(the) American (Novel of)

Murder So Bland
to the model, or the gaze. “YOU are the model!” . . . You are
news, you are the social, the event is you, you are involved, you
can use your voice, etc.” A turnabout of affairs by which it becomes
impossible to locate an instance of the model, of power, of
the gaze, of the medium itself, since you are always already on the
other side. No more subject, focal point, center or periphery: but
pure flexion or circular inflection. No more violence, or surveillance;
only information. 20
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What Baudrillard proposes here, then, is that media and the information
they carry tend to implode reality, drawing us into their
rarefied domain. With this implosion, the distance between subject and
object is eliminated. We become the event and the event becomes us,
leaving us frozen in a hyperreal space consisting of subjects converted
into objects and events and vice versa. We no longer participate in the
event, but rather, the event participates through us. And this, to be sure,
leaves the subject in a unsettled position in its relation to the reality of
events. As frozen moments within the vast schema of electronic media
and information, we can no longer move up against these events, nor
can we absorb them, understand them or react to them. Our capacity
to respond to them from a deeper inner level, to respond to them in
what might be considered conventional, cathartic ways, is severely restricted,
if not entirely effaced. The loss of distinction between the
watcher and the watched, the listener and the heard, and so on, eliminates
the necessary poles for traditional forms of empathy. There is no
longer the possibility of delving into the inner world of the subject, as
there is no longer anything secret, dissimulated. Everything you are and
will be is already inscribed in the very act of watching, contemplating,
listening to, performing, becoming media and information.
All these modes of what Marshall McLuhan once called “extensions”
21 in the end, contribute, I suggest, to the decline of the transgressive
force of the criminal act. In the age of electronic information, the
very concept of inner/outer, of representational and aesthetic distance
has given way to its mechanistic extensions, to media, to the blinding
light of pure information. The subject/object-centered language of “the
counterfeit”—catharsis, sublimity, shock, transgression, inner, outer, event,
spectator, and so on—is no longer fully operative since, in the postmodern
era, it has become virtually impossible to locate an instance of the