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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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.

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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

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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

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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

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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).

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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.

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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

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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

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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

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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,

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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

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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

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(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

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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

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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).

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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).

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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

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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:

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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.

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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

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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,

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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

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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.

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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

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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

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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.

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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,

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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?

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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.

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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.

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