3M Girl Theory

 3M Girl Theory

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"She is, literally, the polaroid of perfection"

-Beginning of Clueless TV series theme

"One doesn't need sunglasses to see that such shimmering water is also the dazzle of a late liquid capitalism, which has flooded the world with its flows"

-Zach Blas, "Is the Internet a Urinal?" (in I was Raised on the Internet, ed Omar Kholeif)

Willendorf Venus

 

3D printable model of Willendorf Venus

Murakami's 3M girl, viewed from rear

3M Girl, frontal view

 

Sublimation is not the same thing as assuming a physiognomy, because any physiognomy (face/mask/faciality) I "assume" (by identifying myself, singling myself out among various other simulacra, identifying my "image") is the result of a process of sublimation, not the start thereof. We do not fall into the orifice so easily, the rim of which shimmers with anticipation and is an ur-metaphor which traverses language itself. The "cool" (in Mcluhan's sense) glitch or punk feminism (see the recently published books "The Cyberfeminism Index", a broad overview, and "Revolutionary Demonology", a tightly written metaphysical manifesto) which tends to identify the simulacrum itself as the point of subversion (as evidence for this I point out the obligatory inclusion of an "images" section in the CFI and the focus on "the Imaginary" with this notion of demonology), to take a pop cultural example, hyperpop rapper Ashnikko's music video for "Drunk With my Friends", where reality is distorted through a kind of intoxicated hyperreal psychedelic-fairie consciousness in which the image-identified viewer is flipped into an avatar with the maximum level of distortion. This is an inversion of the ob-scene, putting the vulgar, bulbous, pornified body back into the culture industry's more mainstream, "respectable" (or "tolerable") framework. Not unlike the 3M Girl's superflatness, I would say that Ashnikko's work (as with any other hyperpop star) is a symptom of surplus-enjoyment. Surplus-enjoyment is, let's say, a vicious-but-healthy circle, not a symptom to be eradicated through "subjective desolation" as Zizek claims. This might be the stoic masculine position (or the Christian conservative position) and I would refer you to Norman Mailer's "Tough Guys Don't Dance" as well as, more significantly, Kirk's "The Conservative Mind". The key difference I want to finesse, from a perspective which is both Feminist and Marxist but which also calls into question the meaning of such terms, is the difference between a "somatization disorder" (or a "gender dysphoria") and intuition qua noumenal rather than sensuous. Thus drag per se, as queer masquerade, becomes a means of imposing restrictions on thought and behavior, a way to resist the heteronomy of the will through a categorical imperative to introduce more and more artifice (more "sexiness", more glamour; from a conservative frame of mind the prerogative of the "fetishist" who is gradually trapped in the spiderweb of their own desire, at least supposedly, although as I claim the imperatives of fetishism become moral commands which actually counteract heteronomy in Kant's sense). The extreme limit is Cindy Sherman's use of prosthetics and artificial body parts, appropriated in a relatively "light" way by Petra Collins, who does not follow Sherman's prescription for evading the "hot role model" role.

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But, more abstractly, the philosophy and psychology of 3M Girl abides in the space of connectivity and modularity, a pantheistic, telepathic space of instantaneous, frictionless consumerism, a consumer-topia, a blink-of-the eye consumerism. And yet there is real hope here, I think, all the same, there is hope in the sense that, following Fredric Jameson, it is possible to be intellectually cynical but spiritually (almost secretly) utopian. A flat ontology of objects decoheres (in the assemblage theory sense) the subject who enters into the supposedly vicious circle of simulacra and fractured identity. But what if this circle were not even vicious-healthy after all, suppose it is a question simply of the "realm" of the simulacrum, a theatrical space into which one willingly enters in order to lose one's identity but which does not shatter or dissolve the subject, since to take up this theatrical stance is itself a product of subjectivity, of a taking-up-a-position with respect to a truth-process in Badiou's sense. Because "Superflat" (the manifesto and the concept) exists, because Murakami has made clear his art-polemical "position", it may seem excessive or simply redundant to derive a theory from only one of his works. But I think my point of view is different enough from Murakami's for this exercise to be worthwhile. In a flat ontology, 3M Girl is like the Willendorf Venus (or the Callipygian Venus alluded to by Klossowski in "Living Currency"). I want to derive a theory, if only in the form of a sketch of a concept, and almost a kind of pre-manifesto based upon "3M Girl", as if in this post I were setting myself up to eventually derive, like Spinoza, everything from infinite substance, with 3M Girl as that God or Nature or Body without Organs. I always hope that my blog posts can be like ciphers and prisms of a potential theory. The 3M Girl is the virtuality of the erotic body, it is the extreme limit case of "machine realism" (again, it is a plastic, anime version of the Willendorf or Callipygian Venus, a toy-model of a Venus), like Duchamp's bride, like a pneumatic Picabia woman (woman as a gear or a pneumatic cylinder within an implied machinery), 3M Girl affirms (like Wesselmann and others at the forefront of the first wave of pop art) the abstract, metaphysical existence of the erotic body as a vehicle of transcendence (see Bataille, "Death and Sensuality"). 

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We often relegate the erotic and its aesthetic ironies to the stupid (see Ronell on thought's stupor). But this non-knowing is rather that extremity of intuition in which the mind receives the imprint of its own ideas at the limit of its capacity not to know, that tremor, that suffering Christ that for Dostoevsky was the prototype for The Idiot (here religious art is like pornography in that it becomes the parody of thought and a means of "capture" or on the other hand a line of escape from the impossible, domineering imperative to not be stupid/credulous, something which Dostoevsky himself wrestled with in writing The Idiot), which Ronell discusses with incredible acumen in the magisterial work, Stupidity (see also Acconci, "Seedbed"; according to Acconci in Seedbed he projected a "power-field" over the space of the gallery in which the visitors to the gallery were reduced to "material for my mind, material for my sexual fantasy" in order "to keep my masturbation going"; as well as Preciado "Porn Power" in Testo Junkie; Preciado points out the complicated "assemblage" in which both porn and ordinary subjects participate, in other words the total "effect" of porn, which she points out cannot be reduced to the ob-scene, the putting out of scene of the pornographic, because the pornographic suffuses the real qua assemblage). 

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With primeval artefactual icons such as 3M Girl we are struck with a pornographic-religious stupor in which we do not to know what to "do" or "think" next. This incapacity which Artaud so wonderfully glossed, this inability, which is so closely related to monastic asceticism, to celibacy as a kind of tortured catatonic state (here we can evoke Flaubert, who was obsessed with stupidity and wrote a version of The Temptation of St Anthony; the title of this blog is a tribute to Flaubert and to Sartre's monumental study of Flaubert, "The Family Idiot", because "Zero Brain Cells Left" is simply a meme zapping or draining all of that genius into a stupid catchphrase, something out of our contemporary burnout/slacker zeitgeist, and in this sense I do affirm that to be a burnout and to be as one-dimensional as a meme is, not so much "inescapable" or sublimely beautiful in a Flatland sort of way as it is a gesture of resistance to an authoritarian prudishness that would attempt to put the obscene out of scene and the mainstream out of stream) this is the powerlessness from which thought proceeds, having run out of steam, so long as it is taken up in the erotics of the Body without Organs, its every seam taut. 

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Holistic methods of self lifestyle-design are related to all of this, but the question is whether a "holistic" approach to, for example, catatonic depression, does justice to the "violence" in thought of which Artaud and Deleuze are examples. 3M Girl creates a short-circuit in which the catatonic knight of stupidity, asleep at his horse, is jolted into action by an unpredictable clinamen, like the protagonist of Eraserhead, hypnotized by the vibrations of his radiator, only to be jolted back into a nightmare with no way out. I am not partial to the pessimism which turns itself into a kind of lead-weight of despair out of sheer hopelessness, not so much because despair is a "sin", whatever that may mean, but because despair is so much a ground or anchor of thought that it is an evasion of the precarious or unbalanced catatonia of thought, jolted into action by (potentially disturbing, but important) stimuli or microperceptions, and thereby ultimately, even if initially subject to a kind of schizophrenic "shattering", finding a subject position through which to articulate a means of resistance, both for the conscious ego and for the collective, because our suffering matters.

-copyright James Krendel-Clark, June 2024

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