Flatline_Constructs 4.2 Borges Doesn't Make it into Cyberspace

Baudrillard: “We once lived in a world where the realm of the imaginary was governed by the mirror, by dividing one into two, by theatre, by otherness and alienation. Today that realm is the realm of the screen, of interfaces and duplication, of contiguity and networks.” (TE 54)

Two reconstructions of Borges’ tales for postmodernity.

At the beginning of his Precession of Simulacra, Baudrillard recounts “the Borges fable in which the cartographers of the Empire draw up a map so detailed that it ends up covering the territory exactly.” (SS 1). There was a time, Baudrillard claims, when this story would have struck us as the most beautiful allegory of simulation”, but, by now, “this fable has come full circle for us and possesses nothing but the discrete charm of second-order simulacra.” (SS 1)

What motivates Baudrillard into relegating the Borges fable to “second-order simulacra”? It is because the charm of the story, its power and its fascination, reside in the “sovereign difference” (SS 2) that it still posits between the real and its simulations, a difference that third order simulacra have effaced. In the age of “genetic miniaturization” the simulation’s “operation is nuclear and genetic [...] The real is produced from minitiaturized cells, matrices, and memory banks, models of contro [l...]” (SS 2) There has been a change in the nature of abstraction. “Today,” he claims, “abstraction is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror, or the concept [...] It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal. The territory no longer precedes the map, nor does it survive it. It is nevertheless the map that precedes the territory.” (SS 1)

At the end of his Heterology and the Postmodern, Julian Pefanis quotes, in full, Borges’ (very) short story “The Fauna of Mirrors.” The story begins with the claim that “the world of mirrors and the world of men were not, as they are now, cut off from each other. They were besides, quite different, neither beings nor colours nor shapes were the same [...] you could come and go through mirrors. One night the mirror people invaded the earth. Their power was great, but at the end of bloody warfare the magic arts of the Yellow Emperor prevailed. He repulsed the invaders, imprisoned them in mirrors and forced on them the task of repeating, as though in a kind of dream, all of the actions of men [...] a day will come when the magic spell will be shaken off [...] little by little they will not imitate us. […]”[259]

Is this an anticipation, as Pefanis suggests, of the third order, or does it still belong to the second order? Certainly, the third-order is marked by a failure of mirroring, by the non-equivalence of simulation technologies and what they simulate (“ little by little they will not imitate us”). Yet, to qualify as fiction of the third order, the tale must offer no hints of transcendence. If there is no more mirroring, Baudrillard says, there is also no possibility of getting to the other side of the mirror, no possibility of an escape of “the other side” into “our world”; in part because our world and the other world have fatally fused. As Baudrillard writes of Dick, in the essay “Simulacra and Science Fiction”, “there is no longer a double, one is already in the other world, which is no longer an other, without a mirror, without a projection, or a utopia that can reflect it - simulation is insuperable, unsurpassable, dull and flat, without exteriority - we will no longer even pass through to ‘the other side of the mirror,’ that was still the golden age of transcendence.” (SS 125) (We shall examine in more detail below what Baudrillard means when he posits the end of the double and the shadow.)

In Neuromancer , Gibson produces an image which simultaneously fulfils Baudrillard’s description of the science fiction of the simulacra and moves beyond it - the “black mirror”. In Gibson’s radically immanentized world, as in Baudrillard’s, “the golden age of transcendence” is over: “we will no longer pass through to ‘the other side of the mirror’”, we encounter the “flat” surface of the black mirror.

“[W]hat’s cyberspace?” (CZ 163)

But what then does the black mirror show us, if not our own reflections? In part, the black mirror is another image of cyberspace black out - the catatonic “neuro-electronic void” or cut-out of conscious signal we have already discussed. (See especially, Chapter 1: “Flatlines”, and Chapter 2: “Body Image Fading”). The black mirror, then, is the image of the noumenal event horizon beyond which we cannot go: what we “always” are “in the other world” we are “already” in. But the black mirror is also an image of cyberspace itself. Like Borges’ map, the Matrix is an enormous simulation that has absorbed the world into it.

‘The world.” (CZ 163)

Yet, just as Baudrillard suggests, the Borges map provides an inadequate template for understanding the relationship between cyberspace and “the world”. Cyberspace is not, straightforwardly, a copy of the world, a mere tracing[260] of it, in Deleuze-Guattari’s terms, as Borges’ “map” is; nor is it “outside” the world. It is fully a part of the world, what can appear to a naive human empirical realism as “just a way of representing data.” (MLO 83-84). Yet Cyberspace is fully a part of the world, in a very real economic sense. In an inversion Baudrillard would appreciate, it would perhaps be better to reverse the emphasis; now, actual goods function as second-order copies of the data that can be accessed raw, in cyberspace. This, after all, is the point of data-hacking – data can be treated as primary, as itself a commodity. The technical systems of Gibson’s cyberspace – which, let us remember, is much more than the colloquial contemporary use of the term implies, being a souped-up combination of the internet and Virtual Reality – simulate “the world” , but not passively, or mutely: what happens here is immediately effective in the world outside the technical environment (if, bearing in mind McLuhan’s theses in particular, it makes any sense to talk of human beings being able to extricate themselves from the technical environment at all). There is both operational difference – the translation of “the world” into data, the raw material of cyberspace (and of cybernetics), makes a difference[261] – and ontological in-difference – cyberspace is continuous with “the world”, not different from it. Feedback ensures that the operational, or cybernetic, relationship between this simulated realm destroys any “illusion of difference”, denying metaphor its ground (the economy of representation as such).

The relationship between cyberspace and the world is not metaphorical at all – cyberspace does not simply stand in for the world, any more than “the world” substitutes for cyberspace. Rosemary Jackson (whose theorization of the literature of the fantastic we shall consider below) opposes metaphor to both metonymy and metamorphosis[262]. In metonymy and metamorphosis, she writes, “one object does not stand for another, but literally becomes that other, slides into it, metamorphosing from one shape to another in a permanent flux and instability.” (F 42) The system of well-ordered forms, regulated resemblances and analogy gives way to a demonic world of instability and constant transformation. Cyberspace simulates the world whilst – at the same time - it is in the world; its existence is exactly a sign that all those “exterior” realms Baudrillard thinks cybernetics has dispensed with have been superseded. It is both the contemporary candidate for being such a realm, and a clear example of why such zones can no longer exist.

Cyberspace is also a world within a world: “a whole universe” (CZ 170), complete unto itself. Needless to say, this poses all the thorny, Kantian questions of the status of spatiality. Where is cyberspace (- is it) in space? As Nick Land puts it, in transcendental materialist terms: “Cyberspace can be thought of as a system implemented in software, and therefore ‘in’ space, although unlocalizable. It can also be suggested that everything designated by ‘space’ within the human cultural system is implemented on weakly communicating parallel distributed processing systems under 10¹¹(nerve-) cells in size, which are being invasively digitized and loaded into cyberspace. In which case K-space is just outside (‘taking outside in the strict [transcendental] sense.”[263]

Rather than presenting a relationship between an object and its mirror image, we must understand the relationship between cyberspace and the world in terms of the more tangled, complicated (and Deleuzian) “figure” of the implex. The implex describes less a relationship between objects than a transformation that happens to a system. Implex designates a process of folding, or unfolding: thus cyberspace is neither “inside” nor “outside” the world, it constitutes a fold in the world that is nevertheless a real production – an addition – to the world as such. Nick Land offers a simple example of implex in text production, the nested bracket. “() (or (( )) ((or ((( ))))) does not signify absence. It manufactures holes, hooks for the future, zones of unresolved plexivity, really so (not at all metaphorically). It is not a ‘signified’ or a referent but a nation, a concrete interruption of the signal.”[264] Wherever there is “unresolved plexivity”, that is to say, there really is a zone, as the black mirror folds in upon itself, producing “spaces” that are – simultaneously - “within” and ulterior to conventional spatiality as such. Gibson’s cyberspace, like today’s “primitive” Virtual Reality systems, is the production of such a fold. The process is not without its schizophrenic implications, which Virtual Reality is already making concrete - or perhaps hyperreal (as Cronenberg’s Videodrome, offering an unsurpassed examination of the destabilizing effect of these interior-ulterior zones, was quick to realize). [265]

Gibson deals with the question of the implex – the multiple-folding of worlds (within worlds (within worlds (etc…))) - in Mona Lisa Overdrive, in a narrative development which may well be an explicit nod to Borges (whose short story “The Aleph”[266] concerns the question of a nested infinity). Bobby Newmark (a.k.a. Count Zero) is in a catatonic trance, plugged into a piece of software called the Aleph. The Aleph supposedly contains “an approximation of the matrix, […] a sort of model of cyberspace.” (MLO 315) This immediately recalls one of the key features of postmodernist fiction as defined by Brian McHale: here is, in McHale’s terms, “a world inside a world”, “a chinese box world.” “Gentry said that the Count was jacked into what amounted to a mother-huge microsoft; he thought the slab was a single solid lump of biochip. If that were true, the thing’s storage capacity was virtually infinite […] ‘He could have anything in there,’ Gentry said, […] ‘A world. Worlds. […] If this is aleph-class biosoft, he literally could have almost anything in there, he could have an approximation of everything …’” (MLO 162-163) The Aleph (a world within a world) is an approximation of cyberspace (which is itself a world within a world). The real confusion starts, of course (and the real interest is awakened) when an implexed zone begins to affect the zone into which it is implexed. This is hyperreality.

As Baudrillard shows with reference to media in particular, in hyperreality, “embedding” structures of ontological hierarchization increasingly fail, or become compromised. Media, which are of a supposedly ontologically inferior status to what they mediatize, increasingly come to influence and determine the ostensibly ontologically superior “real world.” This happens almost simultaneously, and most intensely when the media attempt to present an “unmediated” picture of the Real – witness Baudrillard’s example of the TV coverage of the Louds family in Precession of Simulacra. In an analysis which has becoming increasingly prescient in the age of “docu-dramas”, Baudrillard shows how the very presence of the TV crew which attempted to offer a “fly-on-the-wall” image of the family inevitably corrupted the ability to decide whether this is a true or false image of the family’s life. Since there is a feedback relation – the fact that the family are being filmed inevitably affects their behaviour – we are drawn into the same “undecidable” vortex opinion polls open up. Baudrillard’s point is that there is no image of the Real which does not participate in – and therefore affect – what it is supposedly representing. Therefore, no more representation.

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[259] Borges, The Book of Imaginary Beings, trans. Thomas di Giovanni. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980, 67-68, qtd., Pefanis, Heterology and the Postmodern, 103-104. Note that Baudrillard himself quotes this story in The Perfect Crime.

[260] It is worth elaborating at more length here Deleuze-Guattari’s distinction between the map and the tracing, in part because of the likely confusion between Borges’ – more straightforward – use of the word “map” and the more specialized sense of the term Deleuze-Guattari give to it in the “Rhizome” plateau of A Thousand Plateaus . For Deleuze-Guattari, the Borges story Baudrillard refers to is not about mapping at all, but tracing. The tracing, Deleuze-Guattari says, belongs to representation: it is a straightforward mimetic copy (insofar as such a copy is possible: for Deleuze-Guattari, the Borges story offers as good an example as you could hope for of the absurdities that necessarily arise when the logic of tracing is pursued to its limits). The production of the map, like its usage, is motivated by pragmatic criteria – “experimentation in contact with the real” (TP 12) – rather than with fidelity to the dictates of any representational regime; “tracing”, however, “always involves an alleged competence.” (TP 12) The map, rather than copying or preceding any territory, is “itself part of the rhizome. The map is open and connectable in all its dimensions; it is detachable, reversible, susceptible to constant modification. It can be torn, reversed, adapted to any kind of mounting, reworked by an individual, group or social situation.” (TP 12)

[261] To paraphrase Bateson, whose formula has it that information is the difference that makes a difference.

[262] A Baudrillard with a slightly different tone to that adopted by the avowedly melancholy figure of The Transparency of Evil, the Baudrillard of Forget Foucault, follows Jackson in suggesting the displacement of metaphor by metamorphosis. “There is no longer any metaphor, rather metamorphosis. Metamorphosis abolishes metaphor, which is the mode of language, the possibility of communicating meaning. Metamorphosis is at the radical point of the system, the point where there is no longer any law or symbolic order.” (Forget Foucault, New York: Semiotexte, 1987, 75) As with Jackson, this Baudrillard sees becoming displacing substitution, explictly invoking Deleuze-Guattari. In respsonse to Lotringer’s question, “And what would correspond to that mythology in the order of metamorphosis?”, Baudrillard answers, “The possibility of transmutation: becoming-animal, becoming-woman. What Gilles Deleuze says about it seems to fit perfectly.” (75)

[263] Land, “Cybergothic”, 82

[264] Land, “Cybergothic”, 86

[265] In what probably amounts to a testament to the spreading of schizophrenization across culture, Douglas Hofstadter has shown how implex effects are becoming increasingly familiar - Hofstadter’s example of the news anchorman (who passes the viewer onto a special correspondent (who is interviewing a politician)) could be placed alongside numerous contemporary examples from computer software.The micropolitical issue here, if this is not too archaic a term, emerges as a question of the nature of the connections between these zones. An arborescent structuring enforces a real embedding – the containing of one zone within another, with a hierarchization of zones implicit – whilst a fully rhizomatic relationship entails that any zone can hatch – connect to, or from - any other – a fully multilateral system. See “Strange Loops and Hyperfiction” below.

[266] Borges, The Aleph and Other Stories, 1933-1969, trans. Norman Thomas di Giovanni, London: Picador, 1973, 11-23