Politics of Place: Issue 02

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TECHNOLOGY

Politics of Place Issue 02: Technology Editors Rory Hill Steven Maiden Simon May

Contributors Bradley Garrett (University of Southampton) Martin Gleghorn (University of Durham) Mathilda Rosengren (Freie Universität Berlin) Scott Sundvall (University of Florida)

Editorial Board Prof Rod Edmond (University of Kent) Prof Nick Groom (University of Exeter) Dr Paul Harrison (Durham University) Prof John McLeod (University of Leeds) Prof Fiona Stafford (University of Oxford) Enquiries Steven Maiden - politicsofplace@exeter.ac.uk Copyright Copyright in editorial matter and this collection as a whole: Politics of Place © 2015 Copyright in individual articles: pp.2-17 © Bradley Garrett 2015 pp.18-39 © Scott Sundvall 2015 pp.40-59 © Martin Gleghorn 2015 pp.60-81 © Mathilda Rosengren 2015 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be issued to the public or circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published.

Design and Art Direction Liz Mosley (www.lizmosley.net)

ISSN 2052-4501 (Print) ISSN 2052-4498 (Online)

Other images property of their respective copyright holders and/or used with permission.

Photography Interview and cover photographs courtesy of Bradley Garrett (www.bradleygarrett.com/stills/).

Image on pages 40-41 - dreamstime.com

www.exeter.ac.uk/politicsofplace

EDITORS’ INTRODUCTION

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Ours is a century in which digital technology has proliferated. Smartphones, for instance, and what they make possible, are notably absent from the books, films, and art of the twentieth century. Their portable, tactile omniscience has mastered space, time, and our very lived experience in ways that Marx or Woolf or Picasso would have found hard to imagine. And yet the ordering potential of technology has frequently haunted literary and artistic imaginings of humanity in the future, just as it facilitates our lives in the present. Hal, the obedient, omnipotent computerised familiar of the astronauts in Stanley Kubrick’s ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’, was, perhaps, one of the most abiding visions of a technology that came so close to being human that it eventually inherited human desires and sought to usurp human authority in its own bid for survival. In Hal, Kubrick cautioned that technology might independently surpass its function to better the human experience, thus threatening to usher in an era of human redundancy. It is a warning and prophesy that continues to be a familiar trope in many contemporary works of fiction; works themselves conceived, produced, distributed, consumed and criticised in technologically saturated spaces.

Such entelechies of the relationships between humans and technology, and of how these are understood through the humanities, are the focus of this issue of Politics of Place. Once again, we received submissions from contributors around the world, and once again we were impressed by the high quality of these submissions. The editorial process took a great deal of time, and we pared the issue down to four strong and original interventions.

The first is highly topical: an interview with Bradley Garrett, whose physical and philosophical work on urban exploration has ignited questions about trespass, surveillance, the rights to the city, the opaque spaces we pass by and over every day, and the use of technology in mediating each of these.

The three papers that follow are all unique takes on how technology troubles human life: through utopias and dystopias, through desire and fallibility, and through memory and the self. The question of what it means to be human in a technological age has been evoked and interrogated in the pages that follow. We have been provoked to considerable reflection by them; we hope that you will be too.

Rory Hill, Steven Maiden, Simon May March 2015

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Into the Meld

Interview with Bradley Garrett

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‘Place-hacking’ as a form of urban exploration has burst onto the scene with publications, documentaries, and a longrunning court case. But getting to know the detail of what urban explorers do, how they feel, and what their philosophies are remains a challenge. With a special interest in the interactions between fleshy human feeling and mutable, powerful technologies, Politics of Place approached Bradley L. Garrett for an interview. Dr. Garrett is the author of the much talked-about book Explore Everything: Place-Hacking the City (Verso, 2013). Following research at Royal Holloway and Oxford, he has been appointed as lecturer in the School of Geography and the Environment at the University of Southampton.

PoP: Could you tell us how you first became interested in urban exploration, and how you found entering the UE community?

BG: I was raised just outside of Los Angeles, on the edge of the Mojave Desert, and I used to drive into the desert looking for old mines and structures, camping in them for days at a time. I was naturally drawn to archaeology when I began studies and spent many years travelling the world doing both terrestrial and underwater archaeology, digging, diving and mapping. When I moved to London and found there was a whole community

of people exploring urban environments in similar ways, I had to get involved. Urban exploration has always been, for me, a kind of adrenaline-fuelled archaeology, a way of getting close to history, or indeed infrastructure or construction, without guides or interpretation. So my fascination came from those intersecting interests in history and the politics of place, especially in finding hidden and secret places in the world.

That being said, this is, for obvious reasons, a very difficult group to do ethnographic work with. Urban explorers are notoriously suspicious of outsiders – though once you get in it’s an unbelievably welcoming community. It took me about eight months to really to build up enough trust that people were willing to invite me out on weekend expeditions and then on longer road trips.

If you think about how anthropologists undertake fieldwork though, often it takes years to begin to assimilate enough get glimpses of the culture under study from the inside, so I didn’t find this to be a prohibitive process in any way.

PoP: Your book Explore Everything: Place Hacking the City is full of stories of infiltrating ruins, scaling building developments, abseiling into tunnels, and so on, that would terrify many people.

In your paper Undertaking recreational

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trespass: urban exploration and infiltration you briefly mention the ‘tendrils of affect conjured by shared fear and excitement’ (p.9) amongst urban explorers. Could you tell us more about the role fear plays for you and those you have explored with?

BG: There is certainly a very particular kind of bonding that takes place when you are exploring with people. This is something that has been well-documented in war, where people come together, often people who might not have met under any other circumstances, and experience (or create) highly pressurized, adrenaline-fuelled moments that, unlike many representations of the events, are often almost completely chaotic. Very often having these experiences together builds lifelong bonds as you are forced to intellectually contend with something that is, by definition, almost incomprehensible, so the collective imagination gets activated in interesting ways.

Richard Sennett famously argued that the modern city (the late capitalist city or neoliberal city) is constructed to, in many ways, contain our experiences and pacify our bodies. He argued that spaces are built to circumscribe discovery, creating limitations about what can be experienced and, even more nefarious, what can be imagined.

The modern security apparatus, in effect,

eliminates fear in the city by creating legal constraints and cultural taboos around access to certain types of information and, importantly, this applies to physical space as much as virtual systems, though the latter tends to dominate our conversations and concerns these days, understandably.

Most people accept urban surveillance as positive, assuming it makes them safer – and it does in some ways. However, when the city becomes more secure and controlled, when ranges of fear are eliminated, a fundamental way people bond also becomes lost, replaced by states of internal chaos like drunkenness which temporarily satisfy our inherent desires to deal with complicated situations. So urban explorers reintroduce fear into the equation, in a way that is, for the most part, playful.

Here, the philosophy of Henri Lefebvre, and more importantly, Guy Debord and the Situationist International, is key to understanding how explorers reintroduce play as a coping mechanism for dealing with a society that encourages spectatorship over participation. But through that playfulness, explorers are making room for fear and chaos that I argue are existentially fundamental to human happiness, contradictory as that might seem.

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I might also mention that a lot of what is pinpointed as something necessary to avoid stems from fear of the biological (in a Foucauldian sense) because we all carry with us this modernist sensibility that our bodies should be closed off from the world.

So one of the things people always bring up, when I show them a picture of us wandering around in a sewer or derelict building for instance, is their concern about the fragility and porousness of our bodies, how we are making ourselves unnecessarily vulnerable, that this is ‘foolish’ and that our lack of fear points to a fundamental dysfunction in our rejection of social taboo. While this is probably true to a degree, there is also much benefit in making ourselves vulnerable that should not be overlooked.

PoP: Some of your work makes use of field notes, and they often appear to have been scribed at times of imminent action or danger. How did you find fitting the physical process of ethnography in amongst the fraught and swift movement of urban exploration?

BG: It was honestly very difficult. The problem with any recording technology, whether we’re talking about writing, taking photos or making audio recordings, is that it changes the nature of the event and that, as researchers, we can’t anticipate how

that might unfold. This is why Margaret Mead made attempts at creating ‘objective’ ethnographic films, setting up cameras and then leaving them to record on their own, like a weird precursor to CCTV. That was such a naïve notion, that the machine, somehow lacking consciousness, would therefore not influence human behavior, as if the camera didn’t have a gaze. So the balance here, methodologically, is in being present, acknowledging the way everyone’s behavior is affected by the pen, the camera, the Dictaphone, and indeed our very bodies, and then deploying those tools in the right place and right time, respectfully. Often this involves a bit of social engineering, like making a joke about how you’d better ‘write that great quote down in the toilet’ during a conversation and sneaking away. People think you were joking but you actually did just that. Doing good ethnographic work is always about playing a double game and being adept at code switching. The danger is in straddling lines of dishonesty, and that is where, again, we have got to be really critical in our engagements. That’s why good ethnographic work is so exhausting; you are always crosschecking your positionality.

In terms of those more dangerous moments in my own research, walking in sewers, running live train lines, abseiling down

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ventilation shafts and evading security, ethnographic observation gets deprioritised when things get raw. However, at times you can get around this by keeping an audio recorder going in your pocket, for instance.

Sometimes this happens accidentally – I’ve got this video footage from Poland when we’re running from a security guard and I’ve forgotten to turn the camera off. Watching that nauseating footage later was really useful when I was writing up and trying to relay the moment of euphoric panic in the text.

PoP: Indeed, the camera seems to hold an interesting place in your work; acting as both an emblematic tool of surveillance and prohibition (CCTV), and as a tool with which to catalogue and communicate exploration. Is this representative of a wider ambivalence around technology for urban explorers?

BG: That’s a good point! I’m glad you get that the camera isn’t just a recordation tool for explorers. As Harriet Hawkins and I wrote in Antipode recently, the imagery urban explorers produce encourages us to think about relationships in the assemblage of body, camera and place.

The distribution of imagery, and further, the ways in which people consume, share and rework that imagery when it goes to

work in the world, add a multiplicity of unpredictable meanings and force to the images that confounds the expectations and anticipation of the photographer (we might consider Jacques Rancière’s work on the emancipated spectator).

The thing about CCTV technology, then, that is a key difference, is in the voyeuristic control over the consumption of the imagery. We can of course imagine a blearyeyed security guard sitting in a cold hut, eyes darting between screens, who might be our spectator. But what urban explorers prove again and again is that most of those recordings often actually have no human audience - they are visual archives to be delved only if ‘needed’. So classically, as Foucault might argue, the point of the CCTV camera is not to record images, it’s to condition our bodies by making us think we are being watched, that an audience exists. The technology, in both cases, conditions the body in different ways and that is the assemblage between body, camera and place – an assemblage that’s being reworked constantly as technology, and our perceptions of technology, morph.

PoP: Talking of technology, you have argued that the period 2000-2005 was a key moment in the development of organized urban exploration. Do you see

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the concurrent spread of internet access and portable digital photo and video technology as a necessary condition for this development?

BG: I’m sure urban exploration has existed as long as the notion of private property – there will always have been somebody sneaking into off-limits spaces throughout history. What the Internet facilitated was the connection of individuals for whom this was a primary interest, which inevitably led to the creation of the development of an urban exploration community (I use that term loosely). It also led, as the anthropologist Marc Augé wrote in NonPlaces, to the inevitable co-option and fragmentation of any coherent sense of monolithic motivation to the practice.

You are right to point out that this is not simply a matter of scaling up and connecting, it’s also a matter of circulation.

A photo taken and shared has far more impact than a photo taken and hoarded.

The Internet allows for, and encourages, that sharing of experiences in a way that, in one sense, simply satiates narcissism but in another sense allows us to relay a politics of potentiality which, I argue, has democratic and emancipatory potential. So the record of the exploration, be it in the form of a photo, a video or a forum report,

allows us to inhabit those spaces virtually and then, hopefully, to incite others (and ourselves) to go back into the world to continue the journey of discovery. There’s a hint of a politically conservative arms race here, a notion that every experience must be ‘trumped’ by another, that has led to some recent forms of urban exploration that seem to be devoid of critical thrust – they’re simply about shocking the viewer, entertaining rather than inviting. A recent Channel 4 documentary called Don’t Look Down comes to mind here.

However, I’d like to be more optimistic about this. I think what’s happening is that the nature of technology is changing so fast (during my PhD, the body-mounted POV camera was brand new technology) that experimentation is running rampant. So there’s an incredible sense of reaching, trying and, dare I say it, hacking, involved with the deployment of these new technologies in ways that might actually shock the people developing them. Essentially, in this formulation, we co-opt the capitalist forces working on these projects and recruit them to our cause, which in turn spurs on their investment in the development of more technology, most of which no one can anticipate the use of. And that’s the point, in the context of the Situationist project,

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not to condemn the spoils of capitalism and the relentless accumulation of stuff like camera technologies, but to meld those technologies into our desires, to entangle the spectacle by its own means.

PoP: You describe exploring the technological underbelly of the city: sewers, communication networks, and underground transport. These are parts of the city that are invisible, though essential, to most people. Could you tell us more about how it felt to be in the flow, or at least in the pipes, of networks which we usually only experience as end-users?

BG: Absolutely. Standing in the flow of underground rivers, the imagination inexorably stretches to distant bubbling sources and conjures up an imagination of the water’s journey. By the time it gushes past our feet, wedding fishing waders to skin, it’s a murky grey mess of floating turds, tampons and toilet paper, sometimes accumulating into little islands just solid enough to traverse (with trepidation). In that darkness, the visual often gives to the aural. Beyond the ceaseless stridency of rushing waters and car tyres popping manholes out of the tarmac, you can sometimes hear car horns and screams in the city above, another indication of porous boundaries. I guess in a Burkian sense, it all gets pretty sublime.

In my book, I describe what I call ‘the meld’. It’s a classic non-representational formulation where the urban explorer, after sustained and intimate association with the hidden features of the city, and with an understanding of the history of those connections, attempts to lace associations between places, connect whole networks and actually reconfigure conceptions of connections – so buildings become networks. But the understanding doesn’t start or end there, those attempts are often frustrated by the immediacy of the felt moment. It’s felt, most importantly I think, in the body, before it is apprehended in a way that makes much sense rationally.

Those encounters then seep into our awareness and colour the way we see spaces that are constructed, as Sennett argued, to present us with pre-packaged qualities that pre-empt our inherent desires to discover by offering us simulacra of discovery. I don’t want to create a problematic binary here, but I do want to argue that not all spaces are created equal!

This stuff isn’t new – John Hollingshead, a writer commissioned by Charles Dickens, traversed London’s sewer system in 1861 and ventured into a drain under a house he once owned in London’s West End, where he wrote that he felt as if the power had

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been granted to him to open a trap-door in his own chest, to look upon the longhidden machinery of his up-to-this-point mysterious body. Obviously Hollingshead was going through something similar here, where he can feel the existential panic bleed through as he embraces the failure to clearly articulate his experience, when the boundaries between his body and the city suddenly dissolve and he’s left staring at a piece of brick that he’s sure is sweating, in a tunnel that appears to be breathing, watching the contents of bowels, maybe partially his, flow over his feet.

You could argue that explorers are just adding to the distracting simulacra because they use these technologies and produce representations. You could argue that about Hollingshead’s journey too, since Dickens commissioned him to go and he was writing for a journal. However, I think that as explorers reveal urban cracks and gaps through the representations they produce, they also open those fissures out through persistent exploration, creating imagery that does more than simply document, it creates blocks of sensations, new creative imaginary space opened through the (continued) collective force of the images, connecting dusty archives to stinky street gratings. That’s the meld, the political

entanglement of the whole assemblage.

PoP: In Explore Everything: Place Hacking the City you see urban exploration as being about ‘taking back rights to the city from which we have been wrongfully restricted through subversions that erode security and threaten clean narratives about what one can and can’t do’ (p.8). Is this idea exclusive to urban explorers, or would you advocate a more widespread change toward how we occupy and engage with urban spaces?

BG: Urban exploration is, of course, a temporary occupation and many people level criticism at explorers for that. A few friends who are squatters, for instance, have told me that explorers are missing an opportunity to effect real social change by opening spaces for others. The spaces urban explorers do open, as well as the spaces they occupy, are largely an imaginative space and I don’t accept that this has no social value or that physical occupation of space is inherently more political then virtual or imaginative occupation of space.

In making transparent the world around us that has been closed to access, and in making clear that those spaces can be accessed if the desire is strong enough, we create a politics of possibility that does in fact resonate quite strongly in an age where we are told security is rapidly reaching a

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point of complete ascendance, where our every movement will be traced by facial recognition and motion tracking software .

What urban exploration does in disseminating these stories and imageries is to help us perceive worlds other than the ones presented to us. As David Harvey has noted, the freedom to make and remake our cities and ourselves is one of the most precious and neglected of our human rights, and I don’t think I’m overstating the case when I say that it’s vital to the maintenance of what few rights to place we have left to continually make transparent and subvert the boundaries that are constantly being circumscribed around our bodies and imaginations. I think technology can help us in that and we shouldn’t be so quick to dismiss technologies as being antiintellectual or somehow prohibitive to critical deployment – everything can be hacked.

PoP: Finally, what are the latest directions in urban exploration, and what can we look forward to seeing from you in the future?

BG: Urban exploration is at an interesting point right now. There is a sort of new branch reaching out that is a meld between parkour (free running) and urban exploration. These people seem to be less interested in the

spaces themselves and more interested in exhibiting athleticism at the risk of death by hanging from construction cranes hundreds of meters high, standing on top of teetering masts and jumping big gaps. There’s also an escalation in ‘ruin porn’ photography taking place now, where photographers are sneaking elaborate costumes and models into derelict building for ‘illicit’ photo shoots.

I’m sure researchers will be doing work on these emerging aspects of the practice in the next few years.

As far as my research, my first book, Explore Everything: Place-Hacking the City has done well and was recently translated into Japanese! I also worked with my project participants to release a collaborative photobook called Subterranean London: Cracking the Capital that visually dissects underground London layer by layer. It was published by Prestel (Random House) and it contains 120 gorgeous photos, some writing from me and others, a forward by Will Self and drawings by Stephen Walter.

That book actually sold out in four months and is now going to paperback in the Autumn. There still seems to be a lot of interest in urban exploration! The release of Subterranean London also coincided with a celebration of our court victory.

Some readers may have heard that eleven

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of my project participants and myself were charged with ‘conspiracy to commit criminal damage’ in 2012, which carries with it a 10-year jail maximum sentence.

We worked very hard to get everyone out of the dock and the charges were dropped against seven explorers late April 2014. I was given a ‘conditional discharge’ by the judge in early May 2014. My life as a nocturnal trespasser is likely over in the UK since the ‘conditional’ in the ‘conditional discharge’ means that if I am charged with anything in the next three years, I can be brought up on those conspiracy charges again. I’m not overly perturbed about the inability to do urban exploration here since that project is complete. However, the broader result of that ruling is that I’ve also been barred, in no uncertain terms, from doing research on any social practice that may cross legal lines for the next few years. That is, I would argue, an unfortunate byproduct of an already disconcerting attempt to stifle reasonable academic research that was undertaken to public benefit. However, the world is a big place and I’ve got plenty of ideas for new research projects, along with a new permanent lecturer position at the University of Southampton – I’m just going to use this time to realign my interests a bit.

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Clonetrolling the Future: Body, Space, and Ontology in Duncan Jones’ Moon and Mark Romanek’s Never Let Me Go

by Scott Sundvall

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Introduction: A Science Fiction (That Is Not) “Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn’t” — Mark Twain In the most radical sense, we can consider science fiction (or speculative fiction) as the representational harbouring of utopia and dystopia, even and especially as “utopias and dystopias are histories of the present” (Gordin, Prakash, and Tilley 1). SF produces utopias/dystopias in terms of the historical present insofar as it grounds one foot in the actual present (what is) and another in the “conditions of possibility” (what could be) (Mannheim). As such, if we take Bernard Stiegler’s claim of a modern technological redoubling seriously, as something which is causing a phenomenological and ontological disorientation, then the recent re-emergence of SF as a popular and commercially successful genre makes good sense.1 We find evidence of this redoubling not just in various iterations of philosophy of technology (Stiegler, Martin Heidegger’s question concerning technology, Paul

Virilio’s “dromology”, etc.), or in related fields of theoretical inquiry (Marshall McLuhan’s “global village”, Gregory Ulmer’s “electracy”, Mark Hansen’s new philosophy for new media, etc.), but in contemporary technological developments themselves.

Many of these technological developments continue to expand and revise the previously understood boundaries of the human body: cochlear implants, prosthetic legs, artificial hearts, bionic limbs, even digital cameras implanted in the back of heads.2 The development of cloning, however, might arguably be the one most wrought with philosophical and political implication (and consequence).

In any event, the technological developments calling into question the legible status of the “human” in general—cloning in particular, or at least most conspicuously—have been addressed and/or represented in a long list of SF works over the past several decades. Specifically, both Duncan Jones’ Moon and Mark Romanek’s Never Let Me Go use the philosophical and political

Bernard Stiegler’s Technics and Time volumes (particularly the first and second) note the emergence of meaningful “being” as inextricably connected to the inauguration of technics, particularly language (which affords memory, punctuated temporality and spatial delimitation, history). As such, the proper ontological constitution of “being” is oriented by and with technics. Modern technological development, however, has progressed at such a speed that “man” cannot “think” it as quickly as it emerges and moves, creating a rupture of sorts: an ontological and phenomenological “disorientation”.

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2 Wafaa Bilal, a New York University Arts Professor, had a camera implanted on the back of his head as a performative gesture. It should further be noted that the above list says nothing of our everyday immersion in digital technologies: smart phones, laptops, face-to-face communication interfaces and, recently, Google glasses, to name a few examples.

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potential of cloning to produce a cinematic representation of a (dubiously dubbed) “dysoptian” future (what tragically could-be as predicated upon what-already-is).3 The “dystopic” tenor of either film4, however, cannot be reduced to an attack on cloning technology itself—nor on technology in any sense, most broadly conceived. Rather, the narrative of the films use (the potential of) cloning, in conjunction with spatial methods of control, to call into question power, class and, most importantly, “our” ontological status itself.

In this sense, both films function as “‘critical dystopia[s]’, which act as warnings, through an ‘if this goes on’ principle” (Milner 109).5 Again, the “if this goes on” principle present in both films does not concern cloning or technology in general; it concerns the appropriation of such technologies in a particular way, and by power structures already well-woven into our social and political fabric. By examining the manner in which cloning technologies

can be appropriated by a ruling class, and how such can be used for the spatial management of such “producing-bodies”, the ethical and political dimensions of the film must be approached in a radical manner: the complete rethinking of “our” very ontological grounding.6 Nonetheless, in both films a political management of space, boundaries, and territorialization is what (re)produces such ontological questions / ruptures / dystopias: appropriation and control of certain technologies (such as cloning) and space can afford a categorical, ontological re-grounding of desired interest.

In other words, the ethical and political question of “what is a human right?” loses its valency when one can reframe the ontological question of “what is a human?”

If the answer to the latter is “the subject in question is not human”, as we find in both Moon and Never Let Me Go, then the former question becomes meaningless. This is why we give ontological priority to the

3 Jones’ Moon, which serves as his directorial debut, opened at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival. Filmed in a little over a month on a $5 million budget, it met favorable reviews from critics. Romanek’s Never Let Me Go, based on Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel of the same name, operated on a $15 million budget and premiered at the Telluride Film Festival. It also received positive reviews.

4 [N.B. Permission was not obtained from FOX for the reproduction of still images from Never Let Me Go; only images from Moon are reproduced in this essay. –Ed.]

Andrew Milner, who here is referring to Fredric Jameson’s two categories of dystopia, situates “critical dystopia” from “‘anti-utopia’, which declares utopia as impossible” (109).

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For the purposes of this analysis, I use the term “producing-bodies” in a rather specific sense: the production of bodies (and body parts) by way of cloning; the use of these bodies (and body parts) to then (re)produce.

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dystopic questions and warnings posed by both films, though both are nonetheless inflected by techno-spatial, political arrangements of power and discourse. In this sense, we arrive at a “dystopia…[that] is a utopia that has gone wrong; or a utopia that functions only for a particular segment of society” (Gordin, Prakash, and Tilley 1). In this sense, we will approach these two films as representational shifts from the Foucaldian “disciplinary society” to a Deleuzian “control society”, and not just in the political sense of the management of subjects, but further in the ontological sense of what constitutes a “subject” as such. Likewise, we will explore the emerging paradigm shift from an ethics and ontology of “humanism” to that of “post-humanism”, as it concerns the films and beyond.

Out-There/In-Here: Extension and Intensity, and the Spatial Logic of Material Production “Somewhere out there, Out where dreams come true” —James Ingram, “Somewhere Out There”

Before departing into the films, in their specificity, we might pause to consider the limitations of a fair cross-section of seminal SF criticism and theory, at least for our intents and purposes. Much of SF, and its correlating criticism and theory, operates by way of metaphor and metonymy: Don Siegel’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers as an expression of the Red Scare; Neill Blomkamp’s District 9 as an alien-infused representation of xenophobia; JeanLuc Godard’s Alphaville as a warning of totalitarian governments, so on and so forth. This tendency towards hermeneutic decoding, however, does little more than merely decode (this means that; this is like that), and provides us with little recourse for the philosophically generative work called for in Moon and Never Let Me Go. Fredric Jameson’s comprehensive and informative Archaeologies of the Future, on the other hand, not only rethinks and renews the possibility and potential of the utopia/dystopia SF narrative, but also covers some of the more common themes and tropes in SF.7 While Jameson’s expansive thematic coverage includes the (uncanny) ontological shock of humans confronting their own Other, the examples given are

7 In particular, Jameson establishes his position of “anti-anti-Utopianism.” In short, Utopia might be best understood as an impulse for a more desirable future; Utopian narratives provide a window into such a possible horizon. As such, Jameson does not subscribe to the teleological ideation of Utopia, per se, but remains nonetheless opposed to oppositions of Utopia.

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more traditional—the “alien body” (119-141), or the “android” (141). Granted, this might largely be attributed to the fact that Jameson’s concern rests more with the practical, political dimensions of SF narratives, rather than questions of the ontological in and of itself. In any case, it does not provide sufficient critique of the instance in which the human confronts its otherwise-own-self as ontologically Other, even if this concerns arrangements of class and power, as it does in our two films of study.

Scott Bukatman’s Terminal Identity offers a more promising avenue for our pursuits: postmodernity, and its representation in various SF narratives, has radically rethought the relationship between technology and subject, to such a degree that there no longer exists an essential separation between the two.

Bukatman’s work here, then, definitely lends itself less to a hermeneutic analysis, and more to a generative heuristics. While the text thus does a rigorous job of detailing the emerging “virtual subject”, we are not concerned with the human-qua-virtual-subject by way of techno-human interdependence and digital immersion. Rather, our inquiry concerns the primary relation of technicity and being and how, quite ironically, the appropriation of certain technologies (i.e., cloning), in concert with spatial manipulations, might call into question or put into erasure the “human”

entirely. Or, at least, we are concerned with the SF representation of such.

Keeping this in mind, Never Let Me Go unfolds as a revisionist history SF film: in 1952 certain medical developments have enabled people to live well beyond 100 years old. This comes at a great cost, though: the fictional social field clones a small portion of the population, and these children clones are raised in isolated boarding schools for the eventual donation of organs and body parts, until “completion” (death). While many such boarding schools exist, we find that our protagonists (Kathy, Tommy, and Ruth) attend one of the most unique— Hailsham. Although Kathy and Tommy exchange signs of affection at an early age, Tommy eventually ends up dating Ruth.

The three nonetheless continue travelling together after Hailsham, eventually split up, reunite and, after Ruth “completes”, Tommy and Kathy enjoy a brief romantic period. The romantic period comes to a determinate end when Kathy (a “carer”— one who helps other clone donors) watches Tommy “complete” during his final surgical procedure.

Of course, the concern here rests not so much in the logic of the love triangle, but rather in how such a human drama could develop in this way. If they knew they

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were destined for endless butchering, why didn’t they run? The most viable answer to this question can be found early in the film, when a young Tommy chases a ball during a game, but then stops as the ball glides beyond the Hailsham fence. Later, when one of the school docents, Ms. Lucy, asks a group of girls why Tommy did not retrieve the ball, the first girl flatly states, “that fence is the boundary of Hailsham grounds”. Another girl adds, “We can’t cross the boundary, Ms. Lucy. It’s too dangerous”.

The girls then collectively recount the various horror stories they have been told concerning previous boys and girls who breached the Hailsham boundaries: mutilation, starvation and, of course, death.

When Ms. Lucy asks the girls if they believe the stories to be true, one girls responds: “Of course they’re true; who’d make up stories as horrible as that?”

Who, indeed? Perhaps the most obvious and traditional reading of this formative strand of the narrative would include a gesture to ideology. As Terry Eagleton notes in Ideology, however, the problem with a given reading that concerns ideology is that it is almost always far too ideological: it can mean anything and everything. As he explains, “Nobody has yet come up with a single adequate definition of ideology….

This is not because workers in the field are remarkable for their low intelligence, but because the term ‘ideology’ has a whole range of useful meanings, not all of which are compatible with one another” (1). Eagleton then proceeds to list a number of working definitions for ideology, from which we will cherry-pick for our own purposes: (b) a body of ideas characteristic of a particular social group or class; (c) ideas which help to legitimate a dominant political power; (d) false ideas which help to legitimate a dominant political power; (f) that which offers a position for a subject; (g) forms of thought motivated by social interests; (h) identity thinking; (i) socially necessary illusion; (j) the conjuncture of discourse and power.

(1-2) This manner of thinking ideology functions rather congruently with Louis Althusser’s work on the matter. As found in “Ideological State Apparatuses”, the children of Hailsham have an “imaginary relationship…to their real conditions of existence”, or what we might consider the underlying basis of ideology in action (109).

Nonetheless, this “ideology has a material existence”, whereby they are “interpellated”

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as “concrete subjects” (112, 115). The stories they are told not only condition them in a concrete and specific manner, as obedient subjects (not to leave the Hailsham gates) but, over time and eventually, to accept their fates as “donors” as materially given. This ideological process not only reproduces the children—and, eventually, “donors”—on a day-to-day level, but it further reproduces the Hailsham school itself (an ideological state apparatus).

This line of thinking can be extended to Michel Foucault, who studied under Althusser, and who reformulates the concept of ideology into “discourse formations” (knowledge-power) that create legitimized institutions that shape docile bodies (biopower and bioproduction).

Generally speaking, this reformulation constitutes a Foucauldian “disciplinary society”.8 Gilles Deleuze, however, distrusts the representation of ideology entirely (other than it being a concentration and grammar of desire itself), and late in his life suggests that we are moving from a Foucauldian “disciplinary society” to a “control society”. Control societies, for Deleuze, shift the method of subjective

ordering from progressive conditioning to one of micro-control and discrete management, especially apparent now with the introduction of emerging technologies: pass-codes, retinal scans, and fingerprint authentication replace the key; ankle bracelets replace the physical site of the prison; and, most specifically, the long line of credit and subsequent debt replaces the chain (“Control” 7). In short, one no longer needs to prop up a bending tree with a stake; instead, one needs only to genetically engineer a tree that does not bend in the first place.

That said, while the fence-myth within Never Let Me Go’s narrative operates primarily according to the rubric of ideology, the ideology functions in the service of micro-control. In order to understand how this works, we must consider space (limits, boundaries, territories). Amongst other things, in describing control societies, Deleuze writes that “confinements are molds, different moldings, while controls are a modulation, like a self-transmutating molding continually changing from one moment to the next” (“Control” 3-5). Thus, the fence-myth, as a figurative and literal

7 While much of Michel Foucault’s scholarly career concerns the archaeology of discourse as such, Discipline and Punish and The History of Sexuality volumes serve as key examples of such a pursuit.

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boundary or limit (territorialization), does indeed operate as a mechanism for moulding Tommy and the other clone donors as certain conditioned subjects (ideology). This ideological conditioning, however, as executed in terms of extensive spatiality, works to diminish and eventually extinguish the intensive properties of Tommy himself, reducing him to a mere body. After all, the ideology of the external or extensive space of the fence-myth is meaningful only insofar as it guarantees the appropriation of Tommy’s body as a space for material production. In this sense, then, Tommy does not undergo ideological training in the traditional sense (to turn him into a self-reproducing labourer), but rather undergoes such to submit his entire body, to give himself over to a totality of material control. The ontological implication should be quite clear: Tommy does not become a good working human subject (ideological formation); rather, he ceases to become a human at all.

In Moon we find a slight variation to the above clone problematic. Initially, we meet Sam Bell, an isolated worker on the moon who mines resources for Lunar Industries in an imaginary future. Through a series of scenes we see Sam Bell interact with his human-like robot assistant, GERTY;

receive supposed transmissions from his family on Earth; and count down the days until his promised return. At this stage of the narrative, we have no reason to consider him, for all intents and purposes, anything other than an “authentic human”.

First (or older) Sam Bell, however, suffers a crash while roaming outside, due to a hallucination. Second (or newer) Sam Bell awakes on the operating table, and GERTY tells him that he underwent a serious accident, though we find that this narrative is given to every new Sam Bell clone to explain their lack of recent memory. Newer Sam Bell grows suspicious and creates an excuse to go outside. While outside, he discovers older Sam Bell, whom GERTY treats for injuries upon recovery. The two Sam Bells quickly become confused with, and antagonistic towards, each other. Not long thereafter, they discover the sublevel compartment that holds a nearly endless hallway of Sam Bells, all waiting to awake. After reviewing several decades of surveillance tape, the Sam Bells realize that, by way of artificial memory, they have been conditioned to work for several years as clones, and then disposed, all under the false and implanted pretense of their return to a family that is not “their own”. As such, they devise a plan to “return” one of them from the moon “back” to Earth.

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MOON © 2009 Lunar Industries Limited. All Rights Reserved. Courtesy of Sony Pictures Entertainment

Again, the operation and control of space proves vital to understanding how Sam Bell comes to be, and how he can be reproduced (in terms of individual abstract labour, as well as in terms of actual Sam Bells). Specific to this reading, GERTY restricts Sam Bell’s movement beyond a certain external boundary, as breaching such a space would allow him to communicate with actual Earth (as opposed to the endlessly reproduced and inauthentic messages sent to him from his “family”). While the use of artificial memory and inauthentic transmissions produce ideological conditioning and obedience— imaginary relations to otherwise real

conditions—such can only work with the technologized micro-control of Sam Bell’s movements (spatial control).

Moreover, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s Capitalism and Schizophrenia volumes (Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus) might lead us to understand that the extensive mobility of Sam Bell directly corresponds to his intensive potentiality: not a spatial metaphor (controlling external space is like the control of Sam Bell), but rather the actual political management of space corresponds to the determining ontological frame of Sam Bell. But it does not work this simply. To be sure, Sam Bell

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presents us with a rather unique and hyperliteral iteration of a “desiring-machine” (Anti-Oedipus). Thus, within the specific framework of Deleuze and Guattari, it cannot be enough to say that the Sam Bells were merely “duped” into falsely desiring something (to return to a family that was not “their own”). Rather, there exists a certain degree of desiring that “duping”, of desire-repressing-desire: desire is what creates the impulse (intensity) of the newer Sam Bell to breach the spatial parameters established for him (extensivity), and it is desire-repressing-desire that renders older Sam Bell so unwilling or unable to accept the reality of the situation. In any case, while the political management of spatial boundaries attempts to keep the Sam Bells in ontological stasis, the more haunting ontological—nonetheless political— question is: who is Sam Bell?

Both films present politically-inflected ontological questions (or warnings) that perhaps demand a post-humanist reflection. In either film, we find Donna Haraway’s otherwise optimistic “Manifesto for Cyborgs” gone depressingly deflating.

In large part, this might be because we

are not dealing with cyborgs (and all the political potential therein), but rather with the manipulated production and erasure of otherwise human beings. Indeed, in both films, we are dealing with the “technical basis of simulacra, that is, of copies without originals”, but in a way that hits as close to ontological home as possible (207). Because of the micro-control in both narratives, particularly with regards to space, the “informatics of domination” becomes not just a “movement from an organic, industrial society to a polymorphous, information system”, but a nightmarish ontological shift as well (203).

The lesson to be teased from these two narratives, perhaps, is that spatial control and ordering, for whatever purpose, have always relied upon a certain technology and/or technique: sticks, markers, roads, signs, property, etc. 9 Technology has developed to such an extent, however, that methods of control via space have come back full circle—back to the inscription of the very body as site of space. Indeed, technical progress has fundamentally assisted the shift from disciplinary societies to control societies, and such a shift calls

It should be remembered, however, that neither of these films are indictments of technology itself. As Deleuze and Guattari note, “The war machine is exterior to the State apparatus”, and it is only the appropriation of the war machine by the State that produces such destruction (A Thousand Plateaus 351). This should be considered as an analogue for understanding cloning technologies and the appropriation of such by the ruling classes in both Never Let Me Go and Moon.

9

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into question not just politics and ethics (though these are legitimate concerns), but of our very ontology. In any event, the space out-there (extensive) directly corresponds to the space in-here (intensive). As such, the relations between space, body/ontology, and control might be best understood by asking not, “‘What does it mean?’ but rather ‘How does it work?’” (Anti-Oedipus 109).

Negative Ontology: The Shipwreck (On the Beach), The Bodies (In the Ground) “And you will do As you are told, Until the rights To you are sold”

—Frank Zappa, “I’m the Slime”

In Original Accident, Paul Virilio famously quips, “To invent the sailing ship or the steamer is to invent the shipwreck. To invent the train is to invent the rail accident of derailment. To invent the family automobile is to produce the pile-up on the highway” (10). The logic of this concept, which has followed his work for decades, marks a given technological invention (e.g. ship) as the initial space and potential for corresponding accident (e.g. shipwreck).

Certainly, this does not mean the invention necessarily demands an accident; rather, one can only ultimately trace the accident back to the originary invention. Virilio thus contends that there exists a “negativity” in every technology, in technical progress itself (Politics 89). The invention, however, masks the inherent “negativity” contained within it, concealing (in a latent or unconscious manner) the accident which looms on the horizon (to-be-manifest). The situation becomes more dire as technological progress increases in speed, or what Virilio coins, “dromology”. In short, we cannot (or we choose not) to see the disaster towards which we race ever more quickly.

The concept of “original accident”, then, takes a particularly interesting form when it frames the question of the human clone.

What potential accident corresponds to the invention of the human clone? How can we think the human clone in this manner, rather than in mere ontological contrast or mapping (“human” versus “human clone”)?

Does the ongoing discussion concerning the science and ethics of human cloning render a necessary discussion on the corresponding phenomenology of the potential accident (“accidentology”) moot?

In Never Let Me Go, clone donors Kathy and Tommy take their ailing donor friend, Ruth, to the beach. After a tracking shot

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follows them walking down the grassy path, we cut to a long shot showing the line where the beach meets the grass, and where the three stop for a moment to stare out onto the horizon. In the distance but squarely on the beach, there sits an object, difficult to make out at first—a ship. The camera cuts back to a medium shot of the three facing towards the ocean (the camera), but one can hardly discern where their attention rests: maybe the ship, maybe beyond the ship into the deeper horizon, maybe neither. Kathy and Ruth watch Tommy run off, and a return to the long shot shows Tommy running towards the ship (more clearly visible now), calling after them to “come on”. Kathy and Ruth, however, do not share Tommy’s excitement with the accident ahead; they stay behind.

A montage of medium shots show Tommy’s exploration of the shipwreck. When he returns, he says, “I wonder if that is what Hailsham is like now”.

Perhaps the clearest point of departure here would be to answer Tommy’s metaphor: does the beached shipwreck resemble the present Hailsham? The answer is

definitely yes, but not because Hailsham itself might lie in ruins. Hailsham resembles the shipwreck because Hailsham is not the form or space of the school, but rather the content(s) of the clone donors the school produces. The invention is not the school itself, but rather what the school invented.

As we have already established, through the meticulous practice of not just mere ideology, but also through the micro-control of space and material bodies themselves, the school invented clones, strictly for the service of donating organs and body parts.

It should come as no surprise, then, that the conversation Tommy has with Kathy and Ruth on the beach, after exploring the beached shipwreck, concerns the uncertainty of knowing which donation will lead to “completion”.10 The figurative shipwreck is written on and in the bodies of the clone donors: they primarily function as bodies distinctly moving towards their own accident (“completion”). Thus, the beached shipwreck does not function as a delivery system for the metaphor of physical space of the Hailsham school. It functions, rather,

9 That the otherwise “death” of a clone donor results in “completion” is also interesting, as it suggests the clone donors perish as animals (or at least non-humans), rather than die as human beings (á la Martin Heidegger’s concept of thrown-ness, being-in-itself and for-itself, finitude, etc., and as taken up by other writers, such as Giorgio Agamben’s The Open and Stiegler’s Technics and Time volumes). Such a terming further frames the clone donors in an ideological (the conceptual marking of them as non-human) and control (the juridical marking of them as non-human) arrangement. We see this non-human framing again when a former Hailsham teacher questions whether or not they have souls, and when, immediately thereafter, they are called “poor creatures”. Interestingly enough, though, these “poor creatures” seem to be very much aware of their mortal finitude, and bring a new accent to the concept of “being-towards-death”.

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as a mirror for Kathy, Tommy, and Ruth that reflects their own “negative ontology”.

I use the term “negative ontology” here in a rather specific manner. First, drawing from Virilio’s suggestion that a certain “negativity” resides within any technological invention, the clone donors in Never Let Me Go move only towards their own negation (accident).

While it could be said that such is true of any given ontology (that any object or subject eventually withers, perishes, or dies), the essential function of the clone donors is that of fulfilling the promise of their “completion” (not to mention the social field treats the clone donors as artificial, not as natural). Second, drawing from Deleuze, “in control societies you never finish anything”; the clone donors never complete their duty as donors until they can literally donate no more (“Control” 6). Becoming-negation, if you will, best frames their ontological meaning. This method of control becomes operative by using emergent technologies (cloning, organ transplantation, advanced psychological manipulation) with carefully constructed spatial orderings of control (Hailsham school, travel, the body) to return the “subject” to a mere “body”. Indeed, being a “subject” never seemed so desirable.

A similar production occurs in Moon.

Towards the denouement, newer Sam Bell returns from an exploration outside to find

older Sam Bell hunched over on the ground.

Older Sam Bell informs newer Sam Bell that he “found his secret room”. We cut to them in simple medium shot, hovering over a hole in the ground that leads into a sub-level compartment. Older Sam Bell descends the staircase first, and we cut to a near deep focus shot, our eyes directed towards the seemingly endless tunnel lined with rectangular holding units. The newer Sam Bell descends and together they open one of the holding units, finding a not yet “awake” Sam Bell clone. Newer Sam Bell sighs, “Jesus Christ, there’s so many of them.

Why are there so many of them?” Older Sam Bell quickly returns up to the main level, while newer Sam Bell slowly moves backwards, staring at the endless supply of Sam Bells.

Aside from this scene finally revealing to both Sam Bells that they serve as small parts of an endless chain of Sam Bell production, the scene further notes the methodological importance of controlling space. In order to control and reproduce Sam Bell’s labour production, Lunar Industries had to conceal the clone production of Sam Bells (down below). In contrast to Never Let Me Go, Moon’s narrative emphasis on control eclipses ideology almost entirely: rather than being subjectively conditioned to believe it is his duty to work for several years and then die, Sam Bell has an artificial

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MOON © 2009 Lunar Industries Limited. All Rights Reserved. Courtesy of Sony Pictures Entertainment

memory implanted in him, through which he lives out false memories and hopes.

Indeed, Deleuze notes the “ominous judicial expressions [between ideology and control societies]: apparent acquittal (between two confinements) in disciplinary societies, and endless postponement in (constantly changing) control societies are two very different ways of doing things” (“Control” 5). By way of his artificial memory, Sam Bell worked on the pretense of ideological trappings—towards an apparent acquittal— only to be disposed towards the end of his working tenure, replaced with a new Sam Bell—an endless postponement.

This brings interesting light to the question of our negative ontology. Sam Bell’s artificial memories and environment treat him as a unique human subject with past, present, and future (finitude), and they assist in reproducing his labour which unfortunately slowly dissolves his clone body. And yet time and time again, instead of returning “home”, Sam Bell gets flushed away, and a new clone awakens. To this end, with even more temporal precision than with the clone donors in Never Let Me Go, Sam Bell’s negation remains cyclically fixed.

Unbeknownst to Sam Bell, his only real guarantee is not a return trip home to see “his” family, but rather an ontological

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guarantee: his negation. When the two Sam Bells discover the apparently endless row of Sam Bells, do they not discover “their own” endless negation? (As we discussed in a previous section, the answer is both absolutely “yes” and “no”).

The function of ideology and control in each narrative raises several key points concerning space and control, the body, and ontology. Never Let Me Go presents ideologically conditioned subjects reduced to bodies, as the clone donors’ bodies metonymically function as their labour production. Despite the convergence of advanced medical technologies and sophisticated methods of spatial control— extended all the way into the division of their own flesh and blood—the clone donors are never fully unaware of the actual reality which circumscribes them. This becomes most evident when Kathy and Tommy go to apply for a “deferral”, using Tommy’s artwork as an attempt to show the truth of Tommy’s soul, that he and Kathy are truly in love. On the ride back home, after Kathy and Tommy are told they were taught to produce art in the first place not to expose their souls, but to see if they had souls at all, Tommy has a breakdown. Even after this—any possibility of apparent acquittal or prolonged postponement denied— Kathy and Tommy (and all clone donors,

for that matter) continue in their work—a reduction of their possible selfhood to bodily harvesting until their “completion”, their final negation.

In contrast, and as already discussed, the reproduction of Sam Bell’s labour depends upon a complex myriad of operations: the replication of Sam Bells, specifically as desiring-machines, whose desire to return to “their” families (by way of implanted memory) is used to push them towards completing their work; coupled with specific management and control of their spatial surroundings, so as to keep them from figuring out the framework at large.

Again, while the external territorializations (extensive, spatial control) for a long time reinforced the hyper-territorialization of Sam Bell’s desire (intensity), usually reproducing the calculated negation of a given Sam Bell for a new one, the desiring-machine eventually failed (which is to say, in another sense, it succeeded). In this sense, Sam Bell’s becoming-other was Sam Bell becomingwhat-he-actually-is. The elusive and abstract concept of the body-without-organs found expression in the recognition of endless bodies, endless organs: all Sam Bells, and all not Sam Bells. This ontological break of Sam Bell, the desiring-machine, provided the radical horizon: not the virtual potentiality of working towards returning to a home that

34 Politics of Place • Technology • Issue 02

was never his, but the actual return home to Earth, for whatever that could mean (AntiOedipus, A Thousand Plateaus).

None of this, however, answers our initial question concerning what the future accident of the invented human clone might look like, or what this might mean for our own generalized ontology. First, the negativity which marks the negative ontology of the clone donors and Sam Bells remains specific to them: the constant reproduction of those inventions qua inevitable accidents (negation, death) serve as the very basis of production for those outside their plight. In other words, the majoritarian non-clone donors who receive the organs and body parts benefit, just as Lunar Industries profits off the endless reproduction of Sam Bell clones (arguably as do the consumers of Lunar Industries).

This, of course, should come as nothing new. As Fredric Jameson notes in “Utopia as Method, or the Uses of the Future”, WalMart serves as a glowing example of how the utopic and the dystopic, at times, cannot be so cleanly demarcated: what seems so clearly monstrous and reprehensible to some is nonetheless desired by many others (6-7).

While we will explore strategies of (dystopic) escape in the following section, it remains unclear (at best) as to whether or not any

of the leading post-humanist thinkers (Haraway, Katherine Hayles, Rosi Braidotti, to name a few) can sufficiently navigate the ontological questions (and warnings) posed by these films, despite their post-humanist themes. This causes pause for concern, as the ontological is political. Cloning is one example of many (genetic information, right to self-termination, and reproductive rights being some others) that closes in on the close tension between the ontological and the juridical: to be a being, and to own/ have a being.

Conclusion: We Are What We (Do Not) Watch “What happens tomorrow—on Days of Our Lives” —Days of Our Lives Deleuze reminds us in “Control Societies” that “we don’t have to stray into science fiction to find a control mechanism that can fix the position of any elements at any given moment—an animal in a game reserve, a man in a business (electronic tagging)” (“Control” 7). Yet, if the maxim of “they do not know what they are doing, but they are doing it” functioned so effectively during the age of disciplinary societies, then turning to SF as a reflective relay in the age of control societies certainly would

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not hurt. (Though, in the above example of Wal-Mart, as given by Jameson: they know what they are doing, and they are doing it anyway.) The message forwarded

by Deleuze, however, remains essentially true: what we witness in Moon and Never Let Me Go should not be dismissed as an unlikely potential. The technologies and the institutional methods of spatial control are very much already actual, and the potential/virtual impact on our very ontology has already begun. Nonetheless, Deleuze and Guattari reminds us, “Not that man is ever the slave of technical machines; he is rather the slave of the social machine” (Anti-Oedipus 254). Thus, the focus should remain on the manner in which emerging technologies are appropriated, rather than the technologies themselves.

Likewise, Donna Haraway has long suggested a similar politico-ontological narrative for our dubiously dubbed “postmodern” conditions: the story of the cyborg. Early in her seminal “Cyborg Manifesto” she relays that “This is a struggle over life and death, but the boundary between science fiction and social reality is an optical illusion” (191).

Science-fiction-cum-reality has rendered us all (becoming-)cyborgs, without origin, spirit, or history (192-193). While much of this section concerns a political strategy for resisting “informatics of domination”,

it also asks a more pressing fundamental question concerning cyborganics: are we even willing and capable of meeting the task of “becoming-cyborg”, and if so, how will we do so in terms of politics, ethics, ontology? This question directly shadows the recursive ontological one we have been exploring throughout this paper.

One cannot help here but be reminded of Karel Čapek’s R.U.R., a text which brought the term “robot” into colloquial exchange. In this text, we find robots developing agency, becoming human, revolting against their human inventor masters. As the robots develop a conceptual humanity, we must ask if we can retain our own (humanity) as we push further into the frontiers of what can be classically understood as the artificial, the machinic, the robotic? Both films explored in this article demand such an answer.

If, as Haraway points out, we historically and currently negate “others” based on race, gender, sex, and other identity markers already, why would our collective situation improve with the inauguration of the cyborg (197-201)? If we continue our complicity with the mass exploitation of our global neighbours because of the convenience of Western market luxuries, what kind of “affinity” could the cyborg ever offer up? Why would the possibility of Moon or

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Never Let Me Go not seem a likely horizoncourse—not because it would be imposed upon us, but because we would desire such?

In any case, in both films we find a general turn from popular SF—from the paranoiac vision of a despotic body, a hyper-vigilant and technocratic State, and towards the flows of market-driven commodity and desire that implicate all of us individually. Organs and/or body parts harvested from human clones; energy mined by pre-programmed clones on the moon—whatever the cost. Neither film imagines “us” as oppressed subjects, nor as disadvantaged masses duped by some State elite. For moral “better” (say, Robocop, Judge Dredd) or “worse” (perhaps, THX 1138, Brazil), these films carry little of the “government warning” contained in earlier SF films dealing with similar content. The true haunt of these films rests within the absurdity—but true possibility— of the logic: the dissolution of ourselves by ourselves. The energy human clones mine for Lunar Industries can be traced back to mere consumer desire, as can the organs harvested from the clone donors.

The Big Bad Wolf in these fairy tales does not emerge from the deep dark woods, but rather stands brightly lit in the mirror in front of us. And in this version, the fairy tale seems slightly less fiction, slightly more

looming horizon, a space already being breached.

Yet, the optimistic echo from Deleuze: “The key thing is that we’re at the beginning of something new” (“Control” 7).

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The Techno-Human Condition in the automotive fiction of J. G. Ballard and Will Self

by Martin Gleghorn

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“At this level, it’s not that you can’t handle the truth; it’s that you can’t even grasp it” (Allenby and Sarewitz 64). So posit Braden Allenby and Daniel Sarewitz about the third and final level of their Techno-Human Condition, a work that categorises the cultural complexities arising from the relationship between humans and technology. Prior to this supposed incomprehensibility of Level III, however, the first and most neatly definable category – Level I – states that at “the level of individual use… technologies are volition enhancers: they give us a better chance of accomplishing what we want to do than would otherwise be the case” (37). J. G. Ballard claims “that the twentieth-century reaches almost its purest expression on the highway’, due to ‘the speed and violence of our age, its strange love affair with the machine”, (Millennium 262) and it is this significant cultural magnitude that justifies the car being used as a tidy example of a Level I technology. Specifically, it imagines the car as a “technological solution to the problem of getting from one place to another effectively… at a time and rate of one’s choosing” (Allenby and Sarewitz 39). Straightforward enough, but things become more complicated upon reaching Level II, which deals with the emergent social systems that technological advances

invariably lead to. Persevering with the example of the car, the subsequent emergent system at Level II is the traffic jam – a familiar and uncontrollable scenario that is inconvenient only because the individualistic goals set at Level I are still visible, as Allenby and Sarewitz note that at Level II “we can see what the technologies do, and we can recognize what is it the system and what is not, even though acting to achieve a particular intended outcome is often difficult” (63). It is these goals and this recognisability that have disappeared

by Level III, however, as here: The point is not that any particular technology may affect a particular human; the point is that we cannot understand what humans are unless we also understand the meanings of the technological systems that we make, and which in turn re-make us. For as individuals, members of communities and larger societies… the state of technological play is bound up with what it means for us to be human. (Allenby and Sarewitz 83) Levels II and III transcend the comfortable idea that technologies are mere ‘volition enhancers’ for humans. Yet, whereas the emergent behaviours at Level II are generally taken-for-granted aspects of

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modern existence, the disappearance of these mean that the questions posed at Level III are infinitely more far-reaching.

In their place come emergent behaviours defined as “transformative Earth systems” (Allenby and Sarewitz 84), equipped with enough existential baggage to challenge core aspects of humanity in ways that cannot even be envisaged, much less accurately predicted and controlled.

Ballard’s The Atrocity Exhibition (1970) and Crash (1973) – arguably his two most controversial works – are predicated upon the hypothesis of the rapidly evolving dynamic between humans and automotive technology, meaning that the initial question in this essay concerns, to paraphrase Allenby and Sarewitz, how close these works come to grasping the truth of this dynamic. A generation on from the two works, Iain Sinclair talks about classifying writers as “walking writers or driving writers”, unsurprisingly adding about Ballard that “you can’t really see him getting out of the car” (Sinclair). In the same interview, Sinclair evaluates the post-Ballard generation of British writers, summarising that there “is a line now from Ballard through Martin Amis and Will Self and Alex Garland – young, hip writers who have taken their tricks from Ballard. And

yet I don’t think any of them had what he had to start with” (Sinclair). One of these “young, hip writers”, Will Self makes no secret of the profound influence Ballard had on him, writing candidly about how “[t] here were those writers whose work spoke to me… and then there were a very select few who had carved out the conceptual space within which I sought to stake my own claim. Of these, Ballard was the preeminent” (Psycho 13). Self’s 1997 short story, ‘Design Faults in the Volvo 760 Turbo: A Manual’ is a thematic descendent of Crash, and the examination of Ballard’s work in the context of Allenby and Sarewitz’s ideas will lead to a discussion on the distinctive traits of Self’s automotive fiction.

Ricarda Vidal acknowledges the importance of car crash culture as an individual entity, asserting that it “developed from car culture, but it is also a concept in its own right” (5).

Similarly, Ballard’s emergence coincided with two seminal events that give credence to both Vidal’s point and his own argument that: A car crash harnesses elements of eroticism, aggression, desire, speed, drama, kinaesthetic factors, the stylising of motion, consumer goods, status – all these in one event. I myself see the car crash as a tremendous sexual event… a liberation of human

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and machine libido (if there is such a thing). That’s why the death in a crash of a famous person is a unique event – whether it’s Jayne Mansfield or James Dean – it takes place within this most potent of consumer durables.

(Extreme 31) These titillating characteristics of car crash culture, married with Dean, the face that exemplified Hollywood teen rebellion during the 1950s, creates a striking enough image to ensure that Dean remains the touchstone for the tantalisingly sensuous prospect of danger within the car. Indeed, David Cronenberg utilised this in his 1996 film adaptation of Crash, including a recreation by Vaughan and Seagrave of Dean’s collision, and Roy Grundmann notes this addition is a significant one because the “Dean intertext of Fifties drag strip races, teen rebellion, and car sex suggests the close link between the sexual revolution and car culture.” (25).

Eight years after Dean’s death came a different but no less shocking kind of death within a car: the assassination of John F. Kennedy. It was a death that proved a catalyst for The Atrocity Exhibition and crystallised what Ballard felt was “the peculiar psychological climate that existed in the middle sixties”, adding that he viewed

it as “the most important event of the whole of the 1960s” (Extreme 51-2). This momentous shift in the American political landscape led to the rise of Ronald Reagan, a figure who embodied an uneasy amalgamation of Dean’s Hollywood stardom and Kennedy’s political attractiveness, and someone who would become a focal point of The Atrocity Exhibition. This is not least because of his “smooth, teleprompter-perfect tones of the TV auto-salesman to project a political message that was absolutely the reverse of bland and reassuring. A complete discontinuity existed between Reagan’s manner and body language… and his scarily simplistic far-right message” (Atrocity 168-9). This assertion that viewers would overlook the unabashed ideological content of Reagan’s words on the condition that he looked and sounded reassuring on a surface level seems preposterous, but the worrying suggestion that Reagan’s “verbal material was found to have minimal effect, as demonstrated by substitution of an edited tape giving diametrically opposed opinions” (Atrocity 166) was ultimately borne out by his ascension to the positions of Governor of California and eventually President of the United States. The prescience of such a hypothesis relates to what Andrzej Gasiorek refers to as Ballard’s “transformative aesthetic” (62) that defines The Atrocity

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Exhibition and bears a notable rhetorical resemblance to Level III of The TechnoHuman Condition, not least because – as Gasiorek argues – The Atrocity Exhibition emphasises “the far-reaching nature of this cultural transformation, the full effects of which are impossible to calculate” (Gasiorek 66).

The nucleus of Crash first appeared as a section of The Atrocity Exhibition, but as Roger Luckhurst notes, the “move from the polylogue of The Atrocity Exhibition to the remorseless monologism of Crash is a startling transition. The complex compositional techniques of collage, juxtaposition and condensation are abandoned for a single, sustained, intolerably intense narrative voice”(123).

Such a remarkable textual evolution sees Ballard methodically charting the indistinguishability of violence, sexuality and advances in automotive technology to a harrowingly logical conclusion.

Consequently, it is unsurprising how neatly Crash ties in with genuine sociological theories on automobility such as Tim Dant’s “driver-car”, which suggests that the “programme of action of both subject and object is transformed once they have come together – combined they may act towards a quite different goal than either could have

achieved independently” (Dant 70).

An unheralded form of social existence through the fusion of two previously independent networks relates to the project of Vaughan and the sexual awakening that follows the narrator James Ballard’s own crash. His acknowledgement that his “pleasant domestic idyll, with its delightful promiscuities, was brought to an end by the reappearance of Robert Vaughan, nightmare angel of the expressways” (Crash?? 66) denotes a move towards the new “form of social being and set of social actions” (70) that Dant outlines in his work. The comfortable banality of the promiscuities that define the marriage of James and Catherine prior to the crash is irreversibly altered following James’s first post-crash affair, with fellow crash victim Helen Remington, in which “the presence of the car mediated an element which alone made sense of the sexual act” (Crash 97). Dant’s theory proposes that, fundamentally, if successful automobility is to be attained, there exists “a network of driver, petrol company, petrol and car to which the humans and the nonhumans must be contributing” (Dant 69).

That the affair between James and Helen is contingent upon the presence of the car offers a psychosexual take on Dant’s theory, in the respect that the pre-existing

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promiscuities of James and Helen fuse with the stylisation of the automobile to create a previously unrealised form of sexual desire – where the car requires driver and car to achieve mobility, the sex act must now include human and car to achieve any gratification.

The unexpected consequences of the union of the natural and the man-made is an idea that resonates with David Wills’ Prosthesis. It is a work that uses the highly personal example of his father’s prosthetic leg as a means of not only examining the relationship between the artificial and the natural and the attitudes such a relationship engenders, but discussing the effectiveness with which human body can be used as a tool. It features a passage that explores the complexities of re-learning to ride a bike in the period between losing a natural leg and acquiring an artificial one: a familiar ride on a familiar bicycle suddenly becomes a difficult apprenticeship, he is suddenly aware of the rank mechanical otherness of this machine he used to climb on without hesitation, without so much as a second thought, stepping spryly into the saddle, pedaling like second nature through rain or shine, up hill and down dale, but now he

feels the apparatus, is conscious of the limitations of his body as though he were required to learn it all over again, the familiar suddenly thrown back into an uncanny warp (22) The poignancy of this passage arises from how apparent it is that change has not been wrought in the bicycle, the means of transport that had, prior to the amputation, constituted “the whole mechanism of which he became the driving force” (22). Rather, it is the defamiliarisation of one’s own body that stands out. Here, however, the passage has been taken out of context of the entirety of Wills’ philosophy, in the sense that this example is an effective way of highlighting the traditional attitudes of pity towards amputees that he wishes to undermine.

With this in mind, it proves a useful foil to the point at which the prosthetic leg has been gained, with Wills noting that there is a hyper-real quality to the new limb, pointing out “the duality of every prosthesis, its search for a way between emulating the human and superseding the human”, (26) and “the fact that the model… can always surpass the original in its functioning, simply do the job better; or rather do all sorts of other jobs the original could not conceive of” (29). Instead of being pitied, Wills emphasis that the curious

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psychological and physical duality of the prosthesis is something to be discovered, understood, and ultimately celebrated.

In terms of Crash, these ideas relate to Gabrielle, a character yanked by her crash out of her “cozy and passive life, of minor flirtations in the backs of cheap cars enjoyed without any sense of the real possibilities of her body” (Crash 78-9). Even through this short summary of Gabrielle’s past, there is a move away from the belief that the irrevocable changes in her life are a bad thing, yet just as the reader of Prosthesis is initially confronted with the pathos of Wills’ father in the immediate context of the bicycle anecdote, the prevailing feeling of James towards Gabrielle is one of pity. Importantly, however, this feeling evaporates upon their first sexual encounter: For the first time I felt no trace of pity for this crippled woman, but celebrated with her the excitements of these abstract vents let into her body by sections of her own automobile… these sexual apertures formed by fragmenting windshield louvers and dashboard dials in a high-speed impact. (Crash 148)

This sexual epiphany shared by James and Catherine results in celebration rather than pity, as a result of Gabrielle’s altered, mechanised body proving a hugely effective sexual tool, evoking Wills’ belief in the prosthesis being able to “simply do the job better”. Moreover, that such a sexual celebration is possible because of the impact of car on human body skilfully reinforces Ballard’s hypothesis of a marriage of automotive technology and the intricacies of human body and mind engendering an affirmation that is perverse and unheralded in equal measure.

Self’s ‘Design Faults’ begins by inviting the reader into “the terrifyingly tiny world of the urban adulterer” (Tough 155). The adulterer in question is protagonist Bill Bywater, a promiscuous psychiatrist who spends most of ‘Design Faults’ cruising the streets of London in his Volvo as he attempts to consummate an affair with the socialite Serena; an affair that develops concurrently with his own mental breakdown. Loaded with often-puerile humour and sexual wordplay, the idiosyncratic ways in which the story relates, or fails to relate, to the automotive and technological theories espoused by Dant and Allenby and Sarewitz provide an explanation as to how Self’s automotive fiction is, despite

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its influence, knowingly far removed from Ballard’s. Indeed, this welcome that opens ‘Design Faults’ begins to mark the story out from Crash, as Ballard prophesises a world in which adultery is anything but ‘terrifyingly tiny’; instead veering between omnipresence to the point of banality, and an actual proviso for sexual desire within a marriage. Nevertheless, ‘Design Faults’ still centres upon the car as the basis for an exploration into the psychosexual tendencies of its protagonist, and much is revealed from the formative meeting between Bill and Serena, as the reader learns that “Bill had arranged to meet her by car. A metal rendezvous” (Tough 158).

Bill’s decision that the car will prove the most effective means of conducting the affair, as well as the metallic quality that Self lends to their rendezvous, may evoke the psychosexuality of Crash, but the viability of Bill’s Level I attitudes are already about to be undermined.

Rather than any orthodox transportation issues, the emergent behaviours that arise in Ballard’s work are perversely affirmative in a sexual context, leading as they do to unheralded levels of sexual gratification for the characters involved. The logistical difficulties of Bill and Serena’s encounter at the start of ‘Design Faults’, meanwhile,

provide an archetypal example of the infuriating complexity of Level II, namely the idea that any emergent behaviours “at least temporarily, subvert the usefulness to the individual of the car as artefact” (Allenby and Sarewitz 39). On this occasion, the inconvenience takes the form of parking regulations: Serena had a Westminster permit – Bill didn’t. He couldn’t find a meter for aeons – he imagined her growing old, her face wizening, an old apple on a draining board. When he did eventually find a space – by the needle exchange Portakabin on South Wharf Road – he had neither pound coins or twenty-pence pieces. He wanted to ejaculate and die – simultaneously.

He stopped one, two, three passersby – got enough to pay for twenty minutes snogging. (Tough 158) The dichotomy between a Level I and a Level II technology is abundantly clear here. That the Volvo is the surest way for Bill to reach the location of his rendezvous is quickly rendered irrelevant by the subsequent and total dominance that the rules of Westminster parking have over him, typified by the desperate begging he must indulge in in order to gain his twenty minutes snogging.

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The departure from Ballard’s work that the story’s ominous welcome hints at becomes more pronounced through the comic absurdity of Bill’s imagination and actions.

On one hand, The Atrocity Exhibition examines the weighty philosophical dilemma of the arbitrariness of time and space through the lens of science and pornography, with Ballard asserting that the pornographic nature of science arises from “analytic activity whose main aim is to isolate objects or events from their contexts in time and space” (Atrocity 49).

In ‘Design Faults’, conversely, the reader is faced with an encounter steeped in pubescent sexuality, that nevertheless evolves into a highly carnal and loveless affair. More significant however is how the temporal and spatial settings of the affair are uncomfortably palpable from the outset; “As he is snogging, Bill is acutely aware of the time: 6.30 p.m.; the place: Sussex Gardens, W2; and the implied logistics: his wife, Vanessa, cycles home every evening along Sussex Gardens, at more or less this time” (Tough 156). Self’s emphasis on time and place here keep the focus on what, for Bill, is the terrifying prospect of being caught out by his wife, the very prospect that underscores the story’s humour.

This anxiety that being spotted by his wife

elicits in Bill is subsequently exemplified by a characteristically Selfian distortion of scale, in which Bill finds himself suddenly and inexplicably “at least sixty feet high. He bestrides the two lanes of bumpy tarmac, his crotch forming a blue denim underpass for the rumbling traffic” (Tough 156-7). That the focal point of Bill’s neurosis then so rapidly shifts from the absurdity of his conspicuously giant self to the mundane minutiae of Westminster parking regulations is a perfect example of the “dirty magic realism” mantra that came to synonymise Self’s work. Once the rendezvous has ended, moreover, it becomes apparent that the spontaneous bouts of gigantism are not confined to the human: But just as he pulls away he realises – given that he has absolutely no justification for being in this part of London, on this day, at this time – that the car is grotesquely elongated.

When he turns right out of London Street and on to Sussex Gardens, the back end of the vehicle is still in Praed Street. When he reaches the lights on the corner of Westbourne Street, his tail end is still blocking the lights, causing traffic in all four directions to back up (Tough 158)

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In terms of The Techno-Human Condition, the sudden, inexplicable hugeness of the Volvo nudges ‘Design Faults’ towards Level III. Obviously, an eighty foot long car prevents Bill from inconspicuously leaving the scene of his infidelity – a scene that maintains glaringly obvious spatial and temporal parameters. Moreover, when setting out for this rendezvous, the loss of a sense of scale that results in his giant self and his giant car as a manifestation of guilt would have seemed incomprehensible to Bill, just as an impending mental breakdown is not something he can so much as imagine at this point, despite these initial warnings. Instead, the blame for the failure of this meeting is placed on the various impracticalities of the Volvo rather than any of Bill’s own psychological shortcomings. This is an idea that had previously crossed Bill’s mind during his meeting with Serena, during his attempts to negotiate the logistical complexities of consummating their relationship, ultimately concluding that “the Volvo 760 Turbo was out of the question on various design faults” (Tough 158).

Therefore, if Bill and Serena’s affair is considered as the type of network Dant posited in order for the ‘driver-car’ to work, what it needs in order to succeed is as

follows: Bill, Serena, not being caught or suspected by Vanessa, the Volvo as a means of arriving at and leaving the encounters, a parking space and change for parking, and a suitable place to have sex. Bill imagining himself as being sixty feet tall as an expression of his own conspicuous guilt is a somewhat anomalous episode in this section of the story, as aside from this, he is at pains to stress that, far from the sexual functionality that automotive design provides in Crash, it is the emergent nonhuman aspects of the network – namely the design of the Volvo and the issues associated with parking – that are not working towards his goal of having sex with Serena. Yet as this section of the story and their rendezvous wind down, Bill’s reverie over a specific idiosyncrasy of the Volvo’s interior introduces the possibility that the dichotomy between human and car is not as obvious as he would like to believe, noting that “even if the operation was technically difficult – he did at least know how to empty the ashtray. The manual expressed it quite succinctly: ‘Empty ashtrays by pulling out to the limit and pressing down the tongue.’

Bill was masterful at this – he could even avoid the cyst” (Tough 160).

Far from deliberately finding fault with the Volvo’s design as Bill has done thus far,

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this unconscious inability to distinguish between the ashtray of the Volvo and the inside of Serena’s mouth is the closest the story comes to Crash’s marriage of human and technology. This is not least because, just as the sexual focal point of James and Gabrielle’s affair in Ballard’s novel is their various bodily disfigurements, Bill’s sense of self-satisfaction is fixated on the cyst inside of Serena’s surgically-repaired mouth. Yet whereas the affair between James and Gabrielle opens up a tantalising new world of sexual possibilities for both individuals, none of the perverse affirmation that ensured Ballard’s work became so notorious is present in ‘Design Faults’. Instead of dreaming “of other accidents that might enlarge the repertory of orifices, relating them to more elements of the automobile’s engineering, to the ever-more complex technologies of the future”, (Crash 148) as James does, the disfigurement in ‘Design Faults’ is the catalyst for the regression to the sexual adolescence that dominates the opening of Self’s story.

The deftness with which Ballard maps out a sexualised take on the emergent behaviour of technology is what makes his work so ground-breaking. By contrast, in Bill Bywater Self creates a character whose frustration builds from the dichotomy

between what he wants and expects to happen with his car, and what actually transpires. Yet despite the Freudian slip at the conclusion of the first section that hints at the intrinsic link between the Volvo and Bill’s sexual desire, the next section of the story sees Bill regrouping five days after his first, unsuccessful meeting with Serena. Trying to rectify the mistakes of that meeting, Bill calls upon his psychoanalytical experience as a means of repressing the conflicts raging within his own guilty conscience: Bill considers that this rendezvous is taking place within a spatial gap – the Edgware Road/Maida Vale hinterland – and, more importantly, a temporal one… Bill has been working on his dissatisfactions with Vanessa for weeks now – building up a comprehensive dossier of her awfulness. Without this adulterers’ manifesto Bill knows that he’ll be incapable of being remotely serene – with Serena. (Tough 161-2) Following the dread that the specific temporal and spatial settings of their previous meeting instilled, Bill actively works to transcend this to gain some semblance of control over proceedings, and that he is able to meet Serena at all

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implies a degree of success in this exercise.

However, that Bill’s justification for leaving the house is fabricated upon the extremely flimsy foundation of escaping from the “nationalist sporting triumphalism” (Tough 162) of an England match neither husband nor wife care about shows that any sense of individual control Bill feels he has over the impending encounter is going to prove equally as questionable. Indeed, even the fulfilment of inhabiting a spatial hinterland proves a false promise, with Self recycling the Level II trait of parking regulations as a trigger for Bill’s neurosis, as he panics that parking illegally is “only too easy to do in a city where the controls of adjoining zones are radically different” (Tough 161).

Despite these anxieties, this encounter sees the consummation of Bill and Serena’s adulterous relationship – albeit outside of the Volvo. The focus of the story from here shifts to the psychological repercussions of the consummation: Bill thinks it suitable that his study should occupy this in-between place, neither up nor down, because he has an in-between kind of psyche especially at the moment. This is now the terrifyingly tiny house of the urban adulterer and Bill moves about it with incredible subtlety, acutely

aware that every movement – from now on and for the rest of his natural life – will constitute a potential, further violation. (Tough 169) For Ballard, the transcending of habitual spatial and social parameters is something that invariably engenders liberation and progress, even if it is in the form of perversely affirmative sexual epiphanies.

Self inverts this, however, ensuring that for Bill the arrival of his psyche at this “inbetween place” denotes the beginning of the psychological life sentence his adultery has earned him. In an increasingly desperate attempt to fight this terror, Bill again looks to psychoanalysis, and an absurdly conscious display of repression involving the Volvo’s manual and a bottle of Tipp-Ex, as he attempts “to convince himself that by eradicating the word ‘Volvo’ from the manual, he will also annul his obsession with Serena’s vulva, which has got quite out of hand” (Tough 169). Not only does this prove an unsurprisingly ineffective act, it finally awakens Bill to just how innate the connection between his car and his lust for Serena actually is: Bill sighs and throws down the TippEx brush. It’s no good, it’s not working.

Instead of the deletion of the word ‘Volvo’ cancelling out thoughts of

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Serena’s vulva, it’s enhancing them.

The firm, warm, lubricious embrace of living leather; the smell of saliva and cigarette smoke; the twitter and peep of the CD – a soundtrack for orgasm. (Tough 170) The more recent technology of the CD aside, the second half of this passage, detailing the intensely alluring sensuality of the car, could easily have been lifted from the pages of Crash. However, for the characters of Ballard’s novel, such automotive sensuality is savoured, actively sought out even.

By contrast, Bill finds himself adopting strategies to dispel it, and once a similar erasing of the word ‘Volvo’ from the car itself has failed, he is moved to seek out the services of Dave Adler - tellingly named after Alfred Adler, he of inferiority complex conception – the mechanic who “has worked on Bill’s Volvo for many years now – ever since he gave up psychiatry” (Tough 172).

In The Techno-Human Condition, Allenby and Sarewitz mark out their concept of Level II by introducing the emergent systems that subvert the effectiveness of technology to the individual in a recognisable social context. From this, they develop their argument to focus upon the broader social ramifications that technological

advancement necessarily entails, pointing out that: Modern society long ago lost its innocence about technology and progress... We have gone from technology as a particular artefact or machine that just does its job to understanding that it emerges from social systems and thus necessarily reflects, internalizes, and often changes power relations and cultural assumptions. We recognize that social systems are in reality techno-social systems, that these systems impose certain orders of behaviour on our lives about which we have little choice (Allenby and Sarewitz 32) Similarly, ‘Design Faults’ initially dwells upon prosaic inconveniences such as parking bureaucracy and the Volvo’s design as a way of continually deconstructing Bill’s naïve belief that he retains control over his car, his sex life, and his mental wellbeing.

The introduction of Dave Adler, a mechanic with psychiatric expertise, at the story’s denouement allows the reader to step back and analyse the situation outside of the confines of Bill’s own deteriorating psyche, an idea that supports Neil Badmington’s claim that “[t]o read Freud is the waning of humanism. Unmasked as a creature

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motivated by desires which escape the rule of consciousness, Man loses ‘his’ place at the centre of things” (6). In light of Allenby and Sarewitz’s argument that “Techno-social systems also make possible hierarchies of expertise, influence, and exploitation”, (32) the story’s conclusion provides an answer to what it means to be a technologicallyignorant, complacent human within the broader context of a techno-social system, as it quickly becomes painfully apparent that Bill’s position in this hierarchy is one of utter subservience to a man schooled in both psychiatry and mechanics, the extent of which is exposed in the story’s final twist: Meanwhile, in Putney, Dave Adler lowers himself into the inspection pit of the Bywaters’ marital bed. He has the necessary equipment and he’s intent on giving Vanessa Bywater’s chassis a really thorough servicing.

As far as Dave Adler is concerned a car is a means of transport, nothing more and nothing less. (Tough 173-4) In the end then, what marks Bill out as such a preposterous and pitiable character is not the act of cuckolding in itself. Rather, it is the absurd and ultimately futile schemes by which he attempts to convince himself of the innate superiority he has over his car, what with it being a mere, Level I

tool for transport, and the comparative effortlessness with which Dave Adler brushes aside the automotive innuendos that have amounted to psychological torture for Bill. Whereas the inability to distinguish between the car and his own psyche is an unswervingly pejorative development for Bill, the superior perspective afforded by Dave Adler’s vastly superior techno-social nous highlights how it need not be a bad thing at all, as long as the human behind the wheel is remotely competent, and as it happens in the case of Bill, “Dave sees no intrinsic design faults in the Volvo 760 Turbo itself, rather he is inclined to locate them in the driver” (Tough 172).

When Sinclair laments that Self and the rest of the post-Ballard generation fail to match the razor-sharp prescience of their predecessor, he’s right, in a word. It is not hard to locate fundamental parallels between the fiction of Ballard and Self, and the psychosexual relationship between car and driver of Crash that is aped by ‘Design Faults’ is just one of these. What makes Ballard’s work unique is the clarity inherent in his pseudo-documentary writing style, that details the future of a society he realised was being increasingly brainwashed by the ideologies of technology, politics and mass media; a future that, paradoxically,

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is resolutely recognisable while effectively calling into question one of the most fundamental aspects of humanity. As such, Ballard’s work is important in the context of the debate surrounding posthumanism between Parisian critical theorists and Hollywood, about which Badmington argues, “whereas the intellectuals were celebrating the demise, popular culture was committed to a defence of humanism (the aliens were always defeated, frequently by a uniquely ‘human’ quality). Man, the films insisted, would survive: this was destiny, the law of nature” (8). Vidal demonstrates the importance of Crash in this sense by espousing that the novel “witnesses the birth of a post-human identity… based on a fusion of animality and ‘machinality’ fuelled by and explored through sexuality and violence” (144). Significantly, this is an identity that transcends the novel, something borne out by the controversy with which Cronenberg’s adaptation was met. Vidal goes on to suggest that, in contrast to how violence and death is portrayed in stereotypical Hollywood blockbusters, Crash “was perhaps too honest, too close to the truth. The detached gaze of the camera did not allow for the festival-like atmosphere that usually surrounds death and violence on the cinema screen” (145).

The Atrocity Exhibition and Crash are two

meticulous hypotheses that imagine the complete obliteration of supposedly innate sexual identities. In his visualisation of this unprecedented bond between humans and cars, Ballard not only engages with the questions that Allenby and Sarewitz pose at Level III regarding the essence of humanity in a world increasingly mediated by technology, but does so by proposing that an existence outside of traditionally rigid boundaries towards sexuality and technology is an altogether more fulfilling one, to the extent that rather than being unable to grasp the truth, he – as Vidal proposes – comes too close to it for comfort.

Rather than the meticulously detailed depictions of mechanisation than characterise Ballard’s work, Self favours the kind of wordplay and innuendos that sit well alongside the sexual immaturity of the story’s protagonist as a means of voicing his opinion on the relationships humans have with automotive technology, and Dave Adler aside, there is precious little fulfilment to be found within ‘Design Faults’.

Moreover, where it is what Sinclair calls the ‘hyper-sharp reportage’ of Ballard’s style that takes it towards Level III of the TechnoHuman Condition, it is Self’s fixation with distortions of scale, that are simultaneously unnerving and humourous, that comes

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closest to doing the same. Indeed, given that the story’s unremitting innuendos go about setting up the ridiculousness of the urban adulterer, attempting to answer the type of profound questions of Level III is surely not the point of ‘Design Faults’. That the psychological problems of one man are offset by the psychological wellbeing of another in what is essentially the story’s punchline demonstrates another deliberate departure from Ballard. This works in the sense that, rather than forging a posthuman identity borne out of sexuality, violence and technology, ‘Design Faults’ uses Dave Adler and Bill’s Volvo to help foster an idiosyncratic brand of humanism based on the humourous deconstruction of Bill’s self-righteous anthropocentric attitudes. As such, the story exists almost exclusively on Level II of The TechnoHuman Condition, in both an automotive and a psychosexual sense. Just as Bill’s faith in his Volvo as volition enhancer is repeatedly undermined by recognisable and mundane facets of a techno-social system, his belief that he maintains control over his sexual escapades and psychological wellbeing is proved completely fictitious by his trusted mechanic – and as Allenby and Sarewitz so wryly summarise, “who, today, can argue with an auto mechanic?” (32).

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WORKS CITED 58 Politics of Place • Technology • Issue 02

Allenby, Braden, and Daniel Sarewitz. The Techno-Human Condition. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011. Print.

Luckhurst, Roger. The Angle Between Two Walls: The Fiction of J. G. Ballard. Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 1997. Print.

Badmington, Neil. Posthumanism.

Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000.

Print.

Self, Will. Psycho Too. London: Bloomsbury, 2009. Print.

Ballard, James Graham. A User’s Guide to the Millennium. London: Flamingo, 1997.

Print.

-----------. Interview. Extreme Metaphors: Selected Interviews with J. G. Ballard, 19672008. By Sellars and Dan O’Hara. London: Fourth Estate, 2012. Print.

-----------. The Atrocity Exhibition. London: Harper Perennial, 2006. Print.

-----------. Crash. London: Harper Perennial, 2008. Print.

Dant, Tim. “The Driver-Car.” Theory, Culture & Society 21.4/5 (2004): 61-79. Sage. Web. 29 Sep. 2014.

Gasiorek, Andrzej. J. G. Ballard. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2005. Print.

Grundmann, Roy. “Plight of the Crash Fest Mummies: David Cronenberg’s Crash.”

Cinéaste 22.4 (1997) 24-27. JSTOR. Web. 29 Sep. 2014.

-----------. Tough, Tough Toys For Tough, Tough Boys. London, Bloomsbury, 1998.

Print.

Sinclair, Iain. “When in doubt, quote Ballard.” Ballardian 29 Aug. 2006. Web. 29 Sep. 14.

Vidal, Ricarda. Death and Desire in Car Crash Culture: A Century of Romantic Futurisms. Oxford: Peter Lang, 2013. Print.

Wills, David. Prosthesis. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1995. Print.

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Memory and digital technologies – a reflection on remembering in a virtual world

by Mathilda Rosengren

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Introduction We are increasingly dependant on digital technologies and on our escalating individual presence in “online” worlds.

This raises questions regarding how our human experience translates, and potentially changes, in and through digital technologies.

More and more a part of real life,1 these technologies invade our way of being, thinking and acting in the world. Projects and planning, as well as history and memory become tangled in ontologically unstable settings; not quite real, not unreal, but virtual2. How are we to deal with memories of what was never the case; how are we to recreate a history of a utopian place?

In this essay I will examine the place of memory in the context of the virtual world Second Life, assessing what forms of memory are allowed to exist within this world. Grounding my analysis in sociologist Maurice Halbwachs’ ideas on memories as socially determined (On Collective Memory, 35-53), anthropologist Vincent Crapanzano’s anthropology of memory (Imaginative Horizons, 148-177) and philosopher Walter

Benjamin’s evaluation of the relations between memory, modernity and shock (Illuminations, 152-196), I will investigate how the users of Second Life relate to remembering and active memory creation.

Second Life was created in 2003 and a decade later it has about one million monthly users.3 The digital technologies that the World is born out of allows its “participants to create personalized avatars and interact with other avatars in simulated environments largely built by participants [themselves]” (Zhoua et al. 262). Unlike many other virtual worlds, Second Life is not a game per se and, just like in real life, there is no “goal” or “winning”. Instead, as the name suggests, it concerns a second living (where, of course, gaming occurs but never as the virtual world’s defining feature). With Second Life’s motto being “Your world. Your imagination.”, it is clearly constructed as a virtual world in which “everything” is (or can be made) possible. The company behind it, Linden Lab, owns and runs the basic platform for the world; “a landscape with land, water, trees, and sky; a set of building

Though aware of the problematic nature of calling one life “real” (does it mean that the virtual one is not?), I have chosen to use the term as it is the one my informants invariably utilise – the term denoting and creating “the distinction of a virtual ‘‘second life’’ in contradistinction to the ‘‘first life’’ lived by flesh bodies” (Brookey and Cannon 161).

1

Although outside the scope of this essay, the history of “virtual realities” both pre- and post-Internet is an intriguing one and worth some consideration (see in particular art historian Oliver Grau’s tracing of these realities throughout history and Tom Boellstorff’s account on his personal engagement with the emergence of digitised virtual worlds (39-52).

2

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tools; and a means to control, modify and communicate between avatars” (Boellstorff 11-12). But, as anthropologist Tom Boellstorff – who conducted several years of fieldwork in Second Life – points out: “Second Life is based upon the idea of user-created content” (11). In the form of your infinitely malleable avatar you can change your eye colour every other minute, fly instead of walk, become an animal, build a castle in the sky, turn the world upside-down (fig. 1), decide whether it is dawn, midday, dusk or night, and so on. In this world of constant flux – with avatars4 and sims5 appearing and disappearing every minute of every day – how are the processes of memory and remembering affected and utilised?

“Memory makes us human. Without it people are turned into a formless mass that can be shaped into anything”, argue historians Mikhail Heller and Aleksandr Nekrich (qtd. in Kuehnast 191). This may be a contentious statement but it does provide an interesting starting point for a reflection on memory in relation to virtual worlds. As one of my informants, Jamie Marie6 explained, “one could argue that all of it is not real, just computer pixels, bits and things, but it is

3

the people behind the keyboards that make [Second Life] real”.

Accordingly, without the real-life human presence behind the Second Life avatar, the avatar could indeed be described as “a formless mass that can be shaped into anything”. With a human being behind it, however, the avatar is imbued with meaning, thus attaining an unstable ontological status.

The avatar becomes a consciously fashioned digital mass, still flexible in form but now being changed into something as opposed to anything. Thus if memory is the requisite for us being human in real life, and the human being is the requisite for an avatar to transcend the “pixels” of the virtual realm, then memory must be intrinsically linked to the social foundations of both.

Definitions of memory Firstly, a distinction needs to be made between personal and collective memory. Crapanzano links the former to “memoralization” and the latter to “commemoration”.

Memoralization is “individual recollection”,

“Infographic: 10 Years of Second Life.”

4

“Avatars” are the virtual embodiment of the “residents”, the users of Second Life.

5

A “sim” is an island or a plot of “land” in Second Life.

6

The interviewed resident’s avatar name.

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fig. 1 – My avatar tildaros is exploring inverted gravity in the virtual reality of Second Life

the personal remembering of each one of us.

Commemorations we do as a collective – a society – and partake in together through rituals, memorials, ceremonies and so on (158). Simply speaking, remembering your dead granddad is memoralization. Taking part in Remembrance Sunday, remembering those who died for the Commonwealth in World War I, is, however, commemoration.

Consequently, commemoration is part of the

socio-historical structures found in society whilst memoralization is more unstructured, informal and personal. Nevertheless, to think that memoralization can exist without any influence from the outside world would, I believe, be a mistake. Believing all memories to be grounded in the social, Halbwachs argues that “it is in society that people normally acquire their memories. It is also in society that they recall, recognize, and

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localize their memories. (38). Thus, both when memories are shaped and when they are remembered, the present socio-cultural structures play a part in influencing this creation and recreation – Halbwachs even goes as far as claiming that “the past is not preserved but is reconstructed on the basis of the present” (39-38).

In her musing on the human body, memory and technology, sociologist Celia Lury states that “questions of memory have always been entwined with the construct of the individual” (105). Seeing how the action of the individual avatar is the basis of all interaction, creation and meaning- making in Second Life, the focus here will lie on memoralization. Nevertheless, I believe it is worth keeping in mind that the social factor is always present to some extent as well as the fact that the lines between memoralization and commemoration can and do sometimes blur.

The second definition to be made is between personal memory and the mnemonic, the object by which you remember something.

According to Crapanzano, “Mnemonics, reminders – they are often taken for the memory itself” (162). For example, the

photographs of your granddad that you look at to remember him are mnemonics, not the memory of your granddad.

Crapanzano mentions several common mnemonics – physical locations, foods, odours, texts, music, statues, photographs and many more – thus showing, in accordance with Halbwachs, how the expressions they take differ depending on the socio-cultural context of the person who does the remembering (162).

In real life, mnemonics make use of all five human senses. Yet in the digitised world of Second Life only two of these – sight and hearing – are functional. This courts the question how the act of remembering works in such an environment. Sight being the means through which the avatars navigate and make sense of their virtual surroundings, Second Life projects itself primarily as a visual world. Admittedly, there is music playing in some sims and the option to use your human voice to speak does exist. Nevertheless, due to slow Internet connections and preferences to be anonymous7 many people revert to using the chat window to communicate and their sight to understand the world. With sight then

7 For instance, visual culture theorists Robert Alan Brookey and Kristopher L. Cannon show that people who gender swap in Second Life prefer to stay anonymous to not face prejudices (157).

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being the dominating sense in Second Life, assuming that most mnemonics in Second Life are of a visual kind is not farfetched.

Early on in my research, when exploring this virtual world both “in-world”8 as well as on other online forums, I was struck by the abundance of photographic representation of avatars, sims, in-world events, etc, that existed online. For instance, the official Second Life blog, Inworld,9 focuses solely on the posting of “Second Life Pic of the Day” – selected photographs taken by Second Life residents. Furthermore, the largest Flickr group devoted to Second Life (there are also several topic-specific groups) has been active since 2004 and has almost 18,000 members who together have uploaded close to half a million photographs.10 Considering this prominent role of visual material being created and shared among Second Life residents, in the following analysis I have chosen to focus on perhaps the most obvious of virtual mnemonics: in-world photographs.11

Thirdly, let us turn to Benjamin’s (152-196) reflection on the Proustian ideas of mémoire volontaire and involontaire. Benjamin argues that urban modernity only allows for one sort of (personal) memory, the mémoires volontaires. These are conscious memories that can be recalled at will. They stem from a certain happening, a certain experienced event in a specific time – what Benjamin calls Erlebnis and that he contends is the kind of experience dominating modern, urban life.

The mémoires involontaires, on the other hand, are the memories of Erfahrung, an experience in a more deep-seated, subliminal sense. A mémoire involontaire is what Proust is experiencing when, through the mnemonic of a madeleine, he is transported – swept even – back to a past utterly untouched by the present. So when Halbwachs argues that the memory of the past is always shaped by the present, the memory that he is talking about is the mémoire volontaire. And, according to Benjamin, this should make perfect sense since Halbwachs’ writing

8

“In-world” is the term used by residents when referring to being online, “inside” the virtual world of Second Life.

9

“Inworld”.

10

Second Life Flickr group.

Though photographs taken in-world are sometimes also referred to as “screen captures”, “screen grabs” or “screenshots”, the majority of the time my informants chose to use the more general term “photo/photograph” (perhaps to assert the link between their real life and their virtual one, as opposed to making a clear distinction between the two). Taking this into consideration, this kind of photographic practice and its outcome will be referred to simply as “photography” and “photograph” in the text below.

11

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is born out of the modernity of the early Twentieth Century.

With the aforementioned concepts as a backdrop, I will in the following analysis firstly examine conscious memory-making and its forms of expression in Second Life, before introducing Benjamin’s idea of shock as preventing involuntary memory creation, and ask if in the post-modern, digitised world of Second Life, mémoire involontaire is ever possible.

Methods Between the months of January and March 2013 I conducted a short stint of fieldwork in Second Life, visiting the virtual world on a regular basis as the avatar tildaros. The potential for virtual ethnography has been accounted for by many, with participant observation in such worlds being particularly highlighted (Boellstorff; Boellstorff et al; Hine). Nevertheless, since my intention was to explore individual memory, I made the decision to focus on conducting semi-structured and unstructured private interviews with avatars,12 to allow, as

Boellstorff puts it, “residents to reflect upon their virtual lives and discuss what they saw as significant or interesting aspects of Second Life” (77).

Concerned with the processes of active memory-making and mnemonics of in-world photography, I found my eight informants through the Second Life Flickr group mentioned above. Aiming to speak to avatars that had participated actively for some time in the photo practice, I chose to contact people who had uploaded photographs in the last month, had been active users for more than a year and whose photostreams13 projected the resident’s life in Second Life.

Considering the time constraints, technical difficulties and privacy of the informants, I let them decide where and how the interviews were to be conducted, with half deciding to be interviewed over email and half in-world (fig. 2).

I notified all informants of the details of my research and told them that they could opt to be anonymous and keep things “off the record”, if they so wished. I have changed names when requested and always received permission before taking photographs or

Interviews, as sociologist Robert G. Burgess argues, “can help the researcher to gain access to situations that through time, place, or situation are ‘closed’. In this sense, interviews might be used to gain access to the biography of an individual or to obtain a career history” (106).

12

13

A photostream is the individual virtual photo album to which each Flickr user uploads his or her photos.

14

If not otherwise indicated, the photographs displayed here are all the author’s own.

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using some of their own photographs for this essay.14 All the informants will be referred to using their avatars’ first names (except for where the names have been changed in respect of the informant’s request for anonymity). I have also taken the liberty to correct any obvious typographical errors to avoid this becoming a distraction.

Alongside interviews with my informants I documented my fieldwork through taking snapshots – thus partaking in

fig. 2 – In-world interview with Swerdred at her Second Life home

my own conscious making of in-world mnemonics. Early in On Photography, Susan Sontag’s influential critique on the role of photography, Sontag argues that “[a] s photographs give to people an imaginary possession of a past that is unreal, they also help people to take possession of space in which they are insecure” (9). For me as a researcher, these snapshots, together with a selection of photographs from my informants, functioned as effective enablers to understand and make sense of both the

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novel, virtual space I found myself in as well as the individual, virtual pasts and presents I had set out to explore.

During my fieldwork in the virtual realm I encountered certain specific issues and obstacles connected to the digital technologies – upon which the world relies – either failing or being hard to use. For instance, one of my informants, Kitti, wanted to meet up in-world but had continuous trouble with her Internet connection and had to email her thoughts instead. It also takes a considerable amount of time and practice just to be able to walk, turn and stop your avatar in a graceful and effortless manner, making it hard for new users to feel fully a part of, or immersed in, the virtual world.15

Mémoire volontaire and photography in Second Life From the interviews the use of several mnemonics in the memoralization process for mémoire volontaires can be distinguished.

Jamie Marie, whilst showing me around the air base that is her virtual home and also the place where she does most of her

photography, mentions talking to others about someone or something as a way to bring back voluntary memories. Sonia,16 who started photographing in Second Life back in 2006 when she was still new to the virtual world, agreed with this, stating that, when wanting to reminisce about something, “meeting with people or just chatting when we are online in the game at the same time [helps to trigger her memory]”. These voluntary memories rely on the social relations between avatars inworld, stressing Halbwachs’ idea of how we remember things in and through a social context. Jamie Marie also uses things she builds in-world as mnemonics. At the air base she has built a memorial for her real life cat, Coco, that died whilst Jamie Marie was training to become a Second Life pilot.

She says that she remembers Coco each time she visits the memorial and when flying an aircraft or spacecraft (fig. 3).

For both Kitti, who became involved in Second Life as part of a university project, and John, who uses Second Life as an outlet for his fantasies, going to visit places linked to certain experienced events functions as

The controls (combination of mouse and keyboard gestures and clicks) are superficially intuitive, but quirks and unexpected interactions make the experience quite unpredictable. Just like being on a real-life boat at sea, knowing how to counteract these oddities is imperative in order to walk, turn and stop smoothly – longtime residents intuitively do so but for beginners this does not come naturally and has to be learned.

15

16

Not her real name.

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fig.3 – Jamie Marie and tildaros at the Coco Memorial Air Base, Hotaru Island

a means to remembering. However, places constantly disappear or change beyond recognition in Second Life so this mnemonic is unstable by its nature. For all eight informants to retain this world continuously in flux, the best and most common way to do so is through in-world photography (made possible by the standardised snapshot function in Second Life). As Aida, who loves to document and participate in her in-world belly dancing groups, puts it, the “best things to remember anything [by] are pictures […]

what can beat the impression of a lovely picture you have from an event you loved so much?” Aida’s words, though far more positively inclined, resonates with Sontag’s: “After an event has ended, the picture will still exist, conferring on the event a kind of immortality (and importance) it would never otherwise have enjoyed” (11).

Furthermore, Starheart, whom I met in the peaceful Second Life sim that she built herself and constantly rebuilds to her liking,

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fig. 4 – Meeting Starheart at her sim (personal photograph by Starheart)

argues that “at least if I photograph as I go I have a record.” And indeed, a while after our conversation she did send me a photograph of our avatars at her home – a record of our meeting and something to remember it by (fig. 4).

All the informants mention similar reasons for taking photos. It is fun, a pleasure, and also a way to document their in-world experience. They photograph their avatars in different shapes, to showcase what they have

built, to document events, parties and places they have enjoyed, people they like and so on – just like people do in real life. Taking photos of what you or other avatars have built (which can amount to whole “worlds”) is an important part of most informants’ photo practice. As Annabell, who runs a Second Life fashion blog, says “if people don’t take photos of it [your builds] it’s like it is not there”. Again Sontag’s words come to mind: “Photography has become one of the principal devices for experiencing

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something, for giving an appearance of participation” (10).

Thus the photographs work as a means of confirming the fleeting experience and existence of builds, events, places and even the avatars themselves. In her text on memory and family photographs Marianne Hirsch, paraphrasing Roland Barthes, confirms in a similar fashion how a photo “authenticates the reality of the past” (6). And, to be sure, by taking (and showing) these photos, the

avatar is creating mnemonics (and to a certain extent memories), registering and even realising a past that would otherwise quickly disappear into cyberspace.

Crapanzano also sees a connection between the acknowledgement of a certain past and the way we use memory and mnemonics. He argues that “through the act of remembrance, we give stature to that which we have remembered” (158, my italics). In line with Annabell’s statement above, I believe that,

fig. 5 – Photographic mnemonic of Tildaros disappearing into cyberspace

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through their photographic practices and their creation of voluntary memories, the informants are giving stature to their past, in-world experiences. Maybe one can even go so far as to argue that they give stature to the virtual reality of Second Life itself.

It is interesting to note that using photographs to give stature to a new world that one inhabits is not a phenomenon tied solely to the technologies that enable and encompass a virtual life. Sociologist Rob Kroes shows that the Dutch who emigrated to America

in the Nineteenth Century sent photographs of themselves and their newly built homes back to relatives in Holland (76-87). This was, Kroes argues, mainly for their relatives to maintain a visual memory of them but, I would add, also to affirm the existence of their new life. The photographs of them and their houses connect the relatives’ “old life” memories of the emigrants to their new life – giving the latter a sense of grounding, acting as documentation and thus generating the feel of an uninterrupted life narrative.

Fig. 6 – Swerdred’s photograph of our meeting (see fig. 1) from another virtual world (personal photograph by Swerdred)

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Anthropologists Dona L. Davis and Dorothy I. Davis come to a similar conclusion when examining twins’ experiences of memory, stating that “[personal] memories are constructed through narrative. Memory creates narrative and narrative creates memory” (131-132).

Comparably, many of the informants move between old and new worlds, real and virtual places, analogue and digital technologies, and make use of photographic mnemonics to maintain a continuous narrative of their lives. For instance, Swerdred, who is active in several different virtual worlds besides Second Life, told me that she brings old Second Life photos associated with cherished memories with her into other virtual worlds.

During our conversation in her home in Second Life she sent me a photo that she had just taken of us, demonstrating how she was really “in” another virtual world (a socalled hypergrid) – through which she was accessing Second Life – whilst speaking to me (fig. 6). Furthermore, one of the images Annabell showed me during our in-world meeting was a collage of three photos she had taken of her avatar self throughout her time in Second Life. Looking at the collage, Annabell said, makes her remember how she looked before and how her avatar (and technology) has evolved through time (fig. 7).

Thus, I would argue, through the active

creation of mnemonics in the form of photographs, memories of an avatars’ virtual life is contained and recreated at each view.

These mnemonics and memories provide documentation and stature to the virtual lives, and thereby present the avatars with a stable, continuous narrative in the everchangeable world that is Second Life.

fig. 7 – Annabell’s visual change throughout the years (“Anna Evolution 2010-2012” )

Is mémoire involontaire possible in Second Life?

Finally, is there then an opportunity for mémoires involontaires to appear in the (arguably) post-modern, virtual world of Second Life?

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“[I]t is [the mémoire volontaire’s] characteristic that the information which it gives about the past retains no trace of it”, Benjamin states (155). And, in seeming accordance with Benjamin, Crapanzano argues that,although voluntary mnemonics give stature and perdurance to memory [they do so] not without cost. In the name of permanence, they subject the remembered to their material requirements, their cultural evaluation and the interpretive conventions that surround them. They deny as they proclaim, the passage of time – their historicity. (162) This historicity is related to what Benjamin finds lacking in the memories of modernity, the mémoires volontaires. Such memories formed of the instant experience, Erlebnis – this experience that seemingly has cut its links to the past, a past that remains unacknowledged yet still shapes it. Opposed to this conscious, voluntary remembrance stands the mémoire involontaire, found in the unconscious part of the human mind. The creation of these memories is only possible through Erfahrung and in order for this experience to be possible, to unconsciously register and remember, one must be open to impression, stimuli, from the outside world. However, Benjamin’s modern man, being bombarded by stimuli

from the urban environment – indeed from modernity itself – is using consciousness as armour against this overstimulation – that is, against the shock. These defences block every stimuli and every shock, and thus deny modern man the creation and remembrance of the mémoire involontaire.

In Benjamin’s own words, “That the shock is thus cushioned, parried by consciousness, would lend the incident that occasions it the character of having been lived in the strict sense [Erlebnis]. If it were incorporated directly in the registry of conscious memory, it would sterilize this incident for poetic experience” (158).

The overstimulation described by Benjamin seems to have hardly diminished during the last century, instead an extra layer has been added to it in the form of ever-evolving digital technologies and the virtual worlds these technologies enable. In 1997 Hirsch argued that we “live in a culture increasingly shaped by photographic images” (14), and I would argue that the fact that Second Life developed some years later out of this culture is not surprising. Perhaps it is also not a coincidence that just this visual aspect of life seems the easiest aspect to control. We have seen that the process of creating mémoires volontaires through the photographic practice is just this: a way to control, shape and authenticate a past through the present.

Second Life is a world where the human

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behind the avatar can control every inch of the virtual, visual space. In such a context, with the person always in control, “on guard”, the chances of Erfahrung and mémoires involontaires seem non-existent.

when one is still interrupted by one’s lack of skill, or technological quirks. Yet, for the more experienced users, like my informants, and when no technical difficulties occur, there may be a chance of it.

Nevertheless, I am not convinced that Erfahrung is forever out of the (post)modern human’s grasp. What I believe Benjamin wants to point out when stating that the (post)modern human’s experience is one of Erlebnis, is that there is an inability for (post)modern man to truly immerse him- or herself in the experiences of life.

He or she is unable to let go of his/her (assumed) control over its existence and experience life on a “deeper” level, the level of Erfahrung. However, I would argue that this control could be diminished in certain circumstances: consider, for instance, the sense of overwhelmingness and detachment music or feelings such as love (and likewise sorrow) can entail. Here one finds a loss of control with the potential of making room for Erfahrung.

Lury, in the wake of the digital revolution, uses the term “prosthetic culture” in debating the contemporary visual representation in the Western world, developing from selfreflection to self-extension:

Yet the question remains as to whether the immersion necessary for Erfahrung can ever emerge through the usage of digital technologies in virtual worlds like Second Life. As noted earlier, even to walk properly in Second Life takes significant practice and the nature of immersion that Erfahrung seemingly requires is surely not possible

The prosthesis – and it may be perceptual or mechanical – is what makes this self-extension possible…

[And in] the mediated extension of capability that ensues, the relations between consciousness, memory and the body that had defined the possessive individual as a legal personality are experimentally disand re-assembled. (3, my emphases) Second Life is indeed such virtual extension of a human being and not a separate world or culture. To experienced Second Life residents this merging between virtual and physical realities, I believe, can have an immersive effect – with consciousness, memory and body subtly entwined. In fact, it may even be a heightened state, as you experience the world from two positions at once (or even more as in Swerdred’s case) – through several representations (extensions) of yourself, with

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not just sight but all of your senses involved.

In this state perhaps mémoires involontaires can appear. Or maybe we even need a new definition for memories and remembrance of this kind? With virtual worlds being a relatively new ontological phenomenon, this still remains to be seen.

Conclusion Memory and remembrance take on multiple sets of meaning in Second Life. As we have seen, the creation of mnemonics and memories through the photographic process gives stature to the virtual world and the lives that the informants lead therein.

The mnemonics that induce mémoires volontaires are easily controlled and provide an uncomplicated, continuous narrative to adhere to. Furthermore, as Halbwachs points out, memories never appear in a social vacuum and social structures shape and are reflected in the memory construction.

Accordingly, from this active memorymaking in Second Life one discerns (perhaps not surprisingly) the importance of the visual in the virtual world.

Nevertheless, the impact of socio-cultural and historical structures is not contained within the realms of the virtual and the use of digital technologies. Anthropologists Peter Collins and Anselma Gallinat argue,

in relation to ethnographic practices, that “ethnographers come to the field with memories of their own [and] that their experiences there creates more” (11). This was true for me during my time in the virtual field but it is certainly also true for my informants. They have come to Second Life with memories of their own, unrelated to virtual worlds, and the ones they obtain from their virtual life will always be attached to the former ones. Thus, memory is also connected to the sphere outside of Second Life, the real life. As Kitti concluded in her interview, “[a]lthough Second Life has been given to us to create a whole new world, we seem to spend a lot of time re-creating the world we know beyond the computer screen”.

So, in regard to which memories are possible in Second Life and in virtual worlds in general, perhaps the key lies in whether the human behind the avatar relates his or her in-world practice to a larger context outside virtual worlds and digital technologies. For Swerdred, “time is time, if I spend time in real life or here, it’s my time, and it’s me”, and as Starheart pointed out, “[people] are kidding themselves [if they don’t think that] whoever or whatever they represent here in virtual is an aspect of who they are in real life”. And, as has been debated, when the residents do not aim to keep the worlds separate and real life and Second Life are

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allowed to overlap, to interact, there might be a possibility for Benjamin’s Erfahrung.

For once the line is blurred, Second Life becomes less like a controlled visual space and more an extension of real life, opening up possibilities of memory-making and remembrance of mémoires volontaires as well as involontaires. Perhaps even for a restructuring of memory in the conjunction of the real and the virtual worlds?

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WORKS CITED 80 Politics of Place • Technology • Issue 02

Benjamin, Walter. “On some motifs in Baudelaire.” Illuminations. London: Pimlico Random House, 1999. [1955]. 152-196. Print.

Boellstorff, Tom. Coming of Age in Second Life: An Anthropologist Explores the Virtually Human. Princeton: Princeton University, 2010. Print.

Boellstorff, Tom, Bonnie Nardi, Celia Pearce and T. L. Taylor. “Participant Observation in Virtual Worlds.” In Ethnography and Virtual Worlds: A Handbook of Method. Princeton: Princeton University, 2012. 65-91. Print.

Brookey, Robert Alan, and Cannon, Kristopher L. “Sex Lives in Second Lives.”

Critical Studies in Media Communication, 26.2 (2009) 145-164. Print.

Burgess, Robert G. In the Field: An Introduction to Field Research. London: Allen & Unwin, 1984. Print.

Collins, Peter, and Gallinat, Anselma.

“The Ethnographic Self as Resource: an Introduction.” In The Ethnographic Self as Resource edited by Peter Collins, and Anselma Gallinat. Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2010. 1-24. Print.

Crapanzano, Vincent. “Remembrance” In Imaginative Horizons: an essay in literary-

philosophical anthropology. Chicago: University of Chicago, 2004. 148-177. Print.

Davis, Dona L., and Dorothy I. Davis.

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SUBMISSIONS Politics of Place is a peer-reviewed journal for postgraduates. It publishes exceptional research focusing on the relationship between culture and spatiality in works of literature, engaging particularly with issues of nationhood, community, class, marginality, and the self. The journal places specific emphasis on the complex interactions between physical environments and human activity.

In addition to its academic remit, Politics of Place is founded on the belief that current postgraduate research can make significant contributions to contemporary academic and political debates concerning the relationship between people and place.

Given its intended function as a transitional space for researchers seeking to become professional academics, the journal values original research that presents considerations of hitherto marginalized texts and themes.

Submissions should follow MLA Guidelines and meet the required length of 40006000 words. Submissions must be written in English but the editors welcome submissions that concern texts written in other languages. Where non-English quotes are used, full translations must be included.

Images can be submitted but only with

consent to reproduce from the copyright holder. Politics of Place reserves the right to reject submissions that do not conform to these requirements. Articles should be sent as an attachment to the following address: politicsofplace@ex.ac.uk.

All submissions will be reviewed by editors for their academic quality and relevance to the journal’s core themes. Initial decisions on whether articles will be considered at the next stage of the review process will be communicated to authors at the nearest possible opportunity. Unfortunately, editors are not able to provide individual feedback on the quality of submissions at this stage due to the high volume of work considered.

Those submissions that are sent forward to the next stage will go through a process of anonymous peer review. The final decision on publication will be communicated to authors as soon as possible. Articles selected for publication will follow a conventional process of sub-editing and proofing before appearing online. Work published in Politics of Place will be licensed to the journal and contributors will therefore retain copyright in their work. By submitting an article to be featured in the journal, contributors warrant that the work they submit has not been published previously and that it is their own.

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In addition to articles, Politics of Place will consider creative submissions that engage with the journal’s themes. Also welcome are short commentaries (less than 500 words) on contemporary academic and political debates, which will be published on the Politics of Place website between editions of the journal. These should be sent to politicsofplace@ex.ac.uk.

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