Discourse

A First Cut: Gesture, or the Fragments of Machines

Charlie Chaplin’s film Modern Times (1936), near silent but made nine years after the official end of the silent era, juxtaposes the two major filmic modes of the first half of the twentieth century: montage and deep focus. The unforgettable assembly-line sequence, with the Tramp’s wrenches tightening bolts and blouse buttons, the auto-feeder allowing the workers to continue tightening bolts while a machine pushes food into their mouths, and the culminating fall into the machine itself, shows the radical imposition of the standardization and routinization process on the body by the machine. The disciplinary aspect of the assembly line, in both its corporeal and temporal dimensions, is underscored here primarily by physical comedy: the Tramp’s at times involuntary rebellion against the machine’s strict routinization of gesture. The Tramp’s inadequacy to the disciplinary regime of industrial production leads him first to a series of nervous ticks, short circuits, and conflicts with his fellow workers. He finally falls into the mechanism itself, passing through its system of gears. Only upon his real subsumption, if you will, does the Little Tramp thoroughly become one of the machine’s products, and only then does he have a complete nervous breakdown, defiantly oiling people with big black squirts in the face before being carried away in an ambulance.

Importantly, this nervous breakdown does not lead the Tramp to the psychoanalyst’s couch but instead to a hospital and then, through a series of employment mishaps, to jail—a place, incidentally, that with its warm dry bed and three meals a day he finds infinitely more congenial than the outside world of the industrial city. I stress this not only because the price of neurological failure for the working machine-man is prison but also because the film’s break from montage and utilization of deep focus at certain key points does not employ this important latter technique to psychoanalytic ends, as in, say, Citizen Kane (1941). Rather, in Modern Times it is physical comedy and the power of the body that are given as [End Page 49] the heroic response to the fragmentation of space and time by the machine. Chaplin’s brilliance is in large part due to his corporeal abilities to reclaim a body that otherwise is robbed of its gestural capacities and effectively shattered by the machine in the mode of montage. Importantly, this bodily mastery also reunifies space and time. As writer, director, and star, Chaplin’s superlative control of the four dimensions (for that, in brief, is, or at least was, cinema) is both an analysis of industrial production and a form of vengeance against industrial capitalism.

Of the two or three scenes that utilize deep focus, I want to talk about the skating scene. The extraordinary tension while a blindfolded Chaplin skates backwards with infinite and graceful abandon as if oblivious to a three-story drop opened by the broken balustrade behind him creates a kind of poetry of the body in which the human animal, slated to become a programmable sheep by the industrialized temporality of the machine age, is shown to be capable of a near supernatural freedom of expressive movement—a form of joy. Not once but many times, Chaplin skates in speedy backwards arcs, with one leg in the air, less than an inch from the edge of what could only be a bone-breaking fall. That this movement in the round, in a temporally continuous three-dimensional space, is narratologically inspired by the love of an impoverished couple battling the dehumanization of the industrial city and by the momentary if illicit enjoyment of the luxurious spoils of a bourgeois department store does not, here at least, diminish the effect.⁴ For through the cinema, Chaplin used industrial modes of production to strive to organize body, space, time, and attention counter to that self-same industry’s Taylorist reconditioning of modern man’s neurological function.

A Second Cut: Castration, or the Fetish Is a Penis (But Not Just Any Penis)

This space-time of realism—which Andre Bazin in What Is Cinema? famously described as a decal or a transfer of reality but is perhaps today better thought of as the realism befitting a certain Euro-American transnational era in a particular media-ecology—is, with Chaplin, far more physiological than psychological.⁵ How different it is in a film such as Citizen Kane, where the journey through a discontinuous set of continuous space-times, what Deleuze calls “sheets of past,” is entered into as if one were to enter directly into different moments of Charles Foster Kane’s snow globe, that is, into one of his fetish objects and thus into his unconscious.⁶ The [End Page 50] multiple entries into spaces through windows and skylights emphasize and thematize this effect. There, in these sheets of space-time, sealed off by the closure imposed by Kane’s death and the mystery of the fragmentary accounts of who he was, everything is pregnant with meaning, and, as has been observed, the audience plays the role of detective or psychoanalyst. We embark on a search for an explanation of the inner workings of a public and indeed cultic personality, one first introduced to us, it must be underscored, through the montage sequence of the newsreel at the opening of the film. Kane the citizen, the media mogul, the recluse, who was accused by disillusioned paramour Susan—for whom he built an opera house—of “never giving [her] nothing, but only trying to buy [her] love,” has a public identity built through mechanical reproduction’s financially calculated montage effects, that is, through newspaper ballistics that daily sensationalize the famous Kane’s endeavors and shock the modern public into continuously recalibrated modes of recognition. It is noteworthy, in light of my scarcely disguised assertion here that newsprint and publicity running on the program of a specific platform function as a form of expanded cinema, that Bazin, a great proponent of deep-focus cinema, found montage overly programmatic, saying that montage foreclosed thought. He also accused it of representing things that do not exist. Despite the fact that for Eisenstein the instantiation of a concept or the creation of a conditioned reflex, that is, of a new order of reality via the montage of attractions, was a good thing, or at least a very useful one inasmuch as it both expressed the modal power of cinema and could engineer new perceptions (adequate to the times) and thereby foment social change, the programmatic and behaviorist aspects of montage were correctly intuited by Bazin to be on a continuum with the shredding and reprogramming of space-time that was characteristic not only of the cinema-machine but also of industrialization more generally. Deep focus, on the other hand, allows for ambiguity, according to Bazin, and in Citizen Kane the deep-focus suspension of the determinate meaning of the image is in fact used to probe a montage sequence. The film investigates the newsreel.

For whatever reason, there is one part of the newsreel montage that opens Citizen Kane that I have always likened to that of the stone lion sequence on the Odessa steps in Battleship Potemkin (1925), the paradigmatic splices offered just after Potemkin fires on the czarist troops. But in the newsreel section of Citizen Kane, instead of sleeping lion statue, waking lion statue, fully roused on all fours lion statue, we have the three telegraphic vocal accounts of Kane: “He’s a communist,” “he’s a fascist,” and, in his own words, [End Page 51] “I’m an American.” So, let’s say that the film sets out to contemplate a world in fragments, that is, to find a depth hermeneutic adequate to a world of appearances that suddenly are felt to be mere symptoms of a deeper problematic. In short, Wells seeks a psychoanalytic explanation for a mass-media-produced cultic figure—one who appeared to be sympathetic to the masses and to workers’ struggle but who was a Cesarist in Gramsci’s sense, that is, a charismatic leader who opportunistically diverted the libidinal investments of mass-based struggles for liberation to build his own image in accordance with the laws of private property and profit.⁷ The film proceeds as if rudimentary communism, blatant fascism, and a capitalist media empire somehow culminate in “an American,” and in Kane’s case in “an American citizen,” and as if this “progression,” for lack of a better term, could be understood upon a proper exploration of the question whose answer is “Rosebud.”

This investigation apparently requires the spatiotemporality of deep focus and the long take. As we know—because Wells told his lawyers to tell the press so—Citizen Kane is not about William Randolph Hearst (or Rupert Murdoch, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, or Silvio Berlusconi) but is based on “dollar book Freud.” Of course, a dollar was worth a lot more in 1941, and we certainly should not miss the proximity of psychoanalysis and money in Wells’s riposte. Rosebud, the darkening name on Charlie’s sled revealed to us in the final scene as the trashed sled burns in an incinerator, is fetish numero uno among a series of fetishes that are reconfigured in the snow globe and in Kane’s fetishistic acquisition of “the great treasures of Europe,” bought, crated, and stored in his palatial Xanadu—never to be seen again. Freud, unsurprisingly perhaps, tells us that the fetish is the penis, but not just any penis; it is, quite specifically, the mother’s penis, often associated with the last object seen before the fateful revelation of the mother’s lack. Hence, Freud tells us, the fetishes for feet, velvet, and fur originate from the moment just before the male child looks up the mother’s skirt.⁸ The fetish is a way to simultaneously know and not know; it preserves the plenitude of childhood while becoming a stand-in for the mother’s penis. Thus, the fetish disavows the threat of castration that traumatizes the male child when he sees that the penis he believed to be there can disappear.

This little excursion into the Freudian fetish bears out Wells’s claim, since Rosebud was the last thing the young Charlie Kane enjoyed before his mother’s (symbolic) castration. The mother, domineering in relation to Kane’s father, is in charge of family decisions. But as the story has it, Kane’s relation to his mother and family is supervened by an inheritance that suddenly makes him [End Page 52] one of the richest people in the world. Called over from the plenitude of sledding, little Charlie is informed that he will no longer live at home. Charlie’s new guardian is a bank-appointed custodian of his new fortune. The agency of this fortune—in short, the alienated power of money expressed as the will of the banks—separated Kane from his mother, in spite of his childhood protests to the contrary. The rest of his life, we are to understand, which tellingly includes his hatred for his guardians at the bank, will be an effort to recapture the plenitude of the maternal bond—the time of the maternal phallus. However, the medium for the solicitation of love is forevermore capital, and for Kane, who seeks to make his capital expressive of his own desires, this expression takes the form of the newspaper: mass media itself. But in order to not be castrated as his mother was (her agency was vanquished by the phallic power of the banks), he must prove himself to be more than money, to operate in excess of the explicit logic of money. Ultimately, this turns out to be impossible. Kane’s sympathy for the workers’ movements, expressed via the very means that would require transcendence for it to be authentic (bank capital and capitalist media), becomes only his self-aggrandizing way of buying love on a mass scale. Charismatically, he promotes himself as a great man of the people, thus leading the public to what Walter Benjamin would call “a processing of data in the fascist sense.”⁹ From now on, love, masculinity, mass media, and capitalist exploitation will be welded together, making each of Kane’s libidinal investments nothing more than an exploit and indeed, whether in the form of the masses, the friend, or the lover, an evisceration of the love object. Accordingly, Kane, with his horde of hollow treasures meant to signify a humanity that he does not possess, will die a great man: loveless, friendless, empty, and alone. Freud tells us that all men are great in their dreams. Kane tried to live his dreams as a media capitalist and thus became an exemplary American: neurotic, megalomaniacal, unloving, and unloved.

A Third Cut: The Normal Man, or Mobilized Gazes and the Short Circuiting of the Law of the Father

With the development of the assembly line and mass media, we have examined, all too briefly, the loss first of the capacity to move and then of the capacity to love. Let us continue to survey the damage. Take Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960), a film about a man trying to overcome both of these incapacities. Deleuze was not wrong to indicate that each Hitchcock film contains its epistemic [End Page 53] schema in the opening. The famed opening of Saul Bass’s cut-up credits of Psycho already forecasts the shredding of the symbolic order (both syntagmatically and paradigmatically) and thus of the law of the father—by cinema. Nonetheless, despite the cuts, the symbols remain legible. Recall Marion Crane, lawbreaker, soon to meet a fate similar to that of the other eviscerated birds who one way or another meet their ends at the Bates Motel. Of course, Marion is simply trying to extract some pleasure out of capitalist patriarchy; what she wants is only the narrow payoff that it holds out to a woman who can make the cut. Marion wants to “marry on,” to marry one man, one man named Sam, but the law, and quite literally the (monetary) properties thereof, impoverishes this hope and, by cutting her off from her desire, impels her to take a shortcut.

We first glimpse Marion and Sam in a hotel bed during time stolen from the lunch hour. We glimpse voyeuristically, it must be admitted, as we peer under the curtain and through the window from ten stories in the air. In fact, it is noteworthy that in the first fifteen seconds of the film we go from a bird’s-eye view of the city to a momentary perch outside a curtained window and then into a sex scene—as the characters, the cinema, and the audience seek their quasi-elicit pleasures and their ends. So, with interests thus aligned (we want sex, not psychoanalysis, in risqué 1960), we pursue Marion Crane, who, untamed by the law, takes flight. After having stolen forty thousand dollars, suddenly out of control and haunted, she drives out of town, driven by the gaze and the voice of the law—only, as luck would have it, to fall into the trap of the stuttering Norman Bates, a man with his own scopic, linguistic, and legal issues who also happens to be a taxidermist.

One could say that film was, above all things (including space and time), about the cut, but such a statement would never be more true than in the case of Psycho. For what else is the cut if not a denial, indeed a radical negation of what is? Let us agree: Marion, whose gaze, mobilized like that of cinematic spectators, finds herself momentarily free to follow her desire but is then pursued by the law while on her flight to pleasure. Paradoxically, this journey to pleasure is cut short by a new law, that of the cinematic cut. This cut is the other side, the dialectical antithesis, if you will, of the mobilized gaze. Indeed, it is the film that forces Marion to stop at the Bates Motel. Mobility and the edit: the new grammar of desire and deferral for which the old grammar of the symbolic order and the law of the father must find adequation. This power to fragment and reassemble is at once a condition of possibility of, and subjugating grammar for, an emergent order of desire attendant to [End Page 54] modernity. The mode of its containment constitutes the pathologistical implementation of the gendered organization of pleasure.

Not just a violation of the common heritage that is the human body and its thought, not simply the recomposition of space-time, the grammar of the cinema is a mode of and for the mobilization and reorganization of desire. Marion, the desiring Crane, empowered by her new role in the workplace, cuts the law, but she is not the only one. In stealing the money and fleeing the poetically named city of Phoenix (the bird reborn from the ashes), she cuts out, but she is also cut out: out of society and, even more shockingly perhaps, out of the film. Indeed, Hitchcock shocked audiences not with the one act of cutting against Janet Leigh but with two acts in one: by brutally cutting her up as he did in the middle of the film, he thus, against the audience’s expectations, cut the film star out of the film halfway through the narrative. The second half of the film is the afterlife of both Norman’s and the audience’s fetishistic appropriation and indeed consumption of the female film star.

Let us also remember that for Laura Mulvey, at least, visual pleasure is generated by a narrative cinema “cut to the measure of [male] desire,” and this is accomplished by the organization of three looks, that of the characters, the camera, and the audience. Mulvey describes the exigencies bearing on both woman and the image of woman with a kind of devastating efficiency. “[T]he function of woman in forming the patriarchal unconscious is twofold: she firstly symbolizes the castration threat by her real lack of a penis and secondly thereby raises her child into the symbolic. Once this has been achieved, her meaning in the process is at an end.”¹⁰ As if writing about Marion, Mulvey adds that “Women’s desire is subjugated to her image as bearer of the bleeding wound; she can exist only in relation to it and not transcend it.” And the two sentences immediately following this structural foreclosure of feminine expression almost uncannily describe Norman’s fate at the hands of his mother: “She turns her child into the signifier of her own desire to possess a penis (the condition, she imagines, of entry into the symbolic). Either she must gracefully give way to the word, the name of the father and the law, or else struggle to keep her child down with her in the half-light of the imaginary.”¹¹ For Norman, as we are to find out, is held down “in the half-light of the imaginary”: the child of a widowed mother whose uncommon agency interrupted Norman’s normal development; Mother’s obsessive control kept her child from achieving full, which is to say “normal,” manhood. When, after the father’s early death, Mother expresses herself in another way and takes a lover, Norman kills them both, but this murder is not enough to excise the dominion [End Page 55] of Mother’s consciousness over his manhood or to overcome his phallic lack. Mother—that is, desiring mother unbound from the name of the Father—is already within him; the internalization of insubordinate female agency is precisely what makes him a psycho. Norman’s endeavors to become a man under the unquiet image of his mother lead him to engage in acts whose reality must increasingly be denied if he is to remain a good boy. One might say that for Hitchcock, the diagnosis of modern psychosis is a structural feature of modernity, but it is unbound female agency that presents the problem.

So, Psycho delivers poetic justice in accord with midcentury white American patriarchy. A woman breaks the law for pleasure—cut to her punishment. If that punishment is mildly disproportionate, it is because somewhere else, another woman, in this case Norman’s mother, was seeking her own pleasure in an effort to mean something more than castration and nothing else—at least to herself. But the law of the father, even if it doesn’t function seamlessly, organizes things such that justice is served. The law of the father organizes the fragments and the cuts, organizes the cinema. In the media of patriarchy, one woman’s exercise of agency is shot down by another woman’s exercise of agency. The angel of this justice, the particular medium that provides its deliverance, is first Norman, who as we know is a psycho and, not coincidentally, a voyeur. He also happens to be an embodiment of cinema. Cinema (Psycho is, after all, a classic) is thus the second medium of poetic justice here, since as we shall see more clearly in a moment, Norman’s visual practice is exactly analogous to cinema itself. And psychoanalysis, which at the conclusion of the film functions as explainer and apologist, provides the discursive analysis of the visual event. Here, it is the third medium of patriarchy’s “justice.”

Let’s see how this works. Norman is castrated, or at least tortured by the threat of castration. When his male desire wells, he endeavors to take on the role of standard masculinity (he makes Marion sandwiches), but his mother’s overbearing presence (also a result of modern times) won’t allow him the pleasures of manhood—scopophilia is as far as he can go.

Brilliantly, the peephole into Marion’s hotel room is revealed by Norman’s removal of a small painting, Susanna and the Elders, a nude and a rape. This painting, which displays for the viewer Susanna’s full frontal nudity while she is being assaulted, is a well-chosen example of Western art and its long tradition of the objectification of women for masculine purposes.¹² Here, Norman removes this painting in order to uncover its gaze: the peephole behind it. He is looking at a woman directly through the visual [End Page 56] program of the Western tradition. The peephole is both an image of the gaze and the gaze itself; it is the camera obscura and now the cinema. And there, on the other side of the wall, is Marion in her hotel room, literally in camera. A moment earlier in the very bunker full of stuffed animals for grown-ups, where Norman’s efforts to rescue his failed manhood are housed, Marion had questioned his masculinity by implying that he was subservient to his mother, adding that “a son is a poor substitute for a lover.” But now, Marion’s presence expelled from the den of struggling masculinity, she may be beheld in the cinematic gaze (at this moment in history the culminating technology of dominant Western visual practice); she may, in short, be taken as an object. The viewer’s gaze, now directly aligned with Norman’s, puts both in the position that Hitchcock stated he wanted for his audience: “aroused by pure film.”¹³ However, unlike the Renaissance figure, Marion is not yesterday’s woman: she is a working woman, newly empowered, technologically mobile, and a lawbreaker. She embodies new forms of desire as well as access to money and power, and she will have to be treated in the modern mode.

In analyzing her treatment, we would do well to recall here the dialectic of the eye and the gaze. According to Jean-Paul Sartre, if one sees the eye, the gaze disappears; however, if one falls under the gaze, the eye disappears. Thus, seeing the eye, objectifying the body of the other, is a way of warding off castration through the repression and negation of the subjectivity of the Other. That is why Jacques Lacan tells us that the gaze is also an annihilating gaze. As Mulvey tells us, “Desire, born with language, allows the possibility of transcending the instinctual and the imaginary, but its point of reference continually returns to the traumatic moment of its birth: the castration complex. Hence the look, pleasurable in form can be threatening in content, and it is woman as representation/image that crystallizes this paradox.”¹⁴ Cinema, she explains, has developed various strategies of objectification and identification to manage the image of woman, to tack back and forth between voyeuristic pleasure and reinforcement of the male ego: in brief, the sadistic narrative that unmasks the woman and deprives her of power and the fetishistic manipulation of her image via the close-up that removes her from three-dimensional space cuts up her body and renders it two-dimensional and iconic. In the shower scene, the literal liquidation of Marion’s agency—her lifeblood swirling down the drain—gives us a concrete image for the gendered praxis of this gaze as fomented and codified by cinema. As the knife cuts, at once analogously to and here simultaneously with the way in which the cinema cuts up the image of [End Page 57] woman, the camera continues by following the blood swirling in the water of the bathtub down into the void of the drain, only to leave the blackness of the void by exiting the pupil of Marion’s now dead eye. As the camera zooms out from Marion’s pupil, we see her final twitches before she becomes a corpse. Through the sequence of cuts, her subjective (and threatening) gaze has literally been converted into the eye-object. Thus, in abridged form, we have the whole film, both cut to and taking the measure of male desire. The shower sequence is the film within the film that gives us the fundamental relation of the eye and the gaze in an economy of gendered looking circumscribed by patriarchal law. The rest of the material is (a brilliant) elaboration.

Famously, again, the woman must bear the burden of the look; she is the bearer, not the maker of meaning. While she provokes men, she also embodies the threat of castration. Traditionally speaking, then, Norman’s attention to Marion is not properly economic—his attention to her exceeds somewhat his contractual duties as hotel clerk. Indeed, as if to emphasize the extraeconomic dimension of Norman’s use of Marion, the forty thousand dollars that Marion stole is buried under the mire in the trunk of the car, still wrapped in newspaper—in the symbolic order of the business world—and well beyond Norman’s grasp. Norman’s gaze, then, from the point of view of our own times, in which we understand that looking is posited as labor, seems atavistic if not exceptional, part of yesterday’s problems and an older regime of looking, as it is not directly productive of value. However, if we take seriously, as we must, Sylvia Federici’s critique of Marxism and the labor theory of value, for example, then we know that women’s work, although unwaged and unrecognized by capitalist modes of valuation (monetization), is nonetheless the bedrock of social reproduction.¹⁵ Woman as unwaged, unvalued, and unrepresented labor not only bears the gendered burden of social reproduction, but also here, archetypically, is the bearer of the burden of the look. She bears the burden of the look unto death and thereby serves Norman’s desire to reproduce himself as a desiring subject, in this case a man.

With cinematic optics and the mobilization of male and female gazes, however, everything changes somewhat, and the law of the father is threatened: Marion, who is a lawbreaker, and Norman’s phallic mother, who kept Norman down in “the half-light of the imaginary,” constitute modern industrial threats to masculinity, for which the cinematic gaze will have to compensate. Thus, Marion serves, or rather is served up in camera, to foment and sustain the new archetypical voyeur, a psycho. [End Page 58]

In a famous passage about Hollywood narrative cinema that today we must make redound to a critique of Marxist poetics as well, Mulvey reminds us that with the image of woman, “her visual presence tends to work against the development of the story line. This is because the narcissistic needs of the male ego are sutured into an identification with the male character: his gaze, his control of the narrative and his organization of three-dimensional space.”¹⁶ This describes Hollywood’s male lead but also, we should note, Marx’s figure of capital. In Psycho, Marion’s act of theft cuts the law of the father and inaugurates a narrative that is used to reveal the logistics of the law, which is to say, the forces of normalization under patriarchy. The law of the father, via a stochastic-cybernetic system of capitalist patriarchy—what a moment ago I ironically referred to as poetic justice—reestablishes itself. In the encounter with Norman, modern deviance counters modern deviance as cinematic optics confront the law, but systemically speaking, order is reestablished to the cinematically mobilized world through a kind of Norbert Wienerian self-regulating damping effect via the program known as the plot. And in a restoration of the law (if you remember the end of the film), psychoanalysis makes sense of it all.

As if to say “The symbolic order is dead; long live the symbolic order!”, Marion short-circuits the law and is herself cut up by a character who would represent patriarchy but has himself been short-circuited by it via another figure of modernity, the castrating phallic mother. Indeed, we might observe that the main character is himself a resultant cut-up of the symbolic order by the very cinematic optics of modernity that both threaten and enable his fantasy: Norman Bates’s very name is in fact the result of a cutting process. As hinted in Saul Bass’s opening credits, Norman’s name is a condensation of a phrase that can be reconstructed to reveal both the pathological effect of the cinematic cut on the symbolic order and an ordinary truth: “the normal man masturbates.” The normal man masturbates, fine, but in the cinematic world, Norman Bates.

Well, if in 1960 the normal man masturbated, what does he do today? What do any of us do? Particularly after half a century of cinema, digitization, visual saturation, and visual financialization? Citizen Kane or Norman Bates? Neurotic megalomania or psychosis? Two programs for subjectivization. In today’s world in which the entire visual field is posited as a site of value extraction, it is no secret that pornography represents 30 percent of Internet traffic at minimum.¹⁷ If we consider that computer energy usage has expanded to account for more than 3 percent of electricity consumption worldwide, that’s a significant amount of fossil fuel devoted to jacking off. Still, if reaching orgasm in order to ward [End Page 59] off psychosis were the main use of fossil fuels, the world might be a better place. However, the effects are somewhat more serious than all that: structural violence, systematically deployed and titrated with highly fungible vectors of racism and sexism, is embedded in the techno-visualization of everything that appears with the express goal of capturing sensual labor and the consequence of liquidating both subjects and the subjectivity of their objects. Bernard Steigler’s notion of the stripping of the libido and the proletarianization of the senses by what he calls “retentional systems” would be useful here, as would Herbert Marcuse’s idea of one-dimensional man.¹⁸ From Kane to Bates to porn, we witness the mediatic functionalization of subjectivity and the virtualization of the object world. These three pathways are programmatic compensatory means to ward off the radical disempowerment wrought by programs. More than a tendency, the result is an automation of psychic function by computerized and capitalized apparatuses.

But our analysis thus far only reaches 1960 and predominantly concerns the United States, more specifically the white United States. Indeed, the forms of neurological and psychic dysfunction and reformation described herein—people fragmented, castrated, and cut up by money and machines and driven to seek subjectivity by pathological means—are relatively easy to understand, delimited as they are and as compared with the logistics of perception now current. Not to minimize them, since they violently imposed various regimes of the body, psychology, personhood, and desire upon subjects as well as upon those who became objects for said subjects, but we must remark here that they are local manifestations specific to a few dominant nations, races, and classes in a particular epoch. Nonetheless, their mainstream expression and dissemination make them valid precursors, if you will, to the (con)temporary psychosis of today’s mainstream. Yesterday’s white supremacist capitalist patriarchy still configures today’s white supremacist capitalist patriarchy in the United States, Europe, and beyond, a formation that is symptomatically specific to one class fraction but nonetheless potentially deadly to every planetary denizen (if also to itself) for all that.

Outing the whiteness of my examples thus far is not to universalize them but precisely the opposite. Along with Frantz Fanon, we should also recognize the limits of psychopathologizing discourse, which is to say the limits of psychoanalysis. For Fanon, no talking cure was going to cure the sicknesses of either torture victims or sociopaths; only insurrection and revolution could overthrow the forms of egoism and hatred endemic to colonialism and fascism and thus bring about the needed paradigm shift.¹⁹ So in tracking the white psychopathologies that lead toward the dissolution of [End Page 60] their hosts, we are witnessing the implosion, the practical deconstruction, of whiteness.

By way of moving toward a conclusion, I want to make two final points: one about whiteness and what Anne Anlin Cheng astutely calls the “melancholy of race.”²⁰ This will be an additional and indeed constitutive pathologistical vector that characterizes the operating system of the representational dominant and then a second point concerning a generalized liquidation not just of particular human beings but of human being and of being itself.

In The Melancholy of Race, Cheng reminds us that the melancholic is both sad and aggressive:

Dominant white identity in America operates melancholically—as an elaborate identificatory system based on psychical and social consumption-and-denial. This diligent system of melancholic retention appears in different guises. Both racist and white liberal discourses participate in the dynamic, albeit out of different motivations. The racists need to develop elaborate ideologies in order to accommodate their actions with official American ideals, while white liberals need to keep burying the racial others in order to memorialize them. Those who do not see the racial problem or those who call themselves nonideological are the most melancholic of all because in today’s political climate, as Toni Morrison exclaims in Playing in the Dark, “it requires hard work not to see.”²¹

Although Cheng is interested in “the question that Freud does not ask: What is the subjectivity of the melancholic object?”, for the moment I want to remark that the canonical cinema of the United States can be thought of as a melancholy canon, organized as it is to portray white narratives as universal narratives in a society profoundly structured by racial inequality—organized, in other words, to not see.²² While bell hooks and many others have commented on the oppositional gaze in Hollywood cinema, particularly the oppositional gaze of black spectators watching white films, we must learn to better recognize how whole systems of visualization and thus the organization of attention are structured around a disavowal of racism or of the existence of racialized bodies and oftentimes the active annihilation of racialized bodies.²³ Cheng, citing Thomas Mann, who says that “What we call mourning for our dead is perhaps not so much grief at not being able to call them back as it is grief at not being able to want to do so,” shows that “it is exclusion, rather than loss, [that] is the real stake of melancholic retention.”²⁴ Indeed, melancholia approaches psychosis when the lost/excluded object rises up to challenge the melancholic, who in truth no longer desires (or can abide) its return. [End Page 61]

Take, for example, Clint Eastwood’s all too convincing portrayal in Dirty Harry (1971) of a sad cop, Dirty Harry, whose disillusionment and melancholic self-loathing have almost cost him his job on the San Francisco Police Department. When one of the rare black characters in Hollywood cinema asserts himself, albeit scripted in the most stereotypically racist of ways—a black bank robber running from the interpellation of a white man who also happens to be a cop—the line of sight through the peephole of psycho, a masculinity machine if there ever was one, becomes the sight line down the barrel of Eastwood’s .44 Magnum. The title of the sequels, Magnum Force (1973) and The Enforcer (1976), are telling, because the psycho does not simply deny reality (the possibility of other ways and practices beyond his ken); he imposes his vision on others by making them dead, if necessary. Eastwood’s persona from Dirty Harry forward is that of being too much a man for these muddled, liberal, and overly tolerant times—his career turns out to be a heroic elegy of his racial melancholia, which is to say the melancholia of his racism. As one blogger appreciatively writes, “Dirty Harry put a bullet in the heart of the flower-power generation,”²⁵ and it’s true: psychosis overcame poetry, and too many Americans loved him up.

Here we can grasp the virility at the end of Peeping Tom’s camera (Peeping Tom, 1960), which he uses to film women as he murders them, in the form of the camera’s bayonet blade extension, and the virility in the extension of Eastwood’s racist gun. This prosthetics of the gaze constitutes what we should understand as the working edge of the so-called universal man. Dirty Harry’s melancholia is of a profoundly different order than that of African American filmmaker Charles Burnett’s characters in his extraordinary Killer of Sheep (1979). This film could be read as a kind of black Modern Times in which the desultory Watts community in the mid-1970s is also metaphorically figured as consisting of sheep (and on occasion killers), but here the machines hardly work. The film is a kind of bearing witness to the lived temporality, disempowerment, and affective experiences of racialized exclusion. One finds in this film a distinctive composition that creates an apperceptive space of black knowing, which in certain real ways is outside the economy of visual forms and structures proffered at the Hollywood box office (even as it is arguably a partial result of this economy). Following the lead offered in Saidiya Hartman’s work, one might say that the incommunicability and opacity of the legacies of slavery, racism, and Jim Crow are partly the contents of this film. The very difficulty of generating a subject-constituting line of sight, image, or fully resolved perspective or representation testifies to [End Page 62] a nonhegemonic visuality, an unrealized subjectification, and the presence of counterhistories that mobilize a perceptual mode different from that which will align itself and hence be at once repurposed and devoured by the mainstream.

However, the annihilating gazes abstracted and informed in Psycho, Dirty Harry, Peeping Tom, etc., are a condensation of a specific mode of white life’s universal application of a violently imposed sexism and racism to the organization of its perception. These pure gazes mobilizing racism and sexism on various platforms for the prosumption of postfordist tramps to the profit of today’s entrepreneurial Citizen Kanes, small and large, are also the legacy of colonialism, of slavery, of imperialism and humanism. Today, these vectors of for-profit programmatic annihilation consolidate to form, among other manifestations, the predatory gaze of the drone in a global war to be human. These pathological programs of visualization continue to function in ways that are equally as important as the digital computer. The drone, effecting what Allen Feldman calls a liquid archive, couples all the capacities of computation for aerodynamic navigation, videography, cartography, facial recognition, and weapons deployment to create technologically enabled psychosis, or cyberpsychosis.²⁶ The drone and its melancholic functionaries—its cybernetically incorporated pilots (who will go home to kiss their kids after pulling the trigger on someone else’s family half a universe away), along with their entire staff of statisticians, researchers, and commanders who serve both machine and country—draw on a panoply of mutable, and thus programmable, raced and gendered assumptions, as does the press that covers these exploits and the nation that sanctions them. In short, data processing can morphologically produce whatever variant of racist/sexist phobic rage is required for any operation, it being understood, of course, that an operation here means the liquidation of the visualized target. The violent and incorporating logistics of this gaze are utterly banalized in the technical rationality of computers, national security, military protocols, and the scoops of networked news that together produce the required taxidermic effect on each day’s requisite Other. Thus, the drone, as both financial exploit and paradigmatic mode of visualization in the era of mediatic finance capital, also represents the full automation of not just visuality but also subjectivity. Because all systems (computation, financialization, visualization, militarization, national borders and migration, racialization, aestheticization, etc.) tend toward its logic, subjectivity within these programs is only to be found in the logistics of the annihilating gaze: subjectivity has itself become a program, and all outsides are [End Page 63] zones of crisis. This subjectification through annihilation is the real meaning of “convergence.”

So alongside the regular fare, we have war games, war porn, food porn, fashion porn, news porn, reality porn, and regular porn. In fact, this is the regular fare, and it is all part of the attention economy. This all-consuming production by mediated sensual labor functions at a variety of levels, from the ratification of a particular screen image to the game, blog, show or channel through to the interface or platform and their advertisers, shareholders, banks, militaries, and states. We have the bundling of modes of attention by computerized delivery systems and systems of account. We have, in short, the programmatic simulation of reality, the virtual mise-en-scène of all looking, without the guarantee of any real event beyond that orchestrated by the inexorable logic of advertising and value extraction. That our thoughts and perceptions are programmed, accumulated, and capitalized testifies to the automation and expropriation of the general intellect. The general intellect, distributed across media platforms and automated in various apparatuses, is not just part of the means of production in the industrial sense; it is the means of production of sense perception and knowledge. The general intellect has rendered sensuality productive for capital and subjectivity at once automated and fully virtual. Subjectivity is a contingent instantiation (and always was), but the mediatic matrix of its materialization has fully transformed the local conditions of production and has itself entered into computation.

In some brilliant pages of Alex Galloway’s new book The Interface Effect is the following proposition: “The computer however, [which Galloway calls a metaphysical medium because it functions through simulation and instantiates its own objects] is not of an ontological condition [as cinema is purported to be], it is on that condition. It does not facilitate or make reference to an arrangement of being, it remediates the very conditions of being itself. If I may be so crude, the medium of the computer is being.”²⁷ Galloway continues: “If the cinema is, in general, an ontology, the computer is, in general, an ethic.”²⁸ The distinction, as Galloway tells us, is comparable to that between a language and a calculus: the profilmic event as “referent” versus the program that in object-oriented computing instantiates the very objects it will then manipulate. As evocative, and indeed arresting, as this formulation is in defining the flight from being as a metaphysical transformation ushered in by the digital computer, it is also partially incorrect, at least if we are going to abide by Vilém Flusser’s notion of the photographic apparatus—as machine that automates forms of thinking by executing concepts [End Page 64] in a programmatic fashion.²⁹ For Flusser, the technical image, produced by the apparatus known as the camera, is the first postindustrial image, inasmuch as the camera is already a computer—a programmed apparatus whose function is informed by the linearly written notations of the sciences of optics and chemistry. An apparatus, for Flusser, is something that automates an aspect of intelligence, and it no less consists of programs than does a digital computer. Thus, Flusser claims, quite convincingly, that for nearly two centuries cameras have organized the world for the improvement and proliferation of cameras, such that today everything exists in reference to photography, suggesting that this constellation of programs evolves as the photographic apparatus by subjugating humans to its functions, much as a Darwinian evolutionary vector might transform and then dominate a habitus.

Thus, one might say that if computation is an ethic—the imposition of strict rules upon the emergence and trajectories of entities—then cinema was a mode of computation whose ethos was ontology at least for a time, the time of Bazin. Indeed, we already know that this was only true for a specific modality of cinema, deep focus, as montage with its production of attractions and concept already involved a derealization of the profilmic content of the image. It is useful to say things this way because doing so provides a necessary corollary to W. J. T. Mitchell’s notion that “there are no visual media” that can be used to show that the computer is still fundamentally embroiled in the visual.³⁰ Mitchell argues that since even the most “purely visual” media rely on other mediatic modes to function—silent cinema, for example, had its musical score and intertitles, and abstract expressionism had its critical discourse—no medium is really visual. The corollary, indeed anticipated by Mitchell himself, is that they are all visual media. But what is important, as Mitchell tells us, going back to Marshall McLuhan, is the sense ratios—and, we must add, the program. For visuality is overrun with programs. Thus, we see that while the computer is a break in the mode of informaticization (the way in which worlds are textualized and then treated as information, for it must be remembered that nothing is ontologically information, and information is itself a conceptualization of what to do with being, and thus a program), it remains under the sway of the program of visualization induced by the cofunction and indeed convergence of visual media, which, emphatically now, are all of them.

Already in Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up (1966) and as far back as Sergei Eisenstein’s films, the profilmic real was not real; it was material, raw material organized by semiotic systems. This is no less true with computation, which utilizes abstraction to work [End Page 65] on the world. The computer is an apparatus consisting of apparatuses, a program consisting of programs. For all this, actually existing computing is no less keyed into the visual or into the pathologistical vectors I have identified here. The alienation of “man” from “his” object is not alienation 2.0; it is alienation to the google: programmed, weaponized, photographic apparatuses evolving an extraordinary materialist complexity that runs from the atomic to the planetary by siphoning off the sensual activity of human life to the point in which this process has presided over a generalized liquidation of being. Emergent media, however, like the species’ enlarging carbon footprint, do not cancel what has gone before but instead develop media-ecologically, that is, in relation to extant energetics, whether considered from the standpoint of thermodynamics, labor, or information. No doubt new media are marked by quantitative transformations that precipitate qualitative effects; however, we are looking at a transformation that has taken place over several centuries. The ontological categories and ontology itself have been shifting toward a complete liquidation of being—as a category, as an experience, or (and here this word ceases to make sense) as a “reality.” This, indeed, is the story of twentieth-century philosophy in the West, which taken as a whole turns out to be a theory of the image.

Nonetheless, we find it necessary to insist that race- and gender-based exploitation, systemic encampment, rape, enslavement, national wholesaling of populations, and murder continue apace with capitalism’s evolving algorithms—inequality and injustice is the substrate of capitalist simulations. Thus, we can be sure that while the pathologistics of capitalism are our common lot, they function on a system of differences. These differences are lived, and contradictorily perhaps, we will claim that these lived differences are real and that they matter. For otherwise love is outmoded and indeed impossible, and there is nothing to noncapitalist values, except perhaps profound naïveté or cynicism. Capitalism, the very image of nonbeing, the very life of nonlife, would remain our conceptual horizon, however; the world that haunts today’s images persists. And it is calling you. It rebels.

Paul Virilio, whose inflection of the term “logistics” I have heavily relied upon here, would agree that there is a crisis and that the intensifying rhythm of the pulverization and reformation of subjectivity is today endemic to the function of power. In his recent book-length interview titled The Administration of Fear, he speaks of the developmental sequence of three bombs: the atomic, the informational, and the ecological. “The second is no longer atomic and not yet ecological but informational.”³¹ This bomb comes from [End Page 66] instantaneous means of communication and in particular the transmission of information. The informational bomb plays a prominent role in establishing fear as a global environment because it allows the synchronization of emotion on a global scale. Because of the absolute speed of electromagnetic waves, the same feeling of terror can be felt in all corners of the world at the same time. It is not a localized bomb: it explodes each second. The informational bomb creates a “community of emotions,” what Virilio only half-ironically calls “a communism of affects.” “There is something in the [global] synchronization of emotion that surpasses the power of standardization of opinion that was typical of the mass media in the second half of the twentieth century.” And a little later on he comments that “With the phenomena of instantaneous interaction that are now our lot, there has been a veritable reversal, destabilizing the relationship of human interaction, and the time reserved for reflection in favor of the conditioned responses produced by emotion.”³²

So rather than deep focus and the time of the long take, Virilio sees us in the thrall of a new order of montage (already dimly visible in the newsreel from Citizen Kane)—what in an earlier work I called the cinematic mode of production.³³ Far more intensive than Eisenstein’s programmatic montage or even the ambient but still cinematic montage of mid-twentieth-century mass media, this digital montage is produced by the continued and near continuous arrival of information and affect bombs all competing—in increasingly self-conscious ways that are feedback loops of the market—for the capture and expropriation of human attention. Ours is an increasingly impoverished and militarized society, characterized by a total war on the body, on consciousness, and on the senses but also on equality, on solidarity, and on democracy. Today’s attractions rely on sequence, certainly, but also on frequency, intensity, channel, repetition, and spectrum. Taken together, these attractions generate ideas, affects, panics, crises, and swarms: a global impulse network evolved (if that’s the word) to manage and expropriate a world population by revamping its sensory inputs. The cultural ballistics, arguably akin to the sensory deprivation and oversaturation of interrogation techniques designed to force the ego into existential crisis, institute an establishment of fear as a so-called global environment.

The expropriation of increasing quantities of subjectivity that might otherwise have been used for purposes other than capitalist production and annihilation is today the condition of and for the continuing intensification of the capitalist media environment—the fragmentation and, as has been noted, fractalization induced [End Page 67] by capitalized media machines. But more than that, the induction of fear and prevailing if not permanent psychosis is at once a result and a strategy, a modus operandi, a mise-en-scène. Not just a result of but a condition of production of the reigning administration, one that has succeeded in giving us many good reasons to be afraid. But the administration in question is also one that, as Pussy Riot recently articulated from prison, may fear nothing more than poetry and thus makes every effort to drive it out.³⁴ For it may be that the world-making and solidarity-making practice of poetics, in all its forms, is what remains to those systemically extrinsic crisis zones: zones, peoples, parts of people, aware of their oppression and refusing to seek liberation through oppression. Otherwise, awash in intentional signals, literally caught in myriad and all-pervasive gazes in which seeing and being seen have become one and the same act, everyone, a la Baudrillard,³⁵ is just sending messages that ratify the dominant codes: We are the media. We, the media. Everyone is desperate to make words, to make images, that will testify to their existence in an environment of semio-war. But the situation functions as if each and all were suddenly in the position of Jorge Luis Borges’s narrator Yu Tsun in “The Garden of Forking Paths,” each person a nodal point of multiple inheritances seeking agency in a battle for the control of information, warding off abjection for themselves and for their ancestors in an informatic war, and pressed to convert another or many others into a sign, by murder if necessary, if only to flash their own existence on some platform’s program.³⁶ Let us offer a definition of psychosis in the contemporary: the instrumental inscription of signs and images on the lives of others, at speeds and intensities that foreclose their being.

A final note: For capital, and therefore for capitalists, the human species has become a means to the end that is this very mode of representation and visualization, engaging therefore in the practical deconstruction of being itself. The species as a whole has become the means of representation, which is to say the means of capitalist informatic management. This de-essentializing instrumentalization of the species of course resonates with Guy Debord: “in the spectacle all that was once was directly lived has become mere representation.”³⁷ But now representation is really an end in a double sense: first as the drive to which all human production accedes but second as a new order of alienated production that results for postfordist workers (and everyone else) in what precisely Marx wrote 170 years ago resulted for the industrial worker alienated from his product, “the loss of reality.”³⁸ Today, in the near total saturation of mental life by distributed capitalist media, representation is the denial, indeed the negation, and [End Page 68] finally the impossibility of reality. Representation’s functioning is, in short, the very definition of psychosis. Representation wholesale is now the active production of nonbeing. This is no mere metaphor. Like the state and the banks that are themselves constituted in it, representation—visual and linguistic—is structured by a matrix of pathologistical processes and is today totally bankrupt. And this bankruptcy unfolds catastrophically even as it mounts various exploits and derivatives—abstractions—to stave off a final accounting. If psychosis, in service of the preservation of the historically and now evermore precariously constituted ego, entails the denial of reality, then speaking at all today may be its number one symptom.

Because the reality is that, at least as far as capital is concerned, we no longer exist. Shall we prove otherwise?