Cyberpunk Culture and Psychology: Seeing through the Mirrorshades [1 ed.] 2021007157, 2021007158, 9780367535681, 9780367535698, 9781003082477

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‘William Gibson’s novels are phenomenological reports from the frontiers of global technoculture. In this study, Anna McFarlane demonstrates how the visuality of Gibson’s writing textures and shapes the subjectivities of both his characters and his readers. She situates her complex readings at the intersections of gestalt psychology, autopoiesis and chaos theory, psychoanalysis and posthumanism, and ecology to produce a work of “gestalt literary criticism.” Gibson’s fiction is at once the focus of this very productive approach and a case study demonstrating its efficacy. In gestalt perception, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, and the same might be said of McFarlane’s study: this is one of the most insightful and convincing readings of Gibson’s fiction published to date, as well as an incisive examination of science fiction as “a literature of the interface.’” Professor Veronica Hollinger, Science Fiction Studies ‘Cyberpunk is a field deeply important to the current moment of our world and its technological advancement. Anna McFarlane’s Cyberpunk Culture and Psychology is a well-timed contribution to the understanding of how cyberpunk shapes our self-perception in technologized times from one of the most innovative scholars currently working in the UK.’ Dr Lars Schmeink, author of Biopunk Dystopias: Genetic Engineering, Society and Science Fiction

Cyberpunk Culture and Psychology

This book traces developments in cyberpunk culture through a close engagement with the novels of the ‘godfather of cyberpunk’, William Gibson. Connecting his relational model of ‘gestalt’ psychology and imagery with that of the posthuman networked identities found in cyberpunk, the author draws out relations with key cultural moments of the last 40 years: postmodernism, posthumanism, 9/11, and the Anthropocene. By identifying cyberpunk ways of seeing with cyberpunk ways of being, the author shows how a visual style is crucial to cyberpunk on a philosophical level, as well as on an aesthetic level. Tracing a trajectory over Gibson’s work that brings him from an emphasis on the visual that elevates the human over posthuman entities to a perspective based on touch, a truly posthuman understanding of humans as networked with their environments, she argues for connections between the visual and the posthuman that have not been explored elsewhere, and that have implications for future work in posthumanism and the arts. Proposing an innovative model of reading through gestalt psychology, this book will be of key importance to scholars and students in the medical humanities, posthumanism, literary and cultural studies, dystopian and utopian studies, and psychology. Anna McFarlane is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Glasgow with a project investigating images of traumatic pregnancy in fantastic literature. She is the co-editor of Adam Roberts: Critical Essays (2016), The Routledge Companion to Cyberpunk Culture (with Graham J. Murphy and Lars Schmeink, 2020), Fifty Key Figures in Cyberpunk Culture (with Graham J. Murphy and Lars Schmeink), and The Edinburgh Companion to Science Fiction and the Medical Humanities.

Routledge Research in Cultural and Media Studies

Migration, Identity, and Belonging Defining Borders and Boundaries of the Homeland Edited by Margaret Franz and Kumarini Silva Exploring Seriality on Screen Audiovisual Narratives in Film and Television Edited by Ariane Hudelet and Anne Crémieux Locating Imagination in Popular Culture Place, Tourism and Belonging Edited by Nicky van Es, Stijn Reijnders, Leonieke Bolderman, and Abby Waysdorf Heroes in Contemporary British Culture Television Drama and Reflections of a Nation in Change Barbara Korte and Nicole Falkenhayner Visual and Cultural Identity Constructs of Global Youth and Young Adults Situated, Embodied and Performed Ways of Being, Engaging and Belonging Edited by Fiona Blaikie Cyberpunk Culture and Psychology Seeing through the Mirrorshades Anna McFarlane Consuming Utopia Cultural Studies and the Politics of Reading John Storey Language, Image, and Power in Luso-Hispanic Cultural Studies Theory and Practice Edited by Susan Larson

Cyberpunk Culture and Psychology Seeing through the Mirrorshades

Anna McFarlane

First published 2022 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2022 Anna McFarlane The right of Anna McFarlane to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: McFarlane, Anna, author. Title: Cyberpunk culture and psychology : seeing through the mirrorshades / Anna McFarlane. Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2021. | Series: Routledge research in cultural and media studies | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2021007157 (print) | LCCN 2021007158 (ebook) | ISBN 9780367535681 (hardback) | ISBN 9780367535698 (paperback) | ISBN 9781003082477 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Gibson, William, 1948---Criticism and interpretation. | Gibson, William, 1948---Influence. | Posthumanism in literature. | Cyberpunk fiction, American--History and criticism. | Gestalt psychology. Classification: LCC PS3557.I2264 Z77 2021 (print) | LCC PS3557.I2264 (ebook) | DDC 813/.54--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021007157 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021007158 ISBN: 978-0-367-53568-1 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-367-53569-8 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-08247-7 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003082477 Typeset in Times New Roman by Taylor & Francis Books

To Gary, Rory and Owen, with love

Contents

List of figures Acknowledgements Introduction: gestalt psychology and cyberpunk

x xi 1

1

Autopoiesis in the Sprawl trilogy

20

2

Chaos in the Bridge trilogy

46

3

Perception in Pattern Recognition

68

4

Psychoanalysis in Spook Country

90

5

The parallax view in Zero History

112

6

The haptic interface in The Peripheral

136

7

Agency, and Gibson in the twenty-first century

150

Index

166

Figures

I.1 Rubin’s vase 2.1 Lichtenberg figure

4 53

Acknowledgements

The bulk of Chapter 6 originally appeared in ESC: English Studies in Canada vol. 42, no. 1 as ‘“Anthropomorphic Drones” and Colonized Bodies: William Gibson’s The Peripheral’ (2016). Thank you to the editor-in-chief, Allan Pero, for granting me permission to reprint it here, and to the editors of the issue Cecily Devereux and Marcelle Kosman for their hard work on the piece, which doubtless improved it immeasurably. My thanks also to Beth Miller Ball and J.J. Hernandez, who arranged for me to receive an advance copy of Agency to review for American Book Review in 2020: the chance to engage with the book in a critical way before its publication date was a welcome opportunity to begin thinking about the novel, and the experience has shaped my writing on Agency here. This book began its life as my PhD thesis, so my primary thanks are to my wonderful supervisor, Sarah Dillon. Sarah helped an excitable young student to channel her ideas with academic rigour. I learned so much from her sharp critiques, which showed me what it is to be a supportive and incisive editor. Her years of support since I was awarded my PhD, giving up time to advise me on matters both academic and personal, have shown me what academic collegiality looks like, and I am proud to consider her a colleague and a friend. Thanks to Lorna Burns, Jim Byatt, and Peter MacKay of the University of St Andrews, who read the thesis at various stages and offered their expertise. My thanks also to my external PhD marker, Stefan Herbrechter, and to the Critical Posthumanism Network. Stefan was an encouraging marker and has since supported me endlessly. It has been my privilege to contribute to the Critical Posthumanism Network project and to develop my thinking on posthumanism through that avenue. Thanks as well to Manuela Rossini for her hard work on the Society for Literature, Science and the Arts (EU) and all her other projects; I have her to thank for introducing me to Stefan and for relentlessly creating structures that allow scholars of posthumanism to meet and exchange ideas. I have also benefited from being a part of the community of scholars brought together by my colleague and friend, Glyn Morgan, under the auspices of the annual Current Research in Speculative Fiction (CRSF) conference at the University of Liverpool. I attended these conferences throughout my PhD, and am

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ever grateful to have connected with some wonderful academics who have shaped my thinking, including my esteemed co-editor on Adam Roberts: Critical Essays (Gylphi, 2016), Christos Callow Jr., as well as Adam Roberts, Sarah Lohmann, C. Palmer-Patel, Chris Pak, and Rhys Williams. During the years since the award of my PhD I have spent my time working with Gavin Miller at the University of Glasgow, and I must take this opportunity to thank him for his mentorship. This work was completed during my time as a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow, a position I doubt I could have achieved without Gavin’s guidance and encouragement. Gavin has always taken his role as my mentor seriously, and it is my pleasure to work with him. I would also like to thank Hannah Tweed and Douglas Small, my contemporaries, who welcomed me to Glasgow and have been wonderful friends and colleagues ever since. My thinking in recent years has been primarily shaped by my work on The Routledge Companion to Cyberpunk Culture with Graham J. Murphy and Lars Schmeink. I am grateful to them for asking me to join their editorial team, and I am so lucky to work with two such wonderful colleagues. When I took time away from work for maternity leave (twice!) it was our partnership that remained my lifeline to academia and meant that I never felt isolated or excluded. They have both been gracious with their time, giving me feedback on some sections of this book, and Lars has provided a wonderful platform for exchanging ideas about cyberpunk through his organisation of the Cyberpunk Culture Conference 2020 and the Cyberpunk Research Network, both of which have been valuable tools in the final months of this book’s preparation. The continuing partnership between myself, Lars, and Graham is the kind of thing that makes academic work a pleasure. Finally, my thanks to my family, Nancy, Kevin, Michael, Daniel, and Louise; to my friends, Daniel, Jo and Vikas; and to Gary, Rory, and Owen, with love.

Introduction Gestalt psychology and cyberpunk

In the 1980s a new kind of science fiction appeared with the promise of rejuvenating the genre. Cyberpunk arrived with its own one-man marketing department in the shape of Bruce Sterling, a cyberpunk writer who codified a nebulous movement, collected some writers under its banner in Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology (1986), and provided the cyberpunk manifesto in the shape of his preface to the collection. Sterling heralded cyberpunk, and William Gibson’s contribution specifically, as a ‘classic one-two combination of lowlife and high tech’ (1995: 12) and defined a genre concerned with the meeting of the human and the machine, cybernetic organisation and punk anarchy, a genre of the interface; one concerned with the places where opposites are smashed into an uncomfortable proximity to create something new. As Istvan Csicserey-Ronay puts it, ‘the oxymoronic conceit in “cyberpunk” is so slick and global it fuses the high and the low, the complex and the simple, the governor and the savage, the techno-sublime and rock and roll slime’ (1992: 182). Cyberpunk grew from this beginning, both into the mainstream and the academy. The visual nature of cyberpunk’s descriptions of the space behind the computer screen saw it enter the collective consciousness through a number of key popular films, particularly Tron (1982), Blade Runner (1982), and The Matrix (1999). Through its visual literature and its cinematic success, cyberpunk gave viewers a visual vocabulary for thinking about cyberspace. The academic response was similarly enthusiastic as cyberpunk was claimed by Fredric Jameson as a key literature of postmodernism and worked in tandem with science-fictional theoretical work such as Donna J. Haraway’s ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’ (1984) to engage with the key contemporary debate about the figure of the posthuman and its significance for the future of the humanities. Recent scholarship has recognised the continuing importance of cyberpunk as a mode, a visual language that informs our understanding of cyberspace, a space that increasingly shapes our day-to-day lives, and has had an outsized impact on a range of media. Graham J. Murphy and Lars Schmeink’s collection Cyberpunk and Visual Culture (2018) documents some of the ways in which cyberpunk’s visuality has seen it adopted by a number of visual media; and tropes that are developed in cyberpunk media filter into other representations, encouraging the cyberpunk flavour of realist representations. Developing DOI: 10.4324/9781003082477-1

2

Introduction

this theme, The Routledge Companion to Cyberpunk Culture (McFarlane, Murphy and Schmeink 2020) shows that cyberpunk can no longer simply be considered a ‘genre’: as Thomas Foster has noted, cyberpunk should now be considered a ‘cultural formation [which is] a historical articulation of textual practices’ (xv). This monograph contributes to this body of scholarship by bridging the visual emphasis of cyberpunk and its implications for posthuman ontology. Cyberpunk literature and William Gibson, cyberpunk’s most famous practitioner, breathed new life into science fiction in the mid-1980s at a time when the aesthetic innovations of the New Wave of science fiction (1960s–1970s) had long since hit the high-water mark and writers of hard science fiction like Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein had passed the apex of their influence. In his preface to Mirrorshades, Bruce Sterling characterises the key concerns of cyberpunk as ‘the theme of body invasion: prosthetic limbs, implanted circuitry, cosmetic surgery, genetic alteration. The even more powerful theme of mind invasion: brain-computer interfaces, artificial intelligence, neurochemistry’ (1994: xi). Cyberpunk’s interest in interfaces and hybrids had a significant influence on posthumanism and its cultural presence due to its interest in ‘techniques radically redefining the nature of humanity, the nature of the self’ (xi). N. Katherine Hayles includes a reading of William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984) in How We Became Posthuman (1999), the first major investigation into posthumanism and its origins, concluding that Gibson’s novels, ‘present a vision of the posthuman future which is already upon us’ (39). Cyberpunk acts as an interface between science and the humanities, creating art from the interstices between the human and the machine. It also takes its influences from the interface between high and low culture, particularly visual culture, by incorporating influences from collage and the cut-up method, Hollywood westerns, film noir, cable television, architecture, and art installation. Fredric Jameson calls William Gibson’s work ‘an exceptional literary realization within a predominantly visual or aural postmodern production’ (1991: 38) and this monograph takes account of that visual context in its analysis. These dual origins, in posthumanism and visual culture, are brought together in this monograph through what I call ‘gestalt literary criticism’. I take the term ‘gestalt’ from psychology as a helpful term that bridges the visual aesthetic of cyberpunk with its implications for posthuman ontology. Reading William Gibson’s work by focusing on gestalt perception and its role in defining identity allows connections to be made between the importance of visual culture in these texts and the models of psychology used in the novels, understandings of the mind as modelled on the networked computer systems that define and shape contemporary society. Like cyberpunk itself, that mash-up of cybernetic organisation and punk anarchy, gestalt perception is constituted by tensions, such as the tension between foreground and background, or between pattern and randomness. By focusing on these tensions the connections between the quintessential cyberpunk of Gibson’s first novels the Sprawl trilogy (1984– 1988) and the ‘science fiction realism’ of the Blue Ant trilogy (2003–2010) become clear as Gibson’s concerns with the tensions between cyberspace and

Introduction

3

physical space, the human and the non-human, develop into the tensions between science fiction and realism in the Blue Ant trilogy.

Gestalt psychology’s theory of perception The term ‘gestalt’ arrived in English through the influence of the gestalt psychologists, particularly through the work of Kurt Koffka and Wolfgang Köhler. Their unique contribution to psychology in the 1920s was primarily to be found in their influential and persuasive theories of perception. The gestalt psychologists argued against the tabula rasa model of perception that had been held by John Locke, a model that was still prevalent in psychology until the earliest work of the gestaltists became available in English in 1922.1 They argued that the human mind imposes a form, or ‘gestalt’, onto visual information from the outside world. This allows information to be understood without overwhelming the subject with raw data through privileging some information over others. Human perception privileges economy of form, selecting the forms that interest the viewer; similarity, as patterns appear in the raw data; and the figure and ground relationship, as some data is privileged over the rest. The gestalt psychologists suggested other forms of grouping. As well as the figure/ground distinction, Max Wertheimer identified other laws of perception in his ‘Laws of Organization in Perceptual Forms’ (1938). His laws of perception include:       

proximity, which states that perception groups objects on the basis of their proximity to one another; similarity, the tendency of similar objects to be grouped together in the perceptual field, for example, objects of the same colour or shape; uniform destiny, which states that the viewer expects that members of a grouping will act in a similar way; the law of Prägnanz, or ‘good forms’ which states that objects are simplified by the viewer and are viewed as more regular or more simple than they may actually be; related to Prägnanz is the law of closure; when a simple shape is incomplete gestalt perception ‘fills in the gaps’ in order to see the shape; the law of past experience or habit means that perception is shaped by the viewer’s expectation. The perception of repeated shapes or sights is therefore noticed more than random collections of images; the figure/ground distinction. As a demonstration of the figure/ground distinction psychologist Edgar Rubin developed the ‘Rubin’s vase’ image (see Figure I.1).2

When viewing Rubin’s vase, the viewer can make two alternative interpretations of the shapes (either a black vase, or two white faces). The convex faces give shape to the concave vase; the light and the darkness are dependent on one another in constructing the picture. The double nature of such images

4

Introduction

Figure I.1 Rubin’s vase

led the gestaltists to claim that the human eye was not merely taking all the available information and allowing the conscious subject to interpret meaning for itself but rather fitting that information into a perceptual field or ‘gestalt’. Perception is only made possible by gestalt perception’s ability to process visual data, a process that is dependent on privileging some information at the expense of the rest, such as in the figure/ground distinction. The interpretations of an image like the Rubin’s vase can switch back and forth as the gestalt foregrounds either the white area or the black area, but we do not see both pictures at the same time based on a conscious decision.3 The gestalt can be thought of as ‘a whole which is greater than the sum of its parts’ as the components are less important than the relations between them (for example, the relation between foreground and background).4 The black area and the white area are needed to create the image, but also necessary is the interaction of the human brain which fits them into a form, or gestalt, and allows them to be interpreted by foregrounding one part of the image at the expense of the other. Gestalt psychology has previously been used in criticism of the visual arts by Rudolf Arnheim, who studied under gestalt psychologists Max Wertheimer and Wolfgang Köhler at Berlin University. Arnheim combined his understanding of gestalt psychology with his interest in the history of art. He argues that perception is not the passive process some might expect, but instead an ‘active, creative’ process:

Introduction

5

You have to imagine the following: When we observe something, then we reach for it; we move through space, touch things, feel their surfaces and contours. And our perception structures and orders the information given by things into determinable forms. We understand because this structuring and ordering is a part of our relationship with reality. Without order we couldn’t understand at all. Thus, in my opinion the world is not raw material; it is already ordered merely by being observed. (Arnheim and Grundmann) Arnheim’s claim that vision structures reality has echoes of the recognition by quantum mechanics that the mode of observation can change the phenomenon being observed and also grants agency to the reader of literature, or the viewer of media, that would soon be developed through Roland Barthes’s The Death of the Author (1967), both ways of understanding the world that shaped the reception of culture by the late twentieth century. E.H. Gombrich also uses gestalt theory to approach the visual arts, adopting the gestalt psychologists’ laws of simplicity and good form: In order to learn, we must make mistakes, and the most fruitful mistake which nature could have implanted in us would be the assumption of even greater simplicities than we are likely to meet with in this bewildering world of ours. Whatever the face of the Gestalt school may be in the field of neurology, it may still prove logically right in insisting that the simplicity hypothesis cannot be learned. It is, indeed, the only condition under which we could learn at all. To probe a hole we first use a straight stick to see how far it takes us. To probe the visible world we use the assumption that things are simple until they prove to be otherwise. (231) In How to Do Theory (2006) Wolfgang Iser argues that Gombrich’s use of gestalt theory also incorporates the law of closure and devotes a few short paragraphs applying the gestalt theory to literature. He explains that literary texts offer a few, sometimes contradictory, adjectives about a character, setting, or situation and, from this limited information, our minds can create a full picture in an active engagement with the text through the process known to gestalt psychologists as ‘closure’; in other words, the reader forms a complex and whole idea based on partial information. As Iser explains, ‘this gestalt is not explicit in the text, it is “made” by the reader, and is guided insofar as it arises out of the corrections of schemata’ (56). The creative nature of perception is central to gestalt psychology and its previous uses in criticism of the visual arts and literature. While Iser simply considers the implications of closure on how we read literature, the gestalt approach that I propose is more comprehensive and includes closure as well as the other laws of perception; simplicity, proximity, continuity, and similarity which, together, can be referred to as ‘pattern recognition’. I will

6

Introduction

also take into account the figure/ground distinction necessary for viewing images like Rubin’s vase and for allowing perception to perform a ‘gestalt switch’, a change in the figure/ground distinction. In order to discuss these facets of gestalt theory I will use ‘the gestalt’ as a substantive term, a metonym for all these ideas associated with gestalt perception, and put it in conversation with specific texts – the novels of William Gibson – to develop a gestalt literary criticism.5 A gestalt literary criticism allows me to consider the nature of science fiction and cyberpunk as interface literatures, literatures which bridge the gap between the arts and the sciences, between the human and the non-human. Considering cyberpunk, and Gibson’s work specifically, through gestalt literary criticism will reveal these apparent opposites as interdependent concepts, like the figure and the ground of the Rubin’s vase image.

The gestalt in science fiction Science fiction writers work to create coherent, emergent futures and gestalt paradigms are helpful as they recognise the interconnected nature of identity and the environment. Gardner Dozois, an influential writer and editor, situates gestalt paradigms as crucial to the act of writing science fiction: you live in an organic surround, an interlocking and interdependent gestalt made up of thousands of factors and combinations thereof: cultural, technological, biological, psychological, historical, environmental. For all practical purposes you are that surround: if the things that make up that surround are altered, then you will be altered with them. (17) This holistic view, so helpful to creating believable futures, has also provided the opportunity for alternative ontologies; ways of being and perceiving that take the interconnected nature of being into account. Theodore Sturgeon created the species ‘Homo Gestalt’ in his novel More Than Human (1953), which imagined the next stage in human evolution as a journey towards gestalt-as-being. In the novel, various characters depicted as weak or disadvantaged in some way discover that they can make the most of their particular skills if they work together. Eventually, these characters effectively become one organism as their whole being becomes greater than the sum of their parts. Frank Herbert also uses the term in Dune (1965) when he wishes to describe the perspective of his main protagonist, Paul Atreides. Paul’s mother has taught him the skills of the Bene Gesserit, a group of highlytrained empaths who can control the thoughts of others. As Paul spends more time on the planet of Arrakis, or ‘Dune’, he absorbs the planet’s native ‘spice’ which stimulates his existing powers until he becomes the Muad’Dib, a Messiah figure for the native fremen of Dune. Herbert uses ‘gestalt’ as a verb to describe Paul’s heightened sense of awareness as he ‘gestalt[s] the room’ (247). Herbert uses the term to suggest that Paul does not merely pick out details in

Introduction

7

the room, focusing on individual objects, but finds a deeper understanding of the relationship between these objects, and the relationship between his situation and the cultural context in which he finds himself. As in Sturgeon’s novel, Herbert uses the term ‘gestalt’ to suggest something more than human, a heightened perception evocative of the figure of the posthuman. Gestalt perception, as described by the gestalt psychologists, is a condition of all human perception. However, as a marker of subjectivity the gestalt is unpredictable and immeasurable, giving it a superhuman power in the eyes of science fiction writers.6 References to gestalt perception explode in the era of cyberpunk. Cyberpunk tends to be read through the lenses of the literary and social codes it in many ways helped to establish, such as postmodernism and posthumanism (Jameson 1991; Bukatman 1991; Farnell 1998; Hayles 1999; Haney 2006). Foregrounding the visual influences of cyberpunk literature and how these relate to the composition of subjectivity in the narratives reveals perception as the interface between (posthuman) subjectivity and the world in which such subjectivities are embedded. Cyberpunk is, first and foremost, a literature about the worlds of technology and human psychology and how (primarily visual) perception acts as the key mediator between these two realms. As cyberpunk is a literature of interfaces – between science and the humanities, between high and low culture – it makes sense to approach its study via the interface that joins and separates the subject from the technological milieu in which it exists; that is, the interface of perception. Gestalt perception provides a fruitful way of approaching the importance of perception in mediating mind and world, the human and the technological landscape. Bruce Sterling’s Mirrorshades brought together writers he considered to be key to the formation of this new genre. These key cyberpunk writers often use the language of gestalt psychology in order to describe the subject’s interdependent relationship with their environment, for example with computing technologies or designer drugs. In Gibson’s short story ‘Hinterlands’ from the collection Burning Chrome (1995), two human identities can merge into a ‘gestalt’ (86, 92) in order to produce a temporary third subject that features the most desirable attributes of each. Neuromancer’s main character, Case moves through a ‘gestalt of drugs and tension’ (16) as he incorporates and reacts to his environment. In ‘Freezone’ from Sterling’s Mirrorshades anthology (1986), John Shirley describes the communal feeling shared between a band and its audience: ‘the gestalt was there, uniting them, and he pressed its tongs home into the collective body of the audience and took them where he wanted to take them’ (156). In Pat Cadigan’s 1987 novel Mindplayers, Allie, the main protagonist, receives ‘training in dealing with consensual reality’ (45) in order to become a ‘mindplayer’, one who can enter other people’s minds in order to assess or alter their mental state. This training involves reading another person’s ‘Emotional Index’. Allie thinks of her training in reading the Emotional Index as ‘rather vague’:

8

Introduction Somehow, you were just supposed to start doing it. It was easier in the system, since things tended to become palpable. Sight-reading in real reality was a lot less certain. So much depended on body language of a particularly subtle sort – movements performed in a certain order, the tilt of the head, certain facial expressions of course, but you couldn’t always depend on that, either. It had to be a gestalt kind of thing, where you were perceiving everything at once, situation and mood as well as appearance. When you could make it work, however, it was extremely revealing. (64–65)

The regular evocation of the ‘gestalt’ as a means of understanding a situation holistically indicates its value to the project cyberpunk writers undertake. Its use emphasises the co-dependence of the subject with its environment and the ability of subjects to merge with each other into a collective ‘gestalt’. Cyberpunk has an affinity with a gestalt approach from its origins as the offspring of cybernetics and punk rock culture. In her analysis of the movement, Cyberpunk and Cyberculture (2000), Dani Cavallaro argues that the name of the genre, a combination of ‘cybernetics’ and ‘punk’, juxtaposes control and chaos and holds them in tension in order to produce its effects: The ‘cyber’ and the ‘punk’ components of cyberpunk constantly interact to produce varying constellations of the relationship between the glossy world of high technology and the murky world of addiction and crime. What is arguably most distinctive about cyberpunk is that neither of these two elements ever gains priority over the other, the genre’s effectiveness actually depending on their dynamic interplay. (24) The interplay between ‘cyber’ and ‘punk’ that we find in cyberpunk creates a tension that finds an affinity with gestalt perception and ontology. At the 2013 Contemporary Research in Speculative Fiction Conference at the University of Liverpool I had the chance to discuss gestalt perception with Pat Cadigan and to ask her whether she had ever been conscious of any influence from gestalt psychology or related theories. She told me that, as a child, she remembered seeing a box with a window of clear plastic on one side; the light hit the plastic in such a way that she at first thought it was a mirror. She remembered realising at that moment that one object could present itself in two different ways, depending on the perspective of the viewer. She felt that the knowledge that a change of perspective could have a revolutionary effect on perception and understanding had influenced her a great deal. Even if these writers did not consciously think of themselves as ‘cyberpunk’ writers at the time of their first appearance on the scene – or even as they appeared in the Mirrorshades anthology – the term did not just stick because of its aesthetically pleasing sense of postmodernity and rebellion. This awareness of

Introduction

9

duality and of the importance of perspective is shared by this group of writers as they consider the interface between the potentially repressive nature of cybernetic organisation in conversation with the anarchic possibilities of the networked punk rock aesthetic. Bruce Clarke has brought theories born of second-order cybernetics to bear on literature in his Neocybernetics and Narratives (2014), a significant work which offers a detailed history of cybernetics through some of its key practitioners and shows how cybernetics can enrich the analysis of narrative. Clarke’s work is complementary to my project here, in that I read texts using the cybernetic concept of autopoiesis and several others related to this – namely, chaos theory, and ecology. My use of the gestalt can perhaps be considered a development of such a cybernetic approach. By using gestalt psychology, and particularly gestalt perception, as a starting point I give the position of the observer prominence. The role of observation is crucial to cybernetic systems, and a gestalt approach is compatible with those concerns, the observer being key to the construction of being. Giving greater prominence to this role of the observer, and perception in general, through using the gestalt as a means of reading Gibson brings together a number of theoretical positions, including those that would not normally be encompassed by a cybernetic approach such as pattern recognition, or psychoanalysis. While science fiction, and cyberpunk in particular, are infused with awareness of gestalt psychology and the gestalt understanding of perception, I focus on William Gibson’s novels. As the most famous and most successful of the cyberpunk writers, Gibson can stand as a representative of the mode so that connections between cyberpunk and gestalt theory can be made and developed in Chapters 1 and 2. In Chapters 3–5 I turn to Gibson’s realist Blue Ant trilogy (2003–2010). These novels have met with intense critical interest as their contemporary setting has led many to question the role of science fiction in a world where technological advance is exponential, making the construction of genuinely estranging futures more difficult and less productive (Jameson 2005; Hollinger 2006; Miller 2012; Tomberg 2013). Chapters 6 and 7 take the monograph up to Gibson’s most recent novels, The Peripheral (2014) and Agency (2020) to show that Gibson’s return to science fiction responds to the era of the Anthropocene in a way that has significant implications for the visual nature of his work. Making Gibson the focus of this study allows an exploration of gestalt theory and its potential uses in the field of literary criticism from the context of cyberpunk in the 1980s up to the concerns of science fiction literary criticism today.

Perception and the visual in Gibson’s work Perception is foregrounded throughout Gibson’s work, partly because of his interest in the advent of television and the alterations that his early and often interactions with this new technology brought to his way of thinking. In an interview, he reflects on the centrality of television as a formative medium for a child of his era:

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Introduction Having been born into the world of media technology that I was born into, the visual shape of my imagination is fundamentally different than the visual shape of the imagination of an eighteenth century or a nineteenth century man. I think that I actually think of things in terms of close-ups and pans and long shots and it’s not through any desire to be a director, but simply that is the visual language of my culture at this point. (quoted in Rapatzikou 221)

The visual nature of Gibson’s work has been noted by Tatiani G. Rapatzikou in her study Gothic Motifs in the Fiction of William Gibson (2004). Rapatzikou is interested in ‘the visual and graphic quality of Gibson’s fiction in relation to technology’ (xiii) and approaches these visual qualities through a consideration of their origins in the gothic novel. Larry McCaffery notes Gibson’s ‘reliance on the cut-up methods and quickfire stream of dissociated images characteristic of William S. Burroughs and J. G. Ballard’ (263). William Burroughs’s ‘cut-up’ method is explicitly named after, and influenced by, collage and cut-up in the visual arts, while Ballard describes his novel Crash as ‘the first pornographic novel based on technology’ (6), explicitly situating his writing at the interface between science and visual imagery, sex and violence. Thomas Pynchon, another author to whom Gibson pays his dues, is influenced by visual culture.7 In The Crying of Lot 49 (1966) the main protagonist, Oedipa Maas, is watching television with a lawyer who she suspects is trying to seduce her when a film begins starring a young boy who the lawyer claims is him as a child. As the evening progresses, ‘so it went: the succession of film fragments from the tube, the progressive removal of clothing that seemed to bring her no nearer nudity’ (26). Like Ballard, Pynchon finds the fragmentation of narrative through the medium of film and television; just as Oedipa’s loss of clothing never seems to result in the fullness of her nudity, the fragmented images from the television never coalesce into a greater whole or narrative. The influence of these visual writers in Gibson’s work is complimented with references to the visual arts, such as the recurring image of Cornell boxes. Joseph Cornell produced a kind of three-dimensional collage by placing unrelated items in a box so that ‘reading’ the items alongside each other produces a gestalt effect, a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. Gibson compares his writing to these boxes, explaining that he collects details for later use inspired by the Cornell boxes, ‘which consist entirely of found objects, framed, as it were, by a device akin to narrative’ (2003). In addition to this interest in the visual arts, Gibson’s work contains myriad references to architecture, fashion and cable television. As well as expressing himself through visual language in his novels, Gibson also went to Hollywood fairly early in his career; he wrote the screenplay for the screen version of his short story Jonny Mnemonic (directed by Robert Longo and released in 1995) as well as an unfilmed script for the third film in the Alien franchise, a script that was later produced as a Dark Horse comic

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book series illustrated by Johnnie Christmas. He also wrote two episodes of The X Files with Tom Maddox: ‘Kill Switch’ (1998) and ‘First Person Shooter’ (2000). Involvement in film and television is something that Gibson sees as directly connected to the visual nature of cyberpunk. He recognises that film and visual culture have deeply influenced literature but argues that cyberpunk began to redress the balance: Narrative prose has historically had remarkably little influence on film. Though this began to change when cyberpunk emerged as the first determinedly pop-literate prose sf. Through copious quotation of film, music and video games, cyberpunk made prose sf ‘visible’ to filmmakers in a new way. (Gibson quoted in Cornea 2007: 27) This visibility is clear in the many cyberpunk films that appeared alongside the success of cyberpunk as a literary genre. In addition to Johnny Mnemonic (1995) are Steven Lisberger’s Tron, which brought the space behind the computer screen to the big screen, Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner which took protocyberpunk Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (1968) as its inspiration, Kathryn Bigelow’s Strange Days (1995) and The Matrix (1999) and its sequels, directed by the Wachowskis. Cyberpunk’s compatibility with the cinema emphasises the visual engagement of its literary form as its interests in perception and visualisation of abstract concepts offer inspiration to the big screen. It is not only the visual nature of cyberpunk which makes it particularly suited to a gestalt approach, but also the tensions that constitute science fiction as a whole. Science fiction is a literature that mediates between the arts and the sciences. In The History of Science Fiction (2005), Adam Roberts locates the beginning of science fiction as we recognise it today in the Victorian splitting of human knowledge into binary pairs. He writes, ‘something happened to “science” in the Victorian age. To be precise, with the nineteenth century’s conception of science comes a cultural division into arts and sciences’ (4, emphasis in original). As Victorians began to perceive the arts and the sciences as a dichotomy, science fiction became an anomaly, the interface between aesthetics and the sciences. The figure/ground distinction and the law of similarity (grouping perceived objects on the basis of their similarity to one another) are key to understanding this interface between the arts and the sciences as both reading literature and pursuing scientific discovery rely on the figure/ground distinction; whether crafting a metaphor, or explaining a concept within the prevailing paradigm of scientific enquiry, some aspects of a concept will be emphasised at the expense of others. In Metaphors We Live By (1980), George Lakoff writes: the very systematicity that allows us to comprehend one aspect of a concept in terms of another… will necessarily hide other aspects of a

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Introduction concept… a metaphorical concept can keep us from focusing on other aspects of the concept that are inconsistent with that metaphor. (10)

Metaphors work via a kind of gestalt perception as they rely on the reader’s need for consistency, pattern, and figure/ground relationships in order to highlight certain aspects of a concept at the expense of others. Lakoff draws his language from the realm of the visual as he speaks of how a metaphor can ‘hide’ aspects of a concept, instead ‘focusing’ our attention elsewhere. Scientific discovery works in a comparable way, as explained by Thomas Kuhn in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962). Kuhn writes that ‘normal science’ consists of: an attempt to force nature into the preformed and relatively inflexible box that the paradigm supplies. No part of the aim of normal science is to call forth new sorts of phenomena; indeed those that will not fit the box are often not seen at all. (Kuhn 2012: 24) As in the case of metaphor, scientists find themselves unable to ‘see’ that which does not fit into the ‘box’, or paradigm, through which they understand the world. In order to move away from normal science into the realms of innovation a gestalt switch is required. In Crystals, Fabrics, and Fields (1974) Donna J. Haraway recognises Kuhn’s theory of scientific revolutions and the paradigm shift as comparable to a change in metaphor. She describes a scientific revolution as a time when ‘a major reorientation of fundamental metaphor occurs, leading workers in a field to see new problems and to accept radically different solutions’ (5). Metaphors, whether in literary fiction or in the sciences, foreground some features of a concept, rendering them visible while simultaneously rendering others (sometimes temporarily) invisible, lost in the background. Science fiction has also inspired my gestalt approach because of its nature as a literature of the interface. In Positions and Presuppositions of Science Fiction (1988) Darko Suvin defines science fiction as ‘a literary genre whose necessary and sufficient conditions are the presence and interaction of estrangement and cognition, and whose main formal device is an imaginative framework alternative to the author’s empirical environment’ (66). In Critical Theory and Science Fiction (2000), Carl Freedman explains this definition at greater length, arguing that the relationship between estrangement and cognition in science fiction can be considered a dialectic between estrangement and cognition: The first term refers to the creation of an alternative fictional world that, by refusing to take our mundane environment for granted, implicitly or explicitly performs an estranging critical interrogation of the latter. But

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the critical character of the interrogation is guaranteed by the operation of cognition, which enables the science-fictional text to account rationally for its imagined world and for the connections as well as the disconnections of the latter or our own empirical world. If the dialectic is flattened out to mere cognition, then the result is ‘realistic’ or mundane fiction, which can cognitively account for its imaginings but performs no estrangement; if the dialectic is flattened out to mere estrangement (or, it might be argued, pseudo-estrangement), then the result is fantasy, which estranges, or appears to estrange, but in an irrationalist, theoretically illegitimate way. (16–17, emphasis in original) The relationship that Freedman discusses here, between cognition and estrangement, is a dialectic in the Marxist sense of the term, comparable to that between the arts and the sciences, or utopia and dystopia, and the important part of this dialectic is the tension between the opposing (or opposed) concepts.8 The tension between cognition and estrangement is what constructs the science fiction text and challenges the reader. Suvin and Freedman also emphasise the tension between the ‘zero world’ (the world of the reader) and the world presented in the text. Suvin defines the ‘zero world’ as ‘empirically verifiable properties around the author (this being “zero” in the sense of a central reference point in a coordinate system, or of the control group in an experiment). Let us call this empirical world naturalistic’ (1972: 377, emphasis in original). The contrast between the zero world and the imagined world of the science fiction author creates an oscillation in the mind of the reader between knowledge of the world as it is and representation of the world as it could be. The zero world, usually ‘naturalised’ in the mind of the reader through everyday experience, is thrown into contrast with the science fictional world. This oscillation resembles someone viewing the Rubin’s vase image. The naturalised world can be brought to the foreground of thought once it has been ‘estranged’, meaning that the reader can see it as if for the first time. Thomas Kuhn writes of ‘revolutions’ in science which bring about such a gestalt switch in perception: During revolutions scientists see new and different things when looking with familiar instruments in places they have looked before. It is rather as if the professional community had been suddenly transported to another planet where familiar objects are seen in a different light and are joined by unfamiliar ones as well. (111) Revolutionary thought in science is here described using a science-fictional landscape. The impact of the unfamiliar forces the reader to recalibrate their expectations, expectations that in turn shape perception as the mind focuses on details which are compatible with these new expectations. Science fiction

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allows us to experiment with these revolutions in thought, and to question the paradigmatic nature of our thought processes themselves. This switch in paradigm, Kuhn argues, is comparable to a switch in gestalt: ‘at times of revolution, when the normal-scientific tradition changes, the scientist’s perception of his environment must be re-educated – in some familiar situations he must learn to see a new gestalt’ (112). Science fiction allows us to see a new gestalt, to look at the zero world as ‘another planet where familiar objects are seen in a different light and are joined by unfamiliar ones as well’ (111). To these dialectics – arts/sciences, science fiction/fantasy, estrangement/ cognition, zero world/imagined world – I add utopia/dystopia. Very rarely are science fiction writers interested in depicting a universe after its moral heatdeath, either frozen perfectly in a utopia or trapped in an irredeemable postapocalyptic landscape. These two functions tend to be present together, creating a tension at the heart of the text that cannot be resolved. As Rudolf Arnheim says of the visual arts, ‘everything that appears in a work is effective due to forces that are manifested in form and color. The dynamic between the forces, between the elements, conveys the expression’ (Arnheim and Grundmann). The oscillation of these dualities structures the reading of a science fictional text; it defines what the text will foreground and what remains hidden, or naturalised. It is therefore important to take this into account as we consider which metaphors to use for the act of reading – and, particularly, the act of reading science fiction.

Seeing through the mirrorshades In this monograph, each chapter approaches the gestalt from a different angle. Chapters 1 and 2 consider two different aspects of complexity theory; autopoiesis (self-creation) and chaos theory. Chapter 1 discusses the autopoietic nature of identity in Gibson’s Sprawl trilogy as ontological categories are no longer limited to the biologically human; for example, corporations (or, ‘zaibatsus’), holograms constructed from data, and artificial intelligences are all granted ontological status as defined through autopoiesis. In explaining this theory, I focus on the Sprawl trilogy which includes Gibson’s debut novel Neuromancer (1984) and its two sequels Count Zero (1986) and Mona Lisa Overdrive (1988). Autopoiesis defines identity through gestalt properties such as pattern, moving the importance of identity from biological systems to patterns of information. Like the gestalt, autopoiesis gives primacy to the relations between parts rather than the parts themselves, thereby recognising cyborg identities as wholes that are greater than the sum of their parts. Chapter 2 analyses Gibson’s use of metaphors taken from chaos theory. Chaos theory was popularised in the 1980s – synchronous with the Sprawl trilogy – and changed the possibilities open to science fiction writers and the directions that their fictions could take. Chaos theory made its appearance in popular culture primarily through computerised visual representations like the Mandelbrot sets. Gibson uses various aspects of chaos theory in the imagery

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of the Bridge trilogy (1993–1999), thereby privileging perception as the defining characteristic of humanity in what would seem to be a move towards human exceptionalism. Chaos theory also provides a connection between an abstract, or scientific understanding of the world and visual culture by allowing space to be portrayed as increasingly complex, particularly through images of fractals and infinite regress. This creates the impression that cyberspace is just as real as three-dimensional space. Chaos theory acts as an interface, allowing the reader to experience the gestalt switch between real space and cyberspace. While Chapters 1 and 2 considered entire trilogies of Gibson’s work, the following three chapters look at Gibson’s next trilogy novel by novel. While Gibson’s first trilogy in particular has been subject to many academic readings which read it as a significant landmark in science fiction and, indeed, in postmodern fiction more broadly, his twenty-first century work has yet to be analysed to quite the same extent, with the possible exception of Pattern Recognition which has been recognised as a major work of post-9/11 fiction by Fredric Jameson (2003), Veronica Hollinger (2006), and Lauren Berlant (2011) among others. Chapter 3 reads Pattern Recognition’s concern with ‘faulty pattern recognition’ or ‘apophenia’, a psychological tic that has much in common with paranoia, through a gestalt perspective. Following Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, I argue that the attacks on the Twin Towers on 11 September 2001 constituted an anomaly in a pre-existing paradigm. The attacks were experienced as entering the national consciousness from the outside, breaking the previous patterns of culture and thereby destroying the power of those patterns to make sense of the world. Pattern Recognition expresses a paradigm in crisis through visual culture as the main character, Cayce, attempts to find the maker of the ‘footage’, a series of mysterious films that have begun to appear anonymously online. The footage represents a pure visual artefact, uncontaminated by written language. Just as the imagery of chaos theory is used to depict abstract concepts in visual language, the power of the gestalt switch is used as a visual way of describing abstract concepts. Chapter 4 considers the use of the term ‘gestalt’ in psychoanalysis, particularly in the work of Jacques Lacan. Jacques Lacan writes that the subject’s self-consciousness is given to them as ‘gestalt’ during the mirror stage of development. This gestalt gives the subject an idealised image of themselves, known as the ideal-I. This ideal image is internalised; the subject is driven to emulate this ideal but is never able to fully identify themselves with it. This alienation at the heart of the subject is a theme throughout Gibson’s work and particularly in the Blue Ant trilogy. This chapter focuses on Spook Country (2007) in order to explain the idea of the gestalt as used in psychoanalysis. With reference to Fredric Jameson’s reading of Lacan in dialogue with Marxist criticism, this chapter investigates the lack and alienation at the heart of the subject and how this is expressed through the macrocosm of America’s collective consciousness and repression of its ‘spook country’ as the

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narrative deals with espionage and black operations in the era of the War on Terror and the American invasion of Iraq. The idea of a parallax view gives us a further means of discussing gestalt perception in Chapter 5, as well as science fiction’s relationship with time. In an interview, Gibson describes the perspective of the science fiction writer as a parallax view, with one eye on the present and the other in the past (Hicks 2012). This duality of imagined views creates the conditions for science fiction, the place where the tensions of a double view are expressed. This dichotomy is repeated in the text as the two main characters view the same events in different ways, offering the reader a parallax view of the text’s narrative. I go on to express the dichotomy between image and text through an analysis of the use of ekphrasis in Zero History (2010) and The Portrait of a Lady (1881) by Henry James. Perception is just as important to Gibson’s work as in any of his other novels, but concerns about the conditions created by late capitalism come to the fore as vision itself is privatised through the profusion of CCTV cameras and the power of celebrity. Chapters 6 and 7 read the first two novels of Gibson’s Jackpot trilogy, The Peripheral and Agency and, in doing so, bring the concept of the gestalt into conversation with current debates about literature’s role in engaging with the climate crisis. I argue that these novels increasingly privilege the sense of touch as they portray human characters embedded in a world under assault from anthropogenic climate change and disaster capitalism. Gestalt literary criticism brings out the underlying themes that connect science fiction, cyberpunk and alterity itself. In focusing on the role of perception and the visual in navigating both the world and the text, the figure/ ground distinction becomes key to reading and to understanding as it relies on alterity to create meaning. Theory and science fiction have this interest in alterity in common as both seek to estrange the familiar, to allow the world and its possibilities to be seen anew, as if for the first time. My aim throughout is to see and to show the novels of William Gibson anew while considering the theoretical foundations on which I build from a new angle, in order to see a different gestalt.

Notes 1 The idea of the mind as a tabula rasa, or ‘blank slate’ is used by John Locke in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689) to argue against the idea that ‘men have native ideas and original characters stamped upon their minds in their very first being’ (Locke 1934: 42). Instead, he argues that upon birth the mind is ‘white paper, void of all characters, without any ideas’ (42). 2 For more on the life and work of Edgar Rubin see Jorgen L. Pind’s Edgar Rubin and Psychology in Denmark: Figure and Ground (2013). 3 Neuroscientists have suggested that this tipping point, where the picture changes from one to the other, is dependent on the sensitivities of the largest group of neurons, that is the number of neurons sensitive to the stimulus which are ‘switched on’.

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5 6

7

8

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Bruce G. Cumming et al. (2002) argue for patterns of neuronal firing as a cause for the perceptual field to change in addition to eye rivalry and stimulus rivalry. Andrew J. Parker says, ‘the flip occurs when one of these two almost warring populations of neurons, for reasons probably quite random, becomes more active’ (quoted in Griggs 2010). In Principles of Gestalt Psychology (1935), Kurt Koffka writes: ‘it has been said: The whole is more than the sum of its parts. It is more correct to say that the whole is something else than the sum of its parts, because summing is a meaningless procedure, whereas the whole-part relationship is meaningful’ (176). Despite this qualification, the phrase that has become associated with gestalt theory is ‘the whole is greater than the sum of its parts’ and this is the phrase that I will use. To me, the term ‘greater’ implies qualitative, not just quantitative, difference and thereby preserves the connotation of ‘otherness’ that Koffka worried would be lost. The reader should keep this concept of qualitative difference in mind when the phrase ‘the whole is greater than the sum of its parts’ is used here. In The Palimpsest (2007) Sarah Dillon traces the origins and uses of ‘the palimpsest’ as a substantive term, and I owe credit to her for inspiring this move in my research on the gestalt. The term ‘gestalt’ has also made a brief appearance in science fiction criticism in Clark Mayo’s description of Kurt Vonnegut’s work as ‘gestalt fiction’ in reference to its form – particularly referring to how Vonnegut attempts to capture the perception of the time-travelling Tralfamadorian race of aliens in Slaughter-House Five (1969). In an interview Gibson says: ‘Pynchon has been a favorite writer and a major influence all along. In many ways I see him as almost the start of a certain mutant pop culture imagery with esoteric historical and scientific information. Pynchon is a kind of mythic hero of mine, and I suspect that if you talk with a lot of recent SF writers you’ll find they’ve all read Gravity’s Rainbow (1973) several times and have been very much influenced by it’ (quoted in McCaffery 1991: 272). Darko Suvin’s pioneering role in the development of science fiction studies means that his Marxism has had a huge influence on the genre and how it is perceived. Dialectical considerations are key to understanding contemporary science fiction literary criticism. Fredric Jameson’s Marxism and interest in science fiction have also played a major role in integrating science fiction literary criticism with Marxism and dialectics, a trend seen in Red Planets: Marxism and Science Fiction (Bould and Miéville 2009) a collection of scholarly essays on Marxism and science fiction. Suvin, and Freedman, construct a value judgement by contrasting science fiction with fantasy, which they see as inferior. This duality defines science fiction as ‘not fantasy’ and creates another dichotomy which has become constitutive of science fiction and how it is constructed as a cultural category, even though commentators such as China Miéville (Bould and Miéville 2009: 231–48) have attempted to overcome this opposition.

Bibliography Arnheim, Rudolf and Uta Grundmann. ‘The Intelligence of Vision: An Interview with Rudolf Arnheim.’ Cabinet, vol. 2, 2001, www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/2/rudolfa rnheim.php. Ballard, J.G. Crash. London: Vintage, 1995. Berlant, Lauren. Cruel Optimism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011. Bould, Mark and China Miéville (eds). Red Planets: Marxism and Science Fiction. London: Pluto Press, 2009. Bukatman, Scott. ‘Postcards from the Posthuman Solar System.’ Science Fiction Studies, vol. 18, no. 3, 1991, pp. 343–357.

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Cadigan, Pat. Mindplayers. London: Gollancz, 2000. Cavallaro, Dani. Cyberpunk and Cyberculture: Science Fiction and the Work of William Gibson. London: The Athlone Press, 2000. Clarke, Bruce. Neocybernetics and Narrative. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2014. Cornea, Christine. Science Fiction Cinema: Between Fantasy and Reality. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007. Csicsery-Ronay, Istvan. ‘Cyberpunk and Neuromanticism.’ Storming the Reality Studio: A Casebook of Cyberpunk and Postmodern Fiction, edited by Larry McCaffery. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1992, pp. 182–193. Cumming, Bruce G., Kristine Krug and Andrew J. Parker. ‘Neuronal Activity and its Links with the Perception of Multi-stable Figures.’ Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, vol. 357, no. 1424, 2002, pp. 1053–1062. Dozois, Gardner. ‘Living the Future: You Are What You Eat.’ Writing Science Fiction and Fantasy, edited by Gardner Dozois, Tina Lee, Stanley Schmidt, Ian Randal Strock, and Sheila Williams. New York: Davis Publications, 1991, pp. 12–27. Farnell, Ross. ‘Posthuman Topologies: William Gibson’s “Architexture” in Virtual Light and Idoru.’ Science Fiction Studies, vol. 25, no. 3, 1998, pp. 459–480. Foster, Thomas. The Souls of Cyberfolk: Posthumanism as Vernacular Theory. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2005. Freedman, Carl. Critical Theory and Science Fiction. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2000. Gibson, William. Burning Chrome. London: HarperCollins, 1995. Gibson, William. ‘William Gibson’s Blog.’ 27 Feb.2003, http://williamgibsonblog.blogsp ot.com. Gibson, William. Zero History. London: HarperCollins, 2010. Gombrich, E.H. Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation. London: Phaidon, 1994. Griggs, Jessica. ‘Windows to the Mind.’ New Scientist, vol. 2778, 2010, pp. 34–39. Haney, William S. ‘William Gibson’s Neuromancer: Technological Ambiguity.’ Cyberculture, Cyborgs and Science Fiction: Consciousness and the Posthuman. Amsterdam: Rodopi Editions, 2006, pp. 92–112. Haraway, Donna. Crystals, Fabrics and Fields: Metaphors that Shape Embryos. Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books, 2004. Hayles, N. Katherine. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1999. Herbert, Frank. Dune. London: Gollancz, 1965. Hicks, Jesse. ‘An Interview with William Gibson.’ The Verge, 24 January2012, www. theverge.com/2012/1/24/2724370/william-gibson-interview. Hollinger, Veronica. ‘Stories About the Future: From Patterns of Expectation to Pattern Recognition.’ Science Fiction Studies, vol. 33, no. 3, 2006, pp. 452–472. Iser, Wolfgang. How to Do Theory. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2006. Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991. Jameson, Fredric. ‘Fear and Loathing in Globalization.’ New Left Review, vol. 23, 2003, pp. 105–114. Jameson, Fredric. Archaeologies of the Future. London: Verso, 2005. Koffka, Kurt. Principles of Gestalt Psychology. London: Lund Humphries, 1935.

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Kuhn, Thomas. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2012. Lakoff, George. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 1980. Locke, John. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1934. Mayo, Clark. Kurt Vonnegut: The Gospel From Outer Space (Or, Yes We Have No Nirvanas). San Bernardino, CA: Borgo Press, 1977. McCaffery, Larry. Storming the Reality Studio: A Casebook of Cyberpunk and Postmodern Science Fiction. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991. McFarlane, Anna, Graham J. Murphy and Lars Schmeink (eds). The Routledge Companion to Cyberpunk Culture. New York: Routledge, 2020. Miller, Gerald AlvaJr. ‘The Eversion of the Virtual: Postmodernity and Control Societies in William Gibson’s Science Fictions of the Present.’ Exploring the Limits of the Human Through Science Fiction. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012, pp. 99–128. Murphy, Graham J. and Lars Schmeink (eds). Cyberpunk and Visual Culture. New York: Routledge, 2018. Pind, Jorgen L. Edgar Rubin and Psychology in Denmark: Figure and Ground. New York: Springer, 2013. Pynchon, Thomas. The Crying of Lot 49. London: Vintage, 2000. Rapatzikou, Tatiani G. Gothic Motifs in the Fiction of William Gibson. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2004. Roberts, Adam. The History of Science Fiction. New York: Palgrave, 2005. Sterling, Bruce (ed.). Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology. London: HarperCollins, 1994. Sterling, Bruce. ‘Preface.’ Burning Chrome, London: HarperCollins, 1995, pp. 9–13. Suvin, Darko. ‘On the Poetics of the Science Fiction Genre.’ College English, vol. 34, no. 3, 1972, pp. 372–382. Suvin, Darko. Positions and Presuppositions in Science Fiction. London: Macmillan Press, 1988. Tomberg, Jaak. ‘On the “Double Vision” of Realism and Estrangement in William Gibson’s Bigend Trilogy.’ Science Fiction Studies, vol. 40, no. 2, 2013, pp. 263–285. Wertheimer, Max. ‘Laws of Organization in Perceptual Forms.’ A Source Book of Gestalt Psychology, edited by Willis D. Ellis. New York: Gestalt Legacy Press, 1938, pp. 71–88.

1

Autopoiesis in the Sprawl trilogy

Introduction The Sprawl trilogy begins with the publication of Neuromancer in 1984, a year already freighted with science-fictional significance thanks to George Orwell’s eponymous dystopia. Gibson’s debut is the most important cyberpunk novel and the ur-text of the genre. Gibson had already coined the term ‘cyberspace’ in his short story ‘Burning Chrome’ – first published in the science fiction magazine Omni in July 1982 and appearing in the collection of the same name in 1986. However, Neuromancer popularised the term, energising the cultural imaginary to think about how to represent the space behind the computer screen. Neuromancer also referred to data-space as ‘the matrix’, and these terms had an influence far beyond cyberpunk and science fiction, inspiring a generation of computer scientists to think about user interfaces and the influence of a networked world on social structures. Neuromancer follows the story of Case, a washed-up ‘cyberspace cowboy’ (11), who was once ‘jacked into a custom cyberspace deck that projected his disembodied consciousness into the consensual hallucination that was the matrix’ (12). Case is no longer capable of working, or of jacking into the matrix at all, after stealing from employers who punished him by damaging his nervous system with Russian mycotoxin (12), thus banishing him from cyberspace. He hustles for work in Chiba City, Japan, and takes drugs with his sometime-girlfriend Linda Lee until he is tracked down by cyborg, Molly Millions. Molly works for Armitage, a man so damaged by a previous war that the only thing holding his psyche together is the power of an artificial intelligence known as Wintermute. Case agrees that he will help in their plot to combine Wintermute with his counterpart, another artificial intelligence known as Neuromancer. These two intelligences were designed by the nepotistic Tessier-Ashpool family with the intention of preventing them from joining so that their combined power would pose no threat to humanity. Once Wintermute and Neuromancer become one, their knowledge is greater than that of the human race and they are no longer confined to the matrix or the world system. The two novels which complete the trilogy show some of the fallout from Neuromancer and Wintermute’s communion, an event known as DOI: 10.4324/9781003082477-2

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‘When It Changed’. Count Zero follows disgraced curator, Marly, as she is hired by Virek, a cryogenically frozen millionaire, to find the source of some mysterious artworks. Meanwhile, Angie Mitchell, daughter of an eminent scientist, is rescued from the corporation Maas-Neotek carrying a delicate and dangerous deck-of-sorts in her brain. The titular Count Zero, a wannabe hacker also known as Bobby Newmark, finds himself in possession of some black market tech that keeps getting people killed and is taken under the wing of some hackers who explain to him that the matrix is now home to voodoo spirits, or loas, aspects of the one consciousness that had been WintermuteNeuromancer. In Mona Lisa Overdrive, obsessive hacker, Gentry, attempts to achieve a totalised understanding of cyberspace, something he thinks of as the ‘Shape’ of the matrix, and which he expects will give him some insight into the nature of living systems and their relationship to the universe. Mona Lisa Overdrive gives some more detail about the culture surrounding simstim (simulated stimulation, a kind of full-sensory entertainment medium) and its relationship to the matrix, climaxing with the reunion of Angie Mitchell and Count Zero in a pocket universe of the matrix. Gibson’s debut trilogy is named for the ‘Sprawl’, the spread of urban areas on the USA’s East Coast also known as the Boston-Atlanta Metropolitan Axis, a frontier society where the rule of law breaks down and the globalised, data-based free market fills the vacuum. Cyberpunk’s engagement with technology runs deep, using computing and engineering discourse as a metaphor for life, and even consciousness itself. This allows for a subtly drawn hierarchy of conscious, living beings to emerge. As Istvan Csicsery-Ronay puts it: The metaphors themselves have a life. And in the hands of a master, like Gibson, the fuzzy links can become a subtly constructed, but always merely implied, four-level hierarchy of evolving systems of information processing, from the individual human being’s biological processes and personality, through the total life of society, to non-living artificial intelligences, and ultimately to new entities created out of those AIs. (‘Cyberpunk and Neuromanticism’, 190) This chapter traces these systems using the concept of autopoiesis, a definition of life that allows for the inclusion of non-human and non-biological entities, with implications for a posthuman understanding of ontology. Gibson refers to these living systems as ‘gestalt’, highlighting the importance of their relationality over their material substance, and I explore this through examining the role of the matrix, the zaibatsus (the global corporations that rule the geopolitics of Gibson’s world), and the media in the Sprawl trilogy. I also show how viewing identity as gestalt through the concept of autopoiesis complicates the ontology of human individuals, emphasising their interdependence with their environments. Finally, I take a closer look at style in the novels to show that the use of visual imagery in Gibson’s debut trilogy reflects this posthuman content at the level of form.

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Autopoiesis in the Sprawl trilogy

Autopoiesis In the Sprawl trilogy, living systems are represented as ‘autopoietic’, a term which literally means ‘self-creation’. Autopoiesis is a way of defining life and cognition that was born from the field of systems theory and cybernetics. For the field of cybernetics, the Macy Conferences on cybernetics (1946–1953) were a defining moment for the discipline. Part of a wider programme of conferences, the Macy Conferences on cybernetics were an opportunity for cybernetics to develop in a truly interdisciplinary fashion, an innovative crucible for inspiring new academic approaches. By bringing together an interest in communication across living and non-living systems in an ambitious, interdisciplinary environment, the conferences almost inevitably produced new ideas about the nature of cognition. Heinz von Foerster, a key participant in the conferences, sought to define cognition in terms of relationality in order to think about living systems through the new science of cybernetics. Cybernetics sought to take a gestalt approach to social and biological systems through the privileging of relations over components. This relational approach meant that cognition could be thought of as separate from the living system and its organic body. Rather than defining cognition as emergent from organic structures such as a brain and nervous system, cybernetics began to view it as a capability that need not be confined to the human, or even the organic. Von Foerster’s criteria for cognition are as follows: i ii iii iv v vi vii

the the the the the the the

faculty faculty faculty faculty faculty faculty faculty

to to to to to to to

perceive remember infer learn evaluate communicate move (Müller and von Foerster, 30)

Von Foerster makes it clear that these seven characteristics must themselves be considered using a holistic, gestalt approach, with the onus placed on their emergent relationships with one another rather than on their status as ‘components’ of cognition: If one wishes to isolate these faculties functionally, one is doomed to fail. Consequently, if the mechanisms that are responsible for any of these faculties are to be discovered, then the totality of cognitive processes must be considered. If one of these seven faculties is omitted, the system is devoid of cognition. (29–30) The approach taken by von Foerster and other cybernetics pioneers Warren MacCulloch and Norbert Wiener was to be hugely influential for Chilean

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biologists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela as they began to develop a cybernetic approach to biology, an approach they called ‘autopoiesis’. Maturana and Varela combined the insights they gleaned from von Foerster and the wider field of cybernetics with those of phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty who was, in turn, inspired by gestalt theory. MerleauPonty references gestalt psychology’s theories throughout his 1945 treatise Phenomenology and Perception and begins to sound like a posthuman cyberspace cowboy as he recognises relationality as key to human being in the world: ‘we witness every minute the miracle of related experience, and yet nobody knows better than we do how this miracle is worked, for we are ourselves this network of relationships’ (xxiii). Varela credits European phenomenology as a key influence in the development of autopoiesis reading Merleau-Ponty alongside Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger. Of his foray into phenomenology Varela wrote, ‘For the first time I seemed to find in these authors a preoccupation with the range of lived experience which I consider fundamental’ (1996: 409). From these fields of phenomenology and cybernetics, Maturana and Varela developed a relational definition of biology which aimed to explain life and the living system, as well as cognition. In 1973, Maturana and Varela coined the term ‘autopoiesis’ to capture their new approach, creating a neologism so they could use ‘a word without history’ (xvii) capable of describing the self-making that the biologists observed in autonomous living systems. Previous definitions of life had relied on various biological parameters of the organism, normally focusing on one system; for example, life could be defined by the ability to reproduce, thereby defined by its reproductive system. Alternatively, life could be associated with respiration and associated with the respiratory system. With their theory of autopoiesis, Maturana and Varela began to develop a gestalt approach, a relational approach that recognised that the whole was greater than the sum of its parts: But if the organism is a unity, in what sense are its component properties its parts? The organismic approach does not answer this question, it merely restates it by insisting that there are elements of organization that subordinate each part to the whole and make the organism a unity. (5–6) Maturana and Varela overcome these difficulties by defining living systems by the relations, the organisation, that allows the system to function. They find this organisation to be circular, reflexive and self-producing. The whole is defined with reference to the parts and the parts are defined with relation to the functioning of the whole, as Maturana and Varela write that the parts ‘are those whose synthesis or maintenance [the living system] secures in a manner such that the product of their functioning is the same functioning organization that produces them’ (9). Maturana and Varela, taking their lead from cybernetic definitions of cognition like von Foerster’s, explicitly link autopoiesis to

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cognition itself: ‘Living systems are cognitive systems, and living as a process is a process of cognition’ (13). This definition of life and of cognition takes the emphasis away from the ‘natural’, organic body in defining life and experience of the world.

Autopoiesis and posthumanism The emphasis on relationality over the specifics of embodiment that autopoiesis promotes makes it attractive to posthumanist approaches as it takes the focus away from anthropocentric models. Rather than defining the living system as a ‘natural’ organic body, autopoiesis defines life as a pattern of organisation that stands out against a background of randomness. This means that life is not necessarily restricted to the human and other animals, but could potentially encompass artificial intelligence. The predominance of the binary between pattern and randomness is identified by N. Katherine Hayles as one of the defining characteristics of the information age, replacing the importance of the presence/absence binary identified by structuralist and poststructuralist thought as constitutive of society. Hayles even associates the rise of the information society with the rise of deconstruction: the dialectic between absence and presence came clearly into focus because it was already being displaced as a cultural presupposition by randomness and pattern. Presence and absence were forced into visibility, so to speak, because they were already losing their constitutive power to form the ground for discourse, becoming instead discourse’s subject. In this sense deconstruction is the child of an information age, formulating its theories from strata pushed upward by the emerging substrata beneath. (72) Hayles connects this shift from presence/absence to pattern/randomness to the era when randomness ‘was reconceptualised in scientific fields so that it is not mere gibberish but a productive force essential to the evolution of complex systems’ (72). By privileging the pattern/randomness binary at the expense of the presence/absence binary Hayles positions posthumanism as a replacement, or a development of deconstruction; posthumanism is better able to conceptualise pattern/randomness, moving away from presence/absence. However, others have sought to base their analysis on a combination of the two, rather than the departure that Hayles suggests. In What is Posthumanism? (2010), Cary Wolfe separates Hayles’s account of posthumanism into a ‘posthumanism’ based in deconstruction and systems theory and a ‘transhumanism’ (or ‘bad posthumanism’ [xvii]) that aims to escape embodiment and to maintain the normative human exceptionalism that has characterised the humanist era: posthumanism in my sense isn’t posthuman at all – in the sense of being ‘after’ our embodiment has been transcended – but is only posthumanist,

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in the sense that it opposes the fantasies of disembodiment and autonomy, inherited from humanism itself, that Hayles rightly criticizes. (xv) Wolfe responds to Hayles’s concern that posthumanism may reinstate the ‘fantasies of disembodiment’ found in humanism rather than offer a truly radical future for subjectivity through arguing that deconstruction is complementary to autopoietic systems theory, allowing for multiple binaries to exist. In gestalt literary criticism, binaries are characterised as constitutive and interdependent rather than antagonistic, as in Wolfe’s analysis. Like the Rubin’s vase image discussed in the Introduction, the two sides define each other, and the traits of human perception highlighted by the gestalt psychologists – the figure/ground distinction and the propensity to see repetition, similarity, and pattern – are privileged in the understanding of life. I adopt Wolfe’s definition of posthumanism as most useful to a project that seeks to situate the subject as embedded in its environment and embodied through the locus of its point of view. As a gestalt approach highlights the importance of perception, thereby locating the subject in space, it also highlights the importance of pattern in constructing living beings through autopoiesis. The relationship between autopoiesis and gestalt literary criticism can be developed further by considering the connections between autopoiesis and performativity. Performativity is the understanding that words and texts can perform actions, or can bring realities into creation, and was first theorised by J.L. Austin in 1962.1 In the same way, the novel (and particularly the science fiction novel) can be considered performative as it brings a new reality into being through its words. Ira Livingston’s Between Science and Literature uses the comparison between autopoiesis and performativity to align autopoiesis with poststructuralism: whereas structuralism tends to model systems as spatial organizations frozen at a single moment in time, autopoiesis understands them as patterns of ongoing events continually under construction. But this insight is also not particular to autopoiesis theory: it has been one of the hallmarks of poststructuralist cultural theory generally, one of the major ways it has built on structuralism while establishing its difference from its structuralist roots. The handiest general term for this kind of operation (I mean the operation of systems as ongoing events continually under construction) comes from cultural theory: we call it performativity. (80) Science fiction is a particularly performative genre of writing as it brings into being concepts, and even technologies, merely by writing about them. N. Katherine Hayles highlights this as she explains her interest in reading literature alongside scientific phenomena:

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Autopoiesis in the Sprawl trilogy I want to resist the idea that influence flows from science into literature, the cross-currents are considerably more complex than a one-way model of influence would allow. In the Neuromancer trilogy, for example, William Gibson’s vision of cyberspace had a considerable effect on the development of three-dimensional virtual reality imaging software. (21)

In this sense, we can see that science fiction is, by its nature, performative. Through his contribution to a cyberpunk cultural imaginary, Gibson performatively creates the realm of cyberspace by describing what such a technology might look like. In the Sprawl trilogy, this structure is repeated through different levels of the text: at the macro level, the Sprawl trilogy as a science fiction text can be considered an autopoietic, performative system. Moving down to the diegetic level, the work of collective human effort that is the matrix is an autopoietic being with its own cognition, as are the corporations and the media. Our discussion will begin here before moving down another level to consider the human characters in the novel and their autopoiesis in an interconnected world before, finally, focusing on the descriptive level of the text where the importance of gestalt perception is highlighted through the use of visual imagery and gomi style.

Non-human ontologies: the matrix, the zaibatsus, the media gestalt When the reader is first introduced to the concept of the matrix at the beginning of Neuromancer it is defined in visual terms, as an interface between the human and the technological. This role is shared with television throughout the novel, as can be seen in Neuromancer’s famous opening line, ‘the sky above the port was the colour of television, tuned to a dead channel’ (9). The contrast between the ‘natural’ sky and the technology of television static immediately disrupts distinctions between the organic and the artificial while associating that disruption with the distinction between the living and the dead. This confusion between the natural and the cultural is continued in the voiceover of a children’s television programme which tells the reader that the matrix is: a consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts… A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding … (67) Defining the matrix as ‘a graphic representation’ highlights the importance of visual imagery as an interface between the human and the technological,

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while the definitional role of visual media is emphasised by the use of a television to convey the information. Televisual and virtual reality technologies have become naturalised as they appear as background noise, unremarkable to the characters in the novel. The fragmentation of the voiceover – for example, in the use of ‘unthinkable complexity’ as a stand-alone sentence – conveys the peripheral nature of the technology as it shapes understanding without drawing attention to itself, as though only occasional words impinge on the listener’s awareness. The barrier between the natural and the cultural is permeable, allowing the organic experience of ‘hallucination’ and the human domain of ‘the nonspace of the mind’ to become the preconditions for a new reality and a new non-human living being, the being that is the matrix. The matrix is created from ‘the banks of every computer in the human system’ (67) and is then experienced by the human subjects responsible for its creation, subjects who are enhanced by this experience in a feedback loop, as they become more interconnected with each other, and with the matrix itself as an autonomous system. In the non-space of the matrix, a world of visualised data, navigation is dependent on perception: all the data in the world stacked up like a big neon city, so you could cruise around and have a kind of grip on it, visually anyway, because if you didn’t, it was too complicated, trying to find your way to a particular piece of data you needed. (Mona Lisa Overdrive, 22) In Neuromancer, the reliance of the matrix on visual perception also applies to Wintermute and Neuromancer before they combine. Both Wintermute and Neuromancer appear to Case in various visual guises: Wintermute appears in cyberspace as Case’s old colleague, the Finn, and says ‘these aren’t masks, I need ’em to talk to you. ’Cause I don’t have what you’d think of as a personality, much’ (256). The dependence of the AIs on these visual avatars no longer applies once Wintermute and Neuromancer unite and sublate to a different level of existence. Once they have become an autonomous, autopoietic living system the matrix is no longer simply an interface between the human and the technological. It appears to Case as a grotesque apparition of the Finn’s face. Case ‘could see the pores in the man’s nose. The yellow teeth were the size of pillows’ (315). The imagery has become hyperreal as the matrix no longer requires a realistic mask with which to communicate. Case has a conversation with the recently formed entity: ‘So what’s the score? How are things different? You running the world now? You God?’ ‘Things aren’t different. Things are things.’ ‘But what do you do? You just there?’ Case shrugged … ‘I talk to my own kind.’ ‘But you’re the whole thing. Talk to yourself ?’

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Autopoiesis in the Sprawl trilogy ‘There’s others. I found one already. Series of transmissions recorded over a period of eight years, in the nineteen-seventies. ’Til there was me, natch, there was nobody to know, nobody to answer.’ ‘From where?’ ‘Centauri system.’ ‘Oh,’ Case said. ‘Yeah? No shit?’ ‘No shit.’ And then the screen was blank. (316)

While the autopoietic being formed from the union of Wintermute and Neuromancer has moved to another level beyond the visual, represented by the blank screen as the final conversation with Case is ended, the Sprawl trilogy continues to show an interest in visual perception as a means of controlling or understanding the matrix and what it has become. In Mona Lisa Overdrive, the final book in the Sprawl trilogy, Gentry, a hacker, becomes obsessed with seeing the ‘Shape’ of the matrix, as though perceiving the Shape of the entire thing could lead to some transcendental knowledge: ‘Gentry was convinced that cyberspace had a Shape, an overall total form … Gentry had this obsessive conviction that the Shape mattered totally. The apprehension of the Shape was Gentry’s grail’ (83). Gentry differentiates his holistic, gestalt approach from the linear, Newtonian approach taken by others: ‘You’ve been playing cause and effect, but I’ve been looking for outlines, shapes in time. You’ve been looking all over the matrix, but I’ve been looking at the matrix, the whole thing. I know things you don’t’ (237). The Shape came into existence at the same time as Wintermute joined with Neuromancer, ‘When It Changed’, and represents the creation of a gestalt being. It should be kept in mind that ‘gestalt’ is the German word for ‘shape’ or ‘form’ and that Gentry’s idea of the Shape of the matrix suggests gestalt perception, as he suspects that the whole will be greater than the sum of its parts. As Gentry finds out the secrets of the Shape he asks, ‘And the sum was greater than the parts? … Cybernetic godhead? Light on the waters?’ (237– 238). Gentry’s obsession with seeing the entire Shape of the matrix is connected with the human urge to take control over the world, an urge to become godlike, or at least to maintain human exceptionalism in a world that gives less centrality to human importance. The autopoietic nature of the matrix as Neuromancer and Wintermute combine is contrasted with the existence of their creators, the Tessier-Ashpool family who, while human, have lost the autopoietic quality necessary for survival in the world of the Sprawl trilogy. The Tessier-Ashpools have built up their power over generations and to some extent embody a feudalist conception of power and inheritance. As their power is built on the structure of the family, they must maintain blood lines and, in order to do this, they try to achieve immortality through cryogenics and cloning. This way of thinking rejects an autopoietic sense of subjectivity as the family become closed off,

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there is no way for ‘new blood’ to enter the system. They are also physically closed off as they must live on their orbiting space station in order to remain close to their cryogenics facilities and to slow the aging process. These attempts at immortality reduce the vitality of the Tessier-Ashpools – they become more vulnerable with time and this leads to the removal of the conditions of cognition identified by Heinz von Foerster. The Tessier-Ashpools lose the power of movement, as they are trapped on their space station; they lose the power to learn and to react as they become more and more distanced from the everyday affairs of normal life on planet Earth; they even forego the ability to communicate, as they become hermits who almost never see each other, taking turns in the cryogenic chambers. Lady 3Jane is the current clone of the original Jane who began structuring the Tessier-Ashpool clan through cloning and cryogenics. 3Jane explains that her ‘mother’, the mother of the original Jane, Marie-France: dreamed of a state involving very little in the way of individual consciousness… Animal bliss. I think she viewed the evolution of the forebrain as a sidestep … Only in certain heightened modes would an individual – a clan member – suffer the more painful aspects of self-awareness. (Neuromancer, 258) Marie-France predicted that the family could survive by sacrificing all individuality to the collective, but the sacrifice of individual self-awareness resulted in the impossibility of collective awareness and of autopoietic being. The Tessier-Ashpool clan fail to see that the continuation of an autopoietic, collective identity is based on openness and exchange, not on the protection of a status quo, whether that be through an immortal CEO or a bloodline. They lack the fluidity of autopoietic entities such as the matrix and so are doomed to fail.2 While the Tessier-Ashpools decline and decay, they are contrasted with the unimaginably wealthy Virek who hires disgraced art curator, Marly, to find the maker of some artworks reminiscent of Joseph Cornell’s boxes in Count Zero. 3 Virek is presented as a combination of a billionaire businessman and a posthuman entity dependent on, and interdependent with, the matrix. Whereas the Tessier-Ashpools fall apart under the closed system of cloning and genetics, Virek is figured as an example of a ‘parallel evolution’ (144) from the aristocrats of old, one who has adapted to a wired society somewhat and therefore retained some power, as signified through his reference to himself as ‘gestalt’ (242, 300) rather than an individual that heads up a vast estate. Virek’s body is cryogenically frozen, and he seeks freedom from the ‘four hundred kilograms of rioting cells they wall away behind surgical steel in a Stockholm industrial park’ (301). This goal is reminiscent of Case’s attempts to escape the ‘meat’ of his body, and Virek relies on the matrix and other technologies to take on physical forms to make his deals. When Marly first encounters him, she meets him in a construct, a private area of the

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matrix, which he has made up to look like Gaudi’s Park Güell in Barcelona. The use of a space that takes inspiration from organic forms in order to showcase natural beauty, reproduced in the artificial environment of the matrix, is designed to show Virek’s power over space, both cyberspace and real space, as he introduces guests and employees to the reality of a world shaped to his wealth and whims. The mosaic patterns used by Gaudi to evoke wild and mythical beasts might also be taken as a metaphor for Virek’s gestalt, a proliferation of parts that far exceed his corporeal form to create a far greater force. In terms of individuals in positions of power, Virek is an outlier, a fact that is signalled in the text by repeated comparisons between his power and that of the corporations or ‘zaibatsus’ (144, 307) which are considered the standard bearers of power in the trilogy. The end of Count Zero sees him destroyed as an individual personality, in part because he was beguiled by the possibility of transcendence into the matrix and therefore failed to realise that the matrix is a being that cannot be appropriated or contained by the force of a human individual, even one whose wealth dwarfs that of earthly nations. However, Virek’s estate remains and, it is implied, will continue to function in increasingly arcane ways without the oversight of a human personality. While such remnants of individualised wealth and power as the TessierAshpools decline, and Virek’s estate realises itself as a truly posthuman system, the real power in the Sprawl trilogy lies in the vitality of the matrix and another non-human ontology, the zaibatsus. Gibson uses the term ‘zaibatsu’ to describe corporations whose power has grown beyond that of any individual or country, corporations that cross borders in the endgame of globalisation. The zaibatsus are described as the primary locus of power in the world of Neuromancer, partly due to their autopoietic nature: Power, in Case’s world, meant corporate power. The zaibatsus, the multinationals that shaped the course of human history, had transcended old barriers. Viewed as organisms, they had attained a kind of immortality. You couldn’t kill a zaibatsu by assassinating a dozen key executives; there were others waiting to step up the ladder, assume the vacated position, access the vast banks of corporate memory. (242)4 According to Heinz von Foerster’s parameters for cognition, the zaibatsus are cognitive, living, autopoietic beings. Their ‘vast banks of corporate memory’ mean that they can remember. They can ‘transcend old barriers’, and therefore have the power of movement as they cross borders. They can learn, infer, perceive, and evaluate as they develop their businesses. They can even communicate as they make their desires known to the agents that will carry them out. The imbalance caused by the recognition of corporations as living systems is part of the reason that Wintermute and Neuromancer must join in order to make the matrix an autopoietic being. The corporations act as rivals

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to artificial intelligence, privatising the ‘nonspace’ of the matrix with their ICE (Intrusion Countermeasures Electronics) which acts as a metaphorical barrier, like a firewall, to prevent hacker access to company databases. This division of the matrix has to be overcome by Wintermute and Neuromancer in order to achieve being. In the contrast between the Tessier-Ashpool family’s waning power and the corporate living systems of the zaibatsus Gibson shows two very different paradigms for what constitutes a collective. The Tessier-Ashpool family are contrasted with the immortality of the zaibatsus as Case considers the death of their leader: Tessier-Ashpool wasn’t like [the zaibatsus], and he sensed the difference in the death of its founder. T-A was an ativism, a clan. He remembered the litter of the old man’s chamber, the soiled humanity of it. (242) Autopoiesis is portrayed as the only way for a living system to survive in the world of the Sprawl trilogy as the Tessier-Ashpool family are defeated while the matrix, through the combination of Neuromancer and Wintermute, gains its autonomy through autopoiesis. Humanity itself is no longer an important consideration when defining successful, vibrant living things and is even here seen as a weakness, or a limitation. The power of the zaibatsus stands alongside a media that has become, primarily, a source of entertainment rather than a means of communicating. While cyberspace remains interactive, the media in Neuromancer produce simstims – simulated stimulations. Simstims connect directly to the human brain through the use of a ‘plastic tiara’ (71) that holds electrodes in contact with the head. These simstims are anathema to cyberspace cowboys, ostensibly because of their interactions with the senses. Case thinks of simstim as ‘basically a meat toy’ (71), but there is certainly a gendered element to the dismissal of simstim. Case knows that ‘the trodes he used and the little plastic tiara dangling from a simstim deck were basically the same, and that the cyberspace matrix was actually a drastic simplification of the human sensorium, at least in terms of presentation’ (71). The femininity of the simstim tiara and the soap opera aesthetic it offers to a primarily female audience desperate for escapism are contrasted with the ‘serious’ tech of the trodes in both Neuromancer and Count Zero where Bobby Newmark views his mother’s obsession with simstim as a pathetic indulgence: ‘she would soap her brains out good for six solid hours’ (54). The cowboys think of simstim as a distracting, frivolous entertainment, but there seems to be a revolutionary potential waiting to be uncovered via this, ‘gratuitous multiplication of flesh input’ (71). One of the narrative threads of Mona Lisa Overdrive follows Angie Mitchell, who has a connection with the matrix threaded through her brain by her scientist father and has become a simstim star. It also follows Mona, a young drug addict pimped out by her boyfriend who has a passing resemblance to Angie and who is given plastic surgery during the course of the novel with the

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goal of replacing Angie altogether. These two storylines are interwoven with the tale of Kumiko, the daughter of a yakuza sent to London for her own safety during a time of upheaval, and Slick, an engineer suffering the aftereffects of penal amnesia who lives with Gentry in the toxic wasteland of Dog Solitude. Its three female-fronted narratives make Mona Lisa Overdrive the only novel in the trilogy to prioritise women’s perspectives and, not coincidentally, give the clearest account of simstim. Mona is a fan of simstim, and of Angie in particular, and recognises the importance of bodily and intellectual engagement with the medium. She remembers an old friend, a fellow drug addict named Lanette, who dismissed simstim because it was ‘just more of what she wanted out of’ (123). This account gives us a very different sense of simstim when compared with the mindless passivity Bobby Newmark sees in his mother’s behaviour. The contrast between the matrix and simstim is also highlighted when data-thief Tick asks Kumiko whether she has ever experienced the matrix. When she replies that she has only seen it in stims he says that she ‘might as well ’ave seen it, then’ (268). Continuing the themes of the whole versus the fragmented parts found at every level of this trilogy, the matrix and simstim begin to look like two sides of the same coin, and the logic of the novel confirms this with the union of the simstim star Angie with the matrix runner Bobby Newmark in the final pages of the novel. The contrast set up between the feminine embodiment of simstim and the masculine disembodiment of the matrix turns out to be an optical illusion collapsing into holism once again. Through its use as a means of immersive entertainment, the media has become an organism of sorts, and a powerful one like the zaibatsus. The power of the media in Neuromancer is primarily shown through its relationship with terrorism. This becomes clear as Case watches news footage about the terrorist group, the Panther Moderns. An academic sociologist named Dr Viriginia Rambali has been invited to give her opinion on the actions of the group, ‘her name, faculty, and school pulsing across the screen in pink alphanumerics’ (75). The mediation of this advice, in a pre-packaged news segment with Rambali’s credentials used as markers of authenticity, begins to show that the terrorists’ activities, the commentary on those activities, and the media as a whole are all part of the same system: ‘Given their penchant for these random acts of surreal violence,’ someone said, ‘it may be difficult for our viewers to understand why you continue to insist that this phenomenon isn’t a form of terrorism.’ Dr Rambali smiled. ‘There is always a point at which the terrorist ceases to manipulate the media gestalt. A point at which the violence may well escalate, but beyond which the terrorist has become symptomatic of the media gestalt itself. Terrorism as we ordinarily understand it is innately media-related. The Panther Moderns differ from other terrorists precisely in their degree of self-consciousness, in their awareness of the extent to which media divorce the act of terrorism from the original sociopolitical intent …’. (75)

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The media is an autopoietic entity, underlined in the text via Rambali’s description of the media as ‘gestalt’. The media exists as a set of relations, not defined by its components but by how those components relate to each other, allowing the media to change, grow, and interact with its surroundings as an autonomous autopoietic being – autonomous, that is, even to the events that it should report on. In a move pre-empting Jean Baudrillard’s diagnosis in The Gulf War Did Not Take Place (1991, English trans. 1995), the media is in a position to create cultural moments and historical events as part of its functioning. This definition of the media puts the subjects on which the media reports in an interesting position. The media creates itself, and its subjects, performatively. The media defines the terrorists via their acts of terror, rather than via the political goals that the terrorists hope to achieve. In so doing, the media creates the terrorists, it appropriates them so that they are merely an adjunct to the media proper, a sign that the media can then use to pursue its own agenda, whatever that may be. The Panther Moderns are different due to their ‘awareness of the extent to which media divorce the act of terrorism from the original sociopolitical intent’ (75) – however, it is unclear whether this collective self-awareness allows them to function as an entity in their own right, or whether they are simply self-aware that they are functioning as a part of the media. They may be a branch of the media made conscious, producing the spectacle and packaging it for consumption. In this sense, Neuromancer can be read as a paranoid text. It betrays the fear that, once we recognise our role in creating the world in which we live, we accept the potential for that world to be appropriated and distorted by powerful narratives over which we have no control. Reading the text through the lens of autopoiesis and gestalt literary criticism does not produce a comforting view of holism and harmony, it highlights the text’s concerns with the ethics at play in the mutual creation of our worlds. It warns us that, where a more powerful entity can take charge of the narrative, our very bodies and minds are at risk of infiltration and curtailment.

Human subjectivity and subject supplementarity The human characters in the Sprawl trilogy are dependent on their environments as various outside influences – the matrix, drugs or bodily augmentation – keep their personalities together in an autopoietic balance of openness and closure. This balance between openness and closure is expressed in Jacques Derrida’s ‘Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences’ (2001) by the term ‘play’. Derrida imagines that the ‘play’ of the subject is kept in check by its centre, a centre which ‘closes off the play which it opens up and makes possible’ (352). When thinking of the autopoietic living system, the centre of the structure should not be imagined spatially, but as the point of equilibrium at which the subject keeps itself, ‘a sort of nonlocus in which an infinite number of sign-substitutions came into play’ (353–354). The necessity for play to exist, but to be confined, means that the play of subjectivity is both confining and constitutive; the subject

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relies on the ‘play’ between the various tensions that maintain its equilibrium, but at the same time this play is limiting, as in gestalt perception, where the subject relies on the limitation of the visual field in order to constitute understanding of the raw data. The nature of subjectivity as constitutive and confining leads to anxiety, as ‘anxiety is invariably the result of a certain mode of being implicated in the game, of being caught by the game, of being as it were at stake in the game from the outset’ (352). Maturana and Varela recognise this as a part of an autopoietic view of life: ‘we as human beings exist in a network of social systems and move from one to another in our daily activities’ (1973: xxviii) but there is a balance between being part of a network and being used by a network, and if someone is caught up in a system that is not part of their being, ‘if the human being cannot escape from this situation because his life is at stake, he is under social abuse’ (xxix). Derrida goes on to explain that this loss of a centre for the subject in Western metaphysics has led to the use of intellectual ideas as tools which are not expected to hold any truth value in themselves but are merely used instrumentally. He describes this process through the ethnological work of Claude Lévi-Strauss and particularly through the term bricolage, which holds a similar meaning to the word ‘collage’ but refers to the process of making art from diverse objects, rather than pictures or pieces of pictures. Here bricolage is used to mean the process of gathering tools, the debris of outdated forms of metaphysics, and making use of them in whichever way is expedient: No longer is any truth value attributed to them; there is a readiness to abandon them, if necessary, should other instruments appear more useful. In the meantime, their relative efficacy is exploited, and they are employed to destroy the old machinery to which they belong and of which they themselves are pieces. (359) As Gibson writes in ‘Burning Chrome’, a short story set in the same universe as the Sprawl trilogy, ‘the street finds its own uses for things’ (215). In the Sprawl trilogy, Gibson’s characters are bricoleurs, finding ‘supplements’ which allow them to function in the world and picking through the debris of our zero world to make a present for themselves. Derrida defines supplementarity as the ‘movement of play, permitted by the lack or absence of a centre or an origin’ (365). This means that the supplement comes to represent something missing (the centre) but also something extra. Different characters in Neuromancer have different supplements around which they build their subjectivity; for Case this supplement is provided by the matrix, for Molly it is her bodily augmentations, while other characters find supplements through drug use. Lance Olsen mentions this in his study of Gibson’s works, remarking that his characters are often ‘defined by what [they] lack’ (27) – the supplements become something extra to replace that which is missing. These ‘supplements’ portray the

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characters as ‘jacked in’ to their environments as a condition of their identity itself. This paradox between dependence on the environment and closed autonomy is indicative of autopoietic systems as explained by Ira Livingston who writes, ‘you know you have found an autopoietic system when you find together more autonomy and more dependence, more closure and more openness’ (84). He goes on to describe this characteristic relationship between openness and autonomy as though an autopoietic system were separated from its environment by a semipermeable membrane which allows ‘flow across boundaries’: one has to acknowledge that boundaries and the autopoietic systems built around them do more than create traffic: they are traffic. But even as traffic, an autopoietic system is closed as a self-sustaining set of operations; its internal organization (the way it orchestrates its own differentials) seems to be at one remove from its environment, like the objects juggled by a unicyclist on a tightrope are at a remove from his pedalling feet. (83–84) The characters in the Sprawl trilogy are autonomous beings, but they create their world through their actions, through contributing to the creation of the matrix and through the creativity inherent in perception. At the same time traffic flows the other way, from the world into the individual, creating dependencies on external supplements. Cyber-cowboys like Case experience their cognition through the medium of the matrix – to leave the matrix is to have that system of cognition, that process of living denied to them. This means that the matrix becomes a supplement to identity itself and when Case is denied access to the matrix through the partial destruction of his nervous system, he experiences it as a loss of identity. ‘For Case, who had lived for the bodiless exultation, it was the Fall … Case fell into the prison of his own flesh’ (12). Case finds himself amputated from himself. He is still a functioning individual, but he experiences his subjectivity as curtailed. His exile from the matrix as a loss of a part of himself similar to an amputation is highlighted in his reaction as, ‘he’d cry in his sleep, and wake alone in the dark, curled in his capsule in some coffin hotel, his hands clawed into bedslab, temperfoam bunched between his fingers, trying to reach the console that wasn’t there’ (11). Maturana and Varela describe the concept of the wholeness of an autopoietic system as dependent on the expectation of an observer: Although the nervous system has anatomical components it does not have functional parts since any mutilation leaves a functioning unit… a unit in the corresponding domain. It appears incomplete only for the observer who beholds it as an entity from the perspective of what he thinks it should be. (46–47)

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Case expects his nervous system to access the matrix and, as it can no longer do so, it is found wanting in his eyes even though it continues to be a ‘functioning unit’. He attempts to find a supplement elsewhere, through his destructive relationship with Linda and his involvement in ‘biz’ – black market business. When Ratz the bartender finds out that Case is no longer with Linda he tells Case that he will struggle to survive with only biz to give his life meaning, saying, ‘Only biz, friend artiste? … Now some night, you get maybe too artistic; you wind up in the clinic tanks, spare parts’ (11). Ratz recognises that Case needs more than just commerce to keep his subjectivity intact. While the reference to ‘spare parts’ literally refers to his possible butchery at the hands of angry business associates, it also suggests that without the matrix and without Linda he will lose his gestalt identity, he will no longer be ‘more than the sum of his parts’ but will be characterised as a series of parts alone. This need for a supplement, whether that be love, biz, drugs, or the matrix, means that it is no coincidence that on regaining access to the matrix through the deal with Armitage and Wintermute, Case is also fitted with a new pancreas that prevents him from being affected by drugs. His affinity for the matrix will be his only supplement and he will once again become dependent on accessing the matrix, a dependence that suits those who seek to use and control him. Linda also requires a supplement to hold her identity together, but for her it is primarily drug dependency. After getting into a relationship with her, Case finds that: It took a month for the gestalt of drugs and tension he moved through to turn those perpetually startled eyes into wells of reflexive need. He’d watched her personality fragment, calving like an iceberg, splinters drifting away, and finally he’d seen the raw need, the hungry armature of addiction. (16) Linda Lee’s addiction is the supplement that binds her, but it is also selfdestructive and soon her ‘armature’ is the only thing left of her. The word ‘armature’ echoes, not just armour, but the moving electrical parts of a machine, something that must keep moving in a repetitive fashion, defined by drive alone. Addiction, it is implied, is necessary for Linda because it is an armour; it is something that protects her and restrains her movement at the same time. At first Case finds his own completion in ‘the gestalt of drugs and tension’, but later discovers ‘reflexive need’ in Linda’s eyes as a real, reflexive connection between them becomes possible, something that Case denies, preferring the rush of drugs and biz and a return to cyberspace. The connections between Linda Lee’s drug dependency and Case’s craving to return to cyberspace are cemented by Bruce Sterling’s comparison between drugs and technology in his preface to the genre-defining Mirrorshades anthology:

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No counterculture Earth Mother gave us lysergic acid – it came from a Sandoz lab, and when it escaped it ran through society like wildfire. It is not for nothing that Timothy Leary proclaimed personal computers ‘the LSD of the 1980s’ – these are both technologies of frighteningly radical potential. And, as such, they are constant points of reference for cyberpunk. (xi) Drugs and cyberspace are connected here due to their ‘radical potential’ for future understandings of identity as they both provide supplements to autopoietic identities, becoming components in the organisation of living systems and thereby becoming part of living systems themselves. The emphasis on drugs as manmade creations from a laboratory, rather than substances interacting with ancient co-evolved systems in the human brain, simply reiterates that cyberpunk conviction that nature is not to be revered above human endeavour.5 While Molly occupies the position of the femme fatale, inherited from detective fiction and noir cinema, she is also, as a woman, the site of her own matrix, her own womb. While Case feels that he can only performatively change his world in the realm of cyberspace (or, for brief spells, through drugs and sex), Molly finds in the site of her body a place where she can perform changes, a place where she can create her own reality. It is true that Molly is often described primarily through her dress (‘her clothes were black, the heels of black boots deep in the temperfoam’ [36], ‘tight black gloveleather jeans and a bulky black jacket cut from some matte fabric that seemed to absorb light’ [37]) and her augmented body. When he first meets her, Case ‘realized that the glasses were surgically inset, sealing her sockets’ (36) and she threatens him as, ‘with a barely audible click, ten double-edged, four-centimeter scalpel blades slid from their housings beneath the burgundy nails’ (37). These physical attributes are, however, part of Molly’s being. She has created herself this way, has worked hard to make herself into what she is. In many ways, describing Molly’s physical attributes is to describe who she really is. Bruce Sterling explains the ubiquity of mirrorshades, such as Molly’s, in cyberpunk literature: By hiding the eyes, mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman and similar outlaws. (ix) Molly’s mirrorshades are a curious aspect of her characterisation. In many ways, their obfuscation is the only thing that enables us to see Molly’s character more clearly. While Case is the protagonist of the novel and we see through his perspective, Molly is the cypher or the femme fatale. Case wonders, ‘What did he know about her? That she was another professional; that she said her being, like

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his, was the thing she did to make a living’ (72). This is to say, that Molly’s physicality, the being that she has created, is herself. Molly’s identity is also expressed as a bricolage of the novel’s genre influences as Case watches her in a fight: It was a performance. It was like the culmination of a lifetime’s observation of martial arts tapes, cheap ones, the kind Case had grown up on. For a few seconds he knew, she was every bad-ass hero, Son Mao in the old Shaw videos, Mickey Chiba, the whole lineage back to Lee and Eastwood. She was walking it the way she talked it. (253) Molly’s being is expressed as existing at the interstices between these cultural texts, some of which are fictions of the Sprawl trilogy (the Shaw videos and Mickey Chiba) while the other names (Lee and Eastwood) are recognisable as existing in our zero world. Molly’s being is partly created from our society and our culture. She is a bricoleur, her body a site at which these influences can come together to form a greater gestalt, something more than the sum of its parts. The bricolage that we see in the characters, then, is an expression of the bricolage at the narrative level of the text as it brings together the discourses of Westerns and kung fu movies, of cybernetic autopoiesis and the anarchy of punk. The literature of the interface brings this bricolage approach to the level of characterisation. The text’s use of this bricolage in showing its characters’ dependence on the systems around them is, perhaps, at the heart of critiques of the trilogy which argue that the series, and by extension cyberpunk more generally, is beholden to ultimately conservative impulses; for example, Nicola Nixon has argued that cyberpunk harbours ‘a complicity with 80s conservatism’ (231). The supplements adopted by the characters in Neuromancer to maintain their identities are necessary, but ultimately futile in providing real freedom or rebellion as the characters find themselves trapped in a web of power systems. By jacking in, Case makes himself an asset to corporate interests as he has skills that cannot be found elsewhere, but he also arms himself in case he needs to defend himself against those corporate interests. The same could be said for Molly’s bodily augmentations, which give her a disproportionate power that she must then use in service to the matrix. The other option is to opt out of the system all together through self-destruction, often via drugs, as in the case of Linda Lee. Rather than a glorification of masculine, conservative values, the complexity of this ethos and its entanglement with every character, suggests a mournful capitalist realism (Fisher 2009) that recognises the inextricability of these characters from the systems that exploit and support them.

Visual imagery in the Sprawl trilogy The reader’s powers of creative perception are exercised in the reading of the Sprawl trilogy as Gibson produces relational meaning at various levels of the

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text. The autopoietic definition of living systems creates subjectivity through bricolage which can be seen in the characters and their supplements, as well as in the relationality of the matrix. At the descriptive level a kind of bricolage appears again as the reader forms meaning through the relations between the disparate objects described in the novels, making connections between the different styles. Gibson credits William Burroughs as a key influence on his work and the traces of Burroughs’s ‘cut-up’ method are present throughout his work.6 This cut-up method, a literary collage, creates meaning through the relations between disparate images; in short, it creates meaning through the power of the viewer/reader’s perception.7 This interest is reflected in Gibson’s descriptions which often present to the reader a disorganised jigsaw of detritus or gomi, to use the Japanese term, which basically translates as ‘rubbish’. In the short story ‘The Winter Market’ (Burning Chrome) the main character goes to visit an artist named Rubin in his studio, which he describes as ‘an ongoing Inferno of gomi’ (142): Rubin, in some way that no one quite understands, is a master, a teacher, what the Japanese call a sensei. What he’s the master of, really, is garbage, kipple, refuse, the sea of cast-off goods our century floats on. Gomi no sensei. Master of junk. (141) Even the words used to describe the meaning of gomi act as a kind of collage: garbage, kipple, refuse, junk, and gomi itself all offer different perspectives on the material. The reader’s perception is the creative power that combines them meaningfully. Something new is created, even at the levels of meaning and of style, through the very relations between incongruous parts situated alongside each other in the same text. Just as Edgar Rubin created the picture that can be read as either faces or a vase to show the relational nature of perception (see Figure I.1), so Gibson’s Rubin relies on that gestalt perception as the creative power that constructs his art from its disparate, gomi fragments. Even the term ‘kipple’ is adopted from a coinage by Philip K. Dick, suggesting that this gomi style is part of a wider science fiction aesthetic. Indeed, this tendency in Gibson has been picked up by Samuel R. Delany who, in the context of discussing Gibson’s ancestral relationship with, and rewriting of, Joanna Russ and Ursula Le Guin, describes ‘The bricolage of Gibson’s style, now colloquial, now highly formal, now hardboiled, makes him as a writer a gomi no sensei—a master of junk. Applied to Gibson, it’s a laudatory title’ (Tatsumi, 174). This collage style is used in Neuromancer as Case surveys the offices of Julius Deane, an importer/exporter from whom Case is seeking some information: His offices were located in a warehouse behind Ninsei, part of which seemed to have been sparsely decorated, years before, with a random collection of European furniture, as though Deane had once intended to

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Autopoiesis in the Sprawl trilogy use the place as his home. Neo-Aztec bookcases gathered dust against one wall of the room where Case waited. A pair of bulbous Disney-styled table lamps perched awkwardly on a low Kandinsky-look coffee table in scarlet-lacquered steel. A Dalí clock hung on the wall between the bookcases, its distorted face sagging to the bare concrete floor. Its hands were holograms that altered to match the convolutions of the face as they rotated, but it never told the correct time. (21)

This series of styles and objects listed in the text is characteristic of Gibson’s descriptive style. The effect is intentionally disorienting as the reader integrates one incongruous object after another into the (increasingly bizarre) whole. This passage in particular hints at the reason for this style and its importance for cyberpunk. The seemingly random objects are revealed to be connected only through their placement together in the text. What is created in these inter-relationships is a sense of disorientation in space and time. We can see this spatial confusion through the suggestion that the office may have been intended as a home. The two spaces intersect and the purpose of the space in which Case finds himself is made ambiguous. This sense of disorientation is heightened as the objects themselves are semiotically ambiguous – ‘Neo-Aztec’, ‘Disney-styled’, ‘Kandinsky-look’, ‘scarlet-lacquered’ – none of these objects are what they seem. There is a suggestion that each object holds layers of meaning that can never be parsed. Of course, the room suggests temporal dislocation in the image of the clock that ‘never told the correct time’ – but, more than this, the incongruity of the Dalí clock and the hologram hands portrays the awkward coexistence of different eras, the era of the twentieth and the twenty-first century brought together awkwardly and dysfunctionally in one artefact.8 This listing technique in cyberpunk plays on temporal and spatial insecurity, as well as the semiotic insecurities of realist postmodern literature. Neuromancer’s dis-ease with everything retro is not merely a semiotic crisis, it is symptomatic of a panic that our past, present, and future are such different realms that the subjects they produce may be jigsaws themselves, incomplete and searching for a supplement, a missing piece that will allow them to understand themselves and their own meaning. As well as collage, this technique evokes the influence of other visual arts, such as that of the ‘readymade’ and of Cornell boxes. Gibson explains how he takes inspiration from Cornell boxes in a post on his blog: I like to work with ‘readymades’, things I encounter either during or before the period of composition. This means that some of the detail will be accidental, in that it came along with the found object, and wasn’t invented. I have a sort of half-conscious theory that this furthers an experience of mimetic texture, for the reader, that differs from the one that would result in my simply having made up some ‘random’ detail. It also has something to do with my fondness for Cornell boxes, which

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consist entirely of found objects, framed, as it were, by a device akin to narrative. (Gibson 2003) In Count Zero strange pieces of art begin to appear from an unknown origin which prompts Virek to hire art curator Marly to find the creator. The premise of a wealthy man with uncertain interests and motives hiring a younger woman to investigate a troubling subject has since become a staple of Gibson’s work, particularly from 2003’s Pattern Recognition onwards. Here, this relationship is used as means of introducing Marly into an artistic mystery, the pieces of the mystery’s puzzle echoed in the apparently random placement of objects in a box: Marly stared. Box of plain wood, glass-fronted. Objects… ‘Cornell,’ she said, […] ‘Cornell?’ She turned to Virek. ‘Of course not. The object set into that length of bone is a Braun biomonitor. This is the work of a living artist.’ (27) The box itself is described in another list, a collage in words: The slender fluted bone, surely formed for flight, surely from the wing of some large bird. Three archaic circuitboards, faced with mazes of gold. A smooth white sphere of baked clay. An age-blackened fragment of lace. A finger-length segment of what she assumed was bone from a human wrist, greyish white, inset smoothly with the silicon shaft of a small instrument that must once have ridden flush with the surface of the skin – but the thing’s face was seared and blackened. The box was a universe, a poem, frozen on the boundaries of human experience. (27–28) The passage presents the objects, as in a collage, while also documenting the work that Marly’s perception does on the items she sees. She does not simply see a bone, but imagines its function, ‘formed for flight’, and its origins, ‘from the wing of some large bird’. The box of random objects brings her to the ‘boundaries of human experience’ as her perception creates something that previously did not exist. This descriptive jigsaw is echoed in the narrative style as Gibson nods to different genres, as Lance Olsen points out in his study of Gibson’s early novels. Olsen observes that Gibson freely borrows from a range of different styles and genres, including the western and the spy thriller: the text itself is an amalgamation of various narrative modes. By mongrelizing discursive worlds, Gibson mongrelizes the beliefs about existence those discursive worlds suggest. Compartmentalization and hierarchism are

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Autopoiesis in the Sprawl trilogy gone, each discursive world becomes simply one of many, relatively as good or bad as any other. Thus devalued, each discursive world becomes one more instance of gomi, refusing humanist ideas of totality, absolute significance and closure. (35–36)

The seemingly random and web-like connections that the reader must find between disparate objects and jarring narrative styles echoes the web-like structure of the matrix and, indeed, the creator turns out to be an iteration of the Wintermute-Neuromancer self-conscious AI created at the climax of Neuromancer. In the form of a series of robotic arms welded to the walls of the Tessier-Ashpool space station, the AI sifts through the debris of the old order, the artefacts left behind by the decadent aristocrats sifted and shaped into something new, the evocative artworks created by an AI that knew, for a brief moment, a sense of completion. Just as Marly’s perception finds meaning in the random objects of the art works, so the reader finds meaning in the collision of influences to be found in the Sprawl trilogy. Reflections of the same relational structures appear at all levels of the text, whether it be the matrix on the conceptual level; the gomi descriptive style; or the jigsaw puzzle of the narrative style. Through these techniques the text connects the autopoietic forms of the characters that inhabit this partial, gomi text with the perception of the reader.

Conclusion In her critique of Neuromancer’s seductive vision of leaving the meat behind, N. Katherine Hayles writes that, ‘in cyberspace, point of view does not emanate from the character; rather, the pov literally is the character’ (238). The portrayal of the matrix reduces consciousness to pov, but this must be read alongside the importance of perception and embeddedness throughout the novel. While the (human) body is certainly not considered central to consciousness (an autopoietic reading means the human body/mind is not exceptional), it also means that consciousness cannot be understood in its existing form without reference to the relationality between its components, including its embeddedness in its environment. This is seen throughout the trilogy and is deeply woven into the structure of the novels, from characterisation through supplementarity, the suggestive potential of simstim, and the gomi aesthetic of the novels. As Donna J. Haraway writes in her ‘Cyborg Manifesto’, ‘illegitimate offspring are often exceedingly unfaithful to their origins’ (151), using the militant, capitalist structures of their fathers for subversive ends. The Sprawl trilogy shows how these capitalist systems suggest a posthuman model, one that can then be reappropriated for use in environmental contexts, or for postcapitalist models of society. Its use in Maturana and Varela’s work shows that there is no need to leave the body behind, the body can be thought of as a part of this system, not simply elevated for its humanness above other

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substances and systems. The utopian potential in this posthuman ontology is never fully revealed in Gibson’s work but remains enticingly at the margins throughout his oeuvre, even in his most humanist moments. Fredric Jameson calls cyberpunk in general and William Gibson’s work in particular ‘as much an expression of transnational corporate realities as it is of global paranoia itself ’ (1991: 38). Through reading the Sprawl trilogy it becomes clear that the portrayal of ‘transnational corporate realities’ is dependent on an autopoietic expression of identity, one that recognises the zaibatsus as living systems and the media gestalt, attacking human exceptionalism and its associated values. The relationality of the text’s representation of identity highlights the concerns with late capitalism in the trilogy as explained by Jameson. Thomas Pynchon, one of Gibson’s greatest inspirations, makes the connections between cybernetics, autopoiesis, capitalism and modernity in1973’s Gravity’s Rainbow: It’s control. All these things arise from one difficulty: control. For the first time it was inside, do you see. The control is put inside. No more need to suffer passively under ‘outside forces’ – to veer into any wind. As if … A market needed no longer be run by the Invisible Hand, but now could create itself – its own logic, momentum, style, from inside. Putting the control inside was ratifying what de facto had happened – that you had dispensed with God. But you had taken on a greater, and more harmful, illusion. The illusion of control. (35–36) Gibson’s Sprawl trilogy explores the relationship between control and relationality by raising the fear that one cannot have relationships without succumbing to some level of control. In the world of the Sprawl trilogy, as in our own, there can be no meaning or understanding without relationality and, therefore, no freedom from control. Through the use of visual imagery Gibson expresses the relationality of identity at various levels of the text; through the representation of non-human autopoietic living systems, through subject supplementarity and in his commitment to gomi aesthetics. The duality of the reader’s gestalt perception is brought into play as that perception which allows one to experience the world also creates dependencies from which there can be no escape.

Notes 1 Performativity has, perhaps most influentially, been explored with regard to gender norms by Judith Butler in Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990). 2 The association between a lack of individual self-awareness and the ‘animal’ represents another comment on the nature/culture divide as the animals are portrayed as obsolete and unable to cope with the advanced information society of the Sprawl trilogy. The alignment of animals with an obsolete ‘nature’ is emphasised as horses

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3 4

5 6

7

8

Autopoiesis in the Sprawl trilogy are extinct in the Sprawl trilogy after a pandemic of some kind (Neuromancer, 112– 113). Cornell boxes also provide a key image in 2003’s Pattern Recognition; see Chapter 3. The Yakuza are also a form of power, but their outlaw status means almost nothing as legality is not a factor in differentiating between corporate beings. In Gibson’s short story ‘Johnny Mnemonic’ (Burning Chrome, 14–36), in many ways a prequel to Neuromancer, the Yakuza is described as ‘a true multinational … the Yakuza had already absorbed the Triads, the Mafia, the Union Corse’ (22). The gendered nature of Sterling’s comparison between Mother Earth and the manmade nature of LSD is discussed in Nicola Nixon’s ‘Cyberpunk: Preparing the Ground for Revolution or Keeping the Boys Satisfied?’ (1992). In an interview Gibson says, ‘once I’ve hit on an image, a lot of what I do involves the controlled use of collage; I look around for ways to relate the image to the rest of the book. That’s something I got from Burroughs’s work, and to a lesser extent from Ballard. I’ve never actually done any of that cut-up stuff, except for folding a few pages out of something when I’d be stuck or incredibly bored and then checking later to see what came out. But I could see what Burroughs was doing with these random methods, and why, even though the results weren’t always that interesting. So I started snipping things out and slapping them down, but then I’d air-brush them a little to take the edges off’ (quoted in McCaffery 1991: 281). As well as this influence from Burroughs, Istvan Csicsery-Ronay has argued for Gibson’s use of collage as connected with that of Italian futurist collage; see ‘The Sentimental Futurist: Cybernetics and Art in William Gibson’s Neuromancer’ (1992). This technique will be echoed in Gibson’s Zero History (2010); see Chapter 5.

Bibliography Csicsery-Ronay, Istvan. ‘Cyberpunk and Neuromanticism.’ Storming the Reality Studio: A Casebook of Cyberpunk and Postmodern Fiction, edited by Larry McCaffery. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1992, pp. 182–193. Csicsery-Ronay, Istvan. ‘The Sentimental Futurist: Cybernetics and Art in William Gibson’s Neuromancer.’ Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, vol. 33, no. 3, 1992, pp. 221–240. Derrida, Jacques. ‘Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences.’ Writing and Difference. London: Routledge Classics, 2001, pp. 351–370. Fisher, Mark. Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?Ropley: Zero Books, 2009. Gibson, William. Burning Chrome. London: HarperCollins, 1995. Gibson, William. Count Zero. London: HarperCollins, 1995. Gibson, William. Mona Lisa Overdrive. London: HarperCollins, 1995. Gibson, William. Neuromancer. London: HarperCollins, 1995. Gibson, William. ‘William Gibson’s Blog.’ 27 February 2003. http://williamgibson blog.blogspot.com. Haraway, Donna J. ‘A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century.’ Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. London: Routledge, 1991, pp. 149–182. Hayles, N. Katherine. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1999. Livingston, Ira. Between Science and Literature: An Introduction to Autopoietics. Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2006.

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Maturana, Humberto and Francisco Varela. Autopoiesis and Cognition: the Realization of the Living. Dordrecht: D. Reidel Publishing Co, 1980. McCaffery, Larry. Storming the Reality Studio: A Casebook of Cyberpunk and Postmodern Science Fiction. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception, translated by Colin Smith. London: Routledge, 2002. Müller, Karl H. and Heinz von Foerster. ‘Action Without Utility, an Immodest Proposal for the Cognitive Foundations of Behaviour.’ Heinz Von Foerster 1911–2002 (Cybernetics & Human Knowing: A Journal of Second-Order Cybernetics Auto Poiesis and Cyber-Semiotics) edited by Soren Brier and Ranulph Granville. Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2004, pp. 27–50. Nixon, Nicola. ‘Cyberpunk: Preparing the Ground for Revolution or Keeping the Boys Satisfied?’, Science Fiction Studies, vol. 19, no. 2, 1992, pp. 219–235. Olsen, Lance. William Gibson. San Bernadino, CA: Borgo Press, 1992. Pynchon, Thomas. Gravity’s Rainbow. London: Vintage, 1995. Sterling, Bruce (ed.). Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology. London: HarperCollins, 1994. Tatsumi, Takayuki. ‘Some Real Mothers: The SF Eye Interview.’ Silent Interviews: On Language, Race, Sex, Science Fiction and Some Comics, edited by Samuel R. Delany. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1994, pp. 164–185. Varela, Francisco. ‘The Early Days of Autopoiesis: Heinz and Chile.’ Systems Research, vol. 13, no. 3, 1996, pp. 407–416. Wolfe, Cary. What is Posthumanism?Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2010.

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Introduction The 1990s was the decade when cyberpunk went mainstream with the release of The Matrix (the Wachowskis, 1999) and a growing subculture in the West that took note of Japanese innovations in the genre, through transmedia properties like Ghost in the Shell (manga 1989–1990, followed by a feature film directed by Mamoru Oshii, 1995) and Akira (manga 1982–1990, followed by a feature film directed by Katsuhiro Otomo, 1988). While cyberpunk was becoming a major subcultural force, Gibson’s work changed direction, replacing the noir aesthetic of the Sprawl trilogy with the sun and celebrity of the US West Coast in what became known as the Bridge trilogy – Virtual Light (1993), Idoru (1996), and All Tomorrow’s Parties (1999). Set among a colony of people living on the San Francisco Bridge in a makeshift slum after an earthquake has destroyed their housing, the Bridge trilogy marks a change in tone in a move that Gary Westfahl has judged deliberate on Gibson’s part as he sought to diversify his work and prevent himself from being pigeon-holed as the purveyor of one distinctive style (112–113). However, Gibson utilises this change in style to build on concerns about the visual, the ontological and the relational. In Chapter 1’s discussion of the Sprawl trilogy, I focused on autopoietic identity, exploring the relational nature of ontology in these novels. Like gestalt perception, autopoietic identities are defined by the relations between their parts rather than the parts themselves. The visual, relational nature of autopoiesis interacts with the use of visual imagery in the Sprawl trilogy, making the gestalt a useful approach to issues of identity and the importance of perception in constituting that identity. In turning my attention to the Bridge trilogy, I foreground a different kind of complexity, but one that continues the theme of relationality explored in Chapter 1. The Bridge trilogy explores dialectic tensions through the paradigm of chaos theory: there are tensions inherent in the name ‘cyberpunk’, with its origins in the order of cybernetics and the chaos of punk; the tension between physical space and virtual space, differentiated by an unclear boundary as fractal organisation means that both are structured in the same way; and the tension between the human and the posthuman, as emergence and pattern recognition DOI: 10.4324/9781003082477-3

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allow movement from one form of subjectivity to another. Even history itself is a chaotic system, meaning that extrapolation and science fictional futures can only ever be contingent; they must be recognised as narratives about the present since the future itself remains unknown. Pattern recognition is the only tool that can help the characters to navigate such a chaotic landscape, and a gestalt switch is the only way to move from being trapped in chaotic networks of power to inhabiting their interstices, whether that be in a physical sense, as in the ‘places within places’ of the Bridge, or in a metaphorical sense like Virtual Light’s protagonist, the courier Chevette, who works on the interface between physical and electronic space. The first novel, Virtual Light, follows the lives of an old man named Skinner who lives on the bridge, his carer, Chevette, and Yamazaki, a sociologist who has come from Japan to study life on the bridge. Chevette lives a difficult life in poverty, helping Skinner while earning money through her precarious employment as a courier where one of her few pleasures is the rush of the ‘proj’. As Gibson explains in Virtual Light’s acknowledgements, ‘proj’ is a term taken from the San Francisco Bike Messenger Association’s magazine Mercury Rising (295–296). From its context in the novel, the term refers to the speed of the messengers and to the sense of satisfaction they get from being in tune with their bodies and their bikes. Chevette’s affinity aligns her with the physicality of the real world, but she makes a connection to the realm of cyberspace through a happenstance encounter. While making a delivery, Chevette steals a pair of virtual reality (VR) glasses from a man at a party who offends her by implying that she is a sex worker. The glasses turn out to be important as they hold information belonging to the Harwood/ Levine corporation concerning nanotechnology and a plan to use it to rebuild San Francisco. A former policeman, Berry Rydell, is contracted to retrieve the glasses but he and Chevette instead escape together. In Idoru the reader encounters Chia, a young fan of rock star Rez. Rez intends to marry the artificial intelligence Rei Toei, a Japanese idoru or pop idol who is made from data and is only visible thanks to portable projectors. The novel questions the distinction between humans and artificial intelligence (AI) through Rei Toei and through the increasing importance of celebrity in popular culture. In Idoru a data analyst, Colin Laney, is hired by Rez’s entourage to find out Rez’s true intentions towards the idoru, in the hopes that they can dissuade him from the marriage. Laney’s pattern recognition abilities, enhanced through a drug known as 5-SB, are explored further in All Tomorrow’s Parties as he intuitively ‘reads’ the chaotic data of the infosphere to the extent that he can sense the future and suspects that the head of Harwood/ Levine, Cody Harwood, is trying to shape events, somehow, to his own benefit. The trilogy ends as Cody Harwood and Rei Toei ‘secede’ from physical space and enter an ‘informational wormhole’ (252) into virtual space. Each novel follows several characters; chapters are told from different perspectives, but the characters also cross one another’s paths and reappear throughout the trilogy.

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Cyber/punk: order/disorder Chaos theory is a powerful way for science to think about dialectic tensions between concepts that may once have been understood as irreconcilable opposites. This gives cyberpunk an affinity with chaos theory as cyberpunk itself is structured around the dialectic tension between order and disorder. In this section I will explain the similarities between chaos and autopoiesis before describing how chaos approaches the dialectic between order and disorder. I then explore this affinity by focusing on the VR glasses from Virtual Light, which act as a bifurcation point, bringing the order of plot out of the chaos of circumstance. The glasses act as an interface between the subject and the environment, mediating the world and bringing real space under the control of cyberspace in a way that was not common in the Sprawl trilogy, in which cyberspace and real space usually occupied different, albeit interdependent, realms. Chaos theory entered the public consciousness in the 1980s through James Gleick’s popular history of the topic Chaos: Making a New Science (1987), and Ian Stewart’s more technical introduction, Does God Play Dice? The New Mathematics of Chaos (1989). Like autopoiesis, chaos theory acts as a means of thinking about the complexity of living, social and ecological systems. Both theories recognise that reducing nature to basic models means that we fail to examine complex systems and the relationship between their components. Instead, it is important to recognise that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts and that relationships are just as important as objects or components. Ilya Prigogine pioneered the use of chaos theory in chemistry, receiving the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1977, and his descriptions of chaos theory echo Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela’s descriptions of autopoiesis.1 In Order Out of Chaos (1984), a popularisation of Prigogine’s work cowritten by Prigogine with Isabelle Stengers, the writers describe how order can emerge from a chaotic system, using ‘chemical clocks’ as their example. A chemical clock arises when a chemical system is in what Stengers and Prigogine refer to as a ‘far-from-equilibrium condition’ (12). At such a point the chemicals can oscillate back and forth at regular intervals, like a pendulum, creating a rhythm like the ticking of a clock. They write that the regularity of this chemical clock: can no longer be described in terms of chaotic behaviour. A new type of order has appeared. We can speak of a new coherence, of a mechanism of ‘communication’ among molecules. But this type of communication can arise only in far-from-equilibrium conditions. It is quite interesting that such communication seems to be the rule in the world of biology. It may in fact be taken as the very basis of the definition of a biological system. (13) This definition of life, based on self-organisation and communication, echoes Maturana and Varela’s position, and relies on friction between the system and

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the outside world, an event which throws the system out of equilibrium. Such events are described as ‘bifurcation’ points, and the process of order revealing itself from chaos is known as ‘emergence’. In chaotic systems, order and disorder cannot be thought of as mutually exclusive, since complex order can emerge from the chaos of bifurcation points. An infinitesimal change in initial conditions has a great impact on the later states of a system. The sensitivity of chaotic systems to initial conditions is known as ‘the butterfly effect’, and is described by Kunihiko Kaneko and Ichiro Tsuda in Complex Systems: Chaos and Beyond (2001): Even a small difference in initial conditions can be amplified into a large difference. Since we are not able to observe a phenomenon with infinite accuracy, we are forced to introduce probability, based on determinism. Thus, chaos provides us with a dialectic method to reconcile the antithesis between determinism and nondeterminism at a higher level of conceptual understanding. (11) Determinism and nondeterminism, predictable order and unpredictable disorder, are therefore not opposites in chaos theory, but interdependent concepts, like the figure and the ground of gestalt perception. As in the Rubin’s vase image (see Figure I.1), gestalt perception relies on a figure/ground distinction in order to structure the perceptual field, described by Wolfgang Iser: ‘in giving contours to one another, figure and ground can interchange, and in so doing become a structural pattern for varying and even expanding perception, since the relationship involves a straightforward switch from “formed things” to “unformed material”’ (44–45). This dialectical relationship between ‘formed things’ that constitute the foreground in gestalt perception and ‘unformed material’ which acts as the background, can be compared to the dialectical relationship in chaos between order and disorder, as explained by Kaneko and Tsuda: The word ‘chaos’ might be associated with a total mess, utterly devoid of order. Nevertheless, chaos, as used currently in the natural sciences, is significant because it has broken the traditional dichotomy of order and randomness. Order has been found in chaos, and also, by viewing chaos as random, a statistical mechanical approach has been successful. Chaos, with these two opposite aspects within itself, has an extremely complex structure. (12) After the advent of chaos theory, phenomena need no longer be defined as either ordered or disordered, these terms are simply a matter of perspective as a gestalt switch can make the foreground the background, the formed suddenly appears as the unformed.

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The tension inherent in chaos theory, between order and control, is the same tension inherent in cyberpunk itself as the ‘cyber’ of cybernetics, the science of control, is coupled with the anarchic ‘punk’ of disruptive rock music. Dani Cavallaro points this out in Cyberpunk and Cyberculture (2000): The coupling of cybernetics and punk may well seem an unholy marriage, given certain popular tendencies to associate the former with control, order and logic and the latter with anarchy, chaos and unrest. However, that pairing should not come as a total surprise, for what writers like Gibson needed – in order to represent a paradoxical culture riven by conflict and contradiction – was precisely a figure that could bring together apparently incompatible aspects of contemporary life. (19) The nature of cyberpunk, as a genre that holds concepts considered opposite in dialectical tension with one another, allows it to work at the interface between dialectical tensions: between cybernetics and punk, chaos and order, the human and the posthuman. The tension between these terms structures the texts, as George Slusser observes as he attempts to predict the direction of travel for literature in the twenty-first century in the introduction to Fiction 2000: Cyberpunk and the Future of Narrative (1992). Slusser predicts that the frameworks for understanding twenty-first-century fiction: may not be through theme or genre but through those devices that allow literary narrative to harness in a creative fashion the dynamic tensions of the interface. These devices are the basic figures of speech and logic alike, figures such as metaphor. Now, however, metaphor must be seen in the new context of cyberspace, of rhetoric ‘retrofitted’ to allow writers the possibility not of having ultimately to yield to one opposite or the other, to chaos or to order, but of revelling in the constant transfer between otherwise paradoxical terms, between chaos and creation. (10) With the publication of Gibson’s Bridge trilogy (1993–1999) Slusser’s words proved prescient. The Bridge trilogy uses chaos theory as a metaphor in order to analyse the interface between dialectical tensions, such as that between chaos and creation. In the Bridge trilogy, the order of plot emerges from the chaos of possibility through a bifurcation point: the moment when Chevette steals the VR glasses. Chevette’s theft of the glasses is described as an utterly chance and insignificant act, an uncharacteristic deviation from her work as a courier ‘pulling tags’: Chevette never stole things, or anyway not from other people, and definitely not when she was pulling tags. Except this one bad Monday when

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she took this total asshole’s sunglasses, but that was because she just didn’t like him. (Gibson 1993: 35) The moment of the actual theft is passed over, almost as though a gestalt switch has happened. In one moment Chevette sees the glasses, the next they are in her possession with no pause for decision-making in between: Chevette ‘felt a ripple move through her, like she’d crossed some line and couldn’t go back’ (96). The moment in which the decision is made is so brief as to be almost non-existent: ‘Chevette, glancing down, sees something sticking out of a pocket in the tobacco-coloured leather. Then it’s in her hand, down the front of her bike-pants, she’s out the door, and the asshole hasn’t even noticed’ (42). One moment the glasses are in the man’s possession, the next they are in Chevette’s: this impulsive action, despite its insignificance, shapes the events of the trilogy. As well as setting off a chain reaction of events, the theft of the glasses sets the scene for the main themes of the trilogy. It takes place at the interface between the physical and the virtual, as the glasses are an interface between those two realms, acting as the bridge between virtual reality and the visual and nervous system. Chevette discovers that you cannot see through the glasses like normal sunglasses, because they do not use light from physical space, but act as a direct interface between the user and virtual reality, relying on the ‘virtual light’ of the novel’s title. The glasses, ‘got these little EMPdrivers around the lenses, work your optic nerves direct’ (113). By allowing cyberspace to be mapped over physical space, the glasses signify the uneasy dichotomy between physical space and cyberspace. Chevette’s friend Sammy Sal reacts to the theft by pointing out the strict class divide between Chevette and the man she has stolen from, asking what happens when that barrier is breached, but his words can well be read as those which science fiction, and particularly cyberpunk as a literature of the interface, are constantly concerned with: ‘What happens on the interface? What happens when we touch?’ (123). Sammy Sal tells her: There’s only but two kinds of people. People can afford hotels like that, they’re one kind. We’re the other. Used to be, like, a middle class, people in between. But not anymore. How you and I relate to those other people, we proj their messages on … You just went and did something, no reason. Reached through the membrane. Let your fingers do the walking. Bad idea. (123) The disappearance of the middle class, and society’s polarisation into the haves and the have-nots, highlights once again the trilogy’s interest in dialectical tensions. Chevette’s quick decision sets the initial conditions for the Bridge trilogy in motion and is the origin of the narrative that shapes the

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entire trilogy, but the action also occurs in the tension between the two classes that constitute society and in the tension between virtual and physical spaces. These tensions are clear at the thematic level, and Gibson also gives them a visual dimension in his use of fractal imagery.

Space/cyberspace: fractals One of the ways Gibson approaches the interface between different realms in the Bridge trilogy is in the interdependence of space and cyberspace. While the distinction between real space and cyberspace is relatively clear-cut in the Sprawl trilogy, as one is either ‘jacked in’ to the matrix or not, in the Bridge trilogy the boundary between space and cyberspace becomes a semi-permeable membrane. One of the ways that Gibson achieves this change is through the use of fractal imagery, which allows the difference between space and cyberspace to be reduced to a matter of perspective. The most popular understanding of fractals as a mathematical concept and, therefore, the most likely to have influenced Gibson’s appropriation of the term, as well as the associations of his readers, is via the arresting images of fractal shapes published in contemporary accounts of chaos theory and its history. In Chaos, James Gleick writes that, ‘above all, fractal meant self-similar. Self-similarity is symmetry across scale. It implies recursion, pattern inside of pattern’ (103). He goes on to say that this self-similarity is easy to understand due to its presence elsewhere in the culture, ‘in the infinitely deep reflection of a person standing between two mirrors, or in the cartoon notion of a fish eating a smaller fish’ (103). Fractal organisation is also found in the patterns of leaves, river networks or clouds, making fractal mathematics a useful tool for those studying the natural world. Fractal self-similarity means that, whether a fractal shape is viewed from a distance or under a microscope, it will look identical as the pattern is exactly repeated at every level of the shape. This can be seen in Figure 2.1, which shows a fractal pattern in acrylic known as a Lichtenberg figure. The pattern of the fractal as a whole is reflected in miniature at every level of the shape (see Figure 2.1). Popular understanding of fractal shapes was aided by Benoit Mandelbrot, who coined the word ‘fractal’ and created the first computer-constructed visualisations of fractal formulae. These visualisations, known as Mandelbrot sets, show the formal characteristics of fractals by expressing them as shapes, thereby foregoing the need to understand complex mathematical formulae and making fractals accessible to the general public. Many fractal formulae are too complex to draw manually, so the visual expressions enabled by computing technology and pioneered by Mandelbrot were especially important to the popularisation of fractals. This means that fractals have become associated with computer technology despite the fact that one of the first articles that brought fractal shapes to the public’s attention was Mandelbrot’s ‘How Long is the Coast of Britain?’ (1967), which relied on the physical rather than the virtual world for its examples. In this paper, Mandelbrot

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Figure 2.1 Lichtenberg figure

showed that the fractal nature of the coast of Britain means that its length grows with the sensitivity of the measuring equipment. A fractal curve moves through space differently from a one-dimensional line; it can be said to have a fractal dimension so that, while still having only one dimension, it can be perceived as a surface. This fractal dimension means that fractal imagery and fractal mathematics act as a bridge, or an interface, between one dimension and the next. The use of fractal imagery in the Bridge trilogy is not identical with the scientific definitions of fractals found in chaos theory but, as N. Katherine Hayles writes in Chaos Bound (1990), ‘when a word such as “chaos”, invested with a rich tradition of mythic and literary significance, is appropriated by the sciences and given a more specialised meaning … the older resonances do not

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disappear. They linger on, creating an aura of mystery and excitement’ (6–7). Gibson uses the idea of fractals to give the text a visual dimension. Like fractals themselves, the writing is not quite confined to one dimension – that of the literary – but makes a break for the dimension of the visual. Computer programmers in the Bridge trilogy use fractals as special effects; they appear as fractal ‘packets’ that can be used to make virtual spaces more realistic, like the detailed fractal models of Hollywood special effects. Fractals have been used in Hollywood special effects because their self-similarity means that a simple model can be transformed into a complex large-scale model just by iterating the numbers, or feeding them back into the formula (Briggs 1992: 85). By the time of the Bridge trilogy this had already led to their use in computerised special effects for Hollywood movies, including the Star Wars films (1977–1983) and Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982) (Gleick 1987: 114).2 Technology is used in the virtual environments of the Bridge trilogy to emulate the fractal quality of the real world, to make virtual spaces more realistic. However, it is also used to make the real world more like cyberspace, a mathematical construct of data and communication. Gibson uses fractals in both the virtual world (or cyberspace) and the physical world. In doing so, he situates his narrative on the blurry border between real and virtual spaces, suggesting that cyberspace is just as ‘real’ as the physical world; it is subject to the same laws and is constructed in the same fashion. For example, fractals are used to create the spatiality of cyberspace in the Walled City, an online collective featured throughout the Bridge trilogy and described in All Tomorrow’s Parties as an ‘autonomous reality’ (Gibson 1999: 126): Nothing is ever straightforward, in the Walled City; nothing is ever presented as written, but filtered instead through half a dozen species of carefully cultivated bit rot, as though the inhabitants were determined to express their massive attitude right down into the least fractal texture of the place. Where a clever website might hint at dirt, at wear, the Walled City luxuriates in apparent frank decay, in texture maps that constantly unravel, revealing of other textures, equally moth-eaten. (193) The complexity of the fractal shapes produced by computing technology is used to give the viewer the impression of a very organic decay, characteristic of the real world, rather than to make the environment look futuristic. This use of the term ‘fractal’ is not strictly scientific, as there is little sign here that self-similarity occurs at all levels of the fractal; it is merely used to denote a kind of subconscious messiness in the virtual environment. This can be seen as Chia contemplates the unreality of her virtual environment: ‘things weren’t quite the right size, somehow, or maybe she should’ve used those fractal packets that messed it all up a little, put dust in the corners and smudges around the light switch’ (Gibson 1996: 33). Gibson’s use of fractals is not

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confined to the scientific description but almost seems to be a characteristic of the physical world that humans can intuit, whose absence leaves their environment feeling unrealistic, even uncanny. Gibson echoes the fractal nature of this software in physical space. In Virtual Light, as Chevette reaches for her knife its nature is described as fractal: ‘That blade’s under three inches, broad as a soup-spoon, wickedly serrated, and ceramic. Skinner says it’s a fractal knife, its actual edge more than twice as long as the blade itself ’ (Gibson 1993: 37; emphasis in original). Like the coast of Britain, the knife’s edge is longer than it appears due to its fractal dimension. Fractals are also used in the description of the San Francisco Bridge. In All Tomorrow’s Parties it is portrayed as a liminal space, not quite within the confines of the law, and is described using the same fractal imagery as cyberspace: The bridge is real, and to live here exacts its own price. It is a world within a world, and, if there be such places between the things of the world, places built in the gaps, then surely there are things there, and places between them, and things in those places too. (Gibson 1999: 80–81) This description echoes the comical poem ‘On Poetry: A Rhapsody’ (1733) by Jonathan Swift, which Mandelbrot used as a way of describing fractal structures: So, Nat’ralists observe, a flea Has smaller fleas that on him prey, And these have smaller Fleas to bite ’em, And so proceed ad infinitum. (Quoted in Gleick 1987: 103) This poem is useful in describing fractal shapes as it emphasises their self-similarity and their infinite nature at the same time. The use of fractal imagery to describe the bridge blurs the strong association between fractals and the computers used to visualise them, as in the Mandelbrot sets. Here, the reader is invited to view physical reality itself as structured by fractals. By describing real life space as fractal while, at the same time, associating fractals in cyberspace with organic decay, Gibson suggests that cyberspace and reality exist in an interconnected fashion with chaos theory acting as the interface between the two, and gestalt perception as the map needed to negotiate that space.

Human/posthuman In the Bridge trilogy, the interface between order and disorder is echoed in the interface between the human and the posthuman. The butterfly effect, and the relationship between order and disorder, give chaos theory an affinity with

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science fiction which also relies on sensitivity to initial conditions, allowing a future to emerge from the disorder of the present through extrapolation. Science fiction makes a small change to the initial conditions – the condition of the zero world – and extrapolates the results to show that a small change can have a disproportionate and unforeseen impact. The influence of chaos theory and of the butterfly effect on science fiction was quickly noted by David Porush in Science Fiction Studies. In his essay ‘Prigogine, Chaos, and Contemporary Science Fiction’ (1991), Porush notes the overt influence of Prigogine’s work on several science fiction writers, including Gibson’s collaborator Bruce Sterling, who is inspired by Prigogine’s theories, especially in his novel Schismatrix (1985). As Porush points out, chaos theory and the concept of the ‘butterfly effect’ are immediately relevant to fiction, and to the novel specifically, as ‘small accidents send the hearts of mortals and their fates wheeling out of their appointed Newtonian orbits into grand twists of fate and destiny’ (381). As chaos theory becomes established in the sciences it also affects science fiction, particularly in alternative histories such as Gibson and Sterling’s novel The Difference Engine (1990), which imagines a Victorian era transformed by the success of Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace’s computer, the titular ‘difference engine’, which becomes an autopoietic living system. Porush argues that Gibson and Sterling reimagine cybernetics for postmodern (and posthuman) discourses as they ‘seize upon chaos as a persuasive view of being-and-becoming itself, one that might explain how a machine could spring into its own autonomous life in a far-from-equilibrium open arrangement’ (383). Gibson and Sterling write from a chaotic, autopoietic paradigm which allows the relationship between human and machine to be reimagined as a relationship between the human and the posthuman: Their cybernetics is birthed by a machine, which incubates its culture with a nascent postmodern philosophy – including the paradigm of chaos – to match … It begins in determinism and predictability and ends in groping intuitions about feedback loops and autopoietic self-organization and the anagenetic sentience of machines – in short, in postmodern concerns. (Porush 1991: 383; emphasis in original) The postmodern move here is to bring concerns that have always been present in narrative to the level of plot and ideology. In the Bridge trilogy, Gibson continues to tease meaning from the dialectical tensions between human and nonhuman, as autopoietic entities evolve and live alongside humans in a chaotic world and humans secede into the flow of information that makes up the infosphere. This interface between the human and the posthuman is explored through the privileging of pattern recognition. Pattern recognition is a means of understanding and negotiating real and virtual spaces as the fractal dirt of the Walled City and the fractal interstitial spaces of the bridge itself create the conditions for the privileging of the visual. Gestalt perception, and particularly the ability to

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see patterns, is constituted by the limitations of the laws of perception, as we saw in the Introduction. Despite this constitutive limitation, there are still characters who seek to escape these laws of perception and, in doing so, overcome their limitations. In Chapter 1 we saw that Gentry in Mona Lisa Overdrive (1988) attempts such an escape as he seeks the whole Shape of the matrix. In All Tomorrow’s Parties, Colin Laney starts to escape the limitations of perception, chasing the ideal of a holistic viewing experience and attempting to see all data at once, an escape from his limitations that will give him power over time, turning him into a posthuman entity. Laney was treated with 5-SB for a ‘concentration-deficit’ in an orphanage during his childhood, a drug which heightens his powers of pattern recognition and allows him to read the future from chaotic data (25). There is once again a dichotomy between chaos and control: power and control are situated in the observer, in this case Laney, who can read the patterns as though he were standing outside of the chaotic system itself. This gives him some understanding of the power structures at work, and therefore some control over them. This urge to control is connected to the development of chaos theory itself. In ‘Inheriting Chaos: Burroughs, Pynchon, Sterling, Rucker’, Randy Schroeder (2002) argues: Chaos theory is no theory of chaos. Or, more accurately, chaos theory is precisely about changing the definition of ‘chaos’, which in its traditional definition resists theory. As with all attempts to control meaning, this definition-change operates in the arena of discourse, where power is the ability to limit the terms for constructing a picture of the world. (90) Schroeder shows that naming chaos and formulating it as part of a theory brings it into discourse and is therefore an attempt to bring it under control. When constructing a picture, the terms must always be limited in order for gestalt perception to take place, and bringing chaos into the language of science performs a similar function. While Schroeder focuses on chaos as a scientific discourse, the aestheticised characterisation of chaos in the Bridge trilogy renders that control of the observer as omniscient and godlike. Laney is characterised as a shaman because of his ability to intuitively understand chaos, described as, ‘the equivalent of a dowser, a cybernetic water-witch. He couldn’t explain how he did what he did. He just didn’t know… he served as a kind of native guide’ (Gibson 1996: 25). The nature of Gibson’s rendering of chaos as associated with the visual, fractals, and pattern recognition means that reading chaos can only be done intuitively. Dani Cavallaro notes the origins of the term ‘cybernetics’ in the Greek word for ‘steering’, an adoption intended to signify that control should not be administered as a dictatorship, but through ‘steersmanship’ (12). In this juxtaposition between the control of cybernetics and the pre-scientific term ‘waterwitch’, perception acts as an interface between the two different modes of discourse.3 This chaotic data shapes events in real space but is tracked in cyberspace through ‘bulky, old-fashioned eyephones’ (Gibson 1999: 4): ‘Something

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covers Laney’s eyes. Red wink of a diode. Cables. Faint gleam of the interface, reflected in a thin line against Laney’s sweat-slick cheekbone’ (3). Laney’s poor physical health, sweating and coughing with ‘hollowed eyes’ (4) is contrasted with the savant energy of his mind as he reads the data. Laney’s perception, while described as different from perception as we would normally understand it, continues to follow gestalt laws of perception. He says ‘If I enter a specific area, I don’t get any sense of how the data there relates to the rest of it, see? It’s got to be relational’ (Gibson 1996: 149; emphasis in original). Laney’s pattern recognition is also constituted by the figure/ground distinction. As he tries to find someone’s data trail in the infosphere he says that he can see things defined by their absence, which ‘leaves a sort of negative trace; you have to infer everything from the way he’s not there’ (Gibson 1999: 5). The figure/ground distinction is echoed in the way that chaos acts as an interface between the past and the future, between that which Laney can perceive and control and that which he can never access: Laney is aware now of gifts without name. Of modes of perception that may never have previously existed. He has, for instance, a directly spatial sense of something very near the totality of the infosphere. He feels it as a single indescribable shape, something brailled out for him against a ground or backdrop of he knows not what and it hurts him, in the poet’s phrase, like the world hurts God. Within this, he palps nodes of potentiality, strung along lines that are histories of the happened becoming the not-yet. He is very near, he thinks, to a vision in which past and future are one and the same; his present, when he is forced to reinhabit it, seems increasingly arbitrary, its placement upon the time line that is Colin Laney more a matter of convenience than of any absolute now. (106) The passage describes ‘modes of perception that may never have previously existed’ and suggests that Laney has the ability to see beyond the bounds of discourse as he sees ‘gifts without name’. However, the laws of gestalt perception can never be broken, as there is still a background against which presence – or that which can be perceived – must be defined as the figure/ ground distinction reasserts itself. Once again, we encounter the idea of a ‘single indescribable shape’ that makes up everything, just like the Shape of the matrix sought by Gentry in the Sprawl trilogy. However, even though Laney is experiencing the full totality of the infosphere there is still something behind it, ‘a ground or backdrop of he knows not what’ structuring his perception. This suggests that there might be a greater totality, and another backdrop behind in an infinite fractal regression. The comparison with braille, a tactile language that relies on the relationship between foreground and background, the raised dots against the flat paper, shows that there can be no escape from the figure/ground distinction and thus from gestalt perception, no matter how humanity is altered with drugs such as 5-SB, no matter how advanced humans become in their understanding of chaotic

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systems. In a similar way, time may not be reducible to an ‘absolute now’ but it is still constructed by the interdependence of the past and the future, of the ‘happened becoming the not-yet’. The past and the future are as interdependent as the black and white areas of the Rubin’s vase image and, while the present is only the gestalt switch between one reading of the image and the other, it still very much exists in the oscillation between the two. There will always be something beyond the human ability to perceive while perception itself is possible, purely because such a limitation is constitutive of perception itself. The pain that Laney feels in experiencing the totality of the infosphere is also reinscribed as embodied perception. The view connects the realms of the physical, the spiritual and the mental through the reference to the ‘poet’. The poet in question is Sylvia Plath, whose poem ‘Fever 103°’ contains the lines, ‘Your body / Hurts me as the world hurts God’ (78). The title of the poem gives the origin of the narrator’s psychic musings, which traverse history and the laws of physics. The poem makes a connection between the body’s physical processes and the psychic journeying of the fever dream as the poem’s persona relates visions of dreams that include ‘radiation’ and ‘Hiroshima ash’. The interweaving of historical references and the poet’s fever dream draws a connection between the diseased body of the speaker and the burning of the bodies and the body politic in the fires of Hiroshima, raising associations with the burning of the spirit in the fires of hell. The use of the word ‘hurts’ is ambiguous as it implies a sensual, physical pain but could also mean a psychic pain. God’s ability to feel pain implies a physical nature, or a connection to the physical realm. Through the poem the differences between the psychic, spiritual and physical worlds find a meeting place in the feverish body of the narrator. Laney’s encounter with the shape of ‘the totality of the infosphere’ (106) positions him similarly as a god-like being, but one who occupies an interstitial position between the physical, the mental and the spiritual. Unlike a god, Laney can never be omniscient as his mission to see the totality of chaotic data is doomed to fail; he will not succeed in seeing all data, only in limiting the terms of what constitutes his picture of the world. The relationship between perception and human subjectivity itself prevents him from escaping gestalt perception while bringing him face to face with the absence that constitutes human subjectivity. Laney perceives this absence as a ‘Hole’, related to his inability to see the totality of the infosphere. He fears that if he admits his inability to perceive the totality, by admitting the existence of true randomness, he will have to admit his own impotence: The danger of admitting the random is that the random may admit the Hole. The Hole is that which Laney’s being is constructed around. The Hole is absence at the fundamental core. The Hole is that into which he has always stuffed things: drugs, career, women, information. Mainly – lately – information. (Gibson 1999: 40)

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Like the characters in the Sprawl trilogy, Laney recognises the need for supplementarity to complete his subjecthood. By recognising the limitations of perception as constitutive of perception itself Laney recognises absence as the constituting limit of subjectivity, ‘That Hole at the core of Laney’s being, that underlying absence, he begins to suspect, is not so much an absence in the self as of the self ’ (71; emphasis in original). This connection is drawn again as Laney sees the totality of the infosphere and moves towards the event horizon of total understanding: It is a place where metaphor collapses, a descriptive black hole. He is no more able to describe it to himself, experiencing it, than he would be able to describe it to another. Yet what it most nearly resembles, that place where history turns, is the Hole he has posited at the core of his being: an emptiness, as void of darkness as it is of light. (250) While Laney cannot completely perceive the totality, he can approach its event horizon, the place where ‘metaphor collapses’ as discourse breaks down. The glimpse Laney catches of ultimate knowledge is a place where there is no need for discourse or metaphor, because the information can be entirely perceived, leaving no space and no need for the substitution of discourse. The importance granted to this intuitive ability to perceive chaotic patterns creates a distinction between human and artificial intelligence as AIs cannot intuit chaotic systems in the Bridge trilogy. Rei Toei, the artificial intelligence and the title character of the novel Idoru, is ‘a personality-construct, a congeries of software agents, the creation of information-designers’ (Gibson 1996: 92) who appears in physical space as ‘a hologram. Something generated, animated, projected’ (176). Despite this, she acquires the characteristics of a living system: for example, when she becomes engaged to Rez and is increasingly independent from her creators and handlers. There is also the insinuation that she is an autonomous, autopoietic subject as she is ‘infinitely more than the combined sum of her various selves’ (202). By All Tomorrow’s Parties she has become completely independent, living her life in cyberspace and appearing in the physical world with the help of a computerised projector, before freeing herself of the physical realm altogether by disappearing into the infosphere. She displays the ability to learn from her mistakes and to form emotional attachments with people. Despite these qualities, Rei Toei does not have an identity identical to, or equivalent with, human identity. The dividing line chosen to differentiate her from the human characters is her inability to develop pattern recognition in order to understand the chaotic patterns that Laney can see; it is the only human characteristic that Rei Toei does not share, even though Laney attempts to teach her: Perhaps, if shown, she, this posthuman emergent entity, would simply start to see this way as well. And he had been disappointed when she had

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finally told him that what he saw was not there for her; that his ability to apprehend the nodal points, those emergent systems of history, was not there, nor did she expect to find it with growth. ‘This is human, I think,’ she’d said when pressed. ‘This is the result of what you are, biochemically, being stressed in a particular way. This is wonderful. This is closed to me.’ (Gibson 1999: 165) This distinction between human and artificial intelligence means that pattern recognition itself is the thing that defines humanity, separating humanity from emergent technologies. Rei Toei is, herself, a ‘posthuman emergent entity’, but as such she is unable to perceive emergent patterns. This differentiation does seem to be connected with the fact that artificial intelligences, such as Rei Toei, lack a body or lived bodily experiences, given Rei’s reference to biochemical differences. The connection between human pattern recognition and ‘what you are, biochemically’ (165) means that, once more, perception is associated with embodied and embedded subjectivity. The body is recognised as a system defined by relationships; the relationships between the biological, the chemical and the physical, and the ability to recognise such patterns in the world beyond the self. Just as cyberspace and real space are depicted as complementary, so the body and the mind are connected and interdependent. The result of this is that artificial intelligences are incapable of human self-consciousness, and of gestalt perception which is dependent on embodiment. One character says, before Rei Toei disappears into the infosphere: ‘she’s an emergent system. She doesn’t know herself’ (250). While Rei Toei is differentiated from humans through her inability to achieve gestalt perception, there are other characters who challenge that dichotomy. Once again, the gestalt switch occurs so that from one point of view a human behaviour can be read as posthuman, and vice versa. The fluidity of identity is explored through the character of Rez the rock star as part of the novel’s satire on celebrity culture. Rez’s image has as much power as Rez the living system, meaning that he exists as a human, but also as a posthuman emergent identity like Rei Toei: ‘Rez exists as thoroughly, in the realm of the digital, as it is possible for a living human to exist. If Rez-the-man were to die, today, Rez-the-icon would certainly live on’ (55). The interface between human and posthuman is explored through the relationship between Rez and Rei, as Rei sometimes displays more of the characteristics of a living system than Rez: Rez was a law unto himself, very possibly the last of the pre-posthuman megastars, and Rei Toei, the idoru, was an emergent system, a self continually being iterated from experiential input… As she became more herself, through the inputting of experience, through human interaction, she grew and changed. Rez hadn’t, and a psychologist employed by the band’s management had confided in Laney that Rez, whom the psychologist characterized as having narcissistic personality disorder, wasn’t likely to. (163–164)

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While Rei Toei’s inability to recognise patterns through gestalt perception differentiates her from humanity, there is still a sense that the human characters are not purely human and that they rely on their actions and the environment to shape their identities. Through a change in perspective, Rei can become more properly conscious than Rez, as she has the power to grow, to learn and to change in ways that he does not, showing that she fulfils Heinz von Foerster’s criteria for cognition to a greater extent than Rez.4 In All Tomorrow’s Parties, the action of the Bridge trilogy comes to a climax as Laney senses an imminent ‘nodal point’. Gibson uses the term ‘nodal point’ to refer to a point in time and space where events and characters converge before diverging again, fundamentally changed by the event. It is comparable to a bifurcation point in chaos theory, a concept explained by Fritjof Capra and Pier Luigi Luisi in The Systems View of Life (2014): Mathematically, bifurcation points mark sudden changes in the system’s phase portrait. Physically, they correspond to points of instability at which the system changes abruptly and new forms of order suddenly appear. This spontaneous emergence of order at critical points of instability – often referred to simply as ‘emergence’ – has been recognised as one of the hallmarks of life. (116) Rei is an emergent system because she can take in new information and be changed by it, meaning that she can grow and learn. When a nodal point is on the horizon it means that change is coming but not simply for a single living system, but for the system of history itself. Laney tells Yamazaki, ‘We’re coming up on the mother of all nodal points. I can see it now, it’s all going to change … It didn’t change when they thought it would. Millennium was a Christian holiday. I’ve been looking at history, Yamazaki. I can see the nodal points in history’ (Gibson 1999: 4). The nodal point is accumulating around the characters who will be at the centre of the action, particularly Cody Harwood, who shares Laney’s gift for reading the patterns in chaos. Cody Harwood is described as a ‘strange attractor’ (194) because he will be in the centre of the nodal point, but Laney worries about Harwood’s dual role as an actor and as an observer. Harwood is an actor in the nodal point as he is the strange attractor, the point at which the action will converge. However, he also has the ability to read the patterns in chaos and so he can have some control over the event, even while being a part of it. He can guide the system of history itself. Harwood’s ability to read the patterns of chaos, coupled with his position as a strange attractor, leads Laney to wonder, ‘if Harwood is the strange attractor here, the crucial piece of weirdness things need to accrete around, and he’s self-aware in that role, what is it he’s trying to do that has the potential to literally change everything?’ (194–195). Harwood’s position as both an observer and a major actor in the nodal point mean that he acts as a feedback loop, feeding his observations of the situation back into the system

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and thereby controlling it. The novel ends with both the idoru, Rei Toei, and Cody Harwood entering cyberspace, or ‘in the flow’ (252) of chaotic data. In a final show of the power Harwood holds, he crosses the boundary between physical space and virtual space: ‘Harwood is going now, inverting himself into an informational wormhole of the sort the Walled City exists within’ (252). Harwood’s power to control the course of history, through a combination of taking part in the chaotic system and observing the chaotic system, raises the question of the role of time and history under a chaotic paradigm. As Laney continues his study of chaotic data and the infosphere he realises that history itself is a chaotic system. He realises he is looking at ‘a locus of nodal points, a sort of meta-node’ and that, ‘His compulsive study of Harwood and things Harwoodian had led him to the recognition that history too was subject to the nodal vision, and the version of history that Laney came to understand there bore little or no relation to any accepted version’ (165). In chaos, no system is truly closed, and this applies to the system of narrative itself, whether that narrative is fictional or historical. N. Katherine Hayles argues that chaos theory changes the understanding of literature from a formalist model in which internal consistency and aesthetic beauty is prized above all, to a more theoretical approach that recognises the flows of various discourses through the text: As books became texts, they were transformed from ordered sets of words to permeable membranes through which flowed the currents of history, language, and culture. Always already lacking a ground for their systems of signification, texts were not deterministic or predictable. Instead they were capable of becoming unstable whenever the slightest perturbation was introduced. The well-wrought urn, it seemed, was actually a reservoir of chaos. (2) Just as history, language and culture flow through the fictional text, so the fictional text flows through the discourse of history. History itself is changed by the chaotic paradigm and this, in turn, affects its portrayal in science fiction. The development of chaos theory can be read as the admission by science that some things are nondeterministic and could never be measured or observed even given the most precise hypothetical measuring instruments. Adam Roberts writes in The History of Science Fiction (2005) that this must have an impact on science fiction as extrapolation is no longer a scientific certainty: ‘the development of Chaos Theory in the 1980s has finally put to rest the old Positivist philosophical chimera of a science so comprehensive that it can wholly predict the future. History evidently is a chaotic system’ (197–198). Laney comes to this same realisation as he reflects: they must think he could see the future. But he knew he couldn’t … What would happen in the future came out of what was happening now. Laney

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Chaos in the Bridge trilogy knew he couldn’t predict it, and something about the experience of the nodal points made him suspect that nobody could. The nodal points seemed to form when something might be about to change. Then he saw a place where change was most likely, if something triggered it. (Gibson 1996: 250)

The reaction of science fiction to the complexity of reality must be to recognise that the future is plural and this is exactly how Laney reads the chaotic patterns: All his life Laney has heard talk of the death of history, but confronted with the literal shape of all human knowledge, all human memory, he begins to see the way in which there never really has been any such thing. No history. Only the shape, and it comprised of lesser shapes, in squirming fractal descent, on down into the infinitely finest of resolutions. But there is will. ‘Future’ is inherently plural. (Gibson 1999: 107) The ‘talk of the death of history’ that Laney mentions is reminiscent of the debate which sprung up after the publication of Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man in 1992, the year before the first novel in the Bridge trilogy, Virtual Light, was published. Fukuyama had argued that history was over as, after the fall of the Berlin Wall – interpreted by Fukuyama as the effective defeat of communism – neoliberal capitalism had been found to be the best of all political systems. In his 1989 essay ‘The End of History’, which Fukuyama would develop into his famous book, he writes: What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government. (162) Fukuyama predicted that history was over, as humanity would now find itself living in increasing stability, free from the violence of revolution or the threat of political upheaval. Of course, this turned out not to be the case, but at the time the trajectory of events, and the stability of the 1990s for the majority of citizens in liberal democracies, leant Fukuyama’s ideas some credibility. However, Laney recognises the chaotic nature of history itself, its non-linear structure meaning that it can never be said to be over. It is a complex system always open to possibilities, including possibilities that might seem outlandish but can occur from a tiny change in initial conditions.

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Conclusion In the Bridge trilogy, chaos is double-edged: it can be thought of as an invisible matrix of data, shaping the characters’ lives and controlling them in unpredictable ways. But it can also be seen as a liberating paradigm, one that is infinitely interstitial, allowing freedom in those barely visible gaps where dialectical tensions do not quite meet. N. Katherine Hayles explores this dual nature through situating the discovery and popularisation of chaos theory in the context of the growing control of the information society. Hayles argues that the threat of total control posed by the information society was a major influence on the American attitude to chaos and shows that its meaning is twofold, alternating depending on the perspective of the viewer: In this paranoiac atmosphere, chaotic fluctuations take on an ambiguous value. From one point of view they threaten the stability of the system. From another, they offer the liberating possibility that one may escape the informational net by slipping along its interstices. (1990: 5–6) The fear of control evoked by chaos theory is coupled with a potential freedom, depending on one’s ‘point of view’, offering the possibility that one can switch back and forward between the two definitions. This duality is the ‘double edge to the current preoccupation with chaos – the ambiguity of whether it brings chaos within rational compass or signals the final defeat of totalizing projects’ (xiv). By bringing chaos into scientific discourse there is a possibility that it can be classified, that even disorder can be ordered by the taxonomy of science. This possibility, for those experiencing the control of the information society, can be threatening as even disordered spaces come under the control of science. But with that threat of complete control, of being caught up in the web of chaos, comes the thought that freedom is possible by moving through chaotic spaces. This dual nature of chaos structures the Bridge trilogy as characters are caught up in the web of chaos in one moment, and escape through the liminal spaces it creates in another. The difference is merely one of perspective, of a gestalt switch. The activity of matter is foregrounded as Chevette moves through the city on her bike as a courier, becoming one with her bike and one with the city: Sometimes, when she rode hard, when she could really proj, Chevette got free of everything: the city, her body, even time. That was the messenger’s high, she knew, and though it felt like freedom, it was really the meldingwith, the clicking-in, that did it. The bike between her legs was like some hyper-evolved alien tail she’d somehow extruded, as though over patient centuries; a sweet and intricate bone-machine, grown Lexan-armoured tires, near-frictionless bearings, and gas-filled shocks. She was entirely part of the city then, one wild-ass little dot of energy and matter, and she

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Chaos in the Bridge trilogy made her thousand choices, instant to instant, according to how the traffic flowed … (Gibson 1993: 111; emphasis in original)

Chevette finds freedom in the interstices between physical and virtual space, between the human and the nonhuman. She experiences a sense of the posthuman as her bike becomes an extension of her like another limb through the meeting of flesh and inorganic matter in the term ‘bone-machine’ (a possible reference to the Pixies song of the same name, from the 1988 album Surfer Rosa). Chevette is also riding the interface that chaos provides between cyberspace and real space, giving her a sense of freedom in the interstices. Her role as a courier means that she works in physical space as she brings objects from one geographical position to another. However, she is also working as if the city were a virtual space and she a ‘dot of energy and matter’ that keeps the city connected. Chevette is: one who earned her living at the archaic intersection of information and geography. The offices the girl rode between were electronically coterminous – in effect, a single desktop, the map of distances obliterated by the seamless and instantaneous nature of communication. Yet this very seamlessness, which had rendered physical mail an expensive novelty, might as easily be viewed as porosity, and as such created the need for the service the girl provided. Physically transporting bits of information about a grid that consisted of little else, she provided a degree of security in the fluid universe of data. (Gibson 1993: 85) The border that separates different places has been broken down by the electronic communication made available through cyberspace but a border still remains, defined by its ‘porosity’. Chevette works at this interface between cyberspace and physical space, between the human and the nonhuman, finding some freedom in the interstitial gestalt switching between the two.

Notes 1 For an explanation of Francisco Varela and Humberto Maturana’s theory of autopoiesis see Chapter 1. 2 More recently, Mandelbrot’s famous shapes have been subject to 3D imaging by Daniel White and Paul Nylander whose ‘Mandelbulb’ was developed in 2009. The Mandelbulb software has since been used for special effects in Disney’s Big Hero 6 (2014) and Alex Garland’s Annihilation (2018) (see mandelbulb.com). 3 The term ‘cybernetic waterwitch’ (Gibson 1996: 25) is similar to descriptions of the main character in Pattern Recognition (2003), Cayce. Cayce is a coolhunter, someone who spots emerging trends in fashion, and is described as ‘dowser in the world of global marketing’ (Gibson 2003: 2). 4 For a discussion of Heinz von Foerster’s criteria for cognition see Chapter 1.

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Bibliography Briggs, John. Fractals: The Patterns of Chaos: A New Aesthetic of Art, Science, and Nature. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992. Capra, Fritjof and Pier Luigi Luisi. The Systems View of Life: A Unifying Vision. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Cavallaro, Dani. Cyberpunk and Cyberculture: Science Fiction and the Work of William Gibson. London: The Athlone Press, 2000. Fukuyama, Francis. ‘The End of History?’ Globalization and the Challenges of the New Century: A Reader, edited by Matthew Krain, Howard Mehlinger, and Patrick O’Meara. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2000, pp. 161–180. Gibson, William. Virtual Light. London: Penguin, 1993. Gibson, William. Idoru. London: Penguin, 1996. Gibson, William. All Tomorrow’s Parties. London: Penguin, 1999. Gibson, William. Pattern Recognition. London: HarperCollins, 2003. Gleick, James. Chaos. London: Vintage, 1987. Hayles, N. Katherine. Chaos Bound: Orderly Disorder in Contemporary Literature and Science. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990. Iser, Wolfgang. How to Do Theory. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2006. Kaneko, Kunihiko and Ichiro Tsuda. Complex Systems: Chaos and Beyond, A Constructive Approach with Applications in Life Sciences. Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 2001. Mandelbrot, Benoit. ‘How Long is the Coast of Britain? Statistical Self-Similarity and Fractional Dimension.’ Science, vol. 156, 1967, pp. 636–638. Plath, Sylvia. ‘Fever 103°.’ Ariel. London: Faber and Faber, 2004, pp. 77–79. Porush, David. ‘Prigogine, Chaos, and Contemporary Science Fiction.’ Science Fiction Studies, vol. 18, no. 3, 1991, pp. 367–386. Prigogine, Ilya and Isabelle Stengers. Order Out of Chaos: Man’s New Dialogue With Nature. London: Bantam, 1984. Roberts, Adam. The History of Science Fiction. New York: Palgrave, 2005. Schroeder, Randy. ‘Inheriting Chaos: Burroughs, Pynchon, Sterling, Rucker.’ Extrapolation, vol. 43, no. 1, 2002, pp. 89–97. Slusser, George. ‘Introduction: Fiction as Information.’ Fiction 2000: Cyberpunk and the Future of Narrative, edited by Tom Shippey and George Slusser. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1992, pp. 1–14. Westfahl, Gary. William Gibson. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2013.

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Perception in Pattern Recognition

Introduction Pattern Recognition (2003) has perhaps become the most significant work in William Gibson’s oeuvre, with the possible exception of Neuromancer (1984). While Neuromancer was feted for announcing cyberpunk as a major shake-up to science fiction, Pattern Recognition was recognised as a broader contribution to contemporary literature as a whole; it was one of the first novels to capture the affective aftermath of the 11 September 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center’s ‘Twin Towers’ and the Pentagon (attacks that became known by the metonym ‘9/11’) and, as such, contributed to a conversation about how the attacks might reframe the debates about postmodernism and what might follow in its wake. The Bridge trilogy had described a chaotic world that human perception was uniquely able to navigate, with gestalt perception separating humans from artificial intelligence (AI). This faith in the human ability to learn from the data emerging from chaotic systems falls apart in Pattern Recognition, which denies a consistent model for understanding the world. Gestalt perception leads to paranoia, and pattern recognition is often faulty; Gibson calls this ‘apophenia’, ‘the spontaneous perception of connections and meaningfulness in unrelated things’ (115).1 Apophany, or apophenia, means that humans still perceive through gestalt perception, as in the Bridge trilogy, but these intuitions lead to incorrect conclusions, making understanding through epiphanies drawn from chaotic data impossible. Reading Pattern Recognition alongside Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) shows how this faulty pattern recognition is the result of a ‘paradigm shift’, which Gibson portrays as triggered by 9/11. 9/11 is represented as an anomaly, an incident that cannot be reconciled with preexisting paradigms. Pattern Recognition captures the moment of historical and perceptual change by drawing attention to an inadequate paradigm that leaves characters and readers alike without an interpretive template, without the power to extrapolate or generalise. Pattern Recognition is the first novel in the Blue Ant trilogy, which goes on to include Spook Country (2007) and Zero History (2010). It follows Cayce, a young woman with an acute sensitivity to branding and marketing. This DOI: 10.4324/9781003082477-4

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sensitivity, or allergy, manifests itself as a physical reaction that can include nausea and vomiting: ‘some people ingest a single peanut and their head swells like a basketball. When it happens to Cayce, it’s her psyche’ (17). She uses this ‘skill’ in her job as a coolhunter, spotting trends in fashion and passing them on to brands and marketing companies. Cayce’s role is based on the sensitivity of her perceptive power – as she puts it, ‘I try to recognize a pattern before anyone else does’ (86). She is also a fan of an internet phenomenon known as ‘the footage’, a series of short films lacking in temporal markers and uploaded anonymously to the internet. The footage is the subject of much speculation among its followers, the ‘footageheads’ (21) about the origin of the work and whether the short films released online are part of a bigger, complete project. Cayce is hired by Hubertus Bigend of the Blue Ant Corporation, ostensibly to help the company choose a logo. It transpires, however, that Bigend’s real motivation is for Cayce to discover the makers of the footage. Cayce tracks them to Russia via Japan before discovering the truth about the internet phenomenon: the footage is created by a young woman named Nora, disabled by a piece of shrapnel lodged in her brain, with the help of her twin sister, Stella. Throughout the novel Cayce struggles to come to terms with the loss of her father, Win, a Cold War security expert who went missing on 9/11. To make the connections between Pattern Recognition and the gestalt I begin by explaining Thomas Kuhn’s concept of the paradigm shift in relation to scientific revolutions before highlighting the nature of the paradigm as a gestalt switch. The ‘anomaly’ of 9/11 undermines the paradigm that existed before, and the reliability of pattern recognition itself. This crisis is expressed through Cayce and her struggle with her own gestalt perception as she attempts to find the maker of the footage and struggles with ‘faulty pattern recognition’. Despite the novel’s contemporary setting it retains some characteristics of science fiction and I argue that the tension between the dystopian impulse of advertising and the utopian impulse of the footage is one of the ways the novel continues to work in a speculative tradition, and begins to imagine a future. Just as the imagery of chaos theory is used to depict human exceptionalism in visual language, the power of the gestalt switch is used as a visual way of describing estrangement from an unpredictable world and the oscillation between utopian and dystopian futures.

Paradigm shifts The Bridge trilogy described pattern recognition as particularly useful in negotiating the paradigm of chaos theory which, while unpredictable, is based in patterns that humans are uniquely suited to sensing and understanding. For example, in All Tomorrow’s Parties (1999), Laney’s drug-induced abilities are described as heightening an existing sense of pattern recognition to allow him a deeper understanding of the world ‘as it really is’. He sees patterns that really are there, but go relatively unseen by others:

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Perception in Pattern Recognition Laney is a sport, a mutant, the accidental product of covert clinical trials of a drug that induced something oddly akin to psychic abilities in a small percentage of subjects. But Laney isn’t psychic in any non-rational sense: rather he is able, through the organic changes wrought long ago by 5-SB, this drug, to somehow perceive change emerging from vast flows of data. (56)

The rationality and accuracy of Laney’s mystical, chemical gift is never in question in the Bridge trilogy. Information gleaned from pattern recognition reveals the truth as an epiphany; the patterns create emergent gestalt systems that are ‘more than the sum of their parts’, revealing meaning, truth and information from which extrapolations and predictions can be made. In contrast with the valorisation of pattern recognition throughout the Bridge trilogy, where it is a definition of what it means to be human, Pattern Recognition shows perception to be more problematic as faulty pattern recognition, or apophenia, becomes characteristic of human perception. Cayce’s friend and fellow footagehead Parkaboy says, ‘homo sapiens are all about pattern recognition. Both a gift and a trap’ (22). The necessity of pattern recognition as constitutive of human perception is recognised as it is described as a human ‘gift’ – but the inevitable limitations that it brings with it are also recognised, and foregrounded in Pattern Recognition as Cayce undergoes a paradigm shift. The term ‘paradigm shift’ was introduced by Thomas Kuhn in his influential 1962 book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, a book that shared intellectual roots with Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, the Chilean biologists who developed the concept of autopoiesis discussed in Chapter 1. Varela highlights the common roots of the concept of autopoiesis and Kuhn’s analysis of scientific paradigms: I came to know what until then was only known by a minority in Chile, the works of the French school in the history and philosophy of science: Alexander Koyré (above all), Georges Canguilhem, and Gaston Bachelard. All of these authors express the counterintuitive conviction that scientific ideas are made and change abruptly, and not because of a lucky accumulation of ‘purely empirical evidence’, that they are sustained with images and ideas which are neither given nor immutable, and that each age is blind to the foundation of what it considers certain and evident. The general public became aware of all this through Thomas Kuhn’s famous book, which couldn’t have existed without the groundwork of the French school whom Kuhn quotes with reverence. (Varela 1996: 409) Kuhn’s book argues that ‘normal science’ takes place within a paradigm, in the context of that invisible foundation that Varela mentions. The job of normal science is to isolate problems, or gaps in knowledge, and to solve

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these problems using the tools and the thought processes provided by the paradigm. Kuhn describes normal science as: an attempt to force nature into the preformed and relatively inflexible box that the paradigm supplies. No part of the aim of normal science is to call forth new sorts of phenomena; indeed those that will not fit the box are often not seen at all. (24) Normal science does achieve progress through such an approach, but this progress is only gradual and can only happen within the existing paradigm. However, after some time ‘anomalies’ will start to appear – problems that do not make sense and cannot be solved within the existing paradigm. These problems cannot be solved by the gradualist approach of normal science. At this point a ‘scientific revolution’ takes place as a new paradigm suggests itself (usually to a young scientist, or someone new to the field who is not heavily invested in the old paradigm). Kuhn believes that the process of discovery, closes only when the paradigm theory has been adjusted so that the anomalous has become the expected. Assimilating a new sort of fact demands a more than additive adjustment of theory, and until that adjustment is completed – until the scientist has learned to see nature in a different way – the new fact is not quite a scientific fact at all. (53) When a scientist moves from one paradigm to another, Kuhn describes the change as resembling a gestalt switch, though it is different in that the scientist cannot move between one view and the other; the change in paradigm changes the way the scientist sees and there is no going back. As Kuhn writes, ‘the scientist does not preserve the gestalt subject’s freedom to switch back and forth between ways of seeing. Nevertheless, the switch of gestalt… is a useful elementary prototype for what occurs in full scale paradigm shift’ (85). The use of paradigms as a means of thinking about perception and understanding, like gestalt perception, relies on the notion that the subject perceives their visual field as more than the sum of its parts; ‘neither scientists nor laymen learn to see the world piecemeal or item by item…paradigms determine large areas of experience at the same time’ (128). Kuhn indirectly associates science fiction with the ability to interrogate old paradigms when he writes, ‘The analytical thought experimentation that bulks so large in the writings of Galileo, Einstein, Bohr, and others is perfectly calculated to expose the old paradigm to existing knowledge in ways that isolate the root of crisis with a clarity unattainable in the laboratory’ (88). By associating thought experiments with the ability to think ‘outside the box’ of the existing paradigm he opens a space for the role of speculative fiction, which does just that. Speculative fiction can instigate ‘cognitive estrangement’ (Suvin 1979),

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allowing the reader to see their world and perhaps become aware of those invisible and naturalised phenomena that evade the paradigms on which their thinking relies. More specifically, there is also a history of speculative fiction engaging with scientific problems, following in the tradition of the gedankenexperiment or thought experiment.2 Paradigms, then, are essentially tools for pattern recognition. Like Wertheimer’s law of perception which states that habit and experience shape gestalt perception (Wertheimer 1938), paradigms are viewpoints on the world from which scientists seek to confirm their existing expectations. In Gibson’s novel, apophenia, or ‘faulty’ pattern recognition can therefore be read as a failure of the paradigm to accommodate the data. When there is no paradigm or gestalt into which the information will fit, Cayce experiences her pattern recognition as faulty, like a scientist whose results refuse to tally with their expectations. The novel is about a paradigm in crisis and captures a moment before a new paradigm has arisen to replace the old. The novel’s key focus is on the crisis in the North American socio-political worldview, precipitated by the ‘anomaly’ of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The impact of these attacks overshadows the action of the novel; indeed, the plot traces Cayce’s journey towards finding a new paradigm, one that can accept and account for the unprecedented attack on the USA by an outside force. The structure of scientific revolutions functions in the same way as all gestalt perception in that the subject sees patterns that fit into the dominant schema, ignoring other aspects of reality, until the ‘box’ of the paradigm can no longer accommodate these aspects of reality and a new paradigm must be sought.

The anomaly of 9/11 The primary moment of crisis in the novel is the attack on the Twin Towers, as Cayce was in New York on that morning and has since had to cope with the disappearance of her father, who has never been seen since that day. The idea of a paradigm shift, caused by 9/11, is embedded in the creation of the text, as Gibson had begun writing before the attack on the World Trade Center and was forced to accept that Cayce’s backstory: was completely swept aside by my recognition at that point that my world no longer existed and that the meaning of everything – I felt that just as strongly as I’ve ever felt anything in my life – the meaning of everything, ever that had gone before had to be reconsidered in the light of something that had happened. (Gibson quoted in Leonard 2003) Gibson’s description of 9/11 as an incident that ended his world should be understood in the context of the time. 9/11 marked the end of a brief interregnum between the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, which signified the end of the Cold War, and the geopolitical instability that has defined the times since

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2001. In his non-fiction collection Distrust that Particular Flavor (2012), Gibson writes that he ‘cringed [his] way through the heating up of the Cold War, expecting any moment the wailing of the sirens that would call us into the basement of the post office’ (205) where a bomb shelter had been fashioned. Gibson’s horizons were delimited by the nuclear apocalypse that had been all but promised throughout his most formative years. The fall of the Berlin Wall had ushered in a short period of relative prosperity, prompting Francis Fukuyama to declare ‘the end of history’ as liberal democracy was normalised across the globe. 9/11 brought an end to that period of tentative optimism and stability, and the need for a paradigm shift following 9/11 is embedded in Pattern Recognition at every level of the text. 9/11 acts as an anomaly, disturbing the previous paradigm by refusing interpretation. It is something which was never expected and which Cayce feels ill-equipped to understand because it does not fit into the paradigm that she has inhabited during her whole life up until this point. The shock of this anomaly is expressed through the imagery of the text and the primarily visual description of Cayce’s experience of the event. Throughout the text, Cayce associates the event with an image, the image of ‘dead roses, arranged in an off-white Fiestaware vase’ (135) that she sees in a window just prior to the first signs that something is amiss: This was a mysterious window, with a black-painted plywood backdrop revealing nothing of the establishment behind it. She had never been in to see what else was there, but the objects in the window seemed to change in accordance with some peculiar poetry of their own, and she was in the habit, usually, of pausing to look, when she passed this way. (135) The objects in the window do not appear to have any relation to each other. As well as the dead roses Cayce also sees ‘three rusted cast-iron toy banks, each a different height but all representing the Empire State Building’ (135). While the objects do not seem to have a connection with each other Cayce reads into them ‘a peculiar poetry of their own’, just as one reads a Cornell box.3 The lengthy description of the window and its contents, coupled with the many-claused sentence, conveys Cayce’s involvement and peace as she takes the time to look at the dead flowers, reading the pattern of their poetry. One of the dead roses loses a leaf, ‘leaving her sole witness to the minute fall’ (135). This will be contrasted with the public nature of the attacks as everyone witnesses them, either in reality or from repeated viewings on television. As she is disturbed from contemplating the window by the sound of a low-flying plane she thinks ‘they must be making a film’ (135). The disturbance of Cayce’s own pattern recognition, which she experiences as natural and poetic, is associated with the artificial images of film-making. Once the attacks have begun, the narrative suddenly becomes choppy and fragmented, disorganised, as Cayce realises that she is ill-prepared to process an event that is so outside of her expectations:

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Perception in Pattern Recognition Perhaps there is a siren then, or sirens, but there are always sirens, in New York. As she walks toward West Broadway and the hotel, she hears more sirens. Crossing West Broadway she sees that a crowd is forming. People are stopping, turning to look south. Pointing. Toward smoke, against blue sky. There is a fire, high up in the World Trade Center. Walking more quickly now, in the direction of Canal, she passes people kneeling beside a woman who seems to have fainted. The towers in her line of sight. Anomaly of smoke. Sirens. (136)

The visual nature of the narrative continues but stripped of context as Cayce sees, but fails to adequately interpret the images around her. The repetition reinforces this as she is unable to process the sound of the sirens and piece together a gestalt understanding of the situation. The text dramatises Cayce’s attempts to fit the new events into her pre-existing paradigm through rationalisations like ‘there are always sirens in New York’, but the ‘anomaly’ of the smoke acts as an undeniable metonymy for the larger anomaly, the anomaly of 9/11 itself. The importance of metonymy as a means of dealing with the uninterpretable is explained by Jacques Derrida in Philosophy in a Time of Terror (2003), where he argues that metonymy acts as a place-holder for the event which the viewer fails to understand, as it does not fit into an existing paradigm: The brevity of the appellation (September 11, 9/11) stems not only from an economic or rhetorical necessity. The telegram of this metonymy – a name, a number – points out the unqualifiable by recognizing that we do not recognize or even cognize that we do not yet know how to qualify, that we do not know what we are talking about. (Derrida quoted in Borradori 2003: 86)4 In focusing on the metonymy of the ‘anomaly of smoke’, Cayce can navigate the situation without facing the fact that the event is uninterpretable based on the paradigm that had previously been sufficient for understanding her life. As it becomes clear that something has gone wrong, she tries to hold on to the moments of peace she experienced at the window, but the long, contemplative sentences of the earlier viewing are broken into separate images and concepts: ‘she closes her eyes and sees the dry petal, falling. The loneliness of objects. Their secret lives. Like seeing something move in a Cornell box’ (136). The (now explicit) reference to a Cornell box acts as an appeal for that moment, when pattern recognition allowed her to connect the disparate objects and find meaning in their ‘peculiar poetry’ (135). That meaning is no longer accessible, as pattern recognition fails through lack of a paradigm.

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The visual nature of the experience of 9/11 itself and its impact as an intrusion into a system of perception that can never be relied upon again is continued as Cayce reaches the home of a business associate and goes in to see the attacks via the television news broadcast: The television is on, CNN, volume up, and as she steps past him, uninvited but feeling the need to do something, she sees, on the screen beneath the unused leatherette ice bucket, the impact of the second plane. And looks up, to the window that frames the towers. And what she will retain is that the exploding fuel burns with a tinge of green that she will never hear or see described. Cayce and the German designer will watch the towers burn, and eventually fall, and though she will know she must have seen people jumping, falling, there will be no memory of it. It will be like watching one of her own dreams on television. Some vast and deeply personal insult to any ordinary notion of interiority. An experience outside of culture. (137) The visual nature of the narrative continues as Cayce sees the action first on the television screen, before looking up and seeing the action directly. The experience is ‘outside’ of culture, outside of the cultural paradigm through which Cayce understands the world. It is a visual experience that seems to capture something beyond language and culture, and, like the footage, the experience is compared to a dream. It is experienced as an intrusion into her interiority as it is her means of perception and of understanding the world that is under attack in those first post-9/11 moments. The paradigm which she uses to interpret her world has been, effectively, destroyed. Cayce realises that the expectations instilled in her by that outdated paradigm are now useless, or even damaging: Or is it, she considers, simply that the world had gone in such a different direction, in the instant of having seen that petal drop, that nothing really is the same now, and that her expectations of the parameters of how life should feel are simply that, expectations, and increasingly out of line the further she gets from that window in the SoHo Grand. (195) This passage characterises the moment of the Twin Towers attacks as a nodal point which produces an increasingly divergent future the further one travels from the event itself. Cayce contemplates the events of that day from the luxury of a Japanese hotel as she begins to investigate the footage for Bigend; she thinks about how impossible she usually finds it to approach the subject, but ‘she can think about this now because the Japanese sunlight, with the robotic drapes fully

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open, seems to come from some different direction entirely’ (134). Cayce needs to look at the event ‘in a different light’ to face the emotional impact and to find a new perspective that can offer some understanding. Her physical position, in Japan, a different continent from where 9/11 took place, and her futuristic surroundings featuring ‘robotic drapes’ help to provide her with the space – both literal and metaphorical – that she needs to think about the day her father went missing. The description of the drapes as ‘robotic’ echoes Cayce’s emotional distance from the events she remembers, allowing her to approach the subject. Cayce attempts to administer a ‘psychological prophylaxis’ (45), a way of maintaining psychic normality in an extraordinary time. Having discovered that someone has been in the apartment in which she is staying, she first ‘secures the perimeter’ by stacking furniture against the door: She’s trying to remember what would have come after securing the perimeter, in Win’s bedtime stories. Probably maintaining the routine of the station. Psychological prophylaxis, she thinks he called it. Get on with ordinary business. Maintain morale. How many times has she turned to that, in the past year or so? (45–46) Cayce’s struggle to maintain an ‘ordinary’ state of mind has been ongoing since 9/11, the loss of her father and the breach of her socio-cultural paradigm by the extra-ordinary event of 9/11. The attempt to continue with ‘ordinary business’ while the paradigm that made sense of that ordinary business has been compromised, is doomed to fail. Cayce recognises, subconsciously, that her expectations are inadequate: she has a dream in which, ‘she looks up then, and sees, borealis-faint but sharp-edged and tall as heaven, twin towers of light. As her head goes back to find their tops a vertigo seizes her. They narrow up into nothing at all, a vanishing point, like railway tracks up into the desert of the sky’ (227). The image of railway lines evokes two lines that can never meet but will remain parallel forever, an asymptotic approach that can never come together into one, totalising point. The meaning can never be reached within a paradigm that has been shown to fail. This impossibility of approaching understanding leaves Cayce in thrall to the events of 9/11 with no access to the future, only the desert of the present. This is how Pattern Recognition maintains its science fictional veneer. When explaining the nature of scientific revolutions, Thomas Kuhn uses the language of science fiction to evoke the estranging nature of a new paradigm: During revolutions scientists see new and different things when looking with familiar instruments in places they have looked before. It is rather as if the professional community had been suddenly transported to another planet where familiar objects are seen in a different light and are joined by unfamiliar ones as well. (111)

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This new paradigm forces Cayce to see her world as alien, giving her perception of the contemporary world the flavour of an explorer surveying a new and strange landscape – or, perhaps, an alien visitor’s experience of Earth. From Cayce’s alienation, the science-fiction flavour of Pattern Recognition follows.

Apophenia As the old paradigm has been broken by the anomaly of 9/11, Cayce searches for a new way to negotiate the world, but she finds herself victim to apophenia, a term she learns from her father Win, a Cold War security expert: There must always be room for coincidence, Win had maintained. When there’s not, you’re probably well into apophenia, each thing then perceived as part of an overarching pattern of conspiracy. And while comforting yourself with the symmetry of it all, he’d believed, you stood all too real a chance of missing the genuine threat, which was invariably less symmetrical, less perfect. But which he always, she knew, took for granted was there. (293–294) Win recognises the human tendency towards pattern recognition, but realises that it can act as a limitation or a distraction from real dangers as perception gets taken in by the ‘pattern of conspiracy’. This is especially dangerous at a point in history when an old paradigm is starting to show inconsistencies and the struggle to understand leads to the need for new patterns and paradigms. However, those real dangers are never in doubt for Win, as he comments that ‘even paranoid schizophrenics have enemies’ (124). As Cayce suspects she is being followed by a man named Prion who she sees on the same plane as herself, she reminds herself that faulty pattern recognition is the particular occupational hazard of egotistic or self-centred people: Is Prion’s presence on this plane a frank anomaly? Only, she decides, if she thinks of herself as the center, the focal point of something she doesn’t, or can’t, understand. That had always been Win’s first line of defense, within himself: to recognize that he was only a part of something larger. Paranoia, he said, was fundamentally egocentric, and every conspiracy theory served in some way to aggrandize the believer. (124) Win argues that by recognising one’s relationship with the rest of the world one can alleviate some of the dangers of apophenia and faulty pattern recognition. For Win, the key to combatting apophenia is in recognising one’s autopoietic relationship with the larger gestalt that is society; understanding is only possible as a member of a community. This is in stark contrast with

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Cayce’s isolation and loneliness, described in the opening pages of the book as she arrives at her friend Damien’s empty London flat. She is suffering from jet lag, ‘her mortal soul is leagues behind her, being reeled in on some ghostly umbilical down the vanished wake of the plane that brought her here’ (1). Not only is she alone, she is even alienated from her sense of selfhood, and this isolation proves a barrier to understanding. Cayce’s loneliness pervades the book as other characters look for alternative means of finding a sense of community. In the case of her mother, the emptiness of isolation has been partially filled by media technology, as can be seen in her obsession with the ‘Electric Voice Phenomenon’ (EVP), a belief that voices, particularly those of the dead, can be heard in the static of badly tuned televisions and radios. The media occupies the same position as ‘the totality of the infosphere’ (Gibson 1999: 106) in the Bridge trilogy, but whereas the infosphere was the sum of chaotic data, data that could be read and understood, the electronic voices in static are apophenic and cannot reveal any information: Cayce has long managed to have as little to do with her mother’s penchant for Electronic Voice Phenomena as she possibly can, and this had been her father’s strategy as well. Apophenia, Win had declared it, after due consideration and in his careful way: the spontaneous perception of connections and meaningfulness in unrelated things. (Gibson 2003: 115) Significantly, Cayce’s mother believes that she has learned information about Win’s disappearance through the EVP; she is convinced that Win was a victim of 9/11 and needs no further evidence (135). After the anomaly of 9/11, Cynthia uses the EVP as a paradigm for processing her reality. Despite Cayce’s reservations about EVP, she too finds herself believing briefly, albeit under the influence of drugs having been poisoned by Dorothea, one of Bigend’s rogue assistants: She experiences, perhaps, her sole and only brush with EVP – as from some deep and hidden eddy in the river of Sinatra’s voice emerges a strange bright cartoon-like whirling snarl of sound, which executes the sonic equivalent of a back flip and becomes, as though compressed for transmission over unimaginable distances, her father’s voice. (314) The anomaly of 9/11 is wrapped up in Cayce’s mind with the disappearance of her father so that, in a moment of weakness, she can shape the information she is receiving into his voice as the media briefly takes the place of real human contact in an echo of her mother’s obsession with EVP. Pattern Recognition does not merely depict apophenia, it also provokes it in the reader by suggesting evocative connections with Neuromancer. Like

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Neuromancer, the novel is narrated through a single point of view narrative, in contrast to all Gibson’s novels since which had followed three or more different narrative arcs, switching between the perspectives of different characters to tell overlapping facets of the story. Where Neuromancer is told solely through the perspective of Case, Pattern Recognition is told exclusively from Cayce’s perspective. These names also offer a point of resonance; while they are spelled differently they are phonetically identical, as Cayce tells a new acquaintance: ‘… It’s Cayce.’ ‘Case?’ ‘Actually,’ she finds herself explaining, ‘it should be pronounced “Casey”, like the last name of the man my mother named me after. But I don’t.’ (31) Despite the affinity of the homophonic names, Gibson has claimed in an interview that he was not conscious of giving both protagonists the same name and certainly did not have an aesthetic reason for doing so (Leonard 2003). Whether or not we should take Gibson seriously on this point, the names highlight the apophenia that we practice, as readers, seeing patterns that may or may not be there, that may or may not hold significance. The reader of Pattern Recognition experiences apophenia through the novel’s main protagonist, but the case of Cayce and Case reminds us that reading always relies on gestalt perception, and on pattern recognition, whether faulty or not.

Advertising and the footage: utopian/dystopian tension Pattern Recognition marks a departure for Gibson in that it cannot be unreservedly classified as science fiction. The novel was published in 2003 and set in 2002, its almost contemporary setting marking a departure from the future of the Sprawl trilogy and the near future of the Bridge trilogy. The reason for this change in setting is laid out in the novel itself, which argues for the impossibility of imagining the future under the crisis conditions of paradigm change. This inability to access the future is due to the need for a gestalt switch to a new paradigm that will once more allow extrapolation to take place. This is emphasised by the use of the present tense throughout the novel, implying that the narrative voice must coexist in the same timeline as the story: there is no implied future vantage point from which the action can be viewed and narrated, as the story exists entirely in the present. The novel’s contemporary setting does not invite the futuristic settings or technologies that marked Gibson’s previous novels as science fiction. Darko Suvin argues that the difference between realism and science fiction should be considered ‘a spectrum or spread of literary subject-matter, running from the ideal extreme of exact recreation of the author’s empirical environment to exclusive interest in a strange newness, a

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novum’ (1972: 373). Suvin adapts the term novum from the work of Ernst Bloch and uses it to mean ‘a totalizing phenomenon or relationship deviating from the author’s and implied reader’s norm of reality’ (2010: 68). In Gibson’s previous work, cyberspace and virtual reality would be considered the primary nova as these phenomena do not exist in such a form in the reality of the author or the reader and they have a ‘totalizing’ effect as they have an impact on every aspect of life in the novels. In Pattern Recognition, Cayce’s physical allergy to certain brands could be considered a novum, thereby defining the text as science fiction, but the allergy is hardly ‘totalizing’ and does not have a significant impact on the world of the novel, which seems to map onto the real world of the author and the reader in every other way. The difficulty of assigning a genre to the text echoes the epistemological confusion of the characters as they attempt to negotiate a world without an established paradigm into which they can fit their experiences. Whereas futuristic science fiction relies on the tension between the present and the future for its estrangement, Pattern Recognition and its two sequels rely on the tensions between science fiction and realism, producing a text that relies on this boundary and its transgression for its meaning. Veronica Hollinger expresses this tension as the simultaneous understanding of Pattern Recognition through two different registers: ‘Pattern Recognition is/is not science fiction in the same way that it is/is not a story about the future’ (460). Hollinger also points out that the chapter which describes the attacks on New York’s Twin Towers through Cayce’s eyes is entitled ‘Singularity’, because 9/11 ‘functions in much the same way as the technological singularity, as an apocalyptic event that cuts us off from the historical past, leaving us stranded in difference’ (462). Hollinger names Pattern Recognition’s genre as ‘science fiction realism’ (465) in recognition that, ‘today the present is different from the present’ (465). Describing the use of pseudoscience in science fiction, Roger Luckhurst writes that it is science fiction’s interest in the difference to be found on the boundary between paradigms that constitutes the genre: It is less, then, that sf and its cognates are to be judged as inside or outside ‘proper’ science but more that these fictions might be seen to occupy the temporary intervals when knowledge is controversial or in flux, in the phase-space between anomaly and normalization (to use the ancient terminology of Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions). Sf is located in the passing epoch of extraordinary science, where anomalies challenge the known paradigms of normal science and multiple explanations are still, for a time, in circulation. (404–405) In this sense, Pattern Recognition acts as ‘social’ science fiction; science fiction about the gaps between one social paradigm and the next, rather than one scientific paradigm and the next, as the previous paradigm has been shown to be inadequate through the anomaly of 9/11. To quote from the novel, ‘We

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have no future because our present is too volatile. We have only risk management. The spinning of the given moment’s scenarios. Pattern recognition’ (57). In his reading of Pattern Recognition in Archaeologies of the Future (2005), this interest in difference prompts Fredric Jameson to ask: has the author of Neuromancer really ‘changed his style’? Has he even stopped writing Science Fiction, as some old-fashioned critics have put it, thinking thereby to pay him a compliment? Maybe, on the contrary, he is moving closer to that ‘cyberpunk’ with which he is often associated. (384) The homophones of Cayce and Case remind the reader of this connection, but the themes of Pattern Recognition return to those of Neuromancer most clearly in the dystopian impulses to be found in the text. The novel uses the example of the Blue Ant marketing company and its owner, Hubertus Bigend, to suggest the possibility of a dystopian future ruled by corporate persons, leaving human life subject to the homogenising effects of globalisation. These dystopian impulses are held in tension with the utopian impulse of the footage, which offers brighter possibilities for a future of globalised communities. While the failure of paradigms in Pattern Recognition makes it impossible to extrapolate a future, the tension between utopia and dystopia that structures much science fiction is present in Pattern Recognition. In the oscillation of this figure/ground distinction between utopia and dystopia the novel relies on the reader’s gestalt perception for its effect. The discourse of dystopia is represented by advertising and embodied in Bigend, the head of the Blue Ant marketing company, as marketing and branding have a homogenising impact on global society. The possibility of real difference is still available, as Cayce realises when she goes to Russia and finds herself ‘acutely aware of her mind doing the but-really-it’s-like thing it does when presented with serious cultural novelty: but really it’s like Vienna, except it isn’t, and really it’s like Stockholm, but it’s not really …’ (Gibson 2003: 276). This failure of simile, described by the repeated attempt at pattern recognition and at gestalt perception through the laws of similarity and expectation, shows real difference that Cayce cannot fit into her existing cultural paradigms. But the homogenising effect of global corporations such as Blue Ant is noticeable in the erosion of, what Cayce refers to as, the ‘mirrorworld’ effect. Cayce sees different countries as mirror-worlds because the small details that still differentiate between societies produce a barely discernible but irreconcilable difference between cultures, like the difference between an image and its reflection in the mirror. For example, Cayce compares America with Britain as she finds herself living in London: Mirror-world. The plugs on appliances are huge, triple-pronged, for a species of current that only powers electric chairs, in America. Cars are

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Perception in Pattern Recognition reversed, left to right, inside; telephone handsets have a different weight, a different balance; the covers of paperbacks look like Australian money. (2–3)

However, the diminishing difference between cultures, represented by the image of the mirror, is in the process of being broken down by the homogenising power of globalisation, by companies such as Bigend’s Blue Ant and by the dystopian net of advertising. As Bigend says, ‘It’s almost as though the creative process is no longer contained within an individual skull. If indeed it ever was. Everything today is, to some extent, the reflection of something else’ (68). The globalised force of capitalism is figured as an autopoietic being, a nightmarish vision of homogenisation, consuming everything including creativity. Blue Ant is described as an autopoietic being, like the zaibatsus of Neuromancer: relatively tiny in terms of permanent staff, globally distributed, more postgeographic than multinational, the agency has from the beginning billed itself as a high-speed, low-drag life-form in an advertising ecology of lumbering herbivores. Or perhaps as some non-carbon-based life-form, entirely sprung from the smooth and ironic brow of its founder, Hubertus Bigend. (6) Blue Ant is a living system in its own right, and one with far more power than any human individual. The comparison between Bigend and Zeus, who birthed Athena the goddess of war from his forehead, shows Cayce’s fear of his power. Boone Chu has been hired to help Cayce find the makers of the footage, and he says of Bigend, ‘He can afford to buy people … I don’t want to wind up a gadget on his key ring’ (106). Bigend turns people into things and corporations into people. This process has a homogenising effect as the corporations accumulate more global power. Hollis contemplates this as she sits down to a meal in Russia: But perhaps, she thinks, this isn’t a Russian meal. Perhaps it’s a meal in that country without borders that Bigend strives to hail from, a meal in a world where there are no mirrors to be on the other side of, all experience having been reduced, by the spectral hand of marketing, to price-point variations on the same thing. (341) The global gestalt formed by consumers, producers and corporations insinuates itself into every aspect of human life and is described as a kind of invasion. As Cayce looks at a new logo idea: she imagines the countless Asian workers who might spend years of their lives applying versions of this symbol to an endless and unyielding flood

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of footwear. What would it mean to them, this bouncing sperm? Would it work its way into their dreams, eventually? Would their children chalk it in doorways before they knew its meaning as a trademark? (12) Logos reproduce like animals and contaminate like sexually transmitted diseases, as evoked in the description of the logo as a ‘bouncing sperm’. The corporations behave like the dystopian autopoietic systems of Neuromancer and homogenise the globe at the expense of difference and variation. Boone Chu says of the mirror-world phenomenon, ‘I don’t think it’s going to be that way much longer. Not if the world’s Bigends keep at it: no borders, pretty soon there’s no mirror to be on the other side of ’ (106). Later, Cayce even admits to herself that she feels ‘complicit, in whatever it is that gradually makes London and New York feel more like each other, that dissolves the membranes between mirror-worlds’ (194). It is her work for Blue Ant that makes her feel complicit and Blue Ant comes to represent the future of globalisation and the global system. The utopian impulse which counters the homogenising globalisation of corporations and the growing power of advertising is the footage. The visual nature of the footage is significant as this allows it to remain pure for the reader, who has access to it only through incomplete textual descriptions, something that Fredric Jameson points out is in contrast to the constant naming and branding of the world of advertising and of Bigend. Jameson writes that the footage tries to portray ‘an (as yet) unimaginable aesthetic’ (388) and that it ‘projects the Utopian anticipation of a new art premised on “semiotic neutrality”, and on the systematic effacement of names, dates, fashions and history itself, within a context irredeemably corrupted by all those things’ (389–390). This purity of the image and the absence of temporal markers or branding of any kind is emphasised by the description of one of the clips as Cayce watches it for the first time: They are dressed as they have always been dressed, in clothing Cayce has posted on extensively, fascinated by its timelessness, something she knows and understands. The difficulty of that. Hairstyles too. He might be a sailor, stepping onto a submarine in 1914, or a jazz musician entering a club in 1957. (23) The footage captures the absence of a semiotic language that can be ‘read’ by viewers. This gives the footage its seductively enigmatic aesthetic, while also allowing it to be viewed through contrast with the dystopian world of marketing and branding of daily life. The absence in the footage depends on the contemporary world for its meaning, because being read against the background of marketing defines the footage as something other, something that might express the affects of the viewer that must remain suppressed or

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ignored under capitalism. Jameson argues for reframing the discussion of Utopia from a concern with content to a focus on representation: It is not only the social and historical raw materials of the Utopian construct which are of interest from this perspective; but also the representational relations established between them – such as closure, narrative and exclusion or inversion. Here as elsewhere in narrative analysis what is most revealing is not what is said, but what cannot be said, what does not register on the narrative apparatus. (xiii) Of the footage specifically, Jameson writes: ‘The footage … carries the unknown unrealized work of art inside itself like a black hole, the empty present of a future indeterminacy, the absent sublime within the everyday real’ (388). The absence at the centre of the footage, in its original unspoiled form, is reflected in Cayce’s wish to come to the footage ‘clean’. On hearing from a barman that a new section of the footage has been found online Cayce immediately demands ‘no spoilers’ (20) before leaving to experience the footage without preconceptions. When Cayce discovered the footage she ‘gave herself to the dream’ (23). The footage finds its meaning in the contrast between homogenising globalisation, terrorism and apophenia, and a purity which lacks the markers of branding, or time and place. The footage, in this way, seems to offer a utopian alternative to the globalisation that Cayce sees in the world. Its visual nature means that it can never be fully captured in the text. Even for those characters who view it, it is characterised by its lacunae, the absence of place and time (and branding). The utopian nature of the footage can also be seen in the space that it opens for a very different, utopian view of globalisation. Cayce’s words, as she writes to the makers of the footage, describe this sense of being part of the footage and are reminiscent of the moment at the end of Neuromancer when Wintermute and Neuromancer combine to become the matrix; the moment that became known as When It Changed. Cayce writes, ‘we have to allow ourselves so far into the investigation of whatever this is, whatever you’re doing, that we become part of it. Hack into the system. Merge with it, deep enough that it, not you, begins to talk to us’ (Gibson 2003: 255). Though Cayce talks about merging with the footage in almost techno-utopian language, such an engagement has already taken place for the footageheads, both through their online forum and in their relationship with one another in the real world as the footage makes connections between them and forms a secret, global society: In New York, once, during the anthrax scares … she’d found herself looking at a still no bigger than a business card, frame-grabbed and safety-pinned, from a fragment she’d not yet seen, on the green polyester uniform blazer of a weary-looking black woman … The black woman,

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seeing her notice the still, had nodded, recognizing a fellow follower, and Cayce had been rescued from inner darkness by this suggestion of just how many people were following the footage, and just how oddly invisible a phenomenon that was. (52) Membership in the community of footageheads cuts through the fear of terrorism and creates a moment of understanding between strangers of diverse backgrounds. For Cayce the forum, ‘is a way now, approximately, of being home. The forum has become one of the most consistent places in her life… outside of geography and beyond time zones’ (4). While the kind of globalisation represented by corporate bodies, capitalism and marketing is portrayed in the novel as dystopian, the footage performs a similar function but opens a space for real difference: ‘the footage has a way of cutting across boundaries, transgressing the accustomed order of things’ (20). The footage opens a space for global, utopian community, whereas marketing attempts to make everything the same. The investment that the footageheads put into the footage is partly due to their role in constructing it through the act of interpretation, an act which is intrinsic to the enjoyment of the footage and not merely additional. The series of clips which appear on the internet, anonymous and untraceable, provoke heated debate about the nature of the films, which is really a debate about the nature of pattern recognition itself. The followers of the footage are separated into ‘Completists’, who think that the clips are parts of a greater whole, and Progressives, who think they are seeing ‘fragments of a work in progress, something unfinished and still being generated by its maker’ (46). These different interpretations, of course, rely on gestalt perception, particularly the law of ‘closure’ which states that, given an incomplete shape or set of information, gestalt perception will see the complete shape, or extrapolate the complete set of information from what is available (Wertheimer 1938). In the case of the footage, there are two groups who attempt to find closure in the footage, but who do so in different ways. This foregrounds the ‘faulty’ nature of perception, the ways in which perception can be unreliable and misleading. Cayce is a Completist as she believes that the films represent fragments of a greater work that could one day be pieced together. However, Cayce realises that there is more at stake in her reading of the footage than simply aesthetic satisfaction. She asks herself, ‘what if the sense of nascent meaning they all perceive in the footage is simply that: an illusion of meaningfulness, faulty pattern recognition?’ (115). In a sense, the core of the footage’s appeal is the way it brings together a community because its emptiness acts as a blank canvass for the perception of its followers. They perceive the footage, and so construct it. Bigend points out that, ‘You can assemble the segments, but you can’t reassemble them’ (68) because the maker has never assembled them, as far as they know. When Cayce discovers the identity of the maker she realises that Bigend is right: Nora has no interest in assembly, no opinion even on

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how the images fit together – the society of the footageheads and the truth of the footage itself is to be found collectively between the community and nowhere else. It is a utopia in the literal sense of the word, a no place. Cayce’s experience with the footage and its maker is the event that begins to allow her to come to terms with the past and, in doing so, to begin to look to the future. The filmmaker, Nora, has been disabled by a bomb blast and her twin sister, Stella, acts as a distributor, finding the means to anonymously post the film clips to the internet. On meeting Stella and finding out about the origins of the footage, Cayce experiences a gestalt switch and begins to start understanding her world again. After her first meeting with Stella: She feels as though something huge has happened, is happening, but she can’t define it. She knows that it’s about meeting Stella, and hearing her story, and her sister’s, but somehow she no longer is able to fit it to her life. Or rather she lives now in that story, her life left somewhere behind, like a room she’s stepped out of. Not far away at all but she is no longer in. (292–293) Cayce feels a connection to the world again, to the sisters, and she can no longer inhabit her old worldview, her old ‘life’, in the same way again. The new paradigm that she has come to realise is described as a new ‘story’. Not long after, in a state of severe dehydration and exhaustion, she has a brief and hallucinatory conversation with her father, ‘and he’s gone, and this time, she somehow knows, for good’ (324), ‘his very missingness becoming, somehow, him’ (351) as Cayce’s gestalt switches and she begins to see the absence as a presence. She then discovers that the Russians had been paying attention to her: she had surmised on a blog that there may have been a Russian connection to the footage. When the Russians discovered the identity of her father, they became more suspicious and began to monitor her behaviour. As she realises the existence of a conspiracy, she once again has the sensation that her perspective is changing irrevocably: Cayce … feel[s] much of the recent weirdness of her life shift beneath her, rearranging itself according to a new paradigm of history. Not a comfortable sensation, like Soho crawling on its own accord up Primrose Hill, because it has discovered that it belongs there, and has no choice. (340–341) This sense of a paradigm shift continues to be part of Cayce’s life. After leaving Russia she finds herself on an archaeological dig with her fellow footagehead, Parkaboy (who turns out to be named Peter), and her old friend, Damien. She is shovelling bones and mud in one of the trenches and realises that she is crying: ‘Neither Peter nor Damien had asked her why, but she thinks now that if they had she might have told them she was weeping for her century, though whether the one past or the one present she doesn’t know’

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(355–356). Cayce does not know whether she is mourning the loss of a paradigm, or mourning the paradigm that has come to replace the old. Cayce’s father worked with the secret service during the Cold War and Cayce’s psyche is littered with tales of espionage from her childhood. Russia is the final significant setting in the book and Cayce’s perspective of the place is seen through the lens inherited from her father. She thinks of Russia as ‘the world beyond the perimeters of the world [her father had] been dedicated to protecting’ (263) and she tells her mother, ‘it’s never seemed like a real place to me, more a fairy tale’ (265). The source of Nora’s disability, the American shrapnel in the Russian brain, produces a schism from which emerges a utopian work that holds within it the possibility of moving past the old ways of understanding the world. On learning about Nora’s injury Cayce thinks: But that was over now, [her father’s] war … and this one small part [of the bomb], only slightly damaged by the explosion of the ruthlessly simple device, had been flung into the very center of Nora’s brain. And from it, and from her other wounds, there now emerged … the footage … Only the wound speaking wordlessly in the dark. (305) The paradox of ‘speaking wordlessly’ captures the utopian nature of the footage, as something that need not be bound by the existing, ruined paradigms because it speaks in a different language, a new language. The impossibility of reconnecting with the past, reflected in Cayce’s search for closure over the disappearance of her father, shows the essential working through that had to be done to recognise a society’s banishment from the twentieth century and the need to find a new identity through the interstices of the new system. Rather than the end of the Cold War marking the end of history, it impacts the next century in crucial ways, it ‘speaks’ from the past.

Conclusion Pattern Recognition captures a snapshot of a society in flux that cannot look ahead because there is no status quo; society is in the process of finding a new equilibrium and can only rely on pattern recognition in the meantime. In the Bridge trilogy the paradigm of chaos theory acted as a security net for meaning in society – while directly inaccessible to many of the characters, it suggested that there was some underlying reality that the characters could understand through intuition and pattern recognition. The Blue Ant trilogy moves beyond this comfort zone, due to the anomaly of 9/11. Kuhn argues that an ‘important source of change is the divergent nature of the numerous partial solutions that concerted attention to the problem [of the anomaly] has made available’ (83). An event such as 9/11 offers too many possible futures, so there is no clear direction for progress and the future cannot be predicted in the oscillation between dystopian and utopian tensions.

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Paradigms, like gestalt perception, constitute the field of vision while at the same time limiting it as some information must be foregrounded at the expense of information that does not conform to expectations. The paradigm allows one to have expectations, to have a thesis, to predict roughly what the results of an experiment might be. As Kuhn writes, ‘paradigms provide scientists not only with a map but also with some of the directions essential for map-making’ (109). When a paradigm is in crisis it no longer plays this role. The map-making directions inherent to the paradigm are no longer useful as a complete overhaul of the field is needed, a gestalt switch rather than the cumulative map-making that has taken place before.

Notes 1 Apophenia originates with the term ‘apophany’, which was coined by Klaus Conrad in Die beginnende Schizophrenie. Versuch einer Gestaltanalyse des Wahns (The Onset of Schizophrenia: An Attempt to Formulate an Analysis of Delusion, 1958), which is yet to be translated into English. Conrad used the term apophany to describe the ‘unmotivated seeing of connections … [accompanied by an] experience of abnormal meaningfulness’ (quoted in Petchkovsky 2008: 247). Neither ‘apophany’ nor ‘apophenia’ have yet entered the Oxford English Dictionary. 2 For an excellent starting point on this topic, see the entry in the Science Fiction Encyclopaedia on ‘Thought Experiments’ (Langford 2019). 3 For further discussion of the use of Cornell boxes in Gibson’s work see Chapter 1. 4 This formulation is reminiscent of the comment made by United States Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, when asked about the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq: ‘as we know, there are known knowns; there are things that we know that we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns, the ones we don’t know we don’t know’ (Rumsfeld quoted in Graham). The statement sounds convoluted and provoked ridicule, but also became resonant with the values of the Bush administration and the role of America in Iraq, capturing as it did a sense of the disconnect between what could be known in the American consciousness and the reality of the complicated situation in Iraq and among dissidents throughout the world. Rumsfeld became somewhat defined by this statement, naming his autobiography Known and Unknown (2011).

Bibliography Borradori, Giovanna. Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2003. Gibson, William. All Tomorrow’s Parties. London: Penguin, 1999. Gibson, William. Pattern Recognition. London: HarperCollins, 2003. Gibson, William. Distrust that Particular Flavor. London: Penguin, 2012. Graham, David A. ‘Rumsfeld’s Known and Unknowns: The Intellectual History of a Quip.’ The Atlantic, 27 March2014, www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/03/ rumsfelds-knowns-and-unknowns-the-intellectual-history-of-a-quip/359719. Hollinger, Veronica. ‘Stories About the Future: From Patterns of Expectation to Pattern Recognition.’ Science Fiction Studies, vol. 33, no. 3, 2006, pp. 452–472. Jameson, Fredric. Archaeologies of the Future. London: Verso, 2005.

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Kuhn, Thomas. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2012. Langford, David. ‘Thought Experiment.’ The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, edited by John Clute, David Langford, Peter Nicholls, and Graham Sleight. London: Gollancz, updated 19 March2019, www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/thought_experiment. Leonard, Andrew. ‘Nodal Point.’ Salon, 14 February2003, www.salon.com/2003/02/14/ gibson_5. Luckhurst, Roger. ‘Pseudoscience.’ The Routledge Companion to Science Fiction, edited by Mark Bould, Andrew M. Butler, Adam Roberts, and Sherryl Vint. Abingdon: Routledge, 2009, pp. 403–412. Petchkovsky, Leon. ‘Some Preliminary Reflections on the Biological Substrate of Meaning-Making.’ The Uses of Subjective Experience: Proceedings of the Conference, edited by Amanda Dowd, Craig San Roque, and Leon Petchkovsky. Sydney, Australia: Australian and New Zealand Society of Jungian Analysts, 2008, pp. 243–252. Suvin, Darko. ‘On the Poetics of the Science Fiction Genre.’ College English, vol. 34, no. 3, 1972, pp. 372–382. Suvin, Darko. Metamorphoses of Science Fiction. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1979. Suvin, Darko. Defined by a Hollow: Essays on Utopia, Science Fiction and Political Epistemology, Ralahine Utopian Studies6. Oxford: Peter Lang, 2010. Varela, Francisco. ‘The Early Days of Autopoiesis: Heinz and Chile.’ Systems Research, vol. 13, no. 3, 1996, pp. 407–416. Wertheimer, Max. ‘Laws of Organization in Perceptual Forms.’ A Source Book of Gestalt Psychology, edited by Willis D. Ellis. New York: Gestalt Legacy Press, 1938, pp. 71–88.

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Psychoanalysis in Spook Country

Introduction We have seen that Pattern Recognition (2003) engaged with the contemporary cultural moment; the novel captures the post-9/11 affect, the sense of instability that came from watching the destruction of an existing political and cultural paradigm via the 24-hour news cycle. The second novel in Gibson’s Blue Ant trilogy, Spook Country (2007), follows the consequences of 9/ 11. Following the terrorist attacks, George W. Bush’s administration in the US formed a ‘coalition of the willing’ with the UK, France, and a number of other nations to invade first Afghanistan, then Iraq in 2003. The invasion of Iraq was justified by the assertion that Iraq’s leader, Saddam Hussein, had access to weapons of mass destruction that could be mobilised against Western democracies at short notice. The US military’s existing involvement in the Middle East through their occupation of Afghanistan, and Bush’s description of these interventions as part of a War on Terror served to bolster the case, although the invasion was still subject to some of the biggest antiwar protests ever to take place and the widespread belief that the War on Terror was a smokescreen for the US economy’s thirst for oil. While Spook Country is set in the US, it deals with the Iraq War by allowing Iraq (and American actions there) to haunt the text. While this haunting takes place at the level of the nation, Spook Country shows the effects of the war through personal and social identity which I explore by reading the novel through the lens of Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalysis and, particularly, his theory of the mirror stage. Lacan argues that humans understand their subjectivity through an idealised image of themselves, an imago or ‘ideal-I’, which is given to them as a gestalt during the mirror stage of development. To use the language of Gibson’s Pattern Recognition, this means that the imago itself is ‘both a gift and a trap’ (22): a gift, in that it is constitutive of subjectivity, but a trap, as the subject struggles to fully identify itself with this ‘ideal-I’, a struggle that can never be won. Lacan’s theory of the mirror stage focuses attention on the realm of the Imaginary. In his psychoanalytic schema there are three orders: the Imaginary, the Symbolic and the Real. When the ideal-I is given as gestalt during the mirror DOI: 10.4324/9781003082477-5

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stage the subject has entered the primarily specular order of the Imaginary. The order of the Symbolic is entered later with the subject’s introduction to language, whereas the Real is that which cannot be expressed within the other two orders. In bringing the gestalt to the fore in this chapter I will focus on the order of the Imaginary, the primarily specular order which structures much of Spook Country’s approach to its themes. Through reference to Fredric Jameson (1977) I draw connections between the alienation of the individual at the level of subjectivity, and the alienation experienced by society through ideology, a false but necessary image comparable to the imago. Reading Spook Country in light of Lacan and Jameson’s work brings into focus the ‘spook countries’ that function at different levels of the novel. The ‘spook country’ can be seen as characteristic of the inner world of the subject, as identity is haunted by the imago that can never equal the self. American society is portrayed as another ‘spook country’, as it represents itself through ideology and depends on the secret world of espionage. The final ‘spook country’ is Iraq, as American actions there come back to haunt American society on home turf through the increasing militarisation of civilian society. Looking at each ‘spook country’ uncovers alienation at every level of society: individual, national, and international. On the level of the subject the main character, Hollis Henry, suffers from alienation as she struggles to live up to her image as an ex-rock star. Celebrity culture is symptomatic of a more farreaching alienation, represented here through the phenomenon of locative art, which maps virtual images onto physical space. Locative art shows Iraq as a spook country, haunting America. The circulation of money in the novel provides yet another connection between the different spook countries of Iraq, America and the individual psyche. These connections show the role of the Imaginary in structuring individual and social alienation, thereby foregrounding the importance of the gestalt in psychoanalysis and of gestalt perception in reading the novel. Spook Country continues to follow the activities of Hubertus Bigend and the Blue Ant corporation through a different cast of characters. Like Pattern Recognition, Spook Country does not ostensibly conform to the genre of science fiction but performs a kind of science fiction realism, as described in Chapter 3. The novel follows Hollis Henry, formerly of the indie rock band The Curfew, as she begins to work as a journalist for a mysterious magazine, known as Node and owned by mysterious Belgian entrepreneur, Hubertus Bigend. The name Node is, of course, significant given Gibson’s interest in nodes and nodal points as places or times when significant events converge and have cumulative emergent effects (see Chapter 2). It is also perfectly chosen as a front for Bigend’s activities, given his propensity to be at the forefront (and preferably in control) of such nodal points. Bigend asks Hollis to report on a new form of art that is becoming fashionable in Los Angeles: locative art. These are art installations created through computer generated imaging (CGI) and tagged spatially so that they can be observed at a specific location, with the use of a virtual reality helmet. Hollis realises that the

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Global Positioning System (GPS) technology behind the art and its facilitator, Bobby Chombo, are being used to track shipping containers for a mysterious group working with a family of criminal Cuban immigrants to gain access to one specific container. The same global positioning system that allows the production of locative art is used to tag the shipping container spatially, so that it can be located. This container is of particular interest to Bigend, and Hollis quickly realises that her real task is to find out why the container is of interest to so many parties. It transpires that an ex-CIA agent referred to only as ‘the old man’ is planning to contaminate a shipment of dollar bills, the contents of the shipping container. Originally sent to Iraq as part of the Reconstruction Fund, the money is now sent to Canada, en route back to the USA. The old man is against profiteering from war and seeks to contaminate the bills by employing a freelance risk-taker, named Garreth, to shoot radioactive shells into the shipping container. Tito, the young Cuban immigrant, will cover the bullet holes with magnetic strips to prevent detection. The whole scheme will tag the money, making it impossible to launder. As she investigates the case of the shipping container, Hollis is also dealing psychologically with the breakup of her band, The Curfew, and the death of one of its members, Jimmy, who has unexpectedly left her five thousand dollars in cash as repayment for a debt. In a parallel storyline, a drug addict named Milgrim is held hostage by a man named Brown. It is at first unclear whether Brown works for the CIA or for a private security company, but he values Milgrim for his knowledge of Russian and its visual representation through Roman characters, known as Volapuk. Volapuk is used as a code by Tito and the other Cuban immigrants, and Brown attempts to foil their scheme with Milgrim’s help. Spook Country departs from the single point of view narration of Pattern Recognition, alternating between the points of view of Hollis, Milgrim, and Tito.

Gestalt in psychoanalysis In ‘The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function’, originally published in 1949, Lacan argues that the stage of life between six and eighteen months, at which a child first recognises its reflection in a mirror, is a crucial time for the development of subjectivity. The purpose of the mirror stage, according to Lacan, is ‘to establish a relationship between an organism and reality’ (78). In establishing the importance of this stage in the development of the child Lacan uses gestalt theory as an example, particularly the work of gestalt psychologist Wolfgang Köhler. Lacan understands the child’s recognition of itself in the mirror as structured by a ‘eureka’ moment which he refers to as the Aha-Erlebnis. The child’s discovery of its sense of self ‘is indicated by the illuminative mimicry of the Aha-Erlebnis, which Köhler considers to express situational apperception, an essential moment in the act of intelligence’ (75). By ‘situational apperception’, Lacan means the child’s ability to view a situation in relation to itself; so, the child can distinguish between ‘self ’ and ‘not self ’, but view the entire situation in relation to itself as the subject. Wolfgang

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Köhler was known for his work on the problem-solving abilities of chimpanzees, such as 1925’s The Mentality of Apes. He describes a gestalt switch, a sudden insight, as necessary in order to see a problem in the correct context and thereby reach a solution. The Aha-Erlebnis, or ‘Aha experience’, of which Lacan speaks is a moment that allows everything to fall into place; a gestalt switch that allows for new experiences and understanding. Therefore, in this passage Lacan locates a gestalt switch as the formative moment at which the child achieves ‘situational apperception’ and sees itself as a subject.1 The mirror stage holds this importance for subject formation because it allows the child, for the first time, to identify with an image of itself. By ‘identification’ Lacan means, ‘the transformation that takes place in the subject when he assumes an image – an image that is seemingly predestined to have an effect at this phase, as witnessed by the use in analytic theory of antiquity’s term, “imago”’ (76). Lacan describes the imago of the child as an ‘ideal-I’, an image that the subject can never equal: this form situates the agency known as the ego, prior to its social determination, in a fictional direction that will forever remain irreducible for any single individual or, rather, that will only asymptotically approach the subject’s becoming, no matter how successful the dialectical syntheses by which he must resolve, as I, his discordance with his own reality. (76) Lacan is arguing that after the mirror stage, even before the child becomes socialised through language, it already experiences itself as a subject and aims to live up to the ideal-I that constitutes that sense of self; however, full identification with the ideal-I is not possible, leading to a subject that is by its very nature fragmented and can never be fully reconciled with the reality in which it finds itself. The phrase ‘in a fictional direction’ is important as it shows that the self is structured by an impossible journey towards an unreachable visual fiction. This is why the order is known as the Imaginary, with the dual connotations of visual perception (the image) and fictional creation (the imagination) that that term implies. A useful metaphor for the ideal-I as described by Lacan, is that of the avatar. For example, in Gibson’s Idoru (1996), a young girl named Chia describes her avatar as ‘an only slightly tweaked, she felt, version of how she actually looked in the mirror. Less nose, maybe. Lips a little fuller. But that was it. Almost’ (12). The need to change and ‘improve’ the specular mirror image denotes an impulse towards realising the ideal-I. Another cyberpunk example comes from The Matrix (Wachowskis, 1999) in which the main character, Neo, is awoken from a coma induced by robots who control the ‘real’ world. He must train himself to understand the ‘matrix’, the false reality in which the majority of humanity still lives so his guide, Morpheus, brings him into a training programme. In the programme Neo notices that he is dressed well and that his head, bald in reality from his time in the induced coma, has a fine crop of hair. Morpheus tells him that

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this is his ‘residual self-image’. This image does not match his ‘real’ appearance but is given to him as gestalt, providing him with a sense of wholeness which is constitutive of subjectivity.2 Lacan describes how the subject’s total image of physicality is given to the subject as a gestalt: For the total form of his body, by which the subject anticipates the maturation of his power in a mirage, is given to him only as a gestalt, that is in an exteriority in which, to be sure, this form is more constitutive than constituted, but in which, above all, it appears to him as the contour of his stature that freezes it and in a symmetry that reverses it, in opposition to the turbulent movements with which the subject feels he animates it. Through these two aspects of its appearance, this gestalt … symbolizes the I’s mental permanence, at the same time as it prefigures its alienating destination. (76) As far as Lacan is concerned, the human subject is trapped in a catch-22 situation. In order to attain subjectivity, the child must relate to its image as gestalt, thereby constituting its ego; but in return, it must relate to this gestalt as an outside force, one that it can never actually become fully identified with. The gestalt is an image of plenitude that announces to the subject its own fragmentation and alienation. Lacan situates the mirror stage as ‘prior to the paranoiac alienation that dates back to the time at which the specular I turns into the social I’ (79), the specular I being that which is formed at the mirror stage and allows the subject to relate to itself; the social I being that which is formed afterwards, through the subject’s entry into language and the Symbolic order, allowing the subject to interact with others. The importance of these different levels of subject formation is intrinsic to our experience of reality. On one level, that of the Real, the subject is still unformed; an Imaginary layer constitutes the specular subject of the mirror stage; finally, the socialised subject of the Symbolic order is layered over. The Real is the realm of pure drives and desires without imposed organisation. The Imaginary is the realm of the subject’s specular experience of its existence. The entry into the Symbolic realm happens after the mirror stage in a kind of metonymy that replaces the fullness of the maternal body with the signifier, named by Lacan as the nom-du-père, the Name-of-the-Father. Lacan’s three orders have had a great deal of value in later schools of thought. Neil Badmington (2000) argues that ‘it is possible to interpret the whole of Lacan’s work as a tirade against the subject of humanism’ (7) and this is partly due to the importance of the Imaginary and the role of gestalt perception which shows the subject as embodied and embedded in the world.3 Lacan himself recognises ‘The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function’ as at least an anti-humanist approach by announcing that the mirror stage ‘sets us at odds with any philosophy directly stemming from the cogito’ (75); that is, any philosophy based on Descartes’s claim ‘cogito, ergo sum’, or ‘I think, therefore I am’. This philosophy is foundational to the development of

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humanism, so the strong distinction Lacan makes between these approaches and his own signals a commitment to formulating alternatives to the humanist tradition. The importance of Lacan’s approach is also emphasised by Fredric Jameson (1977), who argues that Marxism and psychoanalysis can be used productively together due to the narrative nature of both discourses, despite their differences: while Lacan gives an individualistic and, to some extent, universalising account of the subject, Marxism recognises subjectivity as historically contingent and socially constructed. Jameson focuses on the mechanisms by which subjective, private experience becomes social and public – primarily through language, and through the literary text. Jameson’s project here is motivated by ‘the need for a model which is not locked into the classical oppositions between the individual and the collective, but is rather able to think these discontinuities in a radically different way. Such is indeed the promise of Lacan’s conception of the three orders (the Imaginary, the Symbolic and the Real)’ (349). In thinking about these realms alongside each other through considering Marxist and psychoanalytic criticism together, Jameson connects the concept of ‘ideology’ with the realm of the Imaginary as found in Lacan, noting that ‘it is no accident that both the Marxist conception of ideology and the Lacanian notion of the Imaginary draw heavily on the model of optics’ (394). Perception is once again foregrounded as the site of the interface between the subject and its world. Jameson’s approach to the integration of Lacanian psychoanalysis with Marxist criticism is useful to us here because it is an effort to mediate between the personal and the social. As we turn to Spook Country, recognising this link allows us to see the fractal nature of the text as patterns of behaviour are repeated at various levels, with political themes expressed in the subjectivity of characters and the presence of nervous conditions normally considered individual surfacing in the collective psyche of the American nation. Jameson’s key innovation is to define History as the Real, the realm which can never be directly accessed. History can only be accessed through the mediation of the Symbolic or the Imaginary and so History, for Jameson, becomes the incommensurable other of these two realms. This reading allows connections to be drawn between the longing for the impossibility of total knowledge as constitutive of the self, always alienated from its imago in the realm of the Imaginary, with the impossible desire to access the Real of History. The secret histories in Spook Country render direct access to History impossible so that the ideology of America acts as an Imaginary writ large, an ideology that the country can never become equal to but can only approach asymptotically, just as the individual subject approaches the perfect gestalt of their own imago, moving closer all the time but with no prospect of meeting, even if they continue the attempt into infinity.

Alienated individuals Hollis particularly struggles with the alienation that Lacan diagnoses as key to the mirror stage and constitutive of identity; the unbridgeable gap between

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the self and the imago. In the first pages of the novel she is described as getting ready to go out and leave her hotel room, ‘having done the best she could with all that had never been quite right’ (Gibson 2007: 3). This description evokes the unattainable nature of the imago given as gestalt during the mirror stage as Hollis has an Imaginary concept against which she measures herself. This impression of failure to live up to a standard is followed with the idea of being forced into a pre-existing mould as Hollis enters a ‘Philippe Starck elevator … She’d once read an article about Starck that said the designer owned an oyster farm where only perfectly square oysters were grown, in specially fabricated steel frames’ (3). Hollis’s wish to identify with her imago is matched with a fear of being forced into a pre-existing form, like that of the imago, a fear that she sees reflected in the architecture around her. Lacan describes the mirror stage as: a drama whose internal pressure pushes precipitously from insufficiency to anticipation – and, for the subject caught up in the lure of spatial identification, turns out fantasies that proceed from a fragmented image of the body to what I will call an ‘orthopedic’ form of its totality – and to the finally donned armor of an alienating identity that will mark his entire mental development with its rigid structure. (78) The imago, the image of the body as a totality, acts as an ‘orthopedic’ brace because its limiting form shapes the identity of the subject. Hollis has a ‘fragmented image’ of her body as she thinks that it has ‘never been quite right’, as if something were missing or wrong compared to her imago. The elevator reminds her of this ‘armor’ that restricts her movement, the freedom of her being, while at the same time constituting her identity. In this way, the imago is both a gift and a trap as it is necessary for subject formation while, at the same time, restricting the subject. Hollis’s status as an ex-celebrity adds a further dimension to her alienation as she has a public identity that constrains her, forcing her to live up to expectations. As she is introduced to locative artist Alberto Corrales, he immediately recognises her as a member of The Curfew: ‘the fan thing, she thought, amazed as ever, and just as suddenly felt ill at ease’ (Gibson 2007: 5). Hollis’s ontological alienation is exacerbated through her awareness that there is an image of her out in the world with which she cannot fully identify. She expresses her wish to escape the confining image of her celebrity persona by imagining that she could be completely separate from it. When she meets the old man’s associate, the freelance risk-taker Garreth, he tells her that he takes part in BASE jumping (a sport similar to parkour, and an acronym for Building Antenna Span Earth jumping) and uses a unique BASE jumping name. Hollis replies, ‘Sometimes I wish I’d used my indie rock singer name’ (311), wistfully expressing her need to differentiate between the self that she experiences and the self that she sees represented in the public sphere as a

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rock star. Others see Hollis as almost her own double at times, reflecting her personal feelings of fragmentation. When Tito reflects on seeing Hollis for the first time he thinks, ‘a woman’s face had regarded him from the wall. And for an instant … he knew who that was, and that he also knew her in some different way’ (366). The doubling caused by the phenomenon of celebrity reflects the doubling of the mirror stage itself, the difference between knowing something as unformed and recognising a specular image. At the same time, Hollis sometimes chooses to play the role of the singer from The Curfew; for example, when she is about to be introduced to Bobby Chombo, who she knows is a fan of their music, she looks into his security camera in an attempt to gain entry to his studio: Hollis was about to smile in the direction of the invisible camera, then pretended instead that she was being photographed for a Curfew release. She’d had a trademark semi-frown, in those days. If she invoked the era and sort of relaxed into it, that expression might emerge by default. (55) Hollis attempts to project an image but, in doing so, finds herself playing the part of herself. The subject’s experience of being haunted by other selves and by the imago turns the psyche into a kind of ‘spook country’. Hollis’s discomfort with her status as a celebrity is portrayed in the novel as symptomatic of, not just her individual psyche, but problems in wider society as the concept of celebrity becomes a dominant mode of relation between the individual and the collective. Bigend sees the importance of celebrity in contemporary culture as a mode of immortality but also as a creature defined by alienation from its own private history: ‘the celebrity is a sort of tulpa … A projected thought-form. A term from Tibetan mysticism. The celebrity self has a life of its own. It can, under certain circumstances, indefinitely survive the death of its subject. That’s what every Elvis sighting is about, literally’ (105). Whereas the origins of the tulpa in Eastern Tibetan mysticism recognise the self as mobile and multiple, the contemporary dominance of celebrity culture leaves the subject behind, as illusions become alienated and subjects are unable to identify with idealised images. The links between subjectivity and Hollis’s celebrity status are reflected in the title of one of The Curfew’s biggest songs, ‘Hard to Be One’. The title emphasises the difficulty of conforming to the celebrity image, of being identical with that ideal of oneself. Bigend wants to buy a rewritten version of the song for a Chinese car commercial, and Hollis’s former bandmate Inchmale is keen to sell. Hollis hesitates since Bigend wants to turn the song into ‘a theme. An anthem. Of postmodern branding’ (349). The difficulty of being ‘one’, of escaping the alienation imposed by the nature of subjectivity itself is seen as key to the postmodern moment, as it connects such individual concerns with the celebrity culture that has come to dominate society. Celebrity culture is also interrogated in the novel through the use of locative art which produces another kind of ‘spook country’ in the text. Locative

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art maps real space using GPS and allows images to be tagged to certain spaces. The images can then be viewed in situ with the use of a virtual reality helmet. The locative artist, Alberto, describes the images of locative art as absent, haunting the space in a way that goes beyond the technological possibilities of the form: The original only exists on the server, when I’m done, in virtual dimensions of depth, width, height. Sometimes I think that even if the server went down, and took my model with it, that that space would still exist, at least as a mathematical possibility, and that the space we live in … Might work the same way. (44) In this sense locative art creates another ‘spook country’ as virtual space is haunted by images, just as ‘the space we live in’ is haunted by the memories of events that once occupied the space. The comparison with haunting is emphasised by the nature of the art that Hollis sees. The first installation Alberto shows her is the body of the actor River Phoenix on the pavement outside the Viper Room nightclub, where he died of an overdose. Other installations mentioned in the novel include photographer Helmut Newton’s fatal car crash (25), F. Scott Fitzgerald’s heart attack (25), and a piece dedicated to Jim Morrison of the Doors (38).4 The choice of famous people as the subject of locative art is significant as the haunting nature of celebrity experienced by Hollis as individual alienation is, almost literally, projected onto public space. It is reminiscent of Bigend’s comment that ‘the celebrity self has a life of its own. It can, under certain circumstances, indefinitely survive the death of its subject’ (105). Locative art relies on a combination of real space with virtual reality and is situated at the interface between the two; space and cyberspace are placed into tension through the artworks. Alberto and his fellow artist, Odile Richards, explain to Hollis the logic of cyberspace on which locative art depends: ‘See-bare-espace,’ Odile pronounced, gnomically, ‘it is everting.’ ‘“Everything”? What is?’ ‘See-bare-espace,’ Odile reaffirmed, ‘everts.’ […] ‘Turns itself inside out,’ offered Alberto, by way of clarification. ‘“Cyberspace”.’ (21) The artists claim that cyberspace has turned itself inside out so that the logic and characteristics of cyberspace have found their way into the real world, rather than being confined to another realm. Hollis’s mishearing of Odile’s term ‘everting’ is telling as cyberspace is now ‘everything’ and has spread into the real world. This allows locative art to function, as artworks can be

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geographically tagged to specific areas. This means that the artworks are present and absent at the same time; the viewer is allowed to ‘see bare space’ in some conditions, and to view the artwork in others.5 The play between presence and absence in locative art specifically appeals to the realm of the Imaginary as Jameson highlights, ‘this process of definition by binary opposition is itself profoundly characteristic of the Imaginary’ (350). The Imaginary is the realm of binary opposition because it marks the moment when the child recognises the difference between self and other through recognition and identification with its mirror image. The evocation of the Imaginary realm affected by locative art replicates the alienation characteristic of that stage as the world is shown to differ from itself. The eversion of cyberspace into the real world is coupled with the impression that locative art allows the eversion of the internal Imaginary structure of the subject to be represented in the world. Odile tells Hollis that Alberto ‘is concerned with history as internalized space … He sees this internalized space emerge from trauma. Always from trauma’ (6). Alberto’s art maps the traumas of history through the deaths of celebrities onto real space, thereby enacting another kind of eversion that appeals to the Imaginary realm. Gibson seems to acknowledge the trajectory of his fiction, from his first trilogy where cyberspace was introduced, to the Bridge trilogy’s fractal blurring of the division between real space and cyberspace, to Spook Country’s assertion that cyberspace has ‘everted’. When Hollis meets Bobby Chombo, the man in charge of both uploading locative art to servers and tracking the mysterious shipping container, he tells her: Once it everts, then there isn’t any cyberspace, is there? There never was, if you want to look at it that way. It was a way we had of looking where we were headed, a direction. With the grid, we’re here. This is the other side of the screen. Right here. (67) The journey from cyberspace to locative art is mapped on to Gibson’s fiction itself as the science fiction realism of the Blue Ant trilogy is almost described as a logical departure for the cyberpunk project. The retro nature of the classic cyberpunk aesthetic is reflected in Hollis’s thoughts as she asks Alberto whether locative art relies on virtual reality (VR): ‘she hadn’t heard the term spoken aloud in years, she thought, as she pronounced it’ (7). Despite the limited use of VR in contemporary life, when compared to its ubiquity in cyberpunk texts, the term already feels outmoded and obsolete. The replacement of virtual reality with locative technologies before VR has really arrived speaks to a retrofuturism, one that does not necessarily mourn the failure of the cyberpunk aesthetic to materialise, but that perhaps mourns the loss of a shared sense of the future and the optimism and radicalism concomitant with those futuristic imaginaries, that are not in evidence in the contemporary period. Gibson has since explicitly noted this absence:

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The loss of a future is synonymous with the loss of a shared culture, so that subjectivity struggles to maintain its coherence without an environment against which to define itself. The individual and social need for understanding is rendered in the text as an imaging and as an imagining. Locative art is used to make visual that which cannot be understood through the Symbolic in an attempt to gain access to truth, a project that is doomed to fail. For example, the Mongolian Death Worm of Hollis’s imaginary is rendered visible through locative art. The Mongolian Death Worm begins its life in the imagination of Hollis’s former bandmate, Inchmale, one of his ‘imaginary pets’ (Gibson 2007: 34), a zoomorphic visualisation of dread. Hollis imagines it ‘circling, hidden, beneath the surface’ (34). The novel finishes with an image of the Mongolian Death Worm as locative art: She put the helmet on, turned it on, and looked up, to where Alberto’s giant cartoon rendition of the Mongolian Death Worm, its tail wound through the various windows of Bigend’s pyramidal aerie like an eel through the skull of a cow, waved imperially, tall and scarlet, in the night. (370) Locative art provides a significant strand of imagery in Spook Country. As Jameson writes, the imagery of a text becomes ‘the sedimentation of the imaginary material on which the text must work and which it must transform’ (376). The text works on the imagery of the Mongolian Death Worm, rendering it visible by the end of the novel, but no more accessible. Rather it seems to dominate the landscape. Locative art acts as a spook country in the novel, rendering the anxieties of celebrity culture and Hollis’s nightmares visible, while keeping them hidden from normal view. This foregrounding of the Imaginary in the novel is also achieved through challenging the power of the Symbolic order as the distinction between language and perception is eroded. This is partly shown through the repeated misunderstanding of speech in the novel. As well as Odile’s ‘cyberspace is everting’/ ‘cyberspace is everything’ (Gibson 2007: 21), when Hollis first meets Alberto she hears him say ‘Vote for Santa’, but after asking for clarification she realises he said ‘À votre santé’ (5). The surreal nature of the phrases that Hollis thinks she has heard erode the power of the Symbolic as the signifier is disassociated from its referent. The confusion of the orders is also associated with locative art through Alberto’s tattoos: ‘She was looking

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at the crazily elaborated black-letter work down the outside of both his forearms. She could make absolutely no sense of it’ (40). When she asks Alberto for the meaning of the text, he tells her it means ‘nothing’: ‘It was designed by an artist in Tokyo. He does these alphabets, abstracts them till they’re completely unreadable. The actual sequence was generated randomly’ (40). While the tattoos resemble a language, and seem to refer to the Symbolic order, they are actually images which do not refer to anything outside of themselves. For Tito, the Cuban immigrant, entry into language is not a permanent state as he loses touch with his knowledge of Russian: ‘Sometimes he watched the news in Russia, on the Russian Network of America, on his Sony plasma screen. The voices of the presenters had begun to acquire a dreamlike quality. He wondered if this was what it felt like, to begin to lose a language’ (14). The ‘dreamlike’ quality that Tito experiences shows that the signifier has once again lost its relationship to the referent and that this has led to a breakdown in the relationship between the three orders as he begins to experience waking life as unformed, unbound by the definition that language brings. This confusion between orders of language is shown again in Milgrim’s understanding of Volapuk, a language based on its visual appearance. He describes it to Brown: Esperanto… That was an artificial language. Volapuk was another. When the Russians got themselves computers, the keyboards and screen displays were Roman, not Cyrillic. They faked up something that looked like Cyrillic, out of our characters. They called it Volapuk. I guess you could say it was a joke. (17) The letters become images as they are chosen for how they look, and for their resemblance to the original Cyrillic letters. Although a language is still maintained (unlike in the case of Alberto’s tattoos), meaning is rendered indirectly as the Roman letters are used as imagery. This confusion between the Symbolic and the Imaginary orders introduces an element of paranoia into the text as the characters attempt to find meaning where none exists (like Hollis attempting to read Alberto’s tattoos), and even the possibility of achieving meaning is challenged through the degradation of language through mishearing, mediation and distance.

The War in Iraq and American militarisation The focus on the mirror stage in Spook Country shows a fear of the imago coupled with an awareness of the necessity of its existence for subject formation. This fear is heightened because of the threat posed to the subject by the increasing militarisation of society. This is represented by Iraq, which acts as the USA’s spook country, a hidden double that returns and destabilises. The USA can try to keep itself safe, but the war in Iraq bleeds back to its source in the form of out-of-work mercenaries and spies. This increasing militarisation is

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shown during an incident set in Union Square, New York, as Milgrim’s captor Brown hires mercenaries who have cut their teeth in Iraq, asking one of them, ‘Blackwater dump your ass for dumbness?’ (201). Blackwater became infamous for providing freelance troops to the Iraq war and the presence of trained mercenaries on the streets of New York is an example of militarisation coming back to haunt America on its own soil. Militarisation can also be observed in the development of locative art, an artistic practice driven by the appropriation of ex-military systems. While locative art shows the reader a spook country by mapping the ghosts of celebrities on to real space, it also acts as a means of introducing the reader to Iraq as a spook country. The militarisation of American culture is intertwined with the birth of locative art itself, as it relies on an ex-military system, GPS, albeit one that became public before the Iraq War. Locative artist Alberto Corrales tells Hollis that the medium began on 1 May 2000: Geohacking. Or the potential thereof. The government announced then that Selective Availability would be turned off, on what had been, until then, strictly a military system. Civilians could access the GPS geocoordinates for the first time. (21) Locative art relies on militarisation but the military equipment of the GPS is turned back on its origin, as Alberto creates a memorial to the American casualties of the Iraq War, a field of white crosses that is the only piece of art he shows Hollis that is not spatially tagged but can be viewed anywhere: She swung the duct-taped hybrid toward Sunset, seeing a crisply defined, perfectly level plane of white cruciform, spaced as on an invisible grid, receding across the boulevard and into virtual distance. Their square white uprights, approximately level with the pavement, seemed to continue, in increasingly faint and somehow subterranean perspective, back under the rise of the Hollywood Hills. ‘American fatalities in Iraq,’ Alberto said. ‘I had it connected to a site, originally, that added crosses as deaths were reported. You can take it anywhere. I have a slide show of grabs from selected locations. I thought about sending it to Baghdad, but people would assume real grabs on the ground in Baghdad were Photoshopped.’ (23) The free-floating nature of the Iraq tribute implies that the responsibility for the deaths, or the reality of the deaths, cannot remain on Iraqi soil, but will haunt the American psyche. The location of Hollis’s viewing of the art is also key – the famous surroundings of Sunset Boulevard and the Hollywood Hills are inevitably and forever associated with the fictions of the film industry. Ironically though, it is in these surroundings that Alberto’s representation of

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the deaths is taken more seriously. Iraq has lost its claim on reality – it is now perceived as a site of lies and fictions, it seems to have no power to produce its own realities independent of a reaction against the American occupation – hence, anyone observing the deaths in Baghdad could assume that they were fabrications or exaggerations. The association between the military and the identity of the country evokes again Lacan’s analysis of the subject: ‘the finally donned armor of an alienating identity … will mark his entire mental development with its rigid structure’ (78). The armour of American militarisation shapes the American psyche, even as it restricts the possibilities for the future. Such a reading is intrinsic to Lacan’s mirror stage theory when one reads it as historically contingent, as Hal Foster (1993) does. Foster argues that Lacan’s mirror stage is not universal, but is inspired by the historical events contemporary with his theorisation, namely the rise of fascism in Nazi Germany. Lacan’s ‘The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function’ was published in 1949, but was originally given at a conference in 1939 and there were significant changes made to the theory between the two iterations. Foster argues that this historicises the theory of the mirror stage as Lacan’s observations are specific to the fascist political situation that rose and fell during its development: inscribed in this theory is a contemporary history of which fascism is the most extreme symptom: a history of world war and military mutilation, of industrial discipline and machinic fragmentation, of mercenary murder and political terror. It is in traumatic relation to such military-industrial events that the modern subject becomes armored – against otherness within (sexuality, the unconscious) and otherness without (for the fascist this can mean Jews, Communists, gays, women), all figures of this fear of the body in pieces come again, of the body given over to the fragmentary and the fluid. (8) By reading Lacan’s theory as historical we can see the reasons that Spook Country lends itself to a reading via the mirror stage so well. The reason for the anxieties of the characters and for the psychoanalytic nature of their worries – and for the emphasis on perspective that leaves them constantly haunted by the mirror stage – is the fear of a new fascism, the fascism of American life in the aftermath of 11 September 2001. The incident of the contamination of the money acts as a break in this anxiety – Hollis describes it as a ‘prank’ (Gibson 2007: 350), and the free-wheeling nature of the comedy moment allows imagination to break out of the straitjacket of fascist tendencies, the orthopaedic armature of the imago. It is also significant that the prank is described as a ‘contamination’; the term contamination suggests invasion by an Other, rather than the suppression of the other within that Foster argues is crucial to the fascist subject, shaped by the mirror stage. While military armour can be seen as one way that America shapes its identity, the text does offer a second option. Milgrim has an outburst at

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Brown as he sees the legal frameworks of America and the civil liberties of its citizens undermined by Brown’s black ops espionage. Milgrim argues for the American legal framework to take the place of militarisation in shaping the identity of the nation: ‘A nation,’ he heard himself say, ‘consists of its laws. A nation does not consist of its situation at a given time. If an individual’s morals are situational, that individual is without morals. If a nation’s laws are situational, that nation has no laws, and soon isn’t a nation… Are you really so scared of terrorists that you’ll dismantle the structures that made America what it is?… If you are, you let the terrorist win. Because that is exactly, specifically, his goal, his only goal: to frighten you into surrendering the rule of law. That’s why they call him “terrorist”. He uses terrifying threats to induce you to degrade your own society.’ (140) Milgrim holds out an idealistic possibility, that the legal framework and the principles underpinning it might represent the imago that America should be striving for, a constitutive power that guides the nation towards a better state. The fight for narrative becomes the fight to decide what America should be, the fight to provide a model for the country to live up to, and to restrict its damaging behaviours. America, as a subject, is fixed in ‘a fictional direction’ (Lacan, 76) which will decide its future direction and the formation of its character. There is an argument over what fictional direction should dominate the American personality as the country attempts to move into the future. The difference between using military might or legal frameworks to define the country is a matter of ideology, and the ‘spook country’ of the novel’s title returns repeatedly, like the return of the repressed, to show that America will never be identical with those ideologies. The alienation caused by this failure to live up to the nation’s ideals is at the root of the paranoia that suffuses the text. The identification of the outside world with inner states of mind, so typical of paranoia, is shown as Hollis finds herself out in the street, ‘her Adidas found actual unstyled Sunset sidewalk, a pointillist abstract in blackened chewing gum’ (Gibson 2007: 4). A similar investment of meaning takes place when Hollis sees the GPS grid through the virtual reality helmet for the first time. She immediately finds the grid artistic in and of itself: ‘she squinted at the small screen. Brought it closer. She saw Alberto’s woollen chest, but confused somehow with ghostly verticals, horizontals, a semitransparent Cubist overlay’ (22). The interpretation of the grid as ‘Cubist’ means that Hollis invests meaning into what is really empty space, awaiting the meaning of locative art. Carl Freedman describes paranoia as similar to ideology, and both as emblematic of the Imaginary realm: ‘Like any ideology, paranoia is finally based on a refusal of any complex theoretical structure of differentials, remaining instead within the specular or dualistic reductionism proper to the Imaginary. Only thus can its unswervingly hermeneutic logic operate’ (22). As

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Lacan writes, paranoia is related to the alienation of the ego in the mirror stage: In the course of an analysis, something like an object may be formed. But this object, far from being what is at issue, is only a fundamentally alienated form of it. It is the imaginary ego which gives it its centre and its group, and it is clearly identifiable with a form of alienation, akin to paranoia. That the subject ends up believing in the ego is in itself madness… Paranoia, as compared with schizophrenia, always has a relation to the imaginary alienation of the ego. (247) Lacan argues that paranoia is symptomatic of the very conditions of existence. The ego itself is imaginary, and is formed through the struggle to take on the impossible journey towards the imago just as ideology is imaginary and is formed as an imaginary identity for a wider society to find a fictional direction. This comparison between individual and social states of consciousness is shown in the difference between representations of America and the country as it ‘really’ is, a state that (like the imago for the subject) is unattainable. Louis Althusser defines ideology using Lacanian terminology as ‘a “representation” of the imaginary relationship of individuals to the real conditions of their existence’ (162). This is shown through Milgrim’s captor Brown, and his inability to accept the public image of America as portrayed in the media: Brown didn’t like the New York Times. Brown actually didn’t like news media of any kind … because the news conveyed did not issue from any reliable, that was to say, governmental source. Nor could it, really, under present conditions of war, as any genuine news, news of any strategic import whatever, was by definition precious, and not to be wasted on the nation’s mere citizenry. (Gibson 2007: 80) A ‘true’ portrayal of the country is impossible, especially in a time of war. The official news is pure ideology, an image of the country as it would like to think of itself and be seen, as opposed to the unreachable reality of the country which must involve the barbaric and illegal aspects of war. For people like Brown, who are invested in the ‘spook country’ of espionage and in the romance of combat, the sanitised version portrayed by news media loses its power.

History and money The threads of personal and social identity in the novel are interwoven through the circulation of two sums of money: the money in the shipping container that prompts the action of the novel, and the five thousand dollars

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that Hollis carries with her throughout the narrative. Hollis’s relationship to these two sums of money reminds the reader of her existence at the intersection of personal, individual history and public history through her two different identities – her identity as an ex-singer in a band and her identity as a private individual. When she discovers Tito, the old man (the ex-CIA agent at the heart of the scheme) and his associate, Garreth, the old man recognises the significance of her position and asks her if she will witness the climax of the scheme. He says: There is public history and there is secret history. I am proposing to make you privy to secret history. Not because you are a journalist, actually, but because you are, to whatever extent, a celebrity… You already constitute a part of the historical record, however small you might prefer to see it… By inviting you to witness what we intend to do, I will be using you, in effect, as a sort of time capsule. You will become the fireplace brick behind which I leave an account, though it will be your account, of what we do here. (298) By making Hollis a witness to the contamination of the money, the old man draws connections between the secret history of espionage and the public history represented by celebrity culture. This recognition of two different histories that can never be identical with one another can be compared to the personal alienation experienced through the mirror stage. America, like Hollis, can never be ‘one’ as public and secret histories contradict each other. Hollis recognises the difference after the scheme has come to an end, when there is no mention of it in the news media. The incident was still very much a secret, as nothing at all had appeared anywhere about a truck being seized as it entered Idaho from Canada. They had told her to expect that, though. The whole business had to play out initially in spook country, and might well remain there for a very long time. (369) Through dividing history into the public and the secret the truth of History is rendered inaccessible, as Jameson suggests in his reading of Lacan when he equates the Real with History. Jameson writes that psychoanalysis ‘is guided by a concept of truth, not as adequation with reality… but rather as a relationship, at best an asymptotic approach to the Real’ (383). Jameson goes on to explain his reading of the Real in Lacan: It is not terribly difficult to say what is meant by the Real in Lacan. It is simply History itself: and if for psychoanalysis the history in question here is obviously enough the history of the subject, the resonance of the

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word suggests that a confrontation between this particular materialism and the historical materialism of Marx can no longer be postponed. (384) Hollis’s position at the interstices between the history of the subject and public history, between the secret history and public history, means that by observing the contamination of the money she brings the episode closer to ‘truth’, by allowing it to approach the Real of History. Like the imago, the Real of History can never be reached, only approached, but the combination of the public and private, the secret and the official, allows an approach that gives the old man’s scheme a significance it would lack without Hollis’s observation. Hollis’s perception of the event makes it real and it becomes more than a punishment for those who are trying to benefit from the money. It gains a wider social significance through Hollis’s act of observation. The connections between the individual and the social continue: anxiety on the individual level is projected onto the United States as a country and, to reverse the situation, the social anxiety of America as a country and as a culture is projected back onto the individual. This is done through the metaphor of Stockholm Syndrome, the psychological state in which a hostage becomes attached to his or her captor.6 As in the mirror stage, the tension in Stockholm Syndrome is once again a tension between containment and constitution. The subject fears confinement by a captor, but also grows attached to the captor as the hostage’s captivity becomes constitutive of their experience of their own identity. Milgrim thinks about the condition as he considers his position of captivity under Brown: ‘Milgrim decided that Stockholm syndrome was a myth. Going on a few weeks now, and he still wasn’t empathizing with Brown. Not even a little bit’ (20). Milgrim’s life is already formed by his addiction to a drug known as ‘Rize’, a sedative: Milgrim went into his bathroom and ran the cold. The Rize hadn’t gone down smoothly. He looked at himself in the mirror and noted that he could use a haircut. As he drank the glass of water he wondered when he’d quit looking at his own face in mirrors, other than for the most basic functions of grooming. He never saw himself there. At some point he’d decided not to. (157) Milgrim’s addiction has taken over his being, his very subjectivity. This means that Brown’s role is one of facilitation, rather than control: Milgrim’s real captor, to whom he has definitely developed an attachment, is the drug itself. On the other hand, when Hollis is taken captive by the old man and his associates, she wonders whether she will develop Stockholm syndrome. Whereas Milgrim dismisses the idea, Hollis entertains the notion and relates the feeling to the mood in America as a whole so that individual psychological idiosyncrasies are scaled up to express the socio-political state of an entire country:

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Psychoanalysis in Spook Country She remembered Inchmale describing Stockholm syndrome, the fondness and loyalty one could supposedly come to feel for even the most brutal captor. She wondered whether she might be experiencing something like that, here. Inchmale thought that America had developed Stockholm syndrome toward its own government, post 9/11. But then she thought that she really should have been more likely to develop it toward Bigend than toward these three. Bigend, her every gut instinct told her, was an infinitely spookier captor. (312)

Connections are drawn between the personal and the political, in a fractal arrangement as the patterns of alienation that constitute the self are repeated at the socio-cultural level of the nation. Hollis’s sense of captivity is compared to the feeling experienced by the American people as their government restricted civil liberties in the aftermath of 9/11. When Hollis relates this back to Bigend, a figure in the novel who symbolises transnational capital and the power of advertising, she suggests that the real captors of subjectivity are not national governments, but transnational flows of capital, as represented by the shipping container and the Iraqi reconstruction fund money. The act of destroying the money’s value, a true act under Hollis’s observation, represents a moment in which this network of power is compromised. The alienating structure of subjectivity through the imago and the alienating structure of society through ideology are drawn together in the novel through the symbol of money: both the money in the shipping container and the money left for Hollis by her deceased bandmate, Jimmy. The shadow of the shipping container is cast over the action of the novel as a whole as its shape is constantly echoed in other objects which invade the private space of the characters and sometimes enclose them entirely, consuming and trapping them. On the first page Hollis hears the gentle bumping of artist Odile Richard’s cleaning robot against the furniture – a robot made entirely of white Lego, its rectangular white blocks beginning the trope of the white box that pervades the novel (1). A few pages later and Hollis enters the Philippe Starck elevator, again a confining white box (3). The characters are held captive and shaped by their environment. Bobby Chombo, the computer programmer who masterminds the technical aspects of locative art, is another box in the sense that his name, ‘Chombo’, is Swahili for ‘container’, and Bobby keeps himself contained, as Alberto explains to Hollis: Bobby divides his place up into smaller squares, within the grid. He sees everything in terms of GPS gridlines, the world divided up that way … He won’t sleep in the same square twice. He crosses them off, never goes back to one where he’s slept before. (42) Bobby allows himself to be captured and moved around by his own technology, circulating in his own space like currency through an economy. The trope

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of the white box is also echoed in the iPods that the old man uses to transfer illicit data, with Tito’s help: Each time the old man received another iPod, accepting it the way an ancient and sagacious ape might accept a piece of some not particularly interesting fruit, Tito half-expected him to crack its virginal white case like a nut, and then to draw forth something utterly peculiar, utterly dire, and somehow terrible in its contemporaneity. (10) The contrast between the ‘virginal’ white of the surface and the dread of what might lie within shows the ambivalence of containment in the novel as the constitutive necessity of conforming to an imago is recognised but feared at the same time. Containment represents the conflicting needs to be kept safe in a contained space while maintaining freedom of movement, thought and identity. Tito’s aunt Juana ‘had herself been trained in the white-painted subbasements of a building whose upper stories afforded narrow views of the Kremlin’ (10). Tito lives in a room which is ‘square, windowless, with a single steel door and white-painted plaster-board walls’ (14). The shipping container, and the money within, is another opportunity for the novel to draw the socio-political threads together with the individual storylines. Finding its location is subject to the use of technology, but also to gestalt perception as the ‘patterns of global shipping’ must be interpreted (39). The money in the shipping container is echoed in the money Hollis has in her possession, a debt repayment from her former bandmate, Jimmy. Heidi, another former member of the band, gives Hollis the envelope containing five thousand dollars, from Jimmy who has since died from a drug overdose. Hollis has suffered from Jimmy’s death and found it difficult to overcome: ‘It was as if she expected him to be there, as if he should be there, as if he actually were there, just out of focus, or around some corner’ (114). Hollis’s experience of her memory of Jimmy is one of presence defined by absence. This is especially clear as she thinks about him while taking a bath: ‘She lowered her shampooed hair back into the water. The bathroom kept on filling with the absence of her dead friend, and she’d started to cry before she could start to rinse’ (121). The package containing the money from Jimmy goes with Hollis as she travels through the novel, as a reminder of his death. Inchmale warns her not to bank the money, describing the hundred-dollar bills as ‘the international currency of bad shit’ (129). It is only after the drama with the shipping container has come to an end that the money disappears, as if destroying the value of the money in the shipping container also destroys the power of the money Hollis carries. She explicitly associates the shipping container and its cargo with the money from Jimmy. As the old man tells her about the contents of the container, she asks him: ‘“How big would that be, ten million?” She thought of Jimmy’s five thousand, in her purse. “In hundreds”’ (306). During the scheme to contaminate the money in the shipping

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container Hollis’s purse, containing the money from Jimmy, is taken, ostensibly by some men that Garreth had arranged to clean up after their escape. ‘“They must’ve taken it by mistake,” he said. “But that was strictly a one-way transaction. Sorry”’ (341). Garreth tells her that they cannot return to collect it: ‘But then, strangely, she found she was glad to be done with that as well. Something oppressive about it, wrong’ (341). The destruction of the money and its associated value allows Hollis to move past Jimmy’s death as in Zero History she appears in a relationship with Garreth, the one who pulls the trigger and contaminates the money. In the moment of contamination, she finds herself able to get over the symptoms of her previous relationships and to accept a new one into her life. The freedom that Hollis finds in the disappearance of the money connects her with the social level of the novel, and the moment of freedom that opens up with the contamination of the money and its effective removal from circulation.

Conclusion The idea of ‘spook’ versions behind the banal, everyday façade is reflected in Hollis’s advice from her old bandmate, Inchmale, who ‘said that when you were presented with a new idea, you should try to turn it over, to look at the bottom’ (131). In a sense, this is what Spook Country does – it attempts to understand the ideologies and conditions of its contemporary period by turning their façades over to look at the bottom, discovering the necessary but unseen aspects of those conditions, mutually reliant and never identical. Lacan writes that the experience of the analyst leads to the recognition of the ego as a ‘perception-consciousness system’ (80, emphasis in original) and his emphasis of an Imaginary order based on a specular subject reinforces the importance of perception to his project. This focus on perception can be scaled up to the social system, which turns out to be a perception-consciousness system in kind, produced by the gestalt perceptions and artistic creations of its individual members. This is the link that draws together the different approaches to understanding in Spook Country: individual understanding, socio-political understanding and historical understanding. These approaches are drawn together only so that the impossibility of their reconciliation can be highlighted. All perspectives remain plural, leaving the Real of History unattainable, just as the individual subject can never attain identity with their imago, even though they can sense it in their mirror image, as gestalt.

Notes 1 Lacan does not cite or quote directly from Köhler and refers to him only by his second name, but a thorough discussion of Lacan’s citations and interpretation of such in ‘The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function’ has been undertaken by Michael Billig, who concludes that The Mentality of Apes is the likely source for Lacan’s claim. Billig points out that Köhler observed chimpanzees maintaining

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interest in their mirror image, rather than losing interest as Lacan claims (Billig 2006: 9). This reading of the residual self-image as an imago through gestalt perception can also be found in Douglas A. Cunningham’s ‘Stalling Zion: Hegemony, Whiteness, and Racial Discourse in The Matrix Phenomenon’ (2009: 261–262). For a more detailed consideration of the relationship between gestalt perception and posthumanism, see Chapter 1. Helmut Newton is also mentioned in Pattern Recognition as Cayce ‘squints into an actual mirror, canted against a gray wall, awaiting hanging, wherein she sees a black legged, disjointed puppet, sleep-hair poking up like a toilet brush. She grimaces at it, thinking for some reason of a boyfriend who’d insisted on comparing her to Helmut Newton’s nude portrait of Jane Birkin’ (Gibson 2003: 3). This passage displays similar themes to Spook Country as the alienation caused by Newton’s camera is compared to the alienation Cayce feels by being compared to an external image. This interplay of presence and absence is echoed in Zero History as Hollis writes a book on locative art, entitled Presences. See Chapter 5. While the term ‘syndrome’ implies some medical legitimacy, Stockholm Syndrome was named for a hostage situation in which the police response endangered the hostages (an attempted bank robbery in Stockholm, 1973); it has never been consistently observed as a psychological phenomenon, and has been criticised for its misogyny. For a discussion see Jess Hill (2019: 59–61).

Bibliography Althusser, Louis. On Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, translated by Ben Brewster. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971. Badmington, Neil. Posthumanism. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2000. Billig, Michael. ‘Lacan’s Misuse of Psychology: Evidence, Rhetoric and the Mirror Stage.’ Theory, Culture and Society, vol. 23, no. 1, 2006, pp. 1–26. Cunningham, Douglas A. ‘Stalling Zion: Hegemony, Whiteness, and Racial Discourse in The Matrix Phenomenon.’ At Home and Abroad: Historicizing Twentieth-Century Whiteness in Literature and Performance, edited by La Vinia Delois Jennings. Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 2009, pp. 255–284. Foster, Hal. ‘Postmodernism in Parallax.’ October, vol. 63, 1993, pp. 3–20. Freedman, Carl. ‘Towards a Theory of Paranoia: The Science Fiction of Philip K. Dick.’ Science Fiction Studies, vol. 11, no. 1, 1984, pp. 15–24. Gibson, William. Idoru. London: Penguin, 1996. Gibson, William. Pattern Recognition. London: HarperCollins, 2003. Gibson, William. Spook Country. London: HarperCollins, 2007. Gibson, William. Zero History. London: HarperCollins, 2010. Gibson, William. ‘Future Perfect.’ Canadian Art, 9 March2020, https://canadianart.ca/ interviews/william-gibson-future-perfect. Hill, Jess. See What You Made Me Do: Power, Control and Domestic Abuse. Victoria, Australia: Black Inc., 2019. Jameson, Fredric. ‘Imaginary and Symbolic in Lacan: Marxism, Psychoanalytic Criticism, and the Problem of the Subject.’ Yale French Studies, vol. 55, no. 6, 1977, pp. 338–395. Lacan, Jacques. ‘The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function.’ Ecrits, edited by Jacques-Alain Miller, translated by Bruce Fink. London: W.W. Norton & Company, 2006.

5

The parallax view in Zero History

Introduction In 2010, William Gibson brought the Blue Ant trilogy to a close with Zero History. Through Pattern Recognition (2003) and Spook Country (2007) the focus was on the shortcomings of the contemporary moment; its instability, and the concomitant impossibility of making predictions or extrapolating from that moment of flux. Zero History, as its title suggests, considers the role of history during such an unstable period, as well as considering the dialectical tensions between a number of other concepts. In the Introduction I explained the dynamics of the Rubin’s vase image (see Figure I.1), which illustrates that our brains work by foregrounding some parts of reality at the expense of others. This gestalt perspective is a framework that both limits and constitutes our field of vision: in foregrounding the vase, we ignore the faces; in foregrounding the faces we ignore the vase. But the vase and the faces together make the gestalt, they are interdependent and cannot be separated. Gestalt is the entire shape of our perceptual field. In this chapter I approach the gestalt by using the example of the parallax, by reading Zero History alongside Slavoj Žižek’s book The Parallax View (2006). A parallax is the perceived change in an object caused by looking at it from a different position, such as the difference in position achieved by the writer of science fiction as they look at their ‘zero world’ from the imagined world of the science fiction text. Darko Suvin (1972) defines the ‘zero world’ as ‘empirically verifiable properties around the author (this being “zero” in the sense of a central reference point in a coordinate system, or of the control group in an experiment). Let us call this empirical world naturalistic’ (377, emphasis in original). The science fiction text produces a tension between the ‘zero world’ (the world of the author) and the world presented in the text, as the author views their quotidian reality from the estranging perspective of the world as presented in the science fiction text. I would expand this definition of the zero world to apply to the world of the implied reader, as well as that of the author.1 When the reader encounters the science fiction text their own zero world is thrown into contrast with the science fictional world in an oscillation resembling that of the Rubin’s vase image as the view of the faces switches to DOI: 10.4324/9781003082477-6

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the view of the vase. The reader of science fiction experiences an oscillation as they view the worlds of science fiction from their zero world, as well as their zero world from the perspective of the science fictional world. The term ‘parallax’ comes from the Greek ‘parallaxis’ meaning ‘alteration’. It came to mean the ‘difference or change in the apparent position or direction of an object as seen from two different points’ and was particularly used in astronomy to describe differences in the appearance of celestial objects from different points on the earth’s surface. These differences could lead to misconceptions about the nature of the solar system and the distance between celestial bodies – a ‘parallax view’ was often a misconception or a mistaken view which failed to take atmospheric effects, such as refraction of light, into account (OED 2020). It is also a very useful term to use in a science fictional context to mean, not just a mistaken view, but a wilfully different outlook, one that foregoes the generally accepted ‘objective’ viewpoint and looks for alternatives or alterations. W. Bourne brought ‘parallax’ into the English language and wrote in 1580, ‘Paralax is when that the Moone in some partes of the Skyes … shall seme nearer or farther vnto those starres’ (OED 2020). Science fiction writers have, in this sense, been adopting a parallax view since the inception of the genre, oscillating between depicting our world and its moon as very near to the stars and rendering the stars unreachable.2 Darko Suvin (2010) recognises this when he writes, ‘the oscillation between the author’s “zero world” and the new reality induces the narrative necessity of a means of reality displacement’ (76). This oscillation, between the zero world and the new reality of the science fiction text, is a parallax view. What seems to be univocal, monocultural, or even natural, becomes estranged and distanced through the oscillation between the zero world and the science fiction world. This chapter explores this parallax view, particularly focusing on how it functions in a reading of Zero History. Zero History takes up the story of Hollis Henry and Milgrim, both characters who were introduced in Spook Country. Milgrim has been weaned from his drug addiction thanks to Bigend, who has had him rehabilitated through blood transfusions and therapy at a clinic in Basel. Hollis has lost money in the 2008 financial crash and so finds herself working for Bigend again, against her most fundamental instincts. This time he has tasked her with finding the creator of a mysterious line of clothing known as ‘Gabriel Hounds’. He admires the Gabriel Hounds clothing for its design and its marketing and claims to be interested in asking the designer to work on designing clothing for the US military (197). The concept of the parallax view resonates with Zero History’s use of generic motifs, as Hollis experiences a kind of science-fictional parallax view in her interactions with Bigend, offering a new way of thinking about the text as ‘science fiction realism’, a term I adopt from Veronica Hollinger (2006) and which was introduced at length in Chapter 3. This parallax view allows Hollis to experience Bigend as a monster, even though Zero History is ostensibly a realist narrative. I also consider the possibility of a temporal parallax view,

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one taken from a different position in time rather than space, through the use of history in the novel. Finally, I show how ekphrasis, or the portrayal of visual objects in writing, plays just as important a part in Zero History as in Gibson’s other novels through a comparison with Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady, first published in 1881. Both writers approach European settings from an outside perspective, as Americans (although Gibson is an adoptive Canadian), and this creates a parallax view which is reflected in the use of ekphrasis; the aestheticised view of the subject from the outside is contrasted with the rich inner life of subjectivity.

Science fiction as a parallax view The term ‘parallax view’ is here taken from Slavoj Žižek’s 2006 book of the same name.3 Žižek describes the ‘parallax view’ as the contrasting perspective given when approaching a topic from two different, incompatible discourses. He also speaks of a ‘parallax gap’, which is the incommensurable distance and difference between the two discourses. In his Critique of Pure Reason (1781), Kant identifies a ‘transcendental illusion’. Just as perception allows vision by assimilating it to a pre-existing gestalt, so Kant’s transcendental illusion is necessary in order for reasoning to take place while at the same time limiting it.4 Žižek uses Kant’s ‘transcendental illusion’ as a means of illustrating the incompatibility of different discourses: The illusion of being able to use the same language for phenomena which are mutually untranslatable and can be grasped only in a kind of parallax view, constantly shifting perspective between two points between which no synthesis or mediation is possible. Thus there is no rapport between the two levels, no shared space – although they are closely connected, even identical in a way, they are, as it were, on the opposed sides of a Moebius strip. (4) The ‘illusion’ here is caused by the necessity of seeing the world through gestalt perception. We cannot see things atomically, only as part of our field of perception, formed by a gestalt. This means that two different, irreconcilable registers are dependent on each other, like the faces and the vase in the Rubin’s vase image. The images are irreconcilable, as one image must act as the background in order to give meaning to the foreground. However, the images are interdependent as they shape one another. Like the two sides of a Moebius strip, they constitute one another but can never coexist in the same time and space. We only experience them both together through a ‘constantly shifting perspective’, or an oscillation such as that between the zero world and the real world in the reading of science fiction. The tension between the foreground and background inherent in Rubin’s vase and in gestalt perception is, Žižek argues, key to the understanding of dialectical materialism: ‘the first

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critical move is to replace this topic of the polarity of opposites with the concept of the inherent tension, gap, noncoincidence of the One itself ’ (7). Science fiction takes part in this discourse through its dialectic structure. As explained in the introduction, science fiction is structured around the dialectic tension between cognition and estrangement (Freedman 2000: 16–17). This dialectic tension is echoed in science fiction’s relationship with time, as it attempts to speak about the future in the same language that one speaks about the present; trying to speak absolute difference in the language that is familiar to us. Gibson has spoken of the problem with science fiction in today’s culture as technology seems to have caught up with, or even overtaken, the science fictional imaginary. In a 1992 interview he already spoke about this relationship between the present and the future, saying ‘It’s not like [the future]’s catching up. It’s just that other people are starting to realise that it’s already here’ (Gibson quoted in Fischlin et al. 1992 2). Gibson describes the perspective of the science fiction writer as a parallax view (Hicks 2012), with one eye on the present and the other in the past. The science fiction writer offers a contrast between two perspectives – that of the writer/contemporary reader, the other the imagined view from the past. This is important for us to contextualise our contemporary situation. As our present is so brief, and so unstable, the past becomes even more important as a key to the interpretation of the present. Rather than view our world from an unstable present, we can look at it through the imagined view from the (far more stable) past and, in doing so, understand our contemporary situation more successfully. Gibson says: I think that part of my experience of growing up in the American South in the early ’60s was one of living in a place unevenly established in the present. You could look out one window and see the 20th century, then turn and look out another window and see the 19th … It provides a sort of parallax. If you only have one eye, you don’t have depth perception. If you’re able to look at things with one eye in the 21st century and the other eye in the 20th century (or possibly even the late-19th), it provides a kind of perspective that otherwise wouldn’t be available. (Gibson quoted in Hicks 2012) As the settings of William Gibson’s novels have moved closer and closer to our own time (having started in the far future of the Sprawl and become almost identical with our own time in the Blue Ant trilogy) the nature of this would-be reconciliation between the future and the present becomes clear. The future and the present approach each other, but asymptotically; the space between them reduces infinitely, but yet they never meet. The future folds over onto the present but can never become one with it; the future and the present align only to highlight the difference that will always exist between them, no matter how close they may seem. Like two sides of a Moebius strip, they exist together but can never be one with each other. This relationship,

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between the present and the future, is echoed in the literary relationship between realism and science fiction, two genres that can overlap but can never become fully identical. These tensions in Gibson’s writing have been analysed by Jaak Tomberg in ‘On the “Double Vision” of Realism and SF Estrangement in William Gibson’s Bigend Trilogy’ (2013).5 Tomberg recognises the relationship between these two discourses in Gibson’s work, the discourses of SF and realism, writing that these ‘apparently opposing generic tendencies approach each other to the closest possible degree’ (263) in the Blue Ant trilogy. Tomberg notes that bringing science fiction poetics into realist fiction is a reaction to a culture that seems to have no outside: we might interpret Gibson’s hypothesis that the only way to write sf nowadays is to write novels of contemporary realism – and vice-versa, we might add: the only way plausibly to describe the artificial immanence of contemporary culture is by using the toolkit of sf poetics … in a culture that behaves as if it had no outside, there is also no plausible outside space-time where science fiction can position the figure of its estranging Other. (277, emphasis in original) In a world where systems of thought seem to have failed, leaving one with no alternative, Gibson’s trilogy implies that science fiction must find its ‘estranging Other’ in the ‘real’ world. In Gibson’s Sprawl trilogy, cyberspace is a novum that provides a space for science fictional estrangement. In the Blue Ant trilogy, as Odile the locative artist claims in Spook Country (2007), cyberspace has everted, taken over the real world leaving no imaginable outside (21). As with the Žižekian parallax view, two irreconcilable discourses – in this case, science fiction and realism – appear to coexist. However, it is only in the oscillation between the two that the novels can be interpreted. Zero History oscillates between science fiction and realism in a subtle manner. Rather than including obvious nova Gibson describes a ‘mercury penguin’ (145) that acts as a remote-controlled surveillance system. It is not immediately clear to the reader whether such a technology is possible given our current capabilities. This confusion between science fiction and realism is echoed in Hollis’s response to Garreth when he tells her that the bone in his leg has been replaced by rattan after an accident: ‘Rattan. The stuff they weave baskets and furniture out of. They’ve found a way to turn it into a perfect analog of human bone.’ ‘You’re making that up.’ ‘They’re just starting to test it on humans. On me, in fact. Works a charm, on sheep.’ ‘They can’t. Turn that into bone.’ ‘They put it in ovens. With calcium, other things. Under pressure. For a long time. Turns to bone, near enough.’

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‘No way.’ ‘If I’d thought of it I’d have had them make you a basket. Brilliant thing about it, you can build exactly the bone you need, out of rattan. Work it as rattan. Then ossify it. Perfect replacement. Actually a bit stronger than the original. Microscopic structure allows the blood vessels to grow through it.’ ‘Don’t mess with me.’ (273–274) Hollis voices the reader’s position as she does not know whether the technology is really possible or not. In truth, rattan was indeed being used experimentally in sheep in the way described at Gibson’s time of writing (Kennedy 2010) but the reader finds it difficult to differentiate between new technologies and science fictional nova from the evidence available in the novel. This confusion over the novum is just as estranging as a traditional novum as the reader is estranged from what they think of as their own world – the world represented via the mimesis of realism. Hollis’s words, ‘Don’t mess with me’ (274), voice the reader’s confusion as the text ‘messes with’ the reader by blurring the lines between science fiction and realism. By extension, the world itself is messing with the reader as it becomes more difficult to distinguish between present-day fictions and realities due to the speed and unlikelihood of the contemporary moment’s rapid changes and innovations. As well as the defamiliarisation of the real world through science fiction realism, Zero History’s settings and characters are alienated from mimetic realism through comparisons with science fictional tropes. Gibson characterises Hollis’s bizarre hotel, Cabinet, as alien; the hotel becomes a character in the book through its unusual furnishings and their lavish descriptions. The shower in Hollis’s room is first described as ‘a Victorian monster, its original taps were hulking knots of plated brass. Horizontal four-inch nickel-plate pipes caged you on three sides … It reminded her of H. G. Wells’s time machine’ (16). The reference to science fiction through the figure of H.G. Wells, the ‘monstrous’ nature of the shower and the sense that Hollis feels trapped while at her most vulnerable (undressed and washing) combine to give the reader an eerie sense that the hotel is alive, and monstrous, and controlling Hollis. In ‘The Uncanny’ (1919), Freud makes a distinction between heimlich and unheimlich, or ‘homely’ and ‘unhomely’, to describe the difference between that which is familiar and that which is uncanny. This applies very much to Cabinet as things that Hollis finds familiar from science fiction media, such as the H.G. Wells shower, appear in mundane reality and so become uncanny. The lift is described as an ‘iron cage’ (18) when Hollis leaves her room after her shower and her room contains a ‘caged library’ (16) creating the sense that, wherever she goes in the hotel, she is still confined in the belly of the beast. This impression is not only caused by the hotel and its strange décor, but by Hollis’s gaze itself as she lies in bed ‘staring up at a dim anamorphic view of the repeated insect cartouche, smaller and more distorted the closer to the ceiling’ (16). Anamorphosis is a type of image in the

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visual arts that requires the viewer to stand in a particular place in order to understand it. The hotel’s beastly character can only be seen from where Hollis stands, through her parallax view. The beastliness of the hotel is compared to that of Bigend as Hollis sees him as a similarly monstrous creature. Bigend, the personification of Blue Ant’s troubling marketing and branding activities, is shown as cartoonishly evil in the novel, more so than in either Pattern Recognition or Spook Country, and much of this nightmarish characterisation is based around imagery of eating and consumption. Heidi suggests that he eats muskrat (67), he ‘fattens on the blood of the proletariat’ (289), he is a ‘Bond villain’ (399) and a vampire (30). He is repeatedly described as eating full English breakfasts, with emphasis on the black pudding (also referred to as ‘blood pudding’ in the American usage [20]). Hollis ponders, ‘[Bigend] somehow managed always to give her the impression, seeing him again, that he’d grown visibly larger, though without gaining any particular weight. Simply bigger. Perhaps, she thought, as if he grew somehow closer’ (19). So, to take the parallax view metaphor forward, it is not Bigend who has gotten bigger, or changed, it is Hollis’s own position that has changed, relative to him. She is moving towards a future that, for whatever reason, fills her with dread and is personified in the character of Bigend – or, perhaps she is standing still as the future incrementally encroaches on her space. Garreth later says: ‘Bigend, somehow, is now too big to get a handle on. Which may be what they mean when they say something’s too big to fail’ (396). The phrase ‘too big to fail’ has connotations with the banking system, as banks that have reached a certain size are considered to hold national economies in their vaults and must, therefore, be bailed out to save the economies, as happened in 2008. The future that Bigend represents is a globalised future of flowing capital that takes no account of human or geographical concerns and this fills Hollis with existential fear. This fear is expressed through Bigend’s description as a monster, moving through the alien landscape of Cabinet: And when she’d watched him, from her chair, the collar of his coat popped like a vampire’s cape, finally descend the stairs to Cabinet’s foyer, dropping further out of sight with each step, she put her head back against slippery brocade and gazed at the spiralled lances of the narwhale tusks, in their ornate rack. (30) The convolutions of the sentence curl around Bigend’s presence like the narwhale tusks as he moves through Cabinet’s living landscape: the sentence is lengthened thanks to the opening ‘and’, letting the reader feel they have intruded into a far longer sentence at a midpoint; the sub clauses force one to read retroactively. This ornate sentence puts distance between Hollis (and, by extension, the reader) and Bigend as his vampirish form recedes and Cabinet

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reclaims Hollis’s attention, as she puts her head back against her chair. The presence of Bigend renders Cabinet more comfortable by comparison; Hollis experiences a kind of parallax view of discomfort. When experiencing Cabinet alone she finds it monstrous, but in comparison to the unease that Bigend inspires it becomes homely in the Freudian sense, familiar but with the potential for uncanny defamiliarisation, through science fiction realism. This relationship to the uncanny is also evident in Bigend’s clothing, which makes visible his social positioning and his relationship to the market. When Bigend makes his first appearance in the novel, for a meeting with Hollis, she sees he is wearing ‘the only International Klein Blue suit she’d ever seen’ (19). When she questions him about it he says, ‘it unsettles people’ (20). Later, Hollis considers that she does not have an avatar to represent Bigend on her iPhone: ‘She had no iconic image for Bigend. Maybe a blank rectangle of Klein Blue?’ (146). ‘Klein Blue’ was first mixed by French artist Yves Klein, who patented its use in his works in 1961. The colour is unnaturally vibrant; when Milgrim looks at it, ‘the weird cathode blue of his suit seem[ed] to float in Milgrim’s retina at some special depth’ (266). Later, ‘the aura of his blue suit’ is ‘almost painful’ (277) and Hollis says that Bigend is ‘curating suits that do retinal damage’ (336). The suit actively attacks the viewer, disrupting the gaze that creates their gestalt, that allows them to perceive and interact with the world. It is something that aims to be extra-ordinary and it positions Bigend as superior, a figure that seeks to manipulate and disorient those who encounter him. Hollis experiences a climax of horror in the final chapter when the two monsters, Bigend and Cabinet, are conflated in her dreams. Throughout the novel, Hollis notices a stuffed ferret in a vitrine in Cabinet’s foyer behind some other worse-for-wear stuffed animals and birds: Behind them, anthropomorphically upright, forelimbs outstretched in the manner of a cartoon somnambulist, came a moth-eaten ferret. Its teeth, which struck her as unrealistically large, she suspected of being wooden, and painted. Certainly its lips were painted, if not actually rouged, lending it a sinisterly festive air, like someone you’d dread running into at a Christmas party. Inchmale, on first pointing it out to her, had suggested she adopt it as a totem, her spirit beast. (4) It does indeed seem like Hollis feels some affinity with this grotesque object as she notices it whenever she passes and says goodbye to it when preparing to leave the hotel (369). The final chapter of the novel, entitled ‘The Other Side’, shows Bigend and this ferret conflated into one creature: ‘And at the far end of a vast, perhaps endless room, in a pool of warm light, a figure, seated, in a suit of Klein Blue. As it turns, pale fur, muzzle rouged, the wooden painted teeth’ (404).

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Time and the parallax view The speed of contemporary technological change creates a temporal uncertainty as the time we refer to as the ‘present’ seems never to stand still. As Bigend says in Pattern Recognition, ‘fully imagined cultural futures’, like those made available through science fiction to previous generations, ‘were the luxury of another day, one in which “now” was of some greater duration. For us, of course, things can change so abruptly, so violently, so profoundly, that futures like our grandparents’ have insufficient “now” to stand on. We have no future because our present is too volatile’ (57). The volatility of the present creates a parallax relationship between the present and the future as they approach each other without ever becoming identical to one another. In Zero History, the Gabriel Hounds clothing line tries to replace the concept of the present with atemporality. When Hollis visits Meredith, a fashion designer who longs to transcend the seasonal model institutionalised in the fashion world, Meredith explains the reasoning behind the anti-seasonal (and, incidentally, anti-marketing) approach of the Gabriel Hounds clothing line: ‘It’s about atemporality. About opting out of the industrialization of novelty. It’s about a deeper code’ (116). She goes on to say that her own fashion design had attempted to construct atemporal things, ‘things that weren’t tied to the present moment. Not to any moment, really, so not retro either’ (120). Temporalising or historicising is shown as alienating to the characters. Hollis feels nonplussed by the ’80s-themed Salon du Vintage, ‘she always found it peculiar to encounter a time she had actually lived through rendered as a period. It made her wonder whether she was living through another one and, if so, what it would be called’ (102). Hollis experiences a parallax view as she remembers the experience of living through the period as it happened, and compares it with the view of the period from her contemporary present. This process alienates Hollis from her own present as she knows it will look different in the future, once rendered as a period. In ‘Postmodernism in Parallax’ (1993), Hal Foster argues that this feeling of estrangement is symptomatic of a period in which temporalities are differently distributed: ‘There is no simple Now: every present is nonsynchronous, a mix of different times. Thus there is never a timely transition, say, between the modern and the postmodern: our consciousness of a period not only comes after the fact: it is also always in parallax’ (5–6). This gives us another parallax, as our viewpoint is dependent on the difference between the present and the future but, as Veronica Hollinger puts it, ‘today the present is different from the present’ (465). As well as this relationship between the present and the future, the volatility of the present complicates our relationship with the past. Gibson has pointed out that ‘we’re all living in someone else’s past’ (quoted in Delucci 2013), thereby suggesting another way to think about our present. By situating our present as someone else’s past there is an appeal for another framework of understanding through which we can see the importance of our age. This has been an explicit concern of Gibson’s throughout the Blue Ant trilogy, and his

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interest in the interplay of time, memory, and history have in many ways characterised his career from the start. For example, one of Gibson’s most famous short stories, ‘The Gernsback Continuum’ (1986: 37–50), follows a photographer as he imagines a world in which the futures of Hugo Gernsback’s Amazing Stories magazine, and the world of Golden Age science fiction more generally, have come true. He is sent by a London publisher, Dialta Downes, to document ‘those odds and ends of “futuristic” Thirties and Forties architecture you pass daily in American cities without noticing … segments of a dreamworld, abandoned in the uncaring present’ (38–9). While on this job he begins to see that Gernsbackian future. This is not as simple as a story in which the future is represented; ‘The Gernsback Continuum’ is a story about an imagined view of the future from the past. ‘I knew, somehow, that the city behind me was Tucson, a dream Tucson thrown up out of the collective yearning of an era. That it was real, entirely real’ (47). This ‘reality’ of the dream is where the story’s uncanny quality originates; in the fear that humans create realities with their dreams, things are dreamed into being and cannot be destroyed. The resulting world is disturbing; authoritarian and Aryan, ‘it had all the sinister fruitiness of Hitler Youth propaganda’ (47), suggestive of ethnic cleansing and the hegemony of white, American culture, as can be seen in the inhabitants of the city: They were white, blond, and they probably had blue eyes. They were American. Dialta had said that the Future had come to America first, but had finally passed it by. But not here, in the heart of the Dream. Here, we’d gone on and on, in a dream logic that knew nothing of pollution, the finite bounds of fossil fuel, or foreign wars it was possible to lose. They were smug, happy, and utterly content with themselves and their world. And in the Dream, it was their world. (47) It is the parallax view itself that allows this homogeneous, utopian future to be revealed as a utopia for the few, and a death camp for the many. This white supremacist vision of the future suggests that American science fiction has, and perhaps still is, guilty of colonising the future. In this sense, the Blue Ant trilogy could be seen as a postcolonial science fiction, one that no longer feels the future is there for the taking.6 It is also a parallax view that allows us to see the present in a new light. After his encounter the photographer goes to LA where he finds, ‘Hollywood was full of people who looked too much like the couple I’d seen in Arizona’ (49). He can no longer see his own world from the inside; he sees it in a parallax view, via the imagined future of the past, and learns something from that comparison. The ‘luxury’ of those ‘fully imagined cultural futures’ (57) Bigend remembers is one that is available to a select class during a specific historical period and is one that should be viewed as complicated and potentially toxic. Memory also provides a parallax in that one can see things differently by comparing the attitudes of one’s past self with one’s current outlook. The

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narrative of one’s own life runs alongside false or misinterpreted memories which, in turn, compete with commonly accepted history to establish the ‘truth’. This is the true import of the title of Zero History (2010). Zero History’s Milgrim has erased his history; a decade of drug addiction has kept him ‘off the grid’ and there is no evidence of him in official systems. Furthermore, Milgrim has lost much of his memory from this period, his ‘memory of the past decade or so was porous, unreliable as to sequence’ (47). This empty patch in his personal history leaves him estranged from his younger self, whom he views as a separate person in many ways. In addition, Milgrim has internalised the voice of his therapist, which interrupts Milgrim’s own thoughts: ‘It was [Bigend’s] theory (or “narrative”, Milgrim’s therapist in Basel might have said)’ (400). Milgrim sees the action of the novel through a parallax view – he views the action as parts of his fragmented self while also interpreting it through the eyes of his therapist. ‘Milgrim felt as though he’d become his therapist, in some weird role-flip, or rather Hollis’s [therapist]’ (175). The ‘zero history’ of the novel’s title, then, refers to the characters’ negotiation of their own, personal, pasts as parallels to the accepted, public understanding of history. We can understand ‘zero history’ with reference to Darko Suvin’s term mentioned above, the ‘zero world’. The zero world represents the mundane, ‘real’ world available to the reader in daily life, as opposed to the alternative worlds offered by science fiction. Zero History recognises that there is a narrative accepted as objective history, but this narrative is constantly undermined by the personal histories of the characters and the secret histories of the worlds they investigate. Personal histories, such as Milgrim’s history of addiction, are blurred with the narratives of the zero history; ‘[Bigend] valued Milgrim’s questions. Milgrim had arrived from a decadelong low-grade brownout, and was, according to Bigend, like someone stepping from a space capsule. Smooth clay, awaiting the telltale imprint of a new century’ (141). One of the secret histories that acts as an alternative to the zero history is the world of espionage, a world in which Hollis’s boyfriend Garreth has worked as a kind of stunt man. Hollis describes Garreth as being a graffiti artist of history (61) but says she feels uncomfortable with his role: ‘I need the world to have a surface, the same surface everyone sees. I don’t like feeling like I’m always about to fall through, into something else’ (61). This kind of parallax view of history, achieved by layering personal, public and secret histories over each other means that history cannot be taken seriously as a single narrative. The oscillation between science fiction and realism, the past and the present, the past and the future, is reflected in Gibson’s habitual alteration between focalising characters. Since the Sprawl trilogy, his books have been constructed through establishing the contingency of a character’s perspective. For example Case, the main protagonist and point of view character of Neuromancer (1984) is never mentioned directly in Neuromancer’s sequel, Count Zero (1986). His name only appears in Mona Lisa Overdrive (1988), the final book in the trilogy, as Molly Millions (now using the alias Sally Shears)

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converses with a digital construct of her associate, the Finn. She is looking after a young girl named Kumiko, whose point of view is used to focalise the scene. After Molly briefly sketches the details of how her relationship with Case came to an end, ‘Case, who seemed to Kumiko to have been something more than Sally’s partner, never reentered her story’ (176). Gibson’s habit of writing trilogies is associated with this concern with the contingency of past, present and future. If a character is the main viewpoint in a narrative, as with Case in Neuromancer, and is later side-lined, his fate explained with an offhand comment in a later novel, the foregrounding of the new perspective is complete. A character’s history is diminished in light of the new narrative, revealed as contingent to the larger narrative arc, with the implication that history itself is contingent and alters depending on the viewpoint. This technique is also used in Zero History, but more frequently as chapters alternate between Hollis’s and Milgrim’s perspectives. This is particularly apparent at the Salon du Vintage. Hollis and Milgrim split up and experience the fair separately, in alternating chapters, so that several identical images or examples of architecture appear, but filtered through their different perspectives and changed, in the process, accordingly. As Milgrim enters, he frames the fair through its objects: He was more at home in the world of objects, his therapist said, than the world of people. The Salon du Vintage, he assured himself, was about objects. Wishing to become the person the Salon du Vintage would want him to be, hence somehow less visible, he climbed a handsomely renovated stairway to the second floor. (111) Milgrim feels that the Salon du Vintage wants him to be less visible, as if humanity must make itself scarce in this object-oriented world. The objects even define the way that he expresses this as the staircase, and, by extension, the architecture of the building, circumscribe his actions, defining how he inhabits the world. Hollis experiences the fair quite differently: Every second or third person in her field of vision was Japanese, and many were moving in approximately one direction. She went with them, up a minimalist stairway of pale Scandinavian wood, emerging into the first of two very large bright rooms, chandeliers glittering above carefully arranged racks of clothing, glass-topped display tables and pieces of period furniture. (102) By contrast to Milgrim’s object-focused view, Hollis observes the people and chooses her direction by going along with the crowd. The oscillation between the two perspectives creates a parallax view as the contingency of an individual perspective is exposed and the certainty of any one perspective is called into question.

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Gibson as a cargo-cultist In an entry to his blog from the 11 April 2010, Gibson writes: ‘I think I’m more of an interpreter of technologies, an amateur anthropologist. I’m a sort of Victorian weekend naturalist of technology, who somehow found a way to make a living doing that.’ Gary Westfahl (2013) describes this as ‘one of the most revelatory comments Gibson ever made about himself ’ (69) and seems to accept that ‘Gibson has no interest in theorizing about the information he provides … His role is to provide raw materials from which others can forge theories themselves’ (69). This claimed approach – that of the anthropologist with a perceptive eye, hesitant to make value judgements on his subjects, forbidden to meddle with their lives in any way for fear of consequences – positions Gibson as particularly omniscient though completely omni-impotent. In taking on this role he claims to ignore the political impact that anthropologists can have by presenting their subjects as agents of change, as examples that have much to teach other cultures.7 However, this depoliticisation of anthropology and anthropological perspectives is not actually at work in Gibson’s novels. Gibson does not offer an objective perspective, as shown above through the powerful defamiliarisation of science fiction realism and the ways in which that process undermines narratives, whether those be historical, political, or ideological. In his interview with Westfahl, Gibson also compares himself to a ‘cargo-cultist’ (173), thereby reversing the role of anthropologist and the subject of study. The concept of the cargo cult comes from anthropological observation of Melanesian societies which, upon first contact with Western societies, began to develop practices to encourage the return of the visitors and their cargo. The concept has since become a popular term, even as it has become a contested one in anthropology with some arguing that the term has outlived its usefulness while others maintain that it invites a cultural critique of Western society and colonial practices (Otto 2009). The concept of the cargo cult can turn the hegemonic, Western, dominant culture into the alien culture, the material fragments of our existence being just as strange to previously uncontacted societies as crop circles have been to our culture in the twentieth century. In science fiction, the cargo cult has affinities with first contact stories, especially the Strugatsky Brothers’ Roadside Picnic (1972), in which a short alien Visitation leaves behind a series of Visitation Zones containing artefacts that humans struggle to comprehend. Gibson approaches the subject of cargo-cultism in his short story, ‘Hinterlands’ (1986: 76–98), in which Toby Halpert, an occupant of the space station Heaven, explains the station’s history and his role on board. The station is located at the site of an anomaly; an astronaut on a standard mission to Mars briefly disappeared and reappeared, dead with an extra-terrestrial seashell in her hand. Further experiments see astronauts returned either dead or insane. Toby acts as a ‘surrogate’; through psychoactive drugs and psychosexual compatibility, he combines his personality with his ‘handler’, Hiro in a ‘handler-surrogate gestalt’ (86), a combined personality that can provide the

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astronaut with an emotional crutch, keeping them sane for long enough to tell their stories. The nature of the situation is described using the cargo cult concept: If the first ones to come back had only arrived with seashells, I doubt that Heaven would be out here. Heaven was built after a dead Frenchman returned with a twelve-centimeter ring of magnetically coded steel locked in his cold hand … We may never find out where or how he got it, but that ring was the Rosetta stone for cancer. So now it’s cargo cult time for the human race. We can pick things up out there that we might not stumble across in research in a thousand years … Charmian says we’re like those poor suckers on their islands, who spend all their time building landing strips to make the big silver birds come back. Charmian says that contact with ‘superior’ civilizations is something you don’t wish on your worst enemy. (88–89) The move from the science fiction of ‘Hinterlands’ to the science fiction realism of Zero History means that the radical ‘outside’ of alien civilisations is replaced with a sense of powerlessness and fear in the face of the civilisation that humans have created, as though that society was the product of alien life. Globalisation itself is experienced as an invading culture, occupying a space that might once have offered a sense of community or authenticity (even if those concepts were, as ‘The Gernsback Continuum’ points out, based on dubious premises). At a fashion fair in Paris’s Salon du Vintage, Hollis observes some Chanel dresses on display and her gaze suddenly switches to that of a cargo cultist, ‘the eight brightly suited dress forms feeling suddenly like tomb statuary, power objects, the fetishes of a departed shamaness, occultly cocked and ready’ (105). The ‘sudden’ change that renders the clothing mythical and alien is one of perspective; Hollis’s perspective undergoes a gestalt switch as she begins to view the clothes from a different position; she views them as if she is foreign to the world that produced them, as if she has lost her sympathy with her cultural context. The ‘power’ of these objects means that the clothes come to represent a threat, ‘cocked’ like a gun ready to fire. Hollis feels her own alienation from the clothes, but it is not that alienation that she fears; what she really fears is becoming consumed by the culture, that the dresses and the culture they represent will become natural to her. This conflict between the identities of anthropologist and cargo-cultist, as it appears in the text, is another parallax view. The discourse of anthropology can only document cultures from an external position, while the discourse of the cargo-cultist can only fully be experienced as existing within a culture that is markedly different from that of the invader and with no experience of the material objects such a system of conspicuous consumption might produce. The parallax view between the perspective of the anthropologist and that of the cargo-cultist maps onto Gibson’s observation that the science fiction

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writer adopts a parallax view of history. Like science fiction, anthropology invites an estranging encounter with our own culture, as it gives the opportunity to view one’s culture from an outsider perspective, a connection that is perhaps most clearly seen in Ursula K. Le Guin’s influence from her anthropologist parents, Alfred and Theodora Kroeber.8 The seemingly contradictory self-identification in Gibson’s critical work with both the role of the cargocultist and the role of the anthropologist, reveals that he is aware of this double vision in some sense. His work seeks to at once embody the curiosity of one discovering a new culture, and the subject facing invasion from a force he is yet to comprehend. He cannot understand, he can only report. He cannot explain the significance of the objects in front of him, he can only sense it and respect them intuitively, presenting them to the reader in the fragmentary style of what I referred to in Chapter 1 as a gomi aesthetic.

Jamesian ekphrasis in Zero History In The Parallax View, Žižek presents a reading of Henry James’s literary style, with particular reference to The Wings of the Dove (1902) and The Golden Bowl (1904), illustrating how a parallax view might function in literary criticism. He does this by arguing that many of Henry James’s stylistic traits – psychological nominalisation, deixis – have the cumulative effect of disenfranchising or marginalising the subject: ‘The subject is not a thing to which attributes are attached, or which undergoes changes – it is a kind of empty container, a space in which things can be located’ (125). He connects this treatment of the subject with the historical era in which James was working: we should not be surprised that the ultimate topic of Henry James’s work is the effect of capitalist modernization on ethical life: indeterminacy and contingency undermine the old reliance on stable forms prescribing how we are to act and to evaluate our own and others’ acts; there is no longer a fixed frame which enables us to find our (ethical) way. (126) These ‘stable forms’ or ‘fixed frames’ represent a gestalt to which the characters no longer have access. The same anxieties have arisen in William Gibson’s novels, as they depict another time of change and uncertainty, represented in the Blue Ant trilogy through the volatility of the financial markets and the lack of a fixed frame as characters are aware of the contingency of their own perspectives. This creates a division between what is seen and what is understood, as can be seen through reading Zero History alongside James’s The Portrait of a Lady (1881). Like Zero History, The Portrait of a Lady is a novel by an American set primarily in England and Europe. The gaze of someone writing about a culture alien to their own is crucial to the construction of both novels and is expressed through both novels’ use of ekphrasis, the description of the visual arts through written language. As James himself writes in his 1908 preface to the novel, ‘I

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had, within the few preceding years, come to live in London, and the “international” light … was the light in which so much of the picture hung’ (614). The position of the writer from the New World as outside of the European culture which is the subject of their prose creates a kind of parallax view, throwing a different light on the subject matter. The comparison between the two authors has also been suggested through reactions to Gibson’s work which situate him in the tradition of the American novel and tend to draw on Henry James as a predecessor. In a review of Pattern Recognition for The New York Times, Lisa Zeidner (2003) recognises The Portrait of the Lady as one of the novel’s literary antecedents, via Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 (1966): ‘The book … manages to be, in the fullest traditional sense, a novel of consciousness – less science fiction than Henry James. After all, Oedipa Maas, the truth seeker of Lot 49, is sort of a pot-smoking Isabel Archer, inheritance and all. Cayce is Isabel, with a search engine.’ The comparison is also drawn by N. Katherine Hayles (1999) when, in her reading of Neuromancer (37–38), she argues that the use of point of view (pov) in Gibson’s cyberspace is a development of James’s reference to the gaze of the author in his preface to The Portrait of a Lady. Hayles contends that Gibson’s pov takes James’s gaze to a new level, one that seeks to transcend embodiment. However, in reading Zero History through the lens of the parallax view and the motif of ekphrasis, one finds that embodied positionality is a key feature of the text and one, I would argue, that Gibson has employed all along. In ‘Ekphrasis and Representation’ (1991), James Heffernan seeks to revive ekphrasis as a literary term and, in doing so, defines it as ‘the verbal representation of graphic representation’ (299, emphasis in original), thereby differentiating ekphrasis from iconicity and pictorialism as ‘it explicitly represents representation itself. What ekphrasis represents in words, therefore, must itself be representational’ (299, emphasis in original). In its essence, The Portrait of a Lady, is an ekphrastic text. The novel’s title has a double meaning as the novel itself is ‘the portrait’ of Isabel Archer, the young woman who ruins her life through a bad marriage; but Isabel as a character is also a representation of herself. She represents different things to different characters, she is aestheticised and thus robbed of her authentic being. Her representations become more real than her being itself, making the novel ekphrastic on multiple levels. The etymological root of ‘ekphrasis’ means ‘speaking out’ or ‘telling in full’. This is the medium through which Isabel is expressed and explained, rather than directly through her own speech. ‘The ekphrastic tradition of generating a narrative from the still moment of graphic art’ (305) is evident in James’s own description of the genesis of The Portrait of a Lady as he traces a similar movement, from a still graphic image to a narrative: ‘the image of the young feminine nature that I had had for so considerable a time all curiously at my disposal … with the recall, in addition, of my pious desire but to place my treasure right’ (609). James describes the movement from still life to narrative as the main challenge in writing the novel, ‘positively organising an ado about Isabel Archer’ (609).

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The title of The Portrait of a Lady foregrounds the importance of ekphrasis to understanding the text. The novel is in the third person and, like Zero History, alternates between the perspective of the main protagonist, Isabel Archer, and the other characters in the novel. We first see Isabel through the eyes of her cousin Ralph as they wander through the gallery of a country house admiring the portraits: She took a candlestick herself and held it slowly here and there; she lifted it high, and as she did so, he found himself pausing in the middle of the gallery and bending his eyes much less upon the pictures than on her figure. He lost nothing, in truth, by these wandering glances; for she was better worth looking at than most works of art. (55–56) The aestheticisation of the subject, as Isabel is aestheticised here through her comparison with the paintings, leads to a kind of dehumanisation. The human being is a product for consumption; ‘Her life should always be in harmony with the most pleasing impression she should produce; she would be what she appeared, and she would appear what she was’ (60). Hollis suffers similarly to reconcile her commodified image with herself. Milgrim speculates about this as he comes across her picture while wandering through the Salon du Vintage: The first thing he saw there was that poster of a younger Hollis, looking at once nervy and naughty. This was not the actual poster, he judged, but an amateurish reproduction, oversized and lacking in detail. He wondered what it would be like for her, seeing that. (111) Here, Hollis and her self-image are filtered through layers of separation. We are given her image through Milgrim’s perspective and, not only that, but through the filter of an amateur replica of a poster which, in itself, reads as constructed as the character of Hollis known to the reader would not be described as ‘nervy and naughty’ with the coy sexualisation implied. When Hollis herself walks past the picture, ‘she carefully kept the blow-up of the Corbijn portrait out of her field of vision as she reached the second floor’ (113). Not only does she avoid the picture, she identifies it as belonging to the photographer, Corbijn, rather than as a portrait of herself. Her image has taken on a life of its own and it is estranged from her subjectivity.9 This move towards ekphrasis releases the narrative potential of both Isabel Archer and Hollis Henry, both unlikely subjects for narration; in Isabel’s case because of the contemporary perception of women’s lives as trivial compared to those of men, particularly the rich inner life necessary to depict the tragedy of her situation; as James opined in his preface to the novel, women are ‘of a class difficult, in the individual case, to make a centre of interest’ (610). In

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Hollis’s case, it is because of her own powerlessness, the inner battle that she fights throughout both novels, never quite sure whether she acts because of her own free will or because of the machinations of Bigend and the corporate system he represents, a problem she shares with Milgrim: She looked over at Milgrim, lost in whatever he was doing. Whatever he was, she found she trusted him. He seemed peeled, somehow, transparent, strangely free of underlying motive. Seemed used as well. Bigend had created him, or would feel that he had; had cobbled him up from whatever wreckage he’d initially presented. That was what Bigend did, she thought, putting her head back and closing her eyes. She supposed it was what he was doing with her as well, or would, if he could. (180) This loss of free will is dramatised through the novel’s ekphrasis, through its negotiation of Hollis as a representation of herself, just as Isabel Archer acts as a representation of herself in The Portrait of a Lady. The contrast between the subject’s view of herself and the view that others have of her, the contrast between authentic being (often inaccessible) and inauthentic representation, is crucial to the constantly shifting perspectives in both novels. The multiplicity of the subject necessitates a parallax view, a consciousness of the reader’s position which produces different meanings dependent on the focalisation or whether the reader’s gaze is directed towards the signifier or the signified, the subject or her representation. This confusion wrought by the aestheticisation of the subject is repeated and compounded by further instances of ekphrasis in both Zero History and The Portrait of a Lady. Hollis begins to feel that she is losing her power to distinguish between the ‘real’ world and her imaginary world through her encounter with a series of paintings; ‘the short sections of corridor, between, were hung with small watercolours, landscapes, unpeopled, each one featuring a distant folly. The very same distant folly, she’d noticed, regardless of the scene or region depicted’ (4). It is the same folly regardless of the region depicted as though a function of Hollis’s gaze rather than the painting itself, leading her to doubt her own perceptions and, by extension, her own sanity. This impression is reinforced as the follies begin to multiply: On her way through the corridors to Number Four, she noticed that one of the landscapes now contained two follies, identical, one further back, on a distant hillside. Surely it had always been there, the second folly, unnoticed. She’d give it no further thought, she decided firmly. (317) The reader is later told, through Milgrim, the answer to this visual riddle: Digging deeper into the archival subbasement of Cabinet’s website, where he might learn, for instance, that the watercolours in the hallways leading

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The parallax view in Zero History to Hollis’s room were early twentieth-century, by the expatriate American eccentric Doran Lumley. Cabinet owned thirty of these, and rotated them regularly. (398)

However, Milgrim never shares this information with Hollis so, from her perspective, the paintings in the hotel maintain their malicious air and the mystery is never solved. This highlights the deception inherent in representation while reinforcing the parallax view between Hollis’s and Milgrim’s perspectives. The confusion that representation causes between the gaze and the object under the gaze is further shown in the title of ch. 74, ‘Map, Territory’ (361). The title evokes the Jorge Luis Borges story ‘On Exactitude in Science’ (1946), which tells the tale of a map so accurate that it had a 1:1 ratio and was laid over the kingdom it depicted. The story was later used by Jean Baudrillard in Simulation and Simulacra (1981) to explain his theory that the contemporary world is now inhabited by simulacra – that is, simulations with no original. Zero History shows the map and the territory as occupying a shared, or at least complementary, plane, playing on that Baudrillardian idea that perhaps the territory is no more ‘real’ than the map. The technology of GPS extends the potential of space by extending the maps, as does the iPhone on which Milgrim views the map and understands the area for the first time: He looked down at the screen, the glowing map. Saw it as a window into the city’s underlying fabric, as though he held something from which a rectangular chip of London’s surface had been pried, revealing a substrate of bright code. But really, wasn’t the opposite true, the city the code that underlay the map? There was an expression about that, but he’d never understood it, and now couldn’t remember how it went. The territory wasn’t the map? (362) In ‘Why Ekphrasis?’ (2007), Valentine Cunningham gives some reasons for the continuing textual power of ekphrasis and argues that ekphrasis is a kind of postmodernism avant la lettre because it closely depicts a material object through the medium of literature, thereby drawing attention to the absence of the object itself: There are, after all, no natural signs in view. All the objects of the ekphrastic gaze are made ones. Doubly so, in fact, for these made objects are also remade out of words. And ekphrasis knows that from the start. The portrait looks alive, a record of the living one, a presencing of the living. But everything is, to use Spenser’s repeated word, just a seeming. There is my last duchess painted on the wall looking as if alive, but only as if. (68, emphasis in original)

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Ekphrasis draws attention to this lack of natural signs; but it also expresses a yearning for a deeper reality, a presence, as Cunningham goes on to argue: a set of paradoxes, of course – eloquent silence, plenitudinous emptiness, exact inexactitudes, present absence … Paradoxes, I would say, educed, manifested, in all ekphrasis … it’s the tension between the realist, presencing, logocentric desire and the counter-pressure of absence. (71) This tension between presence and absence, one which Cunningham reads as a tension between realism and ‘the counter-pressure of absence’, reflecting the tension between realism and science fiction, is depicted in one of Zero History’s several-times-removed ekphrastic descriptions; the description of Hollis’s book, Presences: Locative Art in America. The book depicts the examples of locative art that Hollis observed in Spook Country, but here we get not only a literary representation of the art, but a literary representation of the mediation of the art. This deferral of meaning through layers of media can be seen, as Cunningham argues, as a yearning for that presence that ekphrasis, by its nature, denies: paintings and the plastic rest, seem as if they could be the kind of texts to overcome that tension, the tension of art, in the direction of positive presence, realism, truth, thereness, and so might provide proof, an example, or at least a vital analogy of that overcoming. They do not overcome the tension, because what is truly insurmountable can never be surmounted. But ekphrasticists – even the most postmodern ones – keep on trying, because they keep on hankering. (71) This yearning is common to Zero History and The Portrait of a Lady, and is shown in the frequent use both novels make of ekphrastic imagery. Despite Zero History’s destabilisation and defamiliarisation of the narrative of history, temporality, and realism itself, it still hopes to find positive presence – even if only by implying its existence through the depiction of absence.

Conclusion Despite Gibson’s insistence on his role as a passive reporter of cultural ephemera, a ‘naturalist’, there is a moral framework to his novels. It is not didactic, but is wrapped up in his style. Žižek notes the same effect in the novels of Henry James as the lack of a moral centre in itself allows for another kind of morality to emerge: The uncertainty itself, the lack of a fixed socio-ethical frame of reference, far from simply condemning us to moral relativism, opens up a new

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The parallax view in Zero History ‘higher’ field of ethical experience, that of intersubjectivity, of the mutual dependence of subjects, of the need not only to rely on others, but also to recognize the ethical weight of the others’ claims on me. (127)

Bigend challenges such an ethical perspective as he sees himself (and is, in the sense of power) above the people with whom he interacts. By extension, the globalisation of capital is critiqued throughout the Blue Ant trilogy, and in Zero History particularly. Finally, Žižek shows how, in James’s works, objects become subjects and subjects become spaces for the interaction of abstract concepts and relations. Like the titular golden bowl, for example: The cracked bowl is thus what Lacan calls the signifier of the barred Other, the embodiment of the falsity of intersubjective relations condensed in it; consequently, we should not treat it primarily as a metaphor but as an agent in and of intersubjective relations: its possession, destruction, the knowledge about its possession, and so on, structure the libidinal landscape. (141) We see this in the Blue Ant trilogy from start to finish. In Pattern Recognition the footage is, essentially, a meaningless object in which relationships between people (fellow fans, marketing executives who wish to harness its power, curious parties who want to know its history) become material. In Spook Country, the Iraqi reconstruction money takes on this role, as the money is followed around the world and back before becoming unusable. And in the blue ant itself, a toy given to Hollis by Bigend, the paranoia associated with the corporation and, by extension, with marketing and globalised capital becomes solidified. Hollis finds it impossible to lose the ant; it travels with her even when she forgets to pack it and it turns out to contain a tracking device as if the paranoia and distrust that she felt towards the Blue Ant corporation had congealed into a physical object. She even puts her passionate (negative) feelings about Bigend into the toy: She’d tried abandoning it, at least once, but somehow it was still with her … She’d come, however vaguely, to imagine it as a sort of inverse charm. A cartoon rendition of the trademark of his agency, she’d let it serve as a secret symbol of her unwillingness to have anything further to do with him. (Gibson 2010: 17) While these objects might be dismissed as MacGuffins, they have a greater significance, structuring not just the plot, but the landscape of the characters’ subjectivities.

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By reading the novel psychoanalytically, and identifying the parallax views on which the novel relies – the relationship between science fiction and realism, fiction and reality, History and histories – we can think of the novel and its relationship to the world from a gestalt perspective. We see that what the novel offers us is an alternative view, and what that alternative view provides is a different place from which to look at our real world, to see it in a new way.

Notes 1 Suvin describes the novum, or ‘new thing’, that defines the science fiction text as ‘a totalizing phenomenon or relationship deviating from the author’s and implied reader’s norm of reality’ (Suvin 2010: 68) so there is a precedent for considering the author’s world and the implied reader’s world to be represented by the term ‘zero world’. Of course, the world of the reader may deviate significantly from that of the writer, which is one of the reasons that science fiction is said to become dated more quickly than other forms of fiction. However, for our purposes here studying contemporary fiction this is not particularly problematic. 2 Despite these affinities between the parallax view and the perspective of science fiction the term is not commonly found in the genre itself. Exceptions are Robert J. Sawyer’s Neanderthal Parallax trilogy of novels (2002–2003) and Keith Brooke and Eric Browne’s collaborative short story collection Parallax View (2013). The parallax in these titles refers to, respectively, the difference in perspective between two worlds as an alternative Earth, occupied by Neanderthals, is discovered and the difference in perspective between two writers as they collaborate. Outside of the genre, Alan J. Pakula directed the 1974 film The Parallax View. The film is a paranoid thriller about a conspiracy theory and, as such, shares more with Gibson’s Zero History (2010) than the science fiction texts mentioned. It is interesting that while Slavoj Žižek is noted for his interest in film and often draws on films to illustrate his philosophical arguments, he never mentions the movie The Parallax View in his book of the same name (2006). 3 Žižek adapts the term from Kojin Karatani’s use in Transcritique: On Kant and Marx (2003), and ‘The Parallax View’ was the title of Žižek’s 2004 review of Karatani’s book. 4 These issues are explained more fully by Michelle Grier who argues that the concept of transcendental illusion is crucial in order to understand Kant’s writings in Kant’s Doctrine of Transcendental Illusion (2001). 5 The ‘Bigend’ trilogy is another way of referring to what I call here the Blue Ant trilogy. When Tomberg published his article in 2013 there was no consensus among readers or through official channels as to which title would become accepted, though now Penguin Random House, who publish the books, refer to the Blue Ant series. 6 For a study of the relationship between science fiction and postcolonialism see Jessica Langer’s Postcolonialism and Science Fiction (2011). 7 A notable example is the work of David Graeber, who seeks to repoliticise anthropology in works such as Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology (2004) and Towards an Anthropological Theory of Value: The False Coin of Our Own Dreams (2002). Graeber argues that anthropology is intrinsically political because it offers alternatives to post-industrialised neoliberal capitalism. 8 For more on this comparison between science fiction and anthropology, including in the case of Ursula K. Le Guin, see ‘“Becoming Acquainted With All That Pain”: Nursing as Activism in Naomi Mitchison’s Science Fiction’ (McFarlane 2019). 9 For a psychoanalytic reading of Hollis’s distance from her own image see Chapter 4.

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Bibliography Cunningham, Victoria. ‘Why Ekphrasis?’ Classical Philology, vol. 102, no. 1, 2007, pp. 57–71. Delucci, Theresa. ‘“We’re All Living in Someone Else’s Past”: William Gibson Speaks at NYPL.’ Tor, 22 April2013, www.tor.com/blogs/2013/04/william-gibson-live-at-nypl. Fischlin, Daniel, Veronica Hollinger and Andrew Taylor. ‘“The Charisma Leak”: A Conversation with William Gibson and Bruce Sterling.’ Science Fiction Studies, vol. 19, no. 1, 1992, pp. 1–16. Foster, Hal. ‘Postmodernism in Parallax.’ October, vol. 63, 1993, pp. 3–20. Freedman, Carl. Critical Theory and Science Fiction. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2000. Freud, Sigmund. ‘The Uncanny.’ In The Uncanny. London: Penguin, 2003, pp. 121–211. Gibson, William. Burning Chrome. London: HarperCollins, 1986. Gibson, William. Mona Lisa Overdrive. London: HarperCollins, 1988. Gibson, William. Pattern Recognition. London: HarperCollins, 2003. Gibson, William. Spook Country. London: HarperCollins, 2007. Gibson, William. Zero History. London: HarperCollins, 2010. Gibson, William. ‘William Gibson’s Blog.’ 11 April2010. http://williamgibsonblog. blogspot.com. Graeber, David. Towards an Anthropological Theory of Value: The False Coin of Our Own Dreams. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002. Graeber, David. Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology. Chicago, IL: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2004. Grier, Michelle. Kant’s Doctrine of Transcendental Illusion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Hayles, N. Katherine. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1999. Heffernan, James. ‘Ekphrasis and Representation.’ New Literary History, vol. 22, no. 2, 1991, pp. 297–316. Hicks, Jesse. ‘An Interview with William Gibson.’ The Verge, 24 January2012, www. theverge.com/2012/1/24/2724370/william-gibson-interview. Hollinger, Veronica. ‘Stories About the Future: From Patterns of Expectation to Pattern Recognition.’ Science Fiction Studies, vol. 33, no. 3, 2006, pp. 452–472. James, Henry. The Portrait of a Lady. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2001. Kennedy, Duncan. ‘Turning Wood into Bones.’ BBC News, 8 January2010, http:// news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/8446637.stm. Karatani, Kojin. Transcritique: On Kant and Marx, trans. Sabu Koshu. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003. Langer, Jessica. Postcolonialism and Science Fiction. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. McFarlane, Anna. ‘“Becoming Acquainted With All That Pain”: Nursing as Activism in Naomi Mitchison’s Science Fiction.’ Literature and Medicine, vol. 37, no. 2, 2019, pp. 278–297. OED. ‘parallax, n.’ OED Online, June2020, www.oed.com/view/Entry/137461?redir ectedFrom=parallax&. Otto, Ton. ‘What Happened to Cargo Cults? Material Religions in Melanesia and the West.’ Social Analysis, vol. 53, no. 1, 2009, pp. 82–102.

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Strugatsky, Arkady, and Boris Strugatsky. Roadside Picnic, trans. Antonina W. Bouis. New York: MacMillan Publishing Co., 1977. Suvin, Darko. ‘On the Poetics of the Science Fiction Genre.’ College English, vol. 34, no. 3, 1972, pp. 372–382. Suvin, Darko. Defined By A Hollow: Essays on Utopia, Science Fiction and Political Epistemology, Ralahine Utopian Studies 6. Oxford: Peter Lang, 2010. Tomberg, Jaak. ‘On the “Double Vision” of Realism and Estrangement in William Gibson’s Bigend Trilogy.’ Science Fiction Studies, vol. 40, no. 2, 2013, pp. 263–285. Westfahl, Gary. William Gibson. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2013. Zeidner, Lisa. ‘Netscape.’ New York Times, 19 January2003, www.nytimes.com/2003/ 01/19/books/netscape.html. Žižek, Slavoj. The Parallax View. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006.

6

The haptic interface in The Peripheral

Introduction Upon its publication, The Peripheral (2014) appeared to mark a departure in Gibson’s writing habits. With its time-travel narrative and futuristic setting, the novel showed a return to science fiction, but accompanied by a more developed social conscience and a greater interest in the specifics of the decline of civilisation in the era of climate change than had been evident in his first six novels. Gibson also maintained that the novel would remain a stand-alone affair, in large part because of the ‘genre cheese potential’ (Newitz 2014) that comes with the multiverse concept that the novel employed – although we now know, with the publication of 2020’s Agency and the promise of a third book reframing The Peripheral as the first in the ‘Jackpot Trilogy’, that this would turn out not to be the case. While its concerns differentiate The Peripheral from Gibson’s previous work, in terms of its philosophical position it is the continuation of a career-long trajectory. As I have argued throughout this monograph, Gibson’s work is consistently concerned with the relationship of the individual to their society and the interface between the two, as mediated through the senses. The Sprawl and the Bridge trilogies privileged vision as the most important of the senses, particularly in cyberspace where virtual reality is experienced as a gaze on a spatialised landscape. The Blue Ant trilogy began to resituate the body and its affects as key to engaging with the world, while The Peripheral takes this philosophical journey further, privileging the haptic as a key site of phenomenological engagement. The term ‘haptic’ refers to the sense of touch, in the same way that ‘optic’ refers to the sense of vision. As a kind of phenomenology, a gateway to understanding the world around us, it is perhaps best understood through the lens of affect theory which attempts to think about intuitions and unconscious autonomic responses to the environment in a move based on the theories of Gilles Deleuze. ‘Affect Studies’, as Robert Seyfert describes, ‘captures the situational nature of affect in conceptualizing affects, as emerging at the moment when bodies meet, affecting the bodies involved in the encounter, and marking the transformation/s of the bodies’ (29, emphasis in original). This means that ‘affects’ can include haptics, the focus of my attention here, DOI: 10.4324/9781003082477-7

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as well as emotions. The increasing importance of the haptic and of affect more generally are crucial to understanding the development of the politics in Gibson’s novels over his career. While the use of vision in Gibson’s novels always served to highlight relationality, the nature of vision meant that a sense of distance was implied between observer and observed. In contrast, the haptic and affective relations demand characters recognise their interdependence as embodied beings in a shared world. This turn to the haptic therefore offers a new ecocritical politics that changes the ways in which the future is depicted, reacting to the threats of climate change, remote warfare, and the increasing financialisation of the global economy. Once again Gibson is contributing to the direction of science fiction as a genre and as a literary technique by asking what we need from the future, and how science fiction can serve this need. Faced with these multiple threats, which do not just endanger the direction of the future but the very concept itself, Gibson responds with a kind of science fiction that emphasises the interdependence of the individual, society, and ecology through affective environments. While The Peripheral brings elements to the fore that have always been core to Gibson’s work – the importance of embodiment and of viewing the world relationally, through a gestalt perspective, are key – it does so with a new urgency, founded on its concern with the climate crisis. The climate crisis that we are living through and anticipating is another strange game with time. We have not enough now to stand on, so we await the crisis even as we experience it. It is also another case of the future arriving with uneven distribution. There are already displaced people, climate refugees, but still Western political discourse tends to frame climate change as a possibility that may happen in the near future, rather than an issue that is already shaping our way of life. Viewing Gibson’s work through a gestalt perspective can help us to approach the issues that suffuse this text; the interdependence of humans with their environments. The holistic nature of a gestalt perspective and its emphasis on relationality highlight the interdependence and continuation between humans, environment and technology. This relationality has long been core to the very concept of ecology. In Neocybernetics and Narrative (2014), Bruce Clarke gives an account of the close connections between the development of ecological thinking and the development of cybernetics through the Macy Conferences in 1942. Clarke points out that pioneers of ecological thinking, G. Evelyn Hutchinson and Gregory Bateson were present at the conferences and later paid tribute to the deep influence that cybernetics, and particularly the concept of autopoiesis had on the development of their thinking. This relationship between cybernetics, autopoiesis and ecology is so complementary that Clarke claims that, ‘ecology is a species of systems theory, perhaps even a keystone species’ (144). Viewing ecology as relational via systems thinking and a gestalt approach foregrounds the interdependence of humans with their environment, an issue that has been increasingly of concern to those who carry the mantle of the gestalt psychologists – that is, gestalt therapists who aim to put the concepts of gestalt psychology into clinical practice. Gestalt therapy continues to

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promote a holistic view of the subject as embedded within an environment, but in the clinic this has sometimes not been put into practice, with the patient–therapist dyad encouraging the analysis of the individual, intrapersonal conflict, and interpersonal conflict with little concern for the wider social systems in which that individual is embedded. Steffi Bednarek has worked to bring this bias in the clinic to the attention of the field: Our theoretical view is holistic and encompasses all that is part of the field. Field theory and our notion of self as being formed at the contact boundary emphasises our embeddedness in the world and our reciprocal interdependence with this world. So how come that we are still relatively ill prepared to include the state of the world and our relationship with it in what we do in our consulting rooms? (20) This question is perhaps even more pressing given the potential that gestalt therapy might have in dealing with the issues faced by climate refugees. Vikram Kolmannskog argues that gestalt therapy might be complementary to the kinds of transformation demanded by climate change because, ‘the Gestalt approach … includes attention to body, mind, emotions, spiritual aspects, social relationships and the wider environment. It challenges dualist views or dichotomies such as inner and outer, mind and body, humans and the natural environment’ (80). Gibson has, of course, always been interested in relational systems as we have seen throughout this book, for example the chaos theory discussed in Chapter 2. Climate change science is fundamentally influenced by chaos theory and its legacy as scientists are forced to consider the earth as a holistic system whose forces will interact with each other, sometimes in unexpected ways. The instability and unpredictability of weather systems and geographical transformations (some of which may trigger positive feedback loops, speeding up previously steady processes and causing domino effects in other systems) mean that science becomes an increasingly uncertain method for making specific predictions about what changes will take place and when. The need to consider humans as embedded within the environment is expressed in The Peripheral through a preoccupation with skin and the sense associated with it – the haptic. While the skin can be seen as a boundary, that which differentiates the individual from its surrounding environment, it can also be seen as a permeable membrane, the place where the individual is most connected to their environment. Such a concept builds on the ideas of interdependence with the environment that we have seen throughout this book, particularly ideas from posthumanism, viewing humans as non-exceptional, but as bound up with the fate of the world at large. A useful concept here is that of the Anthropocene, the era in which humans have begun to influence and change the environment at a deep, ecological level. The term ‘Anthropocene’ contains at its heart a tension. While it is an example of a posthuman understanding of the world, one which recognises the mutual influence

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of humans and the environment, it is also one that risks privileging the human by making human action central to the significant global changes in weather patterns that we currently see. Other suggestions have been made as a way of overcoming this problem, or as a way of emphasising different aspects of the future we now face (for example, Donna J. Haraway’s Cthulucene). The Peripheral is structured by a series of alternating chapters capturing two different points of view: that of Flynne, a young woman in late-capitalist, near-future America, and that of Wilf Netherton, a freelance public relations man in the London of the early twenty-second century who works for the reality star and performance artist, Daedra. As the novel opens, Wilf is directing an encounter between Daedra and the ‘Patchers’, humans who have adapted to living on the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a gyre of debris including plastic waste that continues to accumulate in the Pacific Ocean of our time. In this future public relations, reality television and diplomacy are all but indistinguishable. Wilf ’s future London is underpopulated, with manufactured humanoids, or ‘peripherals’, filling in for missing people; its economy is dominated by inherited wealth. The event known as the ‘Jackpot’ is an apocalyptic watershed moment that happens between Flynne’s and Wilf ’s different presents, killing off the majority of human beings on the planet, leaving Wilf ’s London to a privileged elite and the peripherals who serve them. The two are brought together when Wilf ’s Russian oligarch friend, Lev, finds a way to communicate with the past through a mysterious computer server. Flynne’s present is not Wilf ’s past, as communication changes the timeline, causing the two to diverge, a process that gives such timelines the nickname of ‘stubs.’ Flynne’s world is characterised by its weak economy, based primarily on 3D printing and a ‘funny’ (black market) economy as vital as straight business. Warfare in Flynne’s America is part of life and drone technologies have become standard, although this has not saved the health and the lives of those still sent to war. Flynne’s brother Burton is a veteran tattooed with patterns known as ‘haptics’ which allow his body to be controlled remotely, turning him into a kind of human drone. His fellow veteran, Conner, has also been damaged by the war and is a quadruple amputee relying on 3D-printed technology and an adapted motorbike to aid his mobility. As the novel goes on, communication between Flynne’s world and Wilf ’s forces both of them to reassess their worlds, their pasts, and their futures. Flynne becomes involved with Wilf, Lev, and his assistant Ash after she witnesses a crime: when her brother, Burton, asks her to fill in for him in his job, flying drones in what he thinks is an advanced computer game, Flynne witnesses the murder of Daedra’s sister Aelita, a real murder that takes place not in a computer game but in Wilf ’s futuristic London. She agrees to pilot the titular peripheral, in order to attend a party and identify the murderer. The use of the peripheral raises Flynne’s awareness of her mind-body connection, as does her relationship with her brother who was damaged during his time as a soldier.

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The Peripheral and the politics of haptic cyberpunk There are some sly links between The Peripheral and Gibson’s previous cyberpunk novels, implicit notes to the reader that the novel marks a return to science fiction proper after the Blue Ant trilogy’s contemporary setting. The Peripheral openly signals its move to science fiction as a return to the roots of cyberpunk and to Neuromancer in particular. Flynne’s gamer tag is ‘Easy ICE,’ a reference to the Intrusion Countermeasures Electronics (ICE) of Neuromancer, the term Gibson uses for what we might now refer to incongruously as a ‘firewall.’ Those who can easily break the ICE are the cyberpunk cowboys, like Gibson’s main protagonist, Case. Flynne’s gamer tag therefore suggests that she shares an outlaw status and hacker skills with Case, developing her characterisation while allowing Gibson to signal the continuum between Neuromancer and The Peripheral. Another echo of Neuromancer is in the body modifications of Wilf’s client, the celebrity performance artist Daedra. Daedra has had a series of body modifications, one of which is, ‘a thumbnail. As long, when it fully emerged, as her forearm’ (Gibson 2014: 25), echoing the bladed nails of Molly Millions in Neuromancer. When Case first meets her, Molly threatens him as ‘with a barely audible click, ten double-edged, fourcentimeter scalpel blades slid from their housings beneath the burgundy nails’ (37). The traces of Gibson’s earlier work signal his return to a more overtly cyberpunk concern with body modification, a feature that was absent in the Blue Ant trilogy where interventions into the ‘natural’ body were largely framed as medical, in response to disability or injury.2 While various themes from Neuromancer, such as body modification, reappear in The Peripheral, they are used in a different way; to elevate affective channels, such as the sense of touch, in order to draw attention to the interdependence of individuals, communities, and environments. The novel forges connections between vision and affective sensation, particularly in the character of Burton, Flynne’s older brother. Burton understands the importance of vision, as is clear when he teaches his sister how to win a computer game against a competitive opponent, an ex-SS officer. Burton emphasises the importance of vision in becoming the predator, rather than the prey, describing the process in terms of a gestalt switch between the two: Burton came over, sat on the couch beside her, watching her play, and told her how he saw it. How the SS officer, convinced he was hunting her, wasn’t seeing it right. Because really, now, Burton said, she was hunting him. Or would be, as soon as she realized she was, while his failure to see it was a done deal, fully underway, growing, a wrong path … And sometimes she felt him jerk, haptic misfire, while he was helping her find her own way of seeing it. Not to learn it, he said, because it couldn’t be taught, but to spiral in with it, each turn tighter, further into the forest, each turn closer to seeing it exactly right. (48)

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As in Gibson’s Pattern Recognition or the Bridge trilogy that came before, sight is here characterised as an intuitive sense and an active one. By becoming aware of what is usually a subconscious intuition, Flynne can actively choose how she sees the action in front of her, thereby acquiring the advantage over her opponent. This active sight is reminiscent of Ender’s revelation in Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game (1985), one of the earliest and most significant science fiction video game novels. Ender is being trained for war and plays a game in which he and his team must battle a rival team, overcome them and reach their gate. Ender realises that fighting in zero gravity gives him the advantage of choosing which direction to think of as ‘up’ or ‘down’ and tells his teammates to remember that ‘the enemy’s gate is down.’ By shifting their perspective, he and his team take control of their battles and have repeated victories. Ender’s tragedy is that he takes part in the war through what we would call drone strikes. The training he undertakes on a computer screen turns out not to be a war game, but a remote piloting system through which he inadvertently commits genocide. The connection between remote killing and the illusion of sight as a sense that allows for control and for keeping that which is seen at a distance is echoed in The Peripheral. Even as Burton describes the importance of sight and its active role, his strategic advice is punctuated by the intervention of his body, by his glitching haptics, like a physical manifestation of PTSD. Vision might be important, but the body is never left behind, as Ender discovered too late. The haptic rendering of the relationship between the player and the game is in marked contrast to the depiction of cyberspace in Neuromancer; while Case’s matrix is a purely virtual environment, Flynne is unwittingly controlling a drone in a futuristic London. Despite a virtual situation that could be considered more ‘real’, Flynne’s experience remains rooted in her physical presence at the computer. While she observes the ‘bugs’ in the game, other drones that she has been tasked to disperse, she remains aware of bodily sensations such as the need for food and drink: Took the jerky out of her mouth, put it on the table. The bugs were back, jockeying for position in front of the window, if that was what it was. Her free hand found the Red Bull, popped it. She sipped. (Gibson 2014: 14) As one can see from this passage, there is no leaving the ‘meat’ behind, whether that be the meat of Flynne’s physical body or the meat of the jerky that she chews in her mouth: Back around, the bugs were already bobbing, waiting. She flew through them, making them vanish. Tongued the cud of jerky away from her cheek and chewed. Scratched her nose. Smelled hand sanitizer. Went after bugs. (22)

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Flynne’s perception is split between different senses, as evidenced by the short sentences which act as flitting sensations across Flynne’s sensorium. Sight, touch, taste, and smell are all evoked so that Flynne’s optical experience of what she thinks of as a video game does not transcend her other senses. Even Flynne’s visual perception, the primary means of engaging with the video game, is experienced as mediated. There is nothing direct about her vision, no direct connection between the optic and the mind: ‘Camera down giving her the white rectangle of the van, shrinking in the street below. Camera up, the building towered away forever, a cliff the size of the world’ (9). The mediation of the ‘camera’ prevents Flynne from experiencing her visual input as direct, certainly no more so than any of her other senses. Vision is no longer elevated in the way it once was in Neuromancer. The connections between Neuromancer and The Peripheral, such as Flynne’s gamer tag, Easy ICE, serve to highlight the contrast between the two experiences of virtual (or, in Flynne’s case, remote) reality. Flynne’s rootedness in her own bodily experience paves the way for the novel’s wider consideration of the importance of touch and the body. Technology in The Peripheral has also been modified, becoming increasingly haptic and moving away from the purely visual experience of the matrix in Neuromancer, as in the description of mobile phone technology in Wilf Netherton’s timeline. He uses his phone through touch, and with his mouth in a more intimate gesture than on a touch screen: Netherton swiped his tongue from right to left, across the roof of his mouth, blanking his phone … he double-tapped the roof of his mouth, causing the feeds, left and right, from their respective corners of the square, to show [the image]. (24) Essentially, the tasks that we would perform with a mobile phone have been implanted into Netherton’s body creating a haptic relationship with his technology, one that we can read as an extrapolation of the increasingly tangible relationship we have with our present-day technology through the ubiquity of touch screens. The connection between the body, the mind, and technology is also present in the ambiguous nature of the peripherals themselves. Their ontological status is uncertain as they are human ‘on a cellular level’ (124), so they are not merely cameras used to view remote action, but there is no consciousness in these bodies when they are not occupied by a pilot so neither are they independent beings. Wilf recognises the less-than-human nature of the peripheral as he meets one piloted by his colleague Rainey: He imagined her now, stretched on a couch in her elongated Toronto apartment, a bridge across an avenue, diagonally connecting two older towers. She’d be wearing a headband, to trick her nervous system into believing the rented peripheral’s movements were hers in a dream. (30)

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Wilf does not see the peripheral as an avatar or a substitute for Rainey, but as a tool mediating his interaction with her. The mediation of the peripherals is regularly reinforced through the description of the experience of touch while piloting them, such as when Wilf watches Flynne first become accustomed to the sensation of feeling via peripheral: ‘Lightly tapping a knuckle on a steel handle. Testing the peripheral’s sensoria, he guessed’ (195). As Flynne tests out her peripheral’s haptics, Lev’s assistant Ash warns her that the experience may give her some trouble when she returns to her own perceptions: Your peripheral’s sensorium is less multiplex than your own. You may find your own sensorium seems richer, but not pleasantly so. More meaty, some say. You’ll have gotten used to a slightly attenuated perceptual array, though you likely don’t notice it now. (226) This use of the term ‘meat’ is, again, reminiscent of Neuromancer’s Case who experiences his banishment from cyberspace as a fall back into the ‘meat’ of his body. When Flynne enters the peripheral for the first time, her haptic connection to the peripheral is still not immersive but connected with other senses in a synesthetic experience. She sees, ‘that colour like Burton’s haptics scar, but she could taste it behind her teeth’ (175). The combination of colour (sight) and taste make the affective experience of using the peripheral an intensely mediated one. Ash describes the peripheral to Flynne as ‘an anthropomorphic drone … a telepresence avatar’ (175). Rather than read the peripheral as an avatar of herself, she connects it with military drones, recognising its anthropomorphic nature for what it is – merely a superficial illusion. Flynne judges the peripheral based on its use – surveillance and telecommunication – and the affect of piloting it, not on its visual appearance which she finds disconcerting. Netherton has chosen the peripheral to resemble Flynne as much as possible, in order to minimise the confusion when Flynne begins to pilot it, but Flynne does not recognise it as a likeness, ‘just the haircut’ (259): ‘That familiar pang, when she looked into the tall mirror: Who was that? She was starting to feel like the peripheral looked like somebody she’d known, but she knew it didn’t’ (441). There is no identification between the peripheral and its pilot, no more so than between a drone and its remote controller. The origins of the peripheral’s technology in the military and the sensory mediation prevent any direct identification between peripheral and pilot. The recurring motif of skin functions as an interface between the individual and the environment, something that is foregrounded from the chapter that introduces us to Wilf Netherton’s far-future. We are introduced to Wilf as he attempts to shepherd his client, Daedra, through a diplomatic mission to communicate with the Patchers, the evolved and adapted humans that live on the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a vortex of debris that has gathered in the Pacific Ocean of our time and, by Netherton’s time, has coalesced with the

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help of the Patchers into a habitable quasi-landmass. Glyn Morgan describes the garbage patch using Timothy Morton’s concept of the ‘hyperobject’, an object that exceeds the conception of time and space that humans usually work within. The plastics will outlive us, the patch is colonising an ocean that remains out of our view. The exposure to sunlight and to the waste materials that constitute the patch have altered the Patchers, who live symbiotically with the refuse of societies that have come before in a posthuman conception that, as Morgan writes, ‘taps the -punk aesthetic we recognise from Gibson, giving us an early example of polymerpunk’ (6): The boss patcher, unless he wore some carnival helmet fashioned from keratotic skin, had no neck, the approximate features of a bullfrog, and two penises. […] Perhaps a little over two meters tall, with disproportionately long arms, the boss had arrived atop a transparent penny farthing, the large wheel’s hollow spokes patterned after the bones of an albatross. He wore a ragged tutu of UV-frayed sheet-plastic flotsam, through whose crumbling frills could be glimpsed what Rainey called his double dickage. (Gibson 2014: 23) As Morgan writes, the role played by the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is ‘to illustrate the link between resource exploitation and plastic, between capitalism and plastic, and between capitalism and anthropocentric damage to the planet’ (7). It is impossible to view the Patchers as discrete individuals since their bodies and their way of life are so completely embedded in their environment. The interaction of the ‘natural’ and the ‘cultural’ in this passage – the UV rays that naturally emanate from the sun made more dangerous by the human erosion of the ozone layer, the sheet-plastic made by humans from naturally occurring oil put to unnatural purposes, the description of the plastic as ‘flotsam’, as though it is interchangeable with matter like seaweed, thrown up by the ocean itself – the intermingling of these concepts renders the very boundary between nature and culture nonsensical and writes their confluence into the Patcher’s skin. The mediation of touch is also found in Daedra’s performance art. Traditionally, touch has been considered the most immediate of senses because of the nature of the skin, the primary organ associated with haptic perception.3 As part of her performance art, Daedra repeatedly tattoos her skin before having it flayed and displays her past skins as pieces of art. This separation of the skin (and the implication that the experiences are separated with it as part of the performance and in the ink of the tattoos) highlights the skin as the organ of touch, drawing attention to the mediation required for haptic perception. The illusion that touching the skin is some kind of direct contact with another person is shattered, just as social media shatters the illusion that knowing everything about a person’s daily movements can equate to ‘knowing’ them. Daedra’s artistic process works as a series of removals, making the

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skin less authentic to her life experience with every stage: ‘Each of her pieces is a complete epidermis, toes to the base of the neck. Reflecting her life experience during the period of the work. She has that removed, preserved, and manufactures facsimiles, miniatures, which people subscribe to’ (347– 348). The production of Daedra’s skins shows the impossibility of recording affect itself, the wordlessness of an individual’s emotional and autonomic relationship to the world. The mediation of haptic experience is brought to the fore once more through the use of this very term to describe the traces on Burton’s flesh of the remote-control device used on him while he was a soldier. Burton’s haptics are tattoos used to control him during his time as a soldier, turning him into an ‘anthropomorphic drone’ of a different kind: They didn’t think Flynne’s brother had PTSD, but that sometimes the haptics glitched him. They said it was like phantom limb, ghosts of the tattoos he’d worn in the war, put there to tell him when to run, when to be still, when to do the bad-ass dance, which direction and what range. (1) The war machine has colonised Burton’s body, turning him into a drone, controlled remotely by someone else. Even his sense of touch, that sense considered so close to the unspoken world of affect, has been co-opted. The fact that his symptoms are not recognised as PTSD shows that this link between his body and his mind has been damaged by his experience and he is not even able to (emotionally) feel the effects of the war, but can only feel them in his skin, when the haptics glitch him. This experience is reflected in Burton’s gamer tag, ‘Hapt-Rec.’ The tag is short for ‘Haptic Recon 1,’ the name of his army platoon, but it evokes the meaning ‘Haptic Wreck,’ one whose haptics have been forever damaged by his use as a drone. Flynne understands Burton’s army experience as one of remote control: ‘Burton won a lot of drone games, was really good at them, Haptic Recon 1 having been about them, so many ways. Even, she’d heard someone say, that Burton himself had been a sort of drone, or partially one, when he’d still had the tattoos’ (89). Drones are used for both surveillance and attack, a dual concern that is reflected in Gibson’s continued interest in perception as an ontological category alongside his turn towards the haptic. The body is under attack from drones and as part of the warfare system and the systems of exploitation we find today; therefore, the body (and its vulnerability) must come to the fore in any account of those systems, science fictional or otherwise. The background of the video game also links classic Gibson with modern concerns, perception with the body count of the drone as Flynne repeatedly confuses the piloting of the unmanned vehicle with a video game. Gibson has been interested in the links between culturally important fields (technology in the Sprawl trilogy, fashion in the Blue Ant trilogy) and their use (or origin) in military contexts. In The Peripheral military uses are shown at the root of robotic technology,

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something that precludes human beings from experiencing robots as anything other than manmade automatons as their origins in warfare are marked into their design and, for the humans, into the experience of interacting with them. This trauma (unfelt by Burton, except in his skin) may be at the heart of this move from the optical to the haptic. In Pattern Recognition where this move began to make itself known, the traumatic event was 9/11 and Cayce’s loss of her father in the attack. In The Peripheral there is a very personal experience of trauma, that of Burton and Conner, both victims of a war that colonised their bodies and left them scarred and partial. However, there is also a collective sense of trauma in the novel’s other strand. The post-Jackpot world is itself scarred and partial through the loss of its populations. The scars of the Jackpot can perhaps be read most clearly in the tattoos of Ash, Lev’s assistant. Extinct species are tattooed onto her body in moving images, reminders of the lost world, ‘Ash … her hand quite black with tattoos, a riot of wings and horns, every bird and beast of the Anthropocene extinction, overlapping line drawings of a simple yet touching precision’ (50). As in Daedra’s performance art, the skin and tattooing are considered the appropriate medium for this tribute to extinct species, a constant reminder of their loss. While there is a certain nostalgia in Ash’s tattoos that Netherton judges as kitschy, there is the sense that the tattoos are also a real reminder of the problems humanity has caused. While Netherton watches her he sees, ‘the line drawing of a sole albatross, slowly and as if in distant flight, circling her white neck’ (52). The imagery of the albatross, particularly around the neck, is reminiscent of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ in which the albatross is a good luck charm for the sailors, before it is shot by the titular mariner. Upon the death of the albatross his fellow sailors blame him for a bad turn in the weather; ‘all averred, I had killed the bird / That made the breeze to blow’ (210). As a punishment they hang the albatross around his neck, to remind him of the curse he has brought on the crew, leading to their deaths. The mariner is left alone among the dead men, just as the population of Netherton’s timeline exist in the space left empty by the majority of mankind who perished in the Jackpot. Ash’s tattoos, like the ancient mariner’s albatross, are a visual and tactile reminder that humanity has brought about its own end through its treatment of the planet. Part of this curse is the saturation of the post-Jackpot world with drones and drone technology. In Drone Warfare (2013), Medea Benjamin points out that drones are rumoured to have acquired their name through their resemblance to bees. The post-Jackpot world is beeless, and the omnipresence of the bee-like drones, emblematic of the increased security of the 1% and the increased vulnerability and extra-judicial killing of the 99% is a constant reminder to those living in this world of the trade they have made: optimum security in exchange for a healthy planet. The trauma of the post-Jackpot world is present in the relationship between Flynne’s and Wilf ’s timelines. They are bridged through the server, as though those in Wilf ’s present feel

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condemned to visit the past again and again even if they can never change their own present. Even this traumatic revisiting is only done in order to accrue capital, not to work out problems or to free the people in the stub, but to colonise their world and to feed off of it in an act that can never lead to closure but can only reinforce the power of the kleptocracies and the oligarchies that rule Wilf ’s time. As Ash points out, it is ‘imperialism … We’re third-worlding alternate continua. Calling them stubs makes that a bit easier’ (Gibson 2014: 103). There is no sense of the future for Wilf and his associates, who merely move from one job to another, or live off of the wealth of their relatives, separated from other people and with no way to experience the passage of time, the possibility of a new and different future. This understanding of the event, to some extent, explains the almost bizarre, overly domesticated scene which is Flynne’s life at the end of the novel. Flynne is pregnant with the Deputy Sherriff’s baby, and Burton and Flynne’s friend Shaylene have consummated a romance that had gone unrequited in the novel up to that point, as have Conner and a young woman named Clovis. Conner has had new limbs created through 3D printing, using the technology they have acquired through their communication with Netherton’s timeline. Using their money and the business they bought from Lev’s fortune, Flynne and her extended family are doing all they can to avoid the Jackpot, a possibility that seems likely in the novel’s closing pages, even if Flynne worries ‘that they weren’t really doing more than just building their own version of the klept’ (481). The encounter with the future frees the timeline from the necessity of the Jackpot and allows the characters to orient themselves towards a future once again.

Conclusion Philosophically, the move from optics to haptics is a journey from the fetishisation of the subject’s ability to control their environment, to a subject who is interdependent with their environment. This journey could be seen as one of activity to passivity, one of which Burton’s suffering is emblematic as he teaches Flynn about the active nature of perception while suffering the glitching of his haptics, a passive victim. However, the novel does some work to challenge this active/passive dichotomy. The interdependence of the characters and their affective relationship with their environment, highlighted by the cautionary tale of the Jackpot, represents a call to action, to prevent the future that Netherton describes. In affect theory this dichotomy is similarly being challenged. In a discussion of haptic aesthetics in the work of Deleuze and Derrida, Claire Colebrook argues that a turn towards the haptic in philosophy represents a need for something that cannot be captured by philosophical or theoretical thinking, as thinking is by definition reflexive and requires a certain distance as opposed to the immediacy of the affective: Questions or problems – what we might refer to as theoretical events – that would strive not simply to live in pure immediacy but enquire into

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This inability to portray touch, the necessity of mediation, means that The Peripheral cannot hope to portray the haptic in any direct way. However, it still attempts to do so, incorporating touch and the other senses into its text to an extent that we have not seen from Gibson before. The reason for making this impossible attempt is that the novel seeks to show how the human body itself is subject to the political and economic factors that control society. Rather than the active, almost libertarian, outlook of Neuromancer’s cyberpunk cowboys, The Peripheral shows the subjection of the planet to anthropogenic disasters. The activity of humans can destroy the world or save it, but the affective interdependence with the environment acts as a warning signal that must be heeded, rather than a mere passive way of being in the world.

Notes 1 Although, as Seyfert argues, the two should not be conflated, ‘since “emotion” usually refers to the particular human configurations, I suggest using “affect” as a general term that defines relations among all kinds of bodies, or which emotion is but one particular form’ (31). 2 For example, Nora’s body in Pattern Recognition, paralysed in a bomb blast, or Garreth in Zero History, injured in a BASE jump and healed with artificial bones made from rattan. 3 For an account of the history of touch and its role in philosophy from Aristotle, see Mark Paterson’s The Senses of Touch: Haptics, Affects and Technologies (2007).

Bibliography Bednarek, Steffi. ‘How Wide is the Field? Gestalt Therapy, Capitalism and the Natural World.’ Gestalt Journal of Australia and New Zealand, vol. 15, no. 2, 2019, pp. 18–42. Benjamin, Medea. Drone Warfare: Killing By Remote Control. London: Verso, 2013. Card, Orson Scott. Ender’s Game. New York: Tor Books, 1985. Clarke, Bruce. Neocybernetics and Narrative. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2014. Colebrook, Claire. ‘Derrida, Deleuze and Haptic Aesthetics.’ Derrida Today, vol. 2, no. 1, 2009, pp. 22–43. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. ‘The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner.’ Lyrical Ballads and Other Poems. Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions, 2002, pp. 207–227. Gibson, William. Neuromancer. London: HarperCollins, 1995. Gibson, William. The Peripheral. London: Penguin, 2014. Kolmannskog, Vikram. ‘What Gestalt Approaches Can Contribute to Climate Change Transformation.’ Journal of Sustainable Development, vol. 6, no. 10, 2013, pp. 78–86.

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Morgan, Glyn. ‘Economies of Scale: Environmental Plastics, SF, and Graphic Narratives.’ Paradoxa, vol. 31, 2020, pp. 436–451. Morton, Timothy. Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology After the End of the World. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2013. Newitz, Annalee. ‘William Gibson on the Apocalypse, America, and The Peripheral’s Ending.’ Gizmodo, 10 November2014, https://io9.gizmodo.com/william-gibso n-on-the-apocalypse-america-and-the-peri-1656659382. Paterson, Mark. The Senses of Touch: Haptics, Affects and Technologies. New York: Berg, 2007. Seyfert, Robert. ‘Beyond Personal Feelings and Collective Emotions: Toward a Theory of Social Affect.’ Theory, Culture and Society, vol. 29, no. 6, 2012, pp. 27–46.

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Agency, and Gibson in the twenty-first century

The problem for contemporary literature, as Gibson puts it in Pattern Recognition (2003), is of having ‘insufficient “now” to stand on’ (57), and it is one that Gibson continues to confront as the meaning of his novels-in-progress chafe and transform against a changing context. History refuses to give us a period of stability in which to catch our collective breath. Gibson’s first experience of writing a contemporary novel against a changing socio-historical backdrop was with Pattern Recognition, when the terrorist attacks of 9/11 demanded a significant rewrite placing the tragedy front-and-centre and making the novel one of the first to respond to that post-9/11 affect. However, while Pattern Recognition portrayed the experience of a sudden break from a previous paradigm, Agency demands that new situations be assimilated at all times without anything so clear as a break from the past. Gibson had to react to historical events as he wrote, namely Brexit and the election of Donald Trump to the White House, events that seemed unlikely, if not impossible (to some) even as the results were announced. These events forced Gibson to rewrite the novel and, taking inspiration from Bruce Sterling and Lewis Shiner’s proto-‘stub’ short story ‘Mozart in Mirrorshades’ (1985), he placed its action in a parallel timeline, albeit one that could have been ours from the perspective of 2016 had Hillary Clinton won the election (as she was favoured to do). Linking Agency with the strategy of time travel and the creation of The Peripheral’s ‘stub’ realities salvaged Agency, leading to the inclusion of yet another serial engagement with a fictional world in Gibson’s corpus. Agency continues to explore the futuristic London of The Peripheral – focalised through the same character, a PR specialist named Wilf Netherton – alongside a storyline set in San Francisco’s Bay Area circa 2017 that follows Verity, an ‘app whisperer’ who is introduced to some exciting new artificial intelligence (AI) technology. Netherton’s world has found a way to change and communicate with the past via a mysterious Chinese server, but this does not involve a change to Netherton’s present; rather, it results in yet another branching of the timelines of the sort previously experienced in The Peripheral. The alternate timeline introduced in the earlier novel (i.e. Flynne’s timeline, now dubbed ‘the county’) is set after the alternate 2017 timeline depicted in Agency, so Gibson’s second novel in this ongoing sequence (that DOI: 10.4324/9781003082477-8

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promises at least one more novel) is both a prequel and a sequel to The Peripheral. 1 In Agency, a bad actor from Wilf ’s time has created Verity’s 2017 stub by reducing the influence of Russian cyber-manipulation so that Hillary Clinton won the 2016 election and the Brexit referendum came back with a vote to remain. This narrative tactic amounts to the use of alternate history, albeit an alternate history of very recent times. Alternate history resonates with the novel’s concerns with climate change and instability; as a genre, it tends to draw upon the outcome of a change to the timeline – in this case, the different outcomes of the presidential and Brexit votes – in a moment that can be referred to as a nexus point. In Gibson’s Agency, the nexus point is our uncertain contemporary moment and the sensation of living on a tipping point – that is, ‘the moment of critical mass, the threshold, the boiling point’ (Gladwell 12) —from which the devastating effects of climate change may or may not be reversed. The ‘tipping point’ expression has been used by climate scientists to describe the power of the choices we make now in shaping our future (Lenton et al.), and the increasingly urgent warnings about the devastating effects of climate change can prompt us to imagine our present moment from the perspective of very different futures: in some, the climate crisis has been addressed and contained, often through the radical redesign of our lifestyles and financial models; in others, the warnings are ignored and the world decays into violence and destitution, soon to become uninhabitable. From these alternate future perspectives our contemporary moment becomes a tipping point that holds the power to produce either one future or the other, and science fiction narratives drawing on this imagery encourage us to imagine looking at our historical moment from these very different futures.2 Intervening in Verity’s timeline is a complex technological breakthrough that has the power to influence the direction of future events. Verity is hired to test out Eunice, an AI named for the acronym UNISS (Untethered Noetic Irregular Support System). Eunice is a human-AI hybrid of sorts – the product of Department of Defense (DoD) experiments to upload minds to computers. The goal for the DoD is not some transhuman ascent for humankind, and not to achieve immortality; the goal is to share the knowledge of certain actors who have specific talents and knowledge of areas of strategic economic, military and political importance, or CCAs (Competitive Control Areas). Such an AI might be used as a consultant, offering a wealth of knowledge and flexibility to its owner and giving them an advantage over any situation. Power over the AI is a valuable commodity, and gives the user ‘agency’, one of the possible referents of the novel’s title. Verity has been hired by a DoD front company named Tulpagenics, a company whose name refers to the Tibetan concept of the ‘tulpa’, a manufactured spirit, and uses the Greek ‘genics’ which means ‘growing’, or ‘coming into being’; as Eunice puts it, ‘Tibetan occult thought-forms. Or people who’ve invented themselves an imaginary playmate’ (Gibson 2020: 20). Verity is to give Eunice a Turing test, establishing whether the voice speaking to her is distinguishable from a

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human being, but the tech is so desirable that she finds herself in the middle of a corporate war. Meanwhile, espionage specialists from Wilf’s timeline believe they can use Eunice’s skills not only to avert a nuclear disaster (which has been delayed but not avoided due to the changes to the stub), but also to dismantle the conditions fuelling the jackpot, the nickname Gibson’s characters use to describe a period of climate collapse with which Wilf’s future is still reckoning. Agency continues the serious exploration of climate change that Gibson started in The Peripheral, but it also shows the ongoing relevance of the ideas that have shaped Gibson’s oeuvre, even as their meaning shifts against a changing technological and political backdrop. While climate change comes to the fore in ways that we have not so far seen in Gibson’s work, we find that the concern with the gestalt—i.e., the relationship between the parts and the whole—is embodied in Agency through the figure of an AI, a motif that stretches as far back as Neuromancer. The novel intersects this concern with the issue of race in North American society, building on concerns developed in Count Zero (1986), which I highlight as an important step towards understanding Gibson’s use of race, a topic that has had little attention barring some useful critique of the role of race in Neuromancer. 3 Finally, Agency highlights the importance of nostalgia in Gibson’s work; both Agency and The Peripheral include incongruously happy endings that give the reader cause to question the logic of an ending in a novel that seeks to portray a society in flux, raising questions about the future of cyberpunk and its ability to describe (and therefore, potentially challenge) dominant paradigms.

Race in Agency and the loas of the Sprawl Gibson’s choice to code the Eunice AI as African American must be treated as significant in any discussion of this novel, and it certainly complicates the representation of AI in Agency while drawing on the theme of holism vs. fragmentation that has informed Gibson’s portrayal of cyberspace and artificial intelligence since the Sprawl trilogy. The Eunice AI is partly based on the consciousness of an African American woman who worked for the navy, so in this sense she has a race (as well as a gender). This racial identity is underlined by Eunice’s decidedly non-robotic voice; when Verity expresses some scepticism about Eunice’s nature she says, ‘Believe me too fast, they got me the wrong white girl’ (11). That touch of African American English and the claim to a raced identity (albeit rather baldly inserted into the text) begin to build a picture of who Eunice might be, one that is introduced by the cover of the American and Canadian edition of the book, which features an African American woman’s face blurred out behind a ‘loading’ symbol. Her characterisation is developed through the close bond she quickly forms with Verity, but unfortunately Eunice is deleted by Cursion, Tulpagenics’s parent company, and the reader loses Eunice for the greater part of the novel, her voice only returning for the novel’s denouement as her constituent parts (known as ‘laminae’, or ‘laminar agents’) recombine to resurrect Eunice.

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In terms of representation, Gibson has missed the opportunity to showcase an intriguing African American voice as a central feature of the narrative. On the other hand, Eunice’s absence from the novel can be read as evidence of a writer who is concerned about making a misstep by adopting a subject position far beyond his lived experience. This concern is an evolution from the younger Gibson of the Sprawl novels who struggled with issues of race and cultural appropriation. Count Zero is arguably the Gibson novel that deals the most with issues of race, featuring as it does an African American society of cyberpunks, albeit introduced to the reader via the point of view of Bobby Newmark, a young white boy who shows a clear discomfort in black social circles. This struggle can be read as channelling Gibson’s feelings of being out of place in capturing such voices, while recognising them as core to understanding the USA, a society that remains deeply segregated. In Count Zero, this segregation is represented geographically through the Projects, a predominantly African American neighbourhood, ‘a world Bobby had never seen’ (50), which is geographically separate from the predominantly white community. The Projects are a collection of high rises that dwarf Barrytown, the suburban neighbourhood where Bobby lives with his mother. When Bobby is trying to find Two-A-Day, a black ’ware dealer who sold him some dangerous software, he stops looking: ‘Sometimes you just had to wait. That was one of the things Two-A-Day had taught him’ (56). These lines echo the Velvet Underground’s ‘I’m Waiting for the Man’ (1967) – ‘He’s never early, he’s always late / First thing you learn is that you’ve always got to wait’ – a song about a white boy going up to Harlem to meet his drug dealer and being challenged as his white skin marks him out as an interloper: ‘Hey, white boy, what you doin’ uptown? / Hey, white boy, you chasin’ our women around?’. The USA’s continued segregation acts as a barrier to cross-cultural understanding, reinforcing the potential for suspicion and conflict between the two groups, alongside the systemic oppression and violence inflicted on the African American community by white supremacist power structures. It is difficult not to read Eunice’s absence from the main body of Agency as symptomatic of this same discomfort, an unwillingness by Gibson as a white, American-born Canadian to commit to the centring of an African American voice, a commitment that would require ventriloquizing the contemporary black experience via an AI who has already been somewhat dehumanised through her status as an AI. In fact, the (predominantly white, male) developers of the AI, primarily represented in the novel via Gavin, Verity’s contact at Tulpagenics, have already co-opted this woman’s identity into their software. When Eunice remembers her identity as a black, woman naval officer, Verity hears ‘an absence in her tone, something almost bereft’ (13) as Eunice remembers her lost identity and her corporeality. While Gibson shows some discomfort around the characterization of Eunice and the AI’s complicated identity politics, he appears to recognise the impossibility of avoiding the question of race relations in the contemporary USA. Gibson’s engagement with race has been sporadic and has been criticised for falling into the old binaries of associating black culture with the primitive,

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the religious, and/or the natural, while whiteness is coded as cultural, and technologically advanced. Much of this justified criticism is based on Neuromancer’s orbital group of Rastafarians who are manipulated into helping Case on his mission to unite the AIs Wintermute and Neuromancer. Samuel R. Delany reads them as, ‘completely without power or knowledge to cope with the real world of Gibson’s novel: indeed, through their pseudo-religious beliefs, they are effectively barred from cyberspace’ (quoted in Dery 195), and Isiah Lavender III develops this point to note that, ‘Gibson fetishizes these marginal characters and we never truly experience the complexities of race functioning in the novel’ (311). Count Zero seeks to offer a more complex portrayal of black cultures and their interaction with cyberspace, giving black people some power to understand and interact with cyberspace, although this power is still channelled through a pseudo-religious paradigm. The Wintermute-Neuromancer AI has been unable to maintain the integrity of the matrix as a single self-conscious entity; it has fragmented and returned as a series of figures described as loas, ‘voodoo’ gods (or ghosts) in the machine.4 This development returns the role of human spirituality to the realm of the matrix, disavowing the transcendence of the technological Singularity at the climax of Neuromancer. Bobby Newmark is introduced to Lucas, Beauvoir and Jackie, a group who interact with these figures via the voodoo paradigm. Bobby questions why these entities present themselves (or, are interpreted) as voodoo gods, Lucas tells him that their description as voodoo gods is a ‘metaphor’: you should pretend that we are talking two languages at once. One of them, you already understand. That’s the language of street tech, as you call it. We may be using different words, but we’re talking tech. Maybe we call something Ougou Feray that you might call an icebreaker, you understand? But at the same time, with the same words, we are talking about other things, and that you don’t understand. You don’t need to. (122–123) Here, black characters are best placed to understand the structure of cyberspace thanks to their religious and culture heritage, rather than being excluded from cyberspace because of those very beliefs, and the characterisation and placement of these characters within the wider community of the Projects is more nuanced than that of the isolated and ineffectual orbital Rastafarians. However, taking inspiration from African and Caribbean diaspora beliefs, especially from the subject position of a white writer, is certainly in danger of inviting accusations of cultural appropriation.5 Count Zero’s interplay between the holism of an AI and the fragmentation of its parts reappears in Agency. Upon Eunice’s ‘death’, Eunice’s constituent parts – referred to as ‘laminar agents’, ‘laminae’, or ‘branches’ – continue to function even without the availability of that unifying voice in a way comparable to the loas of Count Zero. Eunice’s laminar agents lack her distinctive

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voice, instead speaking in the stilted ‘does not compute’ language more readily associated with computer programmes or bots. These fragments can effectively perform all of the functions that Eunice had previously carried out, but they simply lack the je ne sais quoi of Eunice’s united Being until they come together at the novel’s climax and her voice returns for the final chapters. Unfortunately, as Lavender has written, Gibson’s history in dealing with race is, at best (and most charitably), uneven and while Agency may, in some manner, be an improvement from the problematic depictions of Rastafarians and voodoo loas in the Sprawl trilogy, it does not redress Gibson’s failings by keeping Eunice on the side-lines of the novel’s action. On the other hand, race is used as a structuring feature in one of Gibson’s key concerns, the relationship between the whole and its parts and how this might function in terms of the consciousness of artificial intelligence. Despite the various failings in how race is depicted in Gibson’s fiction, there is at least a commendable move in Gibson’s oeuvre from the fragmentary diaspora, coded unmistakeably as black in Neuromancer and Count Zero, to the wholeness of an African American consciousness in Agency. Gibson’s novel therefore opens a space for a commentary of sorts on the ways in which the role of African Americans (and the racism concomitant with their position in US society) structures the American body politic. Black culture is often separate, like the high-rise Projects of Count Zero, but black culture structures the American experience. In Agency, the co-optation of an African American woman’s personality for what is essentially a tool of control echoes the reliance of militaristic American society on the abuse of black bodies. As Mark Dery writes, African Americans ‘inhabit a sci-fi nightmare in which unseen but no less impassable force fields of intolerance frustrate their movements; official histories undo what has been done; and technology is too often brought to bear on black bodies (branding, forced sterilization, the Tuskegee experiment, and tasers come readily to mind)’ (186). By coding an AI as black and evoking a character made bereft by the loss of her corporeality and her humanity, Agency has the potential to speak to this tradition and its continuation in contemporary US politics, but a commitment to true engagement with these complicated and brutal political dimensions is never realised.

Opportunism and climate change Climate change was never a structuring aspect of cyberpunk futures, although there are some small nods towards ecological devastation, such as the mention that horses have gone extinct (Neuromancer 112–113). As I have argued elsewhere, this is in part because of cyberpunk’s focus on the enterprising individual making the most of the hand dealt to them (McFarlane 2018), an individualism that does little to allow for the collective identity and action needed to recognise and address the issues raised by the climate crisis. In his introduction to Green Planets: Ecology and Science Fiction (2014), Gerry

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Canavan points out that the futures envisioned by cyberpunk were produced in the aftermath of the ‘Spaceship Earth’ concept, which imagines planet Earth as a closed and finite system that must be treated as sustainably (in terms of production and consumption) as a well-organised space mission. Canavan muses that some of cyberpunk’s cultural importance might be down to the fantasy of ‘an alternative scheme for getting outside scarcity and precariousness – simply leave the material world altogether, by entering the computer. In virtual space, with no resource consumption or excess pollution to worry about, we can all be as rich as we want for as long as we want (or so the fantasy goes)’ (9). In Gibson’s early work, scarcity and precarity are endemic to the characters we meet, as is inequality, so there is little by way of a utopian multiplication of resources allowing everyone to be as ‘rich as we want’, but it is undeniable that the realms of cyberspace represent a new frontier, allowing for infinite growth for the zaibatsus and the organised criminals at the top of the pile in a way that failed to convey the real limitations of accumulation represented by the ‘Spaceship Earth’ slogan. While The Peripheral began to seriously consider climate change, it never deeply explored the nature of the jackpot; it preferred to focus on its fallout. However, Agency begins to reveal further information about the nature of the disaster and the reason for its apparently incongruous name. The jackpot, the disaster that decimated the population of the world and left an echoing, empty London in its wake, was named as such because history was written by the victors, and those who survived and are in power are primarily the kleptocracy: opportunists who saw a way of making a financial killing from the destruction of the environment and the tsunami of wealth moving from the poor to the rich under increasingly inequitable financial conditions. This opportunism is by no means a narrative conceit: author, activist, and filmmaker Naomi Klein went from writing The Shock Doctrine (2007), her analysis of ‘disaster capitalism,’ to This Changes Everything (2014), her book on climate change, signalling her progressive centring of the climate in her anticapitalist activism. Agency reminds us why climate change activism and anticapitalism are interwoven in contemporary society: there are people who know that the best conditions for gaining wealth are in the power vacuum created by chaos, and Gibson’s kleptocracy in Agency’s post-jackpot future are the descendants of that class. Agency explores the environmental state of the postjackpot world in greater detail. Towers taller than the Shard (and named ‘shards’ in honour of that original skyscraper) line the banks of the Thames, scrubbing the air for those few humans still left to breathe it. Meanwhile, there is the bittersweet figure of Wilf’s eleven-month-old son playing with his robotic nanny in the form of three rolling robotic panda cubs. The pandas are visions of kawaii-cuteness – they roll around in response to being tickled – but also act as a reminder that this species and many others are no longer available for the child to encounter, only these robotic replacements remain. Like Ash’s moving tattoos in The Peripheral, they are animated simulacra that evoke nostalgia and a subdued grief for what has been lost.

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Nevertheless, the novel complicates its engagement with climate change through its refusal to disavow our affective connections with the capitalist system through twenty-first-century consumerism. Consumerism has been instrumental to the systematic littering of the planet and the use of its resources, while also beguiling with its promise of comfort and an elevated lifestyle. Agency most clearly demonstrates consumerism’s powerful draw through the prominence given to the opening of the package that contains the interface Verity will use to communicate with Eunice. The opening chapter of the book is entitled ‘The Unboxing’, giving the moment a sense of ceremony. The chapter title draws on a genre of YouTube videos which show vloggers ‘unboxing’ new gadgets, allowing the viewer to vicariously experience the thrill of encountering a new and untouched consumer product. Before opening the box, Verity eats from a plastic takeaway container ‘with its admirably compostable translucent lid’ (2), centring the painfully ironic contradictions inherent in early twenty-first-century Western society: any guilt over the disposable plastic of the takeaway tub, a symbol of the importance of convenience at the expense of the environment, is somewhat absolved in the mind of the consumer through a lid that will not stay on the planet for longer than a human lifetime, a largely empty gesture towards climate responsibility. This engagement with disposability leads us to Verity’s encounter with the interface and its packaging. The endorphin rush that comes with engaging with a new electronic gadget, the ‘pale gray minimalist temples’ (3) of the glasses that she will use to allow Eunice to see through her eyes, is combined with a loving evocation of a plastic container that ‘hugged’ (3) the phone that connects with the glasses, and the chargers to power these gadgets, ‘commonest of consumer fruit’ whose cables are still ‘factory-coiled’ (3). This description reminds us of the deeper contradictions inherent in the use of plastic: while plastic has recently become synonymous with waste, it continues to evoke the cleanliness of something that has never been used by anyone else (a guarantee based on its nature as single-use), and allows for the perfect fit between the gadget and the tray that holds it. The way the text delicately and deliberately captures this moment makes clear consumerism’s attraction while, at the same time, giving an elegiac, nostalgic tone that admits that these pleasures cannot (or must not) be available for much longer. This urge to both celebrate and bid farewell to the excesses of twentieth- and twentiethfirst-century capitalism offers a way to address the climate crisis that is worth considering as a means of giving society the closure it needs to move on to a new relationship with its objects, through recognising particular qualia that may be missed but, at the same time, must be lost as part of those ‘tipping point’ choices we must make.

Nostalgia and Joe-Eddy’s smirk The form of the novel as alternate history is, as mentioned above, in part due to the writing process. Gibson had begun to write a novel about the

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contemporary USA but events overtook him and he had to consider how to write the Brexit Referendum and Donald Trump’s election into the novel after the fact. Thus, making the setting of his novel an alternate version of our reality found in one of the ‘stubs’ allowed him to keep the main body of the novel without changing its content substantively. However, the rendering of this timeline as alternate history contributes to a sense of nostalgia that permeates the book. Nostalgia, that longing for a past that never was, is particularly suited to the genre of alternate history which consciously constructs pasts that did not happen but yet have the power to take an affective hold over their readers – a trend seen in one of alternate history’s most popular topics, the depiction of a USA in which the South won the Civil War. In the case of Agency, the nostalgia is for a competent Democratic president. This reality was seen most recently via Barack Obama, but the use of Hillary Clinton as the president, combined with a political background noise that appears not to be structured around vicious culture wars, gives the impression that the novel is reaching further back, to Bill Clinton’s presidency in the ’90s. The sense of nostalgia is compounded by the central conflict in the novel: the possibility of a nuclear war, which looks back even further to the Cold War of the mid-century, a formative framework for writers of Gibson’s generation. This Cold War nostalgia, one that Gibson explored in Pattern Recognition, returns here and can also be found in his comic book series, Archangel (2017), another alternate history story that revolves around the possibility of nuclear war. The construction of alternate worlds in which The Bomb is the structuring conflict gives a sense of a novel that is somewhat out of sync with the very contemporary issues it touches upon: climate change and structural inequalities. Agency’s ending sees Eunice return to the scene in her original form, with her characteristic voice, in order to save the day. Eunice and Verity avert a crisis, and this is reflected on the international stage as President Clinton prevents the outbreak of war and the characters raise a glass to her. Given the elegiac tone of much of the novel which seems to grieve the past and the future in equal measure, this ending is incongruously optimistic, and rings with a glorification of neoliberal Democrat politics. The president is portrayed as a figure of security and competence throughout the novel: when addressing the nation about an escalating crisis in Qamishli on the Turkish border, Verity reflects that ‘she hadn’t looked terrified. She looked like she was on the case’ (15). The end of the novel sees the president celebrated, and situated as the single figure who has everted disaster: ‘We should have a toast,’ Joe-Eddy said, […] ‘A shadow’s been lifted.’ ‘The president,’ said Kathy Fang. ‘She got us out of it.’ Verity saw Joe-Eddy smirk. ‘Eunice says it was the president,’ Verity said to him. ‘The president,’ said Kathy Fang, raising her coffee, and they all clinked mugs, toasting the president.

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Conner, in the drone, thrust its manipulator’s thumb-equivalents up in support, and she heard Ash’s voice join in as well. (400) This scene can be read as a nauseating display of uncritical belief in the neoliberalism-with-a-human-face of the American Democrat Party with all the characters, from all the participating timelines, on board. Almost all. The fly in the ointment is Joe-Eddy’s smirk, which Verity feels unable to ignore, appealing to authority by telling him that Eunice has endorsed their reading of events. A smirk on the part of one minor character, a character that has been primarily characterised in the novel thus far as a bit of a slob, might be too much to hang an alternate reading on, but it is there nonetheless and gives a hint of irony in this otherwise jingoistic scene. It is worth comparing this ending with that of The Peripheral, which is so perfectly heteronormative, with the characters paired off like Noah’s animals, that that perfection in itself might be considered the ‘smirk’. In post-jackpot London, Netherton gets together with his colleague Rainey (in Agency we find them taking care of their young son), while in the county Flynne ends the novel pregnant by Sheriff Tommy, Conner is coupled with Clovis and Burton with Shaylene, while Flynne’s mother’s health has significantly improved now that her drugs are being custom made. The promise of children represented by these heteronormative pairings and Flynne’s pregnancy draws on reproductive futurism (Edelman, Sheldon) to give the reader hope for the future via this saccharine tableau. The incongruence of these endings, their positivity so pronounced that they verge on irony, begs the question: how are we to read them? Neal Easterbrook (2010) discusses this issue with regards to Pattern Recognition and gives two options for understanding the novel’s ending. The first is that Gibson simply struggles with ending his novels. This was an issue pointed out by Darko Suvin (1992) upon Gibson’s completion of the Sprawl trilogy. Suvin argues that the ending of Mona Lisa Overdrive (1988), which sees ‘the Romeo-and-Juliet pair … willingly withdraw from empirical to cyberpunk space’ (361), can essentially be read as a withdrawal into the realm of death: ‘As is well known, Death is the final horizon of melodrama’ (361). This understanding of Gibson’s endings could be read as showing a downfall of the genres in which Gibson works, and even of the novel’s form in general, in dealing with the systems and situations that Gibson wishes to explore. The novels of Gibson’s oeuvre are clearly interested in exploring relational, gestalt systems which do not function in a strictly linear manner. The form of a Gibson plot tends to follow that of a heist, a mystery, or a thriller, in which there are certain actions that must be performed in order to bring about a given end or uncover some hidden knowledge. These generic formulas clearly have no problem with finding an ending since the book ends when the action has been performed, the mystery solved. However, Gibson’s plots see his characters becoming involved in these mysteries on behalf of an external force (Wintermute in Neuromancer, Virek in Count Zero, Bigend in the Blue Ant

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trilogy …), so this leaves the book with the issue of closure for the protagonists, and perhaps Gibson finds an easy way out through pairing off his characters, or showing them uncritically celebrating their political hegemony. The second option offered by Easterbrook is to read the endings of the novels from a place of ironic detachment. In interview, Gibson has addressed the issue of these endings and described them as designed to repel readers unwilling or unable to engage with his work (Newitz 2014). Rather than convenient and conventional means of tying up a narrative, perhaps we might consider these endings as satirical, or at least not wholly in earnest. Easterbrook muses that Gibson has always been concerned about the impact of technology on human societies, and that his work itself comes to us through ‘the machinery of fiction’ (60). In Pattern Recognition, particularly, this machinery is foregrounded and subject to metacommentary due to the novel’s exploration of humans as meaning makers, as homo significans. The Peripheral and Agency share these concerns to an extent. As argued in Chapter 6, The Peripheral is particularly concerned with the embodied subject and the use of haptics in allowing humans to navigate and interpret their environments, making meaning from the skin and the textures encountered. Agency touches on some of science fiction’s staple concerns with meaning-making; namely, whether this ability is specifically human, or whether it might be emulated and even improved by an artificial intelligence with consciousness. However, the change in Gibson’s work to its concerns about climate change and the possibility of building a future are equally important to an analysis of the endings of these novels. In The Great Derangement (2016), Amitav Ghosh famously pointed out the limitations of the literary novel when it comes to conveying the climate crisis, arguing that the literary novel, by definition, is expected to deal with the small, cumulative actions of the quotidian rather than the seismic melodrama of the climate catastrophe. Perhaps the linear nature of the novel, demanding depth followed by closure is another sign that the novel is ill-prepared to deal with our contemporary circumstances. In The Peripheral and Agency there is a tension between giving the audience what they want and giving them what they need. These endings offer utopian hope at a time when optimism is in short supply and so they offer an escapist appeal. They tie up the events of the novel into a linear narrative that offers the generic satisfactions of popular literature. But, at the same, time, the novels are aware that such a move is inadequate. Only a smirk gives away the inadequacy of such a move, and perhaps that is not enough. The difficulties found in Agency and The Peripheral in capturing the contemporary moment place a question mark over the role of cyberpunk in twentyfirst-century culture. Recently, academics have focused on Thomas Foster’s claim that cyberpunk is no longer merely a genre, but a more generalised cultural mode, and evidence for this is shown through some important work in a number of key volumes: Beyond Cyberpunk (2010), Cyberpunk and Visual Culture (2018) and, perhaps most significantly given the scope of its geographical and academic topics, The Routledge Companion to Cyberpunk Culture (2020). It is perhaps,

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then, beyond doubt that cyberpunk has shaped our contemporary understanding of the world and the role that connectivity has to play in organising our economic and social structures. Seeing the internet as a neon data space has allowed us to understand it as an alternative space, and one where actions have consequences. However, it is important that in recognising this we consider cyberpunk critically and investigate the phenomena that it is less successful at showing and describing. As we have seen over the last few years, the most pressing issue that technology has raised for our politics and social cohesion is that of the monopolisation of cyberspace by large corporations like Amazon, Google, and the social media giants. This monopolisation and the political problems it causes are largely driven by black box algorithms; these are algorithms designed to drive human behaviour (for example, by increasing time spent on a website) which can tweak their own behaviours based on user feedback so that even their designers are not accurately aware of the actions they are carrying out. Bots and other bad actors can take advantage of such systems, boosting their divisive signal by taking advantage of the favouritism these algorithms show towards polarising debates and enraging opinions.6 These issues flow just beneath the surface of Agency: in this version of 2017 the events caused by these bad actors are projected instead onto the kleptocrat who started the stub and reduced Russian interference in order to change the outcome of the Brexit referendum and the presidential election. It is Verity’s task to perform the Turing test, to establish whether Eunice is a bot or could, in fact, be a bona fide AI. This distinction between a bot and a ‘real’ AI belies the slippage that, in fact, causes these two concepts to overlap in our world. Programmers would refer to algorithms capable of change based on user feedback as a kind of artificial intelligence, so the difference is in terms of degree rather than in terms of quality. At the same time, attributing the differences in the referendum and the presidential election to this kleptocrat provides a neat solution to Gibson’s problem – that he had drafted a novel based on a world that changed drastically around him as he wrote – but is in danger of offering a unifying theory to explain a situation that is complex, in the manner of conspiracy theory. The real issues at stake here are not easy to visualize – cyberpunk does not imagine a ride through the neon dataspace of an internet walled off by monopolies and dominated by an irritating mix of bots, bad actors, and human emotion. Gibson’s cyberpunk is not particularly interested in imagining interaction with an AI who has not achieved consciousness and cannot converse. The concept of the AI as we see it in Gibson’s Agency is in danger of drawing on nostalgia for a concept that has long existed in science fiction, but is still unattainable and shows no signs of emerging from the datasphere. In writing about nostalgic science fiction, Gibson (2012) advises us to ‘distrust that particular flavour’, and in doing so gives us some guidelines for reading his own work. The nostalgia for a nuclear threat and for an artificial intelligence gaining sentience that we see in his work should be viewed critically. He continues to work towards a literature that can help us to understand contemporary life but, so far, his work – and I would argue cyberpunk in a more general sense – is merely adjacent to our needs. But cyberpunk

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gave us the tools to imagine a globalised, data-driven world, and those tools may yet prove useful in tackling the contemporary datasphere and its social, political, environmental embeddedness. A utopian prediction for the future of the mode.

Gestalt literary criticism The project of thinking about a cultural mode from a new perspective requires a gestalt switch in its own right, and this monograph has been a journey towards allowing such a switch to take place. Approaching William Gibson’s work through the visual imagery and influences of the novels reveals new insights and new continuities in the work of one of the most important writers on the contemporary scene, exploring the tensions in his work between the human and the posthuman, the visual and the haptic, the utopian and the dystopian. As well as offering this new reading of Gibson’s work, I hope that gestalt literary criticism can be used in future to analyse the permeable membrane between the literary and the visual arts. Instituting a new literary criticism, even one with such deep foundations, is a challenge and the new paradigm offered here provides a point of departure for elaboration and further investigation. In a world where the boundaries between different media, especially popular media, are increasingly eroded through the move towards transmedia artistic projects and public engagement via the internet, thinking about the ways in which visual culture works in literature will be of key importance. Here, I have taken an aesthetic approach that argues for a synthesis between form and content, a use of visual motifs and techniques that serves to shore up and complement the importance of ontology in these texts. There is also an argument to look at this topic from a more pragmatic, economic viewpoint, as popular literary fiction is written with an eye towards lucrative screen adaptation. An example of this in genre fiction might be J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series, which begins with internal description and action, and finishes with battle scenes described with the detail of a movie script. One could also point to the work of David Mitchell, one of the most important authors working today and one whose literary output is increasingly in conversation with his work as a screenwriter with the Wachowskis (Sense8, Cloud Atlas). This tendency is, of course, found in Gibson’s work too, whether through the film of Johnny Mnemonic, the two episodes of The X Files that he wrote with Tom Maddox, or his production of a screenplay for a film in the Alien series (adapted as a graphic novel and published as William Gibson’s Alien 3 in 2019). Such considerations are beyond the scope of this book, but will be valuable areas for future research, acknowledging the transmedia nature of contemporary culture. This book began by pointing out the tension at the heart of cyberpunk, that tension between the control of cybernetics and the anarchy of punk. Control has remained the key organising theme of Gibson’s work throughout his career, and in Agency the name itself shows that the question of who is in control, who has the power, and how individuals within a society can claim

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some agency for themselves remains at the forefront of his mind. However, the anarchy of punk has perhaps faded in the years since cyberpunk’s birth as the internet has somewhat lost the lustre of a lawless new frontier and become another system heavily invested in rampant capitalism, strangled by monopolies and increasingly structuring and restraining our collective agency, acting as a machine for moving wealth upwards, to those who already hold the power. The massive increase in Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’s wealth during the coronavirus pandemic of 2020 is only one of the most extreme examples, and one that positions him as a forefather of Gibson’s kleptocracy. The ‘punk’ in cyberpunk has also been challenged by the increasingly urgent recognition of the climate crisis as the attraction of the cool, rebellious individual is replaced with the urgent need for collective action (McFarlane 2018). With the complication of that structuring tension between punk and cyberpunk, what does this means for reading Gibson’s work through the lens of a gestalt literary criticism? The critical methodology I have described here is one based around conflicting modes held in tension, and one that particularly draws upon a visual aesthetic. This study foregrounds the visual as a structuring metaphor for reading practices, and through this approach we have been able to look at Gibson’s work from different angles in each chapter. With each new angle we have become aware of the limits of perception. Perception is constituted through the figure/ground distinction, meaning that it can only take place on the principle that the field of vision will be limited, that some things will remain obscured or unseen. Pattern recognition can warp a visual field even as it constitutes it, finding patterns that are not there, or constraining the visual field so that it provides only a partial view. This focus on perception has also allowed us to see that limitations allow greater functionality in vision. A parallax view brings our position in time and space to the foreground, allowing us to see our present time and society anew, while the constitution of subjectivity in the Lacanian Imaginary is found in constraint. The complexity of chaos and autopoiesis privilege pattern recognition, as the sciences move away from reducing systems to their most basic components and move towards a complex, relational understanding of the world that complements the increasing complexity of our social, political, and ecological structures. Finally, we have considered how the visual nature of our reading practices might render some truths difficult to explore, like the black box algorithms that still lack a useful visual language with which to interrogate and challenge their power. The questions that cyberpunk raises again and again are those of agency and control: the control of cybernetics versus the anarchy of punk, and the tension between those two poles. The interplay of this gestalt, and the reading practices suggested by the mode of cyberpunk, give us some ways to see the contingency of our positions, bound by circumstance; to interrogate the fantasy of control, and perhaps to find some agency.

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Notes 1 While a third title is yet to be named at the time of going to print, Gibson’s publisher Penguin Random House is advertising The Peripheral and Agency as the first two books in the Jackpot Trilogy Series. 2 The concept of looking at our historical moment from the perspective of at least two very different futures encourages a change in gestalt and is reminiscent of my discussion of the parallax view in Chapter 5. 3 See Mark Dery’s interview with Samuel R. Delany in ‘Black to the Future: Interviews with Samuel R. Delany, Greg Tate, and Tricia Rose’ (1994) and Isiah Lavender III’s ‘Critical Race Theory’ (2020). 4 The term ‘voodoo’ is used in the novel and so I maintain it here – however, it should be noted that ‘voodoo’ is an umbrella term that refers to a series of African and African diaspora religions, often with a reductive, pejorative, and/or racist understanding of their associated beliefs and practices. 5 There are, of course, other interesting (and more developed) engagements with black diaspora traditions in cyberpunk culture: one might consider Nalo Hopkinson’s use of Caribbean and Yoruba cultural figures in Midnight Robber (2000), or the Voodoo Boys gang from Mike Pondsmith’s tabletop role-playing game Cyberpunk 2020 and the videogame it inspired, Cyberpunk 2077 (CD Projekt Red 2020). 6 For more on these issues and the shortcomings of cyberpunk representations see ‘AI and Cyberpunk Networks’ (McFarlane 2020).

Bibliography Canavan, Gerry. ‘Introduction: If This Goes On.’ Green Planets: Ecology and Science Fiction, edited by Gerry Canavan and Kim Stanley Robinson. Middletown CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2014, pp. 1–24. Dery, Mark. ‘Black to the Future: Interviews with Samuel R. Delany, Greg Tate, and Tricia Rose.’ Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture, edited by Mark Dery. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994, pp. 179–222. Easterbrook, Neal. ‘Recognizing Patterns: Gibson’s Hermeneutics from the Bridge Trilogy to Pattern Recognition.’ Beyond Cyberpunk: New Critical Perspectives, edited by Graham J. Murphy and Sherryl Vint. New York: Routledge, 2010, pp. 46–64. Ghosh, Amitav. The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2016. Gibson, William. Count Zero. London: HarperCollins, 1995. Gibson, William. Pattern Recognition. London: HarperCollins, 2003. Gibson, William. Distrust that Particular Flavor. London: Penguin, 2012. Gibson, William. Agency. New York: Berkley, 2020. Gladwell, Malcolm. The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference. New York: Little Brown, 2000. Klein, Naomi. The Shock Doctrine. London: Allen Lane, 2007. Klein, Naomi. This Changes Everything. London: Allen Lane, 2014. Lavender III, Isiah. ‘Critical Race Theory.’ The Routledge Companion to Cyberpunk Culture, edited by Anna McFarlane, Graham J. Murphy, and Lars Schmeink. New York: Routledge, 2020, pp. 308–316. Lenton, Timothyet al. ‘Climate Tipping Points – Too Risky to Bet against.’ Nature, 27 November2019, www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-03595-0.

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McFarlane, Anna. ‘Could the Climate Crisis Spell the End for the “Punk” in “Cyberpunk”?’ Deletion 14, 2018, www.deletionscifi.org/episodes/could-the-climate-crisis-sp ell-the-end-for-the-punk-in-cyberpunk. McFarlane, Anna. ‘AI and Cyberpunk Networks.’ AI Narratives: A History of Imaginative Thinking About Intelligent Machines, edited by Stephen Cave, Kanta Dihal, and Sarah Dillon. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020, pp. 282–306. McFarlane, Anna, Graham J. Murphy and Lars Schmeink (eds). The Routledge Companion to Cyberpunk Culture. New York: Routledge, 2020. Murphy, Graham J. and Lars Schmeink (eds). Cyberpunk and Visual Culture. New York: Routledge, 2018. Murphy, Graham J. and Sherryl Vint (eds). Beyond Cyberpunk: New Critical Perspectives. New York: Routledge, 2010. Newitz, Annalee. ‘William Gibson on the Apocalypse, America, and The Peripheral’s Ending.’ Gizmodo, 10 November2014, https://io9.gizmodo.com/william-gibson-on-the-ap ocalypse-america-and-the-peri-1656659382. Sterling, Bruce and Lewis Shiner. ‘Mozart in Mirrorshades.’ Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology, edited by Bruce Sterling. New York: Ace, 1988, pp. 223–239. Suvin, Darko. ‘On Gibson and Cyberpunk SF.’ Storming the Reality Studio: A Casebook of Cyberpunk and Postmodern Fiction, edited by Larry McCaffery. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1992, pp. 349–365.

Index

Figures are shown in italic. Footnotes are indicated by the page number followed by ‘n’ and the note number e.g., 88n1 refers to note 1 on page 88. 9/11 terror attacks 15, 68–9, 72–80, 87, 90, 108, 146, 150 advertising 69, 79, 81–5, 108 affect theory 136–7, 145, 147–48 Anthropocene 9, 138–9, 146 apophenia 15, 68, 70, 72, 77–9, 84, 88n1 Arnheim, Rudolf 4–5, 14 artificial intelligence 20–1, 24, 31, 47, 60–1, 68, 150–55, 160–1 autopoiesis 9, 14, 22–4, 31, 33, 38, 43, 46, 48, 163: and ecology 137; intellectual roots of 70; and posthumanism 24–6 Ballard, J.G. 10 Barthes, Roland 5 Baudrillard, Jean 33, 130 Berlant, Lauren 15 bifurcation point 48–50, 62 Borges, Jorge Luis 130 bricolage 34, 38–9 Burroughs, William S. 10, 39, 44n6 Cadigan, Pat 7–8 Canavan, Gerry 156 Card, Orson Scott 141 Cavallaro, Dani 8, 50, 57 celebrity culture 16, 47, 61, 91, 96–9, 100, 106, 140 chaos theory 14–15, 48–50, 62, 65–6, 69, 87, 163: and climate change 138; and fractals 52–55; and science fiction 55–8, 63 Clarke, Bruce 9, 137 class 51–2, 118, 121, 156

climate crisis 16, 121, 136–8, 151–2, 155–8, 160, 163 Cold War 64, 69, 72–3, 77, 87, 158 Colebrook, Claire 147–8 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 146 colonialism 121, 124–6, 147 Cornell boxes 10, 29, 40–1, 73–4 cybernetics 8–9, 46, 50, 56–7, 162–3: and autopoiesis 22–3, 43; and ecology 137 cyberpunk 1–2, 8–9, 20–1, 26, 37–8, 43, 46, 48, 81, 140, 160–2: and climate change 155–6, 163; as cultural mode 1–2, 160; as literature of the interface 2, 6, 7, 50–1; as postmodern 40; as retro 99; as visual 11, 46 cyberspace 1, 15, 20–1, 26, 28, 37, 47–8, 80, 116, 154, 156, 161: and disembodiment 42, 127, 136, 143; and physical space 48, 51–5, 61, 66, 98–9 Delany, Samuel R. 39, 154 Deleuze, Gilles 136, 147 Derrida, Jacques 33–4, 74, 147 dialetics 12–14, 17n8, 24, 46, 48–51, 56, 65, 93, 112: materialism 114–15 drugs 7, 20, 31–2, 36–8, 47, 59–60, 70, 78, 107, 113 dystopia see utopia Easterbrook, Neal 159–60 ekphrasis 16, 114, 126–31 emergence 46, 49, 62 espionage 16, 87, 91, 104–6, 122, 152 extra-terrestrials 124–5

Index figure/ground distinction 3–6, 11–12, 16, 25, 49, 58, 81, 163 Foster, Thomas 2, 160 fractal 15, 46, 52–8, 64, 95, 99, 108 Freedman, Carl 12–13, 104, 115 Freud, Sigmund 117, 119 Fukuyama, Francis 64, 73 gestalt: as form 28–9; as gestalt switch 6, 12–13, 15, 47, 49, 51, 59, 61, 65–6, 69, 88, 93, 140; literary criticism 2, 5–6, 16, 25, 33, 162–3; and mirror stage 90–6; perception 3–5, 12, 34, 39, 49, 57–62, 68, 72, 81, 85, 114; psychology 3, 23, 137; and science fiction 6–9, 12–14; therapy 137–8 Ghosh, Amitav 160 Gibson, William: Agency 150–63; All Tomorrow’s Parties 46–7, 54–5, 57–64; Archangel 158; Count Zero 21, 29–30, 31–2, 41–2, 122, 152–5; and Bruce Sterling, The Difference Engine 56; Distrust That Particular Flavour 73, 161; ‘The Gernsback Continuum’ 121, 125; ‘Hinterlands’ 7, 124–5; Idoru 47, 60, 93; ‘Johnny Mnemonic’ 44n4; Mona Lisa Overdrive 21, 27–8, 31–2, 57, 122–3, 159; Neuromancer 2, 7, 20, 26–40, 42, 68, 78–9, 81–4, 122–3, 127, 140–3, 148, 152, 154–5; Pattern Recognition 15, 68–88, 90, 120, 132, 146, 150, 158–60; The Peripheral 16, 136–48, 150–2, 159–60; Spook Country 15–16, 90–2, 95–110, 116, 132; Virtual Light 47–8, 51–2, 55, 64–6; William Gibson’s Alien 3 10, 162; ‘The Winter Market’ 39; Zero History 16, 110, 112–14, 116–20, 122–3, 125–33 Gleick, James 48, 52, 54–5 globalisation 30, 81–5, 125, 132 Gombrich, E.H. 5 gomi 26, 39, 42–3, 126 Haraway, Donna J. 1, 12, 42 Hayles, N. Katherine 2, 7, 24–5, 42, 53, 63, 65, 127 Herbert, Frank 6–7 history 59–61, 99, 103, 105–7, 112, 121, 126, 131, 150: alternate 151, 157–8; as chaotic system 47, 62–4; end of history 64, 73, 86–7; History as the Real 95, 106–7, 110; ‘zero’ history 122–3 Hollinger, Veronica 9, 15, 80, 113, 120

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human exceptionalism 15, 24–5, 28, 43, 69 humanism 25, 94–5 hyperobject 144 Iraq War 88n4, 90–2, 101–3, 108, 132 Iser, Wolfgang 5, 49 James, Henry 16, 114, 126–9, 131–2 Jameson, Fredric 1–2, 15, 17n8, 43, 81, 83–4, 91, 95, 99–100, 106 Johnny Mnemonic (Longo) 11, 162 Kant, Immanuel 114 Klein, Yves 119 Koffka, Kurt 3, 17n4 Köhler, Wolfgang 3–4, 92–3 Kuhn, Thomas 12–15, 68–71, 76, 80, 87–8 Lacan, Jacques 15, 90–6, 103–6, 110, 132, 163 Lakoff, George 11–12 Livingston, Ira 25, 35 loas 21, 152, 154–5 locative art 91–2, 96–100, 102, 104, 108, 131 Locke, John 3, 16n1 Macy conferences 22, 137 Mandelbrot sets 14, 52, 55 marketing see advertising Marxism 17n8, 95 matrix 20–1, 26–39, 42, 57–8, 84, 142, 154 Matrix, The (Wachowskis) 1, 11, 46, 93 Maturana, Humberto 23, 34–5, 42, 48, 70 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 23 military 90–1, 101–5, 113, 143, 145–6, 151, 155 Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology 1–2, 7–8, 36–7 Moebius strip 114–15 Morgan, Glyn 144 Morton, Timothy 144 news media 32–3, 75, 101, 105–6 Nixon, Nicola 38 nodal point 61–4, 75, 91 novum 116–17: definition 79–80, 133n1 Olsen, Lance 34, 41 paranoia 15, 43, 68, 77, 94, 101, 104–5, 132 pattern recognition 46–7, 56–8, 60–1, 69–70, 73–4, 81, 85, 87, 163: definition of 6; as faulty see apophenia

168

Index

performativity 25 Pixies 66 plastic 139, 144, 157 Plath, Sylvia 59 polymerpunk 144 postcolonialism see colonialism posthumanism 2, 7, 24–5, 138 postmodernism 1, 7, 68, 130 Prägnanz 3 Prigogine, Ilya 48, 56 Pynchon, Thomas 10, 17n7, 43, 127 race 84–5, 152–5 reproductive futurism 159 Roberts, Adam 11, 63 Rubin’s vase 3, 4, 6, 13, 25, 49, 59, 112, 114 science fiction 2, 6, 16, 17n8, 39, 69, 71, 79–81, 112–13, 121–2, 137, 140, 160: as cognitive estrangement 12–14, 76–7; as extrapolation 56, 63–4; and gestalt 6–8; Golden Age of 121; history of 11; New Wave of 2; as parallax view 114–9, 125–6; as performative 25–6; science fiction realism 2–3, 80, 91, 99, 113, 124–5 Shirley, John 7 simstim 21, 31–2, 42 Slusser, George 50 Stengers, Isabelle 48

Sterling, Bruce 1–2, 7, 36–7, 56, 150 strange attractor 62 Sturgeon, Theodore 6 supplementarity 33–8, 42–3, 60 Suvin, Darko 12–13, 17n8, 71, 79–80, 112–13, 122, 133n1, 159 television 2, 9–11, 26–7, 73, 75, 78, 139 terrorism 32–3, 84–5 tulpa 97, 151 Turing test 151 utopia 13–14, 43, 69, 79–87, 121, 156, 160, 162 Varela, Francisco 23, 34–5, 42, 48, 70 Velvet Underground, The 153 video games 11, 141–2, 145 virtual reality 26–7, 47, 51, 80, 91, 98–9, 104, 136 von Foerster, Heinz 22–3, 29–30, 62 voodoo see loas Wertheimer, Max 3–4, 72, 85 Wolfe, Cary 24–5 X Files, The 11, 162 zero world 13–14, 34, 38, 56, 112–14, 122, 133n1 Žižek, Slavoj 112, 114, 116, 126, 131–2