Quote of the Month, no. 2

At the close of E.T.A. Hoffmann's "The Sandman" (the bedtime story Freud incorporated within his essay on "The Uncanny" at great wavelength) the gadget-happy protagonist Nathanael still sees Klara, his humanoid bride-to-be, and not the automaton Olympia when he gives the other the look through his I-spy glass. At this tele-point he faces a crisis in the category of the beautiful and reproduction that sends him sky diving down the sublime route - of suicide. Once the relationship with Klara comes to a screechy halt before the contradiction that pops up between the mirroring "clarity" she was holding up to Nathanael and against the parental guidance she represents when she "speaks against" (contra-dictio) what she name-calls the "phantom" of Nathanael's "own ego", Olympia emerges, emergency style, as the new and improved other, in place of the one that was lost. Why does the woman's body get technologized? Her body, which is at the same time (that is, the first time) the mother's body, is both the only body around and the body that's off limits. It marks the spot of separation or contradiction that works the inside of the relationship to one's body. It is technologized because reproduction, which keeps the separation going as the good news of future generations coming soon, is not what the ego getting into machines of replication is into.

Somewhere over the transference, between psychoanalysis, which doubles as science of media and haunting, and such Faustian fantasies as "The Sandman", Frankenstein, Eve future, and Metropolis, there's a genre of science fiction which I propose naming or respelling "psy fi". Jeff Koons's marriage to his own media-monumentalization is a New Age arrival or survival of this genre and engendering. The spectacle, testimony, or testicle he makes of himself cannot leave out the built-up union with Bride of Koons, La Cicciolina. It figures the psy-fi impulse as the turn to the robotic blow-up dolly through which the wound of separation or contradiction gets remetabolized as the miracle of merger with technology. This covers the context or contest of reproduction versus replication, the fundamental meta-psychological plot underlying the at-once science fiction or psychotic - or psy fi - impulse. Here the erogenous zonesof technology and psychic apparatus no longer turn on to a reproductive distinction between the sexes or sex orientations. Koons: "And narcissism - I mean, I have placed myself in a heterosexual context here - also is on display here." The psy-fi impulse, which pressures towards re-fusing separation through merger with technology across the outer limits of intra-psychic space, represents an alternative plan for the future, one that is not only patented or parented along reproductive lines or in interpersonal columns.

But while humankind beams up into merger with the techno-apparatus, there's another body of separation around, dead or alive, that keeps us close to the traumatic opening of the take-off of flights of science fantasy. Already in the Faustian era of psy fi the miraculous non-contradiction of the machine-being can't help but turn the corporeal lover into a leftover appendage tagged for evolutionary extinction. What follows (like clockwork) in these eraly stories of man's falling in love or self-love with robot woman is destruction of the machine and the gadget lover's suicide. The merger didn't go through. The destroyed apparatus was his better half, and suicide follows as the down side or slide of replication and autotechnologization.

from "the art of psy fi", Narcissistic Disturbance, LA: Otis Gallery 1995, 16-25, here: 16)

Last month's quote was: Cargo Cult