Nebula4.3, September 2007
Rrose Sélavy, Barbarella, Madonna: Cybersublimity after the
Orgasmotron.
By Michael Angelo Tata
We do not yet possess the perceptual equipment to match this new
hyperspace, as I will call it, in part because our perceptual habits
were formed in that older kind of space I have called the space of
high modernism. The newer architecture therefore—like many of
the other cultural products I have evoked in the preceding
remarks—stands as something like an imperative to grow new
organs, to expand our sensorium and our body to some new, yet
unimaginable, perhaps ultimately impossible, dimensions (Fredric
Jameson, Postmodernism, 38-39).
So in the late 50s I started an affair with my television which has
continued to the present, when I play around in my bedroom with
as many as four at a time. But I didn’t get married until 1964
when I got my first tape recorder. My wife. My tape recorder and
I have been married for ten years now. When I say “we,” I mean
my tape recorder and me. A lot of people don’t understand that
(Andy Warhol, “Love (Puberty),”THE Philosophy of Andy
Warhol, 26).
Some Sums
It is no accident that this essay takes as its point of departure a mosaic comprised of
Fredric Jameson lost in the hyperspace of Los Angeles’ Westin Bonaventure Hotel in his
seminal glance at the cultures of late capitalism, Postmodernism, and Andy Warhol wedded to a
piece of equipment for capturing, storing and replaying the voices of others in his THE
Philosophy of Andy Warhol. Nor is it an accident that Jameson, the unacclimated, unfortunate
Modern waiting for his body to sprout a new perceptual apparatus which will allow him to
process the newly mutated spatialities surrounding and subsuming his subjectivity, and Warhol,
the closest thing to a cyborg the artworld has ever produced, will be dumped in turn.1 Swerving
1
Although I am advancing an Orgasmotronical and cyborgian reading of Duchamp’s Le Grand Verre (1915-1923)
and the Étant données (1966), as well as cubist works like Nu Descendant un Escalier, No. 2 (1912), La Mariée
(1912) and more representational works like Broyeuse du Chocolat, No. 2 (1914), I do not identify Duchamp himself
as a cyborg. Though automated in a way which prefigured and made possible Warhol, Duchamp himself did not
become a man-machine as fully as Warhol did. Gazing toward the servo-mechanistic and the industrial, Duchamp
remained apart from technology as its consumer and observer. Obsessed with machines and, in general, with how
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from Jameson and Warhol, I offer a second mosaic, this one comprised of the now Retro
Madonna of “Ray of Light” and two newcomers, cyborgs themselves, women tuned in, turned
on and short-circuited by technodesire: the anonymous “dumped dummy,” as Jean-François
Lyotard in Les Transformateurs Duchamp refers to her, of Duchamp’s posthumous assemblage
Étant données: 1 la chute d’eau, 2 le gaz d’eclairage (1966), and the campy space kitten
Barbarella from Roger Vadim’s film Barbarella, Queen of the Galaxy (1968).
Other cyborgs, art-machines or recyclatrons could have been selected to illustrate the
connection between trash and transport—for example, Jeff Koons, with his factory-made,
Coney Island souvenir-stand aesthetic horrors such as Pink Panther, Popples or Michael
Jackson and Bubbles (all 1988), French body-mod performance artist Orlan, with her
grotesquely reconstructed body and accompanying videodocumentation of her many surgeries,
or the inimitable transsexual performer Amanda Lepore.2 However, I have chosen my three
stars, (1) Duchamp’s Bride, (2) Jane Fonda’s cosmonaut and (3) the “new” (yet of course now
“old”) cabbala-correct, ethereal, British Madonna, for the relation they bear to what I will, after
Barbarella, term the Orgasmotron, or perpetual pleasuring machine, a device which exists only
within the cinematic, yet which crystallizes the philosophical complexities of postmodern
sublimity, persisting as an operative metaphor at the heart of cyberculture.3
As the introductory Warhol quote demonstrates, the sexual pleasure of machines or
machine/human interfaces is nothing new. Occurring with gizmos as diverse as television sets
(Nam June Paik’s installations, for example TV Garden, 1982, or Pyramid II, 1997), telephones
(Avital Ronell’s The Telephone Book: Technology, Schizophrenia, Electric Speech), tape
recorders (Warhol’s Philosophy, a, or Andy Warhol’s Party Book) and computers (Donna
Haraway’s and Sue-Ellen Case’s theories of the wired body), this pleasure colonizes physically
embodied human-human relationships, replacing them with something akin to the pleasure of
things work, Duchamp never transformed into a mechanism proper—although he did set the stage for such a change
to occur (indeed, he made the obviation of the human a mere formality).
2
Regarding Orlan, the implantation of the Mona Lisa’s brow into her forehead (Omniprésence, 1993) allows her to
complete (temporarily) the Gioconda series [Da Vinci Duchamp Warhol Orlan]. See Bernard Blistene’s
monograph Orlan (Paris: Flammarion, 2004), as well as the film Synthetic Pleasures (Gund, 1996).
3
The cyberpunk documentary Synthetic Pleasures also uses Barbarella’s Orgasmotron as a model for cyberpleasure.
In this context, the Orgasmotron both instigates and amplifies whatever sexual pleasure it is that results from the
collapse of the body/technology interface. Examining phenomena as disparate as the total environment, the
transsexual body and the party drug MDMA, Synthetic Pleasures never loses sight of the fact that the mechanized
can saturate, rend and reorganize the human body.
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too much information, sensory overload, or cybernetic immersion in the infinite. This pleasure
also resonates at the same frequency as Longinus’ hypsos, Nicolas Boileau’s ravishment,
Edmund Burke’s terror at the threat of annihilation, Immanuel Kant’s overheated imagination,
and Friedrich Nietzsche’s Dionysian frenzies, all formulas for being-overwhelmed: they
generate the same Hertz reading, although in a novel atmosphere and perhaps with different
coefficients. In company with these purveyors of sublimity, Barbarella, Madonna and
Duchamp’s dummy, who, for my own perverse aesthetic reasons, I will refer to as his drag
persona Rrose Sélavy, all respond to the sexual pleasures of technoannihilation—intensities to
which they willingly surrender, but which do not necessarily contain or control them (they
become the machine’s ghost made external, to pervert the expression preferred by the theory of
mind).4
The difference between the two summations represented by those experiencing
sublimity, or
[Sélavy, Barbarella, Madonna], and those expostulating upon what people
experience when they experience sublimity, or
[Longinus...Nietzsche], hinges upon the
nature of the exact and specific pleasure experienced in the face of an indifferent infinite which
changes according to alterations within physical, material reality.5 For obvious historical
reasons, the Orgasmotron cannot arrive as a site of pleasure until a certain technology is in
place, making it improbable that Kant could have ever spoken as to its contours—even though,
as Ronell points out in her Crack Wars: Literature Addiction Mania, the 18th and 19th centuries
viewed the novel as an illicit, orgasm-producing black box (an aphrodisiac simulating a genre),
the implication being that the idea of a pleasure-generating aesthetic object did exist prior to its
mechanization.
Joseph Tabbi’s formulation of technopleasure in Postmodern Sublime: Technology and
American Writing from Mailer to Cyberpunk posits the self’s immersion in potentially
infinitized webs of information as generative of a sublimity unique to the postmodern world;
sexualizing his version of this dissolution is an objective of this essay. Embodied in and
4
While there is no indication in Duchamp’s writings that either the bride of La Mariée or the corpse of the Étant
Données are Rrose, I treat her as such in order to further volatilize Duchamp’s alterego. Construing bride and body
as a veritable [Duchamp]’ or “Duchamp Prime,” I insert the artist into his masterpieces in order to complicate their
gender configurations.
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enacted by works of literature by novelists Norman Mailer, Thomas Pyncheon, James McElroy
and Don DeLillo, as well as by cyberpunk renegades like Kathy Acker and Donna Haraway,
Tabbi’s postmodern sublime corresponds to the feeling of being swamped or overwhelmed by
the vast wash of information characterizing Jean-François Lyotard’s “Postmodern Condition.”
As “metaphor and more than metaphor,” the machine at once represents and transcends the
postmodern non-individual, whose radical inability to represent “the whole of American
technological culture” results in “a complex pleasure derived from the pain of representational
insufficiency” (1).
Tabbi’s pleasure is the negative pleasure discussed by Kant in his Critique of Judgment
and further elaborated on by Lyotard in his Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime and The
Inhuman: Reflections on Time (specifically, the chapters “The Sublime and the Avant-Garde”
and “After the Sublime, The State of Aesthetics”), the difference being that in Tabbi, there is no
ensuing positive pleasure following the infinite’s assault on the individual, no triumph of the
imagination, which, in Kant and in Lyotard, experiences the highest raptures of its freedom as
the paradoxical result of its unfreedom. Detached from human interest, the infinite does not
present itself, while simultaneously thwarting and circumventing every attempt at representing
it.6 For Tabbi, as well as for Jameson, the postmodern variety of sublimity consists in the
failure of the postmodern, dispersed subject to signify, to transform the world of which it is a
part into meaningful discourse. The resulting heteroglossia (Tabbi) or schizophrenia (Lacan via
Jameson) of the diasporic subject stammering in the face of the untotalizable, the suprasensible,
the swamping, is exactly what gets performed by the writers Tabbi enumerates: they represent
the unrepresentability of postmodern hyperspace and its many imbricated yet never fully
articulable networks.7
5
I use the Greek symbol Epsilon, or , to denote summation. Hence [Sélavy, Barbarella, Madonna] refers to the
fictitious series whose sum can be tabulated by “adding” bracketed quantities “Sélavy,” “Barbarella” and
“Madonna.” My use of Epsilon, as my use of other mathemes, is both literal and metaphorical.
6
In The Inhuman: Reflections on Time (Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1991), Lyotard describes the
indifference of matter: “Matter does not question the mind, it has no need of it, it exists, or rather insists, it sists
‘before’ questioning and answer, ‘outside’ them. It is presence as unpresentable to the mind, always withdrawn from
its grasp. It does not offer itself to dialogue and dialectic” (142). In other words, the world does not present itself—it
does not care. Radically outside all human interest in re-presenting it, it persists over time without the wish to be
known or knowable. Thus all knowledge is excessive.
7 In Postmodernism (Durham, Duke University Press, 1993), Jameson explains what he means by a non-clinical
schizophrenia: “When that relationship breaks down, when the links of the signifying chain snap, then we have
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Diverging from Tabbi’s postmodern or technological sublime, I wish to posit a specific
variety of postmodern/technological sublimity, which I term the cybersublime. As I have
already elucidated, one specific characteristic of the cybersublime is its inherent
Orgasmotronicity: Sélavy, Barbarella and Madonna, in their own respective ways, testify to this
fact, as I will demonstrate.8 For me, there undoubtedly exists the category of the postmodern
sublime, but this category is not limited to the epistemological pleasures of unavoidable misrepresentation, or of the self’s fatally flawed responses to the Big Other’s question, Che Vuoi?;
rather, this category is inclusive of a vast number of ecstatic postmodern experiences hinging
upon dissolution, drifting and being-lost.9 Revising Tabbi, my postmodern sublime takes the
notion of the gross and scandalous proximity of the high to the low within contemporary
consumer culture—what Tabbi, quoting Thomas Weiskel’s The Romantic Sublime: Studies in
the Structure and Psychology of Transcendence, refers to as the “dangerous proximity” of the
high and the low within Romanticism—and turns it into the sublimity of kitsch, a sublime
derived from the great voraciousness of trash (15). The self’s immersion in a culture of trash
elevated to the status of the masterpiece, its subsumption within a neverending stream of junk,
is what Warhol theorizes with his introduction of the notion that an infinity of Marilyns,
automobile wrecks or Brillo boxes could constitute some uninterrupted field of aesthetic
immersion. Hence for me any postmodern sublimity must also include a notion of the
transportability of kitsch. In addition, it must also include a notion of the aesthetically
immersible; that is, not mere technological immersion, or the self’s incorporation by a
technology which always exceeds it and which threatens it with annihilation, but the absorption
schizophrenia in the form of a rubble of distinct and unrelated signifiers. The connection between this kind of
linguistic malfunction and the psyche of the schizophrenic may then be grasped by way of a twofold proposition:
first, that personal identity is itself the effect of a certain temporal unification of past and future with one’s present;
and, second, that such active temporal unification is itself a function of language, or better still the sentence, as it
moves along its hermeneutic circle through time” (26-27).
8
See my “Orgasmotronicity of the Servo-mechanistic” in the exhibition catalogue Greater New York (MOMA/PS1,
2000) for an additional look at the connections between being plugged in and sexed up.
9 The glissement of the self as it moves metonymically from one méconnaisance to another in response to the
hallucinated demand of the Big Other is explicated by Zizek in The Sublime Object of Ideology (New York: Norton,
1989). Zizek’s interpretation of Lacan’s Graph of Desire makes it clear that, for Lacan, the self is a signifying chain
gone horribly awry in its attempt to decipher the desire of the non-existent yet always-already-posited Big Other (the
Big Other’s voice is no more than an act of ventriloquism).
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of the self by various aesthetic networks, such as those provided by cyberpunk and technorave,
or by the gymnasiums, steroids and all-night parties of “the circuit.”10
For me, the technological sublime begins to be recognized by poets like Hart Crane and
artists like the Constructivists, Dadaists and Futurists. It takes as its operative premise the idea
that the machine has replaced the body, going on to transfer the Romantic Sublime onto the
products and networks of technology (the Alps of William Wordsworth’s Prelude give way to
the Brooklyn Bridge of Hart Crane’s The Bridge). While the cybersublime is a moment within
the technological sublime, it is in no way exhausted by it. Instead, the sublimities of late
capitalism’s vast informational networks, matrices and cybernetic crystallizations themselves
constitute a mutation within the technological, a sort of by-product or supplément which has
come to engulf industry, or the bridges, smokestacks, skyscrapers and dehumanized urban
geographies of classical capitalism.
The excesses of information and the dissolution of the self into the informational
networks of cyberculture—indeed, as Haraway intimates, the postmodern self, the self at the
end of the Second Christian Millennium, is a cyborg by default—produce a version of sublimity
which in popular culture is frequently described and represented in sexual terms. This
sexualization is not a great surprise, considering that even for Nicolas Boileau, who in his 1693
translation of Longinus’ On the Sublime identified the sublime as rape, there is no sublimity
without violation. The cultural products with which this essay is concerned—the Étant
données, Barbarella and “Ray of Light”—each sexualize the cybersublime in kind. Thus
Duchamp’s discarded mannequin, exhausted by the pleasure engine of the Étant données’
prequel La Mariée mise a nue par ces Celibataires, même, lies wasted with only the natural
resources of gas and water to accompany her corporeal decomposition (she decays in the
shadow of an Industrial Revolution and an industry which no longer need her). Barbarella,
having out-orgasmed the Orgasmotron, having “turned its wires to faggots,” awaits further
sexual torture at the hands of evil scientist and positronic-ray-wielding Duran Duran. Madonna,
10 See Elmer DeWitt’s article, “Cyberpunk,” in Maasik and Solomon eds. Signs of Life in the USA (Boston:
Bedford, 1997). See also the film Synthetic Pleasures referred to in n1. Finally, Dirk Shafer’s film Circuit (2001)
provides a wonderful representation of the queer party circuit. As untotalizable network of parties, substances and
sexual encounters, the circuit stands by the side of the rave as cultural form embodying the postmodern experience of
epistemic and emotive loss.
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having incandesced into whatever atomic particle it would be that could travel in excess of the
speed of light, “gets herself a universe,” leaving her alienated consciousness behind, her body
along with it, and transcending that body-consciousness system by morphing into a liquidly
blissful ray of pure energy, uncontaminated alpha rhythm.11 These women are all the pleasure
victims of technology, the ravished and evacuated corpses who litter the information
superfreeway since F.T. Marinetti first theorized the sexiness of the airplane or Fernando
Pessoa, the malleability and morphability of personality.12 Donna Haraway’s formulation of a
manifesto for cyborgs in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature and
subsequent search for imploded, intergeneric life forms in
Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.FemaleMan©_ Meets_OncoMouse™ is a search for
those ontological nexuses of the natural with the cybernetic, for those moments when the human
subject is diasporized, overwhelmed, absorbed, overheated. Similarly, Sue-Ellen Case’s search
for the body in The Domain Matrix: Performing Lesbian at the End of Print Culture, her Osirian
quest among the many networks, channels, and loops of communication for embodiment, is a
search for Rrose Sélavy, Barbarella, and Madonna. Conquested by endorphins, each reduces
her body to the minimum weight of a photon. Trashed, and trashing, each recycles energy in
turn, demonstrating three of the many ways that the human epidermis can respond to
hyperstimulation.
Impossible Integrations
If Sélavy, Barbarella or Madonna were to pursue calculus, if they were to quantify their
experiences as short-circuited cybersluts, how would they represent those experiences in the
11 Such is my interpretation of Madonna’s current New-Age-meets-Jewish-Mysticism-in-the-House-of-Gaultier look
and attitude. Transcending her previous images, the majority of which are intensely corporeal and lusty, the Spiritual
Girl leaves her shopping bags behind to enter a world of gleaming surfaces and beaming rays. In Cyborgs, Simians
and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991), Donna Haraway describes the
dematerialization effected by the machines of post-industry: “Our best machines are made of sunshine; they are all
light and clean because they are nothing but signals, electromagnetic waves, a section of a spectrum, and these
machines are eminently portable, mobile—a matte of immense human pain in Detroit and Singapore” (“A Cyborg
Manifesto,” 153).
12
Since I am trucking in popular images in this essay, I offer the cover of 80s electronic group Berlin’s EP Pleasure
Victim (1982) as yet another representation of screens, women and orgasm. Victimized by pleasure, lead singer Terri
Nunn performs ecstasy on a TV monitor for an arrested male pervert looking to get off on her getting off. The film
Videodrome (Cronenberg, 1983) presents a similar paradigm of techno-sexual exhaustion.
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impersonal symbolization of mathematics? In Part Two: Semantics of Modest Witness,
Haraway presents a cheeky mathematical formulation encapsulating their respective situations:
NATURE™ CULTURE™ dN dC dt = NEW WORLD ORDER, INC.
0
0
1945
Urging that the modest witness, or unbiased observer, of millennial scientific
advances/mutations performs a triple integration on a trademarked nature, culture and time (not
trademarked), Haraway traces the derivative (NATURE™ CULTURE™ dN dC dt) back to the
master-function NEW WORLD ORDER, Inc.; in other words, she solves the problem of what
mathematical function a trademarked nature and culture correspond to by offering the solution
that they are traceable to the equation f(x) = NWO. Ultimately, the trademarking of nature and
culture represented by transgenic creatures like DuPont’s emblematic OncoMouse™ are the
result of a new world order in which nature and culture, the raw and the cooked, the given and
the constructed, implode. Throughout Modest_Witness, Haraway is obsessed with what she
terms transuranic elements and transgenic species. Using the periodic chart developed by
chemist Dmitri Mendeleyev in 1869 as a point of inception, Haraway casts her gaze toward the
scientific fabrication of elements with atomic numbers greater than 92, or the atomic number
assigned to uranium, the naturally occurring element with the greatest atomic number—for
example, plutonium (244Pu94 and its explosive isotope, 244Pu94) is lab-fabricated, and hence
transuranic (its atomic number is 94). Elements such as plutonium represent an implosion of
nature and culture, both of which collapse into and onto one another such that questions of the
naturalness or constructedness of plutonium become moot, or, if we use the language of the
Pragmatists, less interesting.13 An insuperable amalgam of nature and culture, plutonium is a
13
I mention the Pragmatists in an effort to fold William James and Richard Rorty into the mix: James, for his belleslettrist performance of truth in essays like “The Present Dilemma of Philosophy,” “What Pragmatism Means,” and
“Pragmatism’s Conception of Truth” in the collection Pragmatism and the Meaning of Truth (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1978), and Rorty for his attention to incommensurability (Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature) and
vocabularic plasticity (Contingency, Irony and Solidarity). Their innovations (James’ idea of truth as what-works;
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cyborg element born in the human race to develop nuclear technology (hence the significance of
the date 1945 in Haraway’s triple integraton):
Two things stand out simultaneously in the presence of the
transuranic elements: First, they are ordinary, natural offspring of
the experimental way of life, whose place in the periodic table
was waiting for them. They fit right in. Second, they are
earthshaking artificial productions of technoscience whose status
as aliens on earth, and indeed in the entire solar system, has
changed who we are fundamentally and permanently. Nothing
changed and too much changed when plutonium joined the terran
family. The transuranic elements—embedded in the semiotic,
technical, political, economic, and social apparatus that produces
and sustains them on earth—are among the chief instruments that
have remade the third planet from the sun into a global system
(55).
Refashioning planet earth into a global reactor, plutonium and its sister actinides are among the
host of technological intrusions into the chemical and physical to have indelibly marked human
consciousness. However, standing apart from other nature/culture meldings produced through
the modest witnessing of “the experimental life” introduced by the seventeenth-century chemist
Robert Boyle, these elements, themselves freaks, commodities, and fetishes, catapult the
postmodern subject into a universe of radical implosion in which the human and the mechanized
are interfaced so completely that separation is impossible: this fusion constitutes sublimity.14
If the introduction of transuranic elements represents one feature of the New World
Order or, as it is referred to in other passages, the Second Christian Millennium, then it is the
even more traumatizing, exhilarating introduction of transgenic species into the lifeworld which
puts the finishing touches on a way of life based on the opposition of nature and culture to one
another (the experimental way of life championed by naturalist Robert Boyle represents one
Rorty’s description of knowledge-claims as incommensurable with one another and personality as incommensurable
with itself) all apply to the cybersublime and also to the postmodern sublime in both Tabbi’s and my senses.
14
With his development of the air pump, a device supposedly permitting neutral, objective, world-disclosing
observations of nature, Boyle set up a new paradigm for interpreting and living the world. Inventions such as the air
pump allowed him to create and study vacuums, culminating in Boyle’s law, pV = C (the pressure times the volume
of a gas is constant for a given mass at a constant temperature). Haraway’s point is that Boyle introduced a new type
of living, one through which the human subject separates itself from the world and is thereby able to deduce its
axioms and laws. A mere witness or spectator, Boyle’s subject observes phenomena from a distance (just like, within
philosophy, Hegel will emerge as history’s spectator).
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such N/C Node). Haraway takes the very real example of the world’s first trademarked
creature, DuPont Laboratories’ Superstar OncoMouse™, as evidence of the fact that, for
postmodernity, nature and culture have imploded so fully that it is no longer possible to resist
the diaspora of selfhood which results when the oppositions around which selfhood has formed
in the West (supereminent among these being anthropology’s nature/culture) are obliterated in
favor of an oppositionless and desublimated network of synthetic pleasures. Accompanying
OncoMouse™ is a more fictive hybrid, FemaleMan©, OncoMouse™’s “Elder Sibling” (69).
Taking her cue from Joanna Russ’ 1975 science fiction novel The Female Man, Haraway
proposes a copyrighted and spliced-together “FemaleMan©” as brother/sister to OncoMouse™:
I have made a tiny little typographical amendment to
Joanna Russ’s version of the oxymoronic hominid: I write it
“FemaleMan”to highlight this being’s unexpected kinship to other
socioeconomically—genetically/historically—manipulated
creatures, such as OncoMouse. Like OncoMouse™ , the
FemaleMan© lives after the implosion of informatics, biologics,
and economics. If we date the implosion from the first successful
genetic engineering experiments in the early 1970s, Russ’s Female
Man lived at the flash point of that momentous collapse of
organisms, information, and the commodity form of life (70).
For Haraway, the FemaleMan© is precisely the sexless, ungendered figure of the cyborg as it is
described in her “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the
Late Twentieth Century”: “The cyborg is a creature in a post-gender world; it has no truck with
bisexuality, pre-oedipal symbiosis, unalienated labour, or other seductions to organic wholeness
through a final appropriation of all the powers of the parts into a higher unity” (Simians,
Cyborgs and Women, 150). Rejecting the origin-narratives of Hegel, Marx, Freud and Lacan,
all of whom posit a secondary split which must always haunt the subject with the lack it
introduces into psychic life, impelling that subject to spend its time healing its split via a
circular and impossible return to its origins, the cyborg is not a part of the gendered world.
Imploding gender, conjoining female with male in a unity that is not at all a sublation, the
cyborg, imaginative counterpart to DuPont’s cancer-infused mouse, represents the liberatory
fantasy of a world rendered fully cybernetic.
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Applying these ideas about transuranic elements and transgenic species to the book’s
rather cryptic title yields the following scenario: at the end of the Second Christian Millennium,
in the midst of a technoaesthetical mutation, the Modest Witness of Boyle’s experimental and
Baconian way of life—that is, the de-masculinized, presumably humble, objective witness to
the physical phenomena of the world embodied in the historical person of Robert Boyle—
confronts the trademarked OncoMouseTM and the copyrighted FemaleMan© through
information received at its e-mail address, the book’s title.15 As “the sender and receiver of
messages in (Haraway’s) e-mail address,” the modest witness exists at the interface of the
informational secretions of the FemaleMan© and the OncoMouse™. Their informational blips
and bleeps reconfigure that witness such that she is no longer modest in the Boylean sense.
Instead of merely witnessing the external events of mechanistic science, as the Oculist
Witnesses inhabiting the upper pane of
Le Grand Verre merely observe the potential sexual interaction of Bride with her Bachelor
Machine, Haraway’s new witness “works to refigure the subjects, objects and communicative
commerce of technoscience into different kinds of knots” (23). Drawing on the literary tradition
of figuration, Haraway proposes a chiliastic, parousial reading of the characters populating her
drama: “Signs and wonder bring us to the next contaminated practice suffusing my book and
built into the title Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.FemaleMan© _Meets_OncoMouse™:
that is, figuration. In my book, entities such as the modest witness of the Scientific Revolution,
the FemaleMan© of commodified transnational feminism, and OncoMouse™ of the
biotechnical war on cancer are all figures in secular technoscientific salvation stories full of
promise” (8). The apocalyptic and comical result of Haraway’s figuration is such that the Book
of Revelations, with its fantastic, phantasmagorical Second Coming of Christ, is replaced with a
secularized and technological equivalent, a pastiche in which two eminent and paradigmatic
cyborgs make the “man” of science blush with prurience (he, too, is a whore).
See Chapter 1 of Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.FemaleMan C _Meets_OncoMouseTM (New York:
Routledge, 1997) for a description of what it means for the modern scientist to be an impassionate witness to the
workngs of nature: “The world of subjects and objects was in place, and scientists were on the side of the objects.
Acting as objects’ transparent spokesmen, the scientists had the most powerful allies. As men whose only visible
trait was their limpid modesty, they inhabited the culture of no culture” (25). See also Haraway’s description of how
the modest witness modified male virility such that the traditionally female qualities of modesty and humility became
desirable masculine virtues (33).
15
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Revising Haraway’s original integration, I, in my attempt to locate the cybersublime in
Haraway’s ideas about the pleasures of implosion, provide the following substitute:
Transgenic Species, Transuranic Elements, Vampires,
Technofetuses, OncoMiceTM, Flavr Savr Tomatoes,
SimCity, SimEarth, SimLife, SimSim...
In offering an “epsilonic” alternative to Haraway’s integration, my intention is to emphasize the
sublimity of implosion, the fact that the many hybridized, cyborgian creatures gleefully
enumerated by Haraway throughout the many dazzling pages of Modest_Witness are in their
sheer effulgence sublime. In my reformulation of the integration as summed series, I make no
attempt to trace back these hybrids to some originary curve, some fictive f(x). Diverging from
Haraway, I do not provide a solution to an integration, for the very reason that it is an important
feature of cybersublimity that such hybrids, implosions and nexuses are in no way traceable to
any master equation: they can only be added together. While Haraway will posit the New
World Order as the solution to the triple integration of nature, culture and time, my interest in
sublimity leads me to frustrate integration by leaving it indeterminate: I am not the conspiracy
theorist that Haraway is, and thus refrain from attributing any unity to the tangle of wires and
genes that define current technological configurations. For the pleasure of the cybersublime, the
bang with which Rrose Sélavy expires, with which Barbarella's Orgasmotron pops, and with
which Madonna passes from particle to wave, is a result of the postmodern fusion represented
by hybrids such as these. Immersed in an incomprehensible and unrepresentable technological
infrastructure, Jameson’s lost hotel sojourner and Tabbi’s ambivalently integrated auteur cannot
solve for f(x) except to get the equation wrong. While there exists technology, biology and
power, and while these three do experience some implosion, overlap or palimpsesting, it is not
necessary that the three congeal into the Foucauldian force of technobiopower posited by
Haraway; in fact, the cybersublime’s charge results from there being no one entity to which the
products and organisms of late capitalism can be ontologically regressed.
Special Cases
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Haraway’s diasporic postmodern subject is matched by a similarly dispersed subjectivity
in Sue-Ellen Case, whose spectacular mess, The Domain Matrix, is also preoccupied with the
nature/culture interface represented by the cyborg.16 Searching for the body in a culture that has
fulfilled Marshall McLuhan’s wishes in The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic
Man and transcended print, Case supplies our three heroines, Sélavy, Barbarella and Madonna,
with two models which provide answers to their mysterious disappearances: (1) voodoo and (2)
sadomasochism. Case’s concerns are similar to Jameson’s. The confusion, anxiety and
bewilderment with which Jameson confronts the architectural space of the Westin Bonaventure
and his consequent prognosis that, somehow, the human subject of high modernism has lost
pace with the mutations of technology and is no longer able to process sensory data received
from the world of that technology’s making, is no more than Case’s articulation of a “new
organization of space” that relocates the functions of “nation, screening, sexuality and the
body” within the networks and new spatialities of cyberspace (3). Case compares the
postmodern and high modern subject’s respective relation to space. Using Guy Debord and his
fellow Situationistes Internationales’ idea of a “unitary urbanism,” Walter Benjamin’s notion of
the flâneur, and Michel de Certeau’s plan for “walking in the city” to “describe the relation
between reader and hypertext” in the modern milieu, Case posits two types of wandering, one
effected in the space of the city, the other in the suburbs of cybereality.
For Case, surfing the Net, navigating its many corridors and wormholes, is a version of
that very Barthesian textual encounter, cruising. The International Situationist, the flâneurdandy and the streetwalker all partake of the same activity, that of imbuing a certain geography
with meaning. The urban matrix, a prefigurement of the cybernetic matrix, presents the
observing, experiencing, locomoting subject with the technological sublime of Hart Crane, the
Constructivists, the Futurists and the Dadaists. The transition from urban matrix (grid of
buildings, people and situations: New York City) to suburban matrix (sprawl of wires, wash of
16
Case’s project has to fail: print culture cannot mime cyberculture, which it must always approximate. Although
Case gives it her best shot, her book, with its “optical” and hypertextual organization, is nowhere near as exciting as
the experience of surfing the Net. Furthermore, the gross excess of information crammed into its pages is wearying
and unsexy, the product of what she terms “the dowdy dyke” (versus the trendy and commodified “dildo dyke”).
Rrose Sélavy, Barbarella and Madonna would never achieve orgasm with this particular wash of information: there is
no dumped dummy, no Queen of the Galaxy, no ray of light, but this absence is important, emblamatizing the
otherness of the Net from print culture, their radical discontinuity and heterogeneity.
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electronic-libidinal impulses, alienation with simultaneous hyperconnection via mobile
technologies: Los Angeles) is the selfsame move from the modern sublime to its postmodern
cousin.17 Examining the various spatial configurations of cybertechnology and its many
products, Case hits on the two metaphors mentioned early on in this present paragraph; namely,
voodoo and sadomasochism. These two interpretations of what transpires when the POMO
cybernaut dives headfirst into a world of layered screens and virtual egos tie the “DomainMatrix” of the Net to two fundamental spatial configurations: (1) magic, conjuration,
incantation, performative utterance, and (2) the sexual tableau vivant of the master and servant,
Venus in Furs and Severin, as they are configured in their proper positions with respect to one
another in the sexual theatre. Seeking as her project a reclamation of the lesbian body, a body
resuscitated by Monique Witig in Les Guérillières and The Lesbian Body, yet subsequently lost
to that great dissolver of bodies, the Internet, Case searches for performance: both performative
utterances in J.L. Austin’s sense of the expression in How to Do Things with Words, and
“performance” in the more banal sense of some discrete, physical, corporeal, located body
doing something in the space of the world.
While Haraway promulgates the view that the postmodern subject is a diasporic,
“electrophoresed” separation of what in other eras had been unified under the pronoun “I,” in
Case “diaspora” carries with it a self-conscious reference to those other atomized bodies of
postmodernism, the postcolonial selves whose emigrations and immigrations have brought them
into and out of America’s cities and whose cultural practices have become intertwined with
established American practices which they in turn influence and alter via a principle of
syncretism. Positing voodoo as one potential metaphor for explaining what goes on when the
postmodern “I” taps some mysterious code onto a keyboard and is instantaneously transported
into a screnic omniverse of detached and disembodied paraperformances, Case literalizes
Haraway’s metaphor of the diasporic. Referring to a character in William Gibson’s Count Zero
17
It is of utmost importance that Case’s book ends with a chapter called “Los Angeles: A Topography of Screenic
Properties,” since it is the radical suburbanism of Los Angeles, city of Jameson’s clueless wonderment, which is
most amenable to the postmodern sublime as it is found in technoimmersiveness and in the idea of the cyberflâneur.
The succession of cities—from Paris to New York City for the moderns, from New York City to Los Angeles for the
postmoderns—presents one model for interpreting the move from a technological sublime to a cybersublime. Within
this schema, Madonna’s own artistic move toward cabbalism stands out as emblematic of a larger cultural trend: she,
too, leaves the city for the suburbs. See the collection Madonna’s Drowned Worlds: New Approaches to Her
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who equates the immediacy of cybertechnology (“getting things done”) with the immediacy of
le voudou, Case explains her post-colonial appropriation of Hatian ritual:
Gibson’s character perceives voudou as the language of doing, of
functions, not of abstract concepts. Voudou is used by the
outsiders who hack into this net that would transcend their
miscreant spaces to represent a belief system that thinks by doing.
Like the street, voudou is a system which takes found objects, the
trash or litter that the transcendent system leaves behind, and
redeploys them in a useful, hopeful manner. Voudou vessels, for
example, on the altars, are empty bottles reworked with sequins
and ribbons to aid in involving the loas, or spirits, who work on
various problems the petitioner submits. Online, Gibson’s
character takes the old computer parts or software functions to
grab some online time—the unit of value (52).
Case goes on to link the cyberpunk deployment of junk with the practice of bricolage found in
the Afrofuturism of films like John Sayles’ The Brother from Another Planet and Lizzie
Borden’s Born in Flames, in Sun Ra’s Omniverse Arkestra, in black comic books such as Static
and Icon, and in graffiti art.18 For Case, the radicality of these cultural practices lies in the
“complex signification of space” which they embody. Opposed to the Eurocentric rationality
which in the West (and East: Japan) has culminated in the stunning technological advances
making cyberspace possible, the bricolages and pastiches of Afrofuturism are evocative of the
religious, aesthetic and social practice of voodoo—indeed, of all other systems dismissed as
“superstition” with the emergence of Haraway’s Modest Witness in the person of Robert
Boyle—making Futurism a looking forward which is also a looking back (futurism becomes
technoprimitivism). Deterritorializing rather than colonizing, the practice of voodoo as it
belongs to its Hatian believers or to its diasporized adherents in, for example, New Orleans, to
the Afrofuturists, or to an Italo-American cybertraveler like Madonna, liberates the West from
Cultural Transformations, 1983-2003 (Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 2004) for further analyses of what Los Angeles
means to the new Madonna.
18
For a better discussion of the postmodern significance of graffiti art, see Case’s discussion of Chicano decorative
practices in Southern California in “Performing City: Chicano Chariots of Fire and Drive-By Art” in her DomainMatrix: Performing Lesbian at the End of Print Culture (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1996, 227-231).
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Euclidian space, allowing it to perceive a new interrelatedness and immediacy which, for those
Hatian women gluing sequins onto bottles, is no more than an old immanence.19
For Case, the real glue which bonds voodoo with cyberpunk is the relationship that each
practice bears to the abject. As means of salvaging the garbage, junk, detritus, trash and refuse
produced by the human organism, both voodoo and cyberpunk, themselves marginal practices,
appropriate the discarded, the wasted, the junked, reworking it, redeeming it, remixing it into
something that is decidedly not-trash. The scandalous proximity of the high and low to one
another in the Romantic Sublime comes to mind, as does Duchamp’s assemblage of bricks,
mannequins and one large, abandoned portal in L’Étant données. Case makes her most
beautiful evocation of this sublimity, that of the most abject piece of filth being associated with
the highest transports of the soul, in her discussion of the voodoo vever for Legba, loa of the
crossroads:
The vever is a figure drawn to chart the particular course through
space that the need of the moment would employ to evoke the
appropriate spirit. The vevers are drawn with various materials,
most importantly, again, with materials produced as
“leftovers”from other functions. For example, the black markings
within the white lines of a vever may be made with coffee grounds
(54).
Case continues to explain that the vever, displayed via waste products like coffee grounds,
becomes the doorway through which one gains access to a loa, or “window of space” akin to the
windows one passes through on the Net: for Case, the spatiality of voodoo is precisely the Net,
or hypertextual, visual, immediate mess of intersections, sites and paths through whose tangles
information clots and circulates (like the space of post-Euclidian geometry, it is curved,
hyperbolic). The theory of the leftover which Andy Warhol puts forth in the chapter from his
Philosophy entitled “Work” is eerily present in Case’s yearning for the abject, raising the
question of what relation the respective bricolages of voodoo and cyberpunk bear to camp, that
19
Beginning with the mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss in the 18th and 19th centuries, the existence of a postEuclidian geometry made itself known. Revising Euclid’s famous “fifth postulate” from his Elements (roughly, that
for each line there exists only one parallel), post-Eudlidian geometry redefines physical space by formulating
alternatives to the one-parallel-per-line axiom. In the 20th century, this geometry influenced chaos theory, fractal
theory, and theories of self-organization, such as autopoiesis. See Leonard Mlodinow’s Euclid’s Window: The Story
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other great employment of leftovers which has absorbed artists, writers, performers from Esther
Newton’s communities of drag queens in Mother Camp: Female Impersonators in America to
the current mania for all things white trash (see, for example, Jerry Springer’s Too Hot for
TV).20 Representative of the sublime uses of trash, voodoo and cyberpunk attack from the
margins, using the undesirable, the wasted, the jettisoned in meaningful, empowering,
aesthetically innovative ways: and so the cybernaut achieves identity with the diasporic, seizing
upon a historically older mode of thought as a model for interpreting its own current activity in
the same way that the scientist of Quantum Physics eschews Newtonian mechanics for holistic
models of particle-systems in tune with discarded Western practices such as alchemy and with
the religious thought of the East, specifically Zen Buddhism.21 While these equations often
come off as facile and condescending—”Oh! They really did get it right! Those crazy
Hatians!”—it is immensely important to note their presence in theories of artistic, religious and
scientific production at the end of the Second Christian Millennium and to ask why it is
suddenly so important, so urgent, for the cybertheorist to connect the immediate present with
the remote, devalued past.
Abjection provides one way of symbolizing cybertechnology and the sublime;
sadomasochism provides a second. It is this second metaphor, the Domain-Matrix, which Rrose
Sélavy, Barbarella and Madonna speak to in their respective raptures (and captures). Their
different responses to what Haraway terms “the informatics of domination” (“Manifesto,” 161),
or new networks of power marked by simulation and surface, are made in the presence of the
Domain-Matrix as she overheats the devotee of pleasure. Case’s relationship to her screenic
universe, to the cybersimulacra she confronts in her electronic-libidinal travels through the vast
of Geometry from Parallel Lines to Hyperspace (New York: Free Press, 2002) for a deeper analysis of the history of
Euclidian and post-Euclidian geometries.
20
“I always like to work on leftovers, doing the leftover things. Things that were discarded, that everybody knew
were no good, I always thought had a great potential to be funny. It was like recycling work. I always thought there
was a lot of humor in leftovers. When I see an old Esther Williams movie and a hundred girls are jumping off their
swings, I think if what the auditions must have been like and all the takes where maybe one girl didn’t have the nerve
to jump when she was supposed to, and I think about her leftover on the swing. So that take of the scene was a
leftover on the editing room floor—an out-take—and the girl was probably a leftover at that point—she was probably
fired—so the whole scene is much funnier than the real scene where everything went right, and the girl who didn’t
jump is the star of the out-take” (Philosophy, 93).
21
See Maurice Berman’s The Reenchantment of the World (New York: Bantam Books, 1984), as well as Karl Jung’s
work on alchemy and the collective unconscious in “Individual Dream Symbolism in Relation to Alchemy” in The
Portable Jung (New York: Penguin Books, 1976).
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domain and boundless terrain of the information matrix, is one of domination, humiliation,
subjection, enslavement, subordination: technology makes her its servant and she derives sexual
pleasure from it, metaphorically and literally. Bottom to the Internet’s top, Case performs
accordingly:
Hanging onto my crucial amulets, I enter the scenario with the
“Domain-Matrix.” I am disciplined by her, but I maintain my role;
I am ignorant of her plan, but capable of improvising within it; I
beg her to recognize my body, to bind me, to seduce me, while
performing in the anxious space of her far-reaching domain and
power, whose boundaries are, by definition, beyond my purview
and my control. I am seduced and pleasured by her spectacle, but
wary of its consequences. I fully expect some final satisfaction,
but assume it will never be dispensed. I realize that it works only
within strict parameters, but want it never to end...The point is not
to succeed. The hope that “we shall overcome”only emulates the
Domain-Matrix. Instead, playing the bottom, while denigrating
even that role as efficacious or conclusive, might be the only
“point” that succeeds precisely where it fails (236).
Case, the “butch bottom,” is disciplined by her conqueror’s cords of love, by the very wires
whose mysterious configuration produces and sustains the charmed illusions of cyberspace.22
Waiting for final satisfaction, Case is in the same position in which Lyotard, in The Inhuman:
Reflections on Time leaves Burke: she waits, she anticipates, she finds herself suspended.23 The
fear of “nothing happening,” the cessation of all activity, the eradication of the “now” delivered
by death, is what Burke faces and which Kant elides. In The Inhuman, Lyotard connects the
possibility of nothing happening with sublimity: “The possibility of nothing happening is often
associated with anxiety, a term with strong connotations in modern philosophies of existence
and of the unconscious. It gives to waiting, if we really mean waiting, a predominantly negative
22
I take the expression “cords of love” from a Chris and Cosey song of the same title on their 1991 album Pagan
Tango (Play It Again Sam).
23
In “Coldness and Cruelty,” Gilles Deleuze connects the experience of suspense with masochism: “In Masoch’s
novels, it is the moments of suspense that are the climactic moments. It is no exaggeration to say that Masoch was
the first novelist to make use of suspense as an essential ingredient of romantic fiction. This is partly because he
masochistic rites of torture and suffering imply actual physical suspension (the hero is hung up, crucified or
suspended), but also because the woman torturer freezes into postures that identify her with a statue, a painting or a
photograph. She suspends her gestures in the act of bringing down the whip or removing her furs; her movement is
arrested as she turns to look at herself in the mirror” (33). See the compilation Masochism (New York: Zone Books,
1991).
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value. But suspense can also be accompanied by pleasure, for instance the pleasure in
welcoming the unknown, and even by joy, to speak like Baruch Spinoza, the joy obtained by the
intensification of being that the event brings with it” (92). Case, penetrated, permeated and
pleasured by the apparatuses of technology, yet left suspended, forever waiting, occupies a
position similar to Burke’s. Rrose, Barbarella and Madonna all nod their heads in agreement
and, perhaps, enjoyment. The pleasure inflicted upon Rrose in the swatch of spacetime
separating La Mariée Mise a Nue from the Etant données; the ecstasies and transports forced
upon Barbarella by Duran Duran and his pleasuring-torturing apparatus, the Orgasmotron; the
Material Girl’s sacrificial immolation in the flame of technology: all three scenarios operate via
principles of domination and submission articulated by Case yet prefigured by Burke.
Pulling the Plug on the Big O
It is at this point that I allow Rrose Sélavy, Barbarella and Madonna to part company
from my discourse. In piecing together the philosophies of Donna Haraway and Sue-Ellen Case
with a little help from Edmund Burke, Immanuel Kant and Jean-Francois Lyotard, I have
hopefully achieved my rather strange goal of finding a way (1) to differentiate the cybersublime
from Tabbi’s conception of the technological or postmodern sublime, while (2) highlighting the
Orgasmotronicity or sexual stimulation associated with the human/machine, cyborgian interface.
It should be obvious that not all accounts of the human subject’s postmodern plight, or the
assimilation of heterogeneous bits of information and simulacra demanded of it by the new
technologies which have proliferated in late capitalism, are couched in terms as blatantly sexual
as those I have chosen: not every cybernaut will be a Rrose Sélavy, a Barbarella or a Madonna.
My intention throughout this enterprise has been similar to Case’s: that is, to find some way of
talking about sexual desire and performance in a world of rapidly disappearing bodies.
Overheated by her nine bachelors, all of whom constitute some machine, lubricious gear train or
desire magneto, as Duchamp referred to them in From the Green Box, Rrose Sélavy,
Duchamp’s drag alterego, vanishes from Le Grand Verre to reappear cunt-forward on the other
side of a peepshow in the Étant données; in another room of this strange house, Barbarella, her
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hormones and blood pumping, cums so hard she destroys the machine which produced this
pleasure, only to be subjected to further sexual devices which she will likewise short circuit,
while, on the roof, Madonna, sick of her lusty Catholic material body, vaporizes into the
apparent nothingness of one hyperactive wave: for these women, being a cyborg means much
more than the genderless dystopia of Haraway’s future. The cyborg is voracious—whether or
not she is able to withstand the pleasure she receives. Technology is no arid arrangement of
wires, plugs and circuits: it has the power to satiate sexually, to motivate limbically, to
imbricate libidinally, with the accompanying dangers of human explosion (Mme. Sélavy),
technological counter-suffusion (Mme. Fonda) and the very tempting prospect that body and
machine might fuse-implode in a fantastic discharge of light and heat (Madonna).
True, these women inhabit only one moment in time, after which their subsequent
manifestations part company from the cybersublime. For Madonna, the acorporeality of “Ray
of Light” gives way to an oddly bodily spirituality in which the renunciation of the material
world must be articulated on repeat in a futile effort to convince none other than herself that an
egoless universe is possible. As her Re-Invention (2004) and Confessions (2006) tours
demonstrate, the Material Girl does not renounce materialism, but rather creates a species of
religious experience in which immaterial entities like “soul” or “agape” are treated
materialistically, horded and mastered as commodities in their own right. For only a moment,
she vaporizes into some force, vapor, quintessence or subatomic particle-wave jetting away at
speeds in excess of 186,000 miles/second, an épatisme in the face of Albert Einstein, whose
Special Theory of Relativity posits the speed of light in a vacuum as matter’s upper motility
limit (“VII: The Apparent Incompatibility of the Law of Propagation of Light with the Principle
of Relativity,” as well as “XV: General Results of the Theory”). And then she’s gone.
Similarly, there is no proof from the mind of Duchamp that the destroyed woman of the Étant
Données is Rrose Sélavy proper; her existence in this tableau I have only surmised, and with the
most devious of motives. And Fonda will never short circuit a sexual device again, despite
what an embittered Ted Turner might say. As with any aesthetic experience, the cybersublime
is delicate in constitution, evanescing the moment that anyone, including myself, seeks to pin it
down. A truly Heisenbergian creation, the precise moment of pleasure can only be located at an
expense, becoming a mere snapshot of expired desire which can only be regarded retroactively.
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The technological waste product of Duchamp’s mannequin, together with the intergalactic pixie
and the materially condensed pop princess, all speak the language of love. Their dialects
identical, each hails from Diotima’s hideaway and takes as her object the infinite as embodied
in the flows and streams of a technoreality which might destroy her, but which also might send
her careening into the tenth dimension. “Is there any difference?” she seems to be asking,
clarifying the nature of pleasure for a desublimated, post-Millennial audience of pill-popping
metros, silicone-stuffed globe-trotters and individuals absolutely coincident with screen names
and user profiles.
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Music and Video
Berlin. Pleasure Victim. David Geffen, 1982.
Chris and Cosey. Pagan Tango. Tvt, 1993.
Cronenberg, David. Videodrome. Universal, 1983.
Gund, George. Synthetic Pleasures. Caipirinha, 1996.
Madonna. The Re-Invention Tour. Warner Bros, 2006.
Madonna and Orbit, William, et. al. “Ray of Light.” London: WB Music Corp., 1998.
Shafer, Dirk. Circuit. TLA Releasing, 2001.
Springer, Jerry. Too Hot for TV. Heliotrope Productions, Inc., 1997.
Vadim, Roger. Barbarella, Queen of the Galaxy. Paramount, 1967.
Tata: Cybersublimity after the Orgasmotron.
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