Steve Shaviro's Doom Patrols

"With postmodernism, as with drugs and pornography, the only way to get anywhere is to immerse yourself in it as much as possible, as mindlessly and as abjectly as possible, and then just sit back and enjoy it...

"Plagiarism "is democratic," Morrison says, "because everyone can plagiarize... The text takes on a whole other meaning when passed through a plagiarist." And so, in exemplary postmodern fashion, Morrison vandalizes, appropriates, and recycles the most diverse, incongruous sources. And not just old comics. Burroughs and Borges, for instance, are frequently in evidence. A single page of DOOM PATROL may also contain allusions and references to Gnostic heresies, pop music, and chaos theory, to Thomas De Quincey and Andy Warhol and Jack Kirby, to the Brothers Grimm and Salvador Dali and Mr. Ed, to X-Ray Spex and My Bloody Valentine and T. S. Eliot and Terence McKenna. The comic shows an amazing capacity for sucking up and regurgitating the detritus of Anglo-American (and world) culture. It annihilates categories of high and low, proper and improper, subjecting all distinctions to a continual play of absorption, mimicry, frantic accumulation, and prodigal display. It opposes the dreariness of standardized routine with its continual show of recombinant delirium..."

"We're not complaining that the values people once believed in are now empty; to the contrary, we're doing our best to empty them more and more. Get used to it. Stealing is a thrill in itself; this enjoyment is the real reason for postmodern appropriation. We aim to undermine those "convictions" of authenticity and truth, of proper meaning and right order, that sometimes seem to be as dear to Marxist dialecticians as they are to bureaucrats in the Pentagon. Speaking in my own voice is a tedious chore, one that the forces of law and order are all too eager to impose. They want to make me responsible, to chain me to myself. "Man could never do without blood, torture, and sacrifices when he felt the need to create a memory for himself" (Nietzsche). But forgetting myself, speaking in others' stolen voices, speaking in tongues: all this is pleasure and liberation. Let a hundred simulacra bloom, let a thousand costumes and disguises contend..."

"Plagiarism, blank mimicry, parasitic borrowing, speaking in tongues: these are the tactics of exemplary postmodern works like DOOM PATROL. Irresponsible freeplay is our best response to a cultural landscape supposedly composed of fragments and ruins..."

"In the postmodern world, where everything is borrowed and transitory, identity explodes to such a point that we can't even say that it has been lost. We experience not the morbid fixity of melancholia, but the accelerated dislocation of convulsive hysteria and full-blown paranoia. We don't project allegories upon the ruins, so much as we restlessly traverse the bifurcations of Borgesian labyrinths: the infinitely divisible straight line suggested at the end of "Death and the Compass," or the proliferating multiplicities of "The Garden of Forking Paths." Here "nothing is true, everything is permitted"; every alternative gives way to the next, with no ground for choice among them. The paranoid discovery that there is no solidity or consistency in the world, that nothing is truly my own, at least frees me from the burdens of indebtedness and guilt...Does this mean that we've now reached the stage, dreaded by Benjamin, when mankind "can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order"? Say rather that the King, the totalitarian Leader, loses his head when he is reflected in these delirious mazes. Andy Warhol made multiple portraits of Chairman Mao, just as he did of Marilyn and Elvis. Is there really any difference? What Taussig calls our culture's "mimetic excess" destabilizes all fixities of signification and power. The proliferation of Pop replicas, the paranoiacally elaborate plot twists of science fiction novels, the lurid colors of comic books: these cannot be dismissed merely as distorted adolescent representations, since their `distortions' make up the real itself. DOOM PATROL is less a surreal fantasy than it is a naturalistic rendering of our supersaturated cultural space. We never come to the end of simulation; there is no culminating moment (such as Jean Baudrillard melodramatically imagines) when everything has been captured, coded, and serialized. There's always the possibility, indeed the necessity, of once more upping the ante. The famous "extermination of the real," encountered in the form of a comic book apocalypse, turns out to be just a cheap plot device, a suspenseful (and ultimately ridiculous) twist designed to keep readers in a state of ungratified anticipation, the better to lead them to the next issue in the series. Don't produce, but waste and expend; for every destruction marks the birth of a yet realer real, of still another grotesque, outrageous, and irresponsible flowering of simulation."


I had forgotten how sheerly fucking AMAZING this essay and this entire book are. If you haven't already read it, do yourself a favour and JUST DO IT!

Speaking of forgetting...

Oh maaaaan, remember drum and bass - when it was THIS fucking good?!?

Goldie - Sensual