Becoming-in-space

In Strangers to Ourselves, Julia Kristeva writes that a foreigner’s space is the train in movement. It is a place always going somewhere, always leaving somewhere else, never belonging. In transit, always becoming (1991:7)

In ‘Fragments for a Queer City’ from Pleasure Zones, David Bell quotes Henning Bech that a train station is the space for the queer, as somewhere that is a travel space, ‘of chronic transit from one place to another’ (97).

The similarities of these two comments is not coincidental. People both queer and foreign are outside of the normal, outside of the accepted, outside of the known. Spaces do have important meaning for people, in constituting an identity that is comfortable or not within a particular space, in allowing people to access the(ir) world through movement and physical connection. How does the body react?

Culture commodified into commodity culture

I WANT THIS TEE SHIRT

Virtual bodies, no bodies at all

The Kingdom is another text in which Lars von Trier challenges conventions, not only of the cinematic form but also of the principles of institutions and cultural attitudes. The direct aesthetic of this television show is shared with von Trier’s film The Boss of It All (2006), set in an institutionalized environment and largely a comedy, like The Kingdom, although the comedy works to intensify criticism of conservative discourse. It also follows in the form of Dogville (2003) as von Trier explores the reaction of such a discourse to other realms (spiritual) and other bodies (cadavers, injured bodies, foriegn bodies). In Dogville, Nicole Kidman’s Grace, as a foreign body, is rejected by the townspeople because they do not want to co-exist with an outsider, they see their own perception of the world as the one and only allowed in their space. In The Kingdom, Mrs Drusse is not tolerated by the medical hospital because her spiritual beliefs represent outside of their scientific discourse on the body. There is far too much unknown in the realm of spirituality for such an institution where epistemological variation is not allowed.

Modern science, having progressively become techno-science – the product of the fatal confusion between the operational instrument and exploratory research – has slipped its philosophical moorings and lost its way

– Paul Virilio, The Information Bomb, 1.

The Kingdom tries to come to terms with human feelings associated with ‘the modern scientific gaze on the body’ (Thacker 1998). By highlighting the medical world’s preoccupation with the physiological and anatomical form of the human body, von Trier reveals the incongruence of such study with the emotional, feeling (and spiritual) aspects of human life, and death. Thacker writes, ‘what is at issue is the explicit recoding of the body of medical science and what will come to be culturally understood as a body more generally.’ What is the harm that such institutionalized thought brings to the body? The fascistic nature of this thought is signified through the two workers in the kitchen of the hospital, who have an innate sensibility as to what is going on in the hospital, spiritually and otherwise. As the working class characters of the television show, their beliefs are systematically opposed to those of the people (literally and figuratively) above them. The opposition/oppressors of the working class within the hospital are dictated by microfascistic politics. The workers in the kitchen, and Mrs. Drusse, can ‘see’, they possess a spiritual sensory perceptive ability by which they can detect individual need and see past the cultural and institutional regime.

So what does become of the body when it is put into an institution dictated by such thought? In Buffy the Vampire Slayer, creator Joss Whedon addresses this question with the death of Joyce, Buffy’s mother. In the episode ‘The Body’, Dawn sees Joyce’s deceased body in the morgue wing of the hospital. It’s not her, she’s gone, Buffy tells Dawn. Then, “Where’d she go?” In The Kingdom Lars von Trier tells us that ‘Ghosts are in the space in between.’ So, the body could be just a vessel for the soul. Perhaps it does not matter what happens to a body when it is deceased, because the human soul has departed for a new home already (which does not mean that doing anything to a body when it is merely under hypnosis is called for). Yet as that original vessel the body should not be under dictation of a cold and limited institution, because it is still important to those who are living. Like the son in The Kingdom who does not want his father’s body cut up for science, he still sees the body as a part of the person. In Buffy, Dawn’s strongest spiritual reaction to her mother’s death is when she sees/touches Joyce as cadaver. The body, although perhaps only a vessel for the human soul, is necessary.

The technobody, the ‘live-feed’ body, is a body that only takes shape, or becomes digital [sic] embodied, as it is encoded’ (Thacker 1998). ‘These reconfigurations of the body-technology interface forms an assemblage of new digital anatomies, where bodies are strategically and experimentally digitized, transmitted, and remotely displayed – here the hyper-texted body is not so much an archived database of images as it elaborates and extends a process of digital embodiment.’ What are the implications for this kind of body on humanity, then? This time, not a medically institutionalized body but a body without organs in the techno-realm. In the gaming world, human bodies can be virtually transferred to a screen and their virtual bodies can participate physically in a world, interacting with other virtual objects. Touch becomes unnecessary. Perhaps, soon, with the advancement of digital technologies we will no longer need to touch. Along with Antonin Artaud’s concerns that human bodies and organs will no longer be required for reproduction, perhaps they will no longer be needed for sex, for play, anything.

Because one must produce,
one must by all possible means of activity replace nature
wherever it can be replaced

(Artaud, To Have Done With the Judgement of God)

Deterritorialization

William Zanzinger killed poor Hattie Carroll
With a cane that he twirled around his diamond ring finger
At a Baltimore hotel society gathrin’
And the cops were called in and his weapon took from him
And they rode him in custody down to the station
And booked William Zaninger for first degree murder
But you who philosophize disgrace and criticize all fears,
Take the rag away from your face
Now ain’t the time for your tears

William Zanzinger, who at twenty-four years
Owns a tobacco farm of six hundred acres
With rich wealthy parents who provide and protect him
And high office relations in the politics of Maryland,
Reacted to his deed with a shrug of his shoulders
And swear words and sneering, and his tongue it was snarling,
In a matter of minutes on bail was out walking
But you who philosophize disgrace and criticize all fears,
Take the rag away from your face
Now ain’t the time for your tears.

Hattie Carroll was a maid of the kitchen
She was fifty-one years old and gave birth to ten children
Who carried the dishes and took out the garbage
And never sat once at the head of the table
And didn’t even talk to the people at the table
Who just cleaned up all the food from the table
And emptied the ashtrays on a whole other level
Got killed by a blow, lay slain by a cane
That sailed through the air and came down through the room,
Doomed and determined to destroy all the gentle
And she never done nothing to William Zanzinger
But you who philosophize disgrace and criticize all fears,
Take the rag away from your face
Now ain’t the time for your tears.

In the courtroom of honor, the judge pounded his gavel
To show that all’s equal and that the courts are on the level
And that the strings in the books ain’t pulled and persuaded
And that even the nobles get properly handled
Once that the cops have chased after and caught ’em
And that the ladder of law has no top and no bottom,
Stared at the person who killed for no reason
Who just happened to be feelin’ that way without warnin’
And he spoke through his cloak, most deep and distinguished,
And handed out strongly, for penalty and repentance,
William Zanzinger with a six-month sentence
Oh, but you who philosophize disgrace and criticize all fears,
Bury the rag deep in your face
For now’s the time for your tears.

The beast has eyes before him

Vectors of Death

So welcome to the machine

Welcome my son, welcome to the machine

What did you dream? It’s alright, we told you what to dream.

– Pink Floyd

Like vampires in Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel, the supernatural entity Bob in Twin Peaks (David Lynch, 1990-91) is a body without organs. He is a fascistic figure whose only pathway to existence is through the bodies of humans, and as he exists in someone he also consumes them, destroys their original humanity and will inevitably lead them to death. At which point he, only a spirit and without a body to be destroyed, will move on, within another person.

Antonin Artaud: ‘To Have Done With the Judgement of God’

What makes it serious

is that we know

that after the order

of this world

there is another.

…

One says,

one can say,

there are those who say

that consciousness

is an appetite,

the appetite for living;

…

and it was then

that I exploded everything

because my body

can never be touched

Bob’s appetite for living will, eventually (if Lynch’s verse was endless, rather than discontinued), make the system of the world explode. He cannot be touched, he cannot be stopped. Does he represent the new world order, one where bodies are not necessary? Just technical machines, maybe – make Bob a cyborg body and let him be. Excise my brain and put it into a box, and a screen can spell out my thoughts. Maybe.

‘The BwO is the egg…The egg is the BwO’ (D&G 2007:181-2). It is linked to childhood, it is a childhood block (not a memory), it is ‘continually in the process of constructing itself’ (182). Bob, the body without organs, came to Leland as a child, blocked Leland’s memories of that time. Bob as BwO put Leland’s body into a permanent state of becoming, just as Bob does have to continually and always put himself in someone new. So they both then live in a liminal state of existance, always transversing between the states of spirit and body, life and death.

David Banks spoke yesterday (29/4/2008.) about the Doctor Who machinic characters of Daleks and Cybermen being stripped of their emotions – ‘perfected’ to exist purely as productive machines, more efficient than human because neither they nor their tasks are hampered with feeling. So they don’t have sex because it’s a waste of time. Like Barbarella, where they hold hands because it’s quicker. In Doctor Who these are literal bodies without organs, bodies without any of the complications that distract from production for the capitalist machine. Without emotion their desire for existence may lead, as Artaud writes, to a new world order. Guattari writes of the machine, it ‘is shaped by a desire for abolition. Its emergence is doubled with breakdown, catastrophe – the menace of death’ (1995:37). The Daleks and Cybermen do desire abolition of everything that is not of their order, and with the opening of the vortex in the episode ‘Army of Ghosts’ they threaten total breakdown. In Twin Peaks Bob is a mind without a body, his mind always around in spiritual form, but he is without the permanent home of a body. It is Bob’s existence as this intangible spirit-virus that, comparatively, allows Cooper access to information about Bob’s activity only within his own head. Things travel between Leland’s unconscious and Agent Cooper’s unconscious (his dreams). These clues seep through into his conscious mind, as the ‘reversal of the conscious waking state occurs regularly during the transition from waking to sleeping, and what then emerge most vividly are the very things that were unconscious by day’ (Jung 1974:28.). What this allows us to see is that it is our thoughts and our unconscious that make us human, and without the emotional registers that the cybermen have taken away we would not possess these levels of humanity. The structure of our bodies, and thus the structure of the body of the world, would be entirely different.

If capital is the body without organs of the capitalist, then as a whole it operates with the illusive image of being all-powerful. But in smaller segments capital can be seen as a collection of ‘parts that it neither unifies nor totalises’ (D&G 1983:43). The defining structure of capitalism is separate but related to all of the smaller capitalist operations, the ones that try to exist outside of it but never do; ie. eBay, op-shops. They are outside monopolistic organisations (perhaps in theory) but still work on their terms, on the terms of producing capital. The capitalist machine, and all those anti-humanist machinic bodies on Dr Who, are founded on a regime of disequilibrium – cyborgs destroy, capitalists punish. They only exist in relation to the other, and an other which they can control. In D&G’s glossarial discussion of deterritorialization, they write ‘the territory itself is inseparable from vectors of deterritorialization working it from within’ (2007:560). So the underdogs of capitalism – the poor, the “less fortunate” – are always at the mercy of the cogs of the capitalist society. Their bodies (their territory) are constantly under threat of such vectors and they are deterritorialized from their own space because they live within the space of consumption, one in which they cannot participate. Leland, in Twin Peaks, is literally inseparable from the deterritorializing agent of Bob, as Bob literally overtakes Leland’s territory (his body, his actions, his thoughts) from within.

If Bob is a body without organs, and capital is so of the capitalist, then war is the body without organs of the repressive government, operating on a doctrine of perpetual war for perpetual peace.

The scientific and industrial production machine is doubtless merely an avatar or, as they say, blowback from development of the tools of destruction, from this absolute accident that is war, from this conflict pursued in all societies over the centuries, this ‘great war of time’ that never ceases to flare up out of the blue, here and there, despite the evolution in customs, the means of production and ‘civilizations’. Its intensity never ceases to grow, either, with technological innovations, to the point where the latest energy, nuclear energy, at first appears as a weapon, at once an armament and absolute accident in history. (The Original Accident 2005:71)

The anxiety of Paul Virilio’s writing here is present in Richard Kelly’s films. Southland Tales (2006) contextualises war as the absolute accident, that produces conflicts in the USA as extraneous offshoots of those enforced in other nations. For example in attempting (or so the public is told) to prevent death and suffering, those in control actually infect the public with pain, hatred and suicide, so the point of such conflict can become remarkably obscured. For the kid who says “dawg” all the time, his efforts against his becoming-killing-machine for the Iraq war are so intense that he becomes-vigilante. It never ceases. Maybe the reason that “the future is going to be far more futuristic than they originally predicted” is because it is going to end with a bang, not a whimper. The world has finally realised that the original accident was the invention of the a-bomb, because the a-bomb is the apocalypse. The a-bomb is the way the world is going to end, or has ended: not its detonation but its invention.

The global acceleration assisted by the invention of all these machines is going to be slammed to a halt, brought to an absolute stop. It is said in Southland Tales, the apocalyptic crime rate of events is resulting in a global deceleration that will eventuate in the end of the world. Will this be, thinking of D&G, an “absolute” event? ‘A movement is absolute when it relates “a” body considered as multiple to a smooth space that it occupies in the manner of a vortex’ (2007:561). Instead of having an absolute ‘creation of a new earth’, Southland Tales represents the reverse, the destruction of an earth, without the known future of a new. This seems to be the most absolute movement, even more so than “absolute”, as it is one toward a potential absolute nothingness. Artaud has predicted that after the order of this world, there will be another. Perhaps there will be, perhaps there won’t, but we will have entirely no part in it, and that is what makes it serious. Like the virus of Bob who will infect and destroy Twin Peaks, and then expand his destruction, warfaring governments will infect their hopes of survival with chances for destruction. On a smaller scale, within smaller moments, the domination of capitalism will also add to the breakdown of the world, as proved by the weapons dealer who wants cash, no cheque, who is then beaten to a pulp for his lack of tolerance. If no one moves beyond such greediness (or if we don’t get enough cardio) then this will happen to us all, eventually.

Southland Tales is a text where so much is said but it is hard to discern what it all is meant to say. Perhaps nothing, in this era where everything has to have a wholesome meaning that is consistent throughout entirety, and anything that doesn’t is flippantly derided as too postmodern for its own good. It is interesting though when one of Krysta’s bimbos questions the implications of the reversal of time across space-time zones. What happens when one moves outside the boundaries of chronometric time (aside from the morning after pill becoming the morning before pill)? We could, potentially, create a double of ourselves, like Roland Taverner. So although this comment from this blog describes my and my housemate’s first reaction – the film ‘attempts to be everything, and ends up being nothing’ – further pondering on the film makes me think more of it. The blog’s author goes on to talk about the film being so full of potentially important things that never get expanded or sorted out, or get any time at all, so the film ends up being meaningless. I don’t think so, as a film can have meaning in a few significant parts or characters, rather than as a whole singular sphere. I went throughout the film noticing potentially important little bits, and these are still important even if they don’t contribute to some overarching ‘meaning’. So I prefer this review from J. Hoberman (last Jan in NYC I spoke to him for only a few minutes and he mentioned how great this film is): ‘Kelly’s movie may not be entirely coherent, but that’s because there’s so much it wants to say.’

Roland’s eye gets shot out towards the end of the film, lost during the apocalyptic battle, firing on all frontiers. In Donnie Darko (2001) Frank has also lost an eye, and it is he who is the bridge to another dimension – his glowing eye represents a portal to another time-space configuration, just like the light emanating from Roland’s hand(s). Joining his hands together melds together the two dimensions, meant to exist separately, so of course, chaos ensues.

What is it about the eye? In the Buffy episode ‘Dirty Girls’, Caleb (Nathan Fillion) gouges Xander’s (Nicholas Brendan) eye out because he is the one who sees things. But who’s to say he won’t see more with only one eye, as both Frank and Roland have wider access with an eye injury. The eye, perhaps, is removed from this regular (doomed) dimension and placed instead in the realm of another. A path through space and time, to one more fortunate. So it is not really the eyes in themselves that allow Frank to see things, or that give Roland the path into another space-time, they are just symbols of ‘seeing’ when the actual sight lies somewhere else. Perhaps, if there is too much focus on looking, on the grandeur of something (for example, the a-bomb) there is no time to think beyond.

When Roland gets shot in the eye, his body becomes deterritorialized, but reterritorialized when the two universes combine/clash. Both Roland and Frank are posthuman, victims of bodily modification not technological but spiritual and of consciousness. Roland’s body does not become posthuman in the sense that Cherry (Rose McGowan) does in Planet Terror (Robert Rodriguez, 2007). Her female-body-machine-gun is a hybrid body of machine and organism, that has no sense of unity or nature, that is ‘committed to partiality, irony, intimacy, and perversity. It is oppositional, utopian, and completely without innocence’ (Haraway 2000:292). “Cherry darling, it’s all you,” says Freddy Rodriguez – except for your right leg, that’s a machine gun. Roland becomes posthuman because his body no longer ends ‘at the skin’ (Haraway 2000:314) but extends into other spaces, and into other bodies (ie. his other body). Leland’s body, on the other hand, becomes deterritorialized when it is no longer his body, when his ‘personal’ space becomes infected by Bob. His body never becomes his own again, but his soul is returned to him.

Deleuze and Guattari tell us that ‘Every BwO is made up of plateaus’ (2007:175), that it is constituted by alternating realms of intensity. Further, that a plateau is a continuous region of ‘intensity constituted in such a way that they do not allow themselves to be interrupted by any external termination.’ A region of space that exists on its own terms, such as the Black Lodge/Red Room in Twin Peaks, which exists outside of universal space (and time?). And within this space, spirit-Bob resides, in communication with the other, with Cooper’s mind, with Laura’s becoming-dead body.

In The Gift of Death, Derrida writes, ‘By means of the passage to death the soul attains freedom’ (1995:40). When Leland is eventually dying, Bob’s virus flees his body, and Leland recovers knowledge of the evils he has committed, his body as a vector of death. Inside the Black Lodge in the final episode of the series, Agent Cooper meets Leland’s shadow self. As Deputy Hawk has said earlier, ‘The Black Lodge is the shadow-self of the White Lodge. The legend says every spirit must pass through there on their way to perfection. There, you will meet your shadow-self.’ It is a plateau outside of the world, in between the states of life and death. Agent Cooper finds Leland’s shadow-self in the Black Lodge, because Leland’s soul, his real self, had attained the freedom that Derrida speaks of. In Donnie Darko, Donnie travels a literal passage to death, a passage through time, and it is then that his soul must become free. Death is presented in these two texts as external to the body – although the dead body is seen/spoken of, the soul is not ignored. Thinking of this via Battersby, who writes, ‘the boundary of my body should rather be thought of as an event-horizon, in which one form (myself) meets its potentiality for transforming itself into another form or forms (the non-self)’ (Hallam et. al. 2001:69), death is presented as something outside of the body, as a transit to something/somewhere else. In Southland Tales, Richard Kelly does not quite give closure on Roland’s path, although we can be fairly certain that he is going to his death (at least from this present world). The fourth dimension opened up by his handshake (at which time the hangar door is also opened – like Donnie Darko‘s cellar door) allows Roland to choose his death. With both of Roland’s bodies together, he has access to what is absolutely his, all of him, and what belongs to him is his death (Derrida 1995:44).

This is Roland’s personal death, but what of the death of the world? Roland’s eyes end Southland Tales with a revelatatory image of a tidal wave, pointing to the apocalyse (here – last ten seconds). A sketched eye in Donnie Darko, revealed moments before Donnie travels back in time to his death, forbodes death in its pupil. Presumably this was sketched by Donnie along with his pictures of Frank’s ‘bunny suit’, and is an image of Frank’s eye. An eye from the Donnie Darko: Directors Cut reveals, in close up, waves of water, or cloud, or dust, which, although unclear, are distressingly ominous. Presumably this eye too belongs to Frank, as he is able to open the portal to the way the world will end. Roland’s and Frank’s eyes, despite being connected to space-time portals, have only gotten that way by injury, Roland shot, Frank stabbed and then shot. And what the image of the skull in Donnie Darko epitomises is that even though these portals may tell us something, it will always be distorted by death and destruction. Whether this pathway to destruction is a micro BwO as in Twin Peaks, or a macro BwO as in Southland Tales, the texts both explore (and deplore) that the world as it should be is coming to an end.

References

Artaud, Antonin, 1948. ‘To Have Done With The Judgement of God’, available online: http://ndirty.cute.fi/~karttu/tekstit/artaud.htm.

Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Félix, 1983 [1972]. Anti- Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Minneapolis; University of Minnesota Press.

Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Félix, 2007 [1980]. A Thousand Plateus, trans. Brian Massumi, London: New York; Continuum.

Derrida, Jacques, 1995. The Gift of Death, Chicago: London; University of Chicago Press.

Guattari, Félix, 1995 [1992]. Chaosmosis, trans. Paul Bains & Julian Pefanis, Indianapolis; Indiana University Press.

Hallam, Elizabeth et. al., 2001. ‘The Body in Death’, in Contested Bodies, ed. Ruth Holliday and John Hassard, London: New York; Routledge: 63-77.

Haraway, Donna, 2000 [1991]. ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’, in The Cybercultures Reader, eds. David Bell and Barbara Kennedy, London; Routledge. 291-324.

Jung, Carl, 1974. Aion: Researches nto the Phenomenology of the Self, London; Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Virlio, Paul, 2007 [2005]. The Original Accident, trans. Julia Rose, Cambridge: Malden; Polity Press

Filmography

Barbarella, 1968. Roger Vadim; Marianne Productions: Dino De Laurentiis Cinematografica (Rome).

Buffy the Vampire Slayer, 1997-2003. Joss Whedon (creator); 20th Century Fox Television.

Doctor Who, 1963-present. Sydney Newman (creator); British Broadcasting Corporation.

Donnie Darko, 2001. Richard Kelly; Pandora Inc: Flower Films: Darko Productions.

Planet Terror, 2007. Robert Rodriguez; Weinstein Company: R.I.P. Rodriguez International Pictures: Dimension Films: Troublemaker Studios.

Southland Tales, 2005. Richard Kelly; MHF Zweite Academy Film: Cherry Road Films: Darko Entertainment: Inferno Distribution: Eden Roc Productions: Persistent Entertainment: Universal Pictures.

Twin Peaks, 1990-91. David Lynch and Mark Frost (creators); Lynch/Frost Productions: Propaganda Films.

a machinic existence

From The Age Green Guide, I think on Thursday April 3rd:

I scanned this piece just because I think it’s pretty awesome. Also, because Brooke’s character trajectory seems like an inflated version of Frank Gallagher’s relationship with Monica’s mother in Shameless.

The Bold and the Beautiful is a daytime soap, a distinct expression of Félix Guattari’s machinic ‘continuum’ (1995:43). The series is distinctly infinite, with no predetermined series arc and nothing (ie. death) remaining in definite permanence.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer is a series drama with a somewhat defined episodic form (more noticable in seasons one to five, this weakened in the final seasons to give more screen time to the arc than to the self-contained episode). It is a television machine that can and does invent histories for its characters, but can also because of its affectation of the supernatural bring back past characters in real or representational form. Spike is a character for whom the creators of the story introduced a huge back story, in addition to the stories told in ‘Fool For Love’, in ‘Lies My Parents Told Me’ Joss Whedon expanded Spike’s complex history and also for the second slayer that he killed. The character of Robin Wood was introduced in season 7 and they wanted to link him importantly into the story, so it was his mother whom Spike killed in 1977.

Also like ‘Fool For Love’, Buffy features temporal and spatial shifts, notably in ‘Storyteller’. For example in the episode’s opening, Andrew’s videotaping activities as he narrates a story in a different space to the one where he has filmed it, but they are edited together in a single sequence to emulate his own imagination of the scenario. In this episode, and also in others, the fanbase of the show are consciously recognised within the Buffy diegesis. Andrew, in our place, wants the ‘end of the world’ to be recorded so that people can watch what they have done. This is what we do as fans. Guattari writes, ‘What happens at a level of the particulate-cosmic is not without relation to the human soul or events in the socius’ (1995:38). In this episode the events in the particular episode realm are in response to the external world of the show. But generally, also, and with other television series, it is the particulate-cosmic that either relates to people’s lives, or people wish for a relation, and this accounts for such an engulfment in the television machine.

If we’re not supposed to believe Glen Creeber’s definition of series vs. serial, then I also dispute his claim that a television drama consists of the ‘interaction of a set of signs with an overall code.’ Guattari says that a machine should not engulf itself in a semiotic register that has only a single signifying chain. Instead, that ‘The machine’s proto-subjectivity installs itself in Universes of virtuality which extend far beyond its existential territoriality’ (44-5).

Television does this, and when the Buffyverse and all things dubbed Whedonesque gets into the hands of fans who produce fanfiction, who create fanart, shippers, and organise conventions etc, the machine enters into all sorts of universes and signifies differently depending on what is done with it.

I’m pretty sure I gave this as an online card to people one year.

Existential machines are at the same level as being in its intrinsic multiplicity. They are not mediated by transcendent signifers and subsumed by a univocal ontological foundation. They are to themselves their own material of semiotic expression.

(Guattari 1995:52)

Machines are polyvocal, then. Buffy is a polyvocal machine and for us, by watching it, participating in its culture and purchasing it in its commodity form, we are living a machinic existence. The ‘ontological transversality’ (38.) of the television machine as existential system and system of tangible commodities, entwined into our lives, is why we desire/need it so much. We are a part of it and need to watch in order to sustain.

More from Interview magazine

Kylie believes it too: ‘Your life really does become part of your art.’

But she is not like Madonna. We don’t know everything about her, but she really points out what Madonna is because she thinks we know a lot about her life. With Kylie, her art has become what her life is to the commodity world. We can buy into part of  it here (and even learn with teaching materials!).

Teen subjectivities

Paranoid Park (Gus Van Sant, 2008.) has a power that comes from the mind of a teenager. When the film finished, there was no conclusion to the story. We had no closure. But Alex’s (Gabe Nevins) story had finished, he had moved through his thoughts and come out with a deeper knowledge of himself.

The meditating slow-motion shots accompanied by music for the mind of a melancholic teen (eg. Elliot Smith) communicate both the stillness and the rage in Alex’s mind. Apart from the detective, the adults in the film are held out of focus for most of their time in the film. Rather than this acting as a sort of ‘segregative social practise’ for Gus Van Sant, as an adult, to isolate his teenager from the ‘real’ world, it suggests that Alex’s becoming into the world of responsibility is entirely his own journey, his own choice. No one, not even adult, can help him through it.

All the mechanisms producing a “machinic” subjectivity, everything that contributes to provide, a sensation of belonging to something, of being somewhere, along with the sensation of forgetting oneself, are “drugs.”

Felix Guattari, ‘Machinic Junkies’.

In Alex’s case, his subjectivity as a skater is his own, but he has also been put into the collective assemblage of ‘skaters’ by his peers, mother (“Where’s your skateboard?”) and school institution. His skating culture was for him a drug, it gave him the sensation of belonging somewhere, feeling surrounded by something meaningful – so much so that he could go there alone. His skating, and the skating set-up at Paranoid Park, represents a new system, ‘capital as a mode of semiotic reterritorialization of human activities and structures uprooted by machinic processes’ (Guattari 1995:121). Paranoid Park was built up from nothing, entirely by the cultural group who were going to use it. It is not a space that has been imposed upon public space by an external power, not, for example, a city square that is designed by an abstract fore but used by the people. Thus it uproots the ‘human’ structures of government and council, it is a space made as a new subjective form.

Making Madonna

Looking special at the Berlin Film Fest 2008

Vanity Fair

Madonna: Do you have a daughter?

Me: No, three sons.

[Madonna looks at me accusingly.]

Me: I didn’t choose it—it just happened.

Madonna: Do you believe that? You think things just happen?

Me: I think that just happened.

Madonna: Mm-hmm.

Me: So who’s making the decision?

Madonna: You are, you and your missus.

Me: About what kind of kids we want?

Madonna: You chose it. Your soul chose it.

Me: No. Do you believe that? That my insides wanted boys?

Madonna: Unconsciously. Yes.

Me: I kind of like the idea, three sons—it’s like having a little army out in the woods.

Madonna: And all the work they can do, and you can teach them carpentry and then build houses for you in Old Greenwich, or wherever you live.

…She then said, “If your joy is derived from what society thinks of you, you’re always going to be disappointed.”

Is this hypocrisy? Does Madonna construct herself around what society thinks of her/wants her to be? Yes, but she also perpetuates it – for example, by continuing even now to publish an image of youth and beauty. Tetzlaff writes that the audience is aware that none of her presentations represent the “real” woman (1993:256), but this is not relevant to her place in the culture machine. Fans of Madonna are infatuated with her different images, because her image is her product, and her product is what they buy and love. Tetzlaff calls Madonna ‘a marvelous icon’ (1993:241). In a book about another great icon, Marilyn Monroe, S. Paige Baty writes that Marilyn has an iconic force that is ‘bolstered up by reproduction’ (1995:64). And while Madonna does not quite have the catalogue of items upon which her image can be bought that Marilyn Monroe has, she as an icon is reproduced upon her own ubiquitous, and still very much alive, body. Her iconic status is preserved by her constant reinvention (which will keep her always with mass culture’s attention), by her never submitting to her age, and by her identity existing only above the surface and in front of the camera. And it really is like her identity is only comprised of what we see in the media – but this does not seem to only be one side of her. With Madonna we seem to get everything – as Warren Beatty says in In Bed With Madonna (Keshishian, 1991), ‘She doesn’t want to live off camera…what’s the point existing?’

So even back in 1991 Madonna lived a whole lot of her identity for us on screen, and now she gives us more! We get to see all of her commodity-images, we know what she does when she goes to bed, we’ve seen her eat, her religion (or is it spirituality?), we see her children, so I think that what she gives to the culture industry, and what she gives to her audience, is pretty much all of her. Madonna’s ‘art’ is her life. This result of her star status began with her – her desire to ‘be a star’ and that’s all – but that wouldn’t have held if it wasn’t for the intervention of the culture machine. Deleuze and Guattari (1983:26) write, ‘Desire is a machine, and the object of desire is another machine connected to it’; fans desired Madonna as a product, so the Madonna-machine created herself to fulfil their desire (disguised as needs, ‘derived from desire’ [1983:27]). Tetzlaff documents that the intense desire for Madonna as product does not singularly come from her music, her personality, her films, or her ‘sex appeal’ (because really, her crotch-grabbing is just not attractive), but that it comes from her ‘aura of power’ (242). Her power is connected to her audience having access to all of these facets of her life, and more even than I listed above.. Cuba Gooding Jr. was quoted in The Sunday Age ‘Life’ magazine (5/4/2008), in regards to Tom Cruise, that the more people know about your life the less they are able to believe a character you may play. And while this sounds true for Tom Cruise the actor, Madonna the celebrity uses her life to allow people to be continually attached to her. For people who possess knowledge of Madonna, they don’t want to lose it, so they continue to consume her life.

‘The real is not impossible: it is simply more and more artificial’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1983:34). I have thought/written earlier about how the real is not diminishing in the world, it is just something that is becoming much harder to negotiate when we think about the presence of culture. So thinking of Madonna, and her excessively mass-mediated character, we should not think of her as not being real, and not of the cultural world as being too artificial, but of Madonna’s life-as-art machine being the real source to access her. As Baty writes, ‘The circulation of an issue or figure through mass-mediated channels serves to grant a form of “real” public status’ (1995:17). Madonna, so present in many forms of media (so that even in The Age she had a head shot taking up a quarter-page), is ‘real’ in our world, we have access to her ‘real’ self as all of her, not just some, exists to us. In her Hall of Fame speech (I think in this part), Madonna said, ‘I am only the manager of my talent, not the owner,’ and this is somewhat accurate. She is not an authoritative owner. As explained on screenmachine, when Madonna’s idea for her own fame was formed, her celebrity became affected by its own path – for example, her becoming as a style icon is made continuous by the style-machine, her figure always mutating so it/she could remain alive in the machine. Adorno and Horkheimer write, ‘In the culture industry the notion of genuine style is seen to be the aesthetic equivalent of domination’ (1993:37). I don’t know what genuine style is but Madonna’s recreation and presentation of herself through her shifting style has definitely given her some hold of domination. A whole audience of people dressed like her, after all, and her first line at H&M ‘sold out in minutes’. She presents herself as very dominating in the commercial for her collection. Further presenting herself as distinctive, and powerful, was her appearance at the 2003 Video Music Awards. She is an entirely different image to the other two ‘Madonna wannabes’ (as JT calls them), ensuring that remains distinctive and dominating: taller, black over white.

Yet, it has not all been her, the standards and requirements of mass culture that the culture-machine have inflicted on her played a part in how she has become. So although as a product this commercial is for Pepsi (albeit only screened a few times in 1989), its content of Madonna watching herself as a child, morphing into her child-self watching (dreaming/desiring) Madonna-as-star enforces the account of Madonna-as-star-inherently. The culture machine attempts to enhance Madonna’s celebrity by trying to remove its involvement. Plus, people even want her daughter Lourdes to succumb to the machine and get a makeover. In In Bed With Madonna, we can see a more innocent side of her, of a person who, although very much desiring and aiming for stardom, was not affected by the commodified image-machine as much as she is now. On screen, Madonna claimed she didn’t care what people thought of her, that her breasts were hers and she didn’t believe in plastic surgery, etc. But the expectations of the culture machine for her to remain marketable, and her own desire to not look ageing, made her resort to all this. But maybe that’s okay – according to some she is the queen of good plastic surgery.

I don’t think sexy or seductive work for her anymore. At least not where her crotch is heavily featured.

In her latest feature in Interview, she says that she wrote one of her recent songs just so that she could have a good time doing it in a stadium. And then her interviewer says that a lot of other people are about only wanting money, implying that Madonna’s values were different. Which they may very well not be – see the blog linked from screenmachine: ‘Funny how it’s always the richest acts who expect their fans to dig the deepest.’ It doesn’t do too much for her values of caring about poverty and children in Malawi (+ ‘I think women are the future of Africa’ – buzz feminism, means nothing) when she blows money on a commodified spectacle about her, and not her ‘values’. Much of that Vanity Fair interview, especially the section I have included above, and this response here, gives me the feeling that it not really hypocrisy. It just suggests that she doesn’t know what she’s talking about or what her thoughts are, but that is trying to be as much in the focus of the publicity-machine as she can be. This is not to suggest that Madonna does not have ‘substance’, which Greg Seigworth wants to make sure we don’t forget (1993:299). It is just all on the surface, and she knows it. She knows that all of her has become a marketable star-image, so she plays on that and builds herself up as the most powerful/important.

The truly remarkable thing here is that Madonna’s conscious self-commodification may be the primary trait for which she is admired by her mainstream audience. This is a frightening indication of how deeply late-capitalist values have been absorbed into our popular culture. Commodity values are more precious than human values. Our culture validates success no matter what is sacrificed to achieve it. (Tetzlaff 1993:258.)

In From Hegel To Madonna, Robert Miklitsch writes that this reading is a wholly negative reading of Madonna-as-commodity (1998:120). But Madonna is not a negative commodity, despite her in large part not really having any idea what she’s talking about. She is an important figure because her entire body is part of a commodity-machine. She fulfils peoples’ needs – needs that we have in the same way that Edgar Morin (2005:111) talks about cinema – ‘those that practical life cannot fulfil.’

Post Thoughts: Madonna’s video for American Life which she pulled herself out of respect for the soldiers in Iraq, then made some replacement lite-version. Is this the point where she began to really care what people thought of her? Where she didn’t make statements because it’s what she wanted to do (like the masturbation performance in Toronto), but she wanted to go with whatever her fans wanted – ie. latest album, collaborating with JT and Timbaland, ‘so hot right now’ type of status.

References

Adorno, Theodor and Horkheimer, Max, 1993, ‘The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception’, in The Cultural Studies Reader, ed. Simon During, London: New York; Routledge. 29-43.

Baty, S. Paige, 1995, American Monroe: The Making of a Body Politic, London: Los Angeles; University of California Press.

Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Felix, 1982 [1973], Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Minneapolis; University of Minnesota Press.

Miklitsch, Robert, 1998, From Hegel To Madonna: Towards a General Economy of ‘Commodity Fetishism, Albany; State University of New York Press.

Morin, Edgar, 2005 [1956], The Cinema, or the Imaginary Man, Minneapolis; University of Minnesota Press.

Tetzlaff, David, 1993, ‘Metatextual Girl: -> patriarchy -> postmodernism -> power -> money -> Madonna’, in The Madonna Connection: Representational Politics, Subcultural Identities, and Cultural Theory, ed. Cathy Schwichtenberg, Sydney; Allen & Unwin. 239-263.