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MELATONIN
The fictions of Brett-Eason Ellis and the theories
of Paul Virilio
by Adrian Gargett
“The major advances in civilization are processes that all but
wreck the societies in which they occur”
(A.N. Whitehead)
“One day the day will come when the day does not come”
(Paul Virilio)
The velocity of contemporary existence has fundamentally transformed
notions of perception. As digitalized time ticks away, the mind has developed
to cope with a phenomenological blizzard. The attraction to speed is ultimately
suicidal, a rush towards disintegration. The ethos of speed is remorselessly
belligerent.
We no longer appear to live in a real time experience but alternatively
seem to exist in an immediate, phospherent instant – time cannot
be conceived as linear and segmented, but multi-directional and deep.
The primary function of this project is to animate an intersection processed
via interacting the fiction of Brett Easton-Ellis with the theories of
Paul Virilio. In the investigation it is the attempt to adopt a strategy
according to Virilio’s mechanisms (of concepts as mental images)
to proceed by engaging the conceptual elements with the material in the
program.
Paul Virilio as a “dromologist” claims not to believe in explanations,
but in suggestions, “in the obvious quality of the implicit”.
In his work he has opened up a new trajectory for the effective critique
of contemporary discourses of social reality, and in particular the “social
reality” of contemporary “hyper-capitalism”. Virilio has
created an operational process by which to interrogate contemporary transformations
and appearances and the radicalization of the “politics” of
time. Not only would political rationality understand the motion of matter
and of bodies, it would seek above all to perfect the mechanisms of producing
it. The “movement-of-movement” or “speed”, as a technical
achievement emerges, as a societal principle, re-ordering the modern world.
In the fiction of Brett Easton Ellis we observe artfully drawn satires
that continually reflect an uncanny power of observation towards contemporary
society. An “epic” flight through hyper-kinetic life. It is
funny, hip and relentlessly sharp.
Ellis’ first novel “Less than Zero” (1985), a book of just
200 pages with autobiographical strains, introduced a passive, detached
narrative concerning a group of spoiled but drifting Los Angeles youth
“anaesthetised” by drugs sex and violence. Its parties and beach
interludes and drug deals via parents’ telephones were so stylized,
so similar to each other, so smoothly repetitive in their re-telling,
that a reader becomes disconnected from the narrative. The crucial aspect
is atmosphere: by turns, blissed-out and ominous, seductive and spooked.
Throughout, the central character deliberates whether or not to let go
of his feckless, coke-addled teen milieu and go back to college. This
was satire, but so discreet it looked like celebration.
“Everything I write is monologue. “Less than Zero” is
a monologue by this zombie surfer dude from L.A. Everyone thinks “Clay,
he’s so sensitive because he went to school back East” He
decides to leave in the end. That would always bother me when people
would say, “the hero of the novel”. He’s isn’t a
hero at all to me. He’s like this big void. He troubles me more
than any other character that I’ve written about.”
(Brett Easton-Ellis) (1)
Ellis’ sentences were long, fast, and as hypnotizing as the LA freeways.
To readers familiar with this environment they rang true to others they
sounded strangely exotic.
“People are afraid to merge on freeways in Los Angeles”
(Less than Zero)
For the driver on a freeway, every moment is “now” by refusing
the emotional resonance of a traditional novel, by denying the sentences
the basic “humanity” of language and granting his words of freedom
of innocence, Ellis reduces every moment in “Less than Zero”
to “now”. The chapters are as brief as MTV videos and the vocabulary
simple, not so much to reflect an ever-diminishing attention span but
rather to terminate it. Too much happens in “Less than Zero”,
you cannot possibly follow what’s happening because everything occurs
simultaneously and nothing spans a perceptible expanse of time.
“Less than Zero” was received not only as a notable first novel,
but also as a definitive reflection of a nihilistic generation. The second
work “The Rules of Attraction” (1987) was a similar examination
of the indulgent nihilism of youth, set in an East Coast campus, rather
than L.A.
However beneath the surface glamour in Ellis’ fiction there is an
inverted “morality”. “When I wrote “Less Than Zero”,
I was really writing about a person that I found totally morally bankrupt.
The reason he troubles me more than the other characters is because at
least he has a bit of a conscience. Yet he still refuses to break out
of his passivity. He still allows evil to flourish around him” (Brett
Easton Ellis). (2)
In Virilio’s theoretical investigations all the key tendencies of
the contemporary epoch are envisioned; the fantastic acceleration of culture
to its imminent moment of collapse in a nowhere zone between speed and
inertia, the mutation of subjectivity into “dromocratic consciousness”
and the irradiation of the mediascape by a “logistic of perception”
that proceeds according to the “laws” of the virtual world.
Virilio’s Dromology is an empire of immediacy, speed and communication
where the self continuously mutates, where living means quick circulation
through the technical capillaries of the mediascape and where culture
is reduced to the society of the spectacle.
“American Psycho” (1991) is a first person narrative describing
a part of the life of Patrick Bateman, a Wall Street executive who is
– or believes himself to be - insane and a serial rapist and murderer.
The story has no real plot; it follows no coherent time line. It is just
a series of events in Bateman’s life told from his point of view.
The desolation of the book lies not in its murder victims, its rising
body count, ritualistic murders, torturous sex, or overabundant profanity,
but instead in the fact that you are faced with a man who you are compelled
to feel such sympathy for. Even the book’s most chilling moments
seem to happen at a distance. We do not live inside the victim’s
fear. We live instead inside Bateman. Horrified by Bateman’s actions
you cannot deny his charisma, nor can you dismiss the metaphor he represents.
Bateman is a nightmare of a human being – he experiences a vacancy
of identity and cannot feel human emotion yet he comes to embody a society
of glistening surface sheen. Bateman is a symbol who represents the craziness
of an era, all its psychosis embodied in one person – obsession with
clothes, obsession with food, obsession with skin. “American Psycho”
is a dark satire on American “values”. Bateman is the All-American
Boy except for the fact that he happens to butcher innocent people.
Ellis’s obsessive notation of designer labels and brand names suggests
that Bateman’s world is all surface and its effect is numbing. “American
Psycho” wants us to see Bateman as emblematic of his time, his material
fetishism as the sick product of a culture that has enshrined acquisitiveness
and greed. Everything including people are commodities.
In New York, appearance is everything, a form of currency, or at the very
least a calling card. One must look wealthy in order to be recognised
as a person of worth. In a sense the whole city is an audience and from
time to time, someone will stand up and announce, “Last year I made
$1,000,000, but this year I’m going to make $10,000,000”, while
everyone applauds.
Throughout the streets of Manhattan, Ellis’ “American Psycho”
takes you on a tour of a horrific American Elite, making you wonder who
is truly the monster. Bateman lives his own perverse American Dream, which,
in the chaos of his world, almost makes sense, and you come to like him
more and moreÖ.and then the graphic violence begins. Horrified by
it you cannot help but continue as the narrative accelerates, drawing
to a detonation point at which you are left wondering if it was all real
or not.
“There is an idea of Patrick Bateman, some kind of abstraction.
But there is no real me. Only an entity. Something illusory. And although
I can hide in my cold gaze, and you can shake my hand and feel the flesh
beneath yours, and sense our lifestyles are probably comparable...I
simply am not there”
(Patrick Bateman) – (3)The surface glistens and shines all at once:
the period (late Eighties) the social milieu (affluent young Wall Street
Traders) the tone (social satire) and the theme (the deadly price of greed
and consumerism). Bateman’s problem as he informs us, is a feeling
of “not being there”. He has no past, does no work except “murders
an executions”, misheard as “mergers and acquisitions”.
In this universe everyone looks good, and everyone works out, but this
also makes them interchangeable. Bateman is often confused with someone
else. The concentration on surface, the detached, affectless tone leads
ultimately to an insistence on an erasure of identity. In the final sequence
of the book, as the bodies pile up an intriguing question arises as to
Bateman’s reliability as a narrator. Is he sufficiently insane to
have merely imagined his crimes? Certainly no one wants to hear his confessions
– but does that say something about him or the society he inhabits?
It is a teasing enigma which allows “American Psycho” to slip
away gracefully.
“So Harold, “ I say, “did you get my message?”
Carnes seems confused at first and, while lighting a cigarette finally
laughs. “Jesus, Davis. Yes, that was hilarious. That was you, was
it?”
“Yes naturally”, I’m blinking, muttering to myself, really,
waving his cigarette smoke away from my face.
“Bateman killing Owen and the escort girl?” He keeps chuckling,
“Oh that’s bloody marvellous. Really key, as they say at the
Groucho Club
“...”Davis”, he sighs, as if patiently trying to explain
something to a child, “I am not one to bad-mouth anyone, your joke
was amusing. But come on, man, you had one fatal flaw: Bateman’s
such a bloody ass-kisser, such a brown-nosing goody-goody, that I couldn’t
fully appreciate it. Otherwise it was amusing".
“ Wait, Stop”, I shout, looking up into Carne’s face,
making sure he’s listening. “You don’t seem to understand.
You’re not really comprehending any of this. I killed him. I did
it, Carnes. I chopped Owen’s fucking head off. I tortured dozens
of girls. That whole message I left on your machine was true. “I’m
drained, not appearing calm, wondering why this doesn’t feel like
a blessing to me”(American Psycho) (4)
Virilio’s theorizes the contemporary mediascape. In his work we
observe the fundamental trajectories of the “now”. The primary
conflict between subjugated human knowledge and a menacing dromocratic
intelligence flashing across all of the screens and networks (“The
Aesthetics of Disappearance”), the “jet-subjectivity” of
the vacant bodies drifting across the airport terminals of the world (“Speed
and Politics”), the “exhausted offence” of the dictatorship
of movement (“Pure War”) the disappearance of politics into
the terminal phrase of the “logistics of perception” (“Cinema
and War”), and the transformation of city-scapes into an architecture
of virtuality complete with eviscerated bodies caught up in an endless
drift through the circulatory capillaries of the transportation network.
Ellis’ latest work “Glamorama” (1999) is an insider look
at the media and the cult of celebrity. This is a frantic but shallow
fast-living world peopled by the gorgeous, the mindless and selfish. It
depicts an era where physical beauty is regarded as an accomplishment
and rewarded with huge sums of money and fame. This disturbing and breathtaking
novel sends the reader on an epic journey from a celebrity obsessed New
York to a Paris under siege by chic terrorists. This is a world of drugs,
vicious sex, loud music and technicoloured violence. Ellis adopts flat
dead-eyed prose, avoiding metaphors and adjectives and aspiring only to
description, even when the subject is sex or disembowelling violence.
The hero of this novel, a model/actor, glides effortlessly through a shallow
self-absorbed experience like a spiritual refugee, unable to make meaningful
contact with any of the inhabitants of this moneyed desert. Ultimately,
the human carnage unleashed by his terrorist associates on the City of
Paris temporarily re-focuses his perspective. Unfortunately, though, he
experiences no real redemption even after witnessing the unspeakable carnage
enacted by his “glamorous” friends. In fact, the violence serves
only to increase his celebrity.
Virilio’s “dromocratic” subject is a body emptied out,
turned into a blank “metabolic vehicle”, a speedway absorbing
all the iridescent signs of the mediascape, trapped in a closed horizon
which moves according to technological not biological time.
“Glamorama” is in a way the ultimate Brett Easton Ellis product.
It is two and a half times as long as “Less than Zero” and contains
characters from that and every other Ellis volume. “Glamorama”
has sections set in Manhattan, Los Angeles, London, Paris, Milan and the
middle of the Atlantic. Its protagonists are super models and slouching
teenagers, night-club owners and terrorists, spies and slack-jawed tranquillizer
addicts. Their wandering and wealthy lives are detailed, as Ellis always
does, with an immensely mocking dryness. One character. For example, is
described as “Uma Thurman if Uma Thurman was five feet two and asleep”.
“Glamorama” Is “American Psycho” with the volume turned
full on, louder and more extravagant in its death count and uniquely and
wildly distorted as to obtain a quality quite distinctive in contemporary
literature. In “American Psycho” Patrick Bateman appeared to
have a near-authorial control over his circumstances; in “Glamorama”
nobody, not even Easton-Ellis seems to have control over Victor Ward’s.
Beneath all the “pre-packaged” gore and empty personae, the
real action is structural – it is fundamentally an experimental work.
“Glamorama” is primarily not a novel about people, but about
the state of the novel itself – there are too many narrative lines
for the reader to draw a single conclusion or to infer a coherent hypothesis.
“I’m just staring at nothing or what I image is nothing until
I’m finally moved to say, “As a general rule you shouldn’t
expect too much from people, darling” and then I kiss her on the
cheek.
“I just had my make-up done, so you can’t make me cry”
(Glamorama) (5)
Ellis likes to evoke enclosed, solipsistic worlds, which are also, conundrums.
“Glamorama” not only fits the pattern of its predecessors, it
also remakes them. Just as Patrick Bateman suffers deep ennui at the consumer
perfection of his existence, so Victor is aghast at his own self-absorption.
Society in Ellis’ books is an urban nightmare labyrinth disrupted
by the seething denatured and confined male ego it was built to control.
“ (it) sums up my feelings about where we are today: either by
ridiculing the things we seem to find important or the way we’re
obsessed with surfaces glamour and status”(Brett Easton Ellis)
(6)
“The question is “How has television informed every book?”
Media has informed all of us, no matter what artform we pursue, whether
painters or musicians. T.V unconsciously, whether we want to admit it
or not, shaped all our visions to an inordinate degree. How? I don’t
know, I couldn’t give you specifics. Is it good or bad? I don’t
know. I think it just is.”
(Brett Easton-Ellis) (7)
The sociology is now re-inforced by a second section engaging a plot detailing
a mysterious assignment, a voyage on an ocean liner, and a scramble against
time. The great drifting paragraphs are now compressed and accelerated,
in places, into one-line shots of story development. “Glamorama”
is really about conspiracy. The connection between fashion and terrorism.
Powerful forces of insecurity.
“I think the connection I’m making has to do with the tyranny
of beauty in our culture and the tyranny of terrorism. Of course that’s
a metaphor and the idea of models actually blowing up hotels and air
lines is far fetched. But the idealization of beauty and fame in our
culture drives people crazy in a lot of ways; we resent it, we want
it, we love it, we hate it. And the psychological toll it takes on our
psyche is pretty big”.
(Bret Easton Ellis) (8)
“I am so tired of looking at that empty expanse that’s supposed
to be your face” (Glamorama) (9)
“Glamorama” shows us what we have become in the inside in the
era of mediascape, where we are passive observers of what is happening
to us in the complex sign-system of information society. Ellis’ work
is insightful as a “Virilio-like” analysis of the construct/inner
discourse of contemporary image formulated consciousness. His writing
is principally about the “subjectivity of the instant”, which
does not exist except as an empty site for a convergence traced by the
discourses – a technical culture which is programmed by techno-generated
logic, the implosive logic of he image/the screen and of imminent violence,
that is a “narrative continuity” in information society can
only be assured by a violent increase in speed. Everything plays at the
edge of the ecstasy of speed and the detritus of inertia – we are
positioned as inert observers of the spectacle of velocity. “Glamorama”
combines its narrative lines of flight into an exact simulacrum of how
power as speed functions today.Throughout his fiction Ellis has ultimately
secured a place as a chronicler of an amoral society virtually tearing
at its own entrails. He depicts an empty society, inhabited by bored designer
clones engaged in mindless conversations. Sleek, shiny surfaces have always
been paramount in his work, his characters value beauty, fame, designer
labels, consumer products and well-tanned bodies. In fact they do not
see anything else.Virilio describes a culture that is pulverised by the
mediascape, a society held together by the sleek sheen of surface and
network entering into the simulacra. This culture is modelled on pure
speed, driven from within by the reduction of experience to “dromocratic
consciousness”.
“It’s interesting, this idea of being so overwhelmingly influence
by pop culture, and yet, in your writing, not that influenced by events
in your life. That’s a new idea very common to artists of this
generation. You’re making up stuff, but at the same time it’s
autobiographical because it stems from how you’re feeling. I think
temperament and sensibility can be autobiographical”.
(Brett Easton-Ellis) (10)
The dual phenomena of immediacy and instantaneity are presently among
the most dramatic problems confronting society. Real time now dominates,
prevailing above both real space and the geosphere. The primacy of real
time, of immediacy, over and above space and surface is a “fait accompli”
and has inaugurated a new epoch. This situation is critical in our relation
with the world and our vision of that World.
“I think that the infosphere – the sphere of information –
is going to impose itself on the geosphere. We are going to be living
in a reduced world. The capacity of interactivity is going to reduce
the world, real space to nearly nothing. Therefore in the near future,
people will have a feeling of being enclosed in a small, confined environment.
In fact, there is already a speed pollution which reduces the world
to nothing. I believe that there will be for future generations a feeling
of confinement in the world, of incarceration which will certainly be
at the limit of tolerability, by virtue of the speed of information”
(Paul Virilio). (11)
In “The Art of Motor” (12) Virilio suggests the “Subject”
in the figure we understand it is barely able to hold together or maintain
form – like trying to watch a million T.V. channels at once. The
culprits: television, the Industrial media, and the twin spectres of biotechnology
and cybernetics. For Virilio each of these elements represents a particular
combination of Speed and Vision; combined, the play of these two forces,
mediated through the four factors mentioned, obliterate the “Subject”.
“The Art of the Motor” conjures up a world in which information
is speed and duration is no more. Information as Speed, Virilio, tells
us is the third dimension of matter replacing old notions of information
as mass and energy. He details the ways in which this change has led to
a new visual regime – a serialization of images and sound that permits
an extraordinary manipulation of both the form and content of messages.
According to Virilio, the incredible pace of the mutation of appearances
– made possible by the “Art of the Motor” ends up mutating
reslity itself.
The theories that Virilio elaborates are related to increasing speeds.
He traces the development of vehicular relationships from the inside,
marking the various amputations and extensions as they occur. He suggests
that we can trace the dominant diversions of various speeds of culture,
from the locality of sex to the ubiquity of telepresence. Some of the
transitions are surprising, as when he traces the movement out of theatres
and onto the freeways. The windshield of the automobile, he says, is the
mechanism/screen for experiencing the world at a new speed. The driver
is a voyeur – voyager, now dedicated to a kind of pure circulation
which works against the possibility of contemplation or critical thought.
The real world becomes increasingly replaced by our pre-emptive engagements
with it.
What lies ahead is a disturbance in the perception of what reality is;
it is a shock, a mental concussion. Experience entails a loss of orientation
regarding alterity (the other) – a disturbance of the relationship
with the other and with the World. It is apparent that this dislocation,
this non-situation, will inaugurate a deep crisis which will affect the
complexion of society.
History now unfolds within a “one time system” – global
time. What is being effectively globalized by instanteity is time. Everything
now happens within the perspective of real time – henceforth we will
exist in a “one-time system”. Previously History has occurred
within local times/local frames, regions/nations. However globalization
and virtualization inaugurate a global time that prefigures a multitude
of distorting perspectives. History had been localized existing in spatially
banded lines which overrode universal time. Our History now appears in
universal time, the consequence of instantaeity.
We now encounter real time superseding real space. A phenomena that renders
both surface and distance irrelevant in favour of time-span. In addition
global time, belonging to multi-media and cyber space increasingly dominates
the local time frame of our cities and communities. This deconstruction
of the relationship with the world is not without consequences for the
interaction of citizens themselves.
In “The Aesthetics of Disappearance” (13) Virilio suggests that
the contemporary subject is prone to a mild form of epilepsy. This has
interesting consequences in the realm of creativity, since it has been
observed that picnoleptic children faced with absences that they cannot
explain and which they must account for, will begin to recall more than
actually happened. They will insert additional details to cover gaps.
This is a type of deterrence in the realm of narrative and experience.
The best memory is one that interacts with experience at a median point,
manufacturing additional experiences.
The explosion of unlimited experiences produces a distinct “accident”.
No information exists without dis-information. The contemporary situation
creates a new form of dis-information, totally different from voluntary
censorship. It centres upon a type of “choking” of the senses,
a loss of control over “reason”. Real-time interaction is to
information what radioactivity is to energy. The disintegration does not
simply affect particles of matter, but also the constituents of which
our societies are constructed.
The prescient question Virilio advances asks: is there any space remaining
for us to occupy which is not the non-space of perpetual movement of speed
moving towards its limit, or, at the limit, the non-space of inertia?
He describes an epochal tension between the labyrinth of domination of
everyday technological life and the subjugated knowledge of a “possible”
human experience outside the technical maelstrom.
Media, but altering the environment, evokes in us unique ratios of sense
perceptions. The extension of any one sense alters the way we think and
act- the way we perceive the world. When these ratios change, people change.
While multi-media modern technology has ended primary alienation, social
alienation in the form of a hierarchy has continued. People are treated
as passive objects, not active subjects. After degrading being into having,
the Situationists concept of “the spectacle” has further transformed
having into merely appearing. The resultant situation positions a dramatic
contrast between cultural poverty and economic wealth. The contemporary
first World may well guarantee a society of security but it’s one
that entails the risk of “dying of boredom”.
We are today increasingly unable to discriminate the validity of information.
We require a new form of critical competence, an as yet unknown art of
selection and decimation of information, in effect a new critique. The
spectacle now pervades all reality, making every relationship manipulated
and every critique spectacular. The speed of life, the pace of the spectacle,
is proportional to the speed of computers and communication. The challenge
at the present is to recover the Situationist critique from the abyss
of the spectacle itself.
Virilio claims that the elimination of the logic of power/knowledge has
presented a situation of “moving power”. Consequently there
has emerged an order of knowledge defined not simply by its space, but
its relation to time; what we might term a span of conscious mobility.
Individuals become subordinated to a higher realm of ordering (speed).
Revolution and not status has established itself as the universal principle
of modern order, leading finally to what he has termed the “peace
of exhaustion”. Motion has emerged as the destiny and law of a new
“politics” of order.
Dromology: the will-to-speed finds its final realization in the destruction
of space, reducing the expanse of the world into the negative initiating
a global epoch. Dromocratic power has facilitated the release of the will-to-speed
through which we confront a “negative horizon” – the implosion
of space under the violence of speed.
Adrian Gargett (PhD) May 2000
NOTES
(1) Interview (1994) with Mark Amerika – Alexander Laurence
(2) Interview (1994)
(3) “American Psycho” – (film version – 2000)
(4) Brett Easton-Ellis – American Psycho (1991) – New York:
Vintage Books.
(5) Brett Easton-Ellis – Glamorama (1999) London: Picador
(6) Interview (1999)
(7) Interview (1994)
(8) Interview (1999)
(9) op.cit Brett-Easton Ellis (1999)
(10) Interview (1994)
(11) Paul Virilio – Interview with James Der Derain – Speed
1:4 (1997)
(12) Paul Virilio – The Art of the Motor – (trans Julie Rose)
University of Minnesota Press 1995.
(13) Paul Virilio – The Aesthetics of Disappearance (trans Philip
Beitchman) Semiotext (e) 1991.
REFERENCES
Paul Virilio – The Aesthetics of Disappearance. (trans. Philip Beitchman)
Semiotext (e) 1991.
Paul Virilio – The Art of the Motor (trans Julie Rose) – University
of Minnesota Press 1995.
Paul Virilio – Speed and Politics: An Essay on Dromology – Autonomedia
1986.
Paul Virilio – War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception. (trans.
P Camiler) Verso 1989
Paul Virilio – Pure War – Semiotext (e) 1998
Paul Virilio – The Vision Machine – BFI Publishing 1994.
Paul Virilio – The Lost Dimension – Semiotext (e) 1991
Paul Virilio - The Information Bomb – Verso 1999
Paul Virilio – Open Sky (trans Julie Rose) Verso 1997
James Der Derian (Ed) – The Virilio Reader – Blackwell Publishers
1998.
FROM;
ADRIAN J.H GARGETT (PhD)
30 Darley Mead Court
Hampton Lane
Solihull
West Midlands B91 2QA
England
Telephone: 0121 704 4985
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