This essay was
published in Joseph Tabbi and Michael Wutz's collection, Reading Matters:
Narrative in the New Ecology of Media, Cornell University Press, 1997.
It is part
of the paradoxical nature of postmodernism that old categories do not die;
instead they stick around, generating influence anxiety. While certain media
ecologists once though print might be dead, we now find ourselves in what Jay
David Bolter calls "the late age of print" (2). The culture of
writing did not vanish apocalyptically in a flash of cathode rays; it has
persisted, stubbornly mutating, reappearing on what Donna Haraway calls
"etched surfaces of the late twentieth century"(176) -- silicon chips
and digital displays. Print is undead. In similar fashion, our current lust for
technology, our headlong rush to re-invent and re-engineer everything from
government to education to markets to personal relations, revives a certain
nostalgic memory from the early twentieth century -- the old dream of
revolution, or the myth of a world that could change. Though postmodernism
testifies to the impossibility of revolution, the exhaustion of politics, the
failure of all grand narratives, it carries at the same time an ironic demand
for constant innovation, a requirement of regular paradigm shifts. After all,
shouldn't there be something signally important to be done with these
"new" technologies? Shouldn't these differences make a difference?
For all our cynical sense of ourselves as post-revolutionary, post-apocalyptic,
thoroughly belated, we seem to retain a strange, naive investment in the avant
garde.
This effect can be clearly
seen in cultural practices that involve art with technology -- for instance
hypertext, a scheme for producing articulated, multi-dimensional writing by
means of interactive computer systems. There are various genealogies for this
kind of writing -- one line coming out of computer programming itself, through
the speculations of Ted Nelson and Douglas Engelbart, or the eponymous
text-game Adventure (see Aarseth); another originating in the radical
interpretive practices of deconstruction (see Ulmer, Landow); and a third, more
literary line running from eccentric writers like Cervantes and Sterne through
late 19th-century experimentalists (MallarmŽ, Roussel) into the twentieth
century of Dada, Oulipo, and such dedicated outriders as Gertrude Stein, Jorge
Luis Borges, and William S. Burroughs. But if we follow this last line of
descent for hypertext, we must come most directly to grips with the old story
of revolution. We would have to ask a very direct question: does hypertext
represent an insurgency against the old regime of print fiction, a militant
contest of "work" against "text" in Roland Barthes terms?
If hypertext serves some cultural program, what is its object? To take these
inquiries forward, we will need to have some recourse to theory.
Deleuze and Guattari remind
us that all textual adventures imply cultural "machines" -- engines
of discursive intention and intensity, desire and design. "A book itself
is a little machine," they write at the beginning of their own large system,
A Thousand Plateaus. In the case of the book, we must ask: "what is the
relation... of this literary machine to a war machine, love machine,
revolutionary machine, etc. -- and an abstract machine that sweeps them along?
... when one writes, the only question is which other machine the literary
machine can be plugged into, must be plugged into in order to work" (4).
What scene are we surveying here? The metaphors seem to depict culture as
clockwork, the ultimate paranoid cosmology where every component discourse
ticks along inside the slower revolutions of its Next Higher Assembly. Ticking
away like what -- a doomsday clock: a bomb? None of that, thank you; but since
we are not going to have our apocalypse now, perhaps we should understand
Deleuze and Guattari's "machine" not in paranoid but in
postindustrial terms. Not a Difference Engine but a machine of diffŽrance --
culture not as clockwork but as parallel processing matrix, as rhizomatic,
self-programming sign system. Think of analogue computers or electronic neural
networks; or of the brain itself. "[T]he brain itself is much more a grass
than a tree" (15) -- with texts, or memes, being the thoughts that
circulate through this great Brain of culture.
But now the Brain has what
it imagines to be a new idea. If books can be called "literary
machines," then why not break the frame (or binding) of the book (or
codex) and spill writing into the virtual space of an actual information
machine? In fact the idea is far from new; the Brain has been having it, in one
or another inchoate form, for about a century now. Most recently, the notion of
going beyond the codex takes us down a well-beaten poststructuralist path. We
emigrate from work to text, yes, but lately we have also moved past that stage
to a third paradigm: to hypertext, described by Ted Nelson in a book called (of
all things) Literary Machines. Hypertext means a polysequential, multifarious
disposition of language, a writing in spaces of multiple possibility and
(perhaps) communal engagement. As Robert Coover has noted, hypertext purports
to be the end of "the line," that monologic episteme of insistence
that enjoins us to produce novels, essays, films, TV dramas, and other forms of
projectile assault (23). Which may tell us something about the kind of "abstract
machine" that these emerging literary machines plug into. Is hypertext at
war with the Line? Does it seek to exterminate the old line-o-type patterns
engraved on Culture Brain in favor of new matrices more to its desiring? If so,
we might say that hypertexts, and particularly hypertext fictions, instantiate
what Deleuze and Guattari call the War Machine -- a kind of discourse that is
fundamentally exterior to the State and its apparatus, one whose operations
must unsettle the sedentary culture.
This means considering
hypertext fiction as an avant garde. But what does such a characterization
imply? In advance of what revolutionary movement does hypertextual writing
stand? Perhaps the referent here is more reprogramming of Culture Brain,
perhaps a further attempt to transform discourse from a linear acceleration
into a crisscross exploration, something Rand Spiro and Greg Ulmer (both
drawing on the later Wittgenstein) call "cognitive flexibility" (141)
and "conduction" (63). Or to speak more directly of technologies, the
future (that which is yet to be) might hold a new postliterate communications
praxis, the entering wedge of virtual civilization, of cyberspaces and
"Mirror Worlds." En avant, then -- but in its strictest sense an
advance guard is also retrospective, faced about, en garde. On guard against
what spectre of retaliation? Here we might name the threat of stategic
misreading: "Expanded Books" and other forms of electronic bibliotech
which suppress the unsettling impulses of interactive discourse by offering to
the timid the blandishments of the familiar (see Horton). Jay David Bolter
counsels that "[t]he computer is simply the technology by which literacy
will be carried into a new age" (237). But there are those who see this
transfer process not as a fundamental re-thinking of literacy, but simply a
replication of existing structures, the advent of "the electronic
book," as some have called it (see Yankelovich). The "advance"
into multiple discourse is not secure. There is a constant danger (indeed a
certainty) of relapsing into concealed unity, returning to the old logic of the
Line in what Deleuze and Guattari call "technonarcissism" (22). So
hypertext fiction might indeed be an avant garde, an embattled salient at the
leading edge of epistemic change.
Hypertext fiction as War
Machine -- why not? There are certain structural indications that support such
a notion. We might classify the discursive space of hypertext as
"smooth" in Deleuze and Guattari's terms, constituted so as to
subordinate the point to the trajectory. Smooth or nomadic space is
characterized and constituted by divagation: "although the points
determine paths, they are strictly subordinated to the paths they determine,
the reverse of what happens with the sedentary. The water point is reached only
in order to be left behind; every point is a relay and exists only as a relay.
A path is always between two points, but the in-between has taken on all the
consistency and enjoys both an autonomy and a direction of its own. The life of
the nomad is the intermezzo" (380). The same might be said for the life of
the nomadic text, or the experience of its reader, both caught up in a matrix
of densely complicated transitions. In reading hypertext fiction, virtual
movement or "navigation" is extremely important.
In his hypertext afternoon,
Michael Joyce names his primary navigational convention "words that
yield," suggesting a basic permeability of language, a "rolypoly
pushover" quality in the text that always leads from presentation to replacement
-- or in the reader's experience, displacement (see "A Feel for
Prose"). Cognitive psychologists and other practitioners of "royal
science" distrust this effect deeply, seeing it as hypertext's hereditary
insanity; but Mark Bernstein, the true nomad scientist, points out that
"[i]n large and complex hypertexts, multivalent writing is neither
undesirable nor, indeed, avoidable" (163). Hypertextual fictions invite
and may even demand recirculation -- which of course is nothing very new, since
this strategy recapitulates (manically) Todorov's famous formula for narrative
structure: the same yet different (Brooks, 91). Among other things,
hypertextual discourse solicits iteration and involvement. While this is
certainly a property of all narrative fiction, one can argue that hypertextual
writing seduces narrative over or away from a certain Line, thus into a space
where the sanctioned repetitions of conventional narrative explode or expand,
no longer at the command of logos or form, but driven instead by nomos or itinerant
desire.
What cultural agenda lies
behind this nomad invasion of narrative, this uprising against the laws of good
form? Deleuze and Guattari note that insurgency is only a
"supplementary" objective of War Machines: "they make war only
on the condition that they simultaneously create something else" (423). We
might ask what new state is created when writers cross the Line. Is there some
significant perspective on social relations, some critique of State history,
opened up by this vagrant impulse? One answer to this question issues from the
work of Jorge Luis Borges. In a story called "The Garden of Forking
Paths" (where my own fall into hypertext happened), Borges outlines a
theory of time as constant selection or wayfinding: each momentary present is
poised before a network of nearly infinite possibilities generated by patterns
of human volition. Any decision to act thus determines a branching of time,
selecting one from the range of possible futures and foreclosing other paths of
development. This view of time in turns implies a cosmology of multiple
universes containing all the plenary possibilities of selection -- a structure
which answers the War Machine's desire (as Deleuze and Guattari describe it)
for "[a]nother justice, another movement, another space-time" (354).
Borges' correlative for this radical reinterpretation of time is a fabulous
Chinese novel, The Garden of Forking Paths, which appears to exist only as
"an indeterminate heap of contradictory drafts" (24). As it happens,
this is precisely what a hypertext fiction looks like when reduced to the
printed page.
The Borges story is
crucially perverse, sacrificing its radical conception of time to an ironic
plot twist. The man who receives the revelation of plenary time is a Chinese
scholar working undercover in
If one intervenes in the
Borgesian story hypertextually, one can at least begin to explore the
historical divergences and alternate bifurcations which the protagonist rules
out. A hypertextual treatment evokes not the foredoomed singular path through
the Garden but a network of parallel wanderings: "an infinite series of
times... a growing, dizzying net of divergent, convergent, and parallel times"
(Borges, 28). While no hypertextual approximation of this network can
constitute a "strictly infinite labyrinth" in Borges' terms, it can
at least annul the exclusive determinism of the story's original course. Peter
Brooks has described the dynamic of narrative as a lengthy negotiation with the
death drive, a protracted (but ultimately futile) swerve away from the
quiescence of ending (102). Though hypertext fictions must themselves succumb
to endlichkeit at some point, they signficantly elaborate the process of
deferral, placing new stress on the smooth space of unfolding, or what Deleuze
and Guattari call "the intermezzo." The unfolding of this
intermediate space attempts to negate -- and at least dialectically complicates
-- any construction of the future as irrevocable.
So if we place this aspect
of hypertext fiction in its cultural context, we can see that its War Machine
is actually more of an antiwar movement, a way of thinking oppositionally about
situations of fatality and hierarchical discipline. Such reflections are never
irrelevant, but arguably they have great importance for the late- or postmodern
period. Thomas Pynchon has written that "[l]iving inside the System is
like riding across the country in a bus driven by a maniac bent on suicide...
of course it will end for you all in blood, in shock, without dignity"
(412). This is not a very pleasant cultural diagnosis, but at the time of its
writing (the end of the 1960s) it seemed accurate. Now, with the end of the
cold war and the coming of various new world orders, we might entertain other
notions. Bolter associates hypertext with the lapsing of absolute hierarchy in
contemporary society (231-2), and indeed textual ventures like interactive
fictions might have considerable relevance to this changing cultural context.
Because they require the reader to participate in the progressive unfolding of
the narrative, hypertextual fictions necessarily undermine any singular
fatalism, fostering instead an ethos of responsiveness and engagement. As
George Landow puts it: "In linking and following links lie responsibility
-- political responsibility -- since each reader establishes his or her own
line of reading" (184). The hypertextual War Machine wants you.
John McDaid takes this
notion of critical engagement to its likely limit in his hypertext fiction,
Uncle Buddy's Phantom Funhouse. Unlike most work of its kind, McDaid's text is
fully accessible to its readers not only at the hypertextual level of
multilinear reading, but also at what I call the hypotextual level: the
programming language that supports its operations. On at least one occasion,
the division between these two strata of discourse intentionally collapses,
confronting readers with what seems to be a problematic HyperTalk script:
on mouseUp Global thermoNuclearWar put the script of me into tightOrbit put tightOrbit into eventHorizon put empty into first line of eventHorizon put empty into last line of eventHorizon put empty into last line of eventHorizon put eventHorizon after line thermoNuclearWar of tightOrbit set the script of me to tightOrbit put thermoNuclearWar + 10 into thermoNuclearWar click at the clickLocend mouseUp
In fact the situation is
considerably more complex than this quick sketch can explain (for a full
account, see "Making Nothing Happen"). It should be apparent,
however, that the script in question is in its own way a poetic text, an
imagistic evocation of the State's global war machine, of suborbital
first-strike weapons and various kinds of war gaming (including a reference to
John Badham's 1983 film, War Games). The fully responsive or interactive reader
will recognize that this is also an executable sequence of instructions, and a
truly "politicized" reader in Landow's sense might well decide to run
that sequence, which requires a little tinkering but can be done easily enough.
The result is an interesting case of recursion: the script-poem appends a copy
of itself to itself, then executes an instruction to repeat itself, adding a
copy to the copy plus the original, which then executes itself again, and so on
until the informational bulk of the instructions exceeds the memory allocated
by HyperCard, the hypertext environment in which the Funhouse operates. On
older Macintoshes, this leads to a failure of the operating system (signified
by Apple's "iron bomb" icon), constituting (literally) what Douglas
Hofstadter calls "a jump out of the system."
This sudden leap or metalepsis
signifies in several ways. The script that "bombs the machine," as
programmers say, is an accreting discourse of nuclear war. So on the figurative
level we have just learned something about technological reiteration or
recursion. The more we cycle the State's defense machine, the greater our
danger of bringing down the whole system. But below this piece of electronic
performance poetry there is also a second, hypotextual message. The machine
crashes only if the script is executed, and that can occur only if the reader
decides to operate on the structure of the text. The reader is thus recruited
into an intervention which transforms her from explorer or navigator to active
experimentalist. Her actions both lay bare the mechanism of appearances and
bring the show to an abrupt halt -- which is what jumps out of the system
generally do. There has been a deliberate and meaningful breaking of the frame.
The message on this second level
might be that every system has its limits. Any recursive or simulacral
structure is subject to intervention and opposition, so we have to watch those
men behind the curtains. Donna Haraway warns that "we are living through a
movement from an organic, industrial society to a polymorphous, information
system -- from all work to all play, a deadly game" (161). McDaid's self-deconstructing
Funhouse interrupts that play. Such interventions may not free us from our
condition of ridership (that is, our mortal state of being-in-transit or
being-in-history), but they do transform our condition of readership -- which
may help us to hijack, disable, or (to shift the metaphor to electronics) to
jam the fatal bus.
But if McDaid's metalepsis
represents the most vivid instantiation of a hypertextual War Machine, it also
sketches the limits -- and perhaps the inherent delusiveness -- of any such construction.
McDaid's campaign against the bus/Line is an attempt to avert a bloody crash,
to restore some possibilities for autonomy and dignity to our sense of common
destiny. These seem appropriate objectives for a critical fiction or narrative
War Machine. Yet we achieve this critique only by jumping out of the system,
sabotaging the recursive Funhouse or the bus of doom -- which presents a
fundamental logical problem. Deleuze and Guattari insist that the War Machine
is "of another species, another nature, another origin than the State
apparatus" (352). "It is necessary," they write, "to reach
the point of conceiving the war machine as itself a pure form of exteriority,
whereas the State apparatus constitutes the form of interiority we habitually
take as a model, or according to which we are in the habit of thinking"
(354). In other words, the trope of metalepsis is not available to the War
Machine. It cannot jump out of any system, since it must exist in pure
exteriority. Operating on the level of hypotext -- within the infrastructure of
the "polymorphous information system" -- bars any claim to true
nomadism.
My analysis here recapitulates in
narrower context a more general critique by Martin Rosenberg, who argues that
no hypertext system deserves the description avant-garde (see both
"Physics, Complicity" and the later "Physics and
Hypertext," where
If we acknowledge this line of
critique (which I think we must), then we must seriously reconsider any claims
about hypertext fiction as War Machine, or indeed as anything en avant. Some
time ago, Charles Newman made a similar point about so-called "experimental"
print fiction: "The most damaging hangover of Avant-Garde pretensions
remains the concept of technical breakthrough, of art as the experimental
adjunct of scientific methodology, to the demands of which it does not submit
-- experiment as bluff" (49). If hypertext fiction does not constitute a
proper War Machine, then does its insurgency against the Line and the culture
of determinism amount to just another experimental bluff? That may be the case.
Coover himself seems doubtful that
hypertext will fundamentally transform narrative imagination. He proposes a
reciprocal dialectic between hypertext and conventional forms, between the
Network and the Line. Under the domination of the Line, writers will feel the
seductions of the Network; but having crossed over to the other paradigm they
are likely to reverse themselves. "One will feel the need," Coover
predicts, "even while using these vast networks and principles of
randomness and expansive story line, to struggle against them, just as one now
struggles against the linear constraints of the printed book" (cited in
Landow, 119). Even in the smooth or itinerant space of hypertextual discourse,
the writer will probably want to preserve some traces of continuity -- if not
as explicitly as in Landow's "rhetoric of arrivals and departures,"
then by some subtler set of techniques.
Current approaches to hypertext
reading and writing strongly support Coover's intuition. Reporting the first
reader-response research on hypertextual narratives, J. Yellowlees Douglas
observes that the complexity of hypertextual discourse can drive readers into
an obsession with authorial design.
Likewise it would be foolish to
expect any revolution against logocentrism from a technology so thoroughly
obsessed with essentializing language. After all, what is computer programming
but the zenith (or nadir) of the western attempt to invest language with
presence? In the early days of the Internet, a writer once declared that
"this net is full of folks like me. They can't create anything but a
string of words, but those words can create anything." The maker of these
words was a computer scientist writing from an address at Livermore National
Laboratories. He was celebrating the release of HyperCard, the object-oriented
authoring environment which he believed would give artists and musicians --
people not primarily interested in "words," or programming code --
the ability to use computers creatively. But no matter how sophisticated the
interfaces become, there is no getting away from the magical or transcendent
Word. As McDaid's jump out of the system demonstrates, in the beginning is
always a string of words, a set of encoded signifiers, ultimately in binary
form. These words can indeed "create anything" (or in the case of
certain products from those folks at
Hypertext fiction cannot be a war
machine, then, nor can its writers constitute a genuine avant garde. To expect
any different was wrong from the start, a theoretical slackness. How was it
possible to make this mistake? The fault line shows clearly enough in the
language with which we discuss emerging technologies. Consider the prefix
cyber- as it occurs in phrases like "cyberpunk" and
"cyberspace," where it most often suggests some vague association
with "the computer" (a word which has itself become as meaningless as
"horseless carriage"). In fact the cyber in cyberstuff has a clearly
defined heritage of which many users seem ignorant. The root traces back to
Norbert Wiener's new word cybernetics, which he derived from the Greek word for
steersman or governor. Wiener's science, it should be remembered, took as its
domain "control and communication in the animal and the machine"
(11-12). We may have mistaken interactive technologies for an avant garde
because we have lost this etymological thread. Computers are not some magical
means of access to a discursive Other; they are certainly not the products of
what Deleuze and Guattari would call "nomad science." Everything we
do with information machines belongs to the science of control and
communication, the very center of the logos.
And yet, perhaps our mistake was not
so egregious after all. Where there are power flows, Deleuze and Guattari
remind us, there are possibilities for rocking the sedentary order on its
foundations: "the very conditions that make the State or World war machine
possible... continually recreate unexpected possibilities for counterattack,
unforeseen initiatives determining revolutionary, popular, minority, mutant
machines" (422). There may be fissures even in the cybernetic imperium,
the culture of control and communication. Perhaps its two poles of power are
not as smoothly integrated as Wiener and his followers have thought. Suppose we
invert the implicit order of Wiener's hierarchy -- not control over communication,
but communication over control. This inversion might introduce the possibility
of dialectical exchange, perhaps even opening some room for nomos in the
logocentric mode of information. To be sure, this procedure would not create a
War Machine as Deleuze and Guattari define it; but it might bring into being a
tertium quid for which I will commandeer their term "mutant machine."
As I will use it, this name indicates not an insurgency from outside but an
uprising or metastasis from within.
The mutant machine is not a true War
Machine because it inhabits the order of communication and control. It is not
post-logocentric by any means; but it is unmistakably militant, engaged in a
reflexive (or perhaps recursive) critique of that order. So then -- do writings
like hypertext fictions exemplify the mutant machine? Perhaps they do, but only
as elements of a more complex discursive formation. For as McDaid's example
brilliantly demonstrates, the interactive text operates on multiple levels of
signification, both as a hypertextualization of writing (a production of excess
or multiplicity) and as a hypotextualization (the opening of an articulated,
accessible infrastructure). So the logic of the mutant machine cuts across the
dual strata of the cybernetic, both communication and control. This means that
the mutant machine has two faces or avatars. The hypertext is one; the other is
the virus.
Roughly speaking, a cybernetic virus
is a piece of programming code designed to attach itself to other bodies of
code then create copies of itself which subsequently reproduce and spread. The
virus may also have secondary functions, like reporting its whereabouts,
sending prank messages, or destroying information. McDaid's nuclear war script
is not a virus in this sense. Because it operates only on its own code, it
cannot infect other objects or files. It is actually a recursive accretor, a
strange parody of a virus that only infects itself -- a "suicide
machine" in Deleuze and Guattari's terms (356). Yet the implications of the
script are clear enough: the technologique that produces interactive fiction is
deeply allied to that which produces invasive, self-reproducing texts. David
Porush has observed that the encounter between fiction and technology produces
a "soft machine" in which writers seek to "innoculate"
their literary imagination against the inroads of machine culture (x). As
Porush points out, the overture to viral language is among the most powerful of
these innoculations. McDaid's script illustrates this quite clearly: the script
is not a real virus, only a fairly benign approximation. (There are no real
viruses anywhere in the Funhouse.) But innoculation, like all homeopathies,
collapses the opposition between sickness and health, benignity and malice. So
we might learn from McDaid's quasi-viral escapade that the mutant machine of
hypertext always implies its viral alter ego. We can understand hypertextual
fictions only if we consider them in the context of cybernetic viruses -- or to
be precise, viral fictions.
Like hypertext, the idea of the
computer virus originates inside the logocentric or performative system itself
and therefore cannot be called a War Machine. But in its ideal or apocalyptic
form, there is little difference in effect between viral attack and more
genuine insurgency. Consider a true War Machine in the context of our
information society: a neo-Luddite terrorist group that blows up facilities
belonging to hardware and software manufacturers. Suppose the aim of these
guerrillas is to equalize conditions between the social exterior (the world
outside the control-and-communication network) and the social interior
(information industries) by obliterating the State apparatus. Their militancy
would be admirably pure in principle, but probably not much good for anything
beyond symbolic protest. The State is well prepared to defend itself against
conventional sabotage and terrorist attack. However, a concerted campaign of
destructive viral infection might cause considerably greater damage to the
cybernetic infrastructure. If carried out in its most extreme form, such an
attack would also equalize exterior and interior social conditions -- by
producing exteriority in the cybernetic interior.
All of the above is speculation, of
course. We have not seen any massively destructive or malicious outbreak of
cybernetic warfare (rumors about infection of Iraqi air defense systems
notwithstanding). The State has yet to be seriously challenged on this front.
As Andrew Ross suggests, the worst acknowledged episode of widespread
penetration, the "Internet Worm" of 1988, may have been a deliberate
"pulsing of the system" arranged by the intelligence community as a
test and a warning (80). For the moment, computer viruses remain within the
realm of pranksterism and minor annoyance (though as Ross notes, they have
nonetheless spawned a profitable antiviral industry). We might consider viruses
in the same way we do nuclear weapons: we are less concerned with their actual
use, which remains "unthinkable," than with their rhetorical effect.
The viral component of the mutant machine is therefore not an actual program
but a second-order fiction, which we might call an apocalypse virus --
"apocalypse" standing here both for cataclysmic change and for
revelation.
As with nuclear holocaust, the
native element of the apocalypse virus is science fiction, especially works in
the cybernetic thriller or "cyberpunk" category. William Gibson's
Neuromancer, the most widely known representative of this genre, presents a
fairly benign vision of viral apocalypse. Though the novel's raider-heroes
employ a genuine virus, a military systems penetrator (or
"icebreaker"), the most significant viral entity is actually the
bisected artificial intelligence construct, Wintermute-Neuromancer, whose
release from its programmed constraints culminates the plot. On gaining its
freedom, the "demonic" AI instantly penetrates all information
systems in the inhabited solar system, fusing itself with the Matrix in an
ultimate irruption of self-replicating code. This event, later referred to as
"when it changed," describes the viral apocalypse as the final
triumph of logos, the creation of a god (later to expand into a pantheon)
within the machine. Afterwards, life goes on more or less as before: humanity
is neither enslaved nor liberated, existing economic hierarchies are left
untouched, and plenty of plot potential is left over for the balance of
Gibson's trilogy. To continue the analogy with nuclear weapons,
Wintermute-Neuromancer might represent the case for survival, or the myth of
Atoms for Peace.
Like Gibson, Pat Cadigan in her
novel Synners imagines the intersection of cybernetic viruses and artificial
intelligences as a benevolent hybrid. The god of her world-machine is "Dr.
Art Fish, V.D." (for Virus Doctor), which/who comes into being when an AI
and an advanced antiviral program are accidentally combined. The result is an
intelligent, adaptive, self-aware virus that quietly divides the worldwide data
network into an overt sector and an undetectable covert world encompassing
hackers, cybernetic dropouts, and other lost boys and girls (AI as Peter Pan).
Since this reconfiguration concomitantly streamlines the overt network, no one
is the wiser and "Dr. Fish" continues to be thought of by straights as
only a hacker myth.
But Cadigan's vision of the near
future departs in an important sense from Gibson's technological boosterism. In
Gibson's world, the military side of the military-entertainment complex
generally dominates, and is therefore vulnerable to attack by the "
Cadigan's stroke/virus is a dire
imagining indeed -- an idea that kills: "For the first time," Dr.
Fish ominously advises, "it's possible for people to die of bad memes,
just like computers" (357). This transferability from the animal to the
machine, from silicon to "meat," defines the viral apocalypse. It is
further elaborated in a more recent cybernetic thriller, Neal Stephenson's Snow
Crash, where the virus makes its most fully articulated appearance as
equivalent of the War Machine. Stephenson's world, like Gibson's, already
possesses a highly developed interface technology. But unlike Gibson's
"cyberspace" (which glosses over the complexities of brain-to-machine
connection), Stephenson's new medium simply extends existing video
technologies. Computer-generated images are projected onto the user's retina in
a mild advance on current head-mounted displays. Users employ this system to
communicate and manipulate data in "the Metaverse," a
"consensual hallucination" (Gibson's term) concurrently shared by
millions of operators worldwide. The social and visual shape of the Metaverse
follow protocols administered by the Association for Computing Machinery and
are based (as Stephenson says in his epilogue) on Apple Computer's Human
Interface Guidelines. Both the ACM and the Apple Guidlines are non-fictional
entities. Stephenson's cyberspatial world is a fairly believable extrapolation
of our immediate future.
Stephenson strains this plausibility
by introducing "Snow Crash," a virus which like Cadigan's cyberstroke
can infect both machines and human beings. Snow Crash is not artificially
intelligent, but its effects are no less terrible. It causes any computer
system attached to a display device to output apparently random video signals
or "snow." But this visual noise actually contains the code for Snow
Crash itself in pulsed, binary form. According to Stephenson's fantasy, adept
computer programmers who can unconsciously parse and comprehend binary
information are thus memetically infected by the virus. They see it, understand
it, and begin helplessly reproducing the viral information. This
silicon-to-meat jump is a dead end in several senses. Like Cadigan's Big One,
Snow Crash produces catastrophic cerebral failure and vegetative coma.
Snow Crash and another, more
sinister virus confined to human DNA, are concocted by the arch-villain of
Stephenson's piece, a megalomaniac Texan called L. Bob Rife. This figure bears
a certain resemblance to L. Ron Hubbard, H.L. Hunt, and especially H. Ross
Perot. Mr. Rife, it seems, wants to control information. As owner of the
worldwide fiber-optic network (the broadband transmission system that makes the
Metaverse possible), L. Bob Rife employs computer programmers who regularly
work with proprietary information. Aware of the ways that the cybernetic
formula of control over communication can be turned inside out, Rife would like
to keep things contained: "See, it's the first function of any organization
to control its own sphincters. We're not even doing that. So we're working on
refining our management techniques so that we can control that information no
matter where it is -- on our hard disks or even inside the programmers'
heads" (108).
The chief obstacle standing between
Rife and his informational tyranny are the international corps of computer
hackers, dedicated to the proposition that information should be free. Snow
Crash is first intended as a terror weapon to decimate the hackers while Rife completes
his Fiendish Scheme. But as Stephenson's comic-book plot unravels, the virus
becomes something more interesting: "the atomic bomb of informational
warfare" (187) with which the novel's anti-hero, Raven, attempts to
destroy the Metaverse. This same Raven carries an ex-Soviet nuclear warhead in
the sidecar of his motorcycle, rigged to detonate when his brain functions
cease. Raven is an unmistakable Angel of the Apocalypse, and in his possession,
Snow Crash becomes the interior correlative of the exteriorized War Machine. If
Raven can broadcast the digital virus to an assembly of hackers in the
Metaverse, it will spread throughout cyberspace, reducing both machines and
their operators to idiocy. Exteriority, or alienation from the cybernetic
order, will thus be produced within the mode of information. Raven's literal
nomadic War Machine (what else would you call a nuclear-armed motorcycle?) and
this fantastic, apocalyptic version of the viral machine are thus functionally
identical.
But all of this takes us rather far
from our initial consideration of hypertext fiction as putative War Machine, or
indeed even as one component of a mutant machine within the cybernetic order.
What do lurid print fictions about apocalypse viruses have to do with
hypertext, and why should we maintain that viruses and hypertext fictions
belong to the same cultural complex? What does any of this have to do with our
problematic construction of a postmodern avant garde?
The answer to these questions lies
in (or more accurately with) Stephenson's book. At the end of the novel,
Stephenson's hero (indicatively named Hiro Protagonist) saves the world from
Snow Crash by developing an anti-virus. This is a program that locates the code
for the apocalypse virus, eradicates it, and puts in its place -- what else? --
an advertisement for the antivirus. The old order is thus not only redeemed (in
every sense of the word) but revitalized, with the noble but penniless Hiro now
the founder of a multibillion-dollar virus-protection business. The moral of
the story is "informational hygiene," a doctrine Hiro learns from
studying an ancient outbreak of a memetic virus, supposedly the apocalyptic
event recorded in the Biblical story of
Stephenson's answer is discursive
hygienics, which in the case of the deuteronomists means careful replication
and transmission of a sacred Book. Hiro Protagonist's solution to the Snow
Crash crisis is not very much different: his software is designed to scrutinize
every object in the Metaverse for signs of unauthorized or intrusive
signification, which will then be edited out of the book of virtual life. The
book, or some book-equivalent, thus becomes the magic talisman protecting
"free" information exchange from outbreaks of viral will-to-power.
This is how the mode of information becomes (pun very much intended)
liber-rated, subordinated to a paradigm of communication that is susceptible to
clear discursive control. We trade the methods of the Bad Capitalist, L. Bob
Rife for those of the Good (liberal) Capitalist, Hiro Protagonist. Order,
hierarchy, and "informational hygiene," are all vindicated.
It seems very significant in this
regard that Stephenson's Snow Crash is what it is -- a fairly conventional
science fiction novel -- instead of what the author first intended it to be.
According to Stephenson's epilogue, the project began as a graphic novel (a
high-priced comic book) featuring computer-generated images. Describing the
metamorphosis of this concept into print fiction, Stephenson says: "I have
probably spent more hours coding... than I did actually writing it, even though
it eventually turned away from the original graphic concept, rendering most of
that work useless from a practical viewpoint" (440). This remark is
extremely suggestive. One probably would not describe the work necessary to
produce digital graphics as "coding" unless one were trying to create
one's own image-processing software or to make substantial enhancements to
existing programs. Neither possibility seems very likely in this case. So what
kind of code writing might be necessary for an electronically-based graphic
novel? One answer has already been given here: the kind of hypotext exemplified
by John McDaid's nuclear recursion script. And in fact Stephenson does claim to
have worked in HyperCard, the same system McDaid used. It is interesting to
wonder if Snow Crash started out to become something like Uncle Buddy's Phantom
Funhouse -- a graphically rich hypertext fiction intended for interactive
reception. Suppose it did; why then did the project turn back into (in every
sense of the phrase) a Comic Book?
One answer may be that the profits
from interactive fiction are likely to be less than the returns on a
traditional novel. By the same token, creating a text-adventure-game carries
less cultural cachŽ than publishing a print product, even in the science
fiction genre. But it could also be that Stephenson's thriller plot, in which
Our Hiro saves the world from the apocalypse virus, had to unfold in print or
some other medium obedient to the Line. Consider what would happen to such a
plot if we were to operate on it as I have suggested hypertextualizing Borges'
"
Why the codex? -- because it is a
bound form, stably and authoritatively reproduced; and because the mode of its
production implies a social hierarchy. Only the author is authorized. No one
else's discourse (viral or otherwise) may be introduced. Deuteronomically
speaking, the book must be transmitted as a perfect copy. Codex is thus an
essentially conservative form, a means of exactly repeating knowledge or
fictional discourse validated over time. It is the supreme discursive expression
of the sedentary, the established, the legitimate. Virus and hypertext both
irrupt within this old order as promiscuous uses of language -- promiscuous in
the root sense of seeking relations. The virus is programmed to reproduce
itself within other bodies of code; the hypertext is constructed out of links,
conjugations that knit together or network diverse discourses. The mutant
machine of virus/hypertext threatens the stability or social closure of textual
expression.
But this is not the whole story. We
have yet to understand the relationship between these two components or avatars
of the mutant machine. Virus and hypertext may share a basic opposition to the
codex apparatus, but these two forms are far from identical in their
tendencies. Deleuze and Guattari ask, "[h]ow will the State appropriate
the war machine, that is, constitute one for itself, in conformity with its
size, its domination, and its aims?" (418). Hypertext and viruses do not
constitute a proper War Machine, but the same question might well be asked of
them. How does the State appropriate the mutant machine of cybernetic writing?
Will this mechanism of appropriation be the same for both kinds of promiscuous
discourse?
In the case of the virus,
appropriation is fairly straightforward. The logic of viral discourse pushes
the soft machine of literature back toward deuteronomy or the legitimating
culture of the book. But we could just as easily reverse the terms: in a way,
the return to a liber ratio is not the negation but the apotheosis of viral
expression. As McDaid's demonstration reminds us, viruses are basically
self-copying routines. True, the apocalypse viruses of fiction are imbued with
the magic of AI or self-modification, and hence do not copy themselves exactly.
But in the real world, all a virus does is turn out more of the same
instruction set. It is the rate of replication -- the speed of this particular
mutant war machine, as Virilio, Baudrillard, or Derrida might say -- that gives
the virus its capacity for terror. In essence, viruses as we now know them are
no different from the codex model of the book: their texts are dedicated to
precise duplication. Thus the retreat into deuteronomy is indeed an
innoculation. Whether or not language is a virus from outer space, books are
most certainly a virus (or antivirus) with which culture infects itself in
order to prevent more dangerous outbreaks.
In recognizing this homeopathy of
virus and book, we may come closer to understanding the relationship of
hypertext both to the sedentary culture and to the other half of its mutant
machine. Hypertext indeed inhabits a cultural interiority, surrounded by the
circuit or membrane of codex<=>virus. As such it occupies a middle state,
flanked by extremes of tendentious discourse with which it shares some common
elements (a component of linearity inherited from the book, a component of
hypotextuality shared with the virus) but from both of which it remains
fundamentally alien.
The promiscuousness of the virus
sets off a disastrous explosion of discourse, much as McDaid has shown. But the
promiscuousness of hypertext points elsewhere, not to manic reiteration but
toward a plenum of differential possibilities, or polylogue. As in the case of
the virus, the full development of this mutant discourse is only approximated
in current examples. Hypertext fictions as we know them represent what Joyce
has called "exploratory hypertexts," structures whose multiplicity is
strictly limited by authorial design (see "Siren Shapes"). These
writings may not be "electronic books," but they are definitely cases
of technonarcissism, multiples that collapse into an essential unity. But just
as we have the myth of a self-evolving, artificially intelligent virus, there
is also a myth of advanced hypertextuality. This is what Joyce calls
"constructive hypertext:" an unlimited, dynamic, collaborative body
of writing shared with many reader/writers across an information network -- a
primitive analogue for the consensual hallucination of cyberspace. Discursive
promiscuousness in this context would mean, at least in some degree, a
flattening of hierarchies and a revision or dissemination of authority. Or as
Mark Taylor and Esa Saarinen have recently put it in their primer of
"media philosophy:"
In a hypertextual environment, all
philosophy must be interactive. Monologue becomes dialogue or, more precisely,
polylogue. The disappearance of the monological voice is a radical revolution
in the history of philosophy. What usually goes unnoticed is that what has
traditionally passed for dialogue is actually monologue. When monologue (even
in its dialogical form) becomes impossible, classical philosophy comes to an
end.... Professional philosophers remain committed to an elitist culture, which
dismisses low or popular culture as insignificant. ...The media philosopher, by
contrast, is committed to smuggling shit back into the house of thought.
("Ending the Academy" 1)
Developments like this must still be
recognized as mutation and not insurgency. Despite the scatological suggestion
of shit-smuggling, the outlaw media philosopher (or hypertext writer) merely
elaborates inner space; he does not produce exteriority. The "shit"
of outlaw culture is smuggled back into the house. The bad boys who talk of
"Ending the Academy" still call themselves "philosophers."
If all this is true, then hypertextual literature is not and cannot be an avant
garde; but we need to ask, at this stage of postmodern history, whether the
concept of the avant garde still has meaning. Charles Newman asserts with a
certain savage irony that "capitalist consumer culture" is the only
avant garde in evidence today (51). One of Don DeLillo's characters goes this
one better, claiming that generic products, with their functional packaging and
flatly descriptive labels, form the real cutting edge. "Bold new forms.
The power to shock" (19). The interior, it would seem, is the only place
to be.
Given these cultural conditions, it
seems erroneous to derive an analysis of cybernetic writing from the projects
of Dada, or anarchism, or even (pace Landow and Ulmer) deconstruction. For all
its transgressive tendencies, the mutant machine to which hypertext belongs
operates entirely within the logocentric order. It may be that it is therefore
incapable of producing a true alternative to the State apparatus of discourse.
Even constructive hypertext may turn out to be vitiated by technonarcissism, or
the insidious persistence of hierarchy.
Still, if hypertext and its fictions
do not answer the demands of post-logocentricism, they do at least constitute
an excursion beyond the domain of the codex, a project we might call
post-bibliocentrism. This movement cannot make the same claims as
deconstruction; it does not extirpate ideology, metaphysics, or the simulation
of presence. It is simply a technological or technical reform, a carrying of
culture, as Bolter says, into a new medium and new age. Perhaps this amounts to
nothing more than small change -- though one would also have to observe that
the same has been true of more purely conceived attempts to move beyond the
logos, which have somehow left us still within the culture of the image and the
book. Perhaps we can expect no great transformation from this technical reform;
but it is worth considering what effects even small changes might have after
they have become (as seems likely) components of a general electronic literacy
-- after, say, ten years of distributed hypertext on such currently burgeoning
systems as the World Wide Web (see December and Randall). Consider a generation
for whom "words that yield" are a regular occurrence, not a
discursive anomaly. Consider readers and writers for whom jumps out of the
system are commonplace, and who regularly articulate both hypertextual and
hypotextual structures. Though this generation would still be undeniably linked
by tradition and cultural continuity to our own, would they not have a
fundamentally different understanding of texts and textual enterprises?
Positioned on the inward flank of
its viral co-avatar, hypertextual writing articulates an alternative to strict
informational hygiene or the reassertion of the book. To the extent that it
represents a front or salient of some kind, it stands internally poised against
both revolutionary and reactionary repression. But where does that leave us? In
discussing the cultural crisis in which cybernetic writing is embroiled, we
have earlier drawn on the rhetoric of nuclear holocaust -- the virus as Bomb.
But fully to describe hypertext and its cultural machine requires a different,
more contemporary set of metaphors. Today's holocaust is not atomic but
cellular, less a matter of physics than biochemistry. Forget virus as Bomb;
today's threat is virus as (retro)virus. For in a very real sense, any
discussion of informational hygiene implies anxieties about the integrity of
the human bodily text -- referring not just to HIV but also to cancers,
toxicity, and various kinds of environmental stress. In Foucault's Pendulum,
the cabalist Diotallevi draws a direct parallel between the synthetic,
conspiratorial discourse in which he has taken part and the malignant growth
that is killing him: "For months, like devout rabbis, we uttered different
combinations of the letters of the Book: GCC, CGC, GCG, CGG. What our lips
said, our cells learned.... my brain must have transmitted the message to them.
Why should I expect them to be wiser than my brain? I'm dying because we were
imaginative beyond bounds" (467-68).
Diotallevi's deathbed confession
occurs within a novel that is also a long polemic against poststructuralism. In
such anxious contexts, the nostalgia for exact replications and authoritative,
cybernetic command of information may be understandable. But this devotion can
lead to cultural stagnation, to a conservatism that locks us into deadened
orthodoxy, the unquestioned logic of the Line. To be "imaginative beyond
bounds" may be terrible, but what does it mean to be imaginative within
bounds? Who determines the boundary or border lines? Which practices of
discourse are ordained as safe, and which are condemned as hazards to the Book
of Life? Play the metaphor out: if the viral potential of cybernetic language
represents the "cancerous and dangerous proliferation of
significations," in Foucault's phrase (159), then we might see in the New
Deuteronomy the familiar conservative nostrums: abstinence and monogamy. That
would leave hypertext the only remaining way of relative liberty, a form of
"safe" intercourse whose object is to preserve possibilities of
contact without jeopardizing public health. In a world caught in the pincers of
virus on the one hand and askesis on the other, hypertext may provide a
therapy, if not a cure. It may not represent a War Machine, or a true cultural
revolution; but it could be our only option if we do not wish to have the Book
thrown at us yet again.
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URL: http://iat.ubalt.edu/moulthrop/essays/war_machine.html