ANDROID MARX IN WITHDRAWAL :

SOME NOTES TOWARDS AN ETHICS OF DECISION

by M A T T H E W A. J O N A S S A I N T

As you so adequately put it, said the Architect to the One, the problem is choice. This, from the ending of The Matrix Reloaded, names a problem at the base of my culture that has infected me. Id like to think Im recovering, convalescing from the crisis of indecision. And some crisis. Its to occupy a wonderland of agency but couldnt be more confused by the choices. By the time I was born, there was no garden left for human beings to return to. It was incoherent ashes and nonsense. There is no return to wholeness, no equation to balance. Insofar as one can no longer be guided by the light of logos, God, reason, meaning, or maybe even memories -- then what shall motivate me? How do I make ethical decisions? As a running hypothesis, I wondered about the concept of need. Need, a concept funny enough for capitalism. Karl Marx wrote what remains, to date, the most carefully thorough critique of capitalism. At its core was the recognition, the awareness, that capitalism is inadequate to meet the human needs of society. However, Marx never made his concept of need unambiguous. Though he used need to make explicit definitions, he never described what is meant to be understood by need itself. Agnes Heller was the first to carve out a coherency of the hidden but principal role [of needs] in Marxs economic categories (27), first in various articles and then culminating in her 1974 treatise The Theory of Needs in Marx. But within the discourse, theres some argument as to whether Heller mistakenly ignores the need for capital to self-valorize, i.e., the production of surplus value in individual consumption versus productive consumption, etc. -- and thus whether Heller might minimize material, quantitative needs in favor of so-called truly human needs. It is unnecessary to debate Hellers reading here. Reading Marx on his own terms will suffice. Like I said, Marxs work has been and continues to be the highest standard of analysis regarding capital. Its not a stretch to see his critique was, in one way or another, fundamentally based in a concept of human need. Yet even if it is unclear what structure of needs Marx assumed lies at the root of humanity, we can reasonably paint a picture of what Marxian needs are like under capitalism. The bases range from the anthropological to the historical-philosophical -- but almost immediately, in the course of Marxs developing critiques, he examined the economic basis of need as it is found in bourgeois political economics. He read that basis on its own terms, and found it to be pretty distasteful. In one of his 1844 manuscripts, The Meaning of Human Requirements Where There Is Private Property and Under Socialism, Marx showed how the theorists of his time demonstrate the fundamental principle of political economy is needlessness as the multiplication of needs and of the means of their satisfaction breeds the absence of needs and of means (118). By reducing the worker to having the barest of needs, then calling that bare minimum the standard, political economy makes it so the worker can only have enough to want to live,

and only want live in order to have enough. And the only thing creating and satisfying these bare-boned skeleton needs, these simple animal promises of food, warmth, a place to sleep...is money.1 For one without money, there may be demand, in the sense that a human need may be present. But without money its not possible to realize human need as something which lies only outside of itself; for Marx, that was the difference between effective demand based on money and ineffective demand based on needs, wishes, passions, etc. As such, the true need political economy produces is the need for money -- and it is the only need it produces, said Marx (116). The effect of the money relation, across society, is an alienation. This is elaborated in the first volume of Capital when Marx describes the transformation of surplus-value into capital. There, the sphere of needs is revealed to be both the needs of workers and the needs of capital.2 Bourgeois political economy complains of the lack of abstinence in workers, and that their necessary fund for consumption (for their cheapened, animal wants and their scraped-to-the-bone need to reproduce their labor power) must be properly controlled by wages -- for if the workers could live on air, it would not be possible to buy them at any price. But more than just the exploitation of workers and their skeleton needs, the capitalist himself also becomes unrecognizable as human through their personification of capital, i.e., as embodying, above all, the motive to valorize: insofar as he is capital personified, his motivating force is not the acquisition and enjoyment of use-values, but the acquisition and augmentation of exchange-values (739). Thus both worker and capitalist are subjected to the alien power of capital. Individuals selfishly calculate for new needs in others and gratify said needs, on and on, solely for accumulations sake, until the general mode of dependence is the satisfaction of needs under an alien, othering power: an estrangement of human beings which is its own creation and movement. Another is means towards the satisfaction of my need to accumulate, and the way I extend this power over another is alienating in the sense that it makes my desires the inaccessible possession of another, but also in the fact that everything is in itself something different from itself -- that my activity is something else and that, finally...all is under the sway of inhuman power (Human Requirements, 125). This alienating effect of money, as a relation, is the primary process of the production and consumption of needs in a capitalistic society. As needs multiply, thus needlessness. Relations between the existence of capital and its associated praxis are developed a bit further, and a bit differently, in the Grundrisse. Towards the end of Notebook IV, Marx termed the living objective conditions of labor, from tools to environment and including the capacity for labor, as posited alien existences, separated and independent from each other, or as the mode of existence of an alien person, as self-sufficient values for-themselves, and hence as values which form wealth alien to an isolated and subjective labor capacity, wealth of and for the capitalist (461). The worker relates to his or her labor as an alien activity and entity. Need-to-satisfy is thus a need created by another and satisfied for another. Whether

Its important to point out that by talking about money, we are not finding for ourselves the Sworn Enemy of All Existence, i.e., the Root and Evil of capitalism; by observing the alienating effects of money, we are not in fact discussing capitalism -- not even necessarily capital itself. 2 One need of capital, for example, is to force the cost of labor towards an absolute zero, which Marx describes as a limit in the mathematical sense, always beyond reach (748). This would be, among others, an oversight Hellers accused of.
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or not capitalism must necessarily do all this might remain to be seen. But Marx did leave hints that a structuring of human needs produced and reproduced a certain kind of consciousness. Well get back to that. To get back to Heller: such a new structuring makes what she calls radical needs which, prior to the overthrow of capitalism, represent a consciousness of the social and productive relations produced by capitalism. These needs are distinct from social needs, which in a certain sense belong to capitalism. It will be necessary for human beings to overcome the alienation of their conditions in order to progress to a society of associated producers -- in other words, Heller writes from the perspective of a communist future, where radical human needs manifest in the collective Ought produced by capitalism, and where such needs drive humans beyond capitalism to a liberated human race. Whether this fully reconciles with Marxs concept of need remains to be seen. But both Marx and Heller conceived of a structure of needs as a fundamental part of human existence, and a concept of human needs would be necessary to overcome the effects of alienation. From such a concept of human needs, we might proceed to imagine and outline an ethics of decision. There is only one problem. What, exactly, is a human need? Why must a theory of Marxian needs be necessarily grounded in the human? Why does Heller argue for a progression to a truly human society? Must we forget about the needs of animals,3 for instance? Or what we have discovered in the last century about the biosphere? More to the point, have we not learned better from hundreds of years of thought that human continues to be itself a contested category of meaning? If my skepticism seems surprising, its a surprise several centuries in the making. As Sextus Empiricus wrote in the Outlines of Skepticism, humans seem to be not only inapprehensible but actually inconceivable (73). In any ethics of decision I set forth, I remember Pyrrho and suspend my judgement as to whether humans know, can know, and are known. It could be a mistake to assert a structure of human needs, for the terms are insufficient. As Marx suggested, even the barest of needs such as food, air, water, development of personality, certain luxuries, and so on are reduced to bare needs as such by the money relation and the consequential alienation under capitalism. It might be more insightful to develop a concept of need along the lines of what has become post-human. Whatever that is. Whatever that is, it takes me back to 2011. It was a weird year for me: one I experienced riding a blue 1953 Schwinn bike around construction sites and broken streets, working in a noisy restaurant kitchen until dark, then retiring to a yellowed floor mat in a compound downtown where local gutter punks hung out. It was, above all, the year music died for me. Hard to take its measure. Suddenly, somehow, everything was unlistenable. Sound itself had hardened into a new demon wail of emotion, or lack of emotion. I listened to broken glass and concrete with enthusiasm, frantic buzz in my old computer comforted me to sleep; the summers hits from Lady Gaga, Beyonce, and Katy Perry were horrors. I might never understand. That is how I know music had become dead to me. I abruptly found I couldnt tolerate anything that wasnt full of clanging, chaotic, blinding white light. One day: clacking gears, my bike wheels. The chain like shrapnel when come undone. Wheezy tire rubber as the truck coughed to a stop, grinding over my flayed palms and halting just before my crown, which rested next to my earbuds, which was still playing Pakistani warble over

Or, turning the screw a bit, whether by animal rights we attempt to accord something human to what is not human.

drum beats, and somewhere a honk, and wasnt the light red, and my body just lay there in mid-traffic, waiting for When I snapped to, some mechanical instinct took over, and in one fluid motion I picked up my bike, ignoring inquiries from bystanders and the driver, and sped on down the block to work. Head still ringing. Late. Please clean that blood up and clock in, instructed my boss through her cheery smile. The person who kept this all somewhat comprehensible for me was Lester Bangs. My music apocalypse surfaced in Bangss writings about free jazz and No Wave punk, his glee with Metal Machine Music by Lou Reed. But nothing summed it up for him better than Miles Davis, who in the 1970s began drifting from the expressive depth of soul heard on Sketches From Spain or Kind of Blue to some sinister, anthracite black hate of fusion experimentations. Which irritated jazz enthusiasts, and fascinated Lester. Naysayers argued only egotistical prudes would understand the switch in style. But if Miles seemed to be losing his familiar, soulful sensitivities to a coldness of rage at the very hearts death, he was only enacting -perhaps predicting, as Bangs argued -- what would soon begin happening to everyone else. You probably think Ive stretched a subjective impression too far, Lester wrote. Okay then, look around you. Do those look like people? Hell, they aint even good enough to be animals. Androids is more like it, mutants at best. They have become the machines they worship, successfully post-human. Now go look in the mirror. Like what you see? Think youre pretty cool, eh? Well, reflect on the fact that they all think the same thing when they look in their mirrors. And you look just as grotesque to them as they do to you. Now go put on, say, Side Two of On The Corner [by Miles Davis]. Feel more at home now? [T]his music is about something, and what it is about is what we are becoming: post-human, and, concomitantly, technologyobsessed. This is the poison whirring through the wiring of a supersociety which has become a cageits about an alienation so extreme we could only grow into it (176-77) By the time the 1980s had commenced, Lester Bangs was writing guides to horrible noise, giving a deeper glimpse into the kind of dis-ease infecting his eardrums. Look at it this way, he explained: there are many here among us for whom the life force is best represented by the livid twitching of one tortured nerve, or even a full-scale anxiety attack. I do not subscribe to this point of view 100%, but I understand it, have lived it. Thus the shriek, the caterwaul, the chainsaw gnarlgnashing, the yowl and the whizz that decapitates may be reheard by the adventurous or emotionally damaged as mellifluous bursts of unarguable affirmation (302). Lest he be interpreted otherwise, it is clear from unapologetic flourishes of clarity such as these Lester Bangs was not making simple cynical commentary on high-tech culture; it is likely, in fact, that he found something radically rock n roll in the sharp and inchoate noise that has become everyday urban life. Better than the Bon Jovis and Def Leppards, better than the comparative nullity of Bob Dylan and Journey, the new jazz of Miles Daviss dead heart and the animal snarls of L.A. Blues by the Stooges could honestly paint sonic experiences of a world being secretly invaded by something alien. Like lizards, he said, like insects. It doesnt matter what Bangs ultimately made of such a development. This was how he argued, until his death, he was witnessing a shift in cultural consciousness to something decidedly no longer recognizable as fully human. These observations were written a year or two before Ridley Scott took cinema to a similar task. Blade Runner takes its cues from Philip K. Dick, but it certainly is a film lovers film. I first saw it years ago, then saw

it again recently. By now I see how Sir Scott is in conversation with Fritz Lang, and Metropolis. Ive seen, by now, dozens of 1940s noir, images stuck in my mind like black and white steam and the lips of a woman. Very primal. Settling down into Blade Runner again was to be borne back into a sleeping past. I see now how deliberate it is, but at the first it had seemed much slower. It is evocative, more psychosexual than I remember. Much of the film seems to be about memory, anyway. There is something strange indeed about remembering a film. Recognizing its images in other celluloid. More than anything else, I remembered a chase. In the memory, Deckard is being chased through a neon valley by some scrappy man. It was disorienting to find this isnt true at all, that in fact it is Deckard who is doing the chasing. It is his run that I remember. This sequence is nearly twenty minutes in my mind, towards the end of the film -- in reality, it is an early, relatively brief, and rather pointless chase. A lot of the film is pointless. I mean in terms of plot. There are dozens of holes in the story that create a sort of illogic blanketing you. Why would Tyrell Corp bother making such life-like androids for hard labor? Why does Gaff know about Deckards dreams? Why does a Voight-Kampff test matter when one can test the body of a replicant? But what do such questions matter? The gaps are only in narrative, not in perception. What I remembered ebbed back into shifting depths of perception. Depths of vision. It is a film, as Roger Ebert suggested, that is more about its vision than its story, a vision of the future as a black market, as Pauline Kael wrote in her review. The film forces passivity on you with its post-human feeling, she continued, and keeps you persuaded that something bad is about to happen...but Fords mission seems of no particular consequence. The whole movie gives you the feeling of not getting anywhere -- of being part of the atmosphere of decay. This nothingness, this atmosphere, is exactly what will fly in the face of all those who might claim Blade Runner for respectable arthouse.4 If Deckards mission is ultimately inconsequential, that seems to me to be a rather powerful sentiment about a film glittering with sentiment.5 I dont have a choice, do I? Deckard smiles to the cop. After I finished watching the end credits, I wandered my black house at 4 AM in a dreamy haze. Like being kissed in the dark. Its laser beams and toxic rainfall lingered, and left. Its impossible to trace the pop culture dialogue about the post-human and not find, two years after Blade Runner, Neuromancer by William Gibson. Its future is of shoal and filth mixed with Tokyo glow and Arabic spraybomb, mimetic polycarbons, transdermal units, and endorphin analogs. Its main character, Case, is a basket-case of Marxian (yet) post-human need. When we meet him, he lives in a coffin, which sounds exactly like the poor caves6 Marx described, and his alienation under capitalism is described rather precisely:

4 5 No wonder it trailed behind the 82 summer blockbusters, E.T. and Star Trek II: The Wrath of Kahn. For instance. If Deckard knows hes human and desires a robot, does his love simply obscure the knowledge or awareness Rachel is a robot? Or if Deckard is himself a robot (and knows it, or is willing to accept it as a possibility), does it matter if he loves Rachel? Letting romance play ambiguity between these particular differences is a bit too sentimental for my taste. Im more interested in what happens when a robot is programmed to love, and how, and then how that appears to manifest in its relations to others, human or robot others. This is why the Robot Love Story is, I think, rather well put in A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001), the highly misunderstood Kubrick-Spielberg film. 5 Alternately, some may choose to read the mention of the Tannhauser Gate as a faith in a salvation awaiting death for a Wagnerian outsider. I dont think so, though. In the opera, the minstrel-knight has found a profane love in the subterranean realm of Venus, as opposed to the more sacred love of Elisabeth. What makes Roy Batty an outsider is not his machine parts, but his profaned (and post-human) sense of love and wonder in his surrounding material world. 6 From The Human Requirements (117): Even the need for fresh air ceases for the worker. Man returns to living in a cave, which is now, however, contaminated with the mephitic breath of plague given off by civilization, and which he continues to occupy only precariously, it being for him an alien habitation which can be withdrawn from him any day -- a place from which, if he does not pay, he can be thrown out any day. For this mortuary he has to pay. Compare with Cases rental coffin in Gibson, p. 27.

hed gone into a kind of terminal overdrive, hustling fresh capital with a cold intensity that had seemed to belong to someone else (9). It is disturbing to consider the dead labor of his fellow hacker as a construct (102). Moreover, his employer holds his labor power hostage precisely as an addict (61), in the most ancient and binding sense of the word, controlling and deliberately timing his very mortality in such a way that echoes Marxs chapter on The Working Day in Capital. The only buzz Case can feel anymore is the buzz of capitals movement, the dance of commerce (189), the money relation, as the business relation he has with Molly the razor girl, his partner. Once his employer has yanked away the simple animal promise of food, warmth, a place to sleep (197) and reduced him to bare need, a profound anger is discovered. Then, Case and code fight for or against WINTERMUTE in cyberspace: where the central problem is whether artificial intelligence can have a motive. But Gibsons biggest fan was Kathy Acker, who loved his novel so much that in 1988 she wrote Empire of The Senseless, a brilliant reworking of the sense of alienation and postmodern mucketymuck begun in Neuromancer. In Empire, there are two narrators, Thivai the pirate and Abhor, part black and part robot. Thivai struggles as an addict lost in an apocalyptic realm full of flame, dogs, blood, ash, diseased and undiseased semen in the rivers of Paris where Algerians have overcome the animality capitalism reduced them to (75); they have won the revolution, and a world after capitalism has arrived. To survive, Thivai usually resorts to ignoring human speech as anything but a stuffer of time (27). But Abhor struggles in this senseless waste land as a post-human; her body parts seem separate and isolated from one another and from her, and it is difficult to re/member herself -- or anything else. She cannot recognize herself because thats not part of her code, she cannot even think of her own death. Infected by their employer, Thivai carries the code WINTER, which turns out to be death (52), the code all humans carry, the unthinkable for Abhor and the unknown for Thivai. The world they both live in is characterized by an overwhelming isolation -- and not just, as Abhor can distinguish, the isolation created by business relations (60). In this world all humans can know, which is not death, is separation. It is up to Abhor to recode, rewrite the text of bodies and relations, to describe a structure of needs that can be met. Kathy Acker could see past the trouble with human, and all its hangups of meaning since the nineteenth century. After meaning, after reality, after God and capitalism, clocks and watermelons -- what else is left? The body, Kathy Acker answered. The act of sexuality, or the act of disease, are material, and become grounds for more than fascination. Its in the body finally which we cant be touched by all our skepticism and ambiguous systems of belief. The body, she declared, is the only place where any basis for real values exists anymore. * * * So consider the cyborg. Consider its body. When Donna Haraway wrote A Cyborg Manifesto, she considered the cyborg bodies of Malaysian women in microchip assembly plants during the 1970s, plants conveniently placed in free trade zones, fenced-off areas for multinational corporations to be exempt from many taxation and labor regulations. Young women unaccustomed to being away from the home and the village were taken en masse to these noisy factories. Toilets stood for cultural fears of malevolent spirits near dirty waters. Their female problems were cause of male supervisors to follow, spy on, and terrorize them

(Ong 33-4). But there were ghosts in the machines. Suddenly, first one by one, then in spontaneous groups, the female workers became possessed by evil spirits. Girls would shake and scream at their machines. Whole factories had to be shut down; supervisors complained of losses in production and profit, and hired exorcists. But supervisors only appeared to facilitate cleansing rituals; at one factory, the managements rejection of moral responsibility to personal needs was clearly visible when the ritual feast was served to managers and officers but not a single worker. Here, if ever, was what the Grundrisse calls the mode of existence of alien persons. When Aihwa Ong conducted fieldwork, she found the girls were experiencing an intense moral disorder symbolized by the filth and dangerous sexuality of their own bodies, now forcibly fused with men and machines. These social relations, brought about in the process of industrial capitalism, are experienced as a moral disorder in which workers are alienated from their bodies, the products of their work, and their own culture (38), Ong noted. So the female workers adopted a form of resistance in which they appeared to have no choice, a resistance which ultimately was not recognizable as human. Its hard to think about these Malaysian women and not also be reminded of the Vodou of the Haitians in Saint-Dominigue -- how it is curious the first successful slave revolt in history came about because spirit-possession rituals and noisy, riotous music organized an uprising and the mobilization of an anger and a consciousness...a self-awareness both human and not human.

Which, finally, gets us back to Karl Marx. ...[T]he less you express your own life, he said in The Human Requirements, the greater is your alienated life -- the greater is the store of your estranged being (119). What were looking at, what people like Lester Bangs felt was unarguably affirmed in certain acoustic ecologies: was that growing store of estranged being generating something new. A civilization in withdrawal of being developing another kind of consciousness. And Marx described it in Notebook IV. The new consciousness is the realization that the alienation created by capitalism is improper -- forcibly imposed, Marx emphasized, further contending this realization is an enormous [advance in] awareness, itself the product of the mode of production resting on capital (463, editors brackets). It is the awareness of an enforced relation of estrangement, encounter with the unrecognizable. It is (re)membering my body in accident getting to work. It is the apparently primitive and apparently hysterical fear of the Malaysian women, and Rachel the replicant,7 the primitive magickal fury of Haitian slaves, the deathly rage of Miles Davis, the anger of Case and Abhor. It is, finally, unthinkable. The necessary insight of Marx was not the description of a new consciousness, but the idea that capitalism itself produces the new consciousness, the awareness of being-alienated. Although he seemed to give a positive value to this awareness as an individual development, Id argue for a more general heteroglossia and collective plurality of individual developments which do not aim at an original totality, and do not attempt to return to a misleading holism. It is certainly more difficult to speak of such an awareness, though created by capitalism, as something fundamentally human. Does capitalism as such produce

This is, i.e., the reason why Donna Haraway chooses Rachel of Blade Runner as her archetypal image of a cyborgs love, fear, and confusion in her Cyborg Manifesto.
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alienated needs? To reference Haraways manifesto again: labor, as an ontological category which humanizes and provides subjectivity (and thus knowledge of alienation), is today incomplete, and faces obsoletion. The issue for Marxism today, then, is how awareness of alienation appears in terms other than human ones -- for if, in the eyes of classical economics, the proletarian is merely a machine for the production of surplus-value, the capitalist too is merely a machine for [capital] (Capital 742). If hegemony, as Gramsci defined it, is a form of ideological domination based on the consent of the dominated,8 the class diffusion of the dominant ideology is not alone what secures that consent. But I also suggest intentionality can no longer be examined within the borders of humanness. Nor the concept of need. To challenge current hegemonic systems, one must go beyond those borders, perhaps beyond reason or memory, to what is unknown...to construct, finally, an ethics of decision, deploying the deliberate, responsible Yes and No. Then hegemonic consent will no longer be so secured. The model for these intersections remains post-human; the cyborg, fusions of flesh and machine, is the most interesting place to posit the meaning of intentionality, as opposed to agency, and to radically and rigorously define need instead of only untangling human needs from human alienation. Self-consciousness comes before the revolution. Marx knew that. So do his replicants. These are the things I can reflect on. If the somewhat schizoid representation of such considerations limits the argument, perhaps there is no argument, and philosophers should never try to force an argument where there isnt one. Cyborgs can remember and they can recognize, but they cannot perform functions beyond certain demands. If an android passes a test or composes a thesis, that isnt called thinking, no matter how closely the automaton would resemble a human. But would it have a motive? And can that motive have an epistemological orientation? Those are questions for a new philosophy. The task of a substantial, sturdy ethics of decision. I can only arrange a constellation. I can project hybrids. To make something of a map for other cyborgs and androids to follow when what I see, and what I hear, motivates me to consider Marxian needs, and the trouble with human.

Iminterestedinonething,andonethingonly.Thefuture. Andbelieveme,Iknow:theonlywaytogetthereistogether. TheOracleprogramtotheOne,in TheMatrixReloaded

As quoted in Ongs article.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Acker, Kathy. Empire of the Senseless. New York: Grove Press, 1988. Bangs, Lester. A Reasonable Guide To Horrible Noise. Psychiatric Reactions and Carburetor Dung: The Work of A Legendary Critic: Rock n Roll as Literature, Literature as Rock n Roll. 301-304. Alfred A. Knopf: New York, 1987. --------. Miles Davis: Music For The Living Dead. Main Lines, Blood Feasts, and Bad Taste: A Lester Bangs Reader. 172-78. Anchor Books: New York, 2002. Gibson, William. Neuromancer. New York: Ace Books, 2004. Haraway, Donna. A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism In The Late Twentieth Century. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. pp. 149-181 New York: Routledge, 1991. Online. http://www.egs.edu/faculty/donna-haraway/articles/donna-haraway-a-cyborg-manifesto/ Heller, Agnes. The Theory of Need In Marx. London: Spokesman Books, 1974. Kael, Pauline. Blade Runner. 5001 Nights At The Movies. (79-80) Picador: New York, 1982. Lebowitz, Michael. Heller on Marxs Concept of Needs. Science & Society (43), Contemporary Issues In Marxist Political Economy (1979), pp.349-355. Online. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40402187 Marx, Karl. The Human Requirements Where There Is Private Property and Under Socialism. The Difference Between Extravagant Wealth and Industrial Wealth. Division of Labor In Bourgeois Society. Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. Prometheus Books: New York, 1988. --------. Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy. Trans. by Martin Nicolaus. Penguin Books: London, 1973. --------. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, volume I. Trans. by Ben Fowkes. Vintage Books: New York, 1977. McCaffery, Larry and Kathy Acker. An Interview With Kathy Acker. Mississippi Review (20), 1991, pp. 8397. Online. http://www.jstor.org/stable20134512 Ong, Aihwa. The Production of Possession: Spirits and the Multinational Corporation in Malaysia. American Ethnologist (15), Medical Anthropology, Feb., 1988, pp. 28-42. Online. http://www.jstor.org/stable/645484 Zwann, Victoria. Rethinking The Slipstream: Kathy Acker Reads Neuromancer. Science Fiction Studies (24), Nov., 1997, pp. 459-470. Online. http://jstor.org/stable/4240647