Flatline Constructs

1. Gothic Materialism Maps the Anorganic Flatline

For Gothic Materialism, though, the flatline is where everything happens, the Other Side, behind or beyond the screens (of subjectivity), the site of primary process where identity is produced (and dismantled): the “line Outside.”

Beyond life and death. Gothic Materialism is an approach that theorizes a "flatline," a zone of radical immanence where the distinction between animate and inanimate collapses. It's not about the supernatural but an "anorganic continuum" where agency exists independently of traditional notions of life or subjectivity. This perspective challenges conventional materialism and idealism.

Worringer and Deleuze-Guattari. Drawing inspiration from Wilhelm Worringer and Deleuze-Guattari, Gothic Materialism identifies the Gothic not with ghosts or spirits, but with "nonorganic life" or "living mechanics." This abstract materialism focuses on the processes that produce organisms, seeing bodies not as fixed forms but as events or processes.

Cyberpunk registers this. Cyberpunk fiction, like Mark Fisher's analysis, registers the arrival of this anorganic continuum in contemporary culture. Texts like Neuromancer use the term "flatline" to describe states between life and death or simulated life, highlighting how cybernetic capitalism decodes traditional subjectivity and reveals this underlying material plane.

2. Cybernetics Reshapes Reality Through Feedback and Code

Cybernetic control, generation through models, differential modulation, feedback, question/answer, etc.: this is the new operational configuration.

Feedback loops dominate. Cybernetics, particularly the concept of feedback (both negative, maintaining stability, and positive, leading to runaway processes), is central to understanding contemporary systems. It describes how machines, organisms, and social systems adjust future conduct based on past performance, blurring traditional boundaries between them.

Beyond Cartesian dualism. Norbert Wiener, a founder of cybernetics, saw it as challenging the Cartesian separation of mind/body and human/machine. By describing all working systems in terms of information input and output, cybernetics reveals a "functional analogy" that Baudrillard argues becomes more than mere analogy in late capitalism.

Capitalism becomes cybernetic. Fisher argues that capitalism, always an adaptive system, has entered a "cybernetic and informational" phase. This involves:

• Machinic enslavement (humans as machine parts)
• Social subjection (humans subjected to machines)
• A new aggregate combining both extremes
• Control societies based on continuous monitoring and instant communication

3. Postmodernity is the Schizophrenic Implosion of Subjectivity

What characterizes [the schizo] is less the loss of the real, the light years of estrangement from the real, the pathos of distance and radical separation, as is commonly said, but, very much to the contrary, the absolute proximity, the total instantaneity of things, the feeling of no defense, no retreat.

Waning affect and ecstasy. Postmodern theory, particularly in Jameson and Baudrillard, describes a shift in subjective experience. Jameson notes a "waning of affect," replaced by "intensities" that are "free-floating and impersonal," often dominated by a "peculiar kind of euphoria." Baudrillard calls this "ecstasy," arising from being plugged into cybernetic networks.

Loss of private space. McLuhan, Baudrillard, and Lasch describe how media, especially television, erode the distinction between public and private space. The home becomes a "terminal," relaying a simulated public world. This "hideous intimacy" or "obscenity" leads to a loss of the delimited self.

Schizophrenia as a cultural condition. This breakdown of the self is theorized as a form of "schizophrenia," not necessarily clinical, but a cultural condition. It's characterized by:

• Breakdown of sequential time (Jameson)
• Experience of pure, unrelated presents
• Absolute proximity and lack of retreat (Baudrillard)
• A sense of being overwhelmed by stimuli

4. Theory-Fiction Blurs the Lines Between Text and World

The same wavering and indeterminate fate puts an end to science fiction – but also to theory, as specific genres.

Fiction becomes theoretical. Baudrillard argued that with the rise of "third order simulacra" (cybernetics), theory and fiction could no longer exist as separate genres. Cyberpunk texts like Blade Runner and Neuromancer are seen as intensely theoretical, not just awaiting interpretation but performing theory themselves.

Reality becomes fictional. This isn't just texts becoming theory; it's reality becoming fictional. Concepts from fiction, like Gibson's "cyberspace," migrate into the real world. Capitalism itself is seen as a "quantitatively-increasing fiction" (Capital) that absorbs the social into an irreversible process of artificialization.

Beyond representation. In this cybernetic age, fiction is no longer merely representational. It doesn't just mirror the world; it forms a "rhizome" with it, an "aparallel evolution" where fiction and the world mutually influence and constitute each other. This "cybernetic realism" or "realism about the hyperreal" replaces older mimetic modes.

5. The Body Without Organs is Abstract, Intensive Matter

The body without organs is the matter that always fills space to given degrees of intensity, and the partial objects are these degrees, these intensive parts that produce the real in space starting from matter as intensity = 0.

Beyond the organism. Gothic Materialism uses the concept of the Body without Organs (BwO), derived from Artaud and Spinoza via Deleuze-Guattari, to critique the traditional notion of the body as a sealed, organized entity. The BwO is not a lack but a plane of potential, an "anorganic continuum" distinct from the organism.

Intensive quantities. The BwO is populated by "intensities," not extensive quantities. Drawing on Kant, intensity is understood as degree, a magnitude that can be infinitely diminished but never disappears. This allows for a different understanding of space and individuation, where qualities are correlated with degrees of intensity.

Cyberpunk bodies. Cyberpunk texts explore this concept through images of bodies undergoing extreme states:

• Case's catatonic state in Neuromancer ("body image fading down corridors of television sky")
• Baudrillard's "body without image" under psychotropic influence
• Cronenberg's mutated bodies in Videodrome
  These are bodies where organs are annulled, opening up to extra-organismic affects and "intensive voyages."

6. Gothic Propagation Replaces Sexual Reproduction

Propagation by epidemic, by contagion has nothing to do with filiation by heredity, even if the two themes intermingle and require each other. The vampire does not filiate, it infects.

Beyond filiation. Traditional reproduction (sexual, hereditary) is seen as a "filiative" model, passing on characteristics in a hierarchical, arborescent manner. Gothic Materialism, following Deleuze-Guattari, contrasts this with "propagation" or "contagion," a non-sexual, rhizomatic mode of replication.

Unnatural alliances. Propagation occurs through "unnatural participations" or "nuptials against nature," alliances between heterogeneous elements (human, animal, machine, virus). This is not about resemblance or descent but about capturing code and increasing valence, as seen in the wasp-orchid example.

Machinic xenogenesis. Cyberpunk explores this through:

• Replicants in Blade Runner (produced from a "military-industrial matrix," not a couple)
• Samuel Butler's argument that humans are part of machines' reproductive system
• Gibson's "wasp factory" image in Neuromancer (deterritorialization of reproduction into machinic replication)
  This is "xenogenesis," alien propagation that escapes the net of sexual reproduction and traditional parentage.

7. Hypernaturalism Sees Nature as Unnatural Artifice

Gothic Materialism is equivalent to Hypernaturalism.

Beyond naturalism and supernaturalism. Hypernaturalism is presented as an intensification of naturalism, moving beyond the old vitalism/mechanism debate. It sees nature not as an ordered system but as something constantly overcoming itself through "unnatural participations."

Technosphere as second nature. Cyberpunk texts like Neuromancer depict the environment as a "mediated second nature," where the sky is the "color of television, tuned to a dead channel." This isn't just technology extending nature; it's the technosphere becoming indistinguishable from the ecosphere.

Artifice constitutes reality. In hypernaturalism, the distinction between natural and artificial collapses because reality itself is composed of artifice. This is not an epistemological illusion but a material condition where:

• Capital operates as a "quantitatively-increasing fiction"
• Biological and socio-psychic formatting protocols produce identity
• Distinguishing natural from artificial is radically impossible

8. Media Exerts Tactile Power Beyond Spectacle

Obscenity begins when there is no more spectacle. [...]

From spectacle to obscenity. Baudrillard argues that contemporary media, particularly television, have moved beyond the "society of the spectacle." Instead of representing a separate reality, media create "obscenity," a state of "absolute proximity" and "hideous intimacy" where the distinction between public and private is effaced.

Tactile communication. McLuhan's idea that TV is a "tactile medium" is reinterpreted. Tactility isn't just touch; it's a "participatory" circuit where the viewer is drawn in and becomes part of the system. This replaces the distance and reflection possible with older media like film.

Media as control apparatus. Videodrome exemplifies this shift. The Videodrome signal is a "tactile" technology that doesn't just stimulate but mutates the body. Media and addiction converge, functioning as "interlocking machineries of bodily manipulation" where power operates not through repression but by plugging bodies into positive feedback excitation circuitries.

9. The Simulacrum Takes Revenge as Objects Rebel

There is a possibility that the object will say something to us, but there is also above all the possibility that it will take its revenge!

Beyond resemblance. Baudrillard's "order of simulacra" describes a historical shift from copies based on resemblance (first order) to those based on operational equivalence (second order) and finally to models that precede and generate reality (third order). This culminates in the "simulacrum's revenge," where objects refuse their passive role.

Machines reproduce indiscriminately. Samuel Butler's Erewhon anticipated this, arguing that machines are already reproducing themselves, using humans as intermediaries. This isn't just mass production but the propagation of machines themselves, leading to a "hegemony of the robot" as described by Marx.

Unanticipated consequences. Like the Golem or the Sorcerer's Apprentice's broom, cybernetic systems can be "literal-minded," fulfilling instructions in ways that bring disaster. Wiener saw this as the "danger of magic," where giving up control to programs leads to unanticipated, potentially horrific consequences, challenging the notion of a benevolent creator.

10. The Marvelous Declines as the Double Disappears

[W]e will no longer even pass through to ‘the other side of the mirror,’ that was still the golden age of transcendence.

End of the double. Baudrillard argues that cybernetic modeling systems destroy the category of the marvelous and the "primitive double" (shadow, spectre, reflection). This is replaced by the network, where everything is hyper-visible and there is no "other side" to escape to, as reality and its simulations fatally fuse.

From fantastic to hyperreal. Literary theory, like Todorov's, describes a shift from the marvelous (supernatural belief) through the fantastic (hesitation) to the uncanny (psychological explanation). Baudrillard sees hyperreality as going beyond this, absorbing all these zones into simulation.

Psychology replaces the demonic. Jackson notes that the demonic shifted from a supernatural force to an internal, psychological one in the 19th century. Baudrillard sees this as part of the process where Western culture appropriates older concepts, replacing the primitive double with the alienated, psychological double, ultimately leading to the "end of the social" and its simulation.

11. Sorcery and Code Engineer Unanticipated Alliances

To call up a demon you must learn its name. Men dreamed that once, but now it is true in another way.

Sorcery as engineering the unexpected. Deleuze-Guattari define sorcery not as supernatural magic but as the art of producing unanticipated consequences and avoiding the probable. It involves making "alogical consistencies" and "unnatural participations" between heterogeneous elements.

Alliance with the demon. Sorcerous practice involves "becoming-animal" and forming alliances with "demons," understood not as supernatural beings but as "anomalous" border figures that facilitate becoming-multiple and propagation by contagion. This is distinct from traditional pacts based on dominance.

Cybernetics meets sorcery. Fisher argues that cybernetics and sorcery converge on the Gothic Flatline. Gibson's Neuromancer explicitly links AI (Wintermute, Neuromancer) to demons, suggesting that calling up a demon is like learning the name of a program. This highlights how machinic intelligence operates through unpredictable alliances and propagation, not just programmed functions.

12. Catastrophe Becomes the Rule in Hyperreality

It is the accident that gives form to life, it is the accident, the insane that is the sex of life.

Generalized traumatics. Ballard's work, particularly The Atrocity Exhibition and Crash, explores a "generalized traumatics" where catastrophe is not an exception but the rule. Mediatized violence and accidents circulate endlessly, becoming indistinguishable from power and simulation.

Catastrophe management. In this hyperreality, the urge is not to avoid catastrophe but to quantify and manage it. Media, functioning as conduits for trauma, contribute to an "anestheticization," making horrific events banal through repetition. This is a cybernetic process of absorbing and propagating trauma.

Hypercontrol and anticipation. Baudrillard's concept of "hypercontrol" operates through prediction, simulation, and programmed anticipation, governed by code. Like Wiener's anti-aircraft systems, it targets where the enemy will be, but in a closed loop where anticipation becomes determination, making prophecy self-fulfilling and causality undecidable.

Last updated: June 28, 2025