Proposal
1
The
Death Drive and Science Fiction: Death Race 2000 and
"Beyond the Pleasure Principle"
In
his Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (1823),
Jeremy Bentham writes that "Nature has placed mankind under the governance
of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure. It is for them alone
to point out what we ought to do, as well as to determine what we
shall do. On the one hand the standard of right and wrong, on the
other the chain of causes and effects, are fastened to their throne.
They govern us in all we do, in all we say, in all we think: every
effort we can make to throw off our subjection, will serve but to
demonstrate and confirm it."
Yet
nearly one hundred years later, Sigmund Freud does succeed in, if
not "throwing off," then at least questioning, "our subjection" to
the balanced economy of pleasure and pain that Bentham proposes. In
his "Beyond the Pleasure Principle" Freud probes the pleasure principle
for flaws and finds that, in addition to a simple equation that works
to balance out portions of pleasure and pain, there is another force
at work in the psychical apparatus, one which strives towards displeasure,
pain, and, indeed, its own oblivion. Freud dubs this impulse the "death
drive."
The
death drive works against the utilitarian economy of the psychical
apparatus. Rather than hoarding an endless series of pleasurable moments,
the death drive works subversively and silently, in order to subvert
pleasure's provenance. Yet, although it is clear that the notion of
the pleasure principle and the death drive are at odds with one another,
it paradoxically seems possible that the two systems of mental economy
do not operate independently of each other, and, in fact, need each
other for proper functioning.
Science
fiction films such as Paul Bartel's Death Race 2000 demonstrate
the symbiotic tension between the balance-of-pleasure economy that
utilitarian philosophy suggests and the death drive (in Death Race
2000 the death drive is a literal drive of death, and I make the
comparison to Freud's text shamelessly--without subtlety) that Freud
introduces in "Beyond the Pleasure Principle." This project, then,
is an attempt to examine the tension in Bartel's pulp classic in order
to reveal how these opposing philosophies interact with each other
and to see to what extent science fiction, itself, embraces the death
drive in favor--and at the expense of--utilitarian doctrines.
Proposal
2
0467839:
Imagining Memory in Neuromancer
In
William Gibson's Neuromancer, the memory of the legendary cyberspace
cowboy Dixie Flatline is stored as file number 0467839 in the basement
library of the Sense/Net archives. In Mona Lisa Overdrive,
the memories of fallen Yakuza leaders are accessed by a living Yakuza
oyabun and stored in the form of "black lacquered cubes arranged along
a low shelf of pine" 137. And in Gibson's Idoru, information
specialist Colin Laney surfs through endless data fields, searching
for "signature patterns" in order to track down the elusive rock star
bride Rei Toei.
In
all three texts, memory is codified and filed according to various
idiosyncrasies of technological advancement and becomes divorced from
organic/bodily experience. Yet because of the implied digital
nature of the proposed technology, such memory devices problematize
the key principle of underpinning modern archivization, namely, the
principle of provenance.
In
his essay "Principles of Archival Arrangement," Ernst Posner writes:
The content of individual documents that are the product of activity
can be fully understood only in context with other documents that
relate to the same activity…A collection of manuscripts…
is more than "the sum of its parts," so that the mathematical formula
"the whole is equal to the sum of its parts," known to every schoolboy,
does not apply. (92-93).
Yet
how is the principle of provenance upheld when the archive or series
in question is, itself, modular? The digitized object exists
as the sum of its individual parts, disrupting the principle of provenance's
reverence for context, yet at the same time paradoxically maintaining
the archived item's original order. The question of provenance
in terms of digital archivization becomes an interesting one, not
only in terms of Gibson's science fiction, but also in terms of the
way we perceive and attempt to imagine memory and access information.
By
treating Gibson's fictional constructs (e.g. the Dixie Flatline and
the black lacquered memory cubes) as metaphors for information retrieval
and memory, it might be possible to gain insight into real-world retrieval
systems, such as those systems that monitor the steady pulse of information
that moves through the electro-phonic threads of the World Wide Web.
Proposal
3
Retinal
Scans, Interrogation Rooms, and the Gom Jabbar: The Turing Test and
Passing for Human in American Science Fiction
Blade
Runner, I, Robot, Dune