In Lord Byron’s “Darkness,” “the bright sun was extinguish’d,” leaving the world in a black void of catastrophic decay, “a chaos of hard clay.” Consumed in this apocalyptic fervor, “all earth was but one thought–and that was death.” The narrator, like all Byronic heroes, sees something that others do not, a vision of a world that is entirely anti-human, self-destructive, and nihilistic, a sublime and ineffable experience that leaves the individual uncertain in the face of death. The “dream” that is this poem is “not all a dream;” it remains true and existing while remaining ineffable and, in a more contemporary sense, virtual. In this liminal space of simulation/reality and virtual/actual, the Byronic figure is alienated from the romanticized “natural” world that caters to their human and personal needs while experiencing and understanding the limits of (human) finitude. In both “Darkness” and Manfred, Lord Byron’s macabre, yet ironic, understanding of nature, existence, and humanity prepares one for the coming/existing ecological disaster/shifts of the Anthropocene (where the human and natural distinction collapses) and the age of techno-capitalism that is both rapidly consuming and destructive. Nick Land’s essay “Meltdown” succinctly illustrates this new world that mirrors Byron’s “Darkness.”
The story goes like this: Earth is capture by a technocapital singularity as renaissance rationalization and oceanic navigation lock into commoditization take-off. Logistically acceleration techno-economic interactivity crumbles social order in auto-sophisticating machine runaway. As markets learn to manufacture intelligence, politics modernizes, upgrades paranoia, and tries to get a grip (Land 441).
At the foreground of this technology-wrecked landscape where darkness masks both trees and skyscrapers stands a Byronic figure surveying the end of civilization à la Casper David Friedrich’s “Wanderer”: the mass murderer.
On the morning of April 16th 2007, Seung-Hui Cho, armed with a backpack containing two semi-automatic pistols, 400 rounds of ammunition, chains, locks, a hammer and a knife, killed two of his Virginia Tech peers. Moments later he went to a post office to mail a package to NBC News containing his writings, photographs, and video recordings. Out of nearly an hour of video footage, forty-seven photographs, and thirty-three pages of writing, NBC News decided to release only a fraction of Cho’s documents to the public. In one of his writings, Cho describes himself as an outsider that is viewed by his peers as “nothing but a piece of dog shit.” While he is an alienated figure, he likens himself a savior, a hero that will “inspire generations of the Weak and Defenseless people” and, like Moses, will “spread the sea and lead [his] people.” In this all-out war against civilization, Cho becomes less of savior and more of a martyr. After killing thirty-two people, Cho shot himself; he willed his own death, becoming the author of his own life. Cho envisions not only a world where his weak “children” are no longer victimized and “raped” but also, like Lord Byron, a world that is consumed with one thought, Death. Cho pollutes human civilization with not only death but also through narrative, both of himself and of a world he envisions.
The contemporary mass murderer is an alienated figure that is the author of his/her own death (Cho), is fragmented, parasitic, and authors of their own popular (media) representation (Klebod and Harris), and is entirely consumed in the Sublime experience of narrative (Holmes). It is clear that this figure is destructive to human civilization but news outlets, popular media, and online communities are fascinated with mass murderers. It is through these mediated means do they continue to exist. Similarly, Lord Byron, who was “mad, bad, and dangerous to know,” continues to live on as a meme in literature and popular culture to the point that he becomes more of a reference and less of a poet/revolutionary/person. The Byronic figure and mass murderers share more similarities beyond their posthumous memetic fame. They both experience and disrupt the Sublime (a term that will be later connected with post-human detachment), which causes them to separate push themselves from human civilization, and are authors of their own undoing. But unlike Lord Byron and his Romantic peers, the “natural” world, that has been in some way a primary source of the Sublime, is no longer accessible in the same way for the contemporary Anthropocene figure; the natural landscape looks more like The Bladerunner and Nick Land’s “Meltdown.” While Lord Byron is firmly rooted in the Romantic tradition, his darker-hued Romanticism, along with his various literary representations, provides readers an apocalyptic vision that anticipates the end of human existence and the simultaneous ecological and mass-murderous annihilation that will bring the end of history. With this nontraditional/dark/Anthropocene Sublime that the Byronic hero (Manfred, Victor Frankenstein and his creature, and mass murderers) experiences, the individual does not experience the outside world only to develop, transcendentalize, or refine their identity/self, but rather collapses the division between the human self and the world, illuminating an image of an interconnected and enmeshed network of objects. Thought/narrative and death become one entity.
There is No “Nature”
The world, natural or otherwise, is no longer the same one that the Romantics live and breathed. In 2000 Nobel-Prize-winning chemist Paul Crutzen and biologist Eugene Stoermer coined the term “Anthropocene,” a newly proposed epoch in Earth’s history that the International Anthropocene Working Group later concluded in 2015 began with the Trinity nuclear test on July 16, 1945. In this present epoch, “many geologically significant conditions and processes are profoundly altered by human activities” (Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy). Anthropogenic activities, like colonization, agriculture, globalization, and urbanization, have affected the Earth’s atmosphere, caused mass extinctions of plant and animals, and polluted the ocean. The gyre of marine debris in the North Pacific Ocean (the Great Pacific garbage patch) composed of plastics, chemical sludge, and other debris and global warming are lasting byproducts of human activities that has reshaped the Earth’s landscape and ‘health.’ In this current epoch, the void that separates human civilization and the natural sphere dissipates as human activities have affected the latter, a sphere that has once believed to be immutable, transcendent, and pure. The earth is no longer fecund, pure, and a separate space from human civilization.
The natural sphere that Romantic poets and philosophers engaged with appears to contemporary individuals differently, both aesthetically (e.g. ecological effects, industrialization, urbanization) and ethically, in the sense that the human and natural spheres are seen as interdependent and parasitic to each other. While individuals may experience the Sublime in ways that Percy Shelly describes it in “Mont Blanc,” “the everlasting universe of things / [that] flows from the mind” will be interpreted differently. The natural sphere is no longer a sphere that one isolates oneself in order to transform and experience the Sublime. The Sublime experience that one undergoes in the Anthropocene is one of limits, death, extinction, and the end of human civilization, like Byron’s “Darkness.” We can no longer romanticize the natural space (a space that is unspoiled by mankind/civilization) as one where the transcendent exists, nor can we say that we can “go out to nature” since it is no longer and has never been a separate space.
In the Anthropocene, the romantic figure is incapable of going out to nature and returning to human civilization. The two spheres are one and the same place. In The Natural Contract, Michel Serres opens up his reevaluation of the human/nonhuman relation by analyzing Francisco Goya’s Fight with Cudgels (figure 1) as a depiction of human centered dialectical history ignoring the marginalized and voiceless participant: the landscape. In the Anthropocene,
(Figure 1: Francisco Goya’s Fight with Cudgels)
humans forget “the world of things themselves, the sand, the water, the mud, the reed of the marsh” (Serres TNC 2). Our culture, our human centered culture, abhors the world. Under this traditional Hegelian master-slave dialectic, history occurs when two forces compete for power over the other. But as Goya illustrates, the duelists are not only fighting against each other but are also competing against the quicksand that is impeding their progress. The voiceless world is interrupting, “burst[ing] in on our culture, which had never formed anything but a local, vague, and cosmetic idea of them: nature” (3). This interruption not only reminds humans of the power and agency of the landscape but also dismantles the human/self and nonhuman/world relation. “A tremor of nothingness, living in a permanent earthquake” (124) literally destabilizes the relation, uniting the Earth with the individual “in a single aura.” Byron’s “Darkness illustrates the interconnectivity of human life and the health of the planet. “The world was a void, the populous and the powerful–was a lump.” When the planet’s waves die, so does man expire.
The destabilization of the human/earth and self/outside relationships functions in two ways: materially and immaterially. Michel Serres’ recently published Malfeasance continues his earlier work on this destabilization and a call to renegotiate human’s relationship with the “natural world,” expanding on the different methods that humans have affected or “polluted” the earth: hard pollution and soft pollution. Hard pollution is quantifiable. Oil consumption is inextricably linked with greenhouse gases, a quantifiable activity. Animal extinction, garbage, and deforestation can be categorized and monitored. These are “hard themselves, in the sense of aggressive or sometimes fatal” (Serres M: ATP 40). Soft pollution is a little tricky; it is pollution based on language and communication. They arrive as “tsunamis of writing, signs, images, and logos flooding rural, civic, public and natural spaces as well as landscapes with their advertising” (41). While hard pollution affects the planet more directly (i.e. physically and materially), both forms of pollution “emanates form our will to appropriate” the world (42). Soft pollution acts to “code” the world to fit the coder’s necessities and desires. This form of ecological advertisement comes in many forms: “a pissing and barking dog,” police sirens, birds singing in the morning, cries of unimaginable pain, and, most relevantly to the present research, poetry. The nature poetry of the Romantics, as it has been traditionally understood, does not look out to the world in order to establish a deeply interconnected mesh of being or to reevaluate existing human-centered definitions of the natural space, but rather uses the “outside” natural space to understand and broaden the viewer’s sense of self. They only go out to further go inward. While Shelly leaves the sublime natural experience open to interpretation (via question mark), the “silence and solitude” of the “earth, and stars, and sea” are possibly vacant and it is only in “the human mind’s imaginings” could they exist and have meaning. In the Anthropocene, where human life is interconnected with its landscape, the earth, mankind cannot ignore both hard and soft pollution and their relationship with each other.
While human civilization has polluted the earth in two ways (hard and soft) as a way to appropriate and fit all life and objects on the planet into the an anthropocentric world, the question of how humans interact and, particularly, view the natural world would be problematized once humans and the world are no longer separate and now viewed as interdependent, one and same, and a biological mesh (see Figure 2). Traditionally, nature is separate from human beings (e.g. green world and court world). Man goes to nature only to be changed by solving a personal existential drama and returns to civilization with a more nuanced understanding of self. In a similar fashion as Serres’ ecological works, Jedediah Purdy’s After Nature discusses how a new politics of the Anthropocene must make space for the nonhuman world in the entirely humanist project of democracy. Purdy discusses how the traditional relationship with nature that the Romantics exemplify, particularly Wordsworth, is impossible. “The nature that Wordsworth portrayed [is] harmonious,” as well as “the human mind that receives and answers it” (Purdy 15). In the Anthropocene, nature is anything but harmonious and entirely “natural.” The natural space that Wordsworth and the Romantics observe is no longer possible since “what things reveal today is that [nature] is neither natural nor unnatural. And neither are we.” In the same fashion that human life is now inextricably connected with the natural space, what has been codified as natural and artificial begins to dissipate and blur; the two have merged.
(Figure 2: In Anthropocene, nature [material] and mankind [immaterial] are inextricably connected)
The nature writing that typifies Romantic writing, or at least how it is traditionally read, could work against an ecological thought. By viewing and analyzing a space as if it exists “out there,” one sees the natural world as separate from the viewer, seeing an unspoiled landscape without human fingerprints; this writing is both counter-intuitive and antithetical for Anthropocene subjects and experiences. Romantic writing romanticizes both the human viewer and the nonhuman landscape, completely ignoring and bypassing the interdependent human/nonhuman mesh of being. The “beautiful [human] soul,” a Romantic invention, suffers existential dread while the outside, whether it is a natural landscape or nonhuman animals, remains “out there.” In this sense, the natural space is constructed as a separate sphere from the human viewer. The outside is mediated through the viewer, creating not an ecological lens but an egological one. The humanist ideal of nature is mediated through words, artifacts, television shows, literature, images, concepts, science, and other forms of “soft pollution.”
Nature is more of a concept/metaphor and less of a physical sphere that exists. In “Truth and Lies in an Extramoral Sense,” Friedrich Nietzsche defines “Truth,” and in turn language and concepts, as “a mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms,” a fictional concept that serves to ground and center the world around human needs and concerns (i.e. Anthropocentricism). The traditional conception of “nature” as a space “out there” away from human civilization is not possible in the Anthropocene; man and what was once understood as nature are one in the same. The lines are blurred. While with this conception of nature and man’s relationship with it devalues the romantic subject and the sublime experience that is typically coupled with him or her as an entirely anthropocentric phenomena, highlighting the fictive nature of “nature,” one could read the romantics against the anthropocentric project that is typically presented as Romanticism and highlight ways that their indebtedness in immersion in the outside/nature opens up a line of flight towards not only a different conception of nature and an entirely different Sublime experience that acts as the only way Anthropocene subjects can experience the Sublime.
The contemporary figure, like the mass murderer, does not see “nature.” Their nature is mediated (e.g. film, video games, parks, etc.) through an army of metaphors and significations. In this simulated relationship with nature, the (once) natural space is nothing more than anthropocentric concepts, like the way that arboretums have various signs that identify plants and trees and manipulated sections that divide by “region.” While the Anthropocene illustrates the ways in which mankind is immersed/imbedded in their surroundings, this experience also serves to alienate the contemporary figure. What was once called “nature” (as a space untouched by civilization, ‘green world’) is no longer accessible, but, as it will discussed later, the mass murder is a force that forces the populous out of this postmodern trap by way of murder/death. By way death, the mass murderer does not compel viewers to face death in order to be an existentially fulfilled human (i.e. Heideggerian Dasein), but show, like Byron’s “Darkness,” that mankind is one with the death of the planet. Instead of
Manfred and Dust
After experiencing a (traditional) sublime moment, “why are ye [‘mother earth’] beautiful?” (I.ii.9), Manfred is tossed into this rapturous state that compels him to see the world as anti-human. “Ye were not meant for me – Earth! Take these atoms!” (109). After the Chamois Hunter saves Manfred from jumping off the cliff, Manfred states, “I am most sick at heart – nay, grasp me not – / I am all feebleness – the mountains whirl / Spinning around me – I grow blind – What art thou?” (113-5). In this passage, nature is depicted as a space that exists independent of and against human existence. While it is destructive, it is also fecund and expansive, “ the ripe green valleys with destruction’s splinters” (95). Manfred’s sublime experience pushes the limits of his humanist belief. As “half dust, half diet[ies],” humans are “unfit” for both the human and the transcendent spheres. Facing the sublime makes one vulnerable (“feebleness”), decentering the human subject and problematizing anthropocentric concepts of a world-for-us.
With Manfred’s sublime experience, the poem’s general investigation of finitude and corporeality are deeply intertwined with the nonhuman spheres (“natural” and “transcendental”). The sublime experience of feeling miniscule and insignificant with the nonhuman world along with facing human/humanity’s finite nature with a seemingly indifferent, nonhuman world prefigures the contemporary philosophic trend of Speculative Realism, specifically the work of Eugene Thacker’s concepts of world-for-us, world-against-us, and world-without-us (Earth). The “world-for-us” is a world where objects in said world function for the earth’s benefit (i.e. an anthropocentric world view). This is problematized when the seven spirits fail to help Manfred. The “world-against-us” is a world where the world presents an environment that is hostile to human existence. In the above passage, Manfred is so overcome with anti-humanist emotions and thoughts that he is left vulnerable and decentered. The “mountains whirl” around him, causing Manfred to lose his sight. In this state of human decentering and vulnerability, he sees the human body as composed as merely “atoms” and without human and cultural significance beyond simple materiality. Thacker’s final term, “world-without-us,” deals with the planet Earth existing without human life. While this concept is purely speculative, since we are not capable of understanding what lies beyond human thought and existence (hence sub-lime, or below the limit), one can not ignore the fact that Earth without human life is a possibility, in a similar way that Manfred states, “ye [Earth] were not for me.”
While the concept of the “world-without-us” may seem contradictory to the Sublime Anthropocene experience of the human and non-human worlds intermixing, Thacker’s term is specifically subverting the human-centered world view, in other words dismantling “the great chain of being” that places human life superior to all life except the heavenly. To see human life, in Thacker’s words, as dust of this planet, places human life on the same plane as all material life. From the perspective of the universe (sub specie aeternitatis), all life is equal, but as Byron argues, only one thing exists: death. “Darkness had no need of aid from them [all of life] – She was the universe.” But in Manfred’s own terms, human life is not composed of one material or substance but rather “half dust” and “half diety.” If one views Manfred’s words as a thoroughly Aristotelian concept of human life, one returns to viewing the Byronic hero as a humanist and anthropocentric figure, a concept that, as previously discussed, is not possible in the Anthropocene. Instead, we must rethink how we read “dust” and, specifically, “diety.” For “dust,” Thacker’s use of “dust” (e.g. In The Dust of This Planet) to designate the brute materiality of all life will be used. All life, organic or inorganic, regardless of “consciousness” or “sentience,” is “dust.” For “diety,” the Oxford English Dictionary’s second definition will be used: “an object of worship; a thing or person deified.” In this sense, “deity” is a being composed of narratives and fiction; a being that is discussed and talked about. This mix of material and immaterial is at the heart of the Anthropocene existence/sublime and the Byronic figure, which is based on a material being (i.e. Lord Byron) and an immaterial one (i.e. the narrative, fiction, and concept of the actual person).
The Byronic figure of Manfred does not “celebrate the Romantic ‘egotistical sublime,’ embodied in the figure of a Wordsworth,” as Timothy Morton argues in “Byron’s Manfred and Ecocriticism,’ but “radically frames and undermines its protagonist with the theatrical environment” (Morton BMaE 156). Against the traditional Romantic and ecological discourse of experiencing transcendence by immersing oneself in the natural sphere, via the ‘church of ecology,’ Manfred’s sublime experience is one of isolation and excommunication. “With men, and with the thoughts of men, / I held but slight communion; but instead, / My joy was in the Wilderness” (II. Ii. 60-62). Using this Wordsworthian language, Byron illustrates how man’s immersion within nature serves to establish man’s transcendence over earthly things, the “wish to surround oneself with natural things, saying that it could represent a triumph of ego as much as of going out of oneself” (164). Contrasted with both Byron’s “Darkness” (apocalyptic visions) and Manfred’s (spirits and abysses) natural space as darkness, the Byronic figure sees the natural space as a void that remains unnamable and distant. Manfred stands in the precipice, literally, between the transcendent Romantic sublime that Wordsworth represents and the amoral and destructive Nietzschean play of forces. Being a liminal figure, Manfred stands between materiality and immateriality, between natural and unnatural, by committing “a monstrous, unspeakable crime (incest?) – the crime that is both against nature and supremely ‘natural’, that designates what human culture strives to transcend” (166). It is this very namelessness of both the natural space and Manfred’s crime that Morton argues is at the heart of Byron’s view of nature and human life. Morton states that the “we are within the realm of the symbolic rather than the real, of language rather than nature.”[1]
Byron’s use of irony in both Manfred and throughout his oeuvre would seem to work against ecological thought, which is typically characterized as a “discourse of evangelical rightness, justness, aptness, fitted to the world as Wordsworth says his poetics fits the world.” Along with moralizing ecological actions, Byron’s post-modern-esque irony that displaces the connection between the symbolic (immaterial, human) and reality (material, nonhuman, animal) appears to go against Romanticism’s “Beautiful Soul” that establishes a “one-to-one” connection with the natural sphere by way of the traditional Sublime. Ironically, it is the displaced ironic connection with the nonhuman (i.e. purely symbolic/immaterial) that actually enmeshes the human with the nonhuman outside and not the traditional Sublime that believes one could have an authentic connection with the transcendent “natural” space but in turn demarcates the human and nonhuman spheres.[2] Byron’s ironic concept of “nature” (i.e. more symbolic than real, neither human or animal/natural) is more fitting in the Anthropocene/Post-Romantic age “where irony is an escapable fact of the ideas we have and art forms we create.” We cannot return back to the idyllic green world of authenticity before language, industrialization, appropriation/pollution, globalization, and the spectral space of the Internet. It is possible that the Byronic figure and mass murderers, who are unnatural and who will their own death, are figures that could give us an understanding of humanity’s space in the Anthropocene, contextualizing human life as equal to all life and as a none-being in the void of the apocalypse.
Beyond “Mad, Bad, and Dangerous to Know”
The hybrid nature of Manfred and other Byronic heroes (the later discussed Frankenstein, Creature, and mass murderers) is at the heart of what J. Andrew Hubbell calls “Byron’s theory of cultural ecology,” which argues that Byron’s work “builds the foundation of a broader understanding of the co-evolutionary interdependence between the natural environment and human society” (Hubbell 6), a theory that is apposite in the Anthropocene. Human life is not simply “half dust, half diety,” but rather material/dust and immaterial/diety are “too finely mixed to be separable” (15). Manfred’s final words, “’tis not so difficult to die,” do not support a humanist and transcendent romantic will that elevates mankind beyond materiality and towards diety, but rather “the power of a person who has accepted his mortality” (18). Manfred releases his human all too human control, dissolving the ego. Hubbell argues it is Manfred’s acceptance of his mortality and his “mix’d essences” that affirms “his mind’s embededness in a passionate, bodily, earthian identity,” mixing material and immaterial.
The Byron hero is more than a figure that is “mad, bad, and dangerous to know.” The figure dismisses the Cartesian mind/body dualism and foreshadows Derridean differance, as Hubbell argues, as well as a figure that performs. The contextual personas that Lord Byron used in daily life, as Gabriele Poole argues in “The Byronic Hero, Theatricality and Leadership,” are used to “facilitate [their] unmasking by observers and obtain their sympathies” (7). Byron, along with the various representations and copies that followed, use identity (particularly one of melancholy and isolation) ironically. While Poole is particularly interested in how Byron used personas in a pseudo-Machiavellian sense that he “explored the theatricality of power and the power of theatricality” (17), but is the ‘public’ aspect of the Byronic hero, in terms of the dual necessity of hero’s need to perform and the public’s reception and attention. With this hyper-awareness of the performative aspect of identity, the Byronic hero plays and/or exploits the ways in which their material existence (their corporal materiality/body) could be shaped and manufactured by language (speech and writing) and other immaterial forces (see Figure 3). The Byronic figures’ use of narrative and language to manipulate their material existence illustrates a way out of the postmodern trap of “language as arbitrary.” As Timothy Morton argues in Dark Ecology, this postmodern “coordinates are terribly out of date” (9). In the Anthropocene,
(Figure 3)
materiality and immateriality are together. Man and what we have deemed nature are one in the same. “The postmodern meme,” which detaches materiality with immateriality, “was simply a late symptom of the modern myth of transcending one’s material conditions” (9-10)
Along with the liminal/hybrid and theatrical aspect that characterizes the Byronic hero, the figure embodies “Dark Romanticism,” a subgenre of Romanticism that anthropomorphizes evil through spirits, demons, and other creatures. While Byron’s Manfred clearly exemplifies Dark Romanticism with the use of spirits, Dark Romanticism extends beyond creatures embodying evil and sin. Michael Lowy argues in Morning Star how Dark Romanticism extends to Guy Debord’s Situationist brand of post-Marxism, where his critique of the “society of the spectacle” that seeks to “transform the individual into a passive spectator who watches the movement of objects for sale (commodities) and who views events in general” (Lowy 97), is connected to Romanticism’s “protest against society in the name of the values of the past” (100). Caught in the indeterminate space of bourgeois modernity between an idealized natural past and the uncertain future, the Byronic hero is torn.
The dissolution of human communities and ecosystems (“Darkness”) and question of human identity (Manfred and Frankenstein) places the Byronic hero and mass murderers in the precarious position that is entirely contemporary (Anthropocene). Lowy argues that Debord’s revolutionary anti-modernism as a Dark Romanticism, favoring dark imagery to one of enlightenment, where inhabitants of human civilization are divided into two groups and “one of them wants to see it dead” (104). The Byronic narrator of “Darkness” (“all earth was but one thought–and that was death”), Manfred (“tis not difficult to die”), Frankenstein and his creature (“I am solitary and detested,” “I am an unfortunate and deserted creature”), and Anders Behring Breivik’s conservative/racist mass murder that claimed 77 lives (“Not only will all my friends and family detest me and call me a monster; the united global multiculturalist media will have theirhands full figuring out multiple ways to character assassinate, vilify and demonize”) all view human civilization and the modern bourgeois world through a nihilistic lens, a lens that is appropriate, as well as very disconcerting, in the Anthropocene, who’s iteration of Dark Romanticism (similar, albeit more [obviously] virtual) will discussed later.
Organic/Dark Sublime
The Byronic Hero, as it will be used for the remainder of the essay, is the subject and object of the sublime, simultaneously cause and victim of an inexpressible event. This dissolution of inside and outside aligns with the ecological thought of the Anthropocene or Posthumanism. We can no longer separate the human and nonhuman, soft and hard pollution, immaterial and material, or narrative and death. The dual image of Victor Frankenstein and his Creature and the disruptive nature of the latter, problematizes the traditional, humanist, and anthropocentric sublime experience. While it is the Creature’s later iterations (e.g. cyberpunk, The Bladerunner) that more explicitly biologicizes, or naturalizes, technology, the Creature is neither purely mechanical nor human, neither animal nor human. “The dissecting room [human] and the slaughter-house [animal] furnished many of my materials” (Shelley 34). Mirroring both the Christian creation myth and the Promethean myth, the Creature extends what humans are. The human identity’s mechanization and materialization is illuminated in the face of the Creature. The Creature brings to light the hybridity of human identity, as well as the hybridity of all life (i.e. existence as mesh).
The face of the Creature, as well as any Byronic hero, embodies, what Paul Outka calls, the “organic sublime,” a sublime that is antagonistic to and is the ideological counterpoint to the traditional sublime, which is transcendent and creates a divide between man and nature, inside and outside (Outka 31). The creature constantly disrupts the Kantian sublime resolution where the human transcends the physical and the natural, the traditional sublime that we have been discussing. Outka argues that the creature’s appearance, “whether mushing on a dog sled, bounding up an alpine, or demanding a long conversation in a hut with his maker,” disrupts the “sublime formation of the human/natural binary” (36). When Victor viewed the ‘”tremendous and ever-moving glacier” that “filled [him] with sublime ecstacy that gave wings to the soul” (Shelley 66), he is experiencing the traditional sublime experience. Upon viewing Mont Blanc “in [its] awful majesty,” he exclaims in typical Romantic fashion, “Wandering spirits, if indeed ye wander, and do not rest in your narrow beds, allow me this faint happiness, or take me, as your companion, away from the joys of life” (67). He stands at the precipice, literally and figuratively, of the sublime, but at the very moment before the sublime’s conclusion towards transcendence, where the human spirit detaches itself from materiality, the creature appears, “advancing towards [Victor] with superhuman speed.” Unlike the “sublime ecstasy that gave wings to the soul,” Victor trembles with “rage and horror” as he faces “the wretch whom I had created.”
The organic/dark sublime that Victor experiences interrupts the traditional sublime forces him to see subjectivity and materiality fused, human and non-human as similar, and the division between inside and outside dismantled. Being “uncannily material”–he’s composed of human and animal body parts–and “uncannily immaterial”–he speaks, desires, feels, suffers, and thinks while being simply meat–the creature is “at once too natural and unnatural, both excessively organic, material, material, fleshy other” and artificial (38). Witnessing the “immaterial,” which encompasses everything human from language to consciousness (i.e. spirit, soul), melting into materiality, Victor experiences an entirely different sublime. Instead of separating human beings from nature, being witness to the nonhuman creature problematizes the material/immaterial binary. The human (immaterial) appears mechanic, fleshy, and monstrous, while the nonhuman (material) becomes more than flesh or material; the nonhuman could have culture[3], consciousness, and have “human subjectivity.” Victor and the creature are not only similar because of the creator/created relationship, but in the sense that human subjectivity is a “patchwork” of parts in a similar fashion as the creature’s identity (39). The creature, being “uncannily material” and “uncannily immaterial,” is an image of all life, human and nonhuman (see Figure 4). While Victor is most obviously defined as a Byronic hero, the creature, as a mirror figure of its creature, is one too. As one side of the same coin, both Victor and his creature embody the Byronic hero that is neither human nor nonhuman, neither immaterial nor immaterial. In the Anthropocene, where human life cannot be separated from the ecosystem it is embedded into, the Byronic hero is a victim to the sublime moment that questions human identity and the question of “nature,” as well as the cause of the sublime; Victor and his creature are both victim and cause. Victor is the victim since he witnesses his creation and he is the cause since he (obviously) brought the creation into existence, while the creature is the victim since it suffers an existence it never asked for and is othered due to its “patchwork” identity and its uncanny nature and it is the cause since it disrupts Victor’s traditional sublime experience. This different (organic) sublime complicates all divisions, all binaries.
(Figure 4)
This organic sublime illustrates that we have always, in fact, been posthuman, always been part of a postnatural world. What we have designated as “nature” has been separate form human life. Nature, as a space unspoiled by human civilization, has always been simulacrum, since we created a fictive concept of existence that separates the human being from its surroundings, as Outka, Serres, and Morton argued previously. The creature’s apocalyptic threats against humanity and the horror it elicits are cries from the outside (othered), calling attention to beings and issues that are ignored. This space of the outside is contemporarily characterized by “deep internet” culture (see “Betamale” discussed later) and the voices of ostracized beings, like mass murderers. The mass murderer’s mix of materiality (i.e. killing a significant number of people) and immateriality (e.g. manifestos, videos, and artifacts that act as an autobiography)
functions similarly to the organic/dark sublime, acting as a reminder that materiality and immateriality are one. They are both a material body but also an army of “soft pollution” and artifacts that they present to the world.
Civilization and its Sublime Discontents
In the Anthropocene, we are confronted with this organic sublime that shocks and wakes us up from the slumber of human hubris and anthropocentric thought. In this sense, human civilization is in crisis. But as Sigmund Freud argues in his later sociological text Civilization and Its Discontents, the very foundation of civilization is one of crisis and violence. It is the organic sublime that the Byronic hero simultaneously suffers and enacts on the world that pierces the veritable “veil of maya” of human civilization. We see a world where suffering is constant and humans create fictions in order to placate their anxiety. “The populous and the powerful,” as Lord Byron envisions in “Darkness,” “was a lump / Seasonless, herbless, treeless, manless, lifeless / A lump of death, a chaos of hard clay.” All life, both the “populous and the powerful” are vulnerable to death decay. Everything, human and nonhuman, is categorized as “a lump.” Collapsing the inside and outside, the human and nonhuman, leaves everything coded as human/immaterial in a vulnerable state. Humanity is “threatened with suffering form three directions: from our own body, […] from the external world, […] and finally from our relations to other men” (Freud 26). Aligned with Freudian Pleasure Principle, humans turn away from the “dreaded external world” by “turning away from it” (27). We fear the monstrous, the patchwork creatures like Frankenstein’s creature, since they show us the non-binary nature of existence. Humans dread the external world, preferring the immaterial and transcendent human sphere, ignoring materiality and death.
In order to ignore the “dreaded external world,” humans satiate themselves with beauty, or the traditional sublime that separates man from the outside. “Happiness in life is predominantly sought in the enjoyment of beauty, wherever beauty presents itself to our senses and our judgment” (Freud 33). Beauty appears in a myriad of forms, from “human forms and gesture” to “natural objects and landscapes.” In a similar fashion as traditional theorists on the sublime (e.g. Burke, Kant), Freud sees that “beauty has a peculiar, mildly intoxicating feeling” and serve little pragmatic use, “yet civilization could not do without it.” These moments of beauty serve to alleviate suffering and create community and civilization since it is these moments that separate man from nonhuman life. But it is not these moments of sublime beauty that could, for a lack of a better term, save humanity, rather it is the very cause of human suffering. Freud argues, “what we call our civilization is largely responsible for our misery” (38). Suffering is the foundation and life force of civilization and in order to placate the suffering, civilization imposes norms over individuals à la the function of the Superego. In this state of perpetual suffering a person, or Byronic hero, “becomes neurotic because he cannot tolerate the amount of frustration which society imposes on him in the service of its cultural ideals” (39). It is civilization and this normalizing function that fosters the individual’s personal unrest. The Byronic hero, who becomes aware of this destructive nature of human civilization and the decay of existence (e.g. “Darkness,” Manfred, Frankenstein), disrupts and resists the normalizing function of civilization, creating lines of flight out of civilization, whether it is conscious or unconscious.
Within this sociological framework, language is immaterial/cultural. In a similar fashion of Serres’ concept of hard/soft pollution and appropriation, Freud recognizes culture/immaterial (i.e. soft pollution) as “activities and resources which are useful to men for making the earth serviceable to them, for protecting them against the violence of the forces of nature” (42). By appropriating the world, man becomes, what Freud calls, a “prosthetic God” (44). Through language, humanity creates narratives, in other words they create their own destiny. Within a Posthuman framework, one cannot isolate the immaterial aspects of existence (e.g. language) away from the materiality of life. Creating narratives of humanist transcendence are no longer possible in the Anthropocene. The Byronic hero’s proclivity to write their own death, à la Manfred and the later discussed mass murderers, combines materiality with immateriality by uniting using language to appropriate death and material existence into one event/being.
The neurotic figure, which will be equated to the Byronic due to their simultaneous subjugation and resistance to civilization and the traditional sublime, “creates substitutive satisfactions for himself in his symptoms, and these either cause him suffering in themselves or become source of suffering for him by raising difficulties in his relations with his environment and the society he belongs to” (64). Being a victim and desirer of modernity/civilization, this figure is a paradox, problematizing the inside/outside binary. While it is simple to disregard the neurotic/Byronic figure as weak and overwrought with personal/existential drama, Freud acknowledges “the element of truth behind all this” (68). “Men are not gentle creatures who want to be loved, and who at the most can defend themselves if they are attacked,” instead they are “creatures among whose instinctual endowments is to be reckoned a powerful share of aggressiveness.” While civilization imposes particular humanist fictions on the populous, the root of humanity is rife with violence and aggression. Even with the aggressive nature of humanity, civilized society is constantly in a precarious state (i.e. threatened with disintegration).
With this aggression and destruction of humanity comes a “narcissistic enjoyment” (81). The Byronic figure acknowledges the brutish/animalistic nature of man, dismissing social mores and humanist fictions, but also attempts to use narrative and language to control one’s material nature (e.g. death, sexuality). Manfred’s parodic Wordsworthian sublime experience atop the cliff, his self-willed death, and his final words (’tis not so difficult to die”) highlight the importance of narrative for the Byronic hero and the ways in which that immateriality (e.g. narrative, fiction) and materiality (e.g. death, decay) are interconnected and do not lead to transcendence and only acknowledgement of an ethics of immanence, which establishes a non-hierarchical relational structure that destabilizes dialectical thought. The Byronic hero and mass murderers, as defined above, disrupt humanity’s attempt to master “the disturbance of [their] communal life by the human instinct of aggression and self-destruction” (111), through their disavowal and awareness of the conflation of materiality and immateriality by way of the organic/dark sublime. The latter (literally) disrupts civilization, acting as a force that, in Freud’s analysis of civilization, illuminates and highlights mankind’s violent nature, emphasizing the civilization’s id and death drive towards its dissolution.
The Death of Cruel Optimism
Freud’s analysis of human civilization and of those who are subject to its strictures and control is still relevant in the current Anthropocene/Post-Internet/Posthuman age, what Freud lacks is a specific formulation that symptomizes humans’ desire for teleological progression (i.e. optimism) and their own self-destruction, or stunted growth. Lauren Berlant’s concept “cruel optimism” not only connects the desire for community and transcendence with aggression and decay but argues that the various affective connections that one desires is in itself the source of one’s dissolution and destruction. In other words, “cruel optimism is the condition of maintaining an attachment to a significantly problematic object” (Berlant 24). Berlant points to neoliberal economics of upward mobility and the compulsory act of “work” as symptomatic of western civilization’s cruel optimism. With neoliberal ideology, subjects’ desire for the “good life” of unfettered capitalist economic growth is never fulfilled since it is not possible for the majority of the population to achieve it. In a sense, the “good life” is a fiction; in a similar fashion that Freud conceptualizes “happiness” as impossible. Freud argues, “Man thinks himself happy merely to have escaped unhappiness or to have survived his suffering” (Freud 26). Happiness is merely placation and contentedness. The Hegelian historical dialectic that has been the foundation of western conceptions of time, along with the already discussed fictions of nature and transcendent humanity, is no longer possible; instead civilization is in a standstill. Berlant argues that contemporary life is one characterized with “self-interruption, self-suspension, and self-abeyance” (Berlant 27). We desire the good life, the American dream, even though signs show that not only is it impossible, the very belief of this concept is the source of the possibility of that life. Optimism is the heart of our own destruction.
With Berlant’s concept of cruel optimism she paints a contemporary landscape that is uncanny, familiar yet not. An office worker wakes up early in the morning, eats breakfast with their family, and sits in morning traffic for hours. The only difference is that this office worker has been laid off for a couple months. Instead of sitting in a cubicle, watching a clock’s second hand tick interminably, the “worker” sits in his car parked in an empty parking lot of a recently demolished shopping center. The worker will maintain the façade of the “good life” even though it is impossible and the continued façade prevents them from attaining the “good life.” Berlant calls this way of living a “slow death,” which includes the compulsory act of working and perpetual dieting.
While Berlant does not see a way outside the trap of cruel optimism, since she argues that “all attachments are optimistic” (23), the Byronic figure could provide a way outside this trap. As stated above, the Byronic hero is a disruptive figure that collapses bifurcating ideologies (i.e. binaries, dialectics). The Byronic hero is not afraid to die, like Manfred, and disrupts traditional sublime narratives that separate inside/outside spaces, like Frankenstein and his creature. The Byronic hero is a figure that could possibly disengage the populous from not only the postmodern irony of cruel optimism but also civilization and its discontents. The figure of the mass murderer haunts popular American culture. They disrupt moments of cultural contentedness, unveiling a darker side of not only American culture but also civilization and humanity as a whole. The mass murderer, like the Byronic hero, is simultaneously a victim (of contemporary culture/civilization) and the criminal, the bringer of suffering and the sufferer. While it may seem counterintuitive to in any way call mass murderers as Byronic heroes, in the sense it is silly to equate mass murderers to a well-loved romantic poet and literary/cultural trope/meme let alone call them “heroes,” the two figures are more akin to each other than one expects. In a similar fashion that Manfred engages in taboo acts (incest?) and wills his own death, the mass murderer’s acts of violence on both others and themselves (i.e. suicide) are both material and immaterial. Death and murder are not simply material with the Byronic figure. Instead narrative, an immaterial object, is needed. Manfred/Lord Byron uses language/poetry to engage with death. Manfred does not die by the hands of others; he dies at the hands of his words, “tis not so difficult to die.”
In the Anthropocene, inside/human and outside/nonhuman are one in the same. The violent acts of mass murderers use narrative tools (e.g. journals, manifestos, proposed films, video clips/YouTube videos, audio recordings, etc.) that discuss death and the dissolution of civilization. These narrative tools, like Byron’s poetry and words, are immaterial. The Byronic hero is a figure fit for the Anthropocene, since the immaterial aspects of the figure (narrative) are inextricably connected with the materiality of the being. Byron’s writings and the representations of Byron through the Byronic hero/meme (Frankenstein and his creature) are made more material and tangible than Byron as an actual material being. Byron and his contextual personas that Gabriel Poole discussed illustrate the immateriality or deterred identification of the actual being (i.e. Byron himself). The mass murderer, like Frankenstein/Creature, engages the populous with the organic/dark sublime, which is at the heart of the public’s fascination with them and the Byronic hero in general. They not only call attention to the impossibility of the “good life” and neoliberal contentedness through their violent acts, but also the organic/dark sublime of mass murders attracts the populous’ death drive, or their own Manfred-esque desire to die.
Connect the Pieces
What does this all mean? With so many moving parts being presented, once can easily
get the various concepts and terms mixed up. The chart above (figure 5) illustrates the relationships between the various terms and figures/characters. Everything on the right side embodies “human” characteristics and affects (immaterial, narrative/language, and soft pollution) and the left side embodies what typically characterizes “nature” (material, death, and hard pollution). Each aspect has a correlation with another aspect on the other side (e.g. material and immaterial connected by the liminal space that Frankenstein and his creature exists in). All of these couplets work together. The Anthropocene ideas that connect man and nature are connected with fusing nonhuman materiality and human immateriality. The way in which material death and the writing of it (narrative) are interconnected in the Byronic heroes provides one with a way to understand the Anthropocene experience. Understanding the ways that the Byronic hero fuses materiality (death and hard pollution) and immateriality (narrative/language and soft pollution) together reshapes or reformulates not only the Byronic hero as an
(Figure 5)
Anthropocene and ecological figure but also as an alienated contemporary figure (e.g. the mass murderer).
Mass Murderers as “Heroes”
We have discussed the Anthropocene, Byronic heroes, a different kind of sublime, neoliberal ideology, narrative, materiality/immateriality and how all of these connect, but we have barely touched upon the figure that has been haunting both this paper and contemporary culture: the mass murderer. The mass murderers are (literally) in the margins. As briefly discussed before, the mass murderer is a Byronic hero. Both figures are detached from human civilization because they have “seen something” others have not (i.e. sublime), will their own death, are infamous, and “exist” primarily through cultural representation. They both bridge the gap between materiality and immateriality through their use of narrative, text, and representations as a means to affect their finitude, or death.
In Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi’s Heroes: Mass Murder and Suicide, he identifies and maps out the characteristics and the relationships of the mass murderer with contemporary capitalism, which is increasingly more technological and semiotic, specifically with regards to the ways that semiocapitalism “occupies the sphere of randomness and value,” as well as laws and morals (Berardi 76). In his analysis of mass murderers, Bifo argues that mass murder and suicide, both aspects of the Byronic hero, as logical conclusions and byproducts of contemporary neoliberal/capitalist civilization, in a similar way that Freud argues that civilization as inherently violent and self-destructive and Byron’s “Darkness” presents a world whose one thought was ‘death.’ The precarious life of neoliberal economics that both Berlant and Bifo discuss has “deterritorialized production and randomized the very source of power, the shared conditions of ethical behavior has vanished” (201). In this precarious state, “the entropic law of dispersion, loss, malady and death” (202) cannot be ignored, and it is the Byronic hero, or mass murderer to be exact, that forces this dark/organic sublime to the populous, from the victims and their friends/families and to the general public who experience the mass murder spectacle via media outlets. While I am not in any way condoning the violent acts of mass murderers, or glorifying the Byronic hero (whose ‘hero’ status is debatable), it is important to note the destabilizing act that mass murder has on the population. The populous begin to vilify, categorize, analyze, and understand the mass murder, in a similar fashion that Lord Byron, let alone all literary figures, exists in the purely symbolic/immaterial realm.
From Seung-Hui Cho’s “army of metaphors,” as Nietzsche would describe it, (video recordings, journals, photos, etc.) to James Holmes hyperreal Batman theater production/spectacle, mass murders, like Manfred and other Byronic heroes, mix narrative and immaterial forces with actual material tools and experiences, like bullets, smoke grenades, and death. As Bifo argues, mass murderers are not only the cause of mass murders but are also victims of the precarious nature of neoliberal civilization, in a similar style that Frankenstein and his creature are both victims and causes of violence. Prior to the ecological thought[4] that the Anthropocene gives us, anthropocentricism and humanism seemed like a rational mode of thinking. Humans are “half dust” and “half diety” according to Manfred, aligning this thought with Aristotelian categorization of life and man as a “political animal.” In the dark/organic sublime that the creature’s continual disruption of Frankenstein’s traditional sublime experience, the alternative sublime shocks the one experiencing sublime with the knowledge that mankind is not only immaterial (e.g. knowledge, transcendent, cultural, civil, etc.) but also material (animal, dead, vulnerable, etc.). The mass murder disrupts the traditional sublime (e.g. superhero films) and reminds humanity of their vulnerable animal state, reminding them of their own precarious state.
What the mass murderer represents is an extension of the Byronic hero, acting as an Anthropocene/Posthuman Byronic hero, since it destabilizes the inside/outside binary. The violence that is usually cast aside the animal wilderness of nonhuman spaces and war zones is brought into spaces of safety, immateriality, and human cleanliness and transcendence: high schools (Klebold & Harris in Columbine), universities (Cho in Virginia Tech), and movie theaters (Holmes in an Aurora). Mankind is not separate from their animal state (vulnerable, finite). The humanist fiction of transcendence is impossible in the Anthropocene. We are bound to our earthly existence and the Byronic hero (mass murderers) not only remind us of this fact but do so with the use of immaterial tools (i.e. narrative devices, artifacts) to demonstrate the inseparability to materiality and immateriality (i.e. the dark/organic sublime).
Lone Wolf: Cho
Virginia Tech University. April 16th 2007. Thirty-three people are dead, including the shooter Seung-Hui Cho. This event became the deadliest lone gunman shooting in US history at the moment. While it is the reactionary position to demonize Cho or individuals like him (i.e. xenophobia), these figures are both victim and criminal. In the contemporary landscape, everyone is complicit to the existing social structures even though they actively work against it and the Byronic hero embodies this fact.[5] In a Freudian sense, the Byronic hero is a victim of modernity and alienated from their milieu and in contemporary culture the most alienated figure is the mass murderer, psychologically, socially, and ideologically.
Unlike the stereotypical mass murderer in America (i.e. white, male), Cho was a Korean immigrant who struggled to assimilate to not only American society but to socializing in general. When Cho and his family moved to America,
None of the family spoke English. Both children felt isolated. The parents began a long period of hard labor and extended work hours at dry cleaning businesses. English was not required to do their work, so both there and at home they spoke Korean (Virginia Tech Review Panel).
Cho and his siblings were “made fun of” due to their ethnic and linguistic difference. Specifically, Cho became more withdrawn and isolated after their immigration. This sense of “displacement, cultural and linguistic disorientation, loneliness and a sense of inadequacy in a new cultural landscape” others the individual (Berardi 62). This is not a particular and subjective experience, rather it, as Bifo states, is “the story of millions of migrants all around the world.”
Within the discourse that surrounds Cho and the events of Virginia Teach, the subject of his selective muteness is a constant. The linguistic shift that occurred due to his immigration to America is typically seen as one of, or possibly the reason why Cho experienced social isolation and anxiety. The linguistic dissociation he experienced “might have,” as Bifo argues, “played a significant role in the development of Cho’s mental distress” (66). This distress led to being diagnosed with selective mutism and finally major depressive disorder. This linguistic dissociation is coupled with the cultural dissociation that arose due to the shift in his environment, from Korea to America. Two plays he wrote for class, Richard McBeef and Mr. Brownstone, discuss themes of anger and mistreatment, with the former making direct references to being a stranger in an unknown land. This sense of isolation is characteristic of Byronic hero, whether it is Manfred’s solitary cliff-musings or Victor Frankenstein’s journey across Europe.
While Cho is a selective mute, it is important to note how his literary/artistic output acted on an existential level, from plays he wrote for class to his manifesto and, ultimately, his death. As discussed with Byron’s Manfred, the act of suicide (i.e. self willed death) is a way of owning one’s life and narrative. The act of writing and narrative construction provided Cho with a voice, one that pushes back after years of silence and isolation. He wrote of “the happiness I could have had mingling among you hedonists, being counted as one of you, only if you didn’t fuck the living shit out of me” (Cho). Living his life in a state of an other, Cho’s linguistic and cultural dissociation explodes into a tirade against American society, the “Descendants of Satan Disguised as Devout Christians.” In this existential narrative that he crafted for himself, he ordains himself as a savior. “I am Ax Ishmael. I am the Anti-Terrorist of America.” Cho and other mass murderers craft narratives (immaterial) along with their violent acts (material) towards the general populace in order to take claim of their own subjectivity. When Manfred resists death by other only to will his own dissolution when he states, “tis not so difficult to die,” he takes ownership of his own death. While Cho’s suicide was brought upon by social influences and affects, his death was, as some existentialist have argued, the most authentic act of freewill an individual can perform. His mix of material (murder) and immaterial (narrative) affect is paradigmatic of the Byronic hero’s embodiment of the organic sublime that materializes the immaterial and immaterializes the material. The mass murderer forces the populace (via dark/organic sublime) to understand how murder creates narratives and how narratives (via Nietzsche’s analysis of language and significations) act to placate the violence of human civilization.
In his all-out war against humanity (“when you’re raped of everything, you got nothing to lose”) in the fashion in Byron’s “Darkness,” Cho radicalizes his isolated position by being a victim and actor of violence. In Nick Land’s analysis of Derrida’s Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question, particularly his prioritization of “spirit”[6], he argues, “these are the words of a man who is confident he will survive for some considerable time” (Land 179). This prioritization of immateriality (language, spirit, and transcendentalism) is ill fit for moments of crisis, whether it is the Anthropocene or the social and psychological trap mass murderers feel and cause to others. This “spirit/immateriality/human” focused ideology lacks urgency or haste. In a Landian sense, the actions of mass murderers, exemplify his “wolf” figure, and with Cho, he is a lone wolf. This figure, like Byronic heroes, distances themself from “all concern for decency” and “ethical earnestness.”
Instead they are propelled by extremities of libidinal tension, which fragment their movements, break up their tracks with jagged discontinuities, and infest their nerves with a burning malaise, so that each gesture is backed in a kiln of ferocity. (180)
The mass murderer and Byronic hero act with pure libidinal violence, resisting against their milieu of restrictions and limits.
Apocalyptic Fantasy: Klebold & Harris
With regards to school shootings and mass shootings in general, we could say that there is a “pre” and “post” Columbine society. How American society deals with gun safety, psychology, media consumption, censorship, public safety, and many other aspects of social life have been shaped and reshaped after Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, both senior students of Columbine High School, killed a teacher, twelve of their peers, injured twenty-seven others, and ultimately committed suicide in 1999, signaling the end of the twentieth century and start of the new millennium that would be marked with uncertainty, global distress, a precarious economy, and shifts in political, ethical, social ideologies.
Typically seen as a copycat film of Oliver Stone’s 1994 film Natural Born Killers, the Columbine massacre is deeply imbedded in the media saturated wasteland of technocapitalism. Discussing their planned events, Klebold stated, “Directors will be fighting over this story” (Time). The two desired to be canonized as film icons. Like Byron and his use of personas, Klebold and Harris are more concerned with their cultural representation and how the said representations could be used culturally and less as a singular act of violence. They desire to combine narrative violence with material violence and this combination is based on cultural references, like Stone’s film, video games like Doom, and music. With regards to this mediated social and psychological existence, Bifo discusses how “human beings learn more vocabulary from a machine than from their mothers […] leading to a new kind of sensibility” (Berardi 48). As the organic sublime that Frankenstein’s creature represents the mixture of nonhuman components (e.g. animals and technology), Klebold and Harris are a new kind of human, one that is not entirely natural yet not entirely unnatural. They exist more in a virtual space; they write, create levels in Doom, record videos of themselves, create narratives, and hope their lives are adapted into film. This multilayered network of references[7] is paradigmatic of millennial existence, prefiguring the plurality of constructed identities that constantly overflow social media sites[8]. Klebold and Harris referenced a film, desired to be referenced as film-beings, and will forever be referenced for the fragmentation of American culture. They are “children [who] are increasingly removed from the bodily presence of other children and subjected to a virtual form of communication with distant entities whose body does not belong to a sensitive and sensible space” (49). This millennial existence is marked by virtuality; the natural space is no longer marked be trees and mountains, but rather polygons and lines of code.
Like Lord Byron himself, who was hyper aware of “identity” and the how it could be used to craft narrative, Klebold and Harris use this manufactured identity to simultaneously embody (as paradigmatic victims) and resist against neoliberal ideology. On the day of the shooting, Harris wore a shirt with the words “Natural Selection” printed in black on it. The pair’s psychology “could be synthetically described as a suicidal form of the Neoliberal will to win” (51). As previously discussed, this neoliberal ideology of upward mobility and competition is a trap and is a form of “cruel optimism.” Klebold and Harris, like Cho, desire to be atop of the proverbial food chain and die as winners (via suicide). This contemporary Byronic hero, in the vein of the romantic/revolutionary spirit, brings to light the flaws of contemporary life while also exemplifying said flaws. “The mass murderer is someone who believes in the right of the fittest and the strongest to win in the social game, but he also knows or senses that he is not the fittest nor the strongest” (52). The only authentic way to exist in this contemporary/precarious life of the Anthropocene is to kill or be killed. Human life is frail and narratives to mask this fact are ineffectual; human civilization, as Freud argued, is violent and self-destructive.
As opposed to Cho, who is a lone wolf (i.e. a singular being), Klebold and Harris are fragmented beings that function symbiotically, à la Aristophanes. While Lord Byron, as a Byronic hero, uses multiple identities/personas, illustrating the plurality of a singular human being, the Klebold-Harris assemblage demonstrates the symbiotic nature of beings, which becomes a “posthuman” concept once it is attributed to human beings and not only to nonhuman beings. In Why Kids Kill, Peter Langman discusses the tradition typology of the mass murderer, which notes whether or not they have a form of “trauma,” if they could be categorized under the schizophrenia spectrum, and whether they are “psychopathic,” “psychotic,” or “traumatized.” While Harris has no trauma, does not fall into the schizophrenia spectrum, and is categorized as psychopathic, Klebold has no trauma, does fall into the schizophrenia spectrum, and is categorized as psychotic[9]. The two’s characteristics serve to function as a whole being that characterizes a whole Byronic hero. Harris’ violent social behavior compliments Klebold’s detachment from reality, which is not unlike the Byronic hero’s brash and rebellious acts against social limits and their detachment from reality (i.e. existing more in immaterial narrative than material existence).
On the seventeenth anniversary of the Columbine shooting, Michel S. Rosenwald argued Harris is a victim of “damaged masculinity,” where he uses violent act as a form of gaining power that has been lost. Harris had a defected leg and a sunken chest and “guns, he reasoned, could give him power and control” (Rosenwald). While this analysis, as well as Langman’s, could be contested, it is worth noting that after seventeen years media outlets still discuss the Columbine shooting; the mass murderer demands analysis. This posthumous existence is one essential aspect of the Byronic hero. Along with shared the sense of isolation, narrative creation, and the acceptance of death found in the mass murderer and the Byronic hero, they both share a popular attraction that is based on a negative affect. The Byronic hero’s attraction is based on distance. The (traditional) Byronic hero is distant because they willingly distance themselves emotionally and physically; they are, in a sense, impossible beings. Rachel Monroe’s article “The Killer Crush: The Horror Of Teen Girls, From Columbiners To Beliebers” bridges the gap between mass murderers and teen idols, noting the attraction based on distance. She notes how “the Columbiners,” or fans of Klebold and Harris “are not so different from the Beliebers” (Monroe). While “Justin Bieber is unattainable because he’s a famous pop musician […] Harris and Klebold are famous because they are murderers, and unattainable because they are dead.” The Byronic hero is distant in the same way as pop stars and mass murderers. They are all isolated; but unlike pop stars, the others are subject to and will their own isolation. The lives of Klebold and Harris continue to exist, like Lord Byron’s, through mediated immaterial forms (i.e. virtual and linguistic spaces). Online spaces offer a space to showcase the admiration of Byronic heroes; those who are “mad, bad, and dangerous to know.” Tumblr, specifically, is
the perfect medium for a crush shrine, one that’s far more dynamic and interactive than a scrapbook or a bedroom wall. It allows posts and re-posts of pictures, quotes, gifs, and video clips while discouraging wider analysis or any sort of logical connection between content. Instead, the obsession acts as its own context. Every internet trinket relating to the crush object—a photograph of his parents’ house, a doodle in the margin of his math homework, a yearbook photo, a stock photo of the gun he preferred, his autopsy report—is relevant, because a girl with a crush is omnivorous, and very, very hungry (Monroe).
The Byronic hero, based on their posthumous immaterial existence, exists indefinitely through a virtualized, symbolic, and memetic space, a space that Byronic heroes plays with and, ultimately, carries this immaterial space with the material sphere.
Theater of Cruelty: Holmes
It is July 20th, 2012 and people flock into an Aurora, Colorado theater to see the new Batman film, The Dark Knight. A half hour into the midnight screening of the movie, a man enters the theater in full combat gear: gas mask, ballistic helmet, bullet-resistant leggings, a throat protector, and tactical gloves. This outfit is not uncommon in midnight showings of films with a large following (i.e. fandom), so this man does not stand out in the theater; he is could be an ordinary audience member. His appearance appeared, based on accounts from audience members, to be a publicity stunt, where promoters have some actors dress up and act as characters from the film, but this man had no connection to the theater, DC comics, or any corporate entity, other than he was a fan of the previous Batman movies and paid for a midnight theater ticket. Instead of a silly publicity stunt, the unreal fiction of the superhero/action spectacle became a reality. The masked man threw a smoke grenade with some people thinking it was fireworks. He then proceeded to fire a shotgun towards the ceiling and then the audience. People panicked, jumping out their seats and running towards the exits. Along with a shotgun, he used a Smith & Wesson M&P15 semi-automatic rifle and a Glock 22 handgun. Twelve people died with seventy injured. The shooter, who had reddish-orange hair and “seem[ed] dazed and scarcely aware of his surroundings” (Berardi 11), was arrested, offering no resistance. The shooter name was James Holmes.
In this instant, the violence of the movie bled into the reality, producing a sublime spectacle where the safe inside space of the theater/audience is mixed with the danger outside of the film, the contemporary natural space. The contemporary natural space is mediated through film, videos games, music, etc. We, as Edmund Burke stated years before the advent of moving images, experience the sublime better through representations of the natural space. The sublime is not experienced in the method of Manfred and Shelly and Mont Blanc, rather through the poetic representations of those moments. This mediated and replicated form of the sublime is the method humans experience the world. Yes, one could view a sunset and experience a moment of complete emotion and psychological unrest, but this is already mediated, since this experience serves to heighten both humanist concepts of subjectivity and an anthropocentric worldview (i.e. the world functions for me and must provide me with sublime experiences). Like Outka’s concept of the organic sublime and Frankenstein’s creature, Holmes and the Aurora shooting function as an epistemological break that separates the media spectacle with human life. As media saturated as contemporary human life is, the distinction between fiction (immaterial) and reality (material) is still heavily demarcated. Holmes, or rather Holmes as a cultural concept/figure, disrupts the traditional sublime narrative that separates the human subject from the outside world (spectacle).
With the mass murder, and more literally with the Aurora shooting, the public enters into a “Theater of Cruelty.” Antonin Artaud argued against “detached art” that acts as a simple distraction, a “symptom of our power to castrate” (Artaud 77). With his concept of the Theater of Cruelty, he proposed a theater that brings danger in the artistic space, where the audience becomes one with the violent emotions and stimuli of the theater production. In a way that the Byronic hero shows the materiality of language and narrative, Artaud argued for theater to be aware of the materiality of language, proposing to use language as a violent act against the audience (e.g. screams, imperceptible speech, etc.). This new speech “extends the voice. It utilizes the vibrations and qualities of the voice. It wildly tramples rhythms underfoot. It piles-sounds. It seeks to exalt, to benumb, to charm, to arrest the sensibility” (91). This speech is material. Artaud called for the dismantling of the stage, presenting a production that has no inside or outside. “A direct communication will be re-established between the spectator and the spectacle, between the actor and the spectator, from the fact that the spectator, placed in the middle of the action, is engulfed and physically affected by it” (96). While Holmes might unaware of Artaud’s concept, he turned the midnight showing of The Dark Knight into a Theater of Cruelty.
Unlike Manfred, Byron, Cho, Klebold, and Harris, Holmes is still alive. As stated previously, the Byronic figure is unafraid to die, willingly walking towards death’s embrace. He is still alive, but in many ways he is already dead. He has claimed amnesia, which many contest, stating that he does not know why he is imprisoned. He sees himself as the Joker. He is imprisoned, ostracized from the populace. While the Byronic hero is typically analyzed posthumously, Holmes is still available for face-to-face analysis. He is dead because he is lost in the sublime, crossing over into the void where the self is obliterated. He went too far into the sublime. He conflated the immaterial spectacle with materiality of death and real life.
One key component of the Byronic hero is their popularity, specifically how they continue to exist past their material existence. While Holmes is still alive, he has been commodified and analyzed in a similar way that the Byron continues to exist past his death through literary and cultural representations. Shortly after the Aurora shooting, a rubber mask of Holmes went on sale on eBay for $500. It captured his dead, emotionless face and his orange hair. This commodification and imitation is emblematic of the Byronic hero and the Byronic/Frankenstein meme. Others desire to imitate this figure, whether it is for Halloween, as it was the case for the Holmes mask or through imitation shootings.
The World is Death
In this Anthropocene/posthuman existence, “death” becomes the central focus. Civil humans are incapable of ignoring the ultimate danger of death. While philosophers, and at its most extreme form found in Schopenhauer, E.M. Ciorin, and Eugene Thacker, have focused on the centrality of death in existence, the way that Anthropocene and Lord Byron illustrate the unavoidability of death provides one with a methodology that provides a nuanced understanding of the tension that underlines the material/immaterial binary. In the ways that the Byronic hero and the organic sublime uncover the unknown, or at the very least aspects of humanity and civilization human thought (un)consciously ignores. As Jerome Christensen states, “dark romanticism is the name for a design unseen – unseen because closeted, conspirational, eclipsed” (Chrisetnsen 107). The dark/organic sublime that we have been discussing embodies this definition of dark romanticism. It is not necessarily about literal monsters, ghosts, or demons, but, rather, the monstrous of humanity, the non-humanity of humanity, the nonhuman materiality of human immateriality and culture.
In this dark romanticism, violence and death, as the mass murderer embodies, becomes a religious experience. Georges Bataille, whose anthropological and philosophical works focused on the tension between spirituality and death, argued in Death and Sensuality: A Study of Eroticism and the Taboo that “violence in these conditions is no longer a purely natural animal affair,” instead it takes on a “divine significance transcending immediate satisfaction” and becomes “a religious matter” (Bataille 116). While it may be incorrect and ethically problematic to analogize mass shootings as a religious experience, the communal aspect of the shooting and the sensation of death, which some definitions of the sublime take into considerations, are both transcendental characteristics that they both share. In Nick Land’s analysis (or subversion) of Kant’s definition of the sublime, he reshapes Kant as a Bataillian. “Sublime pleasure is an experience of the impossibility of experience, an intuition of that part of the self that exceeds intuition by means of an immolating failure of intuition” (Land 135). The sublime is self-destruction. If Freud is correct and civilization is always face-to-face with self-destruction, this dark sublime is the most organic/natural (if there is such a thing) act humanity could experience, uncovering the deathly nature of not only humanity but also existence itself. As Byron’s “Darkness” states, Death and “Darkness had no need of aid from [mankind]—She was the Universe”
Humanity is trapped in a mediated, immaterial, symbolic existence. It is only through death that we could escape this trap. Bifo discusses how there are tons of people like Holmes who “medicate on video games, porn, and cheap carbs” (Berardi 27) and only continue to exist through an Internet connection, where they escape their shitty job and confining apartment. The acts of Holmes and other mass murderers pierce the veil of maya that masks human civilization, both with the regards of morality and humanist conceptions of transcending our material existence, reminding that humans are not only immaterial beings who write, code, and create art, but are also from the earth and are vulnerable. If mass murderers and other Byronic figures could be considered heroes by any stretch of the imagination, it is this unveiling of the darkness of existence and the ironic trap that immaterial existence serves, whether it is Lord Byron’s post-modern personas or the ways the Cho used technology and language to develop a self-serving narrative.
In Jon Rafman’s 2013 short film collaboration with Oneohtrix Point Never, titled “Still Life (Betamale), they compiled pictures and video from the deepest and darkest caves of the Internet, spaces where individuals are trapped in the excessive stimuli of consumerism, fantasy, and escapism. From still images of graphic pornographic art and the squalid living conditions of individuals entirely consumed by the Internet to videos of violent 90s Japanese visual novels and niche sexual fetishes (e.g. furries), the film presents the hidden nature of humanity’s newest frontier. These are individuals who have gone too far into the posthuman sublime, as they see no escape but death in this technological natural space. The film ends with a video of an individual in a furry suit drowning in quick sand and it is never made clear whether or not he survived or not (see figure 6). The narrator’s words bear a startling resemblance to Byron’s Darkness, albeit more fitting for the contemporary version of the Byronic hero.
As you gaze into the screen, it is possible to believe you are gazing into eternity. You see the things inside you. This is the womb. The original site of imagination […] You have become invisible. […] You can still see every detail clearly but cannot grasp the meaning. […] A new patter of order and disorder emerges in front of you. […]You are again in a dream, walking endlessly in winding paths and you cannot find a way out of the maze you have been convinced was made solely for you
(Figure 6 from https://vimeo.com/75534042)
A specter of humanity’s self-destruction haunts civilization and the mass murderer/Byronic hero and the popularity of this figure is a sign of the end of history.
Work Cited
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Berardi, Franco. Heroes: Mass Murder and Suicide. London: Verso, 2015. Print.
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Freud, Sigmund. Civilization and Its Discontents. New York: W.W. Norton, 1962. Print.
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–– Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence. New York: Columbia UP, 2016. Print.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. “On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense.” Oregon State. Oregon State University, n.d. Web.
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––The Natural Contract. Ann Arbor: Michigan UP, 1995. Print.
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Thacker, Eugene. In the Dust of This Planet. Winchester, UK: Zero, 2011. Print.
––Starry Speculative Corpse. Winchester, UK: Zero, 2015. Print.
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Notes
[1] It is unclear whether or not Morton is using Lacan terms (e.g. real, symbolic, etc.) but it is safe to assume he is.
[2] The latter exemplifies “correlationist thought” that Immanuel Kant advocates.
[3] As in memes in nonhuman beings (e.g. bird “songs,” peacock “aesthetics”)
[4] See Timothy Morton’s The Ecological Thought
[5] This is another aspect of Berlant’s concept of “cruel optimism.”
[6] “For the moment, I follow solely the passage of spirit.”
[7] See Jean Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation
[8] i.e. presenting oneself with different “personas” for different online spaces. LinkedIn for jobs, Facebook for a general socializing, Twitter for short bursts of information, Instagram for images, and Snapchat for crude ephemeralities. All of these require different personas.
[9] For the purpose of this essay, these psychological terms will not be thoroughly analyzed or expanded upon