Originally posted on sciy.org by Rich Carlson on Fri 09 May 2008 08:41 AM PDT
In Toledo, Ohio, I sat down to enjoy the latest Philip K. Dick film adaptation, A Scanner Darkly.
The film stars include Keanu Reeves (as
Agent Fred/Bob Arctor/Bruce), Woody Harrelson (as Ernie Luckman),
Winona Ryder (as Donna Hawthorn), and Robert Downey, Jr. (as Jim
Barris). Directed
by Richard Linklater, it is animated using the same rotoscope-esque
animation technique employed in his earlier and similarly dreamy film, Waking
Life
(2001). Rather than claim I was stricken with a sudden insight about
posthuman cinema by the film, I feel I had been prepared for this
event:
first, by my current writing on consumerism, lifestyles, and household
technologies, and second, by my appreciation for Dick. If I remember
correctly,
I was halfway through the novel when I learned that the film was being
released, and therefore had to finish the book quickly if I planned on
seeing
the movie after having read the book. A bit like Bob Arctor,
the story's protagonist, or maybe like Dick, I was working on this
article before
I had realized it -- before I had even read the book. And, rather
appropriately, I cannot even remember if this sequence of events is
entirely accurate.
The purpose of introducing my subject thusly is not to be
deliberately confusing, or even to be completely honest. Rather, the
purpose is to talk
about a sensibility: a way of experiencing reality and its absence. I
have been puzzling lately over a genre of film which is hard to
situate: films
which deal with forgetting and remembering, in which we ride shotgun
with protagonists who are just as interested in character development
as we are.
While the genre itself has not been fully mapped out, potential
candidates for inclusion include Abre Los Ojos (1997), Vanilla Sky
(2001), Memento (2000), Minority Report (2002), The Bourne Identity (2002), Paycheck (2003), Eternal Sunshine of
the Spotless Mind (2004), and, most recently, A Scanner Darkly (2006). I call this genre the "Posthuman Bildungsroman."
The Bildungsroman label is commonly applied to "coming of age"
tales or novels of education. For reasons discussed below, this common
usage is not
entirely accurate, but taken in the larger context of Western
Literature such usage makes sense. The traditional questions associated
with Western
Literature can be summarized in this way: What is a story? An account of change. What is a good story? An account of
change that all people can relate to. The assumption is that in order to be sufficiently engaging, change must center on "the human." And in
practice, "the human" has overwhelmingly been depicted as an individual. [1]
Outside of non-modern folk
tales, children's stories, religious texts, and legends, there is
little room in this essentialist construct for distributed cognition,
nonhuman
characters, and environmental agents. Philosophy, literature, and the
self grow together/merge under the common characterization of the
Bildungsroman. The result is a tradition of "good stories" about the
formation of an identity that is rooted in interior personal growth.
In the Posthuman Bildungsroman, the individual is present not
as the expression of a coherent self, but as the central problem of the
story. Rather than triumph over external obstacles through force of
will, the will itself is formed through the effects of outside forces.
The story
remains a tale of growth and education, but the end of this process is
an attempt to stabilize the subject and construct a coherent
representation of
the self that is consistent with the expectations of its cultural
milieu (or, perhaps, the genre).
Before I go any further in explaining this phrase, I must first define the term Bildungsroman more
accurately. To understand this term, we
can take two approaches: the historical route or the theoretical route.
A historical view of the genre situates it in a particular time and
place:
"first, that the Bildungsroman is a peculiarly German form, and second,
that it was the dominant form of the German novel in the nineteenth
century."
[2] The theoretical approach is more concerned with understanding those works which are preoccupied with
the idea of Bildung: "The idea of cultivation (Bildung) through a harmony of aesthetic, moral, rational and scientific education had
long been a common property of Enlightenment thought." [3] It is this second, broader sense, which has
lapsed into the general usage of the term to describe stories about "growing up."
However, the consensus among scholars of the Bildungsroman is a view that takes both realities into account by recognizing that Bildung, as
a concept, must be understood culturally. According to James N. Hardin, we must first understand
Bildung as a developmental process and,
second, as a collective name for the cultural and spiritual processes
of a specific people or social stratum in a given historical epoch and
by
extension the achievement of learning about that same body of knowledge
and acceptance of the value system it implies. [4] Jeffrey L. Sammons adds:
the concept of Bildung is intensely bourgeois; it carries with it many assumptions about the autonomy and relative integrity of the self,
its potential self-creative energies, its relative range of options within material, social, even psychological determinants. [5] The Bildung is described as "the early bourgeois, humanistic concept of the shaping of the individual self from its innate potentialities
through acculturation and social experience to the threshold of maturity." [6]
In other words, it is not
just that the Bildungsroman is a German novel from the 1800s or a novel
about growing up. Rather, it is a novel in which the protagonist,
consistent
with middle-class ideas about individuality, comes to be a "person" in
the sense of the word as it was understood by the nineteenth century
German
bourgeoisie.
In response to this genre come the triumvirate of speculative
genres: the gothic, the detective, and science fiction. The gothic aims
to represent
a rotten heritage beneath the polite and hopeful exterior of the
bourgeois world. This heritage can take the form of perverted
bloodlines, clerical
corruption, and/or supernatural remnants from the old world. The
detective story aims to represent, within the pride of bourgeois
progress, the
corrupt heart of the city. This corruption is both hidden and
pervasive, but it exists everywhere that modernity exists. Finally, the
science
fiction story breaks with the promise of the bourgeois world altogether
to point to a multitude of possible worlds: utopian and dystopian. Some
are
unlike ours, and all the better for it. Some are quite like ours, and
utterly miserable because of it. The three genres point to the three
possible
temporal sources of corruption: the past, the present, and the future.
Their chief mechanisms are the supernatural, the everyday, and the
technological, respectively. All three of these responses represent a
dissatisfaction with the model held up in the coming of age novel, as
if to
proclaim that the past, present, and future of modern society are
doomed.
The purpose of this essay is not to add a banal definition to
an already embattled literary term. Rather, the purpose is to use the
term Bildungsroman as a heuristic device. This leads to a couple of
fundamental questions. First, what does the protagonist of the
Posthuman
Bildungsroman learn? And, second, what does this process of discovery
and its conclusion tell us about the current state of Western culture?
Certainly
it remains informed by bourgeois notions of the individual. The key
similarity, I will argue, is that this new genre, which constructs
identity from
the trappings of consumer culture, is concerned with the same matter as
the Bildungsroman: it tells a story of becoming a fully-formed person
in
relation to society as a whole. However, it differs significantly in
the means and ends of this personhood. In an age when capitalism's
"creative
destruction" has trickled down, even to the deepest recesses of the
individual (in body, mind, and spirit), the moral lessons of the
Bildungsroman are
indistinguishable from the moral critiques of the speculative genres.
Good and evil are no longer a meaningful backdrop for the human story.
For
posthuman subjects, these are stories about learning what it means to
be human.
The Genre and Its Origins
If we wish to take a historical view, the Posthuman
Bildungsroman can be seen to break off from earlier innovations leading
up to and including
reality television. [7] While reflexive narrative techniques have a long history in the literary tradition, the 1960 Twilight Zone
episode "A
World of Difference" represents an early gesture towards the coming
"realization" of representation that would appear with the first
reality
television show. "A World of Difference" tells the story of a
businessman whose daily life comes crashing down around him when a
director shouts
"Cut!". Over a decade later, An American Family debuted on PBS. This twelve-hour documentary follows a real family as it falls apart. [8] In 1979, Albert Brooks' comic film Real Life revisits the concept of An American Family
in
a fictionalized form. Throughout the 1980s, the taste for "realism" in
television spawned a wide range of "real" and dramatized courtroom
shows, talk
shows, and the still-running television series Cops (which has aired nearly seven hundred episodes). In 1992, MTV introduced viewers to the
Real World (now in its eighteenth season), a show which is
widely acknowledged as the inspiration for the current popularity of
the reality
television genre. With the development of websites such as/including
YouTube and MySpace, the distinctions between everyday life and
entertainment
continue to blur.
In an insightful essay on the contradictions inherent in "reality" television, David Banash writes:
Set within the confines of a small house, Big Brother pitted
ten houseguests against one another under total surveillance that
included
twenty-four hour web-cam feeds. While the program sold itself as a
glimpse of everyday life, the house is particularly odd in that it
lacks almost
every kind of device its core audience takes for granted: no phones,
televisions, computers, or radios. In essence, what most Americans
spend most of
their time doing (consuming media) is almost the only thing that Big Brother
really forbids. Thus, the authentic moments of emotion which the
show sells as its real attraction are, in fact, generated through the
most heavy-handed and apparent simulations. The same could be said for
similar
programs such as Survivor, The Mole, and Temptation Island.
The very heavy-handedness of the narratives, their utter dissociation
from everyday life, moves them further and further away from the kind
of realism with which the documentary has traditionally been
associated, and yet
the promise is still always the real itself. [9] The reality genre does not focus on "reality" per se, but an
admission that reality is "under construction." As Banash points out,
reality shows
operate under a compromised definition of reality. If there is an
"authentic" thread that connects these media artifacts, it is our own
anxieties
about reality in the face of media. It is a worldview formed with the
expectation of the spectacle.
Driven by its popularity and low production costs (no writers
and no professional actors), reality television has metastasized in
recent years,
bringing the techniques of its format to every conceivable demographic.
Many shows seem to pick up where the hit talk shows of the 1980s and
'90s
(like Oprah, Donahue, Jerry Springer, Montel Williams,
etc.) left off. As a result, these shows tend to reflect a
self-help formula in which problems are identified, exposed,
confronted, and resolved within a single episode. Any titillation or
scandal that occurs
is contained within a safe, therapeutic context. And though frank
discussions of human conflict have great utopian potential, these shows
rarely
challenge the root causes of interpersonal conflict or address systemic
structures that exacerbate them. Instead, they tend to reassure the
dominant
values, producing solutions consistent with comfortable norms and the
neo-liberal worldview.
For the sake of expediency, contemporary reality television
shows can be broken down into eight general themes: sociocultural,
makeover, survival,
professional, romance, fame, reform, and practical joke shows.
Sociocultural shows like Wife Swap, Queer Eye for the Straight Guy (eventually shortened to Queer Eye), Dr. Steve-O and
The Simple Life draw their inspiration from areas of social and cultural conflict. In Wife Swap,
two families, typically from different
social, economic, and cultural backgrounds, exchange wives/mothers for
a two week period. The conflict in the series circulates around the
collision
of cultures, habits, and expectations. The recently cancelled hit Queer Eye features gay cultural experts who are enlisted to bring style and
panache to the bland world of the heterosexual male. Dr. Steve-O, on the other hand, bills itself as an "antitdote" to Queer Eye and
promises to "de-wussify" American men. [10] The Simple Life focuses on class distinction in the United States. These shows often aim to
bridge different worlds and open up entertaining discussions about demographics and particular "types" of people.
Makeover shows such as Extreme Makeover and Pimp my Ride focus on self governance. In Extreme Makeover, men and women subject
themselves to radical physical change through diet, makeup, hair styling, fashion, and surgery. The subjects of The Biggest Loser struggle
against obesity aided by a "coach." Shows like Trading Spaces and Pimp My Ride
focus, respectively, on home improvement and automobile
customization. Rather than examining large external conflicts, these
shows turn the subjects over to guided self-improvement regimens.
Survival shows like Survivor and Fear Factor advance contestants based on their ability to compete in adverse circumstances.
Survivor, the classic example of an elimination-based survival
show, combines social and physical endurance with competition and
cooperation by
allowing contestants to be "voted off the island" by their teammates. Fear Factor
focuses on stunts that capitalize on popular phobias like
fear of heights, spiders, drowning, etc. As with makeover shows, these
shows emphasize overcoming personal limitations through determination.
Professional shows, from American Chopper to The Apprentice, highlight individual success in a trade or a profession. In American
Chopper, the celebrity motorcycle mechanics of Orange County Choppers create outlandish custom bikes. In contrast, The Apprentice pits
aspiring executives against each other in an ongoing survival competition.
Romance shows including Flavor of Love and The Bachelor focus on heterosexual relationships starring conventionally attractive, young
women. In The Bachelor, twenty-five women compete for the hand of one bachelor (for the sake of gender parity, the show was followed by
The Bachelorette). The Flavor of Love (and the spin-off Rock of Love)
features former celebrities (Flavor Flav and Brett
Michaels, respectively) who select a mate from a field of female
contestants. These shows put a competitive spin on romance, reinforcing
the idea
that relationships are held together through submission to the desires
and expectations of another.
Fame-based shows circulate around the cultivation of a celebrity (American Idol) or on life as a celebrity (Surreal Life). Like
professional shows, America's Next Top Model, American Idol, and Making the Band glorify exceptional individuals, but they
contain the added dimension of celebrity. Meanwhile, shows like Gene Simmons Family Jewels shine a light into the daily lives of famous
people.
On the other end of the spectrum, reform shows like Judge Judy and Supernanny are primarily concerned with punishment and shame.
Judge Judy is a courtroom show which stars a feisty, outspoken
"judge" who cuts through grievances by telling it like it is to the
guilty and
innocent alike. Supernanny serves up discipline both for unruly children and inept parents. These shows, along with the long-lived
Cops, create a spectacle around deviance and highlight the desire for aggressive solutions to social problems.
Finally, practical joke shows like Girls Behaving Badly, Bam's Unholy Union, and Punk'd create absurd situations that disrupt
the expected norms of daily reality. Punk'd exposes celebrities to ridicule and shows them in unflattering situations. Bam's Unholy Union
(a spinoff of Jackass and Viva la Bam, with a nod to the Newlyweds) exposes the social order and plays with the rules of polite
society by focusing on the absurd domestic life of the anarchic Bam Margera. The stars of Girls Behaving Badly pull
pranks on unsuspecting
subjects, usually in a consumer-oriented public space, often exposing
gender norms to ridicule. While the other types of reality shows borrow
freely
from the practical joke shows for comic relief, these shows are the
most difficult category because of their challenge to the status quo.
It is important to note that there are also many shows that do
not rest easily in any of the categories outlined above. Shows such as
MythBusters (a science show about testing urban legends) and Sweet 16 (a showcase of debutante excess) are among them. In fact, none of
the shows operate exclusively in any single category. For example, Queer Eye for the Straight Guy and Flavor of Love could be viewed as
makeovers, while shows like Girls Behaving Badly and Survivor both drift into the sociocultural categories. The Simple Life is
also a fame-based show and, at times, a dating show. And The Apprentice and Extreme Makeover certainly comment on discipline and
punishment.
That which unites these shows has little to do with their
content and more to do with their production and the subjects they
produce. Underneath
the popular discourses on demographics, self-improvement, personal
achievement, professional life, dating, celebrity worship, discipline,
and other
consumer practices, is a more basic underlying principle. In order to
take hours of raw, meandering footage and cultivate them into a
coherent human
drama, the production values take center stage. In effect, we witness
characters that are developed by the editor. Narrative arcs are pieced
together and aided by voiceovers, soundtrack choices, and visual
effects to create drama, inspire emotions, and provide closure. The
individuals who
provide the "reality" at the center of the enterprise are, in fact,
people living in front of rolling cameras, but their subjectivities are
entirely
constructed by context, editing, and consumption. Characters emerge
from the stream of real time, written after the fact by an elaborate
sociocultural apparatus.
Thus reality television plays a crucial role for contemporary
audiences. In the same way that the traditional Bildungsroman served to
educate
citizens in the emerging norms and values of the middle class, the
reality genre provides instruction in postmodern ontologies. Through
popular
media, we engage in the process of "governmentality." In "Technologies
of the Self," Michel Foucault defines this concept as "[the] contact
between
the technologies of domination of others and those of the self." [11] Nikolas Rose's Governing the
Soul provides a more detailed discussion:
The citizen is to enact his or her democratic
obligations as a form of consumption through new techniques such as
focus groups and attitude
research. This kind of 'government through freedom' multiplies the
points at which the citizen has to play his or her part in the games
that govern
him. [12] In other words, governmentality is the means by which subjects
discipline themselves in order to conform more fully to systems of
power. Reality
television, rather than offering a naturalistic representation of the
world as it meets our senses, educates viewers in an "idealized"
version of
identity construction vis-Ã -vis consumer culture. The genre aims to
represent reality not as it is, but as it will be, provided we follow
the roadmap
of becoming that is held up in its text.
By the late 1990s, films like Peter Weir's The Truman Show (1998) and Ron Howard's EdTV (1999) emerged to criticize the place of reality
television in contemporary culture. In The Truman Show,
Truman Burbank (Jim Carey) lives his entire life on an enormous
soundstage called Sea
Haven. Televised twenty-four hours a day, Truman's life is the ultimate
reality show, that is, until his blissful existence is shattered by the
realization that his life is an elaborate media contrivance. The film
plays on both the fascination with reality television and the unreality
of the
gated community, suggesting that the two species are coexistent. In EdTV,
Ed Pekurny (Matthew
McConoughey) rises to superstardom as the subject of his own reality
show. Both films give voice to a wider popular skepticism about the
merits of
the reality genre.
More interesting are the films which invert the reality
television conceit (by playing on the supposed unscripted character of
the real), and use
the idea of the pre-scripted as real. Though not explicitly about
reality television, these stories draw upon the same zeitgeist:
surveillance,
editing, and image figure prominently in the development of character.
While drama is traditionally rooted in change, these dramas are about
the
subject's conformity to what is. In the traditional detective genre,
the protagonist must sift through competing narratives to uncover the
truth. In
these ontoteleological films, the protagonist must sift through the
multitude of subjective states to realize the self. Chris Nolan's Memento,
Steven Spielberg's Minority Report, and John Woo's Paycheck
all feature protagonists who must discover their identities through the
course of the narrative (although each director approaches this in
different ways and with different levels of cinematic success).
Memento's Leonard (Guy Pierce) cannot remember anything
that has happened to him since his brain injury. For him, every day is
a clean
slate, a mystery. In order to discover how his wife was murdered and
how he became who he is, he leaves himself mementos: clues in the form
of
polaroids, tattoos, notes, and instructions. Through these physical
markers he constructs an autobiography and thus attempts to learn who
he is. In
the end, we discover that it is Leonard who has deliberately distorted
his autobiography and created a false and troubling solution to the
crime. Not
unlike the editor of a reality television show, Leonard engages in a
process of elimination that reduces the many facts of his existence
into a single
narrative thread with which he can live. In his discussion of Memento, Nate Burgos notes the fundamental similarity between cinema and
cognition: "Memory is the camera, the film, the sound, the projector, and screen." [13]
For Burgos, the film succeeds in laying bare the nature of human
subjectivity: "[E]veryone is an auteur." We construct ourselves in real
time as we shoot, edit and project our memories forward. However, to
truly
understand the nature of this auteurship, it is important/necessary to
contextualize the film both within its genre, and alongside the closely
related
reality genre. The film is not simply a statement about truth. It is
the statement of a particular truth that exists within the individual
engaged
in the discovery qua production of the posthuman self.
In Spielberg's Minority Report, John Anderton (Tom
Cruise) is a "pre-crime" detective who prevents murders and convicts
would-be murderers
based on tips provided by "precogs" (technologically augmented
clairvoyants). When the precogs reveal that Anderton himself is to
become a murderer,
the detective sets out to discover why. In "Time and the Fragmented
Subject in Minority Report," Martin Hall explains Anderton's negotiation
of the dissonance between who he considers himself to be and the way in which he is represented:
We see Anderton dismantling and restructuring
images, searching for whatever possible versions of this representation
are available to him, other
than the one that represents him as a murderer. In the Lacanian sense,
he is not merely trying to describe his trajectory, he is staging its
movement:
he believes that the play of images represented will resolve themselves
into the absolute knowledge that the future anterior tense this
fragmentation
has placed him within does not allow for. [14] Through the course of the film, we learn along with Anderton how he
comes to complete the image. But in a clever twist, the "murder" that
Anderton
is to commit is revealed to be a suicide. Although Minority Report works as a critique of the "surveillant assemblage" that seeks to pre-empt
future disasters, [15] it shares with Memento the sense that, ultimately, identity construction
emerges from the will of the individual in dialectic with the constellation of things which holds that identity in place.
John Woo's 2003 Paycheck (based, like Minority Report and A Scanner Darkly, on a work by Philip K. Dick, whose novels also
inspired the films Bladerunner [1982] and Total Recall [1990])
is the story of a reverse engineer who takes a job so secret that his
memory will be deleted upon its completion. When he discovers that his
assignment has the potential to destroy the world, he leaves a trail of
clues
that will help him reverse engineer his deleted memory and allow him to
undo the product of his labor. While the protagonist of the film
discovers
himself in his objects, Paycheck shares with Minority Report the hope that the individual can come to an honest self-representation in
spite of the conspiratorial nature of the coming future society.
The ambiguous nature of the Posthuman Bildungsroman comes to its clearest representation in A Scanner Darkly.
Agent Fred is a narcotics
officer living in deep cover amongst addicts under the name Bob Arctor.
His cover is so deep that Agent Fred must always wear a disguise to
conceal
his identity, even from his colleagues. As part of his investigation,
he must record the everyday activities of his household. To keep his
cover
intact, he must use the drug Substance D and file surveillance reports
on himself along with everyone else. In order to succeed, he must
convince
both his friends and his employers that he is Bob Arctor. His addiction
to Substance D only complicates things further, a substance which has a
botanical name of Mors ontologica, or "ontological death." The
primary side effect of Substance D dependency is a growing disconnect
between
the hemispheres of his brain and a resulting split in his subjectivity.
Uncertain about his actions as Arctor, he must submit to the authority
of
police surveillance. Eventually, he loses his job over his covert
activities and enters rehabilitation. In the New-Path rehabilitation
program, he
takes the name Bruce, and must undergo extensive behavior modification
in order to destroy his former self and be rebuilt into a functional
member of
society - which, in the end, is revealed as part of a police plan to
find the source of Substance D: New-Path's farm labor camps. By then,
of course,
Agent Fred/Bob Arctor has been fully replaced by Bruce, who can barely
function and who would be unrecognizable to any of his former selves.
The common thread running through these films is the idea that
a self that can be encoded, erased, and re-written. In spite of the
specific
characteristics of each film's protagonist, they share a common
identity in that they are all cobbled together from the images,
objects, and
information that surround them. If an inner self or authentic identity
exists at all, it is in the will to self-actualization vis-Ã -vis the
material
world. These characters personalize and give the blessing of "agency"
to the surface of this process. Unlike a true Bildungsroman, culture in
these
films does not offer the means by which one can discover a deeper, more
authentic self. In the case of Memento, the external datastream
confounds and distorts the protagonist to the extent that his only hope of a self is to embrace a lie. In Minority Report, the protagonist
manages to buck the system, even as the image itself remains true but misinterpreted. In Paycheck,
the protagonist's possessions are
ultimately the only markers of truth. All three protagonists strive
frantically for self-discovery, but must rely on the world of
commodities, media,
and representation in absence of a centered self. To return to the
roots of the genre, the protagonists resemble reality television stars
in that
their reality is produced before their very eyes. The Fred/Arctor/Bruce
personality in A Scanner Darkly seems to have totally abandoned the
possibility that a "self" exists at all.
For a better understanding of the genre, it is useful to
consider Scott Bukatman's concept "terminal identity." Terminal
identity is spawned by
"terminal culture" (which plays with definitions of "terminal" as
destination, interface, and demise). Developing a discussion initiated
in Haraway's
"Cyborg Manifesto," Bukatman claims that the ambiguous postmodern self
of contemporary popular culture is characterized by a "transcendence
which is
also always a surrender." [16]
To paraphase, terminal identity is the subject position which can
embrace the slick surfaces of the virtual without looking for something
deeper. The terminal subject accepts the image at face value.
If we accept Bukatman's theory of terminal identity, then we might ask what sort of "coming of age" tale these films invoke. [17]
Traditionally, we have had novels where "being" is uncovered: the first
type being the traditional
Bildungsroman, and the second type being those which exist in
opposition to the genre -- incest genealogies of the gothic, the
cracking of the mystery in
the detective novel, or the radical revisions of science fiction -- all
of which revel in the secrets of modern society.
The postmodern "coming of age" is radically different not just
in its construction of identity through an assemblage of surfaces and
images, but
also in its ambiguous relationship with its purposes. The reality genre
appears as a representation of what really is, but it also implies its
own
satire by exposing the flaws of "real people" and the flaws of
"representations of real people." Hence the nearly instantaneous
arrival of films like
EdTV and The Truman Show. On the one hand, these shows
reveal a scorn for mediation and a scorn for the bourgeois culture that
they aim
to police. On the other hand, they are pure forms of mediation and pure
expressions of bourgeois values. The self becomes only the agent of its
own
destruction, saying "yes" to/by affirming reformatting and the
installation of new operating systems.
Unlike the traditional Bildungsroman, whose countertype was the
triumvirate of speculative genres aforementioned, the countertype to
reality
television is more essential in its critique. The two genres of reality
television and its satire do not battle over the questions of Good and
Evil;
rather, they battle over the very existence of the self. In this way
they resemble the gothic, the science fiction, and the detective story.
But
within these texts, there is fundamentally little difference between
tales of disassembly and reassembly: they are equivalent processes of
posthuman
becoming.
The twist presented in these stories is not a discovery that
pertains to some other; instead,it comes in the realization of who the
protagonist has
been all along. Where things get interesting is in the protagonists'
utter mystery/uncertainty and befuddlement as to who they might be.
Rather than
wondering what is concealed beneath the surface, the characters
themselves are pieced together from external cues, arriving at a
subjective space that
is not determined by an interior state, but by an assemblage of
surrounding signs. Hence, Leonard's erroneous story is written on his
skin. Anderton's
story is edited into a coherent scheme which fits social knowledge
about crime and deviance. Jenning's story is tucked into an assemblage
of objects. Finally, Arctor's story is molded to fit the narrative of
substance abuse, therapy, and law. If there is an inherent, internal
knowledge of the
essential self, these protagonists do not seem to know it/are unaware
of it.
Unlike the traditional Bildungsroman, these tales do little to
affirm the value of bourgeois society as an instrument of personal
growth. Rather,
they challenge the possibility of individual personal growth in favor
of the outward signs of a coherent subjectivity and, in the process,
call into question the validity of an atomistic self. This approach to
externals affirms the conventional wisdom of what we know about
postmodernism as an aesthetic that is preoccupied by surfaces and which
eschews depth and interiority. It also confirms the assumptions of
posthumanism, which suggest that the "person" is not simply the
expression of an eternal, immutable state, but rather, is the point
where discursive
threads converge. Personal identity is an interpretation of culturally
constructed notions of subjectivity.
Most importantly, the Posthuman Bildungsroman might simply be a
refinement of narrative itself. As Bernard Stiegler points out in "The
Time of
Cinema": "Memory is originarily forgetting because it is necessarily a
reduction of what has occurred to the fact of being past, and
therefore, it is
less than the present." [18]
If the function of memory is to edit a dense informational realm of
perception into a coherent stream of significance, memory is functional
insofar as we can forget. Film attempts to accomplish this experience
in
advance of perception, editing, focusing, and streamlining information
in the service of narrative while "forgetting" the static and noise
that would
confound its coherence. A Scanner Darkly takes this
streamlining process a step further, replacing the "live" actors with
animations. Viewed in
light of Foucault's notion of "governmentality," these stories
dramatize subjects who arrange themselves around power. Teetering at
the edge of the
void, scrambling to find meaning, the subject submits to the
disciplinary system in which he or she makes sense.
The protagonists of these "ontoteleological" genres, then, are
only doing what all characters have been told to do. They have been
scripted such
that they come to develop personalities free from histories, free from
an interiority or an essence, but also remarkably free of their own
autonomy.
This conceit -- that the narrative is self-consciously unreal -- has
been with us at least since the time of Shakespeare (and perhaps
throughout human
history), but what differs is that now it has become a stable and
compelling subject of narrative itself. It has long been understood
that
postmodernity is tied closely to the experiences and lessons of mass
mediated representations, but in films such as A Scanner Darkly, we
discover that this solipsistic realm of experience has congealed into the terra firma of postmodern truth.
Notes
[1] This trend makes Mary Shelley's Frankenstein
all the more interesting: A being formed
outside of the human biological process, assembled from multiple
bodies, striving to form himself in accordance with the perceived norms
and values of
his society.
[2] Jeffrey L. Sammons, "The Bildungsroman for Nonspecialists: An Attempt at a Clarification," in James
N. Hardin, ed., Reflection and Action: Essays on the Bildungsroman, Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1991, 26-45, p. 28.
[3] Fritz Martini, "Bildungsroman -- Term and Theory," in James N. Hardin, ed., Reflection and
Action: Essays on the Bildungsroman, Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1991, 1-25, p. 5.
[4] James N Hardin, "An Introduction," in James N. Hardin, ed., Reflection and Action: Essays on the
Bildungsroman, Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1991, ix-xxvii, pp. xi-xii.
[5] Sammons, p. 42.
[6] Ibid., p. 41.
[7] This section is a divergent interpretation of texts presented in my book, A Small World: Smart Houses and the Dream of the Perfect Day, Durham: Duke University Press, 2008.
[8] David Banash, "From an American Family to the Jennicam Realism and the Promise of TV," Bad
Subjects 57 (October 2001): n.pag. 16 March 2004 https://eserver.org/bs/57/Banash.html.
Accessed April 3, 2008.
[9] Ibid.
[10] Christopher Rocchio, "USA to debut new 'Dr. Steve-O' reality makeover series on October 1," Reality television World, 21 June 2007, https://www.realitytvworld.com/news/usa-debut-new-dr-steve-o-reality-makeover-series-on-october-1-5396.php. Accessed April 3, 2008.
[11] Michel Foucault, "Technologies of the Self," Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel
Foucault, Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988, 16-49, p. 19.
[12] Nikolas Rose, Governing the Soul: The Shaping of the Private Self, New York: Free
Association Books, 1999, p. xxiii.
[13] Nate Burgos, "Memento, Memory, and Montage," CTheory, 27 November 2001, www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=321. Accessed April 3, 2008.
[14] Martin Hall, "Time and the Fragmented Subject in Minority Report," Rhizomes 8
(Spring 2004), https://www.rhizomes.net/issue8/hall.htm, par. 8. Accessed April 3, 2008.
[15] For a more complete discussion of the "surveillant assemblage" and Minority Report, see
Samuel Nunn, "Tell Us What's Going to Happen," CTheory, 12 September 2006, www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=518. Accessed April 3, 2008.
[16] Scott Bukatman, Terminal Identity: The Virtual Subject in Post-Modern Science Fiction.
Durham: Duke University Press, 1993, p. 329.
[17]
Ultimately, I think these tales are about the expression of a larger,
incorporated subjectivity
which dwarfs the individual. They tell the story of the emerging
character of a system that increasingly interprets subjectivity through
the external
assessment of personality via pattern recognition, data-mining, and
demographics research and presumes to meet desires and needs through an
ever-evolving matrix of lifestyle norms.
[18] Bernard Stiegler, "The Time of Cinema: On the 'New World' and 'Cultural Exception,'"
Tekhnema 4 (Spring 1998): 66-112, p. 84.
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------------------------
Davin Heckman is an Assistant Professor of English at Siena Heights University in Adrian, Michigan. He is the author of A
Small World: Smart Houses and the Dream of the Perfect Day (Duke University Press, 2008).
Unraveling Identity
Watching the Posthuman Bildungsroman
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