PHASE III

Growing up Cyber: Male Trunks and female Freaks
Ferociously intelligent and exasperating, Limbo presents itself as the notebooks of Dr. Martine, a neurosurgeon who defiantly left his medical post in World War III and fled to an uncharted Pacific island . He finds islanders, Mundunji tribe, practicing a primitive form of lobotomy to q quiet the tonus in antisocial people. Rationalizing that it is better to do the surgery properly than to let people die from infections and botched jobs, Martine takes over the operation and uses them to do neuroresarch on brain function mapping. He discovers that no matter half deeply he cuts, certain characteristics appear to be twined, and one can not be excised without sacrificing the other - aggression and eroticism, for example, or creativity and a capacity for violence.

The appearance on the island of queer limbs, man who have had their arms and legs amputate the and replaced by atomic-powered plastic prostheses, gives Martine an excuse to leave his island family and find out how to world has shaped up in the aftermath of the world. The island/mainland dichotomy is the first of a proliferating series of divisions. Their production follows characteristics pattern. First the narrative presents what appears to be a unity (the island locale; the human psyche), which nevertheless cleaves in to (mainlanders come to the island, a synecdoche referencing second locale that exists apart from the first; twin impulses are located within psyche). Sooner or later the cleavage arouses anxiety, and textual representation try to a chief unity again by undergoing metamorphosis, usually truncation or amputation (martin and the narrative leave the island behave and concentrate on the mainland, which posits itself as a unity; the islanders undergo lobotomies to make them whole citizens again)..

The island/mainland dichotomy is the first of a proliferating series of divisions. Their production follows characteristics pattern. First the narrative presents what appears to be a unity (the island locale; the human psyche), which nevertheless cleaves in to (mainlanders come to the island, a synecdoche referencing second locale that exists apart from the first; twin impulses are located within psyche). Sooner or later the cleavage arouses anxiety, and textual representation try to a chief unity again by undergoing metamorphosis, usually truncation or amputation (martin and the narrative leave the island behave and concentrate on the mainland, which posits itself as a unity; the islanders undergo lobotomies to make them whole citizens again). The logic implies that truncation is necessary if the part is to reconfigure itself as a whole better to formalize the split and render it irreversible, so that life can proceed according to a new definition of what constitutes wholeness. Without truncation, however painful it maybe, the part is doomed to exist as a remainder. But amputation always proves futile in the end, because truncated part splits in two again and the relentless progression continues.
Trough delirious and savage puns, that text works out the permutations of the formula. America has been bombed back to the Inland Strips, its coastal areas now virtually uninhabited wastelands. The image of a truncated country, its outer extremities blasted away, proves prophetic, for the ruling political ideology is Immob. Immob espouses such slogans as"Demobilization without immobilization" and pacifism means passivity. It locates the aggressive impulse in the ability to move, teaching that the only way to end war permanent is permanently to move the capacity for motion. True believers become volamps men who have undergone voluntary amputations of their limbs.
Social mobility paradoxically translates into physical immobility. Upwardly mobile executives have the complete treatment to become quadroamps ; janitors are content to be uniamps; women and blacks are relegates to the limbo of unmodified bodies.
Treating the human form as a problem to be solved by this/assembly allows it to be articulated with machine. This articulation, far from leaving the dynamics driving the narrative behind, carries it forward into a new area, the assembly zone marked the by the joining of trunk to appendage. Like the constructions that preceded it, Immob ideology also splits in two. The majority party, discovering that its anther and are restless lying around with nothing to do approves the replacement of missing limbs with powerful prostheses (or pros) which bestow and enhanced mobility, enabling Pro-pros to perform athletic feats impossible for unaltered bodies. Anti-pros, believing that this is a perversion of Immob philosophy, spend their days proselyzing from microphones hooked up the baby basket that are just the right size accommodate limbless human torsos - a detail that later becomes significant.