| Such fantasies
can truly be called cyberpunk, with the emphasis finally not on some
vague allusion to digital processing but properly on the Greek word kybernetes
or "governor" after which Norbert Wiener named cybernetics, "the
science of control and communication in the animal and the machine"
(11-12). Narratives in this genre usually thematize absolute governance
or control, even as they fantasize about breakdowns or irruptions. As Andrew
Ross observes of the Cyberpunk roleplaying game: "the education
of desire proceeds through learning and interpreting the rules of the play,
not by changing them" (160). After all, what fun is a systems
crash without a system? Or as Pirate Prentice observes in Gravity's Rainbow:
"Creative paranoia means developing at least as thorough a We-system
as a They-system" (638). Such thoroughly systematic discourses are
also transparently hysterical, and in its own cyberpunk-in-boystown way
Snow Crash supports the impression that Foucault's Pendulum
is indeed the last great paranoid fiction. Still, for all his control hysteria (see "Deuteronomy Comix") Stephenson does add one crucial evolution to the discourse of technokabbalism: a recognition that our words are increasingly able to create anything, just as the gentleman from Livermore Labs testifies in the epigraph to this section. The full context for this remark was a response to Apple's HyperCard, an early multimedia authoring program that had just been released in 1987. The writer, an experienced programmer, celebrates the possibility that software like HyperCard will give non-programmers graphic artists, illustrators, musicians new access to electronic media. He suggests that HyperCard's multimedia potential and its graphic, "object-oriented" approach to textuality might carry us beyond the purely verbal encoding of traditional programming. Paradoxically, as the word becomes more powerful, so do the nonverbal superstructures built upon it, suggesting an apparent departure toward postlogocentrism, or as Gregory Ulmer calls it, "videocy" (17). Being a good cybernaut, Stephenson is current with this trend. According to his epilogue, Snow Crash was originally conceived as a computer-generated graphic novel, and Stephenson avers that he "spent more hours coding during the production of this work than I did actually writing it, even though it eventually turned away from the original graphic concept" (440). But there are still strong graphic conceptions in the verbal content of the novel, including perhaps the most plausible fictional account to date of an artificial social environment or cyberspace ("the Metaverse"). Stephenson acknowledges that his Metaverse was inspired by the Apple Human Interface Guidelines, the statement of principles and protocols on which HyperCard is based. This suggests that HyperCard, in its paleolithic way, may be an ancestor of virtual environments yet to be. In fact Stephenson uses "hypercard" as the generic name for multimedia objects in his Metaverse. Like the "cyber" in cyberpunk, the "hyper" in HyperCard has a history: it derives from the word "hypertext," which was coined in the mid-sixties by Theodor Holm Nelson to designate the mode of computer-supported "non-sequential writing" which he had helped invent (Dream Machines, 29; see also Landow). Porush has suggested that postmodern writers seek to "innoculate" themselves against an increasingly mechanized and cybernetic civilization by injecting elements of programmatic technique into the "soft machines" of their texts (x). Such a process may be at work in the increasing obsession with information machines evident in the progress from Pynchon to Eco to the cyberpunks; or perhaps the innoculation has turned into a viral irruption in its own right. At the beginning of this discussion we asked where we were going, speeding through the darkness with such great abandon. Hypertext (and its fancier cousin, hypermedia) may turn out to be among our stopping places. That is to say, the "Real Text" which we find ourselves exploring may be a hypertext a polymorphous, promiscuous, paranoid space where, as Pynchon specifies, everything is connected and the vectors or lines of flight point all different ways. And this hyper/real/text may in turn hold the key to understanding the transformation from paranoiac apocalypse to the new order of panapocalypse. If the convergence of Inside and Outside, word and world implies not an explosion but an irruption, then it also implies a transformation in the medium for narrative, a transformation that may change the context for narrative. As Leo Bersani directs, the questions we must ask are not hermeneutic but ontological: what is this text around us? But in a world of viral technologies, of nam-shubs or empowered, realist-magical language, the revolution of the signifier does not invalidate functionality: rather it escalates it to new levels of power. The text is what the text does, and the text "can create anything" or uncreate everything, as certain magic words from Livermore Labs might yet do. So the question needs repeating: when we switch it on, to what end does the text (or our new, improved hypertext) operate? Is its function still explosively apocalyptic, or does it lead to some other, perhaps non-terminal state? Any consideration of "the Text" as defined by Pynchon, Le Carré, DeLillo, Stephenson or other eschatologues postmodernists, cyberpunks, hypertextualists alike must confront the problem of apocalypse. If paranoia is not the gnosis it once was, we must also face the fact that the end of the world is not (ever) what it used to be. On one level this is simply to invoke a current idol of the tribe: the "cold war" is "over" and "we" have "won." Who knows what this statement means? Perhaps the new world order signifies a recession (not an extinction) of the nuclear threat though in all likelihood that dire possibility will only be replaced by the spectre of environmental collapse. Looking back on the eschaton circa 1964, Andrew Ross notes: "Time was running out in a way that was radically different from all previous eschatological forecasts about the end of the world. With the growth of public consciousness about environmental degradation, the temporality of the future took on a new dimension. No longer the haven of inevitable progress, and no longer the scene of apocalyptic wipeout, the future was now fraught with complex responsibilities for which no easy or coherent utopian narrative was appropriate" (141). By the mid-sixties the end of the world was already not what it once had been; and it is now three decades and several ozone holes later. Perhaps the new eschaton signifies the end of late capitalism, though as Ross goes on to note, the projections of late-late capitalism in neo-dystopian novels like Snow Crash, Cadigan's Synners, or William Gibson's Neuromancer give little cause for optimism. We are left with certainty only about change, the assured reshuffling of self-assembling systems, grand narrative as continuous improvisation. This would seem to be the mode of information's favorite paradigm. "You could put your faith in technology," a character in DeLillo's White Noise suggests. "It got you here, it can get you out. This is the whole point of technology. It creates an appetite for immortality on the one hand. It threatens universal extinction on the other" (285). This formulation fits nicely with both the poststructuralist and the paranoid deconstruction of dualities. But what sort of Apocalypse does it imply? If the end of the world changes, then our stories about the end, and the ends of our stories (in every sense), must change as well. "The pressure of reality on us is always varying," Frank Kermode observes. Centuries, millenia, and epochs play out, but social experience does not, and seems unlikely to do so unless post-humanism implies mass catatonia. History goes on, charged as Ross says with complex responsibilities for the world in which we live and the way we live in it. Therefore as Kermode specifies, "the fictions must change, or if they are fixed, the interpretations must change.... we shall continue to have a relation with the paradigms, but we shall change them to make them go on working. If we cannot break free of them, we must make sense of them" (24). Making sense of our current sense of an ending (and of the narrative/technological breakdown from which it issues) may be the most important item on the postmodern agenda. |