Museo Pumapungo Autor: Cesar Piedra

this fully globalized and computerized society, we must first look at the trajectory of Gibson’s writings because the trajectory of his literary output parallels the growth of computerization in the past three decades. Only by placing Pattern Recognition within the overall framework of his oeuvre can we fully grasp the significance of the text in relation to the postmodern society of control. With the possible exception of The Difference Engine (1990), a steampunk novel that Gibson co-authored with Bruce Sterling, Gibson’s entire body of work consists of texts that examine the potential effects of computer networks, and even The Difference Engine concerns the creation of steam- driven computers in the Victorian era. Gibson initially envisioned the invention of cyberspace in a series of stories that originally appeared in Omni magazine during the early 1980s: “Johnny Mnemonic” (1981), “New Rose Hotel” (1981), and “Burning Chrome” (1982) first introduced readers to the world of “The Sprawl.”21 But he did not attain true notoriety until the publication of his first “Sprawl” novel Neuromancer (1984) and its two sequels: Count Zero (1986) and Mona Lisa Overdrive (1988). This series

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played a fundamental role in giving birth to the science fiction sub-genre of cyberpunk. As its name indicates, “The Sprawl Trilogy” depicted a seemingly bleak, noirish future in which cities have spread out and engulfed their surrounding environs and in which

information is housed and transmitted through a global computer network known as the Matrix.

Gibson’s “Sprawl” series spans the 1980s when the Internet was still in its gestation phase, but, once the Internet went public, Gibson’s fiction underwent a serious transformation in order to accommodate the new technological advances occurring around him. Gibson’s next major series deals with a much less distant future, one in which the technology seems to be just around the corner. Generally referred to as “The Bridge Trilogy,” this series began in 1993 with the publication of Virtual Light and was followed by two sequels: Idoru (1996) and All Tomorrow’s Parties (1999).22 The trilogy takes its name from the fact that a gigantic earthquake severed San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge, thus making it incapable of supporting automobile travel. However, the bridge maintained enough structural integrity for a group of squatters to move in and construct a community that exists outside of traditional United States law and order.23 While the Bridge novels featured such technological advancements as virtual reality helmets and a computer-generated, artificial intelligence pop music icon, they still operated in a future barely removed from the contemporary world in which they were written—for example, Virtual Light was set in the year 2005, only a scant twelve years from its publication date. As he states in the above-cited interview, these works read almost like adventures in an alternative present, in a present that was reached along a different forking path (to follow Gibson’s Borgesian metaphor). With his next novel,

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Pattern Recognition, Gibson began to forego futurity and alterity altogether, and he continued this new narrative paradigm in his follow-up to Pattern Recognition: Spook Country (2005).24 For the bulk of this chapter, I will focus on Pattern Recognition because it provides a more sophisticated investigation of the computerization of the postmodern worldscape, but, in the conclusion, I will transition into a brief discussion of Spook Country in order to provide some final thoughts on the topic of control.

Gibson’s novels have often dealt with the implications of rampant globalization. In the two decades since the publication of Neuromancer, Gibson’s interests have not altered, but his approach has changed. Gibson still writes about globalization, the effects of information upon the psyche, the cyborgization of the human, and international

intrigues surrounding information, but now he writes about such anxieties in a realistic present or recent past milieu instead of in futuristic worldscapes. In this respect, Pattern Recognition represents the moment in Gibson’s own body of work at which the

distinction between present and future vanishes. From Neuromancer to Pattern

Recognition, Gibson’s literary output charts the collapsing of the temporal event horizon that he discusses; that is, as linear time has progressed from past to present to future, Gibson’s works have inverted this paradigm by migrating steadily from the future to the present or even the past. By means of this inversion, Gibson’s texts schematize the manner in which the objects of speculative fiction have become the real world technologies of today, or, in other words, how the future has become the present. Furthermore, because Gibson’s texts always deal with computer technology, they act as programmatic indexes of what Francois Lyotard terms “the hegemony of computers”; that is, each of his works acts as a response to the growth of computer and

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communication technology by charting the effects of this computerization upon both the individual and socio-political levels. In short, we might say, Gibson’s works concern nothing less than postmodernity.

In The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (1979), Jean-Francois Lyotard explicitly links the postmodern era with the rise of computer and cybernetic technology. Of course, Lyotard remains most famous for his definition of the

“postmodern as incredulity towards metanarratives,” that is as a skepticism towards any schematic attempt to explain human identity, reality, or historical forces.25 Any

overarching narrative that attempts to provide the key to understanding all of or some facet of human experience becomes a dubious object: psychoanalysis, Darwinian evolution, Marxism, scientific empiricism, etc. all become suspect under the auspices of postmodern epistemology. For Lyotard, the “modern […] designate[s] any science that legitimates itself with reference to a metadiscourse of this kind making an explicit appeal to some grand narrative, such as the dialectics of the Spirit, the hermeneutics of meaning, the emancipation of the rational or working subject, or the creation of wealth.”26 But knowledge undergoes a transformation “as societies enter what is known as the

postindustrial age and cultures enter what is known as the postmodern age.”27 In the era of postindustrialism and postmodernism, the legitimation of knowledge ceases to depend upon metanarratives; instead, it is increasingly grounded in its exchange value—it undergoes a process of “mercantilization.”28 With the advent of cybernetics, which concerns itself with flows of information and the ability of computers and robots to process and exhibit information,29 Lyotard argues that our definition of knowledge must undergo an alteration in order to accommodate the emergent concept of information:

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The nature of knowledge cannot survive unchanged within this context of general transformation. It can fit into the new channels, and become operational, only if learning is translated into quantities of information. We can predict that anything in the constituted body of knowledge that is not translatable in this way will be abandoned and that the direction of new research will be dictated by the possibility of its eventual results being translatable into computer language.30

Thus, the postmodern era gives rise to what Lyotard terms the “hegemony of computers,” a hegemony in which, to be legitimated, all knowledge must be translatable into

information, into a language that can be read and processed by computers. Because of this hegemony of computers, knowledge becomes exterior to the knower, and it “ceases to be an end in itself, it loses its ‘use value.’”31 There is no use apart from information, no value apart from capital: “knowledge is and will be produced in order to be sold, it is and will be consumed in order to be valorized in a new production.”32 For Lyotard, information and its exchange value achieve a hegemony over knowledge—information becomes a commodity to be bought, sold, and housed by means of computers.

Pattern Recognition traces this transformation of knowledge. The novel’s protagonist, Cayce Pollard, inhabits an almost mystical position in the world of

postmodern marketing, advertising, and computerization. She works as a “coolhunter,” someone gifted with the intuitive ability to recognize the next hot trend.33 She possesses this ability because she has internalized not just the commodity marketplace but also the hegemony of computers. This hegemony is established in the book’s opening pages, which describe Cayce’s profession by means of her Google search results: “Google Cayce and you will find ‘coolhunter,’ and if you look closely you may see it suggested that she is a ‘sensitive’ of some kind, a dowser in the world of global marketing. Though the truth, Damien would say, is closer to allergy, a morbid and sometimes violent

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reaction to the semiotics of the marketplace” (2). In this passage, we can see how Google and other such search engines have become indexes of society—they provide a basic structuring principle for the flow of capital in the postmodern economy.34 As it title indicates, the novel explores the growing importance of pattern recognition in the newly computerized global market, and sites such as Google function by means of such pattern recognition. Similarly, as Cayce explains, her employment depends upon her pattern recognition skills: “It’s about a group behavior pattern around a particular class of object. What I do is pattern recognition. I try to recognize a pattern before anyone else does” (88). Her ability relies on the fact that social images, particularly those of company trademarks, have become embedded in her psyche to such a degree that they elicit complex emotional responses. She has even developed an allergy to some of them, “a sometimes violent reactivity to the semiotics of the marketplace” (2). Her condition “is a side effect of too much exposure to the reactor cores of fashion. This has resulted in a remorseless paring-down of what she can and will wear. She is, literally, allergic to fashion” (8). Hence, she only wears non-descript outfits with the trademarks removed, which allow her to avoid suffering violent reactions to the logos—in effect, she removes her body from the sphere of brand-named commodities.35 Her seemingly brandless outfits represent her attempt “to carve out an original identity in a world filled with ‘simulacra of simulacra of simulacra.’”36 But her struggle to find her own “trademark” proves ultimately to be in vain because the novel proceeds to examine the manner in which postindustrial capitalism commodifies even the most aberrant lifestyle choices.37

In “Fear and Loathing in Globalization,” Jameson terms Cayce’s condition “commodity bulimia” as if her consumption at the constant buffet of commodity

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trademarks forces her psyche to purge them by wearing generic attire and developing an allergic response:

Indeed, within the brand name the whole contradictory dialectic of universality and particularity is played out as a tug of war between visual recognition and what we call the work of consumption (as Freud spoke of the work of mourning). And yet, to paraphrase Empson, the name

remains, the name remains and kills; and the logo into which the brand name gradually hardens soaks up its toxicity and retains the poison.38 Thus, postmodern capitalism administers a lethal injection of commodities into each consumer, causing them to internalize the commodity system. In essence, Cayce acts as a sort of commodity mystic, “a very specialized piece of human litmus paper” who can merely look at company logos and determine, without any kind of rational thought, whether they will function as lucrative product symbols or not (13).39 Therefore, the novel demonstrates the manner in which the human becomes like a computer: by means of her internalization of the commodity system and its attendant system of advertising, Cayce becomes capable of processing trademarks, logos, and brand names—it is a “hermeneutic disposition” that allows her mind to intuitively perform the massive endeavors of real-world coolhunters who employ “focus groups, market research, consumer surveys, and statistical models as the basis for their predictions.”40 Her brain has internalized the semiotics of the marketplace so deeply that it can instantly recognize patterns; it is no accident that her friend Damien jokingly refers to her bland outfits as C.P.U.s (Cayce Pollard Units, but, of course, also Central Processing Units), which further highlights the fact that Cayce operates like a computer. In effect, Cayce has internalized this postmodern hegemony of computers: the pattern recognition protocols of computer programs have embedded themselves in Cayce’s psyche. Similar to the manner in which various companies offer product suggestions based on previous consumption

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patterns without any need for additional details about a consumer’s life, Cayce becomes capable of identifying logos that will prove profitable among the largest possible

demographic. She achieves this without rational thought because she has internalized the commodity marketing system and the hegemony of computers to the point that they have become like deep psychic structures that operate akin to a reflex response.

III. The Digitized Aesthetic: The Façade of Freedom and the Web of Control