Deleuze and Baudrillard: From Cyberpunk to Biopunk

289 Pages·2016·4.604 MB·English

by  Sean McQueen

Deleuze and Baudrillard
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Plateaus – New Directions in Deleuze Studies
‘It’s not a matter of bringing all sorts of things together under a single concept but
rather of relating each concept to variables that explain its mutations.’
Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations
Series Editors
Ian Buchanan, University of Wollongong
Claire Colebrook, Penn State University
Editorial Advisory Board
Keith Ansell Pearson
Ronald Bogue
Constantin V. Boundas
Rosi Braidotti
Eugene Holland
Gregg Lambert
Dorothea Olkowski
Paul Patton
Daniel Smith
James Williams
Titles Available in the Series
Christian Kerslake, Immanence and the Vertigo of Philosophy: From Kant to Deleuze
Jean-Clet Martin, Variations: The Philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, translated by
Constantin V. Boundas and Susan Dyrkton
Simone Bignall, Postcolonial Agency: Critique and Constructivism
Miguel de Beistegui, Immanence – Deleuze and Philosophy
Jean-Jacques Lecercle, Badiou and Deleuze Read Literature
Ronald Bogue, Deleuzian Fabulation and the Scars of History
Sean Bowden, The Priority of Events: Deleuze’s Logic of Sense
Craig Lundy, History and Becoming: Deleuze’s Philosophy of Creativity
Aidan Tynan, Deleuze’s Literary Clinic: Criticism and the Politics of Symptoms
Thomas Nail, Returning to Revolution: Deleuze, Guattari and Zapatismo
François Zourabichvili, Deleuze: A Philosophy of the Event with The Vocabulary of
Deleuze, edited by Gregg Lambert and Daniel W. Smith, translated by Kieran Aarons
Frida Beckman, Between Desire and Pleasure: A Deleuzian Theory of Sexuality
Nadine Boljkovac, Untimely Affects: Gilles Deleuze and an Ethics of Cinema
Daniela Voss, Conditions of Thought: Deleuze and Transcendental Ideas
Daniel Barber, Deleuze and the Naming of God: Post-Secularism and the Future of
Immanence
F.LeRon Shults, Iconoclastic Theology: Gilles Deleuze and the Secretion of Atheism
Janae Sholtz, The Invention of a People: Heidegger and Deleuze on Art and the Political
Marco Altamirano, Time, Technology and Environment: An Essay on the Philosophy
of Nature
Sean McQueen, Deleuze and Baudrillard: From Cyberpunk to Biopunk
Forthcoming Volumes
Marc Rölli, Gilles Deleuze’s Transcendental Empiricism: From Tradition to Difference,
translated by Peter Hertz-Ohmes
Ridvan Askin, Differential Narratology
Cheri Carr, Deleuze’s Kantian Ethos: Critique as a Way of Life
Guillaume Collett, The Psychoanalysis of Sense: Deleuze and the Lacanian School
Visit the Plateaus website at www.edinburghuniversitypress.com/series/plat
McQUEEN 9781474414371 PRINT.indd 2 28/04/2016 12:24
DELEUZE AND BAUDRILLARD
From Cyberpunk to Biopunk
2
Sean McQueen
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Edinburgh University Press is one of the leading university presses in the UK. We publish
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© Sean McQueen, 2016
Edinburgh University Press Ltd
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in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, and the Copyright and
Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498).
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Contents
List of Figures vi
Acknowledgements vii
List of Abbreviations viii
Introduction 1
Control
1 Viddy and Slooshy 31
2 Chronic S(t)imulation 53
3 Seducing-Machines 72
4 Remote-Control Society 102
Contagion
5 Biocapitalism and Schizophrenia 133
6 Matter in Revolt 158
7 Durable Consumers 173
8 Organic (De)Composition of Biocapital 196
9 Viral Capitalism 216
Coda 241
References 247
Index 270
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Figures
Figure 1.1 Stanley Kubrick, A Clockwork Orange, 1971 42
Figure 1.2 Stanley Kubrick, A Clockwork Orange, 1971 42
Figure 1.3 Stanley Kubrick, A Clockwork Orange, 1971 43
Figure 1.4 Stanley Kubrick, A Clockwork Orange, 1971 43
Figure 5.1 Francis Bacon, Three Studies for Portrait of
Lucian Freud, 1964 142
Figure 5.2 Patricia Piccinini, Protein Lattice – Subset Red,
Portrait, 1997 149
Figure 9.1 Brandon Cronenberg, Antiviral, 2012 224
Figure 9.2 Brandon Cronenberg, Antiviral, 2012 225
Figure 9.3 Richard Lindner, Boy with Machine, 1954 226
Figure 9.4 Brandon Cronenberg, Antiviral, 2012 234
vi
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Acknowledgements
This book began its life as a doctoral dissertation. Books and disser-
tations are different animals, and acknowledgement is, above all, due
to Andrew Milner, without whose generous supervision and mentor-
ing both would have been impossible. I owe my sincerest thanks to
Claire Perkins and Alison Ross. This book bears the impress of their
wisdom and care. For their assistance and interest in this project,
I warmly thank Ian Buchanan, Claire Colebrook, Steven Shaviro,
Cathy Falconer and Carol MacDonald.
For their sufferance, personal support, professional stimulation
and friendship I owe debts of gratitude to Sam Bateman, Lauren
Bertacchini, Nick Karamanos, Rob Letizi, Janice Loreck, Deirdre
McQueen, Lee McQueen, Michael McQueen and Luke van Ryn. I
am indebted, too, to my father, Richard McQueen, from whom I
inherited both my love of science fiction and the selected works of
Marx and Engels.
Parts of this book have been published previously in different
forms. A version of Chapter 1 appeared in Science Fiction Film
and Television (5:2) as ‘Adapting to Language: Anthony Burgess’s
and Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange’. An abbreviated
version of Chapter 5 was published in Science Fiction Studies (41:1)
as ‘Biocapitalism and Schizophrenia: Rethinking the Frankenstein
Barrier’. A version of Chapter 9 appeared in Science Fiction Film
and Television (8:1) entitled ‘Antiviral: Capitalism of the Fourth
Kind’. Chapters 3 and 4 share their titles with and began their lives
in International Journal of Baudrillard Studies, although they now
bear no resemblance to ‘Seducing-Machines: Baudrillard, Deleuze,
and Crash’ (10:1) and ‘Remote-Control Society: Baudrillard and
Inversive Utopia’ (11:1). I am grateful for the editorial labour of
Mark Bould, Gerry Coulter and, especially, Sherryl Vint, all of whom
steered these articles from peer review through to publication.
Preparation of this book was partially funded by a Monash
University Postgraduate Publication Award.
vii
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Abbreviations
Works by Jean Baudrillard
A America
CS The Consumer Society: Myths and Structures
FF Forget Foucault
FS Fatal Strategies
MP The Mirror of Production
PES For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign
S Seduction
SED Symbolic Exchange and Death
SS Simulacra and Simulation
TE The Transparency of Evil: Essays on Extreme Phenomena
Works by Gilles Deleuze
DR Difference and Repetition
FB Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation
LS The Logic of Sense
N Negotiations: 1972–1990
PSC ‘Postscript on the Societies of Control’
TI Cinema 2: The Time-Image
Works by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari
AO Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia
K Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature
TP A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia
Works by Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet
D Dialogues
viii
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Introduction
This book will be an attempt at a cognitive mapping of the transi-
tion from late capitalism to biocapitalism.1 It is a Marxian critique
of science fiction, capitalism, psychoanalysis; an interdisciplinary
work that aims to go to the heart of new currents in critical thought,
science, technology, literature and cinema. It will do so by examining
two science fiction subgenres, the established subgenre of cyberpunk
and the emerging subgenre of biopunk.
Science fiction is a critical perspective from which to critique
the mutations of capitalism. Mark Bould writes that science fiction
distinguishes itself from other genres by offering a ‘snapshot of
the structures of capital’ (2009: 4). Here, Bould follows Darko
Suvin’s extraordinarily influential Metamorphoses of Science Fiction
(1979) and Carl Freedman’s Critical Theory and Science Fiction
(2000), both of which argue for the necessity of a dialectic between
estrangement and cognition, without which the text qualifies neither
as science fiction nor as Marxian. As Freedman summarises it,
estrangement ‘refers to the creation of an alternative fictional world
that [. . .] performs an estranging critical interrogation [. . .] The
critical character of the interrogation is guaranteed by the operation
of cognition, which [. . .] account[s] rationally for [the] imagined
world’ (2000: 16–17). Against these prescriptive definitions, Bould
writes that ‘there is no necessary relationship between Marxism and
[science fiction] – although there has always been a close one’ (2009:
17). Dialectics are at the core of this book, but it is not its intention to
verify the presence of this dialectic between estrangement and cogni-
tion. Rather, it will follow Fredric Jameson, who famously described
cyberpunk as the ‘supreme literary expression if not of postmodern-
ism, then of late capitalism itself’, ‘fully as much an expression of
transnational corporate realities as it is of global paranoia itself’
(1996: 419 n. 1, 38). The consensus amongst science fiction scholars
is that the cyberpunk movement has come to an end. Biocapitalism
is the frontline of capitalism today, promising to enrich and prolong
our lives whilst threatening to extend capitalism’s capacity to
1
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