FLATLINE CONSTRUCTS GOTHIC MATERIALISM AND CYBERNETIC THEORY-FICTION Mark Fisher

http://www.cinestatic.com/trans-mat/Fisher/FC2s9.htm#_ftn5

The ficto-theoretical elaboration of the concept of  anorganic continuum is what makes Ballard so crucial a resource for Gothic Materialism. Ballard’s schizophrenic gaze recapitulates what the set designers of The Cabinet of Dr Caligari had produced - a radical continuity between supposedly organic bodies and inorganic landscape, emerging in a refusal to distinguish figure from (back)ground. But, this time, there is no framing narrative that will attribute the perception to a disordered mind. Instead, Ballard replaces psychology - and Oedipal psychoanalysis - with what is, in effect, a geo-traumatics. At its most radical, this implies a a metapsychology stripped of all vestigial organicism, an analytic procedure complementary to Deleuze-Guattari’s stratoanalysis, whose object is not persons but landscapes; all psychology collapses back into geology.  “Ballard often talks about the conflict between geometry and posture, the competition between the animate and inanimate and the way the inanimate often creeps in and wins.”*



* Eshun, Motion Capture [Interview], Abstract Culture 2, Winter 97