by Neil Vodavzny

“I like to watch” is the key phrase to this ostensibly ludicrous cult sci-fi thriller from 1975, with Katherine Ross as the hippy-ish heroine.

Her sidekick, Paula Prentiss, is the perfect foil, apparently channelling a braless Katherine Hepburn. Stepford, as I guess most of you know, is the eternal TV commercial, run by men for men (show me a female commercial director).

The men study and subject the women to various tests, to further their aim of producing perfect flesh for perfect studs. Such unsettling sleaze apparently scared off several actresses and, seen in hindsight, I think you should see a comparison to H+? This is ’75, so you have to fast-forward the technology. Sleaze on such a colossal scale occurs when we are missing the world of praxis, which is sensual and romantic, and of which techne is just a part, not the whole caboodle.

Stepford is not licentiousness; everything is disguised in a superficial, repetitive round of stylised women performing services, ie, shopping. Again, you could flash-forward to contemporary pop-stars who are walking products (Rita Ora makes money just by stepping-out). In order to perceive the sinister role techne is playing in such degradation, I went back to ’02, just about the time mobiles were starting to take root.

A mobile is something which is always changing, and there is something sinister in as product that monopolises social-intercourse, while metamorphosing endlessly towards the oft-stated perfection of seamless interfacing. Man and machine as one. None have captured this unstoppable techne trend better than Avril Lavigne.

At the time seen as the “anti-Britney”, in actual fact we now have multiple-Britneys in the shapes of Ri, Cyrus, Perry.. How is it that the pop-punk rebel of formidable talent was not able to persevere? I did a bit of research, and it seems the prevailing view is “more of the same”. In a world of accelerating social-techne, nothing you do can stop the change. Nothing you do can stop the techne co-opting female flesh to its nefarious aim of nicely kitted-out products that sing & dance (online for your satisfaction). Next stop cyborg-city.

You think I jest? Here is a good joke, actually. In ’03 Lavigne perfectly prefigured the era of Miley Cyrus, here in her suggestive loin gyrations she is giving a brilliant parody. Lavigne was/is the intuitive-intellectual, her French (Canadian) indifference is/was indicative of exceptional confidence. Telling it like it is, but I guess few are listening.

Add to this the fact that the music is real, hummable Nirvana-ish anthems, in contrast to the genre-medley of current vogue, lyrically mouthy, completely contrary to prevailing trends. If you check this video for current track Hello Kitty, seems like quite a typical parody, but of course tweets were “racism” (zzz). Why even bother? Where the cyber-public can’t discern the relevance of racial mannerisms and bleat racism like dead parrots, they’re also incapable of discerning relevance of parody. Also, is the parody of ritualistic traditions, or the cute cyborgs that inhabit Japanese pop-culture? How can you tell?

Such mental dysfunction is half-way toward the apparent aim of a textual cyber-future, where the public utter robotic bleats with no connections to a physical world of what you might call theatricality. The Japanese troupe in the video is performing a sort of ritualistic mime, as identifiable with Japanese tradition as The Mikado. This is just one facet of an animalistic world of motifs and emblematic imagery. Think only of heraldic devices, coats of arms, images intuitive of mythic or racial origin, specifying a world connected with subconscious drives.

Race, flora, fauna, symbols ... all are signs of connection with Mother Earth. You can actually see it in the stage designs for The Cunning Vixen (previous). The “connected world” of social-nets is possibly a bridge to the aim of H+, where the body is an adjunct to a colossal Cartesian multiverse of social-text. If this is the aim, or an implicit one at least, then Lavigne’s song will have become literal fact. With everything mobile, stasis – symbolised by the eternal yew tree - has no traction.

Stasis is the inner world of fantasy and subconscious imagination, so one has to say that, however well-intentioned the aims of the cyber-knights, they are doomed to failure against such an impregnable bulwark. The relation between the Right and stasis is probably worth pursuing.