Cyberkill: Melancholia, Globalization and Media Terrorism in American Psycho and Glamorama

This Essay Examines the Relationship Between violence, global space and political subjectivity in Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho and Glamorama. By analyzing the depictions of violence in these novels, I want to theorize an aesthetic of globalization and a corresponding figuration of subjectivity that I see in a number of particularly brutal postmodern narratives including popular horror films on the order of Eli Roth’s Hostel, James Wan’s Saw and Michael Haneke’s Funny Games and literary texts such as J. G. Ballard’s fiction and Cormac McCarthy’s recent novels, No Country for Old Men and The Road. What these somewhat disparate narratives share is an aesthetic logic of violence and global space I’m calling rendering, a logic based on a metaphorical equation between bodily violence and descriptive discourse. In order to capture this equation, my pun on rendering is meant to refer, on one hand, to the discursive act of constructing a representation and, on the other hand, to the visceral act of processing a carcass for consumption. In this double sense, both painting and butchering are rendering. Indeed, the visceral sense of rendering, i.e. the physical butchering of a body, points toward the symbolic commodification of said body as meat. That is to say, the bodily register of the term gestures toward the discursive register and vice versa. As an aesthetic phenomenon at work in Ellis’s fiction, then, this metaphorical equation of the visceral and the discursive—an equation I am terming rendering—articulates an abstract space of globalization and a melancholic subject homologous to this global space.

Before looking at how this aesthetic plays out in Ellis’s novels, I want to clarify what I mean by globalization and elaborate on the political consequence of this aesthetic of rendering. By “global” I am referring to an ontological rather than geographical phenomenon. Following Giovanni Arrighi, Fredric Jameson outlines these two senses of global deterritorialization. In the geographical sense, globalization means the chartable process whereby “capital shifts to other and more profitable forms of production, often enough in new geographical regions”; in the related ontological sense, globalization denotes “the ultimate deterritorialization, that of territory as such—the becoming abstract of land and the earth, the transformation of the very background or context of commodity exchange into a commodity in its own right” (153–54). While the former sense of globalization refers to a traceable movement of capital and labor across geographically mappable contexts, the latter sense is an abstraction of space as such—an ontological merging of commodity and context, foreground and background, discourse and reality. For Jameson, globalization, in this latter sense, is “a kind of cyberspace in which money capital has reached its ultimate dematerialization, as messages which pass instantaneously from one nodal point to another across the former material world” (154). Understood as a dematerialized cyberspace, the “globe” becomes a discursive totality—a textualized no-place where neither autonomous speaking subjects nor tangible spaces of inscription exist as such.

The narratives I’m looking at posit a properly ontological globalization by which I mean a globalization supposedly divorced from historical materiality and dependent entirely on this violent aesthetics of rendering.¹ In other words, these narratives are premised upon a radically de-historicized and post-ideological worldview in which acts of discursive violence—videotaped serial killings and terrorism—constitute and reconstitute a virtual world of discourse ex nihilo. Rather than the result of chartable relocations of labor and capital, the ontological globalization figured in Ellis’s fiction results from a discursive violence whose site can be as narrow as an apartment where a serial killer videotapes his violent escapades or as expansive as a city block where a “terrorist” bombing produces a violent media image.

This global aesthetic of rendering at work in Ellis’s fiction is inseparable from an historical conceptualization of media terrorism.² In Glamorama, the main characters are literally terrorists who jet across the globe plotting highly publicized bombings and making torture videos while, in American Psycho, it is not a terrorist per se but...