Autogeddon
Stephen Metcalf
To start with a fragment of autobiography, a parable of the territory to be
explored, a story which may or may not be true:
I began thinking obsessively about the indifferent ease with which my own
destruction could take place after my near-death in a car accident.
My memory having been wiped in the aftermath of impact, I can hardly begin
to explain what happened that day.
Words are inadequate to convey anything in excess of the facts of the event,
selling out the pain in representation.
Nothing much there.
An unconscious and virtually dead body Closing down all systems With
the single aim of survival.
From the testimonies of witnesses, the medical personnel who treated me, from
the two policemen who restrained me with paternal sympathy (while I, thrashing
in a semi-conscious fit and seizure, punched and kicked them—true wonder
what you can get away with when not strictly responsible for your actions!), and
from insurance company investigators, I can furnish myself with a virtual
construct of what happened.
The car couldn’t have hit me at much more than forty miles per hour, or my
death would have been assured.
The impact threw me high into the air Into a curving arc
Hitting the ground about five meters away from the crash site
Polluting the asphalt with patterns of lost blood Scraps of detached skin
and hair.
First memory: awakening in hospital three days later, wired to various machines
monitoring the functions of my body, listening to the reassuring trance-beat of a
pulsing green cursor digitizing my heartbeat. Second memory: pain—intense
pain, in massive voltage spikes, relayed between spinal column and head.
146 POST-HUMAN PRAGMATISM
Question: how do I get out of this terminally fucked-up state? What possibility
for reconstruction is there after the crash?
Which leads to the purpose of this story: if we define modernism as theories of
evolutionary/teleological tendencies toward a crash/the end, measured in causal
chains of consequences; and postmodernism as ceaselessly repeating, selfreferential autopsies performed on the crash as perpetual present, an inert
necropolis of nostalgia, dead events and dead identities; we are still left facing an
uncertain future which has been conveniently canceled as unthinkable or
impossible. Buried in the wreckage and squinting myopically at processes
beyond our control though we may be, exhausted, decrepit, and living in some
futile retrospective drive for authenticity; there remains this: inertia is potential
movement, insofar as the inert body can be acted upon by an external force,
perhaps to the degree that it achieves escape velocity from the gravitational pull
earthing its dynamic motion to a certain frame of reference. This external force is
the machine, dismantling its human producer and assembling a new construct,
the illegitimate child of the twentieth-century technological dynamo—part
human, part machine, never completely either.
At an extremely banal level, the car has become a near-sacred object in
twentieth-century thought, entering our consciousness in the guise of the
automobile—the personal vehicle. As an extension of ourselves and symbol of
human progress, whether celebrated by the Futurists in their glamorized world of
speed and power; or reviled by, for instance, the Situationist International for its
dehumanization of the landscape of urban cores, increasingly redesigned around
the requirements of a mobile population, the automobile remains in a fairly
stable position of being an ambivalent object to be used by a human subject. To
quote McLuhan, embracing the “Mechanical Bride” in her promiscuous
availability, en route to a global village, in which America, as the first society
where universal possession of uniform goods apparently levels the social strata
into a classless, horizontal utopia, comes to represent perfection: “The simple
and obvious fact about the car is that, more than any horse, it is an extension of
man that turns the rider into a superman” (McLuhan 1964:221). Another
restatement of the tired idiocy of equating technology with virility and power, as
man transcends himself, by means of a mechanical catalyst, toward perfection. He
gets a bigger dick.
But the car, wrongly mistaken for a four-wheeled, gleaming chrome and steel
strap-on for too long, soon takes its revenge. This is a far more recent trajectory
of thought, which concentrates on the aberrant possibilities of automobile use,
and the one in which I am interested here.
First example: Car—a novel by Harry Crews, a hugely underrated American
writer—in which a young man, driven by a manic desire to assert his mastery
over machinery, attempts to eat a huge Cadillac saloon, while his family
capitalizes on his rather extreme behavior by staging the feast as a media
spectacle, and by selling the portions of metal he ingests as trinkets when they
emerge from the other end of the excremental cycle.
AUTOGEDDON 147
Needless to say, he fails.
With his mouth and asshole in tatters, and his guts bleeding internally,
contorted with crippling spasms, he is forced to quit and, having compromised
the honor of his profiteering family, returns to his job as the operator of a carcrushing machine in a wrecking plant. His fatal mistake was to suppose that
Machine needs Man, a master:
a man who controlled and understood the car. Understood its weaknesses.
Its flaws. But god in Heaven! He had opened up that Cadillac car and
looked behind the instrument panel, and he had felt his own mortality in a
way that he had never felt it before,
(Crews 1972:103)
The machine, refusing to obey his commands in any total sense, ravages his
organism.
I have saved the best for last. Here I refer to two books by J.G.Ballard—The
Atrocity Exhibition and Crash—where a circle of manias and fetish objects is
explored to its identity-effacing limit, the fusing sequence of which initiates a
terminal eroticism of technology as it collides with the human body and shatters
it into fragments, violently hollowing out a subjectivity which is deposited as
waste.
Ballard begins, in explosive fashion, with the crash: the big bang, scattering
the material fragments of the universe with colossal force. The human body
performs a blood-red shift as the car mounts the crash barriers of some freeway
or other: the horizon of what we sentimentally refer to as humanity recedes as the
sanitized space of the self is invaded by exogenous forces. Autogeddon begins its
Fetch-Decode-Execute cycle as the subject enters Ballard’s “suburbs of Hell”
(Ballard 1969:11) the psycho-geographical zone in transition where the soft
technologies of the interior (the body) and the hard technologies of the exterior
(the environment) are thrown together in collision and almost surgically cut each
other up. A complete mess. Twisted matings of severed limbs and machine parts,
fractured body panels, spikes of metal, plush vinyl seating, burning cloth and
rubber, body and machine fluids mingling.
All is not lost, however: crash is followed by reconstruction as the virtually
dead body is redesigned by means of life-support machines and prosthetic
organs. The normally assigned boundaries of the body having been breached,
wounded beyond recognition, the subject recedes into an ambient disappearance
in the environment. No longer the sentinel controlling the flows of traffic
between the interior and the exterior, the subject is diffused across a virtual
machine—consisting, in Ballard’s post-human inner landscapes, of sexualization
of (and, hence, identification with) the geometric affinity between the curvatures
of bodies in sexual collision, car bodywork and interiors, road junctions
interpenetrating like lovers, perverse shapes of architecture, mimicry of facial
148 POST-HUMAN PRAGMATISM
expressions of orgasm or death in radiator grilles. All of this may sound rather
psychotic, but the point is that it works—it facilitates movement; life continues.
While autogeddon attempts to design its own reterritorialization, others have
radically different designs on the body in bits and pieces:
Project Rehumanization initiated. Recuperate at all cost!
One of the most irritating impostures of the state at the moment has to be the
rapid growth of the therapy industry. It is no longer enough to discipline the body
institutionally. In a millennial meltdown in which virtually anything could be
about to happen, the state now wants to get inside our heads, to make sure that its
subjects conform to the official way of being in both public and private spheres.
Therapists develop an apparently morbid interest in deviancy for a single
purpose: to affirm normality by negating perversity, which they figure into a
series of readily comprehensible symptoms —as if being, say, a masochist was
like catching a venereal disease—and then prescribe a course of treatment in some
state-sponsored drive for inoculate ions.
According to the diagnostics of cop-talk, Ballard is almost certainly guilty of
fetishism, the heinous crime of investing bodily bit parts and inhuman objects
with sexual significance. Mr and Mrs Vanilla-Sex-Patriarch von Suburbia recoil
in horror! Disgusting! echoes around the asylum walls in prissy drawl.
Public outrage and mirth, fueled by the claims of the state’s mind cops, focus
on a single issue: in what way are these perverts deficient, what is this certain
“something” they lack that prevents their enjoyment of the blessed institutions of
heterosexual monogamy?
Blasting orchestral overtures illuminate one of those dazzlingly overlit stage
staircases, lined with dancing girls, waiting for a figure like Fred Astaire, cane in
hand, to descend singing and tap-dancing. The star of the show emerges,
articulated upon Artaud’s “dead rat’s ass suspended from the ceiling of the sky”
(Deleuze and Guattari 1984: 143), from which the Oedipal triangle is emitted,
swinging from a hook like a coathanger. Mummy and Daddy provide the
peripheral entertainment as the star takes center-stage—it’s I! I’m about to be
domesticated!
Fetishism, in one of Lacan’s tragicomic routines, begins with the demand that
there be such a thing as a maternal phallus. He claims that the fetishist knows that
the woman’s genitals are atrophied, mutilated, and lacking; he denies this reality
by articulating this demand, thus falsifying it in disavowal.
Disavowal, in Freudian and Lacanian dialectics, is simultaneous denial and
affirmation of traumatic perception, which is proof of its presence in the
unconscious. The unbound force of impact and trauma is recontained by the
creation of a defense mechanism against unwanted perceptions, a symbol
replacing the hole in being left by the missing phallus. Fetishism thus “saves” the
pervert from the possibility of psychoses induced by the traumatic experience of
maternal castration. Mummy hasn’t got a willy! By investing a signifier, the
fetish, with all the significance of the phallus it replaces, the link between fetish
AUTOGEDDON 149
and phallus is always already a signifying relation and therefore, for Lacan,
phallo-centric.
It’s the penile car argument again! The law of the Father lurking at the
terminal point of Ballard’s obsessive transport vectors. Patriarchy and the family
recontaining all perversity in terms of failure in social programming. A fetishist
identity as the strong guarantor of a specular space marking the distinction
between the driver of the car and the outside world.
Baudrillard runs a similar argument. Unlike Lacan’s mirror double, an
imaginary figure haunting the subject as the other, inscribing it as a scene of
alienation, misrecognition, and fascination; prosthetic attachments, insofar as
they materialize the dream of the double, destine humanity to serial propagation
and loss of individuality. Referring to the possibility of cloning an entire
organism from a single strand of DNA, the “cybernetic prosthesis” (Baudrillard
1993: 117), Baudrillard writes:
[T]he point when prostheses are introduced at a deeper level, when they
are so completely internalized that they infiltrate the anonymous and the
micro molecular core of the body, when they impose themselves upon the
body itself as the body’s “original” model, burning out all subsequent
symbolic circuits in such a way that every body is now nothing but an
invariant reproduction of the prothesis: this point means the end of the
body, the end of its history, the end of its vicissitudes. It means that the
individual is now nothing but a cancerous metastasis of his basic formula.
(Baudrillard 1993:119)
Oh! Paranoid nostalgia for the atrophying human body! Plunged into
Baudrillard’s nightmare landscape of synarchy, “the Hell of the Same”
(Baudrillard 1993:113–23) the body is increasingly disabled at the molecular
level by its sub-suicidal coupling with technology. The “Mechanical Bride”
begins to demand that she be allowed to go on top. Humanity ends in the
“Anorexic Ruins” where the body withers away to nothing without its
mechanical life-supports, and a population of deindividuated insect people swarm
over the Earth, as machines level the strata, leaving no other to negate.
An interesting sequence of events to watch over the next few years will be the
degree to which Baudrillard slides further into this sort of elitist panic/fascism—
along with the rest of Europe. For having correctly diagnosed this internalization
of the machine as the end of the alienated scene of the self-other dialectic, the
phallus and Oedipal sexuality, Baudrillard’s next move is to lament their loss in
an apocalyptic nullpunkt where “the subject is neither the one nor the other—he
is merely the Same” (Baudrillard 1993:122) a filthy, incestuous beast repeatedly
cloning exact replicas of itself.
This is all pathetic nostalgia. Why the lament for the loss of a humanity which
since the evolutionary epics of the Enlightenment has been habitually defined in
the male term to the exclusion of all others? All that is lost is what we could
150 POST-HUMAN PRAGMATISM
refer to as the Western White Male will. Any pretentious eulogy for its timely
death is merely a call for more negation, more misogyny, more racism, an
exterior to dominate: the revivalist frenzy of fascism, for the dead end of
humanism.
As for the present: are we in the grip of synarchy, “the Hell of the “Same,” or
a massive epochal shift? An escalating process of feminization resulting in a new,
post-human, cybernetic organism? As in the title of one of Burroughs’ routines:
“The End Is Also The Beginning,” at the point at which catastrophe subsides and
future programs start to run.
Organisms riddled with cancer, regulated by prosthetic control circuits, and
cut up by runaway feedback from everyday machines like cars, have not
necessarily lost anything. As William Burroughs and David Cronenberg have
suggested in their work, cancerous proliferation could be the first stage in the
production of a new organism—an eventually beneficial viral invasion leading to
mutation in the genetic code. For this to happen, the old organism has to be
dismantled first. And here lies the catastrophic source of most of our postmodern
panic theorization, which markedly fail to conceive of any possibility of
inhabiting any space but the ruins of the old world order.
Ballard privileges the car crash over the production and mass possession of the
car as a route into thinking through the notion of this collision of the past, the
present, and the future—a void into which reality crashes and is rebuilt
repeatedly. In this redesigning of the body in bits and pieces, the crash is a
fertilizing, productive event, “the final self-destruction and imbalance of an
asymmetric world” (Ballard 1969:8) which is reordered in a virtual machine
running a program devoid of identity laws.
A virtual machine is the future coming together. In the language of computer
architecture, it designates a theoretical construct around which the production of
a program is designed. It is a machine which may not yet exist, but software is
produced with the very real possibility of this technology coming on line at some
point in the future. In effect, it is an attempt, however futile it may turn out to be,
to prevent current technology from becoming obsolete too quickly. In the sense
we have been using it, the suggestion is that events and objects which may seem
insignificant in their banality are taking on an accelerating significance in the
architectures of a virtual, post-human future, a future which our current language
and conceptual baggage make it difficult to conceive of, except in psychotic
descents into the mania of delirious prophecies. The virtual machine is in a
constant process of production, having a catastrophic moment of genesis, and
drifting toward some principle of reterritorialization.
But first, the subject has to virtually die: and, here, there awaits the danger of a
resurgent machismo in the form of self-immolation, “the last suicidal spasm of
the dextro-rotary helix, D.N.A.” (Ballard 1969:16). This would take the form of
a Cyber-Christ, methodically bolting himself to a car fender, tooling along at top
speed into the traffic flows, burning with divinity in a multiple crash.
Artaud’ s comments on suicide hold particular poignancy here.
AUTOGEDDON 151
He mistrusts the lack of finality in suicide, seen as the terminal attempt to carve
an indelible memory to the subject, even as it eradicates itself. In effect,
By suicide, I reintroduce my design in nature, I shall for the first time give
things the shape of my will. I free myself from the conditioned reflexes of
my organs…and life is for me no longer an absurd accident whereby I
think what I am told to think.
(Artaud 1965:56)
Dramatic, overacted suicide is a craving for martyrdom. An infantile cry of
“notice me, you bastards, or you’ll be sorry!” which is remarkably successful in
achieving its aim.
Ballard notes how the dead bodies of celebrities, whose extinction had some
connection with the automobile, have been glamorized and raised to the level of
almost deified super-beings:
Jayne Mansfield, dead beside her pet Chihuahua, Pupu.
James Dean, who kept a hangman’s noose dangling from the ceiling of his
living room, with which he posed for pictures.
Albert Camus, colliding with death with a copy of Nietzsche’s Gay Science
lying on the seat next to him.
Endlessly repeating film loops, in slow motion, of the exploding head of John
F.Kennedy at the moment the bullet hit him.
But martyrdom, as Artaud knew, is ridiculous. His hunger for non-existence
could never be satisfied by creating a posthumous existence, by killing “this
virtual, impossible self which nevertheless is part of reality” (Artaud 1965:61). His
desire to be completely destroyed having never been satisfied, we romanticize
the schizophrenic visionary, suicided by a society coding his illegitimate vision
under the sign of madness.
What we argue for here is not a posthumous existence etched into a monument
to those who went too far in the pursuit of delirium, but a post-human
reconstruction of the body—if the bad pun can be forgiven. This is a condition
premised not on a suicidal crash, but on an accident; where the human subject is
sucked into a technological slipstream and transformed.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Artaud, A. (1965) Artaud Anthology, ed. J.Hirschman, San Francisco: City Lights.
Ballard, J.G. (1969), The Atrocity Exhibition, St Albans: Triad Panther.
–– (1973) Crash, London: Cage.
Baudrillard, J. (1993), The Transparency of Evil, trans. J.Benedict, London: Verso.
Crews, H. (1972) Car, New York, Murrow.
Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (1984), Anti-Oedipus, trans. R.Hurley, M.Seem, and
H.R.Lane, London: Athlone.