Saul Tenser (Viggo Mortensen) has a problem. His body keeps growing new organs on its own. He’s not the only one. Human evolution has accelerated suddenly. Pain has disappeared from the world, and now everyone is getting unlicensed doctors to operate on them on street corners. Neo-organs, grown by the body or surgically implanted, with or without biological functions, proliferate. Tenser doesn’t like this. At underground shows, in front of hundreds of people, he lies on robotic operating tables while his performance partner, Caprice (Lea Seydoux), a former trauma surgeon, cuts him open and extracts the neo-organs.
Why would anyone go to their shows? What is the meaning of the pleasure we experience on watching a body be cut into?
In Delighted to Death, the neo-reactionary thinker Nick Land posits that the animal, irrational, part of human beings has, unless restrained by reason, a tendency to seek ever grander pleasures, and in so doing destroy itself. He doesn’t exactly tell us what that looks like, but I suspect he has a couple of stock Western fears in mind. Think of someone who’s totally obsessed with sex, for instance, to the point where the quest for sexual pleasure renders them listless, disinterested in other aspects of life, or else pushes them towards acts that harm others. Or take compulsive eating, or substance issues. For Land, this is the general character of morality. The irrational body demands a certain pleasure, and the rational mind denies it with, he suggests, the result that an even greater pleasure is ultimately produced. He calls this Unlust, or negative lust.
It’s a term that he borrows from Immanuel Kant, whose theory of aesthetics serves as a starting point for Land’s essay. For Kant, one of the central questions of aesthetics was to separate what the eighteenth century called “the beautiful” from what they called “the sublime.” The distinction he inherited came mainly from Edmund Burke, for whom there was a fairly simple dividing line: the beautiful strikes us as pleasant, as nice and good, while the sublime fills us with fear. If watching a knife open Viggo Mortensen’s chest makes you shiver a little, and perhaps feel like your chest is being cut open, that’s the sublime. Or imagine the feeling of standing on top of a waterfall. You feel vertigo, at once a desire to fall and a real fear of falling. You visualize what those rocks would do to you. You feel a compulsion to step away from the ledge, or alarm that your friends are as close as they are. And yet you enjoy the experience. It’s sublime.
What’s innovative in Kant’s account of it is the special place he finds in it for the faculty of reason. He suggests that the pleasure we derive from fear comes from finding the object of our fear somehow bigger than anything else. It’s not that it actually is, of course, but that we perceive it to be. Adding (or removing) ten inches to the height of that waterfall changes nothing. It still strikes you as an overwhelming power. For Kant, this shows that there’s something in your mind that goes beyond your sensory faculties, and what else can that be but reason? Fear itself isn’t enough to elicit a pleasurable response, he argues, the point is rather that there’s a supersensible faculty that can resist it: “the irresistibility of the might of nature forces upon us the recognition of our physical helplessness as beings of nature, but at the same time reveals a faculty for judging ourselves as independent of nature, and discovers a pre-eminence above nature that is the foundation of a self-preservation of quite another kind from that which may be assailed and brought into danger by external nature.”1 (emphasis mine) It’s the fact that you know that you can walk away from that waterfall’s edge that produces a sublime experience; you feel the fear and yet you know yourself in control. Reason shows up to keep your emotions from spiralling.
This conception is really exciting to Land because of the special place it finds for violence. In Land’s words: “[Kant] uses the word ‘imagination’ to refer to the pre-conscious process that grasps the raw material of sensation and moulds it into a coherent whole. […] If the subject is to find delight in the excruciation of its animality, it is the imagination that must bear the fury of holy passion”2 (emphasis mine). Or: your senses (imagination/body) put together a cohesive impression, of a room, of a piece of music, of a waterfall. When your senses are overwhelmed by the scope of this impression, they’re brought into conflict with reason, and find in reason a limiting faculty. Hence the violence. The manifold impressions are brought under the yoke of reason, which tells us “big as it is, that’s just a waterfall and I can step back from it.”
He’s fairly disinterested in the aesthetic consequences of this; for him, the point, “if our stomachs are strong enough for it”3, is that this reveals something about morality: “Reason is something that must be built, and the site of its construction first requires a demolition. The object of this demolition is […] the imagination, […] natural intelligence or animal cunning. This is the capability to act without prior authorization of a juridical power, and it is only through the crucifixion of a natural intelligence that the human animal comes to prostrate himself before universal law. […] Only that is moral which totally negates all pathological influence, for morality must never negotiate with empirical stimulation. The Kantian moral good is the total monopoly of power in the hands of reason, and reason finds its principal definition as the supersensible element of the subject, and thus as fundamentally negative.”4 (emphasis mine) In other words, the only path to morality is to have reason use dictates of “universal law” to limit our animal impulses.
But what is universal law? Who’s the arbiter for it? Can we really say that we have a statement of it that’s so cohesive that we can turn it into a series of negative injunctions? In other words, can you express a universal morality as a set of prohibitions? For much of Western history, “universal law” was taken to mean Christian law. Christian law split in half in the sixteenth century and hasn’t found a real synthesis. Christian law was used to justify the serial holocausts unleashed on native populations in the Americas, Africa, and Asia, in the name of its universality. Christian law seems prima facie incompatible with, say, Muslim or Buddhist claims to universality. It’s almost as if it had been produced by a certain historical trajectory. This is perhaps Nietzsche’s great contribution to Western thought: the idea that when you allow people to do moral philosophy, they’re likely to produce rationalizations for things they want to be true, rather than actually approaching anything like the truth.
For instance: Tenser and Caprice find themselves under investigation by New Vice, a police unit tasked with keeping tabs on neo-organs and other human mutations. Detective Cope (Welket Bungué) is a police detective charged with investigating the pair. Tenser turns informant, stating that if he liked neo-organs he wouldn’t be having them removed. This fits in with Cope’s own view of the situation. For him, human evolution must be carefully managed. The neo-organ freaks present a threat to the natural order of things because they’re pulling away from “the human path.”
Why does Cope think this? At first glance, it seems like straightforward prejudice. People don’t like new things, and for most of human history a surprise organ growth has been seen as a tumor. It’s hard to expect anyone to change their views on short notice. This already points to a problem in Land’s conception: reason can only produce moral maxims from extant data –this is something even Kant admits, which is why he’s forced to exclude morality from his critique of pure reason– when new things happen, how are the maxims to be adapted? To counter with “that’s why it’s universal law, because it applies to all times” is just to beg the question: show me that it is. Otherwise, the Nietzschean objection of “you’re just reproducing what you’re habituated to,” seems hard to get around.
There’s probably an even deeper reason for Cope’s prejudice, though. After all, new things are taken up by society all the time. People panicked that the introduction of the iPhone would destroy culture, but the moral panic never reached political proportions. The jig was up from the minute the boomers found Facebook; few people now seriously suggest we ban the internet or smartphones. The clue is in what Cope is using Tenser for. Tenser and Caprice’s performances may happen at the margins of society, and New Vice may be very interested in monitoring all instances of neo-organs, but they’re ultimately not committing any crimes. What Cope is hoping, though, is that Tenser will help him infiltrate an organization that’s dangerous to the status quo.
Lang Dotrice (Scott Speedman) leads a collective of people who have created a surgically implanted neo-organ that allows people to digest synthetic garbage, particularly plastic. In a world where food production and consumption is monopolized by the all-powerful, all-providing corporation LifeFormWare, Dotrice’s organization offers the only alternative. Look at how Cope argues for New Vice’s remit to go after Dotrice: “They [the plastic candy bars eaten by Dotrice] are synth bars. Synthetic. Man-made stuff. Toxic. A normal human can’t eat that stuff, but those people, they just [mimics crunching]. They just munch away, no problem.” The othering of Dotrice’s organization, presenting them as sub- or in-human, coincides with their eating something other than the “natural” stuff offered by LifeFormWare. The very next scene is one of several sequences of someone eating in a LifeFormWare chair. As they gobble up mouthfuls of bright green and orange goo (the only bright colors in the film) that could pass for vegetables, the chair continually shifts and adjusts, pushing against their back, cracking their neck, ostensibly providing all the adjustments needed for perfect digestion. It’s a process that nobody seems to enjoy.
Cope is exhibiting what a Marxist would call “false consciousness.” His convictions ultimately stem from the interests of LifeFormWare, but he’s not close enough to the money to openly say “Dotrice’s organization is bad for business.” Instead, he has to find a reason to imply that something immoral is happening. This is the sort of power-serving rationalization that Nietzsche finds at the core of moralistic discourses. Cope’s real problem with Dotrice’s people is that he’s afraid of social institutions –institutions which place him in a position of power over his peers– changing in any way. He can’t outright admit this to himself, because nobody wants to look like a power-hungry jackbooted thug, so he must find a reason why his opponents –who will necessarily represent newness– are wrong. Again, where does universal law come in here? Land is prepared to give an unwarranted amount of credit to the faculty of reason; a dangerous thing given how easily it’s led astray.
If your reaction to this is to say that reason can only be led astray by emotion, and that therefore Land’s point is correct, spend some time wondering why there’s a leading astray in the first place. Why doesn’t Cope just say “I don’t want my power to shrink?” What rationalization points to is an inner emotional conflict; on the one hand there’s the fear of your power shrinking, on the other the fear of depending on it. The solution to this isn’t the violent imposition of a moral maxims on either of those feelings, but an interpretive process that reveals what they are. What such a process can produce is a new feeling, the result of overcoming the former two, that can openly guide action.
Let’s go back to aesthetics. How exactly does this violence come in? I said earlier that most traditional examples of the sublime are drawn for nature. These are what Kant would call the “dynamically sublime,” which he distinguishes from the “mathematically sublime.” This last is the feeling we experience when we try to visualize the enormity of the universe and our relative meaninglessness in relation to it. Here’s how he sketches out that process: “A tree judged by the height of a human being gives, at all events, a standard for a mountain; and, supposing this is, say, a mile high, it can serve as a unit for the number expressing the earth’s diameter, so as to make it intuitable; similarly the earth’s diameter for the known planetary system; this again for the system of the Milky Way; and the immeasurable host of such systems, which go by the name of nebulae, and most likely in turn themselves form such a system, holds out no prospect of a limit. […] The sublime does not lie so much in the greatness of the number, as in the fact that in our onward advance we always arrive at proportionately greater units.”5
For Kant, again, this feeling runs through reason in a particular way. Our imaginative faculty produces images of the tree, the mountain, the earth, the Galaxy, etc, ad infinitum “with nothing to stop it.”6 But the mind “hearkens now to the voice of reason within itself, which for all given magnitudes –even those that cannot be completely apprehended, though (in sensuous representation) judged as completely given– requires totality, and consequently representation in one intuition[.]”7 He’s saying here that the aesthetic feeling comes from the fact that, although we are forced to imagine these things in a sequence of increasing size, they in fact exist all at once. In Land’s words, “the laborious construction of organized perception [the imagined sequence] is ruinously undermined by means of the sudden collapse of time.”8 The violence done by reason here is its insistence on the fact that infinity does in fact exist and possess a oneness to it that we’re unable to imagine. In other words, we can mathematically manipulate the concept of infinity as one, but we can’t imagine infinity as one; we have to resort to a sequence.
Take a minute to really consider this. Here’s another great example of rationalization. Kant’s philosophical project is to rescue reason from the claws of skeptics, and dammit, it has to succeed. He’s suggesting that because you can mathematically conceptualize infinity, the inability of imagination to grapple with it must indicate that the feeling generated in you when you try to imagine infinity is generated by your reason insisting upon its mathematical oneness. Your imagination realizes that it cannot, in fact, imagine infinity even though your reason insists that it exists. The problem here is that your mathematical conception of infinity is representational, it’s an abstraction. For that matter, I could show you a painting of a bunch of galaxies and say, “there: imagine that to imagine the universe, existing all at once.” The difficulty with imagining infinity isn’t just that the magnitudes extend forever upward, but that they do the same downward. In other words, the reason you’d freak out if I dumped you smack-dab in the center of the Milky Way isn’t just the sheer size of it, but your intuition that each of those little dots is a solar system, potentially containing many planets, potentially containing trillions of lives as complex and detailed as yours. The problem isn’t your rational mind insisting on the oneness of the impression, it’s that your imagination suggests that the oneness is illusory. Just because I can say “limit of 1/x as x -> 0 = infinity” doesn’t mean I’m any closer to having actually grappled with the oneness of infinity. All I’ve done is wrap it round in symbols that allow me to account for the fact that my rational mind cannot comprehend it. Your rational mind can mock your imagination for not being able to see the universe as a single thing; imagination’s retort is that for all practical purposes, it isn’t. The oneness that reason insists upon is something in the mind; suggesting that “everything is a single thing, namely the universe,” is only a sort of linguistic game of grouping things up by categories; all you’re saying is something like “what exists falls into the bucket of ‘universe’ and what doesn’t doesn’t.” For your rational mind to actually grapple with infinity, it would have to be able to present a rational accounting not of the fact that infinity exists, but of why its components are as they are in relation to the whole. Nothing else would actually serve as thinking the infinite as a whole. This, after all, is what reason does; an engineer designs an airplane thinking of why that particular screw goes there with regards to the structural integrity of the whole object. Would you buy bagfuls of parts –screws, panels, strips of leather– at the price of a Cessna? Surely even if I guarantee you that those bags contain exactly the parts of one Cessna 172, you’d feel a little bit awkward about my calling it an airplane, unless you happened to know how to put it together. The airplane emerges from the relations of its component parts when reason is able to account for why those parts in those relations make an object with certain properties. Absent this kind of accounting, the mind’s insistence on the wholeness of any one thing is provisional at best. It’s begging the question. What imagination does by presenting sequential images of increasing magnitude is imply that reason’s ability to conceptualize the whole universe via abstraction is a delusion. Your rational mind is no closer to actually understanding infinity. Or, in Land’s terminology, reason’s time-collapsing view of the world is being “ruinously undermined” by the implications resulting from a carefully constructed perception.
What is happening here isn’t the one-sided violence that Land is so titillated by, but a two-sided tension. The rational mind pulls towards oneness while the imagination pulls towards dissolution of that oneness. Take the waterfall again. The vertigo you feel as you stand at the top is derived from the feeling that if you were to drop down, it would impose on you a power that you can’t imagine. And yet, you kind of want to drop down. Here’s that tension. That your rational mind is able to limit your desire to drop down isn’t that interesting in and of itself; why would it want you to fall? In fact, limiting your desire to fall is its default state. If I show you a picture of the waterfall and ask, “how’d you like to jump down?” you’d probably refuse quite quickly. This is the negative quality that Land associates with reason, the ability to limit you. Yet this, of its own, doesn’t really produce the pleasure we associate with the sublime. But if you were to actually stand atop the waterfall, you’d feel a vertigo that invites you to drop down, an overwhelming desire to find out what it would feel like. Sensory perception is intruding on the territory of reason. It’s not that Unlust doesn’t exist; this is a kind of pleasure that depends on there being a prohibition. It’s just that the pleasure comes from the possibility of violating the prohibition. The violence is two-sided, and the pleasure derived isn’t necessarily associated with reason’s view of things winning.
Why else do people get in barrels to jump down Niagara falls? It isn’t enough to say reason is winning by imposing the barrel: barrels are a widely available commodity, yet only a vanishing minority of people actively seek out the safety of a barrel to tumble down waterfalls. Say, rather, that reason and imagination have reached a negotiated consensus here; imagination’s obliterating pull is so strong that the only thing reason can do is mediate it by saying “we’ll jump, but only if protected by a barrel.” That barrels are, at best, an imperfect protection against the ravages of a waterfall only adds to my point. Think of how many times barrel-jumpers contemplated the waterfalls and thought about tumbling down in a barrel, only to decide against it. This is the issue with Land’s demolition job: it’s never complete. No matter how many times reason imposes its edifice over the demands of the body, the body will keep coming back with demands; sometimes they’ll be new ones, sometimes they’ll be the same demands over and over again.
This is the point of the Cronenberg film. Human bodies insist on producing new organ growths. What is reason’s response? There are three options. The first one’s represented by Cope: reason understands why the parts of the body make up the whole, and anything that contradicts this is dangerous and unnatural. This is, as discussed, analogous to Land’s position.
Tenser’s position seems, at first glance, similar to Cope’s: he claims he’s having the organ growths removed because he doesn’t like them. Only he’s having them removed in public. Indeed, the very first time we see him, he seems relieved to be growing a new organ, because it means him and Caprice can do another performance. What these performances celebrate is the bodily pleasure we feel on watching Tenser be cut open. When we watch knives cutting into his flesh we can’t help but imagine what it would feel like for knives to cut into our flesh, and that feeling carries with it the same sort of sublime tension I’ve identified. We can imagine that if Cope were to have a neo-organ removed, he’d like to be anaesthetized, even though no one in his world needs anaesthesia. The impression generated by watching his body being cut into would distress him. For Tenser’s audience, this rational distress is precisely what the performance is tugging against. You rationally want your body to remain a single unit, but the different parts within it insist on their separability from each other. As the knife cuts into Tenser’s torso and the mechanized arms open him up, we feel the pleasure of dissolution pressing against our rational insistence that this hurts. This is the capital point. The body wants the pain, will keep insisting on the pain, because it understands itself as being in a relationship with reason. Why, in other words, does Tenser’s body keep producing neo-organs? Perhaps because it’s grown accustomed to the cycle of him removing them, and the pleasure produced thereby.
Land and Kant insist on seeing the body and imagination as representatives of a human “animality.” They think that because reason is a distinctively human feature, and having a body is not, the body must be some sort of vestige of our inhuman past, to be brought to heel by the shaping power of reason. But bodies are adaptive systems. If you do lots of exercise, your body grows strong because it expects you to exercise it. If all you ever do is stay home and sleep, you become lethargic. Similarly, if you’re face to face with a waterfall daily but never quite jump, you become used to the pleasure of vertigo. In other words, there’s no “base animality” in the human body; it’s a human body, and the sensory and imaginative phenomena that it produces already account for the fact of their being perceived by a rational being. They’re therefore capable of imposing themselves with an insistence that rationality can only mediate. Hence Caprice and Tenser’s slogan Body is reality. For all that reason may try to impose itself on it, if the body keeps reproducing the same patterns in response to reason, the only valid rational response begins with an acceptance of the body’s primacy. What Tenser is doing by having his organs removed, over and over, in public, is the smallest form of that acceptance. It amounts to confessing that, undesired as the bodily stimuli may be, they’re still necessary to produce the pleasure of removal. The only thing that can result from this attitude is the aesthetic disposition that Tenser takes up. This is why he starts the film prepared to cooperate with Cope; he is suspended in the tension of the sublime, and is allowing the rational side to win.
His encounter with Dotrice changes everything. For Dotrice, the idea of humans born with, or growing, or implanted with, new organs is an imaginative and creative force for change. He sees the bodily growths as something to be channelled and transformed by the rational mind. This might seem no different than Land’s violence. After all, Tenser’s neo-organs are (as far as we know) useless; to turn them into something useful involves limiting their various expressions. But if Land is arguing for a demolition, Dotrice’s project is more like a collaborate construction –or, from reason’s point of view, the shaping of material. It begins from accepting the body’s insistence, and only then attempting to find how reason can best serve it. It’s thus an interpretive process that tries to understand what the body is trying to do by producing these organ growths, then, rather than limiting them, finding ways to accommodate them permanently. It succeeds at convincing Tenser because Tenser has already, albeit subconsciously, accepted its basic premise. This is the power of body horror. When the sublime impression is the waterfall, the thought of infinity, something is, in Land’s terms, being “driven between the two parts of the subject [imagination, rationality] like a wedge.”9 This framing gives all the credit to the rationality and the object of sublime contemplation, and treats the body as a machine that necessarily reacts in certain ways to certain stimuli. But there is no third object for Tenser, all there is is the body’s insistence on being cut apart. The body, in its ability to adapt to what reason will or will not do, is the wedge. The call is coming from inside the house. The vertigo of the waterfall isn’t a neutral spontaneous feeling, it’s the body’s pushing back against the rational maxim not to jump.
The moral consequences should be clear. We can choose to cling fanatically to rational maxims. This limits us in ways that are destructive, reality-denying, and ultimately futile. It turns us into the LifeFormWare chair, shifting every second to force a protean body to conform to pre-programmed norms. Or, we can choose to use reason for interpretation rather than imposition, to understand our feelings rather than denying them, to interrogate our imagination rather than limiting it. This is the only way to make contact with the future, a future our bodies intuit long before our rationality can suspect it.
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgement, 261-262 (trans. James Creed Meredith)
Nick Land, “Delighted to Death” in Fanged Noumena, 134
Ibid, 141
Ibid, 141-142
Critique of Judgement, 256
Ibid, 254
Ibid, 254
Fanged Noumena, 139
Ibid, 138