"The guillotine ("The guillotine produces this monster, a head ("The head (caput), seat of the brain, was for the Romans - and for most peoples - the organ that contains the soul (that is, a person's vital force) and that exerts the directing function within the body. Paul-Henri Stahl has recently demonstrated how decapitation practices, which were very common in archaic, antique and medieval societies, bear witness to these beliefs about the power of the head. Headhunting was motivated by the desire to destroy and often to appropriate for oneself the personality and the power of an outsider, a victim or an enemy, by possessing his head ("But I want you to understand that Christ is the head of every man, and the man is the head of a woman, and God is the head of Christ.") or skull.") without a body which possesses in fact and not fiction the unthinkable consciousness of its own death. The duration of the traditional execution constituted the hora mortis of the condemned man. Not so with the guillotine; on the contrary, if Soemmering is right to suppose that 'the decapitated man retains the impression of his own existence for as long as the grain retains its vital energy', this impression can only be that of death already past. This then is the guillotine's monstrous creation, a head that can think without a body, but think, or so we might suppose, one thought only: 'I think, but I am not.' The guillotine slices in half the reassurance of the Cartesian cogito. The 'factory of death' (Gastellier) gives its victim to think of death as the death he has died.") focuses our attention not upon the body as a whole, but upon the head. The organic unity through which the blade passes is divided into two parts, and of these it is the head that attracts both attention and comment. The Jacobin ideology sought by decapitation to put to death a representation of the body politic in which the head (of state) incarnated the nation in his own body. The guillotine separated this head from its body, and by exhibiting it in all its regal solitude systematically deprived it of its representative value. But by removing the head from the body ("A story in the New York Times illustrates perfectly the obsolescence of the body in the new universe of virtual technology. The United States Air Force had uncovered a critical flaw --- the inadequacies of the body reflexes of pilots --- in the creation of ultra-sonic jet fighters. According to the aircraft designers, the human body is no longer capable of absorbing, yet alone responding, to the "information environment" of jet-fighters moving at hyper-speeds. From the perspective of aerial technology, the human body is obsolete and, as Stelarc predicted, what is desperately required is a new body fit for the age of ultra-technologies. In fact, this is just what the designers have created, at least beginning with the heads ("The surgeon Sue goes one better: the term 'after-pain' becomes 'after-thought'. The transition is pregnant with horror: 'What could be more horrible than the perception of one's own execution, followed by the after-thought of one's having been executed?' The 'temporal syncope' that characterizes the guillotine's action produces an immediate and irreparable break in the unity of the body, but - and here lies the horror - the continuity of consciousness is uninterrupted, and its survival enough to discredit the fatal efficiency, the temporal punctum, ascribed to the fall of the blade. What a philosophical monster the guillotine's instantaneousness now becomes! By suggesting a distinction between the time-continuum of the intact body (at an end) and that of consciousness (which continues), the instant of the guillotine creates a temporal divergence in which the unity of self is fragmented.") of fighter-pilots. To compensate for the inability of human vision to match the speed and intensity of the information environment of jet-fighters, designers are planning to equip pilots with virtual heads ("The mechanism falls like a thunderbolt, the head flies off, the blood spurts forth, the victim is no more."): special helmets which block out normal ocular vision and, by means of a video screen projected on the inside of the mask, feed the pilot at a slowed-down and selective pace specific, strategic information about his aerial environment: altitude, presence of other aircraft, speed, target range. A system of perspectival vision, therefore, for the advanced outriders of teleonmic society.") to set it before the spectator's eyes, the guillotine springs one last surprise. It becomes a sort of portraitist, a veritable, indeed a terrifying, 'portrait machine'. By reducing the 'exposure time' to instantaneousness ("She gets the camera ("Benjamin makes clear both in this early essay and when he returns to the subject in the 1936 "Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" that for him the camera is an instrument that enlarges vision, much the way Freud spoke of it in Civilization and Its Discontents, where technological advances are viewed as a set of "prosthetic limbs" that expand the power of the individual. Benjamin likens the camera for example to the surgeon's knife that can operate dispassionately on the human body and by seeing it in fragments can enter more deeply in its reality.") and it seems to her that with each "click" a knife is thrust into the freedom of her experience of the work, that at each slap of the shutter something live has just died. Suddenly Picasso wheels on her enraged that "without his permission" she has photographed his Renoir. "His Renoir!" she thinks. She tears the film out of the camera and throws it in his face. "No one talks to me like that," she says.") and fixing the expression of the face by a 'technique' as neutral as it is irrefutable, the guillotine produces something like the ideal of the classical portrait. For, in its classical form, the successful portrait is the synthesis of two things: the traces left by history on the model's face, and the essence of the self inhabiting that face as expressed in its 'physiognomy' --- the face's underlying and immutable structure. The most complete portrait, that which best exhibits the person as a whole, must therefore be the last, in which, at the hour of death, history is summed up in the traces that it has left. For the portrait always points to death, be it only in recording the moment in which I was, there and then, in the here and now of the portrait before us, and the guillotine, therefore, produces the ideal of the portrait. By fixing the last expression of the face it puts before us the mask that concentrates and summarizes the totality of its history and its meaning. The term 'mask' is particularly appropriate to the type of image the guillotine portrait represents. For it was possible to make the portraits from death masks taken from the head before it and the body ("Technologically, the body is subordinated to the twofold hypothesis of hyper-functionality and ultra refuse: never has the body (as a floating sign-system at the intersection of the conflation of power and life) been so necessary for the teleonomic functioning of the system; and yet never has the body (as a prime failure from the perspective of a technological society that has solved the problem of mortality in the form of technique as species-being) been so superfluous to the operation of advanced capitalist culture. In technological society, the body has achieved a purely rhetorical existence: its reality is that of refuse expelled as surplus-matter no longer necessary for the autonomous functioning of the technoscape. Ironically, though, just when the body has been transformed in practice into the missing matter of technological society, it is finally free to be emancipated as the rhetorical centre of the lost subject ("But if there is such a proliferation of body rhetorics, might not his tow mean that, like sex before it, the body has now undergone a twofold death: the death of the natural body (with the birth of the languages of the social and, before them, the Foucauldian verdict of the "soul as the prison of the body"); and the death of the discursive body (with the disappearance of the body into Bataille's general economy of excess)? ("Here arises a question that concerns precisely the topography of technology, the mutation of the famous "law of proximity" or, if you choose, that of the least effort or the least action. To reduce, to suppress the distance of the action ("As Gstellier noted, the 'plummeting acceleration' of the guillotine's axe-head was no less than 'the speed of lightning'. It was such that 'from the first point of contact to the last, there is no distance; there is only an indivisible point: the axe falls and the victim has died'. And there lies the frightening paradox of the guillotine; this 'zero distance' defining an indivisible point in time is, in spatial terms, a height of fourteen feet. Raised to the top of the uprights, the blade defines a space which expresses the instant, which is a spatial metaphor of the instant ("Caillois compares this to the experience of schizophrenics. "Space ("Psychoanalysis's space ("Cyberspace is a physically inhabitable, electronically generated alternate reality, entered by means of direct links to the brain --- that is, it is inhabited by refigured human "persons" separated from their physical bodies, which are parked in "normal" space. The physical laws of "normal" space need not apply in cyberspace, although some experiential rules carry over from normal space --- for example, the geometry of cyberspace is, in most depictions, Cartesian. The "original" body is the authenticating source for the refigured person in cyberspace: no "persons" exist whose presence is not warranted by a physical body back in "normal" space. But death in either normal space or cyberspace is real, in the sense that if the "person" in cyberspace dies, the body in normal space dies, and vice versa."), the space of the unconscious, he (Lyotard) comes to realize, disdains this fundamental notion of the coordinates of the real. In defiance of all probability it allows two, or three, or five things to be in the same place at the same time. And these things are themselves utterly heteroclite, not variations on one another but things in total opposition. This "space" is therefore quite literally unimaginable: a congealed block of contradictions. Not a function of the visible, it can only be intuited through the projection of various "figures" that surface from the depths of this "space": the slip of the tongue, the daydream, the fantasy. To this medium, lying below the level of the visible, he gives the name matrix, and he begins to follow its activity, which he recognizes as the production not of the gestalt but of bad form, the activity through which form is in fact transgressed.") seems for these dispossessed souls to be a devouring force," he says. "It ends by replacing them. The body then desolidifies with his thoughts, the individual breaks the boundary of his skin and occupies the other side of this senses. He tries to look at himself from any point whatever of space. He feels himself becoming space... He is alike, not like something but simply like. And he invents spaces of which he is 'the convulsive possession.'"). The guillotine is perhaps the only machine ("We're making machines that function on scales of time outside our own. We can't keep up with the speed of decision-making. We can't run the bases fast enough; we're "out."") thus to exhibit in plain view the essentially destructive, rending, agonizing potential of every instant. This formidable configuration takes us back to the etymology of the word: instans, that which stands over, that which threatens. The image of the machine is the more frightening in that its very reliability suggests but a single instance of time, that of death and its unerring stroke, a mechanized and more 'productive' version of the immortal reaper's scythe.") to the point of introducing into the very interior of the human organism the machine, the means of instantaneous communication, poses formidable questions about the new technical milieu, this post-industrial "technosphere." In effect, to operate at a distance replaces the crucial question of the nature of the interval comprising this distance, an interval of the SPACE genre (negative sign) for the geometric arrangement and control of the "geophysical" environment. Interval of the TIME genre (positive sign) for the organization of control of the "physical" environment, the invention of means of communication. And finally, interval of the LIGHT genre (null sign), third and ultimate interval (interface) for the instantaneous control of the "microphysical" environment, thanks to the new means of telecommunication.") This would mean that we have entered the scene of panic bodies for the fin-de-millenium. Panic bodies living on (their own) borrowed power; violent, and alternating, scenes of surplus energy and perfect inertness; existing psychologically on the edge of fantasy and psychosis; floating sign-systems of the body reexperienced in the form of its own second-order simulacra; a combinatorial of hyper-exteriorization (of body organs) and hyper-interiorization (of designer subjectivities); and incited less by the languages of accumulation than fascinating, because catastrophic, signs of self-exterminism, self-liquidation, and self-cancellation. Panic bodies: an inscribed surface onto which are projected all the grisly symptoms of culture burnout as the high five-sign of the late 1980s. This is why, perhaps, the perfume industry (those advance outriders of hyper-modern theory) are manufacturing a new scent - POISON - for the olfactory pleasures of panic bodies; and why, if there can be now such widespread concern about viruses, this is symptomatic of a broader public panic about dead power as a body invader --- the projection of evil within in the form of viruses ("In our past evolution, the body has been molded in a 1-G gravitational field. The notion of designing the body for new environments fascinates me (Stelarc). Is it possible to create a thing to transcend the environment? Unplugging the body form this planet... Over four million years, the body developed a response against viruses, foreign bodies, etc. But technology is just a couple of hundred years old. The first phase of technology contained the body whereas now miniaturized tech can be implanted into the body. If the tech is small the body acts as if it were not there. It becomes a component. Once the human body leaves this planet we have an excuse to invent a new body --- more expanded and variable.") as postmodern plagues.") of desire after desire: the body as metaphor for a culture where power itself is always only fictional.") were thrown together into the communal grave. But the term introduces a further and especially fertile theme, whose fascination lies in the nexus formed by the three terms 'mask', 'figure' (face and also figure in the sense of having been drawn), and face. The guillotine portrait is thus seen as a figure in which mask and face ("And the eyes ("Sartre places himself in front of the door with the keyhole and understands himself as figure against ground, figure, that is, in the eyes of the other who observes him, who catches him in the act. And in this moment, as Sartre fails to coalesce into figure for himself, hew watches in dismay as he becomes merely ground. Ground against ground. The amorphe. The non-form.") have driven the mouth into obscurity.") coincide. 'Thus there are in the world many celebrated figures about which no one knows anything. What is famous is the mask; the face itself is not generally known.' Robert de La Sizeranne, author of Les masques et les visages a Florence et au musee du Louve, a work which has fallen into well-merited oblivion, here comes very close to an idea whose current formulation has it that the mask is 'what makes a face the product of a society and its history'. Laying bare the essence of what it represents, the masks excludes the detail of personal and contingent singularity to become the 'meaning in so far as it is absolutely pure', such as the portrait of a black man 'born into slavery' that shows 'the essence of slavery lain bare'. Shall we not say the same of the guillotine portrait, whose mask does no other than unmask the traitor, so as to show him in the absolute transparency of his meaning, clearly labelled by the inscriptions that interpret the image. ("A dialectical image begins to form for him (Breton). Its ground is a series of white, geometrical planes, the stark, streamlined architecture ("It is obvious, moreover, that mathematical organization imposed on stone is none other than the completion of an evolution of earthly forms, whose meaning is given, in the biological order, by the passage of the simian to the human form, the latter already presenting all the elements of architecture. In morphological progress men apparently represent only an intermediate ("There on the grid of the chessboard each piece has a value that is not intrinsic (a knight or a rook can come in any form, any material, can be substituted for, even, by another piece if necessary). Instead its value derives from a system of oppositions between its position and that of all other pieces on the board. These values are further vested in the pieces by an absolutely invariable convention, "the set of rules that exists before a game begins and persists after each move." Since each move changes the relations between all the pieces, creating a new utterance by producing a new set of oppositions, at any moment in the game a new synchrony reigns. But each synchronous state --- displayed on the board as a distinct "picture" --- is utterly dissociated from the game's history, folded into the embrace of meaning only because the law resonates through its present set of relations.") stage between monkeys and great edifices. Forms have become more and more static, more and more dominant. The human order from the beginning is, just as easily, bound up with architectural order, which is no more than its development.") of Bauhaus rationalism. Sachlichkeit. The new objectivity. Technology as form. "Ornament," Adorno remembers Loos having said, "is a crime." And gleaming and new, this ("Unlike instruments of torture, which were generally more complex and meticulously designed to inflict a certain quota of pain via a specific part of the body, the guillotine had something of the simplicity and austerity of a diagram: its abstract shape was a declaration of the universal validity of the laws of geometry and gravity. The decapitating machine made public execution a celebration of the mechanical and geometrical, and so ensured the spectacular triumph of these forms of 'just' and 'reasonable' thought. The Goncourt brothers echoed this impression in their extraordinary description of the device: 'In the guillotine, the scientific eye perceives a horizontal plane some feet above the ground on which have been erected two perpendiculars separated by a right-angled triangle falling through a circle onto a sphere which is subsequently isolated by a cutter.") architecture will admit of no crime, no deviation. It will be a machine stripped down for work, a machine to live in. But there, suddenly, on the stretch of one of its concrete flanks, a protuberance begins to sprout. Something bulges outward, pushing against the house's skin. Out it pops in all its nineteenth-century ugliness and absurdity, a bay window with its scrollwork cornices, its latticed windows. It is the house's tumor, Adorno thinks. It is the underbelly of the prewar technorationalism, the unconscious of the modernist Sachlichkeit. It is surrealism, connecting us, through the irrational, with the other side of progress, with its flotsam, its discards, its rejects. Progress as obsolescence.") These inscriptions, however, are scarcely necessary, for the configuration of the image makes its meaning absolutely pure. The guillotine portrait unmasks the traitor in his death mask --- the true face to the traitor and the only one he deserves, for, in Robespierre's words, the 'mask of patriotism' strives to 'disfigure by insolent parody the sublime drama of the Revolution'. ("During the ancien regime the body, be it the tortured body of the criminal or the sacred body of the king, is very much a part of everyday life and symbolism. But this body belongs to a traditional system, a product of both Christian and popular cultures, that is taken for granted. When this traditional system is voided of meaning by the Revolution, a new aesthetics of embodiment becomes necessary. The system of assigned meanings is followed by one where meanings must be achieved through an active semiotic process in which the body is newly emblematized with meaning. The body in early Romantic literature, and thereafter ("Every time there's been a revision of the discourse of man, we have difficulty imagining what happened, because the gist of each of these revisions is always deadened, attenuated, with time, in such a way that today, as always, the word humanism is a bag in which the corpses ("The word anthropometrie made its debut in French around 1750. In 1792 it still referred to the study of the proportions of the human body. It was not until 1871, when the Commune set fire to the guillotine and the people of Versailles had an improved model built, that the term came to mean a specific technique of measurement which was soon to distinguish itself in its forensic capacity. The history of the French language thus suffices to show that the decapitating machine, that paradigm of the instrument of criminal justice, stands at the point at which the aesthetic science of proportions is transmuted into the forensic science of identification.") of these successive disclosures of a revolutionary point of view on man very slowly rot, piled one on top of the other."), assumes a new centrality as a site of meaning. During the Revolution, the new popular genre of melodrama provides a literalistic realization of this new importance of the body as the site of signification.")" Richard Moore
compiled by TRACTION/collaborative