The spectacle erases the dividing line between self and world, in that the self, under siege by the presence/absence of the world, is eventually overwhelmed; it likewise erases the dividing line between true and false, repressing all directly lived truth beneath the real presence of the falsehood maintained by the organization of appearances.T he individual, though condemned to the passive acceptance of an alien everyday reality, is thus driven into a form of madness in which, by resorting to magical devices, he entertains the illusion on that he is reactnig to his fate.T he recognition and consumption of commodities are at the core of this pseudo-response to a communication to which no response is possibel. The need to mi itate that the consumer experiences is indeed a truly infantile need, one determined by every aspect of his fundamental dispossession. In terms used by Gabel to describe quite another level of pathology,“the abnormal need for representation here compensates for a torturing feeling of being at the margin of existence.” —Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle, #219
Kino-I, Kino-World
The development of a media-environment that functions as the mise-en-scène for capitalist production via social cooperation—engineered both culturally and by the deployment of military hardware—short circuits, as it were, traditional forms of subjectivity (experience) and of objectivity (events, collective knowledge, reality).1 In other words, the experiential transformations detailed in the previous chapter have their subjective and discursive corollaries in what from a modern point of view could appear as a form of psychopathology. The disintegration of the subject that occurs as the sensorium takes its cues from a capitalized media-environment begins to offer an historical periodization of poststructuralism and deconstruction, because it links the crisis of subjectivity and of metaphysics (deconstruction, but also identity politics) to the technological and the economic determinants of social life. The consequences of what I call the media-environment therefore are not limited only to the spatio-temporal conceptions of the subject’s location as effected through re-presentation (TV, VR, computers, commercial narrative, in short, “culture”), or, equally, the subsequent reconstruction of the built environment as a “space of flows.”2 In the media environment, the subject itself is reconceived.
One can grasp how in tele-visual warfare the spectacular intensity of destruction as well as the illusion of its collective sanction creates certain subjective effects—a sense of agency and power via the technological prosthesis that compensates for the generalized lack of these in daily life.3 The word “America” still can be made to function in this way. The prerequisite for the full realization of this tendency, however, is that the so-called other whom the self is defined in relation to, completes the motion, already visible in the psychoanalytic work of Jacques Lacan, toward becoming pure image. Such is the final effect when one sees through the eyes of capital. Both the frequency of others (their number and appearance) as well as their depth are effected. Existential loneliness and inhumane brutality, meaninglessness and socio-pathology, appear as obverse and reverse of this postmodern coinage—and the coins get thinner and thinner.
Steadfastly guarding against the tendency of the other to become pure surface, Lacan, in The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, makes a critique of the solipsistic character of idealism. “The mode of my presence in the world is the subject in so far as by reducing itself solely to this certainty of being a subject it becomes active annihilation” (FFCP, 81). For Lacan, this statement describes the inordinate self-privileging of the subject caught up in “the immanence of the I see myself seeing myself” (FFCP, 81). As he says, “The privilege of the subject seems to be established here from that bipolar reflexive relation by which, as soon as I perceive, my representations belong to me” (FFCP 81). Such a conceit, says Lacan, belongs to an idealism intent upon doing away with the material. “This is the irreducible method of Bishop Berkeley, about whose subjective position much might be said—including something that may have eluded you in passing, namely, this belong to me aspect of representations, so reminiscent of private property. When carried to the limit, the process of this meditation, of this reflecting reflection, goes so far as to reduce the subject apprehended by the Cartesian meditation to a power of annihilation” (FFCP, 81). When the world becomes pure image, the subject-function is active annihilation.
In order to explore this relation among subjects further—a relation that is at once ordained by private property and developed to new and extraordinary levels of productivity by cinema and television—I would like to turn here to Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers. Here characters do not spend time doubting that it is their hands they see in front of the faces but rather they become almost utterly indifferent to the fact that it is other people they see before their eyes. Natural Born Killers provides a description of the interactivity of subjects and media in the general constitution of a capitalized media-environment. With a high degree of success, it has abstracted a matrix of the dominant social relations informing the totality of postmodern society. However, despite the critical attention it has received, the ultimate implications of its form have not been drawn.
Born in the contemporary United States, Natural Born Killers is a blitzkrieg narration of the life and love of mass murderers Micky and Mallory. The film stalks the ebullient brutality of Micky (Woody Harrelson) and Mallory (Juliet Lewis) from the time that they slaughter Mallory’s abusive parents through the remainder of fifty-two murders. From there, Natural Born Killers chronicles Micky and Mallory’s subsequent incarceration, and eventual escape. The surface of the screen seethes with a veritable jouissance of killing as well as with, in the phrase of Jean Baudrillard, “the ecstasy of communication.”4
It is important to note that the mise-en-scène of the film is always represented as belonging to different film genres and to the media itself (during the opening credits, for example, the characters drive their automobile through a rush of images). In short, the mise-en-scène is a media-scape that is on a continuum with the one that has been described as the scene for the production of the first Gulf War.5 In Natural Born Killers, changes in film and video stocks occur every few seconds, including hundreds of insert edits of fragments from film and television history, bizarre superimpositions, and an eclectic blood-pumping sound track. These elements are at once diegetic and extra-diegetic, sometimes seen by the characters and sometimes merely playing on the surface of buildings or on the screen—expressive but unrecognized—as if part of a postmodern Faulknerian world in which history, consciousness and the unconscious were blended together in a visuo-cinematic heteroglossia.
Though offhand dismissals of the film as excessive, simplistic, exploitative, and hypocritical contain in germinal form genuine concerns, most often these easy dismissals mean something else.6 Although certainly not an embodiment of every progressive agenda, the film is in fact a detailed and subtle analysis of the predication of identity-formation and consciousness on violence in contemporary capitalist society, that is, an analysis of the subject-function as “active annihilation.”
I would suggest that the misunderstanding of Stone’s “critique,” in the American press and elsewhere, is driven by a certain self-interested necessity. In popular reviews, the idea that “Stone uses, in NBK, exactly the same elements and dynamics that he is criticizing,” that is, that he criticizes violence with violence, was reiterated endlessly. Of course, what the substance of Stone’s criticism is, according to these detractors, we are most often left only to imagine, but it is perhaps something of the order that “television glorifies violence and this is bad.” Stone, we are told, finds it necessary to use the appeal of violence in order to critique it, when there ought to be more dignified ways.
Why this exigency is taken as an indictment of Stone and not of the entire environment in which films are made and seen, I am not entirely sure, especially since it is built into the structure of the film that violence or the threat of violence is precisely the language of intervention in contemporary society. Although Stone is condemned for showing the same violence that exists everywhere, which indeed he does, his presentation is no mere repetition. Rather, violence for him is the prerequisite for social visibility, while peacefulness is, in the present environment, tantamount to disappearance. Better to say then that Natural Born Killers takes violence as the condition of representation in contemporary society.
The root of the Orwellian doublethink (“the holding of two contradictory ideas in one’s head simultaneously and believing them both to be true”), which enables the easy dismissals of Natural Born Killers, can be discovered in Stone’s own analysis of the production of personality. In the spirit of Debord that “when analyzing the spectacle one speaks, to some extent, the language of the spectacular itself in the sense that one moves through the methodological terrain of the very society which expresses itself in the spectacle,” Stone galvanizes the language-function of media violence itself to checkmate the assumptions of the culture that takes the spectacle as its legitimate expression.7
The story of Micky and Mallory Knocks, littered with murders in every frame, passes not only through numerous stock narrative devices but through various television genres as if the story itself were a composite of media forms. Though the film is held together tightly by the storyline, it is riddled with jarring discontinuities and violent outbursts of action and images that are taken from elsewhere, from spaces other than the immediate mise-en-scène of the narrative. The noise of other mediations, other hyped intensities, puts pressure on nearly every scene. This media overflow, which gives cultural formations beyond the immediate narrative line the stature of hallucination, extends the effect to the peripheral characters within the narrative, that is, the victims. Because the camera enters the lives and the romantic love of the protagonists, while leaving their victims more or less as caricatures or anonymous, Micky and Mallory appear as subjects; those whom they kill do not. The couple’s nameless victims are for the most part targets in the landscape, hallucinatory apparitions, perceptual effects without personality. As the gratuitous shotgun killing of the roadside cyclist illustrates, the victims are mere “target practice” because they are not represented as anything other than the statistics or extras which, in this love story, they are. They are extra people—there to be killed. Micky and Mallory become subjects not only because they hold the interest of Stone’s camera, or because they assert themselves through violence, but because they accumulate momentum through the liquidation of others. This is central to their subjective agency. Equally important, their form of self-expression is marketed to other anonymous people who, like Micky and Mallory’s victims, are also extras—without personality in the sense that Micky and Mallory eventually achieve it. Natural Born Killers investigates this social relation in which nobodies pay to be in the proximity of somebodies who appear as somebodies by annihilating nobodies. They achieve a fascistic celebrity through the sublime abjection of their followers. And we don’t need too many more Columbine High School incidents to realize that this is how it works.
The marketability of violence, along with the subjective and economic gradients produced by it, is not a mere accusation launched by Oliver Stone against the media industry; rather, it is an economic hypothesis acted upon and therefore validated daily by mass media. The dialectic of celebrity and abjection is a structural formation. As Stone’s episodic construction of the film through forms from nearly every television genre argues, Mickies and Mallories are starring everywhere, from cartoons to television news. The film argues that violence as a product (as a commodity) produces interest, in both the visceral and financial senses of the word (even if it doesn’t produce much analysis by anyone other than media commandants, that is, media producers). This lack of an analysis of violence by those who consume it, coupled to the intensive development in the marketing and sale of violence by people with advanced degrees and six-figure incomes, produces the contradiction in the public sphere that violence is interesting and violence is banal, that violence is central and violence is marginal.
Violence appeals to the unconscious as a type of fetish because of its proximity to the generalized organization of society even as it is consciously dismissed. This semiconscious attraction of violence draws precisely on our semiconscious participation in rituals of violence. Because those who broadcast violence become personalities and because those who receive violence remain statistics, known to television producers and to each other only as ratings, such a division suggests that personalities are constituted through the annihilation of other persons. Therefore our social relations are mediated by violence on which the identities of personalities are built. As the consumers of these identities, we participate in their construction—we ratify the terms of personality. Our consumption of violence is in effect an expression of our relations with each other. The less we are as audience, the more they are as stars, as if their personalities were vacuum bags that evaluated and collected our identities until we were flat. Such a form is analogous to that of the global United States as subjective agent in the world, hell-bent on a romance with democracy.
This formula for the mediatic production of personality precisely reproduces that of other structures that create subjective agency by utilizing the leveraged pyramid of capital. A corporate head who exists intellectually and socially thanks to the labor of nameless workers in the sweatshops of Malaysia or Mexico, exists through a similar annihilation of persons. So too does the owner of bonds and mutual funds. Those who command capital are subjects, those who do not, exist below the threshold of social subjectivity. The workers’ sensual labor, their subjective potential, is extracted by capital and confronts them as something alien. The construction of personality through violence is not just another form of “free enterprise” (free enterprise at a higher level, an abstraction of free enterprise), it is the truth of free enterprise. The value that accrues to the likes of media icons such as Micky and Mallory, occurs via an economy that prevents other people from achieving personality, that is, from achieving power and status as subjects. Indeed, the very personality and subjectivity of victims and consumers alike accrues, in the film, to Micky and Mallory. The more Micky and Mallory kill, the more adored they are. The more adored they are, the greater the violence they have license to effect. They are the sum total of their victims—the collecting of victims is the creation of personality and the creation of personality is a mode of production.
If mid-twentieth-century existentialism held that subjectivity is at base a kind of violence, it was because, historically speaking, violence was slowly becoming the condition of existence, the condition of saying anything at all. With the decay of traditional societies, to exist for others, to speak to others, to demand a place in the consciousness of others becomes a violent act. Stone develops the idea of Natural Born Killers through violence not because violence among humans is ontologically given (the infinitely mediated presentation of nature in the film argues that the “nature” of Natural Born Killers always is mediated by culture and technology and therefore can be only a question, never a fact), but rather because historically, in the war of each against all, it has become the language of the times. Nature and history appear as they do through the lens of contemporary violence. The new pre-eminence of violence and the appearance of nature as violence is not merely a matter of fashion or trend, but an historical and economic eruption. Careers, fortunes, and nations are built on violence and increasingly, since the Cold War, the threat and the spectacle of violence.8 Violation has its immediate effects and its affective effects; it is productive both as event and as representation. However, the increased frequency of both of these conditions makes them merge into a unified productive process. At an international level, this violence at once derives from and endeavors to ensure the continued exploitation of proletarian and third-world–style labor and third-world–style polities. At a personal level, it derives from the taking of others as means. Wealth, political, and military power are increasingly the conditions of subjectivity, the conditions of articulating anything, at any and all levels of society.
As few as one hundred years ago, it was perhaps unnecessary to be on television in order to really exist. Today, only those who command the most attention are genuine personalities. Those who have nothing (the indigent, the homeless, the planet’s impoverished majority) cannot speak, and those who have little speak through their consumer practices. One of the things we (those of us who have little) buy are images (enabling) of personality. The consumption of these personalities helps us to imagine what it would be like to actually have one. That action, which in its own meager way realizes a desire for individuality, is necessary because if we did not believe in the possibility of eventually having a personality we might not believe in individuality, which means we might not believe in “representative” democracy, or in America, or in that Truth among truths: humanity’s social nature itself—capitalism. If we doubted more rigorously the moral rectitude of capitalism, its truth as an expression of human nature, its incontestable force of destining the world, we might become more imaginative. In valorizing the closed circuit that constructs personality at our own expense, we consume and internalize the very relation that negates us. We pay, we give our all, to retain our faith in the system that denies us precisely what we desire: agency. This is the rationale of consumerism, which finds its homology in the fascist aesthetics noted previously in which we consume our own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure. In consumer society, we renounce our own agency for the myth of agency. This is the nature of representative or, better, representational democracy in capitalism. It need not be added that this mediated flattening out cum crushing of human agency in “democratic capitalism” is necessary to the function of capitalism precisely because democracy and capitalism are oxymorons. Structural inequality is the direct contradiction of egalitarianism. The consumption of one’s structural privation is the mediation that sustains this contradiction and renders it as nearly as possible unconscious.
Thus the sublime proportions of Micky and Mallory’s agency puts us all in our places; indeed, these figures exist in place of us. We are their abject, that which they must cast out if they are to constitute themselves as agents, subjects, personalities, media-icons. It is their “lifestyle” that is represented and we who quietly pay to see it. Our payment, it must be emphasized, is not rendered in the single act of trading money for admission to a theater or for video rental, but is our valorization of the affective complex generated and objectified in our viewing of film and TV in general. What is unusual about Natural Born Killers is that the film provides us with an opportunity to see what we have made. We are forced to reckon with what our participation, our activity, and our aspirations generate. To claim exemption from this economy is, in short, to lie. Micky and Mallory’s existence is not based only upon the liquidation of their immediate victims, but on the liquidation of us all. Additionally and at the same time, they murder so that we don’t have to. Their personalities, acquired through killing, sustain our (necessary) belief in the possibility of subjective agency, since we exercise so little of our own. Micky and Mallory’s murderous escapades help us to affirm our own existence as subjects, an existence that in the environment of capital we might realize fully only through the very same means that they employ. In fact, the extent of our agency in capitalism is a fairly reliable index of the extent of our complicity with murder. Through murder, Micky and Mallory become personalities and personalities become our role models. Should we desire to become anyone, there is the path of the star system: Micky and Mallory, or the subject “America” in the Gulf War. It is this aesthetico-political structure in which the agency of a celebrity, a president, or a superpower, provides a compensatory and illusory agency for an impotent subject that is characteristic of fascism. Because this logic is both ideological and material, and because it is hegemonic in the realm not only of economics but also of representation, if we are to claim a stake in existence under these terms, we either worship the killers or become them.
As the driving scenes in Natural Born Killers beautifully assert (Micky and Mallory drive through a road of moving images), it is media finally that is the mise-en-scène of the film: The media is the environment, at once the space where power, capital, and murder are negotiated and the very possibility of their negotiation. Television is an essential component of global organization; it provides the environment for the perpetuation of everything. Micky and Mallory travel through a world of images. This is not to say that the media landscape is nature, but that it has replaced nature. It is a second nature made possible through the intensive logic of capital. The environment, everywhere penetrated by technology, capitalized by technologies for the reorganization of space, matter, consciousness, and the genetic code, overdetermines the terms of appearance and action for concrete individuals, their meanings, and their possibilities. “The spectacle is the accumulation of capital to such a degree that it becomes an image”;9 the image’s mediation of the environment and all it encompasses, is capital’s mediation of the same. Exchange-value, first posited then presupposed as the universal systems language, mediates all matter in and as image. All that matters appears on a screen, or it is of no matter. Such a media-world selects for Mickies and Mallories, as the Darwinians might say, and in this world they too select their prey according to the rules of the media environment. The nature of Stone’s killers derives from capitalist mediation—they are subjects who embody the logic of the media economy. In short, they are forms of capital.
Stone does not so much offer a critique of media society as provide a text with which its contradictions can be thought. In my opinion, most of the angry dismissals of Natural Born Killers occur at the moment when the logic of the consumption of violence begins at a semiconscious level to indict the liberal ideologies informing the intellectual positions and practices of free-market liberals, that is, at the moment when violence begins to appear as the necessary underside of the free market. Thus, the hasty condemnation of Natural Born Killers is, in the Orwellian vocabulary, an example of “crimestop,” the refusal to continue a line of reasoning that might lead to “thoughtcrime,” or unorthodoxy punishable by nonexistence. In order to maintain that the free market is the bastion of individual freedom, human possibility, and collective achievement, violence must be relegated to the status of a mere accident, exception, or moral failing, and must not appear endemic or systematic, that is, it must not appear to be directly produced by the free market. To praise the free market and to condemn violence must not erupt in liberal consciousness as an essential contradiction, that is, as a form of nonsense or a lie. The Persian Gulf Wars must remain justified correctives to a violent Iraq, not a violent act of neo-imperialism, necessary both for the destruction of surplus (in order not to return it to the general population and subvert the wage structure) and the production of procorporate America affects. East Timor must remain invisible, or shed so much blood for so long that the stain cannot be hidden. We must believe that dictators and so-called terrorists, inasmuch as they feed off of the lives of others, are immoral actors, not products of the free market responding to it as subjects in accordance with its own logic. America, the subject of history, cannot maintain its essential innocence if violence emerges as its basic premise. Forrest Gump got one thing right: America can imagine itself innocent only on the condition that it remain as stupid as the film’s central character.
The differences between Micky and Mallory and most of the rest of us are twofold. First, they are celebrities and we are not—they do capitalism better than we do. Second, they do capitalism so well because they have fully internalized the logic of television—they produce according to the protocols of television. Its properties are their environment. During their predatory escapades atom bombs explode, the walls of buildings screen images of flame, the entire world is a screen on which is projected their momentary thoughts and feelings. Their emotions and hopes, their moods and affectations are not only signified televisually, they are televisual images, historical fragments of decontextualized moving pictures summoned up by who knows what. In short, Micky and Mallory have tele-vision and therefore treat people as images. By treating others as images, they become icons. Their relationship to the world and to others is in fact not subject/ object, but rather subjective/image, or better, god/image. They see their entire lives through television and televisual conventions, hence they “naturally” select victims the way we would images, wiping them out by remote control when they tire of them. Capitalism turns empathy into television and humans into images.
Materiality and Dematerialization
As argued in the first two chapters of this volume, revolutionary Soviet filmmakers including Dziga Vertov and Sergei Eisenstein were painfully aware of capital’s encroachment on the visual, precisely because they fought capital on its most advanced front. These directors went directly to the evolving properties of the visual to combat capital expansion. Vertov’s decodification of commodity reification in Man with a Movie Camera, his “communist decoding of the world,” tracks the process of industrial assemblage. The image composes itself in such a way that objects become legible as process. At the same time, the image tracks (represents) its own conditions and strategies of production, and effectively reveals that the image is built like a commodity. With Man with a Movie Camera, industrial culture attains the visual and cinema is grasped as the necessary medium for the decodification of objectification under capitalism—the rendering of objects and images as social relations.
The easy legibility of this relation between image-objects and the process of their assemblage so carefully articulated by Vertov quickly falls back into the unthought of the image during the course of film history. However, as this book has endeavored to show, the structure of the image thus revealed nonetheless continues to pertain. For his part, Eisenstein, an engineer by training, works with the industrial application of visual technology. He deploys it in accord with the logic of Pavlovian Behaviorism and Taylorization, and takes the image as a technology for “the organization of the audience with organized material,” effectively grasping cinema as a social machine for engineering the socius. For Eisenstein, a film is “a tractor ploughing over the audience’s psyche.” Even though not conceived precisely in these terms, in the films of Eisenstein, for the first time, image machines are slated to function for the configuration, extraction, and application of what Marx termed “sensuous labor.” The films were to release the necessary energy for the proletariat to continue that labor intensive project called revolution.
Whereas in Vertov, the audience must be shown going to the theater in order to develop a critical relation to ambient images, and in Eisenstein, the director controls the effect of the image on the audience by rigorously controlling their organization according to a plan for sequencing conditioned reflexes, some seventy years later, in Natural Born Killers, the images come to viewers higgledy-piggledy. Here the image, rather than a mere outgrowth of industrial society, has folded itself back into the fabric of the socius and of the subject. Viewers do not encounter the techno-imaginary only on the screen; its logic is already inside them. This enfolding of the image into the social fabric already was implicit in Vertov; recall that the kino-eye project was to make new films every day and was to be part of the quotidian apprehension of sociality. The spectator saw through the very material of industrial society and film was to forever alter perception in the combinatory dialectic of mind and nature, corporeality and technology. However, in something like an ironic fulfillment of Marxist utopian poetics, Natural Born Killers marks the technological realization of this condition of ubiquitous, ambient, instrumental images and the fusion of perception with technology, because the mediations presented in the film, while operating in accord with the two great insights of soviet cinema (the cybernetic extension of perception and the engineering of social praxis), are precisely the mediations of capital. The images do not foster dialectical thinking; rather, they are the raw material of the dialectic itself—the modality of capital’s articulation of the viewer. The images are capital’s cutting edge. They dream us while we dream through and in them.
With Natural Born Killers, we may mark an evolutionary moment in the history of cinema. Instead of merely positing a new order of consciousness mediated by images, as in Vertov, the money-driven image is shown to envelop consciousness. This is consistent with the argument put forth in chapters 3 through 5. In Natural Born Killers, the image, through an increase in sheer quantity, achieves a shift in quality, realizing a change of state in which images themselves become the mise-en-scène for action. Natural Born Killers, in which two young lovers rescue one another from drudgery and oppression and become mass murderers and then celebrities, is about the conditions of personality formation in such a media-environment. Micky and Mallory drive through a mediascape in which natural landscapes fuse seamlessly with CGI, resulting in hallucinatory shifts in context and scale. This world is not virtual in the sense that it is make-believe or pretend, but virtualized by virtue of becoming bereft of its traditional standards, properties, and proportions, all of which have been geographically, temporally, perceptually, and proprioceptually transformed by mediacapital. In this new world, where nature is not nature (but always already mediation) and people are “naturally” born killers, the image of a nuclear explosion or of two open-mouthed hippos having intercourse in a swamp are of the same order: They are pure affect machines. They are on parity here; each exists here as an intensity in an endless series of dematerialized flows. The images come out of the walls and the woodwork and their omnipresence alters the significance, that is, the signification, of each and all forever.
It is the image as the context for action that not only renders ethics virtual but allows Micky and Mallory to accelerate the logic of capital in the creation of their personalities. Instead of stealing the lives of others over an extended period of time, as do plant bosses, plantation owners, and stockholders in order to establish themselves as social agents, Micky and Mallory use weapons to appropriate the value of individual lives all at once. Micky and Mallory see through the media, and having internalized its vision, act out its very logic. They are, in short, higher iterations of capital. Because they have tele-vision (they are television incarnate), that is because their sight is televisual, they see everything as if it were already an image, people included. The depthlessness and ostensible immateriality of others accelerates the rapidity with which others can be liquidated and, somewhat like the worker in The Strike whose suicide is the catalyst for the work stoppage but for antithetical purposes, their subjective potential profitably taken. They convert people into spectacle.
As I have noted, such a conversion process depends upon an evacuation of the other and is in accord with an intensification of the constituative relation in the formation of the subject described by the Lacanian theory of the objet petit a. As is the case with Psycho’s Norman Bates, whose name I long have been convinced is the jump-cut version of the phrase “The Normal Man Masturbates,” desire’s shortcutting around the social prohibitions that give the Other subjective amplitude, and its unrepressed taking of Others as image-objects, outside the codes prescribed by Western civilization and laid out in psychoanalytic theory, leads to psychosis and murder. Of course, these shortcuts (stealing the money, the knife in the bath) are symptomatic of over-“objectification,” otherwise known as castration, and are a cultural tendency of capitalist reification. The person/object is deep-frozen as image and drained of all subjective content. Overcoming that nonexistence involves a desperate and violent act of inflicting it upon another. In Natural Born Killers, identity based on mass murder made possible through the taking of the other as image is the logical outcome of the constitutive relation between the subject and the objet a, a relation of capital from an earlier social moment, now placed under the pressure of an intensifying capitalism where language can no longer fill in and give amplitude to the troublesome image of the other. Subjects assert themselves in the liquidation of other subjects by taking these others as images. Self is produced and maintained today through an intensification of the annihilating function of the gaze. With the deepening penetration of materiality by media, a process that really means the intensifying mediation of materiality, a dematerialization of the object-world occurs. The more deeply entrenched in material structures capitalist mediation becomes, the more everything tends toward the image. Here is Guy Debord:
Every given commodity fights for itself, cannot acknowledge the others, and attempts to impose itself everywhere as if it were the only one. The spectacle, then, is the epic poem of this struggle, an epic which cannot be concluded by the fall of any Troy. The spectacle does not sing the praises of men and their weapons, but of commodities and their passions. In this blind struggle every commodity, pursuing its passion, unconsciously realizes something higher: the becoming-world of the commodity, which is also the becoming-commodity of the world. Thus by means of a ruse of commodity logic, what’s specific in the commodity wears itself out in the fight while the commodity-form moves toward its absolute realization.10
This passage might well be taken as a thesis on the philosophy of cinema history, that is, a meditation on the adventures of the medium par excellence for the epic poem of the commodity. It also provides a chilling image for the struggles of cinematic-cybernetic “subjects”: us. For it is finally we ourselves, the kino-I’s, who engage in a pathological life and death struggle with/as the commodity form. However, if Debord’s attention to the spectacular and the visual as the paramount field of capital exploitation is to be understood properly, then that which he calls “a ruse of commodity logic,” which over time allows for the liquidation of the specific materialities of commodities as it brings the commodity-form toward “its absolute realization” (as image), must be shown in its socially productive aspect. The spectacle means not just commodification but production. Psychopathology, of which, if you will excuse me, all of you are guilty, is a means of production, which is to say that you, kino-you, are a means of production.
This is the lay of the land. That old spectre still haunts the house of Hollywood. What Natural Born Killers shows most graphically is that massive social formations (a nuclear bomb blast, for example) today are experienced on the same level as a pang of jealousy or a bad mood. The quantity of inequality has induced a qualitative shift in the form of its appearance. For God the spectator, the image of the enormity of the atom bomb persists on the same scale as a momentary subjective impression. Images have taken pre-eminence over what was once known as reality; they have supplanted and thus restructured our experience. In this situation of the gross violation of the law of equivalence, people no longer relate one to one. Human proportions have been annihilated. A few days ago, for example, I read an article in the newspaper that examined how the war in Yugoslavia affected the mindset of shoppers at the mall with respect to their purchases. There has been a terrible shift in scale. One death or thousands or millions of deaths today carry for a viewer-deity the same weight as an emotional twitch. With the inequality of power and representation prevalent in the world, this situation of radical inadequation is not merely theoretical, but real and realized. Hundreds of thousands dead in Iraq, Bosnia, Rwanda, Afghanistan barely perturb: We are powerless in the face of that and hence give it but little thought. At the same time, the whims of the few, be they presidents, political entrepreneurs, drug lords, or financiers, can change the lives of thousands, even millions. If we are natural born killers, then it has taken all the artifice of corporate capital and the history of industrial technologies to help to realize our present nature.
The media-environment that today enfolds the sensorium is not a completely new set of effects. As I have argued in previous chapters, cinema is an extension of the relations of commodities, commodities that have themselves always been mediations. Cinema and now television are machines for the extension of the rationale of objects (which are impacted social relations) into consciousness and viscerality. They express the point of view of the commodity with the same degree of centrifugal variation that is possible in commodity production. The laws of exchange of which object relations were and are their expression shift into the visual environment. The world of alienated objects, in other words, which slowly was perceived to have its own alien will, helped to create new perceptions and was the consequence of new perceptions.
Today the tendrils of the prosthetic body of capital have a grip not only upon objects and therefore upon the relations of production but upon images and therefore upon the senses, a grip that forces the production of new sensations and new sensibilities. Among these new sensibilities are geographical dislocation and the overall conversion of objects (which are always objectified subjectivity and therefore subjects in potentia) into images. Subjectivity, on the other hand, if one chooses to hang on to the term, now achieves, inasmuch as it exists as such, a sort of specialization as spectator-destroyer. Those who see and are seen seeing, are seen because they destroy. Recognized subjects are seen because they destroy and because they destroy what they see. Those who merely see have a lot of destroying to do before they might actually be seen seeing.
1. For more on the term “social cooperation,” see Antonio Negri, “Twenty Theses on Marx,” trans. Michael Hardt, Polygraph 5: Contesting the New World Order (Durham, N.C., 1992). “When the capitalist process of production has attained such a high level of development so as to comprehend every even small fraction of social production, one can speak, in Marxian terms, of a “real subsumption” of society in capital” (139). This subsumption of society in capital means that that in principle all human activity is potentially productive labor for capital.
2. See Manuel Castells, The Informational City: Information Technology, Economic Restructuring and the Urban-Regional Process (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1989). See also M. Gottdiener, The Social Production of Urban Space, 2nd edition (Austin: University of Texas, 1994). As Gottdiener writes, “The process of socio-spatial development associated with the present phase of Late Capitalism is deconcentration, which produces a distinctive form of space—the polynucleated, sprawling metropolitan region” (198). My argument is that in the society of control in which social relations in their entirety have been subsumed by capital, the structure of the built environment is homologous with the structuring of representation and subjectivity.
3. Here of course the Gulf War is the usual example, but one should see this as only a particularly striking example of the generalized war on subsistence and laboring populations being waged politically, culturally, and economically every day.
4. Jean Baudrillard, The Ecstasy of Communication, trans. Bernard and Caroline Schutze (New York: Semiotext(e), 1988).
5. See my essay “City of Television: Metropolitan Affects and the New Americanism,” Polygraph 8: New Metropolitan Forms (Durham, N.C., 1994).
6. Excessive: “More troublesome still about Natural Born Killers is the picture’s basic fascination with its subject. Of course it is dificult to analyze something without in some way representing it, but the joyride aspect of this movie makes it less than the coolheaded and sardonic critique of media culture that the film at first affects.” Christopher Sharrett, “Movies vs. the Media,” USA Today 123 no. 2598 (March 1995): 37.
Simplistic: “NBK … certainly represents some kind of breakthrough in terms of the speed and intensity with which it marshals its images, but it does so without any rhetorical complexity. By throwing enough extreme images at us, it proves we live in an extreme world… . NBK is a clumsy, stupid, extremely tiring film that leaves you numbed and disinclined to form any complex judgments,” Jonathan Romney, “Virtual Violence,” New Statesman and Society 8, no. 341 (February 24, 1995): 49.
Senselessly Exploitative: “For no apparent reason, Mr. Stone’s camera spins around in all directions and angles, and goes back and forth from colour to black-and-white. The picture ends with glimpses of two real-life killers: the Menendez brothers… . Other examples of real-life-murderers-as-popular-heroes appear on Mr. Stone’s screen along with the final credits. No justice is seen to be done but a lot of money is being raked in at the box-office.” The Economist 333, no. 7885 (October 15, 1994): 119.
Hypocritical: “How lamentable … is Oliver Stone’s latest and most horrible film, Natural Born Killers, from a story by another current hotshot, Quentin Tarantino. Mr. Stone’s narcissism and megalomania, like badly driven horses, run away with this gross, pretentious, and ultimately senseless movie. Purporting to show how crime appeals to the American public, and how the media exploit it for their self-promotion and the public’s cretinization, it is manifestly far too enamored of what it pretends to satirize, even if it knew how to do it… . Natural Born Killers is neither wise nor witty enough for a satire, and displays only the depraved unhingedness of a hypertrophic ego.” John Simon, National Review 46, no. 18 (September 26, 1994): 72.
Hypocritical (again): “Natural Born Killers is like bad sex and a bad drug trip combined. It’s an ejaculatory farce, but without satiation or rest. Stone pushes well beyond plausibility, yet we are meant to take the movie seriously as the essential, rabid truth of our times—we are meant to take it as satire. Stone can’t successfully satirize anything, however, because he can’t distance himself from his subjects. He’s driven by the logic of what he hates, or what he claims to hate.” David Denby, New York 27, no. 35 (September 5, 1994): 46.
7. Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle (Detroit: Red and Black, 1977), #11.
8. Weapons no longer have to fire but have to seem to be able to destroy. See Paul Virilio, Speed and Politics: An Essay on Dromology, trans. Mark Polizzoti (New York: Semiotext(e), 1986). See also his more recent work, The Vision Machine, trans. Julie Rose (London: BFI, 1994).
9. Debord, Society of the Spectacle, #34.
10. Ibid., #66.