Ts’ui Pen must have said once: I am withdrawing to write a book. And another time: I am withdrawing to construct a labyrinth. Every one imagined two works; to no one did it occur that the book and the maze were one and the same thing. Almost instantly I understood: “the garden of forking paths” was the chaotic novel; the phrase “the various futures (not to all)” suggested to me the forking in time, not in space. . . . In the work of Ts’ui Pen, all possible outcomes occur; each one is the point of departure for other forkings.
An extensive but finite number of forks can be represented on an interactive CD or laser disc, but they do not reproduce life, in which the unimaginable is often what comes next. The greatest tragedy of the new technologies may be their elimination of the incalculable—the coincidences and provocations and metaphors that in some literal sense “take us out of ourselves” and put us in relation to other things. To live inside a mechanical world is to live inside plotted possibility, what has already been imagined; and so the technologies that are supposed to open up the future instead narrow it. I am not arguing for existentialist freedom with this difference between inside and outside, only for an unquantifiable number of paths in the latter, a too predictable course in the former.
Much recent attention to the use of interactive media proposes that it makes passive viewing become active engagement. What is interesting about these products is that they map out a number of choices, but the choices are all preselected (and, with the rare exception of work by artists such as Lynn Hershman, the choices have little to do with meaningful decisions). That is, the user cannot do anything, go anywhere the creator has not gone before; as usual with computer programs, one must stay on the path and off the grass (by which analogy hackers do get off the path, a subversive success that keeps them in the park). We could chart the game as a series of forks in the road, in which each choice sets up another array of choices, but the sum total of choices have already been made. Thus, the audience becomes the user, a figure who resembles a rat in a conceptual version of a laboratory maze. The audience-user is not literally passive; he or she is engaged in making choices, but the choices do not necessarily represent freedom, nor this activity thinking. Participating is reduced to consuming. The ur-game, Pac-Man, made this apparent: the sole purpose of the Pac-Man icon, a disembodied head-mouth, was to devour what was in its path as it proceeded through a visible maze.
Perhaps what is most interesting about this form of interactivity is its resemblance to so many existing corridors of American life, in which a great many choices can be made, but all are ultimately choices to consume rather than to produce. About a decade ago, the 7–11 chain of convenience stores ran a series of television ads whose key phrase was, “Freedom of choice is what America is all about.” The ads echoed a pervasive tendency in the culture to reduce freedom to the freedom to choose from a number of products, to the scope of the consumer’s ability to consume. Perhaps it is not surprising that consumption should become the metaphor for democracy in a country that has long had little but representative democracy: that is, the ballot too is a kind of Garden of Forking Paths and not an open plain on which to roam and encounter. By the time the political process has reached the voting booth, all the real choices have been programmed in, and the voter becomes a consumer. Few genuine choices remain, and the act of voting becomes the act of acquiescence, an endorsement of the maze as an open field. The laboratory maze through which the rat moves is one metaphor for it. Another is supplied by the critic Norman M. Klein in an Art issues article on virtual reality: “VR is reverse Calvinism—predestination posing as free will. In that sense, VR may be as old as the Massachusetts Bay Colony, a new consumerist form of metaphysical redemption.”
The real landscape of Silicon Valley seems wholly interior, not only in the metaphor of the maze and the terrain of offices and suburbs but also in the much promoted ideal of the user never leaving a well-wired home and in the goal of eliminating the world and reconstituting it as information. Again, what disappears here is the incalculable, this time as the world of the sensory and sensual, with all the surprises and dangers that accompany it. In all the hymns to information, little is said about the nature of that information or the ability to use it; one pictures the empty trucks of metaphor hurtling down that information highway. Thinking is an aesthetic occupation, a matter of perceiving relationships and resemblances between things on many levels that defeat computerization because they are aesthetic, not rationalistic; the sensual world is necessary to it as grounding and inspiration, and as parallel. Computers can reason, but they will never really imagine, because the incalculable of the body is forever beyond them, though it may be simulated with increasing complexity—toward what end?
Understanding works largely by means of metaphors and analogies—the incalculable relationships between bits of information—and the way those metaphors and analogies are drawn from the nonconstructed world. The most obvious examples are expressions: stubborn as a mule, dumb as two sticks, pigheaded, dog breath, pussy, cock, cuckoo, horse sense, drones, worms, snakes in the grass, aping the gentry, bovine, donkey’s years. There are also shared (but fading) fables: the ant and the grasshopper, the tortoise and the hare, the dog in the manger, and a million coyote stories, which provide animal analogies for human dispositions, moralities, and fates. The microcosmic macrocosmic metaphors are particularly important, and they’re most immediately obvious in geography metaphors: the foot of a mountain, the bowels of the earth, a river’s mouth, the heart of the forest, tree limbs, even the soft shoulders of roads. (For a minor example, in Tristes Tropiques, Claude Lévi-Strauss compares speaking of his research to an unreceptive audience to dropping stones down a well, an analogy few would be likely to make nowadays.) The majority of figures of speech that make the abstract concrete and the abstruse imaginable are drawn from animals and organic spaces. It’s the animal world that makes being human imaginable, and the spatial realm that makes activity and achievement describable—career plateaus, rough spots, marshy areas. And it’s the image of the maze that’s gotten me through all the aspects of Silicon Valley I’ve approached thus far, and the approach to a specific landscape in California that’s made it possible to articulate some effects.
Computers are significant for their lack of metaphor: their processes don’t resemble organic processes, and only the crudest analogies can be drawn. Instead, they provide imaginatively sterile terms that are projected back onto organic life; we can be made to resemble them more easily than they can be made to resemble us. (It’s interesting that another machine-age invention, the superhighway, was used as the metaphor for information circulation systems and even more interesting that the information highway already has “gridlock.”) I wonder if generations of being without contact with such undeveloped spaces and nonhuman beings will eventually diminish English into a kind of blanked-out newspeak, a machine language, which has already appeared as the shorthand on networks, the disembodied platitudes of electoral politics, and the starkly denatured language of inner-city rap with its license-plate number-letter combos, police codes, and so on.
All those metaphors are ways of navigating the way things span both difference and similarity; without metaphor, the world would seem threateningly amorphous, both identical with ourselves and utterly incomprehensible. The anthropological theorist Paul Shepard writes, “Humans intuitively see analogies between the concrete world out there and their own inner world. If they conceive the former as a chaos of anarchic forces or as dead and frozen, then so will they perceive their own bodies and society; so will they think and act on that assumption and vindicate their own ideas by altering the world to fit them.” The loss of a relationship to the nonconstructed world is a loss of these metaphors. It is also loss of the larger territory of the senses, a vast and irreplaceable loss of pleasure and meaning.
Finally, even nowhere has its twin: everywhere. Silicon Valley has become a nowhere in the terms I have tried to lay out—an obliteration of place, an
ultimate suburb, a maze in which wars are designed, diversions are generated, the individual disembodied. But the physical landscape of Silicon Valley is now everywhere, not only in the attempts to clone its success but in the spread of its products and its waste throughout the globe, the outside world being ravaged by the retreat to the interior.
If you imagine a computer not as an autonomous object but as a trail of processes and effects and residues, which leave their traces across a global environmental maze, then it is already everywhere. The clean rooms in which poorly paid chip makers were exposed to toxic chemicals are now subcontracted out in the Southwest, Oregon, and the third world, so there’s a little of the valley there. The waste that was leaching through the once fecund earth of Silicon Valley is leaching still, and more of it is leaching around the globe. Some of the chemicals used to clean the chips have been peculiarly potent ozone-depleters (though most Silicon Valley firms have switched over to other compounds), so think of the upper atmosphere too; and the landfill where the packing and shipping material goes; and the electrical generating station your computer is plugged into and its energy sources (coal, hydropower, nuclear, geothermal, natural gas?); think of the networks it may be hooked into; think of the corporations whose pockets it lined—but don’t picture pockets, the money is in imageless cyberspace—and the stock markets where their shares are traded; think of the forests the manuals are printed on; think of the store that sold it; think of where it’ll be dumped when it’s rendered obsolete, as all computers have been.
These are the tentacles, the winding corridors, the farthest reaches of Silicon Valley, and the hardest to imagine. It is the scene of the crime that has vaporized, and resisting an unlocatable and unimaginable crime is difficult. One of the principal challenges for environmentalists is making devastation that is subtle and remote seem urgent to people with less vivid imaginations. Another is finding a site at which to protest (which is why Greenpeace has largely relocated from actual sites to wherever the media can be found). And the ultimate problem of the landscape of Silicon Valley in its most abstruse, penetrating, and symbolic forms is that it is unimaginable.
Apple Computer, which is headquartered in six buildings, indistinguishable but for their security levels, on Infinity Loop in Cupertino, is a key landscape for Silicon Valley, one that apparently displaced real orchards. When I was there, the Olson orchard across Highway 280 in Sunnyvale was selling Bing and Queen Anne cherries, and Latino workers were cutting up apricots to dry. But a third of the orchard was bulldozed this past spring [1994] for housing, and the rest of the Olson orchard is on its way out. What does it mean, this rainbow-colored apple with the bite taken out of it, which appears everywhere on Apple computers and on the many commodities (mugs, key rings, t-shirts) Apple markets, this emblem that seems to sum up the Santa Clara Valley’s change from agriculture to technology? It seems to have been appropriated to connote simplicity and wholesomeness, though apples aren’t rainbow colored in anything but the sloppiest association of positive emblems; and the bite also recalls temptation in Eden: the emblem is denatured, reassuring, and threatening all at once. But more than that, it is forgettable, dead in the imagination, part of nowhere—it has been a decade since I last pondered the Apple logo, which has become part of a landscape of disassociation in which the apple image connotes neither sustenance nor metaphor, only a consumer choice, the fruit of the tree of information at the center of the garden of merging paths.
2
BORDERS AND CROSSERS
A Route in the Shape of a Question
[2004]
The incomparable writer-philosopher Walter Benjamin long imagined that his life could be drawn as a map, but never imagined that the map would come to an abrupt termination in Port Bou, Spain, in 1940. In 1939, when the dictator Francisco Franco declared an end to the Spanish Civil War, tens of thousands of refugees walked north over the Pyrenees, seeking shelter in France. They expected to be welcomed as defenders of democracy, but many were forced into camps. A year later, the tide had turned, and refugees from the Third Reich and the Vichy regime began trickling into Spain, seeking passage out of Europe altogether through Spanish or Portuguese ports. Benjamin, a Berlin Jew who had been living in Paris for many years, was one of them, and the tale of his walk from France to Spain has acquired something of the aura of a legend in the academic and intellectual circles where he matters most, for at the end of it he died.
A map of an altogether different sort fell into my hands when I went to Port Bou to retrace Benjamin’s final walk. I had expected that my task would be an obscure one, but as soon as we arrived in the town, my companion and I found a kiosk by the little beach bearing maps of the region and an unfolded brochure on Benjamin and the monument to him that stands on the edge of town. The brochure contains a greatly reduced topographical map on which his final walk is marked with a thick orange line. There were other surprises. Most accounts say that he “walked across the Pyrenees,” but by the time the Pyrenees meet the Mediterranean, they are only steep hills, not the mountains I had always pictured.
Port Bou and the nearest French town of Cerberes (Portbou and Cervera are the Spanish spellings) are separated by a range of hills and connected by a tunnel. The French trains run on a different gauge track than the Spanish, so each town represents the terminus of a foreign system. It would’ve taken us two trains and several hours to get from Port Bou, where we woke up, to Banyuls, the second-to-last French town on the Mediterranean, where Benjamin began his walk, so we gave up halfway and took a taxi from Cerberes. The young man who drove us was affably multilingual, chatting to us in French and broken English and asking directions in Catalonian of a gaunt old man rearranging the stones on one of the terraces of a vineyard. At our request, he took us up into the steep amphitheater of grape terraces behind the town and left us in what to him looked like the middle of nowhere. We wouldn’t have minded walking there, but we weren’t sure we could have found the right road out of town.
The Mediterranean was blue, the unripe grapes were the same green as the leaves of the vines, and the ground was covered with the same deep-brown shale that the terraces, culverts, and occasional huts were made from, a stone that broke up into flat tablets and shards. I’d never been anywhere remotely nearby, but it all looked strangely familiar, the terraced vineyards like a leaner, steeper version of Sonoma or Napa, the hillsides above like the coast north of San Francisco where I hike all the time, even down to the live oaks, rattlesnake grass, and fennel growing in the hills. After we climbed above the vineyards, we walked for a long time on a road, alone, except for the insects.
There were huge grasshoppers with the wingspans of dragonflies when they took to the air, and small ones whose scarlet wings made them look like butterflies, though they vanished into drabness again when they landed. And there were many species of butterflies, small white ones, a yellow one that folded its wings to look like a green leaf, and a pair of swallowtails that chased and courted each other in the breeze. My companion remarked that butterflies have four basic wing motions that occur in so random a sequence that predators cannot predict where they will be; their erraticness makes them elusive. I answered that this sounded like Benjamin, who in his work was a historian, a theorist, a lyrical writer, creating writing as uncategorizable as it is influential. Though his most famous essay is “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” he devoted himself at far greater length to elucidating the meaning of Paris, labyrinths, cities, walks—a series of ideas that spiral around, double back, open into each other, metamorphose, and make endless connections, a map of the world drawn as much by poetic intuition as by rational analysis.
On his walk to Spain, he carried a heavy briefcase containing, he told his companions, a new manuscript more important than his life; and it was part of what made the walk so arduous for him that he had to stop one minute out of ten to catch his breath. There is a steep ascent up to the plateau between Banyuls and the slopes east of Cerberes, durin
g which the route is due south. It then rises to loop around the ridgeline, which is also the international border. Finally, the route heads due east again along the south-facing slopes above Port Bou. The route looks like a giant inverted question mark, like the ones at the beginning of questions in Spanish. There’s a Paul Auster novel, City of Glass, that Benjamin would have loved, in which one character takes walks across a city whose routes trace the outlines of letters of the alphabet and another character has to figure out what the walks spell; but he probably never knew that his last walk was in the form of a question.
Benjamin succeeded in leading a largely uneventful life until history at its most virulent intervened. Mostly he read, wrote, talked, and walked, activities that blurred together in his thinking, where the city was a magnificent labyrinthine mystery to be read by walking, a musing, meandering kind of walking. Though he had grown up in Germany when climbing mountains was so established a part of sentimental-romantic culture that he was photographed with an alpine background and alpenstock as a child, he was devotedly, unathletically urban in adulthood, nearsighted, with heart trouble, wandering his Paris labyrinths slowly. He was supremely unequipped for what even the foothill walk from France to Spain would require of him, though he was fortunate in his guide.
Lisa Fittko is one of the countless heroes who rise to confront disaster. Active against the Nazis, she had fled Germany years before and was living in Paris when the French government began sending foreigners, regardless of affiliation, into camps. As France surrendered and the Nazis moved south, Fittko, like Benjamin, like myriad Jews, foreigners, and resisters, fled south, looking for a way out of the noose. Fittko came to the southeast corner of France alone to look for escape routes and was given enormous assistance by the socialist mayor of Banyuls and, during the months she lived there, the townspeople. The mayor, Monsieur Azema, told her about a smuggler’s route that had also been used by the communist General Enrique Lister in the Spanish Civil War. This was the route she was exploring for the first time when she guided Benjamin, a woman called Frau Gurland, and Gurland’s teenage son over the mountains, turning back herself once she had gotten them to Spain and within easy reach of Port Bou. Over the next six months, she helped hundreds more escape along this route. She survived to flee to Cuba and then the United States [where she died in 2005, in her mid-nineties].
Storming the Gates of Paradise Page 8
