“(In)Visible Generations”: Anarchist Technologies And
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(IN)VISIBLE GENERATIONS: ANARCHIST TECHNOLOGIES AND EMBODIED RESISTANCE by Riley McDonald Submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts at Dalhousie University Halifax, Nova Scotia August 2012 © Copyright by Riley McDonald, 2012 DALHOUSIE UNIVERSITY DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH The undersigned hereby certify that they have read and recommend to the Faculty of Graduate Studies for acceptance a thesis entitled “(IN)VISIBLE GENERATIONS: ANARCHIST TECHNOLOGIES AND EMBODIED RESISTANCE” by Riley McDonald in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts. Dated: August 21, 2012 Supervisor: _________________________________ Readers: _________________________________ _________________________________ ii DALHOUSIE UNIVERSITY DATE: August 21, 2012 AUTHOR: Riley McDonald TITLE: (IN)VISIBLE GENERATIONS: ANARCHIST TECHNOLOGIES AND EMBODIED RESISTANCE DEPARTMENT OR SCHOOL: Department of English DEGREE: M.A. CONVOCATION: October YEAR: 2012 Permission is herewith granted to Dalhousie University to circulate and to have copied for non-commercial purposes, at its discretion, the above title upon the request of individuals or institutions. I understand that my thesis will be electronically available to the public. The author reserves other publication rights, and neither the thesis nor extensive extracts from it may be printed or otherwise reproduced without the author’s written permission. The author attests that permission has been obtained for the use of any copyrighted material appearing in the thesis (other than the brief excerpts requiring only proper acknowledgement in scholarly writing), and that all such use is clearly acknowledged. _______________________________ Signature of Author iii “Never believe that a smooth surface will suffice to save us.” Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari iv Table of Contents Abstract.............................................................................................................................. vi Acknowledgements........................................................................................................... vii Chapter One: Introduction.................................................................................................. 1 Chapter Two: “These Are Conditions of Total Emergency”: Extending Bodies, Liberating Realities in the Nova Trilogy........................................................................... 14 2.1 The Old Symbiosis Con: Addicted to Nova Content................................ 24 2.2 “Cut the Word and Sense Bleeds”............................................................ 29 2.3 Infinite Tickets, Infinite Realities............................................................. 35 2.4 Conclusion................................................................................................ 39 Chapter Three: “A System of Heresies”: Embodied Networks in Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland............................................................................................................................ 41 3.1 An Image Onscreen Talking: 24fps and the Dangers of Visibility........... 52 3.2 “Transcendence Through Saturation”: Jamming the Tech-Death Impulse............................................................ 59 3.3 Conclusion: Vineland the Good................................................................ 71 Chapter Four: “There Is No Enemy”: The Anarchic Circuitry of Grant Morrison’s The Invisibles........................................................................................................................... 74 4.1 “I/YOU”: Power and Violence as Anxious Expression............................ 86 4.2 “The Part of Heaven We Can Touch” ....................................................... 95 4.3 Conclusion: As Above, So Below.......................................................... 106 Chapter Five: Conclusion............................................................................................... 109 Bibliography................................................................................................................... 113 v Abstract This project investigates the employment of new media technologies toward anarchistic revolutionary purposes in three postmodern texts: Williams S. Burroughs’s Nova Trilogy, Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland, and Grant Morrison’s The Invisibles. Spanning over three decades, these texts examine the continuous need for anarchist organizations to develop new and generative practices of resistant tactics against authoritarian hegemonic forces in order to remain relevant. This thesis explores how media technologies are used by these anarchist groups in order to break both the body and technology out of instrumentalizing purposes by apparatuses of control. In developing new embodiments that exist beyond the categorizations of power and authority, these authors demonstrate ways in which anarchist organizations are able to subvert the increasingly networked machinations of control and create potential embodied sites of resistance outside the realm of domination. vi Acknowledgements First and foremost, I would like to thank my supervisor, Dr. Anthony Enns, whose enthusiasm for this thesis was evident from the very beginning of the year, and who always availed his formidable insight to help guide me throughout. Dr. Enns’s role from this project’s inception to its finality was felt throughout, and it is due to his continued diligence and mentorship that this thesis is anything other than a collection of half- formed ideas. I would also like to thank Dr. Todd McCallum for his tireless energy for this project, and his enviably detailed knowledge of The Invisibles. As well, I would like to thank Dr. McCallum for his plethora of secondary reading materials that he freely lent me: a mountain of texts stacked atop my bookshelf that always threatened to topple over but never did. I cannot think of a more apt metaphor for this thesis. Finally, I would like to thank Dr. Dorota Glowacka for her attentive reading, incredibly helpful and encouraging comments, and for getting me to insert the absolutely excellent pun on page 69 that otherwise would have escaped my notice. Finally, I would like to thank my parents and friends for their equally tireless and endlessly inventive tactics of distraction whenever my anxiety threatened to overwhelm me. Their continued support, friendship, and empathy are what got me through the hardest parts, and this thesis is dedicated to them. Last, but certainly not least, I want to thank Mary-Beth MacIsaac and Carole Poirier of the English department, who were always able to answer my unceasing questions and calm my raging anxieties with both incredible promptness and warmth. It is an unavoidable truth that I would not have completed this project without them, for which I cannot thank them enough. vii Chapter One Introduction The interrelationship between embodiment, technology, and political action is a fascinating and complicated one, and yet, all too often now, these three concepts are reduced to their simplest terms. Fredric Jameson argues that technology may well serve as an adequate shorthand to designate that enormous properly human and anti-natural power of dead human labor stored up in our machinery – an alienated power, what Sartre calls the counterfinality of the practico-inert, which turns back on and against us in unrecognizable forms and seems to constitute the massive dystopian horizon of our collective as well as our individual praxis. (35) Among Jameson’s major influences is Herbert Marcuse, who, in his landmark sociopolitical work One-Dimensional Man (1964), argues that technologies in late- capitalist societies merely serve to “superimpose upon the individual … the needs which perpetuate toil, aggressiveness, misery, and injustice” (5). And yet, Marcuse opens his book with the remark that “essentially, the power of the machine is only the stored-up and projected power of man. … it becomes the potential basis of a new freedom for man” (3). Media are thus considered both implements of authoritarian control and a potential means of resisting that control, and my thesis initially sought to discover the “innate” state of such technologies. Yet I soon realized that there can be no definitive answer, because it is the wrong question to ask. The focus, then, is not whether media are inherently authoritarian or anti-authoritarian, but rather why society often tends to view technologies in this fashion. I argue that the answer to this question is ultimately one of 1 embodiment: hegemonic forces seek to inscribe upon the human body what is and what is not human — in essence, defining and limiting the body and thus the full extent of human potential. The goal of anti-authoritarian politics, then, is to collapse this boundary, incorporating media technologies into new and generative subjectivities. If we stop envisioning media as a tool of ideology, but rather as an essential part of the human body, then revolutionary acts are not about gaining control of a weapon to use against hegemony, but reconstituting the body. By garnering a new understanding of the relationship between technology and embodiment, it is possible to rescue them both from ideological instrumentality, creating an ever-evolving and shifting network of embodiments not contingent on concrete identity formation. In examining the interplay of technology and embodiment, I turn to literary depictions of anarchism. Not only is anarchism an exemplar of anti-hegemonic