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FLATLINE CONSTRUCTS GOTHIC MATERIALISM AND CYBERNETIC THEORY-FICTION |
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4. BLACK MIRROR: HYPERNATURALISM, HYPERREALITY AND HYPERFICTION |
4.1 Never Mind Metaphor 4.2 Borges
Doesn’t Make it into Cyberspace 4.3 Hyperreality
and Postmodernist Fiction 4.4 Social
Science/Social Science Fiction (How the True World Became a Simulation) 4.5 The
Decline of the Shadow (or, the End of the Marvellous) 4.6 Machinism
and Animism (or, Gremlins in the Hyperreal) 4.7 Capitalism
as Toy Story: Hyperfiction, Strange Loops and Rhizomes 4.8 A
Closing Parable: Hyperfiction and In
the Mouth of Madness |
Baudrillard:
“[W]e will no longer even pass through to ‘the other side of the mirror,’ that
was still the golden age of transcendence.” (SS 125)
Gibson: “ ‘A tug pilot claimed there were feral
children living in a moth-balled Japanese drug factory.
‘Yes,’
she said, thinking of Legba, of Mamman Brigitte, the thousand candles[…]
‘I wish, though,’ he said, ‘that I could have
gotten through to Lady Jane. Such an amazing story. Pure gothic.’” (MLO 111)
Gibson:
“ ‘How were they weird?’
‘Hoodoos. Thought the matrix was full of
mambos ‘n’ shit. Wanna know something Moll?’
‘What?’
‘They’re right.’” (MLO 179)
Land:
Voodoo passages through the black mirror.[256]
What happens when fiction (itself)
propagates, contaminating the Real?
The cyberneticization of fiction begins
when fiction begins to affect, rather than simply reflect, the Real .This
feedback circuit means the end of fiction as mirror, the end of “realism” in
its mimetic mode. But, to invoke M. H. Abrams’ classic opposition, if
cybernetic fiction is not a “mirror”, it is not a “lamp” either – a visionary
or imaginary transcendence of the empirical. What we have instead is what Grant
refers to as “realism about the
hyperreal” – a suggestive formulation we encountered for the first time as far
back as Chapter 1, but whose implications we will begin to consider now in more
detail. What happens, to fiction - and to the “world” (or worlds) with which it
forms a rhizome – when the relation between the Real and its simulations is
cybernetically reconfigured?
Needless to say, this is a recurring
theme in Gibson’s work, which, as we shall see, is constantly preoccupied with
the question of artificial worlds and their relations with each other. But
Gibson also deals with the relation between different modes of explanation for the same world – in particular, he focuses
on the competition between “supernaturalistic” and “naturalistic” explanatory
framworks, ultimately melting both into what we have called hypernaturalism.
4.1 Never Mind Metaphor
Gibson:
“Bobby, do you know what a metaphor is?”
“A component, like a capacitor?”
“No. Never mind metaphor, then.” (CZ 162-163).
It is in
the second two novels in the Neuromancer
trilogy – Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive – that voodoo comes to assume central importance,
both as a sorcerous practice and as an explanatory system. Less impressive than
the opening novel, [257] the subsequent books function most
effectively as commentary on Neuromancer,
deepening and supplementing its thematic register (the retrospective coding of Neuromancer as a voodoo narrative being
one of the most fascinating contributions Count
Zero in particular has to make to the Gibson fictive system). Gibson moves
emphatically away from any supernaturalist take on voodoo by
hypernaturalistically paralleling it with cybernetics. How closely can the
conceptual schemes – the competing
explanatory systems - of contemporary
technical systems and of Haitain voodoo
mesh? In a complicated passage in Count
Zero, Lucas, cyberspace operator and voodoo initiate, attempts to explains
to Bobby Newmark, the young would-be cyberspace jockey whose pseudonym gives
the novel its title, how the voodoo system relates to the cyberspace world with
which he is familiar.
“When Beauvoir and I
talk to you about the loa or their horses, as we call those few the loa choose
to ride, you should pretend we are talking two languages at once. One of these,
you already understand. That’s the language of street tech, as you call it.
Maybe we call something Ougo 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 need
to understand.” [...]
Bobby took a deep breath. “Beavouir said that
Jackie’s a horse for a snake, a snake
called Danbala. You run that by me in street tech?”
“Certainly. Think of Jackie as a deck, Bobby, a
cyberspace deck [...] Think of Danbala, who some people call the snake as a
program. Say as an icebreaker. Danbala slots into the Jackie deck, Jackie cuts
ice. That’s all.”
“OK,” Bobby
said, getting the hang of it, “then what’s the matrix? If she’s a deck, and
Danbala’s a program, what’s cyberspace?”
“The world,” Lucas said.
(CZ 163)
But if cyberspace is the world what is the world?
Let’s pause for a moment before
addressing that question, and consider the relationship between voodoo and
cyberspace, myth and technology, that Lucas outlines for Bobby Newmark. The
voodoo and street tech languages function as competing but ultimately
complementary explanatory systems, the one pointing to entities, and treating all technical descriptions as derivative,
the other seeing the technical plane
as primary, and treating the language
of entities as derivative. Metaphor would come in, in each case, to describe
the level taken to be derivative: for street tech, voodoo is metaphor, and vice
versa. Yet, despite what Lucas tries to tell Bobby, for Lucas and Beauvoir,
who, let us remember, are both cyberspace jockeys and voodoo initiates, the
relationship between these explanatory systems cannot be described in terms of
metaphor. Both, to speak like a Spinozist, are adequate explanations; adequate
but parallel. What is fascinating,
ultimately, is the lack of
equivalence of terms – while parallel, voodoo and cybernetics, like the world
and cyberspace, are not ultimately reducible to one another, precisely because
there is a relation of feedback between the two.
“Never mind metaphor, then...” “The
possibility of metaphor,” Baudrillard declares in The Transparency of Evil, “ is disappearing in every sphere […]”
(TE 7) Metaphor belongs to the ontologically-stable world of Baudrillard’s
“first order simulacra”: a world where the logics – or anti-logics – of
simulation are still contained within structures of resemblance and
non-resemblance, original and copy, true and fake. But “for there to be
metaphor, differential fields and distinct objects must exist” (TE 8), which,
in the age of “networks and integrated circuits” (TE 7), they no longer do. “Perhaps
our melancholy stems from this, for metaphor still had its beauty, it was
aesthetic, playing as it did upon difference, and upon the illusion of
difference. Today, metonymy – replacing the whole as well as the components,
and occasioning a general commutability of terms – has built its house upon the
dis-illusion of metaphor.” (TE 8)[258]
Why should cybernetic fiction bring the
end of metaphor? To understand something of what is at stake here, it might be
useful to compare Gibson with one of Baudrillard’s favourite authors of
simulation, Jorge Luis Borges.
<< Back to Contents
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Section 4.2 Borges Doesn’t Make it into Cyberspace >>
[256] Nick Land, “Meltdown”, Abstract Culture 1, Winter 1997, Cybernetic Culture Research Unit, (no page refs)
[257] Perhaps because Gibson supposedly adopted a more self-consciously “literary” approach in the latter two books, involving character-based storylines and branching narratives; all of which are opposed to the headlong adrenal rush of Neuromancer. So much the worse for Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive.
[258] Like Baudrillard, Deleuze-Guattari declare an end to metaphor, but where Baudrillard is melancholic, Deleuze-Guattari – not for the first time – are celebratory. When Deleuze-Guattari define the “plane of consistency” as “the abolition of all metaphor” (TP 69) they are setting out to undermine a kind of ontological hierarchization. The possibility of metaphor implies commitment to a reality principle, whose underlying assumption is the belief that reality is no longer under production. Since “all that consists is Real”, Deleuze-Guattari insist, the plane “knows nothing of differences in level, orders of magnitude, or distances. It knows nothing of the distinction between the artificial and the natural.” (TP 69)