Cyberposmodernism

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Technology and Postmodernism: Cybernetic FictionAuthor(s): David PorushReviewed work(s):Source: SubStance, Vol. 9, No. 2, Issue 27: Current Trends in American Fiction (1980), pp. 92-100Published by: University of Wisconsin Press

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Technology and Postmodernism:Cyberetic Fiction*DAVID PORUSH

I. Between Men and Their Machines: The Fourth Discontinuity"Man is on the threshold of breaking past the discontinuity between himselfand machines. In one part this is because man can now perceive his ownevolution as inextricably interwoven with his use and development of tools, ofwhich the modern machine is only the furthest extrapolation."In this quote, Bruce Mazlish, an historian of science at M.I.T., identifieswhat he calls the Fourth Discontinuity, a gap between what is perceived ashuman and what is perceived as mechanical in the self, a gap which he predicts

is about to be effaced or bridged. The three other discontinuities in Mazlish'sscheme are those between man and the natural universe (bridged by theCopernican revolution); between man and the beasts (bridged by the Darwinianrevolution); and between man and his unconscious self (bridged by theFreudian revolution). The anxiety that technology poses a specific threat to orcompetes with something human has been articulated by artists and criticsagain and again since the Industrial Revolution: the English Lake poets, theFrench Symbolists, D. H. Lawrence, Henry Miller, Matthew Arnold, G. K.Chesterton, Hilaire Belloc, and Lewis Mumford are just a few who havehistorically taken a firm stand against technological encroachment. Morerecently, Jacques Ellul, Hannah Arendt, and Marshall McLuhan, as well asinnumerable authors of humanistic science fiction, have offered us a vision ofa more or less apocalyptic world in which homofaber is converted into homomachina and subjugated by his own fabrications.That science fiction and NMcLuhanand Kenner (in The Counterfeiters)betray a perverse fascination for and celebration of machines at thesame time that they warn against its assaults on expression and freedompoints to one of the paradoxes of technology: gazing into the hithertoineffaceable and unfathomable distance between man and his creations, thosewriters discover an ambivalence toward man's technological success, a power-ful vertigo produced by this disposition, at once fascinated and revolted.

*This paper was originally delivered to the MLA section on Postmodernism and Fiction,December 29, 1978 in New York City.Sub-Stance N? 27, 1980 92


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Cybernetic FictionPostmodernist fiction occupies a similarly paradoxical point betweenfascination and revulsion. This fiction, devoted in part to an examination ofhow it came to be (self-reflection), is forced to address the notion that not only

man, but the literature he produces and the language he uses, may be nothingmore than a machine.

II. Cybernetic Fiction Defined and Some ExamplesIt is not surprising, then, that in examining the work of artists who areidentifiably postmodern-Barth, Barthelme, Beckett, Coover, and Pynchon-one discovers the obsessive return to stories of men who behave like, think like,

are defeated by, fatefully linked to, derived from or turning into machines.These stories share a theme which has long been the province of science fiction:the theme of the Mechanized Man. Postmodernist fiction (which does notexclude science fiction by any means) returns to the theme by rendering it intexts which themselves imitate machines, purport to be machines or "gen-erated" by machines, or are structured like highly polished and integratedmechanical devices. I call this sub-genre of postmodernist fiction "cyberneticfiction."Barth's fiction has been exemplary of this sub-genre. A cybernetic reading

of Barth's Giles Goat-Boyreveals that the text is structured in two symmetricalvolumes made up of three reels each, those reels indicating computerprintout tapes, themselves made up of seven sections each. Similarly, the plotis a symmetrical repetition of a series of seven feats performed by the heroaccording to instructions given him by the computer, WESCAC, which mightalso be his progenitor. The instructions involve the hero in a series of tests anddramas, which Barth modeled on Joseph Campbell's blueprint for a hero-machine: if, according to Campbell and Barth, a character were to performthose acts prescribed by the blueprint, he would be a programmed, officialmythological hero. In the case of GilesGoat-Boy, he heroic activity is aimed atde-fusing (demystifying, unriddling, interpreting, correlating, resolving theparadoxes of) WESCAC's capacity to bring the University (universe) to anapocalyptic end.Barth's penchant for devising self-reflexive, postmodernist, "machine-generated" texts is further expressed in Lost in the Funhouse and his mostrecent Letters.Texts like "Autobiography: A Self-recorded Fiction" and "Lostin the Funhouse" make it clear that Barth envisions himself as a sort ofhomespun tinkerer-mechanic, inventor of word-contraptions, which like thefunhouse that gives its name to the collection, are combination Babbagecalculator and labyrinthine gimmicks. "Autobiography" tells us that it hasbeen created by the illicit intercourse of voice and machine and, unhappybastard device, pleads with us to "turn it off." Barth, in an introduction to hisown reading of Lettersin 1977, commented that his son's work in artificialintelligence at M.I.T. had influenced his own interest in computer texts.Letters was originally designed as an epistolary computer-generated, self-pro-

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David Porushgrammed fiction. The author or human narrator in "Autobiography"and Lettersdisappears, to be replaced by an eminently clever thinking machine, orcybernaut. This is an act of technological self-effacement like that of theanonymous crafters of Swiss watches with transparent faces and backs. Theyexpose the mechanisms behind the message to show that the mechanism s themessage; Barth calls attention to the perfection of his contrivance away fromthe humanness of his characters, ideas and art.Barth is not alone in his ]postmodern penchant for cybernetic fiction.Thomas Pynchon applies scientific theory itself-an imitation of true tech-nologists who apply physics to hardware-in deriving a structure for his"entropic" works like V, The Cryingof Lot49, Gravity'sRainbow,and "Entropy."These texts are "entropic" because they are structured according to theprinciples suggested by dual (analogous) formulas for entropy in thermo-dynamics and information theory. Simply stated, entropy is a conceptemployed by Pynchon because of the attractiveness of all three of its possibledefinitions: as a measure of the energy which leaks out of a closed system; as ameasure of the uncertainty and competing messages carried by any onesymbol in a system of signs; and as a description of the final state of theuniverse-the degradation of matter and energy to the zero point of form-lessness, patternlessness, and undifferentiation. Pynchon projects these threedefinitions into his more literary purposes, constructing texts which, respec-tively, run down or wind to an end without winding up or resolving itsconflicts; texts which are highly polysemous in all their aspects and thereforeare made inaccessible by the number of conflicting interpretations carried byeach message; and, finally, texts which are apocalyptic, which suggest a worlddoomed to End at a final zero-point of culture and man.

"Entropy," an early short story by Pynchon, is structured like the classicdescription of the Maxwell ]Demon experiment. Two closed systems orrooms-one with a wild party and another with a solitary hero watching hisbird die-slowly leak energy into one another in a way which is controlled andselected by the author who, in this analogy, plays the role of Maxwell'sDemon. The party, like most parties, winds down to a state of utterexhaustion and enervation as the last remaining souls lie about and babble ateach other. The bird dies. Simultaneously, the text itself becomes more andmore incomprehensible (in imitation of the second understanding of entropy:confused and parallel messages borne by a single set of symbols).The other three Pynchon texts, V, The Crying of Lot 49, and Gravity'sRainbow, are structured as multi-layered searches. V is the search for theincarnation of the iconic V in a woman, a robot, a type of rocket, "Vheissu,"(human, cybernaut, machine, apocalypse). The Cryingof Lot 49 is a search forthe secret postal system-message carriers-which seems to have influencedthe course of history since the Renaissance; evidence of the system isdiscovered everywhere, but the system nowhere. Gravity'sRainbow narratesthe search for the system of systems, the military-industrial-war machinewhich, allied with extrasensory perception, tarot, black magic, and wealth,forces men to act like, serve, and become transcendentally linked to machines(as in the case of rocket bombs falling on the sites of Slothrop's copulations).

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Cybernetic FictionAll three novels are highly complex, polysemous, and suggestive of apoca-lypse. In each, the hero or heroine is caught in a universe so richly plotted,inhabiting texts of such systematic design and cross-referential structure, thattheir discoveries make them acquire a special sort of madness: what they oncebelieved, naively, was a random and free universe, becomes a system soornate, immense and determined that it becomes an unmappable machine, anunchartable machina incognita. Pynchon's fictions echo Jacques Ellul's pro-phecy for the dark triumph of technological order: "True technique willknow how to maintain the illusion of liberty, choice and individuality, butthese will be carefully calculated so that they will be integrated into themathematical reality merely as appearances." Pynchon, therefore, is also atechnologist of texts, having mastered the technique of constructing fictionaltexts that are machines.

A third text that begs for cybernetical analysis is Beckett's The Lost Ones.Only fifty-six very dilute pages long, it is the product of four years of intensewriting by Beckett. The Lost Ones is a crystalline machine of a fiction, toldfrom a weird, dehumanized point-of-view, the third-person absent omni-scient (e.g., the first sentence: "Abode where lost bodies roam each searchingfor its lost one.") A good portion of the text is devoted to a series of blueprintinstructions describing the contained environment in which the lost onesroam: "a flattened cylinder fifty metres round and eighteen high for the sakeof symmetry" containing two hundred bodies, grouped into four categories;temperature and light inside the cylinder oscillate in uncoordinated butregular intervals as the creatures grope through alternate gloom and blindinglight, freezing cold and uncomfortable heat. In other words, the cylinder is ahuge machine. Beckett details in clinical language the effect of the oscillationsin heat and light on the bodies of the lost ones and emphasizes the systematicway the four groups of bodies are organized so that "in the cylinder alone arecertitudes to be found and without nothing but mysteries."The beings themselvesare enslaved to the mechanical, determined world in which they are trapped,and have become extensions of it; their every sensation and act is subject tothe laws of the machine. The only reference to any subject or notionrecognizably human and external to the system of the lost ones is to Dante.Like Dante in his portrait of hell, Beckett has created a closed system of someultimate human fate, some eternal structure of doom. Except that Beckett'shell, unlike Dante's, is entropic, leaking energy into the world at the sameinfinitesimal rate that a sand dune, protected from the winds, is diminished:"lessened by three grains every other year and every following increased bytwo," until "the last of all if a man ... after a pause impossible to time finds atlast his place and pose whereupon dark descends and at the same instanttemperature comes to rest not far from the freezing point. Hushed in thesame breath the faint stridulence mentioned above [the humming of themachine?] ... So much roughly speaking for the last state of the cylinder andof this little people of searchers. .. ." TheLost Onesis an exemplary cyberneticfiction, using mechanical diction to catalogue a set of dehumanizing dataabout a large machine and its machine-like occupants.Robert Coover stumbles into cybernetic territory in his short story,

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David Porush"Morris in Chains." In it, Coover contrasts the highly stylized ruminations of arandy satyr, roaming on the plastic, steel and concrete hull of a pre-fabricatedcity-park, to the official report, written in bureaucratese by technicians whotrack, capture and neutralize Morris because of the threat he poses to theirultimately ordered society. "Only rarely did Morris escape our network ofobservers now, and then but briefly. His least event was recorded on notepad,punchcard, film, tape. Observers reported his noises, odors, motions, choices,acquisitions, excretions, emissions, irritations, dreams."

Joseph McElroy in Plus invents a dehumanized point-of-view, which inturn engenders a highly idiosyncratic and reflexive style similar to Beckett's inThe Lost Ones. One could call McElroy's position first-person absent as he tellsthe story of a brain, excised from its human body and launched into orbitaround Earth on a computerized platform. The brain, Imp Plus, transmitsdata back to Earth as it culls information from its electrical inputs. However,as it floats in its glucose bath, it slowly re-invents its human past, rejects itscybernetic role, and, miraculously, grows an array of tentacles, organs,sprouts and stalks which obtain sensuous information for the brain. Imp Plus,in a manner of speaking, grows back into humanness. As a final act ofaffirmation it terminates its life against the protest of Cap Com (Earthcommand station) by decaying the orbit of its platform into Earth's atmos-phere and burning up. McElroy's text is weird and highly technologized,filled with data readouts and an imitation computer vocabulary.Barthelme's fiction has continually shown its author's tinkerer's delight inre-assembling the contextless details of a mechanized culture in devices whichbecome strange and ironic montages. One critic calls Barthelme's fictions"verbal machines with all their gears exposed." Barthelme constructs cyber-netic fictions in several instances. One of the most striking is "Paraguay."LikeTheLostOnesand GilesGoat-Boy,"Paraguay"is an entire country or world, "notthe Paraguay on your maps," but a Paraguay of some future imaginativeprojection, a utopia of "gleaming surfaces." This Paraguay is described in aparody of an atlas, with headings for "Temperature," "Error," "Rationaliza-tion," "Microminiaturization," and "Silence," among others. In Paraguay, "Agovernment error resulting in the death of a statistically insignificant portionof the population... has made people uneasy; Art has been 'rationalized,'and each artist's product is translated into a statement in symbolic logic."Barthelme explains the process:

Rationalizationproduces simpler circuits and, therefore, a saving in hard-ware.... The statement is then "minimized"by variousclevertechniques.Thesimpler statement is then translatedbackinto the designof a simplercircuit....Flip-flop switchescontrol furtherdevelopment.

Finally, as in The Lost Ones, "temperature controls activity to a remarkabledegree." The story is short and haunting, especially in its self-reflexive imageof the fate of art in a technologized society.

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David Porushas it exists in and of its own structure, but the operation of the reader on thetext. It is "we" who make "the whole thing work." We make it work by makingit over in our own image, or at least, in the image of our own scrutiny.Interpretation transforms the postmodernist text-which invites such inter-pretation-into an overdetermined grid of intersecting, competing andparallel systems of meaning which arise from and mirror the expectations ofthe reader. In this understanding of cybernetic fiction, the reader is againplaced astride the Fourth Discontinuity. This time, however, it is not by thesubject of the text (robots, etc.), nor so much by its inherent structure (Barth'scomputer reels), but by the reader's interpretation itself. The attempt to makea text work makes it into a phenomenological machine."The modern work of art," Deleuze writes, "isanything it seems to be; it iseven its very property of being whatever we like, of having the overdeter-mination of whatever we like. The modern work of art is a machine andfunctions as such." Postmodernism goes one step further. Postmodernistauthors are concerned with the mechanics of their fiction in recognition ofthis notion. They taunt their readers with the impossibility of ever really beingsure that their interpretation is single by making fictions which are disguisedas machines but are loaded with hidden systems, paradoxes, ambiguities, non-sequiturs, and tautologies. Trying to interpret all the allegorical and allusiveproperties of TheLostOnes is an essay in madness. Barth is well known for hislove of analogical games, paradoxical structures. The cybernetics of post-modernist fiction is a playful treachery; it may look like a machine, it may talkabout its own mechanics or about Mechanized Man himself, but it functions assomething more than a machine, something inexplicable. It works, but thereader doesn't know how.There is a name for this sort of machine, one which works to inviteinterpretation but which is itself too elusive to be interpreted singly andunambiguously, too ornate to be wholly described, too minute and numerousin its particulars to be measured or mapped. This mysterious machine is, inengineering jargon, the black box.When engineers draw a diagram of a complicated machine, they use asymbol to indicate those junctures where none of the details are renderedbecause they are too complex for the scale of the drawing; they draw a blackbox to stand for the operation of the machine and then label it with thatoperation. The black box, then, indicates what is supposed to occur in thefinal product, not how or why. The next engineer down the line would readthe label, translate it into a diagram that would "make it work." The idealreader.

However, black boxes are not just shorthand for highly complex machinestoo detailed to diagram. They also signify, to scientists and analysts, the pointat which a deterministic or technical explanation breaks down. They stand forthe statement: "We know it works but we don't know how." It is this sort ofblack box which postmodernist fiction imitates.If these analogies and conjurations and borrowings from technology seemcontrived, then consider for a moment Barthelme's story with the suggestive

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Cybernetic Fictiontitle, "The Explanation." It is placed in a particularly elusive collection ofshort stories, City Life, perhaps Barthelme's best, certainly his most experi-mental in terms of formal devices and brave games with inaccessibility andnonsense. In it, a large black box is reproduced on several pages surroundedby written text. The writing is a parody of the interview form, perhaps themost mechanical form of that most mechanical novelistic device, the dialogue.The interviewer and interviewee are identified only by the anonymous "Q"and "A" in place of names.Q seems to be interviewing A on his response to the black box, whichappears above them on the page. They refer to it as a "machine":

Q. Do you believethat thismachinecould be helpful nchanging hegovernment?A. I don't know what it does, what does it do?Q. Well, look at it.A. It offers no clues.Q. It has a certainreticence.A. I don't knowwhat it does.Q. A lack of confidence in the machine?Is Barthelme addressing the "reticence" of his own texts to yield tointerpretation? It would seem so. The exchange between Q and A is filledwith non-sequiturs, broken answers and nonsensical repetitions, but they

always return to a discussion of the machine. A. begins to see in it a womanslowly undressing, a striptease image for the enticement of the reader by thetext and the pleasures promised him or her; but is also an image for thehallucination of the reader. A. sees a woman removing her bra, but the boxremains black. "Q It has beauties. / A The machine."At the center of the fiction, Q draws attention to the "explanation" behind"The Explanation." This explanation draws explicit connections between theblack box, cybernetics, and the fiction itself. Q states: "I have a number oferror messages I'd like to introduce here and I'd like you to study themcarefully... they're numbered. I'll go over them with you." He then lists aseries of coded instructions borrowed from a computer programming man-ual. These instructions, or "error messages," are used by the programmer atthat most meaningful point in the drama between man and machine: whenthe machine corrects the fallible man. Error messages are the responses by acomputer to nonsensical or uninterpretable programming instructions. Bar-thelme tips his hand to the reader by choosing those messages which aredouble entendresfor literary terms and could be applied to the way an author"programs" his fiction: "improper sequence of operators ... missing operator... mixed mode, that one's particularly grave... improper characters inconstant . .. invalid character transmitted in a sub-program stateme ... that'sa bitch ... no END statement." The words "character," "operator," "ENDstatement," and "mixed mode" hint at the self-reflexiveness of Barthelme'sproject. But there is nothing ambiguous in Barthelme's message about theinterpretation of his own text: his fiction is a mysteriously working machine, ablack box which the answerer, the reader, explains.

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100 David PorushWhere, then, in Barthelme's scheme of machines and black boxes and the

like, is there room for the human? Is his explanation the same as Coover's andBarth's and Beckett's and the other cybernetic postmodernist fiction writers,that humanity has been taken away from men and women and placed in thehands of the machines that imitate them? When Q states, "The face. . . themachine has a face," the reader is prompted to look, even though the machineis only a black box. Q, the defender of the machines, seems to address thisdisplacement of the human by the technological in literature: "I don't like touse anthropomorphic language in talking about these machines, but there isone quality...." "What is it?"A asks: "Q It's brave. / A Machines are braverthan art." Even A is reluctant but finally admits the attraction of machinesover art for citizens like A, who give their assent to them. Yet, A sawsomething quite un-machinelike in the black box: a striptease by a beautifulwoman, a face, bravery.

IV. A Rhetorical Epilogue on Cybernetic Fiction as InoculationThere is something about these highly specialized postmodernist blackbox fiction machines which is brave. They are more daring than otherfictions, perhaps; they court nonsense, chaos, paradox, entropy, silence and

oblivion. They ask to be misunderstood, misinterpreted-though creatively.And though they are quite vociferous about the mechanics and "advancedtechnology" (or technique) of their own design, this is no more than aninvitation to the reader to enter into a relationship with the text which willreturn the reader to his or her own humanness. The reader, like Barthelme'ssomewhat befuddled A, projects, hallucinates or interprets the impenetrableand unyielding obscurity of the black box to mean something human; thereader sees in it not only a face (perhaps or perhaps not the face of the reader)or a striptease or bravery, but the enduring assurance that as long as there areblack boxes there will always be something the mechanics and technicians anddeterminists can't explain. Cybernetic fiction, by anticipating the effacementof the discontinuity between man and machine, inoculates against the post-modern disease of technological determinism.

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Cyberposmodernism

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