The Wayback Machine - https://web.archive.org/web/20030812085721/http://www.k-gothic.net:80/usgothik.html
mark de'rozario
amerikkkan gothik
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 Runner¹s 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
(psychoanalysis¹ 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, it¹s in the buildings and advertising hoardings that our
warring drives play themselves out, not in some politely repressed
Viennese interior. Blade Runner¹s LA is the postmodern unconcious - the
cyberpunkonscious. Let¹s not forget that LA is the dream factory: and to
that extent, it¹s 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 you¹re close to what¹s
really at stake in cybergothic. Everything can be machined. Not only the
wetware - that¹s easy meat. Even now, so they say, out in Siberia, exSoviet 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 you¹ll believe it. When Deckard
confronts Rachael, it¹s 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 you¹ll 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 Œuh
philosophical questions.¹ Those who police the line are called Blade
Runners in Scott¹s world, Turing cops in Gibson¹s. 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 enemy¹s head without becoming them?
(It¹s a perpetual problem in Philip K Dick¹s paranoiaverse, and he gives
his most harrowing account of this fatal double-dealing in A Scanner
Darkly.)
Worrringer¹s 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 Worringer¹s 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 socalled 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. It¹s 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 selfenjoyment. 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.
Worringer¹s 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 Worringer¹s 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 Œuncanny pathos¹.
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 Deckard¹s 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. It¹s 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 nonetoo 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, Worringer¹s 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
Runner¹s densely referenced futurescape is like travelling back through a
history of the cinema. Blade Runner¹s black sepulchres remind us that LA¹s
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 Runner¹s 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 today¹s 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 SF¹s Dream home piles up in Dick¹s 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 Dick¹s world - as in Tricky Dicky¹s - you take nothing at
face value, you can¹t believe in anything, especially not yourself. When
you learn to distrust everything deep, you¹re ready to enter Dick¹s
America, which is also, probably, Baudrillard¹s.
Baudrillard¹s 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 America¹s '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
Œlack of roots.¹² (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 Munch¹s Scream and
thinks: 'that¹s how an android must feel.' The expressionist style Scott
adopts is arty through and through: even the adverts look elegant (whereas
in Dick¹s world, all the art would be an advert - probably for a hardware
store. We¹ve already noted the irony here: that Scott¹s vision will be
swallowed whole by advertising in the end. Commerce always trumps
aesthetics, in Dick¹s world as well as ours.) In the movement from
paperback to art movie, there¹s also a shift in religious sensibility.
Dick¹s religion is Weekly World News improbable: revelation is inseparable
from mass-mediated sensationalization. It¹s all dimestore prophecy and
visions of God under the influence of a dentist¹s 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 Dick¹s 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
replicants¹ is the language of America as it dreamed it would be, Dick¹s
is the language of how it is. The offworld colonies might as well be the
past; like the first pilgrims, the replicants haven¹t 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 Runner¹s 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 Œcybernetic
troglodytes¹ 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. Freud¹s 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. It¹s the best Horror story since Kant¹s The Critique of
Pure Reason. In Freud¹s 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 Œskinjobs¹ - 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
Œdead¹, nor to that of Œliving¹; instead, it can only be thought as
matter-energy circulating endlessly in its Œpermanent revolution¹. 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 ŒInside¹ 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 Œskin¹ (to pursue the libidinal apparatus) is the product of
the identitarian reproduction of the system, its re-presentation of its
own constitution to itself.²2
There is no negation, an observation reinforced by Freud¹s remarkable
analysis of the un prefix in his essay on ŒThe Uncanny¹ (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.
An electric nothing-body instead of us.