From: CTheory Editors [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
Sent: 26 February 2003 18:20
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Subject: Article 122 - Posterchild for the Future
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CTHEORY THEORY, TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE VOL 26, NOS 1-2
*** Visit CTHEORY Online: http://www.ctheory.net ***
Article 122 03/02/26 Editors: Arthur and Marilouise Kroker
_____________________________________________________________________
Posterchild for the Future:
Living with Michael Jackson
==========================================================
~Are Flagan~
Throughout February 2003, the tabloids dug even deeper into their
font suitcases to extra extra bold the recurring headline "Wacko
Jacko." After a global screening of the doubly famous and infamous
documentary _Living with Michael Jackson_, which was put together by
the Brit Martin Bashir, the unanimous media verdict could not
possibly be snappier than the larger-than-life Jacko being cut down
to size with the rhyming echo of Wacko. Upright commentators and
moral agents of all denominations joined the wailing chorus to secure
the King of Pop's self-inflicted fall from grace, while devoted fans
and sympathetic supporters lashed out at the prejudices and lies
allegedly edited in and out by the royal dramatist Bashir, who once
had a sniveling tete-a-tete with Princess Diana. Some voices even
went as far as classifying the 90-minute kitsch fest, done with the
full and knowing collaboration of Jackson, an elaborate suicide note
from an unaware victim. Perhaps it was only appropriate, then, that
legions of experts, in the form of psychologists and voice analysts,
were unleashed upon the footage to extract an opinion on the truth.
Quite predictably the mental trade labeled him a casebook case for
arrested development, and an Australian outfit, using a method akin
to a lie detector, revealed the recorded speech patterns to show
stress levels indicative of deception in his voice; the meaning of
pivotal words was "scientifically" turned around to nail high-pitched
frequencies already subject to suspicion. [1] While cable and network
programming was humming with that unmistakable freak show buzz,
pressure was put on the proper authorities in Santa Barbara County,
where Jackson lives, to take penal action against him for televised
breaches of propriety. Doubting the criminality of his admissions,
however, officials declined the public demand to make a case out of
an example, due to a lack of evidence. Meanwhile in Britain, the
frothing frenzy made it into the House of Commons, where Labor MP
Helen Clark and Tory David Amess made a strong bipartisan stand on
what they saw as unsuitable for broadcasting. Airing such views and
practices as those of Mr. Jackson was, in their allotted stance of
the most honorable proclamation, a dangerous endorsement that
certainly merited condemnation from the highest body of public
policy. [2] The King of Pop was by now a moral pauper, his rule a
disgraced ruin of dubious glory. That Wacko Jacko decided to strike
back and turn the postmodern tables with his own documentary on
Bashir, flogged to the networks by a gay porn pundit to maintain the
tabloid-friendly tenor of terror, will not concern us here. Nor will
we dwell on the astounding figures that initially glued 15 million
Brits (more than half the entire TV audience) and 27 million
Americans to the screens for the first airing, saw millions of
dollars change hands in return for rights, and subsequently demanded
more than 20 hours of primetime over a period of two weeks following
February 6. [3] This postscript must rather address what exactly
prompted this outrage and suspension of belief that preoccupied the
global attention and exponentially multiplied search strings in
Google almost instantly. Something fundamentally disturbing and
collectively stirring was no doubt filtered through the airwaves to
reverberate in the public domain.
Those not privy to the broadcasts may benefit from a brief TV guide
to some of the most scandalous highlights: First of all, there was
the wide-eyed admission that Jackson "slept" with children that were
not biologically his own. Following the 1993 charge of sexual
misconduct by J. Chandler, a case Jackson settled out of court for an
undisclosed sum, the criminal investigation into the matter has
remained open and, as the permanent-probation saying conjured by the
media suggests, subject to new evidence. Hand in hand with one of his
child proteges, 12-year-old Gavin, Jackson innocently confessed to
sharing his bedroom with guests and tucking sleepovers in with hot
milk and cookies. The slumber parties were described as very sweet
and not sexual, with the millionaire idol, at age 44, dutifully
taking up residence in a sleeping bag on the floor -- after reading
bedtime stories. Bashir was quite incredulous in his insinuating
innuendos.
The interview segments concerning Jackson's rather striking
appearance superficially corroborated such skeptical charges coming
from the edited voiceover. When confronted with questions about
plastic surgery, he admitted some minor work on the nose (references
to reconstructive surgery from an accident were edited out), while
changes to the overall bone structure were explained as time taking
its toll; the racial shift from black to white, the result of a
medical affliction. Again, the words slipping through those finely
sculpted lips seemed to insist on a different creation story, which
did not quite match the tale put forward. Bashir sought the full
disclosure of a middle-aged black man in the face that resembled, if
anything, a white, slightly effeminate adolescent.
But instead of getting revelations and bravely halting,
single-handedly, the invasion of the body snatchers, Bashir simply
sunk further and further into a, for him, alarming fantasy that
required a suspension of conviction and a confrontation of prejudice
to make much sense. Next up was an explosion of the nuclear family,
which at first had little coherence and disintegrated further into
that genealogical tumbleweed of contractual marriages and surrogate
mothers. After the two-year marriage to Lisa-Marie Presley was
dissolved in 1996, Jackson married his nurse Deborah Rowe and had two
children with her, both of which he helped deliver and the second of
which he apparently rushed from the hospital upon exit from the womb
-- placenta dripping in his trail. (A beautiful image of nativity to
rival any Christmas display.) The marriage ended in 1999, when
Jackson assumed sole custody of Prince and Paris, a boy and a girl.
Both appear, although masked in public, to be distinctly white in
terms of features and pigmentation. During the filming of the
documentary another infant, nicknamed "Blanket," entered the
dysfunctional family picture and this offspring was born by a
surrogate mother, ostensibly black although the baby appears once
more to be white, through artificial insemination of Jackson's sperm.
Bashir now incredulously wonders if his world of black and white has
been turned completely upside down into some sort of colorblind
meta-matter.
With the navigational bearings thus staked in a very circumspective
fashion, the pairing of reason versus imagination set off to enjoy
Las Vegas. Although one would think that this change of backdrop
befits the Jackson narrative, the repartee takes another surreal turn
on a multi-million dollar shopping spree in the Treasure Chamber, a
prime piece of super-indulgent consumerism in the Egyptian-themed
Luxor Hotel. Specializing in antiquities proper, genuinely not faux,
the iconoclastic sales display of the ancient proved an irresistible
trove for Jackson, who is seen pacing around and pointing to the
shopping list without ever stopping to ponder the zeros ticking over
on the tab. Finally at rest before a particularly fetching
sarcophagus, filmed in a second segment the day after, he seems
utterly perplexed and somewhat embarrassed by the inquiry into his
own preferred burial rites, as the King of Pop. Anything like this
golden coffin already proven fit for royalty? Further prodding breaks
the pregnant pause of time and Jackson proclaims in a pre-pubescent
voice that he wants to live forever, presumably in the vessel he is
already molding. Bashir responds with the only subversion that may
somehow coach Jackson back into the mortal coil -- really?
Thus the prolonged interview is persistently like two vectors of time
and space passing in the twilight. Bashir never recognizes the
self-proclaimed Peter Pan, and Jackson never faces the middle aged
black man he mirrors by birth. It is a dialectical battle between the
virtual and the real where both quite successfully hold their own
ground. Back home on the 2800-acre Neverland Ranch, where an entire
amusement park is built in the backyard, the childhood fantasy
literally comes alive to invigorate and reincarnate the aging child.
These fun-filled acres are, of course and in effect, an enclave
molded to the troubled psyche that happily rejoices in
merry-go-rounds to orbit its own world and pays very handsomely for
development and maintenance costs. There can be no psychological
crime of arrested development here, only comparative spending to keep
pace with a progress toward eternal immaturity. Neverland is like
Jackson himself regressing toward this naive forever, a secret
chamber of retreat spread across the fenced grounds. Visitors are
therefore mischievously asked to individually sign a contract where
they pledge to never ever tell a living soul what they are about to
see and hear there. But this silencing, signed for on the dotted
line, is of course mute in the exited eyes and ears of those
embarking on this thrill ride, ready to scream. Even the most austere
legal jargon of the outside world becomes the whispering of
adolescent pacts inside the gates of Neverland; I'll let you see if
you promise not to tell. No wonder Jackson went into a tantrum of
betrayal when Bashir knocked down the door to his juvenile paradise
and let everyone in, with real-world preconceptions: he simply broke
the naive trust children live by. This bittersweet antagonism
effectively built, and inexplicably balanced itself, over eight
months of one childish star exposing an innocent world of beauty and
one seasoned journalist revealing an undercover world of scandal. The
outcry that followed those initial 90 minutes of _Living with Michael
Jackson_ essentially drove the virtual and real apart into an open
conflict. But what was it, really, as Bashir always muttered with a
question mark attached through intonation, that we saw and heard from
the deepest secrets of Neverland (buried beyond the realm of show and
tell) that prompted such an emotional turmoil of everything from
sympathetic pity to righteous shock around the globe?
Let us examine the offending creature before us. He is a man that
claims to be a child and subsequently adores children, as playmate
equals and not subjects of authority. He is a gendered being that
denies the sex of his organs and, seemingly, prefers an androgynous
innocence to sexual difference -- suggestively grabbing his groin
only after doing some moon walking to fluently make it part of the
same surreal act. He is racially ambiguous after switching from black
to white, although there is apparently an uneven skin tone underneath
the makeup covering the condition. He effectively denies having
altered his appearance and argumentatively returns crude surgical
biotech to the time-honored changes of evolution, resisting the
visible entropy of both processes. He strongly aspires to be a
father, but denies romanticized reproduction its innate role in the
formation of the nuclear family and disciplining of the body,
preferring instead the copulation of the test tube and the marriage
of the legally binding contract. He confuses the idol with the icon
and religiously grants himself eternal life, augmenting the argument
with a mutant look (a soul searching for a body) and a voice
straining terribly with the low vocal chords. He even releases a
sycophantic album called _HIStory_, which breaks apart grand
narratives in favor of personal idiosyncrasies, but does not, if
truth be told, sell and badly flops into the bargain bin. Such a
mantra of characteristics for the King of Pop could easily read like
a Top 100. The extended point of its charting is to recognize the
pattern developing: the quest for eternal immaturity; the absolutions
found in technology; the science of biology as profoundly logical and
desirable; the plasticity of identity; the eradication of sexual and
racial difference; the flirtation with and seduction of the Other;
and the apotheosis of one in many and many in one. This refrain is
like a formulaic hit song for the future, with that catchy chorus of
cyberspace. We have repeatedly heard it before yet long to hit repeat
it again. But when faced with an actual documentary instead of an
overproduced and slick music video, usually ahead of its time
(Jackson's trademark), we balk at the sights and sounds and go into
global convulsions of outrage and disbelief, as if the world is
suddenly poisoned by the grotesquely otherworldly without proper
warning. What lie behind the gates of Neverland, however, is our
contemporary dreams of the future; Jackson being nothing more or
less, on that wobbly vector of infinity, than a cartoon version of
cyberpunk, science his pixie dust.
In his book _The Information Bomb_, Paul Virilio describes modernity
as the enamoring of immaturity. The process does ultimately not
strive toward human progress. Instead it convincingly animates
narratives like _Alice in Wonderland_, with her telescopic looking
glass, and _Peter Pan_, a child vehemently trying to escape his
future in the refuge of Neverland, as lifelike and vibrant, at an
intimate remove, in cybernetic networks and technologies. Arrested
development, Jackson's alleged affliction, can thus not really be
considered an irrational trespass, but rather the logical law of
modern advancement. Drawing on the temporal compressions of speed,
Virilio argues that the split-second relay flattens experience to the
extent that technology awards instantly what time can only grant
gradually, thereby refusing to wake up to the unfolding of life.
Modernity is thus purposefully stuck in a refusal to grow up,
preferring the illusions of the virtual to the reality of adulthood
and death. According to Virilio's parallel analysis of _The World of
Yesterday_ by Walter Zweig, the generational gap results in a
conflict that fears the process of becoming inhabited by children,
bringing discipline and security to the table in order to control and
curtail it. While children are, as we have heard so often as a moral
prelude, the future, they are also part and parcel of the potential
dangers it harbors. They must consequently be properly educated and
forced into a state of dependency throughout their adult years.
Through the constant rehashing of knowledge in learning institutions,
we also have another intersecting layer of potential conflict in the
substitution of old values as new values, effectively facilitating a
reversal of the historical process. This brings Virilio to proclaim
that: "Nietzsche was not a philosopher, nor Hitler a statesman. Both
were, rather, the paranoid interpreters of the apocalyptic ultimatum
of youth battling with the ~irreversibility of time~..." [4] Nihilism,
with its violent tendencies, is thus the infantile voice of youth
casting off the ominous shadow of perpetual old age, already
prehistoric at birth. To subdue and overturn this forceful urge, it
is channeled into the hybridization and leveling of the ages, where
every TV dinner, suitable for those unable to feed themselves, has
the sugary and fatty flavor of a Happy Meal, and the techno hub of a
SONY Playstation posits all players as equal partners. Through such
cycles, reproduction inevitably also turns toward pedophilia in
erasure of the same limits (with a constantly lowered age of sexual
consent and stories of 9-year-old girls getting pregnant), and a
multi-billion-dollar pleasure industry arises to assure us that sex
is the greatest game of all, our body just another toy. It is in this
juvenile ecstasy of the modern that we must locate the progeny of the
future and initially ponder why a man, who just wants to be a boy, is
apparently powerless to profess his innocence and relinquish his
sexuality, despite assurances everywhere that he can and must.
Jackson, in what has become an overstated fact, never had a
childhood. He was the shooting star of an entertainment industry that
sparkled with every growth burst -- and faded into the startling King
of Pop to make every parental wish initially poured upon this
starstruck trajectory come true. Except, as every celebrity
psychologist has insipidly argued, his instinctive desire for
infancy, which turned into the adulterated nightmare now playing.
Following those beaten clinical paths toward maturity, the standard
diagnosis sees Jackson filling in the gaps of development that he
has, through the coercion of his homegrown talent, been denied with
abhorrently abnormal results: childhood can never seem natural for
those that have physically outgrown it. But this astute assessment,
with its pathological insights, rather seeks to once more deny the
full-grown child its will to inhabit the future, shape its own
destiny and break away from the zombie surrogates of the virtual and
real that are playfully staging the permanently immature by mirroring
the old rules in a new game. Maybe Jackson is simply the prototype of
a new juvenile delinquent -- unabashedly and irresponsibly laughing
in the face of a patent violence -- for the prenatal posthuman age?
At close documentary quarters of Neverland, the modern craving for
immaturity in the virtual womb is conceivably translated into a
clandestine look at things to come, an ultrasonic peek-a-boo at the
highly mutable self and its unsettled relations with Others.
Since Stelarc got hooked on the biomech that developed into biotech
and morphed into another bio-logic, now with a genetic suffix, we
have heard and rather crudely seen, with futuristically glazed eyes,
that the body is inadequate and obsolete. It is merely a defunct
prosthetic of a superior mind. But the metal arm that wrote EVOLUTION
after dictation from its organic counterpart (a defining Stelarc
moment) never really made much of an appearance beyond the many
theoretical amalgams with a bright alloy shine. Sure, there were
goggles and gloves to equip the budding cybernetic organism, but all
that waving inside the pixel parade did not quite display the super
powers strutted in sexy mixes like those of the comic heroes X-Men.
Strapping the game console to the senses never quite made the first
cut as far as metal and flesh goes. But then, adversely of course,
there were those that immediately broke the test tube and called us
cyborgs from the outset, due to our overt reliance on tools and aides
made of matter other than tissue. Bad eyesight plus glasses equals a
cyborg they argued. This split personality of the cyborg has
continued to pivot around the same mortal coils and data stacks.
N. Katherine Hayles, for example, makes a compelling case in _How We
became Posthuman_ for how traditional Western notions of human
identity have gone from incorporating views of disembodied
information, the uploaded brain syndrome, toward reconciling this
vision with material embodiments in what then qualifies as human and
information symbionts. [5] Recognizing that all information must
indeed have a presence to exist, which on second thought (not
confused with the heady spinning of a hyperspace hard drive) seems
quite logical, she foresees a growing symbiosis between the forms of
information and the shape of the body. The futuristic point, in her
view, is to argue for the best size and fit.
Someone like Ollivier Dyens, on the other hand (if we are indeed
still left with two), appears more inclined to give information the
upper hand in a scenario where culture and technology dominate
biology with an iron fist to perform a transformation of the body. It
leads him to exclaim rather apocalyptically, with inverse positive
terms if one so prefers, that: "The cyborg is nothing but a fusion
between biology and culture, and, as such, it marks the end of living
beings as defined by our current conceptions. The cyborg is a
semantic transformation of the body; it is a living being whose
identity, history, and presence are formulated by technology and
defined by culture. It is a body free of dualities, guilt, sexual
repression, and frustration... The cyborg is a sexless living being,
man, woman, and machine all at once. The cyborg is the obliteration
of the biological." [6] This legendary being, which is optimistically
given the adjective living, breeds an implosion of opposites into a
powerful -- textual and tactile -- nucleus of culture and technology,
which bears more than a passing resemblance, in the evolutionary
sense of a strictly logical time, to the constantly decomposing yet
perennially youthful Jackson countenance. Out of synch with time and
dualistic nature, it is a composite that revels in reversals and
suppresses the trace of any transformation to erase its haunting
twin.
Without embarking on the entire anthropological journey of body
modifications, it should be clear that the cyborg is not exactly a
new ticket to how cultures and beliefs interact with the bodily
subject closest at hand and to heart. The plasticity of surgery has
been around for decades, and Tinseltown, from which Jackson hails,
has been obsessed with keeping up timeless photogenic appearances to
booster a sanctified image well into the shrunken golden years. It is
equally clear that the practice appeals to the identity politics of
an image culture that applauds the flawless and airbrushes away
specks and blemishes. One is defined by this projected image of
oneself, and through an identification with the body, which
perpetually revolves around the divisive symbiosis of the index (the
Cartesian split resolved through revolution), the plastic aspects of
its appearance become subject to surgery; the incestuous drive to
modify and repair takes hold. The goal is to reconcile the
informational model and mould with the body and thereby erect the
proverbial temple adhered to by those aspiring to be the most healthy
and fit, whatever the procedure and cost. [7]
The latest trend here is the less intrusive Botox (a trade name for
Botulinum Toxin Type A) treatment. By locally injecting a neurotoxin
directly into muscle fibers with a syringe, the nerves are
temporarily weakened for a period of up to six months. The result is
a mask of deadened tissue that is unable to move, and therefore
wrinkle; suspended death has effectively become the chic of a society
rejuvenated by toxins. But this evolution of the facial expressions,
which would have prompted Charles Darwin to ponder his 1872 treatise
_Expressions of the Emotions in Man and Animals_ with a less happy
and sad postscript, is already rather trivially transformed from
plastic surgery to cosmetic surgery, poison being just another
accessory in the make-up kit. The blurring plasticity of the body is
thus furthered and simultaneously halted in an induced state of
controlled rigor mortis, installing a ~matter~ of ~fact~. This
accurately recalls, once more, the semantic transformation of the
body in the hands on technology and culture. However, the
instrumental desire of plastic surgery has already sought to escape
its synthetic, and by inference false, roots in the works of
Professor Gunter von Hagens. Most famed for his _Body Worlds_ exhibit
touring the scientific sideshow circuit for the last few years, he
uses a process aptly named ~plastination~ to drain the body of fluids
and fill its porous cavities with polymer resin. [8] Through this
robust overkill by compounds, the body literally hardens to plastic
and smothers both wrinkles and death in one bloated appearance filled
with the tantalizingly lifelike forever.
We are starting to fully see the contours of Jackson's persona here
in light of constructive surgery and his expressed modernistic will
to beat the inertia wheel with immature carousels. But he appears to
have crossed that fateful border beyond upgrading and fallen into
horrifying decline instead. Hence the shock and horror does not
address his process but the product, installing a fear that the body
will in the end betray the many incisions of the cultural. As is the
case with Jackson's delicate nose, it will cut off the blood supply
and cause permanent mortifying damage to the crafted tissue. What we
identify in this face is a vanishing threshold of technological
progress, where the quest for improvement has turned around and
started to falter. Not that his expression, per se, is other than
benign, or that it truly resembles a fictional monster of extremes --
all his doctors are probably found in the Yellow Pages, not in some
Transylvanian castle. His transformative pursuit is rather so close
to upper class Botox parties and grimy high street body sculpting
cum tattoo parlors that only a price tag sets them apart. Unlike the
wealthy New York socialite Jocelyn Wildenstein, for example, who has
undergone extensive work (which she, incidentally, denies) to put
some feline into the female, Jackson has stayed within the sheltering
shadow of the human. Wildenstein has tried to jump columns in the
Linnean taxonomy by surgically emulating a cat, both with apparent
success and not without a hint of mockery for the upgrade curve of
the cyborg. Only inspiration from an ape might possibly have been
less flattering for the evolution applied to this look. Someone much
closer to Jackson spiritually, and hence in flesh, would be the
French artist Orlan. During the 1990s she underwent several plastic
surgeries, billed and choreographed as performances that aimed to
profile her face into ideal shapes lifted from cultural norms on
beauty. Today she has the forehead of Leonardo da Vinci's ~Mona Lisa~
and the chin of Botticelli's ~Venus~, or rather the flesh painting of
these pictorial icons. To finance this costly endeavor, everything
from her surplus body parts to less controversial merchandise was
made available for sale, turning Orlan into a commodity whose name
will, once the process is complete, be substituted with another brand
by an advertising agency. Citing and in the same instance offending
conservative religious and psychoanalytical views that the body be
left alone and the spirit elevated, she does a fine cut and paste job
that fuses ideals with technology and embarks on a journey that she
herself intends to be nothing but shocking, the goal ultimately
unattainable. Two paths obviously collide here with the same iconic
objective: Orlan picking features to assemble the ultimate mosaic of
beauty, Jackson rearranging his assets to complete the psychic puzzle
of identity. Both are equally the celebrated products of the popular
imagination and they are both peaking at the demographic pinnacle of
the average, as uniquely different in their top-of-the-class,
head-of-the-curve pursuits. The horror, the horror that is mirrored,
however, reflects the avowed path of progress getting off track and
out of control, perhaps speeding too fast, too soon.
The convulsions of this momentum are rekindled in the many other
dichotomies taking a fall, in that very biblical sense, with Jackson.
Links and boundaries between race and age and sexuality are mingled
and mangled beyond puritan recognition, devoid of all common decency
according to the righteous gasp of the public. Once we thought
eugenics had vanished on the progressive horizon, James Watson, Nobel
Laureate and co-discoverer of the double helix structure of DNA,
publicly made speculative conjunctures between melanin and sexuality.
Melanin is responsible for skin pigmentation, and it was in one study
conducted for cancer prevention research found to cause sexual
arousal in male patients injected with increased levels. [9] Ergo,
Watson argued in his contentious lecture, we have Latin lovers and
English patients. As the Human Genome Project progresses amidst fears
that cultural and behavioral concerns will be factored into
information biology, and just as a surprisingly uniform gene bank is
erasing race as a valued category, the assertion grounded in proof
that does not meet scientific standards simply served to invoke
prejudicial conceptions of the black libido. Recalling the savage
attraction and titillation of the nineteenth-century Hottentot Venus,
dimly associative bonds were drawn between chemical and genetic make
ups and sexually motivated behavior, black then being the predatory
color of uncontrollable urges. Imagine, then, the once-upon-a-time of
a wolf in sheep's clothing and the Neverland fairytale. This is the
black man camouflaged in a white boy's body to deviously lure the
innocent with simulation. But thanks to the biological thumbprint of
data and the graphic traces of a morphing timeline, the anomalous
creature is ceremoniously unveiled and identified as a hybrid animal
instinctively ready to pounce. All the work done on the transposition
of identity, echoed in the hyperbolic talk of aliases in cyberspace,
appears to have vanished in the face of a deeper and better informed
determinism that accepts nothing at face value, unless it is backed
up by data. No matter what his intentions, regardless of his guilt,
there is a profile attached to Jackson that looks at the pedophilic
assimilation of the Other, by itself a deeply sexual act driven by
the immature desire of modernity, couples it with a genetic
silhouette steeped in racial prejudice, and passes a sentence of
misleading deception on all counts, a betrayal based on appearances
we now know to be otherwise. We would be well advised, however, not
to confuse this stripped identity with an about-face turning the
future on its head, puncturing the virtual with the real and finally
exposing an inappropriate thought to its deformed body, metaphysics
standing naked before us. It is on the contrary an indication that
Jackson has slowly come of age and entered the imperceptible
slipstream of time that moves at a pace humans can tolerate without
panicking. His face, awfully scarred by modernity, is now the
postmodern Cro-Magnon of the networked information society, merely a
plastic bronze preceding the interminable data flows.
As the festooned gates to Neverland close behind us, we are also
leaving the shock of the future behind as we once found it to be.
Modernity has reached another chapter in the evolving fairytale and
has, ecstatically incomplete, expanded the horizon of happily ever
after. Once upon a time once more belongs to those vast vanishing
reaches, as an image and an imagination slowly slide over the
curvature of the Earth. What is most striking about this passing
appearance is how the blueprint of modernity, from which Jackson is
so haphazardly yet candidly constructed, remains attractive and
instructive despite its rather obvious entropy. The evident patchwork
of destructive effects that caused this public uproar was quickly
reduced to an isolated anomaly and normality was restored at the apex
of popular culture -- chart positions are now slipping, record sales
are dwindling, we are told. Subtracting black and adding white,
romancing the pedophilic self, and harnessing the power of the Other
apparently only mixes the copyrighted soundtrack of let there be
light for another, grossly distorted world. Our horror over Jackson
stems, and let this be his premature epitaph to keep with the theme
of staying ahead of time, from the impractical recognition that he
may be the ultimate conformist to our way of life and the foremost
balancing act of the heavens today. The moral anger, spewing over
from his supposed corruption of values and children, emanates partly
from our visit to the furtive Neverland, which turned the modern
dream of the future into the twinkling halo of a Disney theme park.
Forever may thus have turned out to be the molester's candy after
all.
Notes:
------
[1] Jacki Quist, "Experts React to Jacko,"
<todaytonight.com.au/stories/487123.html>
[2] BBC News, "MPs Attack Jackson Documentary,"
<news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/2748259.stm>
[3] Bill Carter, "Networks Scramble for Anything Jackson," New York
Times, February 14, 2003,
<www.nytimes.com/2003/02/14/business/media/14JACK.html?ex=
1045890000&en=269f7f05bd628722&ei=5062&partner=GOOGLE>
[4] Paul Virilio, _The Information Bomb_ London: Verso, 2000,
p. 98.
[5] N. Katherine Hayles, _How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in
Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics_ (Chicago, IL: University of
Chicago Press 1999).
[6] Ollivier Dyens, _Metal and Flesh: The Evolution of Man:
Technology Takes Over_ (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), pp. 82-83.
[7] See also the following essay: Jean Baudrillard, "Plastic Surgery
for the Other," _Ctheory_,
<www.ctheory.net/text_file.asp?pick=75>
[8] Andy Miah, "Dead Bodies for the Masses: The British Public
Autopsy & The Aftermath," _Ctheory_,
<www.ctheory.net/text_file.asp?pick=363>
[9] Michelle Locke, "Sex and Sunshine: Nobel Laureate Links Skin
Color and Sex Drive,"
<abcnews.go.com/sections/science/DailyNews/sunshine001124.html>
--------------------
Are Flagan engages in a multitude of fields and practices that
usually end up passing through a computer. He received an MFA from
the University of New Mexico and has contributed to several
publications internationally. On April 26, 2003, his curatorial,
research and design project entitled Transcodex will open online and
onsite at Boston University in conjunction with the biannual Boston
Cyberarts Festival.
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