(the) American (Novel of)

Murder So Bland
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postmodern instances of murder and mayhem are concerned primarily
with monitoring faithfully an event as if it was being recorded through
some medium, domonstrating a decided concern for how one might
appear within another image or screen, inspired, in most instances, by
yet another image. In short, the modern murderer/criminal craves to
become the medium itself. This presumably being the case, one might
seek a possible explanation for this postmodern form of image production
in the different ways in which we have come to view human
subjectivity vis à vis electronic and informational media, that is, our
means of reproducing images of ourselves and our specific relation to
these images.
Recently, Mark Poster, in The Mode of Information, makes a case for
our being cut off from ourselves by our own technologies and inventions.
In discussing databases and informational technologies, he argues
that the unprecedented spread of database technology has created a
“multiplication of the individual”—a new form of subjectivity that has
assumed its place alongside the Cartesian vision of the subject. As a
result, the Cartesian idea of immanence, mind as superior and distinct
from material substance, is no longer conceived as the central model for
identity. The self, traditionally viewed as circumscribed within an inner
realm, is now, in the postmodern era, grafted onto completely external,
impersonal systems. And these systems are composed entirely of electronic
information about individuals, databases.
The average database entry, the “additional self,” contains hundreds,
sometimes thousands of bits of information composing the person’s
file. A credit information file, for example, might contain pertinent
biographical data on a person (age, sex, educational background, and so
on), but also a list of every financial transaction he or she has engaged
in (including, for example, college loans), as well as, in many cases,
extremely personal information like home costs, political affiliations,
present salary, criminal records, subscriptions to communist publications,
unpaid parking violations, medical conditions, and so forth. In
effect, the data bank profile constitutes a subject which is entirely
separate from the person, but which, in many instances, touches significant
portions of the real subject’s life—serves, as it were, as a surrogate for
the subject. For example, the database self, due to certain pertinent facts
in his file, can be turned down for a mortgage, thus affecting how real
subjects live, where their children go to school, who their neighbors are,