Abstract
Examining two key narratives by Pepe Rojo, “Ruido gris” (1996) and Punto cero (2000), these works present a fantastic televisuality—as opposed to virtual reality—as a dominant feature of this scopic regime during the last half of the 1990s. The story analysis includes how NAFTA altered the Mexican media industry that resulted in a cascade of effects, such as causing a proliferation of hyperviolent reality TV programs that inspired the author. Rojo’s overlooked essay on posthumanism that argues for the body’s obsolescence, “Tócame estoy enfermo,” is also brought into dialogue with both narratives. Given the author’s affinity for Jacques Lacan, this novel analyzes Punto cero through a Lacanian lens, while also interpreting the novel’s articulation of detemporalized subjectivities—a hallmark of the postmodern condition caused by televisual regimes.
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Notes
- 1.
Here are some examples of his other work where visual themes appear but are not as central to the two works treated in this chapter: “Conversaciones con Yoni Rei”, “Y de pronto,” and “El deseo y su cura” from Yonke; “El presidente sin órganos,” “Dos años,” and “Apariciones,” “Tócame, estoy enfermo” from interrupciones; “Imag/Esp/Ecies: Random notes Towards a Zoology,” and “Estroboscopía.”
- 2.
A very similar scene occurs in David Cronenberg’s Videodrome, which Rojo cites in his essay “Tócame, estoy enfermo” (2009b), and clearly is a key influence in Rojo’s thinking.
- 3.
This is also what characterized US cyberpunk in the mid-1980s. Following up the brief mention of the subgenre in the introduction, it appeared in William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984) as a literary movement and by the time cyberpunk story compilation Mirrorshades came out in 1986, some of its writers were already speaking of its death as a movement. Curiously, some Mexican cyberpunk authors, such as Rodrigo Pardo and others, have stated that they wrote cyberpunk stories before knowing of or having read Gibson or other US cyberpunk. According to Luis Ramírez: “Por ese entonces varios escritores contaban la ciencia ficción desde una perspectiva que (debido a que no eran fáciles de encontrar las obras de Gibson, [Bruce] Sterling y otros, y no estaban, por lo tanto, muy difundidas), parecían propuestas sin abordar. Es el caso de Rodrigo Pardo -que obtiene el Premio Puebla en 1996, con un híbrido cyberpunk/hombres lobo-, quien asegura que él ya escribía cyberpunk antes de conocer el trabajo de Gibson. Eso nos pasó a muchos” (n.d. “Cyberpunk…”) [At that time some writers told science fiction from a perspective that seemed like unchartered territory (due to the fact that it was not easy to finds works by Gibson, [Bruce] Sterling, and others, and they were not as such well known). That was the case with Rodrigo Pardo—who won the Puebla Prize in 1996 with a hybrid cyberpunk/wolfman story—who claims that he wrote cyberpunk before knowing Gibson’s work. That happened to many of us.]. While some of the roots of Mexican cyberpunk have been said to be traceable as far back as Porcayo’s short story “Sueño eléctrico” (1984) and José Luís Zárate’s “Análogos y therbligs” (1986), this was not a self-aware movement labelled cyberpunk until the mid-1990s.
- 4.
These were determined by various indicators that equal the Digital Opportunity Index (DOI), and is comprised by factors such as percentage of population that use a mobile telephone, mobile telephone tariff rates, internet access tariff rates, proportion of households with a computer, proportion of households with access to Internet at home, proportion of individuals that use the Internet, ratio of fixed broadband consumers, etc. (“World Information…” 2007).
- 5.
This is not to be confused with John Caldwell’s appropriation of the term in his 1995 book (also called Televisuality) to describe a characteristic excess of style proper to US television starting in the 1980s.
- 6.
In addition, H. García rightly points out that the media company appears as an amalgam of a maquiladora and a factory- or government-like entity that organizes most core aspects of the life of its workers or citizens (2011, 109).
- 7.
This stance goes even further in Rojo’s story “Conversaciones con Yoni Rei” (1998), where parents exchange their unwanted children with the generically named, multinational corporation Telcor International for credit to be used for shopping. Telcor uses these children as subjects for experiments (69). The tragicomic protagonist Yoni Rei of the title reveals himself to be a sad, irreverent, perverse, and increasingly monstrous cyborg as the story progresses.
- 8.
See Thomas Mathiesen’s article about the synoptic society “The Viewer Society: Michel Foucault’s ‘Panopticon’ Revisited” (1997).
- 9.
Despite this reading, however, there exists a unique element to viewership and ratings worth considering: advertising in media markets inverts this idea that viewers are the consumers of televisual broadcast commodities, that they possess “consumer sovereignty” (qtd in Williams 2004, 89); this is because advertisers demand audiences from media companies in order to market to them, which then determines supply. As such, rather than viewers being consumers in this realm, they are actually the commodity sold to the companies advertising on television. This would be pertinent to any analysis of “Ruido gris” if commercials appeared anywhere in the text, but they are wholly absent. Commercials do not exist in this fictional world and can only be inferred as a background element driving the value of ratings. Therefore, this curious omission in the story leaves ratings as a kind of floating signifier that are not explicitly connected to the ratings system.
- 10.
This is according to the Nielsen Television Audience Measurement webpage, where the Introduction page confirms: “Since it was established in 1991, IBOPE has done a systematic, continuous and automated television ratings measurement in México” (Nielsen n.d.) 1991 is the year when set meters and diaries began collecting data (a more rudimentary form of collecting data), and in 1993 “people meters” were installed to achieve more precision. IBOPE refers to the parent company, Instituto Brasileiro de Opinião Pública e Estatística, a market research company established in the 1940s that expanded to numerous other countries in the 1980s and 1990s.
- 11.
This occurred after a suspicious bidding process that later implicated the owner of TV Azteca Ricardo Salinas Pliego of being gifted with favoritism, given the connection of his brother to the ex-president Raúl Salinas de Gortari at the time (Toussaint 1998, 133–134).
- 12.
Rojo has written a substantial number of nonfiction texts, including essays, manifestos, and other experimental, hybrid works. His 2009 book i nte rrupciones includes six essays (2009a), although his work can be found in a wide variety of publication outlets, from science fiction websites like La langosta se ha posado to independent cultural criticism in Revista Replicante: periodismo digital, critica cultural and in independent publisher Tierra Adentro’s website.
- 13.
Rojo wrote two non-fiction texts with the title “Tócame, estoy enfermo.” The first, mentioned above and discussed in this chapter, initially appeared in the website run by Gerardo Porcayo La langosta se ha posado in 2002. In 2009, a revised version appeared, also in PDF form (without printed page numbers, but for which I am citing as the number of pages within the PDF) with extensive footnotes attached, and making the text rather lengthy at over 9000 words. The second text with the same title is much shorter and appears in the 2009 collection book i nte rrupciones with a mixture of essays, poems and short stories. Rojo argues something quite different and more Lacanian in the shorter essay: language is a virus to the human (2009a, 101).
- 14.
Given the year this essay was published, it joins a number of other nonfiction texts written by Mexicans regarding the posthuman, sharing numerous thematic affinities with them: El cuerpo transformado: cyborgs y nuestra descendencia tecnológica en la realidad y en la ciencia ficción (2001) by Naief Yehya, La utopía de los seres posthumanos (2004) by Luz María Sepúlveda, El cuerpo post-humano en el arte y la cultura contemporánea (2005) by Iván Mejía, and Posthumano: la vida después del hombre (2007) by Mauricio Bares. For more information, see my article “Does the Posthuman Actually Exist in Mexico? A Critique of the Essayistic Production on Posthumanist Discourse Written by Mexicans (2001–2007)” in Posthumanism and Latin(x) American Science Fiction (Tobin, 2022).
- 15.
The essay offers a hodgepodge of US and European thinkers and science fiction writers whose output focuses on media and subjectivity, such as J.G. Ballard, Jean Baudrillard, William Gibson, Marshall McLuhan, Steven Shaviro, Bruce Sterling, and Slavoj Žižek, among others. While not an academic text per se, its length, numerous citations, and overall depth of argumentation makes it a valid entry into essayistic discourse on the posthuman.
- 16.
Rojo also cites other concepts by Virilio in his essay, such as “retinal persistence,” and “industrialization of perception” (2009b, 3), the “third interval” (2009b, 5), “endocolonization” (2009b, 9), and “vision without a gaze” (2009b, 11). Virilio’s thought is vast and complex, and too much to adequately discuss here, but John Armitage succinctly describes the overarching thrust of the French theorist’s thought when he writes that Virilio’s work “traces the gradual but continuing disappearance of human subjectivity into technological systems” (1997, 201) Eventually, human visual perspective will be displaced by “vision machines” that see in place of the human. See Virilio’s The Vision Machine (1994) for more information.
- 17.
Shafer reads this parallel as evidence that el Desencantado is representative of a queer figure/cyborg (2017, 90).
- 18.
I have taught this story numerous times in multiple courses about science fiction from Latin America, and a majority of students consistently rank this as their favorite.
- 19.
A virtual kidnapping, also called telephonic extortion, consists of the criminal dialing a telephone number, often at random, and the person who picks up the phone hears a voice, usually a minor, screaming for help. The victim in a panic usually says the name of his or her son or daughter out loud, and the extortion begins, after the victim believes that their son or daughter has been kidnapped when in reality they have never even met the kidnappers. The ransom amount requested varies from as low as 500 pesos up to 20,000 dollars. The turnaround time is usually quick and minimizes the risk for the criminal. In the year 2001, only 10 cases were reported, but in 2007 that figure reached as many as 10,000 (Amescua Chávez 2010, 116). The “virtual” aspect to this event is facilitated by leveraging the anonymity of a telephone call to make the victim believe a loved one has been kidnapped and demands ransom to be saved. However, this is not the case of Punto cero, where the virtuality of the kidnapping occurs on television and not in the subjective experience of the protagonist who is supposedly kidnapped.
- 20.
More precisely, this tendency can be understood as the “modern fantastic,” according to Omar Nieto’s Teoría general de lo fantástico: Del fantástico clásico al posmoderno (2015), where he offers a tripartite taxonomy between classic, modern, and postmodern types.
- 21.
This particular plot point becomes the most difficult to suspend disbelief on, given the many suggestions of his friends and extreme ease with which he could make a phone call or just take a walk out of his apartment to anywhere to see how—or if—he is seen by others. The narrative gives no substantial justification as to Ray’s motivations, only that the television seems to take away his desire to do anything other than watch it: “Ray piensa en llamar a la policía para dar cuenta de su situación con tal de poder utilizar de nuevo su tarjeta de crédito y comprar todas las cosas que se le antojan. Lo olvida tan pronto como cambia de canal” (2012, 114) [Ray thinks of calling the police in order to account for anything that would allow him to again use his credit card to buy all the things that he wants. He forgets as soon as he changes the channel].
- 22.
With the exception of the character Lucy, which carries a first-person narration, the majority of the novel is told with a third-person, omniscient narrator.
- 23.
For Raiford and Friedberg, this can include screens other than television. The notion of space refers to “the ‘space’ that is constructed, effaced, traversed, contained on, through, in, at and around a variety of screens” (2004, 131). They state that televisual space has a multitude of potential definitions and uses and does not refer exclusively to television as the electronic device that receives broadcast signals and displays them on a monitor, but could also include the screen spaces where other types of images cross the television screen, such as the video games and video art installations.
- 24.
In the original English translation of The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, there is a negation included in the last sentence that completely inverts its meaning: “But I am not in the picture” (1998, 96; my emphasis). This would seem to be a very unfortunate translation error, taking into account the radical change of meaning for the sentence. This Spanish translation presumably comes the Paidos publication of Lacan’s text from 1997. Given this, as well as for consistency’s sake, I have chosen to keep the original translation that appears in the novel, rather than correct it and speculate how this came to be. In any case, taking into account how Lacan’s overarching theory articulates a severely decentered subject, it strongly suggests that the “I” is not locatable in the picture.
- 25.
Kas is a soft-drink manufactured and sold by Pepsi-Co that was originally released in the Spanish market before entering Latin America in the 1990s. Predominantly sold in the largest markets in the region, Argentina and Brazil, it was not until it entered Mexico in 1994 that it reached a moderate degree of success. Leveraging the power of cross-marketing, the drink was sold with the promotional help of the song “Dame más,” played by the Argentine group The Sacados, itself a full-length, four-minute musical video-cum-Kas commercial located on a beach with many surfing shots, the singer belting out verses while the choruses involves ample takes of young, attractive people swilling Kas and smiling. Also, other advertisements were known for employing highly stereotyped gendered depictions, often with a slim, attractive, head-turning young woman whose body becomes the object of young male gazers who look onward. This last one clearly influences Rojo’s introduction of Andrea, as the description parallels the stereotyped model just described. (“Kas” 2009).
- 26.
Rojo’s story “Conversaciones con Yoni Rei” also incorporates televisual vernacular in its discourse. The story attempts to emulate a mediatic structure throughout by framing the story within the context of a television script. It both commences and closes with a framing device that employs textual markers: “Fade in” (written in English) begins the narration whereas “Fade out” closes it. This frames the story with an explicit ideal reader in mind as a televisual spectator. Throughout the story, text maintains this structure with other scene descriptions that mimic scriptwriting conventions, such as “(Aplausos)” [“Applause”] (1998, 68, 71, 80, 82, “(Sollozos)” [“Sobs”] (1998, 70, 75), “(“Risas)” [“Laughs”] (1998, 76) and various “Corte a” [“Cut to”] a different scene—all in order to either give the text a script-like format or the story a television-like reading experience where the reader is immersed in a literary world that emulates a televisual world of sensationalist reality TV.
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Tobin, S.C. (2023). Televisual Subjectivities: Mediatic Ultraviolence and Disappearing Bodies in “Ruido gris” [“Gray Noise”] and Punto cero [Point Zero] by Pepe Rojo. In: Vision, Technology, and Subjectivity in Mexican Cyberpunk Literature . Studies in Global Science Fiction. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-31156-7_3
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