Abstract
In an endnote to a recent article, Katherine Hayles comments upon how “it is interesting that science fiction writers, traditionally the ones who prognosticate possible futures, are increasingly setting their fictions in the present” (“Computing” 149, n.2). In this article, Hayles contends with the hu ma n desi re to gener ate prog nost icat ions ab out t he future, and she argues that such attempts (whether they are in scientific discourses or in the literary domain of science fiction) prove inherently problematic: “If the record of past predictions is any guide, the one thing we know for certain is that when the future arrives, it will be different from the future we expected” (131). Hayles argues that such speculations are important not for what they tell us about the future but for how they allow us “to explore the influence that such predictions have on our present concepts” (131). She proceeds to examine the ways in which speculations about the future of computers and robotics affect our views of such technologies in the present. Therefore, both scientific and science-fictional visions of the future prove to not be about the future at all but about the present in which we live.
For the apparent realism, or representationality, of SF has conceal ed another, far more complex temporal s truc ture: not to give us ‘images’ of the future … but rather to defamiliarize and restructure our experience of our present, and to do so in specific ways distinct from all other forms of defamiliarization.
—Fredric Jameson (“Progress” 286)
We barely have time to reach maturity before our pasts become history, our individual histories belong to history writ large […] Nowadays the recent past—‘the sixties,’ ‘the seventies,’ now ‘the eighties’—become history as soon as it has been lived. History is on our heels, following us like our shadows, like death.
—Marc Augé (Non-Places 26–7)
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
The Internet has only taken over this role as the predominate index or cognitive map of our globalized society in recent times. This role was previously held by television. Park Chan Wook’s recent film Oldboy (2003) explores this capacity of television. In Oldboy, the main character Oh Dae-Su is locked for 15 years in a hotel room that functions as a space in which rich clients can pay to have people imprisoned for prescribed lengths of time. Despite his absence from the outside world, Oh Dae-Su continues to learn and follow the history of civilization by means of the television in the room. Oh Dae-Su’s narration during his 15-year imprisonment in Oldboy provides an insightful reading of both the television and the Internet: “If you stand outside a phone booth on a rainy day and meet a man whose face is hidden by a violet umbrella, my advice is that you make friends with television. The television is both clock and calendar. It is your school, home, church, friend, and lover. But my lover’s song is too short” (Scene 2). Oh Dae-Su makes this last statement as he is masturbating and watching a female pop singer, whose song climaxes prematurely before he manages to achieve a similar feat. Oh Dae-Su’s complaint about his “lover’s song” being overly brief depicts the one flaw of television that the Internet does not share: temporal constraint. His situation is similar to the one Paul Virilio discusses in The Vision Machine involving inmates’ watching television in prison during his discussion of the private space’s loss of autonomy: “The private sphere thus continues to lose its relative autonomy. The recent installation of TV sets in prisoners’ cells rather than just in recreation rooms ought to have alerted us … From now on, the inmates can monitor actuality, can observe television events—unless we turn around and point out that, as soon as viewers switch on their sets, it is they, prisoners or otherwise, who are in the field of television, a field in which they are obviously powerless to intervene” (64–5). Virilio here recognizes the power of the image and its ability to control the subject, for Virilio quotes the prisoner who states that watching television makes prison more difficult because the prisoners are allowed to witness all the aspects of the world in which they are not allowed to take part. Virilio’s concept of “imprisonment in the cathode-ray tube” almost directly evokes David Cronenberg’s Videodrome (1983), and indeed the television controls our perceptions of reality through its portrayal of everything from politics to sexuality to its definition of “fun.” As Pattern Recognition explains, the Internet operates in the same sphere as television because certain places, such as Brazil in the novel, make no real distinction between TV and Net culture (90). The Internet is thus the logical successor of the television. Virilio’s discussion of the private sphere hearkens back to Jürgen Habermas’s theorization of the public and the private sphere and their place in modernity versus postmodernity in The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society.
Interestingly, “The Suffering Channel” also concerns the September 11th attacks. Unlike Gibson’s novel, Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005), or
Don DeLillo’s Falling Man (2007), the attacks function as an absence in the text. Instead of directly depicting the attacks or examining their aftermath, “The Suffering Channel” revolves around the lives of writers at a magazine company in the World Trade Center a month before the attacks take place. While the attacks are never mentioned explicitly, Wallace does make passing references to who will live or die on the day of the Towers’ collapse. Furthermore, like Pattern Recognition, “The Suffering Channel” examines the place of art and its commodification in the global, postmodern marketplace. Wallace problematizes the status of postmodern art by means of Brint Moltke’s ability to excrete works of art: part of the text centers around the debate over whether his feces represent true art (found art, moreover, for he does not craft them in any way) or if they are in actuality just “shit.”
Copyright information
© 2012 Gerald Alva Miller, Jr.
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Miller, G.A. (2012). The Eversion of the Virtual: Postmodernity and Control Societies in William Gibson’s Science Fictions of the Present. In: Exploring the Limits of the Human through Science Fiction. American Literature Readings in the 21st Century. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137330796_4
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137330796_4
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-44234-8
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-33079-6
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)