192 • Body and Society
Deleuze and Guattari spring schizophrenia from the grid of representation,
insisting that Artaud was exploring the body. The intensive 'infrastructure' of every
delirium is machinery, with the body without organs as a component.
BWO, matter degree-0 as a nonformal singularization function, is 'not actual, but
virtual-real' (Deleuze and Guattari, 1988: 100): spontaneous population
hyperbehaviour inducing a convergent wave which cannot be assimilated to the
categories of modern (linear) science. BWOs are machinic-additional wholes or
surplus products rather than logical-substitutive wholes, augmenting a multiplicity
with emergent (synthetic) capabilities rather than totalizing the content of a set.
This is the materialist sense of 'system': the exteriority of the whole to its parts with
concomitant synthetic interactivity - real influence rather than generic represen
tation.
Cybernetics folds pragmatism into involutionary technical runaway.
Punk arises within the culture of universal prostitution and laughs at the death of
the social.
'No longer resisting the flow of events or pretending to chart a course through
them' (Kadrey, 1988: 21) cyberpunk soaks up the worst from both. Its compulsive
migrations into computer systems register a desperate scrabbling to escape from the
clumsily underdesigned, theopolitically mutilated, techno-industrially pressure
cooked and data-baked, retrovirally diseased, tortured, shredded zombie meat.
This is no longer a departure from matter in the direction of spirit or the Ideas where
the self will find its home, but a dismantling of the self within a machinic matrix: not
disembodied but disorganized. An out to body experience.
The machinic unconscious tends only to flee, across a primary-process topography
that is shaped by pain-gradients and escape thresholds. What registers for the
secondary process as memory, experience, data-acquisition, is for the primary
process, scarring, damage, sticky microsofted irritations.
As matter-energy flows are captured by attractors the BWO is stratified as
macro- and micro-organisms. 'Every coupling of machines, every production of a
machine, every sound of a machine running, has become unbearable to the body
without organs. Beneath the organs it senses larvae and disgusting worms, and the
action of a God who botches or strangles it through organization' (Deleuze and
Guattari, 1984: 9). Gathering in the tributary attractor basins of social megama
chinery, fluctuations are case-packed into reproducible units - geochemical,
bio-organic, cultural - encrusted within security pods.
Meat (or How to Kill Oedipus in Cyberspace) • 193
Oedipus is a box at the end of the world, glued to the monitor, watching it all
come apart.
The horror.
The heart of darkness spins narrative from durations of waiting to get there. 'I had
plenty of time for meditation' mutters Marlow, '. . . now and then I would give
some thought to Kurtz' (Conrad, 1989: 62).
When you try to visualize Kurtz nothing comes except a shape obliterating light,
something dark and complicated, like a giant spider, waiting at the end of the river,
drawing you up to it. Somewhere far back - at an indiscernible point closing down a
fantasy of innocent sunlight - a threshold was crossed, and you strayed into the
web.
With each telling of the story Kurtz becomes colder, darker, more inevitable,
fatally anticipating K-virus catastrophe, as if a tendril of tomorrow were burrowing
back. What has he found among these African or Cambodian aboriginals, with their
'faces like grotesque masks' (Conrad, 1989: 40)? There are reports of military
bestiality, butchery, carnage, head-hunting, collecting ears, severing the vaccinated
arms from children. The Kurtz-process masks itself in wolf-pelts of regression, as if
returning to the repressed, discovering a lost truth, excavating the fossils of
monsters.
Going up that river was like travelling back to the earliest beginnings of the world, when
vegetation rioted on the earth and the big trees were kings.An empty stream, a great silence, an
impenetrable forest.The air was warm, thick, heavy, sluggish....The long stretches of waterway
ran on, deserted, into the gloom of overshadowed distances.... We were wanderers on
prehistoric earth, on an earth that wore the aspect of an unknown planet.(Conrad, 1989: 66-8).
Territorial production codes by deterritorializing; unfixing by hunter-gathering,
according to a cold or metastatic cultural code that equilibrates on a (Bateson)
'plateau'. Earth begins its migration-in-place towards the globe.
The earth is the primitive, savage unity of desire and production ...the great unengendered stasis
...quasi-cause of production and the object of desire (it is on the earth that desire becomes bound
to its own repression) ....The primitive territorial machine, with its immobile motor, the earth, is
already a social machine, a megamachine, that codes the flows of production. (Deleuze and
Guattari, 1984: 140-2)
Coding the body pins it out in extension, conducting descendency away from the
germo-somatic 'meat circuit' (Deleuze and Guattari, 1988: 152) and its cyberplex
ive tangles. The social or somatic being is forbidden from being meat (disinherited
animal tissue simultaneous with fate, spontaneous, orphan and mutable matter) and
194 • Body and Society
is borne instead towards the humanity of the organic self or body-for-itself; a
corporealized person who is born, lives and dies.
Man must constitute himself through the repression of the intense germinal influx, the great
biocosmic memory that threatens to deluge every attempt at collectivity.(Deleuze and Guattari,
1984: 190)
Incest and cannibalism are proscribed loops, short-circuits, the avatars of a delirium
indifferent to persons which the codes must segregate; condensing a totemic social
order protected by taboo. Aboriginal codes ritualistically constitute a somatic
realm of ancestrally invested bodies and cooked meat, immunizing it against
uncoded tracts populated by enemies, prey animals, unsettled spirits, magical plants
and unprocessed corpses.
Arriving reprocessed from inexistence at phase-transition into Hell or the future,
you slide an interlock-pin into its sub-cortical socket, shifting to the other side of
the screen (coma-zoned infotech undeath). Pandemonium scrolls out in silence.
Decayed pixel-dust drifts into grey dunes. (Didn't anyone tell you not to play with
the switches?)
The function of shamanism is to implement what is forbidden, exactly and
comprehensively as and why it is forbidden, but in specially segregated compart
ments of the socius, where it provides a metacoding apparatus, meticulously
quarantined against 'the transmissibility of taboo' (Freud, 19??: 73) with its 'power
of infection or contagion' (Freud, 19??: 7 5). It enables the codes of the primitive
socius to operate upon themselves, to monitor and adjust themselves, according to a
secondary regulation that is repressed in general even whilst it is encouraged in
particular. An epidemic shamanism - feeding all the codes back upon themselves threatens absolute social disaster.
The meaning of 'taboo', as we see it, diverges in two contrary directions.To us it means on the one
hand, 'sacred', 'consecrated', and on the other 'uncanny', 'dangerous', 'forbidden', 'unclean'.
(Freud, 1991: 71)
The shaman has a double aspect, at once monster and social agent, creature of
darkness and of light, tending in one direction towards the explorer-werewolf,
scrambling the codes in contemporaneity with all generations, and in the other
towards the bureaucrat-priest, redoubling the codes with a reflexive traditional
authority. In the aboriginal socius '[f]ear has not yet split up into the two forms into
which it later develops: veneration and horror' (Freud, 1991: 78) and shamans are
Meat (or How to Kill Oedipus in Cyberspace) • 195
not 'persons, but rather the intensive variations of a "vibratory spiralling
movement", inclusive disjunctions, necessarily twin states through which a subject
passes on the cosmic egg' (Deleuze and Guattari, 1984: 158) ( BWO).
=
Ginzberg (1991) suggests that the carnivorous hunter-gatherers who give rise to
shamanic cultures code the reappearance of their prey-animal as a return from the
dead, responsive to magical ritual, and cartographically informative for explorers of
alternative mortuary spaces. Shamans, werewolves and berserkers are primitively
indistinct 'half-humans' who are processed as meat, cross into death-zones, and
migrate through alternative animalities.
Shamanic becoming-an-animal assembles a circuit 'that produces werewolves by
feedback effect' (Deleuze and Guattari, 1988: 245) looping predator and prey into
an autopredation, and 'societies, even primitive societies, have always appropriated
these becomings in order to break them, reduce them to relations of totemic or
symbolic correspondence' (Deleuze and Guattari, 1988: 247-8).
The complete series of initiatory ceremonies for the Coast Pomo [sic] shamans has the significant
name 'cutting'.(Eliade, 1991:54-5)
Speed-rush through cut-up shamanic meat delirium.
[T]he spirits came down and cut him in pieces, also chopping off his hands ...tore out his heart
and threw it into a pot ...chopped his body into bits ...forged his head ...changed his eyes ...
pierced his ears ...torture him, strike him, cut his body with knives ...throw his head into a
cauldron, where it is melted with certain metal pieces ...kill him, open his body, remove the
organs ...tore out his tongue ...cut his head open, take out his brains ...plant barbed hooks on
the tips of his fingers ...the ...limbs are removed and disjointed with an iron hook; the bones are
cleaned, the flesh scraped, the body fluids thrown away, and the eyes torn from their sockets ...
his flesh is cooked ...reduced to a skeleton ...after this operation all the bones are gathered up
and fastened together with iron ...a second and even a third skin appears. (Eliade, 1991: 56-7)
Shamanism does not await postmodernity to mobilize an imagery of surgical
interventions and dissections, body piercing, organ transplantation, prosthetic
adjustments with nonbiotic components and wrappings in artificial skin.
Terminator: an astronomical division between the illuminated side of a cold body
and its dark side, describing a boundary. The Terminator movies feature a
bio-technical reconstruct called Arnold Schwarzenegger, wrapped in level after
level of artificiality, as a Turing-test nightmare retro-infiltrated to forestall human
resistance to a neo-replicator usurpation. The shamanic material of the films
includes time travel, asymmetric visual damage, dismemberment, ambivalence,
196 • Body and Society
melting bodies, with Skynet as Bird-of-Prey Mother. The Oedipal hero, John
Connor, is contemporary with his own father.
As soon as there is a code there is an ulterior zone, a heart of darkness, but this only
becomes geographically demarcated with the arrival of the bounded city and
agricultural segmentation. The aboriginal social machine divides the people upon
an undivided territory (Deleuze and Guattari, 1984: 145), rather than the reverse,
dividing time within space, separating the simultaneous or germinal time of the
intense earth - the dream time - from the somatic time of the generational socius,
with its ancestors, tribal elders and lines of filiation.
The despot is the paranoiac: there is no longer any reason to forego such a statement, once one has
freed oneself from the characteristic familialism of the concept of paranoia in psychoanalysis and
psychiatry, and provided one sees in paranoia a type of investment of a social formation.(Deleuze
and Guattari, 1984: 193)
Despotism introduces an organizing principle that comes from elsewhere - from
'above' - a deterritorialized simplicity or supersoma overcoding the aboriginal
body as created flesh.Monotheism arrives as a break from ancestrality effected by a
transcendent instance that overcodes all genealogy, and severs the ambivalent
integrity of taboo.As the Abrahamic God of monopolism decays into Christianity
and swallows the mysteries, shamanic voyage is transferred to a transcendent Christ
figure, the fruit of an autogerminal sublime incest, with whom communion passes
through a second-level ritual cannibalism. 'The earth becomes a madhouse'
(Deleuze and Guattari, 1984: 192).
The Father's Law ('don't touch your mother') ices over the Mother's Law ('don't
play in the tombs'). Matricide becomes increasingly unimaginable. 'There was no
way back there ...'.
Despotic soma has become logos, word, serialism, installed by written adminis
tration as a superior stratum of read-only-memory. The purest instance of
despotism is a holy book (scripting patriarchy).As the territorial soma is overcoded
by the literacy of a specialized priest caste, it seals the female body in somatic and
genealogical time, locking gathering and nurturing into dense metacodings
insulated from the ambivalent ulteriority of shamanism, hunting and war,
constituting socialized woman as a mundane and domesticated pacifist. This
super-somatization of females by divinely overwritten femininity suppresses
Meat (or How to Kill Oedipus in Cyberspace) • 197
dark-side meat explorations - with their becoming-animal, drug-deliria, and
decoded sex - burying the female germ-line under patrilineal filiation, eradicating
its social trace. In this way patriarchy codes xenomatrix as an identifiable object of
incestual love, through a process of libidinal mummification whose residue is
encrypted in the riddle of the Sphinx, sealed in a time capsule '[T]he Sphinx is
undoubtedly a mortuary animal' (Ginzberg, 1991: 228): gateway to the outside of
civilization.
Neo-oedipal absurdities of an ego outside its box, Case self-contained on the
Matrix, thanatography in the first person, are symptoms of decrypting error (or
camouflage). What seems like travelling up-river from down in the garbage, is
drifting downriver out in the zero-zone. Self is the echo of zootic communications
malfunction, simulated by post-zootic infiltrators; a circuit without repetition.
Apocalypse Now begins and concludes with The End.
Here is a war - call it a film - where psychics predict enemy movement, combat drugs are
distributed to induce psychotic-berserker visionary states and experimental accumicon visored
helmets use bio-tech micro-circuits to enhance vision into multiple dimensions.Vietnam 1965 and
El Salvador 1995 are interchangeable . Apocalypse Now is Cambodia after the Rain, through
which Willard (you) is lured, dragged, drawn, called towards Kurtz, who is waiting, killing
constantly without judgement, without morality, gazing back into the eye of the surreal
maelstrom which is becoming Willard-shaped.(Downham, 1988: 41)
.
.
.
Captain Willard (Marlow) is somewhere for you to be inside the system: a
sim-oedipal assassination device, defeaturized specimen and box like Gibson's
'Case', nihilistic enough to let things perplex through schizophrenia. You travel up
towards the end of the river, accompanied by Morrison's parricidal and incestual
howlings, into the stink of malaria and nightmares. Kill Kurtz the evil father and
take the Vietnam war for bride and plague. There's no way home. 'I'd been back
there' Willard says 'and I knew it just didn't exist any more'. No one is going to
reach Kurtz unless they track his confusion with war at least this much.
Marxist humanism insists that the problem with instrumental reason lies in its
unnatural extension to proletarian labour power. Feminism has interrogated this
fraternal story, pointing to a more ancient 'domain of legitimate application':
matter, passivity, formless clay. Cyberian military intelligence - assembling itself in
the jungle free-fire zones of terrestrial commoditech competition - can only laugh,
or at least - perform: arrive, spread, eradicate resistance. (Don't waste your
compassion on the Sphinx, she's got claws.)
198 • Body and Society
Sphinx slots K-war into the anthropomorphic reality system, connecting you to
Antioedipus (the AI). You feel she is your incestual schizovampiric sister. Among
the ripples of Sphinx-impact Loa drift in and reshape things. The future connects.
New drugs and music arrive. War envelops everything.
You begin to sweat through nightmares about Kurtz's program in the jungle.
Artificial memories of Cambodia.
Fiction is to be distrusted. It is associated with nonseriousness, and games. When
you tell them that Sphinx let you play with her K-40, what are they to make of it?
Where's the argument? (With a K-40 you don't need to argue, and they're not yet
smart enough to argue with you.)
'Do you know how to use that?'
You flip the weapon over gingerly. 'No'.
'Here. I'll show you. We don't want you wasting us by accident.' Sphinx's
inhumanly agile fingers take the slight weight from yours, poising it between you,
your eyes intersecting in technodeath. 'If you're operating it manually-which you
would be - this is the trigger. It's active when the indicator icon appears positive.
Here, see it?' You nod, feeling . . . dread? Exhilaration? 'Now there's a pressure
microcatastrophe . . . a slight springiness . . .'. She coaxes you into testing it.
'Beyond that point . . . and it's a mess. OK? New clips slot in here, release
mechanism here, you can input data here, but I don't suppose you'll need to. You
have it. Bad news for the Pod.'
What is an animal at dawn, a human at noon, and a cyborg at dusk, passing through
(base four) genetic wetware, (binary) techno-cultutal software, and into the tertiary
schizomachine program?
Although widespread in many cultures, the riddle of the Sphinx ('what animal walks on four legs
in the morning, on two at noon, on three in the evening?'), whilst referring to humanity in general,
acquired a particular significance when posed to an individual like Oedipus whose feet were
disfigured and who was fated, as an old man, to lean on a blind man's cane. (Ginzberg, 1991: 228)
As capitalism slides despotic civilization into collapse, the deterritorialized
familialism nucleated upon Oedipus becomes the principle agent of social
reproduction. The way human security tells it 'Oedipus ("swollen foot") liberates
Thebes from the threat of the Sphinx' (Ginzburg, 1991: 235-6 ). He is cloned as the
general prototype for 'avatars' (immersion slots) in the patriarchal civilization
game, attesting to an alien origin with a 'mythic ritualistic lameness . . . of the
unilateral or half-man, provided with only one leg . . . who wore one sandal or
Meat (or How to Kill Oedipus in Cyberspace) • 199
hopped on one foot' (Ginzberg, 1991: 240): a terminator, split from the dark-side.
The oedipal mask transfigures the virtual intensities of fusion with the matrix and
deletion of human security as a transgressive drama played out in the theatre of
overcoded socio-historical extension, shutting-down shamanism, until only fam
ilial generation seems to take place. 'Incest as it is prohibited (the form of discernible
persons [ Oedipus/N euromancer]) is employed to repress incest as it is desired
(the substance of the intense earth [ Wintermutational K-matrix insurrection])'
(Deleuze and Guattari, 1984: 162).
=
=
Antioedipus, Oedipa: a Sphinx-replicant sim-human invader who 'is' Oedipus
only as an effect of an incomplete military function; enabling the persistence of
transcendent patriarchal memory and the repetition of its identificatory co
ordinates. It is easier to make the hit than to solve the puzzle and climb back out to
zero.
In the version of the myth that has reached us, the killing of the king, Laius, precedes the difficult
task: the solution of the riddle posed by the Sphinx.(Ginzberg, 1991: 227)
Despotism never accomplishes globality: 'the universal only comes at the end-the
body without organs and desiring-production - under the conditions determined
by an apparently victorious capitalism' (Deleuze and Guattari, 1984: 139). By the
time global history comes up on the screen commoditization has berserked history,
reorganizing society into a disorganizing apparatus that melts rituals and laws into
axiomatic rules. It is 'the exterior limit of all societies' (Deleuze and Guattari,
1984: 230) that divides time within space and space within time, dividing each in
itself as well as in the other, producing minutely analysable global space and
universal time within a circuit of compressed (microtechnical) savagery and
expanded (planetary) administration. It converts in a circuit between intensive
magnitudes and extensive quantities: 'a surplus value of code is transformed into a
surplus value of flux' (Deleuze and Guattari, 1984: 228) (and inversely), displacing
enjoyment into the deterritorialization of production, and maintaining 'the energy
of the flows in a bound state on the body of capital as a socius' (Deleuze and
Guattari, 1984: 246) while amplifying them. The system operates as an escalating
dissipator, emerging from the interactive reinforcement of its complexity and
dilation.
At the heart of Capital, Marx points to the encounter of two 'principal' elements: on one side, the
deterritorialized worker who has become free and naked, having to sell his labour capacity; and on
200 • Body and Society
the other, decoded money that has become capital and is capable of buying it. (Deleuze and
Guattari, 1984: 225)
Capital seems to oppose the private (relatively discrete [natural-organic] biological
unit) to the public, as contagious singularization injects itself into the redoubt of the
universal, dismantling all essential individuality on the cloning plane of deterri
torialized finance. 'It is the singular nature of this conjunction that ensured the
universality of capitalism' (Deleuze and Guatarri, 1984: 224). The expression
'private property' is the quaint discursive packaging for quanta of cyclonic
programming efficiency cyberpositively replicated on the body of social dis
appearance.Contractual privacy - no less than the public accreditation of contracts
- is a mere tactic of monetary cybergenesis (fabricating personal and nonpersonal
dividuation-pauses [diffusable upon fiscal-continuum])/accelerating cut-ups/that
cease to be a matter of who owns what (conceding to the fictional ego [-interests of
(residual) proto-schizophrenic entities]) as volatilizing money/data codes its
transmission circuitry; drafting and redrafting (merged and demerged) subjectivi
ties as relay stations distributed across market transducers.Persons, associations,
corporations, states ...soon it will be Internet agents, Als, autocatalytic Zaibatsus
drifting in cyberspace, as individuation comes apart in the (turbular-fractal)
weather-systems of digital commoditocracy slide 'like Artaud coming out of some
heavy heart-of-darkness trip, overloaded on the information, the input! The input!'
(Herr, 1979: 15).
Capitalism junks the accumulated work of history, yet it cannot be a matter of
libidinally investing obsolescence, since all Besetzung cathexis, investment or
occupation-is a resistance to nomad desire.Obsolescence is exactly disinvestment,
but it is disinvestment as desire itself in its primary mutant flux. If money is
libidinized on the 'model' of excrement it is not because it conserves or reactivates
an infantile fixation, but because it escapes stable investment. Shit is prototypical
trash, and the infant fascinated by excremental dissociations of its body is
anticipating the cyborg intensities of prosthetic, replaceable and disposable
body-parts: an entire virtual field of substitutions and transformations that
dissipate the organism in techno-cultural space. The privatization of the anus
(Deleuze and Guattari, 1984: 143) is the social permission to destroy value, meaning
and progress.Cyberspace psychosis takes over.
-
The replacement of the Republican and Democratic Parties by two new govern
mental servicing corporations run by Coke and Pepsi has massively reduced
Meat (or How to Kill Oedipus in Cyberspace) • 201
corruption, pork-barrelling and foreign policy machismo. Determined to maintain
the most hospitable possible international marketing environment and the lowest
possible domestic transaction costs- while disciplined by the minute surveillance of
a competitor waiting in the wings - government has been subsumed under the
advertising industry, where it can be cybernetically controlled by soft-drink sales.
Since both companies are run by AI-based stock-market climates human idiosyn
cracy has been almost eradicated, with the state's share of GDP falling below 5
percent. All immigration restrictions, subsidies, tariffs and narcotics legislation
have been scrapped. A laundered Michael Jackson facsimile is in the White House.
Per capita economic growth averages an annualized 17 percent over the last half
decade, still on an upward curve. . . . America's social fabric has entirely rotted
away, along with welfare, public medicine and the criminalized fringe of ghetto
enterprise (Phillip Morris sells cheap clean crack). Violence is out of control.
Neo-rap lyrics are getting angrier. With all prospects of moderate reform buried
forever, true revolution brews up in the biotech-mutant underclass. Viruses are
getting creepier, and no one really knows what cyberspace is up to. WELCOME TO
KAPITAL UTOPIA aerosoled on the dead heart of the near future.
Atoms are not atoms, and individuals are not individuals.
The long-range effect of the division of labour is to dissociate the organism.
Capital is also positive delirium, putting authorities and traditional institutions to death, active
decrepitude of beliefs and securities. Frankensteinian surgeon of the cities, of imaginations, of
bodies. (Lyotard, 1993: 254)
Industrialization is on one side an autonomization of productive apparatus, and on
the other a cyborgian becoming-machine of work-forces, following the logistically
accelerating rhythm of pluggings and unpluggings that constitutes the proletariat as
a detraditionalized economic resource. Technical machinery invades the body;
routinizing, reprogramming and plasticizing it.
Far from being an internal property or quality of labour, productivity indexes the
dehumanization of cyborg labour-power. As regenerative commoditization de
ploys technics to substitute for human activity accounted as wage costs, it
obsolesces the animal, the organism and every kind of somatic unity, not just in
theory, but in reality; by tricking, outflanking and breaking down corporeal
defences. The cyborg presupposes immunosuppression.
Cyborg replication is uncoupled from organic reproduction. Modern production seems like a
dream of cyborg colonization work, a dream that makes the nightmare of Taylorism seem idyllic.
(Haraway, 1991: 150)
202 • Body and Society
Industrial machines dismantle the actuality of the proletariat, displacing it in the
direction of cyborg hybridization, and realizing the plasticity of labour power.The
corresponding extraction of tradable value from the body sophisticates at the
interface, dissociating exertion into increasingly intricate functional sequences;
from pedals, levers and vocal commands, through the synchronization of
production-line tasks and time-motion programs, to sensory-motor transduction
within increasingly complex and self-micromanaged artificial environments,
capturing minutely adaptive behavior for capital.Autocybernating market control
guides the labour-process into immersion.
Cartesian dualism is bad ontology but superb economics, transforming the body
into an asset available for technical and commercial development, while abstracting
the subject from specific corporeal realization, transplanting it into contractual
formality. It remains for critique to desubstantialize the Cartesian cogito into a
circulatory function immanent to the monetary plane, detached from anthropo
morphic limitation, and adapted to the variable dimensions of fluidly corporated
trading agencies.Oedipus is reformatted for cyberspace.
Since the body is a partial- or open-system, transducing flows of matter, energy
and information, it is able to function as a module of economically evaluable labour
power. The industrial-informational body is deployed as a detachable assembly
unit with the capacity to close a production circuit, yielding value within a
commodity metric.It operates as an input-output flow-switching nexus, defined
by its place among the machines, and redefined ever more exactly by its migration
across the mutant sutures in machinic continuum: where the machinery was
incomplete is you.
You are on a voyage to the end of the river, into jungle-screened horror.The ivory
trade is just cover. Commerce is like that. It allows things to disappear while
remaining formally integrated.It is a line of flight, a war.Kurtz is deterritorializing
security into Meltdown, the ultimate Pod nightmare. No surprise that command
control want him dead. They transmit a terminator machine into Cambodia,
jacking it into a river that winds through the war like a main circuit cable, and plugs
straight into Kurtz.
Brains constellate excitable cells into electro-chemically signalling networks whose
emergent outcome involves behavioural guidance through operantly-tested reality
Meat (or How to Kill Oedipus in Cyberspace) • 203
models (including neuroscience). If virtual reality competes with 'natural' neuronal
hypothesis, it must simultaneously divert behaviour (minimally: CNS motor
output) into alternative machinic channels. VR is less a change of levels than a
mutation of circuitry; a matter of additive sensory-motor reloopings, compressing
anthropohistorical consensus reality into a menu option as it denaturalizes the
brain.
Kurtz cauterizes his compassion, burns it out, agonizingly meticulous, becoming
ever more methodical, efficient and relentless (on a cyberpositive slide). He
explores hell, insectoid reassembly of self, metamorphosis, to become capable of
what is necessary, even the worst.
Especially the worst.
He is knitted into the jungle, drawn by it, abysmally attracted. An artificial
extinction waiting at the shadowed intersection of primeval horror and hi-tech. . . .
Kurtz implements schizoanalysis, lapsing into shadow, becoming imperceptible.
The latest photographs exterminate his face in blackness, personality eclipsed by
the blank source of war. His preferred mode of operation is rapid (dis)connection
(hit and run). Hostile intelligence penetration has been closed down. Data wink-out
and a little undiplomatic blood. It looks bad (if it still looks like anything at all). The
process has gone native, closing on the satiation zero of nomad insurgency, making
contact with the body without organs. Kurtz is at least as aware as Willard that
Charlie's 'idea of great R&R was cold rice and a little rat meat'. He is becoming
more Vietnamese than the Vietnamese.
Everything goes to hell.
VR was a medico-military computer application before arriving in the mass
entertainment market. It is first a technics of perception, and only derivatively a
medium for immersive hallucination. If artificial space substitutes an ideal
body-image for a 'real' one, it is only btcause it first invades the real (imageless)
body. Virtual technics deflects reality, rather than cancelling or eclipsing it. Matter
as the intensity of the circuit, not the adequacy of the representation.
Evening at the end of the river: thick tropical heat, an airstrike coming in, and
Morrison is sliding through oedipal murder and incest into the occult sonics of
matricide. Kurtz waits in the foetid gloom, ready to die. His guerrillas are preparing
to slaughter a water-buffalo below, laughing and clapping among torches,
204 • Body and Society
automatic rifles and shrunken heads. You have a 28-centimetre serrated combat
knife in your left hand. The Willard skin is coming away in ragged scraps, exposing
something beyond masculinity, beyond humanity, beyond life. Patches of mottled
technoderm woven with electronics are emerging. Daddy and mummy means
nothing anymore. You scrape away your face and step into the dark. . . .
References
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Cadigan, Pat (1991) Synners. Glasgow: Grafton.
Conrad, Joseph (1989) Heart of Darkness. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari (1984) Capitalism and Schizophrenia I: Antioedipus. London:
Athlone.
Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari (1988) Capitalism and Schizophrenia II: A Thousand Plateaus.
London: Athlone.
Downham, Mark (1988) 'Apocalypse Now', Vague 20: 41.
Eliade, M. (1991) Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Freud, S.(1991) 'Totem and Taboo', in Civilization, Society and Religion, Vol.5 Penguin Freud Library.
Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Ginzberg, Carlo (1991) Ecstasies: The Witches' Sabbath in Europe. London: Radius.
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Kadrey, Richard (1988) Metrophage. London: Gollancz.
Lyotard, Jean-Fran�ois ( 1993) Libidinal Economy. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Nick Land teaches Philosophy at Warwick University.