Every individual is on one hand the subject of cognition, that is to say, the complementary cognition of the possibility of the whole objective world, and on the other a single manifestation of that same Will, which objectifies itself in each thing. But this duplicity of our being is not founded in a unity existing for itself: otherwise we should be able to have consciousness of ourselves through ourselves and independently of the objects of cognition and willing: but of this we are utterly incapable; as soon as we attempt to do so, and, by turning our cognition inwards, strive for once to attain complete self-reflection, we lose ourselves in a bottomless void, find ourselves resembling the hollow glass ball out of whose emptiness a voice speaks that has no cause within the ball, and, in trying to grasp ourselves, we clutch, shuddering, at nothing but an insubstantial ghost.  
  - Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Idea  

  [The Subject without properties is]  the philosophical figure for what becomes, with increasing literalness throughout the nineteenth century, the global ubiquity of the white European. His domination is virtually self-legitimating since the capacity to be everywhere present becomes a historical manifestation of the white man's gradual approximation to the universality he everywhere represents.  
  - David Lloyd,  Race Under Representation  

   I am everyone, and no one. I am everywhere, yet nowhere.  
  - Darkman

*

Patrick Bateman, the protagonist of Bret Easton Ellis's novel American Psycho, may stand as the most polemical representation of American materialism during the Reagan years. In Ellis's allegorical examination of the socio-pathology of commodity culture, the mechanisms of self are singularly constituted in the right of consumption. With increasing ferocity, Bateman accumulates the names of others - Calvin Klein, Donna Karan, Vidal Sassoon - to alleviate the nagging sense that his own name has lost meaning. The distinction between people and objects is thoroughly blurred, to him they are no different than the products he acquires, uses up, and discards; a substitution already manifest in the advertising that surrounds him. As his transformation into a total sociopath becomes complete, even the power over life and death cannot reaffirm his identity. At the close of the book, still no one can remember his name.

Ellis's novel touches on the perennial anxiety of late capitalism, as our own surroundings are tailored to our desires, our sense of self is externalised to the point of complete erasure. We fear becoming as inhuman as the objects that are meant to reflect our deepest aspirations and desires. As we move through the novel, we too must become numb like Bateman, as indifferent to the random graphic acts of violence as we are to the contents of his medicine cabinet. The most readily granted expression of subjective agency in commodity culture is constituted as the right of consumption, and with this right comes the promise of re-attaining sovereignty over our domain. In short, we are all promised that with enough money, we each could be king. Ellis speculates about the endpoint of this becoming, the moment of actual assumption of the role of sovereign power hinted at in advertising copy. In the end Ellis realises this consumptive fantasy in the ability to give and take life, or, as more explicitly posited by Michel Foucault, a power constituted in 'the moment when the sovereign can kill' as the true realisation of 'his right over life'.¹ In Bateman's case, this is his attempt to control his own life. In Ellis's vision every act of consumption is an allusion to death, and this forms our attraction to it. And its power - a power originating as the unique right of sovereignty constituted as an exception to the rule of law - provides a model for the individual as a form of absence, in direct opposition to a contemplative reflexive model of the self. As we each approach this sovereignty via consumption, we must accept the inevitable side effect - that, in the words of Giorgio Agamben 'sovereign power is the very impossibility of distinguishing inside from outside...'²

In this model of social anomie we lose ourselves in the ebb and flow of a realised utopia of our desires. Our perpetual movement between the limbos of non-places, such as airport terminals, thruways, malls, housing developments and pre-fab communities - all realisations of some form of consumptive desire - creates a sense of place wholly dissociated from previous ideas of specificity, be they regional, historical or temporal. Our downtowns are made to appear and feel like the malls that had once displaced them, our front yards are decorated with the same wood chip and shrub islands we witness at corporate office parks, our airports declare their own attractiveness as destinations in themselves, a status once limited to the cities they are located in. Thus we fear we are defined by such places, emerging as subjects who demand and are comforted by such control, even empowered by it, and yet are simultaneously subordinated, and de-individualised through the aggregation of our wants and needs. As we spread our culture everywhere, our own identity becomes catastrophically generalised, diluted, and at the moment globalisation completes its mythical project, completely dissolved. The sense of control and order we feel when we can be sure that in any major city in the world we can order a hamburger 'just the way we like it' is coupled with the afterthought that once everyone sees that burger as their own, our tenuous connections to our own identity will evaporate.

This is one brief formulation of a crisis of subjectivity, a post-structuralist apocalypse where all texts and sites refer back to the ideological premise of a masterful subject who stands in a perpetual state of his own erasure. An almost self-deconstructing concept, the 'universalised subject' arrives fully formed in a state of disrepair; its dismantling follows the circular chain of its development: the more we attempt to order and control our own world, the more we are defined by it and enact, symbolically and practically, our own absence. But with every compulsive deconstruction of the 'universalised subject' we force ourselves back into this void. Repeated claims for a depleted agency of the subject appear as the inescapable endpoint of contemporary culture. New technologies are said to offer the complete domination of a society of control, as Jonathan Crary puts it, in 'new levels of mimetic "fidelity" (holography, high-resolution TV) there is an inverse move of the image toward pure surface, so whatever drifts across the screen of either television or home computer is part of the same homogeneity... an infinity of routes and the equivalence of all destinations.'³ this vision of an apocalypse of the subject is not limited to the fixations of theoretical texts, but also a favoured imagining of the mass media. For this reason, the attraction we feel to this idea and the anxiety that it engenders seems better addressed as a kind of fantasy than a functional theoretical concept.

It might be why, as we desire the convenience of 24-hour discount shopping and a Starbucks on every corner, we also fantasise about seeing it all destroyed. Hollywood has offered us ample opportunity to witness the apocalypse of the familiar, and notably its favoured object of annihilation has been Los Angeles itself. We have seen LA rocked by earthquakes in epic scale, re-imagined as an unliveable utopia, crushed by meteors, ripped apart by dinosaurs, pierced by volcanoes and even incinerated by UFOs. While this destruction is sometimes played out in literal form, Los Angeles is often imagined as the site of social apocalypse, a wasteland of immorality and alienation. Los Angeles has been the backdrop for a multiplicity of destructions, easily molded to the worst we can imagine. As Ed Ruscha once remarked about the city, 'it's all facades here, that's what's interesting about LA'.⁴ His emptied black-and-white images of banal architecture - apartment complexes, fuel stations, parking lots - are executed with a seeming arbitrariness rivalled only by the objects he points to, an aesthetic realisation of an Angeleno fantasy of destruction. For Ruscha, people are 'incidental', a 'distraction', as though the Los Angeles he saw precluded the existence of its inhabitants.⁵ With characteristic vagueness, Ruscha posits this reading of his work: 'It may be that there's some sort of emptiness or stage play at the roots of my work. Or at least it may be some kind of final solution' (emphasis added).⁶ For all the playfulness of Ruscha's practice, the ominous ring of the phrase 'final solution' should not be lost.

In the early 1970s the disaster film enjoyed a renaissance of sorts, beginning with breakthrough hits such as the Poseidon Adventure, Towering Inferno, Earthquake and Airport, and re-emerged in the 1990s in a computer-enhanced form. These depictions of the complete destruction of the familiar, and of our collective punishment for technocratic hubris, provided ample escapist fantasy. But the disaster film never allowed the annihilation to be complete; the cataclysmic always allowed a kind of redemption, in which confrontations with death culminated in a new beginning. We could then discard the very history that lurked as the most troubling undercurrent of rationalist expansion in the service of modernity, free to begin anew. Our debt to the past was now paid as a final penance on the way to social utopia. From the ashes of disaster liberal-capitalist democracy could reinvent itself as the utopia it promised but never delivered. The very real social inequalities and economic challenges to American capitalism (the deep recession of the early 1990s and urban unrest that struck American cities) echoed the situation the late 1960s and early 70s. We could forget the Los Angeles riots because the city was a now a smoking crater, with the survivors banded together around the American flag that now operated as a collective symbol of redemption and forgetting.

While these films sublimate and reconfigure the anxieties of western democratic capitalism, they are prefigured, in the 1970s and 90s, by films that concern themselves directly with the construction of subjectivity within an apocalyptically amoral society. This social catastrophe reaffirms and reconstitutes what might be considered a traditional retro-subject in jeopardy. The signature vehicles for such stars as John Wayne and Bruce Willis insistently assert this re-emergence of the modern anti-hero. Moments of crisis are used to reveal our need for such 'real men', whose alienation from society is marked by their reflection of the harsh realities that lie beneath the safety of social order. But Hollywood fantasy is not the only location for realising this return. Shortly after September 11th, the mythical 'real men' that were our working-class heroes were heralded as the new model for the masculine, the trend celebrated even in the sober pages of The New York Times. The traditional masculinity of men who spoke with actions and not words assured us that our rugged individualism could again double for our national identity. This mythology provided comfort, and gave us permission to ride the globe like cowboys searching for the ultimate villains of our consumerist polity.

The focus of this essay is not the repeated play of the collapse of the familiar but, more explicitly, the fantasy of experiencing this collapse as the vicarious protagonist who survives as the echo of society itself. This, it seems, is the central fantasy and the source of our attraction - the embodiment of the dissolution of the social field in a dialectic metonymy. In his exemplary investigation, White, Richard Dyer convincingly argues the key role of the martyr fantasy as it reasserts the centrality of white subjectivity. The suffering of the white male subject, Dyer posits, 'typically conveys a sense of dignity and transcendence in such pain... the white man has - as the bearer of agony, as universal subject - to have dark drives against which to struggle.'⁷ these 'dark drives' often reflect the crimes of society as a whole that are mirrored in the becoming of the universalised subject, thus the sins of man are possessed by this subject and are his to embody and triumph over. This suffering is often codified in an alienation from a world populated by those who cannot fathom or complete their penance due to the limits of their own perception. In bearing this weight of understanding, the white subject formulates this suffering in a worldview marked by 'disinterest - abstraction, distance, separation', mirroring a 'public sphere that is the mark of civilisation, itself the aim of history'.⁸

Film and television narratives enact the most overt play of such fantasies, but despite their fictional and escapist qualities, they are not a diversion from reality, but more accurately, they accentuate the aesthetics of these desires. In this sense, they are more deeply implicated within positivist, empiricist representations of the 'real world' than they are often credited with. My contention is that the very basis of any realist endeavour is deeply intertwined with such mass-cultural narratives, and moreover directly employs fantasy to define the parameters of an objective reality. While film often asks to be interpreted in terms of its immediate social context, only recently have the implications of these fictions been directly related to our construction of a world view. Pictorial media still have not undergone such analysis; the political and social examinations of painting and photography usually rely on the relationship to the real instead of the construction of the fantastic. The important distinction to make is that pictorial narrative is deeply tied to specific historical contexts, and its examination is not a tacit assertion of a kind of ur-text of experience, but of a relation of specific social conditions that such fantasies originate.

The most troubling dimension of the investigations of subjectivity, and the postmodern and post-structuralist examinations of its collapse, is that they themselves extricate their own fixation from the milieu in which they develop. Such investigations stem from a position defined in radical opposition to the dominant ideology while often claiming that the possibility of radical practice has already been rendered wholly impossible. Most Marxist social critics operate within this paradox of positioning - while defining capitalism as an expansive, all encompassing, social system able to subsume any revolutionary opposition to its workings, the very act of writing in opposition seems an exception to the rule. It seems these inquiries are launched from a kind of non-place, a voided location from which critical distance and meta-operations can still function while their very ability to do so is suspect. The limitless and displaced quality that is ascribed to capitalism as a concept seems to mirror the very subjectivity from which their critique is mounted, the dismantling of the authorial subject mirroring the supposed dissolution of the nation-state under globalisation. As we look outside, we seem to be able to see only the reflection of ourselves.

It was such a death that Barthes saw as the foregone conclusion of every photograph. Only after his lamentation of his own mother's death could photography deliver him melancholic redemption in the form of the 'punctum' or, in Lacanian terms, the 'ever-returning real'. It was no mistake that Barthes defined the punctum as a wound, an indexical trace of a collision. The effect of his unanticipated encounter with a photograph of his mother reawakened visceral experience as a traumatic void, an emptiness constituted by her fleeting, inexplicable presence within the image. Death, for Barthes, lurked in every image as this type of personal loss. In Sigfried Kracauer's description of a familial photographic confrontation, he saw something more absolute than death: total erasure. To his horror, his grandmother, just a young showgirl in the image, was buried alive in a litany of banal detail. She became an 'archeological mannequin' into which memories of his grandmother had 'dissolved'. But it wasn't actually his grandmother who became absent, but Kracauer's own memory, his own history. For Kracauer the impenetrable surface of things was the wasteland of the photographic image. For both men, the lens pillaged this sense of the personal, the real, reducing it to a catalogue of things, textures and shapes. Memories and histories were successfully obliterated under the weight of its descriptive power.

The play of anxiety that plagues both Barthes's and Kracauer's interpretations of the photograph is located at the intersection of positivist empirical investigations of truth, and for lack of a better term, the poetic and mnemonic experience of the real. This dual model might be best described as the objective view, and the emotive or experiential (the first finds its correlative in the figure of the cowboy/explorer, the second in the flâneur). In both of these approaches, the concept of the real as an accessible and expressible constant is asserted. These modes of approach, as they are theoretically defined, make such a claim through their assumption of, first, a truth that can be ascertained by the photographic imaging of a subject and second, through the distillation of an affect or essential emotive quality and persist despite their repeated deconstruction.

In one of John Szarkowski's foundational attempts to define the nature of photographic representation in the catalogue for the 1978 Museum of Modern Art exhibition 'Mirrors and Windows' he writes that the core of its meaning lies between a 'central and indispensable presence in the picture of its maker, whose sensibility is the photograph's ultimate subject', and a realist approach that 'is used... to stand for a more generous and inclusive acceptance of fact, objective structure, and the logic of process and system'.⁹ Objectivity here is tacitly defined as an ability of the photograph to reveal a kind of latent truth through a positivist faith in perception as aided by machine. The historical conditions of this notorious deployment of photography are far too numerous to delve into here, but in this genre the geological surveys of the American West, the physiognomic studies of criminals, the motion studies of Etienne-Jules Marey, and Charles Marville's documentation of Old Paris all come to mind. Each of these projects proposed that the documentation of facts was possible through pictorial organisation, and were all equally consistent in the relegation of the conditions of their production (and most often the agendas that guided them) to a quiet subtext. They served these unacknowledged ideological ends better by claiming 'factual' and universal ideals, claiming these pictorial models to be the raw materials for social, economic or scientific understanding. Objectivity then is better understood as a claim made from a position of power than as something implicit within the images themselves. The lie in this assertion of objectivity is that no singular subjectivity (or ideological belief) can be found at its origin, but a universal concept operating as the interminable de facto criteria for all relations, i.e. as absolute and non-ideological. Moreover, these formulations of the external world and their conditions of production maintain a deep relevance to our contemporary culture.

The American Survey image captured the expansionist desires of a fledgling republic after the Civil War. The surveys were meant to provide both valuable geological and topographical information about the West to the Congress, and were also a means of indirect subsidy for the private sector - to encourage land speculation and to attract the development of unsettled territories. Through their pictorial organisation these photographs demarcated land as possession, placing it under the singular view of a privileged eye. In demonstrating that the land could be encompassed in the monocular gaze of the camera lens, these images provided subliminal reinforcement of the idea that man could control it. Writing on the American West, Jane Thompson describes the power of these representations to locate an imperialist desire within the passive experience of the spectator, transferring an agenda in the service of a state apparatus to the psyche of the individual citizen. As she writes: '[the blankness of the plain] implies - without ever stating - that this is a field where a certain mastery is possible... the openness of the space means that domination can take place virtually through the act of opening ones eyes, through the act, even, of watching a representation on a screen.'¹⁰ As this experience of possession is 'shared' with the individual subject, the sense of triumph is claimed as a democratic realisation of personal freedom enabled by the state and economic opportunism. This defined a distinctly American mythology of the West as an area to be mastered and colonised and whose subordination could be experienced as a triumph on the personal level.

This understanding of the effectiveness of the photographic image to disseminate universal ideals to individual subjects, led in part to the development of photographic models that chose the appearance of participatory or experientially authentic reportage. Such images announce their first-person observation through more dynamic, asymmetrical or seemingly arbitrary form-al structures. As the opposing dialectical pole of positivist claims for objective reality, the experiential model privileges immersion and intimacy over detachment (most often realised as the 'snapshot' style). As John Szarkowski wrote in the introduction to The Photographer's Eye: '[the photographer] learned that the world itself is an artist of incomparable inventiveness, and that to recognise its best works and moments, to anticipate them, to clarify them and make them permanent, requires intelligence both acute and supple.'¹¹ this 'real' of experience is the mark of authenticity in the photograph, an echoing of the photographer's inner world, as it is manifest in his chosen object. In his formulation, the work of Garry Winogrand or Robert Frank operates as much as a comment on life in the city, as it does as a dislocated self-portrait, thus the experience of the specific auteur is presented as the cipher for universal understanding. In essence, the photographer must become as dynamic as the city itself, and in the end, be as capable of experiencing and responding to its multiplicitous character though the production of its most worthy subject.

As the quintessential Baudelairian flâneur, the photographer becomes 'the passionate spectator' whose home is 'in the heart of the multitude, amid the ebb and flow of movement, amid the fugitive and infinite',¹² 'a mirror as vast as the crowd itself'.13 The flâneur is defined by Baudelaire in terms of vision, the view of the scene encompasses his capacity to internalise the system around him, from which he vacillates between a mastery over the crowd and his own dissolution into its flow. Walter Benjamin makes special note of this condition, as he writes in his 1938 essay, 'Paris in the Second Empire in Baudelaire': 'Baudelaire divorced himself from the crowd as Hero... he set out to conquer the streets - in images.'¹⁴ This view of the crowd is intertwined with a primal revulsion, as Baudelaire goes on to say: 'the idolatrous mob demanded an ideal worthy of itself and appropriate to its nature - that is perfectly understood',¹⁵ and for Benjamin the primacy of vision in Baudelaire amounted to a way of regaining control, to avoid 'disappearing forever'.¹⁶ Klaus Theweleit observes that 'command not only tames the mass in its entirety; more important, it reconstitutes the bodily mass... giving it direction, reassembling - or even recreating - a body in dissolution'.¹⁷ These positions are again drawn into direct conflict in the late 1960s and early 70s when, in the United States, a violent recon-figuration of the urban was taking place, simultaneously threatening bourgeois identity in terms of its authority within and identification with the city.

It was in the widespread urban unrest of the 60s that the street photograph had its heyday. The white male subject found himself in a disturbing paradox, as Richard Dyer astutely describes: '...white man has attained a position of being without properties, unmarked, universal, just human'. For Dyer this quality constitutes the quintessential anxiety of the white male subject, as he continues, 'to be without properties also suggests not being at all. This may be thought of as pure spirit, but it also hints at non-existence, or death.'¹⁸ Benjamin Buchloh has argued that this might be the cause of a return to the traditional pictorial genres within photography, identifying this precarious situation within Thomas Struth's portraits of the 'globalised' upper-middle class. Struth's portraits appear problematically regressive, as 'the condition of subjecthood appears... restricted to those that are fortunate enough to have privileged access to... the apparatus of subject formation as much as to the proper conventions of representing subjectivity, i.e. to the Western European genre of portraiture'.¹⁹ But Buchloh speculates that Struth may in fact be representing 'the dissolution which constitutes the subjective experience at this very moment', an indication of the demise of the centrality of the subjectivity that his archive first appears to be reifying.²⁰

Marc Augé saw this as the paradox of the contemporary subject of 'supermodernity'. Writing of the world traveller in the modern age, Augé posits that 'he is confronted with... an image of himself, but in truth it is a very strange image. The only face to be seen, the only voice to be heard, in the silent dialogue he holds with the landscape-text addressed to him along with others, are his own: the face and voice of solitude made all the more baffling by the fact that it echoes millions of others.'²¹ this might be why Robert Adams turned to the cluttered expanse of Denver's suburbs to redeploy the American landscape tradition (as it was originally constituted in the photographic surveys of Clarence King, with whom Timothy O'Sullivan, Carleton Watkins and William Henry Jackson made some of their most renowned work). Lewis Baltz once commented that the formal composition of his images merely 'mirror' the implicit logic of the landscapes he saw. The open space of the American West was 'an apparently unbroken expanse of land [that] is, in fact, overlaid with a network of invisible lines demarking ownership and indicating a pattern of future development... the arbitrary result of financial speculation'.²² Baltz's images depict the mythology of the American West as realised in the concept of 'landscape as real estate', where the classical binary opposition of man and nature is displaced by the great equaliser, capital.

Even at the time of the American Surveys, a capitalist restructuring of the open plain was occurring. A subset of the geological survey images was the documentation of mining projects in the American West, which designated territories of possession and use. While the photographs of the largely uncharted West often provided the occasion for the very naming of the land, Allen Trachtenberg has observed that this was a tautological impulse. He writes: 'the name lays claim to the view. ... A named view is one that has been seen, known and thereby already possessed'.²³ thus with each act of naming and viewing, a re-territorialisation of the bounds of the self occurred, a self defined more completely in the territories into which its expansion was a foregone conclusion. But this process of naming was already being deployed by the mining industry to more explicit effects, as Trachtenberg writes, '[names] were more nakedly aggressive... outward signs of the act of appropriation of the "mining industry" if not the "survey" itself.'²⁴ Names such as 'Confidence', 'Challenge', 'Empire' and 'Imperial' make explicit the mythology they were establishing, and the sense of empowerment and moral justification in its exploitation.²⁵ Such names encouraged the subject position the views of the West were meant to illicit, a model of subjectivity whose core system was the 'self-justifying ideology of competition and expansion'.²⁶

The territorialisation of open space through naming, as it occurs first in the seemingly innocuous approach that Clarence King engaged in and the more ominous capitalist/industrial naming of the mining companies, is further complicated in Baltz's series New Industrial Complexes around Irvine, California. In Baltz's images, territories are marked only by opaquely bland monikers such as 'PlastX' or 'Semicoa', denoting neither place nor conquest, but a completely disengaged moniker of 'face-less-ness'. Essentially these are the markings of nowhere zones. The process of industrialisation as consolidation is realised as its dispersal in the corporate formation: there is no longer a centre but a disengaged concept, a branding. Ideological implications are wrapped in isolated spheres of self-referential, hermetic meaning, divorced from an outside object, equally disengaged from the flow of production in any material sense as their names are devoid of semantic meaning.

The pictorial innovations of O'Sullivan and his contemporaries are located within Baltz's work as the first step toward the numbingly bleak vision of contemporary life presented within 'New Topographics'.²⁷ Baltz's highly regimented, meticulously titled, gridded studies of the anonymous architecture of late capitalism resonate as apocalyptic environments where the inhabitants for which they were built are completely erased. Just as the survey images' 'objective' ordering of the landscape was underscored by economic interest, Baltz here acknowledges that capitalism may offer the truest objective order for the landscape, after all, the ether of capitalist exchange value has no face. As Gilles Deleuze observed, 'in a society of control the corporation has replaced the factory, and the corporation is a spirit, a gas'.²⁸ Just as the street photograph and survey image formed the respective mass subjectivities of the time, the ideal bourgeois subject now may be the corporation, as described by Baltz's images of mute exteriors breathing no indication of life within.

This might have been the impetus for Miles Coolidge's views of Safetytown (1991), a three-quarter-scale city built in southern California to teach children about urban safety. The city assumes oddly ominous qualities; empty facades, blank windows and vacant intersections make one think more of post-apocalyptic science fiction than a teaching tool. Unlike the New Topographics work, which played on absence in densely settled areas, Safteytown is an autonomous city never intended for living in. The only markers of the functional city that remain untouched in this mini version are the bright colours of corporate sponsorship, demarcating this land where there are no inhabitants, only potential consumers. Child-scale gas stations suggest a consumption that will occur years later, a Denny's restaurant brackets the main intersection hoping that the image of its logo will inform the mini-passers-by in their future decisions of where to take their as yet non-existent families. The city as a social network is relegated to symbols of consumption, freed from even the scale of the city it mimics; corporate logos are its monuments.

These representations of the city abandoned still leave room for the survivor, the photographer himself as the last witness to the destruction. While the narrative of the survivor has been explored in film, often he is a figure acted upon, trying to put up one last gesture of defiant resistance to chaotic collapse. Here we are given the post-apocalyptic subject who is aware of the complete social breakdown that surrounds him, moving, flâneur-like, through the city as a reflection of its state of crisis. 'De-Fens', played by Michael Douglas in Joel Schumacher's 1991 film Falling Down, is just such a vehicle: mild-mannered, heroically average and permeable. Moving through the marginal spaces of a disintegrating Los Angeles, he encounters every social and racial stereotype imaginable, from the money grubbing Korean shopkeeper, to Chicano gangsters and neo-Nazis. Each time he declares his own separation, dispensing violent 'justice' to those he meets, and finally, after making his way across the city, takes his own life. His dislocation from the city that surrounds him is calibrated by the name he assumes, cribbed from his car's vanity plate - once a pathetic celebration of his profession, and now a sign of white male subjectivity in a state of retreat. The violence done to him, and that he has done to others, is prefigured by the corporation that defined his life and then set him adrift.

A similarly distopic imagining of Los Angeles gave birth to Liam Neeson's character Darkman, in Sam Raimi's 1990 film of the same name. Neeson, a noble scientist and inventor of a synthetic skin turned misanthropic crime fighter, is hunted by a malevolent real-estate developer and his band of ruthless thugs. They incinerate him and his laboratory and he is left disfigured on the banks of the Los Angeles River. He is then found and miraculously given super strength, which along with his own invention gives him the ability to seek revenge. He infiltrates the very identities of his tormentors, in order to infiltrate their ranks and hunt them down. Taking to the sewers, abandoned warehouses and other marginal spaces of Los Angeles, he becomes a metaphor for the city itself, a seamless façade that obscures the scars that lie beneath. In the final scene in the film, after sending the real-estate developer and his henchmen to their deaths, Neeson flees the fiancée he has just liberated. She screams his name, 'Peyton', and he replies, 'Peyton is gone'. With that he runs into the street and merges imperceptibly with the crowd. She tries in vain to find him but soon realises the futility of her search. He has disappeared into the rush of commuters, and as the camera pans over the crowds, settling on one anonymous face, Neeson's voice-over begins and we learn that he has become 'everyone, and no one'. Neeson's character re-emerges as a heroic survivor of the city mired in corruption and crime, a transformation that occurs in this complete loss of his previous individuality. Unlike the schizoid model of superhero and alter ego, he is the totalised combination, a third term that doubles as a void.

Within these two films, the transcendence and martyrdom of the main characters is marked by their floating names. They are externalised from the city, embodied in their own erasure, as their alienation takes on physical form as absence. In distinction from this, some recent action films propose a similarly restrictive image of society but assure that the transcendence offered by such heroic martyrdom of the white male is a reinstatement of his subjective autonomy. In The Matrix characters are renamed when they ascend from the false values and worlds in which they had lived, proposing the renaming as their reconnection with their true selves. The Matrix follows Keanu Reeves's ascension from a lowly computer programmer who moonlights as a hacker, to the Kung-Fu-fighting Jesus-surrogate, Neo. In a world that is a computer-generated fantasy, the other inhabitants are semi-disposable zombies who aren't cognisant of their own They Live, Neo is gifted with an awareness of the façade that surrounds all people, and the elusive foreign agent that has constructed the world in which we think we live. While in They Live Nada (whose name provides ample evidence of the stark contrast between these films) sacrifices himself to bring a world controlled by interplanetary bourgeois capitalists, whom he discovers accidentally, to a point of collapse, Neo is the redemption of a unified subject who has been almost divinely 'chosen' to be a saviour. Nada begins the film as nothing, and ends up in much the same state, while Neo is the embodiment of redemption itself. In Neo, the white male subject has gained life after death with the conclusion of his worldly character; he ascends to a higher plan of existence.

The Matrix Reloaded follows a distinctly more complicated form of transcendence. This time the most radical metamorphoses occur not to our saviour in Prada, but to the computer programme in human form, Mr Smith. In the first film Smith is a predictably evil agent - with a deep disgust for everything human, he is little more than a de-individualised villain. Clothed in a variation of working-class professional attire (boxy black suit with white tie), Smith is inconspicuously understated compared to the black vinyl and shiny euro-trash aesthetic of the gang of protagonists. But through the course of the film we learn that Smith has in fact undergone a radical and unforeseen mutation. Through his contact with Neo his programming has changed, gaining new powers and an autonomy from the computer system that created him. With equal ferocity, he combats both the agents of the synthetic world and the human rebels lead by Neo. Smith's mutation is a function of his ability to replicate himself in others, in essence to take over other bodies, not assuming their appearance, but instead making them identical to him. Each individual is not a vehicle to be controlled by the original Smith, but an identical sentient copy, a completely decentralised subject. Smith is the serialised model of white subjectivity, here presented in ubiquity. Like the endless reproducibility of the commodity, Smith is a succession of selves, each arriving fully formed. This mob is an inversion of the Baudelairian metonymy of the flâneur, a crowd as singularity. One might imagine armies of Mr Smith returning from work to the sprawling identical houses photographed by Adams or Baltz, or the serial displays of vernacular architecture of Ruscha's frames. The perfect subjects for the mass-produced home. What is key here is that the process of naming, as was the case with the survey image, creates a new body for the dominant subject. The crisis of Patrick Bateman is realised in figures who violently enact their positions as voided characters, and evolved into those whose process of naming is their final redemption as a transcendental subject: a subject that passes through the void, and re-emerges as divine.

— Walead Beshty