Seducing-Machines

This chapter turns to the 1973 J.G. Ballard novel Crash as well as its 1996 film adaptation by Cronenberg. It aims to make careful distinctions between Deleuze and Baudrillard and show why they gravitate to Crash. The primary focus in the novel is a cult of bored, middle-class professionals who feel alive only after modifying their bodies via staged car crashes. From here, the chapter reveals that Crash is notably quite flexible and can be subjected to many theoretical approaches, at times producing contradictory readings as a result. While Crash the novel might be a distinctly Baudrillardian creature, for example, Crash the Cronenberg film appears to lean more toward Deleuze.

Chronic S(t)imulation

This chapter analyses David Cronenberg's Videodrome (1983), which seems emphatically able to demonstrate and augment either Baudrillardian or Deleuzian theoretical positions. Whilst the earliest Baudrillardian readings focus on simulation, critics have linked it to Deleuze's schizoanalysis. Videodrome, as this chapter argues, is becoming-Deleuzian, since these interpretations share the same disavowal of Baudrillard. From here, the chapter suggests two things: first, that the film stages the breakdown of the sensory-motor scheme and the opsigns and sonsigns of Deleuze's time-image; second, that both Deleuze's and Baudrillard's revisions of Freud, Masochism and Seduction, offer new interpretative and complementary strategies.

Coda

This concluding chapter reflects on the next step in the ‘-punk’ subgenre as the cyberpunk of late capitalism gives way to the biopunk of the biotech century. It argues that becoming-Deleuzian demands a thorough reappraisal of Baudrillard's place in SF studies and, combined with the mutations of the genre, a need to rethink cyberpunk as the literature and cinema of late capitalism. Many of cyberpunk's once-progressive impulses have proven as technologically naïve as they are politically harmful. Deleuze and Baudrillard, this chapter asserts, have more to offer this discourse than unlicensed desire and revelries in virtual reality. Beyond Deleuze and Baudrillard, however, the chapter considers the crucial perspectives science fiction offers on the analysis of capitalism.

Remote-Control Society

This chapter examines Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 (1953). This novel imagines a society where minority pressure groups and mass communications technology have evolved into a concordance between masses and the State. Culturally and historically depthless, the fragile texture of a society governed by technology and simulacra is regulated not by an authoritarian State, but by the public themselves — what Baudrillard calls the simulation pact. With that in mind, this chapter argues that Fahrenheit 451's vision of the future has traversed the dystopian model, particularly that of Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, to become an inversive utopia, and that its forms of subjectivity can be explained through Deleuze and Guattari's account of fascism.

Viddy and Slooshy

This chapter looks at how the assemblages that characterise a society of control intervene at the level of speech and thought. It takes up Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange (1962), a meditation on control over language, expression, and thought, but also technoscientific control, namely, through the ‘Ludovico technique’ — an assemblage of cinematic technology and pharmaceutical innovation the State uses to resubjectivise the criminal class. The novel is as famous for its ultra-violent aesthete, Alex, as for its fabrication of Nadsat, a fictional argot spoken by delinquent youths. Though Deleuze never cited Burgess, he wrote at length about Stanley Kubrick, who adapted Burgess's novel in 1971. Hence, this chapter shows how Burgess and Kubrick illuminate Deleuze's thoughts on literature and language, cinema and control, and allows us to trace their affinities with SF criticism and the genre's linguistic creations.

Viral Capitalism

This chapter introduces the last of the contagious forms under discussion — viruses. It looks at Brandon Cronenberg's Antiviral (2012), which engages biotechnology, bodily transformation, and psychosis, all the time maintaining a self-reflexive approach towards the cinematic image. Like the SF films of his father, David Cronenberg, Antiviral attracts either a Deleuzian or a Baudrillardian interpretation. Rather than confining this analysis to either approach, this chapter suggests that Antiviral lays claim to a new, synthetic reading, inspired by Thierry Bardini's Junkware (2011), which is exceptional for its synthesis of Baudrillard and Deleuze into a fourth phase of capitalism. The chapter examines the rationale of this fourth phase and addresses the shortcomings of Bardini's thesis.

Durable Consumers

This chapter considers anatomo-politics through an examination of Eric Garcia's biopunk novel The Repossession Mambo (2009) and Miguel Sapochnik's film Repo Men (2010). The two texts illuminate different aspects of biocapitalistic consumption and biopolitical existence, describing a complex system of circulating biocapital, and the social life of biocommodities — artiforgs (artificial organs). Together and against each other, they grasp Foucault's anatomo-politics, and understand what Baudrillard means when he suggests that consumption has emerged as a form of control. Just as R.U.R. linked industrial production to overproduction, these texts link consumerism to biocapitalistic overconsumption through a cluster of interconnected, contagious forms that form an assemblage of contradictions: the decaying urban landscape and vigorous property development, pharmaceutical therapies and drug addiction, and cancerous organs and the artiforgs that replace them.

Biocapitalism and Schizophrenia

This chapter focuses on Deleuze and Guattari's ‘becoming-animal’. Deleuze and Guattari's animal is one of the specific concepts that attracted Baudrillard's critical attention. His ‘The Animals: Territory and Metamorphoses’ developed a sustained critique of their position. Here, the chapter takes Deleuze and Guattari's thesis that there are three animals — Oedipal, State, and demonic; and far from being a general taxonomy, they are ontological categories defined by the intertwinement of desire, technoscientific experimentation, and investments of capital. This chapter thus establishes the organising theme — contagion. In so doing, it seeks to show how Deleuze and Guattari, as well as Baudrillard and SF acquire a new relevance in biocapitalism.

Organic (De)Composition of Biocapital

This chapter analyses the second, constitutive pole of biopower, simultaneously transitioning from the second- to third-order simulacrum: simulation. Exemplary of this pole and order is Kazuo Ishiguro's novel Never Let Me Go (2005) as well as its 2010 film version directed by Mark Romanek — both versions develop their biopolitical themes differently. Regardless, Never Let Me Go imagines an alternative England in the late 1990s in which a cloned population is born and reared for the sole purpose of having their organs harvested for therapeutic use by humans, or ‘normals’. From here, the chapter reveals the labour and surplus-value of ‘necrocapital’, the negative image of biocapital, and how the system itself cancels the difference between the dead and the living, and kills only to resurrect.

Matter in Revolt

This chapter recasts Karel Čapek's 1920 play, R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots), as the foundational biopunk text, as it reveals a profound intimacy between capitalism and the life sciences, though the play is better known for introducing the term ‘robot’ into SF (derived from the Czech robotá, meaning hard or enforced labour). The play dramatises the simulacral, autonomised organs of the working class, bodies in pieces that (mis)identify with the specular imago of the productivist ego, only to rebel against their bourgeois human creators. This chapter thus situates R.U.R. within the discourse of biopolitics, and explores how its technoscientific inventions make possible a contagious and revolutionary — though ambivalent in denouement — line of flight, thus making it an antecedent to biocapitalism and the bioeconomy.