You have come to meet your maker.
You arrive in the Future - capital F - or what passes for it.
Everyone knows that Science Fiction tells us more about the present
than what is to come. In fact, in 1982, Blade Runner affords an
uncannily prescient glimpse into the very near future; not by virtue of
prophecy, but because of the influence, influenza, that it will shortly
exact. The future catches (on to) Blade Runner very quickly. By the
mid nineteen eighties, Blade Runners cavernous spaces and
streaming lighting will have colonised every area of the media
landscape. Soon, very soon, every bank advert looks like this. And
now --- from Batman to the Matrix --- all available cinematic futures capital F - are retreads of Blade Runner.
When William Gibson saw Blade Runner for the first time, he almost
fled from the cinema - in some mixture of terror, wonder and awe.
What he was seeing was so close to what he was writing about that
it felt as if the screen were populated by images from inside his own
head.
Where had they come from?
Or when?
Freud compared the unconscious to a city: to Rome precisely. But
the analogy between Rome and the unconscious was only a
metaphor - a way of pushing the outside into the inside, folding
geography within psychology (psychoanalysisı most persistent vice).
In 1974, Lyotard demanded that we take Freud seriously on this
point, which is to say literally. And, surveying the Los Angeles of the
Sixties, J. G. Ballard realised that the psychoanalytic zoning of the
unconscious as interior space was no longer adequate to an urban
reality dripping with a totally pervasive psychopathology. Look
outside for the unconscious now, he counselled. The manifest and
the latent have switched places. Landscape has become
dreamscape, itıs in the buildings and advertising hoardings that our
warring drives play themselves out, not in some politely repressed
Viennese interior. Blade Runnerıs LA is the postmodern unconcious
- the cyberpunkonscious. Letıs not forget that LA is the dream
factory: and to that extent, itıs always been cybergothic.
Ever fallen asleep in a cinema? The first time I saw Blade Runner it
was very late at night. I woke up to the climactic scene of Roy Batty
fighting Deckard. It was like the screen was full of images from inside
my own head, dreams fusing with electricity…
Think carefully about the phrase dream factory and youıre close to
whatıs really at stake in cybergothic. Everything can be machined.
Not only the wetware - thatıs easy meat. Even now, so they say, out
in Siberia, ex-Soviet scientists are cloning bodies in mafia black labs
just to cut them up and sell off the parts to western hospitals. Tales
of labour camps full of grotesque subhuman drones - produced by
some combination of molecular biology and animatronics so as to be
able to function without a brain - are as yet unsubstantiated. Tyrell
takes for granted that you can produce the body; it prides itself on its
ability to simulate personalities, memories, dreams (all the old
psychoanalytic bio-access codes, now hacked). An identity so
convincing, even youıll believe it. When Deckard confronts Rachael,
itıs beyond painful. He shows her, brutally, that what she thought
was intimately personal, deep inside - her memory - is in fact a
cyber-industrial product (no different, metaphysically speaking, from
a stick of chewing gum).
Deckard: -- Remember when you were six? You and your brother
snuck into an empty building through a basement window. You were
gonna play doctor. He showed you his, but when it got to be your
turn you chickened and ran. Remember that? You ever tell anybody
that? Your mother, Tyrell, anybody huh? You remember the spider
that lived in a bush outside your window? Orange body, green legs.
Watched her build a web all summer. Then one day there was a big
egg in it. The egg hatchedRachael: The egg hatched...
Deckard: And? Rachael: And a hundred baby spiders came out. And
they ate her. Deckard: Implants! Those aren't your memories.
They're somebody else's. They're Tyrell's niece's -When they were setting up Voight-Kampff, they made extensive
consultations into the work of Wilhelm Worringer.
Look in any textbook and youıll see Worringer described as an art
critic, but that was only a cover. Really, he was a cybergothic double
agent.
For Voight-Kampff, the local problem is distinguishing the human
from the nonhuman. More globally, the issue is differentiating the
organic from the inorganic. As Tyrell knows all too well, this raises all
sorts of uh philosophical questions.ı Those who police the line are
called Blade Runners in Scottıs world, Turing cops in Gibsonıs. They
are border creatures, perpetually operating undercover, going native.
Skincrawlers. They face the problem that spies of every persuasion
have always confronted: how do you get inside the enemyıs head
without becoming them? (Itıs a perpetual problem in Philip K Dickıs
paranoiaverse, and he gives his most harrowing account of this fatal
double-dealing in A Scanner Darkly.)
Worrringerıs chief insight - at least as far as the Turing police are
concerned - is that what characterizes the organic is the capacity for
empathy. The ostensible project in Worringerıs two principal
cybergothic treatises, Abstraction and Empathy and Form in Gothic
is to give an account of the aesthetic underlying the Gothic
cathedrals of the middle ages; it also, very obviously, involves an
attempt to re-evaluate the so-called Dark Ages, and to provide a
psycho-aesthetic profile of the Germanic peoples. In making his pact
with cybergothic, Worringer attempts to racialize, or at least
regionalise, the Gothic. It is, he wants to establish, a specifically
Northern sensibility. (He has support from the more vernacular forms
of Gothic revival. Your typical gothic film is not complete unless it has
a heavy North European flavour. The cinematic chronotope is a
northern Europe caught in some impossible combination of the
nineteenth century and the Middle Ages, angry torch-carrying
villagers massing in the shadow of a foreboding castle. Itıs easily
parodied.)
Art, Worringer claims, has its origins in abstraction. And the motive
for primitive abstraction is - Anxiety. Faced with the contingent flux of
an unregulated Nature, primitive cultures - and for Worringer the
Egyptians are the paradigm case of such a culture - erect an
awesome anti-Nature whose angular artificiality subdues the
unpredictable mutability of the natural under rigid laws of Necessity.
The Pyramids are monuments to an intense anxiety they both
express and sublimate.
Look out of the windows of the Tyrell corporation and you see
pyramids.
Representative art emerges much later, when humanity achieves a
confidence Worringer clearly feels is vainglorious arrogance. This is
the time when the world is dominated by Southern Europe, when the
Greeks and Romans sedentarise culture and banish primordial
anxiety. Empathy emerges as the key feeling here: in the
Greco-Roman world, according to Worringer, enjoying paintings and
sculpture becomes a kind of heightened self-enjoyment. What is
enjoyed is a feeling of connection, of unproblematic flowing into the
world. For Worringer, this is the feeling of organic vitality. One is
neither too close to Nature as to be absorbed in it, nor so far away
that it inspires dread. Art no longer has recourse to the hard
geometries it once used to banish anxiety; it now has the leisure to
be able to imitate the soft curves of a nature in which humanity can
feel at home.
Worringerıs Gothic or Northern line is to some extent a combination
of the the primitive abstract and the organic-vital. But Worringer
warns us that what we find in Gothic ornament is not a Hegelian
synthesis of the two previous lines; it 'is not a case of the
harmonious interpenetration of two opposite tendencies, but of an
impure, and to a certain extent uncanny, amalgamation of them, a
requisition of our capacity for empathy (which is bound up with
organic rhythm) for an abstract world which is alien to it.' The Gothic
cannot be an harmonious fusion of the organic with the abstract
because harmony belongs to the organic sensibility alone. In the
Gothic, the mechanical abstract does not fuse with the organic so
much as it confuses it. Faced with the tangle of lines that
characterises the Gothic, the organic-vital recoils, stunned and
appalled. What motivates the Gothic line is anxiety, but not the same
anxiety that impelled the Egyptians to manufacture their mechanical
mausoleums. Rather, the Gothic arises from a discontent with
terrestrial life, a sense of existential alienness that builds up inside
and seeks release above. This profound unrest sorcerously calls up
matter itself to rise towards an inacessible heaven: hence the
soaring arches of the Gothic cathedrals, which sound, in Worringerıs
description, less like houses of God, and more like hell erupting on
the surface of the planet. There is transfer both of vitality - which is
attributed now to the inorganic as well as the organic - as well as our
capacity for empathy which extends to the inorganic that has
acquired an animation which provokes in us an uncanny pathosı.
Comparing the Classical with the Gothic Worringer writes,
Here in the Classical edifice, the concepts organic and empathy are
completely co-extensive; here an organic life is substituted for
matter; it obeys not only its own mechanical laws, but is
subordinated, along with its laws, to an artistic volition replete with
feeling for organic life. In the Gothic cathedral, on the contrary,
matter lives solely on its own mechanical laws; but these laws,
despite their fundamentally abstract character, have become living;
i.e. they have acquired expression. Man has transferred his capacity
for empathy onto mechanical values. Now they are no longer a dead
abstraction to him, but a living movement of forces. And only in this
heightened movement of forces, which in their intensity of expression
surpass all organic motion, was Northern man able to gratify his
need for expression, which had been intensified to the point of
pathos by inner disharmony. Gripped by the frenzy of these
mechanical forces, that thrust out at all their terminations and aspire
toward heaven a mighty crescendo of orchestral music, he feels
himself compulsively drawn aloft in blissful vertigo, raised high above
himself into the infinite. How remote he is from the harmonious
Greeks, for whom all happiness was to be sought in the balanced
tranquillity of gentle organic movement, which is alien to all ecstasy.
(AE 113)
In Valis, Philip K Dick has a Gnostic vision: the Roman Empire has
never ended. Worringer essentially believes the same thing. The
Renaissance projects back (and forward) across all history an
aesthetic that emerged only with the Greek and Roman empires.
And the victory of the empathic over the abstract, the organic over
the inorganic, is so complete that the empathic sensibility is able to
erase the abstract-inorganic almost completely; erase it or else
consign it to the sidings of history. Within the panoptic sweep of
ever-expanding enlightenment, the Dark Ages are merely an
embarrassment.
As Deckardıs suspicions that he is himself a replicant grow, the
empire of the organic-vital begins to crack.
Like Spengler, an obvious influence, Worringer casts himself as the
observer of a tottering Western culture. For the sickness of
Civilization, Worringer prescribes some wintry Schopenhauerian
Orientalism. Itıs in the utter nullity of non-occidental ego death that
Europe can find its escape from the delibitating grip of its failing
narcissism. Worringer clearly detests what he characterises as the
easy-going, life-affirming sunniness of Southern Europe, and his
work needs to be seen in the context of the cultural wars that were
then being waged - between himself, the Futurists in Italy and Lewis
and the Vorticists in England - over the nature, role, and ethnic home
of abstraction. The war over abstraction was also a none-too coded
struggle over where and with whom the future of mechanical
civilization lay. Needless to say, there is also a relation - not always
as direct as some detractors would claim - to fascism.
Form in Gothic and Abstraction and Empathy are ostensibly about
the past . But no-one is fooled. Even though they make no direct
reference to anything contemporary, Worringerıs studies are widely
read as manifestoes for the German Expressionist artists who were
beginning to work in the Pre-War period. And since German
Expressionism infects and fatally reconfigures the nascent American
cinema, it follows that Worringer is not only writing about the past,
but the future.
Which brings us back to Blade Runner. Following Deckard across
Blade Runnerıs densely referenced futurescape is like travelling
back through a history of the cinema. Blade Runnerıs black
sepulchres remind us that LAıs sweet dreams have been darkened
by European nightmares since The Cabinet of Dr Caligari first
future-shocked American audiences back in 1919. The monsters
brought to unlife by Lugosi, Karloff, Chaney, Browning and Whale in
the early Universal movies combined Americarny spit and sawdust
with German Expressionist sturm und drangst in more or less equal
measure: Hollywood Gothic, indeed. Even the shadows which define
that most supposedly American of genres, pulp noir - another major
component of Blade Runnerıs cinematic DNA - were cast by the
European emigres who populated Hollywood back then; and if not by
them, by Americans lured into cinematography by their dark
incandescence.
In Blade Runner, America, an immigrant culture whose memories
are all borrowed, confronts the prospect that the Future is no longer
virgin territory. The Dream was of crossing a line, beyond which the
past would be shaken off, fake memories could be forgotten, and
everything would be New, and clean, and perfectable. Science
Fiction in its classical form provided the imagery for this jetstreamed,
wipe-clean, airconditioned, atomic-powered New World.
European observer and ironic pro-American Jean Baudrillard
admires Dick because he severs SF from that future, so far distant existentially as well as temporally - from todayıs mess-Age (Public
Enemy), and situates it in an alternative present or presents where
cops, commerce, psychotropics and TV religion are too close for
comfort. All the kipple - the crud, the waste - vacuumed out of SFıs
Dream home piles up in Dickıs seedy tenements. Dick had the
Dream reawakened in him by the youth movements of the 1960s, but
the drug trips turned bad at the same time that the country went to
the dogs: most of his best works are written in the cold dawn of the
1970s, when America woke to the bleak triumvurate of Nixon, the
boys returning from Vietnam and the ending of the Space Age.
Betrayal, defeat and bathos. In Dickıs world - as in Tricky Dickyıs you take nothing at face value, you canıt believe in anything,
especially not yourself. When you learn to distrust everything deep,
youıre ready to enter Dickıs America, which is also, probably,
Baudrillardıs.
Baudrillardıs whole oeuvre rests on a very Worringerian opposition
wherein the inorganic (aka death, the unbound, the object, the
crystal) always outwits the vital. This is doubled by the theme of the
capture and absorbtion of the real (the simulated) by its attempts to
legitimate and authenticate itself (simulation). Sometimes the
dichotomy is gendered, and Baudrillard writes of the masculine
(ungroundable and unwarranted certainty) falling prey to the lure of
the feminine (the ambiguous, the undeterminable, the seductive). All
of this is played out, in Blade Runner, and Do Androids...., in the
scenes where Deckard (male, believing himself to be a real human
subject, but probably a replicant) is seduced by Rachael (female, not
alive, a simulated person) .
Baudrillard sees in Americaıs 'violent expressionism' a replicant
culture, a culture free to be entirely without depth because lacking in
any past. ³For Baudrillard, as for Worringer, what allows [the]
development into an artificial culture, or culture of simulacra, is
detachment from roots, its lack of roots.ı² (IC 141)
In adapting Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, Scott re-roots LA
in the Northern line, imagining the city of Angels as a neo-medieval
City of Quartz . Scott takes his cue from the scene in Do Androids
Dream of Electric Sheep? where bounty-hunter Phil Resch looks at
Munchıs Scream and thinks: 'thatıs how an android must feel.' The
expressionist style Scott adopts is arty through and through: even
the adverts look elegant (whereas in Dickıs world, all the art would
be an advert - probably for a hardware store. Weıve already noted
the irony here: that Scottıs vision will be swallowed whole by
advertising in the end. Commerce always trumps aesthetics, in
Dickıs world as well as ours.) In the movement from paperback to art
movie, thereıs also a shift in religious sensibility. Dickıs religion is
Weekly World News improbable: revelation is inseparable from
mass-mediated sensationalization. Itıs all dimestore prophecy and
visions of God under the influence of a dentistıs drug. Gnosis is to be
found amongst the discarded candy bar wrappers and cheap tunes
of an artless huckster culture where everything is for sale: part of the
challenge is being able to spot that the way out is hidden somewhere
in the trash. Scott replaces Dickıs kooky-quacky loony toons
All-American Gnosticism with the sober intensity of Protestant
nonconformism. His replicants, especially Roy Batty, speak in the
language of Milton or Blake. In a sense, this is no less American.
Rather it represents what has become the paradox of a pure,
authentic America, an America true to itself (rather than, as for
Baudrillard, true to the only condition America can make its own:
miscegenation, syntheticity, superficiality). The replicantsı is the
language of America as it dreamed it would be, Dickıs is the
language of how it is. The offworld colonies might as well be the
past; like the first pilgrims, the replicants havenıt seen America
before, and they come as avenging angels (angeles) from its
memory of the future, representatives of what (it) could have been.
Thus Blade Runnerıs infernal city is more Paradise Lost than Dante.
Arriving from the dying sky of a choked ecosphere, the replicants
come to an Amerikka where the calcified determinism of social
stratification finds metonymic expression in the very architecture of
the city - opulent Citadels of wealth loom far above new shanty
towns, as inaccessible to the subproletarian cybernetic troglodytesı
below as baronial castles were to the medieval peasantry. Europe,
again...
Across Europe, cybergothic infects Freud. You could say that, on at
least two occasions, Freud - in so many other ways a cybergothic
resistor - goes much further than Worringer in the direction of
cybergothic. In the 1895 Project for a Scientific Psychology and the
1921 Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud anticipates what Tyrell
will demonstrate: Voight-Kampff is void because there is no ultimate
distinction - ontological or practical - between the organic and the
inorganic. The organism is a fold in the inorganic.
Hollywood Horror historian David Skal identifies a strong correlation
between Horror and war, arguing that the first flush of American
fright flicks were displaced reactions to the 1914-18 conflict. Freudıs
essay needs to be read in the same context. That is to say, as not
only an essay about the war, but as an effect of it, a seismic registry
of its impact. In part a response to shellshock - which is to say, to the
new pyschophysical assemblages (de)formed by weaponry - Beyond
the Pleasure Principle goes so far as to attribute the formation of all
terrestrial life to trauma. Itıs the best Horror story since Kantıs The
Critique of Pure Reason. In Freudıs account, the organism is
analytically and technically inextricable from the inorganic. At its
most breathtakingly audacious, Beyond the Pleasure Principle is
about the constitution of identity itself. Not personal identity, of
course, but identity as such, the very possibility of individuation.
Identity begins in an attempt to solve the problem of how to manage
stimuli. What this concerns, crucially for the hunters of skinjobsı - the
weirdly sexual demotic term for the replicants - is skin. The skin is
both the outer layer of the organism and the inner layer of the
inorganic.
The organism ... is a differential inserted into the cascade of powerful
energies that threaten to destroy it (before it can destroy itself in its
own manner). This differentiation is premised on an increasingly
densely laminated mechanism of exclusion, within and by means of
which the psychical apparatus can operate, binding and discharging
appropriate quanta of energy. Were this protective membrane
removed, then we would be left with both energy and the
proto-organism undifferentiated and indistinguishable: in other
words, undifferentiated matter-energy. Can we say, however,
whether the laminar filter is itself living or dead? Freud has it that the
envelope itself is inorganic, but it nevertheless forms part - an
essential part - of a living system. Thus the laminae are themselves
both living and non-living, not having the requisite depth or
dimensions, in themselves, to constitute a living dimension. In itself,
it forms the inconceivable differential from which the depth proper to
systems is derived. One cannot conceptually pin this layer to the
category deadı, nor to that of livingı; instead, it can only be thought
as matter-energy circulating endlessly in its permanent revolutionı.
Having, as Freud puts it contra Kant, no time proper to them, these
energies neither live nor die: they are what conjoin the material
processes of life and death in a continuum so absolute as to
preclude the possibility of differentiating one from the other.1 Insideı
the organism is everything familiar: time, . But inside is only possible
on the basis of an outside - an outside marked only by. ³Far from
[organic bodies] being constituted by means of a reference to an
absolute self-possession, an absolute propriety, they are constituted,
as is any closed system, by the exclusions that define the (as near
as possible) noiseless or determinant channels through which the
only information that flows is that which reproduces the identity of the
system as such. In other words, the borders, the skinı (to pursue the
libidinal apparatus) is the product of the identitarian reproduction of
the system, its re-presentation of its own constitution to itself.
There is no negation, an observation reinforced by Freudıs
remarkable analysis of the un prefix in his essay on The Uncannyı
(Das Unheimliche, the unhomely, the strangely familiar), an essay in
which many of the themes that will find fuller elaboration in Beyond
the Pleasure Principle are first rehearsed. By means of a number of
theses, Freud demonstrates that far from the organic being
diametrically opposed to the inorganic, the organism and the
inorganic form a kind of single moebian strip, twisted into a tension
that when taut, is called life and when slackened, is called death.
Which means that on the ultimate ontological plane - the plane of
immanence - there is only unlife.
It is as old as hell. …
it is definite unlife [es ist bestimmt unleben]
There is nothing we would not do to escape.
Nothing. Nothing. Nothing.
But it is fate.
It howls electric bliss beneath our cells.
It is nowhere in time and nothings us.
It is the body of nothing, and electric-hot.