Tetsuo gets that machines are sexy. Or,
rather, that technic-productive forces occur within the greater context of the
libidinal economy, the vast interconnected membrane of desiring-production that
drives existence forward; The Will to Power, id, libido, taken as a macro-whole
which includes all productive activity.
*
For a brief
summary, I suggest consulting everyone’s favourite consensus reality generator, although it isn’t a long
film if you want to watch it first (doubleplus NSFW).
I will assume that the reader has a cursory knowledge of the film, at least.
Tetsuo breaks down all of the barriers
between the organic and the mechanic. The Salaryman first notes his
transformation when he comes across a shard of metal growing out of his cheek,
while the Metal Fetishist drives a piece of metal into his leg. The entire
course of the film is the Salaryman’s transformation into the Iron Man, the
re-rendering of his flesh into metal, but metal that behaves like something
living. The metallic sounds that replace the noise of eating when he feeds his
girlfriend, the sodomy nightmare, the phallic drill- the metal is almost parodying the organic, demonstrating its
absurdities and limitations. The technological infiltrates the ‘ordinary’ human
world, stripping away the cultural edifice, reducing it all down to mere
libidinal drive, to mere process
without direction.
Like I
said, the film gets the sexual
element of technic-production. The way the camera plays over the body of the
car at the beginning of the film in a quasi-pornographic manner, taking in its
lines and curves. The entire sequence of events of the film begins with a bizarre
masturbatory act with the Metal Fetishist penetrating the self-inflicted wound
in his leg with a rusty rod of iron; following on from this, there is the
illicit sexual encounter between the Salaryman and his girlfriend after they’ve
run over and left for dead the Fetishist. It is the illicitness of these sexual
acts that bring about the occurrences of the film, almost as if the breaching
of the traditional structure of sexuality and production allows the true face
of desiring-production to come to the fore in a revelatory manner. That is, the
initial (and initiatory) upsetting of the accepted order of the libidinal economy
allows for the techno-erotic heart of said order to be displayed to us as it
really is.
Oddest of
all is that the Salaryman accepts
this new way of being. Of course, for much of the initial stages of his
transformation, he reacts with perfectly understandable horror as his body
mutates of its own volition into something completely other; this being said,
he does not lose control over his body, for what control did he ever have over
it? He is, rather, forced to accept his lack of control over his body, that the
process now occurring is beyond anything he could ever resist or influence. All
he can do, and does do, is accept it and move along with the transformation. Using
the old Hermetic dictum of ‘As Above, So Below’ (that is, the microcosm is a
reflection of the macrocosm), and taking the Salaryman to be the microcosm of
the order of desiring-production at large, the conclusions are disturbing. We,
as components of the mechanisms of the desiring-machines, cannot resist the process
as we are a part of that process (though this does not, necessarily, discount
the possibility of Exit, if such an Exit is total enough). I’ve quoted Nick
Land on this before, but it’s a good enough quote to warrant its partial
repetition: ‘Machinic desire can seem a little inhuman, as it rips up
political cultures, deletes traditions, dissolves subjectivities, and hacks
through security apparatuses, tracking a soulless tropism to zero control.’
Consider
the films conclusion, in which the Salaryman and Fetishist have embraced and
become one, transforming into (I’m assuming this scene is meant to be comical)
a gigantic bio-mechanoid phallus, and then setting out to turn the whole world
into metal. After the merging has occurred, this line is said: ‘Our love can
destroy this whole fucking world!’ Is this…a positive message? A happy ending? The two main characters, after
all of the horror and trauma, have accepted their new way of being and now seek
to rip apart the world, mutating it into metal, rust and then finally dust. This
is suggestive, I feel, of the possibilities that technology, in all its dynamism
and innovation, can offer: everything can change. Everything. The forces of
production cannot be successfully limited, they will continue to operate, to
self-improve, to increase efficiency, and like it or not, we (or, most of us at
any rate), are going to have to move with it. Ladies and gentlemen, it’s a
weird journey up ahead…
Hope we're not just the biological boot loader for digital superintelligence. Unfortunately, that is increasingly probable
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 3, 2014
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