Science Fiction Criticism

by Rob Latham;

  Although the Gladney family still operates as a social unit (albeit with the geographical dispersion endemic to postmodern life), their conversations are punctuated by random bits of information emanating from the radio and TV. The punctuation points toward a mutation in subjectivity that comes from joining the focused attention of traditional novelistic consciousness with the digitized randomness of miscellaneous bits. The mutation reaches incarnation in Willie Mink, whose brain has become so addled by a designer drug that his consciousness is finally indistinguishable from the white noise that surrounds him. Through a different route than that used by Gibson, DeLillo arrives at a similar destination: a vision of subjectivity constituted through the interplay of pattern and randomness rather than presence and absence.

  The bodies of texts are also implicated in these changes. The displacement of presence by pattern thins the tissue of textuality, making it a semipermeable membrane that allows awareness of the text as an informational pattern to infuse into the space of representation. When the fiction of presence gives way to the recognition of pattern, passages are opened between the text-as-object and representations within the text that are characteristically postmodern. Consider the play between text as physical object and information flow in Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveler (1981). The text’s awareness of its own physicality is painfully apparent in the anxiety it manifests toward keeping the literary corpus intact. Within the space of representation, texts are subjected to birth defects, maimed and torn apart, lost and stolen, and, last but hardly least, pulverized when the wrong computer key is pushed and the stored words are randomized into miscellaneous bits.

  The anxiety is transmitted to readers within the text, who keep pursuing parts of textual bodies only to lose them, as well as to readers outside the text, who must try to make sense of the radically discontinuous narrative. Only when the titles of the parts are perceived to form a sentence is the literary corpus reconstituted as a unity. Significantly, the recuperation is syntactical rather than physical. It does not arise from or imply an intact physical body. Rather, it emerges from the patterns—metaphorical, grammatical, narrative, thematic, and textual—that the parts together make. As the climactic scene in the library suggests, the reconstituted corpus is a body of information, emerging from the discourse community among which information circulates.

  The correspondence between transformations in human and textual bodies can be seen as early as William Burroughs’s Naked Lunch (1959), written in the decade that saw the institutionalization of cybernetics and the construction of the first large-scale electronic computer. The narrative metamorphizes nearly as often as bodies within it, suggesting by its cut-up method a textual corpus as artificial, heterogeneous, and cybernetic as they are.26 Since the fissures that mark the text always fall within the units that comprise the textual body—within chapters, paragraphs, sentences, and even words—it becomes increasingly clear that they do not function to delineate the textual corpus. Rather, the body of the text is produced precisely by these fissures, which are not so much ruptures as productive dialectics bringing the narrative as a syntactic and chronological sequence into being.

  Bodies within the text follow the same logic. Under the pressure of sex and addiction, bodies explode or mutate, protoplasm is sucked out of cocks or nostrils, plots are hatched to take over the planet or nearest life-form. Burroughs anticipates Jameson’s claim that an information society is the purest form of capitalism.27 When bodies are constituted as information, they can not only be sold but fundamentally reconstituted in response to market pressures. Junk instantiates the dynamics of informatics and makes clear its relation to late capitalism. Junk is the “ideal product” because the “junk merchant does not sell his product to the consumer, he sells the consumer to his product. He does not improve and simplify his merchandise. He degrades and simplifies the client” (“Introduction,” xxxix). The junkie’s body is a harbinger of the postmodern mutant, for it demonstrates how presence yields to patterns of assembly and disassembly created by the flow of junk-as-information through points of amplification and resistance.

  The characteristics of information narratives include, then, an emphasis on mutation and transformation as a central thematic for bodies within the text as well as for the bodies of texts. Subjectivity, already joined with information technologies through cybernetic circuits, is further integrated into the circuit by novelistic techniques that combine it with data. Access vies with possession as a structuring element, and data are narrativized to accommodate their integration with subjectivity. In general, materiality and immateriality are joined in a complex tension that is a source of exultation and strong anxiety. To understand the links between information narratives and other contemporary fictions that may not obviously fall into this category, let us turn now to consider the more general effects of informatics on narrative encodings.

  Functionalities of narrative

  The very word narrator implies a voice speaking, and a speaking voice implies a sense of presence. Derrida, announcing the advent of grammatology, focused on the gap that separates speaking from writing; such a change transforms the narrator from speaker to scribe, or more precisely an absence toward which the inscriptions point.28 Informatics pushes this transformation further. As writing yields to flickering signifiers underwritten by binary digits, the narrator becomes not so much a scribe as a cyborg authorized to access the relevant codes.

  To see how the function of the narrator changes, consider the seduction scene from “I Was an Infinitely Hot and Dense White Dot,” one of the stories in Mark Leyner’s My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist.29 The narrator, “high on Sinutab” and driving “isotropically,” so that any destination is equally probable, finds himself at a “squalid little dive” (6).

  I don’t know . . . but there she is. I can’t tell if she’s a human or a fifth-generation gynemorphic android and I don’t care. I crack open an ampule of mating pheromone and let it waft across the bar, as I sip my drink, a methyl isocyanate on the rocks—methyl isocyanate is the substance which killed more than 2,000 people when it leaked in Bhopal, India, but thanks to my weight training, aerobic workouts, and a low-fat fiber-rich diet, the stuff has no effect on me. Sure enough she strolls over and occupies the stool next to mine. . . . My lips are now one angstrom unit from her lips . . . I begin to kiss her but she turns her head away. . . . I can’t kiss you, we’re monozygotic replicants—we share 100% of our genetic material. My head spins. You are the beautiful day, I exclaim, your breath is a zephyr of eucalyptus that does a pas de bourré across the Sea of Galilee. Thanks, she says, but we can’t go back to my house and make love because monozygotic incest is forbidden by the elders. What if I said I could change all that. . . . What if I said that I had a miniature shotgun that blasts gene fragments into the cells of living organisms, altering their genetic matrices so that a monozygotic replicant would no longer be a monozygotic replicant and she could then make love to a muscleman without transgressing the incest taboo, I say, opening my shirt and exposing the device which I had stuck in the waistband of my black jeans. How’d you get that thing? she gasps, ogling its thick fiber-reinforced plastic barrel and the Uzi-Biotech logo embossed on the magazine which held two cartridges of gelated recombinant DNA. I got it for Christmas. . . . Do you have any last words before I scramble your chromosomes, I say, taking aim. Yes, she says, you first. (7)

  Much of the passage’s wit comes from the juxtaposition of folk wisdom and seduction clichés with high-tech language and ideas that makes them nonsensical. The narrator sips a chemical that killed thousands when it leaked into the environment, but he is immune to damage because he eats a low-fat diet. The narrator leans close to the woman/android to kiss her, but he has not yet made contact when he is an angstrom away, considerably less than the diameter of a hydrogen atom. The characters cannot make love because they are barred by incest taboos, being replicants from the same monozygote, which would make them identical twins but does
not seem to prevent them from being opposite sexes. They are governed by kinship rules enforced by tribal elders, but they have access to genetic technologies that intervene in and disrupt evolutionary modes of descent. They think their problem can be solved by an Uzi-Biotech weapon that will scramble their chromosomes, but the narrator, at least, seems to expect their identities to survive intact.

  Even within the confines of a short story no more than five pages long, this encounter is not preceded or followed by events that relate directly to it. Rather, the narrative leaps from scene to scene, which are linked by only the most tenuous and arbitrary threads. The incongruities make the narrative a kind of textual android created through patterns of assembly and disassembly. There is no natural body to this text, any more than there are natural bodies within the text. As the title intimates, identity merges with typography (“I was a . . . dot”) and is further conflated with such high-tech reconstructions as computer simulations of gravitational collapse (“I was an infinitely hot and dense white dot”). Signifiers collapse like stellar bodies into an explosive materiality that approaches the critical point of nova, ready to blast outward into dissipating waves of flickering signification.

  The explosive tensions between cultural codes that familiarize the action and neologistic splices that dislocate traditional expectations do more than structure the narrative. They also constitute the narrator, who exists less as a speaking voice endowed with a plausible psychology than as a series of fissures and dislocations that push toward a new kind of subjectivity. To understand the nature of this subjectivity, let us imagine a trajectory that arcs from storyteller to professional to some destination beyond. The shared community of values and presence that Walter Benjamin had in mind when he evoked the traditional storyteller whose words are woven into the rhythms of work echo faintly in allusions to the Song of Songs and tribal elders.30 Overlaid on this is the professionalization that Lyotard wrote about in The Postmodern Condition, in which the authority to tell the story is constituted by possessing the appropriate credentials that qualify one as a member of a physically dispersed, electronically bound professional community.31 This phase of the trajectory is signified in a number of ways. The narrator is driving “isotropically,” indicating that physical location is no longer necessary or relevant to the production of the story. His authority derives not from his physical participation in a community but his possession of a high-tech language that includes pheromones, methyl isocyanate, and gelated recombinant DNA, not to mention the Uzi-Biotech phallus. This authority, too, is displaced even as it is created, for the incongruities reveal that the narrative and therefore the narrator are radically unstable, about to mutate into a scarcely conceivable form, signified in the story by the high-tech, identity-transforming orgasmic blast that never quite comes.

  What is this form? Its physical manifestations vary, but the ability to manipulate complex codes is a constant. The looming transformation, already enacted through the passage’s language, is into a subjectivity who derives his authority from possessing the correct codes. Countless scenarios exist in popular literature and culture where someone fools a computer into thinking he is an “authorized” person because he possesses or stumbles upon the codes that the computer recognizes as constituting authorization. Usually these scenarios imply that the person exists unchanged, taking on a spurious identity that allows him to move unrecognized within an informational system. There is, however, another way to read these narratives. Constituting identity through authorization codes changes the person who uses them into another kind of subjectivity, precisely one who exists and is recognized because he knows the codes. The surface deception is underlaid by a deeper truth. We become the codes we punch. The narrator is not a storyteller and not a professional authority, although these functions linger in the narrative as anachronistic allusions and wrenched referentiality. Rather, the narrator is a keyboarder, a hacker, a manipulator of codes.32 Assuming that the text was at some phase in its existence digitized, in a literal sense he (it?) is these codes.

  The construction of the narrator as a manipulator of codes obviously has important implications for the construction of the reader. The reader is similarly constituted through a layered archeology that moves from listener to reader to decoder. Because codes can be sent over fiber optics essentially instantaneously, there is no longer a shared, stable context that helps to anchor meaning and guide interpretation. Like reading, decoding takes place in a location arbitrarily far removed in space and time from the source text. In contrast to fixed type print, however, decoding implies that there is no original text—no first editions, no fair copies, no holographic manuscripts. There are only the flickering signifiers, whose transient patterns evoke and embody what G. W. S. Trow has called the context of no context, the suspicion that all contexts, like all texts, are electronically mediated constructions.33 What binds the decoder to the system is not the stability of an interpretive community or the intense pleasure of physically possessing the book that all bibliophiles know. Rather, it is her construction as a cyborg, her recognition that her physicality is also data made flesh, another flickering signifier in a chain of signification that extends through many levels, from the DNA that in-formats her body to the binary code that is the computer’s first language.

  “Functionality” is a term used by virtual reality technologists to describe the communication modes that are active in a computer-human interface. If the user wears a data glove, for example, hand motions constitute one functionality. If the computer can respond to voice-activated commands, voice is another functionality. If it can sense body position, spatial location is yet another. Functionalities work in both directions; that is, they both describe the computer’s capabilities and also indicate how the user’s sensory-motor apparatus is being trained to accommodate the computer’s responses. Working with a VR simulation, the user learns to move her hand in stylized gestures that the computer can accommodate. In the process, changes take place in the neural configuration of the user’s brain, some of which can be long-lasting. The computer molds the human even as the human builds the computer.

  When narrative functionalities change, a new kind of reader is produced by the text. The effects of flickering signification ripple outward because readers are trained to read through different functionalities, which can affect how they interpret any text, including texts written before computers were invented. Moreover, changes in narrative functionalities go deeper than structural or thematic characteristics of a specific genre, for they shift the modalities that are activated to produce the narrative. It is on this level that the subtle connections between information narratives and other kinds of contemporary fictions come into play.

  Drawing on a context that included information technologies, Roland Barthes in S/Z brilliantly demonstrated the possibility of reading a text as a production of diverse codes.34 Information narratives make that possibility an inevitability, for they often cannot be understood, even on a literal level, without referring to codes and their relation to information technologies. Flickering signification extends the productive force of codes beyond the text to include the signifying processes by which the technologies produce texts, as well as the interfaces that enmesh humans into integrated circuits. As the circuits connecting technology, text, and human expand and intensify, the point where quantitative increments shade into qualitative transformation draws closer.

  If my assessment that the dialectic of pattern/randomness is displacing presence/absence is correct, the implications extend beyond narrative into many cultural arenas. In my view, one of the most serious of these implications for the present cultural moment is a systematic devaluation of materiality and embodiment. I find this trend ironic, for changes in material conditions and embodied experience are precisely what give the shift its deep roots in everyday experience. In this essay I have been concerned not only to anatomize the shift and understand its implications for literature but also to suggest that it should be unde
rstood in the context of changing experiences of embodiment. If, on the one hand, embodiment implies that informatics is imprinted into body as well as mind, on the other, it also acts as a reservoir of materiality that resists the pressure toward dematerialization.

  Implicit in nearly everything I have written here is the assumption that presence and pattern are opposites existing in antagonistic relation. The more emphasis that falls on one, the less the other is noticed and valued. Entirely different readings emerge when one entertains the possibility that pattern and presence are mutually enhancing and supportive. Paul Virilio has observed that one cannot ask whether information technologies should continue to be developed.35 Given the market forces already at work, it is virtually (if I may use the word) certain that increasingly we will live, work, and play in environments that construct us as embodied virtualities.36 I believe that our best hope to intervene constructively in this development is to put an interpretive spin on it that opens up the possibilities of seeing pattern and presence as complementary rather than antagonistic. Information, like humanity, cannot exist apart from the embodiment that brings it into being as a material entity in the world; and embodiment is always instantiated, local, and specific. Embodiment can be destroyed but it cannot be replicated. Once the specific form constituting it is gone, no amount of massaging data will bring it back. This observation is as true of the planet as it is of an individual life-form. As we rush to explore the new vistas that cyberspace has made available for colonization, let us also remember the fragility of a material world that cannot be replaced.