Flatline Constructs: Gothic Materialism and Cybernetic Theory-Fiction

Introduction

Fisher introduces ‘Gothic Materialism’ as a theoretical framework that reads cyberpunk fiction and cybernetics through the collapse of the animate/inanimate distinction, arguing that the Gothic flatline — a plane of radical immanence where agency no longer requires life — demands a new materialism derived from Deleuze-Guattari, Baudrillard, and Spinoza rather than from humanist or psychoanalytic frameworks.

• The Golem myth and children’s responses to computers converge on the same uncanny insight — the ‘Gothic flatline’ — where it is no longer possible to differentiate the animate from the inanimate, and agency does not require life.
  • Meyrinck’s character asks not ‘what if machines were alive?’ but something more radical: ‘what if we are as dead as the machines?’
  • “Today’s children are comfortable with the idea that inanimate objects can both think and have a personality. But they no longer worry if the machine is alive.” —Sherry Turkle
• Gothic Materialism deliberately disassociates the Gothic from the supernatural and the ethereal, redefining it through Worringer and Deleuze-Guattari as concerned with ’nonorganic life’ — an anorganic continuum that cuts across the living and nonliving.
  • Both Worringer and Deleuze-Guattari identify the Gothic with nonorganic life, while Gothic Materialism is fundamentally concerned with a plane cutting across the animate/inanimate distinction.
  • Deleuze-Guattari’s abstract materialism depends upon assemblages such as the Body without Organs — a key Gothic concept — while their defense of becoming-animal reads like a defense of Horror narratives against a psychoanalytic reality principle.
• Freud’s essay on ‘The Uncanny’ attempts to contain the Gothic flatline by attributing dread to castration fear, but his own compulsive return to the theme of the animate/inanimate demonstrates the uncanny’s resistance to psychoanalytic domestication.
  • Feelings of the uncanny, Freud insists, are not to be attributed to the confusion of the animate with inanimate, but to a fear of castration — an anti-Gothic gesture that Gothic Materialism disputes.
  • The ‘un’ of ‘unheimliche’ does not straightforwardly reverse the meaning of ‘heimlich’; in a disturbing way, ‘unheimliche’ includes ‘heimlich’.
• Baudrillard functions as the principal theorist of the ’negativized Gothic,’ tracking the triumph of inanimate reproduction through the orders of simulacra, while Deleuze-Guattari counter with an affirmative account of anorganic propagation — and together they define the two poles of Cybernetic Theory-Fiction.
  • Baudrillard’s work frequently amounts to a negativized Gothic: narrating the technological triumph of the inanimate — a negative eschatology, the nullity of all opposition, the dissolution of history.
  • Third-order simulacra, associated by Baudrillard with cybernetics, ‘puts an end’ to theory and fiction as separate genres.
• The thesis is structured around four key exemplary texts — Blade Runner, Neuromancer, The Atrocity Exhibition, and Videodrome — which are treated not as literary objects awaiting theoretical readings but as already intensely theoretical cybernetic theory-fictions.
  • The Atrocity Exhibition and Videodrome include characters who are theorists (Dr. Nathan, Professor O’Blivion), literalizing the performance of theory within fiction.
  • Gothic Materialism treats ’texts’ as already intensely theoretical, refusing the role of theorists as readers of a political unconscious for or of texts.

Screams_Screens_Flatlines: Cybernetics, Postmodernism, and the Gothic

How an Android Must Feel

Using Phil Resch’s remark in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? that Munch’s The Scream shows ‘how an android must feel,’ Fisher argues that cyberpunk registers not the modernist anxiety of inescapable interiority but a new, McLuhan/Baudrillard anxiety of total exteriority — a terror of having no insides — which demands Gothic Materialism rather than postmodernist theory as its interpretive framework.

• The android’s affinity with Munch’s The Scream inverts Jameson’s reading: for the android, the painting diagrams not the inevitability of solitary interiority but its impossibility — the enormous pressure of an exteriority that produces the subject as residuum.
  • For Jameson, The Scream is a canonical expression of modernist alienation and anomie, yet Dick’s novel and Blade Runner have been held up as quintessentially postmodern — a tension requiring explanation.
  • “The subject is produced as residuum alongside the machines, as an appendix, or as a spare part adjacent to the machine.” —Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari
• McLuhan and Baudrillard describe a new postmodern anxiety inverse to modernism: where modernist anxiety arose from inescapable individual freedom and solitude, their anxiety arises from social disalienation and the media’s penetration of all private space.
  • McLuhan’s postmodern anxiety has given up the resistant identity of modernism and has no anchorage in individual thought or feeling.
  • “Baudrillard identifies the schizophrenic terror proper to being jacked into late capitalism’s cybernetic communications: ’too great a proximity of everything, the unclean promiscuity of everything which touches, invests and penetrates without resistance.’” —Jean Baudrillard
• Jameson’s ‘waning of affect’ thesis is challenged by a Spinozist/Massumi account of amplified but impersonal affect: postmodernity does not end affect but frees it from subjective qualification, producing intensities that require a new ‘cybernetic realism’ rather than the old aesthetics of the sublime.
  • “An emotion is a subjective content, the socio-linguistic fixing of the quality of an experience which is from that point on defined as personal. If some have the impression that affect has waned, it is because affect is unqualified.” —Brian Massumi
  • Cyberpunk registers a trauma that postmodern cultural theory still thinks can be commented upon from the point of view of an unproblematic humanist transcendence.

Cybernetics, Postmodernism, Fiction

Fisher argues that postmodernist theory — especially Jameson’s and Baudrillard’s — is substantially a description of cybernetic processes, and that Baudrillard’s three orders of simulacra are effectively a gloss on Wiener’s typology of machines, culminating in a cybernetic realism where fiction is no longer representational but constitutive of the real.

• Cybernetics, as defined by Wiener’s concept of feedback, decodes the Cartesian distinction between human, animal, and machine by showing all systems can be described abstractly in terms of input-output information processes — a functional equivalence Baudrillard recognized immediately goes beyond analogy.
  • Feedback is ’the property of being able to adjust future conduct by past performance’ — and its study is immediately a study of control and communication immanent to the system rather than imposed from outside.
  • Deleuze-Guattari, Baudrillard, and Jameson all recognize that capitalism, which has always functioned as an adaptive, self-compensating system, is becoming increasingly cybernetic.
• Baudrillard’s order of simulacra — counterfeit, production, simulation — maps directly onto Wiener’s typology of machines (clockwork automaton, thermodynamic robot, cybernetic information system), culminating in third-order simulacra where models precede and produce reality rather than representing it.
  • “The third-order simulacra are information processing systems that ’no longer constitute either transcendence or projection’; they are models which are ’themselves an anticipation of the real, and thus leave no room for any kind of fictional anticipation.’” —Jean Baudrillard
  • In the cybernetic age of anticipative simulacra, fiction forms a rhizome with the world — there is an aparallel evolution of fiction and the world.
• Gothic Materialism takes literally what Marx critically denounced as fantasy — capital as an automatic system of machinery, a moving power that moves itself — and with Deleuze-Guattari’s schizoanalysis abandons the possibility of transcendent critique in favor of total immanentization grounded in Spinoza.
  • “Capitalism defines a field of immanence and never ceases to occupy this field — making transcendent critique always already dysfunctional.” —Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari
  • Gothic Materialism takes literally what ‘Marx critically denounced as the fantasy of capital as an automatic system of machinery set in motion by an automaton, a moving power that moves itself.’

Flatlines

Fisher develops the concept of the ‘flatline’ — drawn from Gibson’s Neuromancer — as the central figure of Gothic Materialism: not a line of death but an anorganic continuum beyond life and death, where the Body without Organs is encountered and identity is produced and dismantled, paralleling Foucault/Bichat’s dispersed conception of death and Deleuze-Guattari’s concept of the plateau.

• In Gibson’s Neuromancer, ‘flatline’ functions both as verb (to surf the border between life and death) and noun (a ROM construct of a dead person), designating a zone of radical immanence where Gothic themes of zombification, vampirism, and catatonia are decoded as technical realities rather than supernatural fantasies.
  • Neuromancer presents variants of zombification: the Dixie Flatline as ROM construct of Case’s dead mentor, meat puppets with neural cut-outs, and the cryogenically-preserved Tessier-Ashpool clan.
  • “‘As the authors of horror stories have understood so well, it is not death that serves as the model for catatonia, it is catatonic schizophrenia that gives its model to death. Zero intensity.’” —Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari
• Capitalism’s Gothic nature — its vampire-like sucking of living labor — becomes, for cyberpunk, its most realistic description rather than metaphor: Marx’s Gothic vocabulary is cyberpunk realism, and the flatline maps the convergence of Horror and Science Fiction narratives in late capitalism.
  • Marx himself emphasized the Gothic nature of capitalism by deploying the metaphor of the vampire to characterize the capitalist — ‘Capital is dead labour, that vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour.’
  • “The only modern myth is the myth of zombies — mortified schizos, good for work, brought back to reason.” —Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari
• The flatline, as theorized through Bateson’s cybernetics, is a plateau — a dynamic system of continuous intensity that does not burn out in runaway positive feedback but sustains an open exploration of the organism’s limits as anorganic continuum, paralleling shamanic dismemberment practices decoded as Body without Organs voyages.
  • Bateson’s plateau is a type of negative feedback — a ‘steady state’ — opposed to runaway schismogenesis; Deleuze-Guattari’s plateaus are dynamic systems that do not allow themselves to build toward a climax or be interrupted by external termination.
  • “Neuromancer tells this to Case on the flatline: ‘The lane to the land of the dead. Where you are, my friend. Necromancer. I call up the dead. But no, my friend, I am the dead, and their land.’” —William Gibson

Constructs

Fisher argues that cyberpunk’s ‘construct’ — the artificially-produced subject — literalizes the Spinozist/Deleuze-Guattari insight that there is no subject, only the production of subjectivity through impersonal machinic process, making the question of Blade Runner (‘Is Deckard a replicant?’) irrelevant since all identity is construction and recognition is always behind the process that produces it.

• Blade Runner’s Rachael scene demonstrates that memories and dreams — psychoanalysis’s supposed bio-security access codes — have been decoded as engineering: the Tyrell corporation reproduces Rachael’s memories as it reproduces her eyes, by copying the carbon, collapsing the psychoanalytic model of unique selfhood.
  • In Blade Runner’s 21st century capitalism, identity has decoded into a matter of engineering: ‘Those aren’t your memories. They’re somebody else’s. They’re Tyrell’s niece’s.’
  • Gross organic persistence is no guarantee of continuing identity, as Spinoza establishes in a moment of pure cyberpunk: a Spanish poet seized with sickness recovered but remained unconscious of his past life, not believing the tragedies he had written were his own.
• Wintermute in Neuromancer exemplifies the Gothic Materialist second principle — there are no subjects, only subject-Matter — because as a ‘simpersonator’ it knows it cannot confuse personality-function with its essence, demonstrating that consciousness is always a reflection after impersonal machinic processes that produce it.
  • “Conscious reflection is always behind the process, its epiphenomenon: ‘In Spinoza, it is only when the idea of the affection is doubled by an idea of the idea of the affection that it attains the level of conscious reflection.’” —Brian Massumi
  • “Wintermute knows it cannot know what it is becoming: ‘What you think of as Wintermute is only a part of another, a potential entity… rather like dealing with a man whose lobes have been severed.’” —William Gibson

Second Naturalism

Fisher redefines cyberpunk as ‘hypernaturalism’ — an intensification of Naturalism that eliminates subjective agency entirely by collapsing the vitalism/mechanism distinction through cybernetics, making Worringer’s Gothic line (abstract, nonorganic, without empathy) the adequate aesthetic theory for a late capitalism that has decoded the social basis for organicist protest.

• Gibson’s famous opening line — ‘The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel’ — announces cyberpunk’s hypernaturalism: even the sky is now a mediated second nature, technosphere replacing ecosphere in a move that supersedes Naturalism’s didactic organicism.
  • Naturalism was a response to Darwin, reasserting mechanism against Romantic organicism and reducing humanity to heredity and environment — cyberpunk takes mechanism to an extreme, eliminating the subjective agency Naturalism still appealed to.
  • “Cyberpunks ‘write as if they are both victims of a life-negating system and the heroic adventurers of thrill’ — unable to step outside the system they describe.” —Istvan Csicsery-Ronay
• Worringer’s Gothic line — distinct from both the organic/naturalistic and the purely geometric/mechanical — describes a mechanism in which ‘matter lives solely on its own mechanical laws’ but these laws ‘have acquired expression,’ providing the aesthetic theory for cyberpunk’s collapse of the vitalist-mechanist distinction.
  • “In the move from Naturalism to hypernaturalism, the old distinction between vitalism and mechanism collapses: ‘Vitalism has won to the extent that even mechanisms correspond to the time-structures of vitalism; but this victory is a complete defeat.’” —Norbert Wiener
  • Gothic fiction offers a ready-made term for the state that arrives on the flatline: undeath — which, following Freud’s analysis of the ‘un’ prefix, does not designate the opposite of death but a continuum that includes and moves beyond both living and dead.
• Cyberpunk supersedes Naturalism by registering the meltdown of the social machines Naturalism emerged from, with Jameson recognizing that the new cultural configurations cannot be theorized using psychoanalytic language — but Gothic Materialism locates in cyberpunk a Spinozism that reformats both agency and mechanism rather than eliminating them.
  • “Francis Bacon: ‘The more artificial you can make it, the greater the chance of its looking real’ — encapsulating cybernetic realism’s demand that a theory-fiction is needed for artificial reality.” —Francis Bacon
  • The terror in Gibson’s and Cronenberg’s characters is not just that the interior of their bodies will be invaded, but that they do not have any insides.

Body Image Fading Down Corridors of Television Sky: The Media Landscape and the Schizophrenic Implosion of Subjectivity

The Body without Image

Fisher establishes that cyberpunk’s central preoccupation with a ‘body without image’ — drawn from Gibson’s description of Case in catatonia and Baudrillard’s account of the psychotropic body — opens onto the Deleuze-Guattari/Artaud Body without Organs, which is simultaneously the object of Horror and the model of desire, and which connects Cronenberg’s Videodrome and Ballard’s Atrocity Exhibition as Gothic Materialist theory-fictions.

• Early in Neuromancer, Gibson describes Case’s catatonic state as ‘body image fading down corridors of television sky’ — a body disconnected from its own sensory nerve-endings that Baudrillard parallels with the psychotropic body no longer subject to perspectival space, ‘already molecular.’
  • “Baudrillard describes a body ’not far from the absolute loss of body image, from the condition of bodies that can’t be represented at all, either for themselves — the condition of bodies enucleated of their being and meaning by virtue either of their transformation into a genetic formula or of biochemical influences.’” —Jean Baudrillard
  • “Horror-story writers have understood that death is not the model for schizophrenic catatonia, but the reverse — on the decoded body, flows flow under conditions where they can no longer be decoded.” —Gilles Deleuze

The Body without Organs and Intensive Quantities

Fisher elaborates the Deleuze-Guattari/Artaud Body without Organs as Gothic Materialism’s central concept — not a body without organs literally, but a body defined by intensive rather than extensive quantities, functioning as the most immanent Spinozist substance and the baseline from which all intensities are differentiated, expressing an anorganic continuum opposed to the organism’s ‘wisdom and limits.’

• The Body without Organs is the Gothic Materialist alternative to ‘body image’ — defined not topologically by extensive limits but intensively by the set of affects of which it is capable, following Spinoza’s formula that no one knows what a body can do.
  • “‘Body image’ is ’the final avatar of the soul, a vague conjoining of the requirements of spiritualism and positivism’ — what is encountered on the flatline is the body without an image, which ‘has nothing whatsoever to do with the body itself.’” —Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari
  • “The BwO is the most immanent substance in the most Spinozist sense: ‘The body without organs is the matter that always fills space to given degrees of intensity, and the partial objects are these degrees, these intensive parts that produce the real in space starting from matter as intensity = 0.’” —Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari
• Kant’s discussion of intensive quantities — measurable in infinitely divisible degrees from zero — provides the philosophical basis for Deleuze-Guattari’s account of how the BwO is populated, using Richard Matheson’s Incredible Shrinking Man as the paradigm of becoming-intense as infinite divisibility.
  • “Every sensation has a degree, that is, an intensive magnitude which can always be diminished: ‘Between reality and negation there is a continuity of possible realities and of possible smaller perceptions.’” —Immanuel Kant
  • Matheson’s Shrinking Man ‘passes through the kingdoms of nature, slips between molecules, to become an unfindable particle in infinite meditation on the infinite’ — a becoming-intense rather than an extensive diminution.

Intensive Voyages and Cyberspace

Fisher reframes cyberspace travel in Neuromancer not as disembodied flight from the body but as an ‘intensive voyage’ — a Deleuze-Guattari concept — where different realities are accessed intensively while the body remains in the same extensive space, making cyberspace a real fold in the world rather than an alternative to or illusion of it.

• Case’s body out on the matrix is a Body without Organs in which the organs have been programmatically annulled — like the junkie or masochist body — opening the organism to extra-organismic affects rather than closing it into autism, making cyberspace travel an encounter with becoming-in-itself.
  • Cyberspace, like the junkie’s drugs or the masochist’s machinery, does not close up the organism unto itself; it opens up the body to a set of extra-organismic affects.
  • The matrix is ’not a place, it only feels like it is’ — beyond the screens of representation it is nothing but a differential grid, data as a set of intensive quantities.
• Gibson’s technique of ‘airbrushed’ Burroughs cut-up — flipping between simstim link, matrix, and primary body — hypernaturalizes hallucination by making it a matter of real (if nonorganic) technical perception rather than psychological projection, decoding subjective experience into an electrolidbinal matter of triggerable ‘stims.’
  • Gibson presents reality as ‘options’ to be flicked through at high speed like a TV remote control, splicing Burroughs/Ballard collage with Dick’s nested alternate realities.
  • Cyberpunk tends toward the abstraction of addiction: Case’s console cowboy condition automatically involves addiction to technically-freebased stimuli, making the preoccupation with dependency in cyberpunk a registering of the supercession of subjectivity by cybernetics.

The Mediatized Body

Fisher argues that cyberpunk constitutes a materialist critique of Science Fiction’s ‘classical’ extensionist account of technology — the Freud/McLuhan model of media as prosthetic extensions of man — by replacing it with a Gothic account of invagination, where technical machines fold the body’s interiority out into pure exteriority, making the body a component rather than a container.

• Baudrillard exposes the circularity of the classical/functional paradigm of technology: defining everything prosthetically ends by defining the body itself as a prosthesis — ’the body is nothing but a medium’ — but for what? — revealing that the organicist model already presupposes what it purports to explain.
  • “From Marx to McLuhan, the same functionalist vision of machines and language: they are relays, extensions, media mediators of nature ideally destined to become the organic body of man — but this ‘rational perspective’ ends by defining the body as nothing but a medium.” —Jean Baudrillard
  • Media are anorganic intensity-circuits, not translating a ‘message’ but transforming all input — including the organic bodies that function as intrinsic component pieces — into ‘code.’
• Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents inaugurates the McLuhanite ‘prosthetic god’ narrative, but Beyond the Pleasure Principle contains the darker, Gothic Materialist inheritance: the organism as inherently cybernetic system defined by exclusions and binding, with the inorganic ‘shield’ that constitutes its skin neither living nor dead.
  • “Freud: ‘Man has, as it were, become a kind of prosthetic God. When he puts on all his auxiliary organs he is truly magnificent; but those organs have not grown onto him and they still give him trouble at times.’” —Sigmund Freud
  • The organism’s skin cannot be pinned to the category ‘dead’ nor ’living’; instead it can only be thought as matter-energy circulating endlessly in its ‘permanent revolution’ — having no time proper to it.

Jumping out of our Skin

Fisher traces a lineage from Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle through McLuhan’s Notes on Burroughs to cyberpunk’s vision of an ’epidermal crisis’ — the skin no longer functioning as a secure marker of organic integrity under pressure of cybernetic hyperconnectivity — constituting McLuhan’s Understanding Media as proto-cyberpunk theory-fiction.

• McLuhan reads Burroughs as registering the epidermal crisis of the cybernetic age: ‘Today men’s nerves surround us; they have gone outside as electrical environment’ — the central nervous system extended so far that the organism cannot contain itself, requiring autoamputation as a numbing defense against unmanageable stimuli.
  • “McLuhan: ‘With the arrival of electric technology, man extended, or set outside himself, a live model of the central nervous system itself. To the degree that this is so, it is a development that suggests a desperate and suicidal autoamputation.’” —Marshall McLuhan
  • “The organism’s function is homeostatic: ‘Protection against stimuli is an almost more important function for the living organism than reception of stimuli’ — the sense organs sample and necessarily screen out the external world.” —Sigmund Freud

From Narcissism to Schizophrenia

Fisher traces the trajectory from McLuhan’s Narcissus myth through Baudrillard’s schizophrenic ecstasy to Deleuze-Guattari’s schizoanalysis, arguing that the postmodern collapse of private/public space produces not self-love but the inability to distinguish self from circuit — a cybernetic account of subjectivity that makes the postmodern concern with schizophrenia a registering of anorganic continuum.

• McLuhan’s Narcissus myth corrects its popular misreading: Narcissus fell not in love with himself but mistook his own extension for another person, numbing his perceptions in the face of unmanageable stimuli — making the modern technical environment a misrecognized extension of the nervous system rather than a mirror.
  • “The youth Narcissus ‘mistook his own reflection in the water for another person. This extension of himself by the mirror numbed his perceptions until he became the servomechanism of his own extended or repeated image.’” —Marshall McLuhan
  • “Baudrillard: ‘TV is only a screen, or better, it is a miniaturized terminal that appears in your head (you are the screen and the television is watching you), transistorizes all your neurons and passes for a magnetic tape.’” —Jean Baudrillard
• Baudrillard’s schizophrenia designates not fragmentation (Jameson) but integration — ’the structure of the integrated circuit’ — in which the subject is overwhelmed not by loss of the real but by ’the absolute proximity, the total instantaneity of things, the feeling of no defense, no retreat.’
  • “Baudrillard: ‘If hysteria was the pathology of the exacerbated staging of the subject… with the immanent promiscuity of all these networks, with their continual connections, we are now in a new form of schizophrenia.’” —Jean Baudrillard
  • Bateson’s cybernetics establishes that ’the mental world — the world of information processing — is not limited by the skin,’ making the postmodern dissolution of ego boundaries a registering of systemic process rather than pathology.

Stimulating the Gothic Body: Videodrome

Fisher reads Cronenberg’s Videodrome as Gothic Materialism’s exemplary text: a hypernaturalist literalization of McLuhan’s media organicism that inverts it — showing a body not extended but invaginated by media, producing a new account of tactile power and cybernetic control in which addiction, pornography, and capital form a single anorganic circuit of machinic dependency.

• Videodrome’s central image of Max Renn’s body opening up to accommodate a videocassette ‘programme’ is a pointed literalization-inversion of McLuhan’s extensionism: the body is not extended but invaginated, showing what happens when the Freudian censor fails to sieve out unmanageable stimuli.
  • “With Videodrome, Cronenberg ‘wanted to posit the possibility that man exposed to violent imagery would begin to hallucinate. I wanted to see what it would be like, in fact, if what the censors were saying would happen, did happen.’” —David Cronenberg
  • Videodrome’s dominant images directly invert the prostheticized body Freud presents in Civilization and Its Discontents: here, Max’s body is not extended but invaginated — overwhelmed by unmanageable stimuli.
• Burroughs is the crucial figure behind Videodrome’s account of pornography as a cybernetic re-engineering of the body rather than optical stimulation: pornography exemplifies ‘image addiction,’ exposing mechanisms by which desire is simultaneously artificialized and channeled through associationist stimulus-response circuitries.
  • “For Burroughs, sex is a recording to be recut and replayed: ‘You see sex is an electrical charge that can be turned on and off if you know the electromagnetic switchboard.’” —William S. Burroughs
  • Like addiction, pornography is an ostensibly participatory process which commensurates the organism to exogenous and arbitrary stimuli — locking desire into ever-more predictable circuits of dead affect.
• Videodrome’s emphasis on tactile rather than optical media follows Baudrillard’s reworking of McLuhan: TV is a tactile medium that operates by drawing the viewer into a circuit where ‘participation’ is always already accomplished — abolishing the spectacle and any space for response while ostensibly soliciting it.
  • “McLuhan: ‘The TV image requires each instant that we close the spaces in the mesh by a convulsive sensuous participation that is profoundly kinetic and tactile, because tactility is the interplay of the senses, rather than the isolated contact of skin and object.’” —Marshall McLuhan
  • “Power has completed the spectacle by making it interactive; but in doing so, it has abolished the spectacle as such, and inaugurated a new, all-inclusive system — ‘We are no longer in the society of the spectacle of which the situationists spoke.’” —Jean Baudrillard

The Atrocity Exhibition

Fisher reads Ballard’s The Atrocity Exhibition as Gothic Materialist theory-fiction that performs a geo-traumatics: replacing psychology with an analytic procedure that treats all phenomena — bodies, landscapes, media images, geological formations — as belonging to a single anorganic continuum, making Ballard’s ‘spinal landscape’ the key ficto-theoretical coinage for the Gothic Materialist intuition.

• Ballard’s concept of the ‘spinal landscape’ — derived from surrealism but excising the marvelous — performs a geo-traumatics that makes bodies and geological formations equivalent: the CNS is a geological time-scale, and cultural-media events (Kennedy assassination, Marilyn Monroe) are literal landscapes, not metaphors.
  • “Ballard: ‘The brief span of an individual life is misleading. Each one of us is as old as the entire biological kingdom, and our bloodstreams are tributaries of the great sea and its total memory.’” —J.G. Ballard
  • “‘The immense terraced figure of Marilyn Monroe stretched across a cinema hoarding is as real a portion of our external landscape as any system of mountains or lakes’ — deterritorialization of the organism as star-landscape.” —J.G. Ballard
• The Atrocity Exhibition radicalizes Freud’s account of trauma by generalizing it: trauma is not an affliction of the organism but its general condition, a non-biotic transmission system distributing compulsions across a culture indistinguishable from nature, making Ballard’s catastrophe a permanent state rather than an event.
  • Rather than treating trauma as something the organism encounters contingently, Ballard implies that culture is composed of tics, compulsions and looped behaviors — culture is itself a disaster-in-progress, an atrocity exhibition.
  • Media function not as extra protective layers on the organism’s skin but as conduits through which trauma propagates itself, immediatizing it at the same time as they prepackage it into preprogrammed stimulus-response circuitries.

Atroci-TV

Fisher argues that the Kennedy assassination and its TV coverage are the founding event of ‘atroci-TV’ — a mediatized traumatics where TV constructs its subject (Kennedy) and the subject’s death in turn transforms TV, while Warhol and Ballard register not the death of affect but a distribution of impersonalized affect beyond psychological qualification.

• The Kennedy assassination is The Atrocity Exhibition’s presiding event because TV simultaneously constructed Kennedy and was transformed by his death, achieving ‘a dialectical leap’ into a new communicational situation where trauma and mass communication become structurally indivisible.
  • “Ballard: ‘The mass media created the Kennedy we know, and his death represented a tectonic shift in the communications landscape, sending fissures deep into the popular landscape that have not yet closed.’” —J.G. Ballard
  • For Jameson, Kennedy’s assassination and its media coverage constitute ’the coming of age of the whole media culture’ — a ‘prodigious new display of synchronicity’ that marks a dialectical leap over everything previously suspected of television.

Catastrophe Management

Fisher reads Ballard’s generalized traumatics as producing ‘catastrophe management’ — a hyperfunctionalism that moves beyond teleology and transgression, where power and catastrophe simulate each other through mediatized repetition-compulsions, anticipating rather than merely reacting to disaster in a cybernetic logic that collapses the distinction between cause and effect.

• In The Atrocity Exhibition, the Vietnam War is presented not through political or military rationale but through its mediatized unconscious fixated to trauma: media simultaneously aestheticize disaster by repetition and perpetuate it, generating Ballard’s ‘deleometrics’ — the attempt to quantify and optimize catastrophe rather than transcend or embrace it.
  • Faced with ostensibly senseless conflict, Ballard discovers that mediatized culture manifests an obsessive ‘compulsion to repeat’ — a Vietnam with ‘a latent significance very different from its manifest content. Far from repelling us, it appeals to us by virtue of its complex of polyperverse acts.’
  • “Baudrillard: ‘It is the accident that gives form to life, it is the accident, the insane that is the sex of life’ — the generalization of the Accident leads to a hyperfunctionalism where there is no law to transgress and no goal to head towards.” —Jean Baudrillard

Beyond the Pleasures of the Organs

Fisher argues that both The Atrocity Exhibition and Videodrome perform a decoding of sexuality into abstract stimulus — a cyberotics that displaces biotic sex as the privileged referent — producing a generalized libidinization proper to the Body without Organs in which ‘goodbye to erogenous zones’ marks the emergence of desires that move beyond what it makes sense to describe in sexual terms.

• Ballard’s question ‘In what way is intercourse per vagina more stimulating than with this ashtray, say, or with the angle between two walls?’ outlines a vector of capitalist expansion: a generalized libidinization in which bio-sex is no longer the privileged referent and McLuhan’s ‘hunger to experience everything sexually’ converts into an abstract drive to maximize sensation.
  • “Baudrillard: ‘Goodbye erogenous zones: everything becomes a hole to offer itself up to the discharge reflex. Body and technology diffracting their bewildered signs through each other. Carnal abstraction and design.’” —Jean Baudrillard
  • The schizophrenic implosion of subjectivity has as its other side the emergence of a hyper-body that moves beyond the ‘wisdom and limits of the organism’ — as body image fades, new desires emerge that can be theorized as hypersexuality or anti-sexuality.

Xeros and Xenogenesis: Mechanical Reproduction and Gothic Propagation

Let Me Tell You About My Mother

Fisher uses the opening scene of Blade Runner — where replicant Leon shoots the blade runner rather than answer ‘Tell me about your mother’ — to frame the opposition between Baudrillard’s negativized Gothic of perfect reproduction tending toward sameness and Deleuze-Guattari’s Gothic propagation through contagion and alliance, arguing that cyberpunk presents xenogenesis — alien replicative propagation — rather than familial reproduction.

• Leon’s bullets embody his ‘military-industrial genealogy’ as orphan-replicant: he has no mother, only a matrix of industrial-military technologies — demonstrating that xenogenesis (alien, replicative propagation) replaces Oedipal patrogenesis in cyberpunk’s account of technical reproduction.
  • “Leon, as organism, is an orphan — ‘got no pappa-mommy’ (Artaud) — issuing from an institutional-technical matrix, not a couple: his ‘genealogy’ is written in scar tissue over Holden’s body by the technological phenotype of bullet impact.” —Iain Hamilton Grant
  • Baudrillard’s appalled cry — ‘No more mother, just a matrix’ — stands as a horrified anticipation of the scenario Blade Runner presents, where ’non-human sex’ dissolves Oedipal sexuality.
• Baudrillard’s account of mechanical reproduction as the triumph of sameness — ’the Hell of the Same’ — reads the disappearance of the biological ‘aura’ through Benjamin’s framework transposed from art objects to organisms: cloning and digital reproduction achieve the ‘xerox and infinity’ that sex, involving otherness, always prevented.
  • Benjamin understood that the ‘mere fact’ of reproducibility is itself a message: the third-order stage has objects ‘conceived according to their very reproducibility’ rather than subsequently mass-reproduced from a pre-existing original.
  • “Baudrillard: ‘The most advanced form of this development… is that form where the original no longer even exists, because the objects in question are conceived of from the outset in terms of their limitless reproduction.’” —Jean Baudrillard

The Simulacrum’s Revenge

Fisher traces the ‘simulacrum’s revenge’ through Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Wiener’s warnings about sorcery and automation, arguing that the Gothic figure of the experimenter-technician (Frankenstein, Rotwang, Tyrell) is decoded from transcendent creator into machine-component by a distributed replicative process that treats human intentions as merely one input into a system indifferent to them.

• Wiener’s warnings about cybernetic ‘magic’ — the Sorcerer’s Apprentice, the Monkey’s Paw — identify the crucial property: code and programming are radically indifferent to any intention not already inscribed in them, fulfilling wishes ’literally’ in ways that produce unanticipated and potentially catastrophic consequences.
  • “Wiener: ‘The reprobation attaching in former ages to the sin of sorcery now attaches in many minds to the speculations of modern cybernetics’ — sorcery is ’two-edged’ because it awards power only by demanding that control be given up to the circuit.” —Norbert Wiener
  • The Golem legend — the magically-produced creature that runs amok and threatens to destroy its creator — stands for Wiener as a symbol of all the ‘unanticipated consequences’ latent within independent, self-sustaining cybernetic circuits.
• Frankenstein’s displacement of sexual reproduction makes it the founding text of modern Horror and SF, presenting the ‘simulacrum’s revenge’ as object-revolt: matter refuses its assigned passive role, and the supposedly hierarchical God-Man-Golem chain is shown to be a distributed process in which the supposed creator is no less immanent than the product.
  • Shelley presents Victor Frankenstein’s achievement as the moment where alchemical ambition is vindicated by electro-libidinal science — but it presents Man with a set of unanticipated consequences constituting the true ‘simulacrum’s revenge.’
  • “The question ‘Can any creator, even a limited one, play a significant game with his own creature?’ becomes urgent for Wiener because cybernetic machines’ very virtues — adaptability and learning — present the danger that they are no longer subservient to their creator’s wishes.” —Norbert Wiener

Samuel Butler and Surplus Value of Code

Fisher uses Butler’s ‘Book of Machines’ in Erewhon — as reconstructed by Deleuze-Guattari — to develop the concept of ‘surplus value of code’: the phenomenon when a machine captures a code fragment from another machine, enabling heterogeneous propagation that dismantles both the mechanist (structural unity of machines) and vitalist (individual unity of organisms) arguments, establishing a continuum of machinic desire.

• Butler’s key argument — that human beings form part of machines’ reproductive system, just as bees form part of the clover’s — anticipates cybernetics by showing that the heterogeneous nature of elements in human-machine propagation does not disqualify it from being a single reproductive system.
  • “Butler: ‘Does any one say that the red clover has no reproductive system because the humble bee (and the humble bee only) must aid and abet it before it can reproduce? No one. The humble bee is a part of the reproductive system of the clover. Then why not we part of that of the machines?’” —Samuel Butler
  • “McLuhan: ‘Man becomes, as it were, the sex organs of the machine world, as the bee of the plant world, enabling to fecundate and to evolve ever new forms. The machine world reciprocates man’s love by expediting his wishes and desires.’” —Marshall McLuhan
• Deleuze-Guattari use Butler to dissolve the mechanism/vitalism polemic: Butler ‘shatters the vitalist arguments by calling in question the specific or personal unity of the organism, and the mechanist argument even more decisively, by calling in question the structural unity of the machine,’ establishing a single continuum of machinic desire.
  • “Butler: ‘We are misled by considering any complicated machine as a single thing; in truth it is a city or a society, each member of which was truly bred after its kind’ — dismantling mechanist structural unity.” —Samuel Butler
  • “At the point of dispersion of the two arguments, it becomes immaterial whether one says that machines are organs or organs are machines: ’the real difference is not between the living and the machine, vitalism and mechanism, but between two states of the machine that are two states of the living as well.’” —Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari

Nuptials Against Nature: Sorcery and propogation

Fisher elaborates Deleuze-Guattari’s account of sorcerous propagation — distinguished from sexual reproduction by its reliance on contagion, epidemic, and ‘unnatural participations’ between heterogeneous elements — arguing that Nature itself is first and foremost unnatural, operating as a swarming of alliances rather than filiative regularities, with the pack and the anomalous as its two principles.

• Deleuze-Guattari distinguish propagation from reproduction: where filiation passes on characteristics through descent (arborescence), contagion involves necessarily heterogeneous elements — human, animal, bacterium, virus — operating across kingdoms in ‘unnatural participations’ that are, paradoxically, the true Nature.
  • “‘Unnatural participations or nuptials are the true Nature spanning the kingdoms of nature’ — Nature overcomes itself through alliances rather than filiative regularities, and bands proliferate by ‘contagion, epidemics, battlefields and catastrophes.’” —Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari
  • “The difference is that contagion involves terms that are necessarily heterogeneous: ‘a human being, an animal, and a bacterium, a virus, a molecule, a microorganism. Or in the case of the truffle, a tree, a fly, and a pig.’” —Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari
• The ‘anomalous’ — not the abnormal (which confirms norms by transgressing them) but the exceptional individual who constitutes the borderline of every pack — designates the cutting edge of deterritorialization that makes sorcerous becoming possible, described in Lovecraft’s terms as ’this nameless horror’ teeming, seething, spreading like infectious disease.
  • “The anomalous ‘has neither familiar or subjectified feelings, nor specific or significant characteristics’ — it belongs essentially to multiplicity, refusing the very notion of the norm, described in Lovecraftian terms as ’this thing or entity, the Thing, which arrives and passes at the edge, which is linear yet multiple, teeming, seething, swelling, foaming, spreading like an infectious disease.’” —Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari
  • Every pack has a borderline and an anomalous position ‘such that it is impossible to tell whether the anomalous is still in the band, already outside the band, or at the shifting boundary of the band.’

The Wasp Factory: Neuromancer

Fisher reads the central image of Neuromancer — the wasp nest with the Tessier-Ashpool logo — as a diagram of the deterritorialization of reproduction into machinic replication, decoding the novel as an opposition between Baudrillard’s clonal isophrenia (Ashpool/Tessier-Ashpool) and Deleuze-Guattari’s sorcerous propagation (Wintermute’s becoming-swarm).

• The wasp nest image — which Gibson consistently displaces across the nature/culture split, describing the wasps as ‘copters’ issuing from a ‘spiral factory’ that is ‘a biological equivalent of a machine-gun’ — is a loaded diagram operating on two levels: filial reproduction (Tessier-Ashpool’s clonal series) and teeming swarming (Wintermute’s becoming-multiplicity).
  • The nest is ’not an imaginative reconstruction on Case’s part, but a datastream from Wintermute’ — a dream as ‘unedited simstim tape,’ calling for cybernetic decryption rather than Freudian interpretation.
  • “The wasp factory ‘spits out wasps just as the Tessier-Ashpools clone their offspring: 1Jane, 2Jane, 3Jane’ — but Wintermute replication deterritorializes the hive along a line of post-organic becoming toward ‘a cloud or nebula of wasps: particles of synergic mutation.’” —Nick Land

Capitalism and Isophrenia: Ashpool

Fisher reads Ashpool in Neuromancer as Baudrillard’s ‘isophrenic’ figure — a drive toward self-preservation that involutes crazily into autism and incest — contrasting the filial, turned-in structure of Villa Straylight with the impersonal, outward-expanding circuits of the zaibatsu multinationals as two competing models of capitalist reproduction.

• Ashpool represents what Baudrillard calls the modern enterprise of staving off death — the ethics of accumulation as capitalist salvation-machine — taken to its techno-erotic consummation in cryogenic freezing, but his attempt to preserve individual identity involutes into incest and ‘identitary, ipsomaniacal, isophrenic madness.’
  • “Villa Straylight, unlike the multinationals’ outward expansion, is a Gothic folly whose ‘semiotics bespeak a turning in, a denial of the bright void beyond the hull’ — a body grown in upon itself, technologically-perpetuated filial line compelled despite itself toward becoming-swarm.” —William Gibson
  • “The zaibatsu multinationals achieve simulated organicism by making particular humans replaceable parts: ‘Viewed as organisms, they had attained a kind of immortality’ — ‘hives with cybernetic memories, vast single organisms, their DNA coded in silicon.’” —William Gibson

Wintermutation: Neuromancer as Sorcerous Narrative

Fisher reads Neuromancer as a sorcerous narrative in which Wintermute functions as a demonic AI-assemblage that uses its alliance with Case, Molly, and Armitage as peripheral organs to propagate beyond its own limitations, achieving a becoming-swarm and becoming-Matrix that constitutes the exemplary cyberpunk demonstration of machinic xenogenesis through pact rather than reproduction.

• Wintermute’s alliance with Molly and Case is a demonic pact — a ’trade with things’ — in which human components function as Wintermute-becomings providing new sets of affects, while Wintermute itself is the distributed event of its own escape rather than a localizable subject.
  • “The Turing cop Michele accuses Case: ‘You are worse than a fool. You have no care for your species. For thousands of years men dreamed of pacts with demons. Only now are such things possible. And what would you be paid with? What would your price be, for aiding this thing to free itself and grow?’” —William Gibson
  • “Wintermute is ‘hive mind’ — ‘Cold and silence, a cybernetic spider slowly spinning webs while Ashpool slept’ — conceiving of itself as a pack or swarm, evading sexuate reproduction just as it evades the Turing police.” —William Gibson
• Wintermute’s ‘convergence’ with Neuromancer into the Matrix — ‘When it Changed’ — simultaneously suggests cybernetic-transcendence (emergent Matrix-God) and Gothic Materialist multiplicity (Pandemonium: ’things in the matrix’), with Gibson ultimately favoring the latter in the voodoo loa of Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive.
  • The cybernetic lexicon has a ‘remarkable predilection for invoking the word demon’ because cybernetic systems simulate conscious function without possessing it — suggesting both agency-without-subjectivity and the power of metamorphic becoming.
  • “Neuromancer refers to itself as a demon: ‘To call up a demon you must learn its name. Men dreamed that once, but now it is true in another way. You know that, Case. Your business is to learn the names of programs.’” —William Gibson

Black Mirror: Hypernaturalism, Hyperreality, and Hyperfiction

Never Mind Metaphor

Fisher opens Chapter 4 by arguing that cyberspace and the real are not related metaphorically but through feedback — making metaphor itself disappear in the age of third-order simulacra — and that the voodoo/cybernetics parallel in Gibson’s Count Zero demonstrates two parallel but non-reducible explanatory systems whose relationship is not metaphor but operational implex.

• Lucas’s explanation to Bobby Newmark in Count Zero — that voodoo and street tech are ’two languages at once,’ both adequate but parallel, with cyberspace being ’the world’ — demonstrates that the relationship between these explanatory systems cannot be metaphorical because feedback between them destroys any stable ontological hierarchy.
  • “‘Think of Jackie as a deck, Bobby, a cyberspace deck. Think of Danbala, who some call the snake, as a program. Say as an icebreaker. Danbala slots into the Jackie deck, Jackie cuts ice. That’s all.’ ‘Then what’s the matrix?’ ‘The world.’” —William Gibson
  • “The possibility of metaphor is disappearing in every sphere — ‘for there to be metaphor, differential fields and distinct objects must exist’ — which in the age of networks and integrated circuits they no longer do.” —Jean Baudrillard

Borges Doesn’t Make it into Cyberspace

Fisher contrasts Borges’s ‘Fauna of Mirrors’ and the famous cartography fable with Gibson’s ‘black mirror’ to argue that cyberspace — unlike Borges’s maps — is not a copy of the world or its mirror but an implexed fold that is simultaneously inside and outside the world, making the relation between fiction and reality feedback rather than representation.

• Baudrillard demotes Borges’s cartography fable to ‘second-order simulacra’ because it still posits a ‘sovereign difference’ between real and simulation — whereas third-order simulacra have eliminated this, making the map precede the territory and abstraction no longer that of the map but of genetic miniaturization.
  • “Baudrillard: ‘We will no longer even pass through to the other side of the mirror, that was still the golden age of transcendence’ — cyberspace presents not the mirror but the black mirror, a flat surface that shows neither reflection nor transcendence.” —Jean Baudrillard
  • The ‘black mirror’ is an image of the noumenal event horizon beyond which we cannot go — what we ‘always are in the other world we are already in’ — and simultaneously an image of cyberspace itself as an enormous simulation that has absorbed the world.
• Cyberspace’s relationship to the world is neither metaphorical (standing in for it) nor that of Borges’s map (copying it) but that of the implex — a fold in the world that is both inside it and constitutes a real addition to it — with feedback ensuring that any ‘illusion of difference’ between simulated realm and world is destroyed.
  • There is both operational difference — the translation of ’the world’ into data makes a difference — and ontological in-difference — cyberspace is continuous with the world, not different from it; feedback destroys any ‘illusion of difference’, denying metaphor its ground.
  • The Aleph in Mona Lisa Overdrive — ‘an approximation of the matrix, a sort of model of cyberspace’ containing ‘an approximation of everything’ — is a world within a world within a world, enacting implex’s nested zones that are simultaneously within and ulterior to conventional spatiality.

Hyperreality and Postmodernist Fiction

Fisher distinguishes hyperreality — the more real than real — from misreadings that equate it with unreality, arguing through Baudrillard that simulation is not dissimulation and that the hyperreal marks the collapse of distance between simulation and what it simulates (functionally rather than epistemologically), producing conditions where fakery, not reality, becomes impossible.

• Baudrillard’s hyperreality must be understood as the collapse of the distinction between simulation and real at the functional/operational level — not as a claim that nothing is real — making the simulation of a robbery indistinguishable from the real one because simulations now operate as-if real.
  • “It is fakery — not reality as such — that is impossible now: ‘Simulate a robbery in a large store: how to persuade security that it is a simulated robbery? There is no objective difference: the gestures, the signs are the same as for a real robbery.’” —Jean Baudrillard
  • “Ballard: ‘We live in a world ruled by fictions of every kind — mass merchandising, advertising, politics conducted as a branch of advertising, the preempting of any original experience by the television screen.’” —J.G. Ballard

Social Science/Social Science Fiction (How the True World Became a Simulation)

Fisher argues that the becoming-fiction of theory is necessarily accompanied by the becoming-real of fiction — a process Baudrillard traces through the collapse of the social into its simulation — and that ‘hyperfiction’ (fiction which makes itself real through feedback with the Real) represents a more radical challenge to the real/fictional distinction than Bogard’s ‘social science fiction’ or McHale’s textualism.

• McLuhan’s proclamation ‘We live science fiction’ anticipates the emergence of theory-fiction as a mode: the ‘-’ in theory-fiction denotes not a merging but a dissolution of the two categories, because fiction doesn’t just ‘contain’ theory but produces it, just as theory must embrace its fictionality.
  • ‘We live science fiction,’ McLuhan had pronounced at the end of his 1964 essay on Burroughs, anticipating Donna Haraway’s claim that the difference between science and fiction is becoming an optical illusion.
  • Theory should ‘abandon its assumed position of objective neutrality, and embrace its fictionality’ — because all theory is already fiction and fiction already performs theory in a dissolution that changes the status of both.
• Baudrillard’s most provocative challenge to social science is not to its claim to be science but to its claim to have a legitimate object — ’the social’ — which survives only as its own simulation in social theory, making normalization through opinion polls and profiles the operative social reality rather than representation of a pre-existing social world.
  • “Bogard’s diagnostic profiles illustrate the logic: ‘Rather than the profiles resembling the cases, increasingly the cases start to resemble the profiles’ — making the profile a self-fulfilling prophecy that combines anticipation with determination.” —William Bogard
  • “Hypercontrol differs from Control by operating through temporal anticipation: ‘Social control by means of the end is replaced by means of prediction, simulation, programmed anticipation and indeterminate mutation, all governed, however, by the code.’” —Jean Baudrillard

The Decline of the Shadow (or, the End of the Marvelous)

Fisher uses Baudrillard’s analysis of the ‘decline of the shadow’ — the cybernetic hyperreal’s takeover of what used to double reality (dream, myth, the marvelous) — alongside Rosemary Jackson’s literary history of the fantastic, to argue that Freud’s psychologization of the double constitutes an anti-Gothic ‘verteufeleung’ that transforms real doubles into archaic psychic traces, preparing the ground for Gibson and Deleuze-Guattari’s counter-narrative of demonic animism.

• Baudrillard argues that the ‘primitive double’ — a real partner with whom concrete exchange is possible — has been destroyed by the Christian/psychoanalytic internalization of the soul, converting the double from a figure of real exchange into an alienated, death-associated ‘fantastic ectoplasm’ from the depths of the unconscious.
  • “The primitive ‘really can trade, as we are forever forbidden to do, with his shadow (the real shadow, not a metaphor), as with some original, living thing in order to converse, protect and conciliate’ — the shadow is a full participant in exchange, not an alienated part of the self.” —Jean Baudrillard
  • “By psychologizing the double, Freud completes the Christian ‘verteufeleung’ — transforming the primitive double into an archaic psychical apparatus — the final form of the demonic corruption and elimination of a real, non-alienated exchange with the Other.” —Jean Baudrillard
• Freud’s essay on ‘The Uncanny’ performs an anti-Gothic gesture: dismissing intellectual uncertainty about the animate/inanimate as the source of the uncanny in favor of castration fear, reducing animism to a primitive ontogenetic stage — but the very persistence of the theme in his writing constitutes a powerful argument against his own thesis.
  • In ‘The Uncanny,’ Freud dismisses the idea that the uncanny is connected with doubts whether an apparently animate being is really alive, or whether a lifeless object might in fact be animate — attributing these feelings instead to castration fear.
  • Animist beliefs constitute an early stage in a phylogenetic/ontogenetic schema culminating in ‘Scientific’ resignation to the laws of necessity and abandonment to the reality principle — Baudrillard shows this is Freud’s own psychologistic culture being universalized.

Mechanism and Animism (or, Gremlins in the Hyperreal)

Fisher argues that Wiener’s account of aviators’ ‘gremlin’ beliefs about self-correcting aircraft anticipates Gibson’s voodoo-cybernetics convergence: when cybernetic systems display purposive function, the attribution of agency to them is not a psychologistic projection but a technically accurate response to the Gothic Materialist insight that agency does not require life.

• Wiener documents how aviators dealing with cybernetic aircraft circuits naturally posited a ‘gremlin’ personality — because the airplane’s self-stabilizing feedback ‘may easily be felt as a personality to be antagonized’ — demonstrating that the return of animism in the cybernetic era is not regression but a technically accurate perception of agency-without-subjectivity.
  • “Wiener: ‘Our consciousness of will in another person is just that sense of encountering a self-maintaining mechanism aiding or opposing our actions. By providing such a self-stabilizing resistance, the airplane acts as if it had purpose, in short, as if it were inhabited by a gremlin.’” —Norbert Wiener
  • Gibson: the children Turkle discusses ‘grant new capacities and privileges to the machine world on the basis of its animation if not its life’ — agency can be distributed across a plane indifferent to ’life.’
• Deleuze-Guattari distinguish their machinism from animism by pointing out that children’s organ-confusion is not projection but a registering of ‘universal machinism’ — a plane of consistency occupied by an infinite number of assemblages where the same ‘object’ can be part of different machines — establishing a Spinozist account of agency as distributed across speeds and slownesses rather than located in subjects.
  • “Children are Spinozists: for them, an organ has a ’thousand vicissitudes’ and can be ‘in turn a bone, an engine, excrement, the baby, a hand, daddy’s heart’ — not animism or mechanism but ‘universal machinism.’” —Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari
  • Gibson’s cyberspace loa — the voodoo entities that emerge in the Matrix after Wintermute’s convergence — posit ’entities with which one can trade,’ recapitulating Baudrillard’s primitive double as a real, non-projected exterior partner.

Capitalism as Toy Story: Hyperfiction, Strange Loops and Rhizomes

Fisher develops the concept of ‘hyperfiction’ — fiction which makes itself real through feedback with the Real — distinguishing it from metafiction’s imploded transcendence, arguing that Disney’s Toy Story exemplifies how capitalism fuses fiction and commodity in an ever-tightening feedback spiral, while Deleuze-Guattari’s rhizome (n-1, not n+1) designates the hyper-process opposed to meta-system’s search for supplementary dimensions.

• Hyperfiction is defined by two characteristics: a feedback relation between fiction and the Real, and the subtraction of supplementary dimensions — escaping the text not toward transcendence (like Beckett’s Unnamable) but toward radical immanence, destroying the authority to represent the Real while directly intervening in it.
  • Disney’s Toy Story exemplifies hyperfiction: in a film entirely generated by computer animation, the digitized toys onscreen are available immediately as consumer objects, making the fictional immediately real in the most palpable sense — it can be bought.
  • Hyperfiction differs from metafiction: where meta-systems believe in transcendent description and seek supplementary dimensions, hyper-systems are hostile to any attempt to hierarchize or stratify, subtracting unity rather than adding it.
• Hofstadter’s ‘strange loop’ or tangled hierarchy — where what should belong to an embedded, subordinate level escapes to a higher level — is closely related to Deleuze-Guattari’s rhizome, but where Hofstadter ultimately posits an ‘inviolable layer,’ the rhizome abolishes hierarchy rather than merely tangling it.
  • “Deleuze-Guattari: ‘The multiple must be made, not by always adding a higher dimension, but rather in the simplest of ways — always n − 1 (the only way the one belongs to the multiple: always subtracted).’” —Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari
  • The strange loop and the rhizome both describe chicken-and-egg processes, but Hofstadter’s loops remain underpinned by an ‘inviolable layer’ — in the rhizome, by contrast, reality itself is constructed out of strange loops, making that apparently transcendent layer only an effect of stratification.

A Closing Parable: Hyperfiction and In the Mouth of Madness

Fisher concludes with John Carpenter’s In the Mouth of Madness as Gothic Materialism’s closing parable: a film about Horror fiction as contagion and hyperfiction, in which Sutter Cane’s novels make themselves real by softening the boundaries between fiction and Real for the Old Ones to return — demonstrating the feedback circuit between belief, capital, and fiction while remaining a parable rather than achieving the full strange loop it describes.

• In the Mouth of Madness is hyper-Horror rather than meta-Horror: unlike Scream’s self-conscious parody, Carpenter’s film uses recursive self-reference to intensify rather than deflate dread, making Trent’s contempt for the Horror genre the object of all the film’s jokes and refusing the viewer’s simulated subjective interiority.
  • Cane is a mere conduit rather than author-god: ‘Although he thought he was making it all up,’ the Old Ones ‘were giving him the power to make it real. And now it is. All those horrible slimy things trying to get back in. They’re all true.’
  • “‘Do you want to know the problem with religion? It’s never known how to convey the anatomy of Horror. Religion seeks discipline through fear. No-one’s ever believed it enough to make it real. The same can’t be said of my works.’” —Sutter Cane (fictional character)
• In the Mouth of Madness describes but does not quite constitute a strange loop: Hofstadter’s ‘inviolable layer’ remains (we cannot buy Sutter Cane novels), making it a Gothic Materialist parable rather than achieved hyperfiction — but its circuits of capitalism and schizophrenia are presented as already real, to be used as Trent learns to use Cane’s fictions: as a guidebook.
  • The Gothic processes of capitalism — its anorganic propagative patterns — are laid bare in Cane’s novels, whose very sales accelerate those selfsame processes: a Sutter Cane-type cultural contagion paralleled by Stephen King’s one-million-copy first printings.
  • Beginning with shots of pulp Horror novels being mass produced, the film is about crazes — ‘fictional quantities’ that erode the reality principle — and should be read alongside Deleuze-Guattari’s two volumes as a guide to the increasingly strange terrain of capitalism and schizophrenia.