Excerpt. The heterogeneity of the sound-image in Eraserhead

Sometimes ideas come into my mind that make me crazy.
David Lynch

In Eraserhead (David Lynch, 1977) sound often accompanies changes in shot so that it thereby seems to provide the principle of editing shots or assembling them into segmented sound-images. ‘They are like image tensors, isolating the shots from one another even as they join them, drawing out the time of each shot in relation to its two boundaries, constituted by the two cuts confining the segment’ (Michel Chion). These sound-images are comprised of heterogeneous elements that are linked together in chains in relations of similarity and difference. There are linked chains of images that are segmented together along with a chain of sounds that are related to each other but not necessarily the images. The chains of images and sounds follow their own logic even as they are cemented together in sound-image segments. The images present the theme of psychosis while the sounds provide them with the consistency that, in the absence of language, would otherwise be missing.

The opening shots of Eraserhead in which Henry’s head floats above a planet, becoming briefly superimposed over it, establish the link between the head or mind and the alien planet that it creates, constitutes and occupies. It is a commonplace to say that psychotics live on ‘their own planet’ because they conventionally do not experience the same sense of shared reality as everyone else. At the same time, the title has not only brought into conjunction two disparate ideas, the head and the eraser, but also thereby the associated idea of the erasure of the head (and indeed the sign), the rubbing-out or loss of identity. ‘The psychotic’s ego ... is fragile’ and can shatter like the planet in Eraserhead when confronting the trauma that precipitates the psychotic break. Clearly this trauma is the onset of fatherhood (a common cause according to Lacan) something that is of course represented in the narrative, such as it is, but more powerfully conveyed in the horrifying images of childbirth and its hideous progeny.

The first series of images, the planet-head-eraser assemblage that seems to be linked together according to metaphorical relations of similarity – the planet is a head that with its distinctive haircut looks like an eraser – gives rise to a second series to which it is metonymically related. The idea of an alien planet naturally suggests aliens, an idea also conjured by the strange spirit-form that floats out of Henry’s mouth. Henry gives up the ghost but in the shape of an in-human ‘cord’ that seems to conjoin a spermatozoa with the umbilical cord that its successful fertilization produces in its germination of a baby. Not only are spermatozoa a kind of alien substance that is part and not part of a body, since Roswell in the 1950s generic aliens have taken the oval-headed smooth-bodied shape that suggests both a sperm and a foetus. It is also, of course, the shape of Henry and Mary X’s ‘baby’ that is comprised of just a head and a torso wrapped in bandages.

The metaphorical assemblage planet-head-eraser is therefore subordinated to the logic of metonymy concerning the trauma of childbirth that articulates the chain. The head fails to function as a paternal metaphor that might arrest the chain. Detached from the body, it becomes just one object among others. The severed head in Eraserhead functions a little like the enucleated eye in Georges Bataille’s Story of the Eye (1982) in relation to the egg and the testicle, on the one hand, and the tears, yolk, sperm and urine on the other, all of which are placed into an erotic circuit of metonymy. ‘Using metonymical interchange’ writes Barthes, ‘Bataille drains a metaphor’ and abolishes it. Consequently, ‘the world becomes blurred; properties are no longer separate ... and the whole of Story of the Eye signifies in the manner of a vibration that always gives the same sound’ (Barthes).

In the absence of a paternal metaphor, the organizing principle of Eraserhead is sound, the continuum of which is given consistency through the resonance of the pipe. From the hiss and throb of steam pipes and boilers to the melodious tones of Fats Waller’s pipe organ, the pipe is the primary industrial object that resonates throughout the soundtrack. Furthermore, the paternal function as it is represented in both its failure and its insistence in the movie is bound up with pipes. While Mr. X., the only father (apart, perhaps, from Henry himself) represented in the film, has no name (no name-of-the-father), he has a function: he is a plumber. Both the symbolic burden and failure of paternal law is demonstrated by Mr. X when he passes on to Henry the role of carving the meat (usually undertaken in any case by his wife). Passed on to Henry (‘Do you carve these like regular chickens?’), the action of the knife produces a nightmarish scene of blood gushing through the legs of the chicken, waggling in the air as if in a disastrous birth or miscarriage. At the end of the scene, the father’s fixed grin indicates that he has sunk into a catatonic state itself suggesting genetic psychosis.

‘We are born in sound’, as they say, and Lynch’s superfield of ambient machine-pipe yet watery noise (steam, rushing water, whirlpools, storms) is neither diegetic nor non-diegetic. It constitutes the whole milieu which is both the social reality of the film and Henry’s psychic reality, the sound increasing and abating in intensity depending on the perplexity, anxiety and emotional turmoil of the central character. And indeed of the audience in so far as they identify with his predicament or are drawn into his world. We are enveloped by an amniotic, womb-like world that is as claustrophobic as it is nurturing. The ambient sound of Eraserhead is like a (psychic) body within a body and at significant moments the sound alternates between low frequency bass notes of the circulation of blood and the high intensity hissing of the nervous system, the latter especially at moments of anxiety associated with the spermcords or the proximity of the Lady in the Radiator. At their most intense, the sound of steam/hissing is joined by an incredibly high organ note for example when Henry is cutting open the baby’s bandages or when he is moving to touch the Lady in the Radiator. This hamster-like woman appears to conjure-up the maternal object of Henry’s childhood eroticism. She is first perceived in a rare moment of reverie when he is lying on the bed listening to the sounds of his wife feeding their baby. He begins to hallucinate and perceive the little stage and the tiny Lady upon it between the radiator pipes. We hear Fats Waller’s pipe organ again, though it is not clear whether the music is playing on the gramophone or in his head.

Music, as a ‘cut’ in noise, involves the repression of the noise that would engulf everything in its indifferent intensity. Ironically, this is again initiated when Fats Waller’s music seems to suggest to Henry the solution of killing the baby with the scissors. It plays as he lies on his bed picking at the blanket as the baby laughs at him in the corner. The baby is clearly Henry’s alter ego, his double, something that is confirmed when he imagines that the beautiful woman next doors sees him with the baby’s head, his own having already been erased through being turned into erasers. Locked within the intensity of the imaginary register, any faint symbolic power associated with Fats Waller gives way to the intense rush of ambient noise as Henry cuts open the baby’s bandages, repeating his attempt at carving the chickens, with an even more spectacular result in the production of bodily excess. With the murder of the baby that is effectively a self-murder or suicide, Henry confronts the void that was always there, his fragile ego-planet explodes, the imaginary persona pulling his levers loses control and the sound-image fuses in blinding white noise as he embraces ‘the dream of incestuous fusion’ (Chion) in the form of the Lady in the Radiator and goes to heaven. Where everything is fine.

Of course Henry actually kills himself by sticking his fingers into the electrical socket, hence the horripilation and halo. Electricity is evil.

From: ‘The Heterogeneity of the Sound-Image in David Lynch’s neuracinema’ forthcoming in François-Xavier Gleyzon (ed), David Lynch. Literaria Pragensia

War, opera, amusianalysis

It all sounded like screaming.
-- D.L., on going to the opera.

It is one of the most famous and chilling scenes in cinema. A fleet of Hueys, assault helicopters of the 19th Airborne Cavalry, appear over the horizon at sunrise. As they approach the apparently peaceful Vietnamese village, an eerie sound can be heard above their engines and beating rotors: a kind of screaming or wailing, or perhaps even singing. For the commander of the fleet, Lt. Colonel Bill Kilgore, this noise is his signature and accompanies every airborne assault because he believes ‘it scares the hell out of the slopes’. For this reason, the Hueys are not just equipped with rockets and guns, but an elaborate sound system linked to a reel-to-reel tape machine that can blare out the beginning of Act III of Die Walküre by Richard Wagner, ‘The Ride of the Valkyries’. Part of the original screenplay by John Milius, the scene is one of the highlights of Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979), but it is a curious scene that bears no relation to any actual event in the Vietnam war. Certainly the US military used loud speakers, but as would be expected they broadcast propaganda in Vietnamese, and if they played music they played Vietnamese music. Rather than terror, it is not likely that Wagner would be greeted by the Vietnamese with anything other than incomprehension. While soldiers and armies have no doubt since time immemorial shouted, screamed, hollered, bugled, piped and drummed on their march into war, the sinister sound of rotors signalling the helicopters’ approach would in itself have terrified a Vietnamese village far more than some weird foreign music almost certainly drowned out by the noise of the engines. The scene is purely cinematic and what it conveys has significance only for a cinema audience.

Mladan Dolar begins his book A Voice and Nothing More (2006) with another military call to arms in a joke at the expense of the Italian army. Ignoring their commander’s call to attack, the opera-loving infantrymen merely sigh, ‘Che bella voce!’ ‘What a beautiful voice’. Dolar’s point is to illustrate how the aesthetics of voice can be heard in a way distinct from any message it may convey. But in his conjunction of the army and the opera, Dolar adds another term, psychoanalysis, in order to elucidate a third dimension of the voice. This is the voice as ‘blind spot in the call and as a disturbance of aesthetic appreciation’. Rather than the Italian commander’s battle cry, Dolar finds this third dimension in the effect produced by a speaking-machine constructed by Wolfgang von Kempelen. The machine’s voice inspired awe not because of the clarity or beauty of its speech but its incongruity. The voice, emanating from a crude machine, evoked a sense of the uncanny as if it had become somehow separated from its bodily support in a human being, and left to haunt the machine.

Returning to Coppola’s conjunction of war and opera, is it possible to locate in this scene these three dimensions of the voice? The American example is more complex than the Italian, but at first sight it seems to involve a simple reversal. Rather than a military command being appreciated for its aesthetic qualities, an aria is deployed as a battle cry. Moreover, particularly in the exterior aerial shots, the voices of the sopranos seem to emanate from the helicopters themselves, as is no doubt Coppola-Kilgore’s intention. The Hueys become the Valkyries, bearing death from above; it is the intention to inspire shock and awe through this uncanny effect as much as through the bombs and rockets. But there is more to each of these levels than this. At the level of meaning, the musical extract connotes much more than its ostensible message were it to be taken as speech and received in the context of the opera as a whole within the confines of an opera house. In order for the music to have its effect, it is not necessary for the soldiers, the Vietnamese or the cinema audience to know that they are listening to the daughters of Wotan and Erda carry dead warriors from the battlefield to Valhalla, as appropriate as that scenario might be. For the soldiers and the cinema audience, it is more likely that the music is familiar from other movies, its military heritage generally, and Wagner’s association with the Nazis. It is well known that Wagner was Hitler’s favourite composer and apparently ‘his music was played over the loudspeakers in the Nazi extermination camps’. Among a number of previous movies, ‘The Ride of the Valkyries’ features prominently in the original score of DW Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1915) at the climactic scene of the third act when a number of white Americans, threatened by a group of liberated slaves, are rescued by the Klu Klux Klan. The ‘message’ of Milius and Coppola, therefore, conveyed by the inclusion of this extract from Wagner in this scene can no doubt be read as a comment on Kilgore and the US commanders that he may be taken to represent. Following Groucho Marx in Duck’s Soup, the ‘authorial’ message therefore might be: ‘while Kilgore may strut like a Nazi, act like a Nazi and like Nazi music, don’t let that fool you, he really is a Nazi.’ But that ignores a number of Kilgore’s specific qualities, that judging by subsequent events are characteristically American. The use of music in the midst of war, the delusion of indestructibility evident in his complete indifference to enemy gunfire, and the staging of the battle purely in order to facilitate surfing, testify to the ‘madness’ caused by such a confusion of boundaries in which war as an instrument of foreign policy becomes simply an ecstatic mode of non-productive expenditure. That war is utter joy for Kilgore is evident in the melancholy of his sigh that ‘someday this war will end’. It hasn’t yet.

The aesthetic dimension of the helicopter attack is more complex still because, again, it operates cinematically in excess of its purely operatic context in an assemblage of audio-visual elements. As the voices of the sopranos drift in and out of earshot above the engines and later the explosions and carnage of the attack, singing becomes indistinguishable from screaming. The screams of the helicopters, the villagers and the soldiers both set off and merge with the daughters of Wotan and Erda as the death they bring is borne off to Valhalla. Amidst the clamour, the voices illuminate the silence of the death drive through providing the point of uncanny, familiar strangeness around which the drive pulsates. The sound of the divas bears more than an operatic beauty since their unearthly singing is poised on the edge of screaming. It is that dissonance, for the American soldiers and the cinema audience, that eerie foreign noise singing-screaming in a foreign language that provides the traumatic affect that ensures the scene makes such a strong impression. Taking their cues from the reaction shots of Willard’s crew, it is the cinema audience that registers the terror, assumed for the ‘slopes’, in the alterity of Wagner’s Valkyries. It is the uncanny shock of hearing this foreign dissonance within the repetition of the same old scene of movie-military triumph, surfing on a foaming plume of napalm, that renders the scene memorable and even traumatic. And as so often, the trauma of such a dissonance provides the basis of a series of repetitions (see Fallujah etcetera).

Hank Williams’s cough

I said to Hank Williams: how lonely does it get?
Hank Williams hasn’t answered yet
But I hear him coughing all night long
A hundred floors above me
In the tower of song
-- Leonard Cohen, ‘Tower of Song’, 1988

Did Hank Williams have a cough? When he died at the age of 29, ‘his lungs showed evidence of edema, or accumulation of excessive fluids’ as an effect of the heart disease that killed him (Roger M. Williams). The signs were there; shortly before he died he is reported to have complained, ‘my chest is ready to bust, I can hardly breathe’. The heart disease was of course the result of alcoholism so severe that ‘he’d beg for whisky like a baby begs for milk’. But so far as I’m aware Williams wasn’t a notorious cougher.

Leonard Cohen’s enigmatic lines in his celebrated ‘Tower of Song’ where singers reside, alive and dead, in a tower that represents the great canon of popular song have been taken as an indication of Cohen’s modesty, but the latter has said that Williams is located a hundred floors above himself because ‘I know where Hank Williams stands in the history of popular song. “Your Cheatin’ Heart”, songs like that, are sublime, in his own tradition, and I feel myself a very minor writer’. What is curious of course is that Hank Williams no longer sings in the tower of song, where he is located because of his sublime country classics, he coughs.

Maybe Hank Williams’s coughing answers the question of loneliness. This is how lonely it gets: loneliness beyond speech, beyond song; just the involuntary yet interminable sound of suffering erupting from the place where song or speech should be. For Cohen, the listener, the cough establishes and communicates some kind of presence, communicates without meaning or intention no doubt, but communicates nevertheless and keeps everyone company, keeps everyone awake, whether they like it or not. If Cohen can hear Williams’s cough a hundred floors below, what must it be like just a few floors away? For God’s sake Hank, take some Night Nurse. Sweet Jesus, Hank, Frank Sinatra is going insane in here, shut the fuck up. Sympathy or hostility, a relation of sorts is sustained.

But what is this dead man’s cough and where does it come from? Is there a tradition of ghostly coughs or coughing ghosts? Does the cough denote a subject from whence it comes, or is it simply a cough and nothing more? Hank Williams died on New Year’s Day, 1953; all that is left of him is his song, and all that is left of his song, it seems, is a cough. Perhaps this cough is the distilled remnant, the reverberating echo, of Williams’s characteristic demi-yodel, that catch in the throat that he used to convey pathos in so many songs about loneliness not least in “Long Gone Lonesome Blues”, “I’m so Lonesome I could Cry” and “Love Sick Blues”. The latter using the technique to such a degree that the excessive repetition of “lo-oh-ohnsome blu-oo-oos” defines for many everything that is annoying about country music. All that is left of Williams in the tower of song is this perpetual catch-in-the-throat reduced to a raw cough that expands and resonates throughout the tower in the absence of Williams himself. No one hears from Williams, he does not speak; no one sees him. A cough does not have the lexical form to designate a subject. If it refers to anything, it refers to itself in the rhythm of its eruptions, the variations in its relative thickness, volume, density, resonance. But if a cough does not emanate from the throat of a speaking subject endowed with agency and intention, it does nevertheless erupt from a space divested of those qualities, at least for the period of its duration: the interior of a throat that cannot speak act or refer to itself, but simply suffers.

What is a cough? A cough is a symptom of an underlying physical illness or some kind of manifestation, a signifier, of neurosis (see Dora, for example). Given that he has been long dead, the former can be discounted, but the psyche, neither mind nor body, inhabits the world of ghosts and spirits. Interestingly, Williams’s cough from a Lacanian perspective could be said to occupy both of Lacan’s definitions of the symptom from the perspective of the listener. On the one hand, the cough is a coded message, a response to the question ‘how lonely does it get?’ On the other hand, the ‘message’, if it is one, is emitted in the space of a failure to reply. ‘Hank Williams hasn’t answered yet, but I hear him coughing ...’ The coughing is not taken as a response. It says nothing; it resounds but to no one, responds to nothing, a pure dissonance that repeats. Beyond interpretation, ‘the symptom can only be defined as the way each subject enjoys [jouit] the unconscious, in so far as the unconscious determines him’ (Lacan). ‘Hank Williams’ is of course dead, he does not exist, but the subject of an audio unconscious ex-sists in the dissonance of the cough that repeats and resonates all night long.

Hank Williams’s cough is the amusical song of the loneliness of being in which, moreover, in coughing, 'he' is no longer there. This is as lonely as it gets, and here we are close to Nicola Masciandaro’s speculations on objectless sorrow, the sorrow of being. One coughs, just as one is born, erupting from an aperture in the body, against one’s will. Williams’s cough, that is all that is left of him even as it endlessly prevents him appearing, is the perfect cough that, precisely, has no meaning yet persists infinitely in its suffering and its sorrow as song. For God’s sake Hank ... sssh, or you’ll wake Him up.

Imagine: Was John Lennon a justifiable homicide?

Well of course not. But to the degree to which Mark Chapman shot him because he wrote ‘Imagine’, the murder is perhaps understandable if not in the slightest condonable. Chapman certainly hated ‘Imagine’, and years before he undertook to kill the ex-Beatle ‘engaged in a vendetta against’ the song ‘warning that Lennon’s message – to imagine a world with no heaven or religion – was blasphemy … friends remember that he would sing his own foreboding lyrics to the Lennon tune: “Imagine John Lennon is dead”’ (Jack Jones, 1992).

It is possible that Mark Chapman committed the first amusical assassination, the effect of his amusicosis. The case for Chapman’s psychosis that was made both for his defence and prosecution by different psychotherapists is outlined in Jack Jones’s book, Let Me Take You Down (1992). Both accounts are complementary and convincing, and I don’t want to go into them here. Rather, I want to look at the case as an instance of amusicosis. Amusianalysis is not concerned with the psyche as if it was a unity, normal or pathological, nor as simply an effect of language. It is concerned with the amusical force that produces an audio unconscious that co-exists with the one supposed to be structured like a language (the nature of this co-existence, and indeed of the importance of music to psychosis, will be the topic of future posts).

Although many musicians have been murdered before, in the field of American popular music Robert Johnson, Sam Cooke and Marvin Gaye spring to mind, ‘Lennon was the first in America to be murdered purely because he was a famous musician, the rationale for the killing being “predicated on somebody’s art”’ (Jones). But it is not just hatred of Lennon’s art that defines his killing. Lennon’s music provided Chapman with an ambivalent relation to the world outside himself. Chapman’s profound narcissistic dissonance with his own psychic reality repeated, through its amusical (non)relation to Lennon, the amorous discordance of the formative forces outside himself, one of the most powerful of which was music. Beyond the particularities of his family romance, Chapman’s amusia articulates amusicotic disharmony with the culture generally, the state of affairs that he inhabits.

The form and reception of Lennon’s song ‘Imagine’ is a significant point of inter-connection. The incongruity of a millionaire piously imagining a world of no possessions is the central contradiction that establishes, for Chapman, Lennon as ‘king of the phonies’, allying him with Elvis Costello, Robert Elms and countless others hostile to the song, Elms citing Lennon’s possession of a single ‘temperature-controlled room in his Manhattan mansion just to store his fur coats’ in order to highlight its apparent hypocrisy (Elms, 2005). Indeed, it was precisely photographs of Lennon posing in the luxurious surroundings of his apartment in the Dakota building featured in Antony Fawcett’s memoir One Day at a Time (1975) that Chapman claims particularly enraged him. Chapman came across this book in a library at a point of personal crisis at the same time as he rediscovered JD Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye. His rage, initially extended to the world, soon distilled into a desire simply to destroy Lennon, its imaginary king, as he played the Imagine album repeatedly. The music was the thing ‘after the Catcher and the Lennon book. I would listen to this music and I would get angry at him’ (Jones).

‘Imagine’ provides a point of articulation between the two texts not just because its lyrical sentiments highlight Chapman’s belief in Lennon’s hypocritical ‘phoniness’, but also because the simple two-note basis of its musical structure, reminiscent of nursery tunes like ‘twinkle-twinkle little star’, evokes childhood. Childhood is of course the sacred object of Catcher’s hero Holden Caulfield that is, in the novel, impossibly both lost and threatened by the phony adult world. ‘Imagine’ manages to evoke the lost maternal intimacy of the nursery even as its singer threatens it with his adult lies. Significantly, Lennon and The Beatles were present in Chapman’s own childhood. Disturbed by his parents’ rows and fighting, the young Chapman lost himself in his own imaginary world, a utopia populated by ‘little people’ who adored him. It seems to have been Lennon’s indelible association with Chapman’s lost childhood that became inverted in the image of its ‘betrayal’ in the post-Beatle Lennon lounging on the roof of the Dakota building, as if taunting Chapman with his nothingness.

Ironically, ‘Imagine’ is a song by a ‘somebody’ imagining a world of nobodies. It is a paean to nothingness, a nihilistic hymn. It offers no positive vision, but begins with a series of negations: no heaven, no hell, no countries, no religion or values worth dying for, not even any possessions. The song provides the template for a conceptual country called Nutopia that is practically a Nul-topia in its absence of qualities. Appropriately its ‘national’ anthem, featured on Lennon’s album Mind Games (1973), is a few seconds of silence, and its flag a plain white. All of these featureless features are, of course, consistent with Yoko Ono’s art and practice influenced as it is by John Cage. The song’s imperative to ‘imagine’ is drawn directly from Ono’s book Grapefruit (1966), with its commands to ‘Imagine the clouds dripping / Dig a hole in your garden to put them in’ or ‘Imagine your head filled with pencil leads / Imagine one of them broken’ that Lennon himself found both irritating and inspiring depending on his mood. Ono’s instructions are intended to ‘instructure’ rather than structure, but in so doing they can become what Deleuze and Guattari call mots de ordre or order words that command obedience by implying certain implicit presuppositions. In ‘Imagine’, for example, obedience is commanded through the implicit presupposition of the evils of nations, religions and possessions. Supremely, obedience is commanded through the presumed virtue of the dreamer and the dream: ‘you may say I’m a dreamer’, begins the famous last verse that ends with the equally famous expectation: ‘I hope one day you will join us / And the world will live as one’. Who could refuse? But the dream, in its evocation of a fictional or purely conceptual reality and in its invocation of an indeterminate future, condemns the life of the present both in its actuality and in its potential. For Deleuze, the dream is another form of judgment, another eschatology, in which life is condemned and rejected for a deathly world of shadows. For all its advocacy of a secular existence and ‘living for today’, ‘Imagine’ substitutes a land of conceptual shadows for a world of actually existing people. Musically, its childlike simplicity is flattened out by Lennon’s characteristic drone-like tonal horizontality as if the song were an organism inhabited, from the very beginning, by a drive seeking out its own death not just in its own way but in the negation of all things, all life, even an afterlife.

The utopia or Nutopia that listeners are instructed to imagine, so curious in its vacuity, is often compared to communism (including, apparently, by its author), but there is no mention of any workers. Ironically, since Lennon’s assassination, the song has become sanctified as an unimpeachable utterance of secular piety. Former US President Jimmy Carter is said to have heard it used in over 125 countries as an alternative (or no doubt supplementary) national anthem. As Jon Dennis writes, ‘Imagine’ is ‘so ubiquitous that it is hard to hear with anything approaching objectivity, or indeed without racing for the dial’ (Dennis, 2005). This global ubiquity suggests that far from being a radical or extreme political statement, ‘Imagine’ is perfectly in tune with the current state of affairs, its message of universality at one with the forces of globalization. Indeed Dennis notes that most remarkably Errol Brown of Hot Chocolate led the whole of the UK Conservative party conference in a collective rendition of the song in the mid-1980s at the height of Mrs. Thatcher’s neoliberal revolution.

In its ubiquity, ‘Imagine’ is an annoying advertising jingle not for any particular product, but for globalization itself. Imagine a purely global capitalism, a globally free market with no intervention from nation-states, no religious restrictions, asceticism or terrorism. Imagine a capitalism of no possessions, just activities defined by the desire for pleasure linking income with output. The American neoliberal theory of human capital does precisely this through extending economic rationality into every domain and aspect of human life. It thereby dissolves the situation where individuals are defined by their possessions or by the price of their labour. The theory of human capital analyzes human behaviour and the internal economic rationality of that behaviour. The neoliberal homo economicus is not defined by his possessions but by her modality of self-promotion and branded identity. Imagine. Just Do It. Do it. Do it. Do it. Do it. Do it.

Mark Chapman’s assassination of John Lennon was by his own admission an act of pure self-promotion indifferent to the prospect of material reward. It would of course be facile to suggest that Chapman’s act was conditioned by a utopian tendency in neoliberal desire, even if the ‘identity’ he sought can only find definition on the horizon of an aesthetic-economic system of self-promotion and celebrity that has created its own order. Its support, in Chapman’s case, was the nullibiquitous sonority of ‘Imagine’: its hypnotic two-tone horizontality (equivalent to ‘fort-da’) capturing Chapman as the ambivalent sound of his own desiring affliction. In psychosis, music frequently substitutes for the role played by language, the symbolic order from which the subject is foreclosed. Here, the childlike musical structure of ‘Imagine’ functions as the amusical ‘symbol [that] first manifests itself as the killing of the thing, and this death results in the endless perpetuation of the subject’s desire’ (Lacan, Écrits). Except that here there is no law to define that desire other than the nihilism of Nutopia.

In the cybertopia that has realized much of Nutopia’s requirements – no national or religious limits, no possessions just streams of digital information – everyone is transformed into an image/profile in a world of generalized minor celebrity. There are no more ‘metaphors’, no more stars like John Lennon or Elvis Presley. While there are few Lennons left to kill, the pattern for the universal subject of cybertopia is nevertheless more the half-life of Chapman than Lennon: anyone in any room anywhere, an ambiguous support for text and image, engaged in self-promotion. Lennon or Beatles-scale stardom was itself an effect of limited access to global telecommunications, the first live satellite broadcast around the world being their live-to-air recording of ‘All You Need Is Love” in 1967. Already dead without knowing it, animated and destroyed by an infinite scream passing through the mediascape, Lennon’s stardom flashed for an instance, filling skies across the world. It is now fading away, the scream of a dying star dissolved into the clicking keyboards of a billion fractal web-identities, just like this one.