Post on 27-Mar-2023
Tolerances of the Face in Crash Impacts: Sci-Fi,
Porn, and Human Testing by Ando Arike (2002)
The world was beginning to flower into wounds.
— J.G. Ballard
It has often been observed that the post-WWII flood of
Japanese science-fiction films involving the apocalyptic
destruction of cities — Godzilla and the like — can be seen as a
rather transparent displacement of culpability for the war’s man-
made holocausts: a pop-culture attempt to deal with a collective
terror, guilt, and loss so extreme as to require supernatural
explanation. Might the contemporary American fascination with
alien invasion represent a similar strategy of displacement? A
way of emotionally managing, short of direct confrontation, the
encounter with a regime of technological development which seems
to exceed comprehension on any human or earthly scale of measure?
For more than two generations now, from the panic during the
1938 radio broadcast of H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds, to the rash
of U.F.O. sightings in the 1950s, to the more recent reports of
cattle mutilation and alien abduction, the extra-terrestrial
threat has been a durable and significant feature of the mass
media and vernacular imagination. Most interestingly, it has
Tolerances of the Face / Ando Arike
also provided a rich source of paranoid sexual fantasy. I am
thinking in particular of the widespread accounts of human
testing and medical examination said to take place aboard the
alien "motherships," which in many cases seem a form of S&M
pornography — sci-fi reworkings of de Sade and The Story of O —
viz., the infamous genital and anal "probes." Like so many
earlier alien Others in American history, the figure of the
extra-terrestrial seems to mine an abundant vein of erotic fear
and fascination in the collective subconscious — identified by
Arthur Kroker as a mood of "panic sex" and rampant anxiety about
"body invaders" (1986, 22-25) — and as an expression of the more
visionary sectors of the cultural imagination, can be seen to
dramatize a host of paranoias surrounding individuality, personal
privacy, and the integrity of the body. Consider, for example,
the following summary of the seventy-five cases investigated by
John E. Mack, M.D., "the Pulitzer Prize-winning Harvard
psychiatrist on the front lines of abductee research":
The abductee is usually undressed and is forced naked, or wearing only a single garment such as a T-shirt, onto a body-fitting table where most of the procedures occur...The beings seem to study their captives endlessly, staring at them extensively, often with the large eyes close up to the humans’ heads. The abductees may feel as if the contents of their minds have been totally known, even, in a sense, taken over...Instruments are used to penetrate virtually every part of the abductees’ bodies...Extensive surgical-like procedures done inside the head have beendescribed, which abductees feel may alter their nervous
2
Tolerances of the Face / Ando Arike
systems. The most common, and evidently most importantprocedures, involve the reproductive system. Instruments that penetrate the abdomen or involve the genital organs themselves are used to take sperm samples from the men and to remove or fertilize eggs ofthe female...Abductees frequently experience that some sort of homing device has been inserted in their bodies...so that the aliens can track and monitor them (1994, 34-38).
Where else can one find such an exhaustive enumeration of
contemporary misgivings about surveillance, genetic engineering,
sexual identity, psychological manipulation, and the practices of
modern medicine? Where else such a comprehensive vehicle for
fears that might otherwise remain nameless and unspoken?
As is well-known, abductees generally require therapeutic
intervention in order to recall the details of their traumas,
ranging from hypnosis to the support of self-help groups; thus,
abduction may be a vastly under-recognized and under-reported
phenomenon: who knows how many have been similarly victimized?
The data from a 1991 Roper poll of 5,947 Americans led its
authors to claim that some 3.7 million were "probable abductees,"
a figure which, by one reckoning, would mean that for the past
thirty years some three hundred people have been kidnapped by
aliens every day (Frazier 1997, 207). What sort of invasion do
these figures point to?
David Porush writes of techno-paranoia as "a sort of
epistemology gone wild," suggesting that "the signal event in the
paranoid’s career is his exteriorization of some internal
3
Tolerances of the Face / Ando Arike
apocalypse, some moment in which the inner cataclysm that
threatens his identity is projected onto the world" (1985, 107).
But it seems equally the case today that the world projects its
epistemological cataclysms onto the individual; and if the body
has always been a battleground for power, both in reality and
representation, the skirmish lines now are drawn everywhere in
extremes, from the macro-social maneuvers of electronic mass
psychology to the microbiological logistics of genetic
engineering. McLuhan’s "exteriorization of the central nervous
system" in the mass media has been accompanied by a more general
exteriorization of the body across the airwaves and other
communications channels: the "body electric" on lurid display in
a phantasmagoric shopping mall where the erotic products of
Hollywood and Madison Avenue circulate promiscuously among more
gruesome images of violent death and atrocity. The aggressive
exploitation of sexuality by the marketing industry seems caught
in an ever-escalating round of taboo-breaking, and its underside
is the carnivalesque sado-masochism of countless slasher movies
and their real-life counterparts. We are witnesses, as never
before, to a public anatomization of bodily desire in all its
polymorphic perversity.
As Mark Dery writes in The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium: American Culture
on the Brink, "There’s a fearful synergy at work these days, in
which the tabloid pathologies produced by our manic media are
sensationalized by those same media — amplified and echoed back
at us in an ever-faster feedback loop" (1999, 36). With so much
4
Tolerances of the Face / Ando Arike
of mainstream culture manifesting itself as a sort of softcore
pornographic cartoon, we might expect the more visionary fringes
to push this mode of expression even further. Indeed, an
obsessive theme in the popular hardcore genres of contemporary
Japanese animation is sexual penetration by cyborg beings,
monstrous extraterrestrials, and robotic penis machines, more
often than not in the form of rape; like the test procedures
reported by the American alien abductees, the Japanese hentai
cartoons put a radically new spin on the late modern notion of
sexual experimentation.
It would seem that, just as psychoanalysis emerged to probe
the dispensation of the libido in the Victorian era, with all the
hysterias and neuroses attendant to its traumas, now the stage is
set for a similar science of extra-human sexuality and its
dysfunctions. Freud was preceded by more than a century of
amateur psychoanalysis in the bourgeois novel; perhaps science
fiction, always in the business of prophecy, is now providing the
prelude to a sexual cybernetics. Indeed, J.G. Ballard, the
science-fiction writer whose Crash (1973) pursues the eros of the
automobile into deeply transgressive territory, has called this
book "the first pornographic novel based on technology."
In his introduction to the 1974 French edition of this
novel, Ballard asks,
Do we see, in the car crash, a sinister portent of a nightmare marriage between sex and technology? Will modern technology provide us with hitherto undreamed-ofmeans for tapping our own psychopathologies? Is this harnessing of our innate perversity conceivably of
5
Tolerances of the Face / Ando Arike
benefit to us? Is there some deviant logic unfolding more powerful than that provided by reason (1984, 98)?
I submit that Ballard’s questions here belong properly to the
field of cybernetics, defined by Norbert Wiener, who coined the
term in the 1940s, as the analysis of control and communication
systems in living organisms and machines. Specifically, these
are questions about feedback, the key concept cybernetics has
introduced into general usage. As our culture increasingly
integrates humans and machines in the articulation of its life-
ways and ethos, do we see a "deviant logic" unfolding in the
circuits between our psyches and machinery, a feedback process
one might consider pathological? We shall return to Ballard
anon.
2. The Pedagogy of Perception
From a broad perspective, the programmatic application of
technoscience to the stimulation of production and consumer
demand has constituted, among other things, a massive research
project into the human sensorimotor apparatus, providing the
engine for much of the economic, technological, and social
development in the 20th century. Nietzsche’s notion of
aesthetics as a kind of "applied physiology" is entirely in
keeping with the spirit of the late 1800s, when empirical
research into the human sensorium became increasingly well-
defined and institutionalized; today, this "applied physiology"
has been fully assimilated to the multi-media consumer
6
Tolerances of the Face / Ando Arike
environment, a thoroughly aestheticized realm where the design
and marketing of household sundries and appliances as well as
Hollywood blockbusters and Pentagon adventures are staged as
well-researched efforts to alter, enhance, simulate, stimulate,
and/or control popular perception.
Apart from the trials of alien abduction, then, the
technological testing of human subjects has also been a common
enough human endeavor in the industrial age — from school, to
workplace, to clinic, to laboratory, to battlefield; as Walter
Benjamin observed more than fifty years ago, such testing is
celebrated in its purest form in spectacles like the modern
Olympics, where the competition between athletes is more or less
secondary to their competition against abstract standards
measured in fractions of seconds and centimeters. Comparing the
Olympic contests to Frederick Taylor’s immensely influential
turn-of-the-century studies of factory workers, where "scientific
management" was sought through stopwatch-timed analysis of each
component of the work process, Benjamin writes: "Nothing is more
typical of the test in its modern form as measuring the human
being against an apparatus" (in Buck-Morss 1993, 326). These
comments are remarkably prescient — today, slow-motion, instant-
replay television and the huge clouds of statistics surrounding
all sports have turned these into a popular, participatory
science where everyone can be an expert in analyzing the athletic
performance of the players.
7
Tolerances of the Face / Ando Arike
In his seminal "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical
Reproduction," Benjamin also notes that testing could similarly
describe the transformed situation of the stage actor in his or
her new role before the camera; not only does the film actor
forgo the aura of physical presence before a live audience, but
the complex technical requirements of the apparatus more or less
govern and define his performance, which can be broken down into
any number discrete shots and filmed in whatever sequence
budgeting and logistics demand. Again making the comparison to
industrial management, Benjamin writes:
The expansion of the field of the testable which mechanical equipment brings about for the actor corresponds to the extraordinary expansion of the fieldof the testable brought about for the individual through economic conditions. Thus, vocational aptitudetests become constantly more important. What matters in these tests are segmental performances of the individual. The film shot and the vocational aptitude test are taken before a committee of experts. The camera director in the studio occupies a place identical with that of the examiner during aptitude tests (1968, 246n).
A similar "expansion of the field of the testable" is
described by Siegfried Giedion in Mechanization Takes Command, his
classic "anonymous history" of mass production’s penetration of
everyday life. Demonstrating that the multiple-exposure
photographic investigations of E.J. Marey and Edweard Muybridge
in the late 1800’s can be seen as predecessors to the scientific
8
Tolerances of the Face / Ando Arike
analysis of the work process, he links these not only to
Frederick Taylor’s time-motion studies, but also those of Frank
Gilbreth, whose Cyclographs recorded the various gestures workers
used in the accomplishment of tasks by way of small lamps
attached to their limbs (1969, 103-5). As Giedion’s account of
this period shows, research into the representation and analysis
of motion was not confined to science and engineering, but was
also a preoccupation of contemporary artists; just as
Impressionism decomposed and explored the perceptual experience
of light, Cubism, Futurism, and Expressionism perform a similar
analysis of kinetic synergies between mechanical and organic
movement. The striding man of Umberto Boccioni’s sculpture
"Unique forms of continuity in space" (1913) is a particularly
apt icon of this culture-wide project.
The work of Marey and Muybridge has, of course, also been
widely seen as the technical forerunners of motion pictures;
Marey’s "chronophotography" of birds in flight and Muybridge’s
famous frame-by-frame studies of the "nude descending a
staircase," of a galloping horse, of athletes running and
jumping, prefigure in a striking way the 24 frames per second of
cinematography. Muybridge’s apparatus consisted of a series of
cameras set at twelve-inch intervals, whose shutters were
released electromechanically as the subject passed by; the
motion-picture camera is, in essence, a miniaturization and
motorization of this process, a translation of sequential
analysis into the rotary motion so basic to early
9
Tolerances of the Face / Ando Arike
industrialization. But beyond the remarkable technical
achievement of producing moving images, what may be most
significant about the development of film is what Paul Virilio
calls a "synergy of eye and motor realized in the camera" (1991,
57), where the instruments for an anthropometrics of the gesture
make their appearance with the need to integrate the body’s
movement with motorized production. Here human and machine begin
to function within a circuit of what is called autocatalytic or
positive feedback, each spurring the other towards a greater
complexity of articulation, each testing the other’s potentials.
By bringing to visibility and consciousness structures of
movement hidden by the narrow scope of normal perception, the
film camera opens these to experimentation, creating avenues for
further development and articulation. As Benjamin notes,
a different nature opens itself to the camera than opens to the naked eye — if only because an unconsciously penetrated space is substituted for a space consciously explored by man....The act of reaching for a lighter or a spoon is a familiar routine, yet we hardly know what really goes on betweenhand and metal, not to mention how this fluctuates withour moods....The camera introduces us to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses (1968, 236)
One can’t help wonder whether human gesture in general hasn’t
been altered by the prevalence of the moving image. To
contemporary eyes, for instance, the stylized gestures of early
film-actors seem somewhat ridiculous, and obviously owe much to
10
Tolerances of the Face / Ando Arike
an outmoded dramaturgy of the stage; today’s film and TV actors
may seem more natural, but perhaps this is more accurately a new
adaptation to the camera. How many women, watching the
successful gestures of, say, Lauren Bacall, could not help but
adjust their own bodily sense to hers? How many men learned how
to hold and smoke their cigarettes through the examples of
Humphrey Bogart or Marlon Brando? How many youths today learn
their repertoire of movement from the gesture and dance made
visible on MTV?
It is through similar mechanisms that film and video have
also helped facilitate a sort of adaptation to the dangerous
velocities of 20th century transportation, educating and testing
audiences with increasingly vivid simulations of acceleration and
speed. If early film audiences were often terrified by the
moving images of careening cars and locomotives, today’s film-
makers are locked in a special-effects arms-race of providing
ever more breathtaking experiences of shock. Here again,
Benjamin is prescient in identifying the influence of
psychological feedback; as he writes in 1936:
The film is that art form that is in keeping with the increased threat to his life which modern man has to face. Man’s need to expose himself to shock effects ishis adjustment to the dangers threatening him. The film corresponds to profound changes in the apperceptive apparatus — changes that are experienced on an individual scale by the man in the street in big-city traffic, on a historical scale by every present-day citizen (1968, 250n).
11
Tolerances of the Face / Ando Arike
The changes in the human "apperceptive apparatus" that Benjamin
notes are today strikingly demonstrated in TV and video, where
the norm has become a rapid-fire editing which approaches the
threshold of conscious perception. With the average household
tuned to the TV for up to 40 hours a week, it seems likely that
this "pedagogy of perception" is having marked effects. One
recent U.S. study, for instance, suggests a link between
childhood "attention-deficit disorder" and the editing style of
contemporary TV and video.
Such organic-machinic synergies have, of course, emerged
throughout history; the stirrup, for instance, turned the horse
into a platform for heavily armored soldiers, transforming the
nature of warfare; the printing press, by facilitating silent
reading and the homogenization of dialects, turned word-sounds,
the product of muscular gesture, into a secondary adjunct to
their visual signification. What characterizes our era, however,
is the proliferation and power of these autocatalytic synergies,
and their programmatic and institutionalized application across
the spectrum of human endeavor. For each facet of the human
sensorium and physiology there is now an associated research
specialty; for each a corresponding set of technologies which can
quantify, represent, replicate, and extend in some manner the
faculty in question. For virtually every human function, mental
or physical, we now have an artificial counterpart, each artifice
catalyzing a metamorphosis of human perception and possibility.
12
Tolerances of the Face / Ando Arike
Like the hypothetical "robot historian" in Manuel De Landa’s
War in the Age of Intelligent Machines, we might begin to write an account
of technological development from a decidedly non- or post- or
even extra-human point-of-view:
While a human historian might try to understand the waypeople assembled clockworks, motors and other physical contraptions, a robot historian would likely place a stronger emphasis on the way these machines affected human evolution. The robot would stress the fact then when clockworks once represented the dominant technology...people imagined the world around them as asimilar system of cogs and wheels...Later, when motors came along, people began to realize that many natural systems behave more like motors: they run on an external reservoir of resources and exploit the labor performed by circulating flows of matter and energy.
The robot historian of course would hardly be bothered by the fact that it was a human who put the first motor together: for the role of humans would be seen as little more than that of industrious insects pollinating an independent species of machine-flowers that simply did not possess its own reproductive organsduring a segment of its evolution (1991, 3).
The pages which follow will examine two areas where De Landa’s
robot historian might identify just such a "motorized"
reproductive strategy at work, where the autocatalytic feedback
between a technology and the people who use it creates a system
which is qualitatively more than the sum of its parts. Such
cybernetic systems confound traditional notions of human agency
and volition, for within the system, imagination and behavior are
channeled by processes more or less beyond individual human
13
Tolerances of the Face / Ando Arike
control or comprehension. We might say that it is the system
which makes the decisions, which thinks — or that, as Gregory
Bateson writes, "the mental characteristics of the system are immanent, not in
some part, but in the system as a whole" (2000 [1972], 316).
Here, subject and object must be understood, not as discrete
and fixed ontological categories, but rather the waxing and
waning of intensities within mobile formations of complex action.
As Suzanne Langer writes, "An organism always does everything it
can do" (1988, 169), discovering by trial-and-error all the
behaviors available to it within the bounds of its environment
and physiological "degrees-of-freedom." If the organism’s
environment includes mechanical prosthetics whose own degrees-of-
freedom are suitably complex, subjectivity and agency will
migrate to those areas of the system where the intensity of
attention is most acute. In the resulting "distributed
cognition," it will be difficult to draw a line between where the
intelligence and behavior of the organism ends and that of the
mechanical prosthesis begins (cf. Hutchins 1995).
Thus, like the "hybrid breeding program" in which so many
alien abductees claim to have been unwilling participants, the
20th century expansion of human testing may be serving decidedly
extrahuman purposes. Through processes of cybernetic self-
organization, the industrial system’s exploration of the
combinatorial possibilities of its elements may be insistently
eluding human oversight. For the paranoid, the larger context of
14
Tolerances of the Face / Ando Arike
my discussion might then be this: What systems are using us to become
realized?
3. The Science of Love
While the Hollywood "casting-couch" may have always served as a
preliminary to the screen test before a camera, a fuller
application of industrial principles to consumer research in
sexuality would not be possible until the advent of an
appropriate test-apparatus. Pornographic film, with its high
production costs and temperamental equipment, was always by
necessity a somewhat exotic cottage industry, confined to
underground distribution or the "art" houses of a few large
metropolises; but with the advent of videotape and the VCR,
moving-picture pornography becomes a home appliance as basic as
TV. And although this technology is but two decades old, its
revolutionary nature is becoming ever more apparent as video,
personal computer, and Internet begin to merge within a single
digitized system. Today, the percentage of Internet traffic
devoted to information of a sexual nature forms the largest
category of consumer usage; what Howard Rheingold has termed
"teledildonics" (1991, 345) might be seen as one of the World
Wide Web’s most significant social functions. It is interesting,
too, that such high-tech equipment has been so quickly put to the
service of such insistently "primitive" urges, and that digital
15
Tolerances of the Face / Ando Arike
cybersex continues to rely on a more ancient employment of the
digits.
But as a research tool, video’s inherent technical
flexibility has allowed for an unprecedented range of
experimentation with content, and an unparalleled democratization
of access. At the production end, multiple camera angles and
extreme close-ups provide a hitherto unimaginable level of
detail; while at the consumption end, stop-action, fast-forward,
and rewind capabilities allow for a degree of analysis that would
have made Marey and Muybridge blush. In this context, Walter
Benjamin’s pre-video comments are revealing:
...the filmed behavior lends itself more readily to analysis because it can be isolated more easily. This circumstance derives its chief importance from its tendency to promote the mutual penetration of art and science. Actually, of a screened behavior item which is neatly brought out in a certain situation, like a muscle of a body, it is difficult to say which is more fascinating, its artistic value or its value for science. To demonstrate the identity of the artistic and scientific uses of photography which were heretofore usually separated will be one of the revolutionary functions of the film (1969, 236).
Although an adequate aesthetics of pornography has yet to
develop, its scientific value, especially in the more hardcore
varieties, has already proven itself an important and enduring
feature. This can be seen on a number of fronts: (1) the
anatomical, which Benjamin alludes to above; (2) the ergonomic,
16
Tolerances of the Face / Ando Arike
which as in our discussion of athletics, measures the
capabilities, stamina, and output of the performers in relation
to the equipment; (3) the psychopathological, which serves to
define a number of the subgenres; and (4) the technological,
which in bondage, discipline, and S&M often provides the
overriding interest. As subspecializations in techno-sexual
research, each of the above areas deserves comment; it will be
helpful in the following to remember that Kama Sutra translates to
"science of love":
1. Although the anatomical data revealed in hardcore pornography
has been standard knowledge to specialists for millennia, for the
average layperson hardcore represents a veritable information
explosion — an oft-heard complaint is that nothing is left to the
imagination. Few popular genres present such a detailed
anatomization of the body, and here we might see one of hardcore
porn’s pedagogic functions: in fact, many videos have been
explicitly marketed as therapeutic self-help tools. Furthermore,
few sources are as data-rich as hardcore pornography in its
analysis of the human body in motion; athletics is a distant
second, and in this, the subjects are generally more or less
clothed, and confined to performing the extremely stylized
actions peculiar to their sport. In pornography, on the other
hand, production demands require continual experiment and
innovation, a constant reworking of the repertory of movement,
through positioning, multiple partners, the addition of
17
Tolerances of the Face / Ando Arike
prosthetic devices, etc., and while the combinatorial
possibilities are perhaps finite, it is doubtful that this limit
has yet been reached.
2. In terms of ergonomics, the hardcore video is unique in the
way it highlights the productive (not to be confused with the
reproductive) dimensions of sexuality: in few other areas is sex
linked so unconditionally and unilaterally with a mass-market
commodity form. In many ways, this frees hardcore to pursue what
might be called "pure science," allowing for research and testing
which might otherwise be impossible — a sort of "speculative"
sexuality, often at the frontiers of knowledge. Thus, the
achievement of extremes of endurance is a major theme of many
videos, and highly productive performers will demonstrate
prodigious multi-tasking ability by engaging many partners and
prostheses simultaneously or in rapid succession. Like the
"operating theater" in surgical science, the pornographic
"laboratory" also has its pedagogical side, where performers
demonstrate for an apprentice audience the latest in practices,
techniques, and equipment; behind such cliches as the male
"money-shot" we may see a crude empiricism in operation.
Finally, while the attainment of a certain orgasmic output is
invariably absolute, there are signs that the desiderata of
multiple and delayed orgasms may be weakening this unilinear plot
structure. Particularly in bondage-discipline-sado-masochism
18
Tolerances of the Face / Ando Arike
(BDSM), research into the area of delay has been extremely
fruitful.
3. Psychopathology, too, while a grey area when it comes to
sexual matters, has been immeasurably enriched by the researches
of hardcore video and, as we have noted, the borderline ‘deviant’
character of many subgenres forms the major portion of their
appeal. In fact, there seems to be a trend towards an increasing
specialization of what were once called "perversions" — as
deviations gain in respectability, some of their original
attractions are inevitably redirected. A visit to the alt.sex
listings of Usenet groups shows the vast human potential for
innovation in this area, and unlike the combinatorial
possibilities of anatomy, those of psychopathology may indeed
approach the infinite.
4. The mutual penetration of sex and technology is self-apparent
in the pornography of BDSM. Here, the equipment and the actors
are more or less interchangeable in function; working in sets
that are hybrids between laboratory and torture chamber,
performer and tool meld in a synthesis of rope, leather, metal,
and latex which often boggles the mind in its intricacy and Rube
Goldberg ingenuity. The wide variety of devices used, resembling
combinations of the instruments of medicine, torture, and animal
husbandry point to the peculiar hybrid role of the submissive
sex-partner as both chattel "slave," interogee, and "experimental
19
Tolerances of the Face / Ando Arike
subject"; in a sort of deviant parody of the "will to truth,"
sexual activity is fused with physical examination,
interrogation, and torture.
Emerging on the heels of the sexual revolution of the 1960s,
the generalized orgy of the ‘70s, and the ‘80s reaction to the
onset of the AIDS epidemic, the electronic Kama Sutra at the
millennium suggests that sexuality has become systematically
institutionalized in a way hitherto unseen in human experience.
In addition to the cornucopia of pornography available in VHS,
DVD, and online digital formats, a proliferation of internet
chat-rooms, on-line dating services and so forth offer consumers
an increasing variety of outlets for sexual experimentation.
In this connection, we might recall Foucault’s History of
Sexuality, Volume I (1990), where he proposes that, rather than the
conventional account of an increasing repression of sex beginning
with the 18th century, culminating in the Victorian era, and only
recently loosening its grip, what these last three centuries have
witnessed has instead been a vast multiplication, articulation,
and extension of sexual discourses. Instead of an era of
censorship ushered in by the bourgeoisie, "Sex," Foucault writes,
was driven out of hiding and constrained to lead a discursive existence. From the singular imperialism that compels everyone to transform his sexuality into aperpetual discourse, to the manifold mechanisms which, in the areas of economy, pedagogy, medicine, and justice, incite, extract, distribute, and
20
Tolerances of the Face / Ando Arike
institutionalize the sexual discourse, an immense verbosity is what our civilization has required and organized (32-33).
And a few pages later, in a further clarification of his thought,
he writes:
What is peculiar to modern societies, in fact, is not that they consigned sex to a shadow existence, but thatthey dedicated themselves to speaking of it ad infinitum,while exploiting it as the secret (35).
What Foucault describes, in effect, is the inauguration of a
culture-wide research program — the discovery of sex as a problem
subject to political, scientific, and pedagogical administration.
But if the initial objectives had been regulatory, to increase
power’s hold over sex through a greater knowledge of its
intricacies, the paradoxical result was to enlarge the entire
field, to saturate the social with a mysterious but essential eros
whose power percolates within every detail of existence. Through
the "interrogation" of sex, writes Foucault,
There was undoubtably an increase in effectiveness and an extension of the domain controlled; but also a sensualization of power and a gain of pleasure...Power operated as a mechanism of attraction; it drew out those peculiarities over which it kept watch. Pleasurespread to the power that harried it; power anchored thepleasure it uncovered (44-45).
21
Tolerances of the Face / Ando Arike
Note here the concepts of cybernetics: loops of control and
feedback, the dynamism of interacting systems, an autocatalytic
circularity in "perpetual spirals of power and pleasure." What
Foucault will claim, ultimately, is that the great discovery of
modern power is life — the biological life of populations under
its jurisdiction — and that one consequence will be the growing
"deployment of sexuality" as a strategic region to be mapped and
managed, a form of "bio-power" to be channeled within the Western
project of industrial modernization. Individuals and populations
might be exploited, indeed, but through methods which would bring
about an increase in productivity rather than its repression.
Sex, as Foucault writes,
was at the pivot of the two axes along which developed the entire political technology of life. On the one hand it was tied to the disciplines of the body: the harnessing, intensification, and distribution of forces, the adjustment and economy of energies. On theother hand, it was applied to the regulation of populations, through all the far-reaching effects of its activity.... Sex was a means of access both to the life of the body and the life of the species (145-146).
From this "deployment of sexuality" emerge the four semi-mythic
figures through which the 19th century’s preoccupations were
channeled and distributed — "four privileged objects of
knowledge, which were also targets and anchorage points for the
ventures of knowledge: the hysterical woman, the masturbating
child, the Malthusian couple, and the perverse adult" (105).
22
Tolerances of the Face / Ando Arike
Operating through these four anchorages was the entire regulatory
apparatus of the politics of sex.
But however persuasive Foucault’s analysis remains, it would
seem that by our time the situation had fundamentally changed;
and while vestiges of this sexual dispensation still remain
operational, for example, in the continuing struggle over
reproduction, in the halting acceptance of homosexuality, and in
the identification and prosecution of pedophiles, have we not
seen a more or less thorough breakdown of its underlying logic, a
dispersal and redirection of its power? If today we were to
search the social landscape for semi-mythic figures like those
which the 19th century invested with so much consequence —
figures around which knowledge could accrete similar "spirals of
power and pleasure" — where indeed would we look? I submit that
we would look to the eroticized machine – the desiring cyborg.
4. The Auto and the Erotic
From a 1923 advertisement for the Playboy roadster:
Somewhere west of Laramie there’s a bronco-busting, steer-roping girl who knows what I’m talking about. She can tell what a sassy pony, that’s a cross between greased lightning and the place where it hits, can do with eleven hundred pounds of steel and action when he’s going high, wide and handsome. The truth is — thePlayboy was built for her (in Flink 1990, 163)
The psychosexual dynamics of the automobile have long been a
more or less explicit theme in Western culture, exploited by
23
Tolerances of the Face / Ando Arike
advertisers, celebrated in popular music, incorporated into
teenage rites of passage, and codified in Hollywood film, but few
have gone as far as J.G. Ballard in exploring the full dimensions
of this extra-human "love affair." In his 1973 Crash (1994) —
called by one reviewer "the Kama Sutra of the car wreck" — the
automobile is not only a site for sexual liaison and a sexually
potent symbol, but an active participant in a generalized orgy,
arousing, mobilizing, and shaping the fantasies of all his
characters — shaping their bodies, too, in the violence of
highway carnage. What remains transgressive about this novel,
some thirty years after its original publication, is the
obsessive intercourse it proposes between human and machine,
whose ultimate expression is the sado-masochistic
interpenetration of flesh and steel in the automobile collision.
Let us look in more detail at this singular and prophetic text.
The narrator of Crash, a producer of TV commercials named by
Ballard after himself, confronts the dimensions of this auto-
erotic relationship early on. Lying in his hospital bed after a
crash in which he has killed a man, James begins to articulate
his growing fascinations. The accident, it seems to him, is the
first real experience he has had in years, this brush with death
waking him from his jaded ennui, opening a novel array of
enticing possibilities. Inscribed in his flesh, his wounds are
portents of initiation and renewal, promises of fulfillment in
future encounters:
24
Tolerances of the Face / Ando Arike
As I looked down at myself I realized that the precise make and model-year of my car could have been reconstructed by an automobile engineer from the pattern of my wounds. The layout of the instrument panel, like the profile of the steering wheel bruised into my chest, was inset on my knees and shinbones. The impact of the second collision between my body and the interior compartment of the car was defined in these wounds, like the contours of a woman’s body remembered in the responding pressure of one’s own skinfor a few hours after a sexual act (28).
Returning home from the hospital, James begins to sense a
growing vitality in the great automotive pageant unfolding around
him, a vitality he can no longer recognize in his friends and
neighbors; he explains that "the human inhabitants of this
technological landscape no longer provided its sharpest pointers,
its keys to the borderzones of identity" (49), which he now finds
in the chromium trim of the automobiles, their radiator grilles,
tailfins, and hood ornaments, the exciting new organs of this
metallic species overrunning the expanding highways around his
apartment block.
Through his accident he has met Vaughan, the "nightmare
angel of the expressways" whose auto-erotic suicide — an
attempted rendezvous with Elizabeth Taylor in head-on collision —
is the thematic center of the novel. One of the first of the
"new-style TV scientists," an expert in computerized techniques
for the control of traffic, Vaughan’s TV career ended with his
own horrific motorcycle accident. Now, his obsessive research
project is the compilation of a voluminous photographic catalogue
25
Tolerances of the Face / Ando Arike
of collisions, victims, and their injuries — a whole new genre of
pornography celebrating the bloody fusion of flesh and machine.
As Vaughan’s sexual charisma draws him into closer orbit, James
begins to understand what the automobile requires of him:
Through Vaughan I discovered the true significance of the automobile crash, the meaning of whiplash injuries and roll-overs, the ecstasies of head-on collisions. Together we visited the Road Research Laboratory twentymiles to the west of London, and watched the calibratedvehicles crashing into the concrete target blocks. Later, in his apartment, Vaughan screened slow-motion films of test collisions ...Sitting in the darkness on the floor cushions, we watched the silent impacts flicker on the wall above our heads. The repeated sequences of crashing cars first calmed and then aroused me (10).
Together they begin haunting the roads around Heathrow Airport,
scanning the police bands for accidents in Vaughan’s Lincoln
Continental, "the same make of vehicle as the open limousine in
which President Kennedy had died." James quickly becomes
Vaughan’s disciple, his assistant, and eventually, his lover:
Vaughan unfolded for me all his obsessions with the mysterious eroticism of wounds: the perverse logic of blood-soaked instrument panels, seat-belts smeared withexcrement, sun-visors lined with brain tissue. For Vaughan each crashed car set off a tremor of excitement, in the complex geometries of a dented fender, in the unexpected variations of crushed radiator grilles, in the grotesque overhang of an instrument panel forced onto a driver’s crotch as if insome calibrated act of machine fellatio. The intimate
26
Tolerances of the Face / Ando Arike
time and space of a single human being had been fossilized forever in this web of chromium knives and frosted glass (12).
In the world of Crash, the automobile and its infrastructure have
consumed the entirety of the physical, the social, and the
psychic landscapes. This constitutes a fundamental mutation in
the ecology of the human species, unprecedented in evolutionary
development, requiring a new form of adaptation, one in which sex
has gained a transformed significance through its conjunction
with the design kinesthetics of the automobile:
Vaughan’s body, with its unsavoury skin and greasy pallor, took on a hard, mutilated beauty within the elaborately signalled landscape of the motorway. The concrete buttresses along the base of the Western Avenue overpass, angular shoulders spaced at fifty-yardintervals, brought together the sections of Vaughan’s scarred physique.
During the many weeks in which I acted as Vaughan’s chauffeur, giving him money to pay the prostitutes and part-time whores who hung about the airport and its hotels, I watched Vaughan explore everybyway of sex and the automobile... With each of these women Vaughan explored a different sex act...almost in response to the road along which we moved, the traffic density, the style of my driving (171-172).
As Ballard has claimed, Crash is indeed a parody of the
stereotypical pornographic novel, with its surfeit of serial sex
acts strewn along a thin plot-line, needing little other
motivation than the proximity of desire. But here, the
technology and its support-apparatus have provided an enlarged
27
Tolerances of the Face / Ando Arike
cathexis for desire, motorizing and mobilizing it to create new
outlets, new enthusiasms, new perversions, uncharted regions of
research into the combinatorial possibilities of sexual coupling.
As Susan Sontag writes:
The universe proposed by the pornographic imagination is a total universe. It has the power to ingest and metamorphose and translate all concerns that are fed into it, reducing everything into the one negotiable currency of the erotic imperative. Thus, the reason why pornography refuses to make fixed distinctions between the sexes or allow any kind of sexual preference or sexual taboo to endure can be explained "structurally"...to multiply the possibilities of exchange (1969, 66).
In the "total universe" of Crash, the erotic imperative is
invested and expressed throughout every detail of automotive
styling, manufacture, and infrastructure, where the bodies of the
characters are symbolically metamorphosed and reflected; in the
process, however, this eroticism is itself transformed and
redistributed, forging startling new linkages with other, more
forbidden impulses. The paranoid vision of an unlimited and
conspiratorial semiosis — a world thickly saturated with codes,
ciphers, and menacing messages — fuses with the pornographic
imagination to multiply sexual exchange across the entire
prosthetic landscape, which has become the matrix for a new
species of being:
I felt the warm vinyl of the seat beside me, and then stroked the damp aisle of Helen’s perineum. Her hand
28
Tolerances of the Face / Ando Arike
pressed against my right testicle. The plastic laminates around me, the color of washed anthracite, were the same tones as her pubic hairs parted at the vestibule of her vulva. The passenger compartment enclosed us like a machine generating from our sexual act an homunculus of blood, semen and engine coolant. My finger moved into Helen’s rectum, feeling the shaft of my penis within her vagina. These slender membranes, like the mucous septum of her nose which I touched with my tongue, were reflected in the glass dials of the instrument panel, the unbroken curve of the windshield (81).
Here, as in all the many sexual encounters in Crash, the Latin
medical terminology blends eroticism with autopsy; each sexual
act is an exercise in forensics, an instant caught in the glare
of the crime-scene photographer’s flash, or luridly lit under the
floodlamps of the dissection room. In Vaughan’s photo-catalogue
of crash injuries, in his continual attempts to reenact the
moment of impact in orgasm, and in his disciples’ growing
indulgence in these obsessions, what Ballard calls "the great
twin leitmotifs of the 20th century — sex and paranoia" (1984,
96) meld in the vocabulary of an "epistemology gone wild," where
the clinical terms of description push the logic of
subject/object toward its outer limits, turning this back upon
itself like the surface of a Mobius strip. Disburdened of any
illusions of organic wholeness, autopsied and open to inspection,
the auto-erotic subject becomes a theater of recombinant data,
self-fascinated by the visceral spectacle of its violent
morphogenesis.
29
Tolerances of the Face / Ando Arike
In an annotation to the 1990 RE/Search edition of his 1970
Atrocity Exhibition, where many of the themes, characters, and
scenarios of Crash had earlier been formulated and rehearsed,
Ballard reveals the source of one of his chapter titles to be a
real-life scientific monograph a friend encountered at her
publishing job: "Tolerances of the Human Face in Crash Impacts"
(1990, 67). Although he shares little information about this
paper, we can readily imagine the grisly sort of analysis it
would undertake: the detailed comparison of injuries caused by
various categories of accident, correlations by make, model,
speed and angle of impact, age of victim, sex, body type, etc. —
the prototype of Vaughan’s compendium of erotic injury. But note
the weird ambiguity in this paper’s curiously objective title,
the strange effect of applying the engineering term "tolerance"
to the human face, the eerie inversion of value performed by the
syntax. It is this inversion which provokes the question lurking
throughout Ballard’s Crash: Who is the dummy in this crash-test?
5. The Road Test
It is statistically predictable that each year in the U.S.
some 40,000 people will die and several hundred-thousands be
seriously injured in auto accidents, the average casualty-rate
for the past half-century. Comparable statistics obtain for all
industrialized countries, and in fact, the per capita toll is
higher in less developed nations where highway infrastructure and
driver training have yet to adjust to demand; worldwide, the
30
Tolerances of the Face / Ando Arike
International Red Cross estimates that as of the 1990s, some
500,000 people are killed and 15 million injured each year in car
accidents. Apart from firearms and military ordnance, no other
technology is implicated in so much violent death and injury; and
it is difficult to imagine that if airplane or train wrecks
killed this many people anyone would continue to fly or ride
trains. To "do the math," the 40,000 yearly American deaths
caused by car accidents is the equivalent of two fully-laden 727s
crashing with no survivors each week; the half-million worldwide
deaths each year is the equivalent of two full jumbo-jets
crashing every day. How have we come to tolerate as normal the
automotive violence in everyday life, and to categorize this
predictable mass carnage as "accidental"? What kind of denial is
at work here?
Consider the concept of "road rage," much in the news in
recent years (Lupton 1999, 57-72). Here, the tendency of people
to become violently irritable when stuck in traffic cannot be
directly blamed on the technology’s tendency to produce traffic
jams, so a new psychopathology is constructed to absorb
responsibility. The murderous emotions of the frustrated driver
can thus be disassociated from the automobile — which, after all,
is only an object — and therapeutically redirected. The social
valorization of the technology requires that it must remain a
morally neutral instrumentality, while at the same time it is
marketed as a cyborg prosthetic under the signs of aggression,
desire, and rebellion. Drivers are urged to be sober,
31
Tolerances of the Face / Ando Arike
responsible, and safety-conscious at the same time they are
encouraged by both automotive engineering and mass media imagery
to attempt daredevil feats behind the wheel; understanding, at
some level, what is expected of them, many speed willingly to the
sacrificial altar.
Whether or not one believes, as Freud did, that the
dialectic between Eros and Death is an instinctual aspect of the
human psyche, "mass motorization" (as the British literature
terms it) has made this dialectic its vehicle and motive power.
Other than the auto, few mass-produced commodities achieve such
ubiquitous linkage to the pleasure zones of so many bodies; few
other commodities are so haunted by violent death. No other
commodity pits human against human in a daily struggle for square
footage and the advantages of speed, size, and position; no other
has been so phenomenally successful in dissimulating the
aggressive egotism inherent in its very operation. In the
industrialized countries of the West, and increasingly elsewhere,
the insistent equation is Auto = Self, an equation now playing
itself out in all the contradictions of mass individualism.
Ballard’s vision of a post-Darwinian "unnatural selection"
at work in the autocultures of late industrial civilization
gathers a certain credence when we consider the increasing depth
of our investment in the automobile and its physical
infrastructure. Worldwide, car production is outstripping
population growth by a ratio of 2.5 to one; between 1960 and 1990
human population grew by approximately 100 percent, while the
32
Tolerances of the Face / Ando Arike
number of automobiles grew by 300 percent. By 2010, the number
of autos on the planet is expected to reach 1.1 billion, that is,
about one car for every seven people. In the U.S., by far the
largest consumer of automobiles, 10 percent of the arable land
and one-half of all urban space is devoted to the automotive
infrastructure; in Los Angeles, where it is estimated that the
average car uses eight parking spaces daily, an astonishing two-
thirds of all land area is devoted to the automobile (Freund &
Martin 1993, 15-19).
For most adult Americans today, to be car-less is to be a
second-class citizen, more or less unemployable and socially
handicapped; in some areas, a person on foot is automatically
considered a criminal suspect. These facts-of-life are
insistently reiterated in all the details of the cultural matrix,
from the lack of sidewalks in so many suburbs, to the incessant
wail of car-alarms in city neighborhoods, to the million-dollar
iconography of the film industry’s high-speed chase scenes. The
economic facts, too, are telling: in 1990, auto sales accounted
for one-fifth of the dollar value of all U.S. retail sales, and
one in seven workers were employed by auto-related industries
(Freund & Martin 1993, 134). Of the top four Fortune 500
companies in 2004, ExxonMobil was 2nd, GM and Ford, 3rd and 4th;
Wal-Mart, the suburban shopping mall behemoth, was number one.
As catalyst for the industrial and economic growth of all
Western societies, the automobile’s role has been unparalleled.
But in the U.S. it has asserted a sort of Manifest Destiny.
33
Tolerances of the Face / Ando Arike
Emerging from WWII as leaders in the global political and
economic order, the American auto and oil industries quickly
demobilized for civilian production. In 1955 the U.S. produced
approximately two-thirds of the entire world output of motor
vehicles (Flink 1990, 278), a global dominance which was the
cornerstone of its postwar prosperity. Thus, in the present
U.S., the production of automobiles has become more or less
synonymous with cultural re-production; and if Ford’s Model-T was
once legendary as a place for the conception of American babies,
to the generations growing up in the decades after WWII,
possession of a drivers’ license has become tantamount to sexual
maturity. Indeed, it could be said that the Department of Motor
Vehicles now presides over our pubertal rites of passage as did
the village elders or shamans of earlier times, mediating our
adolescent sexuality with the same mysterious power. Consider
the scene of the road test: the virginal initiate is brought to
the sacred site by an experienced, licensed driver, often a
parent or older sibling, where he or she will perform a secluded
ritual overseen by a mystical priesthood.
In the primally charged mythology of American Autoculture,
the death-behind-the-wheel of a Hollywood icon like James Dean
can become, then, a sort of visionary martyrdom, not so much a
cautionary symbol but an inspiration, a cathartic attunement of
desire. Ballard is only partly ironic when he observes: "It is
clear that the car crash is...a fertilizing rather than a
destructive experience, a liberation of sexual and machine
34
Tolerances of the Face / Ando Arike
libido... mediating the sexuality of those who have died with an
erotic intensity impossible in any other form" (1990, 99). As he
explains, "Sexual intercourse can no longer be regarded as a
personal isolated activity, but is seen to be a vector in a
public complex involving automobile styling, politics and mass
communications" (94).
Not long ago, the worldwide catharsis attendant upon
Princess Diana’s spectacular auto-martyrdom demonstrated again
the power of this systematic synergy between the camera’s
motorization of the eye and the automobile’s motorization of
desire. Eulogizing Diana in a New Yorker article titled "Crash,"
Salman Rushdie ascribed her death to "a sublimated sexual
assault" by the "long-nosed snouts" of the paparazzi’s phallic
cameras, whose pursuit of her car led to the fatal accident. "To
die just because you don’t want to have your picture taken! What
could be more absurd?" he asks. Ultimately, he finds the
public’s fetishistic attention at blame; "We," Rushdie writes
grimly, "are the lethal voyeurs." And indeed, there was
something darkly obsessive at work in the media’s feeding-frenzy
around the circumstances of Diana’s death, in the way the image
of that wrecked Mercedes was repeated ad infinitum, burning it into
the collective memory.
But it was also difficult not to notice that, alongside the
official shock, mourning, and accusation, the event had catalyzed
a certain festive exhilaration — that, as in the circus-like
atmosphere often accompanying hangings, crucifixions, and other
35
Tolerances of the Face / Ando Arike
rituals of human sacrifice, Diana’s death was not without its
element of fun. From the perspective of Manuel DeLanda’s
hypothetical robot historian, we might see this event as an
archetypal moment in the ongoing project of machinic
fertilization — millions of industrious humans pollinating with
their dreams and delirium a vast cyborg hallucination.
6. Autocalypse?
While exploration at the frontiers of science and
engineering has, no doubt, always required human sacrifice,
throughout history it has typically fallen upon unknown legions
of soldiers, sailors, construction workers, and medical patients
to serve as guinea-pigs for developing technologies. What is
unprecedented in the 20th century is the way a new caste of
technician/test-subjects — race-car drivers, pilots, and
astronauts — will begin to achieve the status of cultural heroes
for pitting their bodies against the intense and often unknown
forces unleashed by our era’s high-powered machinery. Willing to
sacrifice their lives, if need be, in the name of research and
development, these men (and the rare woman) represent a decisive
mutation in our civilization’s ethos, where the new heroes are
those who test their skill and endurance, not against a human
opponent or nature’s elements, but against a machine. To win in
these contests is to achieve a certain fusion with the technology
— to become, in effect, a successful cyborg.
36
Tolerances of the Face / Ando Arike
By the early 1900s, as automotive transport began its rapid
penetration of Western societies, the lineaments of this new
ethos were making themselves clear. As the Italian Futurist and
Fascist F.T. Marinetti proclaimed in 1909:
We say that the world’s magnificence has been enriched by a new beauty; the beauty of speed. A racing car whose hood is adorned with great pipes, like serpents of explosive breath — a roaring car that seems to ride on grapeshot — is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace....We want to hymn the man at the wheel, who hurls the lance of his spirit across the Earth, along the circle of its orbit (1971, 41).
Seven years later at the peak of World War I, in a manifesto
titled "The New Religion-Morality of Speed," he would write, "The
intoxication of great speeds in cars is nothing but the joy of
feeling oneself fused with the only divinity....Forthcoming
destruction of houses and cities, to make way for great meeting
places for cars and planes" (96).
Self-styled spokesman for a techno-cultural modernization
which would cleanse Italy and Europe of "the smelly gangrene of
professors, archaeologists, ciceroni, and antiquarians...the
numberless museums that cover her like so many graveyards"(42),
Marinetti prophecies a century of industrialized warfare rooted
in an aesthetization of the kinetic energy and motive power of
the machine. If Nietzsche’s notion of the aesthetic is an
"applied physiology," for Marinetti this becomes an "applied
physics," apropos a period where technological and scientific
37
Tolerances of the Face / Ando Arike
development has begun to work startling changes in human
perception and sense of possibility:
We stand on the last promontory of the centuries! ...Why should we look back, when what we want is to break down the mysterious doors of the Impossible? Time and Space died yesterday. We alreadylive in the absolute, because we have created eternal, omnipresent speed (41).
Marinetti’s Futurism is a millennialist version of Fordism,
preparing to scourge civilization of its "passéist" habits and
idols; the values of a decadent Romanticism, steeped in
nostalgia, slowness, and the feminine, are to be superseded by
the masculine virtues of speed, aggressiveness, and martial
discipline. Industrialization’s fossil-fuel-fired energies,
gathering for over a century, have engendered a species of phase-
shift in Western cultures; for Marinetti, this shift will
precipitate an apocalyptic cleansing through the cruel and
glorious mechanisms of "war, the world’s only hygiene" (104-108).
As he writes in one of his many paeans to techno-fascist warfare:
War is beautiful because it initiates the dreamt-of metalization of the human body. War is beautiful because it enriches a flowering meadow with the fiery orchids of machine guns. War is beautiful because it combines the gunfire, the cannonades, the cease-fire, the scents, and the stench of putrefaction into a symphony. War is beautiful because it creates a new architecture, like that of the big tanks, the geometrical formation flights, the smoke spirals from burning villages, and many others....Poets and artists of Futurism!...remember these principles of an
38
Tolerances of the Face / Ando Arike
aesthetics of war so that your struggle for a new literature and a new graphic art....may be illumined bythem! (in Benjamin 1969, 241-242)
While we may be repelled by the casual brutality, Marinetti’s
manifestos have the virtue of clarity: the "hygiene" he proposes
for the world is precisely what, time and again during the last
century, industrial modernization has required. Two World Wars
and the lesser conflicts in their wake have thoroughly
institutionalized the aesthetics of mechanized slaughter, and the
divinity of speed — the only divinity — is proclaimed on every
highway.
Today, as the outlines of another global confrontation take
shape amid the oil-fields of the Mid-East, it is instructive to
see how this has been mirrored by the arms-race escalating on
U.S. streets. On April 6, 2003, when the New York Times reported
U.S. tanks rolling into Baghdad, one of the most telling
commentaries on the invasion was the lead piece in its automobile
section, an article titled, "Hummer H2: An Army of One." Sales
of more than 3,000 per month of these 11 mpg, 3-and-a-half ton
behemoths were making this suburbanized facsimile of the military
Humvee Detroit’s hottest S.U.V., and according to the Times, the
patriotism inspired by Operation Iraqi Freedom was largely
responsible — as one California salesman quoted so bluntly put
it, "Nothing screams ‘American’ like driving a Hummer."
Another piece on this theme, titled "In Their Hummers, Right
Beside Uncle Sam," had appeared the previous day on the front
39
Tolerances of the Face / Ando Arike
page of the Times’ business section, and among the patriotic
Hummer owners quoted therein was Rick Schmidt, founder of the
International Hummer Owners Group, otherwise known by the
suggestive acronym I.H.O.G. Schmidt’s philosophical musings on
the Hummer were revealing. "It’s a symbol of all we hold
dearly," said he, "the fact that we have the freedom of choice,
the freedom of happiness, the freedom of adventure and discovery,
and the ultimate freedom of self-expression." For Schmidt, love
of country and love of motor vehicle were inextricably linked.
"Those who deface a Hummer in word or deed," he added, "deface
the American flag and what it stands for" (Hakim 2003a).
The Hummer is, of course, only the most extreme example of
an enlargement which has captured the imagination of American
motorists for more than decade now. Sales of S.U.V.s and so-
called light trucks have been increasing to the point where they
now, at this writing, make up one-half of all private vehicles
sold in the U.S., and despite the growing bad publicity regarding
their safety — in crashes, S.U.V.s and light trucks kill the
occupants of other vehicles at a rate more than triple that of
midsize cars — the trend shows no sign of abating (Hakim 2003b).
Nor does it seem that sales have been slowed by worries about
increasing fuel prices or the mounting evidence of global
warming. Indeed, with more and more large vehicles on the road,
public perceptions around personal safety may be driving sales;
for defensive reasons, if nothing else, it has perhaps become
necessary to drive a 3-ton vehicle. Japan’s recent S.U.V. for
40
Tolerances of the Face / Ando Arike
the American market, the Nissan Armada, is an almost absurdly
frank acknowledgment of the logic of this arms-race, which is by
definition a process of autocatalytic feedback, the constant
escalation of threat and counter-threat.
When the 1973 OPEC oil shocks introduced Americans to the
idea of high gas prices, fuel rationing, and long lines at the
pump, the overwhelming response was to buy smaller cars and
cultivate the idea of conservation as a civic duty. But the ‘70s
disenchantment with Autoculture was short-lived, and who
remembers now the talk about banning cars from metropolitan
areas, or about bicycle paths, or pedestrian malls, car-pooling,
or that broader idea, "appropriate technology"? The very thought
of fuel economy now seems retrograde — who remembers the
competition to produce a 50 mpg car, or when mass-transit was an
enlightened notion?
At present, with only 5 percent of the global population,
the U.S. consumes nearly 26 percent of global oil production.
Many experts now predict that, worldwide, oil production will
peak sometime between 2010 and 2020, with the largest reserves
remaining in the Middle East, where some two-thirds of the
planet’s conventional oil deposits are thought to lie (Rifkin
2002, 31-33). With its invasion of Iraq, the current U.S.
administration has made clear its intention to control Mid-East
oil; in its car-buying habits, if nowhere else, the American
public has implicitly seconded that intention. But what will
happen as reserves are depleted elsewhere, and Russia, China,
41
Tolerances of the Face / Ando Arike
Japan, or the European Union feel the need to challenge that
control? What kind of systems will then use us to become
realized? Who will be the dummies in this crash test?
Works Cited
Ballard, J.G. 1973. Crash. NY: Noonday.
-------. 1984. J.G. Ballard. Ed. V. Vale and Andrea Juno. San
Francisco: V/Search Publications.
-------. 1990. The Atrocity Exhibition. San Francisco: Re/Search
Publications.
Bateson, Gregory. 2000. Steps to an Ecology of Mind. Chicago:
Chicago UP.
Benjamin, Walter. 1969. Illuminations. NY: Shocken.
Buck-Morss, Susan. 1991. The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the
Arcades Project. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Dery, Mark. 1999. The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium: American Culture on the
Brink. NY: Grove Press.
42
Tolerances of the Face / Ando Arike
DeLanda, Manuel. 1991. War in the Age of Intelligent Machines. NY: Zone
Books.
Flink, James J. 1990. The Automobile Age. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press.
Foucault, Michel. 1990. The History of Sexuality: Volume I. Trans.
Robert Hurley. NY: Vintage.
Frazier, Kendrick. 1997. The UFO Invasion: The Roswell Incident, Alien
Abduction, and Government Coverups.
Freund, Peter and George Martin. 1993. The Ecology of the Automobile.
NY: Black Rose Books.
Giedion, Sigfried. 1969. Mechanization Takes Command: A Contribution to
Anonymous History. NY: Norton.
Hakim, Danny. 2003a. "In Their Hummers, Right Beside Uncle
Sam." New York Times. 5 Apr. 2003: C1.
-------. 2003b. "Big and Fancy, More Pickups Displace Cars."
New York Times. 31 Jul. 2003: 1.
Hayles, N. Katherine. 1999. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in
Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Chicago UP.
43
Tolerances of the Face / Ando Arike
Hutchins, Edwin. 1995. Cognition in the Wild. Cambridge: MIT
Press.
Kroker, Arthur and David Cook. 1986. The Postmodern Scene:
Excremental Culture and Hyper-Aesthetics. NY: St. Martin’s.
Langer, Suzanne K. 1988. Mind: An Essay on Human Feeling. Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins UP.
Lupton, Deborah. 1999. "Monsters in Metal Cocoons: ‘Road Rage’
and Cyborg Bodies." Body & Society. Vol. 5(1): 57-72.
London: Sage Publications.
Mack, John E. 1994. Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens. New
York: Scribner’s.
Marinetti, F.T. 1971. Marinetti: Selected Writings. Ed. R.W. Flint.
Trans. Flint and Arthur A. Coppotelli. NY: Farrar, Straus,
and Giroux.
Porush, David. 1985. The Soft Machine: Cybernetic Fiction. New York:
Methuen.
Rheingold, Howard. 1991. Virtual Reality. NY: Touchstone.
44