"Dream of the Soft Cyborg (Performance Art) : Polymorfy: "Super, Sugar Bear (Performance,)" Pioneer Square, Seattle, WA. La Cocina. 2016.
Flashback:
The year is 1999 or was it 2000? Yeah, I think it was the millenium and I was in the last year of my Art History program at UC Davis. I remember it like it was yesterday, so bright and vivid in David Hockney pastels, the weather was beautiful as it often is in the warm, zephyrous, Southern Californian sun. I was standing in front of the Art History class that I was "T.A.'ing" for Dr. Dianne Sachko Macleod; who was my advisor until I switched over from an emphasis in Victorian Studies to an emphasis on contemporary art and gender issues. I have been very lucky over the years to have studied with some of the most amazing and accomplished professors female and otherwise--and Dr. Macleod was no exception. She was always a remarkably badass professor and hard as nails. Her classes almost kicked my ass, but on many occasions she left me full of new insights and changed my view of the world, the structure of scientific revolutions, the archeology of knowledge and the dialectic of history!
In the background, a jet flew overhead. At some point, in every college class that I have ever taught, especially the ones where I felt a real connection to the students, I have tried to take one day to just communicate with them, to get a feeling for the world that they live in--a sense of how they view their lives. Add to that a love of Socratic Method and Platonic ideals and of course that meant that I had to teach a class beneath the eucalyptus trees just outside the UC Davis Art Department.
It was the last day of regular classes. The next one would be test preparation and then we would meet for finals, which I would then have to grade. In many ways I actually knew these students better than the professor did--but that was the nature of the University experience. We were the grunts, but because we cared so much about what we were doing, they kept piling more and more duties upon us. If you've ever seen Project Runway--imagine that times a hundred and you've still got no idea what grad school is like.
We spoke of many things that day. We spoke of contemporary music, how things had changed since I was an undergraduate and we talked about just how crappy "Star Wars: A Phantom Menace" was. We talked about philosophy and the students' own plans for the future--and I realized that it didn't look like they could truly articulate any. Then I asked them for their sense of the current state of the world, reality--life, the universe and everything--their sense of existence in 1999, or was it 2000.
One person asked me if I had ever seen the video for "Numb" from the 1993, U2 album, Zooropa. Another said she felt as though she were trapped in plastic, wax, amber or "something like that." That's what she said..."or something like that." It was odd that I remember that so clearly--it wasn't even out of the ordinary, but then again, maybe life is actually made out of an ever increasing series of ordinary moments, moments of no apparent consequence that only become consequential upon reflection.
The next student said that it felt as though they were waiting for something, like they were locked in place, going through the motions--waiting for something. I asked what they thought they were waiting for. The end of the world? The Second Coming? "Yeah," they said. They didn't know, but they all agreed that they were waiting for something, something that would change everything and bring form and meaning to their lives.
Flashback further:
When I was a child I remember a cartoon dog that used to float up in the air (in a state of what has to be described as orgasmic bliss,) when he was given a doggie treat. I loved this doggie and was fascinated by how happy he could become when he received the object of his affection. This fascination seemed like utter bliss to a young child, but, I don’t have to reach so far back to find his contemporaries. Scooby Doo, for one will do anything to get his “Scooby Snacks.” He will easily apprehend the same villain that had eluded the Scooby’s for the first half of the cartoon. He will happily overcome his own fears and attempt all sorts of inexplicable super-heroic feats for the promise of these snacks. He too becomes orgasmic and ecstatic in the presence of his main addiction.
Think of cereal commercials with their animated emcees, those spokes-chickens, muscle-bound Tigers and Sugar-bears. Think of the Trix Rabbit, who is named after the product of his affection—one that according to the logic of his mythos, he can never attain, because when he does, if he is not stopped by the children around him--he goes insane. This is true also about Sonny, the Cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs Crow, who wants nothing more than to be one with his General Mills cereal. But what drives these characters to be such all-consuming need machines?
It is interesting that one of the ways to see the evolution of our society is as one of an increasing alienation of mankind from the baser needs of the human as animal. This is evident in our language, in our supermarkets and oddly, it is evident in our media. Recently, I have had the pleasure of rediscovering another program of my childhood--the old "Our Gang" comedies--also known as the Little Rascals. In these comedies, aside from the casual racism of the age which is horrible and seeps into these epic, little stories--children of various ethnicities hang out together and have amazing adventures. But something else interesting occurs here--these children, the main protagonists-- are very poor, poor in the way that we simply do not see presented anywhere today, but they are proud, smart and damned clever. And there are several episodes that center around these children attempting to find--or rather, steal food.
Now this is something that we simply do not see anymore--it is not part of how we allow ourselves to be represented. Starving children, children fighting for their existence is simply not considered funny. In fact, there are very few instances in the popular media in which the food chain is ever dealt with--excepting two very notable areas. Firstly, television commercials--of course, deal with food and feeding in very abstract ways--but still, it is a component of many of their one-minute narratives. Secondly, however, many of the narratives of cartoons continue to deal with the intricacies of the food chain, animal against animal, hunter and hunted, cat and mouse, vulture and rabbit, wolf and roadrunner all with the frustrated intention of feeding (something, which I am just now realizing could be made to connect to the frustration machine that Marcel Duchamp created with his large glass. I will have to come back to this. 2020.) These dramas continue to this very day in new Warner Brothers Cartoons, Ren and Stimpy and even on the Simpsons with the Itchy and Scratchy Show.
It is with these cartoon characters that we have allowed a kind of Lacanian imaginary space to grow--one in which we safely and with a distance allow our baser needs to be represented. The need to feed, which includes the need to kill, which includes countless chicken-beaks, and which is not pretty, clever, comforting or kind--as Morrissey said ages ago--"it is the unholy stench of murder." However, again, we see a kind of sublimation--a fetishization which occurs and allows us to distance ourselves from the baseness of these dark, animalistic desires and which makes them palatable, which in turn allows us to deal with even deeper issues than mere feeding--issues of addiction and even of desire--again, from the safe distance of sublimation into the alien/alienation.
In fact because the text is opened to us by way of the distance that is allowed us through alienation and fetishization--it actually becomes easier to see why these cartoon spokes-creatures love these products so much—they are in fact addicted to them. Desire and addiction fuel these narratives. Cocoa Puffs and Trix are the drugs that they seek. They wrap their existences around these products; they promote them and thus they become part of each other. This is evident when we look closer at characters like Toucan Sam, and Sonny, the emcee for General Mills’ Cocoa Puffs, who are even the same color as the product that they promote. It is a part of their cellular makeup and especially Sonny seeks to return himself to his originary place of utter bliss, one in which he and cocoa puffs can become one.
If we imagine that Sonny is real, for a moment, we will discover that this is actually a very easy thing to do. In fact, if we look very closely at these commercials we will see that we have always been asked to imagine that they are indeed real beings--these cartoon emcees. These characters are seen to exist in a world that is very much like our own. Like Roger Rabbit, they interact freely with the humans they encounter. There is no barrier between the children and mothers in these commercials that the Trix Rabbit, for instance, must contend with.
And like Roger Rabbit, these commercial emcees, too, seem to exist via a set of defining rules, their existences calculated to make others happy, like Roger, they are also incapable of passing up the punch-line to a joke and they seem to exist as slaves to our, and especially their, own passions. Sonny, Toucan Sam and the Trix Rabbit may be cartoons, soft and furry and made of painted cells like Roger, but they are something more--they live in and effect our world.
This is an odd assertion to make about characters that are, in fact creations of corporate men and women—whose sole agenda is to sell a product. But if one looks around, she will see that these hybrid creatures are in fact everywhere, from Mickey Mouse, The Michelin Man, the Jolly Green Giant, talking and singing dogs on TV and at X-mas™, even Snuggles the living teddy-bear—we must admit that we are surrounded by these grotesqueries and I will make many more assertions before I am through.
Let’s look at, perhaps, the most well known of these creations, better known than even Bugs Bunny, I am of course speaking of Mickey Mouse. A moment ago, I spoke of a Bakhtinian idea that comes from the caves and grottoes of the mythic world, images that have come to be called grotesque. In these ancient drawings and carvings animals and humans were seen to be interacting, often in vulgar and obscene ways, at other times and throughout history we have seen fantastic images of men and women who may have been the offspring of these grotesque carnivals. Mythology is filled with Minotaurs, hecubi, etc. those creatures, which are a mixture of man and animal.
However, now these creatures have lost their connections to the real animals, they once mimicked. They are confabulations and fabrications instead of having connections to their real counterparts. These are creatures like Mickey Mouse, who wear pants and shoes, who live in 50’s houses and who own other animals, speak openly and who’s jobs seemingly are to act as spokes-creatures, ad-monsters and film-stars.[1] But there is something more here, something that gives these beasties, perhaps, an even greater claim to being real than you and I.
No longer happy with Pinocchio's simple desire to be a boy, to be human, to enter our world and be one of us. These "Soft-Cyborgs" are claiming immortality.
Let's think for a moment about how stories and texts are subverted, often despite their original intentions and are opened up to new interpretations. Within Fantasyland attractions, for instance, little attention is given to the original, “authorized” narratives of the books and movies. Especially in rides like Alice or Pinocchio the narratives break down and are overturned, becoming new ride narratives. Because of this, often there is little chance for the rider to make sense of these rides in a traditional sense. At times, characters appear and disappear for no good reason, and events occur out of order. In Alice, for example, the White Rabbit appears at times when he is meant to be missing. The Queen of Hearts screams at riders unprovoked and the Madhatter’s Tea Party occurs at the end of the tale.
Pinocchio is one ride that especially contests the traditional narratives found in the Pinocchio book, film and the moralities of the park in favor of an amoral ambivalence. The savage interior of Pinocchio’s Daring Adventure is one of the many places in which Disneyland logic breaks down, and a cautionary tale transforms into a celebration of the vulgar and low. This “daring adventure” is a breakneck of Carnivalesque imagery, ultimately turning Disney’s own messages against him.
Several biographers have noted that Disney was very much in favor of the wild, adventurous, seeking, experimenting (male) child.[1] Film characters like Peter Pan, the Lost Boys, Pecos Bill, and even Mickey Mouse and Pinocchio, are to some extent--examples of this. But, if Disney in the movies questions the world of adulthood and its breaking of the child’s will through rules and procedure, in Disneyland he gives almost completely into the propriety of civilized mannered society. Pinocchio’s Daring Journey was originally meant (like Mr. Toad) to be an admonishment to children against the dangers of breaking the rules of society. This, however is not what occurs in the ride.
Throughout the ride, walls are painted with scenes of Pinocchio’s temptation. Disney is meticulous in showing the threat and punishment of desire. From the start, however, Disney’s intentions are thwarted. Riders begin at the gates to the puppet theatre, already mise-en-scene. Pinocchio is shown dancing on strings, already entrapped because he has succumbed to the temptations of sublimated sexual desire and the greed of fame. He has chosen an “actor’s life” (literally, he has chosen to be an actor,) to take active control of his life and environment, and is no longer the passive puppet that F.C. Sayers accuses Disney guests of becoming.
Like the civilized admonishment and implied threats throughout the park, this daring journey was also meant to be about the control of base emotions and the unregulated id (the child in us all.) In the adventure though, Pinocchio’s conscience, (Jiminy Cricket) is always shown attempting to catch up and only ever reaches the puppet at the end of the ride--when he has safely returned home. In this telling, Pinocchio never has to deal directly with his conscience.
Interestingly, this ride contains a Disney representation of a carnival. However, unlike the Bakhtin carnival, riders are not meant to enjoy the ironically named “Pleasure Island.” Very quickly, any implied pleasure turns into menace. This is a manic, malicious carnival that hurls riders through at a breakneck pace while a loud calliope organ plays atonally, in the background. As guests pass through a debaucherous orgy of smoking, gambling and sex, they are unnerved by the distant braying of donkeys--the threat of Pinocchio’s eventual transformation into beast. This is the ultimate fear of coupling with our own animal natures. To add to the threat, against the last wall before Pinocchio’s transformation can be seen a jumbled sexualized creature--a mixture of moving human and animal figures.
Once Pinocchio has finally and utterly succumbed to all sorts of debauchery and has become a jackass, he is almost immediately swallowed by Monstro the whale. The next scene, immediately shows the “good fairy” returning Pinocchio home safely. Where Geppetto greets him with the words, “I’m so happy.” But something is amiss and the traditional story has been radically changed. Pinocchio has not renounced the ways of debauchery and sin. Within the ride, we do not see a moment in which the puppet has a change of heart. Any misgivings have to be extrapolated from sources outside the ride—outside of this text. Instead, here Pinocchio has to be saved only when events would surely have destroyed him. This Pinocchio has unremorsefully enjoyed all that the carnival has to offer, and (just barely) survived. To further show the lack of his awareness, in the final scene of the ride--Pinocchio has not become a boy. He has chosen to stay in this imperfect state. The traditional Happy Ending has been thwarted. Here, the attraction itself has “overturned” the Disney’s narrative in favor of a new ambivalent one. Despite all of their scriptwriting, Imagineers have been incapable of controlling their own text.
Further thwarting any simple understanding of the assumed texts, as emcees, by selling their animated souls to monopolies and mega-corporations they have become larger, longer-lasting, stronger, more powerful than the men that have created them. They no longer die, when their creators die. They simply acquire a strange new voice, a new stance, chiaroscuro shadowing and continue on. They have become demi-hegemonic, that is, they continue as long as the product they speak for continues to sell. This sell/cel/cellular aspect of the soft-cyborg is fascinating and puts our mere mortal bodies to shame.
In opposition to Roger Rabbit, who according to his own mythology, made those first tentative steps into our world in the thirties, only to find that he missed the comfort of his own world, we can find a system that has begun to inverse itself. One in which it is humans who are attempting to enter the world of these cartoon characters, to trade in their flesh and blood for the promise of animated immortality.
What, then, exactly is the allure of the Soft Cyborg--what is the carrot that is dangled before us in order to make us even want to become soft in the first place? What desire can possibly be fulfilled by us becoming a cross between human and cartoon character? What do we gain from becoming soft? What happens when flesh becomes furry? What is the value of pliant flesh? Pliant, suppliant metal against flesh?
Let's start at a point that is more manageable and which seeks to be more descriptive. Going back to when I was a graduate student at UC Davis working on my second thesis paper, I read a few German magazines speaking of the birth of a new kind of Mannerism, pretty much going as far back as Matthew Barney's Cremaster series. For the sake of any easy to work with definition we will consider "Mannerism" to be a period that is a break of sorts from the traditional styles of a time, a break from the classical, but also a continuation of it and a growth from it, generating work that tends to be more stylistic and individual than it is about replicating the accepted rules of what is considered classic, rote, etc.. It is then, a kind of collecting, internalizing and understanding of the rules, elements and tropes of a previous period and taking that knowledge to play with these tropes.--In essence, a mannerist period is one in which artists take and make the tropes, styles, tricks, aesthetics, philosophies, limitations etc. and bend them to their will, making them their own. Essentially, it is play after the rules have been set and understood.
Let us look at what I will call the ill-mannered mannerists--because their desire was to remake the rules, remake art in their own image. Back when I was a child, the first exhibition I ever saw was an installation at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. It was an exhibition of mannerism in which all of the paintings were of women and men with the most translucent, white skin and the longest of all possible long necks. It was a group show, involving several mannerist artists and included paintings and sculpture of the period.. The artists had reworked anatomy to the point that it no longer had anything to do with reality--think of Ingres and his reclining nude with the extra bones in her back and really take that many steps further. When I first saw these paintings and sculptures, I thought that perhaps this meant there was another race of creatures on our planet, all of them with longer necks and perfect skin. I took these paintings at face value and I asked my mother if they were, in fact, aliens. She just smiled and said that that was the style of the time. I was about six--what did I know about style, history, anatomy or art.
My second point here is not merely aesthetic, but critical and theoretical--and more-so, it is actual. Going back to the story that I opened this dialectic with, the story of my students who could not describe what was happening to them.
The students, who had earlier become speechless, were alienated from their own place in history, waiting for something to change everything--some sort of a sign, which would give them direction or, at the very least, wake them from their slumber. They appeared to be in search of a break from what had gone before. In my estimation that horrible break actually did come in 2001, on my mother's birthday in September and it came with a price tag that was to be amazingly terrible, but which created a very decisive, very definite cut-off date for the Post Modern--especially, the late, last part of the Post Modern (and by extension) the program of Modernism.
This last part being one wherein there was an intrinsic desire to return to the roots of the modern and to regain the abstract and abstruse ideals of the early modern philosophers and through this conservative return to the roots of modernity to again deny any real, critical, theoretical or physical access/ability to and of the subaltern--and by extension all of us. For that was the secret of the subaltern; that, in the eyes of the institution, if you are not hegemonic, you simply have no meaning,- no reason, and you are speechless.
We Are Twinkies
We are Twinkies in that we are ingesting, and here I am talking about a real scientific evolution—us becoming addicted at a cellular level to the products of our desire.
The value of course is that it may be both our inevitable end and our only survival skill, if we imagine a world like the one in Max Headroom—a program that was simply too honest to last long on television-we can imagine a world that is owned part and parcel by large corporations-these corporations are viruses, in that they seek to live for as long as they can using the resources of their host body till the host is destroyed and empty. They are the viruses that we have created, hard-edged and machine like they kill us with their cyborg bodies and hard-edged hegemonic minds.
If we are to survive, we must become like Roger Rabbit, we must become like Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote, our flesh must be pliant and perfect—we must become the plastic and rubber that bounces back after being dropped from the top of the Empire State Building. We must discover the nirvana that occurs in those few moments when we are suspended in mid-air before we drop. Our skin must stretch like Plastic-man and allow the machine to pass through us effortlessly. We must never bleed and instead we must ooze. We must see through the wild, white lidless eyes that see all and know the rules of the mystery. If not, the Terminator 2000 will necessarily destroy us. In essence we must evolve, grow and become what we were always meant to be. Soft.
We must be soft, but strong in order to get and be the good stuff. But what is this cool stuff, is it the desire to run fast, to be stronger, more agile than men, to live forever like advertisement emcees and cartoon characters? Perhaps the truth is ultimately less romantic and much more insidious. Perhaps the truth is one that we might actually prefer to keep hidden and mysterious, perhaps we would be better off to avert or even close our eyes to the answer, or answers. Perhaps, however, what I have spoken of is in fact a survival skill, perhaps our soft-cyborg skin, mutable and fluid like the skin of a cartoon, our addiction and slavery to our own creamy centers is what it takes to live in a world where we are mere mortals, slaves to forces that are much more powerful than we can ever hope to be, perhaps there is a silver-lining in a dialectic that places the human in a world in which large monopolies and lying presidents care more about money than the individuals that they are mutating into the soft-cyborg.
Our bodies like Twinkies,Furries,
We are soft cyborg—we eat, drink and even sleep for the machine etc.
This is evolution. Period.
