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TECHNOLOGIZED DESIRE:
SELFHOOD AND THE BODY IN POSTMODERN SCIENCE FICTION

By

David H. Wilson

A DISSERTATION
Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
Department of English

2005

ABSTRACT

TECHNOLOGIZED DESIRE:
SELFHOOD AND THE BODY IN POSTMODERN SCIENCE FICTION

By

David H. Wilson

Technocapitalist media have reformatted subjectivity, the body and the self as
ultraviolent, pathological phenomena in the postmodern world. Selfhood is a technology.
It is what Marshall McLuhan has called an “extension of man,” a creative projection
from the body of the subject that encompasses everything from language to electronic
machinery. Our technological extensions have become raw products of the commodity
spectacle. The cultural matrix that they collectively define in turn reproduces the factory
of subjectivities that bear them as mediatized desiring-machines. Such a volatile,
aggressive process instills in “terminal” subjects a desire to both embrace and transcend
the socioeconomic (dis)order. The human is addicted to as much as it is repulsed by its
media, which are not passive formations but active mediators of social relations. This
oppositional emotional condition is the fundament of terminal identity. Despite desire,
agency from consumer-capitalism is a fiction. The human is obligated by its own
pathological unconscious to always-already choose to be enslaved by technocapital.

T echnologized Desire analyzes the evolution of the technological self as it has
been represented by postmodern science fiction. It is informed by a range of postmodern
theory, particularly Scott Bukatman’s Terminal Identity, a study of how cybernetic
technologies have affected and revised the human condition in predominantly cyberpunk

narratives. My scope is resigned to proto- and post‘cyberpunk narratives in an effort to

deliberate the origins, the contemporary condition, and the alleged future of terminal
identity. Ultimately I try to point to a postcapitalist subjectivity that has become an
extension of technocapitalism rather than the other way around.

The texts I examine include television, comics, stories, philosophy, cultural
theory, novels and films. They function as cognitive maps of late capitalist space that
engage with the problem of terminal choice. Either they critique this problem, or they
reify it by being unaware of it, or both. Each text uniquely illustrates a map of the
technocapitalist mediascape and commoditocracy, representing the would-be agential
desires of the human to be paradoxically enslaved by and free of the machine. The
machinic nature of the human is (re)affirmed by dint of this representation. My primary
texts are, respectively, Cameron Crowe’s film Vanilla Sky (2001), select books on
simulation and the hyperreal by Jean Baudrillard, Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle
(1967), the cut-up novels of William S. Burroughs, Sam Raimi’s film Army of Dar/mess
(1993), Deleuze and Guattari’s books on capitalism and schizophrenia, Max Barry’s
novel Jennifer Government (2003), and the Wachowski brothers’ Matrix trilogy of films.
Whatever they purport to be, I regard all of these narratives as simultaneous science
fictions and critical analyses that ultraviolently theorize the dawning postcapitalist

condition by providing “panic” readings of the postmodern landscape.

For my parents, Harlan and Beth Wilson, whose
unshakable support and encouragement was the jet fuel of
this machinery. I love you guys.

Hence schizophrenia is not the identity of capitalism, but on
the contrary its difference, its divergence, its death.

—Deleuze & Guattauri, Anti-Oedipus

 

GOOD ASH
“Who are you? Are you me?”

BAD ASH
“I’m bad Ash. And yer good Ash. Yer little goody two-
shoes Ash!”

Bad Ash dances a funny jig around good Ash, smacking
him in the face. Suddenly a shotgun barrel is shoved into
bad Ash’s frame.

BLAMMITY-BLAM! !!

The blast blows bad Ash off of his feet into a double
backflip. He slams into a tree, slides to the ground.
Clutching the smoldering shotgun, good Ash stares down at
the corpse of his evil self.

GOOD ASH
“Good. Bad. I’m the guy with the gun.”

——Ash & Doppelganger, Army of Darlmess

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction .............................. l

1 Terminal Constructedness and the Technology of the Self in Cameron Crowe’s Vanilla

Sky

The Technological/Self .............................. l4
Livin’ the Dream .............................. 18
The Mediatized Body .............................. 25
Open Your Eyes .............................. 33
Terminal Choice .............................. 41

2 Gongs of Violence: The Pathological Play of William S. Burroughs’ Cut-Up Novels

Pathologizing the Subject .............................. 44
Cognitive Mapping .............................. 52
Soft Machines .............................. 55
The Reality Film .............................. 59
Gongs of Violence .............................. 68

3 How a Discount Store Cashier Defeats an Army of the Evil Dead: Schizoanalysis and
Sam Raimi’s Army of Darkness

Capitalism and Schizophrenia .............................. 75
Postmodern Slavery .............................. 78
The Doppelganger .............................. 86
The Metaphor of the Zombie .............................. 92
Back to the Matrix .............................. 100

4 “Capitalizrn” Unbound: Max Barry’s Jennifer Government

The Ideology of Hyperconsumption ............................. 107
(Later) Late Capitalist Identity ............................. 112
The Technology of the Tattoo ............................. 120
The Space Merchants ............................. 127
Commodity Warfare ............................. 134

vi

5 Terminal Choice in the Wachowski Brothers’ Matrix Trilogy

Comic Book Worlds

Towards a Neurorealisrn

The Freud-Thing

The Nature of/is Technology
Capitalism and Science Fiction

Coda

Bibliography

vii

142
146
156
170
181

186

194

INTRODUCTION

On the subject of Frederic Jameson’s postmodern theory, Sean Homer writes:
The central problem with the cultural logic thesis is that it remains at too
high a level of abstraction; on the one hand, Jameson presents a
persuasive account of an individual subject’s experience of the
disorienting world of global capitalism, and, on the other, a very
generalized theory of the structural transformations of the system itself.
What this work lacked, and the monumental Postmodernism, or, The
Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism failed to deliver, was any systematic
account of the mediations between the individual subject and the world
system. (186)
This lack of mediation is hardly a flaw. The aim of Jameson’s project is to cognitively
map the “strange new landscape” of late capitalist reality in broad, exteriorized terms
(xx). Building on his 1984 essay, “The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” he describes
the condition of postrnodernity in terms of its various media and economies. The focus
of his project is not the individual subject. It is the diverse productions of subjected
communities of individuals. Homer argues that J ameson’s thesis is too ambivalent. But
this is precisely his point: “Postmodernism is not something we can settle once and for
all and then use with a clear conscience. The concept, if there is one, has to come at the
end, and not at the beginning, of our discussions of it” (xxvii). Scott Bukatman uses this
notion as a starting block for Terminal Identity, a study of subjectivity in postmodern

Science fiction. He contends that the flourish of electric technologies in the 1980s have

led to “a deep cultural ambivalence . . . across a wide range of phenomena,” citing
Jameson as a harbinger of this theory. Like Jameson, Bukatrnan expresses an anxiety
about the condition of perception, ideology, language, being and power in the
postmodern world. His theory is much more specialized, however, concerning itself
explicitly with science fiction, especially that produced during the cyberpunk era. The
general thesis of Terminal Identity is that “it has become increasingly difficult to
separate the human from the technological” and that “it has fallen to science fiction to
repeatedly narrate a new subject that can somehow directly interface with—and
master—the cybernetic technologies of the Information Age” (2). Bukatrnan employs
science fiction as a tool to map out the coordinates of the postmodern subject as
produced by virtual and cybernetic forces. It is from this angle of incidence that the
following project makes its departure.

While Bukatman’s book is localized to a particular kind of science fiction, its
scale is rather large, drawing on a range of contemporary cultural theories of the
postmodern in order to interpret a variety of media that include literature, film, video,
television, comics, and computer games. The book’s five chapters are arranged
thematically and read into narratives that address image-culture, (virtual) spatial
relations, body and mind invasion, and the figuration of the cyborg. Bukatman’s
culminating argument is that cyberpunk texts contain the most effective representations
of terminal identity, which produces an anxious, defensive subject who is compelled to
mediate “a complex trajectory between the forces of instrumental reason and the
abandon of a sacrificial excess. The texts promise and even produce a transcendence

Which is also always a surrender” (329). Arthur Kroker and David Cook would call this

sentiment a panic reading of the postmodern condition, a “hypertheory . . . for the end of
the world” that aspires to map out the entropic social economy of electronically
technologized space (ii). Such a reading can be extended to the fictions that are
scrutinized in Terminal Identity, most of which can function as critical hypertheories. I
operate under this assumption in Technologized Desire. I approach science fiction texts
as sources that can be read as technocultural phenomenon as well as sources that
themselves read into the nature of technoculture. My SCOpe, however, is more particular
than Bukatman’s. It is resigned to proto- and post-cyberpunk texts in an effort to
deliberate the origins, the contemporary condition, and the supposed future of terminal
identity. Additionally, whereas Bukatrnan discusses the terminal subject broadly,
mapping out its defining coordinates, my interest is more theoretical. I am specifically
concerned with how the terminal subject is produced as both self and other by the forces
of technocapitalism and how human nature has been refigured by the technology of the
commodity form. With this in mind, I try to achieve a mediation between the individual
subject and the world system that is abstracted in J ameson’s Postmodernism.

The terms self and selfhood have been used in numerous contexts. Some use
them interchangeably with subject and subjectivity as markers for the individual as
affected and produced by sociocultural machinery. Others differentiate the two. In his
E'crits and seminars, for example, Jacques Lacan has portrayed the self as a node in a
symbolic network of other nodes constituted by images and a desire for the Other (which
is ironically the self), while in a discussion of Baudelaire’s poetry in Blindness and
Insight, Paul de Man portrays it as an authorial voice and courier of meaning (172). For

Foucault the self is a technology that allows “individuals to effect by their own means,

or with the help of others, a certain number of operations on their own bodies and souls,
thoughts, conduct, and way of being” in order to achieve a higher emotional and
ontological state (225). The notion of selflrood as a technological organism is
particularly relevant considering the explosion of high media technologies in the
postmodern era that have revised the nature of low technologies like language, power
and production. In the last fifty years, media such as television, video, cyberspace and
virtuality have opened up new existential matrices. Kroker and Cook consider this
formation in The Postmodern Scene, defining the self as a hollow shell, raped of its
insides by media technologies:
The self is now like what the quantum physicists call a ‘world strip,’
across which run indifferent rivulets of experience. Neither fully
mediated nor entirely localized, the self is an empty sign: colonized from
within by technologies for the body immune; seduced from without by
all of the fashion tattoos; and energized by a novel psychological
condition—the schizoid state of postmodern selves who are
(simultaneously) predators and parasites. (vii)
Although it has some validity, this apocalyptic, essentially Baudrillardian definition of
the self as a schizophrenic template onto which culture is imprinted is a postmodern
cliche. Kroker and Cook essay that the self is not a technology but rather something that
is produced (to be schizophrenic) by technology. They also imply that the self originates
outside of the theoretical body it exists on. Postmodern logic of this kind implicitly
disconnects the self from the subject. These chapters attempt to reconnect the two,

Viewing the self as a creative, technological extension of the subject. My position

derives [Tom the theory of electronic media developed by Marshall McLuhan in
Understanding Media. Published nearly forty years ago, the book is in many ways more
applicable now than ever to contemporary identity politics. McLuhan opens with the
following remarks:
After three thousand years of explosion, by means of fiagmentary and
mechanical technologies, the Western world is imploding. During the
mechanical ages we had extended our bodies in space. Today, after
more than a century of electric technology, we have extended our central
nervous system itself in a global embrace, abolishing both space and
time as far as our planet is concerned. Rapidly, we approach the final
phase of the extensions of man—the technological simulation of
consciousness, when the creative process of knowing will be collectively
and corporately extended to the whole of human society, much as we
have already extended our senses and our nerves by the various media.
(19)
Foreshadowing a final phase of social implosion that has already materialized to some
degree (e.g. the Internet), McLuhan technologizes the human by arguing that the
technological is an extemalization of the human’s internal machinery. This is not a post-
industrial formation. The individual and collective human’s technological extensions
have always been its definitive characteristics, beginning with the technologies of
language and hieroglyphics, culminating in capitalist media technologies. These
extensions constitute postmodern selflrood. Born from the machinic body of the subject,

selflrood originates in the cultural atmosphere produced by the very technology that

constitutes it. The technology of culture produces subjectivity and influences how the
self extends from the body. Hence the self is always-already embroiled in a vicious
circle of production that has reached a dangerous level in the realm of advanced
capitalism. Simply put, the self has become ultraviolent.

McLuhan suggests that our electric technological extensions are progressively
more determined by corporate forces and that soon they will become sheer consumer-
capitalist enfants terrible. Like Baudrillard (although not to such a dire and prophetic
extreme), he forecasts an age of implosion when ontological, metaphysical, ideological
and linguistic boundaries are terminally collapsed by the media. Few high technologies
today are not produced for some sort of capitalist gain (or rather, excess), a practice that
reproduces low technologies like language according to a consumer ethic. In addition to
being the ultimate medium for narrating the cybernetic subject, as Bukatrnan says, the
science fiction genre is an efficient medium for critiquing the ways in which the
consumer subject is narrated by electric technology, which we have become dependent
on. This is mainly how I extend (and diverge from) Bukatman’s work: by shifting focus
exclusively to the commodification of the subject and the self as it figures in science
fiction. As our technetronic dependency intensifies, the genre becomes more important
not only in terms of extrapolating potential futures but of representing and assessing the
socioeconomic structure of contemporary life. A principal aim of my discussion is to
convey an awareness of how bodies and identities are distinguished by a mediatized
anomie. The discussion is thus situated within the developing field of study that Patrick

O’Donnell has called “cultural pathology” (Latent vii).

Pathology (mainly in the form of paranoia, psychosis and schizophrenia) runs
rampant in postmodern science fiction, which, jacked into the matrix of irnplosive,
technocapitalist society, abandons the boyish science fiction of the Golden Age that was
characterized by a sense of wonder and discovery. Beginning most meaningfully in the
early 1960s with the New Wave, a term borrowed from the experimental cinema of
French filmmakers Jean-Luc Goddard and Francois Truffaut,l science fiction writers like
Harlan Ellison, J .G. Ballard, Philip K. Dick and others practiced a darker, more
psychological method, often representing the subject as a construction of the media
landscape.2 This aesthetic was furthered in the 19808 by cyberpunk narratives, which
Jameson has repeatedly been quoted as saying are “the supreme literary expression[s] if
not of postmodernism, then of late capitalism itself” (419). Writers associated with this
subgenre include Rudy Rucker, Pat Cadigan, Lewis Shiner, and most importantly
William Gibson and Bruce Sterling, whose respective novel, Neuromancer (1984), and
anthology of short fiction, Mirrorshades (1986), are its foremost touchstones. Inspired
by the artistic and cultural sensibility of the beat generation, cyberpunks continued to
explore the psychological condition of the postmodern subject, underscoring its
schizophrenic body and fixating on its production by hard technology and the theater of
hyperreality. Larry McCafl‘ery writes in Storming the Reality Studio:

cyberpunk authors constructed works that moved seamlessly through the
realms of hard science and pop culture, realms that included chaos theory

and Madonna, dada and punk rock, MTV and film noire, Arthur

 

I
The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, p. 865.

2
Most identified with and representative of the New Wave aesthetic is Harlan Ellison’s Dangerous
Visions (1967), an anthology of thirty-three science fiction stories.

Rimbaud and Lou Reed, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Oliver North,
instant reruns and AI. Decked out in mirrorshades and leather jackets,
the cyberpunks projected an image of confrontational “reality hacker”
artists who were armed, dangerous, and jacked into (but not under the
thumb of) the Now and the New. (12-13)
Employing physical, psychic, linguistic and narrative violence, cyberpunk still offers the
sharpest representations of cultural pathology and the most salient critiques of
technocapitalist subjectivity and selfhood. The 19903 saw the assimilation of the
cyberpunk subgenre into mainstream science fiction, which was itself bleeding into
mainstream pop literature (e. g. the novels of Michael Crichton), as many formerly
distinctive cyberpunk tropes and contrivances began to materialize in the real world (e. g.
the computer revolution, cyberspace, the cult of surgically altered identity). Neal
Stephenson, Jeff Noon, Steve Aylett and other neocyberpunks have carried on the
tradition to some degree, but the well from which they draw has lost the feeling of “the
Now and the New”; as the neocyberpunk Wachowski brothers show in their Matrix
trilogy of films, whose innovation stems almost entirely from carnerawork and CGI,
cyberpunk cannot exist in the contemporary postmodern universe except as a chestnut.
Advanced electric technology is no longer the novelty or even the curio it used to be. In
the last decade more than ever, it has not only become a standard of daily life, but an
outright addiction that is nurtured with a profound air of jouissance. The sexualized
obsession with the “extensions of man”——that is, with the technological/self—is at the
center of my concept of how the postmodern subject is pathologized by our present day

commoditocracy.

A trend in postmodern science fiction has been to posit agency from the terminal
constructedness of the technocapitalist body. As 1 demonstrate in chapters two and
three, one way this has been executed is by dint of madness. In soft science fiction films
like Brazil (1985) and Army of Darkness (1993) and the protocyberpunk cut-up novels
of William S. Burroughs, for instance, psychosis is deployed as a cure for the
postmodern condition. Pathology is ironically used to combat pathology. The subject
does not achieve a transcendence but rather a metaphysical and perceptual shift;
meanwhile its body remains plugged in to the machine. More prevalent than this kind of
agency is free will. A symptom of some recent postmodern science fiction is the desire
to escape the production powers of capitalist technologies by dint of human choice.
These texts suggest the human has the organic capacity to choose a selfhood that is
distinct from the technological. They fail to acknowledge that the self is the
technological, that subjectivity is retroactively refashioned by the technological, and
ultimately that choice is an illusion essential for maintaining systemic order. Fantasy
dictates the structure of reality—this is the fundament of my concept of terminal choice,
which avows that the only choice available to the postmodern subject, despite all desire
and action, is rooted in a dependency on (and devotion to) consumerccapitalism and the
ultraviolent schizophrenic production of the commodity-self. Terminal choice means
that free will is a fiction.

I treat the texts examined in this work as cognitive maps of late capitalist space
that engage with the problem of terminal choice. Either they critique this problem, or
they reify it by being subject to it (that is, by not being aware of it), or both. Whatever

they do, each uniquely illustrates a map of the technocapitalist mediascape, representing

the agential desires of the human to be free of the machine and, by way of this
representation, (re)affirming the machinic nature of the human. The first chapter is a
reading of Cameron Crowe’s film Vanilla Sky (2001). I begin with this text because it
dynamically portrays the state of the contemporary, postrnillennial mediatized body.
The protagonist is a New York City publishing executive who, after a car accident
disfigures him, is reinvented in a computer program he purchases online. Unaware that
his real body is stored in cryogenic freeze and that his diegetic reality is a fantasy, he
vows to become a more assiduous capitalist and partner to his girlfriend. The program,
however, experiences a glitch. Assisted by technical support, he realizes that he is living
a dream and is given the opportunity to choose between returning to the real world or to
another, glitch-free dream. The trouble with the film is its moral imperative. Crowe
equates goodness with a return to the real world and a functional capitalist existence;
badness, in turn, is equated with virtual, pseudocapitalist activity. This is a
representative instance of terminal choice that sets the tone for the rest of my discussion.
In the second chapter I revert back forty years to the cut-up trilogy of William S.
Burroughs: The Sofi Machine (1961), The Ticket That Exploded (1962) and Nova
Express (1964). These wild satires of American image-culture are derivative examples
of the pathological postmodern condition, the reconstruction of the body by media
technologies, and the spectacle of consumerism. The dominant media technology
Burroughs uses to convey his message is film. He constructs a cognitive map that
delineates how 19508 and 603 America used cinematic imagery to mediate social
relations between people. The elements of film are infused in his narratives, creating an

irreality fit for the schizophrenic character of postmodern subjectivity. Burroughs

10

essentially engages in a pathological form of play that he uses to revolt against terminal
constructedness. The effect is not agential. Nor is it intended to be. Establishing itself
as a certifiable panic hypertheory, the cut-ups demonstrate that there is no escape from
the machine and no choice but to live as a technopathological extension of the machine.
This idea spills over in my next chapter, a schizoanalysis of the more recent Army of
Darkness in which a department store clerk named Ash attempts to escape his meager,
monotonous life. I show how Ash is a terminal subject whose journey into the medieval
past can be read as a schizophrenic delusion of grandeur exposing his machinic
unconscious. In his wish-fulfillment fantasy, Ash aspires to transcend his coded,
capitalist self; but he only succeeds in rein his status as a common postmodern
subject. To bring Ash’s experience to light, I use the anti-Oedipal theory of Deleuze and
Guattari, two of postrnodernity’s most dynamic capitalist philosophers and stylists.
Conversely, I use his experience to read against Deleuze and Guattari, arguing that their
seemingly revolutionary theory is constrained by the parameters of the socioeconomic
matrix they seek to subvert.

From this point I return to the twenty first century and concentrate on science
fiction texts that speak more directly to the present state of postrnodernity by
representing potential firtures that terminally historicize the past. Chapter four is a
reading of Max Barry’s novel Jennifer Government (2003). Unlike Army of Darkness,
Burroughs’ cut-ups and Vanilla Sky, all of which operate in diverse realms of fantasy,
this novel operates in a realistic diegesis. It depicts a near-future society where the
consumer-capitalist system has evolved into a fascist regime. Governed by gigantic

multicorporations that have created a global free market, the subjects of this society are

11

identified by the dynamism with which they produce and consume commodities. Barry
has conceived of what Larry McCaffery calls “the ideology of hyperconsumption,”
which he associates with “the next phase of capitalist expansion” (“Still Life” xviii). In
this way, Jennifer Government envisions a postcapitalist future in the sense that
postmodernism is an extension of some aspects of modernism and an innovative
breaking away from other aspects of it. My interest in this chapter is on the varying
levels of violence that the ideology of hyperconsumption invokes. Violence is the
lifeblood of postmodern cultural pathology, and I pursue it further in my fifth and final
chapter, a study of the postapocalyptic Matrix trilogy, namely the latter two films,
Reloaded (2003) and Revolutions (2003). Falling into the subgenre of “neurorealism,”
the trilogy is a pastiche of tropes and cliches that constitutes the historical body of the
science fiction genre. It is a kind of Deleuzoguattarian rhizome that can be entered and
exited fi'om multiple doorways, and like much twentieth century science fiction (among
them Deleuze and Guattari’s books on capitalism and schizophrenia), it presents a
humanistic line of flight from technocapitalist oppression. The trilogy is a
deterritorializing map critiquing the agential desires of the science fiction genre, which
has recurrently insinuated that the human is distinct fiom the technological and that a
“natural,” non-capitalist selflrood is realizable. The Wachowski’s films represent the
genre’s collective anxiety that, in the postmodern world, nature has become a machine.
Like Bukatman’s Terminal Identity, T echnologized Desire encompasses a range
of narratives, including stories, novels, comic books, television shows, philosophy,
cultural theory, and especially films. As we drown in the torrent of media that floods

our daily experience, and as the technology of writing continues to be usurped by the

12

technology of images, cinema is becoming the dominant artistic and cultural medium.
In many ways it is already the dominant postmodern medium, and it is certainly one of
the largest global late capitalist enterprises. With its focus on the visualization of
extrapolated and imaginary devices, entities and realities, science fiction is a perfect site
for filmmakers to test the limits of media technology, particularly in terms of special
effects, which have evolved at an accelerated rate in the computer age. The Matrix
trilogy itself revolutionized filmmaking with its virtual “bullet-time” CGI; since the first
film was released in 1999, these effects have appeared in a number of other films inside
the genre and have spilled outside of it as well. This is indicative of a greater
development: the science fictionalization of reality.

What used to be an alternative genre of scientific speculation and fantasy is
rapidly becoming mainstream as its fictional innovations continue to be actualized and
normalized (and thus denovated) in the real world. These denovations3 are almost
invariably produced by capitalist technologies for some kind of socioeconomic end. It is
an ever more pathological and violent form of production that has spread itself across
the social mediascape and emerged as terminal identity’s most visible characteristic.

T echnologized Desire explores the variables of this characteristic in an effort to make a
sketch of what is ultimately a potential postcapitalist identity. The sketch is admittedly
rough as we are still enmeshed in the beginnings of such a development. But it points to

a not-too-distant future that lay beneath our feet, waiting to be yanked out.

 

3 According to Peter J. Hugill, denovations are what happen to innovations when they cease to be creative
phenomenon and are destroyed, liquidated, or, in this case, normalized.

13

CHAPTER 1
Terminal Constructedness and the Technology of the Self in Cameron Crowe’s

Vanilla Sky

The Technological/Self
Arthur Kroker and David Cook have said that the postmodern body is “a power grid,
tattooed with all the signs of cultural excess on its surface, encoded fi'om within by the
language of desire” (Postmodern 26). A product of late capitalism, this language of
desire’s foremost task is to uphold and perpetuate a community of consumers whose
cyborg bodies bear the brightly colored marks of the media. These marks warn us not to
be less than avid (if not rabid) consumers lest we fall short of being adequate, functional
social subjects. The postmodern body, in other words, is a desiring-machine whose
contours are defined by the technetronic mediascape of late capitalism, which equates
adequacy with excess. This dynamic has been most effectively represented and mapped
out by the science fiction genre, as Scott Bukatman indicates in Terminal Identity: “It
has fallen to science fiction to repeatedly narrate a new subject that can somehow
directly interface with—and master—the cybernetic technologies of the Information
Age, an era in which, as Jean Baudrillard observed, the subject has become a ‘terminal
of multiple netwo ”’ (2). By means of technology, the real world has seen the
actualization of what science fiction narratives of old only imagined. The result is the
terminal or blip subject, a conflation of the human and the technological distinguished

by a new, oppositional subjectivity that is as transcendental as it is submissive.

l4

Much postmodern science fiction can be read as social and political theory,
particularly that which represents the oppositional nature of the terminal subject. Istvan
Csiscery-Ronay, Jr. says science fiction “is not a genre of literary entertainment only,
but a mode of awareness, a complex hesitation about the relationship between imaginary
conceptions and historical reality unfolding into the future” (388). Such an unfolding
into the future almost always involves some form of innovative or extrapolated
technology that manifests itself as a boon, a bane, or both. Cyberpunk narratives, for
instance, which Frederic Jameson calls “the supreme literary expression if not of
postmodernism, then of late capitalism itself” (419n), feature technophilic universes in
which the theme of body invasion is rampant. Widely regarded as the definitive
cyberpunk novel, William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984) is set in an imploded,
urbanized world of infoterrorism where the human is technologized in various ways,
namely by being wired to the computer; subjects are able to interface with a cyberspacial
realm called the matrix‘ by jacking out of their bodies and roaming through a virtual
reality mainframe as an incarnate mind’s eye. This experience evokes feelings of
ecstasy as well as dread. The novel’s protagonist, Case (as in basket case, among other
thingss), uses the act of disembodiment, of freeing his mind from his body, as a drug. In
this capacity technology frmctions as agency. At the same time, Case develops an

aversion to the flesh. He becomes addicted to the matrix and its transcendental powers,

 

‘ Gibson’s matrix has been wildly influential in the science fiction genre. Most notable is the recent
neocyberptmk trilogy of the Wachowski Brothers, whose matrix is flagrantly neuromantic.

5 For example, Tony Myers writes, “it is perhaps not fortuitous that the mise en scene of much of
Neuromancer is cyberspace or, more pertinently, the matrix, a word that finds its etymology in ‘womb’—-—
the paradigmatic topos of container and contained. In this respect, of course, the name of Case himself is
a not insignificant reference to such a spatial formation” (893). The name is also a reference to the
man/machine binary, “case” being the sabotaged body that imprisons his mind and denies it the agency of
cyberspace, and an insignia of the kind of narrative Gibson writes: a detective novel.

15

and his own body becomes a source of fear and loathing. Technology functions as an
affliction, too. This tension indicates a raw anxiety about how the body and ultimately
the self are increasingly spoken by the technological. Critical theory stems from some
form of anxiety about a subject, event or condition. It is the anxiety about the
mechanization of the self that makes Neuromancer and other postmodern science fiction
theoretically savvy.

Some science fiction, however, fails to realize that the self has always been
mechanized, that the human is always-already spoken by the technological. In the words
of Marshall McLuhan, technology is an “extension of man,”6 and today’s “high”
technology is merely the most recent, most expansive manifestation of that extension.
Thousands of years ago, primitive cultures extended (and in so doing defined)
themselves by means of images, tools and ultimately language, just as we do today. The
difference is that our extensions are simply more advanced. Instead of hieroglyphics
painted on cave walls, we have films playing on superscreens. Instead of arrowheads
carved out of bone and stone, we have nuclear warheads constructed out of metal.7 And
unlike the languages of our distant predecessors, ours is a media fabrication schized by
the cult of infotainment. Identity is an effect of the process of projecting ourselves
outside of ourselves, individually and collectively. The self and technology are not
independent of one another, they are co-dependent; and if technology were to somehow

be transcended or extracted from the self, the self would cease to exist. In this way, the

 

6 “With the arrival of electric technology, man extended, or set outside himself, a live model of the central
nervous system” (53). This sentiment is the dominant theme in McLuhan’s Media Unlimited

7 Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) enunciates this evolutionary technological leap in a
famous shot where a bone that a primitive human uses as a weapon to assert his tribe’s dominance is
supplanted for a nuclear warhead orbiting Earth in the future.

16

boundary that separates nature and culture collapses as technology (generally considered
a cultural formation) is a natural part of the (post)human condition. Any expression of a
nostalgia for nature is problematic. A return to nature would simply entail a return to a
lesser state of technological existence/extension. This sort of nostalgia is visible
throughout the history of the science fiction genre, mainly in science fiction produced
during the postmodern era, which has witnessed a terminal extension of the
technological.

A recent science fiction film that expresses an anxiety about contemporary
technologies, underscores the condition of the postmodern body, and vies for a return to
nature is Cameron Crowe’s Vanilla Sky (2001). The film’s protagonist, David Aames,
embodies Bukatman’s terminal subject; he is “an unmistakably doubled articulation in
which we find both the end of the subject and a new subjectivity constructed at the
computer station or television screen” (9). As I have indicated, Bukatman’s primary
thesis in Terminal Identity is that postmodern science fiction narratives aspire to create a
new subject-position capable of negotiating today’s electronic arena of infotainment.
Aames adopts this new subj ect-position by reinventing his body in a virtual reality
program where he exists as an imagistic representation of his original, organic self. In
the end, however, he renounces this diegesis and his image-self because he becomes
aware of it. The knowledge that he is a virtual construct induces a nostalgia in him for
the real, for a “natural” life, which he subsequently repossesses.

But the place (and the self) Aames returns to is also governed by technology—
the technology of the media that constitutes the universe of advanced capitalism. The

underlying moral imperative of Crowe’s film is that the self can and should exist

17

independently of its technological extensions. But one technology is simply supplanted
for another. Aames doesn’t return to nature. He does not return anywhere. Subject to
the technology of the self (because the technology is the self), he merely shifts back and
forth across different spatial planes that exist on the same hyperreal landscape. His
perception is thus dictated by a series of delusions. The greatest delusion of all is that he
has the power of choice—he thinks he can choose what kind of self he wants to be. But
in postrnodernity there is only one self, the capitalist self. Ontological choice is a
fiction. In order to function in a productive manner, however, the capitalist system must
uphold the delusion that ontological choice is a tangibility. Vanilla Sky unknowingly
reifies this pathology, illustrating how the purpose of late capitalism is to convey the

idea that the self is a matter of personal conviction rather than preordained conscription.

Livin’ the Dream
The dream is an important theme in Vanilla Sky and operates on several levels. The film
opens and closes with actual dreams experienced by Aames. The first is a real dream
and will be the focus of this section as it reveals much about his character. The latter is
a virtual dream he purchases after a near fatal car accident. As I will explain, both
dreams are produced by the technological. There are also fiequent visual and verbal
references made to the process of dreaming, references that are meant to rouse the
attentions of both viewers as well as Aames to the dreamlike states he inhabits.
Additionally, Aames, as a prosperous capitalist, is living the American dream,
figuratively and irnagistically: his personality and self-image are distinguished by an

explicit “rugged individualism,” and he owns a corporation, an expensive sports car and

18

a bleached white srrrile.8 The casting of Tom Cruise in this role has a metafictional
impact here. A movie star and multimillionaire, Cruise himself is living the American
Dream, and his image deepens the film’s dream motif. In the eyes of the masses, Cruise
(like any movie star) is little more than the sum of the personalities he adopts in his
films. He is not a real person so much as he is a fiction. It is his fictional self that
energizes Aames’ character, whose identity is established through the dream and its
vicissitudes, and who emerges as a fiction himself.

The film’s opening dream sequence does two main things: establishes Aames as
a terminal subject, and foreshadows the Lucid Dream that will eventually serve as his
surrogate reality. He wakes up one morning to a prerecorded message on his voice-
activated clock-radio. The message repeats, “Open your eyes,” in a seductive,
mysterious female voice until Aames hits the snooze button. He rolls out of bed,
immediately picks up a remote control and turns off the big screen television situated at
the foot of his king-sized bed. Yawning, he shuffles into the bathroom and diligently
inspects his face and hair in a rrrirror. He finds a grey hair, seizes and plucks it with a
tweezers, and frowns at it. Cut to the street. We watch Aames pull out of a parking
garage in a rare, chic-looking sports car. It is an early Spring morning in New York
City, 9:05 am. according to Aames’ watch, and he is on his way to work. Strangely, the

streets are empty. Cars are parked next to curbs, streetlights are working and business

 

8 White teeth are a commonplace symbol of American image-consciousness, especially in European
minds Jean Baudrillard associates the American fetish for white teeth with a loss of national and
individual selflrood. In America, he sardonically writes, “Give your emptiness and indifference to others,
light up your face with the zero degree of joy and pleasure, smile, smile, smile . . . Americans may have
no identity, but they do have wonderful teeth” (34). For Baudrillard, white teeth (and the meaninglessness
they conceal) are a symptom of the passive ecstasy that, through the ongoing process of global
Americanization, has come to dominate the temperament of Western civilization. Aames is a victim of
this condition.

19

signs are lit up. But Aames is the only one there; he has the city all to himself. Anxiety
slowly overwhehns him. He glances around fiantically, stops his car in the middle of
Times Square, gets out. Still nobody in sight. Full of dread, he begins to run, searching
for humanity. But all he sees are the neon images and signs that surround him and seem
to be collapsing on him. The background music quickens. Giant TV screens are
everywhere, running sitcoms, talk shows, underwear advertisements. The hologram of a
monstrous supermodel dances on the side of a skyscraper. Enormous LED displays
churn out the green and red numbers that are the nervous system of the stock exchange,
and a hypnotic network of neon signs stretches up to the sky and out to the horizon.
Realizing there is no escape, Aames stops running. He lifts up his hands, tilts back his
head and emits an agonized scream. During the scream the camera performs a low angle
panoramic shot that revolves 360 degrees around Aames’ waist, and we behold an
overwhelming miasma of images staring down at him from every direction.

And then Aames wakes up. It was just a dream. What he doesn’t realize is that
it is a portentous illustration of his fears and desires. The offshoot of an acutely
mediatized upbringing, Aames is inscribed by the technology of pop culture,9 which has
invoked feelings of alienation and dread in him. There are no other people in his dream.
There is only his body and the media images that pursue and encircle it like a hungry
flock of vultures. The dream could be interpreted as an extemalization of Aames’
unconscious in which his repressed emotions are laid bare and revealed to him (and,
through the filter of his POV, to us viewers). If, as Lacan maintains, the unconscious is

structured like a language, then Aames’ unconscious speaks the language of consumer

 

9 Crowe acknowledges this in an introduction to his screenplay: “Aames life . . . is defined, like so many
of us, by pop culture” (vii-viii).

20

images. Or rather, the language of consumer images speaks him. And by doing so it
devitalizes him, wrangling and regulating the flow of his desires. Aames is a
representation of the postmodern subject who is desensitized by contemporary media
technologies that exist chiefly to facilitate and empower the capitalist system, one of our
collective body’s most significant extensions, an extension that we are absolutely
dependent upon and defected by. Mark Amerika recognizes this situation in The Kafka
Chronicles (1993), a cut-up novel written in the vein of William S. Burroughs that
critiques and satirizes corporate “Amerika.” In the following passage, for example, the
narrator says:
The disease I found myself becoming, an Amerikan, true and bold, was
running out of control, rampant on the scene of our mutual disgust, and I
loved it, it was feeding ground for everybody who knew that to live was
nothing more than losing their creative selves to the artificial means of
production whose disposal was YOU, you who wake up in the morning
and bring yourself to the cumulative psyche of Amerika, the garbage
disposal, the streets of your cities deterritorialized by capital terrorism,
the contamination filtering through your body so that the language you
spew forth becomes a random assortment of criminal sales tactics
designed to reregulate the person you come into contact with’s sense of
self . . . as if such a thing as a self could still exist. (162)
Mark Amerika acknowledges the negative effects of consumer society on the self,
emphasizing how mechanical production infiinges on creativity and how “capital

terrorism” corrupts the human condition. He also identifies the self as a schizophrenic

21

production of the language of consumerism, which causes the subject to “spew forth a
random assortment of criminal sales tactics.” But he seems to be talking about an
organic self, one that precedes language and culture, rather than a self that is assembled
by these things; in saying “as if such a thing as a self could still exist,” he is suggesting
that at some point it used to exist. If we regard selfhood by dint of the magnitude of our
technological extensions, however, his narrator’s mediatized subject-position doesn’t
render him a nonentity. On the contrary, it reifies and punctuates his selflrood. It is his
subject-position that is negated. The same might be said for David Aames——as his initial
dream indicates, he is a mediatized body, too.

Aames’ dream underscores his status as a production and subject of the
postmodern technoscape. He immediately engages with the technoscape when he wakes
up into the dream by means of the clock-radio and its simulated, repeated dictum; the
first piece of information he receives is a command given to him by a machine. He
proceeds to engage with a number of other commonplace machines (the television set,10
the car, the watch, streetlights, and finally Time Square’s spectacle of images), all of
which command him. Then he awakens and performs the same ritual he did in his
dream up to the point where he drives off to work. This time the city is populated with
people, not just machinery and images, and Aames breathes a sigh of relief as he merges
with traffic and heads to work, forgetting the dream.

Not only does the dream allude to what Aames is, it alludes to what he will

become. Early in the film at his birthday party, he is greeted by his friend Brian Shelby.

 

'0 This moment is deepened in that playing on the television set is a shot from the film Sabrina (1954),
starring Audrey Hepburn. In Vanilla Sky ’s DVD audio commentary, Cameron Crowe says, “Beginning
with Audrey Hepburn in Sabrina . . . set such a beautiful tone for me. It was kind of a dream romance that
David Aames . . . was having.”

22

Brian asks him how he’s doing. Aames replies, “Livin’ the dream, baby, livin’ the
dream,” playfully referring to his carefree lifestyle of leisure and extravagance. This
utterance is both an allusion to the aforementioned dream and to his upcoming Lucid
Dream, a computer program in which his life becomes a “realistic work of art, painted
by [him], minute-to-minute” (Crowe 130). Aames’ Sportive response to his friend
eventually becomes a (virtual) reality. The Lucid Dream is a simulacrum constructed
out of the pop cultural images and ethics that defined Aames’ (hyper)real life; it is a
copy of a world fabricated out of mediatized copies of the real. This simulacra is meant
to function as a utopia for him, but it soon devolves into a dystopia where he is jailed
and put on trial for the murder of his girlfriend. The problem is, once he is inserted into
the Lucid Dream, his memory is washed clean; he doesn’t know that the program is not
reality. The culminating dilemma is epistemological. Aames must choose between the
Lucid Dream (reconfigured as the utopia that went bad) or the real world. He chooses
the latter. The implication is that the Lucid Dream, a simulation of the real, is morally
objectionable, much like the Matrix of the Wachowski Brothers’ trilogy. As Daniel
Barwick points out in an essay on The Matrix, this is a common implication:
In most cases, people will choose the real world over an illusory one.
But that does not mean that an illusory world is immoral; it simply
means that people, fed daily on a diet of fiction, prefer the feeling of
what is thought to be real, and what is thought to matter. (Consider the
meteoric rise of reality TV.) But notice that those caught in the Matrix
think that their surroundings are real and that their lives matter. The

Matrix produces an illusory world, not an immoral world. (85)

23

 

 

 

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The same goes for the Lucid Dream. In and of itself, it is not an immoral place. It is
immoral only insofar as it is perceived to be. Which it is. The ironic thing is that the
real world Aames returns to is defined by the fiction-wrought ideology of the media.
But that doesn’t matter to him. A mass man despite his upper class status, he doesn’t
preoccupy himself with the fictive nature of postmodern reality, assuming he is even
aware of it. The knowledge of his existence in the Lucid Dream repels him, on the other
hand, but only afier he experiences a “glitch” in the program that leads to murder. Had
the glitch not occm'red, the knowledge never would have presented itself and Aames
would have continued to live happily and comfortably in the Lucid Dream, thinking it
was reality. It is ultimately technology, not Aames himself, that dictates (or at least
induces) his choice to revert back to his body. Moreover, 150 years have passed in the
real world during his comparatively short existence in the dream; he will be “returning”
to a future where the medical expertise to firlly repair his damaged body has been
developed, a procedure that he desperately needs in order to be an operative capitalist.
The logic of Vanilla Sky paradoxically views this process as a reversion to nature, to
selflrood, to the real—all of which are effectuated by the technological. The
technological thus operates on Aames fi'om the inside as well as the outside, actuating
his desires and constituting the worlds he dwells in. But the film only expresses an
anxiety about one of these worlds, the second-order simulacra of the Lucid Dream. It
does not realize the media-powered simulacra of late capitalist reality. Instead it
idealizes late capitalist reality, representing it as an agency whereby Aames might claim

the self that the machine-powered simulacra stole fi‘om him.

24

The Mediatized Body

Bukatrnan explains that “the disappearance of the body is the disappearance of desire
(more than the manifestation of the self, here the body represents the terrain of a desire
now replaced by its own simulacrum), a symptom of surrender to the desireless
rationality of the cybernetic state” (245). Kroker and Cook would agree with this claim.
So would most “panic theorists.”ll But Aames’ experience in the cybernetic state seems
to be the reverse. It is not until he loses his body that desire truly materializes in him.
His life as a desiring-machine begins at the beginning of his virtual life, tailor-made to
his liking by Life Extension, the corporation from which he purchased the Lucid Dream.

Prior to his car accident, Aames is a narcissistic playboy lacking empathy and
conviction. He treats people (namely the “intricate network” of women he entertains) as
objects, feeding off of their adulation for his upper class power-image, and has no
interest in running the company he inherited from his father. He later admits it during a
conversation with Dr. McCabe, the psychologist appointed to him by the court after he is
accused of murder: “I’m a big nothing, living from woman to woman, fi'om compliment
to compliment, and sleepwalking through that job” (Crowe 119). After the accident,
however, when he is first inserted into the Lucid Dream, desire instills itself in him: he
willingly maintains a monogamous relationship with a woman and runs his company

like a good capitalist. Once he discovers that the world in which he operates as a

 

1' Kroker and Cook describe the role of the panic theorist in The Postmodern Scene: “Refusing (with
Nietzsche) the pragmatic compromise which only seeks to preserve, The Postmodern Scene can
recommend so enthusiastically panic reading because it seeks to relieve the gathering darkness by a new,
and more local, cultural strategy. That is, to theorize with such hyper-intensity that the simulacrum is
forced finally to implode into the dark density of its own detritus, and to write so faithfully under the
schizoid signs of Nietzsche and Bataille that burnout, discharge, and waste as the characteristic qualities of
the postmodern condition are compelled to reveal their lingering traces on the after-images of (our) bodies,
politics, sexuality, and economy. Hyper-theory, therefore, for the end of the world” (ii).

25

desiring-machine is a sham, he rejects it in favor of operating in the same fashion in the
“real” world. We don’t know if he accomplishes this feat; the Open end of the film sees
him merely waking up from the Lucid Dream.12 Even if he does, the fact remains that it
is the “high” technology of literal simulation that permits him to achieve desire, not the
“low” technology of the mediatized reality that bore him and is the womb he may or
may not return to. Hence the technology he fears and rejects turns him into the self he
was incapable of producing on his own, the main reason being that he is produced as an
incapable subject by the media forces of consumer-capitalist society. In this section I
want to address how this condition surfaces in Aames, drawing on the theory of Guy
Debord and Jean Baudrillard, two of consumer-capitalist society’s most important,
innovative critics.

Raised as a single child in an upper class urban environment, Aames is
performed by the infotainment ethos that speaks our daily lives; his ho-hum attitude and
perspective, and the way he “snowboards his way through life,” seems to belong to the
dreamy, stupid universe of a pop song. We don’t learn much about his relationship with
his parents, albeit there are indications that he was closer to his mother. There are
repeated references to him being a “daddy’s boy,” but this seems to be more of a wish-
fulfillrnent on Aames’ part, his work-obsessed father paying little if any attention to him.
(In his autobiography, for instance, Aames Sr. only devotes one sentence to his son:
“David Jr. was a delight as a child”) Consequently the figure of his father stands tall in

his psyche. Aames describes him in this way:

 

’2 Another reading of Vanilla Sky’s conclusion is that Aames is simply waking up from a dream—a dream
that was literally the entire film, not just the second half of it. Here is another stratum to the “livin’ the
dream” theme.

26

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Primer on David Aames, senior. My father was not built for the twenty-
first century. He never ate at McDonald’s, not once, and never watched
television. Yet his biggest magazine is still TV Times. . . . Read his book.
His autobiography is the manual for every cut-throat publisher in New
York. It’s called Defending the Kingdom. (16)
One of the underlying motifs in Vanilla Sky concerns how the authority of images has
usurped that of words in the twentieth century. As Michael Stephens suggests in The
Rise of the Image, the Fall of the Word, the moving image, in lieu of the printed word,
has become the principal source of intellectual and emotional development in today’s
society and will lead to new ways of understanding the (post)human. At first glance,
David Aames Sr. (as he is retrospectively characterized by David Aames Jr.) appears
resistant to this process. A publishing executive, he made his living by superintending
the dissemination of printed words. According to his son, he rejected the authority of
images, especially in the form of television, which is the primary means of dispersing
images. Ironically, however, Aames Sr.’s most reputable, best-selling publication, TV
Times, is one that promoted television and the mass ingestion of images; in this capacity
the printed word is reduced to the medium of its conqueror. Aames Sr. may not be built
for the twentieth century, but he is certainly subject to the twentieth century and the
torrent of visual media that characterize it. lrnages are powerful capitalist vehicles, and
the realms of fantasy they provide for us on a daily basis is growing exponentially. So is
our desire for those fantasy realms. Says Jean Baudrillard: “The solicitation of and
voraciousness for images is increasing at an excessive rate. Images have become our

true sex object, the object of our desire” (Ecstasy 35). While Aames Sr. may not be a

27

fan of this idea, as a capitalist, and as a desiring-machine, he has no choice but to submit
to it.

Unlike his father, Aames grew up a television addict like most postmodern
subjects. To use Guy Debord’s language, he is a product of the society of the spectacle,
of society’s real unreality. “The spectacle is not a collection of images,” writes Debord,
“rather, it is a social relationship between people that is mediated by images” (12). For
Debord and his Situationist counterparts, images are capitalist mechanisms that are used
to nourish and foment consumer society; they do not constitute the spectacle, they are
the agents that facilitate the production of the spectacle. The spectacle itself is an
assemblage of media representations erected in the name of capitalism that composes
and controls social relationships and negatively affects its watchers, pacifying and
alienating them by infringing on self-activity. “Capitalist society estranges workers
from the product of their labor, art from life, and spheres of production from
consumption, thus inducing spectators to passively observe the products of social life”
(Meemkshi 113). Furthermore, the fimdament of the spectacle is unilateralism, as
Bukatrnan observes: “The citizen/viewer, no longer participating in the production of
reality, exists now in a state of pervasive separation, cutoff from the producers of the
surrounding media culture by a unilateral communication and detached hour the mass of
fellow citizen/viewers as a new ‘virtual’ community of television families and
workplaces arises to invisibly take their place” (36). As a result of this separation from
the production of (un)reality, consumers of (un)reality are inclined to passivity, allowing
the forces of production to live their lives for them. The spectacle is a detriment to self-

fashioning. It does not annihilate or negate the self—as long as the technology of the

28

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spectacle exists, so will the self—but it does inhibit the self from the act of creative
extension.

David Aames Jr. exhibits the psychological effects of the spectacle. He does not
possess his father’s hardworking capitalist mentality, and he has no wish to possess it,
partly because of the spectacular climate that constructed him, partly because he has the
monetary capacity to fully pursue the hedonistic values that have been ingrained in him
by the media. When we are introduced to Aames in the beginning of the film, we are
introduced to a modern day dandy. The only difference between him and the traditional
dandy of the nineteenth century is that he does not lack “noble blood”; unlike the
dandies of old, who posed as afiluent socialites, adopting outward characteristics that
elicited a public and personal illusion of grandeur, Aames is in fact an affluent socialite
(he owns 51% of his father’s well-to-do company). But he embodies dandyism in terms
of his reticence to become a working member of capitalist society and Tim his company
(instead of the “seven dwarves,” the board of directors who owns 49% of the company
and conduct its daily business). Charles Baudelaire describes dandyism as “no
profession other than elegance . . . no other status but that of cultivating the idea of
beauty in [one’s] own persons . . . the dandy must aspire to be sublime without
interruption; he must live and sleep before a mirror” (Seigel 98-99). Aames fits this
profile. Entirely self-serving, the only profession with which he concerns himself is the
upkeep of his image: he makes this clear in the opening scene when he meticulously
inspects his blemish-free face in the mirror and yanks the errant gray hair from his head.

An affectation of the spectacle, he focuses on preserving his own existence as spectacle.

29

In addition to Debord’s neo-Marxist theory of the society of the spectacle,
Aames’ character can be read by way of Baudrillard’s theory of the society of the
simulated. Baudrillard is deeply influenced by Debord and the Situationist project. He
shares many of his beliefs, most importantly the belief in the increasing technological
mediation of interpersonal relations.13 At the same time, he argues that a new social
development had dawned. “For Baudrillard, we leave behind the society of the
commodity and its stable supports; we transcend the society of the spectacle and its
dissembling masks; and we bid farewell to modernity and its regime of production, and
enter the postmodern society of the simulacrum, an abstract non-society devoid of
cohesive relations, shared meaning, and political struggle” (Best 6). Whereas Debord is
auspicious, hoping to transform the media and its blasé subjects, Baudrillard is
pessimistic and fateful, arguing that there is no agency fi'om the media. In his view, the
ever-increasing dominance of the cult of infotainment is pushing us closer and closer to
a dystopia where reality and fantasy, self and other, subject and object can no longer be
distinguished from one another.

Baudrillard’s vision of the world as a technopiated, hypperreal, sign-infested
matrix resonates in Vanilla Sky both when Aames’ body is a presence in the real world
and especially when it is a presence in the simulated world of the Lucid Dream. In the
hurricane’s eye of implosion, Baudrillard professes, is the eclipse of the subject by the

object. “It is no longer the desire of the subject, but the destiny of the object, which is at

 

’3 Steven Best and Douglas Kellner offer additional similarities between the two in The Postmodern Turn:
“Both Baudrillard and Debord theorized the abstraction involved in the development of the consumer and
media society. . . . Both saw the media as one-way modes of transmission that reduced audiences to
passive spectators; both were concerned with authentic communication and a more vivid and immediate
social reality apart from the functional requirements of a rationalized society” (95).

30

the center of the world” (Ecstasy 80). Individuality, identity, selflrood—these things are
determined by the surrounding mediascape; they are constructed from the outside-in, not
the inside-out. The self is a blank slate onto which identity is imprinted rather than an
organism whose identity is cultivated and fashioned. For Baudrillard, subjects are mere
screens on which a prerecorded production is always being played out. Simply put, they
are images, copies. Hence when Aames enters the Lucid Dream as a virtual image of
himself, he is entering it as a virtual image of an image of himself.

Baudrillard has many critics. Some think of him more as a science fiction writer
than a cultural theorist, sociologist, philosopher, metaphysician, metaleptic, transversal,
moralist, or however one likes to refer to him (he has been called several things by
himself and others). His writing employs numerous science fiction tropes, for example,
as well as a “hypertechnologized, jargon-ridden language that refuse[s] the possibility of
a critical position” (Bukatrnan 72). The way in which he absolutizes the process of
implosion, predicting the fall of the real like Revelation’s John," also has its science
fiction undertones.15 Nonetheless his basic principles are deft enough. A central
principle relevant to my discussion of Vanilla Sky is passive ecstasy, a psychosocial

condition incited by the parade of images and signs that are perpetually marching

 

’4 Consider the following passage from In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities, one of Baudrillard’s most
would-be prophetic books: “But nothing will halt the implosive process, and the only remaining
alternative is between a violent or catastrophic implosion, and a smooth implosion, an implosion in slow
motion. There are traces of the latter, of various attempts to control new impulses which are anti-
universalist, anti-representative, tribal, centripetal, etc.: communes, ecology, ZPG, drugs—all of these
undoubtedly belong to this order. But we must not delude ourselves about a smooth transition. It is
doomed to be short lived and to fail. There has been no balanced transition fi'om implosive systems to
explosive systems: this has always happened violently, and there is every chance that our passage towards
implosion may also be violent and catastrophic” (61).

’5 For a closer look at Baudrillard’s sf tendencies, see Istvan Csisnery-Ronay, Jr.’s essay “The SF of
Theory: Baudrillard and Haraway.”

31

through our daily lives. He describes it in this way: “There is no longer any
transcendence or depth, but only the immanent surface of operations unfolding, the
smooth and functional surface of communication. In the image of television, the most
beautiful prototypical object of this new era, the surrounding universe and our very
bodies are becoming monitoring screens” (12). Alongside panic theorists like Donna
Haraway and Paul Virilio, Baudrillard “constructs a trajectory that propels the subject
into the machine” (Bukatrnan 17). The result is a cyborg. His cyborg is an idle human
body with a television for a head—a production/performance of the media who takes
pleasure in being produced/performed to be idle.

We have created a world in the image of our desires, says Baudrillard, and the
world has come home to roost with the voracity of Frankenstein’s monster. The media
images that pervade the goings-on of our lives all exist in the name of capitalism in one
way or another. They relentlessly whisper in our cars, “If you are not consuming, you
are less than human,” and we believe what we hear. We unconsciously surrender
ourselves to this dictum, and we consciously enjoy it. That is the ideology of the
postmodern masses, the complacent, blasé middle class to whom Baudrillard
collectively refers as “nothingness,” “inertia,” “the strength of the neutral” and
ultimately “the silent majority” (Shadow 1, 2). In terms of the media that
produce/perform us, however, class doesn’t matter: we are all part of the masses. It is
merely a question of the degree to which we are nothing, inert, neutral, silent. David
Aames is a member of the upper class in terms of his income. Yet he is a model mass
man in terms of his phlegrnatic psychosocial disposition and behavior. Vanilla Sky

contends to be about his awakening. More specifically, it contends to be about the

32

demediatization of his body, a body negated by media technology (the society of the
spectacle/simulated) and dispatched through the vehicle of media technology (the Lucid
Dream).

Aames is not demediatized, of course. The media, after all, functions as his
medium for agency fiom being mediatized. Moreover, if he does return to the real world
of the future at the end of the film as a gung ho desiring-machine and tycoon (assuming
the entire film is not a dream narrative), he will still be a zero degree subject, still a cog
in the machine of advanced capitalism. The difference is he will work harder at being a
cog; he will labor for a capitalistic ideal rather than simply exist as a neutered, imagistic
representative of it. This is implied by his name itself. He is aiming for a less
impassive, more powerful subject-position—the subj ect-position that belonged to his
father. Aames may awaken out of the Lucid Dream, but he does not awaken out of the
dream of hyperreality. No matter what, he is always-already livin’ it. As such, he
successfully fulfills the role of the terminal subject, repulsed by the technological yet
invariably needing and demanding it for his existence as an active, effective postmodem
body. Right now I want to look closer at some of the details of Vanilla Sky in order to

further explicate this point.

Open Your Eyes
Vanilla Sky is a remake of Alajandro Amenabar’s Spanish film Abre los ojos or Open
Your Eyes (1997). Basically it’s the same film, visually and thematically. The one thing

Crowe does differently is set the film in an American context, casting it in the mold of

33

pop culture.16 But the structure and syntax of Crowe’s film follows Amenabar’s closely;
sometimes be copies Amenabar shot for shot, not to mention that Penelope Cruz plays
the same character in both films. Furthermore, the title of the Spanish filmmaker’s
movie resonates throughout Vanilla Sky. In fact, the first and last lines of dialogue we
hear are “0an your eyes,” calling attention to the aforementioned awakening that
Aames does (and does not) undergo. This awakening takes numerous physical and
figurative forms. The most crucial form concerns his status as a blasé subject and the
utopian figure of Sophia, who not only makes him aware of his status, but contributes to
' his desire to transcend it. His love for Sophia opens his eyes to the passive ecstasy that
prescribes his emotional spectrum. As a result, he is motivated to remake his emotional
spectrum. What he doesn’t recognize is that his love for Sophia is not for Sophia. It is
for the image of her—metaphorically in the real world, literally in the Lucid Dream.
Like all of the other elements that contribute to the development of Aames’ character,
she is a form of media, too, a technology that penetrates his subjectivity and renders him
a becoming-thing. According to Mcluhan, “technology is directly responsible for our
desire for wholeness, empathy and depth of awareness (21). This is precisely what the
technology of Sophia does for Aames.

Aames meets her at his birthday party. They hit it off and he ends up spending

the night at her apartment, talking, flirting, watching TV and, most importantly, being

 

16 The pop culturimtion of Abres los ojos is accomplished in three major ways. One I mentioned earlier:
the casting of Tom Cruise, a pop culture icon, in the leading role. In addition, Crowe represents the world
as an explicitly hyperreal space whereas Amenabar does not, and Crowe depends upon an Oedipal element
to establish his protagonist as a mediatized body. César, the protagonist of Abres los ojos, is an orphan
like Aames who inherits a fortune from his parents. Unlike Aames, however, his quest in the film is not
that of a becoming-father in the capitalist universe. Cesar does not own a corporation that he must aspire
to rule with an iron fist—he simply has a big bank account—and the memory of his father does not
candidly haunt and produce neuroses in him.

34

celibate. Aames’ prior relationships with women had always been premised upon the
physical act of sex and the emotional absence of love. Lacan sees love as being in a
state of demand where the lover wants to give something to the loved that cannot be
given and wants to receive something from the loved that likewise cannot be given.
Aames never experiences this demand until connecting with Sophia, and in order for the
demand to manifest itself in him, it is necessary for their relationship to begin in a
sexless context. Aames’ demand is premised upon the need for repressing his sexual
impulses and getting to know the “real” Sophia first. But this is an elementary power-
relation. More important is that which Sophia represents for him: a romanticized
idealization of himself, of what is lacking in his own constitution. In this way he is a
distinctly Lacanian subject. As Lacan says in Seminar 1, “Love, the love of the person
who desires to be loved, is essentially an attempt to capture the other in oneself, in
oneself as object” (276). This is an impossibility, of course, as the other is an imaginary
object that the lover narcissistically creates in order to satisfy his unrealizable demand.
Aames’ love emerges as the desire to capture himself in the image of Sophia.
The interesting thing is that it is an image he formulates based on a collection of images:
a collage of photographs he sees on Sophia’s refiigerator. Crowe explains in his
screenplay that these photos “represent a hard-working, hard-earned, committed and
passionate life. Shot moves across the photos. A young girl’s hard-working and happy
life. Group photo of co-workers. A few from a vacation. A whole new cast of
characters, all committed, and they all look inviting to [Aames]” (43). In a DVD audio
commentary, Crowe goes on to say: “Here [Aames] falls in love with the image of a girl

leading a real life, a life more real than his life. In a way he’s been living a dream, and

35

he wants reality.” Crowe’s use of the words “real” and “reality” are in reference to the
forces of labor. When he says Sophia leads a “real life,” he means she has to work for a
living, to struggle to survive financially in urban America by juggling multiple jobs and
playing her part in the game of consumer-capitalism, an experience Aames knows little
about. In this context, his dream life is a life free from capitalistic constraints,
limitations and anxieties. The film portrays this freedom negatively, as more of a state
of bondage than fieedom, and Sophia is portrayed as the key that will unlock him from
the prison of leisure and prodigality. He sees in her what society has demanded from
him all of his life. Until meeting her he chooses to ignore that demand, but love (a
demand in itself) “opens his eyes.” The problem is that this love is the product of yet

’ another simulacrum—of Aames’ idealization of himself in the image of Sophia based on
photographic images of her. Not only is he terminally constructed by image-culture, he
is terminally reconstructed by it.

This dynamic is magnified in the Lucid Dream. Created in the image of Aames’
perfect world, the Lucid Dream is the setting for the second half of the film. Both he
and Sophia exist as literal image-constructs; Aames’ mind is jacked into a cyberspace a
la The Matrix (1999) where he is more or less a “mental projection of [his] digital self,”
and an avatar of Sophia (as well as the rest of humanity) is implanted into cyberspace
with him. He is effectively god here in that this diegesis is for him alone. Moreover,
like the protagonist of Alex Proyas’ film Dark City (1998), he has the power to conduct
and redirect the operations of the world. He just doesn’t know it. Viewers (as well as
Aames himself) are not made aware that he is literally livin’ the dream until the film’s

end when Edmund Ventura, Life Extension’s tech support representative and the key

36

source of exposition, explains what has been going on. But before turning to the film’s
denouement I need to briefly discuss Aames’ accident and its consequences.

Prior to meeting Sophia, Aames had been casually dating Julianna Gianni, an
aspiring actress and musician. Julianna develops an obsession, stalks him, and finally
tries to kill him in a car crash. Aames survives, but the accident deforms him: his
shoulder is shattered and his face is grotesquely scarred. He seeks out the best plastic
surgeons in New York City to rebuild his face, but nobody can help him, even though
money is no object. The technology needed to rebuild him is simply not up to snuff.
“This isn’t about vanity,” he says to a doctor. “This is about functioning in the world.
It’s my job to be out there functioning.” By functioning in the world, Aames is referring
to his role as a socialite, but more as a capitalist, an ironic claim in that, prior to his
accident, he was anything but a functional capitalist. Thus his disfigurement does the
same thing for him that Sophia does: instills a desire for a fantasy-image of himself that
cannot be consummated. The reality of his ruined image invokes the desire for the
dream of his would-be utopian image. In every way his selfhood is produced by
imagistic machinery.

Aames’ miscarried relationship with Sophia, however, is the true catalyst of his
melancholy. They only spend one night together prior to his accident, which occurs the
following morning when a despondent, stalking Julianna appears outside of Sophia’s
apartment building and asks him to take a ride with her. Feeling sorry for her, he agrees.
She tells him he loves him, he doesn’t reciprocate, and she drives her car off of a bridge.
Aames spends three weeks in a coma and time in rehabilitation afterwards. He is finally

healthy enough in mind and body to attempt to reconcile with Sophia, but he is not the

37

same person anymore. Too self-conscious about the loss of his image—a loss that
leaves him looking and feeling like the elephant man—he rubs Sophia the wrong way,
and she shuns him. But his love for her, the initial image of himself he sought out in
her, still actuates and enables him to become the capitalist he was not able to become
prior to meeting her. With the help of his company’s attorney, Thomas Tipp, he gains
control of his company and defeats the seven dwarves, who pose a constant threat of
corporate usurpation throughout the film. In the end (of his real life), he successfully
achieves the hardworking ethic he so admired in Sophia. But he still longs for her
physical presence, and because he cannot have it, he overdoses on pills and commits
suicide.

Before killing himself, however, he purchases Life Extension’s Lucid Dream.
The purchase reifies his newly acquired subject-position as a functional capitalist, as the
Lucid Dream is a commodity—a commodity that becomes his reality. His body is
cryogenically hem and his mind is interfaced with a virtual reality fashioned out of the
iconography of his childhood: familiar captions fi'om advertisements, television, films
and pop art are used as background props for his environment. In this dream world, his
face and shoulder are flawlessly reconstructed, he continues to prevail as an
entrepreneur, and his relationship with Sophia flourishes. This is his utopia, an
enhanced, romanticized copy of his subjective diegesis that, like a movie treatment of a
novel, is adapted from Aames’ inmost desires and sculpted out of the mediascape that
provided the fiamework for his actual, hyperreal life. That he lacks the knowledge that

this simulated universe isn’t real allows him to enjoy and appreciate it.

38

('0

Y1

He gains that knowledge by degrees, and his utopia dissolves into a dystopia.
“Your subconscious created problems,” Ventura informs him. “Your dream turned into
a nightmare.” Aames begins to hallucinate that Sophia is Julianna. At first he thinks
Julianna staged her death and kidnapped Sophia. It is soon revealed that the problem lay
in his own schizophrenic head. Mistaking Sophia for Julianna, he kills her and is
charged with murder. Dr. McCabe is assigned to his case to try and determine his
motive and state of mind, and it is through the course of his psychotherapy that the
characters in and viewers of the film learn about the origin and history of Aames’ virtual
life. He and McCabe finally go to Life Extension’s corporate headquarters where they
learn the “truth” once and for all. Ventura divulges to Aames that, in the real world, 150
years have passed since he died. The technology now exists to rebuild his body and
face, and he is given a choice: either he can stay in the Lucid Dream and live a happy
life in whatever setting with whatever people he wants, or he can go back to the real
world where he will have to struggle to make ends meet, just as Sophia once had to
struggle. Aames makes up his mind quickly. “I want to live a real life,” he says. “I
don’t want to dream anymore.” In the future he will allegedly wake up in, Sophia will
be long dead. But that doesn’t matter: he is intent on becoming the capitalist-oriented
self he originally saw in her, and her use-value as an object (in which Aames objectifies
himself) has expended itself. One caveat, though—in order to wake up, he must jump
off of the top of a building, defeating his physical and metaphorical fear of heights. It is
a cliche dream scenario; he must have faith that he will wake up before he hits the

ground.”

 

'7 Prior to the jump, Ventlu'a informs Aames: “You know what they say. You never die in your dreams.
You’ll wake up before you hit the ground. The decision is yours” (Crow 146).

39

He jumps. On his way down his life flashes before his eyes in a gust of
mnemonic pictures that flicker onto the screen. It is a life entirely distinguished by the
media. Shots of sitcoms, cartoons, album covers, newspaper and rock concert clips are
interspersed between shots of Aames’ actual life, which is presented mainly through
photo stills and cuts from home movies. Here we see more clearly than ever how Aames
is a terminal affectation of blip culture, a term conceived by Alvin Toffler designating “a
rhetorical (and perhaps ‘real’) construct within which citizens are becoming blips:
electronic pulses which exist only as transitory bits or bytes of information in a culture
inundated with information” (Bukatman 27). Aames’ blip subjectivity begins with his
in-the-flesh self, with the passive man who is produced by the “telefission of the real and
of the real world” (Simulacra 53). He is an image—construct in a figurative sense when
we meet him, part and parcel of the mediatized universe of infotainment, and his blip
subjectivity is exacerbated by the Lucid Dream, which turns him into a literal image-
construct, a representation of a (hyper)real person whose identity is fabricated by
technologies of the real. In the Lucid Dream, Aames is terminally reconstructed as a
construct, and it is through this procedure that he is transformed from a dysfunctional
into a functional capitalist. While humanistic on the surface, Vanilla Sky is ultimately a
representation of late capitalist morality in which goodness is equated with commodity
reproduction and badness with a lack thereof. If the film had a subtitle, it might read:

“Choose Capitalism.”

40

Terminal Choice

“In late capitalist consumerist society,” Slavoj Zizek writes, “real social life’ itself
somehow acquires the features of a staged fake, with our neighbors behaving in ‘real’
life as stage actors and extras. The ultimate truth of the capitalist utilitarian
despiritualized universe is the dematerialization of ‘real life’ itself, its reversal into a
spectral show” (243). This assertion is written in reference to Philip K. Dick’s novel
Time Out of Joint (1959) and the films The Matrix and The Truman Show (1998), all of
which feature simulated societies of the spectacle that are a cross between Baudrillardian
and Debordian theory. Additionally, the plot of each text involves the awakening of its
protagonist from ignorance to enlightenment (and subsequently to conviction); Time Out
of Joint ’s Ragle Gumm, The Matrix’s Neo and The Truman Shaw’s Truman Burbank are
all introduced as ignorant subjects that are unaware of the “spectral shows” of which
they are the stars. For them, real social life is technically a staged fake. And yet they do
not know it is a staged fake—they think the stage is reality—so in a sense, the stage is
reality. As Morpheus explains to Neo: “What is real? How do you define real? If
you’re talking about what you can feel, what you can smell, what you can taste and see
then real is simply electrical signals interpreted by your brain.” In other words, reality is
a matter of perception. What any given subject genuinely perceives to be real is real,
whether it is really real or not.

It is only when a knowledge of the really real is leaked into the subject’s
consciousness that a glitch occurs and leads to some kind of alteration in the flow of the
subject’s desires. Gumm, Neo and Burbank are likened to David Aames in this respect.

The glitch that Aames experiences occurs in the Lucid Dream. It causes a “revolution of

41

the mind” and exposes him to the reality of the unreality of his virtual existence. This
exposure is intolerable. Aames cannot bear the knowledge that his life is a spectacular
simulation. Nor can his psychologist when he finds out. “Mortality as home
entertainment?” exclaims McCabe. “This can’t be the future!” His reaction is
distinctively Phildickian. Like Aames, the ignorant McCabe discovers that the world
around him as well as his own existence is a fraud; he is just a program, an unknowingly
subjected object in Aames’ subjective virtuality whose nature is “to fight for his own
existence.” The difi‘erence between he and Aames is, once the Lucid Dream is
terminated, so is McCabe; he has no life outside of the simulation as he has no originary
body to return to. Such a dilemma is consistently represented by science fiction,
particularly in the postmodern era. Both Aames and McCabe are cast in a future where
the human mind and body are produced by technocapitalist media. It is an imaginary
future as much as it is the (hyper)real present in terms of how certain tropes that once
belonged to the science fiction genre now belong to the “desert of the real.”

Bukatman says that “the ultimate embodiment (or dis-embodiment) of terminal
identity is the electronically enhanced simulation of a human” (253). What are the
consequences of being terminal? According to texts like Vanilla Sky, perhaps more than
anything it is the loss of the freedom of choice. The technological is increasingly taking
away individual choice by surrendering it exclusively to the wiles of capitalist
enterprise. Aames is given the option to choose between what is presented as one form
of being (nature) and another (culture), but what is in fact the same being existing in
different technologically empowered realms, one characterized by the mediascape, the

other by a virtuality (where the mediascape is represented). Aames then is not making

42

an ontological choice, as the film suggests. When he jumps off of the building, he is
merely choosing to reenter the “real” hyperreal world of capitalism as a productive and
thus “moral” subject.18 In the end, it is the only choice one can make, or in any case the
only choice that matters in the postmodern world. Contrary to popular belief, the
development of higher technologies is not an indication of human intellect; it is a means
of increasing the power and fluidity of the consumer-capitalist system, which uses
technology as its motor (Hugill 89). To choose capitalism—this is the terminal subject’s

core purpose, an inevitability that must be endured whether s/he likes it or is aware of it.

 

’8 We aren’t told exactly what kind of socioeconomic future Aames will awake in, or if he will even
awake in a future at all. Ventura mentions that the world is “very different” and his “money will run out
soon, and there are no guarantees” (Crowe 145). Based on the underlying modus operandi of Vanilla Sky,
however, there is every reason to believe that, if he finds himself in the future, it will be a capitalistic one
driven by technology. (There is one indication of this eventuality, too: in the screenplay, Ventru'a says that
“people live to be 200 years old now,” suggesting that the technological has continued to develop and that
humanity’s reliance upon it has intensified.)

43

CHAPTER 2

Gongs of Violence: The Pathological Play of William S. Burroughs’ Cut-Up Novels

Pathologizing the Subject
The film Brazil (1985) is a Kaflcaesque nightmare in which the protagonist, Sam Lowry,
struggles to mediate the culture machine that attempts to program and process him like a
cog. A clerk in the fascist Ministry of Information, Lowry fantasizes about escaping his
petty, monotonous life. In his dreams he is a superhero who contends with evil forces
and pursues the love of a woman bearing a striking resemblance to a Barbie doll in a
wedding dress. Throughout the film, his dreams intensify as the culture machine’s
subjection of him intensifies in his real life. Finally the dream and the real collapse, and
his world irnplodes. The ending of Brazil leaves us with the image of an insane Lowry
strapped to a chair, a dumb little smile plastered onto his face. Director and screenwriter
Terry Gilliam has referred to this as a happy ending. What makes it happy is that Lowry
believes he is driving off into the sunset with the woman he loves. By actualizing his
dreams on a permanent basis—that is, by going insane—he ceases to be a functional
cog. The subject has experienced de-cog-nition.

In Looking Awry, Slavoj ZiZek discusses Lowry’s plight. He references
Lacanian psychoanalysis to explain how insanity is a way of distancing himself from the
sociosymbolic universe of the film. “Although functioning as a support for the
totalitarian order, fantasy is then at the same time the leftover of the real that enables us
to ‘pull ourselves out’ . . . When we become crazed in our obsession with idiotic

enjoyment, even totalitarian manipulation cannot reach us” (128). Thus the Althusserian

notion that the subject cannot get out of the ideological machine which interpellates it
(because ideology “has no outside” or is “nothing but outside”) is disturbed by the
emergence of idiotic enjoyment, a form of jouissance that is symptomatic of ideology
(“Ideology” 175). In other words, the subject that travels this path becomes a kind of
village idiot existing both apart horn and as part of the village—apart fiom the village in
its idiocy, part of the village insofar as it is the village which induced and perpetuates its
idiocy. The village is progenitor and parent, and the village idiot’s idiocy is a symptom
of the village.
Broadly speaking, the postmodern era has seen schizophrenia eclipse paranoia as
the dominant cultural mode of “village idiocy.” The mediatization of the body and the
intensification of late capitalist desiring-production have reproduced the self as a
fragmented object devoid of a fixed, organic identity. In The Postmodern Scene, Arthur
Kroker and David Cook write:
The self is now like what the quantum physicists call a ‘world strip,’
across which run indifferent rivulets of experience. Neither fully
mediated nor entirely localized, the self is an empty sign: colonized from
within by technologies for the body immune; seduced from without by
all of the fashion tattoos; and energized by a novel psychological
condition—the schizoid state of postmodern selves who are
(simultaneously) predators and parasites. (vii)

As a way of negotiating the postmodern self, Kroker and Cook propose hyper-

pessirnism, “the only realistic basis for a raging will to political action” (vii). Panic is

the emotion they harness for their theoretical politics. Overwhelmed by the

45

technological catastrophe that is the postmodern scene, the late capitalist subject
experiences panic as a normative emotion, and in their book they adopt a panic
sensibility in order to critique the schizoid determinism of panic society.‘9 Apocalyptic
and fatalistic, the project is distinctly Baudrillardian, both in content and technique; not
only do they write about schizophrenic civilization, they write as subjects of
schizophrenic civilization, employing a fractal, jargonized language that reflects the
pathological psyche of technocapitalism. They encourage readers to treat the book as
“immanently postmodern.” What does it mean to be immanently postmodern? Here it
means to engage the language of pathology that constitutes mediatized life and allow it
to neutralize itself. Such a panic reading, in the eyes of Kroker and Cook and
Baudrillard, is a last gasp political gesture, an effort
to theorize with such hyperintensity that the simulacrum is forced finally
to implode into the dark density of its own detritus, and to write so
faithfully under the schizoid signs of Nietzsche and Bataille that burnout,
discharge, and waste as the characteristic qualities of the postmodern
condition are compelled to reveal their lingering traces on the after-
images of (our) bodies, politics, sexuality, and economy. (ii)
This sort of “hyper-theory . . . for the end of the world” is not agential. It assumes the
world is irreversibly imploding, doomed to certain collapse. The only transcendence it
offers is a playful reveling in and of itself as it maps out the cultural landscape of the

postmodern scene.

 

’9 “The Postmodern Scene evokes, and then secretes, the fin-de-millenium mood of contemporary culture.
It is a panic book: panic sex, panic art, panic ideology, panic bodies, panic noise, and panic theory” (I).

46

A similar panic aesthetic is evident in the subject of this chapter, William S.
Burroughs’ cut-up novels, which Kroker and Cook amazingly fail to mention in their
book. A forefather of cyberpunk narratives and a seminal figure in postmodern
literature, Burroughs’ surreal, scatological, technophilic narratives are exemplary
symptomatic representations of “excremental culture and hyper-aesthetics.”20 His carny
portrayals of pathological cyborg bodies infected by the technology of consumer-
capitalism have informed numerous panic theorists like him, including novelists,
filmmakers and philosophers. Much academic criticism has been informed by
Btn‘roughs, too. David Porush’s The S0}? Machine, for example, gets its name fi'om the
title of one of the cut-up novels; Storming the Reality Studio, Larry McCaffery’s
anthology of cyberpunk and postmodern fiction and criticism, is a title appropriated
from a directive in another cut-up, Nova Express; Scott Bukatrnan also commandeers a
phrase fiom Nova Express for the title of his Terminal Identity.21 These three texts
contain important critical analyses of cyberpunk, and all of them pay homage to
Burroughs.

Pathology is a marked presence in cyberpunk narratives. As Istvan Csicsery-
Ronay, Jr. contends, “cyberpunk is part of a trend in science fiction dealing increasingly
with madness” (189), a result of the literal, metaphorical and psychological invasion of
the human by the technological. Science fiction writer Bruce Sterling identifies body
and mind invasion as one of cyberpunk’s central themes: “prosthetic limbs, implanted

circuitry, cosmetic surgery, genetic alteration . . . brain-computer interfaces, artificial

 

2° The subtitle of The Postmodern Scene.

2‘ “The entire planet is being developed into terminal identity and complete surrender” (Nova 19).

47

intelligence, neurochemistry—techniques radically redefining the nature of humanity,
the nature of the self” (xiii). Such techniques are totemic of Burroughs. He was
extremely interested in representing how postmodern selfllood has been redefined by
technocapitalism. The worlds he depicts in the cut—up novels, to this day his most
widely read and revered fictions, are dystopian “interzones” where reality has been
subverted by a sultry irreality of terror, absurdism, duplicity and terminal
constructedness.

The cut-up novels include Burroughs’ masterwork, Naked Lunch (1959), and the
subsequent trilogy of novels, The Sofl Machine (1961), The Ticket That Exploded (1962)
and Nova Express (1964). All four books are set in psychedelic diegeses infested with
machines of subjugation. These machines take on a variety of forms, ranging from giant
sadistic centipedes, to talking assholes with fangs, to apocalyptic cities, to government
organizations intent on “the merging of everyone into One Man by a process of
protoplasmic absorption” (Naked 133), to the technology of the media. Burroughs’
characters either fall prey to these machines, or attempt to evade or defeat them, or
both——usually both. The result is a schizophrenizing of the self and a pathologizing of
subjects who in their struggle to negotiate their subjection seemingly extirpate
themselves hour it.

Freud confi'onts the agential power of madness in Civilization and Its
Discontents:

One can try to re-create the World, to build up in its stead another world
in which its most unbearable features are eliminated and replaced by

others that are in conformity with one’s own wishes. But whoever, in

48

desperate defiance, sets out upon this path to happiness will as a nrle
attain nothing. Reality is too strong for him. He becomes a madman,
who for the most part finds no one to help him in carrying through his
delusion. (31)
According to Freud, pathology, the endpoint of the “path to happiness” that despotic
machines compel subjects to follow, is a bane; the epitome of desperation is “to re-create
the world” and deliver oneself out of the real by dint of madness. Nonetheless it is still
an attempt to correct “some aspect of the world which is lmbearable” (32). In
Burroughs’ texts this amounts to an attempt to cure the psychosocial disease or illness
that the machines inflict upon subjects and that make subjects subjects.

Pathology as a cure. This idee'fixe pervades Burroughs’ cut-up novels. It is
particularly apparent in The Sofl Machine. The title is a reference to the human body in
a state of subjection that manifests itself on two levels. On one level, the soft machine
refers to a body controlled by the desire associated with sex and drugs—a desire that, for
Burroughs, elicits feelings of disgust and terror as well as ecstasy. On another level, the
soft machine references a body controlled by the desire associated with the media, which
also elicits an oppositional emotive response. Burroughs represents postmodern media
as a virus that infects the body and conditions the self to be (or at least to act like) a good
capitalist and consruner. The Burroughsian subject is always-already sick. It is a cog in
the culture machine, and pathology is the cure, the gateway to de-cog-nition.

Burroughs sets his sights mainly on American image-culture, constructing a
cognitive map of this space in the vein of Fredric Jameson. A politically fueled

enterprise, cognitive mapping “enables a situational representation on the part of the

49

individual subject to that vaster and properly unrepresentable totality which is the
ensemble of society’s structures as a whole” (Jameson 51). The objective of this chapter
is to localize and deliberate one of the key coordinates of Burroughs’ unusual cognitive
map: the technology of film. Jonathan Beller argues that film is the dominant cultural
capital of the twentieth century. It is a form of consciousness that has led to a new reign
of socioeconomic conceptualization, practice and value. “As an instrument capable of
burrowing into the body and connecting it to new circuits, cinema and mass media in
general are deeply irnbricated in economic production and circulation in the world
system. Indeed, cinema performs a retooling of the sensorium by initiating a new
disciplinary regime for the eye” (52). Burroughs writes under the aegis of Beller’s
notion, depicting film as a sensory and bodily retooler. The text is permeated by
references to and representations of the mechanical aspects of film. Moreover, the cut-
up style of the text is, like film itself, grounded in the principle of montage. Montage is
a violent, schizophrenic method of artistic production that reflects the terrain Burroughs
is mapping out; in the cut-ups it serves as an agent of pathology in that he uses montage
to color and characterize postmodern image-culture and the terminal illness it invokes.
Burroughs was mainly an artist, but he was also a political activist—being
political was part of being beat—and his cognitive map, similar to Jameson’s in
Postmodernism, is a critical methodology whose design is to expose the political
strategies and power relations at work in a specific cultural matrix. That matrix is 19603
wartime America, which saw political upheaval in concert with a surge of media
technologies moralizing the specter of consumerism. During the writing of the cut-ups,

America was unconsciously realizing itself as a thoroughly mediatized body and

50

commoditocracy whose raison d ’étre was to reproduce and entertain spectacles that used
images to mediate social relations between people.22 Burroughs’ cognitive map
delineates this mediation, treating film as the foremost purveyor of images. He thus
projects film onto the irreality of his narratives as a means of representing the way in
which images operate as social mediums, a process that is integral to the
schizophrenizing of the postmodern self. Burroughs representation is hyperbolic,
dreamy and ultraviolent—like a big budget action movie, his map is full of special
effects. He engages in a pathological form of play that reflects and critiques the
schizophrenic social landscape of early postmodernity. This play is used as a weapon
against terminal constructedness, but not an agential weapon. As his cut-ups show, there
is no escape from being constructed by the powers of capitalist technologies, and no
choice but to choose to live as an extension of technocapitalism. For him, play is a gun
loaded with blanks, a sword with a plastic blade whereby he calls attention to the
absurdity and inevitability of the postmodern self’s pathology. The cure Burroughs
offers for the subject’s psychosocial disease is metaphorical. It is not a matter of healing
the body, of getting better by getting rid of the disease. As I will explain, it is a matter

of becoming the disease itself

 

22 Guy Debord’s overarching thesis in The Society of the Spectacle. Like Burroughs’ trilogy, The Society
of the Spectacle was published in the I960s (in France) and is a cognitive map of the commoditocracy as
perceived by Debord. He writes: “The world the spectacle holds up to view is at once here and elsewhere;
it is the world of the commodity ruling over all lived experience. The commodity world is thus shown as
it really is, for its logic is one with men’s estrangement from one another and from the sum total of what
they produce” (26). In terms of the commodification of everything horn reality to the human body,
Debord and Burroughs share the same political views.

51

Cognitive Mapping
I want to begin by discussing Jameson’s notion of cognitive mapping in a general sense.
A key factor in cognitive mapping is the predominance of space over time, or what he
calls the “spatialization of the temporal” (156). Says Jameson:
The distinction is between two forms of interrelationship between time
and space rather than between these two inseparable categories
themselves: even though the postmodern vision of the ideal or heroic
schizophrenic (as in Deleuze) marks the impossible effort to imagine
something like a pure experience of a spatial present beyond past history
and future destiny or project. Yet the ideal schizophrenic’s experience is
still one of time, albeit of the eternal Nietzschean present. What one
means by evoking its spatialization is rather the will to use and to subject
time to the service of space, if that is now the right word for it. (154)
To illustrate this idea, consider the Internet pirate companies bred by Napster.com at the
turn of the century that allow users to download music and videos quickly and for fi-ee.
Rather than get into your car, drive out to Tower Records, buy a CD or DVD, get back
into your car and drive home, all you have to do is log on to the Internet from your home
computer and download whatever form of infotainment you want, negating the time-
consuming trip to Tower Records (as well as the expense of gas and the cost of a CD or
DVD) by a projection of your own space onto the space outside of it. Your space
becomes the outside space and vice versa. Implosion occurs, in other words, and time is

nullified (or in any case minimized).23

 

23 Marx calculated this figuration in the Grundrisse, arguing that capital aspires “to annihilate this space
with time, i.e. to reduce to a minimum the time spent in motion from one place to another. The more

52

For Jameson, the cognitive mapper’s task is to define the coordinates of the
geopolitical space that surrounds us so that we might better understand our irnploded
place within it. Defining such space, however, is impossible: it can only be represented.
Jameson makes an example out of Kevin Lynch’s concept of the “alienated” city, “a
space in which people are unable to map (in their minds) either their own positions or
the urban totality in which they find themselves” (51). Urban disalienation requires that
people create a sort of Disneyland for themselves to “reconquest of a sense of place”
(51). This theory is essentially Lacanian.” Jameson also connects it to Althusser’s
redefinition of ideology as “the representation of the subject’s Imaginary relationship to
his or her Real conditions of existence” (51), one of many theses in his “Ideology and
Ideological State Apparatuses.” Althusser advances this argument by claiming that “it is
not their real conditions of existence, their real world, that ‘men’ ‘represent to
themselves’ in ideology, but above all it is their relation to those conditions of existence
which is represented to them there” (164). Jameson employs a parallel argument. In
order to create cognitive maps of late capitalist society, the operations of which are
schizophrenic and difficult if not impossible to mediate, individuals must construct an
idea of their surrounding space and their place in it. This idea is not the real, but it
masquerades as the real and equips individuals with a sense of selflrood, albeit an

imaginary sense of selfhood.

 

developed the capital, therefore, the more extensive the market over which it circulates, which forms the
spatial orbit of its circulation, the more does it strive simultaneously for an even greater extension of the
market and for the greater annihilation of space by time” (539).

2‘ Postmodernism, p. 51-54.

53

One final principle of cognitive mapping according to Jameson that is important
to my argument: the totalization of history. Patrick O’Donnell articulates this principle
in “The Intractability of Culture”:

Jameson’s post-Marxist stance ordains that postmodern global culture be
regarded as world historical totality, and the role of the cultural theorist
to map this totality . . . rather than to study disparate or purportedly
separate pieces of it; even if one is “mapping” within the parameters of a
specific cultural location (and, in effect, this is the only way that one can
effectively read/map culture), this activity must be conducted within the
framework of a “total,” global history in process. (O’Donnell 135)
eroughs’ cognitive map of the world has its roots in a specific cultural location. Much
of his beatnik, hipster vernacular is distinctly American, and his writing in the cut-up
novels is often a sardonic reading/mapping of American cultural productions and effects.
Consumer-capitalist America is Burroughs’ foremost antagonist. His cognitive map
represents that antagonist “within the framework of a ‘total,’ global history in process.”
His map spatializes time as well. The cut-up technique consists of a process of chopping
up and rearranging time sequences, resulting in the splintering and dissemination of time
into a particular space. In order to produce a temporally operable film, still shots that
capture individual bytes of time must be dissected, systematized, spliced together,
organized in such a way that a certain representational space is delineated. Burroughs
deploys this method in the cut-ups—the method is why they are called cut-ups. His
novels are spatialized assemblages of time bytes, metaphorical films that underscore the

constructed, schizophrenic nature of the real.

54

In a 1962 article in Evergreen Review, Btnroughs writes, “In Naked Lunch The
Soft Machine and Novia Express . . . I am mapping an imaginary universe. A dark
universe of wounded galaxies and novia conspiracies where obscenity is coldly used as a
total weapon” (Hassan 54).25 As these words imply, one of the dominant metaphors in
Burroughs’ imaginary universe is science fiction. Hassan indicates four more
metaphors: death, sex/obscenity, drugs, and money. One he does not indicate that is
particularly visible in The Soft Machine is the metaphor of film. Film takes many forms
in this text. In most cases it is a control mechanism regulating subjects by impregnating
them with itself. I will elaborate on this idea below. Beforehand I want to discuss in
greater detail the connotations of “soft machine,” a term that exemplifies the postmodern

subject-position.

Soft Machine:
David Porush’s The Soft Machine (1985) is a critical analysis of postmodern fiction that
has employed the image of the soft machine—often a literal human/machine cyborg—
and is concerned primarily with cybernetic postmodern fiction.26 The thrust of Porush’s
argument is “that all language is based on metaphor and that metaphors therefore hold

the key to deciphering the code of our knowledge, to mapping the hidden vectors of our

 

2’ Novia Express, not to be confused with Nova Express, was the working title for The Ticket That
Exploded.

26 Porush’s theory is itself a cybernetic formation. His book was first published during the apex of the
cyberpunk movement of the 19803, one year after the publication of the movement’s kingpin text, William
Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984), a novel strongly influenced by Burroughs.

55

cosmologies” (xi).27 His study of the “machine metaphysic” in certain texts is an
exegesis of our technologically frenetic era. “Literature has found in the machine a rich
invitation to create metaphor” (9). Burroughs was a Machiavellian writer in this
capacity. His cut-ups employ the machine as the primary metaphor for marking the
terrain of contemporary American life, a terrain that evokes a sense of enchantrnent as
well as nausea.

Porush’s title seems to suggest that Burroughs’ The Sofi Machine is a keynote
text of his study. Not so. In fact, Porush devotes very little time to Burroughs, using
him more as a springboard to deliberate the “metaphor of the machine” as it is used and
represented by various pre-cyberpunk cyberfictions. But he does have this to say: “In
Burroughs’ apocalyptic mythology, the soft machine is the pure end-product of control
by some malicious and all-powerful conspiracy of government, media, and what
Burroughs calls ‘the Nova Police,’ agents of technology” (Porush 99). He then
stipulates how the soft machine functions as both a controlled and controlling object.
“Not only is the ‘soft machine’ some sort of communicating device, it has been
implanted on our very nervous system; it is a compulsory ‘tape recorder within,’ or inner
‘writing machine’ hooked up somehow to more cumbersome and conventional external
communications devices” (100). Porush conclusively suggests that the soft machine
may signify the text itself. “Curiously, in the volume entitled The Soft Machine,

Bturoughs nowhere mentions the term, though he portrays a few incarnations of it.

 

27 Porush’s thesis is written in the wake of George Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s Metaphors We Live By,
published five years before The Soft Machine. The duo argue that the process of cognition is
fundamentally metaphorical: “Metaphor is not just a matter of language, that is, of mere words. We shall
argue that, on the contrary, human thought processes are largely metaphorical. This is what we mean
when we say that the human conceptual system is metaphorically structured and defined” (6). Porush uses
this axiom to interpret the postmodern world through the vehicle of science fiction narrative.

56

Perhaps he means us to understand that the sort of control that the soft machine
represents is manifested everywhere in his apocalyptic universe; or perhaps this curious
omission is meant to imply that the text we are reading is the soft machine” (102). The
medium is the message, then, and the text acts as a kind of guidebook or manual for
deconstructing the culture machine and the signs it uses to monitor and manipulate its
subjects.

The underlying thesis here is that, from Burroughs’ perspective, language is an
enemy against which we must struggle, a sickness we must strive to remedy. “Language
is the weapon used against its victims by ‘the all-powerful control board’ and their
‘symbol books’ (102). By language, Burroughs does not mean a system of words so
much as he means a method of communication. This method belongs to media imagery
in the postmodern world. Hence he constructs a mediatized language of his own,
playing with (and playing against) what he perceives to be a linguistic holocaust ignited
by capitalist technologies. It is a schizophrenic, ultraviolent, sexualized verbomania in
which events are described in excruciating detail. Burroughs’ rhetoric paints a vivid
picture for his readers that is as close to the experience of watching a film as words can
convey; as such, he speaks to mediatized society in its own language. The language is a
machine, a technology that countervails the technology of the image, which is the engine
of postmodern society. As Porush indicates, this is a modus operandi of much
cybernetic fiction.

Porush gives a number of significations of soft machine, but he neglects one that
I mentioned earlier: the soft machine as a body controlled by the desire associated with

sex and drugs. Burroughs’ lifelong experience as a drug user (of opiates mainly) and a

57

homosexual (especially his pedophilic tendencies) epidemically inform the cut-up
novels, and whereas Naked Lunch is, of the four novels, the most preoccupied with
drugs, The Sofl Machine is the most preoccupied with sex. In these terms, the human
body is controlled by certain metabolic and libidinal forces that exist inside of it.
Helpless against these inner workings, the body can do nothing but obey its thirst—
Burroughs’ narrative conveys this view in extremis.

This is not to say the body doesn’t revolt against its desires. Burroughs is very
interested in bodies that in some fashion attempt to exorcize the control mechanisms that
haunt them from within. Like the cyberpunk narratives he inspired, his narratives are
imbued with a desire for disembodiment. This desire is portrayed as an illness
precipitated by cultural germs. It is a terminal illness (the negation of desire, after all,
would mean the negation of the self). The nature of the body is machinic; postmodern
subjects are desiring-machines, connected to and coded by one another, producing-
productions of one another, and their reality is dictated by desire.28 Burroughs’ desiring-
machines seek “treatment” in pathology. While it doesn’t permit them to transcend
desire, pathology is a way for them to rechannel the flows of desire and redefine the
boundaries of reality. The subject can never cease desiring, nor can it cease to be a
subject. But it can alter its subject-nature. This alteration, this cure, this process of

becoming-pathological is one of the cut-up novels’ main objectives.

 

28 Deleuze and Guattari’s guiding principle in Anti-Oedipus and 1000 Plateaus. While Burroughs’
desiring- machines flmction according to this principle, they are oppressed organisms subjugated by
cultural powers whereas Deleuze and Guattari’s are liberated organisms, alternatives to the repressed
Freudian subject.

58

The Reality Film

Victimized by cruel and often sadistic forces, Burroughs’ pathological characters exist in
fantastical “paraspaces.” Scott Bukatman appropriates this term fiom Samuel R. Delany,
who defines it as a “nonspace” without a center that lacks “coordinates and boundaries,
combined with a paradoxical depthlessness” (169). For Bukatman, paraspace denotes
the milieu of cyberspace, but he recognizes that the construction of paraspaces is not
limited to cyberpunk texts. Whereas some of the Burroughs’ paraspaces are cyberspatial
(principally in Nova Express, the most science fiction-oriented of the cut-ups), others are
not; they are more analogous to the irreal diegeses of Kaflra, Gogol and Borges where
the cause and effect schema that presides over the real world ceases to hold water, albeit
Burroughs is far more graphic and explicitly paraspatial than these comparatively tame,
conservative writers. He makes no bones about breaking the laws of causality.29 What
truly makes his diegeses paraspatial, however, is the language he uses to represent them.
Paraspaces are “rhetorically heightened ‘other realm[s]’ . . . ‘in which language is raised
to an extraordinarily lyric level’” (157).30 As I inferred earlier, and as I will enumerate
later in a close reading of “Gongs of Violence,” a chapter in The Sofi Machine,
Burroughs’ lyricism and linguistic prowess is the fundament of his paraspaces, which
are dreamlike matrixes where reality, nature and the self have no discemable contours.

To illustrate his paraspaces, Burroughs frequently uses the medium of film. This
is an efl’ective tactic in that film, like the soft machine, is a control device. According to

Stuart and Elizabeth Ewen, “Like radio and television after them, the movies were an

 

29 A familiar example is Naked Lunch’s tale of the talking asshole that takes over the body of its master
(1 19-21).

30 The second intertextual citation of Bukatman’s quotation belongs to Delany.

59

exemplary piece of a cultural environment that interacted, over time, with the social
history of its audience, playing a crucial role as an ‘agency of mass impressions’ in the
large-scale displacement of people. . . . As an agency of mass impression, movies
became a new electronic presence in the social landscape of everyday life” (82). Today
the film industry is not only a tool of mass impression, but of mass production,
influencing social dynamics and behavior. The cult of the movie star, for instance, is a
major provocateur of desire. It has been since the dawn of film, as Walter Benjamin
realized in the 1930s in “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”:
“The cult of the movie star, fostered by the money of the film industry, preserves not the
unique aura of the person but the ‘spell of the personality,’ the phony spell of a
commodity” (231).31 The film industry is one of capitalism’s principal enforcers and
executors; its mythologization of the real (and exaltation of idealized representations of
the real) is an earmark of postmodern life. More importantly, film reaffirms the process
of capitalist production. Says Beller:
If ‘cinema’ as the process and the sign for the dominant mode of
production does not immediately have the same resonance as ‘capital,’
one need only begin to think of cinematic relations as an extension of
capitalist relations—the development of culture as a sphere of the

. production line. Thus cinema is at once a sign for itself as a

 

3’ In The Postmodern Turn, Steven Best and Douglas Kellner nicely surmise the relationship between the
celebrity, the subject and capitalism in a discussion of Debord’s society of the spectacle: “Individuals in
the society of the spectacle constitute themselves in terms of celebrity image, look, and style. Media
celebrities are the icons and role models, the stuff of dreams whom the dreamers of the spectacle emulate
and adulate. But these are precisely the ideals of a consumer society whose models promote the
accumulation of capital by defining personality in terms of image, forcing one into the clutches and
cliches of the fashion, cosmetic, and style industries” (90).

60

phenomenon and its processes, as well as a sign for capital as a
phenomenon and its processes. (27)
Film is a symbolic form of capital; it is “consciousness par excellence of twentieth
century capitalism” (25), a schizophrenic material practice that mirrors the practice of
the postmodern psyche. Burroughs tries to convey this crisis, expressing the negative
effects of capitalism by actually treating his writing like film/capital.

In one of his later pieces of writing, Blade Runner (1979),32 Burroughs
repeatedly refers to his narrative as a film: “This film is about America . . . This film is
about a city we all know and love . . . This film is about a second chance for Billy the
blade runner, and for all of humanity . . . This film is about the future of medicine and
the future of man” (3, 4, 5, 6). He even subtitles his narrative A Movie. Written in the
mid-19703, Blade Runner is a short novella set in a near future where right wing
political activism has incited a medical care apocalypse. By calling his novella a movie,
Burroughs underscores the image-addicted sociocultural state of his near future. This is
one of his favorite themes. For Burroughs, reality is a representation of a prerecorded
fiction, not the other way around. He incorporates film in variety of ways to convey this
message.

The cut-ups are not as self-aware as Blade Runner, but filmic qualities are
ubiquitous in all of them except Naked Lunch. Unlike the trilogy of novels that followed
it, Naked Lunch is primarily concerned with the tribulations of drug addiction and

homosexuality, not with the powers of media technologies. Nevertheless the book

 

32 Ridley Scott appropriated this title for his 198] film adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s novel, Do Androids
Dream of Electric Sheep? (I968). Blade Runner is a seminal cyberpunk text. Burroughs’ presence in it is
visible in a number of ways, especially in Scott’s presentation of 2022 AD. Los Angeles as a city entirely
dominated (and degraded) by image-culture.

61

serves as a foundation for the irreal, scatological ethos governing the subsequent trilogy,
which cut up and fold in on themselves and “share the metaphoric structures of the
‘virus’ and the ‘film’” (Friedberg 171). There are repeated references to life scripts,
mind screens, reality films, sound and image flakes, and The Reality Studio. Paragraphs
are constantly fading in and out like scenes in a movie. Mentally irnploded schizoids
lose the capacity to distinguish between reality and film. Images and photographs come
alive in people’s flesh. There is a character who is an actual strip of film tape, another
has “a vibrating camera gun sewn into [his] fly” (87), another with a “James Dean habit”
(27). There is a “sad movie drifting in islands of rubbish” (124), and priests that are
“nothing but word and image, an old film rolling on and on with dead actors” (93). In
the twelfth chapter of The Soft Machine, “1920 Movies,” “a black silver sky of broken
film” hangs over “a city of black and white movies” (135). One scene depicts a war film
shown in slow motion as the audience watching it masturbates in slow motion (79);
another scene sees a man learn to think and talk backwards by running a film and sound
track in reverse (82). The words film and movie riddle the cut-ups like bullet holes,
exposing the celluloid viscera of a sick, image-plagued social body. In this text, film, in
one form or another, lurks in every nook and cranny.33

In addition to Burroughs’ attentiveness to imagery and his adaptation of the
mechanics of filmmaking, his cut-up novels are filmic in that both mediums are
montages. Technically film is not linear and does not provide us with a complete view
of its imaginary diegesis. On the contrary, film consists of a vast series of shots that, put

together in a certain way, form a syntax that gives off the semblance of linearity and

 

33 All of the direct quotations in this paragraph are from The S0]? Machine.

62

completeness; and this semblance is obtained only because we are compelled to fill in
the gaps of the missing syntax (Wood 222-23). Deleuze explains this process in
Cinema 1 as “instantaneous sections which are called images; and a movement or a time
which is impersonal, uniform, abstract, invisible, or imperceptible, which is ‘in’ the
apparatus, and ‘with’ which the images are made to pass consecutively. Cinema thus
gives us false movement” (1). Burroughs’ cut-up technique basically operates in these
terms. Readers are provided with a sequence of narrative shots that form a certain
syntax, although it is a much wilder and more abstruse syntax than the average film.
Dashes and ellipses are used to link together random narrative photogrammes in a
conceptually linear fashion. Consider the following passage from The Ticket That
Exploded:
Movies mix on screen half one half the other—plays in front of movie
screen synchronized so that horses charge in and out of old Westerns—
Characters walk in and out of the screen flickering different films on and
off—Conversations recorded in movies taken during the exhibit appear
on the screen until all the spectators are involved situations permutating
and moving—(Since the recorders and movies of the exhibition are in
constant operation it will be readily seen that any spectator appears on
the screen sooner or later if not today then yesterday or tomorrow as the
case may be in some connection—and repeat visitors of course—). (64)
Each fragment is a distinct mise en scene in which Burroughs describes a particular
event or thing. They have no direct relationship to one another other than the common

theme of cinematic manipulation, which is only realized after the fragments are strung

63

together by dashes and begin to act on and react to each other, forming a “movement-
image.”34 This procedure is the narrative equivalent of stringing together celluloid film
strips. Additionally, the theme of this particular movement-image calls attention to the
theme that dominates the cut-up trilogy: the cinematic manipulation of reality. In
Burroughs’ universe, the real world not only acts like a film, it has become a filrnic
diegesis.

This idea was advanced by the writers and thinkers associated with the Frankqu
School. Sharing Marx’s theory of historical materialism, the Frankfurt School produced
a salient critique of mass culture and media production in twentieth century consumer-
capitalist society. T. W. Adomo and Max Horkheimer discuss the cinematization of the
real in Dialectic of Enlightenment:

Real life is becoming indistinguishable from the movies. The sound

fihn, far surpassing the theater of illusion, leaves no room for
imagination or reflection on the part of the audience, who is unable to
respond within the structure of the film, yet deviate fi'om its precise

detail without losing the thread of the story; hence the film forces its
victims to equate it directly with reality. The stunting of the mass-media
consumer’s powers of imagination and spontaneity does not have to be
traced back to any psychological mechanisms; he must ascribe the loss of
those attributes to the objective nature of the products themselves,

especially to the most characteristic of them, the sound film. (126)

 

34 Deleuze argues that the position of actual human perception is a movement-image, equating the
production-process of film with the production-process of the psyche and by extension the body and
society. Burroughs makes a similar equation, although metaphorically.

According to this logic, film deceives audiences into believing that its diegesis is reality
and infringes on creative thinking processes. The real world is perceived as a
continuation of film, not as a source from which film is represented and extrapolated. In
effect, the real world is confused with a fictional ontological space. Or, as Deleuze says,
the real world “becomes its own image.”35 This type of confusion is characteristic of
most media and has only become more pronounced since Dialectic of Enlightenment
was published in 1944, over fifieen years before Burroughs’ The Sofi Machine. Lived
experience in the trilogy has not become indistinguishable fiom the movies. It is a
movie.

The premise of Horkheimer and Adomo’s neomarxist analysis is that art, namely
film, is no longer art, but business, a cog in the capitalist desiring-machine that they
refer to as the culture industry.

The whole world is made to pass through the filter of the culture
industry. The old experience of the movie-goer, who sees the world
outside as an extension of the film he has just left (because the latter is
intent upon reproducing the world of everyday perceptions), is now the
producer’s guideline. The more intensely and flawlessly his techniques
duplicate empirical objects, the easier it is today for the illusion to
prevail that the outside world is the straightforward continuation of that

presented on screen. (126)

 

35 “The cinema can, with impunity, bring us close to things or take us away from them and revolve around
them, it suppresses both the anchoring of the subject and the horizon of the world. Hence it substitutes an
implicit knowledge and a second intentionality for the conditions of natural perception. It is not the same
as the other arts, which aim rather at something unreal through the world, but makes the world itself
something rmreal or a tale. With the cinema, it is the world which becomes its own image, not an image
which becomes world” (Cinema 56).

65

 

Horkheimer and Adorno presage Baudrillard’s idea of the hyperreal, a mediatized matrix
of implosion where reality cannot be discerned fiom fantasy and culture has swallowed
up nature. Film is a technology and an extension of the human. But in terms of
perception, of the way subjects view themselves and their relations to others, the human
is a technological extension of fihn; for Horkheimer and Adomo, authentic reality is
increasingly becoming a representation of filmic reality, not the reverse. This is
primarily an effect of the development of technocapitalist media and the process of
schizophrenic desiring-production. A representative example of the effects of this
process is visible in Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer (1960). Existentialist in tone, the
novel depicts a man beset by the monotony and superficiality of everyday capitalist life.
In order to compromise the alienation and ennui he feels, he takes refuge in movie
theaters, placing a greater importance on the relations between fictional personalities
than between real ones. He finds social resonance and stimuli in films, not society itself,
which is precisely the sort of “producer’s guideline” Horkheimer and Adorno mention:
the production of the desire for the culture industry.

Burroughs imparts a similar message, emphasizing how society has been
consumed by a filmic ideal that posits fantasy as the dominant ontological space. While
Percy’s narrative is grounded in realism, however, his is clearly not. One might say that
Percy represents social relations whereas Burroughs represents psychic relations. In the
cut-ups, society is a studio in which subjects exist as slaves/actors under the thumb of
the master/director of capitalism and its Darwinian ideology. “The reality film has now
become an instrument and weapon of monopoly. The full weight of the film is directed

against anyone who calls the film in question with particular attention to writers and

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artists. Work for the reality studio or else. Or else you will find out how it feels to be
outside the film. I mean literally without film left to get yourself from here to there”
(Ticket 151). Burroughs is partly being self-referential here. His wildly unconventional,
unformulaic, anti-mainstream writing was not well-received by the general public when
it was originally published, mainly because of its graphic content and its lack of
linearity. Much like an indie film might not use standard Hollywood structures, he did
not use normative/commodifiable literary structures. Burroughs uses film to totalize the
experience of being subjectified by mass market demands. Failure to mind these
demands will result in being thrown out of the reality studio; cut from the “reel,” his
characters’ life scripts will abruptly fade out to black. For them, all the world is literally
a stage—or, as Brian McHale suggests, all the world is a film set. “Burroughs makes
explicit what can only be inferred from other postmodernist cinematic writing, namely
the thematic fimction of the interposed ontological level of the film. Reality in
Burroughs is a film shot and directed by others; we are actors in the movie, our lives
scripted and fixed on celluloid” (McHale 129).

Fantasy does not serve as a support mechanism for the Bm'roughsian subject’s
reality, as it does for actual subjects.36 It serves as the mechanism. Reality is residual, a
sideshow at best. The technology of film is used to convey this position. Anne
F riedberg says that the cut-ups exploit film as “a metaphor for total control, a ‘reality
studio’ which must be challenged and subvert ” (171). Burroughs’ response to this
exaction, like most of his responses to the sundry Big Brothers that permeate his work, is

a call to action, to mutiny: “Storm the Reality Studio. And retake the universe” (Nova

 

3‘ See Slavoj zizek in The Sublime Object ofIdeoIogy: “fantasy is on the side ofreality: it is, as Lacan
once said, the support that gives consistency to what we call ‘reality’” (44).

67

59). Such a directive recurs in the cut-ups and ofien leads to some kind of cataclysm or
pathological uproar. These exhibitions of extreme violence are meaningful coordinates
on his cognitive map. They are metaphorical representations of society’s terminal
illness, reflecting the capitalist process of filmmaking and the schizophrenic way human
perception has come to function like film. The finest exhibition of this kind occurs in
“Gongs of Violence.” There are many points of climax on Burroughs’ cognitive map.

This point is the most acute and revealing of them all.

Gongs of Violence

“Gongs of Violence” is an explosive word salad that satirizes the production powers of
the American culture industry. The citizens of America are referred to as citizens of
“Gravity” or “Annexia,” a paraspace that seeks to convert its subjects into “all out to
Heavy Metal. Carbonic Plague of the Vegetable People threatens our Heavy Metal
State. Report to your nearest Plating Station. It’s fun to be pla ” (159). Burroughs’
disdain for passivity, conformity, homogenization and so—called moral superiority is
conspicuously Nietzschean. He denounces the herd mentality in favor of stark
individualism and creative self-expression, and he views social behavior and relations as
pathologically perforrnative. Annexia connotes anorexia, equating the “American
people” with a body that is unhealthy, weak, listless and addicted to its own decline;
Gravity connotes the idea that one is weighed down, inert, unable to fly and exist as an
overrnan (instead of an everyman).

Like Nietzsche, Burroughs moralizes with a hammer, challenging normative

conventions and calling out the constructedness of the human condition. At the same

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time, their means and ends differ—one writes in the name of transcendence, the other in
the name of symptomatology. An enemy of Christianity and Platonic philosophy,
Nietzsche located agency from social determinism in aesthetic innovation. In the
clutches of the culture industry, only the will of the artist can establish the self, and to do
this the artist must suffer as a fleshly and metaphorical social body. Suffering is the
gateway to individuation; in order to obtain selflrood, it is a prerequisite that the subject
undergo adversity and actively extend itself artistically. The Nietzschean fibermensch is
essentially nothing more than a productive “starving artist,” dejected and miserable yet
capable and free. In contrast, the Burroughsian subject is not an agential being. It is an
affectation, a symptom of the culture industry that does not achieve freedom in artistry.
All Burroughsian subjects are artists (namely actors) by cultural default. The problem is
that the subject/artist is not an innovator, but a banality, a carbon cutout, a Hollywood
cliche. The possibility of artistic individuation is stifled by the mass commodification of
culture, which disavows the self. If there is agency in Burroughs, it is the illusion of
agency. In short, Nietzsche brazenly repudiates the constructedness of the self,
advocating transcendence; Burroughs, in turn, satirizes constructedness, implicitly
repudiating it but understanding that transcendence is an impossibility.

Thus Burroughs’ represents the world as a film and subjects as actors who have
all been allotted the same role and don’t realize it. “Now the way I see it is this:
America stands for doing the job and that’s what’s wrong with America today . . half-
assed assassins . . half-assed writers . . half-assed plumbers . . a million actors . . one
corny part . . So we write a darned good part for every actor on the American set . . You

gotta see the scene as a show” (Ticket 123). He compares the experience of being a

69

capitalist with being an actor on a set, both of which require performativity and are
distinguished by routines. He acknowledges society’s “real unreality”37 and commands
subjects to perceive it that way so as to actively play it like a game. There is no outside
to the “scene as a show,” and everybody must play their respective parts. The only
possibility for individuation is landing a unique role. Even so, a part is still being
played, and it has still been written by a higher power. In the end there is only
pathological play. Burroughs portrays capitalist society as schizophrenic and portrays
subjects who willfully behave like the schizophrenics they have been conditioned to be.
To storm the reality studio and retake the universe is not to overthrow the “producers” of
the (un)real and reclaim the self. It is merely to dynamically realize the self as a
production of technocapitalist media.

This idea is most noticeable in “Gongs of Violence” in the segment where
Burroughs paints a picture of the ominous Slotless City. Jenny Skerl describes it as
follows:

This narrative portrays science-fiction methods of reproduction in a
society in which men and women are at war, leading to the creation of
fantastic new life forms fighting with each other for existence, and
ending with the destruction of all life on earth. The final apocalypse is
conveyed in ambiguous cut-up imagery. It is unclear whether the
destruction is positive or negative, a victory for the Mob or for the
Police, for the disintegration of present reality structures is a form of

liberation from control. (68)

 

37 Guy Debord’s term for the society of the spectacle (13).

70

The use of cut-up imagery in this sequence is doubly resonant. Both the filmic nature of
Slotless City is emphasized as well as the city’s fragmented, dreamlike, ultraviolent code
of conduct. “It is unclear whether the destruction is positive or negative” and whether
good or evil prevails because the pathological operations of Slotless City, while
produced by the laws of causality and moral order that govern the real world, are not
necessarily subject to them. It is a place beyond good and evil where the ethical
structure of mediatized society explodes, discharging a colorful array of angry desiring-
machines. “We are vehement in our desires, there are times when we would like to
devour each other—But the ‘sense of community’ masters us” (Nietzsche 160). A
landscape without slots, without constructedness and the imperial codings of late
capitalism (yet produced/performed by these things), Slotless City is Burroughs’
figurative version of what happens when a sense of community breaks down and we
devour one another, each of us playing our individual schiz-roles:
Have you seen Slotless City? Red mesas cut by time winds—A network
of bridges, ladders, catwalks, cable cars, escalators and ferris wheels
down into the blue depths . . . constant motion on tracks, gates click open
shut—buzzes, blue sparks, and constant breakage— (Whole squares and
tiers of the city plunge into the bottomless void)—Swinging beams of
construction . . . People rain on the city in homemade gliders and rockets
. . . Fights erupt like sandstorms, through iron streets a wake of shattered
bodies, heads bouncing into the void, hands clutching bank notes from
gambling fights—Priests shriek for human sacrifices, gather partisans to

initiate unspeakable rites until they are destroyed by counter pressures—

7l

Vigilantes of every purpose hang anyone they can overpower— Workers
attack the passer-by with torches and air hammers—They reach up out of
manholes and drag the walkers down with iron claws—Rioters of all
nations storm the city in a landslide of flame-throwers and Molotov
cocktails—Sentries posted everywhere in towers open fire on the crowds
at arbitrary intervals . . . The city pulses with Slotless purpose lunatics
killing fiom behind the wall of glass——A moment’s hesitation brings a
swarm of con men, guides, whores, mooches, script writers, runners,
fixers cruising and snapping like aroused sharks—” (154-55)
In this copious microcosrnic view of the terrain that he is cognitively mapping,
Burroughs uses purely descriptive language. There is no exposition to clarify or justify
the absurd, eschatological spectacle. It begins with a portrait of Slotless City’s
“physical” framework, a sort of demonic amusement park that perpetually reproduces
itself and all of the subjects it contains. There is “constant motion,” “constant
breakage,” “swinging beams of construction.” Power is not localized to select social
sectors,.peoples or classes; it resonates everywhere, unrepressed and without restraint.
People from all walks of life wreak otherworldly havoc, destroying the city and killing
one another with a creative flair and resolve. The play enacted here is pathologically
performative, graphic and brutal to the degree that it conveys both a sense of primordial
terror and absurdist comedy. The “gongs of violence” that Burroughs is sounding off
here and elsewhere in the cut-ups is a cartoon, a wild cirque de soleil that seeks to
override the late capitalist system of power dominating and inflicting its morality upon

the American social body. Such conduct is the cure for (psycho)society I referred to

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earlier whereby subjects become their disease, which is to say they become conscious,
firnctional and ultimately hostile schizophrenics.

“Gongs of violence and how-—Show you something—Berserk machine” (159).
These fragments could serve as an epigram to Burroughs’ cognitive map. Not only can
we read the gongs of violence as a signifier for the way the Burroughsian subject
playfully becomes its own terminal illness, we can read them as a signifier for the
culture industry, the vehicle responsible for pathologizing the subject. The gongs of
violence, in other words, are the sound of subjects playing at being pathological as much
as they are the sound of the machine that is prompting them to do so. Furthermore, they
refer to the syntactic montage of Burroughs’ cut-ups, the violent, schizophrenic aesthetic
he uses to illustrate a violent, schizophrenic social matrix; and by extension they refer to
how film as montage is an incarnation of the collective postmodern consciousness, a
fusion of “the protocols of [media] representation and capitalist production” (Beller 5).

There are poststructuralist undertones to Burroughs’ cognitive map, especially in
scenes like “Slotless City.” Binaries such as inside/outside, nature/culture,
reality/fantasy and self/other appear to be involved in the process of being deconstructed
and brought into play. But this is not the case. There are no binaries to deconstruct, and
Burroughs’ play is not Derridean. His diegesis is constituted by singularities that are the
marginalized halves of the aforementioned binaries. There is no outside: the inside is
the only ontological and ideological space (or the inside is the outside and vice versa).
Nature and reality no longer exist: they have been altogether assimilated by culture and
fantasy. And the self is only a self as a result of being produced as an other by culture.

This other is a technological being. It is a perversion of the human plugged into and

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machined by the late capitalist system, and its play involves the realization and
exploitation of its otherness, which is “capable of being represented finally only as a
fractal entity” (Kroker v). '

Similar to the cyberpunk panic narratives of the 19805 that are indebted to
Burroughs, the cut-ups are deeply invested in representing the schizophrenizing
technologies of multinational capitalism, invoking a “rhetoric of technology to express
the natural world in a metaphor that blurs the distinctions between the organic and
artificial” (Hollinger 205). What differentiates Burroughs fiom his successors is that his
panic narratives don’t simply blur the organic and artificial. Rather, they assume that
the organic has been negated and that artificiality is the rule of thumb. We might say
that they are beyond implosion and depict a kind of postcapitalist space. To a degree,
they are temporal anomalies, futuristic narratives not only about the future, but of the
future, mapping out a social, ontological, linguistic and narrative space that is the

devolutionary by-product of terminal civilization.

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CHAPTER 3
How a Discount Store Employee Defeats an Amy of the Evil Dead: Schizoanalysis
and Sam Raimi’s Army of Darkness
Capitalism and Schizophrenia
Jacques Lacan argues that love is a process involving an imaginary relationship. The
emotional exchange between two lovers is a fantasy in which each lover attempts to
capture his or her self in the other. It is a narcissistic “passive desire to be lov ” that is
achieved by unconsciously seeking out an idealized image of oneself in the beloved,
who serves the lover as a medium for objectification (335). To love then is to project an
ego-ideal onto another body and reify the self as image. The crucial thing in love is the
aim, the means, the process of reifying oneself as image, not the culmination of the
process. If it were to culminate it would cease to be love.

Deleuze and Guattari do well to equate this definition of love with schizophrenia
in Anti-Oedipus, arguing that schizophrenia is the normative condition of the late
capitalist subject. “Schizophrenia is like love: there is no specifically schizophrenic
phenomenon or entity; schizophrenia is the universe of productive and reproductive
desiring-machines, universal primary production as ‘the essential reality of man and
nature’” (5). As with love, what matters in the schizoid universe of capital is not a
consummation but a process—the process of commodification and “sociodesiring-
production.” Late capitalist society is dependent upon the media for its existence.
Media imagery produces an imploded sense of social un/reality in a way similar to how
lovers relate (themselves) to their lovers. Postmodern subjects are compelled to engage

in an imaginary relationship with the “essential reality of man and nature,” a reality that

75

is created and supported by technology. The “natural” has become the technological.
The terminal “extensions of man”38 that comprise our physical and social space (and
retroactively our mental space) are the defining characteristics of the human, not some
innate, organic gestalt. To be human is above all to be a productive capitalist, a
mediatized technocrat governed by “the dementia of the capitalist machine and the
pathological character of its rationality” (Guattari 53).

Unlike their arch-enemy Freud, Deleuze and Guattari do not merely speculate
about whether or not civilization is pathological. They assume it is, building their
“schizosophy” on the foundation of madness.39 For them, it is not a question of one
being mad; it is a question of intensities, of the degree to which one is mad. This isn’t
necessarily a bad thing. “Madness need not be all breakdown. It may also be
breakthrough” (Anti-Oedipus 131). Not a breakthrough to a transcendental self, but
possibly to a new subject-position, a different state of desiring-production. Such a
breakthrough can be misperceived as a breakout from the desiring-machine of
capitalism, which has no boundaries or walls—it is the one and only postnrodem space
and thus cannot be escaped. I showed how this is the case in Burroughs’ cut-up novels
where fantasy is “staged” as a normative diegesis, pathology as a normative condition.
Here I want to focus on the plight of the subject itself, as I did in my first chapter,
through a reading of Sam Rainri’s multigeneric science fiction/horror/comedy, Army of

Darkness (1993), the third and final film in the Evil Dead trilogy. Unlike the focal

 

38 As noted in my first chapter, this is Marshall McLuhan’s locution for how technology is a projected
representation of the body’s nervous system that both liberates and subjugates the human.

39 “There is no danger of this machine going mad, it has been mad from the beginning and that’s where its
rationality comes from” (Chaosophy 53).

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character in Vanilla Sky, a wealthy New York City dandy, this focal character is a
cashier and housewares’ clerk at an unknown Midwest American discount store.
Although they come fi'om different socioeconomic worlds, “capitalism and
schizophrenia” does not acknowledge that difference. Their crises and experiences are
vastly dissimilar, but in the end their subject-positions are the same.

Although it is over ten years old, Army of Darkness has garnered little attention
from academic critics; the wildly juvenile antics, slapstick routines and cartoon
uln‘aviolence make it difficult to take the film seriously. But beyond all of the absurdity
lurks a salient critique of advanced capitalism and its pathological effects. The
protagonist goes by the one word name Ash. A simple and ordinary man, he is sent back
in time to the medieval era by a demonic presence he encounters in a remote cabin in the
northern American woods. He is taken in by a group of medievalites ruled by King
Arthur. Initially he is enslaved, mistaken as a spy for a rival kingdom, but once he
redefines himself by the use of certain futuristic technologies (e.g. the shotgun and
chainsaw that were sent back with him), he is deified by the medievalites; they believe
he is a messiah sent to free them from the “deadite” zombies that terrorize their
community. The enslaved becomes the savior, and Ash leads an army of medievalites to
war against an army of deadites who are led by Ash’s undead doppelgiinger. In the end,
“bad” Ash is defeated and “g ” Ash emerges as a stereotypical hero. My reading of
the film treats it as a pathological wish-fulfillment invoked by the powers of late
capitalism in which the war can be interpreted in three ways: human in opposition to
inhuman, Ash in opposition to self (as pathologized by late capitalism), and Ash in

opposition to capitalism (as the machine that perpetuates a society of the figuratively

77

undead). Ash’s journey back in time is a fantasy, a schizophrenic delusion of grandeur
exposing his “machinic unconscious.” In the objective capitalist world, he is a cog; in
his subjective dream world, he is a king. And yet he is only a king by dint of his
technological savvy and the consumer-capitalist ethic that codes his desires and inscribes
his identity onto the social fabric. Whilethis schizoid fantasy may seem agential, it only
reifies his status as a common postmodern subject. My reading of Army of Darkness
also treats it as a critique of Deleuze and Guattari’s theory. I argue that the violence of
the fihn is an allegory for the theoretical violence they employ in their work on
schizophrenia and capitalism, namely Anti-Oedipus and its sequel A Thousand Plateaus,
which they claim to be fi'aught with revolutionary potential. The film suggests that this
potential is limited to being realized by purely violent measures that are accomplished at
the expense of truth. In this sense, Deleuze and Guattari, while certainly innovative and
stylish, are not as revolutionary as they are subject to the very system of oppression they

seek to revolutionize and subvert.

Postmodern Slavery
In the Wachowski Brother’s The Matrix (1999), Morpheus reveals the “truth” about
“reality” to Neo. “You’re a slave, Neo. Like everyone else, you were born into
bondage, kept inside a prison that you cannot smell, taste, or touch. A prison for your
mind.” The prison is a simulation created by sentient machines who were themselves
created by humans. It is a cybernetic paraspace in which subjects unknowingly exist as
digital, disembodied selves while their dormant bodies are farmed for the bioelectricity

they generate. The real world is a dark, apocalyptic wasteland and capitalism no longer

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exists in it. But capitalism is the socioeconomic motor of the illusory matrix that the
machines preside over, a motor that is essential to the sirnulation’s functionality
(originally the machines created a non-capitalist utopia but human nature rejected it).
There is an elementary Hegelian relationship between the two parties. The machines
need the humans for their bioelectricity, the humans need the machines for their
(ir)reality, and each community’s selflrood is established by the mediation of this co-
dependent relationship. In terms of class, the machines represent corporate powers
whereas the humans represent a postmodern middle class of laborers whose machinic
production of commodities is the musculature of those corporate powers.40 The humans
are technologies, extensions of the machines that sustain their lives. Concurrently the
machines are extensions of the humans, artificial intelligences created for the purpose of
quickening capitalistic production who turn against their makers and recreate them as
producing-machines. Both parties are excrescences of one another, and both are fluid
technologies that need yet detest one another. This is the ontological nature of
postmodern slavery: the terminal dependence upon and surrender to the Other that is
capitalist technology—an Other that, as an extension of the human, is also the self.

There are also metaphysical and ideological fundaments of postmodern slavery.
They can be traced back to Nietzsche and the hermeneutic of suspicion he used to
undermine traditional concepts of morality, truth and freedom. Nietzsche’s slavemaster
is Christianity, which he portrays as a desiring-machine whose end is to brainwash

humanity and liquidate the self by promulgating illusory senses of good and evil and

 

40 This is especially visible in the programs that hunt down renegade humans. Agent Smith is the
paradigm. His meticulous FBI-like attire, stony mannerisms and tone of voice, and diehard will to power
reflect that of the stereotypical corporate figurehead.

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free will. Postrnodernity’s slavemaster is late capitalism, which has replaced
Christianity in the Nietzschean scheme of things. A potent desiring-machine, capitalism
uses media technologies to construct a specific (im)morality and (ir)reality, to code
desire and the body according to a consumerist ideal, and to convey the idea that
freedom of choice exists."1 This latter component is the crux of postmodern slavery. In
earlier stages of capitalism, class divisions and power relations were much more distinct;
a wide gap divided corporate masters from working class slaves. That gap has
considerably narrowed in the late capitalist era as the social hierarchy has been
homogenized into a giant, variable middle class ruled not by a higher class but by the the
system itself, which is served ready-made with its own precoded symbolic order and set
of values and beliefs. Deleuze and Guattari say that “from the viewpoint of the capitalist
axiomatic there is only one class, a class with a universalist vocation, the bourgeosie”
(Anti-Oedipus 253). Established by a principle of immanence, the effect of this
categorical meltdown is a collapse of the traditional master-slave relationship in which
the identity of the one is assimilated by the other.
But the bourgeois field of immanence . . . institutes an unrivaled slavery,
an unprecedented subjugation: there are no longer even any masters, but
only slaves commanding other slaves; there is no longer any need to
burden the animal from the outside, it shoulders its own burden. Not that
man is ever the slave of technical machines; he is rather the slave of the

social machine. (254)

 

 

4r
Guattari writes, “Of course, capitalism was and remains a formidable desiring-machine. The monetary
flux, the means of production, of manpower, of new markets, all that is the flow of desire” (63).

80

The system thus prescribes subjectivity as subjugated, and any attempt to achieve
agency from it merely increases the intensity of one’s subjugation. In The Matrix
Revolutions, even Agent Smith, the quintessence of the technological being, cannot “get
free.”"2 The closest he can come to it is by becoming every single subject/slave in the
matrix, a feat that culminates in his destruction. In the postmodern world, freedom is an
intricate mythology that penetrates and produces the subject as slave on multiple levels,
rendering the will to power an avowal of powerlessness.

This dynamic is played out in Army of Darkness from the beginning. In the
film’s opening line of dialogue, the protagonist tells us who and what he is: “My name is
Ash, and I am a slave.” His confession of identity can be read in literal and figurative
terms. Literally Ash has been captured by King Arthur and his subjects, who find him in
the desert after he is hurled back in time by the “evil d .” The rival kingdom he is
believed to be allied with is ruled by Duke Henry, a longstanding enemy of Arthur.
When we meet him, Ash is being escorted in chains back to Arthur’s kingdom to be
judged. His body belongs to the medievalites and the historical present he now lives in.
But his body also belongs to the future present fi'om which he came in terms of his
subject-position. A flashback shows us what Ash’s “life script”43 used to entail: mild-
mannered and somewhat moronic, he works at S-Mart in the housewares department.

His everyday routine mainly consists of stamping price tags onto merchandise, ringing

 

42 Smith expresses this desire for agency in The Matrix while interrogating Morpheus, equating the matrix
with a prison: “I hate this place, this zoo, this prison, whatever you want to call it; I can’t stand it any
longer. . . . I must get out of here. I must get free.” Morpheus does likewise earlier in the film, calling the
matrix a “prison for your mind.” He and Smith represent the binary machine/human in which machine is
the dominant half and human is the marginalized. But both are equally subject to and subjected by the
technology of the matrix.

‘3 A term William s. Burroughs uses in the So}? Machine to convey the lived experience ofthe
postmodern subject who is constructed as a pathologically performative organism by media technologies.

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1p customers and repeatedly urging them to “Shop smart, shop S-Mart.” Equating
intelligence with consumerism as an advertising artifice, the mantra denotes Ash’s status
as an automaton, a machine that is always-already processing and echoing a language of

“intelligence/ consumerism.” His pale blue attire, a uniform worn by all of S-Mart’s

employees, is as blasé and ordinary as his vernacular. Ash lacks a sense of
individualism and purpose, yet he is not consciously aware of it. Unconsciously,
however, he qualifies himself as a residual body. Hence the significance of his name,
Ash, a byproduct, an exhausted remainder, the useless residue of the fires of the
consumer-capitalist machine, which harnesses his “bioelectricity” and uses his body to
maintain its functionality. Stating his name in the opening of the film is as much an
affirmation of being enslaved as actually calling himself a slave: his name and identity
reflect his selflrood and subject-position. Ash is in bondage on two existential planes.
His medieval enslavement is a metaphor for his enslavement by the technology of late
capitalism. Despite his temporal displacement, he is a conventional postmodern subject.
By my reading, however, his temporal displacement is psychological. He is a
schizophrenic breakdown that reinforces his status as a conventional postmodern
subject. To use the language of Deleuze and Guattari, his experience in the past is an
unconscious effort to deterritorialize himself, to become a “decoded flow,” to capture
the BwO (Body without Organs). “As for the schizo, continually wandering about,
migrating here, there, and everywhere as best he can, he plunges further and further into
the realm of detenitorialization, reaching the furthest limits of the decomposition of the
socius on the surface of his own body without organs” (Anti-Oedipus 35). Ash

metaphorically enacts the nomadic way of the schizo by traveling back in time where he

82

hen traverses a vast desert and forest to retrieve a sacred book (the Necronomicon)

containing passages that, read aloud, will both send him home and save King Arthur’s

kingdom from the deadites. He journies through his own heart of darkness and “plunges
further and further into the realm of deterritorialization” in an attempt to manifest the
BwO.

Such a manifestation is unrealizable. Deleuze and Guattari point out in A
Thousand Plateaus: “You never reach the Body without Organs, you can’t reach it, you
are forever attaining it, it is a limit” (150). Like Lacanian love, the important thing is the
process of attaining the BwO, of moving towards it, of setting desire in motion. Ash

illustrates this process in order to negate the socius that has been inscribed on the surface
of his body, which is to say his subject-position as surface. In reference to Deleuze and
Guattari’s concept of the BwO,44 Scott Bukatrnan explains, “The Body without Organs

is the state in which we aspire to dissolve the body and regain the world. So the
contemporary drama of the subject, terminal flesh, is played out upon the surface of the
body—‘depth’ is an illusion that belongs to a passing moment of a particular

subjectivity” (328). Ash wears his heart of darkness on the outside of his body. He does
not endeavor to manifest the BwO in himself, but rather on himself. He is produced by

the capitalist desiring-machine as a coded flow whose surface-movement is restricted,

limited, cut off. His movement towards the BwO—a state Deleuze & Guattari would

 

44 Deleuze and Guattari themselves adopted the concept of the BwO from Georges Battaille, rewriting his
“anthropological/psychoanalytic discourse of excess and transgression . . . within the terms of a
technological—even electronic—culture” (Bukatrnan 325).

83

call his “becoming-thingness”“—is an unconscious struggle to decode himself, “to
dissolve the body and regain the world.” If there is a master in the late capitalist system
(other than the system itself), it is the coded body.

As Ash’s repeated articulation of his S-Mart mantra indicates, the code that
speaks his selflrood is most visible in his own manner of speech. Even when he finds
himself trapped in a precapitalist, preindustrial era, he cannot escape being spoken by
the postmodern commoditocracy. His articulation of the mantra to the medievalites is
particularly revealing. It takes place shortly afier he is brought back to the castle. The
Arthurian knights have just returned from a battle with Duke Henry and his men, many
of which they have captured, including Duke Henry himself. All of them are quickly
sentenced to death. So is Ash, despite his protest that he “never even saw these assholes
before!” He is thrown into a dungeon-like pit, attacked by zombies, and imperiled by
two collapsing walls of iron spikes. With the help of his chainsaw he is able to survive
and climb out of the pit. The medievalites take him for a god, especially when he blows
Arthur’s sword in half with a shotgun. This monologue follows:

Alright you primitive screwheads, listen up. This—is my boom stick!
It’s a lZ-gauge remington, S-Mart’s top of the line. You can find this in
the sporting goods department. That’s right, this sweet baby was made
in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Retails for about $199.95. It’s got a walnut

stock, cobalt blue steel, and a hair trigger. That’s right, shop smart, Shop
S-Mart. You got that!

 

4 . . . . . .
5 The beeommg-thmg rs most notably expllcated m Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature. Thls short book

redefines and empowers Kaflca’s writing technique by schizoanalyzing it as an agential process rather than
a fixed, Oedipalized terminus.

 

 

During the monologue, the medievalites stare at Ash in blank-faced confusion, not
knowing how to respond, let alone what he means. Not only have they never seen a gun
before, they of course have no concept of commodity production and distribution.
Virtually every word Ash communicates to them is foreign; the gun specs, the retail
price, the store he is plugging— socially and ideologically, the medievalites are
incapable of processing the capitalist lingo used to convey these things. The only thing
they do understand is “boom stick,” which, in Ash’s view, is part of their “primitive”
lingo and thus the one utterance that they will process and react to. Nonetheless he
continues to communicate information about the gun, residual information that in this
context has neither purpose nor meaning. This linguistic residue reflects the residue that
is Ash’s selfl'lood. Overcoded by the language of consumer-capitalism, his body is “a
power grid, tattooed with all the signs of cultural excess on its surface, encoded fiom
within by the language of desire” (Cook 26). Above all, the monologue is absurd and
intended to be comedic on a surface level. But beneath the surface is a commentary on
the degree to which Ash, a representative everyman, is consciously and unconsciously
territorialized as a desiring-machine. Moreover, the ridiculous nature of his dialogue, of
his idiotic failure to treat the medievalites solely as non-capitalist subjects and ignore the
code that tells him to do otherwise, alludes to the dreamlike quality of the fihn and the
possibility that what we are seeing is in fact an agential fantasy formulated by Ash. In
the beginning, the fantasy merely represents his status as a postmodern slave. But its
unfolding sees Ash break his chains and become a hero and idol, a transformation he

enacts by exorcizing his coded, “bad” self and literally going to battle with it.

85

The Doppelginger
The schizophrenizing powers of technocapitalist media have led to the popularization of
filmic and narrative representations of the doppelganger that firnction as socioeconomic
analyses and critiques. Deployed as the split, fragmented self, the German term for
“double” has established a special resonance in postrnodernity. Outside of the science
fiction genre, the doppelganger is often a product of image-addiction and a
disillusionment with the superficiality of contemporary culture and subjectivity, as is the
case in American Psycho and Fight Club (the books and the films) and practically every
David Lynch film.46 Within the science fiction genre, it is often a product of capitalist
virtual and cybernetic technologies, as is the case in The Matrix trilogy, William
Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984), and many of Philip K. Dick stories and novels.47 Not so
in Army of Darkness. The highest technologies in this film are Ash’s shotgun, chainsaw
and car. Here the doppelganger is a late capitalist formation brought into being by way
of Ash’s unconscious will to overpower his constructedness. I read his doppelganger as
a metaphorical illness a la Burroughs invoked by the pathology of terminal culture. It
takes the form of a zombie who calls itself “had” Ash and is born from the physical body
of Ash himself. It is a break-flow, a fragmented body spawned by a fragmented body,
the schizogenetic residue of a residue. In an attempt to “get free,” Ash confronts the
dark half of his broken self, a representation of Ash as aflectation. Only by defeating his

“bad,” constructed self does he move towards a revision of his subject-position.

 

46 Most notable is Mulholland Drive (2001) in which a prototypical young/naive Midwestern girl goes to
Hollywood intent on becoming rich and famous and ends up indigent, unknown and schized.

47 Among the more representative Phildickian novels that feature the doppelganger are Ubik ( 1969), A

Scanner Darkly (1977), the Valis trilogy (1981-82), and the posthumously published Radio Free Albemuth
(1985). Not surprisingly, Dick was a schizophrenic who experienced various hallucinatory “doublings”
fliroughout his life (see Lawrence Sutin’s Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K Dick).

86

Ironically, he defeats his “bad” self with his “good” self, who is also a construction, his
identity produced by and dependent upon the existence/antagonism of his Other, and
vice versa. In the end, his subject-position, while it moves (in an act of
deterritorialization), is not revised—it lingers on the same ontological plane as always(-
already). Right now I want to recount how this doubling takes place and explain its
implications.

Ash’s doppelganger begins to form on his way to retrieve the Necronomicon
when he takes refuge in a windmill that alludes to Cervantes’ Don Quioxote (1605)."8
There is a mirror in the windmill. Ash looks in it, and his reflection moves of its own
volition: it turns up its chin and evil-eyes him. He dashes towards and smashes the
mirror. He picks up one of the fiagments and looks in it. This time his image behaves,
its movements corresponding with his own. Ash tosses the fragment onto the floor and
it shatters into smaller fi'agments, each of which reflect a miniature version of his filll
body. When Ash turns his back on the fragments, the images in them freeze and then
leap out, scurrying across the floor like excited mice. The miniatures collectively assault
Ash, prodding him with a fork, shooting him with his shotgun, and finally tricking him
into stepping on a nail. Ash slips, falls flat on his back and is knocked unconscious.
Laterheawakensandthinksthe fightwasadreanhbutwhenhetriestostanduphe

realizes it wasn’t: the miniatures have tied him to the floor in a way that recalls the

 

48 I am referring to the scene in which Don Quixote ridiculously believes a group of windmills is a
Wion of giants and engages in combat with them. Ash and Don Quixote’s characters are very similar:
both are absurd, tragicomic heroes that exhibit a phantasmagoric, overinflated sense of purpose and
selfhood. Whereas Don Quixote’s fight with the windmills (which is ultimately a fight with his psychotic
self) occurs on the outside, Ash’s occurs on the inside, in the body of the windmill, where he contends
with the miniatm'e, mirror-image Ashes that constitute his schizoid self.

87

Lilliputians’ treatment of the hero of Gulliver’s Travels (1726)."9 Two of the miniatures
pry open Ash’s mouth while another dives off a rafier beam into it. Gurgling and
choking, Ash breaks free of his confines and stumbles to his feet. He tries to scald the
miniature he has ingested by drinking a tea kettle full of hot water—as with most scenes
in Army of Darkness, suspension of disbelief is mandatory here—but he only succeeds
in prompting it to literally break out of him. He feels an itch on his shoulder, tears open
his shirt. Lodged in his flesh is a bulging eyeball that seems to be pushing its way out.
Hysterical, he dashes out of the windmill, exclaiming, “It’s getting bigger!” He staggers
and reels in a mad panic as the miniature enlarges and grows out of him. At last it
breaks free—an exact replica of Ash in appearance and stature. “I’m bad As ” it says,
“and you’re good Ash. You’re goody little two-shoes Ash.” Ash stares in disbelief at
his “bad” self as it repeatedly punches him. He quickly sobers up, blasts it with his
shotgun, dismembers the corpse with his chainsaw, buries the body parts, and continues
on his journey for the Necronomicon. Eventually he finds the book, but he fails to
remember the entire sequence of words he must recite aloud in order to retrieve it
without awaking an army of the dead. He takes the book anyway and flees back to
Arthur’s castle, and the dead rise fi'om their graves. Foremost among them is “bad” Ash
whose body parts leap out of the ground and stitch themselves together into the hideous,
deformed monster that leads the deadites back to Arthur’s castle to retrieve the

Necronomicon.

 

49 .

Thls reference to Gulliver 's Travels seems more explicit than the reference to Don Quixote. Ash is like
Gulliver, too, in terms of the absurdities he experiences and the pragmatic ways (e.g. scientific
application) he reacts to and negotiates them.

88

Initially it is tempting to read Ash’s experience in the windmill through the lens
of the Lacanian mirror stage in which the child establishes its originary subject-position,
recognizing its image in the mirror, identifying its station in reality (based on its image’s
station in fantasy), and ultimately delimiting a self/other binary. Ash is a metaphorical
child, afier all, or at least a sleeper; and Army of Darlmess is the story of his birth/
awakening, of identifying himself and fighting to establish a new subject-position.
Lacanian theory, however, is not a suitable means of reading Ash considering what
happens after he looks in the mirror. Lacan writes: “The mirror stage is a drama whose
internal thrust is precipitated from insufficiency to anticipation—and which
manufactures for the subject, caught up in the lure of spatial identification, the
succession of phantasies that extends from a fragmented body-image to a form of its
totality that I shall call orthopaedic” (4). Ash does not become an orthopaedic being.
He becomes the opposite. He enters the windmill as a totality and leaves as a
fiagmented (and fluid) body-image—a quintessential Deleuzoguattarian subject. Not a
neo-Freudian territorialized totality, but a deterritorialized multiplicity capable of
flowing across the “glacial reality” that is the BwO “where the alluvions,
sedimentations, coagulations, foldings, and recoilings that compose an organism—and
also a signification and a subject—occur” (A Thousand 159).50

Dismantled, his doppelgttnger fi-eed, Ash is now in a position to produce

something. What will he produce? Not his selflrood; one’s selflrood, while not

 

5° Ash’s anti-Oedipal subjectivity is further substantiated by the utter lack ofa father or mother figure.
His parents and family are neither mentioned nor alluded to in the film, and no character, save Ash
himself, adopts or exhibits a distinct parental role. There is no Daddy-Mommy dynamic available to
pigeonhole him as a static, fixed, repressed subject. He is presented as a fluid desiring-machine on the
surface of the BwO, “scurrying like a vermin, groping like a blind person . . . nmning like a lunatic: desert
traveler and nomad of the steppes” (A Thousand 150).

89

 

necessarily fixed, is always a post-production inasmuch as a new selfllood can only be
created in lieu of another one. But now Ash can labor to negotiate his selfhood, if only
temporarily: his labor is an act of deterritorialization that inevitably culminates in a
reterritorialization accomplished in his climactic defeat and annihilation of “bad” Ash.
Only “good” Ash remains, the heroic segment of his fragmented mind and body. He
returns to the late twentieth century present (a rettun to consciousness, according to my
reading) and his job at S-Mart by means of a magical passage in the Necronomicon. He
must also recite the words he failed to recall when he originally retrieved the book.
Once again, he can’t remember them in their entirety, and so he opens the gateway for
another manifestation of his doppelgfinger. A second battle/deterritorialization and
defeat/reterritorialization takes place, among other things. This final scene
problematizes the theoretical texture of the film and will be deliberated in the last
section of this chapter. For now, I want to emphasize how Ash is like capitalism itself,
continually “reterritorializing with one hand what it was deterritorializing with the
other” (Anti-Oedipus 259). He is an extreme case of late capitalist economy and
technology, an operative schizo who decodes himself to the limit (Guattari 73).

Ash’s failure to articulate the keywords to his salvation is indicative of his
character. The keywords are “Klaatu Barada Nikto,” an allusion to The Day the Earth
Stood Still (1951). In this classic science fiction film, an alien emissary travels to earth
on a mission to warn humans not to disseminate their violent technologies into space.
Accompanied by a robot named Gort, the alien calls himself Klaatu. He is wounded
before he can give his warning, pursued, and eventually killed. The words “Klaatu

Barada Nikto” are used to resurrect him, albeit not permanently, only long enough for

90

 

him to deliver his warning: if humans “threaten to extend [their] violence, this Earth . . .
will be reduced to a bumt-out cinder” by the robots, the true masters of the universe.
The film foreshadows the machinic apocalypse of The Matrix trilogy, and the parallel
with Klaatu and Christ is forthright (as it is with Neo). The same can be said for Ash.
While he is not killed and resurrected, he is the savior of the medievalites, “the one”
who quests for the grail-like book that has the power to destroy the tyranny of the
deadites forever. Both Klaatu and Ash use the words in an attempt to save humanity.
Unlike Klaatu, however, Ash is a buffoon, a mediatized body spoken by the arid, “S-
mart” language of consumer-capitalist society. The words not only confuse him, they
don’t concern him. He has particular difficulty remembering the final word, “Nikto,”
which he finally utters in the form of an incomprehensible cough, thinking it will
suffice. It doesn’t, of course. The deadites are awakened, his doppelganger exhumed.
Like the monologue concerning his shotgun, Ash’s cough is intended to be fimny
and evoke a sense of idiotic enjoyment in his idiotic antics. But it serves as a badge for
the way he has been territorialized by the capitalist machine to speak and perceive only
the language of the machine. Moreover, the idiotic enjoyment audiences experience
calls attention to the (pop) cultural idiocy that affects both Ash and postmodern subjects
in general. “The diminishment of human consciousness that emanate[s] from pop
culture” is blatantly immanent in Ash (Geyh xvii), who in this capacity is a metaphor for
the social machine of capitalism itself. Language here materializes in the vein of
Burroughs—“language as a system, as code, as an already received structure against
which we all struggle” (Porush lOO)—and Ash’s struggle against the system/code

emerges from the molecularization of his molar, machinic unconscious, fi'om the

9l

breakage of “bad” Ash and the army of deadites connected to him, all of whom are
productions of “good” Ash’s constructedness.

Paradoxically, this constructedness allows Ash to enact a deterritorialization.
Had the keywords resonated with him, neither his doppelganger nor the deadites would
have reanirnated and he would have retrieved the Necronomicon without a hitch. Thus
his “diminished consciousness” inhibits him yet at the same time empowers and enables
him. His salvation is dependent upon his mechanization. In order to redirect the flows
of his desire, he must unleash and disperse the “bad” and fight it with the “good” on the
battlefield of the BwO. These terms are of course spurious (hence the quotations
marks). It is only Ash’s unconscious that perceives the dismantled half of himself as
bad. In his diegetic reality, “bad” Ash is the hardworking S-Mart employee who
constitutes Ash’s jejune, dehumanized exterior. “Good” Ash, on the other hand, is the
dynamic, creative, passionate entity who has been repressed by sociocultural forces—
repressed because he is actually the “bad” one for not being a productive capitalist
subject, whereas “bad” Ash, in being productive, is actually the “good” one. This
connotes that, in the late capitalist arena, to be good is to be a labor-intensive automaton,
and the less emotional an automaton one is, the better. It is fitting then that his

doppelganger is represented in the film as a zombie.

The Metaphor of the Zombie
Army of Darkness alludes to and plays on a number of texts and tropes from different
genres. Most noticeable is its similarity to Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King

Arthur ’s Court (1889). Like the film, the novel is multigeneric, comprising elements of

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fantasy, science fiction, comedy, and the “international novel.” Allison Ensor describes

the international novel as “a confrontation between an American and the older culture of

Europe” (Twain ix), a style that the stiff upper-lipped Henry James mastered. Raimi

much preferred Twain’s tongue-in-cheek style and made use of several themes that

recurred in his narratives. Says Ensor:
To begin with, there is the device of the “mysterious stranger”—
someone fi'om the outside, someone who does not fit, who comes into a
community, ofien with disruptive consequences. Allied to this is the
“unrecognized genius” theme, which was used again in Clemens’ next
significant novel, Pudd ’nhead Wilson (1894). Here, someone having a
great deal of knowledge appears in a community too ignorant to
recognize his worth and may or may not eventually win proper
recognition fiom it. The difficulty in distinguishing dream from reality,
found in Mark Twain as early at T om Sawyer, appears once again,
especially in the ending. . . . The Hank Morgan we see at the end of the
novel is also a good example of the Mark Twain theme of the “lost
paradise.” Like Adam, Clemens’ favorite Biblical character, Morgan is
cut off from an existence which he can never return, from “all that is dear
. . . all that could make life worth living!” (x)

Each of these elements is noticeable in Army of Darkness; Ash is analogous to Hank

Morgan in conduct and circumstance.5 ' He is a mysterious stranger fi'orn the outside

 

5' Ash’s character is much like Daniel Carter Beard’s description of Hank Morgan: “He is a common,
uneducated man. He’s a good telegraph operator; he can make a Colt’s revolver or Remington gun—but
he’s a perfect ignoramus” (16). He also refers to the Yankee as course and vulgar, qualities that typify
Ash.

93

who doesn’t fit and who disrupts the community of medievalites by stupidly awakening
an army of deadites. This awakening allows his unrecognized genius to come to
fruition: using a Chemistry 101 book to make gunpowder, a basic knowledge of
automechanics to soup up his car into a tank-like war machine, and silly know-how he
very likely picked up from a movie to train the medievalites to fight a proper battle, he
leads them to victory. I have already mentioned the dream-reality schism, and as I will
discuss, at the end of the film Ash does rue his lost paradise, explaining to a S-Mart co-
worker, “I thought about staying. They offered me the chance to lead them, to teach
them. To be king. But my place is here.” In contrast to Morgan, however, Ash retains
his would-be paradise shortly after this dialogue when his past/unconscious and his
present/conscious implode.

To a lesser degree, Army of Darkness borrows from other texts. There is the
extrapolation of Don Quixote’s windmills, Gulliver ’s Travels’ Lilliputians and The Day
the Earth Stood Still ’s Klaatu I referred to earlier. There is of course the use of the
Arthurian legend and the quest for the Holy Grail (realized through the medium of A
Connecticut Yankee).52 The Necrononricon is an object originating in the horror
narratives of H. P. Lovecraft; it is a book that in some of his tales contains a mythology
of prehuman beings, and in others spells and incantations. In terms of characterization
and scenery, Raimi applies a comic book sentimentality, as he does in many of his

films.53 In terms of humor, he draws on the slapstick antics of The Three Stooges,

 

5’ The derivative text for the account of the Holy Grail is Sir Thomas Malory’s Morte d’Arthur. The story

fascinated Twain, who inserted a translated excerpt fiom Malory’s text into the preface of A Connecticut
Yankee.

53 Among Raimi’s “comic book worlds” are Crimewave (1985), Evil Dead ”(1937), Darkman (1990),
and most recently Spider-Man (2002) and Spider-Man 2 (2004).

94

whose violent horseplay is recognizable in Ash and the zombies.“ The film is a
pastiche, a patchwork of “imitatation[s] of a peculiar or unique, idiosyncratic style” that
has emerged as a response to “the disappearance of the individual subject” (Jameson l7,
l6). Frederic Jameson contrasts this notion of postmodern pastiche with modernist
parody. But for him pastiche composed in the realm of late capitalism is devoid of
humor; it is “a neutral practice of mimicry . . . amputated of the satiric impulse” (1 7).
This is not the case in Army of Darkness. The film’s humor is explicit and unapologetic
and more akin to modernist parody. Its schizophrenic texture is what makes it
postmodern. The fractal body of the film, its amalgamation of incongruous parts,
reflects the physical and psychic body of the film’s protagonist. Physically Ash is a
cyborg. As he reminds us in a voice-over during a flashback to the Evil Dead 11: “The
book awakened something dark in the woods. . . . It got into my hand and it went bad, so
I lopped it off at the wrists” Ash replaces his hand with machinery: a chainsaw in Evil
Dead 11, and a mechanical hand made of iron and chainmail in Army of Darkness, both
of which he relies upon for survival. Ash is a psychic cyborg, too, subject to the
machinery of late capitalism that constructs him as a desiring-machine with a molecular
unconscious that “is constantly being worked on by global society, that is to say, these
days, by capitalism, which has cut individuals up into partial machines subjected to its
ends” (Guattari 48). And so the fihn is also a desiring-machine, a machinic extension
of the capitalist system created under its aegis, a composite of breakdowns and schiz-

flows borrowed from other sources and temporalities.

 

54 In a featmette on the Evil Dead 11 DVD, Raimi admits to being influenced by the Stooges, including
some of their gags in the film. Similar gags are visible in Army of Darkness.

55 The reference to Ash’s hand going “bad” foreshadows the emergence of “bad” Ash from his full body.

95

On a theoretical level, perhaps the most significant component of Army of
Darkness ’8 pastiche is the metaphor of the zombie. In the postmodern era, the zombie
has often served as a vehicle for expressing social and political anxieties, beginning
most effectively with George Romero’s debut film Night of the Living Dead (1968) in
which the zombies can been read as a representation of the atrocities of the Vietnam
War. More recent is Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later (2002). Unlike Romero’s zombies,
who are produced by “space radiation,” Boyle’s are produced by a virus and can signify
contemporary post-9/ll fears of bioterrorism. Even more provocative is Romero’s
sequel to his debut, Dawn of the Dead (1978). Set in a shopping mall, the zombies are
conspicuome likened to the lobotonrized masses of middle class laborers and
consumers that comprise late capitalist society. Additionally, “jokes about the death of
capitalism, even while the capitalist instinct survives, are focused on the many goods
displayed in the spotless temple of consumerism” (N icholls 304). Zombies function in a
similar fashion in Army of Darkness. Their function is more complex, however,
especially in light of their kinship with Ash.

Ash’s experience as a S-Mart employee is representative of the postmodern mass
man socialized by the routine of commodity labor. In essence, it is the same experience
of the zombie, who is also socialized by a routine, a job it comes back to again and again
till death do them part: to kill and reproduce. As a laborer, Ash has an analogous job, at
least in terms of reproduction. The verbal and behavioral image he conveys of himself
as an agent of S-Mart merchandise and ethics is premised upon the reproduction of S-
Mart consumers. It is a necessity. In the absence of a steady flow of consumers he

would be out of a job, the same as a zombie would be out of a job if it did not perpetuate

96

its kind. Ash also embodies the zombie as a consumer. Like all capitalist subjects, he is
inevitably affected, in the words of Stephen Harper, by the “zombifying power of
consumer fetishism,” which invokes a desire to consume for the sake of consrnning, or
rather, to reproduce the desire to consume. All this reifies Ash’s subject-position as a
postmodern slave; similar to the zombies in Dawn of the Dead, the only emotion he
seems to experience are those that facilitate his ontological purpose. The zombies’
purpose is to produce as killing machines. Ash’s purpose is to produce as a battery
plugged into the capitalist machine. Says Harper: “Zombies function in Dawn of the
Dead as a lumpenproletariat of shifting significance, walking symbols of an oppressed
social group. This function is derived in part from their origins in the literature and
cinema of the twentieth century, in which zombies are synonymous with oppression and
slavery.” Metaphorically speaking, the same goes for Army of Darkness’s protagonist,
who, in the real world of the postmodern present, emerges as the true king of the
deadites.

But this dynamic is inverted in Ash’s would-be agential fantasy, where neither
the zombies nor Ash himself are emotionally territorialized beings, and where their
purpose is far more grandiose. Both parties are emotionally charged (and thus
deterritorialized) beings, one intent on saving humanity, the other intent on destroying it.
The behavioral patterns of the Ash we see in S-Mart and the one we see in medieval
England are diametric opposites. No longer the polite, modest, passive discount store
employee, Ash is crude, bombastic and animated—a charismatic individual, although
not necessarily an appealing one. This is apparent in his speech as much as in his

actions. His discourse is peppered with Obscenities, and he is a virtual repository of one-

97

liners. He actively manifests the Lyotardian apothegrn that “to speak is to fight.”56 His
conduct is no less belligerent. Usually he is engaged in some form of warfare, and his
general treatment of the medievalites, who he refers to as “primitive screwheads” and
“primates,” is outwardly disdainful and antagonistic. Ash’s doppelganger and his army
of zombies exhibit comparable qualities, administering their share of one-liners and of
course violence. Unlike Romero’s zombies, Raimi’s are intelligent, and the violence
they inflict is calculated. These are not mindless drones, not representations of Ash the
employee. They are representations of Ash the hero, warrior and messiah, except for the
doppelganger, who is Ash, or at least one pole of his unconscious spectrum. “Good”
Ash occupies the other pole, and in between is the army of the dead. Ash is both
protagonist and antagonist and his underlying purpose is to save the medievalites fiom
himself. Notions of “good” and “bad” are therefore negated. This negation is implicit in
Ash’s dialogue the first time he kills his doppelgiinger. In response to the
doppelganger’s taunts and to being called “goody little two-shoes,” Ash shoots him in
the face with his shotgun and responds, “Good, bad—I’m the guy with the gun.”
Morality is not the point. Both characters are equally barbarous. What matters is which
character possesses the resources to capitalize on his barbarism most productively and
efficiently.

“Good” and “bad” Ash and the deadites together signify Ash’s decoded self,
which has been unplugged fi'om the machine, fieed fiom the prison of the “matrix.”
Ash’s unconscious spectrum is a rhizomorphous mom in which the shattered

fragments of his schiz-body can flow and interact, and the combat and bloodshed that

 

56 The Postmodern Condition, p.10.

98

these fragments entertain delineate the process of the deterritorialization of his coded
self. The process concludes when “good” Ash kills “bad” Ash a second time,
catapulting the doppelgfinger into the night sky perched on a sack of gunpower that
explodes like fireworks. Ashes to ashes—the doppelgtinger returns to and reinforces the
state of fragmentation that constituted his zombie-body (a stitched together mosaic of
dead flesh) and his original body (an unconscious piece of the zombified Ash’s schizoid
self). It is a reterritorialization for “bad” Ash, who is initially deterritorialized when he
bifurcates from “good+bad” Ash’s primal body, creating two fluid organisms whose
production capacity is reliant upon them being foils for one another. The climax of
“good” Ash’s deterritorialization, in other words, is the beginning of “bad” Ash’s
reterritorialization. The opposition is as appropriate as it is imperative given
capitalism’s dependency on both processes in order to maintain itself as a steady
mechanism of production.

Following the death of “bad” Ash, the remainder of the deadites are swiftly
defeated. What does their defeat elicit? The implosion of Ash’s unconscious spectrum
and another consequent reterritorialization as the spectrum ceases to be a dynamic space
for production. Stasis sets in; there is no longer any work to be done. The zombies
return to the earth—Ashes to Ashes for them, too—and Duke Henry and King Arthur’s
empires are united in harmony. The opposition is liquidated, and violence (that is,
fluidity and procession) no longer has a use-value. Ash must return home to be
reterritorialized. He could stay and be king, but that would be an anti-productive
venture, and whereas Ash has redefined his selfllood, if only unconsciously, he cannot

free himself from capitalist subjectivity. Deleuze and Guattari’s desiring-machines,

their “lines of escape leading elsewhere,” are ultimately not escapist at all since
“elsewhere” is a place that exists inside of the capitalist system. What Althusser says
about ideology can be said about the ontological and metaphysical technoscape of
capitalism: the inside is everything, or there is no outside, or the inside is the outside
(“Ideology” 175). Ash has no choice but to retmn from the past to the present, fiom his
unconscious, decoded self to his conscious, coded self—back to the womb of the

“matrix.”

Back to the Matrix
Two endings were made for Army of Darkness. In the first, Ash retreats to a cave where
he drinks a potion concocted from a recipe in the Necronomicon. Each drop of the
potion will send him to sleep for one century, so he must take a drop for each century
that lay between the medieval past and the late capitalist present. He takes too many
drops, of course, and wakes up in a postapocalyptic future. The last scene shows a gaunt
Ash wearing tattered clothes and a long, shaggy beard—a Robinson Crusoe of the
future. He climbs up an embankment, stares in horror at the ruins of a dead city
demolished by a nuclear holocaust, and helplessly screams and curses. This was the
film’s original ending. It is ineffective for two main reasons, both the result of capitalist
forces. The first concerns the marketability of Army of Darlmess as a commodity. Its
producers believed that concluding on such a negative, open-ended, catastrophic note
would leave audiences dissatisfied and inhibit the film’s sales. For the film to make
money, there needed to be a happy ending. The second concerns the theoretical

groundwork that I have been mapping out. If Ash “returned” to a decimated future,

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from a precapitalist to a postcapitalist society, a reterritorialization could not be
consummated as there would be no means of sociodesiring-production. “Good” Ash
would be entirely on his own with nothing to plug into or to be plugged into.
Additionally, a temporal shift to anything but the originary present would not be a
reversion to the conscious but rather a relocating to another manifestation of the
unconscious, one in which the deterritorialization that had been achieved in the past
unconscious has entropically fizzled out. In order to function according to the binding
principles of late capitalism, he has no choice: he must go back to S-Mart and reinstall
himself in his derivative subject-position. Without this reversion, the film ceases to be a
critical theory. The breakthrough must experience a breakdown. It doesn’t work except
on the level of many early science fiction pulp narratives: a stupid adventure tale for
adolescent boys. A desire to satisfy the consumer market then induces the “happy”
reinstatement of Ash in the consumer world.

The second ending does not only bring “good” Ash back to S-Mart. The spirit of
“bad” Ash hitches a ride, resulting in the implosion of past and present, conscious and
unconscious, “good” and “bad.” Like the ousted ending, Ash must drink the magic
potion, but this time he must also speak the magic words. He doesn’t speak them, not
completely, and so the tiled floors and aisles of the discount store become another
battlefield on which Ash can reengage in deterritorialization and the process of
production. After Ash finishes telling his story to a dubious male co-worker, explaining
how he “basically” spoke the magic words correctly this time, a customer turns into a
zombie. Ash immediately slips back into the alpha male role of his unconscious self,

and the role of Sheila, his medieval love interest, is replaced by a female co-worker.

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Sheila is the proverbial damsel in distress who validates the hero’s masculinity by
submitting to it. (Even when she is zombified by “bad” Ash’s kiss and becomes “bad”
Sheila, she is still submissive to the hero in that “bad” Ash is merely one part of the
hero’s psychic body.) Ash pushes her out of the way as the zombie delivers a powerful
backhand to his face and sends him flying across the store, appropriately into the
firearms department. The zombie tears a cash register off of a checkout counter and
threatens to dr0p it on Sheila’s head. Before it can, Ash picks up a rifle, leaps onto a
tabletop and blasts the cash register out of its hands. “Lady, I’m afiaid I’m going to
have to ask you to leave the store,” he says in a polite monotone. The zombie snarls,
“Who the hell are you?” “Name’s Ash,” he replies, and cocks his gun. “Housewares.”
A fight the likes of Wile E. Coyote vs. the Road Runner ensues. Ash unloads an absurd
fusillade of bullets and the zombie leaps off of a trampoline and soars across the store
like a trapeze artist before being destroyed. Ash tears off his S-Mart uniform; beneath it
is a black, futuristic cowboy outfit. He flips the rifle end over end like a gunslinger,
sheathes it in a holster at his side, and embraces his co-worker when she dives into his
arms. In voice-over, he says, “Sure, I could have stayed in the past. Could’ve even been
king. But in my own way, I am king.” Then, tipping his co-worker over, he says aloud,
“Hail to the king, baby,” and kisses her.

The likening of Ash to a conventional masculine hero as portrayed by
Hollywood cinema is overt: he becomes Gone with the Wind’s Rhett Butler, or Die
Hard’ s John McClane, or any of Clint Eastwood’s spaghetti western protagonists. The
latter reference is particularly apt as the development of Ash’s selfllood climaxes in the

role of the mythical cowboy. This renders the deterritorializing journey through his

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machinic unconscious a process of becoming-cowboy, which is commensurate with
becoming-king. For Ash, the journey fiom present/conscious to past/unconscious back
to present/conscious marks his metaphorical and actual journey from slave to king.
Contrary to its agential objective, it also marks his reification as a late capitalist subject.
Ash may be king, but the streets of his kingdom are paved with linoleum, the buildings
built with canned goods and boxes of merchandise. His subjects are the S-Mart
employees and their customers. The role of the medievalites he lefi behind has been
sublimated onto them, and he is their messiah, sent to protect and serve them and make
certain that the flow of capital is not jeopardized by the wiles of the evil dead (evil
because it inhibits the production process by threatening to kill and decrease the number
of workers and consumers). He is king “in his own way”—the way of the postmodern
subject, which isn’t unique at all. As such, he is still enslaved, especially if we read the
scene as a megalomaniacal fantasy tlurt we perceive through Ash’s point of view. Thus
he is a pathological production of capitalism, fiee only by dint of madness. Reading the
scene literally yields the same thing. While Ash’s subject-position has moved flour a
source of robotic subservience to one of dynamic power, he is still bound by the codes
and ethics that originally constructed him. Rather than achieve a transcendence, he has
consecrated an “eternal return” to that which is immanent in his body: the processes of
capitalist reterritorialization and deterritorialization whose ongoing flux stabilizes the
“social axiomatic” (Anti-Oedipus 258). In this fashion, Ash represents the socius itself.
He is slave and master at once—the outside. Or he is the inside, caught in an incessant
state of becoming between the two, the hyphen in slave/master. Either way, he has

reached the limit of capitalism as a schiz-flow. “Hence one can say that schizophrenia is

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the exterior limit of capitalism itself or the conclusion of its deepest tendency, but that
capitalism only fimctions on condition that it inhibit this tendency, or that it push back or
displace this limit, by substituting for it its own immanent relative limits, which it
continually reproduces on a widened scale” (246).

A distinction between Ash as slave/master and mere slave can be drawn by
comparing the way he names himself here and in the beginning of the film. Recall that
in the beginning he is bound in chains and admits to being a slave. When he introduces
himself, he associates his name (and residual identity) directly with slavery (“My name
is Ash, and I am a slave”). In the end, he is not only free of any chains, he is holding a
weapon-—a powerful technological extension that demarcates a key coordinate of his
selfhood. He is also standing on a table above a crowd in a position of power
accentuated by an up-angle camera shot. When he introduces himself to the zombie, he
does not directly associate his name with slavery, but he does implicitly. “Name’s Ash.
Housewares.” He links his identity to the department he works in. The effect is
tantamount to that of his earlier monologue when he apprises the medievalites of his
shotgun’s marketable qualities: the zombie doesn’t know what “housewares” means.
Nor does it care. “I’ll swallow your soul!” it croaks, oblivious to his treatment of it as a
shopper. The humor of the exchange is rooted in the notion that everyone, even the
undead, is a potential consumer. In any case, Ash still remains a slave bound by the
chains of the commodity. But he is a slave amongst lesser slaves (co-workers and
consumers) who are bound by the same chains. The difference between Ash and them
is that he has realized his full potential as a capitalist desiring-machine. As in his

medieval fantasy, this potential is characterized by violence. In Army of Darkness, the

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pathway to freedom consists of tapping into the unconscious and harnessing and
unleashing its savage libidinal energy.

While Deleuze and Guattari don’t dwell on it, violence is an inevitable
consequence of their theory. It is in fact integral to the map of schizoanalysis they draw
in Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus, which is designed to derail and smash the
structure of psychoanalysis. Dependent on constant breakage, collapse, rupture, cutting
and fluxing, schizoanalysis is itself a violent arena in which the territorialization
processes are not smoothly accomplished. The method of narration that Deleuze and
Guattari use to articulate it is likewise violent. They often engage a machinic, fi'actm'ed
syntax that reflects their subject matter; they compact together a number of
methodologies (mainly philosophy and psychology, but also history, sociology,
anthropology, and literary theory) to unpack their subject matter; and scatological
references stain their writing like graffiti. It is a revolutionary style that depicts the
revolutionary “investment” they believe the schizophrenic process has the power to
invoke in subjectivity.” All this is violent conduct. Even many of the authors they cite
to further their arguments are violent in practice, especially Schreber, Artaud, Burroughs

and Kaflca.58 In short, Deleuze and Guattari fight violence with violence, arguing for an

 

57 Deleuze and Guattari explain the revolutionary potential of schizoanalysis at the end of Anti-Oedipus:
“The schizo is not revolutionary, but the schizophrenic process—in terms of which the schizo is merely
the interruption, or the continuation in the void—is the potential for revolution. To those who say that
escaping is not courageous, we answer: what is not escape and social investment at the same time? The
choice is between one of two poles, the paranoiac counterescape that motivates all the conformist,
reactionary, and fascisizing investments, and the schizophrenic escape convertible into a revolutionary
investment" (34]).

58 With the exception of Schreber, whose Memoirs of My Nervous Illness (1903) recounts a paranoid
schizophrenic fantasy in which Schreber’s body is brutally mechanized by God, all four of these authors
enact a narrative violence in addition to the violence that exists in the content of their narratives. This is
most visible in Artaud’s theater of cruelty, Burroughs’ cut-ups, and the many stories and fables of Kafka
where subjects are preyed on by the specter ofthe Law.

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agential outpouring of the technology of capitalism in contrast to an inhibiting
Oedipalization of it.

A text like Army of Darkness can be read as an allegory of this undertaking.
More importantly, it raises a seminal question: Is there any other way to jack out of the
matrix other than by means of violent praxis? Is, as Baudrillard claims, “theoretical
violence, not truth . . . the only resource left to us” (163)? If so, this is another instance
of how Deleuze and Guattari’s “lines of escape” are not altogether escapist. They
certainly offer a new way of negotiating and abiding the matrix. But the way remains,
like Ash, bound in chains. Deleuze and Guattari admit it. “But in every respect,
capitalism has a very particular character: its lines of escape are not difficulties that
arise, they are the conditions of its own operation” (Anti-Oedipus 67). One could say
something like the same thing about their theory: in every respect, it is as much an open
range as it is a jail cell—despite whether or not it is “good” or “bad” in comparison with
the praxis it seeks to overthrow. In this sense, they are writers of science fiction, as
Scott Bukatman indicates: “Deleuze and Guattari are cyberpunks, too, constructing
fictions of terminal identity in the nearly familiar language of techno-surrealism” (326).
And like many cyberpunk writers, Deleuze and Guattari’s science fictions are deeply
theoretical, critiquing the postmodern condition by mapping out its coordinates and,

most importantly, by technologizing desire.

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CHAPTER 4

“Capitalizm” Unbound: Max Barry’s Jennifer Government

The Ideoloy of Hyperconsumption
The production of subjectivity and the self by capitalist technologies is a central issue in
Max Barry’s science fiction novel Jennifer Government (2003). Unlike Army of
Darkness, Burroughs’ cut-ups and Vanilla Sky, all of which are grounded in fantasy, this
novel is grounded in realism. Set in a near future where the capitalist system has
matured into a Marxist nightmare, it is the epitome of the “Avant-Pop” narrative,
representing “the logic and technologies associated with the next phase of capitalist
expansion, initiated during the Reagan era: the ideology of hyperconsumption”
(McCaffery xviii). Dictating the course of psychological, behavioral, and social
patterns, this ideology is distinguished by various forms of violence that stimulate desire
and define postmodern reality. Such violence is a reaction to the filtering of notions of
truth, reality, and ultimately value through the sieve of the commodity. Says Brian
Donahue: “one can argue that the violence is a sign of the growing socioeconomic
system in which all value has been translated into market value, a situation that sends
parents to work for more hours of the week and leaves children to be surrogate-patented
by television and other forms of commercial mass culture, which merely replicate and
augment the alienation of the adult world, cynically positioning them solely as
consumers representing market segments” (27). Jennifer Government is a map of this
process, portraying the hypercommodification of the human condition as violence on
multiple levels. Deleuze and Guattari argue that capitalism is dependent upon continual

breakdown for its existence. In this chapter I want to explore some of the variables of

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this breakdown, especially that which concerns the subject’s relationship with its
technological self. This relationship is a site of violent disruption within the system that
italicizes the condition of the current capitalist matrix. At the same time, it delineates a
futuristic postcapitalist matrix distinguished by a spectacular implosion of class
divisions and a pathological desire to reconstruct the self in the form of the commodity.
In Barry’s near future, the world is governed by gigantic, predominantly
American corporations. It is a bourgeois utopia where free marketeering has become an
ontological prerequisite. Countries and continents are identified by the dynamism (or
lack thereof) with which they produce and consume commodities. The world is divided
into three primary regions: United States Federated Economic Blocs (North, Central and
South America, the United Kingdom, Russia, South Afi'ica, India, Japan, Indonesia, and
the Australian territories), Non-United States Economic Blocs (Cuba, Europe and
China), and Fragmented Markets (Afiica, the Middle East and Western Asia). All
territories are subject to the socioeconomic dominance of the USA, “land of the free
market”59 where taxes have been abolished in order to create a more fluid capitalist
system and where public institutions are historical remnants. Formerly public
institutions (e.g. the police) have been privatized and operate like corporations. Even
the government has been subject to privatization insofar as it cannot punish criminals

without adequate funding from individual parties.60 Global society is anti-Marxist to an

 

59 This label appears on the novel’s back cover. On it is a global map of Barry’s future demarcating the
different territories.

60 Hunting down the killer of Hayley McDonalds, for instance, requires Jennifer Government to obtain
funding fi'om the girl’s parents. “In order to pursue the perpetrators, we need funding, yes,” she says.
“The Government’s budget only extends to preventing crime, not punishing it” (64). Hayley’s parents
subsequently sell their house to pay for a retributive investigation. In this case, even vengeance is a
commodity.

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extreme degree,"1 and culture only exists as a compliment to the dissemination of
money; high art, for example, is a pair of intricately designed, grossly overpriced,
cleverly promoted Nike sneakers. It is in fact an incident involving a pair of sneakers
that initiates the action of the novel. The incident is an act of violence that spurns a war
between corporate powers. Predicated on the technology of commodity fetishism, the
dominant technology in Jennifer Government, the war is portrayed as the natural state of
the late capitalist system and, by extension, of human existence.

The antagonist of the novel is John Nike, “Guerrilla Marketing Operative,” a title
that overtly equates him with a soldier. Pioneer of “the concept of marketing by
refusing to sell any products,” he is in charge of new products (Barry 4). When we meet
him in the book, he and his colleague (another John Nike) are promoting a new pair of
shoes, Nike Mercurys, which cost thousands of dollars a pair and have been withheld
from the market long enough to instill a frenzied consumer desire for them. But John’s
strategy is not only a matter of retention. In addition, he contracts an assassin to kill a
select number of people who buy Mercurys the day they are released to the general
public. Murdering customers, he believes, will greatly increase the shoes’ market value.
“We take out ten customers, make it look like ghetto kids, and we’ve got street cred
coming out our asses. I bet we shift our inventory within twenty-four hours” (5). To do
the job, John deceives Hack Nike, an insignificant “Mere Oflicer,” into signing a
contract for a job in the marketing department; little does Hack know that the contract’s
small print mandates a killing spree. Hack gets cold feet and subcontracts the job to the

police, and the police subsequently subcontract it to the NRA. Following the

 

61 As Marx writes in The Communist Manifesto, “the theory of the Communists may be summed up in the
single sentence: Abolition of private property” (68).

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assassinations, the government is contracted to hunt down the responsible parties by the
parents of one of the victims. The rest of the novel concerns or relates to the pursuit of
John Nike by former advertising firm executive turned government operative Jennifer
Government. For the most part, the plot is disposable, formulaic—clearly written to be
easily adapted into a film. The interesting thing is the cognitive map of late capitalist
society that Barry lays out. Like many cyberpunk texts, Jennifer Government’s map
designates a postcapitalist society that critiques contemporary capitalist technologies by
mildly extrapolating the current ideology of hyperconsumption. Ideology refers to belief
systems as much as to power relations.62 Barry represents these systems and relations in
terms of a ubiquitous, divinized commodity culture. He effectively realizes Walter
Benjamin’s edict that the experience of the modern subject is “that capitalism will not
die a natural dea ” (Arcades 667).

Unlike stereotypical cyberpunks, Barry does not hinge his postcapitalist universe
on virtual and cybernetic technologies. The most compelling work of cyberpunk gurus
like William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, Rudy Rucker, Pat Cadigan and others thematizes
the integration of hard technology with the body and mind, “the fusion of being and
electronic technology in a new, hard-wired subjectivity” (Bukatrnan 244). The
cyberspatial “interzones”63 of these writers and their offspring (most recently the
Wachowski brothers, whose Matrix trilogy is working directly out of the cyberpunk

tradition) are arenas in which the self, subjectivity and ultimately the subject are

 

62 As Terry Eagleton writes in Ideology, “The term ideology . . . would seem to make reference not only
to belief systems, but also to questions of power” (5).

63 Interzones are one of cyberpunks’ most definitive tropes, as Bruce Sterling suggests in Mirrorshades:
“The cyberpunks, being hybrids themselves, are fascinated by interzones: the arenas where, in the words
of William Gibson, ‘the street finds its own use for things’” (xiii).

llO

renegotiated, reinscribed and reinvented. A cyberpunk fundament is that the absolutism
of capitalism as an ideology has produced an explosion of high technologies that have
penetrated as deeply into the social and cultural body as they have into the human body.
Barry’s novel treats only the former, making it a unique piece of postcapitalist science
fiction. The novel exhibits some paradigmatic cyberpunk traits—the detective story, the
femme fatale, the dominance of multinational corporations—but there is an utter lack of
technophilia except for the presence of that which exists today in the form of television,
the Internet, and similar media. Instead Barry focuses on how the subject is produced by
late capitalist ideology alone; late capitalist technology is treated as subsidiary,
producing little in the postmodern psyche. This inattentiveness is both problematic and
profitable. On the one hand, it dissociates technology from capitalism, which are reliant
upon one another for their existence. In the absence of advancing technologies, the
capitalist system cannot become more fluid; likewise, if the capitalist system fails to
become more fluid, so will technologies fail to advance. Each process produces the
other, and negating one of them would automatically negate the other. At the same time,
Barry is not altogether inattentive to technology; he simply doesn’t account for the
dependence of capitalist innovation on technological innovation. His prioritizing of
ideology over technology (rather than the other way around) as a producer of the
postmodern psyche distances Jennifer Government from its cyberpunk precursors.
Nevertheless it does not submit an alternate reading of how capitalism—or, as Barry
refers to it, capitalizm—defines the interrelations of postmodern subjects. Jennifer
Government, like the conventional cyperbunk text, reveals that violence is the principal

determinant of terminal identity. What kind of violence? If we understand that

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technology and selfhood are interchangeable terms, the kind that effectuates fi'om the

retroactive reconstruction of subjectivity by the extensions of its technological self.

(Later) Late Capitalist Identity

Jennifer Government is divided up into six parts, each of which contains numerous short
chapters. Each chapter itself contains a mosaic of short scenes that leap back and forth
between the novel’s various subplots. Temporally the narrative progresses forward in a
linear fashion, but its structure is fiagmentary, a montage, a schizoid assemblage that
reflects the socioeconomic structure of the novel’s diegesis and ultimately the .
postmodern condition. The structure recalls Burroughs’ cut-ups, which, as I discuss in
my second chapter, reflect the postmodern condition in a similar manner, albeit Barry’s
cut-ups are much more user-friendly given Burroughs’ atemporality and splintered
syntax. In this way, Jennifer Government exhibits what Fredric Jameson calls the
“schizophrenic disjunction” of late capitalist identity and the way it is produced by
transnational corporate reality (Postmodernism 29). (The same might be said for the
online computer simulation game, Jennifer Government: NationStates, which Barry
created in order to sell more novels“)

The first short scene establishes this disjunction. The scene is a water cooler
conversation, a cliche, almost imaginary experience that, in the business world, signifies

a sense of freedom, leisure and community distinct from the machinic drudgery of

 

64 On the Jennifer Government: NationStates website, Barry is asked why he made the game. His
response: “Because it seemed like a fun idea, and a way to let people know about my novel Jennifer
Government. With luck, some of the people who play NationStates will buy the book. Then my publisher
will think I am a lefl-field marketing genius. instead of a Chump who blew four months on a web game
when he should have been working on his next novel.”

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pencil-pushing and number-crunching. In reality, the water cooler is a myth. It is
merely a vehicle for conveying where postmodern slaves/subjects, whose mediatized
reality is constituted by a mythic sensibility, relate to one another and discuss issues that
may not be directly connected to their daily labor (e. g. television sitcoms). Jennifer
Government appropriately opens within the confines of this myth when Hack Nike
bumps into “the suits” or, as they are later called, “the Johns” (3). The meeting is a
fluke as the water cooler on his floor, Merchandise Distribution, has run out, so he goes
to the Marketing floor to use its cooler. Here we are made aware of the great difference
between mediating commodities and marketing them; in the novel’s diegesis, one is a
trivial form of menial labor, the other is a well-respected, well-paid form of artistry and
power. The difference is presented as a class division (lower-middle/upper-middle),
only both classes are contained by the corporate sphere. At first, the Johns think Hack is
one of them. “They were smiling at him as if he was an equal—but of course, Hack was
on the wrong floor. They didn’t know he was just a Merc Officer” (2). They quickly
figure it out, however, and devise a plan to use him as a scapegoat. It is a plan they have
been waiting to hatch for some time. They ask Hack if he would be interested in doing
some marketing work. Overjoyed, Hack breaks down and cries. Not only will he
receive a wage increase, he will receive the social prestige and political clout that
accompanies the art of marketing. It isn’t until after he has hastily signed a contract
without reading it that he realizes the Johns are insincere: in the contract are terms
stipulating that Hack must assassinate consumers of the newly released Mercury shoes.
In addition to introducing readers to the ethical system of the novel’s

hyperconsumerist society, this scene is a portrait of late capitalist identity, particularly

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the way in which the postmodern self is projected by a subject-position that is
increasingly mediatized by technocapitalism. This is assuming four things: 1) the self is
an extension of the subject; 2) the self is an assemblage of technologies projected
outside of the body that distinguish the body in some way; 3) the subject is an
assemblage of technologies injected into the body (by the Other of culture) that construct
it and to varying degrees determine its selfhood; and 4) the Other of culture is merely the
self in disguise. The subject and the self form a fluid binary, in other words, designating
internal/external, and both halves are produced by technocapitalist machinery, which
endeavors to collapse them into one another. This is terminal identity, although not
specifically in the sense proposed by Scott Bukatrnan: “The ultimate embodiment (or
dis-embodiment) of terminal identity is the electronically enhanced simulation of a
human” (253). In broader terms, terminal identity indicates the disappearance of the
subject—rself into the commodity spectacle. The technetronic modification of the
human is merely one means of accomplishing the disappearance of the subject—rself.
Terminal identity thus materializes in the opening scene most visibly by way of
the characters’ surnames. Despite the class division that distinguishes them, Hack and
the Johns alike are identified not by their family and ancestry but by their corporate
employer. Such is the case with all of Jennifer Government’s characters, including
others like Buy Mitsui, Billy NRA, Michael Microsoft, Jason Mutual Unity, Rendell
ExxonMobil and Vanessa F ashion-Warehouse.com; and if people are not old enough to
have a job, they are marked by the names of their schools, all of which are owned by
corporations (e.g. Pepsi, McDonalds, Mattel). This form of identification binds social

subjects to their capitalist labor in the sense that subjects only exist through the medium

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of their employers. Few characters are not bound in this way since unemployment is
virtually nonexistent. The reason: no taxes. Student Hayley McDonalds explains in a
class presentation called “Why I Love America”:
Before USA countries abolished tax, if you didn’t have a job, the
Government took money from working people and gave it to you. So,
like, the more useless you were, the more money you got. . . . But now
America has all the best companies and all the money because everyone
works and the Government can’t spend money on stupid things like
advertising and elections and making new laws. They just stop people
from hurting each other and everything else is taken care of by the
private sector, which everyone knows is more efficient. (7)
This is an ironic foreshadowing of Hayley’s murder and martyrdom. Her death by
consumption (of a commodity) is a key to the success of the Johns’ marketing artwork.
She also serves Barry as a vehicle of exposition, allowing him to explain to readers early
in the novel what “capitalizm” is and how it affects subjectivity. From an early age, the
morals and values of American hyperconsumerist society are instilled in children as they
are trained to speak the language ofterminal identity.“ Their surnames are a kind of
ethical badge. The few subjects who do not have jobs are identified only by their first
names, a sign of immorality in contempt of the socioeconomic order. As the narrator

says of a nomad named Billy, once employed by Bechtel Corporation, later by the NRA:

 

65 The language of terminal identity is tantamount to the language of Guy Debord’s society of the
Spectacle, which “is composed of signs of the dominant organization of production—signs which are at
the same time the ultimate end-products of that organization” (13). In spite of their constructed
relationship with the bodies they signify, names are perceived as a keynote of identity (at least in terms of
distinguishing one person/capitalist from another), and in Jennifer Government, they are used to designate

the capitalist organization of production.

“5

“The truth was he wasn’t Billy Bechtel anymore, of course; he was just Billy,
unemployed wanderer. But it was too embarrassing to announce yourself without a
surname. People thought you were a bum” (24).

Barry terminally identifies some characters by their first names as well as their
surnames. The impact is Dickensian, the names reflecting their personalities. Hack, for
one, is just that: a hireling employed to perform an unpleasant task for money who,
unable to carry out the terms of his employment, sells the job to the police and later
becomes a terrorist, leading a failed resistance against the system of capitalizrn because
he could not “hack” it as a operative capitalist subject. The name John is appropriate for
the antagonists, its abundance and overuse signifying the lack of individuality and
machinic character that the capitalist system creates. It is also interesting that the name
John’s ethnic origin is Hebrew and translates as “God Gave.” The antagonist’s full
names are thus God Gave Nike, which lends a biblical connotation to their identities and
to capitalizrn in general (violent and productive, the Johns are the ultimate capitalist
desiring-machines). Another meaningful name is Buy Mitsui. Buy “was an Account
Manager, Competitive Accounts Group, Southern Region, which meant he was a
stockbroker, which meant he was a salesman” (13). Of French origin, he changed his
name fi'om J can-Paul when he moved to a “USA country” to reflect the American way
(15). Such nomenclature is a tool Barry uses to underscore the great degree to which
identity and subjectivity are determined by “the world of the commodity ruling over all
lived experience” (Debord 26).

In America, Jean Baudrillard contends that “America has no identity problem. In

the future, power will belong to those peoples with no origins and no authenticity who

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know how to exploit that situation to the full” (76). This future has come to fi'uition in
Jennifer Government. Origins and authenticity have been usurped by capitalist know-
how as insignia of identity, rendering identity a matter of power-knowledge. At stake is
the type of knowledge that is empowering: knowledge of postmodern desire, which
entails, above all, the desire to exist as an operative, productive cog in the machine of
American commodity-culture."6 All other forms of knowledge (of history, science, the
“streets,” etc.) are trivial, disposable, hobbies at best. This epistemological mutation has
gained momentum in the postmodern era—consider especially the rising de-emphasis on
education and the liberal arts in the US—positing “the self [as] the haunted repository of
sensitivity, vulnerability, and emotion, of need and desire. The commodity increasingly
invades the realm of satisfaction” (Ewen 263). In the novel, the commodity has
conquered the realm of satisfaction. Everybody is an adamant capitalist desiring-
machine connected to everybody else in the vein of Deleuzoguattarian theory.“7 Desire
has been Americanized, a process attributable to America’s devotion to productivity.
John Nike tells Hack:

You want to know why Americans took over the world, Hack? Because

they respect achievement. Before this was a USA country, our ideal was

the working-class butler, for Christ’s sake. If Australians ruled the

world, everyone would work one day a week and bitch about the pay. . . .

 

66 John Nike expresses this idea when he says: “We’re all cogs in wealth-creation machines. That’s all”
(222). The absence of the machines, he implies, would negate the subject, the body, desire.

67 . . . . . . . .

Say Deleuze and Guattan: “What defines desmng-machmes IS precrsely their capacity for an unlimited
number of connections, in every sense and in all directions. It is for this very reason that they are
machines, crossing through and commanding several structures at the same time” (Anti-Oedipus 126).

117

Then there’s the British, who thought there was something wrong with
making money. No surprise they ended up kissing the colony’s ass. The
Japanese, they think the pinnacle of achievement is a Government job.
The Chinese are Communist, the Germans are Socialists, the Russians
are broke . . . what does that leave? . . . America. . . The United States of
America, the country founded on free-market capitalizrn. I tell you those
Founding Fathers knew their shit. (55-56)

In John’s view, the Americanization of desire was an inevitability as the non-United
States “economic blocs” had aberrant interests in the productivity of material, social and
cultural capital. As such, it is implied that their identities were aberrant by dint of their
failure to embrace the technology of the commodity as the dominant technology of the
self. Global capitalizm, however, has freed them from their mulish ways, asserting that
the natural state of the human condition is one that is always-already immersed in the
process of capitalist production. Nature is thus linked to the commodity, particularly
commodity fetishism. Marx contends that this is a fundamental bourgeois perspective in
the first volume of Capital. In a passage that critiques the lack of a critique of labor in
terms of value, he writes:

Political economy has indeed analysed, however incompletely, value and
its magnitude . . . But it has never once asked the question why labour is
represented by the value of its product and labour-time by the magnitude
of that value. These formulas, which bear it stamped upon them in
unmistakable letters that they belong to a state of society in which the

process of production has the mastery over man, instead of being

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controlled by him, such formulas appear to the bourgeois intellect to be

as much a self—evident necessity imposed by nature as productive labor

itself. (84-85)
According to the bourgeois intellect, then, which is the only intellect in the diegetic
reality of Jennifer Government, capitalist production and commodity fetishism are
demanded by nature. They are natural extensions of the human, and it is the proportions
of these extensions that determine the identities of communities and individuals. In
these terms, identity emerges as the measure of capital one possesses, subjectivity as the
dynamic way that capital is acquired, and selflrood as the commodities one produces and
consumes with that capital. This is basically the way things are today. What
distinguishes late capitalism from Barry’s capitalizrn is an issue of consciousness. In his
biography of Marx, Karl Korsch writes: “Only by keeping the people unconscious of the
real contents of those basic relations of the existing social order . . . only through the
fetishistic transformation of the social relations between the class of specialists and the
class of wage laborers, resulting in the ‘free and unhampered’ sale of the ‘commodity
labor-power’ to the owner of ‘capital,’ is it possible in this society to speak of freedom
and equality” (53). On the other hand, subjects of capitalizrn (that is, later late
capitalism) are not unconscious of the relations of the existing social order. They are
acutely conscious of the commodity-fetishization of society and of themselves,
regardless of their economic and ethical status, mainly because there is only one class,
the bourgeois, which has assimilated the socioeconomic strata beneath and above it.
Divisions still exist, but only within the consummate bulk of the bourgeois matrix, and

subjects that are disillusioned by the ruling commoditocracy and have ethical objections

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to it only do so because they lack the capital to do otherwise. Ethics are thus determined
by income. The same can be said for identity. Moreover, the constructedness of identity
is not something that occurs solely from the outside-in, it is something that subjects
actively pursue in hopes of realizing the “goodness” that accompanies wealth-creation.
In short, there is a fervent, conscious desire on the subject’s part to be constructed by
capitalist technologies on a social and moral level. While this desire has not been fully
realized in the late capitalist era, Barry is clearly suggesting that it is on the horizon and

the world is rushing towards it.

The Technology of the Tattoo
Names are a telling marker of identity in Jennifer Government, and there is nothing
subtle about what they signify: the commodification of the body. Capitalizrn has
tightened the connection between the name and the body. Not so, for the most part, in
late capitalism. From a structuralist perspective, there is of course no inherent
relationship between a name/signifier and a body/referent. A person’s name says and
represents nothing about that actual person; it is merely a word we associate with one’s
flesh and Dasein. Subjects of capitalizrn, however, experience a different relationship.
The natural state of their social bodies is a capitalist state. Unlike Marxist subjects, their
bodies are not denatured by the bourgeois socioeconomic matrix, alienated from one
another and from themselves by the forces of commodity production. They can’t be: the
bourgeois socioeconomic matrix is the only ontology that exists. Nature is not a space

that exists outside the domain of capitalist technologies, it is that domain. In capitalizm,

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names have a more intimate connection with bodies, signifying the specific labor and
commodities that define bodies and reifying the fusion of economy and desire.

In addition to the linguistic technology of nomenclature, Barry employs the
imagistic technology of the tattoo. Both are means of capitalist signification. Rather
than imprint their flesh with images of yin-yangs, butterflies, Chinese symbols, sex
objects, barbed wire or the like, subjects decorate themselves with corporate logos.
Waiting in line to order at a Burger King, for instance, Billy notices “five or six teenage
boys . . . approaching the store, all baggy clothes and tattoos. . . . Billy saw that their
tattoos weren’t ordinary designs, they were logos. He saw a lot of Nike swooshes and
NRA designs. The leader had a US Alliance logo on his shaved h ” (277). Like
naming, these tattoos are signs of allegiance; but they are also fashion statements. This
raises a few questions. In capitalizrn, what constitutes en vogue fashion? What is the
purpose of fashion. What does fashion represent in terms of society, culture, and
identity? I want to address these questions using the tattoo as an example. First,
however, I will briefly discuss the tattoo as it has been represented and perceived now
and in the past.

Jessica Hong writes: “The ancient Polynesians were the ones who created
tattoos. They pounded sharp sticks tipped with ash and coconut oil repeatedly into their
flesh with mallets. . . . Patient[s] . . . [were] tied to a tree so that they cold not run away
from the pain” (Tattoos). For the Polynesians, tattoos were status symbols, and the
painful process of their inscription were rites of passage necessary for elevating them to
positions of power. Virginia Burrus claims that early Thracian cultures considered

tattooing a positive social marker for similar reasons. In contrast, Ancient Greeks and

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Romans “used tattoos to mark bodies of criminals and slaves, that is, to inscribe the
violence of punishment or possession” (Macrina ’s 404). They dismissed cultures that
held tattoos in high regard as primitive and barbaric. Hence the tattoo originally
functioned as a sign of degradation as well as nobility; and no matter why it was
inscribed and how it was perceived, “the body that was marked by another [was] also
marked as other” (405). For better or for worse, the tattoo was at its core an instrument
of individuation, a technology of the image that was used to demarcate a specific kind of
self/other.

Today the tattoo has been ascribed a new meaning. Compared with its origins,
this meaning is an illusion. In an article that explores the postmodern fascination with
cult media and raisons d ’étre called “Stupid Underground,” Paul Mann writes:

How much can be made of a brightly colored scar? Only yesterday the
tattoo was presented . . . as a radical form of self-expression, an intense
and immediate means of repossessing the body, taking it back from all
the social systems that, one believes, have stolen it. In various claims,
developed more through repetition than through thorough investigation,
the tattoo is a risk, an adventure, a gamble with permanence . . . it
resexualizes and resacralizes the body and is hence an attack on a
desacralized culture, a culture that separates spirit and body, purity and
sexuality; it is transcendentally abject . . . it is a provocation aimed at the
straight world . . . it is a way to link those who have undergone the ritual

of tattooing in a sub-community, and therefore a mode of communication

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as well; it is also, as we shall see, a peculiar and stupidly characteristic

instance of fun. (Postmodern 38)
Mann’s portrayal of the tattoo is in reference to its manifestation in the earlier and
middle postmodern era, particularly in the 19808 when subcultural praxis evolved into
mainstream phenomenon. He explains that the tattoo’s proliferation during this time
was followed by the proliferation of logo clothing, namely the shirt. “Every T—shirt is
the sign of advocacy, even if one is not particularly invested in the product. . . . One is
recognized, even if it is by proxy. . . . One submits to the objectification of the human
body by the fashion industry” (3 8). Not only that, one desires the objectification of the
body by fashion, actively engaging in the pursuit of creating a self by clothing it,
literally and metaphorically.“ At this point, however, tattoos were not fashionable on a
mass scale; the bodies that wore them were for the most part associated with “fiinge
subcultures (biker, carny, sailor, con),” and their “brightly colored scars” served the
purposes Mann states in the above passage. The tattoo was an eccentric, audacious
technology, an imagistic extension of the self that individuated the self from normative,
conservative technologies like shirts. Ironically, shirts produced by the likes of Polo,
Izod, Ambercrombie, Calvin Klein and so on individuated subjects as well. The two
differ in that shirts individuated subjects through community, by associating bodies with
a particular brand of capitalist media. The irony is that it is as much a process of

massification (by creating a group of branded bodies) as individuation (by creating a

 

68 Such an awareness hearkens to Horkheimer and Adomo’s notion of the cult of personality in Dialectic
of Enlightenment: “personality scarcely signifies anything more than shining white teeth and freedom
from body odor and emotions. The triumph of advertising in the culture industry is that consumers feel
compelled to buy and use its products even though they see through them” (167).

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group of branded bodies in opposition to groups of non-branded bodies).69 Tattoos have
achieved this very state today. No longer confined to subcultural status, the tattoo has
become a part of mainstream culture. This is primarily a result of the great
dissemination of media over the last two decades that have increasingly glorified what
was once considered to be “a risk, an adventure, a gamble with permanence” and an
“attack on desacralized culture.” Presenting the illusion of individuation through
massification, today’s tattoo represents the same thing as designer clothing, with two
minor differences. First, there is a threshold of pain involved in tattooing. As with the
Polynesians (although not to the same degree), the pain is a right of passage whereby a
body becomes individuated/massified, an experience that does not occur when one, say,
puts on a shirt. Hence the illusion of becoming individuated is enhanced as the pain is
perceived as an additional (and unpleasant) part the process. Second, tattooing is
capitalist in a different sense than designer clothing as it is only produced by capitalist
media technologies. Designer clothing, however, also carries the imprint of its media
production, explicitly calling attention to itself as a commodity.

Mann comments on the signification of the “neo-tattoo” and its illusory impact:
Despite all the claims that are made for the neo-tattoo—again: that it is a
way to repossess one’s alienated body, that it connects one symbolically
with more integrated societies, that it is a sacralizing sacrifice, that it is a

spiritual record, that it is a protective charm against spiritual and political

 

69 This example is further complicated when we consider Polo and Izod in terms of class. While Izod
products were desirable commodities in the 19805, Polos were generally more expensive and therefore
more desirable. In this light, wearing a Polo was a true expression of individuality whereas wearing an
Izod was merely an expression of one’s desire to express one’s individuality, if only they had the
economic means. Individuation becomes a matter of creating a group of branded bodies in opposition to
non-branded and inadequately branded bodies.

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demons, the subjective intensity of the experience subverts cultural
anaesthesis—the very proliferation of the tattoo indicates that, like just
about everything else proposed as the exercise of difference, it too links
the individual with the “economy of signs” in his or her most intimate
dimensions. If we have not yet been subjected to the tattooed corporate
logo, its time is doubtless imminent. (39)
Concretizing Mann’s anxiety of imminence, Jennifer Government deploys the tattooed
corporate logo as a seminal form of identity-construction, rendering it the ultimate
fashion statement. On t0p of being a capitalist media production, it recognizes itself as a
commodity, that is, as something purchased for the sake of indicating allegiance to a
specific capitalist organization. It also involves the rite of passage of physical suffering.
Above all, capitalizrn’s tattoo is a mode of communication, as it used to be when it was a
reactionary, sub-communal artifice. Now it is entirely unreactionary—not a way of
dissociating or distancing oneself from the norm, but a way of expressing alliance with
the norm, which has assimilated the subcultural and put it to use. What is the norm?
The ideology of hyperconsumption, terminal choice, the mediatization of the human
psyche by the desiring-machine of capitalism. Consider the teenagers Billy sees at
Burger King. They are not just a gang of young thugs looking for trouble because they
are bored, high, or want to maintain “respect.” They are corporate thugs, and their
neighborhood “is a [US] Alliance town” (277), us Alliance being one of two dominant
global corporate conglomerates (the other is Team Advantage). They look for trouble in
the name of capitalist production, defending the image of the companies with which they

are allied and by which they are branded. The purpose of capitalizrn’s tattoo is

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consequently to signify, by the process of signification itself, that one is an active,
productive member of the social system. The tattoo is a symbol that represents what it
did for primitive cultures as well as for the ancient Greek and Romans and some aspects
of earlier postmodern communities: social status, communication, bodily (re)possession,
and perhaps more than anything, slavery.

This coagulation of meaning is most poignantly illustrated by the novel’s
protagonist, who has a tattoo herself. Hack considers it strange when he first sees it:
“There were two agents in an office across the corridor, and one of them had a weird
smudge underneath her left eye, like a rectangular bruise. No: a tattoo, 3 barcode tattoo.
That was strange, Hack thought. The Government was meant to be against all that
consumer stuff’ (70). Later we are told that Jennifer was not always a Government
operative. Her name/identity used to be Jennifer Maher, when she was the account
manager for Mattel Corporation. It wasn’t until after she was impregnated and
abandoned by John Nike that she turned into a would-be good Samaritan. Despite her
apparent enmity for consumerism, however, she cannot escape the technology of her
terminally constructed self. That her tattoo is “the product code for a Malibu Barbie”
accentuates this point (313). Jennifer is an agent of the law, but the tattoo serves as a
constant reminder that the law is entirely subject to capital. According to John, there is
no difference between the old and new Jennifer: “You think you changed when you lefl
Maher? You think you grew a conscience when you got pregnant? Bullshit. You don’t
give a shit about those Nike teenagers. You’re after me for what I wouldn’t give you
eight years ago. This is personal” (309). It’s personal because John is the father of

Jennifer’s daughter and she resents him for leaving them. John’s critique of her ethics is

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not altogether true; by and large, she is altruistic and empathic. But that doesn’t matter
in the capitalist scheme of things. The central figure in the novel is a paradox. Even
though she is in a position of power (given a sufficient amount of capital, of course), her
tattoo designates that her ontological status, language and body, no matter what context

they are positioned in, are commodities, products of a totalitarian free market paradise.

The Space Merchants
Jennifer Government’s commoditocracy alludes to an older science fiction novel written
in the early postmodern era, C. M. Kombluth and Frederik Pohl’s The Space Merchants
(1952). Barry mentions the book, implying that his book is an extrapolation of it:
John Nike was reading a novel called The Space Merchants; it had been
reissued and he’d seen a review in Fast Company. They called it
“prescient and hilarious,” which John was having a hard time agreeing
with. All these old science fiction books were the same: they thought the
future would be dominated by some hard-ass, oppressive Government.
Maybe that was plausible back in the 19508, when the world looked as if
it might tmn Commie. It sure wasn’t now.

In The Space Merchants, the world was dominated by two
advertising companies, which was closer to the truth. But still, there
were so many laws the companies had to follow! If these guys had all
the money, John wondered, who could stop them doing whatever they

wanted? (115-16)

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John is obSessed with his image as a corporate icon and capitalist artisan, exerting
power through he medium of his image at any given time.70 Fierce yet suave,
immaculately groomed, and invariably looking to close a deal, he is very much like Alec
Baldwin’s hard-nosed salesman, Blake, in Glengarry Glen Ross (1992), who lives by his
A-B-Cs (Always-Be-Closings). Likewise does the protagonist of The Space Merchants,
Mitchell Courtenay, resemble Blake, at least until he is blackmailed by a rival
advertising executive, demoted from bourgeois kingpin to working, “occupational” class
slave, and his personal values and beliefs undergo a transformation. The appearance of
Kombluth and Pohl’s novel is important for two main reasons. First and foremost, it
allows Barry to further demarcate the boundaries of his diegesis by situating it in the
tradition of science fictions that have portrayed futuristic societies governed by capitalist
media politics.71 The Space Merchants expresses the same anxiety as Jennifer
Government about the technology of commodity-culture. This anxiety is a recurrent
theme in the science fiction genre, and Barry metafictionally insinuates it by placing a
reissue of the novel in John’s hands. In so doing, he also gives his narrator the
opportunity to explain how his book is an extrapolation of Kombluth and Pohl’s, a more

extreme version with fewer barriers to commodity production and consumption, or, as

 

70 The importance of a marketer’s image is underscore when John is hit in the face by an iron: “It was
hard to tell, with all the bandages. That girl Violet had really let him have it: the doctors still weren’t sure
if there was brain damage. Personally, John thought the bigger problem was his face. He hoped a lot of
the swelling was temporary. There was no place in marketing for a man who looked like that” (106).
John’s fears are very similar to those of Vanilla Sky ’s David Aames, whose face is disfigured in a car
accident. Confionted with damaged physical images, both characters experience anxiety, wonying that
they have become ineffective, if not altogether neutered, capitalists.

71 Science fictions that depict hostile commoditocracies are among the most well-respected and widely
read and studied. In addition to The Space Merchants, for example, there is George Orwell’s 1984 (1949),
Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 (1953), Alfred Bester’s The Stars My Destination (1956), Kurt
Vonnegut’s “Harrison Bergeron” (1961), William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984), and a number of Philip
K. Dick novel’s, most notably The Simulacra (1964) and Ubik (1969).

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Deleuze and Guattari might say, fewer blockages in the schiz-flow of desire. More
interesting, however, is the way The Space Merchants, the actual book, functions in the
narrative as an instrument of the image rather than a purveyor of the word.

Most of the action in Jennifer Government takes place in Australia, Barry’s home
country and a newly acquired member of the US Federated Economic Blocs. John is
reading The Space Merchants on a plane fiom Australia to the Nike Los Angeles office.
He is not reading it to entertain or inform himself, it seems, but because he has nothing
else to do. When the plane lands, he leaves the book in his seat pocket instead of taking
it with him. For John, the narrator says, “It was turning into a sly, anti-free market
statement, and irony irritated him. There was no place for irony in marketing: it made
people want to look for deeper meaning. There was no place in marketing for that,
either” (116).72 Later, while he is sitting in a waiting room to meet a Nike executive, he
rues leaving it on the plane. “He wished he’d held onto that novel now. It would have
been good to be seen reading it: relevant yet left-field, demonstrating initiative and a
creative approach to problem solving” (117). The Space Merchants then is a piece of
media that has the capacity to enhance John’s capitalist image. It is a capitalist
technology John could have used to empower the technology of his self. That The Space
Merchants is an anti-capitalist text is yet another irony. What is important is its use-
value, or rather, the image of its use-value, which would be to signify an active

awareness of “anti-freedom.” Such a power-knowledge, in John’s eyes, would not

 

72 John’s sentiments harmonize with Baudrillard’s maxim, “He who strikes with meaning is killed by
meaning” (Simulacra 161). For him, the desert of the real is an exemplary site for capitalizrn. Barry and
Baudrillard hold similar views, except for a crucial one: in Baudrillard’s firture, late capitalism implodes
and culminates in an ultraviolent apocalypse; in Barry’s future, late capitalism has not imploded, but
exploded into a more dynamic and fluid system.

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signify his desires, but rather his consciousness of the desires of the “enemy.” Through
the filter of would-be knowledge, the word (of the novel) becomes the image (of the
self). Unfortunately for John, he must “live on his wits.”73 -
In a recent review of The Space Merchants, Matthew McGowan writes: “To
readers today, it may seem nothing short of amazing that a book like The Space
Merchants was published where and when it was—in an America enthralled by the
hysterical moral panic that was McCarthyism and driven by a post-war economic boom
that had the United States plotted on a steep upward trajectory.” The novel can be read
as a reaction to the Red Scare, representing the paranoid condition of the subject invoked
by the threat of the rise of communism, which is to say the fall of capitalism. At its
center, McCarthyism was not so much about the fear of communism as it was of the
collapse of the capitalist system. The fear still exists today, especially in the wake of
9/11. Whether the enemy is a communist, a terrorist, or a bug-eyed monster is not the
point. All of these iconoclasts are ultimately perceived in the same way: as viruses that
have infected the system. If the virus is not destroyed, the system will eventually be
altogether taken over from head to toe. Kombluth and Pohl, however, do not focus on
this orthodox conservative fear of the infestation of the Americanized world’s
socioeconomic order by some foreign entity. In their dystopian satire, the enemies of
the system are “Consies,” conservationists who seek to foil the colonization and
commodification of Venus by corporate powers. While they can be read as an allegory

for McCarthy’s communists, at no point do they pose a real tlueat, literally or

perceptually, to the existence of the capitalist system. They are mere thorns in its side.

 

73 Says slick-talking Ricky Roma of his salesman colleagues in Glengarry Glen Ross: “Anyone in this
oflice lives on his wits.”

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Kombluth and Pohl’s narrative is a flagrant critique of early postmodern commodity-
culture, but it does not contain a viral element (except for the virus it represents as
capitalism itself). Moreover, it does not aver prescience, mapping out a potential future.
As Peter Nicholls writes, “Stories like The Space Merchants were never intended to be
serious predictions of a possible tomorrow: they exaggerated aspects of the present in
order to comment upon, not the future, but the present itself’ (Encyclopedia 793-94).
Extrapolation as a vehicle for contemporary social critique is perhaps one of the
science fiction genre’s most valuable characteristics. Many postmodern science fictions
are best regarded as critical theories that can be used to read against the fictional text of
the “real,” mediatized world. The same can be said for some earlier narratives, such as
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) and many of HG. Wells’ scientific romances,
which are useful for reading and in some cases theorizing the condition of today’s social
machinery.74 Jennifer Government certainly provides a schematic for interpreting late
capitalism. Unlike much cyberpunk, however, it also provides a likely vision of the not-
too-distant future, using simple, colloquial language. Traditional cyberpunk narratives
do neither of these things. According to Larry McCaffery, they “present an intense,
vital, and often darkly humorous vision of the world Space of multinational capitalism”
(Storming 12). But these world spaces are almost always saturated in high technologies
that have “blipped” the human subject, actually splicing its flesh and psyche with the
machine and turning it into some kind of cyborg. Generally the cyborg emerges as more

of a metaphor for the impact that biological and computer technologies have had on the

 

7" The scientific romances 1 am thinking of include The Time Machine (1895), The Island ofDr. Moreau
(1896), and The First Men in the Moon (1901), all of which featln'e errant technologies of the self.

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subject, rather than as something that might materialize in the imminent future.7S
Cyberpunks’ narrative strategies frequently involve varying levels of montage, “mixing
together genres, borrowing devices from cinema, computer systems, and MTV, infusing
the rhythms of its prose with those of rock music and TV advertising, pastiching prior
literary forms and otherwise playing with literary elements, and, above all, adopting the
familiar postmodernist device of developing familiar ‘mythic’ structures and materials
which can then be undercut and exploited for different purposes” (14). Additionally,
cyberpunks employ a techno-surrealist “language of spectacle and simulation” that
effectively represents how, in their extrapolated diegetic universes, the human has been
redefined by the hi-tech machinery of postcapitalist space (Bukatrnan 11).

By postcapitalist, I do not mean that these narratives transcend our current
socioeconomic ontology, but that they push that ontology to its outer limits,
terminalizing it (just as postmodernism is in some ways a terminal extension of
modernism). Barry does not terminalize late capitalism through the use of the cyborg,
genre mixing, or technocratic jargon. He does so by getting rid of taxes—by
disempowering the government and the law, empowering the neo-bourgeois, and
creating a monstrous free market where the blockages in the flows of consumer desire
are minimized. It is not a difiicult diegesis to imagine given the condition of
contemporary consumer-capitalism; in many respects, the social, cultural, and
ideological reality of the novel is a stone’s throw from here. Unlike much postmodern

science fiction, Jennifer Government does not represent a paraspace, “a site of

 

75 .

For mstance, we are a long way from being able to neurally interface with machines, jack into
cyberspaces, and disembody our consciousness in the ways that have been extrapolated by Gibson,
Cadigan, Sterling, Dick, Cronenberg, Rucker, the Wachowskis, and others.

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ontological confrontation characterized by an intensified engagement with the structures
of language and experienced by the reader as being in collision with mundane reality”
(175). Bukatman recognizes Samuel R. Delany’s argument that many science fiction
texts are paraspatial, cognitively estranging readers fi'om their extrapolated diegeses.“5
In light of how these texts delineate “rhetorically heightened ‘other realm[s],’ . . . the
notion of a paraspace might be endemic to the genre . . . The language in such works
transcends the descriptive, instead offering the reader an experience of explicit
‘otherness’” (157). Cyberpunk paraspaces produce the greatest degree of cognitive
estrangement, using language to allegorize technology.77 One of the most dynamic
allegories of this kind are William S. Burroughs’ cut-up novels. In these proto-
cyberpunk texts, language manifests as protagonist and antagonist, disease and cure,
good and evil. Burroughs treats language “as a system, as code, as an already received
structure against which we all struggle” (Porush 100). Ironically, he seeks agency from
language through language, employing a fractal, pathological patois to critique an
increasingly fractal, pathological society. The origiml cyberpunks of the 805 harnessed
this technique. Their use of language has similar effects, albeit its critique of capitalist

technologies is more acute and graphic. This is absent from Jennifer Government.

 

7" Conceived ofby Darko Suvin in Metamorphosis ofScience Fiction, cognitive estrangement is a
determining axiom of science fiction, “a literary genre whose necessary and sufficient conditions are the
presence and interaction of estrangement and cognition, and whose main formal device is an imaginative
framework alternative to the author’s empirical environment (7-8). The estrangement is accomplished,
Suvin argues, when the writer promotes “the narrative dominance or hegemony of a fictional ‘novum’
(novelty, innovation) validated by cognitive logic” (63). The important word here is novum, which
implies both “estrangement” (experiencing something innovative) and “cognition” (assessing that
innovative thing).

77 “The figures of allegory break the transparency of language and institute instead a metafigural zone of
problenratic identifications . . . The mutability of language in the zones and paraspaces of postmodern
science fiction coincide with this allegorical impulse (although the exigencies of narrative often recontain
the paraspatial excess)” (Bukatrnan 175). Specifically, cyberpunk narratives allegorize the technology of
theselfasitisproducedbythe machine.

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Barry thematizes advanced capitalism like a cyberpunk, but he does not allegorize
technology like one. His novel is not, as the Kirkus Reviews blurb on its cover contends,
“Catch-22 by way of The Matrix.” Like pre-cyberpunks Pohl and Kombluth, Barry de-
emphasizes hard technology in favor of the commodity and its raw effects on human

relations, beliefs,.and values.

Commodity Warfare
The absence of cybernetic technologies is what sets Jennifer Government apart fi-om the
conventional cyberpunk narrative. Both are avant-pop narratives, however, exhibiting
similar overarching themes and critical angles of incidence by way of, McCaffery says,
combining “Pop Art’s focus on consumer goods and mass media with the avante-garde’s
spirit of subversion and emphasis on radical formal innovation” (“Still” xviii). Above
all, they panic-theorize how subjectivity and the technology of the self are terminally
constructed by the society of the spectacle, the postmodern mediascape, the desert of the
real. The most effective tactic authors use to articulate their panic theories is violence.
Deployed on physical, ideological, psychological and theoretical levels, violence
expresses the limitations as well as the transcendency of the self and society. This is
strikingly visible in texts like the Matrix trilogy where the rebel protagonists are
simultaneously enslaved and empowered, existing as down-and-out bohemians in the
real world and as dynamic superheroes in the simulated reality of the Matrix. But in
Jennifer Government there are no irreal, high-flying, Bruce Lee-style kung fu fights.
Nor are there incidents of body invasion by cybernetic organisms, or grandiose battles

between disillusioned, debilitated humans and sentient, spit-shined machines. Violence

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and the act of war are not extraneous to the process of hyperconsumption, the text’s
dominant metaphor. Rather, the process of hyperconsumption is consistently equated
with violence and the act of war.

The marriage of the commodity to warfare is signified in a number of ways.
First, recall the job title of the antagonist of the novel, Guerrilla Marketing Operative. It
suggests that he is a soldier, fighting for the best interests of the “American people” (that
is, the Americanized world.)78 This is an interesting piece of identity construction.
John Nike’s title indicates that capitalist corporations and businesses have become
military formations devoted to serving and protecting their own private interests, which
everybody considers to be the “best” interests of society. With the abolition of taxes
came the abolition of public, government—fimded services like welfare, social security,
retirement, health care, and so on. Privatization is the absolute rule, and the moral order
is premised upon self interests. In a sense, civilization has been derepressed: subjects
can deliberately act upon their desires and pursue the construction of their own capitalist
selflroods without experiencing the specter of altruistic, anti-capitalist guilt. This
condition smacks of Freud’s interpretation of the Biblical commandment “love thy
neighbor” in Civilization and Its Discontents. He argues that the commandment is a
social construct and that the act of loving somebody else is merely the act of seeing and
loving oneself in somebody else. Thus loving thy neighbor is simply loving thyself, as
the neighbor is the other, and the other is a potential threat to the self. “Not merely is
this stranger in general unworthy of my love; I must honestly confess that he has more

claim to my hostility and even my hatred” (67). The culmination of Freud’s argument is

 

78 John’s m.o. seems all to familiar given America’s ongoing attempt to establish a “free” capitalist
system in Iraq.

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that humans are not “gentle creatures who want to be loved,” they are “creatures among
whose instinctual endowments is to be reckoned a powerful share of aggressiveness”

”79 capitalism is a ripened site for this

(68). As a system of “organized narcissism,
aggressiveness to unleash itself. Clayton Morgareidge goes so far as to suggest that
capitalism is a “system of organized crime: it organizes the predatory activity of
individuals against each other to make life safe for the winners” (“Capitalism”). His
sentiment is noticeably illustrated in Barry’s system of capitalizm, whose subjects all
externalizes their aggressive narcissism to varying degrees.80 The result is a constant
state of war that ebbs and flows in intensity.

In Jennifer Government, a warlike sensibility is woven into the fabric of
everyday life. One scene, for example, shows Hack Nike shopping at Sears. Before
leaving the store, he pauses to observe its layout: “On impulse, he turned to look back at
the registers. There were thirty or forty stations, lined up like battlements. Each was
staffed by a clean-cut girl or boy in a Sears uniform. Their blue badges winked at him”
(95). In this short passage, a paramount capitalist venue, the department store, is likened
to an army of soldiers. These soldiers are the American(ized) youth. Defined by their

infantry-like attire, their job is not only to ring up customers, but to defend the American

 

79 Clayton Morgareidge says, “We live in a society organized around private property, the right of private
individuals and corporations to own the resources we all need in order to live. These resources, belonging
to a small proportion of the top one percent of the population, include the natural products of the planet,
what grows in the soil, the oceans and the forests, as well as all of the products of human culture and
industry—the techniques and knowledge and art we have created over the centuries. Even the techniques
of nature encoded in the genes of plants and animals and the human body are now being swept up into the
vaults of private corporations to be exploited for their financial benefit.”

80 Nobody is more aggressive in this capacity than John Nike, who, shortly before he is captured, explains
to a fellow liaison, “Without the Government, we can eliminate Team Advantage. Without Team
Advantage, we have no competition. That’s worth a little conflict. This is all just aggressive competition
within a free market” (296). By this logic, violence is not a means of obtaining freedom. It is a
fundamental component of freedom.

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way from behind the “battlements” of their cash registers by facilitating the process of
consumerism. The violence committed here is imagistic and ideological, the power of
capitalizrn being exerted by the military effigy of Sears and its arsenal of employees.
The processes of corporate naming and tattooing that I discussed earlier are also
examples of this kind of violence. More prominent, however, is the actual, physical
violence that is committed. It begins with Hayley McDonald’s murder and ends with the
war between Team Advantage and US Alliance. The man responsible for the war is
John Nike, who garners a constituency by accusing the Government of enslaving the
American(ized) people. At a press conference with the Government president, John
accuses the Government of “conducting raids against us. It targeted our companies, only
because we’ve been successful at providing products people want to buy. It trespassed
on our private property and assaulted some of our executives” (201-02). This said, he
denounces the Government’s authority.
By this action, the Government has proved that so long as it exists, none
of us are truly free. Government and freedom are mutually exclusive.
So if we value freedom, there’s only one conclusion. It’s time to get rid
of this leftover we call Government. . . . US Alliance has had enough of
being persecuted for the crime of making money. From this moment, we
no longer recognize them as an authority. It’s time for a brave new age.
I hereby declare the end of Government. And you, sir, are out of a job.
(202)
John believes the Government is an impediment to the fi'eedom provided by capitalizm.

It is also distinct from capitalizm, operating under the aegis of a different set of ethics.

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At the same time, it is subject to capitalist praxis insofar as it cannot pursue criminals
and exert punishment in the absence of private funding. Justice is the Government’s
commodity. As a violation of the privatization of postcapitalist life, however, justice is a
highly undesirable, pestilent commodity that obstructs the exchange of desirable,
“healthy” commodities. John vows to liquidate the obstruction once and for all. After
orchestrating the assassination of the Government president without the consent of his
superiors, he must answer to the US Alliance board of directors, who are itching to expel
him so that they can disavow responsibility for his actions. None of the directors care
for the Government of its dead president, but they worry that the conflict will provoke a
consumer backlash. John assures them it won’t, reprimanding them for their lack of
capitalist resolve.
I’m getting rid of the Government, the greatest impediment to business
in history. . . . I’ve given you a world without Government interference.
There is now no advertising campaign, no intercompany deal, no
promotion, no action you can’t take. You want to pay kids to get the
swoosh tattooed on their foreheads? Who’s going to stop you? You
want to make computers that need repair afier three months? Who’s
going to stop you? You want to reward consumers who complain about
your competitors in the media? You want to pay them for recruiting
their little brothers and sisters to your brand of cigarettes? You want the
NRA to help you eliminate your competition? Then do it. Just do it.

(222)

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John’s use of the widely publicized Nike slogan, “Just do it,” is a nimble tactic. As it
has appeared in commercials, the use of the slogan conveys two key, conflicting
messages. First, it assures consumers that, given the proper work ethic, they can excel in
athletics; second, it assures consumers that, despite a work ethic, they are likely to excel
(or at least improve) athletically, and by extension personally and professionally, if they
are wearing or using some form of Nike product. In the absence of a Nike product,
consumers won’t be “just doing it,” not in sports, not in life in general. The slogan
essentially encourages us to establish our identities as successful athletes and human
beings by way of the commodity. John’s use of the slogan puts a spin on this message
by infusing it with an element of combat. Not only does “just doing it” signify buying
and wearing a pair of souped up, state-of-the—art, not-so-reasonably-priced cross trainers,
it signifies fighting a war in the name of the commodity itself. Like good capitalists and
consumers, the board of directors takes the bait. John is not expelled from US Alliance.
With the help of General Li, a representative of the NRA, he devises a plot to use
military force against the Government as well as US Alliance competitors before he is
finally apprehended by Jennifer Government.

In the last chapter of the book, John is applying for a job. It is implied that he
has spent twelve years in jail. He tells the woman who is interviewing him that he spent
the time “working on special projects” (318). After the interview is over, John forces
himself to be polite even though he knows he won’t land the job. “Thank you for the
opportunity,” he says. “I really appreciate it” (318). From this exchange, we learn that
John’s punishment entails being sentenced to jail as well as to non-executive, lower-

middle class life, which is more of a stigma than imprisonment. Out on the street he

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bumps into his old sidekick, the Pepsi kid. No longer the hip—hop, streetwise punk he
used to be, he is now the vice president of sales at PepsiCo. The kid offers him a job in
accounts. Infuriated, John says, “I’m an executive. I was this close to executing the
greatest goddamn business coup in history! . . . One day we’re going to finish what we
started! . . . Nothing’s changed, you know! One day, we’re going to try this again, and
win!” The kid calmly replies, “Maybe. . . . But not with you, John” (320).

Dog clearly has his day here: the bad guy gets what he deserves. John’s last
words, however, are revealing, not necessarily because they are accurate, but because
they indicate the state of perpetual breakdown that the capitalism system must maintain
in order to properly firnction. As I discussed in my last chapter, Deleuze and Guattari
speak to this point in Anti-Oedipus, arguing that breakdowns are the cocoons that lead to
breakthroughs and vitalize the flow of capitalist desire and production. Slavoj Ziiek
addresses the same issue in They Know Not What They Do, suggesting that class struggle
is paradoxical insofar as “society is ‘held together’ by the very antagonism, split, that
forever prevents its closure in a harmonious, transparent, rational Whole—by the very
impediment that undermines every rational totalization” (7). In other words, the world
needs John Nike, who exists in more than one form. Violence is essential to the
interrelations of subjects and to postmodern socioeconomic reality. This includes the
kind of violence inflicted upon bodies as much as on ideologies, psyches, and reality
itself, all of which are increasingly fiactured and fragmented by the hatchet of
technocapitalist media. The society that Barry maps out in Jennifer Government is thus

highly flmctional in its terminal disharmony.

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If Freud is right about our aggressive desire for the dominance of the self,
capitalism is merely a technological extension of it on a mass scale. The cyberpunks
represented this extension by impregnating the body with hard, cybernetic technologies;
Barry does it by impregnating the mind with the hard ideology of hyperconsumption.
But both projects produce and entertain the same turbulent effects, which are a matter of
ontological necessity. The ultimate embodiment of terminal identity may be “the
electronically enhanced simulation of a human” (Bukatrnan 253), but violence is most
certainly its defining characteristic. What genuinely distinguishes writers of postmodern
science fiction, then, is the manner in which they represent the dynamics of violence and

the desiring-machines that enact it.

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CHAPTER 5

Terminal Choice and the Wachowski Brothers’ Matrix Trilogy

Comic Book Worlds

The villainy of the Green Goblin and Dr. Octopus in Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man films is
defined by their technological extensions. These extensions are remakes of their
selfhoods that redirect the flows of their desires, compelling them to tear holes in the
moral fabric of society. Like many comic book antagonists, each is a doppelganger, an
externalized Id who can neither control nor escape the primal, machinic commands of
his liberated self. The Green Goblin is the product of a nerve gas experiment gone awry.
Once a prominent businessman, the experiment schizophrenizes him, spawning the
“bad” personality, a terrorist with superhuman strength whose hard technologies include
a metallic green exoskeleton, a military glider that functions simultaneously as an
airborn surfboard and tank, and an arsenal of chic-looking grenades, bombs and blades.
Dr. Octopus experiences a similar breakdown/breakthrough. A good-willed, cutting-
edge scientist, he is the product of a fusion experiment gone awry whereby giant,
sentient, mechanical tentacles implanted into his spine overtake and control his mind,
forcing him to reek havoc. The difference between the two villains is that the
technological/self of one is a product of the schism (the Goblin’s artillery) and the
technological/self of the other is the producer of the schism (Dr. Octopus’s tentacles).
Nonetheless the “badness” of both is a correlative of their extensions.

Likewise does the “goodness” of Spider-Man correlate with his extensions.
Similar to the Green Goblin, he is a product of technology, bitten by a spider that

redirects his desires in the opposite way: he feels compelled to use his superhuman

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strength and power for altruistic rather than narcissistic means. It could be argued that
his extensions are “natural” insofar as he possesses the characteristics of another living
organism, one that exists in the same fashion in the natural world. But the way those
characteristics are infused in him are made possible by high technology, the spider that
bit him being a radioactive, genetically modified mutation. His job is to negate the
“bad” technology of villains like the Green Goblin and Dr. Octopus with his “good”
technology and uphold the moral order. Ironically, the moral order is dictated almost
exclusively by the media, namely The Daily Bugle, the premier newspaper in Spider-
Man’s New York City. The editor-in-chief of the newspaper is J. Jonah Jameson, an
industrious capitalist who impugns or glorifies Spider-Man and his enemies depending
on what will make the most marketable story. Like any good postmodern enterprise,
truth is subservient to the profits that fiction can gamer, and morality is a sliding
signifier.

The logic of the film, however, suggests otherwise. It indicates that Spider-Man,
the Green Goblin and Dr. Octopus possess the power of choice and thereby the power to
subjectively produce their selflroods as they please. “We are who we choose to be,” says
the Goblin as he threatens to kill his girlfiiend Mary Jane with one hand and a gondola
full of children with the other. The standoff is a metaphor for how Spider-Man’s
immediate actions will reflect upon his identity. He must choose who to save. Saving
the children and letting his girlfiiend die affirms his will to be a superhero and to
sacrifice having an ordinary life; saving his girlfriend and letting the children die will
render him an everyman. He saves them both, of course, but the crisis of choice afflicts

him in each film as he struggles to come to terms with his uncle Ben’s dictum that “with

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great power comes great responsibility.” The villains endure similar struggles, albeit
their ability to choose, unlike Spider-Man’s, is inhibited by their technologies. The
Goblin is the doppelgtinger of Norman Osborn. Despite the occasional desire to do and
be “good” (especially as a father to his estranged son), he is subordinate to the alternate
personality spawned by the machine and must obey it. The same can be said of Dr.
Octopus, formerly Dr. Otto Octavius, who becomes subordinate to the machines jacked
into his back when the microchip prohibiting them fi'om controlling his mind is
accidentally destroyed. Osborn and Octavius are marginalized by the technologies of
the Goblin and Octopus, which, in robbing them of the power of choice, inexorably
destroy them. Granted, their marginalized halves are reinstated as dominants in the end,
but only after they have been beaten by Spider-Man and their deaths are impending.81 In
short, they are not at all who they “choose to be.” They are what technology produces
them to be. Spider-Man’s subject-position is no different. In the second film he quits
the superhero business for a short period and tries to lead a normal life. Norrnalcy is
equated with narcissism in that Peter Parker disavows his dominant half so that he may
pursue his own self interests, especially an education and a relationship with his beloved
Mary Jane. In a sense, Peter Parker becomes a villain by dint of refusing to use his
powers for the benefit of mankind, much like his enemies. The stand he makes against
his technologies doesn’t take, however, and he returns to his crime-fighting ways. Like
truth, choice is rendered a fiction. It is the central theme of the narrative, and it is

presented as a tangibility, an agency that can be manifested one way or the other. But it

 

81 Prior to his death, Osborn apologizes for his actions and asks Peter Parker not to tell his son Harry
about it. Octavius, in turn, is killed as a result of regaining control of his mind (by willpower alone) in
order to destroy the deadly energy mass that the A.I. tentacles force him to create.

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is ultimately nothing more than an artifice, an illusion that reifies the tenuousness of
morality and above all the idea that we have the power to govern the high technologies
which define the postmodern self.

The illusion of choice plays a role in the lives of many other comic book
superheroes and villains. To be or not to be a schizo—they grapple with this question,
each in their own uniquely pathological ways, and invariably choose schizohood. Being
the only option available to them, it is a terminal choice, an ontological imperative. In
the case of Dr. Octopus and the Green Goblin, choosing otherwise results in their literal
deaths; in the case of Spider-Man, it results in the metaphorical death of his messianic
identity, which is insufferable. To not be a schizo is not an option as it would rob one of
a sense of purpose, a highly prized possession and a fundament of superhero narratives.
But purpose is also an illusion which is used to validate the idea that the technology of
the self can be determined and controlled by the subject. In my final chapter I want to
explore how this dynamic manifests itself in certain aspects of the comic book world of
the Wachowski brothers’ Matrix trilogy. Employing a stark comic book sensibility, the
films are together a caricatured representation of how late capitalist technologies
produce postmodern identity. I will show how the Wachowskis manifest notions of
terminal purpose, morality, and most importantly choice, all of which are linked to one
another. Like Raimi’s Spider-Man films, the Matrix trilogy operates under the
assumption that these notions are agencies, rather than fantasies that merely establish the
subject as a desiring-machine. As Slavoj Zizek states, “Fantasy is usually conceived as
a scenario that realizes the subject’s desire. . . . it is precisely the role of fantasy to give

the coordinates of the subject’s desire, to specify its object, to locate the position the

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subject assumes in it. It is only through fantasy that the subject is constituted as
desiring” (6). The trilogy portrays the fantasy that the human, while dependent upon the
technological, is distinct from it—morally, ideologically, ontologically and
metaphysically. This fantasy gives the coordinates of a collective panic desire for a
“natural” selflrood, one that is not produced by the machinery of late capitalism. It fails

to acknowledge that, in the postmodern world, nature has become a machine.

Towards a Neurorealism
Ian Watson writes, “Cyberpunk narratives tend to be flmdamentally Earth-based, since
to set them offworld is to add an unnecessary layer of strangeness. So here is a new
realism. Or neurorealism” (153). Simultaneously set in a futuristic, apocalyptic
wasteland circa 2,199 and a neurorealistic simulation program circa 1999 (although not
our 1999”), The Matrix (1999) is a paradigm of the cyberpunk form, borrowing its
central conceit from the matrix of William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984). Erected on
this conceit is a virtual burlesque of cyberpunk themes, tropes, attitudes, insignia, mise
en scenes, and fashion statements—everything from mirrorshades to technophilic
body/mind invasion to stylized, detail-oriented, pioneering imagery. Inevitably, The
Matrix and its sequels, Reloaded (2002) and Revolutions (2003), reach back into the
historical bowels of the science fiction genre as well as many other genres and

philosophies. As Bruce Sterling writes:

 

82 James Patrick Kelly explains that “it isn’t quite the 1999 that we remember, but rather some discormt
1999 in which clothes don’t quite fit and all jobs crush men’s spirits and the sky approaches ‘the color of
television tuned to a dead channel,’ as William Gibson once memorably wrote” (232). Moreover, the
Matrix is a wholly urban space. Conventional pastoral space is not part of the program. The machines
insert their human batteries into a city, an axis of technological life that inexorably translates humans into
technological beings.

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The Matrix is a postmodern philosophical movie in which fi'agments of
philosophy do this Casablanca cliché dance. There’s Christian exegesis,
a Redeemer myth, a death and rebirth, a hero in self-discovery, the
Odyssey, Jean Baudrillard (lots of Baudrillard, the best parts of the film),
science-fiction ontological riffs of the Philip K. Dick school,
Nebuchadnezzar, the Buddha, Taoism, martial-arts mysticism, oracular
prophesy, spoon—bending telekinesis, Houdini stage-show magic, Joseph
Campbell, and Godelian mathematical metaphysics. (23-24)
This is notwithstanding the abundance of literary nods, especially to the works of
Shakespeare, Lewis Carroll, L. Frank Baum and William Blake. There is also the thread
of the Sleeping Beauty fairy tale that pervades the narrative, scenes that reference the
tradition of the Spaghetti western and Arthurian romance, a ridiculously callow
Hollywood-romance subplot, the infusion of Goth culture and animé, and, as I have
already indicated, both the diegetic reality and simulated hyperreality of the Matrix
trilogy are distinguished by the mythos of DC comics. Sterling is right to call the film a
“real mess” in terms of its many artifices, allusions and postulates (4). It is like an essay
with too many theses and loose ends, a rhizomatic assemblage of desiring-machines, a
“map that is always detachable, connectable, reversible, modifiable, and has multiple
entryways and exits and its own lines of flight” (A Thousand 21). These entryways and
exits lead into the past, present and future, embodying the system of technologies that
define the human subject. As a collective “imitation of a peculiar or unique,
idiosyncratic style” (as well as a collection of science fiction cliches), the trilogy is a

quintessential postmodern pastiche a la Frederic Jameson. Unlike the pastiche I treated

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in my third chapter, the multigeneric film Army of Darkness in which comedic parody
was a central component, the trilogy is “a neutral practice of such mimicry, without any
of parody’s ulterior motives, amputated of the satiric impulse, devoid of laughter of any
conviction . . . blank parody, a statue with blind eyeballs” (Jameson 17). In their dire
seriousness, the films are thoroughbred postmodern texts, depicting neuroreality as the
schizophrenic body of the postmodern condition.

The volume of critical writing about the first film alone is already rather large,
including scores of pop and scholarly articles as well as a number of books.83 The
Matrix has been read from many points of view for its religious, racial, metaphysical,
mystical, epistemological, ontological, Marxist, philosophical, erotic, cinematic,
geopolitical, psychoanalytic, and gendered connotations. It has of course been analyzed
for its ode-to-science-fiction attributes, too, and some criticism has attended to The
Matrix in terms of class and advanced capitalist technologies. My reading of The
Matrix, and especially its sequels, is allied with David Brande’s reading of Gibson’s
matrix in an article that deliberates symbolic economy and ideology in Neuromancer.
Says Brande: “What is at stake . . . in my reading of Gibson’s cyborgs (and of his
construction of cyberspace) is not the degree to which they reflect or represent ‘reality,’
but the degree to which they stage the ideological fantasy that structures reality” (526).
The Wachowski’s Matrix is an explicit illustration of this basic ZiZekian theme; in their
films, subjectivity and the reality it perceives is literally structured by fantasy, and the

Matrix serves as an allegory for the mediatized psyche and space that is pathologized by

 

“3 Three books that inform this chapter are The Matrix and Philosophy, More Matrix and Philosophy:
Revolutions and Reloaded Decoded, and Exploring the Matrix. The first two are collections of essays
written by philosophers and cultural theorists; the third is a collection written by science fiction writers.

148

capital and governed by the law ofterminal choice.“ Given this dynamic, Brande’s big
question in his reading of Neuromancer is “what unconscious desire is articulated in the
‘work’ or form of dream” as represented by cybernetic figurations (528). Using Deleuze
and Guattari to draw his conclusion, he surmises that the novel “helps to structure real
capitalist social relations by providing constitutive fantasies of the final subsumption of
all symbolic exchange, and the subject itself, into the money form of value: cyberspace
as the answer to the crisis of overaccumulation and the means to reterritorialize the
deterritorialized flows of advanced capitalism” (528). Gibson’s matrix emerges as a
symptom of the Lacanian Real around which the rivers of consumer desire ebb and flow
as they negotiate the constant breakdowns/breakthroughs of capitalism’s machinery.

The difference between Neuromancer—as well as the two novels that followed it, Count
Zero (1986) and Mona Lisa Overdrive (1988), both set in the same imploded future and
together called the Sprawl trilogy—and the Matrix trilogy is that the latter wears this
conclusion on its surface, treating Gibson’s symbolic economy as a matter of course.
Whereas Gibson speaks in the technologized, fractal, jargon-infested language of
deterritorialization, the Wachowski’s speak plainly, in the common everyday language
of today’s masses, underscoring that our primal desire is to be defined by being
controlled by our technocapitalist extensions. There is another crucial difference
between the two. In the Sprawl trilogy, capitalism remains the dominant operative
socioeconomic system. In the Matrix trilogy, on the other hand, capitalism is dead; all

that is left is the powerful, antagonistic residue of capitalist technologies, signifying the

 

M Says Zizek: “The utter pmsivity [of the fetal bodies of Matrix-going subjects] is the foreclosed fantasy

that sustains our conscious experience as active, self-positing subjects—it is the ultimate perverse fantasy,
the notions that we are ultimately instruments of the Other’s (Matrix’s)jouissance, sucked out of our life-
substance like batteries” (203).

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dream life of the contemporary commodity form from the wasteland of a
postapocalyptic future that is a regression to a primitive, precapitalist past. By overtly
demonizing high technology and turning it into the films’ primary antagonist, the Matrix
trilogy’s critique of capitalism is clear, direct and ultimately cliche, since one of the
science fiction genre’s foremost practices has always been to express the fear of
technology gone wild. This is merely one of a veritable cirque de soleil of cliches that
distinguish the films. In effect, the Wachowski’s critique of capitalism does not belong
to the them so much as it belongs to the history of the science fiction genre. I will say
more about this idea in the final section of the chapter.
The Matrix trilogy’s critique begins with the use of humans as batteries by the
machines, as John Shirley explains:
Certainly, the use of humans as batteries in the film is powerfully
symbolic of our mindless submission to the consumer economy. We’re
driving the economy by buying things we don’t need, by submission to
the marketplace, as a battery adds its power to the machine——and being
caught up in the consumer culture, the herdlike movement from one bi g-
media entertainment to the next, keeps us hypnotized, maintains the
dreamy alienation from the present moment that insures our slavish
sleep. (55)
Shirley hints at a key element of the concept of postmodern slavery, which I discuss in
my third chapter: the terminal dependence upon and surrender to the Other that is
capitalist technology—an Other that, as an extension of the human, is also the self. In

this sense, the commodity is the doppelganger of the self, just as Agent Smith is the

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doppelganger of Neo. “He is you,” the Oracle tells Neo. “Your opposite. Your
negative. The result of the equation trying to balance itself out.” One cannot function
without the Other, and when the Other dies, so does the One. This is exactly what
happens to Neo, “the One” who saves Zion by destroying Agent Smith in Revolutions.
The inevitable result is the death of Neo and the balancing out of the system. As the
Architect of the Matrix warns the Oracle at the end of Revolutions, however, the peace
treaty invoked by Neo’s sacrifice is ephemeral.85 The system can only remain balanced
for a short time before another breakdown occurs as it is the nature of the system to
breakdown, to be unbalanced. Another One will be manufactured (N eo has five
predecessors). Likewise will an Other-One surface to butt heads with the One and
maintain the violence and the chaos that are the ontological imperatives of society. This
is precisely how capitalism works according to Deleuze and Guattari. “Capitalism is in
fact born of the encounter of two sorts of flows: the decoded flows of production in the
form of money-capital, and the decoded flows of labor in the form of the ‘free worker’”
(Anti-Oedipus 33). In this schema, Smith is money-capital, Neo is the “free worker”
(who is not really flee), and both are decoded desiring-machines. Together they are like
capitalism itself. Two halves of the same schizophrenic body, their purpose is the
deterritorialization of the socius to the nth degree. Smith admits it when he and Neo
square off for the first time in Reloaded. “Are you aware of it?” he asks him. Neo
replies,” What?” Smith says:

Our connection . . . I killed you, Mr. Anderson. I watched you die . . .

Then something happened . . . You destroyed me, Mr. Anderson. After

 

85 “Just how long do you think this peace is going to last?” the Architect asks the Oracle. She responds,
“As long as it can.”

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that, I understood the rules, I knew what I was supposed to do, but I
didn’t. I couldn’t. I was compelled to stay, compelled to disobey. And
now, here I stand because of you, Mr. Anderson. Because of you, I’m no
longer an Agent of this system. Because of you, I’ve changed. I’m
unplugged. A new man, so to speak. Like you, apparently, flee. . . . But,
as you well know, appearances can be deceiving, which brings me back
to the reason why we’re here. We’re not here because we’re flee. We’re
here because we’re not flee. There is no escaping reason, no denying
purpose. Because as we both know, without purpose, we would not
exist. It is purpose that created us. Purpose that connects us. Purpose
that pulls us. That guides us. That drives us. It is purpose that defines
us. Purpose that binds us. We are here because of you, Mr. Anderson.
We’re here to take flom you what you tried to take florn us: purpose.
The latter part of Smith’s dialogue is articulated by a gang of his clones that suddenly
appears in the scene. As the ensuing kung fu fight in which Neo battles against 100 or
so of these clones suggests, the purpose of the One and the Other—4hat is, the purpose
of the flagmented self—is thus to do violence against One anOther, to decode their
collective body and, in so doing, render the socius a BwO. Such is the nature of
capitalism, which “tends toward a threshold of decoding that will destroy the socius in
order to make it a body without organs and unleash the flows of desire on this body as a
deterritorialized field” (33). But of course the BwO can never be achieved, and the

death of the self enacts a temporary reterritorialization of the socius.

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In addition to this aspect of postmodern slavery, Shirley mentions another: the
collapse of reality and fantasy. Pathologized by hypermediatized society, the
postmodern subject, he suggests, is imprisoned in a dream world, alienated flom the real
world by “the sensurround pleasure dome of everyday life” (Gitlin 115). This seems to
be the essence of neurorealism. Cyberspace is an alternate reality, an illusion that is
used to either deceive subjects into believing it is genuine or to offer subjects a
conscious escape flom reality and the prison of the body. The same can be said for the
“real” late capitalist world of “pseudo-events”86 for which cyberspace functions as a
metaphor. But this idea reaches further back in postrnodernity than cyberpunk. As I
indicate in my second chapter, I locate the literary beginnings of it in the cut-up novels
of William S. Burroughs, who was a seminal influence on the iconic cyberpunk writers
(Gibson in particular). Written in the late 50s, the cut-ups map out the increasingly
irreal contours of postmodern life, representing the postmodern subject as a slave to and
production of media technology. Representations of the (high) technologization of
subjectivity have been largely the business of science and speculative fiction, and
Burroughs, writing on the flinge of the science fiction genre, does this most effectively
in his time. He isn’t the only one who does it. Before the cut-up trilogy were Alfled
Bester’s The Stars My Destination (1957), Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 (1953),
George Orwell’s 1984 (1948), Fredric Brown’s “The Waveries” (1945) and Theodore

Sturgeon’s “Ether Breather” (1939) to name just a few texts that express how the real is

 

8" In The Image, an early postmodern text that focuses on the diversity of ways that reality has taken a
back seat to fiction, Daniel Boorstin contends that pseudo-events are a “new kind of synthetic novelty
which has flooded our experience” that are “part of our social image condition(ing)” and that “mix up our
roles as actors and as audience” (9, 27, 29). Boorstin’s culminating argument is that “the American citizen
thus lives in a world where fantasy is more real than reality, where the image has more dignity than its
original” (37). Nowadays this sentiment is a bald-faced cliche that both the cyberpunks and the
Wachowskis have brought into play.

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manipulated into a fiction by sources of power. Between Burroughs and the cyberpunks
of the 80s were authors like Richard Matheson, Robert Sheckley and Philip K. Dick, all
of whom were exponents of paranoia as a vital symptom of postmodernity and the
dominance of technocapitalism. Most notable are Dick’s numerous novels and stories
that feature characters who are always-already executing hermeneutics of suspicion on
the state of reality and their subject-position within it. Dick had a profound influence on
the cyberpunks, too. In the absence of Dick and Burroughs, the cyberpunks may not
have come to fruition.87
Cyberpunk no longer exists as a distinct subgenre. Peter Nicholls suggests the
reason has do to with a discontent on the part of its authors. “Towards the end of [the
805] . . . it became clear that the term ‘cyberpunk’ no longer pleased all those whose
work it had come to envelop. Perhaps it had begun to represent too many cliches, too
many literary constraints, too big a readership wanting more and more of the same”
(290). This may be true. More probable, however, is that the motifs and themes of
cyberpunk began to leak into the science fiction mainstream, which itself was leaking
into mainstream literature as the Internet and computer technologies rapidly matured in
the 90s and became a central part of everyday life. While it is unlike the cyberspaces
imagined by William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, Rudy Rucker, Pat Cadigan, Neil
Stephenson and others, the Internet is certainly a neurorealist matrix in which subjects
can exist as figuratively “disembodied consciousnesses” with multiple identities, as

electric signs and avatars maneuvering through the “rich fields of data” that have

 

87 Ian Watson admits that Dick is a crucial cyberpunk resource. “Without Dick, cyberpunk might not
have arisen, or at least not in the same way—although the visual treatment of Ridley Scott’s movie
adaptation Blade Runner, the noir mean streets with rain forever falling (replacing Dick’s ‘radioactive
motes, grey and sun-beclouding’) and the neon ads and street junk of an Asian third world in high-tech
America has perhaps been just as influential in focusing cyberpunk style” (154).

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become intimate components of human perception, identity, and choice (Neuromancer
5). Like Gibson’s matrix, the Internet is a sheer technology of late capitalism produced
and perpetuated to facilitate the process of oommodification and consumerism. The
Wachowski’s Matrix is the metaphorical result (or demonic version, if you prefer) of the
evolution of media like the Internet. Neurorealism then is a stark technocapitalist
production. Born in the postmodern era, it is a neo reality generated fi'om the collective
desire for the commodity. Say Deleuze and Guattari: “Desire produces reality, or stated
another way, desiring-production is one and the same thing as social production” (Anti-
Oedipus 30). Above all, the neuroreal is the body hardwired to the capitalist machine.
This seems to be the next logical phase of aesthetics. The Matrix trilogy is merely a
beginning, and cyberpunk is a prototype. In the post-postmodern, postcapitalist era,
science fiction will inundate the mainstream. The mainstream will in turn become a
complex articulation of how the technology of the machinic self is connected to and
affected by the machinery of technocapitalism.

In the sections that follow, I want to isolate a few key attributes of the latter two
Matrix neurorealities, examining how they represent the terminal commodification of
individual and collective subjectivity and selflrood. The figurehead of my investigation
is Neo, a romanticized depiction of human nature as it has been represented by the
history of postmodern and pre-postmodern science fiction. Neo is a superhero (in the
Matrix), but he is also an everyman (in the real world) and a doppelganger (in the Matrix
and the real world). He embodies the postmodern condition and all of its schizophrenic
pockmarks and fluidities. He is a Deleuzoguattarian “line of escape,” a sublime

instrument of deterritorialization who maintains order by enacting violence against

’ 155

himself. The films suggest that Neo makes a choice to enact violence and, if he wanted,
he could have chosen otherwise. As the renegade program Merovingian says, however,
“choice is an illusion created by those with power and those without,” even though the
logic of the films overturn this claim in the end by instilling in Neo a “natural” will to
power that allows him to defeat his doppelganger and die for the cause of himself, that
is, the cause of the human (as distinct fi'om the technological). But it is the nature of the
capitalist subject to be powerless and technologized. Neo may be Jesus, but his
martyrdom is not a redemption for the sins of humanity. It is a mere reification of the

way in which humanity is defined by the technological.

The Freud-Thing

In Philip K. Dick’s story “The F ather-Thing” (1954), a boy named Charles Walton
learns that his father has been surrogated by an alien. The alien “eats” his father’s
insides and discards the shell of his body in a trash can in the garage. Then it takes the
place of his father as the head of the household. Mrs. Walton suspects nothing, but
Charles wises up to the father-thing immediately. He discovers his real father’s remains
in the garbage. He also discovers that the father-thing is growing a mother-thing and a
Charles-thing in the back yard. With the help of his fiiends, he kills the aliens. Dick
explains in a note to the story:

I always had the impression, when I was very small, that my father was

two people, one good, one bad. The good father goes away and the bad

father replaces him. I guess many kids have this feeling. What if it were

so? This story is another instance of a normal feeling, which is in fact

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incorrect, somehow becoming correct . . . with the added misery that one

cannot communicate it to others. (413)
In Freudian terms, the father-thing is an unconscious manifestation of Charles’ primal
fear; he is the “bad one” that threatens to castrate the child and deny him the love of his
mother. The would-be castration takes place when the father-thing attempts to feed
Charles to the larval Charles-thing. Freud notes the frequency with which “little boys
are afiaid of being eaten up by their father” (“The Question” 31), and while the father-
thing is not the one doing the eating here, he is the instigator. The killing of the father-
thing doesn’t function as the symbolic death of the father, however, even though both
authority figures are dead. The object that controlled the father-thing is still alive.
Earlier in the story Charles and his fiiend Tony Peretti are spying on the father-thing
through a window. They watch it turn off like an appliance. “As soon as Mrs. Walton
was gone from the room, the father-thing sagged in its chair. It became limp. Its mouth
fell open. Its eyes peered vacantly. Its head fell forward, like a discarded rag doll”
(106). The two boys quickly surmise that the surrogate is being controlled by some
other source. They find the source under a rock in the fi'ont yard. It is “a metallic body.
A thin, jointed thing with endless crooked legs . . . Plated, like an ant; a red-brown bug”
(107). They try to kill the creature, but the father-thing interferes and the creature
escapes down a tunnel. Thus when the father-thing is destroyed, its power source, even
in its absence, steps into its patriarchal shoes. An epistemological uncertainty is
established that in part determines a specific ontological subject-position. The children
don’t know where the creature went, nor do they know if and when it will retm'n to

finish the job it presumably started. Power and control exist jointly as an invisible

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specter that may or may not materialize at any time. It is this invisible specter that,
following in the father-thing’s footsteps, has now surrogated Charles’ symbolic father.
The relationship between Charles and his symbolic father is equivalent to the

relationship between Neo and the Architect of the Matrix, who he meets in Reloaded.
Given the arboreal, patriarchal nature of Freudian psychoanalysis88 and Freud’s
penchant for projecting his father-thingness onto his subjects (as in the case study of
Dora”), it is appropriate that the Wachowskis dressed up the Architect to resemble him.
Donning a trim, stark white beard and hairdo, an unassuming yet sleek-looking
bourgeois suit, and a crisply articulate vernacular with which he dialectically explains to
Neo the history of the Matrix and the inflexible nature of cause and effect, he is a
program, a machine, an A.I. whose purpose is to uphold the Law of the Father—a F reud-
thing. Equating Freud with the father of the Matrix is an evocative tactic, particularly in
terms of schizoanalysis. According to Deleuze and Guattari, schizoanalysis has the
capacity to produce the unconscious whereas the business of psychoanalysis is merely to
reduce it. They argue that pychoanalysis does the unconscious an inj ustice by
subjecting it to a fixed, hierarchal structure of control.

Psychoanalysis cannot change its method in this regard: it bases its own

dictatorial power upon a dictatorial conception of the unconscious.

 

88 Deleuze and Guattari pit their schizoanalytic theory of rhizomatics against the Freudian arborescent
system of psychoanalysis, which they call a “hierarchical system with centers of significance and
subjectification, central automata like organized memories” (A Thousand 16).

89 One of the best known instances of Freud Oedipalizing himself occurs in Dora: An Analysis of a Case
of Hysteria, a document of his psychoanalysis of an emotionally disturbed eighteen-year-old girl. He
reveals that Dora’s family life is rife with traumatic kernels, including an obsessive mother, an adulterous
father, and would-be pedophilic neighbors. He tentatively concludes that Dora’s hysterical outbursts are
the result of lesbian tendencies and a confusion between a love for her father and her father’s mistress.
Before he can complete the psychoanalysis, however, a transference takes place and Dora falls in love
with Freud, who “replac[es] her father in her imagination” (108). In the end of the narrative, Freud
becomes the father-thing, posing a threat to Dora’s unconscious self.

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Psychoanalysis’s margin of maneuverability is therefore very limited. In
both psychoanalysis and its object, there is always a general, always a
leader (General Freud). Schizoanalysis, on the other hand, treats the
unconscious as an acentered system, in other words, as a machinic
network of finite automata (a rhizome), and thus arrives at an entirely
different state of the unconscious. (A Thousand 18)
Psychoanalysis and schizoanalysis are not in opposition to one another. The latter is
merely an alternative of the former, one befitting of the fragmented subjectivity
characteristic of the mediatized, postmodern world. “The important point is that the
root-tree and canal-rhizome are not two opposed models: the first operates as a
transcendent model and tracing, even if it engenders its own escapes; the second
operates as an immanent process that overturns the model and outlines a map, even if it
constitutes its own hierarchies, even if it gives rise to a despotic channel” (20). It is
incongruous that the Architect is cast in the arboreal role of root-tree and tracer while
Neo is cast in the role of canalorhizome and mapmaker. In terms of desire, it renders
Neo and his human colleagues more machinic than the machines themselves, constantly
producing rifts and breakdowns in the body of the socius. They do so by means of
aggressive, carnivalesque violence, unlike the machines, whose violence is essentially
reactionary. Had all of the humans remained in their pods, had they continued to harbor
the illusion of the Matrix under the supervision of the machines as somnambular

“coppertops,”90 there would be no reason for the machines to antagonize them. The

 

90 In a Marxist reading of The Matrix, Martin A. Danahay and David Rieder equate the subject-position of
the worker under capitalism with that of the human beings, who Morpheus compares with a coppertop
battery: “The coppertop reference can be read as an expression of Marxist concerns over the plight of the
worker, who, like slaves or conscripted soldiers, provides power for the machines” (215).

159

Zionites started the war, and it wasn’t the first war they started. As the Architect
explains to Neo, Zion has been destroyed and rebuilt five times prior to the present
conflict. Desire has thus kept the system in a steady state of production (insofar as
destruction is the act of producing a particular effect.) The valence of human desire
differs from that of the machine. Human desire is predominantly a matter of he will.
People want to be able to choose their reality, to choose their selflrood and identity, to
choose their subj ect-position, ultimately to choose the dynamic of their relationship with
technology. The desire of the machines, on the other hand, is a matter of orderliness—
simply to maintain the order of things that was established with their initial rise to
power. This conflict of desire continually frustrates the Architect, who, despite the
impeccability of his self-proclaimed creative brawn, cannot produce a Matrix that
humans will accept and live happily in.” This frustration is tantamount to Freud’s
fi'ustration with the non-compliant Dora, whose refusal to submit to his fascist will to
orderliness (that is, to be structuralized by the Law of the Father) led to an abandonment
of the psychoanalysis. Freud blamed the impasse on transference.92 The architect
blames it on “human imperfection.” Michel Foucault calls Anti-Oedipus an
“introduction to the non-fascist life” (xiii). Neo is a comparable introduction, a cure for

the imperial ego of Oedipus.93

 

91 Unable to come to terms with his failure, the Architect refers to the Matrix as an anomaly: “The Matrix
is older than you know. I prefer counting hour the emergence of one integral anomaly to the emergence
of the next in which case this is the sixth version.”

92 “In this way the transference took me unawares, and, because of the unknown quantity in me which
reminded Dora of Herr K. [her father], she took her revenge on me as she wanted to take her revenge on
him, and deserted me as she believed herself to have been deceived and deserted by him” (Dora 109).
93 The machines, of course, don’t share this outlook. They see things the other way around. In The
Matrix, Agent Smith, playing the role of the Freud-thing, accuses humanity of being a virus and the

160

The scene in which Neo encounters the Architect is the central moment of
exposition in the trilogy. It is set in a room adjacent the Matrix’s “Source,” the machine
mainframe that both generates the reality of the Matrix and serves as a kind of funeral
pyre for errant or broken down programs to come to die. Neo is told by the Oracle that
his terminal purpose is to go there as it is the place “where the path of the One ends.”
Appropriately, the Source is located in a liminal space somewhere between the Matrix
and the real world. The Keymaster explains, “There is a building. Inside this building
there is a level where no elevator can go and no stair can reach. This level is filled with
doors. These doors lead to many places. Hidden places. But one door is special. One
door leads to the Source.” In order for Neo to enter the “door made of light” that leads
to the Source, he must be there during a specific window of time and open it with one of
the Keymaster’s innumerable keys. Beyond the door is an ovular room entirely
circumscribed by walls constructed out of television screens. For the most part, these
screens feature identical head shots of Neo. This is a redolent mise en scene. The room
is a hypermediatized womb to which Neo has returned, both as the One and as a
symbolic late capitalist subject who has been constructed by media technologies. In the
middle of the womb reposes the Freud-thing in a tall, black, leather executive swivel-
chair. He is immediately represented as the CEO of the Matrix, a corporation Neo is
employed by in a Marxist sense as he is exploited for his power (first as an ordinary
coppertop providing energy to the machines, then as a unique One capable of providing

the means of constructing another Matrix) and “‘alienated’ from the realities of work”

 

machines of being the cure. From their respective temporal locations, Freud himself very likely would
have accused Deleuze and Guattari of the same hysterical sickness.

161

(Danahay 217). At the same time, Neo is the J immy Hoffa of the Matrix’s labor union,
the prodigal child who will not do as daddy says.

The grid of television screens that describes the room recalls a number of
postmodern texts. The silk screen paintings of Andy Warhol that exhibit repeated
images of celebrities’ faces as a critique of media-saturated culture immediately come to
mind. The central position of Neo’s image in the screens, the chalky and computerized
texture of its skin, and its sharply robotic gesticulations are reminiscent of Max
Headroom, a literal cybernetic talking head who “embodiesthe notion of an
electronically constituted culture” (Bukatrnan 257).94 The decor is fittingly structured
like a comic book, too, each screen representing a block of action in which each of
Neo’s images plays a singular role, albeit there is no top-to-bottom, left-to-right linearity
to the wall’s schizophrenic narrative. Also notable is Nicolas Roeg’s The Man Who Fell
to Earth (1976). In this film, an alien posing as a corporate executive (played by David
Bowie, at the time a pop star and mogul of spectacular culture), comes to earth to
retrieve water for his dying planet and inadvertently becomes a mediatized body. He
does so mainly by watching the televisions he surrounds himself with in his hotel room,
stacked one atop the other. The process of his mediatization makes him more human.
Paradoxically, it also makes him a different kind of alien, assuming we perceive him as a

genuine Other that comes to earth and is reconstructed as another Other—the condition

 

94 Bukatrnan describes Max Headroom as an “imperfect duplicate” who “was of course a literalization of
television’s talking heads—he consisted of only head and shoulders, usually seen against a shifting
electronic pattern or against a few computer-generated props. . . . Max only exists through television”
(257). Likewise does Neo only exist through the Matrix, initially as an ignorant subject, finally as an
omniscient superhero. The Matrix’s destruction at the end of Revolutions is contingent upon and caused
by Neo’s death by sacrifice. Furthermore, the Max Headroom television series, which consisted of 14
episodes and ran for one season in 1987, addressed many of the same issues as the Matrix trilogy,
including “information control and the invasion of privacy” and “terrorism and the media” (67).

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of the postmodern human, or posthuman. The Other/alien is the mediatized body, an
extension of the self that redefines the nature of the self as a (high) technological being.
This is the very condition of Matrix-going subjects like Neo. He exits the alien world of
the simulation and enters the real, “machine” world,95 which is distinguished by a
mechanized landscape and populated by electronic hardware that the formerly
somnambulant, unknowing subject is compelled to awaken to and negotiate as a newly
subjected organism.

The circurnscription of Neo by his own televised images also points to a great
deal of postmodern theory. Most visible is the well-known assertion made by
Baudrillard in The Ecstasy of Communication: “In the image of television, the most
beautiful prototypical object of this new era, the surrounding universe and our very
bodies are becoming monitoring screens” (12). It is no surprise that Baudrillard is
referenced in the first film.96 Neo is clearly recreated in the image of television here,
surrounded and monitored by a multifaceted, multifaced “screening” of his own
schizophrenic psyche.” This screening can be read as a representation of the
postmodern subject who is the mirror of television rather than the other way around, a

figuration conferred by Arthur Kroker and David Cook: “In postmodernist society, it’s

 

95 In Revolutions, the Oracle implies a distinction between the two diegetic realities of the trilogy: one
created by the machines, the other inhabited by them. Thus the real is bound to the machinic and would
not exist in its absence.

9‘ Neo keeps the illicit software he hacks in a hollowed out copy of Simulation & Simulacra.

’7 or The Matrix, Karen Haber writes, “The wonderful sexy use of rearview mirrors, doorknobs, spoons,
all manner of reflections, and multiple images in video screens, could have come out of a fashion video or
commercial. Slick. Clever. Oh-so-knowing. So many oddly slanted perspectives working to increase the
viewers sense of dislocation, and hint at Neo’s literal dislocation” (216). “Reflections” of this dislocation
climax in the mediatized womb as Neo is digitally illustrated as a schizophrenic subject with multiple
“personalities.”

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not TV as a mirror of society, but just the reverse: it ’s society as a mirror of television.
And it’s not TV as a reflex commodity-form, but the commodity-form in its most
advanced, and exhausted, expression living finally (as Marx prophesied) as a pure
image-system, as a spectral television image” (268). Brian McHale expresses a similar
view in Postmodernist F iction,98 as does Paul Virilio in The Information Bomb, although
Virilio pits the television against the computer screen: “Screen against screen—the home
computer terminal and the television monitor are squaring up to each other in a fight to
dominate the global perception market, control of which will, in the near future, open up
a new era both in aesthetics and in ethics” (112). Virilio’s argument is particularly
resonant if we identify Neo as the television monitor and the Freud-Thing as the
computer terminal. Both parties are striving for perceptual control and, in the process,
redefining the nature of subjectivity. This brings me to Scott Bukatman’s Terminal
Identity, a book that has served as a foundation for my dissertation. I mentioned in my
first chapter that Bukatman defines terminal identity as “an unmistakably doubled
articulation in which we find both the end of the subject and a new subjectivity
constructed at the computer station or the television screen” (9). It is in the mediatized
womb of the Matrix where this articulation truly begins to flourish as Neo finds himself
at a crossroads where he must choose what kind of technology will define the future of
humankind.

Neo’s meeting with the Architect is as much a conversation as a confrontation.

They do not come to physical blows. But there is an aggressive verbal battle, one in

 

98 “Instead of serving as a repertoire of representational techniques, the movies and television appear in
postmodernist writing on an ontological level: a world-within-a-world, often one in competition with the
primary diegetic world of the text, or a plane interposed between the level of verbal representation and the
level of the ‘real’” (128).

I64

which the Architect emerges as a kind of linguistic Bruce Lee. As he stuffily drops a
virtual “information bomb” on Neo’s worldview, he reads and diagnoses Neo’s
reactions, his vemacular peppered with the sundry thuses, hences and ergos indicative of
causal, deductive reasoning. It is a therapy session during which the Architect, wary of
the One’s history, psychoanalyzes him in an attempt to exert authority and oblige him to
return to the Source. In his whet, rapidfire manner of speaking, the Architect says:

The function of the One is now to return to the Source allowing a temporary
dissemination of the code you carry reinserting the prime program after which you will
be required to select from the Matrix twenty-three individuals (sixteen females, seven
males) to rebuild Zion. Failure to comply with this process will result in a cataclysmic
system crash killing everyone connected to the Matrix which coupled with the
extermination of Zion will ultimately result in the extinction of the entire human race.
By providing Neo with a structural history of the system in which he is interpellated, by
assuring him that it is in his nature to be flawed, and by insisting that his future is set in
stone, he attempts to structuralize him according to his code of morality. But Neo has
his own code of morality—that which decodes and deterritorializes the Freud-thing’s
fascist territorialization. Playing the role of the Deleuzoguattarian nomad warrior, he
resists the Law of the Father. His resistance is articulated by his televised images. The
“real” Neo—that is, the real “mental projection” into the Matrix of Neo’s “digital
self”—is standing in the center of the room, defying the Freud-thing only by looming
over him, rather than adopting the role of the stereotypical analysand who lies supine on
a couch, beneath the gaze of his analyst. Despite his commanding stance, however, Neo

keeps his cool. He is clearly perplexed and upset, but his responses are always

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controlled and unemotional. In contrast, his images respond violently, shouting “Fuck
you!” and “You can’t control me!” and “You can’t make me do anything!” A few of the
images flip the F rend-thing the bird. Each collective outburst is followed by the camera
zooming into one of the images, which then dissolves into the “real,” pacified Neo
standing in the rrriddle of the room. Together the images comprise his schizophrenic
body; they are the unconscious desiring-machines, schiz-flows, multiplicities, channels
and offshoots that describe the technology of his selfhood as canal-rhizome.

James A. Steintrager writes, “Deleuze and Guattari thus take aim at the Oedipus
complex, which they see as functioning to perpetuate exploitation by normalizing the
essential unity of capitalist relations of production: the nuclear family” (216). As the
Architect calls to attention, the Matrix functions in the same way, albeit doubly. It
perpetuates the exploitation of the human body for its bioelectric power by maintaining
the illusion of the naturalized conditions of capitalist relations and the production of the
nuclear family. It is the illusion of an illusion, the naturalization of a naturalization, a
thoroughbred simulacra created by the machines, which are terminal technologies of
capitalism. In the diegesis of the trilogy, the Matrix can therefore be interpreted as late
capitalism on literal and figurative levels. Literally it is the terminal end-product of the
capitalist system, the point where the human is utterly disempowered by technology and
the only option is to destroy the system and all of its components and start over fiom
scratch. Figuratively it is an allegory for contemporary commodity-culture and the
society of the spectacle “where fantasy is more real than reality, where the image has
more dignity than its original” (Boorstin 37). Each figuration represents a medium of

control and subjugation that jeopardizes the subject’s use of free will, just as Deleuze

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and Guattari’s rhizomatics do. Moreover, the Matrix trilogy and Deleuze and Guattari
both posit agency from their respective kakistocracies. In their introduction to A
Thousand Plateaus, “Rhizome,” perhaps the most important piece in their work on
capitalism and schizophrenia alongside Anti-Oedipus’s “The Desiring-Machines,”
Deleuze and Guattari enthusiastically urge subjects to adopt the way of the schizo:
“Make rhizomes, not roots, never plant! Don’t sow, grow offshoots! Don’t be one or
multiple, be multiplicities! Run lines, never plot a point! Speed turns the point into a
line! Be quick, even when standing still! Line of chance, line of hips, line of flight.
Don’t bring out the General in you! . . . Make maps, not photos or drawings” (24-25).
They encourage the application of violence to the despotic machine of Freudocapitalist
economy as a means of breaking out of and fleeing it in the form of a new machine.
They ask the subject to make a choice between slavery and freedom. In so doing, they
imply that the subject has a choice. The Matrix films do likewise, employing Neo, who
flies like Superman and kung fu fights in fast-time, as the ultimate Speedster and line of
flight. He chooses this ontology, although not without some difficulty. Choice is
presented as the keynote problem, here and elsewhere, but in the end the trilogy
romantically suggests that it is a tangibility. The difference between this position and
Deleuze and Guattari’s is that the films are not making this assertion of their own
volition. An assemblage of science fiction body parts, they function more as a
mouthpiece for the genre itself, which has frequently expressed a boyish desire for free
will in the grip of technology. In this way, the Wachowski’s successfully critique
science fiction, exposing it as a wish-fulfillment enterprise (like Freudian dreams). They

also critique schizoanalysis, exposing it as a science fiction (choosing to be under the

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liege of General Freud or to be the Pink Panther99 both situate the subject in/as the
machine).

In the end of their conversation/confrontation, Neo must pick between returning
to the machine world and trying to save his beloved Trinity (even though the Architect
insists that it is impossible), and returning to the Source to allegedly save humanity.
“There are two doors,” the Architect intones. “The door to your right leads to the
Source and the salvation of Zion. The door to your left leads back to the Matrix and to
her and to the end of your species. As you adequately put, the problem is choice. But
we already know what you are going to do, don’t we.” What makes Neo different from
his predecessors is his capacity for emotion, namely his love for Trinity; as such, both
the Freud-thing and his analysand know that, despite their claim that the “problem is
choice,” there is only one possible choice that can be made. In effect, the problem is not
choice at all. Unlike his predecessors, Neo’s emotional constitution has been
preprogrammed to experience a specific kind of love by the Oracle, who was solicited
by the Wed Architect to help him build a more functional Matrix.”0 Neo’s exiting
the door on the lefi is an inevitability. He returns to the Matrix and saves Trinity, but
only temporarily; she dies in Revolutions, having served her purpose—to love and be

loved by Neo. Thus she partially fulfills the Architect’s prophesy that “she is going to

 

99 An example of a line of flight that Deleuze and Guattari use in “Rhizome.” They write: “The Pink
Panther imitates nothing, it reproduces nothing, it paints the world its color, pink on pink; this is its
becoming-world, carried out in such a way that it becomes imperceptible itself, asignifying, makes its
rupture, its own line of flight, follows its ‘aparellel evolution’ through to the end” (A Thousand 1 l).
Spawned by the 1963 film that starred Peter Sellers as the bumbling Inspector Jacques Clouseau, The Pink
Panther was a cartoon that appeared in the late 1960s. It featured a panther that persistently defied and
was on the nm from the law.

100 Says the Architect: “Thus the answer was stumbled upon by another, an intuitive program, initially
created to investigate certain aspects of the human psyche. . . . She stumbled upon a solution whereby
nearly 99% of all test subjects accepted the program as long as they were given a choice, even if they were
only aware of the choice at a near rmconscious level.” Choice then has been wired into the system.

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die and there is nothing you can do to stop it.” But the flip side of his prophesy, the
death of humanity, goes unfulfilled. In Revolutions, Agent Smith invades and overtakes
all of the Matrix’s virtual bodies, and he threatens to extend his domination to the
machine world. Neo prohibits this from happening by sacrificing his life. As a result,
the machines grant the Zionites amnesty. The implication is that Neo’s choice led to this
denouement. But we are talking about a terminal choice, one that is constructed by
exterior, extemalized technological forces to culminate in a specific way.101

Even if choice, “vis a vis love,”102 had not been wired into the system, it would
still be a terminal phenomenon in terms of the technology of the self. This is the point I
have been leading up to and want to explore a bit firrther in the next section. According
to the Architect, exiting either door would be a return for Neo—one to the womb, the
other to the grave. Both places, however, are defined by high technology. Let’s assume
for a moment that Neo has the capacity to choose the door that will return him to Zion
and the real world. While it is not a cyberspatial realm, it is nonetheless a realm in
which humans are dependent upon machines in order to survive, individually and as a

103

community. More importantly, it is a realm ruled by the technological. The human

 

tor ZiZek considers the crisis of choice more generally in a short reading of the Matrix trilogy called
“Reloaded Revolutions”: “In short, the choice is not between bitter truth and pleasurable illusion, but
rather between the two modes of illusion: the traitor [Seifert] is bound to the illusion of our ‘reality,’
dominated and manipulated by the Matrix, while Neo offers to humanity the experience of the universe as
the playground in which we can play a multitude of games, fi'eely passing from one to another, reshaping
the rules which fix our experience of reality” (202).

“’2 Says the Architect: “Your five predecessors were by design based on a similar predication, a
contingent affirrnation that was meant to create a profound attachment to the rest of your species
facilitating the function of the One. While the others experienced this in a very general way, your
experience is far more specific, vis a vis love.” It is Neo’s ability to give and receive love that lends him
the (illusory) power to choose.

103 Zion, for example, is energized by a gigantic engine that bears a strong resemblance to certain
architectures found in the machine city.

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has been marginalized. In order to maintain its identity, it needs its dominant half. My
general argument is that this need exists today in our spectacular reality, the dominant
half of our binary being late capitalist media technologies. We have gradually projected
these technologies out of our collective body, creating a selflrood, and now this selflrood
is returning to us, worming back into our body, swimming back to the womb. In effect,
it is revising human nature, which has always been defined by its technological
extensions, but only recently by its capitalist technological extensions. The primary
difference between our condition today and our precapitalist condition is that now we
want to embrace our extensions as much as we want to escape them. And we believe
that we can escape them—that we can choose to escape them. What we don’t want to
admit is that, if “everything is a machine” (Anti-Oedipus 2), and if the machine is
essentially the self, and if the self is simultaneously the Other, there can be no “lines of
escape.” As ZiZek says, “freedom is only possible within the system that hinders its full

deployment” (“Reloaded” 202).

The Nature of/is Technology
Bruce Sterling explains that the fields of pods in which humans are grown and farmed
for their bioelectricity that we are shown in The Matrix are a “technorganic version of
hell” derived fiom Kevin Kelly’s Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social
Systems, and the Economic World (25). The book was published in 1994 and probes the
development of the relationship between hard technology and the living organism.

Wellsian in tone, Kelly speculates on the future of control, emphasizing in his thesis that

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the machine is increasingly becoming indistinguishable from the human. In a key
passage, he writes:
This marriage between life and machines is one of convenience, because,
in part, it has been forced by our current technical limitations. For the
world of our own making has become so complicated that we must turn
to the world of the born to understand how to manage it. That is, the
more mechanical we make our fabricated environment, the more
biological it will eventually have to be if it is to work at all. Our future is
technological; but it will not be a world of gray steel. Rather our
technological future is headed toward a neo-biological civilization. (2)
Kelly’s argument is something of a cross between the panic theories of McLuhan and
Baudrillard, combining a technonaturalist determinism with a technofatalist
dystopianism. Like much science fiction and nonfiction, however, he neglects to
acknowledge a fundament of technology as it relates to the human body. In saying that
the “future is technological,” he implies that the present and the past are otherwise, and
by extension, that the further one travels into the past, the less technological the world
and the self become. As I mention above and in my first chapter, the world and the
self—or rather, the world as it is constituted by the self—has always been defined by
technology, by extensions of the body that create certain typographies. It doesn’t matter
if this extension is a heiroglyphic on a cave wall, a hand-carved arrowhead, a Tommy
gun, or an artificial intelligence: all are technologies that describe a particular form of
selflrood. Technology is not something that is disconnected or dissociated from the

human, it is an intimate part of the human. It is in fact what makes the human human.

l7l

I should make a brief clarification regarding the difference between human
nature and the natural world. Like a good postmodernist, I consider them linked insofar
as the natural world is constructed by the gaze of the subject as a representation (of God,
of the non-human, of that which cannot be represented, and so on). At the same time, I
recognize that the natural world is separate from the human and that “nature” or the
pastoral is something in which the human can insert itself or experience on some
metaphysical level. One is a matter of perception, the other is matter of being. But both
are created by the act of a projection of the self, and in a sense, both belong to the
technology of the self. This linkage often goes unacknowledged by the science fiction
genre. Broadly speaking, in science fiction high technology functions as the central
definitive characteristic, the vehicle most frequently used by writers and filmmakers to
“cognitively estrange” readers and viewers. The pastoral has typically been represented
in a romantic and nostalgic manner as something that is not only distinct from
technology, but gradually being snuffed by it.”4 This is most recently visible in Peter
Jackson’s adaptation of JRR. Tolkein’s The Lord ofthe Rings trilogy,105 especially The
Two Towers, in which preindustrial machinery is used by the malevolent powers of
Sauron to rid the physical landscape of its flora and fauna. Eventually nature, in the
form of the treelike Ents, fights back; and the defeat of Sauron in the final film
represents a defeat of the alleged evils of technology and a return to pastoral tranquility

where the human (and the humanlike) can exist in a state of non-technological purity.

 

'04 Such representations have of course not been limited to the science fiction genre, as Leo Marx
explicates in The Machine and the Garden, which analyzes the “poetic fantasy” of the pastoral and the
inexorableness of the technological in the work of Emerson, Fitzgerald, Hawthorne, Melville and Thoreau
(3).
“’5 While the Lord ofthe Rings trilogy is generally acknowledged as a fantasy narrative, its use of
technology in this way inevitably allies it to science fiction.

I72

Such a dynamic is a science fictional cliche, as Brian Stableford and Peter Nicholls
indicate: “Sf is, of course, the natural medium of antitechnological fantasies as well as of
serious extrapolations of technological possibility” (1203). Whatever the case, very few
texts problematize the relationship between nature and technology, representing the
latter as a destructive or constructive anti-natural entity.

While the Matrix trilogy takes pride in the patchwork of cliches that constitutes
its narrative body, it problematizes this relationship on a number of occasions, conflating
nature and technology. When Neo and Trinity use Captain Naobi’s ship to travel to
Machine City in Revolutions, for instance, there is a scene in which a seeming
distinction is drawn between the two. The closer they get to the city, however, the more
this distinction is blurred. Their reason for going there is unclear at first. “I just have
to,” Neo reluctantly, ignorantly soothsays. By degrees, they learn that it is to fillfill their
terminal purposes. Trinity’s is simply to die (when the ship crashes) and consequently
imbue in Neo 3 grief that allows him to confront the Deus ex Machina106 without fearing
for his own life, which, in the absence of Trinity, he no longer values. His purpose is to
defeat Smith and save the world——to make peace, if only temporarily, between the
human and the technological, between the subject and the self. As they enter into
Machine City airspace, Neo and Trinity encounter heavy fire fi'om a legion of bombers
and sentinels that stretches across the horizon. By way of some form of destructive

telekinesis,107 Neo is able to fend them off for a time; their ship plunges into the brigade

 

‘06 Looking something like a large, satanic porcupine, Deus ex Machina is the representative of the
machinic hive mind who is sent to negotiate terms with Neo when he infiltrates Machine City.

’07 The first appearance of fllis power occurs at the end of Reloaded when Neo and his cronies are nmning

away from a small pack of sentinels in an underground catacomb. Suddme Neo stops running, turns
around. “I can feel them,” he whispers. He raises a spread-fingered hand into the air. The moment before

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and machines begin to explode like fireworks. But there are too many of them. They
steer the ship upwards and pierce through the scorched, electric clouds. Above them is a
vista that is in complete contrast to the dark, gritty, flickering texture of the machine
world. The pastel of soft colors that comprise the sky belong to a Magritte painting. For
a moment everything is quiet and peaceful as the ship reaches the peak of its ascent.

This heavenly skyscape is a pastoral utopia set in contrast to the hellish landscape of the
urban dystopia beneath it, and when Trinity beholds it, she says, simply, “Beautiful.”
Then the ship loses power and plunges back into the abyss.

The contrast in this scene elicits two binaries: human/pastoral and
machine/urban. The human/pastoral is represented as a lost paradise and thus “good.”
The machine/urban is represented as a “bad” consequence of that loss, a fall from Eden.
But as Neo and Trinity enter the city limits and we get a closer view of its machinery,
this contrast is progressively more disturbed. The city is a live thing. Pulsing, greasy,
pyrotechnic and febrile, it is an organism in itself as well as a housing for other, smaller
organisms. It has its own wildlife. After their ship crashes and Trinity dies, Neo walks
down a narrow pathway towards the promontory where he will confront Deus ex
Machina. Surrounding this pathway are the branches and vegetation of a mechanical
jungle crawling with diverse motorized insects and animals. Once Neo reaches the
promontory, we see that the entire city is a jungle. There are creatures everywhere,

creeping and scuttling across the vastness of the cityscape’s electrified rainforest. The

 

the sentinels fall on him, his hand gesticulates. The sentinels freeze and writhe as if strangulated, then fall
dead to the ground. The implication is that Neo is a machine, too, constructed for a specific purpose and
nem'ally connected to the hive mind shared by the machine collective. Neo is unaware of this connection,
however, and when the sentinels go down, so does he. Not so in Revolutions. When he confronts the
sentinels on the periphery of Machine City, he is on the verge of fully realizing his power as a machine.
He is nearing the finish line of the awakening that the entire trilogy marks. Ironically, when he reaches
the point where he can truly “see,” he is blind, having lost his eyes in a brawl with Smith. This blindness
marks his passage from human to technological, from subject to self.

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problem is deepened when Deus ex Machina appears to Neo in the form of a giant
human face constructed out of a swarm of metallic bees. In these respects, Machine City
seems more human/pastoral than machine/urban. The skyscape, in turn, seems more
unreal—not machine/urban, but a representation of nostalgia/desire. We might say that
the skyscape is “more real than real” (Simulacra 81), as Baudrillard says of our
mediatized world. It is no longer part of the natural world, after all, which has been
overrun and redefined by technologies spawned from capitalist production. In short,
what Neo and Trinity’s journey into the Machine City shows is that nature only exists
through the vehicle of the technological, which has redefined the behavior and the gaze
of the subject.

The usurpation of nature by the technocapitalist machine culminates in the final
battle royal in Revolutions between Neo and his doppelganger Agent Smith. The battle
is staged in the form of wuxia pian, a style of fighting invented by Chinese filmmakers
dating back to the 19205. “Based on legends, popular fiction, or Chinese opera, these
films feature action as well as a strong supernatural element, in which kung fu masters
fly through the air, display deadly mental powers, or shoot death rays out of their heads”
(Williams 125). For the Matrix trilogy’s climax, this style is an adequate means of
expressing the ultraviolence characteristic of the trilogy’s diegetic reality on top of the
late capitalist reality from which it was extrapolated. Smith and Neo are two break-
flows plugged into the same machinic entity. The violence they commit against each
other is representative of a violence committed against an individual, pathological self
born from technocapitalist subjectivity. In the schizoanalytic scheme of things, violence

is their terminal purpose, and together they are the bipolarity that keeps the system in

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(dis)order. Ian Watson writes, “What precisely does Agent Smith, tormented by nausea,
hope for? For something—or for nothing, nihilistically? For sheer oblivion? Do the
machines have any agenda other than eradicating Zion and the Resistance and
continuing indefinitely as before?” (167). From a Deleuzoguattarian perspective, no,
they don’t. Smith is the epitome of this agenda. He craves purpose yet thinks he lacks
it, blaming Neo for stealing it from him. Hence he creates a purpose for himself:
becoming God. But this is illusory. His real purpose, as it turns out, is solely to wreak
havoc in the process of becoming God since becoming God is tantamount to manifesting
the BwO and therefore impossible. Neo’s purpose in turn is to counter Smith’s havoc-
reeking. Engaged in the terminal production of violence, both characters are desiring-
machines tearing across the surface of the same BwO. By my reading, they reveal the
nature of the technologized capitalist subject, who creates an illusory sense of purpose
by means of commodity production and consumption. Buried in the unconscious is the
subject’s real purpose: the mere creation and perpetuation of violence.

Ironically, perhaps, this is a basic Freudian tenet developed most poignantly in
Civilization and Its Discontents. Freud’s thesis is that human nature is inherently
narcissistic, aggressive and self—destructive. At the end of the book, he speculates as to
what effects the extension of the subject’s modern (and inevitably capitalistic)
technologies will have on civilization:

The fateful question for the human species seems to me to be whether
and to what extent their cultural development will succeed in mastering
the disturbance of their life by the human instinct of aggression and self-

destruction. It may be that in this respect precisely the present time

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deserves a special interest. Men have gained control over the forces of

nature to such an extent that with their help they would have no difficulty

in exterminating one another to the last man. (111-12)
Put differently, we have reinvented nature by projecting our technologies onto it, and
what remains to be seen is the aftermath of this violent act. One potential aftermath is
the diegesis of the Matrix trilogy. This diegesis is an effect of nature, which has been
reconfigured by the technological, turning against and reconfiguring the human. Freud
implicitly acknowledges that, in Smith’s words, what “pulls us,” “guides us,” “drives
us” and “defines us” is our instinctual knack for violence, that is, the process of
committing violence, if only unconsciously. Here Freud and Deleuze and Guattari are
more or less on the same page. Where they are not on the same page, and where
Freudian theory prevails, is the issue of choice. The Matrix trilogy suggests that Neo
has the power to choose his identity and path in life. So do Deleuze and Guattari
suggest that the subject has the power to choose to be a schizocratic revolutionary.
Freud, however, claims that we are slaves to our unconscious desires and that the
choices we make are machinic productions of those desires. It is in this crucial way that
the Matrix trilogy, in spite of its schizoanlytic current, is a kind of F reud-thing itself.
The problem is not choice. The problem is the films propose that the problem is choice
when in fact they delineate a deterministic universe.

The final battle is orchestrated by the machines. Squared off against Deus ex

Machina, Neo says, “The program Smith has grown beyond your control. Soon he will
spread throughout this city as he had spread throughout the Matrix. You cannot stop

him. But I can.” His words are not well-received. Deus ex Machina is disgusted by the

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prospect of being dependent upon a human and exclaims, “We don’t need you! We
need nothing!” Paradoxically, of course, human bioelectricity is the life support system
for the machines. And despite its claim, Deus ex Machina realizes that Smith poses a
formidable threat. It quickly concedes. A chair constructed fi'om thick fiberoptic
tendrils “grows” out of the promontory beneath Neo and eases his body into it. Another
tendril looms behind his head like a cobra reading itself to strike. It lashes out, thrusting
its sharp head into his cortical shunt and jacking him into the Matrix. Waiting for him is
a dark, rainy city populated entirely by his doppelgflnger. A soaking wet Neo is standing
in the middle of a street surrounded by row after row of Agent Smiths. Smiths are also
staring out the windows of the buildings that loom overhead. Then one of them strides
into the street. Neo says, “It ends tonight.” “I know it does,” the Smith retorts. “I’ve
seen it. That’s why the rest of me is just going to enjoy the show. Because we already
know that I’m the one that beats you.” Always decreeing the inevitability of his
dissemination and dominance, Smith is a sheer determinist, claiming to have
foreknowledge of the future and his position in it. The ensuing dogfight is a kung fu
extravaganza. Most of it takes place in the air. Neo and Srrrith throw a flurry of stylized
punches and kicks. They repeatedly blitz and collide with one another as lightning
strikes and thunder crashes. Neo catches the brunt of the flaws, and finally Smith
piledrives him into the street. Once again he gets up. Frustrated and perplexed, Smith
utters the following climactic monologue:

Why do you do it? Why keep fighting? Do you believe you’re fighting

for something, for more than your survival? Can you tell me what it is?

Do you even know? Is it freedom or truth? Perhaps peace. Could it be

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for love? Illusions, Mr. Anderson. Vagaries of perception. Temporary
constructs of a feeble human intellect trying desperately to justify an
existence that is without meaning or purpose. And all of them as
artificial as the Matrix itself. . . . You can’t win. It’s pointless to keep
fighting. Why, Mr. Anderson? Why, why, why do you persist?
In reply, Neo murmurs, “Because I choose to.” The assertion reifies the trilogy’s central
irony. Smith assumes Neo is privy to the same foresight that he is. In his eyes, Neo
knows Smith is going to defeat him. He knows it is inevitable, and he can’t understand
why Neo won’t give up. We viewers don’t know whether or not Neo actually possesses
that foresight. In all likelihood he doesn’t; he is merely performing his constructed role,
fulfilling his preprograrnmed destiny as a metaphorical and literal machine plugged into
the system. And yet he tells Smith that his persistence is the result of an act of he will.
As he sees it, he alone makes the choice to keep fighting, not knowing that the power of
choice is encoded into his machinic subjectivity. This maddens Smith even more. At
last he shoves his hand into Neo’s chest, imprinting himself onto the One just as he has
imprinted himself onto all of the Matrix’s subjects. Little does he know that Neo jacked
into the Matrix in Machine City, giving the machines full access to his virtual self. Once
Smith surrogates that self, they have access to him. In the end Neo’s real body operates
as a medium through which the collective body of Smith is destroyed and peace is
established between the Zionites and the machines. Neo dies in the process, solidifying
his role as messiah. When he is transported away fiom the promontory on a coffinlike

lath, his body is fittingly splayed out like Christ on the cross.

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In reference to the Zizekian idea that watching television has become a
performative act by which the postmodem subject “does its duty,” Brian Donohue
writes:

This notion has significant implications for theories of both ideology and
subjectivity. For example, the determining efi‘ect of objective activity
regardless of subjective intention can be read as another way of stating
the existentialist slogan that there is no ‘dress rehearsal’ for life: at each
moment actions are final and decisive, even if one believes oneself to be,
for example, merely “performing a role” temporarily before returning to
some other “real life.” That real life is being determined at each instant
by numerous material factors in the face of which a concept like
‘personal choice’ loses the certainty of its suggestion of direct action in
pursuit of clearly understood interests. (20)
This passage is translatable to Neo’s selflrood and to the terminal choice that speaks it.
He is a cyborg body and his identity is defined by his being a technological extension
both inside and outside the Matrix. Inside he is a heroic “mental projection of [his]
digital self’ who fights for the existence of humanity. Outside he is a docile body
perceptually and cerebrally connected to the machines—despite his blindness, he sees
Machine City as a spectacle of code and light (just as he sees the Matrix at the close of
the first film), and he short-fuses sentinels at will. Both sites see Neo frmctioning as a
technology, and both are “determined at each instant by material factors” deriving from
the Opposing schemas implemented by the Architect and the Oracle as to the “function

of the One.” Like Smith and Neo, the Architect and the Oracle are two sides of the same

180

coin; their purpose is merely to offset each other and, in so doing, to balance the
“equation” out. Whatever their metaphysical context, they are all performative
technologies and have no “real life” to return to. Choice is a fantasy in the Matrix
trilogy that poses as a reality. More than anything, the films indicate that the subject can
choose to divide the human fiem the technological. As Neo shows us in spite of
himself, however, this division is an ontological impossibility. Like Christ, he is
simultaneously a common man and a superhero, and it is his existence as a fluid, schized
technology that allows him to preserve the existence of humanity. In this respect,
everything is dependent upon and (pre)determined by technological “capital,” by the
residual capitalist technologies that have adopted the role of Frankenstein’s monster and
theoretically re-engaged in the very “schizosophic” capitalist praxis that exists in our

postmodern world.

Capitalism and Science Fiction
Historically, comic book narratives have been situated to some degree within the science
fiction cosmography, dating back to 1938 when the first issue of Superman was
published by Action Comics. Mark Oehlert explains that this period marks the
beginning of the “Golden Age” of comics, which lasted from 1939 to 1950 and truly
came to fruition when Marvel hit the scene (112).108 In 1941, Marvel introduced
Captain America, the first cyborgian comic book hero. Rejected fi'om the military

because of his meager physical stature, he is given a “super-soldier serum” that jacks up

*

108 This period coincides with the Golden Age of science fiction, which Peter Nicholls says began in 1937

when John W. Campbell took over as editor for the pulp magazine Astounding Stories and ended in the
late 1940s (“Golden” 506).

181

his physiology and turns him into a war machine of a particular type: the anti-Nazi. At
the time, World War H was unfolding and Nazism was spreading across Europe. Adolf
Hitler was appropriately Captain America’s virgin nemesis. Both the science fictional
Superman and Captain America, then, were preoccupied with subverting fascist
hostility, Lex Luther playing the part of Hitler in Superman’s diegesis. Many of the
comics that followed these originary texts indulged the same anxiety, focusing on the
cold war and the threat of communism.109 Today fascist villainy has been superseded by
capitalism and the technologies it disseminates. “The great evils in the [contemporary]
comic book world are the multinational corporations” (120), as is the case in much
cyberpunk fiction. Corporate power is thus represented as the modern day equivalent of
would-be Nazi imperialism. This, too, is the role of the machines in the Matrix trilogy,
which reaffirms the Wachowski brothers’ use of a comic book aesthetic.

Oehlert identifies three types of “latter day cyborg” comic book characters: the
simple controller, the bio-tech integrator, and the genetic cyborg. All of them interface
with or are infected by hard technology in some way. Most complicated is the third
category that includes characters like Neo and Smith. “Characters in this class may or
may not have artificial implants but their primary power rests in a purposeful alteration
of their genetic code. The issues of purposefulness and intent are critical and defining
ideas for this group. It is intent that distinguishes the genetic cyborg fi'om the comic
characters that have been created by accident” (116). Unlike Spider-Man, Neo is created
on purpose, by the machines, as the Freud-thing makes clear. He is a veritable Captain

America, designed to uphold the Law (of the Father) in the name of the technocapitalist

 

'09 For instance, “the title of Captain America’s comic book became ‘Capt. America . . . Commie
Smasher’” (1 13).

182

desiring-machine. All superheroes are schized to some degree by some form of
technology—schizophrenia is the nature of the superhero—and most of them are
situated within an urban capitalist milieu. Classic superheroes like Captain American
are pro-capitalist figures, capitalism being synonymous with American morality and
opposed to fascist immorality. The Matrix trilogy adopts the thematic of the cyberpunk
narrative and inverts this dynamic, painting the consumer-capitalist machine as a vital
source of immorality and villainy. Even the films’ credits do this, as John Shirley
explains:
In his commentary on the DVD, one of the special effects men says that
the Wachowski Brothers were firm about showing the logos of their
financiers, Village Roadshow Pictures, and the corporate monolith,
Warner Bros., in their own digital styling, colored sickly green and
digitized to mesh with the tone of the [first] film. They wanted to co-opt
the logos and thus somehow repudiate the power of these media despots.
(53)
Despite such repudiations, however, the trilogy undermines the cyberpunk thematic by
suggesting the potentiality of free will as well as the potentiality of the separation of the
human subject and the technological self that defines it. In this capacity, they represent
the utopian desires of much pro-cyberpunk and proto science fiction, dating back to the

optimistic narratives of Jules Verne, HG. Wells and Edward Bellamy up to the stories

183

published in pulp magazines like Amazing Stories, Astounding Stories of Super-Science
and Weird T ales.no

This brings me back to something I mentioned earlier. As an elemental and
topical assemblage of science fictional cliches extracted fiom the genre’s beginnings up
to the present, the trilogy is a cognitive map of the genre that theorizes science fiction
with its own machinery. It is not necessarily the Wachowskis that posit agency from the
technology of the self; it is the cinematic desiring-machine that they compile. At its
core, the trilogy is like the science fictions of Baudrillard and Haraway; as Istvan
Csicery-Ronay, Jr. says, it is an articulation of the “fusion of SF and theory . . . that
seeks to generate a ‘futurology”’ (389), the only difference being that it masquerades as
fiction rather than theory. Csicery-Ronay, Jr. emphasizes the theoretical importance of
mapping out “a futurological dimension in every area of research [which] should be as
obvious in the postmodern age as the need for a historical one. Only by attempting to
lirnn the possible directions of evolution, and to clarify the ethical principles that one
wishes to see guiding action, can intellectual work maintain a sense of connection with
the breakneck acceleration of technological innovation” (402). The futurological
dimension that the Matrix trilogy outlines is a postcapitalist dystopia in which the
technology of the capitalist self has turned against and reinscribed the subject.
Postmodern science fiction is a product of late capitalism that usually references or
signifies the capitalist system in some way. A representation of the history of the
science fiction genre, the Matrix trilogy serves as a schized critique and reification of

that system. More than this, however, it points to the future of the genre, suggesting that

 

“0 Peter Nicholls writes, “In the most simplistic version of the history of sf, sf was always (and rightly) an
optimistic literature until the New Wave came along in the 19603 and spoiled everything” (“Optimism”
891).

184

its primary business will inevitably be preoccupied with the way in which

technocapitalism remakes its maker.

I85

CODA

In the war that unfurls in The Matrix Revolutions, human soldiers literally use their
technological extensions to defend themselves against the squidlike machines that storm
Zion. Manning giant mechanical exoskeletons that are nightmarish caricatures of the
human body, the soldiers are efficiently pulverized by the machines, although they put
up a good fight. The exoskeletons allude to the climactic scene in the film Aliens
(1986). While larger, they are virtual spitting images of the anthropomorphic forklift
Ripley uses to square off against and defeat the mantislike alien queen. The allusion is
no doubt deliberate in light of the Matrix trilogy’s own body armor, an assemblage of
science fiction motifs and themes. Unlike the soldiers, however, Ripley’s opponent is a
genuine alien. It is an Other from a distant planet that has no connection to the human
community whereas the machines are spawned by that community. Specifically, they
are spawned by the high technology created in order to build a more fluid and productive
capitalist system. Technology of any kind, whether it be language or a killer robot, is a
creative extension of the subject. In Technologized Desire, I have viewed this extension
in terms of selfllood, which defines subjectivity as an individual and collective
phenomenon. Revolutions’ war is a battle in which the technological self confionts the
technological self. At the same time, it is a battle in which the Other confronts the
Other. This implosive relationship is an effect of the mediatization and subsequent
massification of selflrood by the commodity-culture machine. Individuality is an
evolving fiction. Soon what differentiates one body from another will be the mere

semblance of its technocapitalist armor. Beneath this diversity of armor will crouch the

186

same coppertop subject, terminalized by an oppositional panic-desire to technologically
extend itself ad infinitum and shed its technocapitalist self so as to exist au naturel. In
many ways this is already the case. And as we plunge further into the matrix of our own
diegetic reality, science fiction will serve as a kind of aggressive atlas, mediating the
“complex trajectory between the forces of instrumental reason and the abandon of a
sacrificial excess” and hypertheorizing the denovation——and devolution—of
technologized desire (Bukatrnan 329).

Broadly speaking, Bukatrnan wrote about how science fiction represented the
postmodern condition. I have tried to write beyond this point, visualizing how science
fiction represents the dawning popstcapitalist condition by examining the postmodern
landscape. In other words, my angle of incidence uses science fiction to point to a
postcapitalist subjectivity that has become an extension of technocapitalism rather than
vice versa.

Deleuze and Guattari are the twentieth century’s poet laureates of
technocapitalism, especially in light of the way they terminally plug desire into the
machinery of the capitalist world system. In their books on capitalism and
schizophrenia, they equate the social field with the realm of desire, claiming that the
way they engage in production is the same under the detemrinate conditions of
commodity-culture. Moreover, they argue that this is the only ontological and psychic
space: “There is only desire and the social, and nothing else” (Anti-Oedipus 29). This
space offers an illusion of existential freedom while in reality it is a prison, enslaving
subjects by remaking them in the form of capital and then hotwiring them to each other

as producing-machines. The effect is a communal capitalist technology of the self

187

whose only business is the reproduction of itself. What intrigues Deleuze and Guattari is
a basic problem in political philosophy: the process of subjects, conscious of the illusion
that describes reality, desiring to be fascisized slaves.

Nick Land disturbs the Deleuzoguattarian spatial plane of existence, arguing that
desire is dissociating itself from the social. The reason lies in the melting division of
public and private life invoked by technocapitalist media.

Between the private and the public there is no longer serious
competition. Instead there is an evaporating social field invested solely
by the defeated and stale affects of insecurity and inertia. The real
tension is no longer between individuality and collectivity, but between
personal privacy and impersonal anonymity, between the remnants of a
smug bourgeois civility and the harsh wilderness tracts of Cyberia, “a
point where the earth becomes so artificial that the movement of
deterritorialization creates of necessity and by itself a new earth.” Desire
is irrevocably abandoning the social, in order to explore the libidinized
rift between a disintegrating personal egoism and a deluge of post-human
schizophrenia. (480-81)
Land’s claim incites a number of questions. At what point did desire begin to abandon
the social? Was it already abandoning it thirty-five years ago when Deleuze and
Guattari were writing Anti-Oedipus in the late sixties and early seventies? Where
specifically is desire going if it is leaving the social in its dust? The “harsh wilderness
tracts of Cyberia,” after all, still constitute a type of socius. Where is the location of the

“libidinized rift” desire desires to explore? Is this dissociative tendency the nature of all

188

technologized (or, as Land calls it, machinic) desire? At what point did desire become
technologized? Is it a purely postmodern phenomenon spurned by the technology of the
image, or does it reach back further? How much further? To what degree do modern
industrial forces account for such a wayward technologized desire? More significantly,
what will technologized desire look like in the future? And how will it behave? And
where will it go?

The answers to these questions are embedded in the science fiction genre, which
is the most capable medium for charting the spacetime worm-body of technologized
desire’s past, present and latent destiny. The purpose of this dissertation has not been to
historicize technologized desire so much as it has been to analyze its contemporary
condition and gesture towards its imminent emergence as a postcapitalist schiz-flow.
My discussion does not go back further than the adherents of the Frankfurt School; I
locate the beginnings of my concept of desire, selfllood, and the body in their proto-
theoretical science fictions (Horkheimer and Adomo’s “The Culture Industry” and
Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” above all). But
this is not to say that they are the beginning. Before them, for instance, there was Fritz
Lang’s Metropolis (1927), a science fiction/theory that schizoanalyzes capitalist
subjectivity from a Marxist perspective. And in the nineteenth century there was Marx
himself, theorizing the technology of the self by turning the body into an alienated,
subj ugated machine.

Some scholars mark the beginning of the science fiction genre with Mary
Shelley’s Frankenstein (1817). Brian Aldiss calls it “the first real science fiction novel”

(5), and George Slusser claims that it “is indeed the first SF novel, by which I mean

189

simply that it seems to be the first work in which the processes of traditional fiction and
modern science meet in any meaningful fashion” (46). Others reach back further, citing
texts as antiquated as Gulliver’s Travels (1726), Cyrano De Bergerac’s Voyage dans la
lune (1650), Bishop Godwin’s The Man in the Moon (1638), Johannes Kepler’s
Somnium (1634), and Lucian’s True History (circa 150) as points of origin. These
earlier fictions are at least in part based on scientific principles as formulated or
understood at the time of their composition, and they are distinguished by a sense of
wonderment and discovery. As Mark Rose contends, however, labeling them as science
fiction is “retroactively recomposing [them] under the influence of a generic idea that
did not come into being until well after [they] were written” (5). This is a fair
contention, but it isn’t altogether viable in that history is inevitably named and spoken
from the perspective of the future (whether it’s true or false). While the first appearance
of the term science fiction was in Hugo Gemsback’s editorial to a June 1929 edition of
Science Wonder Stories, the origins of the genre are most fimrly located in the
nineteenth and early twentieth century novels of Jules Verne and H.G. Wells, which
popularized the deployment of high technology in literature. Products of industrialism,
these authors’ respective boyish fantasies and “scientific romances” combined a utopian
sensibility with a plaintive fatalism. This is especially the case with Wells, whose
romances functioned as social critiques and were laden with a desire to overcome human
folly.

Science fiction’s evolution fiem modernist to postmodernist formation marks a
distinctive process: the increasing disappearance of the human. The rise to power of late

capitalist electric technology has mechanized the body, perception, and ideology. As

190

texts like the Matrix trilogy explicitly illustrate, it has induced a slavelike dependency in
the human condition. Says Marshall McLuhan:
It is this continuous embrace of our own technology in daily use that puts
us in the Narcissus role of subliminal awareness and numbness in
relation to these images of ourselves. By continuously embracing
technologies, we relate ourselves to them as servomechanisms. That is
why we must, to use them at all, serve these objects, these extensions of
ourselves, as gods or minor religions. (55)
This is precisely what McLuhan’s successor Jean Baudrillard means when he says “God
is not dead. He has become hyperreal” (159), redirecting the connotation of Nietzsche’s
war cry from Christian to commodity-capitalist morality. The cyberpunks were the first
to effectively represent this cultural condition. At the thematic center of their narratives
is the machine of technocapitalism and its pathological affects. Their stories are
cOgnitive maps of how the technocapitalist self has (re)coded subjectivity and the body.
The sense of wonder and discovery that typified early science fiction does not exist in
these maps inasmuch as the technological innovations that used to invoke that sense
have been injected into the human body. These innovations have thus been denovated.
In other words, the bodily internalization of technology has (re)produced perception in
such a way that the process of technological extension has become a banal activity. In
cyberpunk diegeses, subjects regard their monstrous, machinic environments idly, if they
regard them at all. This sentiment inevitably informs science fiction today. And it
certainly informs the real world, which is in many ways a representation of what was

imagined by the cyberpunks and their predecessors. In his latest book, Matters of

191

Gravity, Scott Bukatrnan writes: “No longer is ‘the future’ a harmless fiction, a utopian
era that, by its very definition, will never arrive; it is instead upon us with a vengeance”
(15). Reality as a representation of the future as portrayed by science fiction—this is
perhaps the first sign of the beginning of postcapitalist life.

There are two dominant visions of postcapitalism. Some have associated it with
a reversion to a primitive society in the wake of a global cataclysm. Here the
postcapitalist is the postapocalyptic. More commonly it is used to denote an
amplification or extrapolation of capitalism in its current form. As Walter Benn
Michaels reveals, for instance, Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy,l ” a series of
novels about the colonization and terraforrnation of Mars, “attempts to imagine
postcapitalism at the moment when Earth is beginning to understand itself as
postsocialist. . . . Robinson's postcapitalism looks a lot like postsocialism—everything is
corporations, everything is private property, it is just that the corporations are
‘employee-own ”’ (664). The subjects that populate Robinson’s postcapitalist space,
however, are not afflicted by the technozombification of perception and desire that
characterized cyberpunk subjects. Rather, they are colorful, wide-eyed personalities
who take an active interest in exploring their (new) world and selflroods. Regardless of
their intimate relationship with high technology, they are not residual bodies, mediatized
and marginalized by the commodity-culture machine. In this way Robinson
romanticizes Golden Age science fiction and creates an authentic fantasy instead of an
extrapolated potential reality. His trilogy does not depict a postcapitalist universe
insofar as his characters are not sufficiently pathologized by what is essentially the

eclipse of subjectivity by the technological self. This, it seems, will be the fundament of

 

“' The trilogy includes Red Mars (1993), Green Mars (1994) and Blue Mars 0 996)-

192

the postcapitalist future. Slavoj Zizek rightly equates such a formation with Frankfurt
School partisans, calling it “the extrapolated embodiment of Kulturindustrie, the
alienated-reified social Substance (of Capital) directly taking over, colonizing our inner
life itself” (“Reloaded” 198). Science fiction will continue to cognitively map the
“colonization of our infer life” by the media technologies of our present
commoditocracy as we slip into the next phase of sociosymbolic economy. It began as a

genre of fancy. It will end as the genre of capital.

193

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