A Sense of Apocalypse: Technology, Textuality, Identity (Literary and Cultural Theory) 9783631648124, 9783653036817, 363164812X

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Literar y and Cultural Theor y

Marcin Mazurek

A Sense of Apocalypse Technology, Textuality, Identity

Reaching into the depths of the collective unconscious, A Sense of Apocalypse explores and re-interprets one of the West’s primordial fears, namely that of the apocalyptic closure of both cultural praxis and individual experience. Yet, in contrast to popular connotations of the term, apocalypse is viewed here in terms of a transitional narrative locating the subject at the intersection of technological determinism, pop-cultural imagination, postmodern urbanism and digital textuality. All these form the components of a new post-apocalyptic landscape, which not only produces a new identity informed by dissolving postEnlightenment paradigms, but also conjures up hints at a large number of existential possibilities triggered by late-capitalist technologies and their cultural consequences.

Marcin Mazurek is an Assistant Professor at the Institute of English Cultures and Literatures at the University of Silesia (Poland). His research focuses on postmodern theory, culture-technology relationship and visual culture. He is the author of a number of articles in the abovementioned fields.

A Sense of Apocalypse

LITERARY AND CULTURAL THEORY General Editor: Wojciech H. Kalaga

VOLUME 40

Marcin Mazurek  

 

   

  A Sense of Apocalypse Technology, Textuality, Identity

       

Bibliographic Information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data is available in the internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Mazurek, Marcin, 1972- author. A Sense of Apocalypse : Technology, Textuality, Identity / Marcin Mazurek. pages cm. – (Literary and Cultural Theory ; Volume 40) Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 978-3-631-64812-4 1. Apocalypse in literature. 2. Technology and civilization. 3. Postmodernism. 4. End of the world in literature. I. Title. PN56.A69M39 2014 809'.93353--dc23 2013050537 This publication was financially supported by the Faculty of Philology of the University of Silesia. ISSN 1434-0313 ISBN 978-3-631-64812-4 (Print) E-ISBN 978-3-653-03681-7 (E-Book) DOI 10.3726/978-3-653-03681-7 © Peter Lang GmbH Internationaler Verlag der Wissenschaften Frankfurt am Main 2014 All rights reserved. Peter Lang Edition is an Imprint of Peter Lang GmbH. Peter Lang – Frankfurt am Main · Bern · Bruxelles · New York · Oxford · Warszawa · Wien All parts of this publication are protected by copyright. Any utilisation outside the strict limits of the copyright law, without the permission of the publisher, is forbidden and liable to prosecution. This applies in particular to reproductions, translations, microfilming, and storage and processing in electronic retrieval systems. This book is part of the Peter Lang Edition list and was peer reviewed prior to publication. www.peterlang.com

The most unusual thing Jimmy had managed to score on his swing through the archipelago was a head, an intricately worked bust, cloisonné over platinum, studded with seedpearls and lapis. […] The thing was a computer terminal, he said. — William Gibson, Neuromancer

Contents Introduction The Argument........................................................................................................ 9 Chapter One From Pre-Apocalyptic Tropes to Post-Apocalyptic Metaphors........................... 19 1. Representing the Non-Representable......................................................... 19 2. Domesticating the Threat.......................................................................... 22 3. 9/11............................................................................................................. 25 4. Theorising the End.................................................................................... 28 5. Science Fiction, Technology, Identity........................................................ 32 Chapter Two The Violence of Revelation................................................................................. 39 1. Violence..................................................................................................... 39 2. Revelation.................................................................................................. 49 3. Theory of Apocalypse vs. Apocalypse of Theory..................................... 55 Chapter Three Technology Unbound........................................................................................... 61 1. Technology and the Social......................................................................... 61 2. From the Industrial to the Postindustrial................................................... 67 3. Visions and Identities................................................................................. 71 4. Maps and Territories.................................................................................. 76 Chapter Four Textual Spaces and Spatial Textualities............................................................... 83 1. The Ontology of Terminal Space............................................................... 83 2. Hypertext: Poststructuralist Theory into Terminal Practice..................... 90 3. Cityscapes and Cyber-Realms................................................................... 98 Chapter Five Identity and Its Discontents............................................................................... 107 1. Posthumanism Revisited: Identity on the Move...................................... 107 2. Posthumanist into Posthuman...................................................................110 3. Snow Crash: Split Presence and Translucent Bodies................................115 4. Terminal Identity as the Third................................................................. 123 Conclusion Apocalypse and the Postmodern........................................................................ 127 Bibliography..................................................................................................... 131

Introduction The Argument Throughout human history, we have been dependent on machines to survive. Fate, it seems, is not without a sense of irony. — Morpheus, The Matrix 1

The overall assumption underlying this book is that of a multi-layered paradigmatic change in our thinking of technology, the subject, the relationship between the two, and the ways in which this relationship is represented. The paradigm shift in question, though largely coinciding with numerous postmodern and poststructuralist postulates, is primarily concerned with the impact that postindustrial technologies exert upon experience and, by extension, upon the process of identity formation. This process, combining cultural theory with cultural praxis, is considered here against the background of representational and discursive practices it provokes and informs. Both elements, the rampant development of electronic technologies and the theoretical reconfiguration of the subject’s premises, not only narrow the distance between theory and practice but, first of all, force us to redefine and re-interpret a large number of discursive claims regarding those ideas which play a formative role in the process of identity construction. This is because one of the most distinctive tones of the discourse in question, borne out of a peculiar clash of postmodern theory with visual and textual representations, is the pervasive sense of distrust towards traditional modes of depicting such cornerstones of identity as space, body, locale, relationship with nature, reliability of the sign and, last but definitely not least, the status of the real. The conviction of technology’s fundamental influence is supported by the belief that contemporary technologies, particularly those of electronic origin, long ago ceased to function as mere tools whose sole purpose is to facilitate human daily operations. Instead, they have become the very core of both present and future systems, “allowing for the existence of the social as such.” 2 Not only did those technologies’ ubiquity alter and expand traditional modes of communication, social relationships and modes of exercising political power, but it also significantly reduced the gap between the born and the produced. The traditional dichotomy of human vs. technological has been vividly challenged and in many cases rendered non-existent. Whether Andy Wachowski, Larry Wachowski, The Matrix, Groucho II Film Partnership/Silver Pictures/ Village Roadshow Pictures, USA, 1999. 2. Mark Hansen, Embodying Technesis. Technology Beyond Writing (Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 2000), 3.

1.

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Introduction

we adopt Marshall McLuhan’s enthusiastic view that current technological capabilities serve as “the extensions of man,” 3 or, on the contrary, conform to the voices of anxiety announcing the decay and weakening of human control, it seems inevitable that “[t]echnology and the human are no longer so dichotomous.” 4 As J. G. Ballard famously put it: “[s]cience and technology multiply around us. To an increasing extent they dictate the languages in which we speak and think. Either we use those languages, or we remain mute.” 5 Seen from this angle, technology becomes the subject’s new natural environment, dramatically restructuring human cognitive horizon. This restructurisation involves, to use Mark Hansen’s term, a process of technesis, or “putting-into-discourse of technology.” 6 As he explains, “[v]iewed in this manner, technologies generate new types of human (or posthuman) embodiment that should lead us to question the privilege we grant thought in determining what constitutes identity and agency.” 7 In other words, technology plays a fundamental role in the process of identity formation through a direct influence upon the subject’s cognitive apparatus, thus questioning the legitimacy of the opposition between the human and the technological. Yet, if the new subject is to emerge or be constructed successfully, the old one must be erased effectively. And this is where the metaphorically understood notion of apocalypse, supported by textual and representational strategies of the science fiction discourse, comes into play. SF’s main preoccupation has always been a paradigmatic shift, whether spatio-temporal or philosophical. As Scott Bukatman maintains: “[s]cience fiction was always predicated upon continuous, perceptible change [...]. In its most radical aspect [it] narrates the dissolution of the most fundamental structures of human existence.” 8 It is precisely this radical gesture of dissolving “the most fundamental structures” which justifies the applicability of apocalypse as an operational metaphor. A powerful signifier, apocalypse remains double-coded; it denotes violent decomposition of the old and at the same time reveals the emergence of the new. The concept’s inherent incompleteness, coupled with its narrative potential (further discussed in chapter one) implicitly problematises the legitimacy of any “fundamental structures” and, as a result, locates apocalypse in the context of transitional narratives, highlighting its inevitable presence at all moments of paradigmatic change. Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media (New York: New American Library, 1964), 17. Scott Bukatman, Terminal Identity. The Virtual Subject in Postmodern Science Fiction (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), 5. 5. J. G. Ballard, “Introduction to Crash,” Re/Search 8/9 (1984), 96–97. Available at: http://www.ballardian.com/introduction-to-crash 6. Hansen, Embodying Technesis…, 4. 7. Hansen, Embodying Technesis…, 6. 8. Scott Bukatman, Blade Runner (London: BFI Publishing, 1997), 8. 3. 4.



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Technological fantasies, though often trivialising the issue of paradigm switch due to commercial requirements, vividly narrate numerous aspects and consequences of technologically-stimulated evolution. Those consequences’ complexity, combined with the newly emerging technological contours of experience, provide the foundation of both the “end” of the pre-electronic subject, and the subsequent “birth” of a new one—approached and defined against the background of a digital horizon. Still, the scope of technologically motivated changes goes far beyond the alreadymentioned stability of social and economic systems. Not so long ago, to determine a citizen’s position solely within the techno-cybernetic system of a postindustrial state seemed only a remote possibility, both futuristic and somewhat threatening. Today, such an operation is considered an unsophisticated daily routine, as the great majority of people living in the Western world are defined through their social security numbers, credit card numbers, various ID numbers, etc. This cyber-bureaucratic environment does not even try to conceal its invasive aspirations: on top of all those numbers is one’s mobile phone PIN—Personal Identity (!) Number—an indispensable secret and private password guaranteeing participation in advanced systems of wireless communication. Hansen’s remark has been quoted above also due to its strict interdependence with the Cartesian framework of reference. The critique of “the privilege we grant thought in determining what constitutes identity” clearly points to the oft-quoted and oft-contested Cartesian formula equating thinking, or more precisely, reasoning, with being. For a number of contemporary techno-critics, this standpoint remains provocative for at least two reasons. First of all, Descartes’ prescription implicitly conveys a neat vision of reality nicely cut up in binary oppositions and hence easily analysable by the rational mind equipped with an appropriate method of investigation. Secondly, Descartes’ dictum contains a strong conviction about human superiority, independence and control over the mechanical. At stake is a worldview depicting technology in merely practical and functional terms and thus depriving it of any kind of feedback-loop power. The relationship between the human and the mechanical is one-directional; the human is in no way to be influenced, let alone determined, by the machine. It is the man (rather than the woman) who establishes the framework of machine operation, not the other way round, and to think otherwise, Descartes suggests, is ridiculous. In his Discourse on the Method he illustrates this unquestioned human superiority through the analysis of a then-hypothetical situation of man-like machines trying to pass themselves off as humans. Machines of that sort, argues Descartes, even if they looked exactly like human beings, would nevertheless be immediately identified by their lack of reasoning and communicative abilities, qualities which even “the dullest of men” possess. Writes Descartes: [these machines] could never use words, or put together other signs, as we do in order to declare our thoughts to others. For we can certainly conceive of a machine so con-

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Introduction structed that it utters words, and even utters words which correspond to bodily actions causing a change in its organs […]. But it is not conceivable that such a machine should produce different arrangements of words so as to give an appropriately meaningful answer to whatever is said in its presence, as the dullest of men can do.9

Needles to say, such a reductionist vision could not pass unnoticed today, when both the attitude towards and the representations of technology are informed by technophobia rather than by technophilia. It is, therefore, the purpose of this book to track and analyse those technologically determined areas in which the paradigmatic change has turned out to be vital for the process of identity formation. As both theoretical and representational practices inform us, the process is closely connected with an inevitable symbiosis of the human and the technological. This is a symbiosis, which, often metaphorically, abolishes the man-machine binarity by narrating both the apocalypse of the Cartesian subject and the subsequent emergence of a new, technologically conditioned one. Though approachable from a number of perspectives, the notion of technologyrelated apocalypse will be treated here largely in terms of its cultural relevance for the contemporary Western condition. Yet, since the notion of culture remains a desperately broad term, a certain restriction and specification of the cultural field in question appears necessary. Thus, the main emphasis will be laid on various textual practices functioning, often provisionally, under the headline of science fiction with particular emphasis devoted to their cinematic representations. Though the use of SF as an illustrative model of cultural dynamics is further analysed in section 5 of the first chapter, an important claim needs to be made at this point. Such restriction or even reduction of the cultural environment is by no means to imply that science fiction, whether approached as films, literature, computer games, cartoons or visual arts, usurps the right to embrace and exclusively represent the whole of the Western cultural horizon, and thereby promote itself to the level of the ultimate genre of cultural debates. On the contrary; until recently excluded from the mainstream of cultural operations, particularly when considered in terms of literary practice, science fiction has occupied a rather suburban position in the Western canon, finding shelter mainly under the protective wings of the film industry. This peculiar inconsistency, i.e., literary neglect combined with blockbuster status, has paradoxically turned 9.

René Descartes, Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting One’s Reason and Seeking the Truth in the Sciences (1637), in Descartes: Selected Philosophical Writings, ed. and trans. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff and Dugald Murdoch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 44–45. Quoted in: Neil Badmington, “Introduction: Approaching Posthumanism,” in Posthumanism, ed. Neil Badmington (New York: Palgrave, 2000), 3.



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the SF discourse into an avant-garde of cultural debates and social commentary, giving it what Bruce Sterling refers to as “influence without responsibility.” 10 One should not, however, reduce science fiction to its stereotypical image habitually associated with naïve promises of space conquest performed by indestructible heroes always on an interplanetary mission. Contemporary sci-fi has undergone a profound shrinking of its high hopes informed by the Space Age dreams. Macro-ambitions of intergalactic travellers have turned into micro-dilemmas of inner-city residents no longer busy conquering the outer space but confined to the inner spaces of their own techno-urban environments. It is precisely this shrinking from macro- and outer- into micro- and inner- that justifies the use of science fiction as a topical illustration of broader cultural operations. SF’s cinematic narratives have replaced the there-and-then with the here-and-now, and this replacement has resulted in a somewhat unexpected proximity between contemporary cultural theory and SF’s apparently unrelated exemplifications of this theory’s postulates. In effect, one might observe a growing convergence between postmodern theory and sci-fi practice without treating the latter as an exclusive narrative mode of the contemporary cultural horizon. In other words, science fiction, due to its somehow peripheral status, has become the ultimate avant-garde of many contemporary debates and as such illustrates a large number of broader cultural tendencies without necessarily restricting those tendencies’ applicability to the SF discourse only. One might claim that sci-fi constitutes a kind of culture’s visualised repressed, returning in the glory of its box-office success. The important thing to remember, however, is that even though the tendencies in question are manifested through SF imagery, they reach far beyond the hypothetical horizons of apparently isolated and abstract fiction. The other reason for treating the visual discourse of science fiction as a valid example of wider cultural inclinations is that no other field of representation seems to reflect and echo the development of digital praxis with such pace and accuracy as the moving pictures. In a truly postmodern manner enhanced by their visual intensity, movies give vent to both conscious and unconscious collective preoccupations, vividly depicting the sense of fear, anticipation and self-(re)construction that accompany current visions of technology-determined future. SF’s sub-genre of cyberpunk provides a particularly topical illustration here. As a literary practice born out of a cinematic inspiration,11 it not only blurs the boundary between film and literature by successfully mixing 10. Bruce Sterling, “Preface,” in William Gibson, Burning Chrome and Other Stories (London: Harper Collins Publishers, 1995), 9. 11. William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984), one of the first and most important books of the genre to date, was to a large extent inspired by Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, a film released in 1982, that is, two years before. Both texts, the cinematic and the literary, have thus established an essentially intertextual space inseparably combining the two modes of representation by a peculiar cyberpunk poetics. Cyberpunk’s dystopian aura, as illustrated by the book and the film alike,

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Introduction

the two in one intertextual-discursive space but, contrary to classic “outer space” SF, depicts the nearest future which in many cases is but an extension of what Fredric Jameson refers to as “our own reading present.” 12 We no longer have Captain Kirk teleporting himself across the most distant corners of the universe, or Luke Skywalker gloriously fighting against the evil forces of the Empire behind the controls of his interplanetary spaceship. Instead, we have a dystopian vision of a not-too-distant future where the essential questions are decided in an ontologically ambiguous realm of cyberspace and, to quote Jean François Lyotard, “[i]t is no longer possible to call development progress.” 13 Information as weapon, expertise as a vantage point, identity as a makeshift operation, body as pure flesh or an experimental field—this is the landscape both reflecting and narrating a pervasive sense of existential uneasiness, dissolving both human subjectivities and non-human identities. Cyberpunk radiates a sense of the inadequacy of stable social structures, clear goals and acceptable moral codes, which attitude coincides with a recent transition in representation of technology-related concerns. J. G. Ballard describes this state of affairs in the following way: The future envisioned by the science fiction of the 1940s and 1950s is already our past. Its dominant images […] of the first Moon flights and interplanetary voyages […] now resemble huge pieces of discarded stage scenery. For me, this could be seen most touchingly in the film “2001: A Space Odyssey,” which signified the end of the heroic period of modern science fiction—its lovingly imagined panoramas and costumes, its huge set pieces, remind me of “Gone With the Wind,” a scientific pageant that became a kind of historical romance in reverse, a sealed world into which the hard light of contemporary reality was never allowed to penetrate.14

Cinematic representations, especially those of SF origin, are treated here with particular attention for yet another reason. It is their unprecedented visual intensity, triggered by rapidly developing media technologies, that offers an almost immediate illustration/interpretation of any imaginable cultural phenomenon. This emphasis upon the visible seems vital for at least two reasons. On the one hand, it appears to constitute a very efficient cultural strategy which might be referred to as problematising-through-visualising. As illustrated by Blade Runner’s obsessive concentration on the reliability of vision and its fundamental role in the process of identity construcis characterised by uncontrolled development of electronic technologies and the urban realm, the presence of non-human identities and a desperate celebration of life at street level. 12. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999), 285. 13. Jean François Lyotard, “Note on the meaning of ‘Post-,’” in Postmodernism. A Reader, ed. Thomas Docherty (New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1999), 49. 14. Ballard, “Introduction to Crash,” available at: http://www.ballardian.com/introduction-to-crash.



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tion 15 or by the post-apocalyptic landscapes of Richard Stanley’s Hardware or George Miller’s The Road Warrior, it seems impossible to problematise a technology-related concern without simultaneously providing its visual analogy. The above mentioned examples hint at merely two of the large number of popular techno-worries, those of rampant progress and ultimate regress. Still, and this is yet another reason for the significance of cinematic representations, with such emphasis upon the strategy of problematising-through-visualising, cinema inscribes itself into the inter-discursive context of postmodern culture which in fact reaches far beyond the moving pictures. In other words, SF films provide an effective visual exemplification of contemporary cultural operations and thus highlight their own participation in the cultural condition in question. One of the most fundamental features of this condition (further analysed in chapter three) is its emphasis upon the role of the image. Out of a vast number of attempts to come to terms with the essentially visual nature of contemporary culture, few seem to grasp the gist of the situation more appropriately than the words of Jean Baudrillard: “[i]t is this promiscuity and the ubiquity of images, this viral contamination of things by images, which are the fatal characteristics of our culture. And this knows no bounds, because […] images cannot be prevented from proliferating indefinitely […].” 16 * * * Five main areas are considered vital for the representation of the merger between the human and the technological in the context of apocalyptic dilemmas. Although the division between them is far from being a clear-cut one, for the purpose of methodological convenience each of the areas is approached in a separate chapter. These concern, respectively: different modes of contextualising apocalypse (chapter one), exploration of apocalypse’s metaphorical potential (chapter two), analysis of the consequences of technological development with particular emphasis on visual culture (chapter three), examination of computer-generated textuality and representations of urban space (chapter four), construction of technologically determined identity (chapter five) and a brief overview of the apocalyptic concerns against the background of postmodernism (conclusion). 15. The movie abounds in references to the act of seeing. The opening scene reveals a huge eyeball reflecting the whole city and photographs of one’s childhood constitute the basis for legitimised memories as a proof of human identity. One of the most disturbing ambiguities concerning untranslatability of the visual experience is brought into play when Roy Batty, the main replicant of the story, talks to the genetic designer who had designed his eyes: “If only you could see what I have seen with your eyes….” For an extended analysis of Blade Runner’s visual discourse see: Scott Bukatman, Blade Runner (London: BFI Publishing, 1997). 16. Jean Baudrillard, The Ecstasy of Communication, trans. Bernard Schutze, Caroline Schutze (New York: Semiotext(e), 1988), 35–36.

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Introduction

Thus, the first chapter begins with a brief analysis of different modes of representing apocalypse in the post-WWII period. A double evolution may be observed here, both in terms of literal factors causing the end to happen and in terms of approaching its very possibility. As for the former, the evolution in representation of apocalyptic factors seems to proceed from the external to the internal ones. Alien invasions, dominant in the 1950s and 1960s, gradually evolved into major malfunctions of domestic techno-cybernetic systems in the 1980s and 1990s, to be finally replaced by the deliberate action performed by the mechanical or the digital against the human. The latter approach, dealing with the very possibility of the end, has in turn resulted in the division of apocalypse-related works into pre- and post- apocalyptic ones, which depict the end either as a threat (pre-apocalypse), or picture the post-apocalyptic situation. Interestingly enough, it is the post-apocalyptic path that offers most stimulating interpretations of the critical situation, both with regard to its visual illustrations and, even more importantly, to the purely theoretical attempts aiming at inscribing apocalypse in the broader context of Western fate. Chapter two is devoted to a further exploration of the discursive background justifying the use of apocalypse as a metaphor of paradigmatic change. Although the change in question remains strictly related to a number of contemporary philosophical proposals, such as Lyotard’s description of the decline of master narratives or Baudrillard’s theory of the autonomy of simulacrum, the chapter traces the origin of apocalypse’s metaphorical power back to the Revelation of St. John, setting it alongside a number of secular representations, in terms of both continuities and discontinuities between the two modes of approaching the end. This is because regardless of whether containing eschatological or secular representations, they all share a violent disposition towards the current state of affairs, and hence, despite the differences between them, highlight apocalypse’s subversive discursive potential. The third chapter’s preoccupation is with both collective and individual consequences of the ubiquitous message/image mediation, i.e., with the discourse of visual culture triggered by the emergence of “invisible” technologies. The chapter begins with the discussion of the origin and legitimacy of the postindustrial era (Bell, Jameson, Toffler) in view of the visualisation practices they offer. The adopted perspective is that of an evolution of visualisation strategies proceeding from the notion of spectacle to the idea of the hyperreal. As Guy Debord and Jean Baudrillard inform us, the preelectronic opposition between the real and the mediated has been significantly blurred and in some cases erased. For all the differences between them, whether we use Debord’s notion of the spectacle or Baudrillard’s idea of the hyperreal void, the rampant development of visual technologies has effectively untied the sense of clearly-definable, stable and tactile reality, postulating its replacement by a self-referential simulacrum. The fourth chapter concentrates upon key characteristics of computer-generated space with particular emphasis upon the phenomenon of hypertext and the textual



The Argument

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nature of the contemporary urban realm. Space, defined through a number of paradoxes concerning its ambiguous composition of the tactile and the digital, questions a number of strategies traditionally adopted while approaching the idea of spatiality. Particularly well-illustrated are those challenging the notion of linearity and promoting the space’s intertextual character: a computer-mediated text requires active participation of the reader/user whose literal co-operation is vital for the text’s functioning. The concept of the net ceases to function as a topical metaphor but becomes an operational mechanism instead. Not only does it allow the reader/user to move backwards and sideways, explore alternate paths and “cut across a work, several works” 17 but often forces him/her to do so. In other words, Barthesian ideals are put into every-day practice of “billions of legitimate operators, in every nation,” 18 to use William Gibson’s definition of a future reader. The fifth chapter represents an attempt to construct a theoretical stance for the postindustrial technological identity. Depicting the postmodern subject in the context of global circulations of data, invisible electronics and ever-present simulation is to inscribe it into the discourse of identity crisis. Such contextualisation invites a broader philosophical perspective, in this case that of posthumanism, upon the territory in which the new subject is located. This act, a reincarnation rather than resurrection, “situates the human and the technological as coextensive, co-dependent and mutually defining.” 19 Scott Bukatman refers to such an outcome of the multi-layered techno-symbiosis as terminal identity, which he defines as “an unmistakably double articulation in which we find both the end of the subject and a new subjectivity constructed at the computer station or television screen.” 20 The concluding chapter, apart from briefly summarising the key points described in the previous chapters, also offers a broader philosophical reflection. Apocalypse, even though habitually associated with irreversible destruction and unprecedented torment, is finally seen in metaphorical terms, as an inevitable moment of all cultural evolutions. Thus, by inscribing itself into a wider cultural context, apocalypse constitutes a vital component of the subject’s experiential territory, and as such plays a formative role in the process of identity construction. The sense of apocalypse, though even in the above-described context prone to a number of interpretations, is thus eventually restricted to a critical evaluation of the subject defined in terms of binary oppositions of pre-technological paradigms. The subject’s apocalypse, however, is not only incomplete (as it is followed by a subsequent rebirth) but much less sudden that it may appear at first. The death of the stable 17. Roland Barthes, “From Work to Text,” in Textual Strategies: Perspectives in Post-Structuralist Criticism, ed. J. Harari (London: Methuen, 1980), 75. 18. William Gibson, Neuromancer (London: Harper Collins Publishers, 1995), 67. 19. Bukatman, Terminal Identity..., 22. 20. Bukatman, Terminal Identity..., 9.

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Introduction

and isolated subject comes about as a result of a long socio-cultural evolution instigated by the development of technology, resulting in a redefined concept of textuality which finally both reformulate the notion of identity. It is these three terms, technology, textuality and identity, presented in this particular order, that eventually tell the story of the subject’s apocalypse. Still, one has to bear in mind that the apocalypse in question is not so much that of the subject conceived as a living individual, but that of the neat, yet out-moded paradigm contouring the subject before the advent of the postindustrial era which is characterised by accelerated technological development. Hence, just like a number of other concepts summoned in this book, including apocalypse itself, technology fulfils a double role here: both that of a caesura and that of an apocalyptic tool, a means through which the old can wither and the new can emerge. As the former, technology helps pinpoint the transitional moment when the electronic equipment ceases to function as a mere gadget of facilitation and convenience. As the latter, it becomes both the cause and the effect of the subject’s major metamorphosis, in the meantime establishing truths and constructing illusions of our post-apocalyptic environments.

Chapter One From Pre-Apocalyptic Tropes to Post-Apocalyptic Metaphors This isn’t a seminar, this is no weekend retreat. Where you are now you can’t even imagine what the bottom would be like. Only after disaster can we be resurrected. — Tyler Durden, Fight Club 1

1. Representing the Non-Representable Few notions have preoccupied Western culture in the post-WWII period to such an extent as the idea of this culture’s inevitable end. Despite numerous icons of the Western world’s supremacy, the sinister shadow of apocalypse has always accompanied the glorious concepts of progress and development. Gloomy images of mankind’s ultimate and irreversible telos, whether motivated by eschatological predictions, self-destructive impulses or disillusionment with the Enlightenment project, have long been discreetly but effectively undermining the firm belief in a glamorous and ever more prosperous future. And yet, as the post-WWII social imagination was gradually seduced by visions of domination and prosperity, the sense of apocalypse disappeared from the immediate horizon of human actions. Accelerated development of urban culture, solidified by belief in the stability of economic systems, pushed the apocalyptic anxiety out of sight, and often out of mind, too. With the promise of unlimited possibilities released by Western technological potential, and the sense of security enhanced by what Donna Haraway refers to as C*3*I, (Command-Control-Communication-Intelligence)2 the fear of the end has been effectively repressed into the social unconscious. This does not mean, however, that the notion was to remain imprisoned in the realm of the non-representable. Seductive visions of wealth, subjugation and control fuelled by numerous and immediately accessible advances in communication sciences managed to somehow alleviate the apocalyptic uncertainty but not to erase it from the public horizon completely. Though covered by a thick layer of illusions of peace and wealth, the uneasiness remained, blossoming on the surface of collective mythology at critical moments of the political and technological history of the post-WWII world. International and domestic tensions accompanying such events as the Cuban crisis, erec1. David Fincher, Fight Club, Linson Films/Fox 2000/Regency Enterprises, USA, 1999. 2. Donna Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology and Socialist-Feminism in the 1980s,” in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women (New York: Routledge, 1989), 150.

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tion of the Berlin Wall, Y2K,3 or the WTC collapse, provide just a few illustrations of apocalyptic fears. No wonder then that the sense of the “end of times” has adopted a number of representational forms often corresponding to the then-current “worst case scenario” of political events. American post-war SF and horror movies illustrate these concerns very well. The Thing from Another World (1951), The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), The War of the Worlds (1953), Invaders from Mars (1953), and The Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) are just a few of a great number of films which combine the emerging hesitant attitude towards technology with the fear of the bomb, exacerbated by the political uncertainties of the Cold War era. In all those films the political and ideological Other, though metaphorically represented by an outer-space invader, remains a clear symbol of technology-based destruction as well as of “the communist threat which lurked beneath the complacent surface of post-war America.” 4 In keeping with the less desirable side-effects of technological development of the post-WWII world, the fear of the alien bomb gradually evolved into the fear of a domestic explosion occurring as a result of human carelessness or a machine malfunction (Dr. Strangelove (1964), The China Syndrome (1979), WarGames (1983), The Day After (1983)). This concern, in turn, was to be later replaced by dreadful visions of unsupervised development of computer and military technologies. The ultimate explosion evolved into the ultimate techno-growth resulting in far-reaching obsolescence of the human factor. The next step, as such films as The Net (1995), the Terminator series (1984, 1991, 2003, 2009) and The Matrix (1999, 2003) inform us, is the techno-system’s urge to eliminate the human element once and for all. As Agent Smith, one of the characters in The Matrix (in fact a computer program in human disguise) puts it: “[h]uman beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet. You are a plague. And we are… the cure.” 5 Such ambiguous attitudes towards the future could not be left unattended in terms of popular representation. The twisted logic of late capitalism has found at least one way of suppressing the idea of apocalypse, one which in the long run questions all purposes of human earthly actions. Like many other vital concepts, apocalypse, too, has been ef3.

This rather enigmatic acronym stands for the year 2000, Y naturally representing “year” and K referring to “kilo” which indicates one thousand. A few months before the end of the last century the Y2K syndrome came to embody all the millennial fears of a world-wide breakdown of both international and domestic computer networks resulting from the systems’ inability to interpret the new date 2000 properly and taking it for 1900 instead, which would subsequently lead to major losses of banking data, total paralysis of air traffic, etc. 4. David Parkinson, “The Day the Earth Stood Still,” in The Ten Definitive Science Fiction Films of All Time, Empire, 1997. 5. Andy Wachowski, Larry Wachowski, The Matrix, Groucho II Film Partnership/Silver Pictures/ Village Roadshow Pictures, USA, 1999.



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fectively turned into a mass culture commodity, becoming yet another item in the intellectual flea market of catchy notions. Often based on well-known predictions of the end, both biblical and secular, horrid scenarios of the planet’s total destruction have inspired popular visions as to what the end might really look like. Again, the film industry’s achievements have turned out to be particularly impressive here, both in the number of works produced and in the ways in which the world is either destroyed or rearranged against our hopeful expectations. The choice of methods is truly wide: we have destruction/distortion by the uncontrolled development of computer technologies (the aforementioned Terminator and Matrix franchises, The Thirteenth Floor (1999), eXistenZ (1999), Avalon (2001), I, Robot (2004) Surrogates (2009) and Inception (2010)), as well as by excessive environmental pollution and unsupervised experiments (Hardware (1990), Twelve Monkeys (1995), 28 Days Later (2002) and I Am Legend (2007)). There is the old-fashioned flood and other natural calamities (Waterworld (1995), Deep Impact (1998), The Day After Tomorrow (2004)) and, of course, warfare accompanied by nuclear holocaust resulting in literal and metaphorical desertification of both the environment and human ethics (The Road Warrior (1981), Beyond Thunderdome (1985), Salute to the Jugger (1989), The Postman (1997), The Road (2009), The Book of Eli (2010)). On top of that there is a bewildering number of movies combining two or more of the above-mentioned methods. Yet, paradoxically, through the act of representation the fear of apocalypse— an integral part of which is the sense of the unrepresentable unknown—becomes textualised and therefore made more bearable. Even the most horrifying vision loses some of its morbidity once it has been visualised, rationalised and aestheticised. To put things crudely, however terrible the end might be, at least we know what we are dealing with. As James Berger aptly puts it in characterising apocalypse’s cultural location, its numerous representations turn apocalypse into a paradoxical, oxymoronic discourse that measures the incommensurable and speaks the unspeakable; a discourse that impossibly straddles the boundary between before and after some event that has obliterated what went before yet defines what will come after.6

Hence, the very possibility of post-apocalyptic representation is based on the assumption of the at least partial incompleteness of the destructive process. Whatever emerges after the catastrophe can only be dealt with by survivors whose very presence confirms the apocalyptic mechanism’s malfunction. It is they who are left with the mission to either create a new order or resurrect the old one, or (an attempt explored in Twelve Monkeys (1995) and the Terminator series) move back in time to prevent the apocalypse from happening in the first place. 6. James Berger, After the End. Representations of Post-Apocalypse (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 19.

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2. Domesticating the Threat Still, it is not only the above-mentioned post-apocalyptic scenario which attracts so many. The very possibility of apocalypse understood as a sense of an ultimate threat has also turned out to be very productive, stimulating a large number of works which might be referred to as the pre-apocalyptic ones. The sense of imminent danger and the resulting urge to avoid it has functioned as a powerful plotline in a great number of works ranging from pop culture icons (e.g., the Batman and James Bond series) to such films as The Boys from Brazil (1978), The China Syndrome (1979) and even such eschatologically-driven movies as The Prophecy (1995) and Legion (2010). For all the structural and conceptual differences between those films, the preapocalyptic works share a very concrete and clearly outlined conviction that the world is in serious danger, shortly to be destroyed or to be taken over by some hostile Other. And like the destructive methods, the dangers are varied, too, though the underlying threat always seems to be that of the world falling into the wrong hands. Significantly enough, whether those hands belong to an outer-space invader or a local, powerobsessed tycoon, is less important than those hands’ potential ability to usurp the rule of the world. The first, and probably foremost, consequence of such a threat is a sinister vision of a situation in which the subject is completely deprived of the ability to control his/ her life, since s/he is now totally dependent on some unfamiliar and hostile higher power. Hence, whether it be a re-created Adolf Hitler (The Boys from Brazil (1978)), the resurrected Fallen Angels’ army (The Prophecy (1995)) or one of Joker’s cunning plans (Batman (1989), The Dark Knight (2008)), the most frightening prospect in the pre-apocalyptic sub-genre is not the fear of losing the world but fear of losing control over it. Interestingly enough, the pre-apocalyptic sub-genre rarely gives us a detailed description of the apocalypse that would follow the total loss of control. More often than not, it is its very shadow which we take at face value and do not question, and which suffices to justify all reasons behind the collective effort to save humankind again. Yet, the question of what exactly we are being saved from remains a mystery. Thus, what seems to permeate the social unconscious with the greatest fears, even greater than those of all-out destruction, is the alarming possibility that human fate will remain out of individual control. And if we include, as a significant component of fate, the belief in a better future achieved through progress, wealth and stability, then at stake will be the cornerstones of modern capitalism. In the pre-apocalyptic scenario the threat is not posed to a hypothetical world alone but, most of all, to a certain unquestioned initial equilibrium that this world is based on. Should the world fall into the wrong hands, all its implicit foundational concepts, such as free will, free trade and freedom of speech, will be seriously endangered



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and must therefore be protected. And even though it is often impossible to save those ideals without incidentally saving the planet, it is a certain system of very specific values that must be defended first of all and at all costs. It is no accident either, that the initial moments of most pre-apocalyptic works present peaceful, middle-class, well-ordered and conflict-free environments. Such idyllic visions enhance the motivation of those who are destined to confront the danger. All doubts concerning the validity of what is being saved are eliminated from their actions; it is a very precise social and economic order that must be secured and has to prevail in order for the world to function properly. In other words, what the pre-apocalyptic works depict in the first place is an act of universalisation of Western values by presenting the threat to those values as an ultimate and absolute threat to the whole world. Therefore, even though the claim that the world is saved for marketing reasons would probably be an exaggeration, the motives behind the rescue operation are clear. It is not any kind of world that is likely to be destroyed and must be saved now, but a world whose ideological and political structure is clearly defined and whose values align with those of the consumer societies of the Western world. Paradoxically then, the bottom line of the pre-apocalyptic fear is of a social rather than psychological nature; the threat becomes rationalised and is directed towards the very foundations on which an individual operates by establishing his/her position in the society. Consequently, the very notion of a happy ending, however ironic it may sound in this context, always narrates a successful prevention of the end through effective restoration of the pre-threat order. In fact, the real end never takes place in the pre-apocalyptic works since the plot always revolves around the desperate attempt to avoid the threat which had cast a grievous shadow upon the initial equilibrium. The happy ending becomes in fact a non-ending in the sense that the vision of apocalypse we were threatened with is never consummated. It stopped half-way through so that the world could be saved from the ultimate danger and—usually through a secret operation— be paradoxically resurrected before it even died. From an almost unlimited number of examples of the pre-apocalyptic scenario the James Bond series seems best to illustrate the above mechanism. Better than any other popular culture icon, the series combines the shadow of the ultimate threat to the planet’s Western world order with subtle praise of free market individualism embodied by Bond himself; even the agent’s surname echoes the banking jargon constantly underlining the stability and reliability of the Western economic system. Originating in the early days of the Cold War era, the series has effectively played with the fears of a global-scale conflict and even though the detailed consequences of 007’s hypothetically unsuccessful mission are never the issue, the “wrong hands” are always personalised by Bond’s direct opponents. We are not confronted with just a lone romanticised agent who saves the world for the world’s sake but with a clearly sketched character whose bond with Western power institutions is never questioned. One might

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risk the claim here that it is precisely those institutions that prevent the apocalypse of the capitalism-based world in an unfailingly successful manner through the “right hands” of its idealised representative packaged neatly in such Western status symbols as brand name drinks and state-of-the-art techno-gadgets. Interestingly enough, the series tries to keep up with the current multinational character of corporate trade. James Bond’s Aston Martin, until the mid-90s (when the company was taken over by Ford) a living legend of the British independent motoring industry and an ultimate symbol of roadworthy individualism, has been accompanied and sometimes replaced by a more affordable German BMW (GoldenEye (1995), Tomorrow Never Dies (1997), The World is Not Enough (1999)), hinting at the Western collectivism in the anti-apocalyptic campaign, discreetly sponsored by a Euro-American economy. And even though Aston Martins returned in the subsequent episodes (Casino Royale (2006), Quantum of Solace (2008)), it is no secret that since 2007 the marque has belonged to a multinational investment group. Seen from this perspective the series inevitably points at one of the most often discussed contemporary phenomena, namely that of globalisation. With communism no longer even an illusory threat, Bond himself has lost a lot of his stereotypical Britishness, gradually turning from a gentleman into an operative businessman always ready to synchronise his actions with particular circumstances, rather than to closely follow MI6’s, i.e. British, orders. In fact, in view of all the criticism provoked by the issue of globalisation and largely informed by the global system’s anonymity, James Bond seems to provide a subtle attempt to humanise the indifferent structures of multinational circulation by giving the system a face. In this sense, Bond’s role has changed radically: from a devoted defender of the world’s right wing universe he has evolved into the guardian of the decentred and invisible circuits of global information and capital exchange. As an obvious product of popular culture playing with the idea of the end of the world, the James Bond series seems thus to vividly reinforce Frank Kermode’s claim that “our predictions of the end are bound to be disconfirmed.” 7 It is upon the territory of popular culture that our fears of the end are visualised, rationalised, or even ridiculed, and therefore made bearable by being placed within the realm of cultural representations. Such textualisation seems actually to have been born out of a self-protective reaction. To leave the concept in the non-representable realm of the collective unconscious would mean to let it flourish, and to abandon all hope of controlling it. The act of representation amounts here to the act of supervision, maintained through careful dosage. That the apocalyptic anxiety is dealt with in popular culture terms somehow prevents the concept’s uncontrolled and unexpected outbreak. 7.

Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending: Studies in Theory of Fiction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967), 10.



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The fearful predictions of apocalypse as represented in popular culture are bound to be “disconfirmed” for yet another reason. As Richard Dellamora maintains, the “genre of apocalypse includes a concept of repetition that permits writing of new stories about the end.” 8 Seen from this perspective, apocalypse remains unfulfilled by definition in order to allow the constant emergence of “new stories” narrating the defeat of a pre-apocalyptic threat and restoration of the original status quo. The repetition that Dellamora mentions in equal measures refers to the emergence of new, postapocalyptic visions of the end and to the perpetual victory of the pre-apocalyptic order which incidentally coincides with the triumphant restoration of the key values of the Western social order.

3. 9/11 On September 11, 2001, at 8:58am, a hi-jacked LA-bound Boeing 767 slammed into the north tower of New York’s World Trade Centre. At 9:16am a second hi-jacked jet ploughed into the south tower, setting it ablaze. The south tower collapsed at 10:07am and exactly half an hour later, at 10:37am the north tower disappeared from the Manhattan skyline forever. WTC’s Twin Towers, whose construction took eight years and which for a long time were the tallest buildings in the world, turned into a pile of debris in just 99 minutes sealing the fate of almost three thousand people in what was later described as the worst terrorist attack in history. Apart from numerous political, military, financial and, above all, human consequences of the WTC and Washington attacks, the very immediate public image was not that of a war declaration or an unprecedented catastrophe but precisely that of apocalypse. The front cover of the Daily Mail ’s Special Edition of September 12 is explicit here, presenting a full-size photo of Manhattan, barely recognisable through the enveloping dust and smoke, with a one-word headline: Apocalypse. This association seems to have been evoked by two major factors. On the one hand, the spectacular collapse of America’s most prominent buildings left no doubt as to the unprecedented scope of the catastrophe. The terrifying scenario of an orchestrated airborne attack on the very heart of the world’s most powerful business district remained, until September 11, the domain solely of science fiction scriptwriters. And even though Manhattan’s skyline has always attracted catastrophic visions, the metropolis’ fictitious devastation has usually been caused by a non-human factor: flood (Waterworld (1995)) or falling meteors (Armageddon (1998)), or both (Deep Impact  (1998)), occasionally assisted by a giant monster (Cloverfield (2008)) or a deadly virus (I Am Legend (2007)). 8. Richard Dellamora, “Preface,” in Postmodern Apocalypse: Theory and Cultural Practice at the End, ed. Richard Dellamora (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995), xii.

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In other words, even in the sphere of popular imagination to turn New York’s tallest skyscrapers into a pile of debris was beyond human capacity. On the other hand though, few buildings throughout the world could be classified as living icons of transatlantic, multinational capitalism to such an extent as the WTC twins. Their uncomplicated and yet futuristic shape, combined with the proximity of New York Stock Exchange, day and night triumphantly announced the victory of the social order based on free-market economy. The Towers’ plain and impersonal look underlined their indifference toward any political change, constantly confirming the faith in the Western system’s stability and supremacy. The buildings’ unprecedented height, shape and size, provoked Jean Baudrillard to draw even further conclusions concerning the uselessness of all competition with the capitalist system. The system, just like the towers themselves competing only with each other, left all potential rivals far below; providing only mutual inspiration, the towers remained forever isolated and enclosed in a self-reflecting circuit. Writes Baudrillard: This new architecture incarnates a system that is no longer competitive, but compatible, and where competition has disappeared for the benefit of the correlations. […] [The towers] ignore the other buildings, they are not of the same race, they no longer challenge them, nor compare themselves to them, they look one into the other as into a mirror and culminate in this prestige of similitude. What they project is the idea of the model that they are one for the other […]. They signify only that the strategy of models and commutations wins out […].9

No wonder then that the shock caused by the sudden collapse of the free-market’s most conspicuous signifiers was additionally increased by the accompanying undermining of the related signifieds of freedom and prosperity, which instantly evoked apocalyptic association. Not only the system’s dominance but its fundamental stability was momentarily halted: NYSE immediately suspended all transactions and all US planes were grounded. The most unlikely apocalyptic scenario became a fact of life. But there still exists a deeper justification of this apocalyptic association. In his post-9/11collection of short essays, The Spirit of Terrorism,10 Baudrillard reaches into the depth of the social unconscious, associating our fascination with the event not so much with the horror of the collapsing social order but, paradoxically, with our semi-repressed sense of relief. “All that has been said and written,” writes Baudrillard, “is evidence of a gigantic abreaction to the event itself, and the fascination it exerts. The moral condemnation and the holy alliance against terrorism are on the same scale as the prodigious jubilation at seeing this global superpower destroyed, […] committing suicide in the blaze of glory.” 11 9.

Jean Baudrillard, “The Orders of Simulacra,” in Simulations (New York: Semiotext(e), 1983), 135, 137. 10. Jean Baudrillard, The Spirit of Terrorism, trans. Chris Turner (London: Verso, 2003). 11. Baudrillard, “The Spirit of Terrorism,” 4–5.



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Not so much an embodiment of the ultimate death-drive impulse, the towers’ collapse is for Baudrillard a semi-conscious incarnation of a violent act of social resistance against the enslaving order of globalisation whose power to disarm and intimidate has eliminated even the remote possibility of rejection, let alone of mutiny. The order’s pacifying strength has resulted in global passivity and acceptance, delegating the oblivious desire to liberate oneself from its constraints into the realm of the semi-collective unconscious: “[t]he fact that we have dreamt of this event, that everyone without exception has dreamt of it—because no one can avoid dreaming of the destruction of any power that has become hegemonic to this degree—is unacceptable to the Western moral conscience.” 12 Naturally, seeing the terrorist attack as the fulfilment of the Western mind’s secret wish (“they did it, but we wished for it” 13) is far from being an uncontroversial conclusion. But what Baudrillard is clearly hinting at is the fact that if we allow for the symbolic interpretation of the WTC collapse, then the symbols in question are not those of victorious free-market reign but precisely of the opposite: of an enslaving regime whose spectacular apocalypse—almost like the destruction of the Bastille—was in fact more than welcome as it offered a momentary relief from the universal “[a]llergy to any definitive order.” 14 12. Baudrillard, “The Spirit of Terrorism,” 5. 13. Baudrillard, “The Spirit of Terrorism,” 5. Emphasis Baudrillard’s. 14. Baudrillard, “The Spirit of Terrorism,” 6.

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4. Theorising the End What distinguishes the notion of apocalypse from other crucial issues of philosophical and mythical significance is a peculiar mixture of fear and anticipation that has always accompanied the notion of human destruction. This mixture has turned out to be a very inspiring one, however cynical this may sound in the context of the WTC collapse, rendering the idea of apocalypse one of the most productive concepts in terms of cultural representation. This is because, contrary to many other ideas, the idea of apocalypse remains deeply embedded in the most pre-verbal and pre-Oedipal instincts. Through numerous representations the concept touches upon the self-destructive, Thanateian instincts, endowing them with a psycho-teleological significance. Two approaches, traditionally separated in case of many other cultural analyses—the critical contemplation and the individual reaction—melt into one whenever the vision of the end appears on the horizon. In other words, it seems impossible to isolate the concept’s theoretical ingredients, which could be contemplated safely at a critical distance, from the morbid and fearful visions provoked by the threat of an all-out calamity. Hence, even if we attempt to evaluate the concept in purely critical terms it will never be 100% fear-free; it will always contain a discreet warning concerning its non-verbal side, a warning that the critic/reader must be aware of and accept, regardless of a particular theoretical approach or mode of representation. And the modes of apocalyptic representations tend to vary greatly, depending on the emphasis of a given text: from political, technological and military to social, ideological and religious. The pre-apocalyptic, threat-based works mentioned before are by no means the only ones exploring the idea and playing with the concept. The desire to bear witness to one’s own or one’s community’s end has resulted in a number of post-apocalyptic or post-catastrophic works, invading popular culture and academic discourses alike. In light of the popularity of the concept within theory-focused discourses, Kermode’s claim concerning the prophecies’ unfulfillment becomes applicable not only to cinematic and literary representations. The recent proliferation of numerous post-approaches in academic circles, as, for instance, Francis Fukuyama’s post-history, or a number of posthumanist claims, suggest that the end is bound to be, and in fact must be, incomplete if only in order to allow its survivors to theorise the post-apocalyptic environment. Needless to say, the attempts to problematise the environment in question are more likely to take place in academia than in a movie theatre. A certain radical, though not often sufficiently highlighted, paradigm shift seems to have taken place in the very discourse of apocalypse. The notion, at least on a metaphorical level, is no longer considered in terms of humankind’s physical annihilation. Death or absence, in its basic tactile form, ceased to function as an ontological limit; instead it has been transferred into the realm of discourse, where it can be mourned over and contemplated, though at the cost of its incompleteness.



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Seen from this perspective, the term apocalypse has been effectively deprived of its powerful destructive component, bits and pieces of which can barely cast their sinister shadow in the pre-apocalyptic and pop-culture representations. Once the idea has been elevated from the street level onto the level of circum-academic discourse, to approach the end does not imply to simply talk about it in terms of irreversible act of destruction. This is because contemporary apocalypses have, in their majority, evolved into sophisticated discursive entities, incomplete by their theoretical nature. Jacques Derrida’s contemplation of the mere possibility of the end of history illustrates this concern very well. As he puts it in Spectres of Marx: “[...] the end of history? [...] It obliges one to wonder if the end of history is but the end of a certain concept of history.” 15 It is precisely this assumption of apocalypse’s discursive incompleteness, or rather its inefficacy (“the end of a certain concept”), that enables Jean Baudrillard to contemplate and decipher The Illusion of the End.16 For Baudrillard “the explosion has already occurred, the bomb is a metaphor now.” 17 This claim, though not without a metaphorical resonance itself, vividly depicts and summarises an important methodological distinction. It is the distinction between apocalypse-as-destruction: ultimate and irreversible, after which no discourse is possible or necessary, and the idea of apocalypse-as-metaphor: assuming survivors and hence incomplete by definition, but widely applicable and theoretically stimulating. Though the former kind of apocalypse-as-destruction inspires the popular imagination through both pre- and post- destructive visions, and the latter interpretation of apocalypse-as-metaphor fuels academic discourses, the distinction between them is far from being a clear-cut one. This is so because of an ongoing exchange between both sorts, the exchange of language on the one hand and the exchange of theoretical inspirations on the other. The popular representations of the end, whose proliferation coincided with the recent fin de millennium, often draw from the deep strata of literary and discursive motifs. Though frequently restricting the apocalyptic stimulus to a single religious prediction, such films as The Sixth Day (2000) or The End of Days (1999) 18 at least 15. Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx, the State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, & the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994), 9. Emphasis Derrida’s. 16. Jean Baudrillard, The Illusion of the End, trans. Chris Turner (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994). 17. Jean Baudrillard, “The Anorexic Ruins,” in Looking Back on the End of the World, eds. Dietmar Kamper and Christoph Wulf, trans. David Antal (New York: Semiotext(e), 1989), 39. 18. From the whole list of available examples I have chosen just these two films because of the figure of Arnold Schwarzenegger, who, probably more than any other actor, is a living icon of blockbuster, action-packed popular cinema. As one might suspect, Arnold saves the world twice: in The End of Days by beating the hell out of the beast and sending it back to where it came from,

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in theory root their inspirations in the discursive field of the Bible, broadening in this way their intertextual horizon beyond a momentary need for excessive bloodshed, special effects and breathtaking explosions. Whether we like it or not, the eschatological context is brought into a postmodern and pop-cultural play. On the other hand, academic approaches to apocalypse understood metaphorically are surprisingly often filled with terms and visions almost directly borrowed from popular jargon. Baudrillard’s powerful and catchy metaphors, though often illustrating sophisticated theoretical issues, still seem to be rooted in popular visions of the end, just to re-quote the “explosion” mentioned above. In other words, a kind of continuous feedback-loop seems to operate between the two v[i/er]sions of the end. It is the exchange concerned with the language of apocalypse, drawing from popular images and invading theoretical discourses, which often carries sophisticated discursive arguments. These, in turn, though often in a largely simplified manner, provide inspirations for popular imagination. One of the most interesting consequences of this exchange occurs within the sphere of cultural transformations of the concept. Within the representational practices one may observe a growing separation between the notion of apocalypse and that of total annihilation. In other words, the vision of apocalypse-as-metaphor, until recently the privilege of theoretical discourses, has turned out to be a very inspiring one for a number of cultural practices and the textual artefacts they inspire. Representations of apocalypse-as-metaphor have adopted a number of subtle, subjective and local forms reaching in their sophistication far beyond the vision of an ultimate, all-out type of disaster. The dominant question is now the subject’s, as opposed to his/ her community’s, reaction to the apocalyptic event. With this shift, from a collective catastrophe to a personal drama, apocalypse has been de-monumentalised, the power of its impact focused on an individual now, no longer sheltered by the community or comforted by the presence of fellow-sufferers but forced to contemplate the critical situation in solitude. Interestingly enough, even when the actual notion of humankind’s end comes into play, it is not necessarily represented through the aesthetic of desolation which, until recently, was the most obvious one. The increasing sophistication of metaphorical representations of apocalypse has resulted in the emergence of what may be referred to as the aesthetics of condensation—an intense vision of congested urban environment, horizonless and de-naturalised, where traditional human premises are done away with through excessive and uncontrolled techno-development providing sinister riddles as for the identity of its posthuman inhabitants. Thus, the post-catastrophic landscapes of George Miller’s Mad Max series (The Road Warrior (1982), Beyond Thunderdome (1985)) are balanced by overloaded and in The Sixth Day by stopping the wide spread of human cloning, which echoes God’s making of man in his likeness on the sixth day (Genesis 1, 26).



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visions of dystopian urbanism as presented in Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982) and its many followers. With this representational shift, from the aesthetics of violent desolation to the aesthetics of excessive condensation, the notion of apocalypse has been deprived of its ubiquitous and monumental quality in favour of a more subtle perspective. The main concern is now the level of individual reaction to the apocalyptic event, whether metaphorical or literal, and its influence upon the construction of post-apocalyptic identity. Such departure from threat-based works in favour of the notion of apocalypse understood metaphorically brings a major methodological advantage. Not only does it open up a new discursive field but it also helps visualise and problematise a number of issues so far dealt with by the academic discourse only. Baudrillard’s claims concerning the end of historical continuity and the reversal of history taking “a turn in the opposite direction” 19 as a result of which “[e]ach apparent movement of history brings us imperceptibly closer […] to its starting point” 20 are subtly reflected by Blade Runner’s visual topography where futuristic machines are accompanied by 1950s Cadillacs, shuttle pilots’ helmets are made of worn-out leather and the latest fashion is often indistinguishable from that of the 1930s. This particular convergence of theory and practice has been aptly summarised by Douglas Kellner, who openly states that contemporary literature can be read as a sort of social theory, while Baudrillard’s futuristic postmodern social theory can be read in turn as science fiction. This optic also suggests a deconstruction of sharp oppositions between literature and social theory, showing that much social theory contains a narrative and vision of the present and future, and that certain types of literature provide cogent mappings of the contemporary environment and […] of future trends.21

To sum up, theoretical and often rather abstract postulates emerging from a number of poststructuralist discourses are often precisely represented in particular literary and cinematic texts. The significance of these texts is not only of an illustrative nature; more often than not their particular character and sophistication inspire a number of theoretical reactions further empowering the exchange between cultural theory and cultural practice and, more importantly, in the course of this exchange blurring the boundary between them. 19. Jean Baudrillard, “The Reversal of History,” in The Illusion of the End, trans. Chris Turner (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), 10. 20. Baudrillard, “The Reversal of History,” 10. 21. Douglas Kellner, “Mapping the Present from the Future: From Baudrillard to Cyberpunk,” in Media Culture: Cultural Studies, Identity and Politics between the Modern and the Postmodern (London: Routledge, 1995), 299.

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5. Science Fiction, Technology, Identity It is not without a reason that Ridley Scott’s film has already been mentioned here. The discourse of cyberpunk science fiction which the movie represents and to some extent defines provides a particularly convenient ground for the convergence of practice and theory, especially with regard to the metaphorically approached notion of apocalypse, which has always been one of the genre’s favourite motifs. Until recently neglected by mainstream criticism, the SF discourse constitutes the ultimate experimental field where the most radical and often contradictory assumptions, are free to clash and interact, thus producing a number of reality-concepts seemingly based on non-referential paradigms. The critical neglect has ironically turned out to be SF’s greatest advantage; unrestricted by the patronising influence of mainstream demands and playfully de-contextualised, SF texts offer a constant “estrangement and renewal” 22 of our contemporary, familiar environments. As Bruce Sterling, one of the most prominent figures in contemporary SF, puts it: “We [SF writers] can play with Big Ideas because the garish motley of our pulp origins makes us seem harmless. [...] [W]e have influence without responsibility. Very few feel obliged to take us seriously, yet our ideas permeate the culture, bubbling along invisibly, like background radiation.” 23 This brief manifesto reveals an important truth: science fiction, with its constant emphasis on paradigmatic instability, liberation from all possible social and natural laws and, last but definitely not least, appreciation of technology, has anticipated and illustrated most contemporary philosophical issues. No other genre considers the deconstruction of ontological boundaries as a sine qua non of its existence. The urge to dissolve such fixed binaries as human/non-human, reality/simulacrum, nature/ technology, to name but a few, dramatically narrows the gap between SF literature and postmodern theory, turning the former into the postmodern genre par excellence. This particular potential has not passed unrecognised among some of the most important figures of postmodern theory: it is precisely this proximity between SF and postmodernism which allows Fredric Jameson to classify cyberpunk SF as “the supreme literary expression if not of postmodernism, then of late capitalism itself.” 24 Science fiction and postmodern textuality are closely linked for yet another reason. Both treat the question of identity and its constructedness as one of their fundamental issues, inevitably placing human agency in a central discursive position. The accelerated technological development of the post-WWII world, whose latest stage 22. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999), 285. 23. Bruce Sterling, “Preface,” in William Gibson, Burning Chrome and Other Stories (London: Harper Collins Publishers, 1995), 9. 24. Jameson, Postmodernism…, 419.



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is the emergence of the Information Society, has challenged many of the traditional critical approaches often based on the aforementioned binary oppositions. In the age of ever-present electronic simulations and mass media ubiquity where identity is often a matter of a conscious choice, those oppositions quickly lose their relevance when faced with the impossibility of a stable and reliable definition. This is how Joanna Russ illustrates this dissolution from a feminist perspective: One of the best things (for me) about science fiction is that—at least theoretically—it is a place where the ancient dualities disappear. Day and night, up and down, ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ are purely specific, limited phenomena which have been mythologised by people. They are man-made (not woman-made) […] Out in space there is no up and down, no day and night, and in the point of view space can give us, I think there is no “opposite” sex—what a word! Opposite what? The Eternal Feminine and the Eternal Masculine become the poetic fancies of a weakly diamorphic [sic] species trying to imitate every other species in a vain search for what is ‘natural.’25

Russ’ perspective, apart from praising the genre’s theoretical potential, points at one more issue particularly relevant for the discourse of apocalypse. The “vain search for what is ‘natural’” seems in fact too mild a term for describing one of SF’s in general and cyberpunk in particular, fundamental features. With the intrinsic emphasis on paradigmatic instability cyberpunk SF perpetually redefines the concept of nature narrating its inadequacy and insufficiency in approaching the human. By offering constant “estrangement and renewal of our […] reading present,” 26 it inevitably offers a deepseated reinterpretation of all the elements which come up to determine the particular “reading present” in question, including the idea of nature. Such gesture, however, constitutive and fundamental in terms of SF/cyberpunk territory, inevitably narrates a critique, absence, or even death of whatever served as the definition of nature to date. Quite simply, cyberpunk SF, defined by the excessive otherness of the reality it displays, implicitly highlights the inadequacy of those structures which are naturally taken for granted. This, in turn, demonstrates the genre’s apocalyptic potential: having dissolved the old in the act of either ignoring it or depicting its withering, it simultaneously reveals the new—a dramatically rearranged post-apocalyptic alternative. In this sense then, SF becomes the ultimate apocalyptic genre, taking as its departure point the end of all previous structures, whether biological, social or philosophical. This peculiar departure from nature does not need of course to be understood literally, i.e. in terms of the departure of the physical and the biological in favour of the artificial and the mechanical. True, nature as represented through the biologi25. Joanna Russ, “Interview,” in Khatru, ed. Jeffrey D. Smith (Baltimore: Phantasmicon Press, 1975). Quoted in: Scott Bukatman, Terminal Identity. The Virtual Subject in Postmodern Science Fiction (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), 10. 26. Jameson, Postmodernism…, 285.

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cal—or to be more precise, organic—is often the first one to fall prey to cyberpunk techno-poetics. Of particular relevance in narrating the apocalypse of nature-as-theorganic is undoubtedly the body. Not necessarily guaranteeing a “pure,” i.e. unmodified human, the body becomes the site of an ontological riddle, or—when unable to operate in accordance with the requirements of the environment—an object of disdain or simply a burden: “In the bars he’d frequented as a cowboy hotshot, the elite stance involved a certain relaxed contempt for the flesh. The body was meat. Case fell into the prison of his own flesh” 27 writes Gibson in his pathbreaking Neuromancer. The body no longer defines human agency. Composed now of both organic and inorganic elements, the body questions and destabilises its own boundaries therefore redefining corporeality anew. The body begins to participate in an intimate feedbackloop relationship with the surrounding techno-environment. By allowing the inorganic/ artificial upon its territory the body not only reduces the distance between the subject and its essentially technological environment, but it also allows for a new definition of itself. To possess the body means now to open oneself to the almost unlimited possibilities of modification, customisation and symbiosis with realms hitherto treated as alien, foreign or artificial. By absorbing the manufactured, the body does not so much de-naturalise itself as it reinterprets and problematises the very concept of bodily nature; the “natural” is no longer opposed to the “artificial.” The binary distinction between the technological and the natural becomes irrelevant in the realm of the new corporality. Technology, from being an invader turns into a component—not necessarily a friendly one, but definitely indispensable. Corporeality ceases to function as an ontological criterion traditionally supported by a neat Cartesian dichotomy: body—human, lack of body—non-human. With this division problematised, the territory of the corporeal becomes a flexible matter, to a large extent definable through the requirements of the moment. The body becomes a largely undetermined field ready to incorporate, accept and utilise the inorganic factor as long as it enhances its “natural” capabilities, or opens up new, previously inaccessible areas of perception. Surgically implanted mirror shades concealing extra visual circuits, or a subtle neuro-surgery intended to enlarge brain capacity by, for instance, erasing memories in order to “make room” for more practical data, become the order of the day in cyberpunk SF. One of the repercussions of the emergence of the flexible body, i.e. one narrating a techno-organic symbiosis, is the further rearrangement of gender relations. Thus, a brief illustration of Joanna Russ’ argument seems necessary, if only to confirm cyberpunk SF’s subversive attitude with regard to classifications based on binary oppositions. The genre offers hardly any room for Eternal Stereotypes: Neuromancer’s 27. William Gibson, Neuromancer (London: Harper Collins Publishers, 1995), 12.



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Molly,28 as well as taking part in brutal unlicensed fights, is an expert thief using brain and muscle power with equal grace; Blade Runner’s Zhora, a female android, though she has a part-time job as a strip-dancer, is in fact a combat model designed to assist the off-world exploration and, last but definitely not least, Sgt. Ripley of Alien 3, with no make-up and a shaven head, effectively commands a group of hard-core prisoners devising a survival plan in a situation where all men had failed before. In other words, the body no longer reveals a direct correspondence with the subject’s gendered identity. It is no longer a clue; on the contrary, it poses but a tricky riddle concerning its human/non-human origin or questions predictions of one’s actions based on gender-related stereotypes. What is left of the body is simply the visible outer layer, the shell, or to recollect the ambiguous name of Neuromancer’s protagonist, the case. With looks as the only accessible area while approaching the other, any predictions as for the “inside” are rendered unjustified and unmotivated; the “age of affordable beauty” 29 successfully corrects nature’s mistakes and imperfections, regardless of whether they concern simple plastic surgery, brain modification or enhancing one’s combat skills. This particular treatment of the body as the container of burdensome flesh does not mean, however, that no attention is paid to it at all. On the contrary: the container, as the last reliable and visible outpost of the human, gains extra recognition precisely because of the fact that it constitutes the sole and thus the final element of the cognitive experience. With the modified inside purposefully obscured, the bodily container turns into an object of ultimate fashion, a piece of an unavoidable garment customised in accordance with the latest requirement of cyber haute couture or an individual caprice. Yet, with this particular shift from the inside to the outside, from the essence to the appearance, any assumption about the identity behind the visible becomes pure speculation. One of the opening sequences of Gibson’s Neuromancer topically illustrates this peculiar image obsession: Ratz was tending the bar, his prosthetic arm jerking monotonously as he filled a tray of glasses with draft Kirin. He saw Case and smiled, his teeth a webwork of East European steel and brown decay. Case found a place at the bar, between the unlikely tan of one of Lonny Zone’s whores and the crisp naval uniform of a tall African whose cheekbones were ridged with precise rows of tribal scars.30 28. Though the character of Molly is generally associated with Neuromancer, she also appears in Gibson’s other novel, Mona Lisa Overdrive (although under the name of Sally Shears), and in a short story called “Johnny Mnemonic.” William Gibson, Mona Lisa Overdrive (New York: Bantam Books, 1988); William Gibson, “Johnny Mnemonic,” in Burning Chrome and Other Stories (London: Harper Collins Publishers, 1995). 29. Gibson, Neuromancer, 9. 30. Gibson, Neuromancer, 9.

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Significantly enough, Case does not find a place at the bar between a prostitute and a navy officer but between those elements of their images which they can easily control— the “unlikely tan,” and the “crisp uniform.” Whether it is one’s skin or one’s clothes does not make a particular difference; it is simply unreasonable to draw any further conclusions about what dwells beyond the obvious. Gibson’s sensitivity of the visible component of the corporeal in by no means unattended in cyberpunk fiction. Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash provides an even more explicit account of the bodily significance. Interestingly enough, however, Stephenson’s peculiar body-fashion show takes place in cyberspace—a territory from which the physical body is paradoxically banned by definition unless substituted by its own representation, an empty signifier of one’s desired looks. Stephensonian version of cyberspace, referred to as the Metaverse, turns first into a virtual catwalk and then into a sophisticated battlefield of what Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Jr. defines as postmodern style war.31 Celebrating representation of the body and representation only, Stephenson vividly illustrates one of postmodernism’s crucial concerns: the obsessive emphasis upon the visible and the profound suspicion of the idea of depth.32 Still, what the privileged position of the image results in, is the necessarily problematised question of the status of the referent, in this case the human subject. This is how Stephenson narrates this opaque resurrection of one’s depthless body in the Metaverse: He is not seeing real people of course. This is all a part of the moving illustration drawn by his computer according to specifications coming down the fiber-optic cable. The people are pieces of software called avatars. They are audiovisual bodies that people use to communicate with each other in the Metaverse.33

The eight years separating the publication of Neuromancer (1984) and of Snow Crash (1992) reveal a certain evolution in the modes of approaching the body, which took place in cyberpunk SF, and which clearly coincides with postmodern primacy of the represented and the simulated over the tactile and the referential. Gibson’s body-as-burdensomeflesh is first modified through advanced techno-interventions to be finally replaced by its own perfected icon, not made of flesh but totally devoted to reconstructing the image of the body. This time, however, this reconstruction takes place without any concern whatsoever as for such cornerstones of identity as the distinctions between male/female, human/non-human, black/white, etc. thus effectively dismantling the “ancient dualities,” mentioned by Joanna Russ. Still, the shift from the body-as-flesh to the body-as-icon would not be possible without the accompanying shift in location and related power structures: the street seen 31. Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Jr., “Cyberpunk and Neuromanticism,” in Storming the Reality Studio. A Casebook of Cyberpunk and Postmodern Fiction, ed. Larry McCaffery (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991), 185. 32. Csicsery-Ronay, Jr., “Cyberpunk and Neuromanticism,” 184. 33. Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash (London: Roc, 1993), 33.



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as the realm of the flesh is no longer the place where vital things happen—it has been replaced by cyberspace, the site of activity which results in major changes in reality. Again, a certain evolution might be observed here, instigated by Gibson and taken over by Stephenson. Neuromancer radiates a dystopian vision of derailed social development, rampant, wild and first of all uncontrolled by any kind of institutionalised authority—and yet, it is an environment rooted in the palatable and the tactile, ready to accept the flesh if only to disrespect it. Gibson’s vision is that of a “deliberately unsupervised” 34 techno-urban jungle narrating its own scenario of the survival of the fittest in a place which was “like a deranged experiment in social Darwinism, designed by a bored researcher who kept one thumb permanently on the fast-forward button.” 35 The fittest have evolved: their survival does not depend solely on the physical skills of their bodies, however modified, as it is now determined by the mental ability to synchronise the style of their actions with the requirements imposed by, surprise surprise, the circulation of capital: Stop hustling and you sank without a trace, but move a little too swiftly and you’d break the fragile surface tension of the black market; either way, you were gone […] Biz here was a constant subliminal hum, and death the accepted punishment for laziness, carelessness, lack of grace, the failure to heed the demands of an intricate protocol.36

This brings us to the notion of nature understood metaphorically, namely, as the collection of naturally established social and economic relations of the self-regulating free-market capitalist democracy. Cyberpunk SF offers no illusions about their irretrievable disappearance: well-ordered and effectively governed societies belong to the past of modernity. Accelerated development of techno-determined urbanism has resulted in an irreversible disturbance of all social and institutional structures whether they be regulated by laws, based on collective agreements or functioning in accordance with clear rules of social exchanges. What we are confronted with instead is a degenerated network of semi-criminal arrangements, shady deals, illegal transactions and relativised values all of which are madly driven by a beastly drive for profit and executed by excessive bodies whose adaptive abilities are conditioned by computer technologies rather than by natural evolution. But exaggerated bodies do not exist in non-exaggerated environments. On the contrary: it is precisely those environments’ uncontrolled development (“fast-forward button”) which imposes such profound requirements upon the bodies of its participants. An unmodified body, no longer capable of adjusting itself to the immediate surroundings in order to meet the survival requirements, does not stand a chance of remaining alive for a long time. Evolution understood in purely biological, unassisted terms has 34. Gibson, Neuromancer, 19. 35. Gibson, Neuromancer, 14. 36. Gibson, Neuromancer, 14.

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exhausted its adaptive potential; it is now technology’s role to take over the stimulation of development and as such constitute a new “natural” environment. This, however, happens without the supervision of a biological master plan or a well-established, protective and predictable framework of a grand narrative of enlightened progress. * * * Such an apocalypse of nature, understood both literally and metaphorically, constitutes the bottom line of the new, technologically-enabled field of opening possibilities. Cyberpunk SF, though in a way narrating the triumph of a degenerate society liberated from all master narrative restrictions and celebrating hybrid bodies, nevertheless proposes a radically redefined version of what it means to be human. Joanna Russ is perhaps wrong, after all, because her idea of the natural still echoes the clear-cut divisions of the pre-electronic era. The search for the natural in SF was not vain; what was found however, forces us to reinterpret the very notion of the natural, and of the social, too. This new vision, as much fearful as promising, nevertheless delineates the evolution of the subject’s identity and in the course of this process narrates the inevitably growing intimacy of technological relationships.

Chapter Two The Violence of Revelation  It is your nature to destroy yourselves. — The Terminator, T2: Judgement Day 1

1. Violence Even a brief look at the division of apocalyptic representations into pre- and postapocalyptic ones, as suggested in the previous chapter, reveals a number of potential difficulties in approaching the idea of apocalypse univocally. After all, the distinction comes down to depicting the apocalyptic event in terms of either before or after, which seems self-contradictory if not mutually exclusive: pre-apocalyptic representations prevent the event from happening, whereas the post-apocalyptic ones treat it as their point of departure. Still, even though both modes of picturing the end point at discrepant factors, to think of them as separated entities is to bypass a crucial characteristics which they both share. This characteristics is the intrinsic violence embedded in the very concept itself, no matter which manner of depicting it is at stake. Whether we consider the potentiality implanted in the pre-apocalyptic threats, or the actuality of the catastrophe as presented by post-apocalyptic visions, what dominates both discourses is a pervasive sense of rupture in the existing state of affairs. Regardless of a particular mode of representation, social contextualisation, or the eschatological framework, the discourse of apocalypse always narrates a fundamental and irreversible change imposed on the current cultural condition. As David Robson aptly puts it: “[a]pocalyptic discourse is […] profoundly hostile to the status quo. Its meanings and referents always exceed what ‘is’ and point toward what is ‘other’ than what is […].” 2 Such emphasis upon an “otherness” generated by the apocalyptic event inevitably brings apocalypse into a relation with the notion of difference, turning it thus into an important element of the postmodern and poststructuralist landscape. Though the details of post-apocalyptic reality informed by “what is ‘other’ than what is” often remain unknown, one thing is certain: a revolutionary and irreversible change is about to take place, a profound alteration of the current state of affairs which would undoubtJames Cameron, Terminator 2: Judgement Day, Carolco Pictures/Canal+/Lightstorm Entertainment/Pacific Western, USA, 1991. 2. David Robson, “Frye, Derrida, Pynchon, and the Apocalyptic Space of Postmodern Fiction,” in Postmodern Apocalypse. Theory and Cultural Practice at the End, ed. Richard Dellamora (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995), 63.

1.

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edly encompass all spheres of life. “Hostility to the status quo,” whether predicted (pre-apocalypse) or experienced (post-apocalypse), endows apocalypse with the status of the ultimate Other whose critique of the “status quo” will be as radical as it will be ubiquitous and devastating (more often than not in the literal sense of the word). David Robson’s view is by no means isolated. James Berger, in his in-depth analysis of apocalyptic representations, is careful to note that what Robson refers to as “hostility” in fact constitutes one of apocalypse’s basic features, which for Berger is nothing but a “total critique of the world” depriving it of “any chance of reform.” 3 Writes Berger:  Apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic representations serve varied psychological and political purposes. Most prevalently, they put forward a total critique of any existing social order. From the Book of Revelation’s condemnation of Babylon, through the millenarian movements of the Middle Ages, to more recent apocalyptic thinking—both religious and secular—visions of the end and its aftermath emphasize that no social reform can cure the world’s diseases. Every structure of the old world is infected, and only an absolute, purifying cataclysm can make possible an utterly new, perfected world.4

Yet, for all the promises and threats of omnipresent destruction, there still occurs an important doubt concerning apocalypse’s deadly effectiveness and its destructive potential. Even when considered as a signifier of ultimate criticism, apocalypse remains incomplete, at least in terms of its ravaging potential, for one vital reason: “new stories” of apocalypse appear regularly. And the very fact that they do, and constantly adopt new narrative forms, implies the existence of survivors who report the apocalyptic ordeal. However, the very fact that they are able to describe their condition, now from a necessarily post-apocalyptic perspective, confirms the incompleteness of the apocalyptic act—in other words, the process of destruction is never finalised. This is so because in the realms of both theory and representation, the notion of the end either threatens the contemporary order or provides but one of many possible visions/versions of the rupture that may shake the order’s foundations in the future. And since the present is hardly in a position to verify the future, let alone legitimise it, all the threats as well as the versions of the end provide nothing but hypotheses of things to come. These, depending on a particular cultural situation, may be attractive or terrifying; still, their status is at best that of a prediction, informed either by threat or desire but nevertheless devoid of certainty. Seen from this perspective, the very idea of the apocalypse, including all its variations, constitutes not so much the ultimate Other as the promise of the Other, “pointing toward what is ‘other’ than what is” but hardly ever specifying it unambiguously. James Berger, After the End. Representations of Post-Apocalypse (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 34. 4. Berger, 7.

3.



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In other words, apocalypse becomes a vast and at the same time always-open signifier. Apocalypse’s incompleteness double-codes the concept in terms of its significational potential. On the one hand, for the past few thousand years it has been filled up with “stories” of representation and theory, and visions of both secular and theological origin stressing its collective or individual dimension. All of those signifieds, however varied, contextualised and often incommensurable, have not only enriched apocalypse’s semantic territory by broadening the scope of its applicability, but also complicated its expression as a sign. On the other hand, however, the very emergence of “new stories,” especially those told from a post-apocalyptic perspective, willy-nilly classify apocalypse as a perpetually unaccomplished discursive project, always inviting and offering room for new contexts and approaches. In other words, apocalypse remains eternally open, to be still filled up with future signifieds as long as there are survivors to produce them. Their presence, however, points to the fact that the scenario of the end of the world was never executed all the way. The concept’s unlimited capacity resulting from its always-already open character underlines apocalypse’s paradoxical nature. For once, it perpetually invites “new stories” of the end thus remaining incomplete and hence empty; but then, however, due to its cosmogonic and eschatological dimension, each particular apocalyptic scenario is located within a framework of a finite master plan or narrative. A temptation of everpresent otherness realised through some future fulfilment is subtly underlined by this fulfilment’s unknown potential. While the concept’s all encompassing impact remains highlighted, the details of its execution are kept dark; what we are offered is but yet another version, attractive or terrifying but nevertheless hypothetical. Even though each of the “stories” introduces an irreversible disruption of the status quo, none of them is capable of providing the final and unmodifiable vision of the end. However exhaustive or extreme these stories might appear, they are not in a position to completely exploit the genre’s discursive potential. The reason why apocalypse sustains its status of an always-open signifier is that there is always room for the new stories to come. This particular openness, though guaranteeing the concept’s productivity in cultural terms, contributes at the same time to a particular sense of uneasiness that has always accompanied the sense of the end of times. Apocalypse is simply not to be tamed: the stories to come remain unknown, their plots and aesthetics are still obscured by the unpredictable future. Only one thing is certain: it is the powerful and disruptive might which will change things on an unprecedented scale. To put things crudely, we do not know what is going to happen, but we do know that it will be devastating, irreversible and, last but definitely not least, unavoidable. As such, apocalypse constitutes the negative cultural project par excellence: capable of disrupting everything, it offers nothing except the certainty of its own disruptive might. Still, to interpret the notion’s significance in terms of its disruptive potential, however pervasive and inevitable, appears to be an understatement. This is due

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to the fact that, regardless of whether what is at stake is the actuality of the disaster or the potentiality included in its prediction, the concept of apocalypse remains intimately interwoven with that of ultimate violence which no man-made structure can ever prevent. Individual or collective, private or public, political or economic, environmental or scientific, apocalyptic violence permeates all areas of life; there is no immunity against the turmoil and disorder of the end. David Robson’s “hostility” combined with apocalyptic orientation “toward what is other,” seems to be much too mild a term. Ultimate critique requires ultimate measures, and it is precisely those destructive and devastating measures, which provoke a pervasive sense of existential uneasiness whenever an apocalyptic vision appears on the horizon. Two components of the apocalypse-related anxiety could thus be identified and isolated. Firstly, it is a peculiar metaphysical angst caused by apocalyptic irreversibility whose operations are to introduce a new, post-apocalyptic order. Recalling Robson’s claim again, it is precisely the fear of the “‘other’ than what is”; “the other” being ultimate and dramatic but as yet unknown. Secondly, it is a more “practical” fear of apocalyptic “hostility” understood in terms of an all-out violent performance which would introduce incomparable torment, inconceivable pain, unheard-of destructions, lots of casualties and few survivors. Of all the spheres constituting the “status quo,” which is to become the object of apocalyptic hostility, one seems to be particularly vulnerable to the violence involved in the end of times. From all the layers constituting daily and textual realms alike, the one which is infected first by the irreversible potential of apocalyptic performance is that of the body. Apocalyptic monumentality remains primarily focused on the corporeal, treated both as the metaphor and the reality of the flesh. The Book of Apocalypse, by offering three powerful symbols: the beast, the dragon, and the harlot, not only stresses their metaphorical significance as the signs of the “end of times,” but, through vivid and detailed descriptions, underlines those symbols’ bodily nature. As Mary Wilson Carpenter claims in her comment on Adela Yarbro Collins’ The Power of the Apocalypse: “what were once literary ‘symbols’ have taken on monstrous corporeality.” 5 Of the three symbols/bodies, the harlot seems to be the most extreme one. Described in terms of her corruptive capacity, her sins are those of the flesh which is “drunken with the blood of the saints” (17:6) and “full of abominations and filthiness of her fornication.” (17:4)6 Her body is not only corrupt itself but also capable of corrupting other bodies, those of “the kings” who “have committed fornication” and have been “made drunk with the wine of her fornication.” (17:2) The body becomes thus the ultimate 5.

Mary Wilson Carpenter, “Representing Apocalypse: Sexual Politics and the Violence of Revelation,” in Postmodern Apocalypse. Theory and Cultural Practice at the End, ed. Richard Dellamora (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995), 111. 6. All citations from the Book of Revelation are from the Authorized Version (King James).



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apocalyptic space, irrevocably infected with sinful disposition, and as such deserving ultimate apocalyptic punishment. It is the site of the unclean and the filthy, but, unlike the other images of the beast and the dragon, the harlot’s impact lies in the fact that it fills up the most intimate private space, vulnerable to temptations and hence prone to be punished before all other areas of both private and public life. God’s victory is also as much a victory over “the devil and Satan” as it is a victory over the bodies of Satan’s followers. The “supper of great God,” (19:17) a long awaited celebration, is announced as an invitation to “eat the flesh of kings, and the flesh of captains, and the flesh of mighty men” and even “the flesh of horses.” (19:18) The beast and the false prophet, though saved from being turned into the feast’s entrée, are nevertheless “cast alive into the lake of fire burning with brimstone.” (19:20) The fear of apocalyptic punishment as presented in the Book of Revelation is thus strictly connected with that of pain and suffering bestowed on the physical realm of the body. Still, Carpenter’s “monstrous corporeality” which dominates St. John’s vision not only threatens the flesh with somatic torment but also, through the cannibalistic tone of “God’s great supper,” questions the body’s integrity as a result of the apocalyptic event. Chapter 19 contains an obvious warning against the consequences of becoming one of the Satan’s followers: the seduced ones will be first “slain with the sword” (19:21) and subsequently fed to birds which are to be “filled with their flesh.” (19:21) Hence, upon closer look, the Book of Apocalypse reveals its less apparent code; underneath the monumental ubiquity and irreversibility of the final days there exists a more subtle tone of the drama of individual decomposition resulting from unavoidable punishment directed against the sinful flesh. Contemporary representations of apocalypse abound in similar visions. The end of the world, regardless of whether it happens through explosion, flood, radiation or war, simultaneously narrates decomposition of the human body in a similar way. For all the differences between eschatological and secular representations, the violent treatment of human corporeality seems to provide a powerful common ground, an intimate yet fearful perspective from which the great finale is contemplated. David Cronenberg’s films provide particularly vivid examples of secular apocalypse overtly underlined by bodily anxiety. The body becomes a site of psycho-somatic drama; seduced by the “false prophets” of its own excellence resulting from suddenly acquired additional modes of perception (The Fly (1986), eXistenZ (1999)), the body nevertheless falls into the trap of irreversible mutation resulting in its final annihilation. Tempted by the possibility of eliminating “all concepts of borders and frontiers,” 7 Seth Brundle, the scientist in The Fly, decides to teleport himself through a device of his own construction. During the operation, however, a fly accidentally gets into the machine which, puzzled by the presence of two organisms instead of one, decides 7.

David Cronenberg, The Fly, Brooksfilms, Canada/UK/USA, 1986.

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to combine their bio-genetic structure triggering an unstoppable mutation. After a short period of initial euphoria caused by newly acquired capabilities, Brundle’s body begins to decompose; the fly factor begins to dominate over the human element gradually turning the scientist into a monstrous creature incapable of functioning in either the human or the insect world. Finally, unable to commit suicide him(it?)self, Brundle begs his former fiancée to shoot his mutant body in what used to be his head. Once the trigger has been pulled Brundle’s body explodes into thousands of pieces scattered all over the former laboratory. This scene, as repulsive as it is representative, reveals nevertheless an existential-apocalyptic drama—there is no hope of resurrection since there is no body which could be resurrected, no site of the eternal soul, the more so that the soul in question is not one but two: part human, part that of an insect. Secular apocalypses—not only those presented in the Cronenbergian mode—provide a peculiar textual polemics with eschatological representations. Sharing a deep concern for matters of the flesh, non-religious representations nonetheless differ in their treatment of other constituents of the ultimate endgame. One of these tropes is the issue of collective participation in the apocalyptic event. Contrary to St. John’s vision, in which the catastrophe engaged whole nations, contemporary visions are largely individualised; the catastrophe is the individual and often solitary act of a single body’s violent decomposition. The drama of the flesh is further stressed by the fact that, again, unlike in St. John’s vision, there is no hope of salvation in sight, no “holy city” (21:2) on the horizon. With the violent disappearance of the body gone is the promise of eternal life; resurrection and salvation cannot take place without the presence of the body and, since not much is left of that, all hopes for salvation are gone, too. Cronenberg’s films are by no means the only representations of the “monstrous corporeality” which has permeated the discourse of apocalypse since the New Testament. The body constitutes the ultimate theme in the Alien series (Alien (1979), Aliens (1986), Alien3 (1992) and Alien: Resurrection (1997)). Though each of the films problematises the issue in a different manner, the central concern of each plot revolves around the relationship between human corporeality and that of the monster. The beast, however, differs significantly from an array of similar creatures populating modern horror and SF cinema. Through a complicated biological process of its “birth” 8 encompassing both the hatching of an egg and the necessary presence of the human carrier (symbolically impregnated with the evil embryo), the beast nevertheless establishes 8. Though the last part, Alien: Resurrection, modifies the genetic purity of the monster by combining its genetic code with that of the human, previous films unfold a consistent spectacle of the alien birth cycle: the Alien Queen lays eggs which, after having sensed a “carrier,” hatch and a large spider-like bony creature (referred to as a “face-hugger”) attaches itself to a victim/parent’s face impregnating the body with the embryo of a “proper” alien. The pregnancy period is counted in hours and when the alien organism is capable of independent life it rips its “carrier’s” chest open and begins eliminating all other living organisms around it.



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an intimate relationship with the carrier’s body which it needs as a nest for the pre-natal stage of its development. Once the “pregnancy” period is over, a violent and splattering “birth” takes place, with the parent’s body exploding beyond repair. Much as one might be tempted to interpret the act in oedipal terms, as a fulfilment of the restless desire to kill one’s father (the impregnated ones are usually males), the Alien’s subsequent behaviour points to its purely apocalyptic mission. With crystal-clear accuracy and admirable consistency the monster eliminates all humans by tearing apart their bodies with bestial rage and technological precision. “I admire its purity” 9 declares one of the characters in the first part of the saga. It is precisely the total purity of both intention and execution, “unclouded by conscience, remorse or delusions of morality,” 10 that endow the monster with a sense of apocalyptic unavoidability. In fact, throughout the saga, the beast, a clear symbol of apocalyptic “monstrous corporeality” itself, is also referred to as “the dragon” 11 or even as “the bitch,” 12 the latter term being a distant though identifiable reference to the third bodily symbol of St. John’s vision, that of the harlot. Approached in these terms, Alien’s corporeality exceeds simple monstrosity enriching it with symbolic significance; it becomes not just one but all three of the apocalyptic bodies. Yet, what differentiates the Alien saga from many other representations touching upon the issue of corporeal suffering, is the fact that very quickly all the attempts to fight the monster’s apocalyptic determination turn into desperate attempts to first protect oneself and then to escape from the beast’s neighbourhood as fast and as far as possible. These attempts are nevertheless futile: the Alien, like the apocalypse itself, is not to be overcome, debated, avoided or tamed. Seen from a broader perspective, it has successfully haunted public imagination for almost thirty five years now and, as the title of the last part informs us, even its own death cannot stop its apocalyptic mission. In other words, for all the differences between secular and eschatological representations of apocalypse, there exists an important continuity between them, that of corporeal involvement. The body transgresses its symbolic function in favour of its own somatic reality, undergoing a violent and irreversible process of decomposition. In the realm of both textual and visual representations, the loss of corporeal integrity constitutes a vital component of the apocalyptic discourse; apocalypse does not exist without the body. Still, even thought the body remains an essential element of the apocalyptic event, it is often reduced to pure flesh and as such constitutes the last outpost shared by both modes of representation. What distinguishes secular versions of the end 9. 10. 11. 12.

Ridley Scott, Alien, Brandywine Productions/20th Century Fox, UK/USA, 1979. Scott, Alien. David Fincher, Alien3, Brandywine Productions/20th Century Fox, USA, 1992. James Cameron, Aliens, Brandywine Productions/SLM PG/20th Century Fox, UK/USA, 1986.

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from the circum-religious ones, is the total loss of the prospect of salvation or afterlife, with or without the body. Secular visions, perhaps rather tautologically, lack the promise of paradise embedded in the theological narrative. As a consequence, with the disappearance of theological justification, the teleological component disappears as well; apocalypse is no longer depicted as a purposeful, horrifying yet only transitional, moment which is to reveal the participants of “the great supper of God” and the inhabitants of “the holy city.” Such representations radically redefine the idea of survival from a secular perspective. It is no longer a matter of God’s reward for the right and just life on earth; on the contrary, staying alive becomes a result of pure chance or one’s “little-narrative” abilities to cope with a particular situation. The latter case is topically illustrated by the Alien series; Sgt. Ripley remains alive due to her purely pragmatic ability to postpone her own death. Postpone, but not prevent. Secular representations of apocalypse thus form a peculiar form of discourse. On the one hand, they remain rooted in eschatological predictions in terms of the concept’s unavoidability and corporal preoccupations. On the other hand, however, they offer a largely individualised narrative, rendering both the idea and participation in the end with a more private and intimate dimension. As a result, secular apocalypse, though always stressing its own inevitability, becomes stripped of its monumental and all-encompassing component in favour of the personal, body-related drama. Yet, with this shift from the collective to the individual, apocalypse loses its telos—the prospect of salvation of the soul and resurrection of the body. Among a number of post-apocalyptic representations, Richard Stanley’s Hardware13 provides one of the most topical illustrations of the peculiar narrative exchange between secular and eschatological visions. Set in a post-nuclear environment of radioactive desert and decaying urban realm inhabited by mentally deranged and physically mutated characters, the film tells the story of a re-activated homicidal robot trying to re-assemble itself from house-hold appliances in order to fulfil its deadly mission. The robot’s central part, its human-like skull endowed with apocalyptic consciousness, turns out to be a part of the experimental military project referred to as M.A.R.K. 13. The Biblical association is by no means coincidental; the film opens with a quotation from St. Mark, Chapter 13, reading: “No flesh shall be spared” (13:20) 14 immediately placing the film’s post-holocaust imagery within the eschatological framework. The fragment is evoked again, when Moses, one of the main characters, realises that that the project’s codename contains an implicit biblical reference: “See these mighty buildings, all shall be thrown down, shattered, splintered, split. The Earth will shake, rattle and roll, the masses will go hungry, their bellies bloat. These are the birth pains. No flesh shall be spared.” (13:2, 8, 9, 20, italics provided). 13. Richard Stanley, Hardware, Palace Productions/BSB, UK, 1990. A.k.a. M.A.R.K. 13. 14. All citations of St. Mark are as quoted in the film.



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The notion of “birth pains” does not operate solely on the metaphorical level. Not only is the prophecy of “mighty buildings […] shattered, splintered and split” vividly illustrated by intensive images of dryness, desolation and human misery (“their bellies bloat”) but, as it turns out, the robot is a part of an army-government initiative called the Emergency Population Control Bill. The “birth pains” are then approached literally, in terms of arrested human reproduction. Interestingly enough, the “birth pains” drama is acted out on the discursive level even before its apocalyptic significance and correspondence with St. Mark’s vision is discovered. While arguing about the idea of having children in such a radio-active waste world, Moses’ girlfriend, Jill, subconsciously re-phrases the three words used in the Bible which depict the fate of “those mighty buildings” (they will be “shattered, splintered, split”) and voices the idea of having kids as “stupid, sadistic and suicidal.” Such discursive exchange contains a double meaning, in fact a paradoxical and a self-contradictory one: it secularises the Biblical prophecy which is transformed into the realm of an everyday conversation, and it solidifies the prophecy’s inescapable potential now that the language of the Bible discreetly infiltrates the realm of ordinary talk. Secular apocalypse, though deprived of any sense of hope, is just as unavoidable, the only difference being that God has been replaced by the conspirational Emergency Population Control Bill. The language, though, remains. The self-destructive tone echoing in Jill’s words opens up the Thanateian context of the film. Though challenging the Freudian model of the Eros/Thanatos struggle through the fact that the death instinct is personified by a woman, the voice of Eros, represented this time by a man, sounds weak, naïve and unconvincing. Moses’ straightforward claim that “[i]t’s in our nature to reproduce” is immediately echoed by Jill’s one-sentence Thanateian manifesto: “[m]ankind’s always gone against its nature.” Still, the character of Jill not only narrates a reversal of the stereotypical masculine/ feminine, destruction/creation stances. What Jill introduces in the first place is the idea of a twisted aesthetic delight derived from self-destructive drives, one which only the female might enjoy as they remain obscure to the simple-minded and unsophisticated male whose one-track mind is preoccupied with survival only. Jill is an industrial sculptress constructing hardware installations from spare parts and old household appliances—waste products of whatever is left in the post-apocalyptic civilisation. The robot’s head, with the American flag painted on its forehead, comes to ornament her latest work. And it is precisely out of those old, dirty and rusty appliances that it reconstructs itself becoming a living embodiment of the destructive tone that informed Jill’s sculptures and at the same time an ultimate symbol of self-imposed devastation. Reconstructed from banal components of everyday routines like kitchen knives, drills, saws and cables, it is an awkward creature, in fact a caricature of a killing machine, especially when compared with such clearly sketched icons of destruction as the Terminators of James Cameron’s series. Yet it is its apocalyptic determination

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that not only does away with human bodies but also with essential human theories. Darwin’s concept of the survival of the fittest comes to be eliminated first. Moses, even though literally described in one of the film’s crucial conversations as “one of the fittest,” does not survive the deadly encounter. The robot, subtly but effectively, brings to a halt thousands of years of human evolution. Apocalyptic measures remain unconcerned about the laws of biology; the fittest are no longer the survivors, and the course of human evolution is over. With the death of the fittest Hardware not only narrates the death of evolution itself but also that of attempts to theorise it. Darwin’s account no longer works; the so far uninterrupted continuum of evolution, also understood in terms of social progress and development, comes to a halt. It is precisely this double-coding, which combines the death of the body with the death of the theory of the body, that makes Hardware one of the most representative examples of secular visions of the end filtered through eschatology. As much Bible-inspired as Bible-illustrating, the film effectively participates in an intertextual polemics with religious prophecy. Even though the amount of New Testament references goes far beyond one chapter from St. Mark, the fundamental feature of secular representations remains intact—the lack of apocalyptic telos, i.e., the prospect of salvation. That the possibility of purpose and eternal life does not even exist is made clear from the very outset of the film. The “good news” of eventual salvation is treated as an out-of-place myth, as Angry Bob, a radio DJ whose frantic comments complete the apocalyptic setting, informs us during his early morning show, asking an almost rhetorical question: “[a]s for the good news? There is no fucking good news.” This is because apocalypse, although placed in an eschatological framework, turns out to be a man-made action, a final embodiment of mankind’s self-destructive drive narrating the return of the repressed and at the same time justifying its incompatibility with the religious prophecy. Mark 13, the ultimate killing machine, is after all made of trivial everyday appliances, a fact which deprives the monster of a divine origin in favour of functional capability. The human potential for destruction appears to exceed that of God’s, at the same time transmitting an implicit message that nobody is capable of destroying us more effectively than ourselves. The religious realm is replaced by a cultural and technological one; the process of annihilation and devastation is given a peculiar aesthetic quality which is revealed both by Jill’s techno-sculptures and by the movie’s overall, essentially toxic, visual organisation. Like any object of visual art, Jill’s sculptures require visual contemplation not so much inviting, but provoking an irresistible gaze, enhanced by morbid fascination with participation in one’s own eradication. The awkward and seemingly disabled robot, like almost any killing machine, hypnotises with the absolute purity of its intention, here additionally powered by the eschatological context. Like the apocalyptic creatures of the Alien or the Terminator series, Mark 13’s only mission is to erase human life. Its trivial components only enhance its grim capacity; it will use anything, even



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apparently harmless everyday objects, to reconstruct itself only to quench its deadly thirst. As Mark Dery, commenting on the film’s unconscious signifieds, has put it: “[l]ike the eerie Stealth bomber, with its devilish silhouette, or the locustlike Apache helicopter, predatory machines dredge from the collective unconscious—man-eating beasts, angry gods.” 15 There is little doubt that the list of “angry gods” that Dery mentions is topped by Thanatos, personification of the death instinct whose voice persistently occurs in the film’s soundtrack; one of the most often recurring phrases in the film’s main theme reads: “this is what you want, this is what you get…”

2. Revelation Secular representations of apocalypse, though culturally productive and intellectually provocative, should by no means be reduced to cinematic visualisations. True, the immediate association is usually that of a spectacular act of destruction usually represented in one of the following ways: as a threat (pre-apocalypse) or as an aftermath (post-apocalypse), through the aesthetics of desolation (The Road Warrior (1981), Salute to the Jugger (1989), Beyond Thunderdome (1985)) or that of congestion (Blade Runner (1982), Escape from New York (1981), The Matrix (1999)), as a collective misery (Outbreak (1995), Deep Impact (1998)) or an individual drama (Apocalypse Now (1979)). Still, all of the above-mentioned examples clearly belong to the realm of popular representations of the concept, which is but one of a few areas in which apocalypse reveals its robust potential. As a matter of fact, the discourse of apocalypse permeates numerous layers of contemporary culture, touching upon fields as diverse as religion or history (it suffices here to recollect Fukuyama’s concept of the end of historical linearity). In the context of this peculiar ubiquity, the claim that apocalypse remains hostile “to the status quo” 16 inevitably poses questions as to the nature of the status quo under discussion—its components and operations as well as the theoretical reflection that accompanies them. Thus, it is the purpose of this section to analyse and exemplify the idea of apocalypse as handled and represented in and by theory. This shift in focus, from popular representation to theoretical contemplation, seems only natural: as an unavoidable moment in time and space, apocalypse touches upon all areas of life, the tactile and the abstract alike. Apocalypse is a concept with a clearly belligerent attitude and there seems to be no reason why it should not exert its thoroughgoing orientation upon all constituents of the current cultural condition, including theory. Hence, since 15. Mark Dery, Escape Velocity. Cyberculture at the End of the Century (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1996), 125. 16. Robson, “Frye, Derrida, Pynchon…,” 63.

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the significance of theory for the development of postmodern discourses may hardly be underestimated, this section will explore the intricate attempts to theorise the end. Yet, in order to necessarily restrict and discipline the apocalyptic field in question, a certain methodological assumption has to be made. Regardless of whether apocalypse is treated literally or metaphorically, its discourse always remains attached to a particular object, be it the referent, the subject or theory itself. Even if the concept is contemplated in purely theoretical terms, i.e. without the immediate presence of apocalyptic operations, it is only possible once a certain common ground of diverse apocalyptic operations has been identified and then isolated. To speak of apocalypse is to speak of the apocalypse of-; it is the object of apocalyptic hostility that remains an indispensable element of the apocalyptic scenario. To put it crudely, apocalypse needs the status quo, which constitutes the ultimate referent of its action. And it is precisely this particular relationship between apocalypse and its referents and the way it is handled by theory which composes the point of departure for this section. Contemporary theory has a problem with the relationship in question. To put things in a nutshell, it is a problem of approach, or to be more precise, the problem of two, mutually excluding modes of coming to terms with the correlation between apocalypse and its object. The distinction between the modes is on the level of engagement and approximation. Two ultimate poles might be identified on this particular spectrum: that of total engagement narrating an advanced merger between the two, as a result of which apocalypse is forced to redefine its own theoretical premise, and, secondly, that of total disengagement and a certain indifference between the apocalyptic act and its object in the course of which apocalypse’s theoretical foundations remain intact. Both modes will be analysed and exemplified here and although the difference between them is not always a clear-cut one, for the purpose of methodological convenience they will be treated here as two different theoretical frameworks informing two different strategies of cinematic and literary representations. Approaching apocalypse in terms of the latter distinction, which for operational reasons might be referred to as the strategy of disengagement, one notices a peculiar distance separating the concept of apocalypse from the object of its performance. Seen as an expression of ultimate criticism, the idea remains paradoxically detached and in fact separated from the object of its critical enterprise; it does not occur as a reaction to a particular social situation or discursive configuration, but as the result of a restless drive to do away with whatever the current status quo is about. Apocalypse ignores the cause-and-effect scheme of things and therefore casts a critical light upon the continuity of cultural development and the linearity of progress. Seen from this angle, apocalyptic discourse is not so much concerned with the object of its criticism as with the totality of the critical act. It is precisely this load of critical violence, accompanied by the inherent unavoidability that the concept is charged with, which



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“prevents its […] coalescence with any particular historical, political or institutional manifestation.” 17 Hence, considered in terms of its engagement with the object, apocalypse turns out to be an opaquely de-contextualised discourse. On the one hand, it is involved in the critical process, on the other it is indifferent toward its very object. Bypassing the action-reaction requirements, it nevertheless remains focused and topical in terms of its deadly effectiveness. This detachment is aptly illustrated by the discourse of eschatological predictions. Without reducing apocalypse’s destructive power, its theoretical premises as well as the details of its performance belong to a broader perspective of God’s master plan. As such, apocalypse effectively ignores the linearity of history or the reason-result relation. It does not appear as an effect and hence cannot be modified by manipulating the cause. The framework of God’s master narrative is not to be negotiated, influenced or changed; there is no plan B to be utilised in case the primary apocalyptic objectives are not fulfilled. Human reaction to the apocalyptic scheme is in no position to distort the mechanism of the final days—apocalypse, as approached in eschatological terms, simply does not follow the action-reaction pattern. The Book of Revelation clearly describes the detachment in question from at least two perspectives. First of all, the distance between the apocalyptic vision and the details of its execution is subtly stressed through the presence of those whose task is to transmit the message, St. John and the angel. The opening lines of St. John’s Revelation point to John’s middle-man role whose task is to inform of the things to come while remaining personally (and bodily, too) unaffected. In fact, John is not the only one endowed with the mission to carry the message. As the first chapter informs us, although “God gave [the revelation] unto him” the message was “signified [...] by his angel.” (1:1) Secondly, the master narrative framework is further highlighted by the fact that those affected by the execution of God’s plan are never individualised, let alone given a subjective status. The persistent use of the third person plural form points to the essentially collective character of the event; those affected by the eschatological grand narrative form “a great multitude, which no man could number, of all nations, and tribes, and peoples” (7:9). The Revelation’s monumental poetics excludes the individual even if considered as reduced to the role of a mere example; such operation is simply unreasonable since the reported events are unavoidable, irreversible, and permeate all possible human communities. Contrary to the strategy of detachment, it is precisely the absence of distance between the critical act and its referent which informs the second of the previously specified points of the spectrum, one which represents the strategy of engagement. Just as the idea of dynamic and flexible participation was unacceptable in the previous mode, it is indispensable for this one. With the distance between the plan and its execu17. Robson, “Frye, Derrida, Pynchon…,” 63.

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tion gone, the strategy of engagement actually inscribes itself into the broader context of postmodern theoretical debates. Informed by Lyotard’s critique of grand narrative “which has lost its credibility,” 18 the approximation of apocalypse and its referents represents a much more focused and regional attempt to come to terms with the concept of the end. Deprived of eschatological master plan, the secularised theory of apocalyptic engagement remains open to adjustments and modifications coming as a result of a particular apocalyptic situation. With the distance in question erased, each apocalyptic story/theory turns into a peculiar “little narrative” itself, independently legitimising its own operations regardless of any grand narrative requirements. Lyotard’s arguments, necessarily simplified here, and offering a deep-seated change of theoretical perspective from monumental to individual, are by no means unique. Ernesto Laclau, whose views are further explored in the later part of this section, describes the “process of mutual contamination between ‘theory’ and ‘empiria,’” 19 and few claims highlight the disappearance of theory’s critical distance more vividly than Baudrillard’s account of the new role ascribed to theory: “[i]t is not enough for theory to describe and analyse, it must itself be an event in the universe it describes […].” 20 Through this merger, theory does not only lose its innocence understood in terms of purity guaranteed by separation from the object. Once infected by practice, often taking the form of a violent engagement, theory is forced to redefine itself, reconstruct and re-interpret its ontological status. In his brief manifesto Baudrillard vividly characterises this new outlook and also specifies theory’s new tasks: “It must become excessive and sacrificial to speak about excess and sacrifice. It must become simulation if it speaks about simulation, and deploy the same strategy as its object. […] If it no longer aspires to a discourse of truth, theory must assume the form of a world from which truth has withdrawn.” 21 This particular fusion narrates a powerful convergence of critical perspective with the event itself as a result of which the perspective loses its abstract objectivity. Such conjunction not only endows the strategy of apocalyptic engagement with the status of a “little narrative” in the Lyotardian sense. Reaching beyond the language of science and the methods of its legitimation, which are of primary importance for Lyotard, this necessarily localised perspective has turned out to be very productive in terms of representational strategies it stimulates. Fredric Jameson, commenting on Lyotard’s 18. Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington, Brian Massumi (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), 37. 19. Ernesto Laclau, “Preface,” in Post-Theory. New Directions in Criticism, eds. Martin McQuillan, Graeme MacDonald, Robin Purves, Stephen Thomson (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999), vii. 20. Jean Baudrillard, The Ecstasy of Communication, trans. Bernard Schutze and Caroline Schutze (New York: Semiotext(e), 1988), 99. 21. Baudrillard, The Ecstasy…, 98.



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claims, stresses the essential “vitality of small narrative units at work everywhere locally in the present social system […].” 22 One of the consequences of this shift in approach, from grand to little, may be observed in a number of concrete techniques employed while representing the end, especially in a secular mode. In contrast to the previously mentioned collective monumentality presented by the Book of Revelation, contemporary narratives display a much more individualised perspective—in other words, the striking vision of the end has been replaced by the subjective act of reporting it in a first-hand manner. Once again, cinematic representations, especially those reaching beyond mere apotheosis of destruction, provide a useful illustration of the act of reporting the end which is often signified by the voiceover technique—one character’s internal monologue, audible only to the viewers and to him/herself. Hence, desolate wastelands of George Miller’s The Road Warrior are prefaced by a faceless voice recollecting “the road warrior […] called Max” whose story begins to unfold as we immediately learn that “in the roar of an engine he lost everything.” 23 Miller’s film is by no means the only one depicting the apocalyptic landscape, whether metaphorically or literally, through the eyes of the survivor: in the background of the desperate continuity between pre- and post-apocalyptic visions of James Cameron’s Terminator 2: Judgement Day, Sarah O’Connor patiently explains details of the holocaust to come while the posthuman landscapes of Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner are echoed by Deckard’s voiceover remarks. The emphasis on “telling the story” is even more vividly highlighted in Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now. Though it comes to terms with the idea of the end in a completely different manner than the previous examples, from the film’s very onset we are informed that the mission aimed at finding and terminating the renegade Colonel Kurtz will be given an extra context—that of the intimate, personal narrative of Captain Willard, the man responsible for the mission’s success. “There is no way to tell his [Kurtz’s] story,” declares Willard, “without telling my own. And if his story is really a confession, then so is mine.” 24 Willard’s voiceover remark stresses an important aspect of apocalyptic reports. There being “no way to tell [Kurtz’s] story without telling [Willard’s] own” points to the fact that reporting the end is inseparable from participating in it. Apocalyptic narratives are located within the event and, as a result, they do not allow us to merely observe the final days without being actually exposed to their devastating potential. The very choice of narrative perspective is no longer a matter of choosing this or that interpretative strategy but remains inevitably related to the possibility of one’s own 22. Frederic Jameson, “Foreword,” in Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington, Brian Massumi (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), xi. Emphasis Jameson’s. 23. George Miller, The Road Warrior, Kennedy Miller Productions, Australia, 1981. A.k.a. Mad Max 2. 24. Francis Ford Coppola, Apocalypse Now, Zoetrope Studios, USA, 1979.

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annihilation. No longer an intellectual exercise, safe but at the same time remote and sterile, the perspective itself reveals the narration’s deadly potential. Seen in this light, apocalyptic narratives question one of the fundamental traditional premises of the theoretical approach, namely, that of critical distance. Understood now as a discursive attempt to seize the current moment, the apocalyptic perspective becomes inseparably bound up with what it tries to approach, thus rendering the traditional gap between theory and practice non-existent. Apocalyptic narratives announce the end of innocence for theory—its perspectives and methodologies are no longer supported with a critical eye safely located somewhere out there and contemplating the event with voyeuristic satisfaction. On the contrary, the perspective taken upon the story already entails a clear and present danger for whoever reports the situation, since the division into “his” story and “my” story simply does not exist. In other words, what differentiates the two theoretical modes of approaching the end and at the same time informs representational strategies, is the presence or absence of the distance between apocalypse’s theoretical premise and the object of its performance. The choice of illustrative examples here is by no means coincidental; few texts display such a grand narrative framework as does the Bible, whose Book of Revelation explicates God’s final intentions for the details of the last days. Needles to say, those details are not to be interrupted in any way—it is precisely the distance in question, highlighted by a clearly defined narrative perspective and the presence of characters who carry the message, which secures the unassailable position of the eschatological scenario. This distance however, is absent from secular representations, where the “story” results from the observation of the narrator’s immediate surroundings. Such reduction of the horizon—from the universal to the local—necessarily eliminates a broader narrative perspective, not only depriving apocalypse of its theological telos but promoting a solitary vision of the event, unaccompanied by the “holy city” or the “supper of God” which would follow the final days. Contrary to the eschatological vision, participation in the final events as depicted by secular representations, is determined by a strong sense of uncertainty about those matters which assert no doubt whenever a comforting religious framework comes into play. Blade Runner’s final voiceover remarks pose a series of unanswered questions which, although simplified for commercial reasons, nevertheless invite grand narrative answers: “All he wanted were the same answers the rest of us want. Where did I come from? Where am I going? How long have I got?” 25 Similarly, Terminator 2: Judgement Day’s Sarah O’Connor’s internal monologue constantly stresses a feeling of desperate insecurity resulting from the realisation that human fate is no longer supervised by a higher power: “The unknown future rolls towards us,” “The future is not set.” 26 25. Ridley Scott, Blade Runner, The Ladd Company, USA, 1982. 26. Cameron, Terminator 2: Judgement Day.



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Secular apocalypses offer a peculiar vision of a largely localised and dramatically individualised event, whose depiction both lacks a broader religious perspective and results from an often accidental act of getting involved in the final events. This particular theoretical-practical background, which might be termed as narration-with-participation, constitutes in fact the ultimate feature differentiating secular representations from the religious ones, as the latter are based on exactly the opposite narrative assumption i.e. that of narration-without-participation. What becomes eliminated as a result of this separation, is both the possibility and the hope of salvation, which disappears together with the disappearance of the space between the origin of apocalyptic message and its destination—the space which occupies such a vital position in the Bible. It is precisely the distance between the event and its grand narrative context, between human operations and God’s master plan which secures the universal position of eschatology. With that distance gone, gone too is the teleological framework embedded in the promise of paradise. What remains is the alienated event itself; fierce and unscrupulous, yet deprived of its own sense of purpose. The voiceover technique appears here as the ultimate mode of narrating/participating in the end—unlike St. John’s revelation, the voiceover narrative is not meant to become part of the public domain. On the contrary, within each particular “story,” the sender and the receiver of the voiceovered message is the same person in fact talking to him- or herself and as such bypassing the context of eschatological master plan which involved “all nations, and tribes, and peoples” (7:9). Thus is revealed the nature of secular apocalypse: deprived of the critical distance placing the event within the framework of comforting teleology and individualised in terms of a perspective largely informed by the bodily drama, secular apocalypse forces the subject to participate in and narrate its own silent story.

3. Theory of Apocalypse vs. Apocalypse of Theory Still, a totally different perspective upon the postmodern mixture of apocalyptic theory and practice seems possible. So far, the emphasis of the argument has been implicitly located in the realm of representations of apocalypse and their inevitably theorising nature. Paradoxically though, the result of this peculiar clash reaches far beyond Baudrillardian postulates concerning theory’s new role, that of “becoming an event” itself. This is because the notion of theory-as-event does not necessarily have to refer to physical annihilation. With the apocalyptic convergence of theory and action, the event in question need not signify literal destruction but, on the contrary, it may also be understood as an event in theory; a radical disruption in the linearity of theoretical development suddenly questioning theory’s argument/counter-argument evolutionary logic.

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Much as one might be tempted here to interpret the shift in purely metaphorical terms, i.e. that of the apocalypse of a particular theory which is substituted by another one, such gesture does not seem obligatory. This is because, even though such replacement would justify the use of apocalypse as a signifier of paradigmatic change, on the very literal level the notion of apocalypse already remains closely interwoven with that of revelation. It is precisely because of the concept’s revelatory potential embedded in its very signifier, that the idea can do without being transformed into a metaphor. To quote David Robson again: “apocalypse means revelation, and although apocalyptic discourse aims to define, contain, and domesticate otherness, it also serves to reveal the other.” 27 Hence, through a long journey across the intricate terrain of representation assisted by theory, we have arrived at the original meaning of the word specifying apocalypse’s primarily function which is to unveil and communicate the difference. And within contemporary cultural operations the difference in question is indeed a major one as it encompasses the whole range of discursive phenomena preoccupied with, by and large, the announcement of their own end. Seen in this light, apocalypse-as-event-in-theory seems to provide a new perspective upon all the discourses containing the disturbing prefix “post-” in their names. Needless to say, much is at stake in the area; suffice it to recollect the classification of contemporary discursive fields made by Stuart Sim where one may find as many as ten different “posts-,” all gathered in a book which is itself characterised as a collection of “post-” thoughts: The Icon Critical Dictionary of Postmodern Thought.28 Still, in order for the prefix to be justly located within the apocalyptic discourse, an important assumption needs to be made, in fact, a vital one for its applicability—the prefix must reveal its double coding: it is no longer to be considered diachronically, as what-comes-after-, but more importantly as the-other-of- what is. Naturally, to place all of the specified entries, including concepts so diverse as postphilosophy, postcolonialism or postindustrialism, under one huge umbrella term of apocalyptic discourse seems a monumental if not impossible task, reaching far beyond the scope of this book. There are at least two reasons which cast a shadow of doubt upon the hypothetical success of such a mission. Firstly, it would differ very little from the attempt to turn apocalypse into a new kind of resurrected grand narrative of contemporary humanities; a rather futile effort since the multiplicity of contemporary discourses results precisely from a reaction against the totalising and restricting influence of one dominant form of master-discourse. Secondly, the attempt would be further complicated by the fact that although the prefix “post-” implies the advent of “other-than-,” the “post-” of poststructuralism is not quite commensurable with, for instance, the “post-” of postindustrialism. 27. Robson, “Frye, Derrida, Pynchon…,” 63. Emphasis Robson’s. 28. Stuart Sim, ed., The Icon Critical Dictionary of Postmodern Thought (Cambridge: Icon Books, 1998), 336–342.



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In other words, apocalypse’s revelatory potential must be again considered in terms of its operation within—this time the within of each particular “little narrative” of a given discourse. Such approach has the methodological advantage of highlighting similarities between various discourses, yet without the aspiration of imposing a restricting limit upon each of them resulting from the totalising disposition. In a truly secular manner the notion of apocalypse is stripped of its monumental singularity implicit in the master-narrative requirements—apocalypse turns into apocalypses disseminated upon various discursive entities. Instead of being one it is replaced by a number of its variations which enhance their applicability without weakening their critical potential. Paraphrasing Roland Barthes’ description of the subversive potential of the text, contemporary apocalypses too take “as its motto the words of the man possessed by demons: ‘My name its Legion: for we are many.’ (Mark, 5:9)” 29 Of a number of contemporary “post”-discourses two seem particularly topical in terms of their relevance for this study, namely those of post-theory and posthumanism. It is not without reason that Baudrillard’s claims concerning theory’s new role have been mentioned before. The postulated convergence of theory and practice, resulting in theory’s participation “in the universe it describes,” not only deprives it of the traditional critical distance but turns the very notion into a term of peculiar excess. Demanding from theory that it be “anything but a challenge to the real” and “disobey the real,” 30 Baudrillard locates theory in the context surprisingly similar to that of apocalypse and its “hostility to the status quo.” It is theory, not apocalypse, whose task is now to bestow a fundamental change upon its objects by challenging and disobeying the paradigms of referential systems operating so far. This functional similarity between apocalypse and theory produces a particular kind of feedback-loop between the two; on the one hand, it helps further theorise apocalypse and solidify its position as the signifier of ultimate criticism, on the other hand, however, this exchange injects an apocalyptic element into theory itself, thus stressing theory’s potential to introduce a profound and often irreversible change in ideas as well as in actions. And indeed, if “[t]heory must operate on time at the cost of deliberate distortion of present reality,” 31 then such an attitude is only a step away from placing theory itself in the context of apocalyptic discourse. Seen in this light, theory, preoccupied with challenging and distorting the real, becomes a primary cause of rupture in the present “status quo of the real”—also in the status quo of theory. The apocalyptic mission becomes thus one of theory’s vital components in respect of the critical disposition that both discourses share. Approached in these terms, theory, regardless of each 29. Roland Barthes, “From Work to Text,” in Modern Literary Theory. A Reader, eds. Philip Rice and Patricia Waugh (London/New York: Edward Arnold, 1992), 169. 30. Baudrillard, The Ecstasy…, 98–99. 31. Baudrillard, The Ecstasy…, 99.

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particular stance, appears as inseparable from apocalypse through their mutual engagement with and treatment of the object. Once theory’s role is to exceed the object, to be “more than” the object, apocalypse appears to constitute theory’s most natural environment, even if the object of theory is theory itself. Baudrillard’s logic of theory’s disruptive excess is finally summarised by prescribing its ultimate goal: “[w]hat theory can do is to defy the world to be more: more objective, more ironic, more seductive, more real […].” 32 Theory’s function, again coinciding with that of apocalypse, is thus to exert a constant change resulting from its fierce engagement with “the real,” which again includes the real of theory. Still, the enthusiasm implicit in Baudrillard’s claims and resulting from the postulated dynamics of theory is not shared by everyone. Ernesto Laclau, following Baudrillard’s views of the new function of theory rooted in its grip on the status quo, also identifies a paradigmatic change resulting from the disappearance “of the distinction theoretical framework/case studies.” 33 Yet it is precisely the “progressive blurring of classical frontiers which made theory a distinctive object” 34 that defines a new discursive entity referred to as post-theory. Again, the “post” of post-theory, rather than specifying the aftermath of theory, points to the reconstruction of the concept which highlights the common ground shared by critical reflection and cultural praxis alike. Still, somehow contrary to the dynamics of Baudrillard’s vision, Laclau speaks of the convergence in terms of “contamination”: “[w]hat we have […] is a process of mutual contamination between ‘theory’ and ‘empiria’—the former having abandoned its aspiration to constitute a ‘superhard transcendentality’ and the latter having lost the innocence associated with pure ‘data.’” 35 In other words, what informs the “post” of post-theory is the end of a sterile paradigmatic framework, which is replaced by a necessarily flexible structure adjustable to the requirements of the moment. The aforementioned loss of innocence of theory, whether mourned over or enjoyed, constitutes a challenge to the very paradigm of theory which ceases to function as a model of things, intact by definition. The shift from theory to post-theory is, in fact, the evolution of an isolated and untouchable field of knowledge into a dynamic discursive entity, vividly engaged in rearranging the status quo of the real, even at the expense of its own mutation. And it is precisely post-theory’s mutational nature that inscribes it into the discourse of apocalypse understood as a revelation or disclosure of the new state of affairs. Yet to narrate the birth of the new is, inevitably though indirectly, related to narrating the death of the old, and even though the division into theory and post-theory is by no means a clear32. 33. 34. 35.

Baudrillard, The Ecstasy…, 100. Laclau, “Preface,” vii. Laclau, “Preface,” vii. Laclau, “Preface,” vii.



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cut one, the very concept of post-theory implicitly narrates the apocalypse of “a certain concept” 36 of theory. Needless to say, the apocalypse of “a certain concept” of theory does not involve the end of theory as a whole. To quote Ernesto Laclau once again, “although we have entered a post-theoretical universe, we are definitely not in an a-theoretical one.” 37 Following Baudrillard’s perspective, the end of “a certain concept,” is an event-inthe-theory of the concept—one which at the same time disrupts its original stability as well as serving to reveal the concept’s other. And within contemporary discursive formations this conceptual otherness is more often than not signified by the prefix “post”—the prefix which, to use Neil Badmington’s words, “does not pre-fix.” 38 The notion of apocalypse of theory as an event in theory reveals in fact a mechanism of discursive transformation shared not only by the naturally self-reflective discourse of theory itself but by a number of other post-discourses as well. Among those, the discourse of posthumanism provides a particularly topical example. The apocalypse of “a certain concept” of humanism, seen again as an event in humanism, is, in its broadest sense, based on the critique of the Cartesian concept of cogito. The concept, through the privileged position given to consciousness, postulates the existence of a universal human essence and, as a result, offers a significant portion of stability attributed to the formation of subjectivity. Still, the “post” of posthumanism reaches beyond a purely critical stance, i.e. that of celebrating fragmentation and merely negating the Cartesian paradigm without providing an alternative. There is no doubt that apart from being defined as “the other of-,” which characterised the discourse of post-theory favouring such position over diachronic explication, the “post” of posthumanism is strictly related with an external factor, namely that of rampant technological development. Thus, posthumanism’s “post” combines two components: the influence of elements at least to some extent taken from the outside of the discourse itself, and the consequences of such influence in trying to define posthumanism. Quite simply, posthumanism does not exist without technology which to a significant degree informs the “otherthan-” approach to humanism, and hence provides a discursive alternative forcing one 36. The reason behind the use of inverted commas is that this very phrase was used by Jacques Derrida in a similarly apocalyptic context of the idea of the death of history, mentioned in the previous chapter. Contrary to critical voices, such as Francis Fukuyama’s, announcing the end of history, Derrida highlights the significance of conceptual transformations operating within a particular discourse: “[…] the end of history? […] It obliges one to wonder if the end of history is but the end of a certain concept of history.” Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx, the State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, & the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994), 9. 37. Laclau, “Preface,” vii 38. Neil Badmington, “Introduction: Approaching Posthumanism,” in Posthumanism, ed. Neil Badmington (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2000), 10.

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to eventually redefine the very concept of humanism as such. To put things crudely, the discourse of posthumanism is both about the aftermath of humanism determined historically by socio-technological development, and about the other of humanism, inspired by the consequences of this development. It is not a coincidence that the critical account of Cartesian ideals opens up the discursive space of posthumanism. On the one hand the idea of cogito, understood as an attempt to create a neat vision of an integrated, conscious and rational being, falls easy prey to a number of contemporary views locating the subject within environments totally beyond its control and more often than not beyond its very consciousness, too. Psychoanalysis and Marxism provide vivid illustrations here; the former stressing the fundamental importance of unconscious processes, the latter pointing to the determining role of social reality, both effectively depriving the subject of even an illusion of autonomy. On the other hand though, the Cartesian model promoting “the notion of a core humanity or common essential feature in terms of which human beings can be defined and understood,” 39 inaugurates the era of social, economic and, most importantly, technological progress which to a large extent has shaped the Enlightenment project of Western culture, the critical engagement with which has, in turn, informed many postmodern debates. In this respect, ideas triggered by Cartesian philosophy still remain, if not stimulating, then at least provocative. One area of Cartesian “core humanity” seems particularly relevant for this study, namely Descartes’ account of the uniquely human capability to make reliable judgements based on the power of reason which is the “power of judging well and distinguishing the true from the false.” 40 Even though the notion of truth has suffered severe blows from a number of contemporary critical standpoints, the issue still constitutes an important landmark of the postmodern horizon due to the way it is interpreted and approached—the true/false distinction has been replaced by the authentic/artificial one. This particular shift has turned out to be inseparably bound up with the discourse of technology, which, in a truly apocalyptic manner, provokes representational practices such as cyberpunk narratives, while simultaneously stressing those narratives’ critical determination in dissolving Cartesian binarities. These questions, however, constitute the subject matter of the next chapter.

39. Kate Soper, Humanism and Anti-Humanism (La Salle, Ill.: Open Court, 1986). Quoted in: Neil Badmington “Introduction: Approaching Posthumanism,” in Posthumanism, ed. Neil Badmington (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2000), 4. 40. René Descartes, Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting One’s Reason and Seeking the Truth in the Sciences (1637), in Descartes: Selected Philosophical Writings, ed. and trans. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothhoff, Dugald Murdoch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 20. Quoted in: Neil Badmington, “Introduction: Approaching Posthumanism,” in Posthumanism, ed. Neil Badmington (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2000), 3.

Chapter Three Technology Unbound All things change in a dynamic environment. Your effort to remain what you are is what limits you. — Puppet Master, Ghost in the Shell 1

1. Technology and the Social Any attempt to comprehensively characterise the significance of technological development for the contemporary cultural condition of the Western world seems barely possible. Implicitly or explicitly, technology infiltrates all spheres of social and private existence, cutting across the whole range of diverse phenomena, from politics and medicine to architecture and communication, thus rendering any effort to grasp it exhaustively a monumental enterprise. This unprecedented scope of technological ubiquity does not mean, however, that technology is approached as an unproblematic phenomenon. On the contrary; technologically-based relationships pose a number of questions touching upon both the social and philosophical consequences of the rampant development of the mechanical and the electronic. A conviction of technology’s formative role in structuring the human environment necessarily results in questions regarding the relationship between this environment and its inhabitant—the human subject. It is not only through the visible everpresence of technology that this relationship is legitimised; a number of discursive and theoretical claims reveal a similar conviction. Suffice it to quote Paul Virilio, who states that “the riddle of science and technology has tended in its development to replace the riddle of Nature.” 2 Against the background of such views, radical as they sometimes happen to be, one might be tempted to analyse the current state of affairs in terms of sudden, if not unexpected, explosion of technological omnipresence instigating revolutionary changes as rapid as they are unanticipated. Yet to consider the contemporary status quo as a new situation, totally separated from a diachronic continuum, could lead to a number of oversimplifications in coming to terms with the condition of the here-and-now as viewed from the technological perspective. It is therefore the purpose of this chapter to contextualise current technological relations by providing a socio-historical framework against the background of which those relations are viewed and analysed. The main emphasis is, however, not so much 1. Mamoru Oshii, Ghost in the Shell, Production I. G., Japan, 1995. 2. Paul Virilio, Sylvere Lotringer, Pure War, trans. Mark Polizzotti and Brian O’Keeffe (New York: Semiotext(e), 1997), 28.

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on the history of scientific progress itself as on both collective and individual reception and attempts to theorise the progress in question. “We cannot think any longer of man without a machine,” 3 declares Bruce Mazlish introducing his theory of the vanishing discontinuity between the human and the technological, and few catchphrases seem to grasp the transformation in question more precisely. Though merely pointing at the tip of the iceberg of the symbiosis under discussion, Mazlish’s claim nevertheless topically summarises a cultural moment informed by the expiry of a traditional Cartesian dichotomy between the organic and the mechanical. His argument is made from a broader background; he sees the disappearance of this particular binarity in the context of other fading dichotomies between the human subject and its techno-environment. The disappearance of the border between man and machine clearly coincides with the emergence of the Information or Postindustrial Society which will be discussed here in the light of Fredric Jameson’s critical account of historical periodisation conducted by Daniel Bell. Although, as Jameson maintains, the legitimacy of the term remains somewhat debatable, one particular characteristics of the postindustrial condition appears to be of great significance for the relationship between the subject and the techno-habitat. It is the essentially visual nature of the culture in question, first triggered by the invisible ever-presence of media technologies and then developed into a basic constituent of the spectacular nature of postindustrial reality. Guy Debord’s concept of the spectacle and Jean Baudrillard’s idea of simulation are subsequently analysed in order to grasp the theoretical location of contemporary visual culture whose obsessive emphasis upon “the visible, the all-too-visible, the more-visible-thanvisible”  4 necessarily results in a complex vision-identity drama. Mazlish’s statement, though catchy and seemingly univocal, still contains an implicit ambiguity which seems to underline the whole of technology-related discourse. The immediate denotation of “the man without a machine” is that of a bare, unequipped subject and, read in this way, the claim rightly points at technology’s increasing ever-presence which more and more blatantly contours contemporary modes of social existence. While the newly burgeoning data-transmission technologies remain largely invisible, private spaces are filled up by dozens of remote-controlled TVs, DVD-Players, smartphones, MP3s and other wireless devices, discreetly announcing the operational capability of their electronic blood-circuits through the red diodes of their stand-by panels. Yet, under closer inspection Mazlish’s statement reveals a less apparent truth: “we cannot think any longer of man without [thinking of] a machine.” Such perspecBruce Mazlish, “The Fourth Discontinuity,” in Technology and Culture, eds. Melvin Kranzberg, Wiliam H. Davenport (New York: New American Library, 1972), 229. 4. Jean Baudrillard, The Ecstasy of Communication, trans. Bernard Schutze, Caroline Schutze (New York: Semiotext(e), 1988), 22.

3.



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tive displays a much more complex nature of the man-machine relationship which reaches far beyond technology’s solely supportive character, in which it is limited to representations and the presence of devices facilitating data circulation, interpersonal communication or car safety. No longer represented as tools but as complex though often invisible systems, technology provides the very foundation of the basic social and economic structures. And since the evolution of the Western mind is strictly related to the development and implementation of technology, Mazlish himself sees the modern machine as an essential factor constituting the ground for identity formation. Inspired by Freud’s account of the three “ego-smashing” discontinuities between human beings and the natural environment, and the way they were gradually eliminated,5 Mazlish adds his own part concerning the disappearance of the fourth discontinuity; this time the one between the human and the technological. For Freud the three major blows bestowed upon the ego consequently disrupted the illusion of man’s privileged and unique position and deprived the human being of the sense of both individuality and dominance. As a result of this peculiar shift in attitude, a number of external and extra-bodily factors came to the fore in the discourse of identity construction. The first of the eliminated discontinuities referred to Copernicus’ discovery which abolished the gap between the terrestrial world and the remaining part of the physical universe. Yet, challenging the geocentric paradigm and eventually replacing it with a heliocentric one could not take place without simultaneously depriving the subject of its supposedly central location in the universe and consequently rearranged the ego-centric world view. Though the idea that the green planet is an appropriately-placed part of the universe represented a major scientific advance, the fact that this place was a peripheral one provided a bitter shock to the ego. Copernicus’ discovery deprived the Earth of the central and hence dominant location in the universe at the same time degrading its inhabitants from the status of masters to that of mere elements in the complex operations of the solar system. The second successfully eliminated discontinuity concerned man’s illusory supremacy over the animal kingdom. After Copernicus, Darwin’s evolution theory further weakened the ego, already recovering from the shock brought about by the heliocentric paradigm. By locating the human within the biological and the organic instead of the sublime and the conceptual, man was “robbed […] of his peculiar privilege of having been specially created and relegated him to a descent from the animal kingdom.” 6 Already a minor ingredient of the solar system, man’s earthly position turned out to be determined by yet another network, this time questioning human advantaged stance over the supposedly inferior realm of brute creatures. Sigmund Freud, “A Difficulty in the Path of Psychoanalysis,” in Psychological Writings and Letters, ed. Sander L. Gilman (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 1995), 269. 6. Mazlish, “The Fourth Discontinuity,” 218.

5.

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Thirdly, another claim to uniqueness and supremacy has been effectively erased by Freud’s own contribution, i.e., the discovery of the irrational mental processes which erased the discontinuity between the knowable world of the ego and the irrational, non-penetrable world of the unconscious. If human actions, particularly those directed at production of culture, are generally governed by unfulfilled and largely unconscious desires, it seems impossible to talk not only of mankind’s gloriously creative potential but also of a person’s mere ability to even monitor the inner operations of his/her own mind. In other words, the last bastion of human control, the powerful mind, suffered a severe blow shaking its very foundations and depriving it of the sense of mastery even “in its own house.” 7 Hence, in the course of social history the three major discontinuities between the ego and its environment have been dramatically abolished, yet, in the process, the idea of human control and the areas of human domination have been significantly restricted, too. The human relationship with the external reality is thus no longer viewed in hierarchical terms. Instead of determining the surrounding habitat from a superior position guaranteed by the presence of the discontinuities in question, individual location turns out to be conditioned precisely by the same environment which was previously thought to remain under human domination. Still, Mazlish maintains, there is more shocking news for the ego. To the three eliminated discontinuities he adds the fourth one, namely the erasure of the distance between the human and the technological. In view of growing technological ubiquity, Mazlish argues, the division into the living and the mechanical loses its relevance since technology ceases to fulfil the role of a subordinate tool, an object merely enhancing human control, but basically constitutes a sine qua non of life instead, and as such becomes a formative element in the process of shaping human identity. Such an approach enforces a thorough redefinition of the traditional assumptions behind the process of machine construction that habitually involves an attempt to transmit some of human qualities upon the mechanical entity. This transmission may ordinarily refer to human form, as the variety of cyborg figures illustrate, or to the specifically linguistic forms of communication with advanced technological systems such as data storage or computer programming. In fact, the desire to construct machines “in man’s likeness” reaches far beyond the contemporary technological fantasies represented by Terminators or Robocops and dates back at least to the 18th century when in 1738 Jacques de Vaucanson presented a mechanical duck “which quacked, gobbled grain from its keeper’s hand, flapped its wings, and excreted droppings.” 8 In 1772 a Swiss clockmaker, Pierre Jaquet-Droz, constructed the Scribe, “a life-sized barefoot boy seated at a desk [which/who(?)] would 7. Freud, “A Difficulty in the Path of Psychoanalysis,” 275. 8. Mark Dery, “Waging a Tinkerer’s War,” in Escape Velocity: Cyberculture at the End of the Century (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1996), 114.



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dip his quill pen in an inkwell, shake it twice, and write a pre-programmed text, moving to the next line when necessary. The automaton’s eyes followed the moving pen, giving it an astonishingly lifelike air. Among the Scribe’s repertoire of famous phrases was Decartes’ axiom, ‘I THINK, THEREFORE I AM.’” 9 Interestingly enough, the very same phrase was to be repeated over two hundred years later by Pris, one of the female androids, “a basic pleasure model,” 10 of Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, after having refused to perform a trivial robotic trick. Though much more limited in its/his physical capabilities, the Scribe nevertheless shares with Pris the desire if not to fully establish a non-human identity, then at least to receive some sort of recognition evolving beyond being perceived as however sophisticated, but nevertheless a tool. Mazlish’s postulate challenges the reductionist approach to technology-as-tool, cautiously questioning the claim to human dominance over non-human entities which has traditionally marked the human cognitive horizon. Still, under closer scrutiny his gesture seems much less revolutionary than it may appear at first. Rather than reversing the roles and privileging the mechanical over the organic, Mazlish’s concept places the human and the technological as co-existent. For him humans “are that particular evolutionary creature whose origins are to be found in both the animal and the machine kingdoms, with the animal and the mechanical qualities together incorporated in the definition of human nature.” 11 There is no doubt, however, as to the consequences of such a manoeuvre; already deprived of the central position in the universe by Copernicus, dominance over the animal kingdom by Darwin, self-mastery by Freud, and now of supremacy over the machine, the human ego, as Mazlish sees it, “will have to undergo another rude shock.” 12 Two important points emerge from the above-outlined theory. First of all, there seems to be little doubt that to talk of the merely technologised character of contemporary modes of social existence will simply not suffice. What seems to be at stake is a complex and consistent technological dominant which provides solid ground for a wholly new attitude toward the role of the inanimate in the process of identity formation, casting a shadow of severe criticism upon the apparently stable binarity of the born and the manufactured. Secondly, once the ego gets over the “rude shock” and begins to accept the ongoing interchange, a kind of psycho-mechanical feedback-loop between the man and the machine, it may start thoroughly analysing this relationship and, in the process, problematise its own nature, origin and quality. One of the far-reaching conclusions of Mazlish’s theory is that since the relation in question is so complex and multi-layered, we might perhaps be dealing not so much 9. Dery, “Waging a Tinkerer’s War,” 114–115. 10. Scott, Blade Runner. 11. Bruce Mazlish, The Fourth Discontinuity: The Co-Evolution of Humans and Machines (New Heaven: Yale University Press, 1993), 8. 12. Mazlish, The Fourth Discontinuity…, 218.

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with the invasion of technology, to which there seems to be very little resistance anyway, as with a visit, in fact a very welcome one. In other words, a number of technoqualities we usually ascribe to the mechanical may in fact be essentially human which would explain the growing prevalence and sophistication of various techno-symbioses, for example the advent of cyberspace or the virtual reality experience. Such a view would not only effectively eliminate the opposition between the born and the produced since both could now qualify as the constituents of the redefined natural environment. Mazlish’s attempts to come to terms with technologically-determined culture and to construct an appropriate subject-position are by no means without parallel. Though other efforts are much more concerned with establishing a modified historical periodicity recognising as its crucial factor the evolution of technology, they all share a deep conviction of the essential role of “the manufactured.” Alvin Toffler’s Wave Theory, for example, divides the whole of human history into three long periods, placing the present in the transitional moment between the Second and the Third Waves.13 The First Wave began some 10,000 years ago with the first consciously planted seed which commenced the age of agriculture and ended the hunt-and-gather, nomadic type of existence. Suddenly attached to a particular location and inhabiting first villages and then towns, people started to constitute societies and create culture in the more contemporary sense of the word. The First Wave lasted up to the 18th century and the Industrial Revolution which restructured social and economic paradigms culminating, as Toffler maintains, during the Second World War and the explosion of A-bombs over Japan. The Second Wave is best characterised by its “mass” embrace of social reality; from “mass” production initiated by Henry Ford to “mass” destruction represented by the morbid potential released by the nuclear holocaust. The Second Wave is not over yet. The virtues of mass production still provide the foundations of Western economic systems and guarantee their stability through franchised fast food restaurants, wherever-you-go credit cards and legendary clothes items. However, and for Toffler this signifies the dawn of the Third Wave, it is knowledge and information supported by social demands for individuation and differentiation (rather than pure machine muscle) that dictate both the pace and direction of the social development. Again, such a turn toward information-as-value would not be possible without a certain level of general technological sophistication and, first of all, almost ecstatic participation in and acceptance of the complex techno-systems operating in the contemporary Western societies. Still, the major difference between the almostgone Second Wave and the not-quite-present Third Wave revolves around the issue of resources driving and sustaining each Wave’s paradigm. As Toffler argues, resources of the Information Age are measureless in quantity since a bit, the basis of all digital information, can be replicated or downloaded ad infinitum. One should not fail to no13. Alvin Toffler, The Third Wave (New York: Bantam Books, 1981).



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tice here that such replication does not exploit the original in any way. What it in fact does is render the difference between the primary and the duplicated indistinguishable. Such replicability did not characterise the Second Wave; the number of Henry Ford’s automobiles, even though the original/copy distinction makes no sense in an assembly-line situation (and though—contrary to the famous catchphrase—not all cars were black), was largely dependent on the diminishable resources and man-power provided. Information, on the contrary, constituting the basis of advanced technosystems, is endlessly multipliable and as such guarantees those systems’ infinite existence powered by their self-replicating abilities. It is precisely the self-replicability of information which, coinciding with Toffler’s Wave Theory, co-determines the ontological status of the Information Society, which term in turn is often used interchangeably with the notion of the Postindustrial Era. And since the concept of postindustrialism inevitably points to its industrial roots, any attempt to define and contextualise the former demands even a brief reference to the latter. Hence, it appears necessary to trace the relationship between the two, the more so that the notion of postindustrialism is neither used univocally nor taken at face value.

2. From the Industrial to the Postindustrial Both terms, the industrial and the postindustrial, have repeatedly provoked the whole range of associations often used selectively in a way which stresses only one of each notion’s characteristics. Thus, “industrial” tends to be treated as synonymous with “mechanical,” while “postindustrial” often means the same as “electronic.” Such reductive simplifications seem however to ignore all of the socio-economic phenomena and their cultural consequences, which remain closely interwoven with the evolution under discussion. There is little doubt that what informs and conditions both terms is the unprecedented pace of development and implementation of technology, which began around two hundred and fifty years ago. Ever since technological relations began to profile social reality the icons of technological growth served as visible symbols of cultural progress and social differentiation: the factory, the assembly line, the power plant. Interestingly enough, as the evolution in modes of production became increasingly synchronised with revolutions in power technologies, from steam to nuclear, each era offered a living and individualised proof of its mass-orientation: a mass-produced piece of clothing, an assembly-line car, a portion of energy. The change in power technologies also instigated a transformation of the technological aesthetics; monumental machineries of the 19th century strenuously propelling early production cycles of the newly emerging factories have been gradually replaced by precise and sophis-

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ticated technological processes. These, in turn, have evolved into advanced systems of data circulation, the chief commodity of the Information Era. In effect, the evolution of technology paradoxically narrated its disappearance; the mighty industrial machine first shrank to the size of a mechanism and then turned into a signal thus vanishing from the visible horizon for good. As Scott Bukatman puts it: “[t]he newly proliferating electronic technologies of the Information Age are invisible, circulating outside of the human experiences of space and time. That invisibility makes them less susceptible to representation and thus comprehension at the same as the technological contours of existence become more difficult to ignore […].” 14 Signal, the key product of postindustrial technologies, still carries with itself an equal amount of promises and threats. On the one hand it seduces the subject with the temptation of invisible ever-presence and participation in esoteric structures of global circulation, a temptation which even the body cannot resist. The teleportation abilities of Star Trek’s legendary Captain Kirk vividly illustrate this desire: Kirk turns his own body into a signal to be able to immediately send it/himself to the most remote corners of the universe, joyfully ignoring traditional travel restrictions imposed by time, space and matter. On the other hand, however, technology’s invisibility and its disappearance from the visible fields of human domination causes a strong sense of lost autonomy, surveillance obsessions and a state of constant endangerment. Philip K. Dick’s prose illustrates this feeling of technology-related anxiety very well.15 Though hardly ever concerned with the technical details, Dick concentrates on the actual implementation of technology which almost always serves to create illusory realities through a sophisticated mixture of mind tampering and universal conspiracy. As a result, the very notion of reality becomes synonymous with an artificially devised construct, essentially mimetic though deprived of ontological stability and thus producing an unavoidable sense of existential uneasiness. Still, the severe dissimilarity between the majestic technologies of the Industrial Age and the imperceptible systems of the Postindustrial Era does not eradicate a certain 14. Scott Bukatman, Terminal Identity. The Virtual Subject in Postmodern Science Fiction (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), 2. 15. Among available examples, “We Can Remember It For You Wholesale” provides an illustrative outline of Dick’s typical concerns: Douglas Queil, leading a monotonous life of an office worker, undergoes a desired and long saved-for surgery during which he is implanted with memories of a mission to Mars in which he had supposedly taken part as a secret government agent. Soon it turns out, however, that his artificial memories are in fact genuine, Queil had really taken part in the mission the authentic memories of which had not been properly erased—hence his life-long obsession with the travel to Mars. It is his humdrum office worker’s life which is but an artificial construct designed to conceal Queil’s real identity. In other words, reality, both the epistemologically reliable and the deliberately illusory, turn out to be dramatically misplaced constructs, possible due to the discreet ubiquity of conspirational technologies—the more invisible the more effective. The story provided inspiration for a movie and its remake, both entitled Total Recall.



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continuity bridging both epochs. This is because in the background of both of them lay fundamental economic relations and the Western social order which to a significant degree have been shaped and sustained by technologies of industrial origin. Needless to say, the social order long outlived its foundational gestures such as James Watt’s steam engine or Henry Ford’s assembly line. The very moment of evolutionary distinction between the industrial and the postindustrial remains far from being a clear-cut caesura and by some critics is treated as a merely operational criterion. Fredric Jameson treats the term “postindustrial” as somewhat misleading as it is implicitly based on the assumption of the decisive role of technology which stimulates all alterations in social structures. For Jameson, however, it is not technology per se, but the consequences of its mass application, which instigate a new type of economic circulation redefining fundamental social roles and modes of collective existence. And it is precisely those primarily economic relations which are believed to have stimulated the emergence of the Information Society. Jameson bases his argument on the historical periodisation conducted by Ernst Mandel in whose opinion subsequent phases of technological development are inseparably bound up with corresponding phases of economic development. Mandel identifies three breakthrough moments in the technological-economic evolution: Machine production of steam-driven motors since 1848; machine production of electric and combustion motors since the 90s of the 19th century; machine production of electronic and nuclear-powered apparatuses since the 40s of the 20th century—these are the three general revolutions in technology engendered by the capitalist mode of production since the “original” industrial revolution of the later 18th century.16

For Jameson, each of the phases specified by Mandel coincides with a corresponding phase of the development of capitalism: the market stage, the monopoly stage, and “our own, wrongly called postindustrial,” which is a misleading name for “what might better be termed multinational, capital.” 17 Jameson questions thus the legitimacy of the very term “postindustrial,” which erroneously highlights the technological in favour of the economic. Writes Jameson: I want to avoid the implication that technology is in any way the “ultimately determining instance” either of our present-day social life or of our cultural production […] Rather, I want to suggest that our faulty representations of some immense communicational and computer network are themselves but a distorted figuration of something even deeper, namely, the whole world system of a present-day multinational capitalism. The technology 16. Ernst Mandel, Late Capitalism (London: New Left Books, 1978), 118. Quoted in: Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999), 35. 17. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999), 35.

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Still, Jameson’s point remains open to debate as it seems oblivious to one of technology’s vital features, namely its subversive potential for instigating cultural transformations. The critique of the legitimate use of the term “postindustrial” engages Jameson in a polemics with Daniel Bell who is credited with both coining and popularising the term. According to Bell, technology’s primary role in structuring the present status quo is not justified by its superiority over the economic, but by its barely controllable capability to inflict change upon the economic and the cultural alike. As Bell puts it, “technology governs change in human affairs […]. Hence, technology is always disruptive and creates a crisis for culture.” 19 Nevertheless, as crucial components of the postindustrial society Bell identifies three elements not necessarily of strictly technological origin: the shift from production to services, the central position of the science-based branches of industry, and the emergence of technocratic elites accompanied by new rules of social stratification. Summing up this necessarily shortened account of the debate revolving around the idea of postindustrialism, one might notice that the major difference between the critics is the proportions of attention devoted to a particular sphere of life determined by the economic, the social, or the technological—still, neither of them questions their interrelated character. While Jameson points to the significance of economic-technological relations (in this particular order), Bells stresses the fundamental significance of the technological-cultural sequence. Yet the most important consequence of this apparently superficial debate concerning the legitimate use of names is the conviction that both critics seem to share: technological, economic and social relations are undividedly connected and must be conceived of as a dramatically correlated, though often complicated, whole. In other words, what informs the notion of the Postindustrial Era is the complex mixture of social, technological and economic relations that establish the horizon of cultural operations. Still, the above mentioned polemics, though vital for establishing grounds for the contemporary Western condition, somehow puts aside the important cultural consequences resulting from the barely controllable mixture of technological potential and often subconscious social expectations. Of all those consequences one 18. Jameson, Postmodernism…, 37. 19. Daniel Bell’s idea of the postindustrial society is explicated in his book The Coming of Post-Industrial Society: A Venture in Social Forecasting (New York: Basic Books, 1973). The fragment quoted above comes form Walter A. McDougall’s book, in which he relates to Bell’s views. Walter A. McDougall, The Heavens and the Earth: A Political History of the Space Age (New York: Basic Books, 1985), 12.



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appears to be particularly related to the discourse of postindustrial condition: it is the essentially visual character of postindustrial culture, a feature which both effectively separates it from the industrial roots and at the same time one which provides a practical framework for the unstoppable process information/identity exchange.

3. Visions and Identities The pervasive presence of electronic technologies dealing with information transmission does more than merely facilitate various means of representing reality. Television’s ever-presence and its world-wide range has caused it to become part, often a significant one, of most people’s experiential reality, discreetly infiltrating our world-views, providing multiple images which are generally treated as reliable, their truth-value being more often than not taken for granted. As Scott Bukatman puts it: “[t]elevision, still the axiomatic form of electronic simulation due to its mass penetration and continually functioning national and global networks, can therefore not be regarded as presenting an image or mirror of reality […] but rather as a constituent portion of […] reality.” 20 As a “portion of reality” television seems to provide a convenient model of a certain socio-psychological mechanism functioning with regard to both public and private reception of televised images. Information does not exist without its medium. The very process of preparing a (tele)-vision imposes a number of limitations and requirements concerning not only the basic notions of time and space but also the image’s comprehensibility, its information content and the projected viewer. All of these elements are strictly connected both with the available technological capacity as well as with the existent ideological modes of portraying reality. Hence, the image which finally reaches the viewer is the result of a number of selections and choices invisibly stimulated by broader cultural phenomena, most of which remain out of sight and are often beyond the knowledge of the viewer. In the light of this particular process of image creation, the often claimed objectivity of visual information, especially in the case of news reports, seems a bit of a misconception. Leaving aside the room for various sorts of manipulations that this inbred subjectivity of information construction seemingly enables, let us take a closer look at some of the consequences of this particular merger of information and its technologically-determined origin. The Medium is the Message reads the title of Marshall McLuhan’s book,21 summarising the symbiosis of the two different aspects of television, the technological and the informational, whose fusion results in an increasing difficulty in separating the content of information from the form of its medium. The message has been replaced, or rather overtaken, by its visual representation to such an extent that its informational 20. Bukatman, Terminal Identity…, 34. 21. Marshall McLuhan, The Medium is the Message (New York: Bantam, 1967).

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quality has been significantly reduced in favour of its visual manifestation. Television possesses an inherent spectacular quality which, combined with its prevalence, makes it “the aesthetic model of the postmodern era […],” creating “[a] society in which images become a primary mode of devaluing the human and [depicting] the social […] through the deployment of images which emphasise their own spectacular nature.” 22 The prevalence, or rather bombardment, of images and visualised messages, made possible through the advances of electronic technologies, provoked Guy Debord to modify the notion of postindustrial society, and to call it the society of the spectacle. The first thesis of his manifesto, published as long ago as 1967 (somehow foreseeing the communicational acceleration of 1980s and 1990s), reads: “The whole life of those societies in which modern conditions of productions prevail presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. All that once was directly lived has become mere representation.” 23 Debord’s remark implicitly points to a certain break in the historical continuity of the Western order, dividing its evolution into before (“[a]ll that once was directly lived”) and after (“mere representation”). Such statement inevitably locates the break in question in the discourse of paradigmatic apocalypse understood as an irreversible and totalising change in the current cultural condition. And indeed, the change in issue, Debord implies, is of a truly apocalyptic size—“the whole life [lived] directly” has been replaced by its representational substitute, direct and unreal, which Debord defines as the spectacle. Inscribing Debord’s theory into the context of the apocalyptic discourse results in the conviction that what Debord really describes is, in fact, the post-apocalyptic landscape—one which comes after the moment of separation between the real and the represented. In other words, the moment of change which Debord identifies defines the spectacle in terms of its detachment from what “once was directly lived” and thus comprehensively questions the very possibility of the spectacle’s mimetic nature with regard to “life of those societies.” Informed by the opposition against “life,” the spectacle is deprived of all the features which could reduce its role to that of reflection, portraying or commentary. The spectacle loses its original inferior status which had arrested its potential by imposing on it a theatrical convention. It is no longer an object of observation to be contemplated safely from a distance underlined by the presence of a curtain. Instead, it moves a step further, irrecoverably abolishes the distinction between the stage and the audience and eventually eliminates the barriers of both space and time by reaching a level of total ubiquity. In this radical process of rampant expansion the spectacle gradually becomes an autonomous entity since, with even the illusion of control gone, the audience moves further and further 22. Bukatman, Terminal Identity..., 62. 23. Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: Zone Books, 1995), 12, thesis 1. Emphasis Debord’s.



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away, no longer able to exert any kind influence upon the essentially spectacularised nature of reality. In other words, the spectacle becomes a totally independent and unrelated performance, its very omnipresence narrating what Debord refers to as “separation perfected,” 24 a violent disconnection between palpable existence and its representation—unrelated and indifferent. Debord explains the separation in question in the following way: The origin of the spectacle lies in the world’s loss of unity, and its massive expansion in the modern period demonstrates how total this loss has been: the abstract nature of all individual work, as of production in general, finds its perfect expression in the spectacle, whose very manner of being concrete is, precisely, abstraction. The spectacle divides the world into two parts, one of which is held up as a self-representation to the world, and is superior to the world […]. In this way the very powers that have been snatched from us reveal themselves to us in their full force.25

Though far from specifying the apocalyptic moment precisely, Debord nevertheless discloses its details in a descriptive manner talking about the “loss of unity” accompanied by the return of the “powers that have been snatched from us,” and which are, by implication, responsible for the apocalyptic separation. The act of separating the spectacle from all “that once was directly lived” is, however, merely the first one in the long series of phenomena taking place in such a doubly-coded and post-apocalyptic reality. The spectacle does not remain isolated in its own vacuum; on the contrary, it counter-strikes with a vengeance, and, through “all its specific manifestations—news or propaganda, advertising or the actual consumption of entertainment,” 26 persistently conquers new areas of life: politics, history, religion and identity. The world’s “loss of unity” results in the ever more increasing power of the spectacle. The spectacle returns in the aura of triumph. Released from the obligation to reflect or comment, it becomes a self-sufficient and self-referential construct “basking in the perpetual warmth of its own glory [and] cover[ing] the entire globe.” 27 The spectacle’s invasion follows thus the rules of successful colonisation; it strikes where least expected by presenting itself as both attractive and harmless. Gradually, it reaches beyond its original visual character, with which it is most often associated, and, in the process of subtle metamorphosis infiltrates the sphere of inter-personal communication. “The spectacle is not a collection of images; rather, it is a social relationship between people that is mediated by images.” 28 As a result, it becomes the primary means of social communication at the same time constituting its own reference point. Seen from this angle, the spectacle 24. 25. 26. 27. 28.

Debord, Society…, 11. Debord, Society…, 22–23, theses 29, 31. Emphasis Debord’s. Debord, Society…, 13, thesis 6. Debord, Society…, 15, thesis 13. Debord, Society…, 12, thesis 4.

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is transformed into the dominant currency of thought-exchange providing a convincing illusion of a consistent world view, “a world view transformed into an objective force.” 29 One of the crucial characteristics of the spectacle appears here. Despite its supposedly communicative nature, the spectacle seems to be characterised by its unilateral quality. It is, by definition, a viewer-oriented performance, at least at the initial stage of its reception, yet this orientation remains very much single-ended. The viewer is by no means obliged to either respond or consciously participate in the formulation of the spectacle, his or her role is reduced to that of a submissive observer, or rather consumer, of images. Response, which assumes understanding, is an undesirable reaction; the hidden law of the image is that of obedience and not of resistance. Henceforth, the spectacle discretely bypasses its supposed communicative foundation which assumes or even requires response as the sine qua non of any communication system. The very concept of response to the spectacle is simply considered irrelevant. The absence of reply becomes now not only one of the viewer’s essential characteristics but one of the basic features of the spectacle itself, further highlighting its self-referential nature. The spectacle paradoxically ignores the one for whom it was created in the first place; its product is simply not meant to be reacted to. As Jean Baudrillard has put it, “mass media fabricate non-communication.” 30 The viewer’s passive attitude results in a greatly diminished quality of inter-personal relationships which not only contribute to the ongoing separation from tactile reality in favour of its mediated substitute, but also, since contemplation of the image is a solitary activity, create significant gaps between individuals. As Richard Sennett has noted, “electronic communication is one means by which the very idea of public life has been put to an end […]. The media have vastly increased the store of knowledge social groups have about each other, but have rendered actual contact unnecessary.” 31 In the light of this statement, the society of the spectacle forms a peculiar, internally inconsistent community. On the one hand, the spectacle is a unifying element for all its viewers, the one that defines the society’s very existence and dictates the modes of its development. In a technologically advanced environment where experiential reality is completely absorbed by the spectacle, it indeed becomes a kind of autonomous “total performance,” the participation in which is not only involuntary but more often that not simply unconscious. On the other hand, though, each member of the society contemplates the spectacle individually. The resulting social construct emerges as a mixture which constitutes what might be referred to as a collective non-community produced by the bogus collectivism of the media. 29. Debord, Society…, 13, thesis 5. 30. Jean Baudrillard, The Mirror of Production, trans. Mark Poster (St. Louis: Telos Press, 1975), 169–170. 31. Richard Sennett, The Fall of the Public Man (New York: Vintage Books, 1978), 282.



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Analysed in terms of a total visual-social construct, the spectacle appears to be not only autonomous but also as possessing a certain identity, best illustrated by its essentially invasive character with regard to the sphere of intra-social mediations. The spectacle’s identity does not, however, come out of nowhere. It results from a necessarily passive participation of the viewer, who, colonised as much exhaustively as unconsciously, gives away a portion of his/her own selfhood in the silent act of acceptance and subordination. The relation between the spectacle and its recipient could be characterised not so much as a feedback-loop as a barter exchange in the course of which the subject trades his/her own distinctiveness for an illusion of control and the promise of active participation in the spectacular reality. The spectacle takes over the subject’s identity to only transform it according to its own spectacular rules, and then return it in as a ready-made product, thus solidifying the illusion of control supported now by the illusion of choice. What the spectacle offers is a secondary, mass-produced identity-image filtered through the delusive promises of accessible lifestyles, standpoints and gestures the reservoir of which seems inexhaustible. The spectacle’s topography is by no means homogenous. As a self-generating entity, the spectacle undergoes a series of constant metamorphoses and mutations following the infinite cycles of illusory choices which it promotes. The power of the spectacle lies in its potential for a never-ending evolution and transfiguration exemplified by the living proof of always new faces, styles, ideologies and bodies—none of them entirely original and none of them final. This provisionality of choice, inscribed into the very nature of the spectacle, seduces the subject with the promise of immortality. Paradoxically, however, participation in the spectacular reality is conditioned by the ineffectiveness of the subject’s choices which must remain unsatisfactory and inconsistent. It is only then that they will have to be corrected or modified, and therefore sustain the evergrowing scope of spectacular operations and exchanges it offers. Such emphasis upon the replicability of the spectacle-based reality, stimulated by inexhaustible consumption cycles, inevitably brings back Fredric Jameson’s remarks concerning the significance of economic relations in the constitution of the postindustrial condition. It is precisely the circulation of capital combined with invisible presence of visual technologies which determines the spectacle’s modus operandi—successfully masking its technological origin, the spectacle appears as a naturally dynamic entity whose mode of existence seems barely connected with the less apparent structures of the Western order, such as the invisible cycles of capital exchange. In fact, the spectacle, somehow coinciding with Jameson’s primacy of economic relationships, constitutes the ultimate postindustrial phenomenon par excellence. The spectacle is an effect of a complex network of technological, cultural, and economic interactions whose absolute, though often invisible, proximity constitutes the spectacle’s natural environment. This is how Debord illustrates the nature of the spectacle from the economic perspective: “[t]he self-movement of the spectacle consists in this: it arrogates to itself

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everything that in human activity exists in a fluid state so as to possess it in a congealed form […] In these signs we recognise our old enemy the commodity, which appears at first sight a very trivial thing, and easily understood, yet which is in reality a very queer thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties.” 32 “Our old enemy the commodity” is thus seen as a primordial driving force initiating the whole mechanism of the endless spectacle which, at the end of the day, is itself identified as the “chief product of present-day society.” 33 Importantly enough, the term “commodity” does not refer to a purely tactile quality of a particular object. The real nature of the commodity lurks in the extra-sensual; commodity reveals its character first of all in its micro-spectacular image which constitutes its fundamental part. The illusion of choice between unnumbered commodities/spectacles which forms a basis of the capitalist order is, in fact, the illusion of choice between identities generated by the micro-spectacles rooted in the very idea of the spectacular commodity itself. Still, this dynamics of consumption cycles is, in Debord’s view, impossible without the previous act of turning the commodity into a fetish. This is done by creating an individual spectacle of which the commodity itself is but a minor component: “[h]ere we have the principle of commodity fetishism, the domination of society by things whose qualities are ‘at the same time perceptible and imperceptible by the senses.’ This principle is absolutely fulfilled in the spectacle, where the perceptible world is replaced by a set of images that are superior to that world […].” 34 The spectacle, in terms of its relation with the market, constitutes thus a peculiar kind of commodity itself; not only is it the main product of the postindustrial society, but also the ultimate one as it contains all other possible products—present and the future alike. Debord’s account offers thus a fairly detailed description of the post-apocalyptic landscape, implicitly highlighting the spectacle’s violent mission. The spectacle fulfils the most important condition of the apocalyptic event: it irreversibly modifies the cultural landscape by usurping to itself the exclusive right to both shape and control this landscape’s mode of functioning as well as to totally dominate its inhabitants by invisibly forcing them to deal with the ersatz reality.

4. Maps and Territories In its broadest sense, Debord’s analysis views the spectacle in terms of a socioeconomic mechanism whose one and only goal is to control social reality to such a degree as to ensure the smooth and undisturbed operation of this reality’s consumption cycles. The spectacle’s main preoccupation is to create artificial demands which 32. Debord, Society…, 26, thesis 35. Emphasis mine. 33. Debord, Society…, 16, thesis 15. Emphasis Debord’s. 34. Debord, Society…, 36, thesis 26.



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could only be fulfilled through the act of consumerist participation in the spectacular reality. Genuine choice remains an illusion; the spectacle, characterised by its colonising disposition, conquers all areas to such a degree that it no longer aspires to reflect reality—instead, it becomes “a map drawn to the scale of the territory itself.” 35 The metaphor of the map is by no means coincidental here. Just as for Debord the map “is drawn to the scale of the territory,” for Jean Baudrillard “the map […] precedes the territory.” 36 Despite a great number of similar points, Baudrillard’s vision differs significantly from Debord’s account. After all, in the background of the spectacle lie economic relationships which turn it into an effective mechanism of social control performed through a process of sophisticated commodification of images. In Baudrillard’s view, the notion of the spectacle evolves into the concept of simulacrum, an entity of equally self-referential quality, nevertheless separated from the immediate tensions involved in power struggle. Although one can hardly ignore Baudrillard’s inspiration from Debord’s manifesto, there exists a significant evolutionary difference between the spectacle and the simulacrum. According to Scott Bukatman, “[t]he passage from Debord’s ‘spectacle’ to Baudrillard’s ‘simulation’ is precisely a shift from a state which constructs the spectacle, to a spectacle which now constructs the state.” 37 This comparison not only appropriately highlights the ideological context of both concepts (or, in case of Baudrillard, the lack of it), but also specifies the critics’ divergent views upon the phenomenon’s origin: Debord, somehow in conjunction with Jameson, stresses the economic roots of the spectacle, while Baudrillard implicitly and explicitly points to the rampant development of media technologies. The other difference consists in the language that they use. In the introduction to his book Debord openly states that “it was written with the deliberate intention of doing harm to spectacular society,” 38 whereas Baudrillard seems to follow the previously discussed posttheoretical mode of engagement with cultural practice, informed by the assumption that “it is not enough for theory to describe and analyse, it must itself be an event in the universe it describes.” 39 Similarly to Debord’s spectacle, Baudrillard’s simulacrum is defined as a totally self-referential construct. Still, if the spectacle was characterised by a subtle relationship with the latent, non-spectacular operations of socio-economic nature, Baudrillard’s simulacrum does not even aspire to such a connection. No referential sphere, however deeply concealed under the surface of economic pulsations, regulates its operations. Separation, so vividly characterised by Debord as “perfected,” attains real perfection 35. Debord, Society…, 23, thesis 31. 36. Jean Baudrillard, “The Precession of Simulacra,” in Simulacra and Simulation, trans. Sheila Faria Glaser (Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 1995), 1. 37. Bukatman, Terminal Identity…, 68–69. 38. Debord, Society…, 10. 39. Baudrillard, The Ecstasy…, 99.

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only in Baudrillard’s account: “the whole system becomes weightless, it is no longer itself anything but a gigantic simulacrum—not unreal, but a simulacrum, […] never exchanged for the real, but exchanged for itself, in an uninterrupted circuit without reference or circumference.” 40 The self-referentiality of the simulacrum is rooted in contemporary technological acceleration assisted by the unrestrained development of media and electronic technologies. For Baudrillard the acceleration has reached such a pace that it has propelled us to ‘escape velocity’, with the result that we have flown free of all the referential sphere of the real and of history. We are ‘liberated’ in every sense of the term, so liberated that we have taken leave of a certain space time, passed beyond a certain horizon in which the real is possible because gravitation is still strong enough for things to be reflected and thus in some way to endure and have some consequence.41

In agreement with Debord’s account, Baudrillard’s also seems to inscribe itself into the apocalyptic context opened by its intellectual predecessor. In fact, Baudrillard describes the critical situation even more vividly: what for Debord was a mere substitution of the real by the spectacular, Baudrillard characterises as a liberation “in every sense of the term”; an almost science fictional departure from “a certain space time” deprived of “the real and of history.” Interestingly enough, unlike Debord, who describes the apocalyptic moment rather than specifying it in time, Baudrillard is more precise as to when it actually happened. This is how he identifies the moment when history ceased to move on and, as a result of the prevalence of the void, “took a turn in the opposite direction”:  At some point in the 1980s, history took a turn in the opposite direction. Once the apogee of time, the summit of the curve of evolution, the solstice of history had been passed, the downward slope of events began and things began to run in reverse. It seems that, like cosmic space, historical space-time is also curved. By the same chaotic event in time as in space, things go quicker and quicker as they approach their term, just as water mysteriously accelerates as it approaches a waterfall.42

Still, somehow contrary to Debord’s spectacle whose modus operandi was defined in terms of conquest and invasion, Baudrillard’s simulacrum, instead of attacking the real, absorbs it, taking advantage of the vacuum pressure caused by the simulacrum’s total separation from the real. The void of the vacuum is filled up with pseudo-events provoking pseudo-comments, pseudo-identities and pseudo-history. Baudrillard 40. Baudrillard, “The Precession of Simulacra,” 5–6. 41. Jean Baudrillard, “Pataphysics of the Year 2000,” in The Illusion of the End, trans. Chris Turner (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), 1. 42. Jean Baudrillard, “The Reversal of History,” in The Illusion of the End, trans. Chris Turner (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), 10.



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suggests a reverse order of the simulacrum-reality flux: intensia instead of extensia and implosion instead of explosion, both stimulated by the irresistible captivation by the void. The operation of the void resembles a critical situation on board a plane whose passenger section has suddenly decompressed and all people, and all objects are immediately sucked outside with the speed of “escape velocity” while the plane, now empty, is left to crash. Baudrillard re-establishes the laws of simulacrum physics which, defined by “[i]nverse attraction by the void, rather than [by] attraction of solids by other solids,” 43 establishes the new matter-and-energy relationship in the abstract space of pseudo-reality. In fact, it is the radical reversal of traditional scientific premises which both constitutes the cornerstones of vacuum ontology and creates its deadly charm. As Baudrillard explains, “[…] it is this which gives our events this particular coloration, this flavour […] of emptiness, this inanity. Even as they occur, they might already be ‘vanishing events’—of little meaning because already heading towards the void. Running counter to the old physics of meaning would be a new gravitation—the true, the only gravitation: attraction by the void. Doubtless the most basic of natural laws.” 44 The void is not only characterised by its unlimited capacity but also by the inexhaustible potential of its suction power. Nothing can resist the “attraction by the void,” which with equal grace absorbs the past and the present, turning both into a series of absent, media-based events devoid of external referents. The void reveals a particularly deep irony in its treatment of history—the era of simulation abounds in events whose artificially fuelled significance endows them with a historic importance in the traditional sense. Each of those events, supported by an ecstatic comment, announces a dramatic change in the status quo of the real which nevertheless never happens. This situation narrates a complete reversal of history in comparison with the pre-simulation era which, as Baudrillard maintains, “brought about changes that were crucial, but did not appear to be so.” 45 The void paradigm is thus underlined by the desperate attention devoted to the act of monumentalising and historicising each event it manages to absorb, regardless of its real significance. As a result, it seems barely possible to distinguish between the vital and the trivial, since the occurrence of both is determined by their presence upon the simulational horizon, where “things no longer take place, while nonetheless seeming to.” 46 Just as Debord’s spectacle turned events into commodities, Baudrillard’s vacuum transforms them into trivial commentaries, shining for a brief moment before being replaced by another pseudo-event. 43. Jean Baudrillard, “The Ascent of the Vacuum towards the Periphery,” in The Illusion of the End, trans. Chris Turner (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), 18. 44. Baudrillard, “The Ascent of the Vacuum…,” 18. 45. Baudrillard, “The Ascent of the Vacuum…,” 16. 46. Baudrillard, “The Ascent of the Vacuum…,” 16.

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* * * The consequences of the essentially visual character of Western culture are not to be examined without considering the influence that this culture exerts upon its human components. As the spectacular space inevitably contours the subject’s environment, it remains of immense significance for the development of the subject’s identity. Much as one might be tempted here to question the reliability of this environment by negating the authenticity of its ontological foundations, the space under discussion nevertheless constitutes a visible horizon of human actions, and as such qualifies as an important element of the subject’s experience. What also underlines Debord’s spectacle and Baudrillard’s simulation alike, is, apart from their essentially visual-technological nature, both concepts’ totalising disposition. One of the major consequences of this particular feature is the impossibility of constructing an effective counter-discourse, which would remain in visible opposition to the all-encompassing discourses of the spectacle and the simulacrum. The ever-presence of commodification practices (Debord) and trivialisation strategies (Baudrillard) seem to successfully eliminate all oppositionality by annexing all contrary standpoints to the totalitarian territory of the spectacular-simulational culture, thus immediately turning the act of resistance against itself into its own vital component. Both Debord and Baudrillard identify a number of consequences which the spectacular-simulational practices exert upon the process of identity formation. What those practices’ one-directional nature results in, before other things, is the illusion of unlimited possibilities of self-reconstruction masking a growing sense of existential alienation. Debord describes this increasing remoteness in the following manner: “separated from his product, man is more and more, and ever more powerfully, the producer of every detail of his world. The closer his life comes to being his own creation, the more drastically he is cut off from that life.” 47 Participation in the spectacular reality, however unconscious and involuntarily, has thus its price: the separation between the spectacle and “what was once lived directly” locates the subject in the suburbia of its own existence. For the spectacle to function properly, the citizen, now turned into a viewer, must remain absolutely passive and consume its products without questioning the spectacular mechanism. “The viewer is always passive before the spectacle; the act of viewing amounts to the act of surrender.” 48 Passivity and acceptance of the spectacle’s ubiquity becomes thus a fundamental condition to be fulfilled by the subject in order to participate in the spectacle-based reality. The subject is gradually deprived of genuine and individualised experience, which is replaced by its secondary, mass-produced 47. Debord, Society…, 24, thesis 33. 48. Bukatman, Terminal Identity…, 39.



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and heavily visualised imitation, turning “the landscape all around [into] a television screen.” 49 Consequently, the subject’s lifeless passivity results in its disaffection; the act of viewing, apart from signifying the subject’s “surrender,” remains an isolated pseudo-experience infinitely separated from other kinds of social activities which could require conscious participation. As Baudrillard puts it, in the process of being absorbed by the simulation-based culture “each individual sees himself […] isolated in a position of perfect sovereignty, at an infinite distance from his original universe; that is to say, in the same position as the astronaut in his bubble, existing in a state of weightlessness […].” 50 The bubble metaphor aptly summarises the complex set of economic-technological relationships which constitute the latent background of the visual nature of the postindustrial condition and points to this condition’s consequences for the process of identity formation. The solitary bubble space-flight comes about as a result of a technologybased reconfiguration of individual space, with the technologies responsible for this rearrangement being as sophisticated as they are invisible. In fact, it is the consequences of those technologies’ discreet and pervasive implementation that narrate the ultimate cultural difference between the industrial and the postindustrial. To define the latter solely in terms of technology-related operations of late capitalism, one of whose consequences is the proliferation of visualisation practices, seems no longer sufficient. What characterises the postindustrial culture in general is first and foremost the emergence of a new spatiality defined in visual terms. For all the differences between Debord’s and Baudrillard’s visions, the emergence of the new space, all-encompassing yet invisible, seems to provide a bridge between both critics’ views. And it is the space in question which locates them in the context of apocalyptic narratives; both accounts identify the moment of disaster and concentrate their efforts on trying to grasp the post-disaster situation which, following the original apocalyptic prescription, has been thus revealed. Their attempts are, however, not limited to the mere description of the post-apocalyptic horizon. What appears to consolidate both perspectives is the situation of the subject whose position is suddenly reconfigured in this new, essentially technological and post-catastrophic environment. The emanation of the space in question is by no means unrelated to the situation of its occupant. The advent of the image/information paradigm instigated a fundamental shift in the subject’s frame of reference, a shift which did not characterise the industrial era. The transformation is essentially that of the status of the referent: from the tactile and the palpable to the abstract and the illusory, or, to be more precise, from the lived into the observed. Such conversion threatens to successfully turn the subject into Baudrillard’s astronaut, both protected and at the same time imprisoned 49. Baudrillard, The Ecstasy…, 13. 50. Baudrillard, The Ecstasy…, 15.

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in his bubble capsule, capable of observing the all-surrounding space but prevented from actually touching it. It is precisely the emphasis upon the significance of the very act of reception which not only stresses the subject’s passivity and alienation, but most of all forces it to contemplate the spectacular space in predominantly aesthetic terms, as this seems to be the only possible mode of engagement between the bubble prisoner and the extrabubble world. Still, to contemplate the real in a purely aesthetic manner does more than violate the traditional distinction between the real and the artefact, which have now merged into one; it also means to allow for the emergent space’s textual character. In other words, it was not only the notion of the real which underwent an apocalyptic reconfiguration that highlighted its visual-textual nature. The modes of interpreting such reconfigured reality have been changed as well and, since the visual-textual entity is a complex and a multi-layered one, the modes of coming to terms with it are necessarily modified, too. The problem of the textual manner of dealing with the real, which replaces the act of experiencing with the act of interpretation, provides an operational bridge to join the far-reaching impact of postindustrial technologies with the essentially textual nature of postmodern space, an issue which is discussed in the next chapter.

Chapter Four Textual Spaces and Spatial Textualities The Grid. A digital frontier. I tried to picture clusters of information as they moved through the computer. What did they look like? Ships? Motorcycles? Were the circuits like freeways? I kept dreaming of a world I thought I’d never see. And then, one day... — Kevin Flynn, Tron: Legacy1

1. The Ontology of Terminal Space There is little doubt that the immense proliferation of electronic technologies of the Information Age have significantly reshaped the contemporary cognitive environment, forcing the subject to redefine a number of notions regarding his/her experiential reality. And even though the ontological credibility of technological simulations is often approached with suspicion, the question of their authenticity must give way to the question of the authenticity of their experience. In other words, the issue of whether technologically determined simulations are considered real or not becomes irrelevant as long as the very act of experiencing them is considered real and authentic. It is the relationship with the subject, direct or indirect, which legitimises the existence of simulation. Therefore, out of the whole range of technologically mediated cultural practices, of particular significance seems to be the notion of electronically-defined space, understood as a ubiquitous realm of visual and textual representations, produced and sustained by invisible technologies. Though already approached in theoretical terms in the previous chapter, the significance of the space in question reaches far beyond the market-based contemplation of Debord’s spectacle or of Baudrillard’s media-related void. This is so because the space in question long ago ceased to function as a sphere of pure representation or a convenient accessory to the existing data storage technologies, thus fulfilling the role of a mere tool whose main function is to facilitate human efforts to cope with the postindustrial milieu. Such approach, derived from the paradigms of the industrial era, offers a very restricted idea of what a technologically-determined space is. Mark Hansen refers to such a view as a machine reduction of technology, claiming that “the aforementioned critical discourses constrain technology to the figure of the machine—a static and mechanical figure that is by nature secondary and pos1.

Joseph Kosinski, Tron: Legacy, LivePlanet/Sean Bailey Productions, USA, 2010.

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terior to the primary and constitutive movement of thought and to whose sway, consequently, it can pose no threat.” 2 Contemporary postindustrial technologies of the Information Age have passed through the mechanistic level of mere subjugation and control. Communication systems and data storage technologies combined with the ever-presence of mass media constitute the very foundation of the current social reality of the Western world, conditioning almost every aspect of its functioning. Their pervasive influence stretches onto the paradigmatic frames of the subject’s cognitive horizon. Remote controlling, wireless communication, data transmission, special effects and information everpresence have become indisputable elements of experiential reality creating the bottom line of electronically-defined space. Needless to say, the representation of the space at issue takes a variety of visualised forms. As Scott Bukatman defines it, the space in question “is entered through panalopy of computer games, [...] and the home, through the flight simulators used by the airline industry and the military and through programmes developed in the sciences [...]. It is the terrain of special effects and [...] videos [...]. It invades ‘real’ space via flashy, digitized graphics on TV: computer generated geometries or processed images-within-images, spinning across the field of the screen.” 3 As the above-quoted passage suggests, the electronically-determined space, apart from encompassing the already-mentioned concepts of the spectacle and the simulacrum, also includes the already well-established notion of cyberspace4 as well as a number of “virtual” spaces existing under the broadly understood slogan of virtual reality. Though there are some important differences between these notions, mainly concerned with the level of bodily and sensory engagement, their underlying features and technological origin remain similar.5 Hence, the phenomena discussed below refer to both of them, though not necessarily in equal measures. 2. Mark Hansen, Embodying Technesis. Technology Beyond Writing (Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 2000), 8. 3. Scott Bukatman, Terminal Identity. The Virtual Subject in Postmodern Science Fiction (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), 107. 4. The term “cyberspace” was first popularised as long ago as 1984 in William Gibson’s Neuromancer, long before the communicational acceleration of the 1990s, let alone the advent of the internet. William Gibson, Neuromancer (London: Harper Collins Publishers, 1995). 5. In fact, three main varieties of cyberspace are often mentioned in the critical circles: Barlovian cyberspace, the already mentioned Gibsonian cyberspace and Virtual Reality (VR). The first, named after John Barlow, refers to existing communication systems that rely upon a limited number of human senses engaged, as, for instance, in a telephone conversation. Virtual Reality, through the use of sophisticated multi-media equipment, involves a realistic feeling of being immersed in a real environment. Gibsonian cyberspace, characterised as a “consensual hallucination,” constitutes a fictional environment in which access to the infinite fields of data takes place through the use of highly specialised gear somehow similar to the one used in VR. The Gibsonian variant



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We might pause here, however, to note that even though the common ground of both these instances of virtuality is their technological origin, the concept of virtuality itself is by no means restricted to its technological foundations. Wojciech Kalaga, cautiously noting that “virtuality has always been here,” 6 addresses the issue from the broader perspective of cultural theory, warning “against limiting the idea of virtuality to the kind of cybernetic concept […].” 7 Approaching virtuality as a peculiar variation of cultural space, or rather space of cultural production, he sees it as a self-contained, though not necessarily entirely isolated, realm of dynamic relations between the actual and the virtual. The actual appears in the moment of entry into the virtual space, access to which “is through the most actual of actualities—the physical object.” 8 What Bukatman characterised as a “panalopy of computer games […], the flight simulators, special effects and computer generated geometries,” Kalaga defines as “objects invested—by individuals and communities—with chains of interpretive relations: monuments, museum objects, souvenirs […] or material vehicles of information […].” 9 In other words, virtuality as a concept is not limited to an advanced technological environment; it invades everyday practice the very moment an object triggers an interpretive chain and provokes an unstoppable process of signification, turning the virtual space into semiospace. In terms of their semiotic capacity there seems to be very little qualitative difference between the computer terminal and, say, a statue; both objects remain physical and their function is that of an interface—to release their signifying potential. This potential in turn, which is the modus operandi of virtual space, is to enable the emergence of relations “dependent on the selective, demarcative, and globalizing power of the interpretive universe, or logos.” 10 This necessarily shortened account by no means aspires exhaustively to present the theory in question. Its significance, however, lies in the fact that it identifies a sophisticated signifying process whose occurrence is often wrongly limited to electronicallydetermined environments but which, in fact, constitutes an indispensable element of everyday existence. This does not mean, however, that the connection between virtuality and technology is an insignificant one. On the contrary; not only does it create a point of departure for the above-outlined theory but it also serves as a topical model of the relations in question. Banishing all doubt Kalaga himself admits that thus somehow encompasses highly advanced visions of both Barlovian cyberspace and virtual reality. See: Mike Featherstone, Roger Burrows, “Cultures of Technological Embodiment: An Introduction,” in Cyberspace/Cyberbodies/Cyberpunk, eds. Mike Featherstone, Roger Burrows (London: SAGE Publications, 1996). 6. Wojciech Kalaga, “The Trouble with the Virtual,” Symplokē, Vol. 11, Nos. 1–2 (2003), 22. 7. Kalaga, “The Trouble with the Virtual,” 15. 8. Kalaga, “The Trouble with the Virtual,” 20. 9. Kalaga, “The Trouble with the Virtual,” 20. 10. Kalaga, “The Trouble with the Virtual,” 17–18.

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“technology has immensely enhanced our access to virtuality. It has greatly intensified the impact of virtuality on culture […], it is only with the technological wiring that a new kind of cybertextuality has become possible.” 11 Thus, having returned to the role of technology in the construction of virtual environments, for the purpose of methodological convenience we will consider all versions of electronically-mediated space to be comprised here under the headline of terminal space as proposed by Scott Bukatman. The concept is to some extent rooted in both William Gibson’s statement defining cyberspace as a “consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators in every nation,” 12 as well as in Michael Benedikt’s vision of “a world in which the global traffic of knowledge, secrets, measurements, indicators, entertainments, and alter-human agency takes on form: sights, sounds, presences never seen on the surface of the earth blossoming in a vast electronic night.” 13 Apart from the above-mentioned inspirations of clearly science fictional origin, Bukatman’s concept of terminal space also stretches onto the technologically-induced simulations as approached by Jean Baudrillard. These, as Baudrillard has it, came to replace the tactile reality with endless and seductive bombardment by media-transmitted images and perpetually replicating sign systems. In fact, this particular shift from the tactile to the digital, is seen by Baudrillard as one of the key characteristics of postmodern culture. Though seldom addressing things directly, Baudrillard narrates a radical change in the very location of events, namely their migration from the real-life, tangible environment into the hyper-real realm of representation. As he maintains: “[t]oday the scene and the mirror have given way to the a screen and a network. There is no longer any transcendence or depth, but only the immanent surface of operations unfolding, the smooth and functional surface of communication.” 14 In other words, Bukatman’s terminal space is born out of a pervasive recognition that a new, parallel and alternative spatiality has emerged, an experiential terrain, both artificial and unknown, man-made and infinitely vast, visible yet intangible. The notion of terminal included in the concept defines its essential characteristics; it is the computer terminal, no longer functioning as a helpful tool but as a metaphorical interface breaking the boundary between the human and the technological, allowing the former to penetrate the realms previously unexplored at the cost of being by those realms invaded. Terminal space, as Bukatman sees it, includes all kinds of electronicallymediated spatial and visual entities which not only challenge such traditional criteria 11. Kalaga, “The Trouble with the Virtual,” 22. 12. William Gibson, Neuromancer (London: Harper Collins Publishers, 1995), 67. 13. Michael Benedikt, “Introduction,” Cyberspace: First Steps, ed. Michael Benedikt (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991), 11. 14. Jean Baudrillard, The Ecstasy of Communication, trans. Bernard Schultze, Caroline Schultze (New York: Semiotext(e), 1988), 12.



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of space as up and down, forward and backward, but first of all, redefine the very notion of territory. Terminal space is therefore best characterised in terms of its indifference towards the ordinary measurements of space based on binary oppositions, so typical for the science of space description, i.e. cartography. The notions of east and west, north and south are totally useless as guidelines for the potential explorer, just as is the very notion of distance. Also, the fundamental idea implicit in any map, the representation of a tangible landscape, is absent from terminal environment whose existence questions the very necessity of map-making. Terminal space functions as a self-sufficient and self-referential entity freed from the need to represent and refer to anything but itself; it has itself become its own map covering its entire territory. As such, it constitutes the ultimate signifier par excellence once and for all liberated from the burden of the signified and absolutely unrelated to the referential sphere. The terminal realm is characterised by the “simultaneous over- and undervaluation of sign systems at a time when the sign is everything but stands for nothing.” 15 The space in question fulfils thus the Borgesian dream of the map entirely covering the territory16 at the same time forcing one to re-phrase Baudrillard’s notion of the map preceding the territory.17 Terminal space, which no longer precedes the territory but replaces it instead, constitutes the ultimate simulacrum, immediately reaching the final stage of Baudrillard’s transition from “profound reality” to simulacrum: “it has no relation to any reality whatsoever: it is its own pure simulacrum.” 18 Any attempt to describe this electronically-determined simulation has to allow for a number of paradoxes in terms of which the concept of terminal space must be approached. The list is topped by a peculiar unfaithfulness towards binary opposition. Though in theory originated and conditioned by computer-generated logic of the 0-1 type, in practice binary oppositions are totally by-passed. As there is no privileged source of origin, be it an ultimate computer or a universal mind responsible for the system’s internal regulation, terminal space appears to be a perfectly de-centred structure. Its net-like nature negates the possibility of a privileged and dominant discourse which could possibly operate within the terminal territory. The most essential consequence 15. Bukatman, Terminal Identity..., 106. Emphasis Bukatman’s. 16. Jorge Louis Borges, “Of Exactitude of Science,” in A Universal History of Infamy, trans. Norman Thomas di Giovanni (London: Penguin Books, 1975), 131. 17. Jean Baudrillard, “The Precession of Simulacra,” Simulacra and Simulation, trans. Sheila Faria Glaser (Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 1995), 1. 18. Baudrillard, “The Precession..., 6. Baudrillard describes four phases of the transformation of the image into a simulacrum: it is the reflection of a profound reality; it masks and denatures a profound reality; it masks the absence of a profound reality; it has no relation to any reality whatsoever; it is its own pure simulacrum.

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of the lack of source is the absence of a periphery, hence the opposition between the centre and the margin becomes irrelevant and is treated, if at all, with remote indifference. No element occupies a central position in the terminal sphere just as no element is sentenced to dwell on its margins. Governed by the logic of betrayal of its 0-1 origin and supported by the confusion in representation of such issues as high and low, terminal space also abolishes all kinds of hierarchies and related value systems. The space, at least in theory, is freed from the corruptive tensions which characterise power relationships. This is not to say that the notion of value does not exist at all in the terminal sphere. Yet, rather than being incorporated in some internally-functioning ethical or economic system, the very idea of value is reduced to the level of its local usefulness and becomes a temporarily existing little narrative whose effectiveness might only be measured in terms of its relevance, topicality, and the degree to which a particular local task is fulfilled. Not only does such an approach paralyse the functioning of a potentially stable value system based on universal criteria but it also results in the idea of temporality being now firmly attached to the very concept of value. Thus, the universal and the omnipresent has been replaced by the temporal and the local whose duration is determined by momentarily efficacy while its very existence is legitimised by its own little-narrative context. The other paradox characterising terminal reality is of an overtly political nature. Its net-like structure coupled with an indifference, if not hostility, towards hierarchybased value systems suggest the space’s democratic nature. In the absence of powerrelated preferences and exclusions, apart from the already mentioned local varieties, the notion of equality seems to dominate. There is clearly no doubt that the terminal space’s essentially textual character allows for a plurality of voices and points of view to emerge on the surface, many of which occupy contradictory or even hostile positions toward one another. Yet the terminal equality remains intact in the sense that access to no part of the spatial-discursive territory is privileged at the cost of other areas to which the access is denied. It is the same level of vulnerability and readiness to be penetrated through the act of entry into the space that guard its equality. Access is the common bread that all the particular sub-spaces share. On the other hand though, no part of the territory is given the choice regarding the desired region. The very moment a new portion of space joins the terminal reality, be it a new website or a media-transmitted event, it automatically becomes open and vulnerable to access from all sides, involuntarily becoming a part of the terminal discourse. In fact, the very idea of accessibility constitutes the space’s ontological spine, a pre-condition necessary for its existence, an ultimate sine qua non of its functioning. In a truly Lyotardian manner, the space is legitimised through the very act of penetration and subsequent use which effectively deconstruct any attempt to endow the system with a hierarchical structure. Long gone is the qualitative autonomy of information:



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“thermonuclear weapons systems and soft drink commercials coexist in an overlit realm ruled by advertising and pseudoevents, science and pornography.” 19 The governing rule behind the terminal space appears thus to be as much democratic as it is totalitarian, offering a compulsory equality from which there is no escape. Ballard’s remark just quoted illustrates the disappearance of the border between the significant and the banal. The ubiquity of information, referred to by Baudrillard as “the information bombardment or cyberblitz,” 20 invading the contemporary consumer societies of the Western world has produced a confusing mish-mash of discourses, registers, myths, lifestyles, religions and identities. Terminal space operates beyond the landscape whose horizon is determined by the universal grand narrative of value judgement. In fact, one might risk the claim that terminal space’s accumulative and internally dynamic character denies the very possibility of a stable, non-relative, firmly grounded, and above all verifiable informational sphere. The polyphonic abundance of standpoints, voices, styles, languages, in other words, communication codes, turns terminal space into a perfect example of a postmodern phenomenon in the Lyotardian sense of the word. Following their own localised and temporal paradigms, each of the codes remains justified by its own micro-paradigmatic structure—isolated and incommensurable with the other ones, still secured by the very language which it uses to express itself. Though in his description of the postmodern condition Lyotard tends to concentrate on the new status of knowledge rather than on the immediate consequences of the techno-development, his account of the situation might as well serve as the depiction of terminal space in terms of its multilingual potential. Writes Lyotard: New languages are added to the old ones, forming suburbs of the old town […]. [W]e can add to the list: machine languages, the matrices of game theory, new systems of musical notation […], the language of the genetic code, graphs of phonological structures, and so on. We may form a pessimistic impression of this splintering: nobody speaks all of those languages, they have no universal metalanguage, the project of the system-subject is a failure […]. That is what the postmodern world is all about. Most people have lost the nostalgia for the lost narrative. It in no way follows that they are reduced to barbarity. What saves them from it is their knowledge that legitimation can only spring from their own linguistic practice and communicational interaction.21 19. J. G. Ballard, “Introduction to Crash,” Re/Search 8/9 (1984), 96. Available at: http://www.ballardian.com/introduction-to-crash 20. Jean Baudrillard, “Design and Environment, or How Political Economy Escalates into Cyberblitz,” in For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign, ed. and trans. Ch. Levin (St. Louis: Telos Press, 1981), 29. Emphasis Baudrillard’s. 21. Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington, Brian Massumi (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), 40–41.

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As the latter part of the above quote suggests, if there is any common ground for this polyphonic diversity, it is a pervasive sense of loss of the protective shelter of universal narrative. This loss, however, can only be contemplated on a theoretical level—none of the selection of available and self-legitimising horizons seem wide enough to offer a bird’s-eye view of the situation. Such a pervasive sense of loss inevitably situates the terminal realm in the apocalyptic context. Interestingly enough, the apocalypse in question differs from the popular image of all-out destruction since it appears as exactly the opposite—it is an apocalypse of surplus and abundance, of congestion rather than desolation, of wild and rampant multiplication and not of annihilation. To the apocalyptic landscape as delineated so far, Lyotard adds another cornerstone: not only is the situation seemingly irreversible, exerting its totalising influence upon all constituents of the newly revealed, postapocalyptic condition, but also, if not primarily, one which forces the subject to first solitarily contemplate the confusing environment and then single-handedly reconstruct its foundations. This reconstruction, however, takes place without the comforting protection of a grand narrative.

2. Hypertext: Poststructuralist Theory into Terminal Practice Although the depiction of terminal space as presented above may give the impression that the space under discussion is defined in predominantly visual terms, a closer look will also reveal a strong textual component. It is not only the image that provides a metaphor of the technologically defined space. One of the most interesting areas of the terminal territory is the realm of electronic writing or computer-driven textuality, referred to as hypertext. The significance of hypertextual space is of a twofold nature. On the one hand it offers a topical hands-on illustration of the theoretical postulates described previously and attributed to the concept of terminal space as a finite entity, with particular regard to the concept’s technological background. On the other hand though, few other areas of the terminal realm narrate such a close convergence of critical theory and everyday practice as the area of computer textuality. Finally, the emergence of hypertextuality marks a certain turning point in the history of print culture, in fact a dramatic one. What the advent of hypertext implicitly narrates is, to put it in a nutshell, the end of Gutenbergian tradition whose tactile products, in a manner somehow coinciding with Baudrillard’s claim of the postmodern shift from the tactile to the digital, are  suddenly accompanied by a troublesome digital alternative. One might pause here to briefly examine the moment in terms of a thorough change stimulated by rampant techno-growth, i.e., in terms of a paradigmatic apocalypse— the withering of the old and the birth of the new. Obviously, to announce the irreversible end of print culture would definitely be a bold move; still, what may be at stake



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is the dawn of a consistent textual alternative whose practical consequences are further empowered by a large number of theoretical claims. These claims in turn redefine such fundamental poststructuralist concepts as the text, the author and the reader from a new perspective. Hypertext inscribes itself in the apocalyptic context understood in literal terms—not as a symbol of an all-out disaster, in this case of print culture, but as a revelation of an additional mode of coming to terms with the text itself. This is so because computer-assisted textuality is no longer seen as a threat to the linguistic sign but as a promise instead: what becomes revealed in the emergent hypertextual praxis is both the potential and the new quality of textual exchanges. The origin of what came to be later known as hypertext dates back to 1945 when Vannevar Bush, one of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s wartime science advisers, published an article suggesting the possibility of inventing machines for storage and retrieval of information, which process would be based on association rather that on traditional methods of classification. Such a device would not only increase the speed of information gathering but also enable one piece of information to automatically appear together with another one, equally pertinent and relevant. Memex, as the device was called, would use translucent screens, levers and motors, which in turn would allow the reader to link information on a microfilm. Yet it was not until 1965 that the term “hypertext” was coined by Theodore H. Nelson who defined this new entity in the following way: “by hypertext I mean non-sequential writing—text that branches out and allows choices to the reader, best read at an interactive screen. As popularly conceived this is a series of text chunks connected by links which offer the reader different pathways.” 22 As the 1960s and 1970s welcomed the advent and widespread introduction of digital computing, “it soon became clear that a new textual technology had arrived, potentially more flexible and powerful than any preceding medium. Digital systems for information storage and retrieval, popularly known as databases, signified new ways of using textual material.” 23 What also needs to be mentioned is that within today’s context of advanced computer and communication sciences the hypertext model has inspired the technology of the World Wide Web, popularly referred to as the internet. George P. Landow, in his thorough and extensive study of hypertext, significantly subtitled The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology,24 begins his lengthy elaboration of the concept by pointing to a seemingly unexpected 22. Theodor H. Nelson, as quoted by George P. Landow in Hypertext: The Convergence of Contemporary Theory and Technology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 4. Emphasis Nelson’s. 23. Espen J. Aarseth, Cybertext. Perspectives on Ergodic Literature (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 10. 24. George P. Landow, Hypertext: The Convergence of Contemporary Theory and Technology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992).

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conviction which is shared by the writers on hypertext and those mainly preoccupied with contemporary theory: […] one theme appears in both writings on hypertext [...] and in contemporary critical theory—the limitations of print culture, the culture of the book. Bush and Barthes, Nelson and Derrida, like all theorists of these perhaps unexpectedly intertwined subjects, begin with the desire to enable us to escape the confinements of print. This common project requires that one first recognises the enormous power of the book, for only after we have made ourselves conscious of the ways it has formed and informed our lives can we seek to pry ourselves from some of its limitations.25

Yet what seems to provide a real point of convergence between both areas is, to quote Landow again, the assumption that “critical theory promises to theorise hypertext and hypertext promises to embody and thereby test aspects of theory, particularly those concerning textuality, narrative, and roles or functions of reader and writer.” 26 Hence, somewhat ironically, the practical embodiment of some of the most essential poststructuralist ideas concerning the widely understood notion of textuality seems to have come from the least expected direction; from the realm of electronic technology and the sciences, by many still approached in terms of their opposition to the humanities. Even though to provide an exhaustive definition of the text as seen from the poststructuralist angle seems impossible, one feature appears to be shared by a number of critics, from Barthes to Lacan to Derrida: namely, the essentially metaphorical nature of the language they use in order to grasp the barely graspable entity of the text. Roland Barthes’s classic description might serve as an illustration of this point. Apart from its stable position in the contemporary critical almanac, the description quoted below sounds particularly relevant due to a number of notions such as the network, the code and the system, which inevitably have computer associations. In this excerpt, written long before computer-assisted textuality was the concern of literary critics, Barthes seems to have somehow foreseen, or at least sensed, the text’s operational possibilities which were to be realised some thirty years later with the emergence of hypertextuality. This is how he describes the theoretical premises of an ideal text as seen from the poststructuralist perspective: In this ideal text, the networks [reseaux] are many and interact, without any of them being able to surpass the rest; this text [...] has no beginning; it is reversible; we gain access to it by several entrances, none of which can be authoritatively declared to be the main one; the codes it mobilises extend as far as the eye can reach, they are indeterminable; [...] 25. Landow, Hypertext…, 28–29. 26. Landow, Hypertext…, 3.



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the systems of meaning can never take over this absolutely plural text, but their number is never closed, based as it is on the infinity of language.27

Barthes seems to be clearly stating at least five of the ideal text’s features here: the network-like structure, the equal status of its constitutive elements, the lack of an obvious point of origin or source, the ability to move backwards and, last but not least, several directions from which it can be approached. One might add to this list the postulate that “[t]he text must not be thought of as a defined object,” 28 and, that it “asks the reader for an active collaboration” and thereby “attempts to abolish the distance between writing and reading, [...] by linking the two together in a single signifying process.” 29 Hypertextual praxis provides practical illustration of all of the features specified by Barthes. The least problematic one seems to be its net-like structure; no longer an idealised metaphor but an operational mechanism instead, the network constitutes the very methodology of organising the hypertextual environment, topically demonstrated by the internet. In fact, what the very term “internet” highlights in the first place, is the textual modus operandi of the system rather than its electronic background, therefore sustaining the primacy of textual exchanges in favour of purely technological determination. The equal status of the system’s constitutive elements corresponds to a particular strategy of text organisation, in which a particular text is composed of blocks of endless sub-texts—a quality Barthes refers to as lexia. Such perspective, radically questioning the possibility of a consistent linear approach, promotes the essentially intertextual nature of hypertext in which collection and association replace traditional methods of literary construction. This particular tactics brings about the notion of what might be termed as hyper-intertextuality; a quality produced not only by a simple merger of two or more sub-texts, but an entity which incorporates elements habitually considered external to the primary text. As Landow puts it: “[e]lectronic links connect lexias ‘external’ to a work—say, commentary on it by another author or parallel or contrasting texts—as well as within it and thereby create the text that is experienced as nonlinear, or, more properly, as multilinear or multisequential.” 30 Adopting the notions of multilinearity and multisequentiality—again, not as metaphors, but as the living reality of the hypertextual experience—necessarily results in the disappearance of all fixed and unchangeable internal structures. No privileged source, whether based on hierarchy or on chronology, regulates the system’s internal stability. There exists no cornerstone, no primordial website from which all other 27. Roland Barthes, S/Z, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1974), 5–6. Emphasis Barthes’s. 28. Roland Barthes, “From Work to Text,” in Textual Strategies: Perspectives in Post-Structuralist Criticism, ed. J.Harari (London: Methuen, 1980), 74–75. 29. Barthes, “From Work to Text,” 79–80. 30. Landow, Hypertext…, 4.

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websites spring. On the contrary, it is precisely the lack of internal hierarchy which both enables the dynamic and unpredictable operation of the system as well as it guarantees the existence of multiple directions from which the system can be entered. As an essentially intertextual system, hypertext does not privilege any of its infinite textual components, nor (perhaps with the exception of commercial websites) does it significantly facilitate or prevent access to any of its regions, thus offering a perfectly democratic textual environment. What is more, the reader/user’s choice may always be changed, since the system provides a continuous chance to withdraw and move back, usually at the click of a button. So, to explore the hypertextual area one can move not only forward but also backwards, or, once the conviction of its net-like structure has been adopted, to the left or right, or even up and down, with no limitations whatsoever. In other words, closely following Barthes’s prescription, the system “has no beginning, it is reversible.” The potential ability to move freely all around the textual field (left/right, forward/ backward, up/down), and hence joyfully to ignore the binary restrictions, results in the need to redefine the usefulness of such coordinates even as metaphors. They still appear to be rooted in linear methodologies which are engaged in a desperate attempt to define an entity which by definition escapes all attempts at a binary approach. In fact, the inability to clearly differentiate between the horizontal axis (left/ right) and the vertical one (up/down) seems to invite another metaphor—that of a 3D textual universe. It is precisely the 3D metaphor of a holographic nebula that Wojciech Kalaga adopts as an operational model of the text’s discursive existence.31 Though addressing the issue from the vantage point of text theory rather than analysing the hypertextual practice itself, he identifies a number of qualities and mechanisms that are shared by both textual realms, the tactile and the digital. The quality which seems of particular relevance for this study is the delineation of text as a peculiar sort of cultural space, “a culturally identifiable discursive density perpetuated through intradiscursive interpretation.” 32 Far from seeing the textual space as “a static conglomerate of meaning,” 33 Kalaga describes it in terms of a process of an uninterrupted series of dynamic, both textual and contextual, exchanges. The exchanges in question remain largely unpredictable and are legitimised by the space’s internal functioning independent of an individual reader’s interpretation. The reader’s mode of participation in the nebular experience is not that of a welcome visitor but rather that of an indispensable element, crucial for the space’s existence. Such a point represents a major development in the role of the reader, especially when compared with the ideas of readership as postulated 31. Wojciech Kalaga, Nebulae of Discourse (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1997). 32. Kalaga, Nebulae of Discourse, 146. 33. Kalaga, Nebulae of Discourse, 155.



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by Barthes. For Barthes, the role of the reader was essentially that of a co-creator of the text, the act of reading was the one which brought the text into being, with the reader him/herself guaranteeing the text’s unity. From the nebular perspective, the reader is no longer in the position of a demiurge drunk with the power of creation-throughcognition. On the contrary; the reader, or rather the participant in the nebular semiospace, does not give birth to the text any more but instead bears witness and takes part in the “ever mobile structure whose contours disperse into the surrounding field of textuality […].” 34 Seeing the text as a “site of transition where a continual exchange occurs […], a stock market in the economy of signification […],” 35 remains strictly connected with the notion of hypertextuality for at least two important reasons. First, through the identification of a number of seemingly hypertextual qualities in the very nature of the text itself, hypertext becomes inscribed in the broader context of textual operations which greatly diminish its technology-inspired outlook and establishe hypertext’s status as a valid illustration of some of the essential textual characteristics per se. Secondly, and perhaps rather tautologically, the essentially theoretical depiction of the nebular text, at least to some extent supported by hypertextual practice, narrows the gap between postmodern theory and postindustrial practice by placing both in the realm of non-material space. Still, this proximity should not obscure certain differences between the nebular and the cyber. Hypertext, though to a significant extent following the prescriptions of nebular semiospace, still seems restricted by a number of “practical” limitations resulting precisely from its cyber origin. Particularly suspicious seems the issue of hypertext’s decentredness; unquestioned as a feature of the holographic nebula, it poses serious problems when applied directly to a single hypertextual event. Though the system, as seen in its entirety, indeed appears to have no central or more privileged inner-structure, the very moment it is entered by a user, the search for his or her desired source becomes the organising principle for an individual hypertextual mission. Thus, the notion of a centre seems to have been largely localised and turned into a functional rather than a universal term. As Landow is careful to note: “[a]ll hypertext systems permit the individual reader to choose his or her own centre of investigation and experience. What this principle means in practice is that the reader is not locked into any kind of particular organisation or hierarchy.” 36 In other words, hypertext does not so much abolish the idea of an organising principle behind the textual process as it redefines it in little-narrative terms. The centre is thereby given a new status, that of a temporal, reversible and largely individualised function. This individuation, however, poses new requirements for the reading sub34. Kalaga, Nebulae of Discourse, 155. Emphasis Kalaga’s. 35. Kalaga, Nebulae of Discourse, 148. 36. Landow, Hypertext…, 13.

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ject, who can no longer remain a passive consumer of a ready-made textual product, but has to become an active participant of the hypertextual experience instead. Again, Landow puts it simply: “The multiplicity of hypertext, which appears in multiple links to individual blocks of text, calls for an active reader.” 37 Hypertext provides thus the ultimate illustration of Barthes’s dream regarding the writerly text while at the same time problematising the distinction between the one who writes and the one who reads by placing both actions upon the same territory and hence significantly blurring the boundary between them. In fact, in his essentially enthusiastic account of the newly emerging textual possibilities released by the hypertextual system, Landow goes even further and redefines Barthes’s separation into the readerly and writerly texts from a technological perspective: “[f]rom the vantage point of the current changes in information technology, Barthes’s distinction between readerly and writerly texts appears to be essentially a distinction between text based on print technology and electronic hypertext […].” 38 Much as this point remains debatable, one thing seems to pose no doubts—hypertext provides a disturbing experiential field for a large number of often abstract poststructuralist claims unexpectedly unifying theory and practice in an apparently unbreakable textual-technological grip. The convergence in question actually seems to release one more phenomenon of traditionally vital importance as seen from the vantage point of critical theory. Hypertext not only provides a palatable and working model fulfilling Barthesian conceptual assumptions, but it also significantly reduces the gap between the author and reader. The latter, almost precisely following Barthes’s idea, remains perfectly anonymous in front of the computer screen, while still being in position to directly shape and decide upon the path of his or her “traversal” textual journey: The presence of multiple reading paths, which shift the balance between reader and writer […] also creates a text that exists far less independently of commentary, analogues, and traditions than does printed text. This kind of democratisation not only reduces the hierarchical separation between the so called main text and the annotation, which now exist as independent texts, reading units or lexias, but it also blurs the boundaries of individual texts. In so doing, electronic linking reconfigures our experience of both author and authorial property, and this reconception of these ideas promises to affect our conceptions of both the authors (and authority) of texts we study and of ourselves as authors.39

Landow’s remark introduces another notion disturbingly present in the hypertextual system from the very beginning—the peculiar role performed by the subject involved in the functioning of that system. As has already been mentioned, one of the major transformations in the subject position, analysed from the point of hypertextual per37. Landow, Hypertext…, 7. 38. Landow, Hypertext…, 5. 39. Landow, Hypertext…, 23.



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spective, refers to the significantly reduced gap between the author and the reader. The term “user” appears to be much more appropriate now, as it combines the essential qualities of both. Landow characterises this new position in terms of transference of the traditional authorial competence onto the reader: “[o]ne clear sign of such transference of authorial power appears in the reader’s abilities to choose his or her way through the metatext, to annotate text written by others, and to create links between documents written by others.” 40 The hypertextual reader/user has thus been granted a significant portion of the power traditionally ascribed to the author, whose presence seems to have disappeared from the hypertextual horizon, or somehow to have dissolved into the digital matrices of the hypertextual system’s data bases. One may notice here a clear association with Barthes’s concept of the postulated death of the author. The important thing to remember, however, is that in the course of developing his argument, Barthes tends to see the author less and less in terms of a particular authorial figure and more as an artificially imposed strategy of interpretation—“to give a text an Author […] (or its hypostases: society, history, psyche, liberty ) […] is to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it with a final signified, to close the writing.” 41 Hypertext eliminates the author in a double way: first, by removing the actual writing body from the immediate hypertextual horizon, and then, much more importantly, by rejecting the very possibility of its even metaphorical existence in the form of one of the hypostases mentioned by Barthes. The second method of effectively eradicating the author is, however, possible only due to the multisequential and reversible nature of the hypertext itself. Landow explains it in the following manner: “[…] there is more than one way to kill the author. One can destroy (what we mean by) the author, which includes the notion of sole authorship, by removing the autonomy of text. One can also achieve the same end by de-centring the text or by transforming text into a network.” 42 Yet if one tried to look at the concept of the user as described above, one might note that apart from the liberating anonymity, the user has been granted the authentic, both practical and theoretical, possibility to create his or her individually-compiled (though not to be confused with his/her “own”) text. The scope of this newly-acquired writerly capability seems much greater than was possible with the traditional print-based technology, where the occurrence of a writerly text was more often than not a matter of a conceptual assumption behind the interpretation process. Nevertheless, even in the light of the new competence given to the hypertextual reader, one should bear in mind that hypertextual practices are of a primarily technological nature 40. Landow, Hypertext…, 73. 41. Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” in Modern Literary Theory. A Reader, eds. Philip Rice, Patricia Waugh (London: Edward Arnold, 1992), 117. 42. Landow, Hypertext…, 74.

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and as such contain at least some of the features attributed to the already-mentioned notion of the terminal space, whose essentially invasive character is difficult to ignore. It is precisely the inscription of hypertext into the broader context of terminal discourse that liberates the hypertextual practice from the status of a marginal technophenomenon whose functioning could be analysed without the broader, technologically-determined context. In other words, the hypertextual praxis as discussed above is not to be approached in the way an isolated and disconnected rarity, elitist but barely useful, might be viewed. On the contrary, the phenomena in question, though of fairly recent origin, narrate both the end of conventional textuality based on the Gutenbergian tradition and, at the same time, the dawn of a completely new mode of both creating and approaching the text; the movable type being replaced by a digital font. Needless to say, such a transformation—potentially questioning many of the notions closely associated with linear reading practices—not only raises a number of issues concerning the ontology, or ontologies, of the digital text, but also poses a series of problems regarding the status of the reading subject involved in hypertextual operations.

3. Cityscapes and Cyber-Realms The notion of hypertextuality, though presented above as one of the most illustrative variations of terminal space, by no means exhausts the space’s discursive potential. Defined through its ability to encompass all visual and textual constructs of simulational background and technological origin, the notion not only embraces such entities as cyberspace, Baudrillard’s simulacrum, and Landow’s hypertext, but seems to extend into the area of the contemporary urban environment as well. This is so because the postmodern city shares with the above-mentioned varieties of terminal space a great emphasis upon the visual and the artificial while at the same time remaining rooted in the whole network of economic relations whose operations to a large extent determine the modus operandi of the contemporary Western world. The present-day city, like cyberspace or the media-transmitted reality, has come to be constituted by multiple communication codes, incommensurable policies, mutually exclusive styles, conflicts and languages which are manifested through a variety of visualisation practices. In fact, the contemporary urban environment provides the pattern for terminal space as well as it constitutes its very origin. Quite simply, terminal space does not exist without the city, whose functioning is in equal measures regulated by restless info-circuits and the modified Cartesian motto: “I am seen therefore I am.” Such superimposition of terminal space upon the contemporary cityscape allows expansion of the scope of the former upon all representational practices filling up the modern-day urban locus. To Bukatman’s list, including “computer games [...], flight simulators, programmes developed in the sciences [...], special effects [...]



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videos [...], digitized graphics [and] computer generated geometries […]” one might add street hoardings, all sorts of visible and audible commercials and a large number of architectural manifestations. In other words, to think of terminal space in terms of electronic simulations only is to ignore the whole set of phenomena shared by both environments. This correspondence is topically illustrated by Bukatman himself when approaching the concept of cyberspace from the urban perspective. He sees a very close relationship between the two, defining cyberspace as “an extension of the urban sector located at the intersection of postmodernism and science fiction.” 43 To put it in a different way, he describes cyberspace as a particular variation of the urban environment. Still, the multifariouness and complexity of the cyber-urban exchange reaches far beyond the view of cyberspace as a mere extension of the urban environment; a reductionist view would immediately establish a simple hierarchy based on the chronology of emergence and thus restrict the interpretation of all cyberspatial phenomena to a matter of direct inspiration by the urban topography. What in fact seems to be at stake, is a sophisticated feedback-loop between both realms, a dynamic and largely unpredictable process of constant exchange, where the status of the inspiring and the inspired is not always very clear. In the silent background of this inter-discursive exchange dwells the human subject, exposed to and often forced to participate in an endless game of visual temptations, paradigm shifts and identity evolutions. Its self-recognition, necessarily taking place against the urban background, enforces a process of perpetual re-interpretation and re-orientation. From a socio-historical perspective, the city, in the course of its development from the industrial to the postindustrial, dramatically reformulates the significance of such cornerstones of identity as place, territory and locale. Much as the description of the postindustrial city from the terminal space’s perspective suggests the sudden if not unexpected emergence of a strange half-glass-andsteel, half-virtual construct, a closer look at its origin will reveal a strong relationship with the industrial predecessor. Though usually assisted by the image of a factory, the industrial city itself provided foundations for what was later to evolve into a contemporary urban locus. A place of dynamic inter-exchanges of the newly emerging social layers and the capital, the industrial city signifies a revolutionary leap forward in the history of human efforts to ignore restrictions imposed by natural laws. Governed by its own day-andnight cycle, providing shelter to a large extent liberating its inhabitants from the inconveniences of weather and temperature, arranging supplies of food, entertainment, knowledge and urban mythology, the industrial city constitutes a living proof of victory over nature and its pathetic attempts to establish and preserve the rhythm of life. 43. Bukatman, Terminal Identity..., 121.

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The victory is confirmed by a banal product of geometry—the ninety-degree angle. Barely existent in nature, it became the basic element of urban planning, dividing the city space into a network of buildings, streets and avenues. The ultimate expression of the industrial city’s triumph over nature is the idea of a park. As a piece of natural environment forever imprisoned in the urban landscape, its functioning and survival are totally dependent on the action of relevant city services. Nature’s dramatic potential is pacified irreversibly and forced into the frames of a landscape determined by a ninety-degree angle. The primordial survival site turns into a safe area of trivial entertainment covered with scars of paths and footways. In this context, the act of fencing parks off and closing them after 10pm, a practice common in England to this day, appears to be a perverse gesture of urban victory solidifying nature’s defeat by locking it up in a place from which there is no escape anyway. The evolution of construction technologies resulted in a redefinition of the modernist assumptions about space organisation. Gradually, the ideals of rational utilisation of space, based on separating such seemingly unrelated activities as work, consumption or entertainment, fell pray to the rampant and barely controlled development of the postindustrial metropolis. As Charles Jencks maintains, modernist architecture lasted as long as the early 1970s and its decline coincides with the demolition of neat and idealised housing schemes, such as that of Pruitt-Igoe, in St Louis: Modern architecture died in St Louis, Missouri on July 15, 1972 at 3.32pm (or thereabouts) when the infamous Pruitt-Igoe scheme […] was given the final coup de grace by dynamite […]. Pruitt-Igoe was constructed according to the most progressive ideals […]. It consisted of elegant slab blocks […]. It had a separation of pedestrian and vehicular traffic, the provision of play space, and local amenities such as laundries, crèches and gossip centres—all rational substitutes for traditional patterns. Moreover, its Purist style, its clean, salubrious hospital metaphor, was meant to instil, by good example, corresponding virtues in its inhabitants.44

The demolition of the ideal of urban functionality could thus be seen as a moment of symbolic architectural transition signalling the end of the modern/industrial vision of space arrangement and the dawn of the postmodern/postindustrial urbanity. Few moments of contemporary cultural history provide such literally apocalyptic associations. Contrary to the previously described moments of apocalyptic revelation which came as mostly invisible moments of paradigmatic, rather than palpable, change, the spectacular demolition of the icon of an architectural order effectively combines both apocalyptic components—that of the withering of the old in order to make room for the new. And although the new in question did not appear overnight, one might risk the claim that it is with a such a climactic moment as the Pruitt-Igoe demolition 44. Charles Jencks, The Language of Post-Modern Architecture, in The Icon Critical Dictionary of Postmodern Thought, ed. Stuart Sim (Cambridge: Icon Books, 1998), 81.



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that the modern city, rooted in the rational paradigms of the industrial era, evolved into a postmodern urban entity, referred to by Melvin Webber as the “non-place urban realm.” 45 The apparent contradiction within the term in fact narrates a significant shift in thinking of the city which is no longer approached in view of its attachment to a particular land surface. The concept of “non-place” separates the idea of the city from that of locality—geographical, historical or cultural—in terms of which the city had been approached before. What Webber postulates is a much more dynamic vision of the city to which he refers as “a social process operating in space,” 46 defined by the participation in information circuits produced and sustained by electronic technologies and communication systems. Seen from the traditional standpoint, the postmodern city of the Information Era is thus liberated from the ballast restraining it to the tactile realm of locality. Instead, it floats in the zero gravity condition sustained by the endless flow and production of information. Still, to uphold this new urban entity, conventional urban structures are no longer needed. For Baudrillard, the decline of rational paradigms of space organisation signifies the emergence of a new architectural dominant which effectively abolishes all external and internal obstacles to urban growth. Using the contemporary American urban landscape as the illustration of his point, he identifies a new mission for postmodern architecture: No, architecture should not be humanized. Anti-architecture, the true sort […], the wild, inhuman type that is beyond the measure of man was made here—made itself here—in New York, without considerations of setting, well-being, or ideal ecology. It opted for hard technologies, exaggerated all dimensions, gambled on heaven and hell… 47

Elsewhere, while describing the virtual character of the Los Angeles area, he writes: Thus the only tissue of the city is that of the freeways, a vehicular, or rather an incessant transurbanistic, tissue, the extraordinary spectacle of these thousands of cars moving at the same speed, in both directions, headlights full on in broad daylight […] coming from nowhere, going nowhere: an immense collective act, rolling along, ceaselessly unrolling, without aggression, without objectives—transferential sociality, doubtless the only kind in a hyperreal, technological, soft-mobile era, exhausting itself in surfaces, networks and soft technologies […]. No verticality or underground, no intimacy or collectivity, no streets or facades, no centre or monuments: a fantastic space, a spectral and discontinuous succession of all the various functions, of all signs with no hierarchical 45. Melvin M. Webber, “The Urban Place and the Nonplace Urban Realm,” in Explorations into Urban Structure, ed. Melvin M. Webber et al. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1964), 89. Quoted in: Scott Bukatman, Terminal Identity. The Virtual Subject in Postmodern Science Fiction (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), 122. 46. Webber, “The Urban Place…,” 89. 47. Jean Baudrillard, America (London: Verso, 2000), 17.

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ordering—an extravaganza of indifference, extravaganza of undifferentiated surfaces— the power of pure open space […].48

Despite the fact that the above description refers to a still tactile urban setting, it nevertheless contains the key features of digital topography. Lack of differentiation into the vertical and horizontal (“No verticality or underground”) is combined with the decentralised character of computer-generated space reflected here by the metaphor of a network—a sourceless structure consisting of intersection points only (“discontinuous succession of all signs with no hierarchical ordering”). The depiction of a virtual urban construct is further completed by highlighting its a-hierarchical nature resulting from the disappearance of a totalising principle, a comforting shelter of architectural grand-narrative regulated by a master plan or by its hypothetical author—“an extravaganza of indifference, extravaganza of undifferentiated surfaces— the power of pure open space.” Baudrillard is by no means unique in his observations regarding the convergence of the urban and the cyberspatial. Gibson’s Neuromancer offers a number of similar illustrations though usually from the cyber, rather than the urban, perspective. While characterising electronically-defined space, he clearly emphasises its bond with the urban “non-place”: “Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding….” 49 Elsewhere in the novel, the relationship is highlighted even more vividly. At one point, Case, the main character of the book, meets his ex-girlfriend, whose outfit is detailed in the following way: “Her dark hair was drawn back, held by a band of printed silk. The pattern might have represented microcircuits, or a city map.” 50 Even though this remark does not develop the theme any further, the synchronicity of electronic and urban spaces is by no means coincidental. The central preoccupation of both realms is the critique of the notion of stable territory which constitutes the background of a complex relationship between the subject and the environment that composes the subject’s experiential terrain. The modern assumption of adjusting the urban space to the idealised needs of its inhabitants has thus been replaced by a vision of a semi-virtual city consisting of a chaotic collection of surfaces, circuits and unrelated sub-spaces. The city, in which walls have been traded for screens, presents a unique kind of textual-visual merger—a text whose destiny is to be watched rather than read. It is precisely the visual-textual element, indispensable for the city and constitutive of cyberspace, that blurs the boundary between the urban and the virtual thereby creating a new entity—a textual image. In this particular marriage the postmodern primacy of the signifier finds its ultimate 48. Baudrillard, America, 17. 49. Gibson, Neuromancer, 67. 50. Gibson, Neuromancer, 17.



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expression offering the most precious value that only a wall or a screen can offer— the value of style, trivial and temporal but infinitely seductive. By revealing itself as a perpetual accumulation of digital visualisations, the city of the Information Era also questions the rules of optical perspective and gravity, thus forcing the subject to participate in an endless game of illusory surfaces, provocative asymmetries and overlapping architectural conventions. Modern attempts to separate the private from the public, the human from the mechanical, the silent from the noisy are effectively buried in the palimpsest of intersecting facades and planes. The subject, involuntarily engaged in a number of spectacular spaces simultaneously, belongs not to a single location but to a multiple one. This dispersion of the locus seriously problematises any attempt to grasp the subject’s identity through the prism of space. Doomed to attend a few technologically-determined and communication-obsessed environments at the same time it becomes an intertextual component of the system itself, an intersectional configuration referred to by Baudrillard as “the terminal of multiple networks.” 51 Any effort to even vaguely designate the subject’s identity on the grounds of the sense of belonging becomes fruitless; location is no longer an indicator of selfrecognition, nor does it determine the borders of the subject’s terrain. The style of the postmodern city reflects the fluctuating condition of the subject, whose status evolves from that of a resident into that of the user, always-already engaged in the whole series of polemical discourses whose theoretical stances are often illustrated by provocative and uneasy architectural representations. The building of West Fargo Court, Los Angeles, offers a topical example here; its shape gives the disturbing impression of a single-surface structure, a smooth and depthless plane treating the very idea of depth as an optical illusion dependent on the position of the observer. London’s Canary Wharf contests the concept of gravity by placing its main entrance some ten meters above the street level and making it accessible by railway only. The human body, unarmed with a means of transportation is in no position to enter the building. In the observation gallery of Boston’s John Hancock Tower, one has a chance to listen to real time conversations between pilots and the control tower of a nearby airport, whose sophisticated audio space becomes in this way decompressed as it is suddenly transmitted into the interior of some other building. In other words, the laws of physics, optics and gravity lose their relevance in the postmodern city since the latter is no longer defined in terms of the tactile only but also, if not mostly, in terms of the digital and the virtual. The reason for these laws becoming obsolete is their natural origin; there is no room for nature in the postmodern cyberpolis other than in the cage of a park. The postindustrial city in equal measures follows and establishes its own laws of de-centralised physics and twisted topography, based on the new architectural ideals, those of surface, image and textual-visual games. 51. Baudrillard, The Ecstasy…, 16.

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Still, together with the suspension of natural laws habitually locating the subject against a tactile background and in view of the abundance of available simulations, also suspended is the possibility to stabilise the subject’s condition. As a result, its identity undergoes a vital reconstruction in the course of which it becomes a flexible process rather than a stable entity. Identity in the postmodern city is turned into an activity of identification; a dynamic, unpredictable and necessarily temporal phenomenon whose pace is dictated by the rhythm of visual and textual temptations constantly emerging upon the surface of the postindustrial urban construct. * * * With the inclusion of the ambiguous urban-visual entity of the postmodern city, the post-apocalyptic landscape is almost complete. Again, contrary to popular associations, the apocalypse in question need not be identified with that of pure disaster. True, the element of a spectacular catastrophe does appear sometimes on the cultural horizon as, for example, in case of the Pruitt-Igoe demolition, but what this apocalyptic event really consists in is the critical moment of the irreversible corrosion of the old paradigmatic system and the consequent emergence of cultural premises (also including those of theory) which somehow follow apocalypse’s original meaning which is that of revelation. Thus, if one were to try even briefly characterise the apocalyptic landscape, one could do worse than begin by acknowledging the widespread consequences of technological development and its close relationship with the social and economic structure of the postindustrial world. In the final analysis, it is the combination of advanced technologies and their mass availability that secures the framework of apocalyptic operations. The key feature of those operations is the disturbingly distorted sense of the real; whether considered in terms of Debord’s spectacle or Baudrillard’s hyperreality, one thing seems to present no doubts; an alternative apocalyptic spatiality has come to the surface, one which no longer aspires to reflect the tactile but remains preoccupied with its own internal workings. If one still insisted on finding palpable examples of the space’s presence, there would be at least two places worth scrutinising. The first one, immediately catching the eye, is the postmodern city. Narrating a total defeat of organic nature and thereby defining yet another feature of the post-apocalyptic landscape, it offers a confusing mixture of both material and virtual surfaces, not only ignoring the traditional laws of gravity and linearity, but becoming a site of temporal identities, information bombardment and infinite life-style seductions—and all of that without the supportive back-up of a universal dominant discourse, which is replaced now by an indeterminate number of self-legitimising little narratives. The second apocalyptic field, one which in fact is all about the multiple narrative possibilities, is the realm of cyberspace, understood as a cultural experience located



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at the intersection of invisible technologies and the advances of contemporary theory. Again, the reason for inscribing it into the context of radical paradigmatic shifts is of a twofold nature. By providing a practical illustration of many of this theory’s postulates, cyberspatial textuality implicitly signifies the decline of the print-based text and the birth of what Wojciech Kalaga refers to as the “new habits of reading” 52— an active presence in the textual space devoid of stable hierarchies, linear reading paths, and predictable interpretive approaches. Secondly, in conjunction with the development of multi-layered urban space, cyberspace, as a realm of dynamic and always-already evolving perspectives, identities and ideologies, vividly voices the death of literature’s grand narrative understood as an organising textual principle. This overlapping of the cyber and the urban seems to emphasise yet another feature shared by both realms, namely their essentially fluctuating nature. Manuel Castells, in his account of the condition of contemporary Western cities, calls the urban space “the space of flows” 53—a collection of different layers of social functioning (technological, financial and managerial) which are superimposed upon one another in time while remaining physically separated. Adapting Castells’ ideas about global cities, one could link the concept of this multi-layered functioning to the operation of cyberspace, seeing it in terms of a perpetual flow of relations taking place in an even more ambiguous realm of technologically-determined reality, at the same time nonexistent and infinitely vast. Such is, by and large, the landscape of the contemporary Western cultural horizon as seen from the perspective of a number of paradigmatic shifts that can be metaphorically grasped by the notion of apocalypse, which is here, again, understood as the demise of the old and the revelation of the new. This necessarily brief account seems, however, to be incomplete without even a brief description of the consequences that all of the phenomena described here exert upon its subject, and the way in which they contribute to the formation of what might be referred to as post-apocalyptic identity. This problem, however, is given a deeper analysis in the next chapter.

52. Kalaga, Nebulae of Discourse, 148. 53. Manuel Castells, The Rise of the Network Society (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996).

Chapter Five Identity and Its Discontents Those aren’t your memories, they’re somebody else’s. — Deckard, Blade Runner1

1. Posthumanism Revisited: Identity on the Move The invading disposition of terminal space, whether considered through the ubiquity of electronic presence or the colonising nature of the urban realm, remains strictly related to the condition of its resident’s identity. Seen in this light, the very notion of terminal, although described in the previous chapter as a metaphor of humantechnological merger, reveals its double coding. It does not stand for the computer station only; on the contrary, its full meaning is disclosed once the word is considered as an adjective. With its double coding deciphered, it no longer translates itself as computer-generated identity, but as a final and a declining one, narrating the expiry of stable identity structures based on enlightened ideals of human mastery and control. Scott Bukatman explains this double connotation in terms of a shift in approach to the postmodern/postindustrial subject as such. The shift, apart from signifying the complex character of technological relationships, narrates the end of traditional Cartesian subjectivity. As he puts it: “I call this new position terminal identity, which refers both to the end of the traditional subject and the emergence of a new subjectivity constructed at the computer station or television screen.” 2 Such a radical reorientation of the subject-position inevitably invites the apocalyptic perspective. Bukatman himself seems to implicitly describe the moment of irreversible transformation speaking openly about the “end of the traditional subject,” and the beginning of a “new subjectivity.” In the context of all paradigm shifts depicted so far, the concept of terminal identity seems to topically locate itself among other apocalyptic narratives providing the hitherto missing bridge between the subject’s location and the formation of its identity, which, since it comes about as a result of serious paradigmatic turmoil, might be referred to as the post-apocalyptic one. What seems to prevent the concept of terminal identity from being classified as yet another interpretation of the traditional man-machine relationship is the complex character of the symbiosis it displays. Even if one managed to pinpoint the human component of the fusion, then, to univocally characterise the remaining part seems much 1. Ridley Scott, Blade Runner, The Ladd Company, USA, 1982. 2. Scott Bukatman, Blade Runner (London: BFI Publishing, 1997), 45. Emphasis mine.

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more difficult. It is because the “terminal” ingredient is a fusion in itself, the one produced by a particular socio-economic arrangement, advanced technology, ever-present simulation and the apocalyptic ingredient. It is the mixture of all four that generates the postindustrial condition, whose predominant feature is its intensely visualised character. This, in turn, through the primacy of representation and the dominance of signifier, discreetly usurps the status of the real and therefore fills up the subject’s cognitive horizon. The omnipresence and totality of vision results in what Bukatman calls “image addiction,” defined as the impossibility of social functioning without being both bombarded and defined by images. Addiction of this sort not only implies the dependence and vulnerability of the addict but it also suggests an extremely tight bond between the addictive substance and the addict him/herself, whose existence is controlled by the drug; in this case, the image and the sign. Yet this particular connection reveals one of terminal identity’s essential characteristics; the image and the sign become the subject’s basic components, dictating the pace of its self-recognition. It is no longer a matter of a relationship but that of a vital symbiosis. As Bukatman puts it, “the pervasive domination by, and addiction to, the image might be regarded as a primary symptom of terminal identity.” 3 Gradually, the image loses its reflective disposition; infiltrating all layers and reaching down to the most intimate areas of the subject’s condition, it becomes a chief component of the terminal subject itself as well as of its terrain, thereby redefining the premises of the subject’s natural habitat. “In the end, image addiction is no longer posited as a disease: it has instead become the very condition of existence in postmodern culture.” 4 One might pause to note here that the culture in question offers its own, re-interpreted version of the natural environment, exemplified by the domination of the urban and the virtual. No longer approached in terms of the biological and the organic as the symptoms of the real, the realm of terminal culture reorganises the natural setting from a technological and simulational perspective. Jean Baudrillard approaches this reorganisation of the real in terms of its capacity for endless multiplication: “[t]he very definition of the real becomes: that of which it is possible to give an equivalent reproduction. […] At the limit of this process of reproductability, the real is not only what can be reproduced, but that which is always already reproduced. The hyperreal.” 5 The emerging subject, significantly referred to by Baudrillard elsewhere as “a terminal of multiple networks,” 6 is thus exposed to a number of mediated realms and artificial spaces, which he or she experiences as real without applying a differentiated set of cognitive Scott Bukatman, Terminal Identity. The Virtual Subject in Postmodern Science Fiction (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), 26. Emphasis Bukatman’s. 4. Bukatman, Terminal Identity..., 69. 5. Jean Baudrillard, “The Orders of Simulacra,” in Simulations, trans. Paul Foss, Paul Patton, Philip Beitchman (New York; Semiotext(e), 1983), 146. Emphasis Baudrillard’s. 6. Jean Baudrillard, The Ecstasy of Communication, trans. Bernard Schutze, Caroline Schutze (New York: Semiotext(e), 1988), 16.

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criteria. This is so because the very process of transition from the real into the simulation of the real is a discreet one, both visualised and invisible, embracing the whole spectrum of the subject’s perceptive horizon. In other words, the notion of post-apocalyptic identity, as seen from the terminal perspective, represents a multi-layered and dynamic phenomenon whose ontology seems to be determined by two major qualities. Firstly, there is the deep conviction that what informs the terminal subject is a collection of external influences, to an unparalleled extent related to contemporary socio-technological modes of being, with particular emphasis on visualisation practices and the advances of electronic technology. Bukatman summarises this influence in the following way: “Terminal identity is a […] potentially subversive reconception of the subject that situates the human and the technological as coextensive, co-dependent, and mutually defining. A new subject has emerged: one constituted by electronic technologies.” 7 Secondly, the identity in question, somehow following the dynamic operations of postmodern culture, is an identity-in-flux, doomed to constant evolution and metamorphosis. It is an identity produced by the unstoppable fluidity of postindustrial cultural operations which, proceeding from temptation to addiction, seduce the vulnerable subject with instant satisfaction of what J. G. Ballard refers to as “any possibility, whether for lifestyle, travel, [or] sexual roles […]” 8 Such fluctuation demonstrates terminal identity’s paradoxical nature: on the one hand, its mutational character seems to liberate the subject from the burden of those determining features which traditionally remain out of the subject’s control. Gender, nationality, ethnic or social origin gradually turn from universal criteria into modifiable discursive entities, thereby offering the constant promise of self-recreation. On the other hand, however, the same promise quickly becomes the subject’s inescapable order, a sort of a life sentence from which there is no early release. The essentially invading character of terminal culture not so much invites the postmodern subject to play and enjoy the never-ending identity games as it actually forces it to participate in the perpetual ritual of identity exchanges. Such perspective, much less celebratory or enthusiastic of the apparently infinite terminal possibilities, inevitably deprives the very notion of identity of any traces of stability and firm grounds upon which it could be established. Terminal identity, seen in terms of its always-already fluctuating quality, narrates an effective decomposition of the self and its simultaneous dispersion into multiple and diversified sub-spaces of terminal culture. The fluctuating ontology of the terminal subject poses one more difficulty, namely that of an exhaustive definition. As an identity-in-flux, to a large extent determined by swinging simulations produced by its direct setting, it effectively escapes all attempts 7. Bukatman, Terminal Identity... , .22. 8. J. G. Ballard, “Introduction to Crash,” Re/Search 8/9 (1984), 96. Available at: http://www.ballardian.com/introduction-to-crash.

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at a comprehensive theoretical approach. It is the dynamic nature of the condition under discussion which always exceeds the theoretical gesture; to talk about its discursive background is to be forever too late. The alternating and mutating nature of terminal identity renders all attempts to problematise it equally provisional and temporary. Just as the terminal condition itself, the efforts to grasp its theoretical nature are always on the move themselves, always narrating a moment of constant discursive transition. Realising the difficulty of keeping the pace with the accelerated development of contemporary cultural operations, Bukatman is fully aware of the necessarily temporary character of the identity concept he postulates. He sees its emergence precisely in terms of a certain shift in the very methodology of the approach which must remain perpetually open-ended and ready to be modified. “Terminal identity,” he writes, “is a transitional state produced at the intersection of technology and narration, and it serves as an important space of accommodation to the new and bewildering array of existential possibilities that defines our terminal reality.” 9 Still, bearing in mind the essentially colonising character of the terminal culture, which results in a simultaneous de- and re-construction of the pre-electronic subjectivity, one might naturally view this particular transition in terms of a serious identity crisis. And it is precisely the notion of crisis, so closely interwoven in the dynamics of terminal exchanges, that inscribes the concept of terminal identity into the context of posthumanism. This inscription however, is not a passive one; terminal identity, rather than only mourning over the decline of the Cartesian horizon, contributes a notable voice to the posthumanist discourse by both topically illustrating the decay of Cartesian ideals as well as by offering a sophisticated conceptual alternative.

2. Posthumanist into Posthuman To touch upon the corrosion of Cartesian framework, at least partly provoked by the dilemmas of terminal culture, summons the concept of posthumanism (already mentioned in chapter two) back into the realm of our discussion. The conviction of posthumanism’s relevance is based on the assumption that, in spite of the technological bias of the terminal discourse, there exists a clear continuity between terminal considerations and the posthumanist approach. This is the continuity of an identity crisis whose roots, we should be careful to note, reach beyond purely technological determinants. This crisis permeates a great number of postmodern discourses. More often than not those discourses remain largely unrelated to terminal culture preoccupations, of which we may mention feminist rejection of patriarchal identity restrictions. Seen from the general perspective however, posthumanism provides an important discursive 9.

Bukatman, Terminal Identity…, 22.



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attempt to provide some sort of an umbrella term, intended not so much to re-introduce the long gone master narrative of misery, but to establish a certain intertextual territory, if only for the sake of discursive convenience. To put it in a different way, contemporary posthumanist debates are informed by a sense of loss of stable identity foundations accompanied by a series of discursive efforts to handle the critical situation. The discourse of terminal culture, by proposing its own crisis-based version of identity, not only inscribes itself into the posthumanist debate but in fact opens up a new discursive field—that of the posthuman, as opposed to posthumanist, considerations. Although the notion of “posthuman” is by no means synonymous with “posthumanism,” there is nevertheless a solid connection between the two. One might risk the claim that posthumanism is the first step into posthumanity. This ordering, however, from the posthumanist into the posthuman, points to a certain chronology of emergence, which locates posthumanism in the position of a foundational structure for the posthuman contemplations. In other words, to comprehensively introduce the latter a brief recollection of the former seems necessary. Much less another –ism at the intellectual flea market of catchy notions than a contemporary perspective casting a new light upon not always new cultural phenomena, posthumanism remains deeply rooted in the tradition of the critique of a stable and definable human essence and the resulting human ability to control one’s environment. Such critique, though originally directed at the Cartesian concept of “cogito,” today draws a number of inspirations from the work of Freud and Marx. For all the differences between those perspectives and the terminal vision, one thing seems common. It is the deep conviction of the end of human autonomy and the impossibility of selfdetermination. Whether considered in terms of the oppressive character of social reality or the uncontrollable and unpredictable operations of human unconscious, a dramatic corrosion of the independent self seems to provide a starting point of all posthumanist debates. Although a deeper analysis of psychoanalytical and Marxist/ Post-Marxist postulates against the posthumanist context reaches beyond the scope of this study, suffice it to recollect the words of Neil Badmington who summarises the significance of both views in the following way: “in the Marxist account, subjectivity is not the cause, but the effect of an individual’s material condition of existence,” whereas Freud “further problematised the Cartesian model in proposing that human activity is governed […] by unconscious motives.” 10 Numerous seeds of posthumanism are also planted in the vast fields of poststructuralism informed by Lacanian theory. Having turned upside down the primacy of the autonomous and internally unified individual, Lacan deconstructs the concept of human essence and the sovereign self at the same time pointing to the fact that the subject’s stable position as a fully-realised human being is a myth. Subjectivity, 10. Neil Badmington, “Introduction: Approaching Posthumanism,” in Posthumanism, ed. Neil Badmington (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2000), 5.

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for Lacan, “is constructed in language and discourse, [the subject], rather than being fixed and unified, […] is split, unstable or fragmented.” 11 An important distinction between humanism and posthumanism comes to light here. In its critical account of the humanist paradigm, the posthumanist approach deprives the human of a sense of collectivity, previously attributed to it by the humanist philosophy. Hence, to follow the humanist perspective means to participate in whatever kind of experience collectively, since the philosophy in question is based on the assumption of a common human core. In contrast to that standpoint, to adopt the posthumanist view amounts to the belief that the experience of reality is a predominantly solitary activity, one which can never be fully shared with the other. One should not bypass a significant historical parallel here; in its consideration of the subject in terms of an alienated/alienating self-as-burden, posthumanism seems to have a lot in common with existentialism. The notion of alienation is not a coincidental one in the posthumanist context. To depict the subject as a product of a large number of external elements rather than a single determining force is also to imply that the subject’s environment is by no means a unified entity. As a result, the environment in question becomes a fragmented, temporary and a discourse-based construct, forcing the subject to adopt a number of different subject-positions while dealing with discrepant layers of experience. Few literary characters seem to illustrate the posthumanist dilemma more appropriately than Doctor Frankenstein’s creature of Mary Shelly’s book.12 Though written in time when a large number of contemporary cultural and philosophical concerns did not even exist, the monster pre-figures many of posthumanist (and also posthuman) preoccupations. A multi-surfaced being in him(it)self, composed entirely of other bodies and other identities, Frankenstein’s monster becomes both a forerunner and a powerful metaphor of contemporary subjectivity, which is often defined in self-contradictory terms. At the same time of superior strength and offputting ugliness, in equal measures capable of beastly rage and infantile sensitivity, the monster shares with the posthumanist subject a strong dependency on external factors and uncontrollable drives, which determine both his/its origin and the mode of existence. This particular mixture of drives and situations allow him to simultaneously pose as the hunter and the hunted, the oppressor and the oppressed, the invader and the refugee, a wonder of human science and a victim of human narrow-mindedness. All of these positions are saturated with a pervasive sense of alienation and confusion resulting from the experience of fragmented reality, a sense that informs many posthumanist discourses. 11. Philip Rice, Patricia Waugh, “The Subject,” in Modern Literary Theory. A Reader, eds. Philip Rice, Patricia Waugh (London: Edward Arnold, 1992), 119. 12. Mary Shelly, Frankenstein (New York: Norton Critical Editions, 1996).



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In other words, posthumanism, in all of its various forms, offers a narration of decomposition of the humanist pedestal erected by Cartesian philosophy. Consequently, posthumanism depicts an evolution of the individual into the subject, also understood literarily; subject to both the external i.e. social/technological, and internal, i.e., unconscious, conditions. Yet, seen in these terms, posthumanism seems to constitute a peculiar form of discourse: on the one hand, a truly interdisciplinary field derived from the whole spectrum of perspectives, from Marxist to postcolonial; on the other, a knowledge of crisis par excellence, at the same time lamenting over the loss of a reliable human premise while placing the very loss in the celebrated centre of its own attention. If such a decadent tone dominates in posthumanist debates, then what informs the posthuman one? Since the former has been described in terms of a certain evolution, as the “first step” into the latter, the notion of the “posthuman” might naturally be associated with further weakening of the subject to the point of its extinction. Perspectives of this kind, though definitely attractive as metaphors, have one vital disadvantage. It is their passive attitude towards the possibility of finding solutions to the critical situation they depict, which turns them into long but nevertheless, blind alleys. And although, as Umberto Eco reminds us, “in the contemporary cultural climate nothing sells quite like a crisis,” 13 one might easily conceive of the moment when this peculiar negativity might exhaust even the most patient of readers, tired of celebrating their own misfortune. The notion of the posthuman, though at first glance inspiring sinister visions, is nevertheless to be characterised in more constructive terms. True, on the one hand the concept is deeply rooted in those advances of contemporary theory which seriously question the subject’s integrity and stability of signification. On the other hand, though, it is strictly connected with the ubiquity of postindustrial media and electronic technologies. These, summarised by the notion of terminal culture, already inscribed into the context of apocalyptic narratives, shape the contemporary cultural climate, offering, to re-quote Bukatman’s claim, a “new and bewildering array of existential possibilities.” 14 In other words, the concept of the posthuman, treated here as an extension of the posthumanist paradigm, is to a significant degree informed by the discourse of terminal culture. As such it extends over such issues as media-induced simulation, strategies of information exchange, bodily modifications, electronically-mediated communication, internal dynamics of societies and operations of multinational capital, all of them filtered through a number of textual and visual representations. Thus, the posthuman condition is based on a re-interpreted and redefined relationship between the human 13. Umberto Eco, “On the Crisis of the Crisis of Reason,” in Travels in Hyperreality: Essays, trans. William Weaver (New York: Harcourt, 1990), 126. 14. Bukatman, Terminal Identity…, 22.

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and the technological. Just as the notion of “posthumanist” depicted technology merely as one of the elements of the current landscape, for the posthuman condition technology-based relations are absolutely indispensable. Contrary to the posthumanist approach, which tends to depict these relations in terms of binary oppositions and treat technology as one of the major sources of the identity crisis, the posthuman approach blurs the distance between the human and the technological almost completely. Man is no longer considered against the machine, just as the machine is no longer treated as a mere tool facilitating daily actions. Hence, what seems to implicitly underline the posthuman discourse is the conviction of a technologically-determined, socio-psychological evolution experienced by the posthuman subject. Needles to say, the evolution in question is of an essentially terminal nature; it places the human and the technological as co-related and mutuallydependent without ascribing primacy to either of them. Few attempts to characterise the posthuman condition are more exhaustive than N. Katherine Hayles’ book-length analysis explaining How We Became Posthuman.15 Significantly enough, the departure point for Hayles takes the emergence of the posthuman subjectivity for granted, for, as she is careful to note “the question is not whether we will become posthuman, for posthumanity is already here. Rather, the question is what kind of posthumans we will be.” 16 Drawing on a variety of fields and inspirations, from systems theory and cybernetics to literature and informatics, Hayles builds up a consistent and challenging approach towards traditional constituents of humanist identity, offering an informational-technological alternative instead. Her vision of posthuman subjectivity is based on the assumption that a human being is predominantly an information-processing entity, whose existence follows almost the same rules and patterns as those of the computer that he/she not so much uses as co-exists with in a partly disembodied “cosmos,” which “itself is a vast computer and [humans] are the programs it runs.” 17 This is how Hayles defines the posthuman in greater detail: What is the posthuman? Think of it as a point of view characterized by the following assumptions. […] First, the posthuman view privileges informational pattern over material instantiation, so that embodiment in a biological substrate is seen as an accident of history rather than an inevitability of life. Second, the posthuman view considers consciousness, regarded as the seat of human identity in the Western tradition long before Descartes thought he was a mind thinking, as an epiphenomenon, as an evolutionary upstart trying to claim that it is the whole show when in actuality it is only a minor sideshow. Third, the posthuman view thinks of the body as the original prosthesis we all learn to manipu15. Katherine N. Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999). 16. Hayles, 246. 17. Hayles, 239.



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late, so that extending or replacing the body with other prostheses becomes a continuation of a process that began before we were born. Fourth, and most important, by these and other means, the posthuman view configures human being so that it can be seamlessly articulated with intelligent machines. In the posthuman, there are no essential differences or absolute demarcations between bodily existence and computer simulation, cybernetic mechanism and biological organism, robot teleology and human goals.18

Much as at first sight the above assumptions seem to topically illustrate the posthuman premises we have been discussing so far, especially in view of the technological foundations which Hayles clearly takes to a higher level of cyber-cultural debate, one of her observations seems to criticize the posthumanist foundations of the posthuman condition. The notion of alienation, so important for the posthumanist, and the postmodern perspective in general, appears to be disturbingly redefined. If the “human being […] can be seamlessly articulated with intelligent machines,” then it seems rather obvious that a new kind of collectivity has emerged, one in which the human subject is no longer separated in an existential drama of experiencing the world solitarily, but instead becomes part of a vast information-exchange system in which life is posited as ever-present data-flow, this time however not only between other, previously alienated beings, but also between humans and computer-mediated environments. Controversial as this theory may seem, it nevertheless narrates a final convergence of the human—liberated from the constrains of a traditional humanist approach—and the technological, whose boundaries seem to have entered the most intimate yet formative components of our subjectivity. Not that Hayles is unaware of the possible critique of her views, as she formulates potential accusations not so much of a post- but of an anti-human standpoint. But as she fittingly summarises this new symbiosis in the last sentence of her book: Although some current versions of the posthuman point toward the antihuman and the apocalyptic, we can craft others that will be conducive to the long-range survival of humans and of the other life-forms, biological and artificial, with whom we share the planet and ourselves.19

3. Snow Crash: Split Presence and Translucent Bodies Where the techno-stimulated evolution coupled with the denial of the subject’s organic heritage—both factors considered here as vital elements of the posthuman condition— finds its most explicit embodiment is in the concept of cyberspace. As an essentially artificial and a self-referential reality construct, cyberspace forces the subject to redefine 18. Hayles, 2–3. 19. Hayles, 291.

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itself in a new, electronically-determined environment. As an illustration of postindustrial space, simultaneously non-existent, infinite and defined through the paradoxes it entails, cyberspace constitutes an ultimate textual battlefield of fluctuating identities. It is precisely the cyberspatial environment, seen against the context of terminal theory as described so far, that informs the philosophical background behind Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash.20 Still, what distinguishes Stephenson’s book from a large number of similar cyberpunk texts is the essentially ambiguous attitude towards the very possibility of a detached, purely technological existence. Even though the central plot is simultaneously located in two realms, the tactile and the digital, Stephenson identifies a number of important continuities between them. Unlike William Gibson, who tends to depict cyberspace in romantic terms as the place of the unknown, the mysterious and even the divine, Stephenson takes a realistic approach and he treats the cyberspatial environment as a predominantly cultural phenomenon with an electronic background. His vision of cyberspace is essentially that of a man-made construct, regulated by advanced software rather than by Gibsonian cyber-voodoo spirits. This is not to say, however, that Stephenson’s vision ridicules the significance of virtual operations; on the contrary, it is precisely in the realm of the digital that vital things happen, things of immense importance for the tactile environment, too. And it is precisely this shift of location that introduces the posthuman context of the book, conveying an implicit message that in the course of technological development the subject has traded its solid grounds for virtual ones, thereby forcing itself to participate in the communication exchanges of the digital realm. What inscribes Snow Crash into the posthuman context, rather than the posthumanist one, is precisely its treatment of electronically-determined reality; no longer the cause of identity crisis but a governing constituent of the subject’s location instead. In fact, in his narration of the posthuman modes of existence, Stephenson goes a step further by clearly differentiating between the confusing and chaotic character of the “real” world and the relatively well-ordered cyberspatial construct. To the perplexing condition of the tactile urban landscape, he adds another cornerstone of instability, namely the completely disintegrated national structure of the United States, clearly ridiculing the idea of a nation consolidated under one set of political and philosophical dogmas. The country, totally dis-united now, is divided into independent burbclaves, an odd collection of commercially run residential enclaves with their own regulations, bar-code visas and properly uniformed security agents. As a result of this dis-unification, the former superpower has lost all of its superiority and specialises now in just four areas of the economy: music, movies, software and high speed pizza delivery: in fact, blatant icons of consumer culture. 20. Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash (London: Roc, 1993).



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Yet, though undoubtedly displaying most of cyberpunk fiction essential characteristics, like the co-existence of electronic space and heavily industrialised urban zones, modified bodies, a semi-criminal underworld, spectacular techno-gadgets, superficial psychology, fast paced action, and, to use J.G. Ballard’s phrase, an “overlit” outlook, the book is still characterised by an implicitly ambiguous attitude towards the very possibility of such a destabilised and discontinuous existence, even within an extremely technological habitat. Snow Crash’s textual space thus becomes a site of polemics between two discourses; one celebrating its own posthuman weightlessness and separation from the burden imposed by the signified, the other placing the narrative within a network of social, historical, linguistic and visual continuities. Even with the humanist integrity of the self discarded, the book still presents an attempt to locate the posthuman subject-position in a number of cultural traditions, some of which date back centuries. Such a gesture carries an important message. First of all, it solidifies the posthuman position on the intellectual horizon of contemporary cultural practices and their theoretical background. Secondly, by placing the posthuman condition within a broader network of cultural operations, Stephenson reduces the idea’s radical outlook, and provides what Scott Bukatman denominates as a “space of accommodation.” 21 To put it crudely, the posthuman condition is not to be feared more than any kind of natural environment is. And just as the organic factor cannot be discarded completely from human actions, it is impossible to locate the subject solely within the digital space without any considerations for the influence of the tactile. The notion of continuity operates in Stephenson’s book on a variety of levels, not always explicitly highlighted and often presented in different proportions. Yet it is present from the very beginning; the introduction of the main character reveals a strong nostalgia for the stable relation between the signifier and the signified, longgone, needles to say, in the posthumanist context. From the very first encounter with the book’s protagonist we learn not only of his heroic abilities but of his central position throughout the story, as his self-chosen name is Hiroaki, Hiro for short, a minor phonetic modification not so much questioning his central narrative position but rather hinting at the common cyberpunk obsession with Japanese culture. If we are still in doubt, Hiro’s surname, which is Protagonist, allays all uncertainty. What may at first look like a conscious act of self-parody is nevertheless a rare gesture of unifying the signifier with the signified; Hiro Protagonist is actually both the hero of the story in terms of his heroic deeds and its protagonist in terms of the story’s structure. In cyber-environments where identities fluctuate and rotate almost by definition, such a stable stance in terms of signification is a fairly unique phenomenon, the more so that Hiro uses the same name both in real life and in cyberspace, 21. Bukatman, Terminal Identity…, 22.

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thus extending his identity into both realms. He also looks the same; his cyberspatial representation, the avatar, is no different from his real life appearance: Your avatar can look any way you want it to, up to the limitations of your equipment. If you’re ugly, you can make your avatar beautiful. If you’ve just gotten out of bed, your avatar can still be wearing beautiful clothes and professionally applied makeup. You can look like a gorilla or a dragon or a giant talking penis in the Metaverse. Spend five minutes walking down the Street and you will see all of these. Hiro’s avatar looks just like Hiro […].22

Stephenson’s nostalgia for the lost stability of signification forces him to redefine a number of concepts in view of their etymological roots; hence Hiro, apart from being a gifted computer hacker, also happens to be a great sword fighter always ready to hack off somebody’s limb with equal grace, regardless of whether it takes place in real life or in cyberspace. After all, the word hacker comes from the verb “to hack” whose original meaning is “to chop or cut irregularly.” Yet where Stephensonian desire for continuity is much more clearly visible than in the above discussed examples is in his concept of the Metaverse, the name given to a cyberspatial construct, the equivalent of Gibson’s matrix, where much of the action takes place. Though this continuity is of social and corporeal, rather than of linguistic nature, the name itself echoes a strong relation with the regular universe, only giving the construct a much more abstract characteristic while still relating it to tactile rather than to digital imagery. Unlike a number of writers/critics who emphasise the essential otherness of any kind of cyberspatial construct, Stephenson makes Metaverse virtually an enhanced and enlarged 3D cyber-version of the urban sector, the central part of the Metaverse being actually called the Street. We may compare the Street with William Gibson’s early version of cyberspace which he famously defined as “[…] consensual hallucination […] of immense complexity,” 23 endowing it with a somewhat mystical quality. While the Gibsonian cyberspatial matrix stresses an essential ignorance of or even disdain toward the body, seeing it as a source of all human limitations (“[…] the elite stance involved a certain relaxed contempt for the flesh. The body was meat,” 24), Stephenson’s Metaverse/Street is all about the body, or to be more precise, bodily appearance. Gibson’s console cowboys taking delight in the “bodiless exultation of cyberspace” 25 have here turned into cyber-pedestrians taking delight in the endless possibilities of shaping and forming their virtual bodies. 22. 23. 24. 25.

Stephenson, Snow Crash, 33–34. William Gibson, Neuromancer (London: Harper Collins Publishers, 1995), 12. Gibson, Neuromancer, 12, 97. Gibson, Neuromancer, 12.



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Thus, as a construct of essentially mimetic nature, the Metaverse imposes certain limitations upon its users’ avatars i.e. their graphic representations, defined as “audiovisual bodies that people use to communicate with each other in the Metaverse.” 26 Their size cannot exceed real life size, and one has to move about the place by walking or using various means of transportation: “You can’t just materialise anywhere in the Metaverse like Captain Kirk beaming down from on high. This would be confusing and irritating to the people around you. It would break the metaphor.” 27 The continuity of social existence between the urban and the cyber life is also reflected in the way avatars inhabit the Metaverse. They have their own houses which vary in size and location depending on the user’s wealth or his/her status in the cybersociety. These size and motion restrictions are the only ones on writing a piece of avatar software; within these limits avatars may look like whatever their owners choose them to look like. For all the continuities between the real life and the Metaverse, the fundamental law of cyberspatial constructs, “choose your identity at will” remains intact. Gender, ethnic background, religion, age, nationality, political and sexual preferences, in other words, all possible criteria determining the construction of identity, may be arranged and re-arranged without any constraints whatsoever, producing a virtually unlimited number of identities which constitute a truly diversified and polyphonic society. The only exception to this rule of absolute freedom is Hiro Protagonist himself who looks the same both in Metaverse and in tactile reality, stubbornly underlining yet another continuity, that of representation. Just as Gibson’s matrix is depicted as a space containing golden fields of data available only to those rich or determined enough to break through the defense software, Stephenson’s Street is a place of sophisticated social exchange and interaction, precisely reflecting the communication mechanisms of real life only on a much larger scale and without any of the real life constrains: inhibitions, fear of rejection, or of infection, truth-value or responsibility. The Street appears to be an ongoing parade, a perpetual exchange of images, styles and data. Depicted as such, the Street precisely illustrates Baudrillard’s concept of communicational ecstasy, once again bridging the concept between postmodern theory and textual practice. The Street’s swarming population constitutes both the stage and the audience, constantly participating in what Baudrillard refers to as a ritual of transparency. This last feature is illustrated by the avatars’ fundamental characteristics; for the sake of convenience they are transparent; one just walks through them. […] the computer system that operates the Street has better things to do than to monitor every single one of the millions of people there, trying to prevent them from running into each other. It doesn’t bother trying to solve this incredibly difficult problem. On the Street, 26. Stephenson, Snow Crash, 33. 27. Stephenson, Snow Crash, 34.

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avatars just walk right through each other. […] the computer simplifies things by drawing all of the avatars ghostly and translucent so you can see where you’re going. Hiro appears solid to himself, but everyone else looks like a ghost. He walks through the crowd as if it’s a fogbank […].28

In the Baudrillardian sense then, the Metaverse could be described as perfectly obscene as it offers very little (though not none) place for the non-visible. The bodies, when given a closer look, hide nothing; there is no mystery of their inside, also understood metaphorically. Their existence is conditioned by the surface of their representation which, under scrutiny, becomes a see-through cover hiding nothing, not even the promise of an interior. “Obscenity,” writes Baudrillard, “begins when there is no more stage, no more theatre, no more illusions, when everything becomes immediately transparent, visible, exposed in the raw and inexorable light of information and communication. We no longer partake of the drama of alienation, but are in the ecstasy of communication.” 29 As the avatars’ primary function is to facilitate communication, Stephenson’s Metaverse may also be considered in terms of a perpetual communication carnival, in which the participants become both the audience and the performers. Deprived of an inside, they form the external texture of the outside, turning themselves into a part of the landscape, in fact the only thing that exists in this cyberspatial reality. Still, the Metaversal transparency/obscenity is never complete, which renders Baudrillard’s prediction unfulfilled. This is because the Street appears to be just as much the realm of the evident and the obscene, as it is rooted in the strict laws of mathematics and information technology which secretly condition and determine its existence. Again, in contrast to Gibson’s vision of cyberspace which stresses its infinity, Stephenson’s Metaverse is all too deeply rooted in the basic structures of the binary code which make the construct vast though not infinite: The Street seems to be a grand boulevard going all the way around the equator of a black sphere with a radius of a bit more than ten thousand kilometers. That makes it 65,536 kilometers around, which is considerably bigger than Earth. The number 65,536 is an awkward figure to everyone except a hacker, who recognizes it more rapidly than his own mother’s date of birth; It happens to be a power of 2—2 16 power to be exact—and even the exponent 16 is equal to 24, and 4 is equal to 22. Along with 256; 32,768; and 2,147,483,648; 65,536 is one of the foundation stones of the hacker universe, in which 2 is the only really important number because that’s how many digits a computer can recognize. One of those digits is 0, and the other is 1. Any number that can be created by fetishistically multiplying 2s by each other, and subtracting the occasional 1, will be instantly recognizable to a hacker.30 28. Stephenson, Snow Crash, 37. 29. Baudrillard, The Ecstasy…, 21–22. 30. Stephenson, Snow Crash, 23.



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In other words, the laws of mathematics are equally applicable and need to be treated seriously regardless of which side of the screen one happens to be on at a given moment. Yet with the occurrence of a computer virus called Snow Crash this communicational paradise loses its innocence. From being a safe place of sophisticated entertainment, identity games and info exchange, the Metaverse turns into a dangerous zone where not only one’s computer can be damaged beyond repair but one’s brain, too. Da5id, Hiro’s fellow hacker, gets infected in the Street but his infection continues in real life, introducing another continuity, the one of corporeal involvement. This is because Snow Crash operates on both levels, the real and the digital, invading both textures with lethal effectiveness. Though distributed in different ways (outside of the Metaverse it takes the form of a drug) the virus attacks both spaces simultaneously, emphasising their closeness and therefore bridging the gap between the mental, so far reserved for the Metaverse only, and the physical, until now associated with the palpable modes of everyday existence. A brief dialogue between Hiro and Juanita, a female hacker explaining how Snow Crash works, illustrates the overlapping of both realms: “Wait a minute, Juanita. Make up your mind. This Snow Crash thing—is it a virus, a drug, or a religion?” Juanita shrugs. “What’s the difference?” 31

It is no accident that the notion of religion is brought onto the stage here. Hiro, in search of a cure, reaches back into ancient history and myths of religious origin, particularly to the myth of the Tower of Babel, which he treats both as a real event and as a powerful metaphor of communication breakdown, possibly caused by a viral outbreak. Such an approach introduces one more continuity between the pre-electronic and cyber eras, this time the socio-religious one. Stephenson analyses the Babel incident in contemporary terms seeing it as an ancient version of informational apocalypse, the infocalypse, at the same time re-interpreting various elements of the Western history as a history of different strategies of information distribution; from religious rites to global networks of data circulation. The socio-religious continuum is further highlighted by bringing various aspects of ancient Sumerian culture under scrutiny, which, in the course of his analysis, discloses the existence of a certain universal mechanism of information infection of which the Snow Crash is just a modern variant. It is destined to attack all cultural and textual constructs, religious rituals and cyberspatial practices alike: I wonder if viruses have always been with us, or not. There’s sort of an implicit assumption that they have been around forever. But maybe that’s not true. Maybe there was a period of history when they were nonexistent or at least unusual. And at a certain point, when 31. Stephenson, Snow Crash, 187.

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the metavirus showed up, the number different viruses exploded, and people started to get sick a whole lot. This would explain the fact that all cultures seem to have a myth about paradise, and the Fall from Paradise.32

Such re-interpretation of the nature of viruses introduces the socio-religious dimension of the book. Snow Crash, the metavirus enabling other viruses to follow, is responsible for, or at least poses a threat of, the current infocalypse regarded in terms of a higher power’s intervention. The purpose of such interference is to slow down or even prevent the rampant development of cyber-environments which, through their intrinsic freedom of identity selection, escape and ignore all control measures and all kinds of authority in favor of self-proclaimed subjectivity which, from a religious standpoint, amounts to an act of blasphemy. In other words, the concept of continuity operates in Stephenson’s book on at least two major levels. The first, synchronic one, through direct signifying practices unifying the internal elements of the sign, greatly reduces the gap between real life and its cyberspatial equivalent, emphasising their common origin and resulting need to obey the laws of natural sciences. Stephenson’s Metaverse remains nevertheless a predominantly social sphere whose main function is information exchange, yet, since the information collected in the Metaverse might be, and is, utilised outside of it and vice versa, the gap between both entities is much smaller than it might seem at first sight. The second longing refers to the continuity of a socio-religious tradition placing today’s modes of social existence, whether it be the real street or the Metaversal one, within a certain narrative of historical process. Seen from this perspective contemporary modes of social existence and informational exchange are merely modern versions of past modes. This particular stance is aptly illustrated by one of the book’s key quotes: […] there’s no difference between modern culture and the Sumerian. We have a huge workforce that is illiterate or alliterate and relies on TV—which is a sort of an oral tradition. And we have a small, extremely literate power elite—the people who go into the Metaverse, basically—who understand that information is power, and who control society because they have this semimystical ability to speak magic computer languages.33

The reason for this rather lengthy evaluation of Stephenson’s book is strictly related to its participation in the discourse of posthuman identity. What Stephenson’s text implicitly postulates is the location of this identity within the framework of a sociotechnological continuum whose roots date back to the pre-electronic era. Posthuman, or terminal, identity, Stephenson seems to imply, comes as a natural consequence of the long and complicated process of identity formation as such, always 32. Stephenson, Snow Crash, 216. 33. Stephenson, Snow Crash, 379.



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prone to influence by radical changes in the subject’s environment. Again, the “post” of the posthuman need not solely signify the aftermath of the human; on the contrary, the emphasis upon the “other than” reading of the pre-fix seems just as important both as a critical description of traditional human premises and as a newly-emerging theoretical perspective. It is with the evaluation of Stephenson’s concept of split presence that the convergence of postmodern theory and SF representational practice seems finally complete. True, one might have the impression that the subject emerging from the socio-economic-technological turmoil of the end of the 20th century is not quite commensurable with the vision proposed by Stephenson, Gibson and other cyberpunk writers and filmmakers. After all, they belong to the realm of pure, and more importantly, popular, fiction, even further separated from theoretical dilemmas by their blatant commercial success precisely as writers of fiction. Still, their presence in the sphere of cultural operations is not only of illustrative value. Probably one of the main reasons for their blockbuster status is that they identify a subtle yet disturbing change in the position of the subject, a change which passed almost unnoticed when it happened some time in the second half of the 20th century, and which is coming to be fully recognised only today. Like the apparently fictional landscape of The Matrix unexpectedly contaminated by a quick glimpse at a copy of Baudrillard’s Simulations, these visions too, provoke theoretical reflection rather than pure fear- or fascinationbased emotional reactions. In other words, to speak of two separate subjects, one born in the realm of theory, the other coming from the area of textual representations, is to miss the profound common ground that they share. This is because what both discourses attempt to grasp, though in two seemingly different ways, is in fact one subject-position whose fluctuating identity inspires such a wide variety of approaches. Hence one should not make the mistake of reducing the SF representations to mere apotheoses of gloriously remote and utterly unrelated difference; though often presenting the subject under discussion in a truly exaggerated way, they nevertheless narrate an important convergence between contemporary cultural theory and accompanying representational practice.

4. Terminal Identity as the Third The disturbing continuity between the tactile and the digital, as described in Stephenson’s book, poses the problem of the subject’s self-definition with regard to both realms, clearly provoking an attempt to approach the issue in theoretical terms. In fact, by pointing to the impossibility of a clear-cut division between here and there, Stephenson implies an equally troublesome distinction between locating the subject in either of the environments: the neat contrast between Self-as-here and the Other-asthere loses its relevance in view of the inseparable nature of the two habitats and their

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overlapping natures. The subject is split, and belongs to both realities simultaneously, as it is both realms which together constitute the premises of terminal space. In other words, identification of continuities between the apparently distinctive areas effectively erases the borders between them. Once this opposition has been wiped out the very possibility of consciously selecting or enjoying a stable subject position (whether here or there) becomes non-existent. Floating and constantly mutating territory results in a similar fluctuation of its occupant’s identity. Terminal space thus abolishes the dichotomy based on the opposition between the Self/First and the Other/Second, yet it does so in a very peculiar manner, by offering a powerful alternative which might be referred to as the identity of the Third. The Third replaces the traditional binarity by including both of its components in a realm where a division based on the stable difference between the Self and the Other is no longer meaningful. The Third, rather than completing the binarity, incorporates it into its own fluctuating territory thus constituting a new identity formation informed by a constant exchange. The number of paradoxes that come to characterise the terminal space’s nature allow the Third to simultaneously choose the position of the Self and the Other, thereby depriving the notion of difference of any reliable quality. Such overlapping of subject-positions is possible due to the terminal space’s internal dynamics resulting from the constant interactions between the infinite number of voices, viewpoints and visualisations that come to create the space’s abstract horizon. The thirdness of the terminal subject results from the uncontrollable flux of identities and positions that absorb both the Self and its Other(s), in the very act of their absorption neutralising the dichotomous oppositions between them. Seen from this perspective, the Third does not expand the dyadic model into a triadic one, but paradoxically reduces it to a singular entity which includes the previous binaries of Selves and Others, deconstructing them successfully through its internal flexibility and dynamics. Various computer-mediated environments, such as Multi User Domains, not to mention the internet, provide vivid examples of the identity shifts one may experience at will in the terminal realm. MUDs, which originated as neo-medieval games, allow the participant to choose from a multitude of identities regardless of their real-life positions: “each player adopts a fictional role that may be different from their actual gender and indeed this gender may change in the course of the game, drastically calling into question the gender system of the dominant culture as a fixed binary. [...] Individuals explore imaginary subject positions while in communication with others.” 34 Connected with the mechanisms of the MUDs are various means of interpersonal computer-mediated communications, such as electronic mail or Facebook-like chat34. Mark Poster, “Postmodern Virtualities,” in Cyberspace/Cyberbodies/Cyberpunk, eds. Mike Featherstone, Roger Burrows (London: SAGE Publications, 1996), 86.



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lines, which take advantage of computer windows originally developed to help a user move through various software applications. As Sherry Turkle notes: windows have become a powerful metaphor for thinking about the self as a multiple, distributed system. The self is no longer simply playing different roles in different settings at different times, something that a person experiences when, for example, she wakes up as a lover, makes breakfast as a mother, and drives to work as a lawyer. The life practice of windows is that of a decentred self that exists in many worlds and plays many roles at the same time.35

It is impossible to underestimate the possibilities opened up by terminal space. The almost unlimited number of identity marks to choose from allow the space’s user to contemplate the similarly unlimited variations of one’s Self or one’s Other in equal measures. Since the user can safely hide behind his/her screen identity, terminal space provides an ideal opportunity for the return of the repressed, which is here at least in theory released from the superego’s supervision. Yet, in the context of the everpresent transparency that characterises terminal space, the repressed quickly loses its potential, as it is extracted from the realm of the non-verbal and brought into the light of universal accessibility. The repressed is now free to participate in the construction of a new provisional Self which, in turn, projects its own Other only to incorporate it into the ongoing play of identity formation. Hence, what seems to characterise the Third’s identity is, along with such features as a perpetually evolving exchange of Selves and Others, the idea of temporality. Discussed elsewhere with regard to the notion of value in the terminal realm, the notion of temporality is now extended onto the concept of space-determined identity resulting in its local and momentarily significance. The initial euphoria resulting from the prospect of limitless possibilities must therefore give way to a more serious concern regarding the stability and reliability of the de/re/constructed Third. The Third is therefore defined by the process of constantly mutating identifications of which the fundamental condition is the dynamic inclusion of both Selves and Others in what Baudrillard refers to as a “ritual of transparency.” That “transparency,” he writes, “explodes into a thousand pieces, which are like the shattered fragments of a mirror, where we catch a last glimpse of our image furtively reflected before it disappears. Like the fragments of a hologram, each piece contains the entire universe.” 36 Terminal space’s post-apocalyptic Third emerges thus as a constantly fluctuating entity, at the same time self-destructive and self-forming, perpetually de/re/constructing itself through a process of vigorous and endless mutations and metamorphoses.

35. Sherry Turkle, Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet (New York: Touchstone, 1997), 14. 36. Baudrillard, The Ecstasy..., 39–40.

Conclusion Apocalypse and the Postmodern […] when you dream about bad things happening, it means you’re still fighting and you’re still alive. It’s when you start to dream about good things that you should start to worry. — The Man, The Road  1

To precisely define one’s own cultural condition is probably the most difficult task that a member of this culture can undertake, especially when the condition in question is of such a complex and multi-layered nature as the postmodern one. Still, one of the underlying notions in terms of which the issue has been frequently approached is that of a crisis. The variety of ways and attitudes in which the critical situation is reflected suggests both the complexity of the phenomenon as well as its pervasiveness. The crisis is frequently reflected by voices of profound intellectual uneasiness claiming that “the postmodern age is one of fragmentation, disintegration, malaise, meaninglessness, a vagueness or even absence of moral parameters, and societal chaos.” 2 One may also come across views voicing mere confusion, caused by an abundance of cultural phenomena that lack a unified, or at least coherent, ontological pedestal, stating that “the ability to see the more diffuse Postmodern connections […] has become more difficult […]. We can only see the world by forming a picture through various specialised mediations […]. We now lack a convincing vision.” 3 In both these approaches, the crisis is repeatedly associated with the excessive rise of new technologies, particularly those connected with mass media and global communication systems. There is no doubt that the rapid technological development of the past forty years has not only challenged but also redefined many of the essential issues concerning contemporary cultural practices and their consequences for the development of postmodern identity. This situation, often perceived as a sort of intellectual emergency, has posed a number of questions concerning the relationship between the subject and the evolution of an intensely informational landscape. As Arthur Kroker and David 1. John Hillcoat, The Road, Dimension Films/2929 Productions, USA, 2009. 2. Pauline Marie Rosneau, Post-Modernism and the Social Sciences: Insights, Inroads, and Intrusions (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 15. 3. Margot Lovejoy, Postmodern Currents: Art and Artists in the Age of Electronic Media (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1989), 247. Emphasis mine.

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Cook have noted, “the terrain is changing within the postmodern condition, and […] the landscape is increasingly figured as a mediascape.” 4 The notion of technologically-stimulated transformation is coming thus to be perceived as one of the cornerstones of the postmodern condition. Technology appears to constitute a bottom line silently enabling the production of a number of further postmodern phenomena, such as the abundance of simulacra, whether they be Baudrillard’s maps preceding the territory or Guy Debord’s spectacles originating in the “loss of unity of the world.” 5 A sense of transformation, often subtle yet detectable, seems to be blossoming within both popular and academic discourses. Fredric Jameson describes it in terms of a disturbing feeling that something has changed, that things are different, that we have gone through a transformation of the life world which is somehow decisive but incomparable with the older convulsions of modernization and industrialization, less perceptible and dramatic, somehow, but more permanent precisely because more thoroughgoing and all-pervasive.6

The impact and scope of technological development and its consequence for both social and individual dimensions stimulates a profound paradigm shift, introducing what Larry McCaffery calls “technological modes of ‘being in the world.’” 7 These new “modes of being” narrate an evolutionary stage that the technologically determined subject is going through. It is a stage in which a whole array of new entities and experiences redefine and rearrange the subject’s cognitive apparatus, in the process badly damaging the subject’s pre-technological position. One of the fundamental consequences of this new technological dominant is that a number of binary oppositions which, until recently, helped structure the process of cognition, are effectively dismantled. Not only does the dichotomy of real/artificial lose its relevance, but so do those of human/non-human, artifice/nature, originality/duplication, and even male/ female, as Donna Haraway’s “Cyborg Manifesto” seems to suggest. A certain shift seems to have taken place then, this time one regarding the relationship between reality and experience. Even though the involuntary participants of terminal culture do not deal only with authentically tactile reality, but more often 4. Arthur Kroker, David Cook, The Postmodern Science: Excremental Culture and Hyper-Aesthetics, eds. Arthur Kroker, Marilouise Kroker (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1986), 13. Quoted in: Scott Bukatman, Terminal Identity. The Virtual Subject in Postmodern Science Fiction (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), 41. 5. Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: Zone Books, 1995), 22, thesis 29. 6. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999), xxi. 7. Larry McCaffery, “Introduction,” in Across the Wounded Galaxies: Interviews with Contemporary American Science Fiction Writers, ed. Larry McCaffery (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1990), 7.



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than not with its visualised substitute, the emerging reality is still approached in terms of a “new experiential terrain.” The terrain, which is to a large extent informed and defined by the “onslaught of news, advertisements, paid political announcements, fashion, living room wars, celebrity and urban sprawl.” 8 Hence the very notion of experience has been not so much replaced by its second-hand equivalent but rather modified and consequently adjusted to the new electronically mediated reality. In other words, it is reality that has changed in the first place and only then have the modes of experiencing it become modified. Such is, by and large, the background of the notion of apocalypse understood as a powerful discursive metaphor of contemporary cultural operations. Though rooted in a number of historical and cultural continua, from the Biblical to the electronic, the notion is eventually treated as a signifier of an essential paradigmatic change. This change is of a twofold nature. First of all, it remains strictly interwoven with the cultural consequences of technological development. The development, however, is by no means to be treated as an isolated phenomenon; on the contrary, it comes about as a result of the development of a particular social organisation, the free market economy. It is only with this background of socio-economic relations that technology is allowed to flourish; without its incorporation into mass consumer cycles and rituals of social exchanges, technology’s impact would be reduced to a point of minor significance. In other words, the change under discussion, though underlining the primacy of technology, eventually covers the subject’s environment and the new modes of social being that technology enables, and sometimes forces. Secondly, as a result of the redefined nature of the human habitat, the subject’s identity begins to evolve in accordance with the discreet requirements and temptations of terminal culture. And it is precisely this evolution that justifies the use of the apocalyptic metaphor. In its course, the subject undergoes a process of radical self-definition, in fact, a sophisticated kind of barter exchange, in which the subject trades its identity’s stable premises, rooted in binary paradigms of the pre-cybernetic epoch, for the fluctuating temptations of endless re-definition and re-configuration of the postmodern/terminal milieu. To speak of apocalypse in the context of postindustrial or posthuman identity is to speak of this identity’s potential for perpetual evolution, seemingly unrestricted, but in fact determined by the range of possibilities offered by the current cultural condition. Still, as seen from a broader perspective, apocalypse is not to be feared. Even though in the postindustrial context it is immediately related to a number of grim concepts that deprive the subject of even the illusion of autonomy, apocalypse’s determining potential and violent disposition are by no means new phenomena. Unlike technological worries, which may appear to be fairly recent occurrences, apocalypse 8. Bukatman, Terminal Identity…, 35–36.

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has always been with us, just as fundamental paradigmatic changes have always accompanied the intricate course of cultural evolution. To think of apocalypse today is not an easy task, though, and the reasons behind this difficulty go beyond the most obvious associations that the concept produces, which mainly revolve around the fear of annihilation. This is because to think of apocalypse is, to paraphrase Fredric Jameson, “to think the present historically in an age that has forgotten how to think historically in the first place.” 9 To think of apocalypse in terms of its somehow natural location in the broader spectrum of cultural tradition is also unfashionable. After all, such perspective proposes a much less revolutionary and sensational attitude, as it replaces sinister readings of apocalypse with a more constructive perception. This perception is to a large degree informed by the awareness of the concept’s inescapability, along with the simple anticipation and appreciation of a new situation. All in all, apocalypse is a concept in disguise; even though when limited to morbid and often repetitive visions of the end, it may appear ugly, when seen in terms of broader cultural existence, it remains absolutely essential.

9.

Jameson, Postmodernism…, 9.

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Literary and Cultural Theory General editor: Wojciech H. Kalaga

Vol.

1

Wojciech H. Kalaga: Nebulae of Discourse. Interpretation, Textuality, and the Subject. 1997.

Vol.

2

Wojciech H. Kalaga / Tadeusz Rachwa (eds.): Memory – Remembering – Forgetting. 1999.

Vol.

3

Piotr Fast: Ideology, Aesthetics, Literary History. Socialist Realism and its Others. 1999.

Vol.

4

Ewa Rewers: Language and Space: The Poststructuralist Turn in the Philosophy of Culture. 1999.

Vol.

5

Floyd Merrell: Tasking Textuality. 2000.

Vol.

6

Tadeusz Rachwa / Tadeusz Slawek (eds.): Organs, Organisms, Organisations. Organic Form in 19th-Century Discourse. 2000.

Vol.

7

Wojciech H. Kalaga / Tadeusz Rachwa: Signs of Culture: Simulacra and the Real. 2000.

Vol.

8

Tadeusz Rachwal: Labours of the Mind. Labour in the Culture of Production. 2001.

Vol.

9

Rita Wilson / Carlotta von Maltzan (eds.): Spaces and Crossings. Essays on Literature and Culture in Africa and Beyond. 2001.

Vol.

10

Leszek Drong: Masks and Icons. Subjectivity in Post-Nietzschean Autobiography. 2001.

Vol.

11

Wojciech H. Kalaga / Tadeusz Rachwa (eds.): Exile. Displacements and Misplacements. 2001.

Vol.

12

Marta Zajac: The Feminine of Difference. Gilles Deleuze, Hélène Cixous and Contemporary Critique of the Marquis de Sade. 2002.

Vol.

13

Zbigniew Bialas / Krzysztof Kowalczyk-Twarowski (eds.): Alchemization of the Mind. Literature and Dissociation. 2003.

Vol.

14

Tadeusz Slawek: Revelations of Gloucester. Charles Olsen, Fitz Hugh Lane, and Writing of the Place. 2003.

Vol.

15

Carlotta von Maltzan (ed.): Africa and Europe: En/Countering Myths. Essays on Literature and Cultural Politics. 2003.

Vol.

16

Marzena Kubisz: Strategies of Resistance. Body, Identity and Representation in Western Culture. 2003.

Vol.

17

Ewa Rychter: (Un)Saying the Other. Allegory and Irony in Emmanuel Levinas’s Ethical Language. 2004.

Vol.

18

Ewa Borkowska: At the Threshold of Mystery: Poetic Encounters with Other(ness). 2005.

Vol.

19

Wojciech H. Kalaga / Tadeusz Rachwa (eds.): Feeding Culture: The Pleasures and Perils of Appetite. 2005.

Vol.

20

Wojciech H. Kalaga / Tadeusz Rachwa (eds.): Spoiling the Cannibals’ Fun? Cannibalism and Cannibalisation in Culture and Elsewhere. 2005.

Vol.

21

Katarzyna Ancuta: Where Angels Fear to Hover. Between the Gothic Disease and the Meataphysics of Horror. 2005.

Vol.

22

Piotr Wilczek: (Mis)translation and (Mis)interpretation: Polish Literature in the Context of Cross-Cultural Communication. 2005.

Vol.

23

Krzysztof Kowalczyk-Twarowski: Glebae Adscripti. Troping Place, Region and Nature in America. 2005.

Vol.

24

Zbigniew Biaas: The Body Wall. Somatics of Travelling and Discursive Practices. 2006.

Vol.

25

Katarzyna Nowak: Melancholic Travelers. Autonomy, Hybridity and the Maternal. 2007.

Vol.

26

Leszek Drong: Disciplining the New Pragmatism. Theory, Rhetoric, and the Ends of Literary Study. 2007.

Vol.

27

Katarzyna Smyczyska: The World According to Bridget Jones. Discourses of Identity in Chicklit Fictions. 2007.

Vol.

28

Wojciech H. Kalaga / Marzena Kubisz (eds.): Multicultural Dilemmas. Identity, Difference, Otherness. 2008.

Vol.

29

Maria Plochocki: Body, Letter, and Voice. Construction Knowledge in Detective Fiction. 2010.

Vol.

30

Rossitsa Terzieva-Artemis: Stories of the Unconscious: Sub-Versions in Freud, Lacan and Kristeva. 2009.

Vol.

31

Sonia Front: Transgressing Boundaries in Jeanette Winterson’s Fiction. 2009.

Vol.

32

Wojciech Kalaga / Jacek Mydla / Katarzyna Ancuta (eds.): Political Correctness. Mouth Wide Shut? 2009.

Vol.

33

Pawe Marcinkiewicz: The Rhetoric of the City: Robinson Jeffers and A. R. Ammons. 2009.

Vol.

34

Wojciech Maecki: Embodying Pragmatism. Richard Shusterman’s Philosophy and Literary Theory. 2010.

Vol.

35

Wojciech Kalaga / Marzena Kubisz (eds.): Cartographies of Culture. Memory, Space, Representation. 2010.

Vol.

36

Boena Shallcross / Ryszard Nycz (eds.): The Effect of Pamplisest. Culture, Literature, History. 2011.

Vol.

37

Wojciech Kalaga / Marzena Kubisz / Jacek Mydla (eds.): A Culture of Recycling / Recycling Culture? 2011.

Vol.

38

Anna Chromik: Disruptive Fluidity. The Poetics of the Pop Cogito. 2012.

Vol.

39

Pawe Wojtas: Translating Gombrowicz´s Liminal Aesthetics. 2014.

Vol.

40

Marcin Mazurek: A Sense of Apocalypse. Technology, Textuality, Identity. 2014.

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