. So much 
activity, not even ceasing when I try to sleep. Doctor Daniel Paul Schreber 
discovers that he is being turned into a woman, as nerves of voluptuousness 
grow throughout his body; these nerves are constantly being stimulated to a 
pitch of orgasmic excitement. He must perpetually listen to the voices of dead 
souls and innumerable little birds, speaking to him in the nerve-language, "an 
empty babble of ever recurring monotonous phrases in tiresome repetition." He 
complains of the compulsive thinking that he is forced to endure, a process of 
"having to think continually," in opposition to "man's natural right of mental 
relaxation, of temporary rest from mental activity through thinking nothing." 
Never a moment in which not to think and feel. Machines within me, engines in 
hyperdrive, factories in constant overproduction. Bataille argues that nature 
and capitalism alike are driven not by scarcity, but by excess, a superabundance 
that we are unable to discharge: "The sun dispenses energy--wealth--without any 
return. The sun gives without ever receiving." My own body is suffused with such 
surplus. But it is impossible to emulate the sun, impossible for me ever to 
spend or squander enough. No wonder I find it difficult to get enough sleep. 
Schreber, suffering under the weight of this irreversible generosity, unable to 
suspend his exquisite soul-voluptuousness and pay off his debt, screams that the 
sun is a whore, and identifies it with God.

Even when the sun is gone, its excessive, radiant energy still refuses to 
subside. Afterimages assault me. Or else the night has its own agitations and 
terrors, like those encountered by Blanchot's Thomas the Obscure: "It was night 
itself. Images which constituted its darkness inundated him." Schreber is 
dazzled by nocturnal, no less than diurnal, radiance. The onset of his nervous 
illness is signaled when malign forces conspire to deprive him of rest: "a 
recurrent cracking noise in the wall of our bedroom became noticeable at shorter 
or longer intervals; time and again it woke me as I was about to go to sleep." 
Like Poe's and Lovecraft's narrators, I am unable to exorcise the merest hint of 
sound, a vibration just beneath the threshold of clear and distinct perception. 
Insomnia is the bane of my existence. It keeps me awake and alert just enough so 
that I cannot enjoy the refreshment of rest; but not sufficiently so for me to 
be able to compose and collect my thoughts. And so I find myself staring into 
the semidarkness, endlessly repeating fragments from unfinished dreams. Emmanuel 
Levinas thus describes insomnia as a state of anonymous, impersonal vigilance. 
My thoughts are tiresomely meticulous, my attention is painstakingly thorough; 
but I can't lay hold of anything concrete. The sense of a centered, stable 
selfhood dissolves; all this thought and attention belongs to nobody and is 
"suspended on nothing." There is no hope of bringing anything to a conclusion: I 
have to follow the very same steps, answer the same objections, count the same 
sheep, over and over again. "I'll never know, in the silence you don't know, 
you must go on, I can't go on, I'll go on" (Beckett). It's not fear of death or 
deprivation that haunts me; rather it's the very exuberance of existence, this 
having always to go on, that becomes an ironic burden. If only I could sleep.

When will it all stop, we ask, how much longer can we stand it? "From a certain 
point of view it would be much better if nothing worked, if nothing functioned. 
Never being born, escaping the wheel of continual birth and rebirth, no mouth to 
suck with, no anus to shit through" (Deleuze and Guattari). Postmodern culture 
is pervaded by such apocalyptic imaginings, fears and longings. We are 
peculiarly obsessed with doom, with the end of the world. DOOM PATROL, living up 
to its name, is filled with signs and portents of the Last Things, barely 
averted threats of universal destruction. Our dread is only the flip side of a 
restless fascination, a deep yearning that arises in long nights of insomniac 
vigilance. Sometimes we want everything to stop, to die, just so that we can 
sink into final oblivion, together with all the rest. The pleasure of making the 
world come to an end is much like the pleasure of finally being able to take a 
shit. For Schreber, "liberation from the pressure of faeces present in the guts 
creates an intense feeling of well-being, particularly for the nerves of 
voluptuousness." But God, who is ignorant of how living beings actually feel, 
who only really understands sleepers and corpses, translates this sense of 
well-being into the delusion that shitting equals death, that taking a shit "is 
to a certain extent the final act" for any living organism. God wants both to 
push Schreber to the point of death, in order to withdraw from his excessive 
attraction, and to maintain Schreber alive in a state of unresolved 
voluptuousness, in order thereby to expropriate that voluptuousness for his own 
sustenance. And so, trapped in this ambivalent double bind, God tortures 
Schreber by producing in him the imperious urge to shit, while simultaneously 
denying him the ability to do so.

The logic of insomnia, like that of constipation, moves in a vicious circle of 
evasion and control. I agitate myself all the more, the more I strive to relax 
and establish peace. Whenever I seek release, I find myself invoking the very 
"miraculous" forces from which I am also trying to escape. Life's "extreme 
exuberance," Bataille writes, "pours out in a movement always bordering on 
explosion": an explosion that is always impending, but that never actually 
arrives. The compulsive thoughts and movements that deny me rest are the same 
ones that threaten to devastate the world; and so I only increase my own 
torment when I call upon them to unleash an ultimate catastrophe. Schreber finds 
that the divine rays that invest his own body with unbearably heightened 
sensation have also annihilated the earth, the heavens, and the entire rest of 
mankind. He is constrained within Being, made to live through his own 
destruction, to feel the evisceration of his organs, to endure more than any 
living organism possibly could endure. The apocalyptic vision of universal ruin 
is in this way itself the nightmare that interrupts my sleep, and throws me 
back upon the torments of involuntary wakefulness. And so I toss and turn in my 
bed, trying out every posture except the right one, the unique one in which my 
body would finally be able to relax.

These divine or infernal machines are at work in our bodies, and all throughout 
society. It seems that they are on the verge of destroying everything, but it 
also seems that they will remain forever in motion, insuring for all eternity 
that there is something rather than nothing. Schreber eventually realizes that 
the old world, which has palpably collapsed all around him, nonetheless 
continues to function in its accustomed manner. The process of his unmanning is 
inexorable, but it will take millennia. Quite similarly, the bewildered heroes 
of DOOM PATROL find themselves trying to combat strange apocalyptic forces that 
on one level menace the existence of the world absolutely, yet on another level 
seem to leave everything intact. In one series of episodes, a Gnostic sect 
called the Cult of the Unwritten Book summons the Decreator, God's dark double, 
who will reverse the order of the creation of the universe and return everything 
to the nothingness whence it came. The process of decreation is unstoppable and 
irreversible, much like entropy; but our heroes are able to slow it down, so 
that it will take billions of years to accomplish itself--the same length of 
time as for the entropic heat-death of the universe--instead of just a couple of 
days. The Apocalypse is in effect, but its progress is so slackened as to be 
nearly imperceptible.

In another series of episodes, a psychic apocalypse is visible only to 
"children, lunatics, and sensitives"; the spectacle of "New York ablaze, overrun 
by screaming phantoms" simply isn't noticed by anybody else. The Apocalypse, in 
this version, may be called virtual (as when we speak of `virtual images') 
rather than actual, since it affects not the immediate experiential world but 
"the soul of the world, the world's dream of itself." But such a virtual event 
is perfectly real, as Deleuze repeatedly says, even if it isn't actual; the 
psychic apocalypse, like a neutron bomb, may leave physical structures 
untouched, but it turns human society into a collection of "dead shells, zombie 
cultures, shambling aimlessly towards oblivion." In wiping out the world's 
dreams, it reduces us to a state of insomniac unfulfillment: we are dead in 
effect, but we are compelled like zombies to live through and testify again and 
again to our death. The agent responsible for this virtual destruction is 
called the Candlemaker: it has emerged from the virtual, traumatically charged 
realm of nursery rhymes and childhood imaginings. Dorothy Spinner, the teenaged 
girl who is the newest member of the DOOM PATROL, has the ability to project her 
innermost imaginings onto the plane of consensus reality; but she is more the 
victim than the master of this power. Her brain is overloaded with scary 
childhood memories, and anxieties over her first menstruation. Fantasy, for her, 
implies bodily shock and trauma; childhood is forever charged with danger and 
loss. And so she imagines the Candlemaker into existence: "It makes candles for 
the dead, that's what it does; it has to kill everyone so it can make candles 
for them." It has to murder, that is, in order then to memorialize. Dorothy's 
mind is trapped in a horrific feedback loop. In the Candlemaker's virtual 
apocalypse, as in the delirium of Schreber and in the busy vacuousness of 
insomnia, the very drama of extinction prevents us from ever attaining 
nothingness.

In this sense, postmodern also means postapocalyptic. The modernists proclaimed 
the millennium, finalities and absolutes of all sorts. They projected triumphant 
aesthetic utopias, and they encountered equally unmitigated political horrors. 
History, they thought, was coming to its dialectically preordained conclusion; 
whether this end was blissful or horrible--socialism or fascism, technological 
paradise or nuclear holocaust-- was only a secondary matter. But today, as the 
literal millennium approaches, we are more likely to conceive the end of life as 
we know it as an everyday and almost casual process, without a "final conflict" 
or an impressive, stirring narrative climax. All through the Cold War we were 
waiting for an ultimate cataclysm, some all-consuming event. But now that the 
Cold War is over, we have come to realize that nothing is ever really over. 
There are more wars and insecurities than ever before. It has been said that the 
only thing we learn from history is that we do not learn from history. Well, 
now we must confront the fact that the only "end of history" is that history is 
always ending, so that in fact there is no end to history. We're beginning to 
understand that there can be no release and no respite, not even in our dreams 
of destruction and renovation. "A screaming comes across the sky. It has 
happened before..." (Pynchon). It's all just business as usual: today is the 
first day of the rest of your life. Which is why our culture's privileged model 
of extinction is no longer nuclear war, but rather the excruciatingly slow, 
always-already-in-process, devastation of the environment. Ecological disaster 
is like constipation: nothing sudden, but a continuing inability to evacuate, 
expenditure blocked and turned against itself, a long-drawn-out and inconclusive 
torment, the slow poisoning of the bowels. Finality just won't come to an end. 
Nietzsche's most striking insight is not the banal modernist one that "God is 
dead," but the postmodernist qualification that "this tremendous deed is still 
on its way, still wandering... this deed is still more distant from [men] than 
the most distant stars--and yet they have done it themselves." We are still 
helplessly entangled in the endless ramifications and reverberations of 
modernism's supposed ultimates, as they perpetuate themselves to infinity; and 
that's the reason for the post- in postmodernism.

And so, we may say that the Apocalypse has already happened; or better, that it 
is happening right now, continually and inconclusively, even as we speak. Only 
nobody noticed. "Armageddon has been in effect; go get a late pass" (Public 
Enemy). Like the heroes of DOOM PATROL, we unwittingly find ourselves in the 
midst of the battle. Doom is no longer a distant horizon, a telos, an ultimate 
limit; it is all around us, it is the very air we breathe. We have already 
survived our own extinction, outlived the ends which alone gave our lives 
meaning. We already live on intimate terms with the forces that threaten to 
destroy us: they've simply become so ubiquitous that we take them for granted, 
and no longer pay them any special attention. The message, according to Jean 
Baudrillard, is "that the catastrophe is already there, that it has already 
occurred because the very idea of the catastrophe is impossible." Schreber 
realizes that he has only further seduced and excited the divine rays by trying 
vigorously to resist them; and so he comes to welcome their efforts to penetrate 
and unman him. He simulates femininity, already becoming a woman in practice by 
decking his body with "feminine adornments" and devoting himself to "the 
cultivation of voluptuousness," even as he waits for the interminably delayed 
miracle that will definitively feminize him. The word apocalypse literally means 
disclosure or revelation, the prophetic uncovering of last things; but in common 
speech it has come to mean those last things themselves. This displacement is 
appropriate, since the postmodern world is precisely one in which whatever may 
be revealed of the future has in fact already unfolded in the present. "The 
boundary between science fiction and social reality is an optical illusion," 
says Donna Haraway. Our incessant waiting for catastrophe to happen itself 
enfolds or embodies the catastrophic event. This is why so much of postmodern 
thought is concerned with events after the end of the world. Military think 
tanks generate contingency plans for "the day after" a massive thermonuclear 
exchange. I also recall a Trotskyist fringe group, the Posadaists, that 
preached the virtues of "revolutionary nuclear war." Such reckless calculations 
may scandalize many, but science fiction writers have long been doing the same. 
Philip K. Dick and J. G. Ballard both regard catastrophe not as the culmination 
of life, but as a precondition, and even a stimulus, for continued action. With 
disingenuous blitheness, Dick suggests that his Dr. Bloodmoney "is an extremely 
hopeful novel," because it "does not posit the end of human civilization as a 
result of the next war. People are still around and they are still coping." 
Indeed, they are "coping," in this and in other of Dick's postapocalyptic 
novels, with vast paranoid conspiracies, with crippling ontological doubts about 
the reality of everything they experience, and with mutants whose magical powers 
and manias for control lead them to inflict new forms of suffering; but this 
doesn't much change things. For Dick's point is that apocalyptic tremors, like 
psychedelic drugs, don't do anything other than force us to be more fully aware 
of the horrors (and the joys) that we are experiencing already. It would be 
superfluous to dread the onset of those very conditions (ubiquitous 
commodification, media manipulation, conspiratorial bureaucracies) that already 
shape our everyday life under late capitalism. We are compelled to acknowledge 
such forces, just as Descartes was compelled to posit the existence of God. If 
Ronald Reagan didn't exist, it would be necessary to invent him.

Many of Ballard's works are similarly set in the abandoned ruins of a 
superannuated industrial society, and depict a life that absurdly continues to 
flourish amidst rubble and ecological waste. Production has been abolished, and 
reproduced mass-media images circulate randomly and fragmentarily on their own, 
having outlived their ostensible purpose of creating demand and stimulating 
sales. In this postapocalyptic world, we are freed from what Reaganite and 
Thatcherite sado-monetarists like to call "the discipline of the market," but 
not for all that from the demands of nonproductive consumption and expenditure. 
Ballard fashions an affectless, yet strangely compelling, lyricism from our 
industrial and information-media leftovers. We are relegated to a life of 
restless scavenging for subsistence and for status; and we are beset by 
obsessive, futile dreams, now of orgasmic vehicular disasters, now of gliding 
in paradisiacal free flight and falling softly into the sun. "The optimum 
sex-death of Ronald Reagan" ("Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan") on the one 
hand, and the beloved President's gentle, but inexorable, slide into senile 
dementia ("The Secret History of World War 3") on the other. For Reagan's 
miraculous body is our collective, postmodern equivalent of Doctor Schreber's: 
it suffers innumerable violent assaults and amputations, yet it remains 
untouched as a quasi-divine "substance of unity" (Kenneth Dean and Brian 
Massumi, First and Last Emperors). Ballard's obsessive catalogues of such 
things as radiation burns, wounds from auto accidents, spinal deformities, 
exploding helicopters, rusted machinery, ruined car parks, and fragments of 
enormous billboards, must be supplemented by those other strange and magical 
objects, the anal polyps and lacerating bullets and water on the brain, that 
surgeons are continually extracting from Reagan's flesh. The ex-President's 
glorious body, just like Schreber's, becomes increasingly saturated with 
voluptuousness: it evidences the messy afterbirths of a monstrous cataclysm 
that went unnoticed at the time, or that somehow never quite happened.

The postmodern Apocalypse is ubiquitous but invisible. The disaster never 
happens in the present, Blanchot says, for it is an abyss swallowing every 
presence and every present: "the disaster ruins everything while leaving 
everything in place." We cannot escape its overwhelming pressure, but we also 
cannot grasp it directly. It is happening now, but so subtly that we confuse it 
with everyday life; or else it has already happened, but so overwhelmingly as to 
have wiped out our memories of what things were like before. Let us then abandon 
the tired modernist rhetoric of crisis and loss. The superabundant energy that 
perturbs and threatens us, and that keeps us awake at night, will never be 
exhausted. Postmodern culture indeed displays a certain sense of urgency and 
impending doom, but one that is always being ironized, stylized, and 
indefinitely deferred. Even death, Bataille says, is a heightening of life, as 
it manifests life's irresistible propensity for the "luxurious squandering of 
energy in every form." Call it the Apocalypse if you like; but remember that the 
dinosaurs' destruction was our stroke of good fortune. The limit at which 
catastrophic expenditure occurs is not a finality; chaos theory tells us that 
it is rather a singularity, a point of phase transition or of metamorphosis. 
Niles Caulder, the Chief of the DOOM PATROL, reveals near the end of the series 
that he has deliberately, experimentally induced the calamitous events that 
transformed the members of the group into paranormal beings, discontented 
misfits with strange powers. Inspired by chaos theory, Caulder works to generate 
the "catastrophe curve," representing "the introduction of sudden, discontinuous 
change into a stable system. We cannot predict the effect of catastrophe, but we 
can use this model to help ascertain the conditions most favorable for its 
manifestation." Having produced catastrophe on an individual scale, he is now 
about to provoke it on a global scale, setting off a convulsion of such 
magnitude that all of humanity will "be forced to change and adapt." The 
Apocalypse thus appears not as a final consummation, but as a new Nietzschean 
throw of the dice, a fresh redistribution of "the movements of energy on the 
surface of the globe" (Bataille). Once we have started experimenting, we must go 
on to question everything: not to discover firm and unshakable foundations, but 
to make sure that nothing ever becomes that firm. Free from the conservative 
dread of disaster, and equally free from the nihilistic urge to bring everything 
to a final halt, Niles Caulder proclaims his "faith in the unexpected, the 
unpredictable... I believe in the catastrophe, I welcome it with open arms."


10. William Burroughs

"Which came first, the intestine or the tapeworm?" In this epigram, Burroughs 
suggests that parasitism--corruption, plagiarism, surplus appropriation--is in 
fact conterminous with life itself. The tapeworm doesn't simply happen to attach 
itself to an intestine that was getting along perfectly well without it. Say 
rather that the intestine evolved in the way that it did just in order to 
provide the tapeworm with a comfortable or profitable milieu, an environment in 
which it might thrive. My intestines are on as intimate terms with their 
tapeworms as they are with my mouth, my asshole, and my other organs; the 
relationship is as 'intrinsic' and 'organic' in the one case as it is in the 
other. Just like the tapeworm, I live off the surplus-value extracted from what 
passes through my stomach and intestines. Who's the parasite, then, and who's 
the host? The internal organs are parasitic upon one another; the organism as a 
whole is parasitic upon the world. My 'innards' are really a hole going 
straight through my body; their contents--shit and tapeworm--remain forever 
outside of and apart from me, even as they exist at my very center. The tapeworm 
is more "me" than I am myself. My shit is my inner essence; yet I cannot 
assimilate it to myself, but find myself always compelled to give it away. 
(Hence Freud's equation of feces with money and gifts; and Artaud's sense of 
being robbed of his body and selfhood every time he took a shit). Interiority 
means intrusion and colonization. Self-identity is ultimately a symptom of 
parasitic invasion, the expression within me of forces originating from outside.

And so it is with language. In Burroughs' famous dictum, language is a virus. 
Language is to the brain (and the speaking mouth and the writing or typing hand, 
and the listening ear and the reading eyes) as the tapeworm is to the 
intestines. Even more so: it may just be possible to find a digestive space 
free from parasitic infection (though this is extremely unlikely), but we will 
never find an uncontaminated mental space. Strands of alien DNA unfurl 
themselves in our brains, just as tapeworms unfurl themselves in our guts. 
Burroughs suggests that not just language, but "the whole quality of human 
consciousness, as expressed in male and female, is basically a virus mechanism." 
This is not to claim, in the manner of De Saussure and certain foolish 
poststructuralists, that all thought is linguistic, or that social reality is 
constituted exclusively through language. It is rather to deprivilege 
language--and thus to take apart the customary opposition between language and 
immediate intuition--by pointing out that nonlinguistic modes of thought (which 
obviously exist) are themselves also constituted by parasitic infiltration. 
Visual apprehension and the internal time sense, to take just two examples, are 
both radically nonlinguistic; but they too, in their own ways, are theaters of 
power and surplus-value extraction. Light sears my eyeballs, leaves its traces 
violently incised on my retinas. Duration imposes its ungraspable rhythms, 
emptying me of my own thought. Viruses and parasitic worms are at work 
everywhere, multiple outsides colonizing our insides. There is no refuge of pure 
interiority, not even before language. Whoever we are, and wherever and however 
we search, "we are all tainted with viral origins."

Burroughs' formulation is of course deliberately paradoxical, since viruses are 
never originary beings. They aren't self-sufficient, or even fully alive; they 
always need to commandeer the cells of an already-existing host in order to 
reproduce. A virus is nothing but DNA or RNA encased in a protective sheath; 
that is to say, it is a message --encoded in nucleic acid--whose only content 
is an order to repeat itself. When a living cell is invaded by a virus, it is 
compelled to obey this order. Here the medium really is the message: for the 
virus doesn't enunciate any command, so much as the virus is itself the command. 
It is a machine for reproduction, but without any external or referential 
content to be reproduced. A virus is a simulacrum: a copy for which there is no 
original, emptily duplicating itself to infinity. It doesn't represent anything, 
and it doesn't have to refer back to any standard measure or first instance, 
because it already contains all the information--and only the 
information--needed for its own further replication. Marx's famous description 
of capital applies perfectly to viruses: "dead labor which, vampire-like, lives 
only by sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more labor it sucks."

Reproduction (sexual or otherwise) is often sentimentally regarded as the basic 
activity and fundamental characteristic of life. It's only through reproduction 
that natural selection does its work. But look a bit more closely: reproduction 
is arguably more a viral than a vital process. It is so far from being 
straightforwardly 'organic,' that it necessarily involves vampirism, 
parasitism, and cancerous simulation. We are all tainted with viral origins, 
because life itself is commanded and impelled by something alien to life. The 
life possessed by a cell, and all the more so by a multicellular organism, is 
finally only its ability to carry out the orders transmitted to it by DNA and 
RNA. It scarcely matters whether these orders originate from a virus, or from 
what we conceive as the cell's own nucleus. For this distinction is only a 
matter of practical convenience. It is impossible actually to isolate the 
organism in a state before it has been infiltrated by viruses, or altered by 
mutations; we cannot separate out the different segments of DNA, and determine 
which are intrinsic to the organism and which are foreign. Our cells' own DNA 
is perhaps best regarded as a viral intruder that has so successfully and over 
so long a stretch of time managed to insinuate itself within us, that we have 
forgotten its alien origin. Richard Dawkins suggests that our bodies and minds 
are merely "survival machines" for replicating genes, "gigantic lumbering 
robots" created for the sole purpose of transmitting DNA. Burroughs describes 
language (or sexuality, or any form of consciousness) as "the human virus." All 
our mechanisms of reproduction follow the viral logic according to which life 
produces death, and death in turn lives off life. And so remember this the next 
time you gush over a cute infant. "Cry of newborn baby gurgles into death 
rattle and the crystal skull," Burroughs writes, "THAT IS WHAT YOU GET FOR 
FUCKING."

Language is one of these mechanisms of reproduction. Its purpose is not to 
indicate or communicate any particular content, so much as to perpetuate and 
replicate itself. The problem with most versions of communications theory is 
that they ignore this function, and naively present language as a means of 
transmitting information. Yet language, like a virus or like capital, is in 
itself entirely vacuous: its supposed content is only a contingent means (the 
host cell or the particular commodity form) that it parasitically appropriates 
for the end of self-valorization and self-proliferation. Apart from the medium, 
there's no other message. But if language cannot be apprehended in terms of 
informational content, still less can it be understood on the basis of its form 
or structure, in the manner of Saussure, Chomsky, and their followers. Such 
theorists make an equivalent, but symmetrically opposite, error to that of 
communications theory. They substitute inner coherence for outer 
correspondence, differential articulation for communicative redundancy, 
self-reference for external reference; but by isolating language's 
self-relational structure or transformational logic, they continue to neglect 
the concrete and pragmatic effects of its violent replicating force. Both 
communicational and structural approaches try to define what language is, 
instead of looking at what it does. They both fail to come to grips with what 
J. L. Austin calls the performative aspect of linguistic utterance: the sense in 
which speaking and writing are actions, ways of doing something, and not merely 
ways of (con)stating or referring to something. (Of course, stating and 
referring are in the last analysis themselves actions). Language does not 
represent the world: it intervenes in the world, invades the world, appropriates 
the world. The supposed postmodern "disappearance of the referent" in fact 
testifies to the success of this invasion. It's not that language doesn't refer 
to anything real, but--to the contrary--that language itself has become 
increasingly real. Far from referring only to itself, language is powerfully 
intertwined with all the other aspects of contemporary social reality. It is a 
virus that has all too fully incorporated itself into the life of its hosts.

A virus has no morals, as Rosa von Praunheim puts it, talking about HIV; and 
similarly the language virus has no meanings. Even saying that language is 
performative doesn't go far enough; for it leaves aside the further question of 
what sort of act is being performed, and just who is performing it. It is not 
"I" who speaks, but the virus inside me. And this virus/speech is not a 
freestanding action, but a motivated and directed one: a command. Morse Peckham, 
Deleuze and Guattari, and Wittgenstein all suggest that language is less 
performative than it is imperative or prescriptive: to speak is to give orders. 
To understand language and speech is to acknowledge these orders: to obey them 
or resist them, but to react to them in some way. An alien force has taken hold 
of me, and I cannot not respond. Our bodies similarly respond with symptoms to 
infection, or to the orders of viral DNA and RNA. As Burroughs reminds us: "the 
symptoms of a virus are the attempts of the body to deal with the virus attack. 
By their symptoms you shall know them... if a virus produces no symptoms, then 
we have no way of knowing that it exists." And so with all linguistic 
utterances: I interpret a statement by reacting to it, which is to say by 
generating a symptom. Voices continually call and respond, invoke and provoke 
other voices. Speaking is thus in Foucault's sense an exercise of power: "it 
incites, it induces, it seduces, it makes easier or more difficult; in the 
extreme it constrains or forbids absolutely; it is nevertheless always a way of 
acting upon an acting subject or acting subjects by virtue of their acting or 
being capable of acting. A set of actions upon other actions." Usually we obey 
orders that have been given us, viscerally and unreflectively; but even if we 
self-consciously refuse them, we are still operating under their constraint, or 
according to their dictation. Yet since an order is itself an action, and the 
only response to an action is another action, what Wittgenstein ironically calls 
the "gulf between an order and its execution" always remains. I can reply to a 
performance only with another performance; it is impossible to step outside of 
the series of actions, to break the chain and isolate once and for all the 
`true' meaning of an utterance. The material force of the utterance compels me 
to respond, but no hermeneutics can guarantee or legislate the precise nature of 
my response. The only workable way to define "meaning" is therefore to say, 
with Peckham, that it is radically arbitrary, since "any response to an 
utterance is a meaning of that utterance." Any response whatsoever. This 
accounts both for the fascistic, imperative nature of language, and for its 
infinite susceptibility to perversion and deviation. Strands of DNA replicate 
themselves ad infinitum. But in the course of these mindless repetitions, 
unexpected reactions spontaneously arise, alien viruses insinuate themselves 
into the DNA sequence, and radiation produces random mutations. It's much like 
what happens in the children's game 'Telephone': even when a sentence is 
repeated as exactly as possible, it tends to change radically over the course of 
time.

We all have parasites inhabiting our bodies; even as we are ourselves parasites 
feeding on larger structures. Call this a formula for demonic or vampiric 
possession. The great modernist project was to let the Being of Language shine 
forth, or some such grandiose notion. If "I" was not the speaker, the modernists 
believed, this was because language itself spoke to me and through me. 
Heidegger is well aware that language consists in giving orders, but he odiously 
idealizes the whole process of command and obedience. Today, we know better. We 
must say, contrary to Heidegger and Lacan, that language never "speaks itself as 
language": it's always some particular parasite, with its own interests and 
perspective, that's issuing the orders and collecting the profits. What 
distinguishes a virus or parasite is precisely that it has no proper relation to 
Being. It only inhabits somebody else's dwelling. Every discourse is an 
unwelcome guest that sponges off me, without paying its share of the rent. My 
body and home are always infested--whether by cockroaches and tapeworms, or by 
Martians and poltergeists. Language isn't the House of Being, but a fairground 
filled with hucksters and con artists. Think of Melville's Confidence Man; or 
Burroughs' innumerable petty operators, all pulling their scams. Michel Serres, 
in his book The Parasite, traces endless chains of appropriation and transfer, 
subtending all forms of communication. (He plays on the fact that in French the 
word parasite has the additional connotation of static, the noise on the line 
that interferes with or contaminates every message). In this incessant 
commerce, there is no Being of language. But there are always voices: voices and 
more voices, voices within and behind voices, voices interfering with, 
replacing, or capturing other voices.

I hear these voices whenever I speak, whenever I write, whenever I pick up the 
telephone. Marshall McLuhan argues that technological change literally produces 
alterations in the ratio of our senses. The media are artificially generated 
parasites, prosthetic organs, "the extensions of man." Contemporary electronic 
media are particularly radical, as they don't just amplify one sense organ or 
another, but represent an exteriorization of the entire human nervous system. 
Today we don't need shamans any longer, since modems and FAXes are enough to put 
us in contact with the world of vampires and demons, the world of the dead. 
Viruses rise to the surface, and appear not just in the depths of our bodies, 
but visibly scrawled across our computer and video screens. In William Gibson's 
Count Zero, the Haitian loas manifest themselves in cyberspace: spirits arising 
in the interstices of our collectively extended neurons, and demanding 
propitiation. In DOOM PATROL, we learn that the telephone is "a medium through 
which ghosts might communicate"; words spoken over the phone are "a conjuration, 
a summoning." The dead are unable fully to depart from the electronic world. 
They leave their voices behind, resonating emptily after them. The buzzing or 
static that we hear on the telephone line is the sum of all the faint 
murmurings of the dead, blank voices of missed connections, echoing to infinity. 
These senseless utterances at once feed upon, and serve as the preconditions 
for, my own attempts to generate discourse. But such parasitic voices also 
easily become fodder for centralizing apparatuses of power, like the military's 
C3I system (command/control/communication/intelligence). DOOM PATROL reveals 
that the Pentagon is really a pentagram, "a spirit trap, a lens to focus 
energy." The "astral husks" of the dead are trapped in its depths, fed to the 
voracious Telephone Avatar, and put to work on the Ant Farm, "a machinery whose 
only purpose is to be its own sweet self." As Burroughs similarly notes, the 
life-in-death of endless viral replication is at once the method and the aim of 
postmodern arrangements of power.

No moribund humanist ideologies will release us from this dilemma. Precisely by 
virtue of their obsolescence, calls to subjective agency, or to collective 
imagination and mobilization, merely reinforce the feedback loops of normalizing 
power. For it is precisely by regulating and punishing ourselves, internalizing 
the social functions of policing and control, that we arrive at the strange 
notion that we are producing our own proper language, speaking for ourselves. 
Burroughs instead proposes a stranger, more radical strategy: "As you know 
inoculation is the weapon of choice against virus and inoculation can only be 
effected through exposure." For all good remedies are homeopathic. We need to 
perfect our own habits of parasitism, and ever more busily frequent the 
habitations of our dead, in the knowledge that every self-perpetuating and 
self-extending system ultimately encounters its own limits, its own parasites. 
Let us become dandies of garbage, and cultivate our own tapeworms, like Uncle 
Alexander in Michel Tournier's novel Gemini (Les Météores). Let us stylize, 
enhance, and accelerate the processes of viral replication: for thereby we 
increase the probability of mutation. In Burroughs' vision, "the virus plagues 
empty whole continents. At the same time new species arise with the same 
rapidity since the temporal limits on growth have been removed... The biologic 
bank is open." It's now time to spend freely, to mortgage ourselves beyond our 
means.

Don't try to express "yourself", then; learn rather to write from dictation, 
and to speak rapturously in tongues. An author is not a sublime creator, as Dr. 
Frankenstein wanted to be. E is more what is called a channeller, or what Jack 
Spicer describes as a radio picking up messages from Mars, or what Jacques 
Derrida refers to as a sphincter. Everything in Burroughs' fiction is resolved 
into and out of a spinning asshole, which is also finally a cosmic black hole. 
In Chester Brown's graphic novel Ed the Happy Clown (originally published in his 
comic book Yummy Fur), there is a man who suffers from a bizarre compulsion: he 
can't stop shitting. More comes out than he could ever possibly have put in. It 
turns out that his asshole is a gateway to another dimension, a transfer point 
between worlds. This other dimension isn't much different from ours: it has its 
own hierarchies of money and power, its own ecological dilemmas, and even its 
own Ronald Reagan. The interference between the two worlds leads to a series of 
hysterical sexual fantasies, grotesque amputations, and surreal confusions of 
identity. But what's important is the process of transmission, not the nature of 
the product. That's the secret of scatology: waste is the only wealth. "Why 
linger over books to which the author has not been palpably constrained?" 
(Bataille). This constraint, this pressure in my intestines and bowels, marks 
the approach of the radically Other. It's in such terms, perhaps, that we can 
best respond to George Clinton's famous exhortation: "Free your mind, and your 
ass will follow."


11. David Cronenberg

We all have our totem animals, our familiars, our spirit guides. They are 
usually other mammals, sometimes birds, occasionally even reptiles or 
amphibians; but they are almost always vertebrates of one sort or another. Our 
relationships with insects, on the other hand, tend to be stranger, more 
uncanny, more disturbing. Few of us--Spiderman aside--willingly accept intimacy 
with the arthropods. "Insect collecting is a hobby few can share," as Shonen 
Knife gently laments. Burroughs waxes lyrical about cats, about lemurs, about 
"sables, raccoons, minks, otters, skunks and sand foxes"; but he can only 
approach centipedes and insects with an obsessive, fascinated repulsion. 
Exceptions can perhaps be made for the beauty of butterflies, and the savoriness 
of certain non-insect arthropods, like crustaceans. But almost none of us enjoys 
our enforced proximity to bedbugs, cockroaches, and houseflies. Is our disgust 
simply the result of being confronted with a life form so utterly alien? Our 
lineage separated from theirs more than 600 million years ago, even before the 
Cambrian explosion. The insects' modes of feeding and fucking, those two most 
crucial biological functions, are irretrievably different from ours. Looking 
across the vast evolutionary gap, we are seized by vertiginous shudders of 
gastronomical nausea and sexual hysteria: "We have all seen nature films in 
which enormously magnified insects unfeelingly dismember their prey. Their 
glittering multifaceted eyes stare at the camera while their complex mouthparts 
work busily, munching through still-struggling victims. We can empathize with 
our closer relatives the lions, who at least seem to enjoy their bloody work. 
But when the female mantis bites the head off its mate in order to release its 
copulatory reflex, it does so at the behest of an instinct that seems to have 
nothing to do with love, hate, or anything else to which we can remotely relate" 
(Christopher Wills).

Such an enthralled disgust is crucial to the postmodern experience of limits. 
The narrator of Clarice Lispector's The Passion According to G. H. is captivated 
by the sight of a wounded cockroach, trapped in a doorjamb as a "whitish and 
thick and slow" paste oozes out of its ruptured body. After pages of obsessive 
contemplation and description, she ritually devours the cockroach, finding in 
it the impossible "embodiment of a prehistoric, pre-symbolic, ecstatic primal 
divine matter" (Camillo Penna). But this effort at communion necessarily fails. 
The flesh of the squashed bug is sacred, as Bataille might put it, because it is 
primordially ambivalent: it arouses both disgust and desire, at once demanding 
and repelling our intimate contact. We cannot touch, much less eat, this debased 
matter; yet we can't stop ourselves from touching and eating it. Insect life is 
an alien presence that we can neither assimilate nor expel. Professional 
exterminators know this well, and so do the best theologians and philosophers. 
Much ink has been spilled recently exploring Thomas Nagel's question, "what is 
it like to be a bat?"--or more accurately: is it possible for us to know what 
it's like to be a bat? But the whole discussion looks suspiciously like a replay 
of the old philosophical canard regarding the alleged unknowability of "other 
minds," only tricked out this time in postmodern drag. And in any case the bat 
is still a mammal, a fairly close relative of ours. That makes it all much too 
easy. Wouldn't it be more relevant and useful to pose the question of radical 
otherness in biological terms, instead of epistemological ones? It would then 
become a problem, not of metaphorically entering the mind of a bat, but of 
literally and physically entering--or metamorphosing into--the body of a 
housefly. And resolving such a problem would involve the transfer, not of minds, 
but of DNA. What's important is not to intuit what it might be like to be 
another species, but to discover experimentally how actually to become one. Such 
is the import of David Cronenberg's film The Fly.

Burroughs cites Rule One of basic biologic law, rigidly enforced by the 
Biologic Police: "Hybrids are permitted only between closely related species and 
then grudgingly, the hybrids produced being always sterile." To innovate means 
to violate this law, to introduce alien genetic material, to assume the risks of 
"biologic and social chaos." But then, viruses and bacteria are doing this all 
the time. There's nothing new about genetic engineering; as Lynn Margulis points 
out, humans are only now adopting techniques that prokaryotes have already been 
practicing for billions of years. As for viruses, they seem just to be 
transposable elements--such as can be found in any genome--which have revolted 
against the tyranny of the organism, or otherwise gotten out of hand. From 
meiosis to symbiotic merger, every genetic recombination is a new throw of the 
dice. No such process can be controlled or determined in advance. In 
Cronenberg's film, Homo sapiens meets Musca domestica only by the sheerest 
contingency. The transformation of Seth Brundle (Jeff Goldblum) into an 
insect--more precisely, into the monstrous hybrid Brundlefly--is a statistical 
aberration: an improbable accident, a fortuitous encounter, an irreproducible 
singular event. That's why Seth never quite comprehends what is happening to 
him, at least not at the moment that it happens. His scientific consciousness 
lags perpetually behind his ceaselessly mutating body. His theories about his 
condition are out of date by the time he utters them. Cronenberg's 
human-turned-fly is the postmodern realization of Nietzsche's prophecy of the 
Overman: "man is something that should be overcome." For the Ubermensch is not 
the "higher man," nor is he any sort of fixed entity. Rather he is a perpetual 
becoming, an ungrounded projection into unknowable futurity. The singular 
hybrid Brundlefly is just such a body, without stable identity, caught in the 
throes of transformation. Did Nietzsche ever suspect that his great metaphysical 
longing would be most compellingly realized in insect form? Any scientist can 
make observations about how flies (or bats, or humans) act in general; but even 
Seth Brundle never knows from the inside "what it's like" to be a fly. For "what 
it's like" necessarily involves the irreversible othering of the knower: the 
"going-under" of the Overman, the continual "becoming" of Brundlefly. The 
pursuit of knowledge, as Foucault puts it, should result not just in the 
"acquisition of things known," but above all in "the going-astray of the one who 
knows."

Insects are well ahead of humans in this regard. Radical becomings take place 
routinely in their own lives. This is especially so in groups that pass through 
pupal metamorphosis. Their bodies are broken down and completely rebuilt in the 
course of transmutation from the larval to the mature stage. Is the butterfly 
"at one" with the caterpillar? Is this housefly buzzing around my head "the 
same" as the maggot it used to be? One genome, one continuously replenished 
body, one discretely bounded organism; and yet a radical discontinuity both of 
lived experience and of physical form. The surplus value accumulation of larval 
feeding gives way to lavish expenditure: the extravagant coloration of the 
butterflies, the coprophilic copulation of houseflies and others. Insect life 
cycles continually affirm the possibilities of radical difference--even if ants 
and bees would co-opt this difference into the homogenizing mold of the State. 
Every insect is a "singularity without identity," in Giorgio Agamben's phrase. 
The fringe biologist Donald I. Williamson even goes so far as to argue that 
larval stages are remnants of symbiotic mergers between formerly independent 
organisms. But whether or not this be literally the case, Brundle's 
hybridization certainly opens the door to yet stranger metamorphoses. The body 
of an insect--far more radically than the mind of a dialectician--is perpetually 
"other than itself."

The high intelligence and adaptive flexibility of mammals is usually attributed 
to our premature birth, and consequent long period of growth outside the womb. 
Genetics is supplemented by empirical learning and parental guidance. We lay 
down numerous memory traces, and build up complex personalities. Learning 
doesn't play such a role in insect development: not only because they have too 
few neurons to store all that information, but more crucially because memory 
traces cannot survive intact through the vast physiological changes of pupal 
transmutation. We higher mammals like to congratulate ourselves on our supposed 
ability to alter our own behavior adaptively in the span of an single lifetime. 
But this complacency may well be exaggerated. Innovation is harder than it 
seems. Insects usually manage to adapt to changed environmental circumstances a 
lot faster than we do, thanks to their greater propensity to generate mutations, 
and their far higher rate of genetic recombination over the course of much 
shorter reproductive cycles. In humans and other mammals, once memory traces are 
forged and reinforced, it's nearly impossible to get rid of them. And as if that 
weren't enough, we've also instituted traditions and norms of critical 
reflection, the better to police our identities, and to prevent our minds and 
bodies from going astray. Education, after all, is just a subtler and more 
sadistically refined mode of operant conditioning than the one provided by 
direct genetic programming. As Elias Canetti remarks, no totalitarian despot can 
ever hope to dominate and control his subjects so utterly as human parents 
actually do control their children. We accept such discipline largely because 
we feel compensated for it by the prospect of imposing it in turn upon our own 
descendants. Our mammalian talents for memory and self-reflection serve largely 
to oppress us with the dead weight of the past. Morse Peckham is right to insist 
that only "cultural vandalism"--the aggressive undermining of established 
values through random, mindless acts of destruction--can free us from this 
weight, and stimulate social innovation. We humans need to push ourselves to 
such disruptive extremes; otherwise we have no hope of matching the insects' 
astonishing ability to adaptively alter their physiology and behavior in a 
relatively brief time. Unburdened by mammalian scruples, insects effortlessly 
practice the Nietzschean virtue of active forgetting: the adult fly doesn't 
remember anything the maggot once knew.

Postmodern biology is increasingly oriented towards what might be called an 
insect paradigm. In postmodern biotechnology, according to Donna Haraway, "no 
objects, spaces, or bodies are sacred in themselves; any component can be 
interfaced with any other if the proper standard, the proper code, can be 
constructed for processing signals in a common language." The organicism of 
romantic and modernist thought--together with its political correlate, the 
disciplinary "biopolitics" described so powerfully by Foucault--has given way to 
a new model of life processes. Postmodern bodies are neither vitalistic nor 
mechanistic. They are structured through principles of modular 
interchangeability and serial repetition; they innovate, not on the basis of 
pregiven criteria, but experimentally, by continual trials of selection. 
Arthropod body plans are especially postmodern, built as they are on multiply 
repeated segments, that can be fused or altered to generate new, differentiated 
structures. (The organic metaphors of the nineteenth century, in contrast, are 
idealizations of vertebrate body plans). Genetic engineering, whether carried 
out in the laboratory or in "nature," requires just such a modular flexibility. 
Stephen Jay Gould, reflecting on the astonishing variety of arthropod forms 
discovered in the fossils of the Burgess shale, suggests that the initial 
diversification of multicellular life progressed precisely in this way. 
Cambrian evolution seems to have taken the form of a "grabbag," mixing and 
matching body segments in a process much like "constructing a meal from a 
gigantic old-style Chinese menu: one from column A, two from B, with many 
columns and long lists in every column." This kind of thing doesn't much happen 
in macroevolution any longer; but it's still crucial on the molecular-genetic 
level, as Christopher Wills argues. Certain mimetic butterflies, for instance, 
have linked "supergene complexes" that allow them alternatively to mimic any 
one of a number of vastly different model species. Segmented repetition with 
modular variation remains the basic organizing principle of all insect genomes: 
hence the frequency of homeotic mutations--multiplied wings and legs, antennae 
transformed into legs, added or subtracted segments--in irradiated laboratory 
strains of Drosophila. Melancholy old conservatives like Jean Baudrillard fear 
that postmodern modular coding leads to a preprogrammed "satellitization of the 
real," and finally to its total "extermination." But even the slightest 
acquaintance with insects will convince you that-- contrary to Baudrillard's 
claims--"the hyperrealism of simulation" allows for a far greater explosion of 
change, multiplicity, and sheer exuberant waste than traditional organic models 
of production and circulation ever did.

Haraway points out that recent developments in postmodern biology involve a 
radical problematization and "denaturalization" of all notions of the organism 
and the individual. Witness Lynn Margulis on the symbiotic basis of eukaryotic 
cells, Richard Dawkins on "selfish genes," parasitism, and the "extended 
phenotype," and Leo Buss on the multiple, variant cell lineages of mammalian 
immune systems. When we look at the molecular-genetic basis of life, all we can 
find are differences and singularities: multiple variations, competing alleles, 
aberrant particle distributions, unforeseeable sequence transpositions. These 
multiplicities never add up to anything like a distinct species identity. 
Postmodern biology deals not with fixed entities and types, but with recurring 
patterns and statistical changes in large populations--whether these be 
populations of genes or populations of organisms. It tends to emphasize 
anomalous phenomena like retroviral infections and horizontal gene transfers; 
in such encounters, alteration "ceases to be a hereditary filiative evolution, 
becoming communicative or contagious" (Deleuze and Guattari). Postmodern biology 
moves directly between singularities without identity and population 
multiplicities, without having recourse either to intervening, mediating terms, 
or to overarching structural orders. It rejects the "holism" formerly attributed 
both to the individual organism and to the larger ecosystem. Look at the 
mutations and transpositions haunting any genome, or observe the behavioral 
quirks of the cockroaches invading your apartment. You will find what Deleuze 
and Guattari call "molecular, intensive multiplicities, composed of particles 
that do not divide without changing their nature, and distances that do not vary 
without entering another multiplicity and that constantly construct and 
dismantle themselves in the course of their communications, as they cross over 
into each other at, beyond, or before a certain threshold."

The obsolescence of those old organicist and holistic myths opens the way to 
strange new social and political arrangements. In our postmodern world, the 
"disciplinary power" analyzed by Foucault is continually being displaced into 
more subtly insidious modes of oppression. The ubiquitous codes of an 
"informatics of domination" (Haraway) are initially deployed by government 
bureaucracies, and then "privatized" as the property of multinational 
corporations. Such flexible and universal codes, insinuating themselves within 
all situations by processes of continual modulation, are the hallmark of what 
Deleuze, taking a hint from Burroughs, calls the "society of control." 
Cybernetic regulation is the human equivalent of the pheromone systems that 
regulate all activity in an ant colony. But let's not assume that this new 
arrangement of power forecloses all possibilities of resistance and change. As 
Deleuze says, "there's no need to fear or hope, but only to look for new 
weapons." Seth Brundle speaks of his paradoxical desire to become "the first 
insect politician," suggesting the possibility of an alternative insect 
politics, different from the totalitarianism of ants and bees. Consider that 
flies, like midges and mosquitoes, tend to swarm; and that locusts periodically 
change form, and launch forth into mass nomadic rampages. Such insects form 
immense crowds without adopting rigidly hierarchical structures. Their loose 
aggregations offer far more attractive prospects for postmodern sociality than 
do the State organizations of the Hymenoptera. Insect swarms are populations in 
continual flux, distributing themselves randomly across a vast territory. They 
are altered by the very processes that bring them together, so that they can 
neither be isolated into separate units, nor conjoined into a higher unity. 
"Their relations are distances; their movements are Brownian; their quantities 
are intensities, differences in intensity" (Deleuze and Guattari). If postmodern 
power is exemplified by the informational feedback mechanisms of the "insect 
societies," then maybe a postmodern practice of freedom can be discovered in 
the uncanny experience of the insect swarms. The next time you see flies 
swirling over a piece of dung, reflect upon what Agamben calls the "coming 
community," one not grounded in identity, and "not mediated by any condition of 
belonging"; or upon what Blanchot calls "the unavowable community" or "the 
negative community" or (via Bataille) "the community of those who do not have a 
community."

Postmodern politics, like postmodern biology, must in any case come to grips 
with natural selection. The romantics and the modernists alike misconceived 
evolution in melioristic or moralizing terms. Even today, New Age 
sentimentalists search frantically for any metaphysical solace that might 
palliate the harshness of neo-Darwinian struggle. We hear tales of beneficent 
feedback mechanisms (Gregory Bateson, James Lovelock), heartwarming cooperative 
endeavors (Francesco Varela, Stephen Jay Gould), synchronic species progression 
(Rupert Sheldrake), and strange attractors at the end of history (Terence 
McKenna). These are all visions of a world as it were without insects, one in 
which change would always conform to petty bourgeois standards of niceness and 
comfort. Burroughs and Cronenberg know better, as do biologists like Richard 
Dawkins. We live, as Burroughs reminds us, in a "war universe." If we want to 
survive, we must avoid the facile self-deceptions of teleological explanations. 
Let us rather construct our "war machines" according to pragmatic, immanent, 
selectionist principles. Mammalian immune systems in fact already work in this 
way: they 'learn' to recognize and destroy enemy proteins as a result of 
differential reproduction rates among widely varying T cells. Similar models for 
the adaptive growth of neurons in the human brain--"neural selectionism" and 
"neural Darwinism"--have been proposed by Gerald Edelman and others. And 
artificial intelligence research now explores the possibilities of allowing 
selectional processes to operate blindly, instead of imposing predetermined 
algorithms. All such selectional systems are what Deleuze and Guattari call 
desiring machines or bodies without organs: they are not closed structures, but 
relational networks that "work only when they break down, and by continually 
breaking down." Breakdowns are inevitable, since the process of adaptation is 
never rapid enough to keep up with the pace of continual change. And every 
breakdown brings to the fore an immense reservoir of new, untapped differences 
and mutations: material in random variation upon which selection can operate. 
These selectional processes, therefore, do not guarantee us anything in advance. 
They do not provide for a future that will comfortingly resemble the present or 
the past. They do not help us to imagine how things might be better--that old 
utopian fantasy, much beloved of 'progressive' social critics. Rather, their 
political efficacy lies in this: that they actually work to produce differences 
we could not ever have imagined. They provoke innovations far stranger and more 
radical than anything we can conceive on our own. "I love the uncertainty of the 
future," as Nietzsche so stirringly wrote.

So cultivate your inner housefly or cockroach, instead of your inner child. Let 
selectional processes do their work of hatching alien eggs within your body. And 
don't imagine for a second that these remarks are merely anthropomorphizing 
metaphors. We can kill individual insects, as spiders do; but we can't for all 
that extricate ourselves from the insect continuum that marks life on this 
planet. The selectional forces that modulate insect bodies and behaviors are 
also restlessly at work in our own brains, shaping our neurons and even our 
thoughts. Does such an idea revolt you? The problem might be that we can't read 
insect expressions: we don't know what they are thinking, or even if they are 
thinking. But this is nothing but an unwarranted vertebrate physiological 
prejudice; after all, "insects are naturally expressionless, since they wear 
their skeletons on the outside" (Christopher Wills). Watch for when the insect 
molts, and its inner vulnerability is exposed.

We should reject all distinctions of inner and outer, as of nature and culture. 
How could you ever hope to separate genetic influences from environmental ones, 
or biology from sociology? Those social critics who think "biological" means 
ahistorical and unchanging--and reject naturalistic explanations on that 
basis--clearly don't know what they are talking about. The bizarre, 
irreversible contingencies of natural history and cultural history alike stand 
out against all endeavors to endow life with meaning, goal, or permanence. 
Entomology is far less essentialistic, far more open to difference and change, 
far more attentive to the body, than is, say, cultural critique grounded in 
Frankfurt School post-Marxism or in Lacanian psychoanalysis. It's still common 
in well-meaning academic humanist circles to loathe and despise sociobiology. 
But this isn't just a matter of disputing some rather dubious claims about 
particular aspects of human behavior. What these critics really can't forgive is 
sociobiology's insistence upon biological embodiment itself. It's not a question 
of whether this or that gender trait is actually "written in our genes," so much 
as it is a case of the panicky denial of evolutionary contingency, or genetic 
limitation, altogether. Humanistic critics of biology merely perpetuate a 
massive, and quite traditional, idealization of human culture: one that has long 
fueled delusive fantasies of redemption and transcendence, and that has served 
as an alibi for all sorts of controls over people's lives, and moralistic 
manipulations of actual human behavior. Edward O. Wilson, to the contrary, made 
only one real mistake when he came to systematize the discipline of 
sociobiology: this was his choice of ants, rather than houseflies or 
cockroaches, as the implicit reference point for examining "human nature." Be 
that as it may, entomological intuitions remain more illuminating and 
provocative than narrowly humanistic ones. Maurice Maeterlinck well expressed 
the uncanny fascination of insect life nearly a century ago: "The insect brings 
with him something that does not seem to belong to the customs, the morale, the 
psychology of our globe. One would say that it comes from another planet, more 
monstrous, more dynamic, more insensate, more atrocious, more infernal than 
ours." What has changed in this picture in the last hundred years? Only one 
thing. We have come to understand that such alien splendor is precisely what 
defines the cruelty and beauty of our world.


12. Bill Gates

It's out there. It's hungry. It grows like a cancer. There's more of it every 
second. It gobbles up entrepreneurs for breakfast; only the strong survive. 
Thanks to personal computers and fast modems and the Internet, INFORMATION is 
circulating and expanding as never before in history. We are finally moving, as 
Burroughs has long urged us to do, out of time and into space: away from the 
teleology of what Lyotard calls "metanarratives," and into the simultaneity and 
fractal self-similarity of the digital matrix. "Everything is information," Rudy 
Rucker rhapsodizes; "the world can be resolved into digital bits, with each bit 
made of smaller bits. These bits form a fractal pattern in fact-space." 
Baudrillard's once radical thesis is now a commonplace: in our postmodern 
economy, the proliferation of simulacra and empty digital signs replaces the 
production of tangible commodities, and even the simple presence of bodies and 
other referential objects. As Timothy Leary says, computers are the new LSD. 
Why bother going out to a bar, when I can dial up LambdaMOO or FurryMUCK from 
the ease and comfort of my own terminal at home? There's nothing like a little 
virtual sex to brighten up a cold winter evening. It's only a few bucks an hour, 
and anonymity is guaranteed. So don't waste time fretting in front of the 
mirror: if you're having a bad hair day, all you need to do is delete your old 
description file, and write yourself a new one. McLuhan, as usual, was right: 
the hardware depends upon the software, and not the other way around. Microsoft 
is bigger business than IBM. Which reminds me of a joke I heard recently: How 
many Microsoft employees does it take to screw in a lightbulb? Answer: none, 
because Bill Gates has declared darkness the new standard. Don't worry about 
material conditions, they're easy enough to work around. All you have to do is 
slap on another layer of code. Changing the lightbulb is a hardware problem, 
and no concern of ours.

Information is everywhere, and everything can be transformed into information. 
Digital code has supplanted money as the ultimate medium of exchange: what Marx 
calls the universal equivalent, or what McLuhan calls the Pentecostal 
translator. Information is the space we move in, the air we breathe. Its very 
ubiquity, however, makes it hard to grasp. As McLuhan says, we tend to be 
unconscious of our immediate technological environment, just as a fish is 
unaware of being in the water. Immersed as we are in information, dependent as 
we are upon it, we don't really know what it is. Indeed, information seems 
rather like pornography: you know it when you see it, but you can't come up with 
a rigorous definition. Information is addictively fascinating, just like 
pornography; and both media arouse the same sort of moralistic indignation. 
When Baudrillard, Neil Postman, Jerry Mander, and Bill McKibben rail against the 
evils of contemporary electronic media, they sound like nobody so much as 
Catherine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin crusading against porn. All these critics 
start from a correct McLuhanesque apprehension: they understand, on some dim 
level, that information and pornography--like all media--are not just passive 
means of representation, but active forces in their own right, "extensions of 
man" (sic) that literally remold our bodies. McLuhan notes that "new 
environments inflict considerable pain on the perceiver" who has not yet 
adapted to their conditions or learned how to negotiate their demands. It's 
impossible to take seriously these arguments for the elimination of television 
and pornography; but I can't help being impressed by the apocalyptic fervor of 
the anti-porn and anti-TV crusaders, their Manichean sense of the depravity of 
images. Writers like Postman and Dworkin are symptomatically important. They 
testify unwittingly to what McLuhan calls our ingrained "rear-view-mirrorism," 
the conservatism and inertia of our genes and memes: "moral vehemence may 
provide ersatz dignity for our normal moronic behavior," McLuhan says; "the 
normal human condition, when faced with innovation, is that of the brainwashed 
idiot who tries to introduce the painfully learned responses from one situation 
into new situations where they apply not at all."

Such idiocy, you might say, is structurally unavoidable. All media are 
extensions of ourselves, yet we can never keep up with the breathless speed of 
their mutations and metamorphoses. There's always lag, as anyone who cruises the 
Internet knows all too well. This explains why, as McLuhan puts it, "the 
content of any medium is always the preceding medium." Information is everywhere 
in our postmodern economy; but the content of that information--what it tells 
us, or what it's about--is still the old world, the world before it was altered 
by microtransistors and fiber-optic cables. John Perry Barlow suggests that 
electronic information "is like farm produce," in that "its quality degrades 
rapidly both over time and in distance from the source of production." 
Yesterday's data, like yesterday's papers, are good only for landfill, or for 
wrapping fish. It's a never-ending struggle, as Bill Gates would surely tell 
you, to stay on top of your game, to anticipate shifts in the market, and to 
make sure you have all the latest upgrades. So don't waste your money on 
CD-ROMs, whose content is obsolete even before it gets engraved in silicon. Go 
out and get more RAM and a faster modem instead. Artificial Intelligence 
theorists couldn't be more wrong than when they try to explain machine 
intelligence on the model of an organism's permanent, long-term memory. As 
McLuhan says, the mere "storage" of data is a relic of the "old technology"; in 
the new electronic environment, "the real job of the computer is not retrieval, 
but discovery." RAM is continually being swapped, and disappears entirely when 
you turn the computer off; a hard disk indeed preserves data, but its most 
important feature is that it's indefinitely rewriteable. A better organic 
analogy for artificial intelligence is therefore short-term memory, which is 
abrupt, multiple, and discontinuous, and "includes forgetting as an active 
process" (Deleuze and Guattari). Continual revision is the way out of 
"rear-view-mirrorism," the one way that can lead, in Foucault's words, to "the 
going-astray of the one who knows." The greatest virtue of the computer is that 
it allows us more and more to dispense with long-term memory, and to approach 
something like Andy Warhol's state of eternally renewable short-term bliss: "I 
have no memory. Every day is a new day because I don't remember the day before. 
Every minute is like the first minute of my life... My mind is like a tape 
recorder with one button--Erase."

Maybe that's what they mean when they say that "information wants to be free." 
Information, like Nietzsche's will to power, is not a static entity, not a 
resource that can be conserved or capitalized. Use it or lose it. It is a 
dynamic inner differential, "the last delta-t" (Pynchon), "a difference which 
makes a difference" (Gregory Bateson). Just as the will to power is "a 
structure in which differences of potential are distributed, a constitutive 
dissymmetry, difference, or inequality" (Deleuze), so information is composed of 
reversible gradients of electronic potential and ever-changing dissymmetries of 
charge. It is a matter of gates and switches, of pulses and fluxes. Its 
oscillations may be induced chemically at synaptic thresholds, or they may be 
triggered by clock signals on silicon chips; in either case, the world is a 
construct of self-organizing and self-executing binary programs. Rucker defines 
the information content of any object as "the length of the shortest computer 
program that would answer any possible question about that object"; on this 
basis, he proclaims that "reality" is nothing more (or less) than "an 
incompressible computation by a fractal cellular automaton of inconceivable 
dimensions." Indeed, an extensive digital software seems at work within the most 
diverse regimes of matter: we find the same nonlinear equations, fractal 
patterns, and strange attractors regulating variations in the weather, 
disturbances of cardiac rhythms, distributions of charge in neural networks, 
fluctuations in the stock market. But these are not closed, balanced systems; 
they are rather what Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers call dissipative 
structures, operating in "far-from-equilibrium" conditions, forever poised at 
the edge of chaos. Being is not stable, but paradoxically, precariously 
metastable.

In such conditions, behavior is in a real sense spontaneous or "free": 
infinitely sensitive to the most minute variations, it cannot be predicted, 
anticipated, or controlled from the outside. Not even Marxists believe in 
central planning anymore. But this "free" behavior is still information, and 
nothing but information: which means that it is ultimately computable, to any 
desired degree of accuracy. It's simply a matter of running the right 
simulations: of course, you need good software, and an awful lot of CPU time. 
Chaos theory thus harmonizes freedom and determinism, or chance and necessity, 
in much the same way that Leibniz, the first great philospher of information, 
reconciled free will with the infallible foreknowledge of God. God knows 
everything that will happen to me, according to Leibniz, because that 
information is enveloped in the concept--or as we should say, the program--of 
what I am. But the running of this program, the calculation of my being, is what 
mathematicians call an NP-complete problem: one that apparently cannot be solved 
by an efficient, time-reducing algorithm. The computation is so vast that it can 
only take place in real time, the very time of my lived experience; and the 
universe itself, in its entirety, is the only computer big enough to crunch all 
the numbers.

You might say, then, that "reality" itself is one enormous simulation, with 
information continually being computed to infinite decimal places. In the 
beginning was not the Word, but lines and lines of code. God is neither a stern 
judge nor a loving father; he is rather, as Leibniz implicitly argues, a master 
programmer. Such is the theology best suited to our postmodern experience of 
the hyperreal: a vision that moves beyond the dead end of modernist paranoia. 
Descartes, the prototypical modernist, worried that the Deity was actually an 
evil demon, bent on deceiving him. His attempts to persuade himself that God 
could be trusted after all are never altogether convincing. For once the seeds 
of paranoid doubt and existential angst have been planted, there's no way of 
eradicating them. Even Baudrillard is still a Late Cartesian, worried that 
hyperreal simulation has left us adrift in a vacant universe, "without origin 
or reality." For us, however--as indeed already for Leibniz--this simply isn't a 
problem. The discovery that God is a programmer running simulations is precisely 
what guarantees his veracity. For if God wanted to deceive us, then first and 
foremost he'd have to deceive himself. But if that were the case, then even his 
lies would end up being true. As Hans Moravec puts it, "A simulated Descartes 
correctly deduces his own existence. It makes no difference just who or what is 
doing the simulation--the simulated world is complete in itself." Our existence 
is no less real, for being that of a computer simulation, or an idea in the 
mind of God. Reality-testing involves what Wittgenstein would call a deep 
tautology: "What is, is. No fantasy. Pain. Just the details" (Kathy Acker). For 
what other criterion of truth and reality do we have? Philosophers in the 
Cartesian tradition are always trying to establish foundations and universals. 
But in every case, the philosophical groundings they've come up with are less 
evident, less solid and secure, than the very phenomena they are supposed to 
ground. The only convincing 'reality test' is a pragmatic one: "Just try--in a 
real case--to doubt someone else's fear or pain" (Wittgenstein). When we say 
that something is "real," we generally mean that it's so vivid, overwhelming, 
and all-embracing that it would be a frivolous--or willfully 
cynical--intellectual exercise to entertain Cartesian doubts as to its 
validity. Something is real because it's intense, and not the reverse.

And so we no longer ask the old Cartesian question: is it real or is it 
Memorex? We trust and believe that the world is real, precisely because we know 
it to be a simulation. Thanks to computers, we have rid ourselves of the 
representationalist prejudice that played so baleful a role in the history of 
Western thought. For a simulation is not a representation, but something 
altogether different: "to simulate something you need more than mere mimicry, 
more than an ability to produce actions that are like the ones you are wanting 
to simulate. You need a working model" (Benjamin Woolley). A representation 
comes after the object it imitates or signifies. That's why "the symbol is the 
murder of the thing," as Lacan put it: every representation implies, to some 
measure, the "lack"--the replacement, the death or the absence--of the thing it 
is supposed to represent. A simulation, on the contrary, precedes its object: 
it doesn't imitate or stand in for a given thing, but provides a program for 
generating it. The simulacrum is the birth of the thing, rather than its death. 
As Deleuze and Guattari say, simulation is how the real is effectively produced. 
No real without its hyperreal: the map becomes the territory. Reality will be 
virtual, or not at all. We live in an age of information, rather than one of 
representation and signification; and information is characterized by plenitude 
and redundancy--not lack. Leibniz argues that, among all possible worlds, God 
necessarily chose to create the one having "the greatest quantity of reality." 
In postmodern terms, this amounts to saying that the program simulating our 
universe is more powerful and detailed, more intense, more packed with 
information--more real, in short--than anything we could possibly run on our own 
feeble machines, or imagine inside our heads. The situation is rather like that 
in quantum mechanics. A wave function is inherently indeterminate and 
probabilistic; but it collapses, or gets determined, once it has been observed 
and measured. Contrary to popular misconception, however, this measuring 
intervention need not imply consciousness on the part of the 'observer.' A 
mechanical device, like a counter, is sufficient to make the wave function 
collapse. Simulation, likewise, is a relativistic and perspectival process, but 
not for all that a subjective one. It coerces my participation, but does not 
require it. As Wallace Stevens writes, "it fills the being before the mind can 
think." Information overload, you might say, is our proof that an external 
world really exists. We do not hallucinate an imaginary presence, says Deleuze: 
"it's rather presence itself that is hallucinatory."

I'm drawn into this delirium every time I turn on my modem. I log in to my 
account, access the World Wide Web, and head out in search of information. Too 
much is never enough. It accumulates more and more, in a classic feedback loop. 
First I download a file, then I need a program to read it. Then I discover a 
bug in the program, so I have to look around for a patch or an upgrade. And then 
I'm desperate to find more files, just to make running the program worthwhile. 
It's like what they say about drugs: watch out for that first hit, because each 
step leads to the next. Better not even inhale. Before I knew it, I was hooked: 
now my hard drive's entirely full, and I've got to shell out for a bigger one. 
It's all so absorbingly self-referential; there's no end to the digital 
labyrinth. Pynchon sees this process as a virtual reconfiguration of the 
American landscape, with information space overlaid upon, and literally mapping 
to, the shopping malls and real estate subdivisions of suburbia: "it was like 
walking among matrices of a great digital computer, the zeroes and ones twinned 
above, hanging like balanced mobiles right and left, ahead, thick, maybe 
endless." On the information superhighway, every house is a byte or a pixel, and 
there are endless opportunities to shop. Bits, as Rucker says, are always 
composed of smaller bits. Leibniz similarly insists on the infinite divisibility 
of matter, with differences animating it on every scale. Information is always 
embedded, one level lodged inside another, sort of like the Cat in the Hat. At 
one extreme, digital information encompasses the entire universe. At the other 
extreme, the smallest possible bit is not an entity, but a difference: an on/off 
switch, an undecidable 1/0, an uncollapsed, still indeterminate, quantum state. 
Something like the VOOM that's in the Hat of the tiniest Cat, a force that can 
accomplish anything, but whose ultimate nature, says Dr. Seuss, "I never will 
know."

With all those levels in between, surfing the Net can be daunting. So much 
depends upon finding a clean, manageable interface, and a smoothly-running 
client program. The sheer ugliness of MS-DOS and Windows is one thing for which 
I never can forgive Bill Gates. There's no need for such opaque protocols and 
rigid hierarchies, since fractal patterns, like all those Cats in all those 
Hats, remain self-similar across differences of scale. In cyberspace, linear and 
hierarchical modes of organization are replaced by what McLuhan calls a 
"mosaic," or what Leo Steinberg calls a "flatbed": "the flatbed picture plane 
makes its symbolic allusion to hard surfaces such as tabletops, studio floors, 
charts, bulletin boards--any receptor surface on which objects are scattered, on 
which data is entered, on which information may be received, painted, 
impressed--whether coherently or in confusion... the painted surface is no 
longer the analogue of a visual experience of nature but of operational 
processes." With programs like Mosaic and Netscape Navigator, you can jump 
discontinuously from any point in the World Wide Web to any other point, 
without having to traverse all those tedious up-and-down intermediate links. 
Microsoft was way behind in adopting this paradigm. World Wide Web browsers turn 
the Internet into what Deleuze and Guattari call smooth or rhizomatic space: a 
space of "acentered systems, finite networks of automata in which communication 
runs from any neighbor to any other, the stems or channels do not preexist, and 
all individuals are interchangeable, defined only by their state at a given 
moment." Selves are no longer constrained by rules of unity and organic form. 
You can adopt whatever handle or pseudonym you want. We are all the same in 
cyberspace, and anyone can be replaced by anyone else, just as Andy Warhol 
dreamed. But the states that such interchangeable individuals can occupy are 
multiplied far beyond our preexisting, restrictive norms; on LambdaMOO, for 
example, ten genders are currently available, instead of merely two.

But let's not get carried away with utopian fantasies. Most straight men are 
assholes, and the mere opportunity for expanded gender play on the Net doesn't 
do anything to change that. A successful drag performance is harder to pull off 
than you might think. Straight guys often pretend to be girls on the Net--I've 
done it often myself-- thinking that the disguise will make it easier to get 
attention, and especially to score with 'actual' girls. But what goes around, 
comes around: the girls these guys meet usually turn out to be yet other guys in 
virtual disguise. Face it, the information of which most straight men are 
composed is monotonously self-referential: it just turns round and round 
forever, in the selfsame endless loop. The orgy always ends in disillusionment 
and boredom. However much you try, you can never be promiscuous enough. Leibniz 
takes the universal, orgiastic communication of bodies, "the fact that every 
portion of matter is agitated by the motions of the entire universe, and is 
acted upon in some way by all other parts of matter, however distant," as 
evidence for a cosmic "pre-established harmony." He reasons that, since 
everything is connected, and all these connections constitute information, and 
all information is computable (at least ideally, in the mind of God), then we 
must be living in the best of all possible worlds. By a similar argument, 
physicists long imagined that they were on the brink of discovering a 'final 
theory of everything,' and that the ultimate laws of nature would turn out to 
make a structure of great simplicity and beauty. If only Congress hadn't 
cancelled funding for the Superconducting Super Collider! But let's face it, 
guys, the universe's actual operating system is an ugly, inelegant 
hodgepodge--much like MS-DOS and Windows. I vastly prefer the Macintosh 
operating system myself; but I know that imperfection is inherent to design, and 
that even the best program is less a dazzlingly logical and elegant construction 
than it is a heterogeneous assemblage, buggy and inconsistent, patched with 
dubious trade-offs and quick and dirty shortcuts. That's the only way natural 
selection can operate. The postmodern God, it would seem, resembles Bill Gates 
far more than he does Leibniz's all-wise Designer. God, like Gates, has exactly 
the aggressiveness, the competitive drive, and the sense of entitlement you'd 
expect in a talented straight boy from a privileged WASP background. He's an 
obsessive hacker, a brilliant but clumsy bricoleur, with an brute-force approach 
to problem-solving. He's a ferocious workaholic, who regularly puts in 80-hour 
weeks, and expects his employees to do the same. And although he's something of 
a visionary, he's not a particularly reliable one; he never meets product 
deadlines, and the goods he so tirelessly promotes are mostly vaporware. God, 
like Gates, owes his power and success less to the quality of his product than 
to his ruthless business sense. He's created a near monopoly by outmuscling the 
competition. You might not like this universe, just as you might not like 
Microsoft's clunky programs; but pragmatically speaking, where else do you have 
to go?

It's Bill Gates's world; we just live in it. Even a cursory look at Microsoft 
programs will disabuse you of the notion that the workings of natural selection, 
or of the "free market," somehow lead to optimal solutions. Most of the time, 
they leave us stranded, as it were, in the basins of insufficiently strange 
attractors: stable but suboptimal norms, programs that work just well enough to 
avert too frequent crashes, and to foreclose the chance of further innovation. 
Even God, you might say, can't really make the trains run on time. Information 
wants to be free; but its liberation won't have the glittering consequences that 
its proponents sometime imagine: "though at first thought a leap out of our 
biological bodies [and into cyberspace] might seem to free us of the diseases of 
the flesh--alas, it is not so" (Hans Moravec). Today's simple computer viruses 
are only the beginning, as Moravec almost gleefully explains. Even as I write, 
new strains are being reported that mutate slightly in every generation, just 
enough to evade detection by standard anti-virus programs. For information has a 
body, even if it's not always the carbon-based one we've been accustomed to. 
Information is never just meaning, it's never a pure signal: there's always some 
waste in the form of redundancy, and there's always an uneliminable residue of 
noise. Redundancy and noise are information's body, the excess--the 
nonproductive expenditure--without which it couldn't function at all. They are 
inherent features of the medium, which means that they take precedence over any 
particular message. As Michel Serres points out, in living systems the couple 
'message/noise' itself becomes, on a meta-level, a new form of information. And 
as Prigogine and Stengers observe, for living systems "a random fluctuation in 
the external flux, often termed 'noise,' far from being a nuisance, produces new 
types of behavior." So let's stammer and stutter and repeat ourselves, spam the 
terminals, jam the channels, and otherwise revel in information overload. The 
problem with Microsoft software isn't so much that it's heavy and slow, and 
filled with bugs and redundancies. What's truly obnoxious about it is that in 
spite of its flaws, it functions all too slickly and too well. It establishes a 
field of coherence and closure that reins in excess, and shuts out other 
programs. The problem is not with Bill Gates the hacker, but with Bill Gates the 
monopolist who unilaterally imposes the latest standard.

So think again about that lightbulb that Gates couldn't be troubled to screw 
in. "The electric light is pure information," says McLuhan; "it is a medium 
without a message, as it were, unless it is used to spell out some verbal ad or 
name." The sheer dissipation of the lightbulb, its prodigal display of 
luminescence, its irreversible expenditure of itself in heat: this is a delirium 
of pure information. You could stare at that one bulb for hours, in a 
psychedelic trance. Of course someone will always try to use the lightbulb, to 
get some reading done, to sell some product, or to spell out some illustrious 
name. But the Second Law of Thermodynamics assures us that information cannot 
ever entirely be put to work. The medium is more than the sum of its messages 
and uses. Information is ecstatic, before it is communicative. It will be 
convulsive, or not at all. Remember Pynchon's story of Byron the Bulb, the 
lightbulb that burns forever? The international electronics cartel, concerned 
for its bottom line, sends out hit squads to 'retire' him. But Byron is 
effectively immortal; somehow he escapes each time, and continues to be screwed 
into socket after socket. Byron the Bulb embodies information in its pure state, 
sterile and sublime and incommunicable, unable to be accounted for, never to be 
put to any productive use: "he is condemned to go on forever, knowing the truth 
and powerless to change anything." And indeed one day "he will find himself, 
poor perverse bulb, enjoying it..."

So there you have it. Turn on, tune in, drop out. In this new world of 
electronic information, it's not what you know that is important, but the fact 
that, whatever it is, and wherever it comes from, it just never stops. That's 
the real point behind Leary's claim that netsurfing and virtual reality extend 
the effects of LSD by other means. It's not that you receive any profound new 
revelations when you're tripping; if you think you do, as often happens, you're 
only fooling yourself. But the value of psychedelia is that it is a vertigo of 
redundancy, an ecstasy of sheer quantitative overload. It's a feedback effect, 
like playing an electric guitar right up against the speakers. The message 
itself is unimportant. What really changes, thanks to the blast of these 
interference patterns, is the medium, or the messenger. All media, McLuhan says, 
are prosthetic implants, extensions of ourselves. But don't imagine that you can 
extend yourself with impunity, without being deeply changed by the experience. 
Even if you are just sitting there stooped over your terminal, or off in a 
corner, in a drug-induced stupor, staring at a lightbulb and muttering to 
yourself--even then, or rather especially then, you will hear voices that are 
profoundly alien. Terence McKenna calls them elves and pixies, William Gibson 
Haitian loas, Burroughs brain parasites from Venus, Jack Spicer little green men 
from Mars, John Carpenter free marketeers from Andromeda. Whatever. These beings 
may be malicious, or simply indifferent to us. They probably don't have our best 
interests at heart. But who cares where they come from, or even what they want? 
It's not as if we could make them go away; it's far too late for that. We have 
to learn to live with them; there's no other option. In the words of Sun Ra and 
his Intergalactic Solar Arkestra: "It's after the end of the world. Don't you 
know that yet?"


13. Pavel Curtis

Maybe it happens like this. You are sitting at a cluttered desk, in a stuffy, 
dimly lit room, somewhere in Seattle. It's night. It's very late. Everyone else 
must be asleep by now. If you leaned out the window to take in a breath of fresh 
air, you might see Jupiter and Mars gleaming in the constellation Scorpio. But 
the window is closed, and the shades are drawn. You are sitting in an 
uncomfortable office chair, hunched over a small terminal. Despite the awkward 
posture and the stifling atmosphere, you remain just as you are; you don't even 
consider getting up. Modem lights blink, the hard drive whirs, lines of text 
scroll across the screen. Occasionally, there is a loud beep. Your eyes squint 
at the small print; your fingers move frantically across the keyboard. You 
notice you've made a typo, and groan in disgust. Meanwhile, new incoming 
messages keep on arriving. You feel a sense of hysterical overload, as your 
brain strives to process five separate trains of thought at once. You're 
wondering how much longer you can keep it up, addressing your replies correctly, 
typing all those puns and sly allusions and heartfelt pleas and properly 
formatted commands, while at the same time reading the incoming lines as 
quickly as possible, before they scroll off the top of the screen. Until, all of 
a sudden, you hit a lag. None of your commands are executed, and nobody else's 
input appears on your terminal. Twenty-five seconds that seem like an eternity, 
as you wait impatiently for something--anything--to happen. Frustrated, 
irritated, you wonder if this isn't the time to call it a night. But you know 
that if you quit now, a vague sense of dissatisfaction would linger, and you'd 
never be able to fall asleep.

Or maybe it happens like this. You've been wandering for hours through the 
Lambda mansion and its luxurious grounds. You took a swim in the pool, grabbed a 
snack in the kitchen, read some books in the library, and fell through a mirror 
into a dingy old tavern. You entered an alien spacecraft, and fiddled around 
with the controls. You wandered through the cubes of a tesseract, trying to 
work out the geometry of its intrusion into three-space. You tried your luck in 
a gambling arcade, and lost all your money at the video slot machines. You 
climbed a rose trellis and found yourself on the roof of the mansion; you took 
in a breath of fresh night air, and saw Jupiter and Mars gleaming in the 
constellation Scorpio. Now you're sitting in a hot tub, sipping a beer, trying 
to relax and think about it all. But things have only gotten faster and more 
frantic. Close to twenty people are packed into this one space. You feel a 
sense of hysterical overload, as you try to follow five separate conversations 
at once. It's hard even to keep track of your companions, as their names keep 
changing, while their bodies metamorphose from one gender to another. Some dude 
is playing power chords on his guitar; another is inhaling outrageous tokes 
from a seven-foot-tall bong. A helicopter buzzes overhead; the pilot leans out 
and waves. This one jerk keeps whispering dumb pick-up lines and sexual 
insinuations into your ear. Someone else dunks you under the water, just for 
fun. Meanwhile, you're trying halfheartedly to flirt, in hurried whispers, with 
this cute guy you've just met. Until, all of a sudden, you hit a lag. Everyone 
seems to have gone into a catatonic stupor. Twenty-five seconds that seem like 
an eternity, as you wait impatiently for something--anything--to happen. 
Frustrated, irritated, you wonder if this isn't the time to call it a night. But 
you know that if you went home now, a vague sense of dissatisfaction would 
linger, and you'd never be able to fall asleep.

Just another evening at LambdaMOO. Two alternative descriptions of the same 
series of events. But whose life is this, anyway? What does it mean to say that 
I was simultaneously here and there, both wandering the grounds of LambdaMOO and 
sitting quietly at home? Just what kind of a place is a text-based virtual 
world? Is the landscape of a MUD or a MUCK or a MOO somehow more real than that 
of a novel or a movie or a sexual fantasy or a Sega video game? Or must I 
concede that the first of my descriptions--sitting in front of the terminal--is 
literal, material, embodied, and actual, while the other--lounging in the hot 
tub--is merely fictive, figurative, disembodied, and imaginary? Then RL ("real 
life") would be to VR ("virtual reality") as experience is to its mimetic 
representation. Or as an author (or a reader?) is to a fictional character. Or 
as the physical body is to the body in Freudian fantasy. Or as what 
semioticians call the "subject of the enunciation" is to what they call the 
"subject of the statement." How else could one possibly make sense of all this?

But when you're caught up in the vertigo of MUDs and MOOs, such distinctions no 
longer make sense. Try it yourself if you don't believe me. Spend some time in a 
virtual world, and you'll be amazed how real it can be. We fight, we fuck, we 
sing and dance, we take drugs: "though initially loosing consciousness from 
matter, MUDs end up producing a curious twin body, a doppelgänger that 
explores, wrestles, hugs, and laughs" (Erik Davis). Total strangers become 
intimate friends or lovers, almost overnight. Jealousies develop, and quarrels 
break out, followed by mutual avoidance, or by tearful reconciliations. The 
sense of tactile, corporeal presence, throughout it all, is overwhelming. Yes, 
that was indeed my body, sweating, grunting, straining its eyes, furiously 
typing. But that was also my body, relaxing in the hot tub, drinking a beer, 
splashing, casually flirting, sorting out sexual responses, and reeling off 
lame one-liners. All these events occurred together, in real time, in the same 
stream of consciousness, along the same continuum of bodily sensations. I got 
tipsy on that virtual beer; the warmth of the water in the hot tub merged with 
the stifling heat of the air in my study. For reality is a matter, not of 
essences, but of effects; my actions have continuing reverberations and 
consequences in LambdaMOO, just as they do in RL. Deleuze writes of a 
hallucinatory "excess of presence, that acts directly on the nervous system, and 
that makes representation--with its putting-in-place or 
putting-at-a-distance--impossible." In this sense, LambdaMOO is a fully present, 
actual world--and not just a vicarious representation of one. For all that it's 
made out of binary code in a mainframe and words scrolling on a screen, 
LambdaMOO is as vividly concrete and detailed as the room from which I access 
it, and as engaging and crowded, as friendly or as menacing, as the bar down the 
street.

At LambdaMOO, we like to talk about the differences--but that also means the 
solidarities--between VR and RL. One doesn't exist without the other. Indeed, it 
gets tricky at times. Each player on the MOO has eir own pseudonym or 'handle': 
so that unless you choose to tell me, there's no way I can find out who you 
'really' are. Anyone you meet online is playing a role, adopting a persona; but 
isn't that the case when we meet in RL as well? It's not that I know you less 
well in VR, but that I come to know you in a radically different way. I may 
become quite intimate with someone, spend hours with em every night, and yet not 
have the slightest idea what eir voice sounds like, or what eir RL body looks, 
feels, and smells like. Thanks to pseudonymity, the space for deception may well 
be larger in VR than in RL. But the space for experimentation, invention, and 
discovery is also larger, by the same logic. Inhibitions are lowered; the most 
unlikely and unexpected patterns emerge. "Erotic interaction in cyberspace," as 
Shannon McRae puts it, "requires a constant phasing between the virtual and the 
actual, the simultaneous awareness of the corporeal body at the keyboard, the 
emoting, speaking self on the screen, and the existence of another individual, 
real and projected, who is similarly engaged. Far from producing a mind-body 
split that allows for the projection of an intact ego, self-awareness must be 
doubled, multiplied, magnified, to an extent that the 'self' is rendered 
incoherent, scattered, shattered." Are all these exciting and excruciating 
transformations 'real'? You'd better believe it.

Or take, as another example, the phenomenon of lag: a perpetual annoyance to 
every MOOer. Too many people are logged in, trying to execute too many commands 
at once: the server at Xerox PARC is overloaded. Even in the electronic global 
village, sometimes you just have to wait. Lag is clearly an event in RL, caused 
by the physical condition of the hardware. It happens as I sit in front of my 
monitor, waiting for more lines to scroll. But lag is also integral to VR: not a 
limitation upon it, so much as an aspect of it, something woven into its very 
texture. Lag is a feature of my VR life, even as incessant rain is a part of my 
RL in Seattle. There's a lag-meter in the Lambda living room, just as there's a 
barometer in my Seattle living room. As legba said the other night, we even talk 
about lag in LambdaMOO in much the same way we talk about the weather in RL. 
Virtual, then, does not mean 'imaginary' or 'unreal.' As Deleuze says, the 
virtual is altogether real in its own way; it should never be confused with the 
merely 'possible.' Indeed, philosophically speaking, 'virtual' and 'possible' 
are almost opposites. The imaginary and the unreal are subsets of the possible. 
A logically impossible object, like a square circle, cannot strictly speaking 
be imagined. On the other hand, whatever we can imagine is possible, no matter 
how unreal. Teleportation, for instance, is easily imaginable in RL, and hence 
possible, although the technological difficulties in making it work are probably 
insurmountable. But things are quite different in VR. Here, teleportation is an 
actual fact, not something you imagine. After all, it makes no difference to 
the LambdaMOO database whether I walk out from the hot tub onto the deck, or 
transport myself directly from the hot tub to the library. Objects in VR, then, 
are real and impossible, instead of being unreal and possible. They are not 
fantasy representations; they are simply more fluid, more open to mutation and 
metamorphosis, than their RL counterparts. After I left the hot tub, I stared at 
a painting in the library, trying to scrutinize the details of its brushwork. 
Before I knew it I was inside the painting, transported into another world. I 
was alone. The scene was bucolic, yet an unspoken feeling of menace floated 
almost palpably in the air... As in an H. P. Lovecraft story, I can't quite 
remember what happened next, nor do I recall just how I finally escaped. But 
like the narrator of a Lovecraft story, I remain firmly convinced that it all 
really happened, even though the physical evidence has somehow mysteriously 
disappeared.

Michael Heim traces the term virtual back to Duns Scotus, who used it "to 
bridge the gap between formally unified reality (as defined by our conceptual 
expectations) and our messily diverse experiences." Virtual Reality, you might 
say, is the actual mode of being of the inessential, the epiphenomenal, and the 
nonconceptual: of all that is unpredictable, unexpected, transitory, 
contingent, or exceptional. VR is then not metaphysical, but 'pataphysical. We 
imagine and represent unreal possibilities, but the real itself, in its messy 
diversity, is unrepresentable and unimaginable. To paraphrase Sherlock Holmes: 
once you've eliminated the possible (that is to say, everything that can be 
imagined, but that doesn't really exist) then the virtual, however improbable or 
outrageous, is what remains. VR thus includes those anomalous quasi-existences 
painstakingly catalogued by Charles Fort: rains of blood, strange hybrids, 
stigmata, spontaneously combusting bodies, perpetual motion machines, 
poltergeist girls, falls of fishes from the sky. But VR also includes everything 
that is banal, everyday, and boringly unremarkable: the "nine tenths" of our 
life that goes on without will or conscious thought (Robert Bresson), the "dirt 
under the fingernails" for which a Platonic Idea is lacking (Deleuze). Such a 
combination of the remarkable and the insignificant, the singular and the 
trivial, is familiar to anyone who hangs out in MUDs and MOOs. We might do well 
to adopt the logic of Fort's research program for our own postmodern 
explorations of virtual worlds: "there is, in quasi-existence, nothing but the 
preposterous--or something intermediate to absolute preposterousness and final 
reasonableness... Infinite frustrations of attempts to positivize manifest 
themselves in infinite heterogeneity: so that though things try to localize 
homogeneousness they end up in heterogeneity so great that it amounts to 
infinite dispersion or indistinguishability."

Life in LambdaMOO is just such a quasi-existence. Far from being an imaginary, 
mental structure, it is actively composed of precisely those things the mind is 
unable to grasp. I'm continually blown away by LambdaMOO's "excess of presence," 
meaning both its psychedelic 'too-muchness' (what Deleuze would call its 
"intensity") and its ungrounded superfluousness (what Fort would call its 
preposterous "externality"). We attempt to homogenize this experience, but we 
are continually thrown back upon Fort's "infinite dispersion," or upon what 
William Gibson calls the "unthinkable complexity" of the Matrix. Gibson defines 
cyberspace, or any form of VR, as a "consensual hallucination." Both words in 
this definition merit extended comment. LambdaMOO is indeed a hallucination, a 
simulacral construct; but then again, so is everything else that we perceive or 
experience as "real." To encounter the real, as Nietzsche says, is to be 
"necessitated to error." The senses themselves "do not lie"; but "what we make 
of their testimony... introduces lies." The direct, intense stimulation of my 
sensory neurons provokes the construction of elaborate simulations in the 
perceptual centers of my brain. And it is these simulations, in turn, that endow 
external objects with their ring of authenticity and truth, and that guide and 
facilitate my bodily engagement in the world. Awake or asleep, we are always 
simulating and hallucinating. This doesn't mean that reality is a somehow a 
product of our minds. On the contrary: we are bound to hallucination, 
necessitated to error, exactly to the extent that reality is objective and 
external: inescapable in its presence, yet irreducible to our representations 
and refractory to our desires. Like it or not, it's there. Thought is never 
spontaneous; it requires a body to provoke it and (as Lyotard says) to make it 
suffer. Even in VR, objects have a definite existential integrity: they are 
more dense and solid, more user- and perceiver-independent--more objective in 
short--than you would ever imagine. For a postmodern sensibility, the world is a 
fictional construct, not in spite of its apparent presence and immediacy, but 
precisely because of these. Excess, delirium, anxiety, sublimity, 
preposterousness, undecidability, the mise en abîme of binary oppositions, the 
breakdown of representational order: these are all consequences--or better, 
hi-tech "special effects"--of presence itself, and not (as the 
deconstructionists too simply suppose) of the critique or deferral of presence.

So you could say that my RL apartment in Seattle depends upon a "consensual 
hallucination," every bit as much as do such virtual, abstract entities as 
subatomic particles, the American legal system, and LambdaMOO. In all these 
cases, the hallucination is shared, public, and objective, just because it is 
consensual. As Wittgenstein insisted, there is no such thing as a private 
language. Even your fantasies, dreams, and inner psychotic delusions must 
forcibly be rendered into the dominant reality. Gibson's word consensual implies 
a constraint far stronger, and far more sinister, than the mere legal notion of 
a formal acceptance by all parties. It's more like what the Mafia calls "an 
offer you can't refuse." The ultimate proof that something is "real" is that it 
imperiously demands my assent at every moment. Seattle and LambdaMOO both exist 
independently of my will; it's for that very reason that I am required to 
torture my will into conformity with them. As Guattari once said, politics 
precedes ontology. The exercise of power, according to Foucault, is "a set of 
actions upon other actions... it is always a way of acting upon an acting 
subject or acting subjects by virtue of their acting or being capable of 
action." That is to say, power always implies the separation or "freedom" of its 
victim. This is what behaviorist psychology was never able to grasp. It isn't 
enough that I am "determined" by the "laws" of nature, or culture, or language. 
No, I also must be led (induced, seduced, coerced, cajoled) into giving my 
"free" consent to all of these laws. Just as workers in service industries today 
can't get away simply with performing their tasks efficiently; they are also 
required to exude team spirit, and to grovel and smile obsequiously before their 
customers. It's an old story: you encounter it everywhere, from software 
licensing agreements to social contract theories. Merely by opening the package 
and removing the disk, you've agreed to all sorts of dubious contractual 
obligations. You may not like them, but your consent is the price you must pay 
in order to be able to run a computer in the first place. Similarly, social 
contract theories (and their more recent descendants, like Lacan's account of 
the Symbolic order) tell you that, simply by virtue of being a functioning 
member of society, you have freely consented to abrogate your own freedom. But 
of course, there's no alternative to this freely willed choice: for it's only 
insofar as you are a socially constituted being that you have the occasion and 
ability to make free choices at all. Catch-22. And so it goes with everything 
real: withholding consent simply isn't an option. We are always collaborating 
in the construction of our own prisons, straining our imaginations in thrall to 
the dictatorship of the real. Even suicide, as Blanchot sadly notes, is still an 
exertion of the will, still a consensual affirmation of reality. The deaths of 
Kleist and of Kurt Cobain--painfully honest as these acts may have been, 
beautiful protests against the tyranny of the real-- alas only ensured that 
their authors would continue to be abusively misunderstood.

VR offers us no escape from this tyranny: it's far too real for that. Virtual 
worlds are anchored by a concrete sense of place: in this they are utterly 
different from utopias, which literally are nowhere. However idealistic their 
programmers' intentions, MUDs and MOOs always seem to end up reinventing the 
bad old RL power relations. Cliques spring up, social classes develop, unequal 
privileges accrue, tricksters run scams, boys act just like boys, and some 
players have even been raped. Why am I not surprised? It reminds me of some 
graffiti I once read, in those old days before the Internet, when VR could only 
be attained through drugs: "Reality is a crutch." -- "And fantasy is a broken 
leg." Think of VR as a kind of prosthetic device. I use my computer to talk and 
to listen, to feel and to touch, just as I use my eyeglasses to see. Electronic 
circuitry, as McLuhan says, is "an extension of the central nervous system," 
even as "the wheel is an extension of the foot, the book is an extension of the 
eye, and clothing is an extension of the skin." Virtual worlds are best 
understood as what Foucault calls heterotopias: other-spaces, or spaces of 
otherness, in contrast to utopian non-spaces. "The mirror is, after all, a 
utopia, since it is a placeless place... But it is also a heterotopia insofar 
as the mirror does exist in reality, where it exerts a sort of counteraction on 
the position that I occupy... The mirror functions as a heterotopia in this 
respect: it makes this place that I occupy at the moment when I look at myself 
in the glass at once absolutely real, connected with the space that surrounds 
it, and absolutely unreal, since in order to be perceived it has to pass through 
this virtual point which is over there." Heterotopias, unlike utopias, have 
bulk, weight, and friction; they are never exempt from the power relations and 
constraints of the societies that spawn them. Indeed, heterotopias express 
these relations and constraints even to excess: they are "capable of juxtaposing 
in a single real place several spaces, several sites that are in themselves 
incompatible." But in so doing, they map out points of fracture in the fabric of 
their culture; they twist the social forms of which they are composed into 
strange new ungainly shapes.

Foucault cites pirate ships and brothels as exemplary instances of heterotopia 
in modern Western culture: virtual spaces, as it were, for a time before 
computers. (It's no accident, I think, that such spaces play so prominent a role 
in the brilliantly subversive novels of Kathy Acker). May not VR, with its 
shifting subjectivities, its incompatible juxtapositions, its nomadic 
displacements, its piratical hackers, and its surprisingly intense netsex, 
become just such a space of messy, risky cultural innovation? Not utopian social 
engineering, but experimentation and bricolage--with all the silly and 
obnoxious, as well as useful and beautiful, consequences that may ensue. Pavel 
Curtis, the chief programmer and wizard (system administrator) of LambdaMOO, 
urges anthropologists and sociologists to study MUDs and MOOs as prototypes of 
new forms of social interaction. And that's only the beginning. Allucquere 
Rosanne Stone foresees, in the not too distant future, a proliferation of MUDs 
and MOOs "in which the objects talk to each other and evolve in a Darwinian way 
even when no biologically based people are logged in." As VR extends and 
accelerates our perceptions, it may well foster the evolution of new sense 
organs that change our sense of being in the world so radically, that we can no 
longer recognize them as our own. But there's no stopping it, in any case; we 
are all already cyborgs, as Donna Haraway reminds us. So we may as well strap 
on our prostheses, and join the party.

Here's how Foucault describes the heterotopia of the pirate ship: "a floating 
piece of space, a place without a place, that exists by itself, that is closed 
in on itself and at the same time is given over to the infinity of the sea; and 
from port to port, from tack to tack, from brothel to brothel, it goes as far as 
the colonies in search of the most precious treasures they conceal in their 
gardens... The ship is the heterotopia par excellence. In civilizations without 
boats, dreams dry up, espionage takes the place of adventure, and the police 
take the place of pirates." In a time when, as Acker also writes, dreams have 
withered, and it seems no longer possible to be a pirate, isn't such 
heterotopic longing the real driving force behind our passionate embrace of VR? 
The space of piracy, as Foucault charts it, has a paradoxical structure. On one 
hand, it is intensely private, like the space of dreams: it is separated, 
closed off, and self-contained. But on the other hand, it is at the same time 
amazingly open: it enters into direct contact with infinitude, with the Outside, 
with the furthest reaches of the Universe. The pirate ship's very excess of 
closure detaches it from its initial context, and gives it an unlimited freedom 
to wander and explore. As Deleuze says, explicating Foucault, "an inside deeper 
than any internal world" immediately encounters "an outside more distant than 
any external world." There's no mediation here, no middle term reconciling or 
linking the extremes. Isn't this very much like what Mark Dery oxymoronically 
calls the "interactive autism" of VR? I shut myself in my room, I lock the door; 
I am all alone, with only a computer and a modem for company. But this privacy 
allows me to explore the secret gardens and brothels of cyberspace, to glean the 
rarest fruits and make the most intimate contacts. And that's how my body can 
find itself in two (or more) places at once. Michael Heim similarly describes 
"the erotic ontology of cyberspace" in terms taken from Leibniz: "monads have no 
windows, but they do have terminals." Every monad is a world unto itself, "an 
independent point of vital willpower"; no common space unites them, and they 
"never meet face-to-face." But don't think of this as some sort of alienation 
or absence; for the absolute closure of each monad is precisely what allows them 
all to be on-line together, in the same virtual space, on the same network. "In 
electric systems," as McLuhan puts it, "communication is by gaps, switches, and 
transistors." Sparks fly across synapses and through logic gates. We have 
scarcely begun to explore the erotics of these sparks, these transfers, the 
compelling immediacy and intimacy of contact at a distance.

The pirate ship's nomadic trajectory, like that of the MUD dweller or the 
Internet voyager, rips apart the fabric of linear, homogeneous, visual, 
perspectival space. We move, as McLuhan says, into a space that has become 
audile-tactile instead of visual: interactive, simultaneous, heterogeneous, 
discontinuous, multidirectional, diversely textured. MUDs and MOOs, at this 
point, are still text-based and low-bandwidth; but as Curtis argues, that only 
makes them "cooler" as a medium, more inclusive, participatory, and tactile. As 
the phonetic alphabet scrolls rapidly across my screen, it at long last loses 
the tyrannical privilege that it has possessed since Gutenberg. For "language 
was the last art to accept the visual logic of Gutenberg technology, and the 
first to rebound in the electric age" (McLuhan). I learn to read and write in a 
new way, one more suited to a postmodern, postliterate culture. New habits 
gradually form, new perceptions, new sexual kinks. Every new medium, as McLuhan 
says, "affects physiology as well as psychic life." We feel sensations in our 
prostheses, just as amputees do in phantom limbs. Yes, that was me you saw at 
LambdaMOO the other night. And as my @description file must have told you, I 
was awake and looked alert.


14. Truddi Chase

The abuse started when you were very young, perhaps only two years old. At 
least that's what somebody locked deep inside you remembers. Confined spaces in 
which the (step)father imprisoned you, his sweaty, stinking bulk manhandling and 
penetrating your flesh. The memory is indubitable, vividly real, even if it 
isn't precisely your own. You bear the scars to this day. How inadequate to 
reduce it to some merely Symbolic process, the Law of the Father or whatever, 
when what the Republicans call family values are thus incised directly in female 
flesh. "Daddy taught me to live in pain, to know there's nothing else" (Kathy 
Acker). Incest and child molestation are as American as apple pie. Or should I 
rather say cherry pie, the dessert of choice in David Lynch's Twin Peaks? Leland 
Palmer is the all-American Dad if there ever was one, so it's more than 
appropriate that he is the one to be possessed by the evil spirit BOB, and to 
rape and murder his daughter Laura. This deed is necessarily something of a 
ritual, the founding gesture of the American nuclear family. "A ritual includes 
the letting of blood. Rituals which fail in this requirement are but mock 
rituals" (Cormac McCarthy). The American nuclear family is never secure, never 
in place once and for all; the patriarchal pact needs continually to be renewed 
with vampiric infusions of fresh blood. And so "it is happening again": 
lookalike Maddy Ferguson takes the place of her cousin Laura Palmer, to be 
murdered by Leland/BOB in her own turn. This eerie soap opera repetition is the 
postmodern equivalent of Freud's Primal Scene, or of Nietzsche's Eternal Return. 
We are all the products of such rituals, survivors of our own deaths. Every 
birth, every coming to awareness, occurs in excruciating pain. When Rabbit 
Howls, by The Troops for Truddi Chase, is the autobiography of an incest victim 
who is thus "born" all too many times: she develops multiple personalities, 
ninety-two distinct selves, in response to repeated parental violation. Patti 
Davis similarly recounts the traumatic abuse inflicted upon her by her kindly 
and universally revered parents, Ronald and Nancy Reagan. And let's not even 
think about what Dan Quayle might be doing out there on the golf course, alone 
with his 13-year-old daughter.

The "I" is always an other, as Rimbaud said long ago. We are continually being 
violated in the flesh, and possessed in the spirit, by voices or by demons. 
Multiple Personality Disorder was once a rare and ignored condition; it suddenly 
became prominent just around the time Reagan was elected President. Today, it 
is the best paradigm we have for postmodern consciousness. No wonder it is so 
prominent on Oprah and Geraldo. Identity is always a multiplicity; the true 
first person is the plural. In Truddi Chase, an extreme case, there are 92 of 
"us"; in Crazy Jane, the superhero in DOOM PATROL who is explicitly modeled 
upon Truddi Chase, there are 64. But every human body contains at least one--and 
therefore necessarily more than one--of these multiple, incomplete selves. In 
the Troops that constitute Truddi Chase, each person is a closed box, a unique 
entity, shut off from the others. Each self has its own typical bodily gestures 
and facial expressions, its own particular habits, preferences, and speech 
patterns, and even its own pulse rate. There's the workaholic businesswoman 
Ten-Four, the party girl Elvira, the Barbie-like Miss Wonderful, the 
catatonically calm Grace, the sophisticated Catherine, the violently obscene 
Sewer Mouth. There are also many selves defined more by their tasks than by 
their emotional characteristics: the Gatekeeper, the Buffer, the Weaver, the 
Interpreter. But even though each of these selves is well-bounded and distinct, 
none is able to subsist alone. Truddi Chase's subjectivity can't be located in 
any one place. It is the result of an immense collaborative effort; it involves 
the delegation of powers, and the coordination of numerous limited and largely 
autonomous functions. There are memory blanks and discontinuities, as each of 
the selves is conscious only part of the time, and none is ever directly aware 
of what happens to the others. Someone acts, someone else hides in terror, 
someone else stirs uneasily in her sleep, and yet someone else's rage or grief 
is a murmur indistinctly resounding. Truddi Chase hears arguments and 
conversations, as if a big cocktail party were continually going on in her 
brain. Opaque walls divide the selves from one another, and these walls are 
never broken down. But disturbing moans and shouts pass through the walls, a 
prisoners' code alerting the selves to one another. Signals, commands, and 
complaints circulate among them. The multiple selves cannot ever merge into 
one, but they also cannot escape each other's proximity. This 
relation-in-difference impels their frenetic activity. The traffic is intense. 
With so many persons continually coming and going, Truddi Chase's hyperactive 
neurons are always firing, and propagating a powerful electromagnetic field. 
Radio, TV, and telephone transmissions are jammed with static; electrical 
appliances tend to malfunction in her vicinity. But if Truddi Chase has more 
selves and generates more interference than do most of us, the difference is 
only one of degree, not of kind. I am only a self in relation to another self, 
in communication with another self; I can't be one, without first being at least 
two.

Pierre Klossowski suggests that Tertullian's demonology offers a better model 
than does Freudian metapsychology for explaining such communication, and for 
conceiving multiple selves. For Freud's self-proclaimed "Copernican revolution" 
in psychology doesn't reject Cartesian dualism, so much as it reinscribes it by 
(re-)locating the ego in what still remains an exclusively interior and 
representational space. The ego/earth is no longer the center, Freud says, since 
it is now understood to rotate around the unconscious/sun. Yet Descartes himself 
had already said as much, when he made the truth of the cogito contingent upon 
the ontologically prior idea of infinity or of God. For Descartes as much as 
for Freud, the conscious ego isn't really the center; for Freud as much as for 
Descartes, the integrity of self-consciousness and the privacy of mental space 
are paradoxically preserved by this very decentering. Freud's unconscious and 
Descartes' God are both structures whose infinitude escapes the ego's grasp. I 
can never encounter God or the unconscious directly; but the effects of their 
actions are so patent that I cannot doubt their existence. God and the 
unconscious alike absolutely exceed my powers of representation; but this very 
transcendence grounds and guarantees the order of mental representations. In 
Freud as in Descartes, then, I remain trapped within a closed circle of 
solipsistic self-reference; I never make the leap from mind to brain, and I 
never encounter anything like a body. Any surplus, any radical difference, any 
remainder irreducible to representation, is easily neutralized by being 
referred to that mythical grand Other that is God or the unconscious. Despite 
everything, Freud still subscribes to the relentless project, of privatizing the 
inner self and objectifying the outside world, that has obsessed Western culture 
at least since Descartes.

Klossowski, to the contrary, affirms the radical exteriority of psychic forces. 
Demonology, far better than metapsychology, recognizes that the mind is not its 
own place, with its own laws and its own order of representations. The mind is 
rather a sort of no man's land, a vessel for spirits, a space continually being 
invaded and contested by alien powers. "The woman" who is Truddi Chase, the 
self who appears continuously to others and who serves as her legal 
representative in the world, is just such an empty space. She is merely a puppet 
or a robot, a "facade," manipulated and ventriloquized by the other selves. She 
remembers nothing, and she speaks only from dictation, like the narrators of 
Beckett's fiction: as the other selves say repeatedly, "the woman can talk, but 
she can't think." Her identity consists only of one redundant, incessantly 
repeated phrase: "for you, there is nothing more." This self is entirely 
vacuous, yet it is necessary, for it provides the physical location that all the 
other selves strive to occupy. Thought is thus radically corporeal: I think when 
demons take hold of my body, just as BOB acts by manifesting himself in Leland's 
body, just as many selves inhabit the body designated as Truddi Chase. My body 
is alarmingly porous; it is always being penetrated, violated, and possessed. I 
am endowed with consciousness only to the extent that others are conscious 
through me.

In such circumstances, Tertullian's credo quia absurdum is a salutary antidote 
to Descartes' cogito ergo sum. The real is the impossible, as Lacan says. The 
secret of self-consciousness is that of Lewis Carroll's White Queen, who taught 
herself to "believe as many as six impossible things before breakfast." To 
affirm the reality of demonic possession is to reject the mentalist cliché 
(stated in its most extreme form by Bishop Berkeley, but substantially 
subscribed to by Freud and Lacan as well) that I can never encounter the real, 
because I only experience my own representations of things, and not the things 
themselves. The mistake of Western metaphysics since Descartes is to conceive 
perception and affectivity as cognitive states, and therefore to subject them to 
canons of representation. But sensation and emotion are visceral processes 
before they are intellectual ones; they are not fixed attainments of knowledge 
and understanding, but ongoing movements of vulnerability and arousal. 
Affliction precedes and exceeds awareness. When I am invested by a demon, or 
when I am bombarded by sensation, I am affected directly: I am seized and 
agitated by something that yet remains apart from me and is not accessible to 
my powers of representation. My very being is altered; the "I" of the previous 
sentence is already someone else. The conditions of possibility or forms of 
representation that philosophers traditionally invoke to describe my experience 
of, and inherence in, the world have always already been radically breached.

This limit-experience might seem to be a rare, extraordinary occurrence; but in 
fact it happens every day. I could only be a fixed self, with a unique, 
unchanging identity, if I were never to act, never to desire, never to 
experience anything new. The God of monotheism indeed sees souls in this way, 
sub specie aeternitatis. For he exists just to absorb and neutralize excess; as 
Schreber puts it, he only understands corpses, not living beings. But the god of 
this world is not the monotheistic one; he is rather the Baphomet, the "prince 
of modifications." As Klossowski explains, the Baphomet presides over an 
unstable and polycentric universe, an anarchy of metamorphosis and 
metempsychosis. William Burroughs maintains the regulative principle that we 
must regard every event as being willed by some agency, as being the expression 
of an intention. Klossowski proposes a complementary principle: he suggests 
that every intention is an external event, a modification of my being, and hence 
a sort of demonic possession. Each thought or desire is an alteration of my 
previous state; it is an intrusion of the outside, a whispering in my ear, a 
breath that I inhale and exhale, an alien spirit prompting me from offstage or 
insinuating itself within me. Of course, not all intentions are carried through 
to their conclusions; but any intention is already in itself a kind of action, a 
tribute paid to the Baphomet, the manifestation of some force in facial 
expressions and in gestures and postures of the body. Klossowski loves to 
depict the play of conflicting impulsions as they traverse the flesh: Roberte 
invites the attention of some young stud by languidly proffering one upturned 
palm, even as her other hand irritatedly pushes him away. Analogous bodily 
modifications betray the presence of BOB within Leland, as he at once tenderly 
cherishes and aggressively abuses his daughter; and also the phase transitions 
when Truddi Chase is handed over from one personality to another. Every physical 
comportment is the immanent product of a struggle or a pact among competing 
demonic forces: hence the violent, yet often surprisingly delicate, ambivalence 
with which the body expresses heterogeneous or conflicting intentions. There are 
many layers and levels of personality, but all of them are literally 
superficial: surfaces and coverings, with yet more layers underneath. No final 
interiority, but masks concealing and protecting other masks. Not Freud's 
unconscious or Lacan's big Other, but simply other consciousnesses, other voices 
and forces, each struggling with, pointing to, or further possessed by, still 
others.

It is because thought is so efficaciously corporeal, and not representational, 
that a single body is forced to contain so many selves. Every manifestation of 
subjectivity is a physical intrusion, a consequence of trauma, a wound: "it 
usually manifests itself as an unusual gash on a human body--on the chest, on 
the hands... It usually keeps getting bigger until the affected person is all 
wound" (DOOM PATROL). The wound is barely noticeable at first, a microscopic gap 
between neurons, an infinitesimal fracture of the skin. But it grows and 
grows--IT HURTS--until it can no longer be ignored. Sensibility begins in pain. 
And pain forces me to think, even as it forces me to scream. An alien 
overfullness of sensation paralyzes the nerves, suspends the autonomic 
processes, hollows out a blank between action and reaction. Consciousness then 
arises in the depths of the violated flesh; it emerges at the very point of this 
cut, this intrusion. I think when, and because, I am unable to act. So long as 
things proceed according to habit, my actions are automatic and I have no need 
to become aware. But I am forced to think when I am confronted with some 
absurdity, some pain, when things no longer fit together on their own. Deleuze 
(following Bergson) and Morse Peckham (following the American pragmatists) both 
suggest that subjectivity is located in the gap between stimulus and response: 
it is the indeterminacy, the space of randomization, the temporal delay in the 
sensorimotor apparatus by virtue of which the latter is no longer a linear 
function and predictable consequence of the former. Every "self" is a 
singularity or a wound: a bifurcation threshold in the language of chaos theory. 
Selfhood is a violent rent in the fabric of my being; every quirk of my 
personality is a point on the catastrophe curve, the trace of a discontinuity 
in the course of my life.

It should come as no surprise, then, that personalities multiply under what 
Walter Benjamin calls the "shocks" of commodity capitalism, and that the 
peculiarly American affliction of Multiple Personality Disorder reached epidemic 
proportions at the very moment when the Republicans escalated from merely 
abusing their own daughters in the privacy of their own homes to systematically 
and publicly abusing the entire nation. For personality is the commodified 
product of trauma, the 'surplus value' arising from repeated exposure to shock 
and stress. A personality trait is not a preexisting structure or an originary 
essence, but always an unpredictable alteration, the freshly crystallized 
outcome of a chaotic phase transition. This is the operating principle that 
guides the research of Niles Caulder, the Chief of the DOOM PATROL, as he 
deliberately provokes `accidents' that transform self-satisfied conformists 
into companionless, existentially tormented superheroes. But the experimentation 
can work in both directions. If this is the story of your suffering, it is also 
the story of how you were able to survive a long history of abuse, and continue 
to function in the world. You found yourself repeatedly trapped in a double 
bind: you couldn't stand the pain, but you also couldn't do anything to abolish 
it. So each time you nominated a representative, a self, to experience the pain 
in your place. Blanchot writes that the "I" is left behind in moments of 
extremity; it cannot register the shock that pushes it or alters it beyond a 
certain threshold. But somebody is always there to witness my pain, even if "I" 
am not. Whatever happens to Truddi Chase, there is always somebody to register 
and respond to it: "someone within the Troop formation screamed a thought." Each 
new outrage on the part of the stepfather impels the traumatized body of Truddi 
Chase to manifest and express itself through a new personality.

Tolstoy wrote that all happy families are alike, while each unhappy family is 
unhappy in its own way; only he forgot to add that all families are unhappy. 
Truddi Chase is simply the most extreme--and therefore the most 
typical--example. "I feel your pain," is what Oprah so frequently says. Well, 
every body has at some point nominated representatives to feel its pain and to 
be its selves; every self is to some extent the survivor and witness of a 
catastrophe. Child abuse is passed like a contagion from father to daughter, 
from Leland to Laura. We suffer, not from lack, but from vertiginous 
epistemological overload. Each of us has endured too great a plenitude of being: 
too much pain, too much sensation, too much consciousness, and finally too many 
personalities or selves. If we're existentially incoherent, this is not because 
(as Freud and Lacan would have it) identity is precariously poised over an 
abyss, suspended on the mystery of a grand Other, or grounded in primordial 
absence. It is rather because we have all too much identity. Every interruption 
of my being introduces new forces into my body, and generates new patterns of 
thought and behavior. The hysterical conversion of the flesh, which Freud 
interpreted as a rebus of repressed reminiscences, is better understood as a 
literal production of fresh sensibility. The more we suffer, the more we have 
identity thrust upon us, even to unwanted excess. We are each distinct selves, 
different from one another, precisely to the extent that we are all victims of 
family values like togetherness, quality time, and moral training, as well as of 
the relentless discipline of the marketplace. The very procedures that are 
employed to standardize and control us in fact drive us berserk, pushing us to 
a point of random and unpredictable metamorphosis. Every self is a mutant or a 
freak. Gabba gabba, we accept you, we accept you, one of us. No wonder the 
bizarre, 'differently endowed' beings in Frank Henenlotter's Basket Case 3 
proudly affirm their self-esteem with a campy rendition of that old favorite 
song, "I've Got Personality."

So this is the history incised in your flesh, the story of "how one becomes 
what one is." The hardest thing to accept is that you actually got off on the 
abuse, that you were aroused by it, even as you felt crushed and violated. Your 
blood flowed, you shook with a panic attack from being trapped in the corner, 
your stomach felt like it was being torn apart, your bones ached from his 
weight, the stench of his breath made you want to retch; yet your genitals were 
convulsed with spasms of pleasure. That's the one thing you'll never be able to 
forgive. That he used you as an instrument for his own excitement is bad 
enough; but that he forced you to be complicit in the process is truly 
horrifying and unbearable. Unspeakably obscene that jouissance should have come 
from him. But the body has a terrifying logic of its own: "what doesn't kill me 
makes me stronger," as Nietzsche says. You thought that you were going to die, 
that it would be better to die; and instead you emerged from the torment with 
one personality the more. In the course of so much suffering, your sensibility 
was heightened and multiplied: so that you extracted--even in spite of 
yourself--a certain surplus value of enjoyment. This realization makes it 
impossible for you to play the martyr, to turn victimization into vicious 
self-righteousness in the manner of Andrea Dworkin. For this surplus value of 
enjoyment is the mark of a possession that can never be denied or exorcised: 
"the father in all of us" (Karen Finley), or the Republican who can never be 
voted out of office. And this is why the self will always remain more than one. 
The Troops for Truddi Chase reject the integration of the personality as a 
therapeutic goal, seeing it as a kind of soul murder. Better that the many 
learn to negotiate among themselves. For as DOOM PATROL's Crazy Jane puts it, 
"there is no `me.' To limit ourselves to one way of seeing and thinking would be 
to diminish our potential, you know? Everyone has a voice. It's like seeing the 
world from every angle at the same time."


15. Philip Pullman

"Oh, I'm so horny. I'm so horny all the time. You know what my Daddy said? 
Daddy said I was a little slut and when I grew up, I'd do it for money. And you 
know what? He was right. Except I don't even want money. I just want to do it." 
This voice belongs to Scarlet Harlot, the most flamboyant among the 64 
personalities of DOOM PATROL's Crazy Jane. She has only one thing in mind, and 
she certainly dresses the part: blonde wig, red brassiere, red miniskirt, long 
red gloves, stockings and garter belt, red high-heeled shoes. The cliché of raw 
sex, the 'essence' of femininity in drag display. Scarlet Harlot just wants to 
get laid, only nobody is man enough (or woman enough) to satisfy her. Her 
excess of orgone energy floods Happy Harbor, Rhode Island, provoking frenzied 
mass hallucinations and orgies in the streets, inspiring surgical operations to 
create new organs of pleasure, and otherwise inciting the "total eroticization 
of everything." But too much is never enough. Scarlet Harlot still can't get no 
satisfaction. She jerks off compulsively, reaching into the etheric plane and 
producing "ectoplasmic mannequins for her own shameless gratification." And she 
consumes these sex toys, one after another. Disarticulated dummy parts lie 
strewn across her bedroom. So many warn out phallic appendages, heaps of 
grotesque prosthetic arms, legs, heads. Did you know that materialized 
ectoplasm looks a lot like cheap plastic?

Our postmodern myths are all modular, standardized, prosthetic constructions: 
Barbie and Ken dolls, or department store dummies with interchangeable parts. 
"Blue eyes, blonde hair, tight body, long legs, she's glamorous, she's welcomed 
by boys, I wanna be Twist Barbie" (Shonen Knife). This suburban white American 
Barbie is the model of what every girl wishes to be (even if, like the members 
of Shonen Knife, she is neither white nor American). Todd Haynes, in his banned 
film Superstar, presents Karen Carpenter as literally a Barbie doll. For isn't 
such an image the real basis, or inner secret, of Karen's saintliness and 
suffering? No human female could physically endure actual embodiment in 
Barbie's ultra-slim proportions. Her bones would be too thin and brittle, the 
force of gravity too strong. Not to mention the unbearable agony of elongating, 
emaciating, and eviscerating your flesh. Strange jouissance, restricting 
yourself to a diet of salads and ice tea, emptying out your intestinal tract 
with Ex-Lax and Ipecac. The anorexic Passion of Karen Carpenter lies in the 
ecstasy and terror of this evacuation, the unendurable stresses of her new 
incarnation in vinyl and plastic. Corporeality is vomited out, or transposed 
into song. Flesh and voice alike are stretched to the limit, stereotypically 
processed and purified, captured and commodified at the most excruciating 
vanishing point. Parents and brother, record producers and music critics, 
President Nixon and the medical establishment and suburban real estate 
developers and multinational corporations: they all conspired to teach Karen 
Carpenter how to be a woman, to imprison her, skin, bones, organs, and breath, 
in an idealized, prosthetic self.

Scarlet Harlot and Karen Carpenter: sex and anti-sex, whore and virgin, the two 
poles of the feminine mystique. Femininity is a stereotype, not an archetype. 
Madonna and Cindy Sherman understand this; Camille Paglia doesn't have a clue. 
It's just like using makeup: you've got to "put on a happy face," or at the very 
least 'put on your face' each morning in front of the mirror. "Faces are not 
basically individual... You don't so much have a face, as slide into one... It 
is faces that choose their subjects," and not the reverse (Deleuze and 
Guattari). Along similar lines, Allucquere Roseanne Stone tells us that in 
virtual reality research "there is talk of renting prepackaged body forms 
complete with voice and touch... multiple personality as commodity fetish!" In 
cyberspace, nobody can hear you scream. But the bathroom mirror is already a 
kind of cyberspace, already a virtual reality. As you stare at that image in 
the mirror, you discover that the face staring back at you was already there 
long before you, just waiting for you to assume it. Good little girls must be 
seen and not heard; they have to look just so. Bad girls are just asking for it, 
you can tell by the way they dress. In either case, the image precedes the 
object, the reflection always has to come first. That's why you must spend hours 
in front of the mirror, agonizing over the right outfit for tonight's date. 
Crazy Jane is a slut because that's what Daddy told her to be. Karen Carpenter 
is a goody-two-shoes because that's the image her managers established for her, 
and her fans came to expect. When I change clothes or put on makeup or rub gel 
into my hair, I'm only trying to compose my face, the better to conform to my 
reflection. Deleuze and Guattari write of the inhuman horror of the standard 
white Euro-American face, Jesus face or Barbie face: "a lunar landscape, with 
its pores, planes, matts, bright colors, whiteness, and holes." The stereotype 
existed before me, I was born to embody it.

People in primitive societies flay the skin of their enemies, thereby depriving 
them of their souls. But we in postmodern America prefer to discipline the body 
by adding ever more epidermal layers, multiplying faces, images, and souls. In 
the power relations that define our society, "the soul is the prison of the 
body," and not the reverse (Foucault). And thus we imprison our own bodies, as 
well as those of others. It's all done with mirrors. Even the psychopathic 
killer Buffalo Bill, in The Silence of the Lambs, only strips the flesh off his 
victims in order thence to sew a second skin for himself. It's just like when 
you go under the knife for a breast implant or a nose job. From applied 
cosmetology to tattooing to plastic and prosthetic surgery, our postmodern 
culture has developed a whole art of distending and adorning the skin. The face 
is less a mask or a disguise, Deleuze and Guattari suggest, than it is the mark 
of an evacuation of the depths, a libidinous transformation of the entire body 
into surface, and nothing but surface. Ex-Lax and Ipecac of the soul. Philip 
Pullman, in his fine novel Galatea, imagines a future in which, thanks to the 
visionary interventions of multinational capital, "nothing was immutable, 
everything was subject to change, including the most private and secret regions 
of the soul... The outward appearance of people could change, and so could their 
natures. Businessmen could become musicians, musicians become businessmen, thus 
illustrating the multiplicity of phenomena and the unity of matter." In 
postmodern epidermal space, "nothing is hidden," as Wittgenstein rightly 
insists: "since everything lies open to view there is nothing to explain." Love 
means never having to say you're sorry.

One summer I bleached my hair and colored it purple. I sat in that chair in the 
beauty salon for four hours. The plaster applied to the surface of my scalp 
adhered to my skin, burned painfully into my flesh, clung to me so tightly that 
I couldn't get it off. Afterwards, I was strangely captivated by the new self 
that stared at me from out of the mirror. Who was I, what had I become? Never 
underestimate the adhesive power of appearances. Such cosmetic and prosthetic 
transformations are all perfectly real. Adorning the skin, acquiring a face, is 
an actual process of physical transformation. Karen Carpenter lived and died for 
this. It is also what seals the fate of Mr. Nobody, the Dadaist politician and 
psychedelic prankster of DOOM PATROL. Mr. Nobody is "the abstract man, the 
virtual man, the notional man," literally a man without a face. He is drawn as a 
sort of sketchy, two-dimensional Synthetic Cubist assemblage, all sharp 
disjunctive rectangles with lots of interstitial space. Freed from the burden 
of identity, as a result of being subjected to bizarre sensory-deprivation 
experiments, Mr. Nobody is able to be nowhere and everywhere at once. He 
transforms Paris into a virtual-reality art playground, and provokes an 
epidemic of LSD hallucinations across the USA. He even runs for President, 
outdoing Ross Perot as a lightning rod for voter discontent. Mr. Nobody's 
surreal, modernist abstraction opens a space of limitless metamorphosis.

But such things mustn't be allowed to happen here; this is America, after all. 
Even a superhero must be confined to a 'secret identity.' And so Mr. Nobody 
meets his antitype: John "Yankee Doodle" Dandy, an old comic book character who 
is faceless because he has too many identities, instead of too few. Dandy has 
been driven insane by his ability to simulate any and every personality. 
Metamorphically fluid, he is scarcely more reliable or more patriotic than Mr. 
Nobody; if the Pentagon is able to appropriate Dandy as a secret weapon, it's 
only because "you point him in the right direction and hope to God that when 
the shit stops flying, the enemy is in worse shape than you are." Dandy's own 
visage is blank and robotic, with ever-changing Scrabble tiles for eyes. But a 
ring of stereotypical faces floats in the air above him, like balls for him to 
juggle, or like a sinister wreath or halo: "the faces howl, like dogs, harried 
by thoughts... faces buzzing like bees, hungry and thirsty." Indeed, nothing is 
more horrible than the cruel rapacity of a human face. And so John Dandy 
destroys Mr. Nobody by literally thrusting one of these faces upon him, 
imprisoning him in a visage of banality and boredom. "I am somebody" is the 
great, deluded American rallying cry. Mr. Nobody is turned into somebody--and 
thus brought back to order and reason--when he is given a determinate face, 
trapped in a fixed expression that clings to him like a leech. "It's such a 
gamble when you get a face" (Richard Hell). Whoever can be recognized can be 
made accountable, held responsible, regimented, punished, and finally killed. 
They give you a face so they can take an ID photo. Identity is a straightjacket 
that you can't ever remove.

But even if you can't escape, you can always hope to change one look for 
another. It isn't a question of truth, but one of simulation. The point is not 
to 'save the appearances,' but to heighten and improve them. The very same 
mechanisms that were invented to make me responsible, to chain me to myself, 
also open the doors to frivolity, irresponsibility, and a sort of divine 
innocence. Nietzsche vastly prefers aestheticians to moralists and 
metaphysicians, because the former are blithely unconcerned with 'high 
seriousness,' with otherworldly heights and depths, or with inner essences. 
Artists and cosmeticians are the last people who would ever bother to hearken 
patiently to the voice of Being. Rather they give us back the world again, as 
appearance and nothing but appearance: "for 'appearance' here signifies reality 
once more," Nietzsche says, "only selected, strengthened, corrected." The truest 
facial expression is the most insincere, stereotypical and superficial. And 
that's why appearances are never deceiving. "Everything is what it seems," says 
the epigraph to Galatea. Clothes make the man, or the woman, as all drag queens 
and fashion models know. You create yourself anew each morning, every time you 
get dressed, every time your body adopts particular postures and gestures, every 
time your face fixes itself in certain expressions. With the right clothes and 
makeup and hairdo, you can choose any identity, embody any fantasy, transform 
yourself into anything you want to be. Each year Madonna comes forth with a new 
likeness, a new wardrobe, a whole new borrowed personality. That's the American 
way. The glamorous images of your desire are always already there, available for 
instant purchase: they are recycled from some old film, and draped on a 
mannequin in a window at Bloomingdale's or Nordstrom's. You can become whatever 
you pay for--and easy credit terms can always be arranged. So let us not be 
bothered that our faces are never our own, that our actions and reactions are 
pre-programmed, or that our most private feelings and most intimate moments 
involve repertoires of behavior that we've picked up by imitating others. Just 
ride the waves of fashion. As the neuroscientists Ronald Melzack and Patrick 
Wall have recently shown, even our inner experience of pain is "largely the 
result of learned behavior." We capitalize on stereotypes. No gain, no pain. 
But that doesn't make the headache I am feeling now any less intense, or any 
less real; I've learned my childhood lessons far too well.

Art and capitalism alike are tirelessly engaged in the great project of 
selecting and refining appearances, stimulating monstrous and artificial 
desires, improving the tone of the skin. Galatea is filled with delirious 
visions of new capital investment: strange mechanical devices, enormous and 
splendidly glittering cities, vast factories hidden in Third World jungles 
whose assembly lines mass-produce beautiful, gracious robots. Martin Browning, 
the narrator of Galatea, transforms himself from an impoverished musician into a 
millionaire entrepreneur, after undergoing a long apprenticeship in appearances. 
He is seduced and initiated into the art of living vicariously, by procuration 
or by pretense. Money changes everything. And "change happens when one state 
imitates another one, because it desires it." You can always find a face that 
suits your needs of the moment. If you don't know anything about art, for 
instance, you (or your corporation) can hire somebody who does. Love follows 
the same pattern. Martin's true beloved, the eponymous heroine of Galatea, is 
described as an angel, an idealized, otherworldly being, a male fantasy of 
absolute, pristine beauty--which means, as Martin finally discovers, that "she" 
is a hermaphroditic automaton manufactured in the factories of the Perfect 
City. But it's of no consequence to Martin's desire whether Galatea is made of 
flesh and blood, or of wires and microchips; nor whether Galatea has "a boy's 
sex, or a girl's, or some inconceivable both, or [whether she is] blank and 
smooth like a statue" (indeed, though Galatea is referred to throughout with 
feminine pronouns, her anatomical gender remains a mystery for most of the 
novel; Martin only fucks her in the ass, and from behind, so that he never gets 
a chance to see or touch her pubic regions). For desire is a matter, not of 
"lack," but of prosthesis, of pure pretense. Its objects are neither missing 
nor lost, but exquisitely artificial; that is, as Deleuze and Guattari say, they 
simply need to be produced. The real is entirely prefabricated, and whatever has 
been fabricated is thereby perfectly real: "nothing is natural any more, and 
nothing is artificial," says Martin towards the end of Galatea. " It's a false 
dichotomy, and we should forget about it. We all show false faces to the world, 
and a good thing too, for a hundred reasons."

So long live the false face--or lots of them, the more the merrier. If we can't 
escape recognition altogether--witness the fate of Mr. Nobody--we may as well 
enhance our visibility, court recognition with a vengeance. Incarnate ourselves 
as talking heads. All we need is media access, and a sufficient line of credit. 
When I was in high school, I told my guidance counselor that my career goal was 
to become a celebrity game show panelist. Or at least a contestant on The Gong 
Show. Better to be gonged by Jaye P. Morgan, than not to appear on TV at all. To 
be truly faceless--without a reflection, like a vampire--is to be deprived of 
being, to be cut adrift without the requisite purchasing power, an orphan of 
the night, a lost soul. No face without a Visa card, no Visa card without a 
face. Martin Browning encounters such lost souls: the Unreal People, light as 
feathers, insubstantial as ghosts. You can't look at the Unreal People directly, 
but only from the corner of your eye. As they have little power to affect you, 
you can't keep them steadily in mind and you tend even to forget that they are 
there. People become Unreal when their lines of credit are exhausted, and when 
their savings have dwindled as a result of inflation. They get ever thinner and 
more transparent, as they become progressively unable to acquire new 
identities, unable to shop, purchase, and consume. They've gone through the 
cycle, and reached the last extremity, of what my old elementary school textbook 
defined as the "four freedoms" of capitalism: "freedom to try, freedom to buy, 
freedom to sell, freedom to fail."

The Unreals cling to this fourth and final "freedom," having exhausted the 
previous three. Their residual subsistence therefore cannot be regarded as a 
condition of deprivation or lack. Think of it rather as an effect--an entirely 
positive expression--of the harsh pressures of the marketplace, or the rigors 
of natural selection. Inflation is a constant environmental hazard, the sinister 
flip side of capital accumulation. But inflation is only possible in the first 
place because the will to simulate and to expend is universal. Marx with his 
theories of commodity fetishism never went far enough. Galatea has a much more 
radical vision: it proposes that money is the vitalistic principle animating 
matter, the élan vital of all living and desirous beings. Money is inherently 
voluptuous and promiscuous; it tends to multiply at a geometric rate if 
unchecked by Malthusian constraints. The contagious "germ" of inflation, once 
it is introduced into an economy, rages to epidemic proportions. Cutthroat 
competition in capitalism or in nature, the notorious 'survival of the fittest,' 
is only the counter-effect of an outrageous original exuberance; for "the 
general aspect of life is not hunger and distress, but rather wealth, luxury, 
even absurd prodigality" (Nietzsche, commenting on Darwin). Galatea similarly 
teaches a delirious lesson of infinite simulation, infinite libido, and infinite 
credit: "Electricity! Money! Love! Happiness! Matter loving itself, making love 
to itself, that's what it all is... Electricity, and finance, and sexuality, and 
happiness, and evolution, they all come about because of the amorous 
inclinations of matter."

Let us then pursue these amorous inclinations on our own accounts. Pretend 
beyond all measure, and send the orgone levels soaring. Follow the lead of Crazy 
Jane as Scarlet Harlot: reinvent sexual promiscuity and rapaciousness with the 
aid of prosthetic stimulants. Let simulated masculinity and femininity run amok. 
As Kathy Acker says in a recent interview, apropos of vibrators and dildoes: 
"packing is gonna make a major revolution! And the only thing guys have to learn 
is that there's nothing wrong with dicks and cocks, but don't think you've got 
the only cocks in the world." Severo Sarduy correspondingly writes that the aim 
of the drag queen is "to be more and more of a woman, until the line is crossed 
and woman is surpassed; transvestites, like insects, are hypertelic: they pass 
beyond their goals." Such extravagance and gratuitous display is the most urgent 
tendency of late capitalist culture, even as it is of arms races and sexual 
selection in biological evolution. Stereotype is transformed into singularity, 
and habit is heightened into intensity, not when these oppressive steady states 
are furiously negated, but rather when they are embraced with a cool, measured 
enthusiasm, carefully refined and stylized, pushed just a little too far. Such 
is the credo, if not quite of Mr. Nobody, then of another of Grant Morrison's 
creations, Sebastian O. Sebastian lives in an alternate Victorian world--a 
'steampunk' world--one which has computers and video. He's the virtual-reality 
equivalent of Oscar Wilde: an aesthete and dandy who's all too pleased to live 
in a universe of artifice and simulation. "It is our duty to be as artificial 
as possible," he proclaims. "One must commit acts of the highest treason only 
when dressed in the most resplendent finery."


16. Andy Warhol

To be obsessed with images, with surfaces, with appearances: what does it 
really mean? In particular, what did it mean to Andy Warhol? Images are nothing 
like objects. When things retreat into their images, the way they do on TV, they 
lose their solidity, their palpability, their presence. Images have a 
weightlessness that is both mysterious and soothing. They haunt us, like 
ghosts; they empty out space, the better to flicker interminably in the void. 
Images are premised upon a visibility so extreme that it relegates the world to 
a state of almost transparency. They resemble their objects so utterly, so 
perfectly, that the objects themselves become almost invisible. The most 
perfect resemblance, Maurice Blanchot says, is the one that has "no name and no 
face." An artist is somebody who wants to turn the whole world into images; but 
he usually ends up making more objects instead. That is at least how Warhol 
regards the matter: "I really believe in empty spaces," he says; "although, as 
an artist, I make a lot of junk... I can't even empty my own spaces." It's a 
dilemma that assaults him day after day: "I'm sure I'm going to look in the 
mirror and see no one, nothing. People are always calling me a mirror and if a 
mirror looks into a mirror, what is there to see?" Maybe that would even be the 
most satisfying outcome. If only Andy could vanish into the mirror, into the 
camera, into the tape recorder... To be an empty image, and nothing but an 
image, just like Marilyn or James Dean or Elvis... But try as Andy may, his 
body never entirely disappears. Instead, "day after day I look in the mirror and 
I still see something--a new pimple. If the pimple on my upper right cheek is 
gone, a new one turns up on my lower left cheek, on my jawline, near my ear, in 
the middle of my nose, under the hair on my eyebrows, right between my eyes. I 
think it's the same pimple, moving from place to place." This pimple, you might 
say, is Warhol's fleshly double, his abject objecthood, the thing that binds him 
to his body, or to himself. The thing that prevents him from turning into an 
image. "Nudity," Warhol tells us, "is a threat to my existence"; and the pimple 
is the point where he's exposed naked, for all the world to see. Your blemishes 
are the most intimate secrets you have; but they are also the first things that 
everyone else notices. That's why Warhol "believe[s] in low lights and trick 
mirrors... [and] in plastic surgery." You can never have too many skin creams 
and lotions and ointments.

No moral, aesthetic, or metaphysical issue is more important for Warhol than 
the question of how to get rid of pimples. "If someone asked me, 'What's your 
problem?'", he tells us, "I'd have to say, 'Skin.'" And he's right, of course. 
Everything that matters is already out there, right on the surface. "Don't 
think, but look!" as Wittgenstein said. Faced with the trauma of an acne 
outburst, or with the heartbreak of psoriasis, I must learn not to bother with 
searching out deep structures and root causes. For such disorders can only be 
treated topically and symptomatically: that is to say, only on the level of 
surfaces and effects. It's impossible to dig down to the origin; the best 
solutions for skin problems are always aesthetic or cosmetic ones. As my trusty 
old Home Medical Guide puts it: "Since the cause of acne is frequently 
misunderstood, the 'victim' may be accused of being responsible for his or her 
condition. Parents often blame their youngsters for eating too much junk food, 
eating too little, eating too much, not washing properly, not getting enough 
sleep, sleeping too much, being obsessed with the opposite sex, having no 
interest in the opposite sex, ad infinitum. The truth is, none of these things 
has anything to do with acne, and if there is any 'blame' attached to the 
disorder, it may well belong to the parents' genes... No exact cause is known." 
Parents are all too likely to read acne as a sign of deviance: of not being 
properly heterosexual, most likely. But a careful, patient attention to images 
and surfaces undoes all such imputations of guilt. As Nietzsche says in a 
similar context, "that no one is any longer made accountable... this alone is 
the great liberation--thus alone is the innocence of becoming restored." Warhol 
scrupulously abstains from pejorative judgments: "It's so nice, whatever it is. 
I approve of what everybody does: it must be right because somebody said it was 
right. I wouldn't judge anybody." Instead, he dispenses expert advice on skin 
care: "I dunk a Johnson and Johnson cotton ball into Johnson and Johnson rubbing 
alcohol and rub the cotton ball against the pimple." Or again: "if you have a 
pimple, put on the pimple cream in a way that will make it really stand out." Or 
yet again: "Haven't you heard about those ladies who take young guys to the 
theater and jerk them off so that they can put it all over their face?... It 
sort of pulls it tighter and makes them younger for the evening." If one remedy 
doesn't work, then simply try another. In the end, Warhol says, "I've never met 
a person I couldn't call a beauty. Each person has beauty at some point in their 
lifetime."

Warhol, too, shows us how to "have done with the judgment of God"; but in a far 
gentler manner than Nietzsche or Artaud. I suppose that's why it's no big deal 
that he went to church every Sunday. For Warhol has none of the anxieties that 
plagued his great Modernist forbears, none of their transgressive urges or 
buried ressentiment. Why worry, if nothing is true, and everything is 
permitted? Lacan says somewhere that the real formula of atheism is not, 'God is 
dead,' but rather, 'God is unconscious.' If that is so, then Warhol--whatever 
his private observances--was undoubtedly the least pious of men. When 
everything's just an image, there's no Symbolic Order left to transgress. And 
that goes not only for God, but for all the other fetishes of modernist faith as 
well: sex, money, and politics. They all come down to appearances, and nothing 
but appearances. Sometimes a penis is just a penis, is what Freud ought to have 
said. Think of it not as the Phallus, but as a convenient dispenser of facial 
cream. Castration is a matter merely of local and passing significance. The 
organ is nothing in itself; it's all a question of how you use it. And there are 
as many different uses as there are different male and female bodies. 
"Everybody has a different idea of love," Warhol writes. "One girl I know said, 
'I knew he loved me when he didn't come in my mouth.'"

That's what Warhol's religion really comes down to. "The Factory was a church," 
Gary Indiana writes, "the Church of the Unimaginable Penis, or something... The 
sanctity of the institution and its rituals is what's important, not personal 
salvation. Maintaining the eternal surface." Maintaining the image, you might 
say. Nothing is hidden in Andy's church, and nothing is transcendent: what you 
see is exactly what you get. Movie and media stars are the only objects of 
worship. Only Elvis or James Dean can tell me what it is to be a man. Or some 
other icon of the time: maybe, even, Fidel Castro. Castro was a hot media figure 
in the 60s, though his glamour has faded considerably since then. It's odd, the 
way his name always used to come up. At one point in Warhol's 1967 film Nude 
Restaurant, Taylor Mead teasingly claims, in close-up straight to the camera, 
that "I was in Fidel Castro's dictionary... I made it with the Big One, Big 
Number One of Cuba." Viva responds by telling how, in pre-Revolutionary Cuba, a 
political prisoner was castrated by Batista's secret police for refusing to 
talk. At which Mead muses, in that offhand, campy manner of his: "you would 
think Castro would be the castrator." In fact, several years before this film 
was made the CIA had indeed plotted, if not to castrate Castro outright, at 
least to devirilize him by lacing his food with female sex hormones. They 
figured that his beard would fall out, and his voice become high-pitched and 
squeaky. Once Castro's macho image was ruined, they thought, he could easily be 
overthrown. An obsession with Fidel's sexuality seems to be present in other 
CIA projects of the time as well, such as the plan to kill him with an exploding 
cigar. This may well be one of those times when a cigar isn't just a cigar. 
Isn't the United States government's hysteria about the Castro regime--one that 
still persists today, even after 36 years--the result of envy and fear at the 
prospect of Fidel's "Big One"? The CIA spooks never succeeded in putting any of 
their strange schemes into action; but the very existence of such plans 
testifies to the potency, as it were, of Fidel's media image. Just like a 
pimple that won't go away, his flashy and fleshly presence on the international 
scene in the early 60s was an affront to norteamericano manliness as then 
embodied by John F. Kennedy. Following the Kennedy assassination, Lyndon Johnson 
more prudently (if no more successfully) decided to pick on Ho Chi Minh instead. 
After all, nobody would exactly say that old Uncle Ho had sex appeal.

Warhol, for his part, goes JFK and the CIA one better when it comes to 
devirilizing Castro. In his 1965 film The Life of Juanita Castro, not only does 
Fidel's estranged, anti-communist sister take center stage, but Fidel, his 
brother Raul, and Che Guevara are all played by women. This gender reversal 
testifies to the fluidity of postmodern bodies. It's not really a matter of 
deflating Castro's ego, or his cock, but of showing how his potency--how 
virility in general--is always an affair of bluff and display, of pure pretense. 
That's just show business. In the world of Warhol's Factory, castrator and 
castrated, or Castro and castration, are able to exchange places with the utmost 
of ease. Warhol describes the idea of the film as "fags on the sugar 
plantation"; he renders the Cuban Revolution as high camp. In Marxist terms, 
history is repeated a second time, as farce. Warhol's treatment not only outdoes 
the CIA, but trumps Hollywood as well: it is even more campy and over-the-top 
than Richard Fleischer's 1969 would-be blockbuster Che!, despite the latter's 
amazing casting of Omar Sharif as Guevara and Jack Palance as Fidel. The Life 
of Juanita Castro is ostensibly based on a Life magazine article in which 
Juanita denounces her brother as a tyrant. But it is actually inspired, Warhol 
claims, by reports that Raul Castro was a transvestite, and that Fidel himself 
had made "attempts to become a Hollywood star," and had even appeared as an 
extra in an Esther Williams musical. Was the Cuban revolutionary regime's 
notorious persecution of gay men a result of Castro's own sense of masculine 
panic, his need to bury a disreputable past? Warhol's film, you might say, 
presents a new Fidel, releasing his bitchy inner queen from the prison of 
Marxist-Leninist virility. The romantic machismo of Third World revolution runs 
a poor second to the sexually more ambiguous allure of celluloid stardom.

The Life of Juanita Castro is a wonderfully skewed film, in all sorts of ways. 
The actors sit in rows, facing the place of the camera, with Juanita front 
center and Fidel and Che on either side of her. Except that the supposed camera 
to which the actors always direct themselves is not the one that actually 
shoots the film. We see the stage instead from an oblique angle, well off to the 
right. The result is that, for instance, when Juanita or Fidel 'steps up to the 
camera' for a monologue and a close-up, she actually moves out of frame. The 
show must go on, but it isn't really being addressed to us: for we are way too 
off-center to engage it. This formal absurdity is only heightened by how the 
script is presented to us. Ronald Tavel, Warhol's screenwriter, sits on stage 
along with the rest of the cast. He reads aloud from his script, telling the 
actors what to do and say. "Fidel, smoke your cigar for a while with great 
satisfaction." "Juanita, say to Fidel, 'You never really cared about the poor 
peasants.'" "Fidel, turn to Juanita and yell, 'Puta! Gusana!'" The actor then 
repeats the line or follows the instruction, usually with over-emphatic gestures 
and intonations, but trying--with more or less success--to keep a straight face 
during the process. Marie Menken, who plays Juanita, has an especially hard 
time. She seems fairly sloshed throughout the film, frequently mumbling or 
mispronouncing lines, totally garbling Spanish phrases, and querulously 
complaining that the words she's been told to recite don't make any sense. 
Sitting in a wicker chair, fanning herself, and taking occasional swigs of 
beer, she displays all the mannerisms of a fallen grande dame. Overall, she 
exudes an air of amused indifference mingled with haughty disdain, as if to say, 
'I can't believe I'm doing this.' Menken's 'bad' performance is the most 
memorable thing about the film, but all the actors have their moments. At times, 
Tavel instructs the entire cast to laugh, or cry, or smile as if for a family 
portrait. The result is something like a well-orchestrated political rally: the 
same stereotypical actions and expressions are manifested at once by everybody 
present. The whole film, in effect, is being dictated as we watch: which is 
just right for a film about a dictator. Language, as Deleuze and Guattari put 
it, is a performance and not a structure: "the transmission of the word as 
order-word, not the communication of a sign as information." The Life of Juanita 
Castro thus performs the Cuban Revolution as camp spectacle, rather than 
informing us of its accomplishments or failures. Which is why Warhol says, 
deadpan, that the political "point" of the film is, "it depends on how you want 
to look at it."

Nothing could be further from the old familiar practices of ideology-critique 
and the alienation-effect. We aren't deceived or stupefied by this spectacle; 
but it doesn't give us space for critical reflection either. This is a point 
that Warhol's critics have often misunderstood. We're usually asked to choose 
between two readings of Warhol's work: one that praises him for exposing the 
institutional structures of commodity capitalism and the art world, and one that 
condemns him for being in complicity with these same institutional structures. 
But aren't both of these readings beside the point? After all, "if a mirror 
looks into a mirror, what is there to see?" Of course Warhol is in complicity, 
and of course he is always calling attention to that complicity. But the real 
interest of his work lies elsewhere. It's too late: the political and art worlds 
are high camp already. You may hate "the society of the spectacle" with a 
puritanical fervor, as the Castro regime so ostentatiously does, or as Guy 
Debord and the Situationists did. But if you care at all for pleasure, if the 
old corrupt Yankee-controlled Havana of nightclubs, casinos, and whorehouses 
holds any allure for you whatsoever, then such purism and puritanism clearly 
won't do. You'll have to work around and within the spectacle, just as Andy 
did. Near the end of Juanita Castro, Fidel accuses Juanita of opposing his 
regime only for the sake of publicity, just in order to further her career as a 
singer and dancer. "But I am a great singer, I am a great dancer," Juanita 
scornfully replies.

Isn't that the point, right there in a nutshell? As Nietzsche said, even 
philosophers ought to learn how to dance. What good is virile self-control, or 
political and aesthetic discipline, compared to the pleasures of a good Cuban 
cigar and (with a nod to Che) of an Argentinian tango? Warhol recounts asking 
Emile de Antonio, in the late 50s, why he was having trouble finding acceptance 
in the art world. "You're too swish," de Antonio replied; "you play up the 
swish--it's like an armor with you." And, Warhol adds, "it was all too true... I 
certainly wasn't a butch kind of guy by nature, but I must admit, I went out of 
my way to play up the other extreme." Come the 60s, this strategy finally paid 
off. I distrust any account of Warhol, no matter how celebratory, that doesn't 
take his swishiness into account. If nothing else, Warhol says, he "always had a 
lot of fun with [the 'swish' thing]--just watching the expressions on people's 
faces." Of course, this sort of campy aestheticism has been a common strategy 
of survival for gay men for quite a long time: at least since the invention of 
hetero- and homosexuality in the later 19th century. Oscar Wilde, Jean Genet, 
and Michel Foucault all urge us to transform ourselves into works of art. If 
Warhol is "the last dandy," as Stephen Koch calls him, it's because he pushes 
this posture further than anyone else. Warhol is the first to understand that 
the whole postmodern world is in drag, and not just certain special individuals. 
In Marxist terms, the actual conditions of production have already outrun 
whatever we may think and say about them. Warhol is content merely to dramatize 
this fact. There's no place for us to look, except into the mirror. There's 
nothing left to do, except go to another party. There are no real men and no 
real women; it's all insinuation. "I dreamed of scented rooms and endless 
permutations of identity: boys becoming girls, girls becoming boys who do boys 
like they're girls," as Grant Morrison writes in his recent comic, The 
Invisibles. Despite Warhol's massive postmortem institutionalization, his swishy 
aesthetic retains its provocative force today. It's a permanent reproach to the 
American cult of virility. It's scarcely possible to take seriously any more, 
after Warhol, all those tough, high-minded claims these days for an art of 
political critique on the one hand, and for an art that teaches virtue on the 
other.

And that's the difference between Warhol and the CIA. The CIA sought in all 
seriousness to subvert Castro: to castrate him literally or metaphorically, to 
subject him to the Law of the Father. To render him accountable, in one way or 
another. Warhol, in contrast, frivolously seeks to pervert Castro: to dress him 
in drag, and perhaps to drag him into bed. That's what drives the gender play 
in The Life of Juanita Castro. Behind every great man stands a woman, popular 
wisdom says; and in this case, Fidel himself is also that woman. Mercedes Ospina 
plays a rather butch Fidel, swaggering and smirking her way through the part. 
But she isn't in drag; she makes no attempt to pass for a man. She's just 
there, in a dress and without a beard. For masculinity is an image and not an 
object: a superficial performance, rather than an attribute of bodies. It's 
Fidel's very womanliness that drives him to act so butch. The effect of 
Ospina's performance is that of an infinite hall of mirrors: a woman playing a 
man who is really a woman in the guise of a man. Tavel's script heightens the 
atmosphere of silly delirium. It gleefully mixes political clichés, bitchy 
reproaches and insults, and moments of absurd overdramatization. At one point, 
Fidel makes an excruciatingly long speech in bad Spanish (it consumes a full 15 
minutes of screen time), while the other actors all fall asleep and snore 
loudly. (Castro, of course, is as notorious for his long speeches as Warhol is 
for seemingly interminable films like Sleep and Empire). The film also abounds 
in sly sexual innuendoes, and in teasing flirtations between the various 
players: especially between those two big maricones, Raul and Che. It's much 
more fun to casually cruise a Party meeting than to work twelve hours straight 
in the hot sun cutting sugar cane. Politics is pervaded and perverted by 
desire: not by that big, fatal passion that consumes your very being, but by 
those silly little whims and compulsions that vex you from day to day. Marxism 
and masculinity must both be redefined. Fidel Castro is nothing but a 
capricious, bitchy diva, spoiled rotten by too much early success on the 
world-historical stage. His revolutionary virility is a grand production number; 
if he carries it off well enough, he hopes, history will absolve him. Fidel is 
best understood, then, as a fabulous camp icon: a dialectical Bette Davis or a 
Commie Joan Crawford. And now, in the late 90s, when he's become passé, still 
holding the line for an obsolete vision of Leninist virtue, doesn't he bear a 
striking resemblance to Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard?

It all comes down to images, and nothing but images. Warhol's art really is 
about fashion and style. It couldn't care less about what's beneath the surface. 
Nothing could be more "corny," Warhol says, than "agonized, anguished art" that 
seeks to uncover hidden depths. The critical spirit finds the world to be 
radically deficient. Images never satisfy it; it always wants something more. 
But Warhol just shrugs his shoulders, and suggests that enough is enough. The 
world, for him, is not deficient, but, if anything, overly full. The junk we 
collect, Warhol warns us, will fill up all our spaces. The junk Warhol himself 
collected still hasn't even been catalogued properly. You may remove a pimple 
today, but you'll discover a new one tomorrow. There's too much out there 
already; why get excited about one organ more or less? The virile fear of 
castration is utterly foreign to Warhol. Straight men tend to get all touchy 
and anxious about their potency. But the straight man is only there to feed the 
comedian his lines. It's the latter who gets the laughter, and the money, and 
the applause. That's why Warhol prefers style over substance, swish over 
machismo, images over things. Why ever bother to dig beneath the surface? You 
can always make selections and corrections on the skin itself. You can add 
additional layers, covering acne with makeup, or treating it with sperm or with 
benzoyl peroxide. "When I did my self-portrait," Warhol tells us, "I left all 
the pimples out because you always should. Pimples are a temporary condition 
and they don't have anything to do with what you really look like. Always omit 
the blemishes--they're not part of the good picture you want."


17. Dean Martin

How we love to recycle and replay the Fifties--even those of us who weren't 
around then. Fifties fashions, Fifties hairstyles, Fifties cars and motorcycles, 
Fifties music, Fifties personalities: these still define what we mean by cool. 
Think of James Dean, think of Marilyn, think of Elvis. Elvis, especially, 
eternally returns to haunt us: he's forever at the center of the American 
psyche. More people have encountered him dead than ever saw him when he was 
alive. Rumors abound: of assassination plots, faked death certificates, secret 
cloning programs, reincarnations, preternatural singing from closets and 
bathrooms, sightings on UFOs. It's all gotten so baroque, multilayered and 
self-referential. Even the Elvis impersonators have their own impersonators now. 
After all, wasn't Elvis, in the latter part of his career, when he performed in 
Vegas wearing that rhinestone-studded white jumpsuit, already a simulacrum of 
himself? Daniel Clowes, in his comic book Eightball, envisions a time, in the 
not-too-distant future, when "there will be nostalgia for the nostalgia of 
previous generations: 'I'm not into The Fifties per se; I'm into the Fifties 
revival of the Seventies!'-- 'Bah! I'm into more of an Eighties Fifties!'" The 
Fifties are the fulfillment of the American prophecy: the age, not of Aquarius, 
but of the Emersonian self-made man, and of Zarathustra's Eternal Return. Now, 
as the millennium approaches, our culture is deliriously awash in clones and 
replicas of the Fifties, citations and allusions, everything always carefully 
encased "in quotation marks." Maybe we aren't into Elvis per se, so much as 
we're into the idea of "being into Elvis." Elvis is rather like the mythical 
phallus of psychoanalysis: there but not there, a simulacral shimmering, present 
precisely in his absence. Sometimes we want to have Elvis, and sometimes we 
want to be him: but in either case we fail, since he remains a virtual image, 
visible but intangible, always ever so slightly beyond our reach. Elvis's 
talent, beauty, and grace--the sound of his voice, the ease of his smile, the 
swaying of his hips--are things you and I can only dream of.

Or maybe catch them at the movies. Clarence (Christian Slater), the hero of the 
recent film True Romance (written by Quentin Tarantino, and directed by Tony 
Scott), sways between fantasies of being Elvis, and of having him. He learns 
lessons of daring, courage, and devotion to his true love from conversations 
with Elvis in the bathroom. He marches in there to piss like a man, and there's 
the King staring back at him from the mirror, giving him words of encouragement 
and big-brotherly advice and approval: "Clarence, I've always liked you." If 
this carries a charge of homoerotic attachment, well then, so much the better. 
After all, Clarence's standard pick-up line is to tell a woman that he's not a 
fag or anything, but still he wouldn't mind going to bed with Elvis. That's how 
cool Elvis is. That tells you just how much Clarence adores the King. Wanting to 
sleep with Elvis is in fact the American dream: it's precisely what Clarence and 
the women he meets have in common. And so all the rituals of traditional male 
bonding and rivalry--locker room pranks, pissing contests, comparisons of penis 
size--get turned into something goofier and finer. The toilet, rather than 
Robert Bly's backwoods, is the site of Clarence's initiation into manhood. Under 
Elvis's benign guidance, he's transformed from a lonely nerd, who works in a 
comic-book store and obsessively watches martial-arts movies, into the 
real-life hero of his own true romance. He runs off with his girlfriend Alabama 
(Patricia Arquette), survives confrontations with Hollywood and the Mob, and 
finds health, wealth, and happiness in a nuclear family of his own, ending up on 
a sunny beach not far from the site of Elvis's 1963 movie masterpiece, Fun in 
Acapulco.

Elvis, now and forever, is totally cool--as the protagonists of True Romance 
never tire of reminding us. It's not so much what Elvis means that is important, 
as the sheer fact of his ubiquity. What has he done to multiply himself--even 
and especially after his death? Just how many of him are there? These are 
questions, not for hermeneutics or semiotics, but rather for population 
genetics. Like rabbits released in virgin territory, Elvis replicas and Elvis 
impersonators have wreaked havoc on our cultural ecology, overrunning and 
overturning the entire postmodern landscape. As soon as Elvis appeared, all the 
earlier crooners were driven quickly to near-extinction. Good-bye Perry Como, 
good-bye Bing, good-bye Frank. And no one subsequently has really been able to 
compete: not Mick, not Michael Jackson, not even Axl Rose or Eddie Vedder. I 
mean, would you trust one of them to be your bathroom confidant? As any 
evolutionary theorist will tell you, adaptive fitness is defined, not in terms 
of quality of life or innate value or even personal longevity, but solely in 
terms of ultimate reproductive success. Horrifying, but true. The body of the 
man, Elvis Aron Presley, was only a vehicle for that berserk replicator, the 
Elvis meme. And it's of no concern to the meme that the later recordings are 
boring, or that Elvis himself put on too much weight in those final years, and 
led such a lonely, empty, unfulfilled life. Andy Warhol once said that "Picasso 
was the artist I admired most in all of history, because he was so prolific." 
The greatest artist, in Warhol's view, is the one who has left the largest sheer 
quantity of images and copies behind. Picasso, of course, was a master in this 
respect: he went so far as to doodle on the backs of checks, hoping that this 
would induce the recipients to never cash them. But even Picasso couldn't 
impose his replicas upon our culture to anywhere near the extent that Elvis did. 
Warhol understood this perfectly: that's why he never bothered with painting 
mock Picassos, as so many lesser artists have inadvertently done, but went right 
ahead and silkscreened multiples of the King.

Of all the crooners of that era, none has vanished so utterly and so 
precipitously as Dean Martin. Throughout the Fifties, and all the way into the 
late Sixties, his singles and albums reached the Billboard Top Forty, his TV 
specials were close to the top in the Nielsens, his nightclub act was the 
biggest draw in Vegas, and his movies were huge blockbuster hits. And then, all 
of a sudden, nothing. Dino seemed to have dropped out of show business 
altogether--aside from hosting an occasional Celebrity Roast. It was as if some 
Big Brother had retroactively erased him, not just from the airwaves, but from 
the memories and dreams of the American psyche. We know all there is to know 
about Elvis and Liberace, not to mention such living fossils as Sinatra and Bob 
Hope and Don Rickles and Wayne Newton--but Dean Martin? Not a trace. Fifties 
nostalgia skips right over him, and Andy Warhol never silkscreened his 
portrait. Scarcely anyone under the age of thirty even knows who he is. It's as 
if he had disappeared as suddenly and as totally as the dinosaurs; or worse, as 
if he hadn't ever existed in the first place. We recycle nearly everything else, 
but there aren't any Dino impersonators around. Dean Martin's story is not the 
traditional one of a star's rise and fall, not the familiar case of inferior 
adaptive fitness and lost evolutionary battles. Think rather of him as a 
singularity, a limit point, a supernova collapsed into a black hole: a fractal 
discontinuity in the warp and woof of American culture. Think of his 
disappearance into a haze of alcohol and Alzheimer's as a silent and almost 
invisible catastrophe: like the disaster of which Blanchot writes, that "takes 
care of everything," that arrives without ever arriving, and whose violence 
consists precisely in effacing those very traces that any actual cataclysm 
would have left behind.

So what happened? Merely to ask such a question, say Deleuze and Guattari, 
"plays upon a fundamental forgetting... it places us in relation with something 
unknowable and imperceptible." Dino: Living High in the Dirty Business of 
Dreams, Nick Tosches' brilliant biography, doesn't restore Dean Martin to 
collective memory, or place him anew in American cultural life: rather it 
affirms the inaccessibility of his character, and recapitulates the irreversible 
erosion of his image. For nothing can bring Dino back: his relaxed, sleazy charm 
is out of sync with the moment, and insensible to nostalgia. The man who 
cynically crooned "Memories are Made of This," Tosches writes, "hated memory 
itself." Dino instinctively sought out that primordial oblivion that exceeds and 
ruins all remembering. "Underneath the feeling in his voice, underneath the 
weaving of those colors, there was always lontananza," the immemorial distance 
of a past that never has been present, and never can be made present. Elvis may 
well be the phallus; Dino just "pissed ice water," a less exalted symbolic use 
of the masculine organ. No matter what he was doing, Tosches says, Dino "never 
had much interest in this world"; he was "a menefreghista--one who simply did 
not give a fuck." Even in his glory days, the Fifties and early Sixties, Dino 
seems barely there, a gorgeous, unworldly apparition: the Zen master of the Rat 
Pack, as Lee Graham calls him. "No one knew him," Tosches writes. "The smart 
ones took that for granted. To [golfing buddy] Nicky Hilton, Dean was like a 
beautiful poem that he loved but could never understand."

What Andy Warhol was to the hip New York art and fashion world, Dean Martin was 
to rootless, suburban Middle America. Martin and Lewis started out playing to 
sophisticated nightclub audiences in New York and Chicago, but Dino the solo 
performer flourished in the pleasure palaces of Southern California and Las 
Vegas. There he unerringly sought out, and slyly, lazily pandered to, whatever 
was the most "anti-serious, anti-art... Dean would become the personification of 
tastelessness itself, projecting the image of one in whose scale of aesthetics a 
single good tit joke would outweigh all of Sophocles and Shakespeare" (Tosches). 
The story is indeed much like Warhol's: Martin, too, is a self-made man, born 
of immigrant parents, who anglicizes his name, and who achieves fame and fortune 
through an art that embraces and celebrates American culture at its most 
commercial and derivative. And Dino, just like Andy, refuses either to redeem 
this culture or to critique it. Martin and Warhol both rather embody the 
vulgarity and anonymity of mass culture--in the precise sense that a mirror 
indifferently embodies whatever has been placed before it. They take all the 
images offered them and reiterate them to infinity, uncritically, but at a 
curious second remove. Dean Martin the singer had nothing to express. He was 
perfectly willing and ready to record any song whatsoever, depending on what the 
market would bear. Just like Warhol, he let others choose his material for him. 
He never spent time rehearsing, and never troubled himself to listen to the 
finished product. Usually, in his stage act, he couldn't even be bothered to 
finish singing a song that he had started. But no matter what the material, no 
matter how ludicrous, corny, fake, or inconsequential, his smooth, easygoing 
voice always "wove it into a lie of gold" (Tosches). The effortless detachment 
of Dino's singing and acting could well be regarded as a sleazy American 
version of the spiritual discipline depicted in Eugen Herrigel's Zen in the Art 
of Archery. According to Zen, an art is performed to perfection only when it is 
unclouded by restless desire, freed of anxiety and of forethought. But this can 
only be achieved, Herrigel says, "by withdrawing from all attachments 
whatsoever, by becoming utterly egoless... by a readiness to yield without 
resistance." The pupil of Zen "must learn to disregard himself as resolutely as 
he disregards his opponent," until "the last trace of self-regard vanishes in 
sheer purposelessness." Well, the only difference between West and East is that 
Dino didn't need long hours of practice to attain such a state. He had no 
worldly entanglements to overcome. It just happened naturally. Sinatra, it 
seems, was an egomaniac and a control freak. But Dino "was not like Frank. He 
got no thrill from this shit, being onstage, hearing himself on the radio, 
seeing himself ten feet tall on a screen" (Tosches). Since he really didn't give 
a fuck, everything just came out right, all by itself.

Dino's songs, therefore, aren't about desire: at least not about the desire 
that in our culture is commonly figured as 'lack.' They are too relaxed, too 
casual, too blithely aware of their own insignificance. They have none of the 
urgency and tension that are the marks of sexual desperation. And they enact 
none of the melodramatics that typify ungratified yearning. The careless lilt 
with which Dino suggests "let's fly way up to the clouds" ("Volare") is a rebuke 
to Romantic myths of the ironic infinitude of desire. And similarly, the deadpan 
blandness with which Dean in the role of Matt Helm tosses off dumb one-liners in 
the face of imminent death nullifies all the old claims for tragic dignity, or 
for high seriousness in art. Forget the castration complex, forget the Hegelian 
struggle for recognition between master and slave. There is no hint of 
transcendence, or even of longing for it, anywhere in Dino's act. His songs are 
suspended rather in the idle hedonism of a blank, dimensionless present: a 
blurry, contextless realm devoid of antecedent or consequence. They express a 
sensibility that's perpetually jaded, perhaps, but without any trace of 
bitterness or disappointment. That's what makes these songs so sensuous and 
caressing, but also so oddly impersonal and indifferent. Booze and Percodan may 
have helped, but from the very beginning such was Dino's way. All Dean wanted 
out of life, Tosches writes, was "a bottle of Scotch, a blowjob, and a million 
bucks." Nothing else was worth striving for. In Dino's own terms, "that's 
amore": all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

This sublime disinterest is Dean Martin's glory--just as it is Warhol's--and 
the source of his powers of seduction. It accounts for our sense that, although 
Dino (just like Elvis) is a pure product of American culture, he's somehow (in 
contrast to Elvis) not altogether in it. We desire Elvis because his taut young 
all-American body seems to contain the living force of all desire. But if we 
desire Dino--or if our parents once did--it's precisely because he doesn't 
desire us in return, because he seems to be beyond desire and beyond 
responsiveness, because clearly he doesn't need us to validate his existence. 
He has none of Elvis's ambition, none of Elvis's craving for admiration and 
approval. Dino is the quintessential early-Sixties swinger, carelessly consuming 
booze and broads, because the spectacles of excess through which he stumbles 
leave him utterly detached and unaffected--even bored. Say that his leering 
'drunk act' is a glitzy, postmodern, Las Vegas update of Baudelairean dandyism. 
Or better, say that Dino is the original slacker--so perfectly so, indeed, that 
today's slacker generation has totally forgotten him. Elvis is retrospectively 
cool because he was once so hot; his restless soul is always being called back. 
But Dino's cool is at so low a temperature as to be immune to revivification. 
Tosches describes it as "a preternatural cool, as divorced from the passing 
modes of the day as he himself was from the world that in turn embraced and 
discarded them... Dean was an effulgence of the warp between the square and the 
fashionably cool; and as such, somehow always would elude the fate of the cool, 
which invariably was to become the square." Dino belongs, then, neither to 
dialectical History with its ever-evolving fashions, nor to the Eternity that 
idealist aestheticians imagine to transcend mere fashion. Rather, he moves in 
another dimension entirely, that of the Nietzschean untimely: a "now" too 
evanescent to be contained by any form of presence, an "unhistorical" 
stylization that affirms itself at once within and against the ideologies and 
fashions of the current moment. "This deliberate, difficult attitude consists 
in recapturing something eternal that is not beyond the present instant, nor 
behind it, but within it" (Foucault). Dino wondrously combines a suave, refined 
aesthetic detachment with a calculated wallowing in whatever is most crass. Such 
an oxymoronic hybridization of sensibilities is his way of expressing the 
"apotheosis of that which is perishable" (Bataille), or the play of "becoming, 
the innocence of becoming, forgetting as opposed to memory" (which is how 
Deleuze and Guattari define the "untimely").

This untimeliness is the key to the mystery of Dean Martin's sudden 
disappearance. If Elvis, with all his clones, is the triumphant product of 
processes of natural selection, then Dino is the anomalous, ephemeral, and 
sterile expression of an illicit counter-movement: of what Brian Massumi calls 
the forces of "unnatural selection." Memes, like genes, are potentially immortal 
replicators. But immortality ain't all it's cracked up to be, as Elvis has 
undoubtedly discovered by now. Timeliness and fame are their own punishments. 
Your very ubiquity guarantees that you will never again enjoy the thrill of new 
discoveries and fresh conquests. The hordes of screaming fans no longer bolster 
your ego; they are just another irritation from which you find it impossible to 
escape. You can beef up your security, and lock shut the gates to Graceland, but 
that just makes you feel like a very expensive prisoner. In any case, you've 
grown bloated and ugly, and every surface you look at turns into a mirror. 
There's nothing left to do, except sing the same songs to the same crowds in the 
same casinos, night after night, suspended in an eternal present. Heaven is a 
place where nothing ever happens. But what's the alternative? Surely nobody 
believes in the old Romantic myths of damnation any longer. Maybe Elvis OD'd 
because he thought it would offer him a way out, or at least refurbish his 
image. But there's nothing more banal than a drug suicide--even that of Sid 
Vicious has lost whatever transgressive allure it may once have had. If 
damnation and salvation are binary opposites, this only means that they are 
virtually indistinguishable. According to Nicole Hollander (Sylvia), damnation 
is indeed a fate worse than death, since Hell is a place "where a medley of 
Andrew Lloyd Webber tunes is repeated for all eternity." But the distance 
separating that ultimate horror from a steady diet of Late Elvis is, alas, far 
less than one would hope or imagine.

Evolution is a dead end, even and especially for the survivors. The greater 
your domination, the more exquisitely fine-tuned your adaptation, the more 
surely you will stagnate. Lamarckian theories (which assert the inheritance of 
acquired characteristics, and thus the possibility of continual 
self-improvement) are wrong: for even the most advantageous mutations only come 
about in spite of a species' genetic and cultural 'striving,' rather than 
because of it. In nature as in Hollywood, the big money is always being invested 
in sequels and remakes. Remember the words of the sage in the Borges story: 
"mirrors and copulation are abominable, because they increase the number of 
men." The problem is not that we live in a world of simulacra, as Baudrillard so 
naively thinks. No: the problem is that nothing is ever simulacral and 
inauthentic enough. The copies, the impersonators, remain all too loyal to 
their models. What would it take to imagine a simulacrum that, as Deleuze 
wishes, "denies at once both the original and the copy, the model and the 
reproduction"? Not a faithful rendition of Elvis, nor a critical parody of 
Elvis, but a performance that is more "Elvis" than Elvis himself ever was: only 
this can release the singer from the torment of his own endlessly repeated 
identity. But what could it mean to will--to select, in a Darwinian sense--your 
own divergence, your own alteration, even your own extinction? "Man is something 
that must be overcome," Zarathustra cries; "what have you done to overcome 
him?" And according to Severo Sarduy, the "hidden goal" of camouflage, in 
fashion as in combat, in humans as much as in insects, is less adaptation and 
survival than "a kind of disappearance, invisibility, effacement and erasure." 
Zarathustra thus praises those who "want to perish of the present," whose very 
"life is a going-under." But doesn't Dean Martin embody such a 
counter-teleology, both in his life and in his art? Isn't his sterile hedonism a 
rebuke to the horrors of infinity and eternity and all-too-faithful reflections? 
Martini in hand, let us then embark on Dino's way, and embrace his strategies 
of disappearance. After all, as Tosches suggests, that's what we Americans do 
the best: "Dean was the American spirit at its truest: fuck Vietnam, fuck 
politics, fuck morality, fuck culture, and fuck the counter-culture, fuck it 
all. We were here for but a breath; twice around the fountain and into the 
grave: fuck it."

What more is there to say? Elvis may well be the Savior; but Dino offers us no 
redemption, not even one "in quotation marks." Now, in his retirement, he is 
more untimely than ever, exiled as he is from the New Hollywood of cellular 
phones and twelve-step programs. Why, in 1988, the last time they reviewed him 
in Variety, they even complained about his lack of "social consciousness over 
the unfunny aspects of intoxication"! Can you believe it? Don't look to Dino for 
lessons in temperance, or foresight, or heroism, or any of the other virtues. 
You won't find him singing on a UFO, or giving advice in the toilet. But isn't 
that precisely his greatness? As his ex-wife Jeanne sums it up for Tosches: 
"Dean can do nothing better than anyone in the world. He can literally do 
nothing... He was always content in a void." Dino's very untimeliness makes him 
more postmodern than any of us. That great decentering, that crumbling of the 
foundations, so often approached with anguish and loathing--well, Dino has 
lived it for years, no problem, without a trace of anxiety. Tosches gives us a 
final picture of Dean Martin in old age, watching Westerns on TV, and sipping 
glass after glass of wine: "every swallow brought breath that bore neither 
memory nor meaning nor even deliverance from them--he no longer needed that 
deliverance--but rather the strange sweetness of something that may or may not 
have ever been." Memory has become indistinguishable from fiction; and 
redemption, or the lack thereof, just isn't an issue any more. Yes, the world 
has receded into its own flickering image, and nothing is true or false any 
longer, and it's very late, and the TV has been on for hours. But what's the 
matter with that? Images proliferate endlessly in the void, regardless of 
whether anyone is there looking at them or not. You don't watch programs on TV; 
you simply watch TV. Turn down the volume and go to bed, there'll be something 
else in the morning.