Escape Velocity (41 page)

Parallels can be found in the least likely places: Rosalind Coward interprets the upsurge of interest in New Age "body work"-Rolfing, the Alexander Technique, the Feldenkrais Method, and other holistic alternatives to conventional medical treatment-as "a place where people can express dissatisfaction with contemporary society and feel they are doing something personally to resist the encroachments of that society."*^^

Coward is rightly wary of this tendency, which she suggests substitutes self-help for political action, shifting responsibility out of the sociopolitical arena and onto the individual:

[S]o strong is the sense of social criticism in this health movement that many adherents proclaim that they are the avant-garde of a quiet social revolution. Yet the journey to this social revolution is rarely a journey towards social rebellion but more often an inner journey, a journey of personal transformation.'^'

Meaningful change is effected through sympathetic magic, with the practitioner as the voodoo doll representing society-a tactic that bears out the social anthropologist Mary Douglas's thesis, quoted in Modern Primitives, "Each person treats his body as an image of society."'" Following a trail blazed by Sade, Nietzsche, Artaud, and Bataille, the ReAearch editors exhort.

By giving visible bodily expression to unknown desires and latent obsessions welling up from within, individuals can provoke change-however inexplicable-in the external world of the social. ... It is necessary to uncover the mass of repressed desires lying within the unconscious so that a New Eroticism . . . founded on aju// knowledge of evil and perversion, may arise to inspire radically improved social relations.'"

The phrase "however inexplicable" fudges the all-important but tellingly absent link between personal transformation and social change. By

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what means the 7et5uo-hke eruption of the id into the everyday will "inspire radically improved social relations" and how such changes will affect the lives of, say, the indigent elderly in South Central Los Angeles or unemployed high school dropouts in Long Island suburbs is left to the imagination. A synthesis of the surrealist faith in the radical results of the unconscious unbound and the Dionysian utopianism of sixties counterculture, the Re/Search editors' politics of modern primitivism founders on the shoals spotted by David Cronenberg in a discussion of his movie Shivers (aka They Came Jrom Within) (1975), about a sexually transmitted parasite designed to reintegrate our estranged minds and bodies. Says Cronenberg,

I had read Norman O. Brown's Life against Death ... in which he . . . discuss[ed] the Freudian theory of polymorphous perversity. . . . Even old Norm had some trouble when he tried to figure out how that kind of Dionysian consciousness would function in a society where you had to cross the street and not get hit by acar.'^"*

There can be no denying that feelings of political impotence undergird modern primitivism; taboo practices fortify the border between the self and the social at a time when the political and moral agendas of others are increasingly in conflict with the individual's right to control his or her own body. Moreover, laws and social conventions proscribing body transgressions are among Judeo-Christian culture's most deeply rooted taboos (Leviticus 19:28: "You shall not make any gashes in your flesh ... or tattoo any marks upon you"), and the sociopolitical repercussions of outlaw body practices are a matter of record. In England, the Spanner trial-a controversial case involving consensual S and M between gay men-resulted in the passage of a law that preserves the legality of decorative body alteration but renders illegal the inflicting of "physical damage on each other, whether it's piercing, tattooing, flagellation, or whatever, for the purpose of sexual gratification," according to Lynn Procter, the deputy editor o( Body Art, an English magazine devoted to piercing, tattooing, and "body decoration."

Nonetheless, the suggestion that social change and "radically improved social relations" can arise, however inexpHcably from mock autoch-

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thonous body art veers perilously close to Freud's "omnipotence of thoughts." Then again, what is modern primitivism if not the recrudescence, in computer culture, of the "primitive" vv^orldvievs^-"the old, animistic conception of the universe," w^ith its "narcissistic overestimation of subjective mental processes"? Those w^ith New Age leanings might well argue, as Julian Dibbell does when he asserts that the computer operates on "the pre-Enlightenment principle of the magic word," that Freud's "omnipotence of thoughts" has come back to haunt us in the seemingly supernatural agency of the information machine.

Whatever its effects on "the external world of the social," modern primitivism embodies a critique of the body and the self in cyberculture that merits serious consideration. The phenomenon is often positioned as the return of the repressed primitive-the pretechnological self imprisoned in what Max Weber called the "iron cage" of modern rationality. Fakir Musafar, the prototypical modern primitive, maintains that

a whole part of life seems to be missing for people in modern cultures. . . . Whole groups of people, socially, are alienated. They cannot get closer or in touch with anything, including themselves. . . . People need physical ritual, tribalism.'"

Likewise, Jonathan Shaw, the owner of New York's Fun City Studio and managing editor of International Tattoo Art, holds that "most people have grown up with television, in a world where they can only read about how human beings are supposed to relate to each other. Tattooing and piercing indicate a longing to try to find a way to reject this senseless input that we're bombarded with, to get back to certain basic emotions that are common to all of us because we're human." Such assertions proceed from the assumption that computer culture's near-total reduction of sensation to a ceaseless torrent of electronic images has produced a terminal numbness (in both the punning and literal senses)-what Ballard calls the "preempting of any free or original imaginative response to experience by the television screen."'^^ Renouncing "the wholesale de-individualization of man" brought about by "an inundation of millions of mass-produced images" that supplant embodied experience with passive voyeurism, the ReAearch editors argue that

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[t]oday, something as basic as sex itself is inextricably entwined with a flood of alien images and cues implanted from media programming and advertising. But one thing remains fairly certain: pain is a uniquely personal experience; it remains loaded with tangible shock value.'"

Significantly, the modern primitive figures prominently in the rhetoric of Marshall McLuhan, who asserted throughout the sixties that the electronic interconnectedness of the "global village" restored "the primordial feeling, the tribal emotions from which a few centuries of literacy divorced us."'^^ "Our teenage generation is already becoming part of a jungle clan," said McLuhan.'^^ In his gnomic pronouncements about "the retribalizing process wrought by the electric media," he returned obsessively to techno-tribal metaphors, cryptically observing that "TV tattoos its message directly on our skins."'^^ More lucidly, he declared that "the new electric technology is retrogressing Western man back from the open plateaus of literate values and into the heart of tribal darkness, into what Joseph Conrad termed 'the Africa within.' "'^'

Certainly, the assumption that computer culture has a heart of darkness underlies the now-obligatory appearance of modern primitives in cyberpunk narratives. The Lo Tek lumpen-tribe of Gibson's short story "Johnny Mnemonic" are "mad children" who roll the atavistic schoolboys of Lord of the Flies and The Road Warrior's postapocalyptic aborigines into one. They roost in the rafters of a derelict mall, in a precarious aerie lashed together from amorphous junk, and their fashion "[runs] to scars and tattoos": a bare-chested Lo Tek girl displays breasts adorned with "indigo spirals."'^^ The Zombie Analytics, one of the feral packs who prowl Richard Kadrey's novel Metrophage, leach the pigment out of their skin and tattoo their bodies with "subcutaneous pixels offering up flickering flesh-images of dead video and rock stars."^^^ And in Walter Jon Williams's short story, "Video Star," a street style called Urban Surgery is in vogue:

The nose had been broadened and flattened to cover most of the cheeks, turning the nostrils into a pair of lateral slits, the base of the nose wider than the mouth. . . . The effect was to flatten the face, turn it into a canvas for the tattoo artist who had covered

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every inch of exposed flesh. Complex mathematical statements ran over the forehead. Below the black plastic eye implants were urban skyscapes, silhouettes of buildings providing a false horizon across the flattened nose. The chin appeared to be a circuit diagram.'^"*

Thus, the same modern primitivism that speaks to antimodern, antitechnological elements in cyberculture lends itself equally to a wired tribalism that reconciles Mondo 2000's techno-yippie vision of the "kids at the controls" of the "cybernet" w^ith the Road Warrior fantasies that Scott Bukatman believes mask "a deeper utopianism: the 'perverse hope that someday conditions w^ill indeed warrant a similar return to the body' as technology collapses into ruins."'^^

These and other philosophical crosscurrents swirl around the style of tattooing known as "biomechanicaP'-an adjective borrowed from the Swiss surrealist painter H. R. Giger, whose imagery inspired the genre. Giger is a meticulous limner of cybernetic nightmares best known for his Hollywood monster-making (the Alien movies) and sumptuous books (Giger'sAlien, H. R. Giger'sNecronomicon, and//. R. Giger'sBiomechanics). His embrace of airbrush, a medium sullied by its associations with commercial illustration, and his fulsome subject matter-a wall of buttocks sodomized by penises and mortared with feces, a quadriplegic infant covered with boils, "erotomechanic" renderings of human orifices penetrated by heavy metal phalli—have ensured him entree to the art world by the servants' entrance only.

But good taste, as Edith Sitwell once observed, is the worst vice ever invented. Giger's sublegitimate status in the art world is counterbalanced by his pervasive influence in cyberculture: At least one PC game, Cyber-dreams's Darkseed, is based on Giger's artwork, and cyberpunk bands such as Cyberaktif and Front Line Assembly routinely cite him as an inspiration. The highest tribute is paid by modern primitives who emblazon themselves with Giger's slavering, mace-tailed Alien-a cyberpunk rite of passage duly noted by Gibson in his novel Virtual Light, which includes an exchange in a near-future tattoo parlor:

"Lowell . . . he's got a Giger."

" 'Giger'? "

"This painter. Like nineteenth-century or something. Real classical. Bio-mech."'^^

It is the ease with which Giger's images adhere to the overlapping, sometimes clashing meanings of technoculture that accounts for the artist's popularity among cyberpunks. His coprophilia materializes what Arthur Kroker calls "excremental culture," the locked loop of production-consumption-excretion-recycling that characterizes an information economy, while his Freudian fear of penetration is congruent with the crisis of masculinity and the AIDS pandemic. Despite the optimistic glosses of critics like Fritz Billeter, who sees in Giger's work the promise of "a potential human existence in which nature and technology form a unity, unknown until now," it is more convincingly theorized as a sump where the repressed phobias of cyberculture bubble up.'^^ Certainly, Giger's biomechanical cosmology, where spaceship hatches resemble vaginal openings and phallic aliens bristle with exhaust pipes and electrical conduit, dramatizes the obsolescence of mechanist and vitalist worldviews in an age of soft machines and hard bodies. But it speaks, more immediately, to the increasingly irrelevant body's anxiety over the invading technologies that threaten, like Alien's "Chestbursters" and "Facehuggers," to tear it apart from within and without.

Of course, no reading is definitive, and modern primitives have invested Giger's imagery with personal meanings. Biomechanical tattoos come in several varieties: images lifted directly from Giger's coffee-table art books, most commonly the Alien monster; intricate, geometric abstractions fashioned from intertwined cords or the dizzy tracery of wiring diagrams; and "rippers," "peelaways," or "bust-outs"-trompe I'oeil renderings of the skin slashed open or Swiss-cheesed to expose cyborg circuitry or mechanical innards (cogwheels, crankshafts, and the like). Not infrequently, tribal and biomechanical styles are combined: transistors, microchips, and other technological odds and ends are integrated into Tinkertoy jumbles of bones or used to fill in bold, simple figures borrowed from the tattoo traditions of Borneo or Polynesia.

Jonathan Shaw surmises that the biomechanical genre "probably started becoming a part of the basic iconography around the time of Alien (1979), when Giger's work started coming into play pretty heavily." Pat Sinatra, the proprietor of the Woodstock-based "ritual tattooing and pierc-

ing" emporium Pat's Tats, dates the inception of the style to the release of The Road Warrior in 1981. "[The well-known tattooist] Shotsie Gorman did a takeoff on the movie, a back piece of a space-age motorcyclist who had melded with his motorcycle," she recalls. The tattooist Marcus Pacheco, who owns San Francisco's Primal Urge studios, attributes much of the style's popularity to Guy Aitchison, a Chicago artist whose neon-bright images of chrome-plated machines, their surfaces dancing with photorealistic reflections, have earned him celebrity status in tattoo culture.

Aitchison, for his part, cites Giger and Kulz as the catalysts for his use of the biomechanical vernacular. "Giger's work grabbed me, and then I saw a full-body photo of Greg Kulz, which really affected me," he says. "He was the first person [to get a biomechanical tattoo], to my knowledge. I started working in that style almost as soon as I saw the photo of Greg, just playing off the idea behind it-the repeated patterns, the hoses, that sort of thing."