Babylon

by Виктор Пелевин

  Only a personality that was real can become unreal. In order to become wrinkled and withered, this ‘self would have had’ to exist. In the preceding argument, and also in our previous writings (see The Russian Question and Cedera Luminosa) we have demonstrated the groundlessness of this approach.

  Under the influence of the displacing wow-factor, the culture and art of the dark age are reduced exclusively to oral-anal content. The fundamental feature of this art may be succinctly defined as ‘moutharsing’.

  A black bag stuffed with hundred-dollar bills has already become the supremely important cultural symbol and a central element of the majority of films and books, for which the trajectory of its path through life provides the mainspring of the plot. In more precise terms, it is the presence in the work of art of this black bag that stimulates the audience’s emotional interest in what is taking place on the screen or in the text. Note that in certain instances the bag of money is not directly present, in which case its function is fulfilled either by the participation of so-called ‘stars’, of whom it is known as a certain fact that they have such a bag at home, or by persistently touted information about the budget of the film and its takings at the box office. In the future, not a single work of art will be created simply for its own sake; the time is approaching when books and films will appear in which the dominant element of content will be a secret hymn of praise to Coca-Cola and an attack on Pepsi-Cola - or vice-versa.

  The effect of the impact of oral-anal impulses is to encourage the development in the human individual of an internal auditor (a typical market-economy variant of the ‘internal party committee’). He constantly assesses reality exclusively in terms of property and performs a punitive function by forcing consciousness to suffer intolerably as a result of cognitive dissonance. The oral wow-impulse corresponds to the internal auditor holding up the flag ‘loser’. The anal wow-impulse corresponds to the flag ‘winner’. The displacing wow-impulse corresponds to a condition in which the internal auditor simultaneously holds up the flags ‘winner’ and ‘loser’. It is possible to identify several stable types of identity. These are:

  a) the oral wow-type (the dominant pattern around which emotional and psychological life is organised is an obsessive yearning for money)

  b) the anal wow-type (the dominant pattern is the pleasurable elimination of money or the manipulation of objects that are surrogates for it, also known as anal wow-exhibitionism)

  c) the displaced wow-type (possible in combination with either of the first two types), in which the individual effectively becomes insensitive to all stimuli apart from oral-anal impulses.

  The relative nature of this classification can be seen from the fact that one and the same identity may be anal in relation to those who stand lower in the wow-hierarchy and oral in relation to those who stand higher (of course, there is no ‘identity in itself - we are concerned here with a pure epiphenomenon). The linear wow-hierarchy that is formed by numerous ranked identities is known as a corporate string. It is a kind of social perpetuum mobile; ifs secret lies in the fact that any ‘identity’ is obliged constantly to validate itself against another that is located one step higher. In folklore this great principle is reflected in the colloquial phrase: ‘keeping up with the Joneses’.

  Individuals organised according to the principle of the corporate string are like fish threaded on a line. But in this case the fish are still alive. More than that - under the influence of the oral and anal wow-factors they crawl, as it were, along the corporate string in the direction that they think of as up. They are driven to do this by instinct or, if you will, by the urge to find the meaning of life. And from the point of view of economic metaphysics the meaning of life is the transformation of the oral identity into the anal.

  The implications of the situation are not exhausted by the fact that the subject who is overcome by the influence of the three residual wow-factors is obliged to regard himself or herself as an identity. Coming into contact with another human being, he or she sees him or her as an identity too. The culture of the dark age has already correlated absolutely everything that can characterise a human being with its oral-anal system of coordinates and located it in a context of endless moutharsing.

  The displaced wow-individual analyses everybody he or she meets as a video clip saturated with commercial information. The external appearance of the other person, his or her speech and behaviour, are immediately interpreted as a set of wow-symbols. A very rapid and uncontrollable process is initiated, consisting of a sequence of anal, oral and displacing impulses that flare up and fade away in consciousness, determining the relations people have with each other. Homo homini lupus est, as one inspired Latin saying has it. But man has long ceased being a wolf to man. Man is not even an image-maker to man, as some modern sociologists assume. It is all far more terrifying and much simpler than that. Man is wow to man - or if not to man, then to precisely another such wow, the result of which is that, projected on to the modem system of cultural coordinates the Latin saying becomes:

  ‘Wow Wow Wow!’

  This applies not only to people, but in general to everything that falls within the range of our attention. In assessing what we are looking at, we experience a weary sense of depression if we do not encounter the familiar stimuli. Our perception is subjected to a specific form of digitization - every phenomenon is disassociated into a linear combination of anal and oral vectors. Every image can be precisely expressed in terms of money. Even if it is emphatically non-commercial, the question immediately arises of how commercially valuable that type of non-commercialism is. Hence the feeling, familiar to us all, that in the end everything comes down to money.

  And indeed, everything does come down to money, because money has long since been reduced to nothing but itself, and everything else proscribed. Surges of oral-anal activity become the only permitted psychological reaction. All other mental activity is blocked.

  The type-two subject is absolutely mechanistic, because it is an echo of electromagnetic processes in the cathode-ray tube of a television. The only freedom that it possesses is the freedom to say ‘Wow!’ when it buys another thing, which as likely as not is a new television. This is precisely why oranus’s controlling impulses are called wow-impulses, and the subconscious ideology of identialism is called ‘wowerism’. As for the political regime corresponding to wowerism, it is sometimes known as telecracy or mediacracy, since it is a regime under which the object of choices (and also the subject, as we have demonstrated above) is a television programme. It should be remembered that the word ‘democracy’, which is used so frequently in the modem mass media, is by no means the same word ‘democracy ‘ as was so widespread in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The two words are merely homonyms. The old word ‘democracy’ was derived from the Greek ‘demos’, while the new word is derived from the expression ‘demo-version’.

  Ana so, let us sum up.

  Identialism is dualism at that stage of development when the major corporations are finalising the division of human consciousness which, being under the constant influence of oral, anal and displacing wow-impulses, begins independently to generate the three corresponding wow-factors. This results in the stable and permanent displacement of the personality and the appearance in its place of the so-called ‘identity ‘. Identialism is dualism that possesses a triple distinction. It is dualism that is: a) dead; b) putrid; c) digitised.

  Numerous different definitions of identity could be provided, but this would be a senseless exercise, because in any case it does not exist in reality. At the stage of identialism, the individual for whose freedom it was once possible to fight disappears completely from the field of view.

  It follows, therefore, that the end of the world, which is the inevitable outcome of the wowerisation of consciousness, will present absolutely no danger of any kind - for the very subject of danger is disappearing. The end of the world will simply be a television progr
amme. And this, comrades in the struggle, fills us all with inexpressible bliss.

  Che Guevara

  Mt Shumeru, eternity, summer.

  ‘ Sumer again. We’re all Sumerians, then.’ Tatarsky whispered quietly and looked up. The grey light of a new day was trembling beyond the blind at the window. To the left of the ouija board lay a heap of paper covered in writing, and the weary muscles of his forearms ached. The only thing he could remember from all that writing was the expression ‘bourgeois thought’. Getting up from the table, he went across to the bed and threw himself on to it without getting undressed.

  ‘Just what is bourgeois thought?’ he wondered. ‘God only knows. About money, I suppose. What else?’

  CHAPTER 8. Safe Haven

  The lift that was elevating Tatarsky towards his new job contained only a single solitary graffito, but even that was enough to make it clear at a glance that the heart of the advertising business beat somewhere close at hand. The graffito was a variation on a classic theme, the advertisement for Jim Beam whisky in which a simple basic hamburger evolved into a complex, multi-tiered sandwich, then the sandwich became an even more intricate baguette, and finally the baguette turned back into the basic hamburger, which all went to show that everything returns to its origins. Traced out on the wall in gigantic three-dimensional letters casting a long drawn shadow were the words: FUCK YOU.

  Written below it in small letters was the original Jim Beam slogan: ‘You always get back to the basics.’

  Tatarsky was simply delighted at the way the entire evolutionary sequence implied in the inscriptions had simply been omitted - he could sense the laconic hand of a master at work. What was more, despite the risque nature of the subject, there wasn’t even the slightest trace of Freudianism in the text.

  It was quite possible that the unknown master was one of his two colleagues who also worked for Khanin. They were called Seryozha and Malyuta, and they were almost complete opposites. Seryozha, a short man with light hair, wore gold-rimmed spectacles and strove with all his might to resemble a Western copywriter, but since he didn’t know what a Western copywriter actually looked like and relied on nothing but his own strange ideas about the matter, the impression he actually produced was of something touchingly Russian and very nearly extinct.

  Malyuta, a robust slob in a dirty denim suit, was Tatarsky’s comrade in misfortune - he had also suffered from his romantically-minded parents’ love for exotic names - in this case the name borne by Ivan the Terrible’s most infamous lieutenant - but that didn’t make them close. When he began talking to Tatarsky about his favourite theme, geopolitics, Tatarsky said that in his opinion it consisted mostly of an irresolvable conflict between the right hemisphere and the left that certain people suffer with from birth. After that Malyuta began behaving towards him in an unfriendly fashion.

  Malyuta was a frightening individual in general. He was a rabid anti-Semite, not because he had any reason to dislike Jews, but because he tried as hard as he could to maintain the image of a patriot, logically assuming there was nothing else a man called Malyuta could do with his life. All the descriptions of the world Malyuta encountered in the analytical tabloids were in agreement that anti-Semitism was an indispensable element of the patriotic image. The result was that, following long efforts to mould his own image, Malyuta had come to resemble most of all a villain from Bin Laden’s gang in a stupid low-budget action movie, which started Tatarsky wondering whether these low-budget action movies were quite so stupid after all, if they were capable of transforming reality after their own image.

  When they were introduced, Tatarsky and Khanin’s other two employees exchanged folders of their work; it was a bit like the mutual positioning of dogs sniffing each other’s ass the first time they meet. Leafing through the works in Malyuta’s folder, Tatarsky several times found himself shuddering in horror. The very same future he had playfully described in his concept for Sprite (the folk-costume image of the pseudo-Slavonic aesthetic, visible ever more clearly through the dark, swirling smoke of a military coup) was present in full-blown form in these sheets typed with carbon paper. Tatarsky was particularly badly shaken by the scenario for a Harley-Davidson clip:

  A street in a small Russian town. In the foreground a rather blurred, out-of-focus motorcycle, looming over the viewer. In the distance is a church; the bell is ringing. The service has only just finished and people are walking down along the street. Among the passers-by are two young men wearing red Russian shirts outside their trousers - they could be cadets from military college on holiday. Close-up: each of them is carrying a sunflower in his hands. Close-up: a mouth spitting out a husk. Close-up: foreground - the handlebars and petrol tank of the motorcycle, behind it - our heroes, gazing obsessively at the motorcycle. Close-up: fingers breaking seeds out of a sunflower. Close-up: the two heroes exchange glances, one says to the other:

  ‘Sergeant in our platoon was called Harley. A real bull of a man. But he took to the drink.’

  ‘Why’d he do that?’

  ‘You know. No one gives a Russian a chance these days.’

  Next frame - a Hassidic Jew of massive proportions comes out of the door of a house wearing a black leather jacket and a black wide-brimmed hat. Beside him our two heroes appear skinny and puny - they involuntarily take a step backwards. The Jew gets on to the motorcycle, starts it up with a roar, and a few seconds later has disappeared from view - all that’s left is a blue haze of petrol smoke. Our two heroes exchange glances again. The one who recalled the sergeant spits out a husk and says with a sigh:

  ‘Just how long can the Davidsons keep riding the Harleys? Russia, awake!’

  (Or: ‘World history. Harley-Davidson’. A possible softer version of the slogan: ‘The Harley motorcycle. Not to say Davidson’s.’)

  At first Tatarsky decided it must be a parody, and only after reading Malyuta’s other texts did he realise that for Malyuta sunflowers and sunflower-seed husks were positive aesthetic characteristics. Having been convinced by the analytical tabloids that sunflower seeds were inseparably fused with the image of a patriot, Malyuta had cultivated his love of them as dedicatedly and resolutely as he cultivated his anti-Semitism.

  The second copywriter, Seryozha, would leaf for hours at a time through Western magazines, translating advertising slogans with a dictionary, on the assumption that what worked for a vacuum cleaner in one hemisphere might well do the job for a wall-clock ticking away in the other. In his good English he would spend hours interrogating his cocaine dealer, a Pakistani by the name of Ali, about the cultural codes and passwords to which Western advertising made reference. Ali had lived for a long time in Los Angeles and even if he couldn’t provide explanations for the most obscure elements of obscurity, he could at least lie convincingly about what he didn’t understand. Perhaps it was Seryozha’s intimate familiarity with advertising theory and Western culture in general that made him think so highly of the first job Tatarsky based on the secret wow-technology imparted by commendante Che during the seance. It was an advert for a tourist firm organising tours to Acapulco. The slogan was:

  WOW! ACAPULYPSE NOW!

  ‘Right on!’ Seryozha said curtly, and shook Tatarsky by the hand.

  Tatarsky in turn was quite genuinely delighted by one of Seryozha’s early works, which the author himself regarded as a failure:

  No, you’re not a sailor any more… Your friends will reproach you for your indifference. But you will only smile in reply - you never really were a sailor anyway. All your life you’ve simply been heading for this safe haven.

  SAFE HAVEN. THE PENSION FUND

  Malyuta never touched Western magazines - he only ever read the tabloids, or The Twilight of the Gods, always with a bookmark in one and the same place. But soon Tatarsky was astonished to notice that for all their serious differences in intellectual orientation and personal qualities, Seryozha and Malyuta were both sunk equally deeply in the bottomless pit of mou
tharsing. It was evident in numerous details and traits of behaviour. For instance, when they spoke to Tatarsky about a certain common acquaintance of theirs, both of them in turn described him as follows:

  ‘You know,’ said Seryozha, ‘in psychological terms he’s something like a novice broker who earns six hundred dollars a month, but is counting on reaching fifteen hundred by the end of the year…’

  ‘And then,’ added Malyuta, raising a finger, ‘when he takes his dame out to Pizza Hut and spends forty dollars on the two of them he thinks it’s a big deal.’

  Immediately following this phrase Malyuta was overwhelmed by the influence of the anal wow-factor: he took out his expensive mobile phone, twirled it between his fingers and made an entirely unnecessary call.

  Apart from all that, Seryozha and Malyuta actually turned out a remarkably similar product - Tatarsky realised this when he discovered two works devoted to the same item in their folders.

  Two or three weeks before Tatarsky joined the staff, Khanin’s office had submitted a big order to a client. Some shady customers, who urgently needed to sell a large lot of fake runners, had ordered an advert from Khanin for Nike - that was the brand their canvas slippers were disguised to look like. The intention was to off-load the goods at the markets around Moscow, but the lot was so large that the shady characters, having mumbled a few incantations over their calculators, had decided to shell out for a television advert in order to accelerate their turnover. And the kind of ad they wanted had to be heavy stuff - ‘the kind,’ as one of them said, ‘that’ll do their heads in straight off. Khanin submitted two versions, Seryozha’s and Malyuta’s. Seryozha, who read at least ten textbooks on advertising written in English while he was working on the job, produced the following text: