“Capitalist realism”

      Our first step should be to analyze this family narrative at its most elementary, kitsch, level. Exemplary here is Michael Crichton, today’s successor of Arthur Hailey, the first great author of “capitalist realism” (whose bestsellers, back in the 1960s—Hotel, Airport, Cars. . .—always focused on a particular site of production or complex organization, mixing a melodramatic plot with lengthy descriptions of the site’s functions, in an unexpected echo of the Stalinist classics of the late 1920s and 1930s such as Gladkov’s Cement).¹ Crichton added to the genre a postmodern techno-thriller twist, in accordance with today’s predominant politics of fear: he is the ultimate novelist of fear—fear of the past (Jurassic Park, Eaters of the Dead), of the nanotechnological future (Prey), of Japan’s economic strength (The Rising Sun), of sexual harassment (Disclosure), of robotic technology (Westworld), of the medical industry (Coma), of alien intrusions (Andromeda Strain), of ecological catastrophes (State of Fear). State of Fear, his most recent book, brings an unexpected final addition to this series of shadowy forces which lurk among us, poised to wreak havoc: America’s fiercest enemies are none other than the environmentalists themselves.²

      As many a critic has noted, Crichton’s books are not really novels, they are more like unfinished drafts, prospectuses for screenplays; however, it is this very feature which makes his work interesting for an analysis of contemporary ideology: the very lack of stylistic qualities, the totally “transparent” mode of writing, allows the underlying ideological fantasies to be staged at their embarrassingly desublimated purest, in naked form, as it were. Exemplary here is Prey,³ in which a nanotechnological experiment in a laboratory in the Nevada desert goes horribly wrong; a cloud of nanoparticles—millions of microrobots—escapes. The cloud—visible to observers as a black swarm—is self-sustaining, self-reproducing, intelligent, and it learns from experience, evolving hour by hour. Every effort to destroy it fails.⁴ It has been programmed to become a predator; humans are its prey. Only a handful of scientists trapped in the laboratory can halt the release of this mechanical plague on a defenseless world . . . As is always the case in such stories, this “big plot” (the catastrophe that threatens to ruin humanity itself) is combined with the “secondary plot,” a set of relations and tensions amongst the group of scientists, with the troubled role-reversal married couple at its center. Jack, the novel’s narrator, was the manager of a cutting-edge computer-program division in a media-technology company before he was made a scapegoat for someone else’s corruption and fired; now he is a house-husband while his wife, Julia, is the workaholic vice-president of Xymos, the nanotechnology company which owns the Nevada desert laboratory where the catastrophe occurs—erotic, manipulative, and cold, she is a new version of the corporate vixen from Disclosure. At the novel’s start, Jack has to cope with their three children, discusses Pampers versus Huggies with another father in the supermarket, and tries to control his suspicions that his wife is having an affair.

      Far from providing a mere human-interest subplot, this family plot is what the novel really turns on: the cloud of nanoparticles should be conceived of as a materialization of the family’s tensions. The first thing that cannot but strike the eye of anyone who knows Lacan is how this swarm resembles what Lacan, in his Seminar XI, called “lamella”: it appears indestructible, in its infinite plasticity; it always reassembles itself, able to morph into a multitude of shapes; in it, pure evil animality overlaps with machine-like blind insistence. The lamella is an entity consisting of pure surface, without the density of a substance, an infinitely plastic object capable not just of incessantly changing its form, but even of transposing itself from one to another medium: imagine “something” that is first heard as a shrill sound, and then pops up as a monstrously distorted body. A lamella is indivisible, indestructible, and immortal—more precisely, undead in the sense this term has in horror fiction: not sublime spiritual immortality, but the obscene immortality of the “living dead” which, after every annihilation, recompose themselves and clumsily carry on their activities. As Lacan puts it, the lamella does not exist, it insists: it is unreal, an entity of pure semblance, a multiplicity of appearances which seem to envelop a central void—its status is purely fantasmatic. This blind indestructible insistence of the libido is what Freud called the “death drive,” and one should bear in mind that the “death drive” is, paradoxically, the Freudian name for its very opposite, for the way immortality appears within psychoanalysis: for an uncanny excess of life, for an “undead” urge which persists beyond the (biological) cycle of life and death, of generation and corruption. Freud equates the death drive with the so-called “compulsion-to-repeat,” an uncanny urge to repeat painful past experiences which seems to outgrow the natural limitations of the organism affected by it and to insist even beyond the organism’s death. As such, the lamella is “what is subtracted from the living being by virtue of the fact that it is subject to the cycle of sexed reproduction”:⁵ it precedes sexual difference, it multiplies and reproduces itself by means of asexual self-division.⁶ In the novel’s climactic scene, Jack holds Julia in his arms while she, unbeknowst to him, is already infected by the swarm and lives in symbiosis with the nanoparticles, receiving from them a superhuman life-power.

      I held her hard. The skin of her face began to shiver, vibrating rapidly. And then her features seemed to grow, to swell as she screamed. I thought her eyes looked frightened. The swelling continued, and began to break up into rivulets, and streams.

      And then in a sudden rush Julia literally disintegrated before my eyes. The skin of her swollen face and body blew away from her in streams of particles, like sand blown off a sand dune. The particles curved away in the arc of the magnetic field toward the sides of the room.

      I felt her body growing lighter and lighter in my arms. Still the particles continued to flow away, with a kind of whooshing sound, to all corners of the room. And when it was finished, what was left behind—what I still held in my arms—was a pale and cadaverous form. Julia’s eyes were sunk deep in her cheeks. Her mouth was thin and cracked, her skin translucent. Her hair was colorless, brittle. Her collarbones protruded from her bony neck. She looked like she was dying of cancer. Her mouth worked. I heard faint words, hardly more than breathing. I leaned in, turned my ear to her mouth to hear.

      “Jack,” she whispered, “It’s eating me.” (468—9)

      This