Doom Patrols
Steven Shaviro
Serpent's Tail Press
London, 1997
Paperback (187 pages) - US $16.00
Sheldon Robert Walcher
NOTHING DID MORE TO secure and codify Modernist conceptions of
authorship than the establishment of international copyright law beginning
in the late nineteenth century. The right of authors to claim ownership
over what they produce, their entitlement to just compensation for their
artistic labor, and their right to license the selling of their work as
intellectual property are all relatively recent developments in western
intellectual history and literature. Indeed, the signing of the first
reciprocal international copyright act between the United States and Great
Britain in July of 1891, which effectively ended centuries of
cross-Atlantic pirating and radically raised the cost of most books, came
about only after decades of fervent political and economic debate. U.S.
opponents of such legislation claimed that the pirating of books
kept them affordable to the burgeoning numbers of literate Americans. The
enforcement of copyright, they argued, would not only undermine the
democratic principles of public school education-by once again limiting
access to literary works to the wealthiest Americans-but would strike an
irreparable blow to American free enterprise, driving out of business the
hundreds of small presses that could not afford to bid competitively on
international copyrights.
One of the most ardent and eloquent advocates for adoption of the act,
however, was the novelist Henry James. Residing in London for most of his
career, James lost considerable sums in royalties when first American, and
then later British publications of his work were pirated. James'
involvement with the American Copyright League actually began after Ward,
Lock and Company pirated and sold his second novel, The Americans, at a
fraction of its worth in British train stations in 1879. Over the next
decade and a half, James wrote dozens of public letters and attended
numerous hearings in New York and London to champion the rights of all
authors to be protected under law. That the intersection of the political
and market forces seeking to legally codify authorship should manifest
itself in the figure of Henry James is actually quite fitting. For both
in this public role as a professional writer, and in his artistic vision
of the writerly enterprise (as articulated in the prefaces to his
multi-volumed New York Edition), James came to embody what has largely
become our cultural image of authorship in the twentieth century: the
solitary artist, toiling ceaselessly in the perfection of his craft,
completely devoted to the rendering of new subjects through the mastery of
language.
Steven Shaviro's book Doom Patrols: A Theoretical Fiction about
Postmodernism challenges the notions of "ownership" and "mastery" that
have come to typify modern conceptions of authorship in this century.
Published in 1997 by Serpent's Tale Press under its High Risk Books
imprint, Shaviro first began posting chapters of the book for 'fair use'
on the internet as early as 1992. Thus, while Serpent's Tale markets the
print version of the book in book stores throughout the U.S. and U.K., the
complete electronic edition remains available for downloading through
Shaviro's home-page at the University of Washington. In fact, the
promotions page of the Serpent's Tail Press website has a direct link to
this electronic edition. While Shaviro retains copyright over his work-all
work originally appearing on the internet is theoretically covered by
current U.S. and international copyright statutes-the dual states of the
work's existence leads to an unusual statement in place of the standard
copyright citation in the print edition: "The right of Steven Shaviro to
be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in
accordance with the Copyright, Design and Patents Act of 1988." Composing
and distributing one's work through an electronic medium grants it a kind
of permanently ephemeral status. That is, the originality and authenticity
of a text somehow become suspect once it has been put on the internet.
Unregulated distribution of and access to a work seem to make its
"authorship" no longer objectively verifiable, but a question of
subjective assertion and faith.
If the approach Shaviro and Serpent's Tail Press have taken in
marketing and distributing this "book" appears counter-productive to the
financial aims of modern publishing, it is because as a work on
postmodernism, Doom Patrols can only approach its "subject" through
performitivity. Or as Shaviro states in his preface: "Postmodernism isn't
a theoretical option or a stylistic choice; it is the very air we breathe.
We are postmodern whether we like it or not, and whether we are aware of
it or not. For this very reason, the word postmodernism isn't explicitly
defined anywhere in my text. Its meaning is its use: or better, its
multiple and contradictory uses, as these emerge gradually in the course
of the book." Thus, if one aspect of postmodernism is that we live in a
highly technological society where words and images are constantly being
recycled, being "borrowed" from television, the internet, books,
magazines, films and CDs, being reproduced, scanned, downloaded,
photocopied, recombined, distorted and redistributed privately and
publicly, then Doom Patrols must make itself subject to these same
"plagiaristic" forces if it is to discuss postmodernism accurately.
Marshall McLuhan says that the medium is the message; if we take him
seriously, then any work attempting to "study" the messages of
contemporary culture must necessarily come to resemble the media which
proliferate and perpetuate that culture.
Shaviro elaborates this idea further in "Grant Morrison," the first
of the book's seventeen chapters, each named after a media personality or
artist. Writer of the DC comic book DOOM PATROL from 1989 to 1992, Grant
Morrison and his work actually become emblematic of Shaviro's whole
enterprise. For like most graphic novels in the 1990s, DOOM PATROL is
actually a reinterpretation of a comic book that originally appeared in
the late 1960s. Indeed, the 1960 version written by Arnold Drake featured
the same group of genetic and social misfits who put their strangeness to
use by becoming superheroes. Yet Morrison appropriates from diverse and
often idiosyncratic sources- ranging from chaos theory to literature,
philosophy to alternative
music-to infuse the 90s version with a mixture of cultural cynicism and
camp utterly lacking in Drake's original.
"DOOM PATROL is just the fix I need," Shaviro writes, "It has exactly
the right mix of ingredients. Everything is in pieces, everything is
borrowed or stolen...Plagiarism, blank mimicry, parasitic borrowing,
speaking in tongues: these are the tactics of exemplary postmodern works
like DOOM PATROL." Just as traditional images of the superheros like
Superman developed in the 1930s get subverted and transformed into "the
world's most bizarre heroes" of the 1960s DOOM PATROL written by Arnold
Drake, so Grant Morrison subverts and transforms the "naive earnestness"
of this original into the "sly hipness" which characterizes the 1990s DOOM
PATROL. Shaviro's subversion and transformation of the play on cultural
and identity construction in Morrison's book into the "theoretical
fiction" which makes up Doom Patrols, then, is merely one more
rotation in an ongoing series. The writing and rewriting of DOOM PATROL as
a text, thus serves not only to introduce many of the themes Shaviro
wishes to discuss, but acts as a strategic statement of the methodology
Doom Patrols will employ: "All we can do with words and images is
appropriate them, distort them, turn them against themselves. All we can
do is borrow and waste them: spend what we haven't earned, and what we
don't even possess. That's my definition of postmodern culture, but it's
also Citibank's definition of a healthy economy, Jacques Lacan's
definition of love, and J.G. Ballard's definition of life in the
postindustrial ruins."
With other chapters like "Andy Warhol," "William Burroughs," and
"Bilinda Butcher," Doom Patrols appears initially like a series of
meditations on the nature of celebrity culture. Yet as we can already
begin to sense in a chapter like "Grant Morrison," Shaviro's goal is
nothing less than to trouble our conceptions of "individual personhood,"
and "representation." Through what are both highly autobiographical and
extremely theoretical discussions on topics ranging from Elvis Presley to
the molecular logic of insect DNA, Shaviro calls attention to the
essential fictiveness of "personality," and endeavors to trace out how
notions of "reality" have been constructed. The chapter on "Walt Disney,"
then, is less concerned with our collective celluloid memories of good old
uncle Walt than it is with trying to explicate American sincerity, with
Shaviro claiming that, "a strange mutation arose in our hominid ancestors,
probably less than two hundred thousand years ago. Call it the Reagan
gene: the ability to deceive others by first of all deluding yourself."
For all the apparent glibness of this initial remark, Shaviro traces
the idea of sincerity back to what Gerald Edelman calls 'higher order
consciousness,' or the ability to know that one is merely playing a role,
and doing so without this knowledge causing the performance to be any less
heartfelt or 'authentic.' This category of 'realness,' Shaviro points out,
is precisely what is most prized by drag queens and method actors: the
triumph of simulating to perfection a gender or character whom one is not.
It is precisely this same quality we admire in audioanimatrons (like the
robotic Abe Lincoln in the Hall of Presidents at Disneyworld), creatures
that cannot help but mean precisely what the say, and say exactly what
they mean. Yet, Shaviro contends both Freud and Marx radically
misunderstood the fetishism of the drag queen, and Americans in general,
convinced as they were as Europeans that an obsession with surfaces and
objects could only be a substitution for feelings of inadequacy, a means
of concealing a lack. Yet, "if all you can say about a drag queen is that
she's 'really' a man, or that her ostentation conceals a defect," Shaviro
counters, "then you've missed the whole point of her performance...This
ability to deceive ourselves and to be sincere-far more than language or
sexuality-is the defining characteristic of what it means to be an
American."
Yet Doom Patrols doesn't limit itself to what some might
consider the "standard" postmodern concerns or positions. In "Michel
Foucault," Shaviro begins with the wonderful anecdote about a woman who
once wrote to Ann Landers asking her whether oral sex meant you 'just
talk about it," and goes on to discuss how social constructions of human
sexuality are actually much more rigid and intolerant of change than those
in the biological world; he ends with an exploration into how electronic
and information technologies invite us to imagine a different economy of
bodies and pleasures not exclusively bound to reproduction. In "Truddi
Chase," Shaviro locates in this case of Multiple Personality Disorder what
is perhaps "the best paradigm...for postmodern consciousness," arguing
against Freudian and Cartesian conceptions of a radically singular 'ego'
in favor of demonology. He argues that we are continually and so
powerfully transformed by visceral sensations and emotions as to make any
philosophical claim to a fixed and stable 'I' entirely illusory. Shaviro
explores in "Bill Gates" how the postmodern God might indeed resemble
this brilliant and ferocious man-talented and competitive, an unreliable
visionary not at all in control of the forces of liberation and mutation
that drive the virulent evolution of cyberlife.
Much of the logic in Doom Patrols is admittedly tautological,
and critics of postmodernism will undoubtedly claim that Shaviro's
playful, meandering, meditative approach is indicative of an entire
movement which is fundamentally anti-intellectual and lazy. I find it
utterly impossible to counter such claims. If it seems difficult to weave
discussions of the band My Bloody Valentine, tape-worms, Dean Martin,
virtual reality, and language as a viral infection into a single,
intellectually unified framework, the problem seems hardly to lie with
these "objects" themselves as much as it does in the critical project. As
Shaviro states in the preface, "I do not propose anything like a balanced
and well grounded critique of postmodern culture. To do so would to
assert my own separation from the phenomena under consideration." Instead
we have a series of gestures, a frenzied dance through the fractured
centers and along the dark peripheries of experience. Everything in this
book is familiar. Every word is "autobiographical."
"Henry James" is not a chapter in Shaviro's book, but it very well
could be. In it we might explore the fate of the printed page in the age
of digital reproduction. Or better yet, we might trace out that all too
human nostalgia certain humanist intellectuals feel for the peace and
sanctity of old mausoleums. That melancholy of anxious critics, as
Shaviro describes them, who find themselves unable to adapt to what
McLuhan calls 'postliterate' culture. But no, Henry James is in need of
no such chapter, for his work is alive and well. His image and excerpts
from his books are available for downloading at numerous websites
dedicated to his work on the net. His artistic visions and authorial
intentions are discussed in electronic newsgroups at many of the major
universities, and as soon as copyright expires on his printed works, they
will undoubtedly be posted on the web beside those of Shakespeare and
Milton. Indeed, Henry James as a virus will soon be free to replicate as
never before.
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