Science Fiction Criticism

by Rob Latham;

  Mutation is the catastrophe in the pattern/randomness dialectic analogous to castration in presence/absence. It marks the opening of pattern to randomness so extreme that the expectation of continuous replication can no longer be sustained. But as with castration, this only appears to be a disruption located at a specific moment. The randomness to which mutation testifies is always already interwoven into pattern. One way to understand this “always already” is through the probability function that mathematically defines information in Claude Shannon’s classic equations in information theory.15 Were randomness not always already immanent, we would be in the Newtonian world of strict causality rather than the information-theoretic realm of probability. More generally, randomness is involved because it is only against the background or possibility of nonpattern that pattern can emerge. Wherever pattern exists, randomness is implicit as the contrasting term that allows pattern to be understood as such. The crisis named by mutation is as wide-ranging and pervasive in its import within the pattern/randomness dialectic as castration is within the tradition of presence/absence, for it is the visible mark that testifies to the continuing interplay of the dialectical terms.

  Shifting the emphasis from presence/absence to pattern/randomness suggests different choices for tutor texts. Rather than Freud’s discussion of “fort/da” (a short passage whose replication in hundreds of commentaries would no doubt astonish its creator), theorists interested in pattern and randomness might point to something like David Cronenberg’s film The Fly. At a certain point the protagonist’s penis does fall off (he quaintly puts it in his medicine chest as a memento to times past), but the loss scarcely registers in the larger metamorphosis he is undergoing. The operative transition is not from male to female-as-castrated-male, but from human to something radically other than human. Flickering signification brings together language with a psychodynamics based on the symbolic moment when the human confronts the posthuman.

  Metamorphisis in progress in David Cronenberg’s The Fly.

  I understand “human” and “posthuman” to be historically specific constructions that emerge from different configurations of embodiment, technology, and culture. A convenient point of reference for the human is the picture constructed by nineteenth-century American and British anthropologists of “man” as a tool-user.16 Using tools may shape the body (some anthropologists made this argument), but the tool nevertheless is envisioned as an object, apart from the body, that can be picked up and put down at will. When the claim could not be sustained that man’s unique nature was defined by tool use (because other animals were shown also to use tools), the focus shifted during the early twentieth century to man the tool-maker. Typical is Kenneth P. Oakley’s 1949 Man the Tool-Maker, a magisterial work with the authority of the British Museum behind it.17 Oakley, in charge of the Anthropological Section of the museum’s Natural History division, wrote in his introduction, “Employment of tools appears to be [man’s] chief biological characteristic, for considered functionally they are detachable extensions of the forelimb” (1). The kind of tool he envisioned was mechanical rather than informational; it goes with the hand, not on the head. Significantly, he imagined the tool to be at once “detachable” and an “extension,” separate from yet partaking of the hand. If the placement and kind of tool marks his affinity with the epoch of the human, its construction as a prosthesis points forward to the posthuman.

  Similar ambiguities informed the Macy Conference discussions taking place during the same period (1946–53), as participants wavered between a vision of man as a homeostatic, self-regulating mechanism whose boundaries were clearly delineated from the environment,18 and a more threatening, reflexive vision of a man spliced into an informational circuit that could change him in unpredictable ways. By the 1960s, the consensus within cybernetics had shifted dramatically toward the reflexivity. By the 1980s, the inertial pull of homeostasis as a constitutive concept had largely given way to theories of self-organization that implied radical changes were possible within certain kinds of complex systems.19 Through these discussions, the “posthuman” future of “humanity” began increasingly to be evoked. Examples range from Hans Moravec’s invocation of a “postbiological” future in which human consciousness is downloaded into a computer, to the more sedate (and in part already realized) prospect of a symbiotic union between human and intelligent machine that Howard Rheingold calls “intelligence augmentation.”20 Although these visions differ in the degree and kind of interfaces they imagine, they concur that the posthuman implies a coupling so intense and multifaceted that it is no longer possible to distinguish meaningfully between the biological organism and the informational circuits in which it is enmeshed. Accompanying this change, I have argued, is a corresponding shift in how signification is understood and corporeally experienced. In contrast to Lacanian psycholinguistics, derived from the generative coupling of linguistics and sexuality, flickering signification is the progeny of the fascinating and troubling coupling of language and machine.

  Information narratives and bodies of information

  The shift from presence and absence to pattern and randomness is encoded into every aspect of contemporary literature, from the physical object that constitutes the text to such staples of literary interpretation as character, plot, author, and reader. The development is by no means even; some texts testify dramatically and explicitly to the shift, whereas others manifest it only indirectly. I will call the texts where the displacement is most apparent information narratives. Information narratives show in exaggerated form changes that are more subtly present in other texts as well. Whether in information narratives or contemporary fiction generally, the dynamic of displacement is crucial. One could focus on pattern in any era, but the peculiarity of pattern in these texts is its interpenetration with randomness and its implicit challenge to physicality. Pattern tends to overwhelm presence, marking a new kind of immateriality that does not depend on spirituality or even consciousness, only on information.

  I begin my exploration with William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984), the novel that sparked the cyberpunk movement and motivated Autodesk, a software company, to launch a major initiative in developing virtual reality technology. Hard on the heels of Neuromancer came two more volumes, Count Zero (1986) and Mona Lisa Overdrive (1988). The Neuromancer trilogy gave a local habitation and a name to the disparate spaces of computer simulations, networks, and hypertext windows that prior to Gibson’s intervention had been discussed as separate phenomena. Gibson’s novels acted like seed crystals thrown into a supersaturated solution; the time was ripe for the technology known as cyberspace to precipitate into public consciousness. The narrator defines cyberspace as a “consensual illusion” accessed when a user “jacks into” a computer (51). Here the writer’s imagination outstrips existing technologies, for Gibson imagines a direct neural link between the brain and computer through electrodes. Another version of this link is a socket implanted behind the ear that accepts computer chips, allowing direct neural access to computer memory. Network users collaborate in creating the richly textured landscape of cyberspace, 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 . . .” (51). Existing in the nonmaterial space of computer simulation, cyberspace defines a perimeter within which pattern is the essence of the reality, presence an optical illusion.

  Like the landscapes they negotiate, the subjectivities who operate within cyberspace also become patterns rather than physical entities. Case, the computer cowboy who is the novel’s protagonist, still has a physical presence, although he regards his body as so much “meat” that exists primarily to sustain his consciousness until the next time he can enter cyberspace. Others have completed the transition that Case’s values imply. Dixie Flatline, a cowboy who encountered something in cyberspace that flattened his EEG, ceased to exist as a phys
ical body and lives now as a personality construct within the computer, defined by the magnetic patterns that store his identity.

  The contrast between the body’s limitations and cyberspace’s power highlights the advantages of pattern over presence. As long as the pattern endures, one has attained a kind of immortality. Such views are authorized by cultural conditions that make physicality seem a better state to be from than to inhabit. In a world despoiled by overdevelopment, overpopulation, and time-release environmental poisons, it is comforting to think that physical forms can recover their pristine purity by being reconstituted as informational patterns in a multidimensional computer space. A cyberspace body, like a cyberspace landscape, is immune to blight and corruption. It is no accident that the vaguely apocalyptic landscapes of films like The Terminator, Blade Runner, and Hardware occur in narratives focusing on cybernetic life-forms. The sense that the world is rapidly becoming uninhabitable by human beings is part of the impetus toward the displacement of presence by pattern.

  These connections lie close to the surface in Neuromancer. “Get just wasted enough, find yourself in some desperate but strangely arbitrary kind of trouble, and it was possible to see Ninsei as a field of data, the way the matrix had once reminded him of proteins linking to distinguish cell specialities. Then you could throw yourself into a highspeed drift and skid, totally engaged but set apart from it all, and all around you the dance of biz, information interacting, data made flesh in the mazes of the black market . . .” (16). The metaphoric slippages between urban sprawl, computer matrix, and biological protein culminate in the final elliptical phrase, “data made flesh.” Information is the putative origin, physicality the derivative manifestation. Body parts sold in black-market clinics, body neurochemistry manipulated by synthetic drugs, body of the world overlaid by urban sprawl testify to the precariousness of physical existence. If flesh is data incarnate, why not go back to the source and leave the perils of physicality behind?

  The reasoning presupposes that subjectivity and computer programs have a common arena in which to interact. Historically, that arena was first defined in cybernetics by the creation of a conceptual framework that constituted humans, animals, and machines as information-processing devices receiving and transmitting signals to effect goal-directed behavior.21 Gibson matches this technical achievement with two literary innovations that allow subjectivity, with its connotations of consciousness and self-awareness, to be articulated together with abstract data. The first is a subtle modification in point of view, abbreviated in the text as pov. More than an acronym, pov is a substantive noun that constitutes the character’s subjectivity by serving as a positional marker substituting for his absent body.

  In its usual Jamesian sense, point of view presumes the fiction of a person who observes the action from a particular angle and tells what he sees. In the preface to The Portrait of a Lady, James imagines a “house of fiction” with a “million windows” formed by “the need of the individual vision and by the pressure of the individual will.”22 At each “stands a figure with a pair of eyes, or at least with a field glass, which forms, again and again, for observation, a unique instrument, insuring to the person making use of it an impression distinct from every other” (46). For James the observer is an embodied creature, and the specificity of his location determines what he can see as he looks out on a scene that itself is physically specific. When an omniscient viewpoint is used, the limitations of the narrator’s corporeality begin to fall away, but the suggestion of embodiment lingers in the idea of focus, the “scene” created by the eye’s movement.

  Even for James, vision is not unmediated technologically. Significantly, he hovers between eye and field glass as the receptor constituting vision. Cyberspace represents a quantum leap forward into the technological construction of vision. Instead of an embodied consciousness looking through the window at a scene, consciousness moves through the screen to become the pov, leaving behind the body as an unoccupied shell. In cyberspace point of view does not emanate from the character; rather, the pov literally is the character. If a pov is annihilated, the character disappears with it, ceasing to exist as a consciousness in and out of cyberspace. The realistic fiction of a narrator who observes but does not create is thus unmasked in cyberspace. The effect is not primarily metafictional, however, but in a literal sense metaphysical, above and beyond physicality. The crucial difference between the Jamesian point of view and cyberspace pov is that the former implies physical presence, whereas the latter does not.

  Gibson’s technique recalls Robbe-Grillet’s novels, which were among the first information narratives to exploit the formal consequences of combining subjectivity with data. In Robbe-Grillet, however, the effect of interfacing narrative voice with objective description was paradoxically to heighten the narrator’s subjectivity, for certain objects, like the jalousied windows or the centipede in Jealousy, are inventoried with obsessive interest, indicating a mind-set that is anything but objective. In Gibson, the space in which subjectivity moves lacks this personalized stamp. Cyberspace is the domain of postmodern collectivity, constituted as the resultant of millions of vectors representing the diverse and often conflicting interests of human and artificial intelligences linked together through computer networks.

  To make this space work as a level playing field on which humans and computers can meet on equal terms, Gibson introduces his second innovation. Cyberspace is created by transforming a data matrix into a landscape in which narratives can happen. In mathematics matrix is a technical term denoting data that have been arranged into an n-dimensional array. Expressed in this form, data seem as far removed from the fascinations of story as random number tables are from the National Inquirer. Because the array is already conceptualized in spatial terms, however, it is a small step to imagining it as a three-dimensional landscape. Narrative becomes possible when this spatiality is given a temporal dimension by the pov’s movement through it. The pov is located in space, but it exists in time. Through the track it weaves, the desires, repressions, and obsessions of subjectivity can be expressed. The genius of Neuromancer lies in its explicit recognition that the categories Kant considered fundamental to human experience, space and time, can be used as a conjunction to join awareness with data. Reduced to a point, the pov is abstracted into a purely temporal entity with no spatial extension; metaphorized into an interactive space, the datascape is narrativized by the pov’s movement through it. Data are thus humanized, and subjectivity computerized, allowing them to join in a symbiotic union whose result is narrative.

  Such innovations carry the implications of informatics beyond the textual surface into the signifying processes that constitute theme and character. I suspect that Gibson’s novels have been so influential not only because they present a vision of the posthuman future that is already upon us—in this they are no more prescient than many other science fiction novels—but also because they embody within their techniques the assumptions expressed explicitly in the novels’ themes. This kind of move is possible or inevitable when the cultural conditions authorizing the assumptions are pervasive enough so that the posthuman is experienced as an everyday lived reality as well as an intellectual proposition.

  In The Condition of Postmodernity, David Harvey characterizes the economic aspects of the shift to an informatted society as a transition from a Fordist regime to a regime of flexible accumulation.23 As Harvey, along with many others, has pointed out, in late capitalism durable goods yield pride of place to information.24 A significant difference between information and durable goods is replicability. Information is not a conserved quantity. If I give you information, you have it, and I do, too. With information, the constraining factor separating the haves from the have-nots is not so much possession as access. The shift of emphasis from ownership to access is another manifestation of the underlying transition from presence/absence to pattern/randomness. Presence precedes and makes possible the idea of possession, for one can possess something onl
y if it already exists. By contrast, access implies pattern recognition, whether the access is to a piece of land (recognized as such through the boundary pattern defining that land as different from adjoining parcels), confidential information (constituted as confidential through the comparison of its informational patterns with less secure documents), or a bank vault (associated with knowing the correct pattern of tumbler combinations). In general, access differs from possession because it tracks patterns rather than presences. When someone breaks into a computer system, it is not her physical presence that is detected but the informational traces her entry has created.25

  When the emphasis falls on access rather than ownership, the private/public distinction that was so important in the formation of the novel is radically reconfigured. Whereas possession implies the existence of private life based on physical exclusion or inclusion, access implies the existence of credentialing practices that use patterns rather than presences to distinguish between those who do and do not have the right to enter. Moreover, entering is itself constituted as access to data rather than a change in physical location. In DeLillo’s White Noise (1985), for example, the Gladney’s home, traditionally the private space of family life, is penetrated by noise and radiation of all wavelengths—microwave, radio, television. The penetration signals that private spaces, and the private thoughts they engender and figure, are less a concern than the interplay between codes and the articulation of individual subjectivity with data. Jack Gladney’s death is prefigured for him as a pattern of pulsing stars around a computerized data display, and it is surely no accident that Babette, his wife, objects to the idea that a man sexually “enters” a woman. The phrases she prefers emphasize by contrast the idea of access.