ABSTRACT
In this chapter, I want to consider some of the relays between serial killing and what I have elsewhere described as the body-machine complex (Bodies and Machines). The intent here is to trace the links between the problem of serial murder and the more general problem of the body in “machine culture”: to trace, that is, the forms of repetitive and addictive violence produced, or solicited, by the styles of production and reproduction that make up machine culture. In what follows I will be focusing on several case studies. First, two of the inaugural writings of the age of the sex crime—centering on the entanglements of blood lust and technology, particularly technologies of writing and information—Zola's La Bête humaine (1890) briefly, and, at some length, Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897). Second, the representation of the radical entanglement between addiction and the body-machine complex—the “white logic” of alcoholism and male repetitive violence—set out, for example, in Jack London's autobiographical John Barleycorn (1913) and in some “cybernetic” analyses of the addictive subject. In the ensuing parts of this study, I will take up more directly some of the recent accounts and representations of serial murder. At this point, though, I want to proceed somewhat obliquely, risking, for reasons that I hope will become clear, a certain abstraction and generalization as to the status of such cases of repetitive violence. Therefore, before turning to these case histories, I want to outline some of the constitutive elements of these cases: namely, seriality, prosthesis, and what might be called primary mediation.
