From: Unleesh-AT-aol.com
Date: Thu, 25 Jun 1998 00:00:36 EDT
Subject: Doctor Doom


   I would like to assert that Doctor Doom from Fantastic Four comics in the
Marvel Universe is as real as IBM, although affecting different domains.
  If IBM is considered a "person" by law, a real entity, then so is Doctor
Doom (or Spider Man or Mr. Spock for that matter). Like IBM, Doctor Doom is an
intersubjective set of agreements that has real effects upon people in the
real world. IBM has econo-political effects ; Doctor Doom has subjective
affects he disperses. These comic book characters help form the subjectivities
of people (not just children) all over ; form emotions inside them, shape
thoughts, create whole universes. Doctor Doom floats through the "unconscious"
of our culture ; Spiderman creeps and crawls through, and Spock migrates from
face to face, incarnating in a person here, now a person there. Aren't these
migratory people just as real as the people who incarnate them? They are sort
of "trans"people : they live across people, sliding across bodies in a body
without organs.
  Couldn't schizophrenics merely be people who recognize that Doctor Doom or
Wolverine or Batman are just as real as IBM? Now it is certain that IBM is
more societally empowered in material domains, especially in the economic and
political sectors, and let us not neglect even the subjective sectors, where
through regulation of workday, market advertising, etc it shapes the spacetime
of everyday life for large, molar numbers of people. But Doctor Doom COULD
become societally empowered. In a different context, weren't this what gods
were : societally empowered fictions? Does the future hold a postmodern Marvel
Comics Voodoun for us?
  I actually think this is an important question, because I find that many
adults, especially parents, downplay and marginalize the REALITY of these
characters who float through our culture, media, and subjectivity.
  Perhaps even more radical are people who engage role-playing games and even
more radical, live action role playing games. This is an area of culture I
have seen little touched upon in Cultural Studies, especially from a Deleuzian
angle. I think there is a lot to argue that the next step in madness after
Anti Oedipus is the molecular revolution that the creation and proliferation
of roleplaying games like D&D in the seventies represented. Role-playing games
are intersubjective ways to live the delirium together. When taken off the
living room table and into the live-action arena (literally into the streets),
we have a situation where madness invades the streets and everyday life, and
has at least the potential of becoming a situation (in the situationist
sense). Present live action role playing games that I know of include Vampyre
and The Apocalypse, about werewolves. Because of stupid demonizing of people
who theatrically enacted D&D in the eighties in idiotic movies and Christian
scare tactics, many of these games have severe reterritorializing tendencies
to keep things in bounds, but it's easy to see how they could get out of
bounds (without getting demonic, but rather, marvelous and fantastic!)
   These might provide some trampolines for interesting lines of flight to
explore how we might socialize delirium and communize madness, permeating more
and more of life with wonderful desiring-machines that do not remain
"fantasy". I will reassert : Doctor Doom is not fantasy. Doctor Doom is real.
  Darth Vader is certainly real. I'm having real delight watching the
subjectifying effects of Darth Vader on a close friend's 2 1/2 year old, who
through his love of the Star Wars movies has chosen Vader as a means of
subjectification. He has a Darth Vader mask he likes to wear that no one else
is allowed to wear, and has developed another "personality" he calls "Vader"
who does all the "bad stuff". In fact, his mother informed me today that he
refused to watch Return of the Jedi until recently, because he just would not
stand for the idea that Vader could become good. Vader has become a model for
the energies that do not fit into the "good" of socialization, and he refuses
to allow Vader to get coopted into that place. If we look at this from a
Kleinian perspective of learning to sort "good" and "bad" through good and bad
objects, through "fantasy" material, we can see that a so-called fantasy
character is having very real effects at a very key developmental point in a
child's life. This will become a part of this child. In fact, isn't Darth
Vader more real than many of us, in the sense of having had more influence on
greater numbers of people? Yet David Prowse or James Earl Jones doesn't have
the same influence or power. What they created together with their crew, with
the special effects, with the make up artists, with the script writers, became
a collective force, such that, I only wish I had the reality that Darth Vader
has.
  I often get the impression that the vision the Situationists give us of a
liberated society is a set of federated local areas where each community is
like a Hollywood crew of everyday life, where people are putting the same
material and creative effort into production of marvelous, surrealist lives
and incredible situations as Hollywood puts into its movies. In this way,
madness materializes : literally. The delirium spreads throughout a social
body and becomes reflected in (continually transforming) architecture, social
practices, costume, meals, etc. Isn't this what Gilles Deleuze and Felix
Guattari point towards in AntiOedipus where they say that the schizophrenic is
merely one who doesn't have his schizophrenizing process backed by the
material forces of social production, and that what is needed is to connect
the artistic, scientific, and industrial machines up to the schizo?
 How do you read all this?

(un)leash