by Mark Dery
The argument seems reasonable, although the word “humane” strikes a sour note in such an inhuman context. Nonetheless, one might respond: Wouldn’t diplomatic negotiation be more humane still? And given that war, the ultimate madness, springs from the collapse of reason, isn’t there an inherent absurdity in the notion of a “safe,” “rationalized” war? Shouldn’t nations whose technological sophistication is sufficient to produce smart, autonomous, robot weapons be intellectually capable of reasoning their way out of armed conflict?
Nonetheless, the pernicious fiction of a smart war exhibits a curious half-life. It lives on in articles such as the enthusiastic feature on the automated battlefield of the future that appeared in Compute magazine a few months after the war ended. One photo depicted the Fire Ant, a teleope-rated “smart assassin” under development at Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, New Mexico. The squat buggy is guided to its post, parked and armed by a remote human operator viewing the surroundings via a small TV camera perched on top of the Ant. When its sensors detect an enemy vehicle, the robotic vehicle locks onto the target and fires a six-inch armor-piercing slug at sixty-six hundred feet per second. A second photo showed the nasty results of the Fire Ant’s sting: an M-47 tank consumed by flames. “Each of the robots shown in the accompanying photographs exists . . . to keep people out of harm’s way,” assured the author.17 Automation makes the world safe for robo-war.
Dreams of hunter-killer machines and robo-soldiers in armored exoskeletons are not new. In 1919, the trailblazing inventor Nikola Tesla envisioned a Jules Verne war fought by intelligent machines called “tel-automata.” Writing in Science and Invention, the pulp editor Hugo Gerns-back celebrated Tesla’s “veritable war of science” where “machines only will meet in mortal combat.”18 A half-century later, General William C. Westmoreland, then chief of staff of the U.S. Army, predicted, “On the battlefield of the future, enemy forces will be located, tracked and targeted almost instantaneously through the use of data-links, computer-assisted intelligence evaluation and automated fire control. I see battlefields on which we can destroy anything we locate through instant communications and almost instantaneous application of. . . lethal firepower.”19 In 1971, a San Francisco Chronicle writer told a cautionary tale about a hardwired war world, “a manless, foolproof, giant lethal pinball machine out of which no living thing could ever escape.” The author warned that “the entire world, if wired right, could become a great maze of circuitry and weaponry, a jungle from which those who walk off the straight paths from home to store would be immediately and totally eliminated.”20 The nightmare battlefield of Terminator 2, a rubble-strewn Golgotha stalked by red-eyed, stainless-steel manhunt-ers, seems bloodcurdlingly near.
Before Operation Desert Storm, the PBS science series Nova aired a segment on smart weapons, titled “Killing Machines.” It included an interview with Tom Clancy, an author of popular techno-thrillers whose remarks account for the program’s spookiest moments. “One of the things about smart weapons that people don’t think about very much is the psychological factor,” said Clancy, with a thin, mechanical smile. “It is one thing to be hunted by a man who has a wife and children and dreams and ideas. It is another thing entirely to be hunted by a machine that doesn’t care that you’re a living person with dreams and hopes and a sweetheart. It just knows that you’re something it wants to kill. That is truly scary.”
Scarier still is the realization that Clancy’s comments, positioned as fact, sound like science fiction. They bear a disquieting resemblance to the doomy monologue delivered by Kyle Reese, a robot-killing street fighter in The Terminator. “It can’t be bargained with,” says Reese, of his mechanical adversary. “It can’t be reasoned with, it doesn’t feel pity or remorse or fear and it absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are dead.”
As the credits to the Nova episode roll, a nagging question remains: If these things are so scary, why does Clancy smile? Perhaps it is because he, like Pauline, finds death technology terrifying but fascinating. The android gunslinger in Westworld or the homicidal robot in the cult film Hardware fascinate because they are graven images come to life, clockwork contraptions born of human ingenuity. And they terrify for precisely that reason: they are inhuman, ticking things, unconcerned that the petrified creature frozen in the crosshairs of the laser scope is “a living person with dreams and hopes and a sweetheart.” Like the eerie Stealth bomber, with its devilfish silhouette, or the locustlike Apache helicopter, predatory machines dredge memories from the collective unconscious-man-eating beasts, angry gods.
Lastly, such devices are erotic, in a necrophilic way. On their matte black, inscrutable surfaces, we inscribe our death fetish, our delicious fear of the unknown. In the Western, Christian tradition, the human subject is affirmed by its boundaries, but it is paradoxically those same boundaries that isolate the island self, separated on all sides by a limitless gulf between it and all that is not it. “We are discontinuous beings, individuals who perish in isolation in the midst of an incomprehensible adventure, but we yearn for our lost continuity,” writes Georges Bataille, in Erotism: Death and Sensuality.21 Thus the duality of death, which promises to return us to that continuity–the womb, where we were at one with the nurturing envelope that was our cosmos-by way of the tomb, which threatens to snuff the self out forever.
The sex act, in which we risk individual dissolution for the ecstasy of fusion, is similarly ambiguous. The cultural critic Claudia Springer has noted the “deathlike loss of self. . . associated with sexual pleasure,” an ambiguity made explicit by the French euphemism for the postorgasmic fainting spells some lovers suffer from: la petite mort (“the little death”).22 In the novels of William Burroughs, this ambiguity mushrooms into an unresolvable conflict that goes to the heart of human sexuality: In The Ticket That Exploded, intercourse is an untenable “arrangement whereby two entities attempt to occupy the same three-dimensional coordinate points.”23 Or, put more poetically on the following page, “Death is orgasm is rebirth is death in orgasm.”24
The necrophilic fantasy of surrendering oneself to devouring machines that “can’t be reasoned with,” like the techno-masochist in “Happiness in Slavery,” conceals the ultimate bid for Bataille’s “lost continuity”: the ritual sacrifice of the integrated, self-reflective consciousness without which Western instrumental reason could not exist. Human sacrifice, argues Bataille, is suffused with a “religious eroticism which is concerned with the fusion of beings with a world beyond everyday reality.”25 He who sacrifices “is free, free to throw himself suddenly outside of himself.”26
Pauline, a shoot-from-the-hip philosopher, is suspicious of high-flown punditry. But he acknowledges the apparent contradiction of a social satirist seduced by military-industrial technology; there is an ambiguity, he concedes, at the heart of his critique of killing machines. “I feel a certain fascination with these devices,” he allows. “They’re very extreme, very intense, and historically, they’ve always horrified-and fascinated-people. On the other hand, I don’t make weapons that kill. I would never be part of the military, which in my opinion is one of the most screwed-up institutions around.”
SRL performances, in which suicidal machines hurtle into each other or consecrate themselves to the flames, can be read as a critique of the permanent war economy the United States has maintained since World War II. “In every year from 1951 to 1990,” asserts Seymour Melman, “the Defense Department budget has exceeded the combined net profits of all American corporations. The Pentagon uses 75 percent of the federal government’s research and development funds, has more employees than the rest of the government put together and has machinery assets that dwarf those of many corporations.”27
To Pauline, the arms race is a missed opportunity for combustible fun. “Once [machines] get specialized to the point where they’re killing machines,” he says, “they’re a lot less interesting. I mean, what if even a little of the money that went into developing a fighter jet went in
to developing a really bizarre machine that did amazing things, something people could be part of? Technology is supposed to make life more interesting, and I honestly believe that it can, although other things usually get in the way, like making money or projecting political power.”
For some, however, Pauline’s aesthetic, equal parts machismo and macchinismo, affirms the very technology worship he insists his work rejects. One feminist critic decried SRL’s orgies of violence as “repressed male sexuality enacted through the mode of destruction.”28 Another railed against SRL’s “fascination with cruelty and aggression”:
Dr. Helen Caldicott succinctly describes the phenomenon of male primitive fascination with artillery, torture and death in her recent book Missile Envy, where she names it as a primary cause of the escalating arms race. The members of SRL are wonderful examples of the “missile-envy” type. They are tough, strong, always sure of themselves, never admit mistakes, never show any emotion but bravado and are very dependent upon members of the same sex for peer-group support.29
Jim Pomeroy’s analysis is particularly cogent:
While [Pauline’s] rhetorical posture is one that advocates resistance and countercultural survival in a technointensive world, his roughly choreographed spectacles deliver little more than strong cathartic climaxes through a visceral experience of violence and entropic destruction. . . . Playing to the pit and dancing on the edge, SRL begs many questions, offers few answers, and moves off the stage leaving smoldering ruins and tinny ears in its smoky wake. SRL is boys’ toys from hell, cynically realizing the mascu-linist fantasies of J. G. Ballard and William Burroughs.30
Asked if his art springs from the same sophomoric impulse that led drunken conventioneer Archie Bunker to bomb pedestrians with water-filled bags, Pauline registers wry amusement. “Well, I do a very complicated and convoluted version of dropping water bombs out of windows, appropriate to a person my age,” he says. “Sure, I get a thrill out of [challenging cultural assumptions], which I suppose could be categorized as an adolescent thrill, but it’s only categorized that way because as people get older, they decide to be ‘grown-up.’ That’s one of the reasons we live in a static, boring society where everything is very predictable.”
Pauline bristles at the suggestion that SRL spectacles provide an outlet for the same repressed male sexuality that finds release in weekend war games in which fun-loving commandos blast away at one another with paint-filled pellets. He questions the received notion, popular among academic feminists, that technology and nature-raping, warmongering patriarchy are inextricably linked.
“This sort of activity has been falsely characterized as male,” says Pauline. “I think it’s sexist to say that what we do is gender-specific; it suggests that women are supposed to be passive, which is what everyone tells them, so of course most of them are. The women who work at SRL like to raise hell and they’re out there in front, doing it-not standing behind the boys.”
Whatever caveats they might have, few critics would deny that Pauline pioneered the definitive cyberpunk art form, mechanical spectacle. For many, SRL embodies the technolibertarian ethos that is the hard center of cyberpunk’s otherwise fuzzy ideology and exemplifies the hybrid of cybernetic and organic, state-of-the-art and street tech that typifies the cyberpunk aesthetic. In SF circles, the group’s formative influence on cyberpunk is a matter of record. Bruce Sterling and John Shirley have sung SRL’s praises, and William Gibson has paid the group the highest possible tribute: The cast of characters in his novel Mona Lisa Overdrive includes the Mark Pauline stand-in Slick Henry, an outlaw roboticist who clangs together machines like the Judge, a clomping monstrosity armed with saws. And the renegade combat ‘droid in the low-budget cyberpunk movie Hardware is undeniably patterned after SRL’s robots, a debt obliquely acknowledged in its name (Mark 13, an obvious play on “Mark Pauline”) and in the SRL videos fleetingly glimpsed on the protagonist’s TV.31
SRL’s visceral appeal requires little explication. At their best, SRL performances are motorized exorcisms, shatteringly powerful psychodramas that sit midway between Grand Guignol and Death Race 2000, pre-Christian rituals such as the burning of the wicker man and blue-collar rituals such as the demolition derby. The group’s machines are marvels of occult engineering, scrap metal monsters that paw the air and belch ball bearings; viewed as moving sculpture, they exhibit a horror-show humor reminiscent of Edward Kienholz’s installation Roxy Madam, an embalmed living room inhabited by a dowager with what looks like a horse skull for a head.
Even so, the muddled politics of Pauline’s art remain highly problematic. SRL, a self-styled company in the theatrical as well as the economic sense-“SPECTACULAR MECHANICAL PRESENTATIONS SINCE 1979,” reads Pauline’s mock-serious business card-seems, on close inspection, to be much more. The group’s psychodynamics invite comparison to those of a teenage gang, a hard-core band, a terrorist cell, or a crew of freebooters. There is something here of the Hell’s Angels, and of Peter Pan’s Lost Boys.
Pauline encourages such readings. It is no coincidence that SRL’s name was taken from an advertisement in Soldier of Fortune, a magazine for war fans, gun nuts, and dug-in survivalists: Pauline seems to encourage the perception of himself as an anomic robopath, to use Lewis Yablonsky’s coinage for “people whose pathology entails robot-like behavior and existence . . . [who are] egocentric, and without true compassion . . . [whose] existential state is ahuman.”32
Pauline seems to cherish his memories of junior high school delinquency as a member of the Fuckers’ Island Gang (“We used to wear Nazi helmets . . . and . . . have military-type maneuvers”), and has expressed a perverse fascination with convicted Watergate plumber G. Gordon Liddy, who once told a Playboy interviewer that he struck fear in the hearts of his non-Aryan jailmates with a lusty rendition of the “Horst Wessel Lied,” the official song of the Nazi party.
Pauline shrugs. “I most certainly am not into Nazism or anything like that, although people accuse me of it because I don’t disavow it. I just don’t think it’s that simple; everybody has those kinds of tendencies. Questioning those feelings, asking why people even have them at all, strikes me as a much more realistic reaction. SRL shows allow people to put concepts together in any number of ways. The real commentary is what you make of it. I don’t believe in preempting peoples’ ability to make their own decisions. To me, making an explicit political statement is basically telling people what to think, which is truly fascistic.
“Any activity that stirs things up is progressive. My job, as someone with a radical bent, is to assert my view about how things should be. I want to extend my ability to project my ideas, using devices that are exterior to myself. SRL makes the point that there are applications for technology outside the mainstream.”
The attendant realization that high-tech expertise can be put to uses never imagined in government think tanks or corporate laboratories is reiterated in SRL’s roll call of rogue technologists and road warriors-underground tinkerers who turn scavenged machinery to impractical, often subversive ends. “A lot of the people who come to work here feel [as if] it’s not morally right for them to be using [their skills] in predictable, culturally sanctioned ways,” says Pauline. “Here, they get to see their work going into strange, unpredictable things that grow in an almost organic way into the monsters that have always been in their minds but have never really had an outlet.” SRL has benefited not only from the computer industry’s discarded hardware, but from its “software” as well-a brain trust comprised, according to Pauline, of “disaffected military types and techies from . . . Liver-more Labs, Hewlett-Packard, and Bell Northern.”33
The electrical engineer Greg Leyh, who designs and builds the analog circuitry in SRL machines, is a typical recruit. He and Jeff Bain-bridge, the resident high-energy physics expert, collaborated on a lightning-bolt generator that produces ten-foot lightning bolts. “It generates a bright, white light that even with Grade Five welding lenses leaves a burn on your retin
a for about five minutes,” enthuses Pauline, “and the explosion is like a clap of thunder. During our 1992 show in Aurillac, France, it destroyed the computer in the generator it was hooked up to.”
The thought of a ragtag band of techno-radicals possessing the know-how and wherewithal to hurl Jovian thunderbolts does not give comfort to those who prefer that such knowledge remain in the hands of the proper authorities. “Projecting power is something that artists aren’t known for,” says Pauline. “These cast-off devices can be used to create a new language which comments on the power structure, which is what the whole cyberpunk thing is about, anyway.
“People are frustrated. You can look at the power structure, as represented by police and politicians, and say, ‘I want to kill all these people,’ but if you really want to influence the nature of their power, the best thing to do is to ridicule them. I’m always encouraged when I see people doing that to the power structure; it makes me think, ‘Well, it is possible to attack these people, you can hurt them really badly.’ I believe in the political potency of the symbolic gesture.”
Chico MacMurtrie: Toward a Green Robotics
Huddled in a capacious loft a short drive from Pauline’s workshop, Chico MacMurtrie’s robots look like escapees from Alexander Calder’s circus. They are reminiscent, too, of the towering, gangly archetypes created in the sixties by the Bread and Puppet Theater or the antic inventions of Jean Tinguely.
True to his name, the Tumbling Man-a google-eyed acrobat with pipes for limbs-turns somersaults with gawkish grace. The prodigiously endowed Horny Skeletons are chronic self-abusers: when they fondle their perpetually erect metal members, steam whooshes out of their ears, eyes, and mouths. The twelve-foot-tall Neolithic Pneumatic Drummer, who swats his drum with stiff-armed strokes, seems a close relative of the skeletal mariachi displayed in Mexico on the Day of the Dead. String Body, an unfortunate being whose copper ball head once bobbed in a toilet, possesses an upper torso resembling a birdcage. When the robot strums the amplified strings stretched across its upper body with a rod, lyric tinklings are heard; a human handler replaces the rod with a cello bow, and the lyrist is transformed into a cellist whose savage scrapings curl hair. Chime Body has a cymbal on top of its head and countless metal chimes dangling from its frame. Raising high its drumstick, it gives itself a tremendous whack on the head, setting its loose-limbed body jingling.
