Hate is All Around: The Politics of Enthusiasm (and its Discontents)
By Mark Dery
Going further, what we like or dislike is rarely half as mind-opening as why we did or didn’t.
And what we neither dislike nor like, but both like and dislike—where’s the button for that?—or are simply fascinated by, is more enlightening still. Freed from the confining binary of loving versus loathing, Facebook Like-ing versus hateration, we can imagine an index of obsessions, an inventory of intrigues that more accurately traces the chalk outline of who we truly are.
In his mind-stretching foray into math-geek metaphysics, The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul: What Gnarly Computation Taught Me About Ultimate Reality, the Meaning Of Life , and How To Be Happy, the magical-realist cyberpunk novelist (and former math and computer science professor) Rudy Rucker introduces the concept of the “lifebox,” a “hypothetical technological gizmo for preserving a human personality.” He describes the gadget as “a small interactive device to which you tell your life story.”
It prompts you with questions and organizes the information you give it. As well as words, you can feed in digital images, videos, sound recordings, and the like. It’s a bit like an intelligent blog. Once you get enough information into your lifebox, it becomes something like a simulation of you. Your audience can interact with the stories in the lifebox, interrupting and asking questions. The lifebox begins by automating the retiree’s common dream of creating a memoir and ends by creating a simulation of its owner. Why would you want to make a lifebox? Immortality, ubiquity, omnipotence. You might leave a lifebox behind so your grandchildren and greatgrandchildren can know what you were like. […] A lifebox is a person reduced to a digital database with simple access software.
Imagine a more anarchic politics of enthusiasm, poetically embodied in a simulacrum of the self that preserves our repulsive attractions and attractive repulsions, reducing us not to our Favorites, nor even to our likes and dislikes, but to our obscure obsessions, our recurrent themes, the passing fixations that briefly grip us, then are gone—not our favorite things, but the things that Favorite us, whether we like it, or even know it, or not.
Here’s the first entry in my Lifebox:
Freaks. Forensic pathology. Cryptozoology. Krampus the satanic Santa. The Cthulhu Mythos of H.P. Lovecraft. The bestiary of theory (from Poe’s Imp of the Perverse to Benjamin’s Angel of History, Deleuze and Guattari’s Body Without Organs to Haraway’s Cyborg). Spirit photography. Psychogeography. Stigmata. Suicide notes (as a literary genre). Somnambulism. Sword canes. True crime. Tentacle hentai. The psychosexual subtext of certain Catholic saints (Saint Agatha carrying her severed breasts on a salver, Saint Teresa in ecstasy, Saint Lucy offering up her enucleated eyeballs as the plat du jour). Petrified forests. Post-mortem daguerreotypes. Phone calls from beyond the grave. Dream life in the Third Reich. Bad taxidermy. Baroque topiary. Polymorphous perversity. Sigmund Freud photographed in Dreamland at Coney Island on the afternoon of August 28 1909. A sign in a dust-streaked shop window in New York City reading Glass Doll Eyes for Every Occasion. Magic lanterns. Museum dioramas in a state of decay. Blasphemous “black popes” who worship abominations in secret. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (considered as Surrealist literature). Pirate utopias. Vast necropolises. Objects removed from peoples’ stomachs. Semiotics. The far fringes of theoretical physics. Sacred monsters of fetal teratology. Mexican masked wrestling. Man-eating animals. Amnesia. Time travel. Time stopped in mid-tick for eternity. Ships trapped in frozen oceans. Abandoned buildings. Lost worlds. Postmodern archaeology (the excavation, from sand dunes near L.A., of the lath-and-plaster ruins of Cecil B. DeMille’s City of the Pharoah from his silent version of The Ten Commandments). Fossil futures. Airplane graveyards (The Davis-Monthan Air Force Base). Radiolarians. Rat kings. Antique prosthetic limbs. Heliocentric sacrifice in pre-Columbian America. Derridean hauntology. Doll hospitals. Fetishists. Eccentrics. Hysterics. Obsessives. Religious lunatics. Kitsch. Camp. Bad taste. The sublime. The profane. The gothic. The grotesque. The carnivalesque. The unspeakable. The unthinkable.