The real…erases itself in favour of the more real than the real: the hyperreal—Jean Baudrillard[1]
He who has no shadow is merely the shadow of himself—Jean Baudrillard[2]
Part I. Introduction
This essay is theoretical, speculative, highly so.
Theory, from Greek theoria, is speculating.
And for many, if not all, of you, this essay may seem very ‘nutty.’
So please bear with my speculations.
The essay draws upon the work of my mentor Jean Baudrillard on the passage of second order reality—what people think of and take as ordinary, quotidian reality—into third order what he calls hyperreality, another name for which is virtual reality, what Baudrillard also calls ‘integral reality,’[3] ‘tele-reality,’[4] reality in ‘high definition,’[5] not an alternate reality but a ‘new’ ‘reality,’ a ‘reality’ with at once too much and too little reality, a pure, total and empty ‘reality,’ a ‘reality’ without, in a word, ‘reality.’
The paper takes as mandate the epigraph to his book La Transparence du Mal: Essai sur les phénomènes extremes (1990), published in English as The Transparency of Evil: Essays on Extreme Phenomena (1993): ‘Since the world drives to a delirious state of things, we must drive to a delirious point of view.’[6]
As well, this essay draws forth from and extends my claims in my Introductions to my two animation anthologies and a number of my essays over the last 27 years theorising animation: that animation is not just a form of film but all film is a form of animation, that animation is not delimited to film or film as such but is always already, never not, transdisciplinary, transinstitutional, transtechnological and transmedial—put simply, all the arts, sciences, technologies and media are forms of animation—that for decades animation has been surpassed by animation’s morphed hyperreal form—hyperanimation—that today animation as hyperanimation comes forward as the most compelling, pervasive, singular process of the contemporary world, and that, in putting animation at stake, what hyperanimation likewise puts at stake is life itself and death itself, motion itself and nonmotion itself, indeed the human and its world, its reality.
Put simply, for me animation has always already, never not, cornered the market on the universe and all within it, what I have called ‘the nutty universe of animation’, all the more so now in its form of hyperanimation, animation post-animation, post all forms of animation, including cinema as form of animation, hence post-cinema, indeed post-film.
As I posited it for the first time in 1991, in my Introduction to The Illusion of Life: Essays on Animation, animation’s purchase is ‘transdisciplinary, transinstitutional, implicating the most profound, complex and challenging questions of our culture, questions in the areas of being and becoming, time, space, motion, change—indeed, life itself’.[7]
To which we add: memory.
What that means for me is that all disciplines are always already, never not, not only themselves forms, practices, processes and performances of animation but per se modes of animation studies, making animation studies the ‘discipline’ of all ‘disciplines.’
And as life increasingly comes forward today as the focus across all disciplines, that claim becomes ever more evident, animation itself ever more visibly and expandingly as that focus on life, even as life—animation itself—is increasingly at stake, undergoing reanimation, as is never not the case, including ‘by definition’ its very definition, including who and what speaks for animation, who and what speaks for life.
For it is the very nature of animation to reanimate, including itself, including its own definition, meaning that its only definition is that it has no definition ‘as such.’
Here I direct you to my essay ‘The Expanding Universe of Animation (Studies)’, published in Animation Studies in 2016.
As I claimed there, what that expanding universe of animation (studies) calls for, indeed, what I have called for from my 1991 Introduction to The Illusion of Life on, is the most expansive, widest-ranging, most inclusive and most far-reaching approaches to animation.
As I quote Paul Wells in that essay:
‘Localised’ thinking inhibits the growth and development of fields because it does not acknowledge enough the necessity of expansive paradigms of both animation and thought itself to properly apprehend what animation as a form has done not merely to be ‘art’ but to change lived experience.[8]
For the sake of economy and contextualisation, I shall reprise here a small number of paragraphs from my essay ‘“Computer Says No”, or: The Erasure of the Human,’ published in 2015 in the anthology Erasure: The Spectre of Cultural Memory, for which essay this constitutes an extension.[9]
Which is to say that this essay is, like ‘“Computer Says No,…”, about computer animation, digital animation.
But since I focus in that essay on the morphing of Michel Foucault’s disciplinary regime into what I call the accountability regime and the administrative, managerial, service—increasingly self-service—apparatus that has operated that regime since its ostensible advent in the mid-1990s—a regime and apparatus animated, operated and governed for me by the computer, a regime I call, with a nod to Gilles Deleuze, the cyberocracies of control—I shall leave you to consult it should you be interested.[10]
Finally, the text is complex, so for those readers who find it difficult, please relax and just try to get a feel, the ‘sense’ of it.
Part 2. Computer Memory
From one sketch to the next in the British TV comedy series Little Britain, service person Carol Beer obnoxiously delivers the bad news to her hapless customer with three painfully definitive words: ‘Computer says no’. Which, put otherwise, means for me ‘The Computer Rules, OK’. The computer as ruler, as archon. The computer as governor, associated with the Greek cyber, as in cybernetic, skilled in governing or steering.
And it’s not just in Little Britain.
The computer has gone global, ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ the telly (English word for television), its net (inter), web (world wide) and reign as ‘medium of all media’[11] networking, enveloping and operating everything—the operating system, as it were, of all (as) systems, the network of all (as) networks (including the Internet of Things, of all (as) things), the web of all (as) webs, its archive the archive of all (as) archives, its data the data of all (as) data, the Big Data of everything.
Put simply, the computer reigns as global animator, animator of hyperreality, reanimating everything thereby as hyperreal.
As all technologies, for me themselves animators, do—that is, reanimate—especially epoch-‘defining technologies,’ technologies ‘defining’ a new episteme, like the latest such epochal ‘defining’ technology, the computer, or rather, in its case, hyper‘defining’ hypertechnology, one ‘defining’ a new episteme, a hyperepisteme, a world of radical, irreducible uncertainty, a world that is ours.[12]
According with the 3 Cs of cybernetics—commander, controller, communicator—technology in which and upon which everything converges and from which everything is driven, is operated—is animated—the computer is what I call, after the name given Arnold Schwarzenegger as Governor of California subsequent to his role as the Terminator in Terminator, ‘the governator’!, the governor of all governors, the government of all governments, the model, operator and animator of our epoch, that of the dictatorship of the digital.
Which is to say that ours is an era in which for me the computer models the human—models in the sense of not only by means of but as (the) computer.
Meaning for me that today the human is human to the degree it imitates the computer, not only with which but upon which it is modelled, even is a computer—a computer human, a cyborg—in a world where, as I have it in ‘“Computer Says No”,…’, if you don’t compute, YOU don’t compute!
The human as cyborg what Baudrillard calls Telematic Man, what I have called homo computans.
To which worrying dictum I am even more unfortunately compelled to add this correlate: ‘If you aren’t computed, YOU don’t compute!
Reminding me of the Borg of Star Trek: Discovery and their chilling words: ‘We are the Borg. You will be assimilated. Resistance is futile’.
And that reanimating by the computer includes memory, for the computer is not only archon but archive, the new ‘site of memory,’[13] a site re-archiving everything, meaning that, unless archived in the computer and what it drives—animates—, it is not archived, nor therefore remembered, at all.
Put simply, the computer as archon governs and steers contemporary memory, even as, as archive, it is contemporary memory.
As Jacques Derrida writes in Archive Fever, an archive’s ‘technical structure…determines the archivable content…and its relationship to the future. The archivization produces as much as it records.’[14]
Not only is technology not what is misguidedly called ‘technology neutral,’ not ‘just a tool,’ every technology is animate and animating, has ‘a life of its own,’ the specificity of its technology a content in its own right, including that of the computer, whose technology is its content, a technology making it archon and archive.
Or better, the computer is hyperarchon, governing and steering hyperreality, which for me is the contemporary, the ‘new’ contemporary, the hypercontemporary, a hyperreal ‘contemporary’ that is paradoxically the pure and empty form of the contemporary, its absence, its erasure—its deleting!—as it is the pure and empty form of reality.
And as hyperarchon, the computer governs and steers memory become hypermemory, which is anything but memory, rather pure and empty memory, the absence, the erasure—the deleting!—of memory. Not merely and no longer leading theorist of memory Andreas Huyssen’s ‘twilight memory’[15] but ‘dark memory’—memory morphed into hyperanimated, indeed hyperanimatic, hyperhuman hypermemory, memory of Baudrillard’s third order of hyperreality, of virtual reality, of the digital.
Even as, as hyperanimated, indeed hyperanimatic, hyperarchive, the computer is hypermemory, making its hypermemory increasingly ‘“human” “memory;”’ that is, human memory morphed into and reanimated as computer memory, which is to say, digital memory, virtual memory, which is anything but memory, rather information and data, just as Artificial Intelligence, ‘Superintelligence,’ is anything but intelligence, rather hyperintelligence, just as a smart phone is anything but smart, rather hypersmart.
Put simply, insofar as today the human is human to the degree it imitates the computer, is a computer, the computer’s memory increasingly defines, even is, ‘human’ memory.
And the computer governs and steers time become ‘dark time’, what Baudrillard calls ‘real time’, which is anything but real and anything but time (including anything but historical time), rather hypertime, pure and empty time, the absence of time, virtual time, time of virtual reality, what I call hypertempor(e)ality, time perfect for ‘the age of endarkenment,’ the Anthropocene. Hypertime is the morphing of the contemporary as Latin contemporārius, that is, with time, within time, into the hypercontemporary as without time, outside/beyond time. And since not only history but memory requires time, the end of time is the end of memory, as well as of history.
Put simply, computer time increasingly defines, even is, ‘human’ time.
Baudrillard writes in his essay ‘The Murder of the Real’:
In virtual reality, absolute transparence converges with absolute simultaneity. This short circuit and instantaneity of all things in global information we call ‘real time’. Real time can be seen as a Perfect Crime perpetrated against time itself: for with the ubiquity and instant availability of the totality of information, time reaches its point of perfection, which is also its vanishing point. Because of course a perfect time has no memory and no future.[16]
In other words, for Baudrillard, ‘…memory, like many other things, has been abolished by the structure of real time’.[17]
For, abolishing every real dimension of time, real time ‘abolishes any present-past-future sequence, and hence any consequentiality. Real time is a sort of fourth dimension in which all other dimensions are abolished’[18]—‘a kind of black hole into which nothing penetrates without losing its substance.’[19]
So the future, not having time to take place, and the past, not having the time to have taken place, are abolished, and ‘the present is only ever the present of the screens’[20]—the screens that hypersaturate the world of hyperreality, that make hyperreality total screen.
‘Real time’, writes Baudrillard, ‘is our mode of extermination today.’[21]
In a moment in Blade Runner of far more import in this regard than might be evident on casual spectating, the replicant Leon, about to kill Deckard by pushing his digits (mark of the digital) into Deckard’s eyes and brain, exclaims, ‘Time to die!’, a phrase repeated and augmented by Roy Batty, the leader of the replicants, in his sublime soliloquy at the end of the film:
I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.
Here I propose a reanimating rereading of those three words doubly spoken by Leon and Roy, recasting that concluding mournful, melancholic thought in a manner whose consequences are paradoxically, ironically, fatal to the human and reality itself: to wit, not just memories ‘lost in time like tears in rain’ but time itself lost, lost in the acid rain falling nonstop in the Los Angeles of Blade Runner; not only ‘Time to die’ but ‘Time to die,’ ironising the narrative in the process, for it is the time of the human and its memory that is to die and the time of the cyborg and its memory to live on, live on as the ‘collective mind’/memory of the Borg hive, what I call (arc)hive —live on in the hypertime of computer hyperreality.
Live on in time out of time.
Put simply, time animates memory, memory in all its forms and modes.
And time’s death spells the death of memory, as it does history.[22]
Here I am reminded of an article by Charles Krauthammer, ‘The Joy of Analog,’ published in Time (!) magazine May 26, 1986, that distinguished between the analogue watch and the digital watch (for which I would here substitute the words second order reality and hyperreality, respectively!). The former, the analogue watch, was imprecise, yet offered an overview, a comprehensive view, on its face, so that one could contextualise the time and one’s place vis-à-vis it and find not only a sense of a duration, a flow, of time but one of stability, security, in it, a sense of groundedness, wholeness, unity, a sense of identity.
The latter, the digital watch, gives what the former lacked—precise numerical time—but at the cost of that overview, that comprehensive (albeit illusory) view, that sense of duration, flow, stability, security, groundedness, wholeness, unity, identity, leaving one with but precise, discrete instants of time but no connection between them, no duration nor flow of them, no consequentiality of, no cause-effect relations between, them, and no context in which to place them or oneself. A perpetual present as un-present, at once full and empty, the void, black hole, that is real time, digital time, hypertime. Each instant its own discrete, pixelated, bubble, cocoon, black box, where transparency means not absolute visibility but absolute nonvisibility, seeing through without seeing anything.[23]
Such is the ‘structure of temporality,’ of ‘lived time,’ in hyperreality.
Krauthammer declares:
…the beauty of analog… [is] [b]ecause—like its linguistic companion, the analogy—it tries to reproduce the contour of reality. It lives in context. There is a before and an after. The digital watch gives you precision, but leaves you wondering where you are.[24]
For me, the digital watch as well ‘reproduces,’ even produces, ‘the contour…’—as shape, as structure—‘…of reality,’ but of reality as hyperreality: a state of precise numerical, digital calculation paradoxically, ironically, producing radical, irreducible uncertainty, decontextualisation, as to where one is, including in time, in time become hypertime, a state I call hypersuspended hyperanimation.
In other words, the digital chops everything into bite-size bits, the numerical, computable bits and bytes of the world of and given us—animated—by the computer, a world where time, therefore human memory, implodes in the instant—what I call the instamatic, the Instagrammatic—an instant ever more micro—too little time for human memory—a world where, at the same time(!), insofar as meaning has been supplanted by information and data, an excess, an overload, of them, there is too much information and data for human memory, especially as their already overload is ever increasing and their already hyperspeed is ever accelerating, even as the rule of information and data is at the expense of meaning, of knowledge, much more so of wisdom.
As Baudrillard states: ‘All events, all spaces, all memories are abolished in the sole dimension of information: this is obscene,…cool communicational obscenity,…’[25]
And the implosion, the death, of human time and memory in hypertime and hypermemory, in computer time and memory, accompanies the death of Baudrillardian second order reality and all its constitutive pertinences, pertinences ostensibly of the order solely of the good—purity, essence, presence, the ontological, unity, wholeness, closure, meaning, truth, reality, value, the individual, identity, self-identity, the social, the Subject, production, reproduction, representation, etc.—the death of the great referentials, as well as the grand narratives, of the culture, including those of the Enlightenment and of humanism[26]—all left behind for his third order—hyperreality,[27] the clone double, pure and empty form of reality and all its pertinences.
Put simply, the erasure of time and memory in hypertime and hypermemory is subsumed in the larger erasure of reality in hyperreality.
The world of hyperreality is a world of models that animate a ‘real’ without truth or reality.
I now call it ‘Trump World’—the delirious, nutty, hyperreal, hypercartoonesque, reality TV, mass media, virtual ‘live show’ world—world of spin, of the trumped up, of the viral, metastatic, more hype than hype, over the top, extreme, hypernarcissistic, hyperpathological, obese, obscene, terrorist, never not morphing, plastic, plasmatic, hyperanimatic, hypermediatic, hyperimmediatic, hyperreal, hypersimulacral, hyperevil demon, total, pure and empty, virtual reality Apprentice President, that is, hyperPresident of the hyperdisUnited States of America.
Trump World is a world trumping second order reality, a world where the fake (as in ‘fake news’) is more true than true and the true more fake than fake, radically indistinguishing them, a world of the factitiousness of fact—which is what simulation is—where fact is more fiction than fiction and fiction more fact than fact, including in and as hypermemory, the world of hyperDoublethink, hyper1984, where memory morphs into mere memorisation, into mere mnemonic, mere meme-ory, the computer itself hypermemento, hypermemorial, as hyperarchive of the memory of memory, of the murder of memory—what I call mnemocide—the murder of memory as something more, other, than automated, algorithmic, programmed, as something more, other, than information, data, instruction, as animation was something more, other, than automation.
Hyperreality is a world of…hype!, of excess, of extreme phenomena and events, of extremism and extremisms, a world whose logic and process is that of the exponential, the hypertelic, the maximalising, the ecstatic.[28]
No longer the dialectic, no longer opposing poles but hyperpolarisation, the hyperin between, the pure and empty form, absence, of the in between, that absence key feature of digital time, real time, as compared with the in between of analogue time, in between privileged by Norman McLaren for animation and by me for animation as what I have called since 1991 the animatic, that nonessence anterior and superior to animation, at once enabling and disenabling animation as essence, what conjures animation and what animation seeks to conjure away but cannot, what uncannily haunts animation as its ghost, its spectre, its death, cryptically incorporating, deconstructing, disseminating and seducing it.
Hyperreality is a world of the ecstatic, yes, but in its viral, metastatic expression, the hypertelic, what I call not the animatic but the hyperanimatic, the ‘more x than x,’[29] as in the faster than fast, the slower than slow, the bigger than big, the smaller than small, etc., the pushing of things, all things, including memory and time, to their limits where they at once fulfil and annihilate themselves, or reverse on themselves, showing their opposite was always already imminent in them, in either case ‘living on’ beyond their end, an example of what Baudrillard calls hysteresis, which occurs when something, having lost its purpose and meaning, ‘lives on,’ even functioning all the better for that, ‘lives on’ as a function whose only ‘rationale’ is to function,[30] to perform, to operate, maximally so, surviving (from French survivant, living on), like Foucault’s disciplinary regime, but in its pure and empty, virtual form,[31] where the virtual is more actual than (the) actual and the actual more virtual than (the) virtual, where everything is everywhere but in itself and everything is in itself but itself, including memory and time.
Here the social is no longer the social. It implodes in the mass, the pure and empty form, the simulation of, the social.[32] This is a cold, disenchanted, disillusioned, world, a world of cancerous metastasis, of the cybernetic and the molecular, a world where identity is defined by the codes of DNA and digitality, a world of television and, exponentially increasingly so, the computer and its world of screens, a world of total screen even, where, fascinated, Telematic Man, computer man, Terminal Man (!)—my favourite the virus Denis Nedry of Jurassic Park, what I call not only homo computans but the zomborg, the cybernetic zombie ironising the term ‘personal computer’—sees nothing, a world where everything, including the human, is reduced to information and data and their collection and communication—a world passed beyond Plato’s wax tablet model of memory, beyond Freud’s Mystic Writing Pad model of memory, a model itself better modelled by film than that Pad,[33] to a new model of memory, that of another tablet, another Pad—iPad!—to computer memory, to GOOGLE and Wikipedia et al., to apps, and to communication, or better, connectivity—what Baudrillard calls interpassivity[34]—connectivity between computers and between computers and the computer humans—the cyborgs, zomborgs—operating and being operated by them, a double autism for the ‘new (bubble) “couple.”’
Now the ‘human’ and its memory forms an integrated circuit with its computer, as it does with its computer-animated media technologies—iPhone, iPod, iPad, iWatch, etc.—and ‘social’ media sites—Facebook (what I call efFacebook), Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, etc.—the human and its memory becoming their extension, an integrated circuit and extension for me marking at the same time a disintegrated circuit in the human and with other humans—what I call the ‘asocial network’ of hypersocial media—and a disintegration of the human, the human become the subordinate simulation clone of the simulator computer clone and cloner, marked for me in the morphing of the, as it were, ‘I’ of the self—of identity—into the ‘i’ of the iPod, iPhone, iPad, iWatch(!), etc.
No time, no memory, no identity.
Rather i-memory of the i-self—what I term the selfie—the hypernarcissistic, total, pure and empty self—recalling the clone doubles, the pod simulation people—the iPod people!—in the 1956 terror cult classic Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
‘They’re here already. You’re next!’ shouts its human protagonist Dr Miles J. Bennell to the oblivious and indifferent (already cloned?!) drivers passing him by on the highway.
And where your ‘identity’, as virtual hyperidentity, is at once your DNA as your data and your data as your DNA, or rather, where your DNA is more your data than your data and your data more your DNA than your DNA, all for collecting in the ironically titled ‘memory bank’ of Big Data, for Big Data is banking on it.
Hyperreality is the world where, inverting Marshall McLuhan, the human has become the extension of, the prosthesis of, the satellite of, the excrescence upon, its technologies, in particular for Baudrillard its media technologies,[35] where for me media, become hypermedia, are hypertechnologies, and technologies, become hypertechnologies, are hypermedia, including, of course, and key for our subject—the computer—the computer as ‘medium of all media’ animating all media, animating all as media, as mass media technologies, animating the rule of media as hypermedia and hyperimmedia, medium in which the ‘human’ swims and which swim in the ‘human’, not only making it impossible to distinguish the human from the media, including ‘human memory’ (in all its forms) from mass media memory, but increasingly morphing the former into the latter.[36]
And since for Baudrillard ‘the whole of our reality is filtered through the media,’[37] for me the whole of our reality is filtered through that medium of all media, the computer, the digital animator of hyperreality, where our mass media are more reality than reality and reality more mass media than mass media.
Baudrillard writes in ‘The Double Extermination’: Today we do not think the virtual. The virtual thinks us.’[38]
Which means for me animates us, lives us!
And that virtual, that virtual reality, is—as Baudrillard coined it and you hear it in the film The Matrix (1999)—‘The desert of the real itself,’[39] a world of increasingly definitive indeterminacy, of the end of finalities, of nonresolution, including of memory and time. As Baudrillard declared: ‘The revolution of our time is the uncertainty revolution.’[40]
And now, for him we have experienced another cycle and entered into his fourth order, one perpetuating and augmenting, amplifying, the third, and its figures of the trans-—the transpolitical, transeconomic, transsexual, transaesthetic et al.—and processes of the obese, the obscene, the hostage and the terrorist, the processes of both hyperreal orders at once infolding, imploding, and enfolding and infusing everything. This is the order of the viral, the fractal, the clone, the mass, the quantum, the transdevaluation of all values, which hyperproliferate and hypersaturate the virtual world, including with the processes of the third order.
This is the world of contemporary memory and time, hypermemory and hypertime, world in which they are subject to all these processes, and vice versa.
And, notably, the death of human memory, time—all the pertinences of second order reality—in hyperreality includes the death of the human, the death of what I call humanimation, the animated memories of the human lost to, erased by, the hyperanimated hypermemories of hyperhumanimation, lost to, erased by, the computer, the cyborg, the replicant, with its prosthetic, programmable and programmed memory implants, its virtual, simulated memories, so poignantly exemplified in Blade Runner by the Nexus 7 replicant Rachel, Rachel a replicant without termination date, for me figuring the cyborg become more again, more ‘more human than human,’ to quote the Baudrillardian logo of the Tyrell Corporation describing its replicants—become hyperimmortal hyperhuman as cyborg—the dream of one mode of Transhumanism for the human itself—become computer hyperarchive of the human, and, as such hyperarchive, the hypercrypt, the hyperhaunted house, of the hypermemories of the human.[41]
Part 3. In Memory of Memory
Here, I am reminded of my 2004 essay ‘The Crypt, the Haunted House, of Cinema,’[42] where after Derrida I first formulated what I call the Cryptic Complex of film as form of animation, subsequently generalised by me as the crypt, the haunted house, of animation, of animation as the animatic, a Complex composed of the uncanny, the return of death as spectre, endless mourning and melancholia and cryptic incorporation, its crypt, its haunted house, incorporating for me memory and time as themselves animatic spectres, crypts, haunted houses.
And, given memory is not only never not twilight memory but also a form of mourning, cryptic incorporation is always already, never not, incomplete mourning, establishing a safe, a crypt, inside the mourner for the dead to live in and to live on in as living dead, as living dead memory, as spectre, making the carrier a living dead, a spectre, a crypt—a haunted house, archive of living dead memory, too—a Complex not simply ontological but rather, to use Derrida’s term, hauntological—of the order of the ghost, the spectre, the in between.
While in the Cryptic Complex of animation, including the animation of memory and time, one has never not to deal with animation as for me the Derridean deconstructive animatic figure of lifedeath—at once the life of death and the death of life—privileging for animation the classic figures and family of the living dead, of the spectre—the ghost, the vampire, the mummy[43]—making of all film as form of animation, including of memory and time, a form of the living dead, the spectre, a form of the Cryptic Complex, hence a form of mourning and melancholia—in the hypercrypt, the hyperhaunted house, of hyperanimation, including of hypermemory and hypertime, one has to deal with hyperanimation as for me the Baudrillardian ecstatic hyperanimatic figure of the hyperspectre, of hyperlifedeath—a life without life, a death without death, a lifedeath without lifedeath, a life and the living more dead than dead and a death and the dead more alive than alive, making of the hyperarchon computer as the hyperanimatic hyperanimator and all that it hyperanimates, including hypermemory and hypertime, a form of hyperlifedeath, a form of the hypercrypt, the hyperhaunted house, a form of the hyperCryptic hyperComplex, hence a form of hypermourning and hypermelancholia, for me privileging for hyperanimation what I call the hyperreal hyperzombie, George A Romero’s reanimating of the cinematic voodoo zombie of the 1930s in his 1968 film Night of the Living Dead, as can be seen these last years most notably for me in the TV series The Walking Dead and Game of Thrones.
Here we pass from death as absence, as exemplary radical Other, model of all Others, to the absence of death, absence of the radical Other tout court. Here death has met its death, and ‘lives on’ beyond it, as does life, too, as ‘life,’ in a world without the capital O Other, a world of the ‘Hell of the Same’, a world beyond time in cold clonal hyperimmortality—that animated by the computer.
A passage beyond marking the morphing of the ontological, Plato’s ‘living memory,’ anamnesis—always already, never not, subtended and deconstructed by the hauntological—into what I have called the oncological, hypermnesis, pure cancerous, viral, hyperproliferating and hypersaturating metastatic hyperspectre, hyperzombie, indeed zomborg, computer hypermemory, the increasing reliance by the human upon computer memory to the detriment, the atrophy, the erasure, of human memory itself.
Here with the oncological, with hyperreality, with the hyperspectre, we pass beyond the pharmakon of hypomnesis, of written, recorded memory that Plato condemned as poison to human memory, which philosopher Bernard Stiegler articulates in terms of mnemotechnologies—technologies of memory—indeed, hypomnemotechnologies—where written memory is at once poison and cure, neither simply poison nor simply cure—into the hyperpharmakon of hypermnesis, of hypermnemotechnologies—where cure is more poison than poison and poison more cure than cure—hypertechnologies which, as hyperanimators—what I call hyperanimnemotechologies—have hyperreanimated everything, playing the key defining, or better, hyperdefining, hyperanimatic, role in hyperreality—that is, the computer and the devices it animates.[44]
The computer—hypermnesic, hyperretentive, hyperprosthetic, hypergenetic, hypertechnological hyperarchive, hyperpharmakon, archiving the hyperCryptic hyperComplex of hypermemory, where the memory of—that is, belonging to—the human has morphed into the memory of—that is, the remembering of, or rather, the hyperremembering of—the remembering more forgetting than forgetting of, the remembering as dismembering of—the human and of its memory—where memory has morphed into the memory of memory in hypermemory, that is, computer/cyborg/zomborg memory.
The computer—hypercrypt, hyperhaunted house, of hypermemory—animator of the ecstatic, hypertelic, double cyberviral epidemic, double cyberviral fever, double overload, of both hyperremembering—the obsession to record, archive, memorialise everything—and hyperforgetting—a culture given over to amnesia, oblivion—both for me abreactions to the increasing uncertainty, unmanageability, of the world of hyperreality, both pushing hyperreality further, maximalising it—the at once increasing acceleration and inertia of both hyperremembering and hyperforgetting, the reversion of each on itself and on the other, the at once hypertrophy of memory (to cite Pierre Nora[45] and Huyssen after him) and atrophy of memory, and of time.
Fatal to Huyssen’s, indeed any effort, to preserve reality against hyperreality, fatal, too, to all analyses and theories of memory, and of time, assuming the continued existence of second order reality and building upon that assumption, including those of the most extraordinary thinkers, including Derrida and Stiegler.
This means too that when Huyssen writes of the struggle against the vitiating of memory by ‘the accelerating technical processes’[46] transforming the world—a struggle to ‘slow down information processing, to resist the dissolution of time in the synchronicity of the archive, to recover a mode of contemplation outside the universe of simulation and fast-speed information and cable networks, to claim some anchoring space in a world of puzzling and often threatening heterogeneity, non-synchronicity, and information overload’[47]—these struggles of slowing down, resisting and recovering, of finding a ‘temporal anchoring,’[48] that he proposes are for me subsumed within this larger erasure, that of memory, time and reality erasing themselves in hyperreality, erased preeminently by the media Huyssen himself proposes as not only ‘carriers of all forms of memory’[49] but as central to and transformers of not only temporality and its structures but memory in our lives.[50]
For me, obviously, the key player in that media world reanimating and transforming temporality and memory, hyperrealising reality, is its governor, steerer and animator, the computer, and all it drives, a process of reanimating and morphing of what I have called since 1991 the animatic apparatus into the hyperanimatic hyperapparatus.
Part 4. The Holocaust: the morphing of memory into the memory of memory, including the memory of time and the time of memory.
Here I introduce, all too briefly, the Holocaust, central to, indeed casting its shadow over, memory and memory studies post-it.
While the Atomic Bomb is for Baudrillard the last great event of reality, the Holocaust wrought by Nazi Germany in World War II, what Baudrillard calls ‘the black hole of Auschwitz,’[51] is the first great event for him of hyperreality, making hyperreality the holocaust of the Holocaust—where the extermination of the Jews in the Holocaust (holocaust meaning ‘burnt whole’, ‘all-burnt’) is doubled by the virtualisation of the Holocaust—its second extermination in its forgetting by its very representing in and by the colder than cold, neutralising, hyperreal, implosive mass media, mass media’s liquidating, annihilating, dissuading, deterring of the Holocaust by its very imaging of it in its hyperarchival mass media memory, in the black hole of hyperreality and hypermemory.
Writing on the TV series Holocaust of the doubled extermination of the Holocaust in its virtualised, mass media imagings—imagings driven, animated, increasingly by the computer—Baudrillard declares: ‘today, everywhere, it is artificial memories that efface the memory of man, that efface man in his own memory,’[52] what I call the holocaust, the apocalypse, of memory, including the memory, and very existence, of the human.
Hyperreality: where the memory of the Holocaust morphs into the holocaust, indeed hyperholocaust, of memory, including of the Holocaust—the virtual holocaust of virtual memory, of all forms of memory (personal, scholarly, cultural, collective, etc.)—virtual reality for Baudrillard the final solution to the Final Solution, the final solution to memory, history, the human and second order reality.
A final solution for me animated and executed by the computer and all it hyperanimates, including the accountability regime as final solution, the final solution to the Final Solution in the hyperhuman, the zomborg.[53]
A final solution marked for me in architect Peter Eisenman’s 2005 Berlin Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, for me viral, fractal, clonal, ashen grey hypercrypts, hyperhaunted houses—indeed, hyperhouses—total screen simulacral hypermemorial marking that double extermination, double disappearance,[54] including for me by the daily selfie zomborg behavoir enacted there and by the hyperdisseminative postcarding of it for mass communication, consumption and memory.[55]
Part 5. The Erasure of the Human
As Baudrillard states, ‘All forms of high technology illustrate the fact that behind its doubles and its prostheses, its biological clones and its virtual images, the human species is secretly fomenting its disappearance.’[56]
For me, all those forms of high technology are forms of the computer and its viral, fractal, clones, implosively irradiating, exterminating—murdering—the human—from genocide to anthropocide—and murdering the human’s memory in its.
Here I am reminded of the warnings against the achievement of the Artificial General Intelligence Singularity by Stephen Hawking, Elon Musk, Bill Gates et al. in a trailer to Ex Machina (2014), as well as by Jann Tallinn in his model of the for me mistitled ‘Evolutionary [rather than Devolutionary!] Staircase,’ especially with this loaded query in Ex Machina posed by Nathan, creator the cyborg Ava,[57] to Caleb, his chosen Turing Test-like examiner of Ava, about Ava: ‘Now the question is: “How does she feel about you?!”’
Which is to say that my hyperanimatic, Skynet-like modelling of the computer as Terminator of second order reality and all its pertinences not only subsumes but ironises for me the fears of Hawking, Musk, Gates, Tallinn and others of the potential future ‘existential threat’ to the human posed by the achievement of the Artificial General Intelligence Singularity, a threat for me already hyperrealised in the termination of the human in the black hole of hyperreality.
For once in the black hole of hyperreality there is theoretically no escaping it nor its singularity, its singularity coinciding for me with the Artificial General Intelligence Singularity, as the Holocaust and The Atomic Bomb (itself a form of holocaust) constitute its event horizon, an event horizon likewise commensurate for me with the advent of the Anthropocene, Trump at this point only epiphenomenal to that passage into the black hole.
Put simply, for me hyperreality and the Anthropocene coincide, including their advent in the Holocaust.
The Anthropocene as era of hyperreality, the total, pure and empty era of Anthropos and reality.
The human erased in their black hole ‘like tears in rain’.[58]
Or as Foucault styled it, so aptly for hyperanimators reanimating the work of animator Caroline Leaf, ‘erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea,’[59] a drawing withdrawn without return.
But wait!
The jury is still out.
For not only is the computer a virus, a cybervirus, as cybervirus it cannot be exempt from its own process, its own systematic desystematizing, de-operationalising, of itself.[60]
As terrorist holding itself hostage!
Baudrillard writes, ‘cancer…is a disruption of the genetic code and therefore a pathology of information, a resistance to the all-powerful principle of cybernetic control.’[61]
The implication: not only can the computer receive a virus that will destroy it!, as itself a virus, a cyberviral carrier and weaponised technology (like all technologies)—a viral Cyber Bomb even,[62] imaged on Nedry’s computer as thought bubble of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the Atomic Bomb’s Jewish ‘father’, animator, connecting the Atomic Bomb, the Holocaust and the computer as Bomb—it can infect and destroy itself, example of the virtual virtualising itself, indeed, self-terminating!
In other words, virtual reality not only erases second order reality, virtual reality as virtual erases itself, for Baudrillard ‘is doomed, as it expands, to destroy its own conditions of possibility’.[63]
Leaving open the possibility of a state beyond hyperreality.[64]
And, in any case, in closing, as I did at the outset, let me reassure you.
All I have said is of course impossible on the face of it.
Just farfetched theory—‘theory-fiction,’ ‘reality-fiction.’
Just wild, delirious speculation.
And yet.
Looks to me like, as a Mexican man says to Sarah Connor as she fills the tank of her jeep to head off into the desert and mountains in the final sequence of Terminator, ‘There’s a storm coming.’[65]
But, as Terminator has never not been telling us, is that storm, that toxic, viral storm, that firestorm, not already here?![66]
Dr Alan Cholodenko is an Honorary Associate of the Department of Art History, the School of Literature, Art, and Media, the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, The University of Sydney.
This paper was presented at The Third Annual Conference of Chinese Animation Research in 2018 in Chengdu, China, 23-24 November 2018.
References
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—. ‘(The) Death (of) the Animator, or: The Felicity of Felix’, Part III: ‘Death and the Death of Death’, in Selected Writings From the UTS: Sydney International Animation Festival 2010 Symposium, ed. Chris Bowman, the Faculty of Design, Architecture & Building, University of Technology Sydney, Sydney, Australia, 2011, reprinted in International Journal of Baudrillard Studies, 11 (1), January 2016.
—. ‘“Computer Says No”, or: The Erasure of the Human’, in Erasure: The Spectre of Cultural Memory, eds. Brad Buckley and John Conomos (England: Libri, 2015).
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Notes
[1] Jean Baudrillard, ‘L’extase et l’inertie’, Les Stratégies fatales (France: Editions Grasset & Fasquelle, 1983), p. 11. My translation.
[2] Jean Baudrillard, Fragments (London: Routledge, 2004), p. 103.
[3] Ibid., p. 66.
[4] Jean Baudrillard, ‘The Automatic Writing of the World’, in The Perfect Crime (London: Verso, 1996), p. 33.
[5] Jean Baudrillard, ‘Aesthetic Illusion and Virtual Reality,’ in Jean Baudrillard, Art and Artefact, ed. Nicholas Zurbrugg (London: Sage Publications, 1997), pp. 25-27. And see Jean Baudrillard, ‘The Year 2000 Will Not Take Place,’ in FUTUR◊FALL: Excursions into Post-Modernity, eds. E.A. Grosz et al. (Sydney: The Power Institute of Fine Arts, University of Sydney and Futur◊Fall, 1986), for his related notion of ‘high fidelity’.
[6] Jean Baudrillard, La Transparence du Mal: Essai sur les phénomènes extremes (Paris: Editions Galilée, 1990).
[7] Alan Cholodenko, Introduction, The Illusion of Life: Essays on Animation, ed. Alan Cholodenko (Sydney: Power Publications and the Australian Film Commission, 1991), p. 15.
[8] Alan Cholodenko, ‘The Expanding Universe of Animation (Studies)’, Animation Studies Online Journal, vol. 11, 2016.
[9] Erasure: The Spectre of Cultural Memory, eds. Brad Buckley and John Conomos (England: Libri, 2015).
[10] Gilles Deleuze, ‘Postscript on Control Societies,’ in Negotiations: 1972-1990 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995). My notion of the accountability regime has much in common with Gilles Deleuze’s notion of the society of control, which for him likewise came to supplant Foucault’s disciplinary regime, but with the caveat that for me that control, as hypercontrol, is at once total and none. A detailed comparison lies beyond the scope of this essay.
[11] Friedrich Kittler so characterises computer systems in ‘Computers,’ in Optical Media: Berlin Lectures 1999 (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2010), p. 225.
[12] In his book Turing’s Man (London: Duckworth, 1984), J. David Bolter lists such epoch-defining technologies as the clay pot or spindle of classical times, the clock of Descartes’ era, the steam engine of the nineteenth century and the latest, for me globally reanimating, such technology, the computer of our epoch, each serving for him and me as metaphorical model and model metaphor of the universe, each itself a time/memory machine/technology.
[13] To reference Pierre Nora’s notion in Realms of Memory: Rethinking the French Past, vol. 1, ed. Lawrence D. Kritzman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996-1998). For me Nora’s milieux de mémoire morphs into the lieu de mémoire, or better, hyperlieu de hypermémoire, the site without site, the at once everywhere and nowhere, that is the computer and what it drives, animates. Recalling Max Headroom! And the hyperspectre Puppet Master hacking the networks in Ghost in the Shell.
[14] Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), p. 17. It is quoted in Jeffrey Shandler, Holocaust Memory in the Digital Age: Survivors’ Stories and New Media Practices (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2017), p. 13.
[15] Andreas Huyssen, Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia. New York: Routledge, 1995.
[16] Jean Baudrillard, ‘The Murder of the Real,’ The Vital Illusion, ed. Julia Witwer (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), p. 65.
[17] Jean Baudrillard, Paroxysm: Interviews with Philippe Petit (New York: Verso, 1998), p. 29.
[18] Ibid., pp. 30-31.
[19] Jean Baudrillard, ‘The Double Extermination,’ Screened Out (London: Verso, 2002), p. 108.
[20] Jean Baudrillard, Paroxysm, p. 31.
[21] Ibid., p. 30.
[22] History itself arguably a special case, the reduced, conditional form, of memory as collective memory, cultural memory, akin to Roland Barthes’ notion of denotation as the last of the connotations.
[23] What Esther Leslie eloquently describes as ‘a permanently overwriting present without recall…’ in her essay ‘Absent Minded Professors: Etch-a-Sketching Academic Forgetting,’ in Regimes of Memory, eds. Susannah Radstone and Kate Hodgkin (London: Routledge, 2003), p 182. Just a succession of instants whose connection is more disconnection than disconnection and disconnection more connection than connection, without the in between that for Deleuze, after Bergson, synthesises, as Joe Hughes tells us, that succession of instants as time, synthesised by impersonal memory for Bergson, ‘which is itself nothing more than the contraction of two instants’, and for Deleuze by ‘an originary subjectivity.’ See Joe Hughes, Deleuze and the Genesis of Representation (London: Continuum, 2008), pp. 131-132. The distinction here between analogue and digital watches and time recalls to a degree Deleuze’s distinction between the movement-image and the time-image.
[24] Charles Krauthammer, ‘The Joys of Analog,’ Time magazine May 26, 1986, p. 68.
[25] Jean Baudrillard, The Ecstasy of Communication, ed. Sylvere Lotringer (New York: Semiotext(e), 1988), p. 24.
[26] By ‘the grand narratives of the culture,’ I refer to Jean-François Lyotard’s defining of them in The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), narratives such as the never-ending progress of history and human evolution, of emancipation, liberation, through science and technology, etc.
[27] On Baudrillard’s orders, orders in not the history but the destiny of the world, see my sketch of them in ‘(The) Death (of) the Animator, or: The Felicity of Felix’, Part III: ‘Death and the Death of Death,’ reprinted in International Journal of Baudrillard Studies, vol. 11, no. 1, January 2016, as well as my reprising of his second and third orders in my ‘The “ABCs” of B, or: To Be and Not to Be B,’ Film-Philosophy, Special Issue on Baudrillard and Film, vol. 14, no. 2, 2010.
[28] And for Baudrillard (to enlarge what I quoted earlier), ‘Ecstasy is all functions abolished into one dimension, the dimension of communication. All events, all spaces, all memories are abolished in the sole dimension of information: this is obscene,…cool communicational obscenity,… A promiscuity which reigns over the communication networks is one of a superficial saturation, an endless harassment [solicitation?!], an extermination of interstitial space’. Jean Baudrillard, The Ecstasy of Communication, ed. Sylvere Lotringer (New York: Semiotext(e), 1988), p. 24. An extermination of the interstitial, the in between, I marked in terms of digital time.
[29] Here a caveat: whenever I figure the Baudrillardian ‘more x than x’ in this essay, it is to be understood as at once more x than x and less x than x, as for example the hyperreal is at once more real than real and less real than real. Limitations of space have necessitated the use of the contracted form.
[30] On hysteresis, see Baudrillard, ‘The End of US Power?’ in America (New York: Verso, 1988), p. 115. Given that hysteresis is the end of all finalities (including time) in the endless of the hyperend, wherever I write ‘at the same time’ in terms of hyperreality, virtual reality, hypertime, it must be so understood. Likewise, where I write ‘new’, become hypernew. See Baudrillard, ‘The Year 2000 Will Not Take Place’ and my ‘(The) Death (of) the Animator, or: The Felicity of Felix’, Part III: ‘Death and the Death of Death.’
[31] For my earlier consideration of the relation of Foucault and Baudrillard, see my ‘“The Borders of Our Lives”: Frederick Wiseman, Jean Baudrillard and the Question of the Documentary’ online in International Journal of Baudrillard Studies, vol. 1, no. 2, July 2004.
[32] See Jean Baudrillard, In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities…Or the End of the Social (New York, Semiotext(e), 1983).
[33] See Thierry Kuntzel, ‘A Note Upon the Filmic Apparatus’, Quarterly Review of Film Studies, vol. 1, no. 3, August 1976, and Annemarie Jonson’s essay engaging it, ‘Porky’s Stutter: The Vocal Trope and Lifedeath in Animation,’ in The Illusion of Life 2: More Essays on Animation.
[34] The ‘interpassivity’ of the ‘interface’ of the human-computer module characterises a situation in which, for Baudrillard, while ‘the machine does what the human wants it to do,…by the same token the human puts into execution only what the machine has been programmed to do’ (‘Xerox and Infinity,’ in The Transparency of Evil: Essays on Extreme Phenomena (London: Verso, 1993) p. 56). Which is to say that the computer (re)programmes the human as computer, as computer-human, as cyborg, and vice versa.
[35] Jean Baudrillard, ‘Aesthetic Illusion and Virtual Reality,’ p. 24.
[36] In other words, a world where our cold mass media have telescoped into reality, short-circuiting it and the polarities that have ostensibly theretofore sustained its ‘givens.’
[37] Jean Baudrillard, ‘Necrospective,’ The Transparency of Evil, p. 90.
[38] Jean Baudrillard, ‘The Double Extermination,’ Screened Out, p. 110.
[39] ‘The Precession of Simulacra,’ Simulations (New York: Semiotext(e), 1983), p. 2.
[40] Jean Baudrillard, ‘Superconductive Events,’ The Transparency of Evil, p. 43.
[41] Recalling in part the character Trent in Harlan Ellison’s ‘Demon with a Glass Hand’ in The Outer Limits (1964), who wakes with no memory but acquires one as he gains one by one the fingers of his glass hand, fingers holding memories for him, and comes to learn that he is a cyborg carrying a civilisation inside him and has been guardian of it and its continued existence.
[42] Alan Cholodenko, ‘The Crypt, the Haunted House, of Cinema’, Cultural Studies Review, vol. 10, no. 2, September, 2004.
[43] Reminding of the photograph as form of animation as for André Bazin a form of embalming the dead, as mummy complex, death mask, inherited by film for him), etc. See my ‘Still Photography?’ Afterimage, vol. 32, no 5, March/April, 2005, reprinted in International Journal of Baudrillard Studies, vol. 5, no. 1, January 2008.
[44] See Bernard Stiegler, ‘Anamnesis and Hypomnesis,’ Ars Industrialis. Accessed 20 October 2013, http://arsindustralis.org/anamnesis-and hypomnesis. Insofar as I have brought the work of Baudrillard to bear upon the morphing of second order reality into third order hyperreality, his work requires this key claim regarding the work of Stiegler as well as Derrida: Baudrillardian hyperreality, with its ‘pure positivity,’ is eraser/erasure of deconstruction’s putting under erasure (sous rature), making hyperreality the eraser/erasure of deconstruction in hyperdeconstruction. And as well this second key claim: hyperreality trumps all those who theorise the contemporary, hyperreality, as if it is still second order reality, making all their analyses, theories, etc., inapplicable.
[45] On Nora and hypertrophy, see Anne Whitehead, Memory (London: Routledge, 2009), p. 143. Jean-Marc Dreyfus and Marcel Stoetzler offer in ‘Holocaust Memory in the Twenty-First Century: Between National Reshaping and Globalisation’ a concise characterisation of Nora’s understanding of memory: ‘The more we remember the more we forget, and the more we become aware of all we forget the harder we struggle to remember, to the effect that we forget even more: memory engenders as well as is the product of its anti-memory’ (Jewish Culture in the Age of Globalisation, eds. Cathy S. Gelbin and Sander L. Gilman (London: Routledge, 2015), p. 71).
[46] Andreas Huyssen, ‘Introduction,’ Twilight Memories, p. 7.
[47] Ibid.
[48] Ibid.
[49] Andreas Huyssen, ‘Present Pasts: Media, Politics, Amnesia,’ Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), p. 18.
[50] Insofar as for Huyssen the media as carriers of all forms of memory ‘is central to the way we live structures of temporality in our culture’ (Twilight Memories, p. 4)—structures integral to ‘the issues of memory and amnesia [which] have been exacerbated by the further development of media technologies since their [Adorno and Benjamin’s] time, affecting politics and culture in the most fundamental ways’ (Ibid.)—that role of media for him effects ‘a transformation of temporality in our lives’, brought on by the complex intersections of technological change, mass media, and new patterns of consumption, work and global mobility’ (Present Pasts, p. 21). One he describes in Twilight Memories as ‘a media world spinning a cocoon of timeless claustrophobia and nightmarish phantasms and simulations’ (p. 9), an ‘informational hyperspace’ (Ibid.), ‘cyber-space’ (Ibid.), transforming the ‘modern structure of temporality itself’ (Ibid, p. 8), a media world for me key player in the hyperrealising of reality (and) integrally linked to, governed and steered by the computer.
So when Huyssen asks ‘Could it be that the surfeit of memory in this media-saturated culture creates such overload that the memory system itself is in constant danger of imploding, thus triggering fear of forgetting?’ (Present Pasts, p. 17)—such an overload as to threaten memory itself period—he cannot but remind me of the computer as hyperarchon and of what for me is told us of it by the total memory of Borges’ Funes the Memorious, Borges’ total library, Citizen Kane’s Xanadu, with Rosebud lost in it, and its avatar—the warehouse archive storing the ark of the covenant in Raiders of the Lost Ark: total archive is archive degree zero, lost ‘arkhive.’ ‘Total Rekall’ no recall at all.
[51] Jean Baudrillard, The Evil Demon of Images (Sydney: Power Institute Publications, 1987), p. 24.
[52] Jean Baudrillard, ‘Holocaust’, Simulacra and Simulation (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1994), p. 49. See too The Evil Demon of Images, p. 22. As I put it in ‘“Computer Says No”,…’:
…insofar as for Baudrillard TV is ‘the veritable final solution to the historicity of every event’ [Jean Baudrillard, The Evil Demon of Images, pp. 77-78]—the memory of every event, too—and insofar as for him virtual reality is ‘the final solution of the real’ [Jean Baudrillard, ‘The Virtual’, in Passwords (New York: Verso, 2003), p. 39], for me the computer as hyperarchon and hyperarchive, in tandem with accountability, is such a final solution, including to reality, the human and its memory—their Terminator.
[53] As is said in George A. Romero’s Dawn of the Dead (1979), ‘When there’s no more room in hell, the dead will walk the earth’, making the earth hell. Here, the ‘human’ no longer has but is its own shadow, its own psuché, spectre, its own clone, its own zombie, its own cancer, its own coffin, its own crypt, its own grave, its own hell, its own haunted house, its own ‘Kingdom of Shadows’, its own film animation.
[54] Here I acknowledge leading animation scholar Esther Leslie’s insightful but for me too sketchy(!) sketch in ‘Absent Minded Professors: Etch-a-Sketching Academic Forgetting’ of Baudrillard’s view of the computer as ‘the last word in the refinement of the hyperreal…’ (p. 182), where ‘Without referent, it is as if the link to history and memory is severed in favour of a permanently overwriting present without recall…’ (p 182), ‘computers…the endpoint of an ultimate forgetting, because memory—our memory—is here externalised, and substituted (just like the memorial, in fact, as commentators, in particular on Holocaust memorials, have argued)?’ (p. 183).
Of course, for me it is not only our memory that is so externalised and substituted but the ‘our,’ the human, itself, the externalising of both memory and the human readable for me in the stele of Eisenman’s memorial even.
But, having delineated that, Leslie retreats from Baudrillardian hyperreality, a retreat already marked in her ‘as if’ and the sentence-ending question mark, then as well in her certitude in declaring, evoking Derrida for me, ‘but still within computing the traces do remain, even after acts of erasure’ (p. 183), Leslie refraining from subsuming them within hyperreality in terms of simulation and remaining within the orbit for me of second order thinkers.
But, recalling Huyssen’s last sentence to his Introduction to Twilight Memories, where in a ‘dystopian vision of a high-tech future, amnesia’…‘will have sealed the very forgetting of memory itself: nothing to remember, nothing to forget’ (p. 9), Leslie’s two sentences of her text implicitly return to Baudrillard and/on the computer with this warning: ‘There is a risk in effacing the trace: if it is unhinged from its connection—however mediated—to actuality, then forgetting is all there is, and memory becomes too distant a memory. There may not be any “recovery” for us from that’ (p. 184).
Which is what I mark by proposing the passage of deconstruction into hyperdeconstruction, where the trace is erased in the hypertrace, the total, pure and empty form of the trace, the trace of nothing. And by proposing the passage of forgetting into hyperforgetting, the total, pure and empty form of forgetting, the forgetting of forgetting, the erasure of erasure. See Esther Leslie, ‘Absent Minded Professors; Etch-a-Sketching Academic Forgetting’ in Regimes of Memory, edited by Susannah Radstone and Kate Hodgkin (London: Routledge, 2003), pp.172-185.
[55] The postcard of the Memorial with the Reichstag in the back with its huge dome designed by Norman Foster in 1999 hyperinscribes for me Hitler’s and Speer’s over the top dream of the hypersized Vox Hall dome of Germania 15 times the size of that of St Peter’s, celebrating the victory of the Nazis over the world, which means it hyperinscribes the Final Solution! What a contrast of extremes in this image and relation in Berlin today!! And the shape of the Reichstag and the Vox Hall domes connects for me with Baudrillard on the Atomic Bomb as last great event of reality, coupling for him with the Holocaust as first great event of hyperreality, in turn connecting for me with the image of J Robert Oppenheimer and the Atomic Bomb on Denis Nedry’s computer. See note 62.
[56] Jean Baudrillard, ‘Aesthetic Illusion and Virtual Reality,’ p. 24.
[57] The more again than Rachel Future Eve than Future Eve of Villiers de l’Isle-Adam’s L’Eve future (1886). So continues the maximalising process.
[58] ‘Why in the Hiroshima War Did Rain Turn Black?’, UCSB Scienceline, June 11, 2006, indicates: ‘It seems that black rain has become a metaphor for the atomic bomb itself in Japan.’
[59] Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage Books, 1973), p.387. Reminding me of the final words of my ‘Who Framed Roger Rabbit, or the Framing of Animation,’ The Illusion of Life on the littoral, suspending the literal no more.
[60] For Paul Virilio every technology brings with it its own accident, making that accident anything but accidental, rather systemic.
[61] Jean Baudrillard, ‘AIDS: Virulence or Prophylaxis?’ Screened Out, p. 5.
[62] Recalling my characterization in ‘The Spectre in the Screen’ of Denis Nedry as Virilio’s Man of Three Bombs—Atomic, Cyber/informatics, Genetic—Man elucidated by Virilio in Crepuscular Dawn, Nedry viral, implosive Bomb of his computer, Bomb that is the computer, the computer wreaking havoc in and on Jurassic Park, the computer that can unleash virtual T-Rexs and Raptors in and as Jurassic Park!, Nedry the avatar for me of that singular hyperspectre, hypercrypt, Dr Strangelove, and precursor of that viral, implosive Bomb, of ‘the virus’, as former White House Communications Director Anthony Scaramucci has called him on MSNBC’s ‘Morning Joe’ show 16 March 2020, that is Donald Trump. In terms of Jurassic Park, see my ‘“OBJECTS IN MIRROR ARE CLOSER THAN THEY APPEAR”: The Virtual Reality of Jurassic Park and Jean Baudrillard’, in Jean Baudrillard, Art and Artefact, ed. Nicholas Zurbrugg, reprinted in International Journal of Baudrillard Studies, vol. 2, no. 1, January 2005. I put it thus in ‘“Computer Says No”,…’: we ‘live’ in Jurassic Park, in the world of “The Returned” of “The Walking Dead”, in the world of Terminator.
[63] Jean Baudrillard, ‘Holocaust,’ Simulacra and Simulation.
[64] Including raising Baudrillard’s two irreconcilable hypotheses—undecidable between them—of The Perfect Crime of virtualisation, of hyperreality, and the Radical Illusion of Seduction, Baudrillard’s sovereign ‘principle,’ with the irresolvable possibility of the former being the avatar of the latter, strangely turning into and returning to the latter, preserving/restoring Illusion, Seduction, thereby. See Baudrillard, ‘The Millennium, or The Suspense of the Year 2000,’ in The Vital Illusion, pp. 53, 55.
[65] Or, as Jon Snow puts it in the ‘White Wolf Reborn’ episode of Game of Thrones, ‘The long night is coming and the dead come with it.’
[66] To which we would add Games of Thrones’ implicit question: ‘Is winter not already come?’; a question Jurassic Park, The Terminator and other films of the apocalyptic genre, or better hyperapocalyptic hypergenre, including the preeminent, ruling mode of that genre, that of the hyperzombie hyperfilm hyperanimation, likewise implicitly ask.
© Alan Cholodenko
Edited by Amy Ratelle