CYBERSPACE AFTER CYBERPUNK
Literary critics of William Gibson’s Blue Ant trilogy, and to some extent Gibson himself, explain the novels’ present-day setting by confirming the sentiment of Blue Ant’s founder, Hubertus Bigend, that the future is canceled by its arrival as a techno-scientific present, making a good old-fashioned future “the luxury of another day.” 1 Consequently, Gibson appears to abandon cyberspace, perhaps his most significant literary invention, which neither arrives in the technoscientific present nor is considered a viable projection. Once the concept inspired notions of an electronic “frontier of consciousness,” 2 but now its apparent real-world manifestation, the internet, has been settled by transnational corporations. Yet if cyberspace has been the defining invention that ties together Gibson’s fiction, and has to some extent fulfilled the adage of William Burroughs that the point of art is to “make it happen,” 3 then the concept has likely migrated elsewhere in Gibson’s later work. One can certainly find figures suggestive of this original conception of cyberspace in the novels that follow the first trilogy, such as the glasses in Virtual Light that add a layer of data over the wearer’s visual perception, or the shapes and “floes” of data seen by Colin Laney later in the trilogy. In this essay I explore how cyberspace reappears, transfigured, in the Blue Ant trilogy through postgeographic cityscapes layered with information, as well as in the highly referential style of writing, which formally demonstrates the experience of advertising and hypermedia and especially in the characters’ modes of observation and mobility.
Fifteen years after the end of the Sprawl trilogy, the Blue Ant trilogy offers a chance to trace the evolution of cyberspace as a literary construction and its manifestation in approximate technologies. The appearance of related contemporary or near-future inventions, such as ubiquitous computing and GPS technology, attest to the continuing importance of cyberspace as an idea to the culture at large, as well as to Gibson. Yet he seems to dismiss these more popular present-day realizations. The closest thing in the trilogy to cyberspace as a distinct space is Spook Country ’s virtual world of locative art, which uses GPS technology. It prompts wonder initially, but later bored familiarity and even dismay when imagined on a larger scale. Hollis Henry, the trilogy’s primary freelancer, asks rhetorically, “Would it all be like this, in Alberto’s new world of the locative? Would it mean that the untagged, unscripted world would gradually fill with virtual things, as beautiful or ugly or banal as anything one encountered on the web already? Was there any reason to expect it to be any better than that, any worse?” 4 She echoes Gibson’s prediction in “The Net Is a Waste of Time,” published between the trilogies in 1993, that the internet would become something much less interesting. 5 Moreover, that essay suggests that leisure must become productive, and thus the spidery wandering of one’s curiosity across the web must also become productive and alienating as it falls more into the economic realm, much as prior media did. By the time of the Blue Ant trilogy, surfing the web can indeed constitute a form of production, as attention industries keep us online long enough for the corporate daimons of the fallen cyberworld to sink their FANGs into us, 6 turning the “elsewhere” gaze into profits. This transformation may explain why characters in the Blue Ant trilogy disregard their devices almost as nuisances, exhibiting none of the cyberpunk’s romantic attachment to machines. In Zero History , Gibson seems to relish describing in detail Hollis’s cavalier gift of her MacBook to Milgrim, spending a full paragraph on the unattachment after she explains she had only opened it three times in three months. Though Milgrim “sank instantly” into the familiar “elsewhere” of cyberspace “that had nothing to do with geography,” 7 he too will not seem particularly attached as the novel progresses (even after he discovers Twitter). Cyberspace as something resembling the internet or the electronic “frontier of consciousness” is dead, an elsewhere no longer else.
Cyberspace in the Sprawl Trilogy
Cyberspace in Neuromancer was a world extrapolated from primitive precursors, such as video arcade games, flight simulations, and data encryption. If it anticipated the internet, it did so by figuring it as an abstract city of clean lines and geometric shapes. Although plenty of secrets remained hidden, dramatized in the first trilogy by black ICE counterattacks, cyberspace promised some measure of access to an inaccessible world of information otherwise secured in corporate and military databanks. In his essay “A Global Neuromancer ,” Fredric Jameson reiterates a briefly made point from Postmodernism regarding Neuromancer ’s achievement in creating a convincing figuration for late capitalism’s transnational corporate structures. Jameson maintains that it is a rare example where the literary creation convinces us of its reality, inspiring belief in it as an objectively existing thing. As such, “it behooves us to look more closely at the notion of cyberspace in Gibson, in order to see what it involves: Is it a new kind of concept, for example, reflecting the alleged historical novelty of information technology in general? To what degree does its content then (apart from any formal innovation) somehow reflect this new reality (whether that of the ‘real foundation’ of late capitalism or merely the ‘neutral’ structure of its third-stage productive technology)?” 8 Jameson observes that this representation of data as a spatial city may appear to be merely a visual metaphor. It would thus work at the level of theme, in the way the city is often a cliché image transmitted metonymically in visual mass media via skyscrapers, helicopter camera shots of moving traffic, and lines of light created by time-lapse photography, all carrying the connotation of networks and nodes of wealth and power but not really giving up the secret. Yet as Jameson reminds us, numbers are also representations (though they are fetishized in contemporary technoculture as the currency of reality). Even if Gibson falls back on a trope, his cyberspace has the merit of a further abstraction, that of turning tables of numbers into images whose analog, Jameson argues, is the axonometric drawings of architects. 9 In this way, abstraction is taken to the “second power.” 10 This second level of abstraction turns what could otherwise be taken as a lapse into cliché into a more complex figuration, directing our attention beyond either mimetic/metonymic presentation or reified data and toward a complex totality, whose complexity stems from the sheer number of relationships involved and this material’s constant state of flux. To the extent that this is a figure for the “real foundation” or at least a novel dimension of late capitalism, Jameson suggests it involves finance capital.
I infer a related concept from Jameson’s point about numbers. Marx uses the phrase “behind the backs” to explain the concept of simple average labor, by which he explains how value is determined. In Marx’s analysis value can only be created by labor power, and its numerical equivalent is equal to an average level of productivity across the entirety of production. He writes: “A commodity may be the outcome of the most complicated labour, but through its value it is posited as equal to the product of simple labour, hence it represents only a specific quantity of simple labour. The various proportions in which different kinds of labour are reduced to simple labour as their unit of measurement are established by a social process that goes on behind the backs of the producers.” 11 The determination of simple average labor takes place on a scale too vast for anyone to see locally and would be constantly changing. This complexity would obviously be greatly increased in our own time as more material inputs to make new commodities are commodities resulting from complex production processes. Jameson’s description of the cyberspace “camera eye” is analogous to scanning financial tables: “following their openings and canyons, skirting their barriers, moving deeper into the nonexistent space of these new systems.” 12 The stock market, then, could be thought of as a representational figure for precisely this impossible-to-capture complexity, but here with a further layer of mediation, in that the numbers do not express quantities of things, production rates, changes in the education of the work force, and so forth. The bulk of the stock market numbers, especially in common cultural understanding, stand for companies. This gives cause to a further twist of abstraction involving the simulation and dissimulation of values.
As the Sprawl trilogy ends with Mona Lisa Overdrive , in addition to the familiar imagery of abstract, volumetric architecture, Gibson emphasizes this politics of representation first by reminding us that it is a representation—“iconics,” as Gentry refers to it—and second by illustrat ing that what it shows has to be taught, as Kumiko recalls her tutor’s lectures explaining “humanity’s need for this information-space. Icons, waypoints, artificial realities.” 13 The ideological lesson, remembered years later by Gentry: “People jacked in so they could hustle. Put the trodes on and they were out there, all the data in the world stacked up like one big neon city, so you could cruise around and have a grip on it, visually anyway, because if you didn’t, it was too complicated.” 14 The fact that Angie and Kumiko recall being taught as children about the need for cyberspace taints it as a transmission of ideology. Media theorist Friedrich Kittler describes schools the same way in his description of the city as a computer, where schoolchildren are the functional equivalent of RAM (thus the visual representation suggested earlier of moving traffic and skyscrapers becomes less metonymic). 15 In this way, cyberspace is an analog for the market, where the ideology that may appear superstructural is in fact internal to the thing, required and generated by it. 16 The two characters through whom Gibson reflects on cyberspace are skeptical of this understanding of it. Gentry tries to discern the shape of the whole, suspecting a more complex, abstract pattern (an idea that anticipates Laney’s pattern recognition in the Bridge trilogy and Bigend’s order flow in the Blue Ant trilogy). Meanwhile, Slick ponders the politics of it, dismissing both the school lesson and Gentry’s attempt to make it into a philosophical totality: “But Slick didn’t think cyberspace was anything like the universe anyway; it was just a way of representing data. The Fission Authority had always looked like a big red Aztec pyramid, but it didn’t have to; if the Fission Authority wanted it to, they could have it look like anything. Big companies had copyrights on how their stuff looked. So how could you figure the whole matrix had a particular shape? And why should it mean anything if it did?” 17
Cyberspace in the Blue Ant Trilogy
One way to think of cyberspace today, removed from its science fiction projection as an actual space, is as a way of seeing already apparent in the Sprawl trilogy’s geometric abstraction that is functionally similar to axonometric drawing but also as a representational scheme related to the production of space. In The Production of Space , Henri Lefebvre describes a shift in the second half of the twentieth century away from the production of things in space (industrialism) to the production of space itself. 18 The idea of cyberspace points toward a new production of space that serves what Gibson refers to as a “post-geographic” landscape. Lefebvre’s narrative converges with Jameson’s reading of cyberspace in the history of linear perspective. Axonometric drawing (like other forms of descriptive geometry) can be connected historically with the invention of linear perspective as the development of technical standards, as Kittler shows in Optical Media . Kittler begins in the Italian Renaissance. In 1425, Filippo Brunelleschi, an engineer who built domes and fortresses, began a “revolution in seeing” 19 by painting a church exterior using the camera obscura technique to achieve unprecedented accuracy. Leon Battista Alberti advanced this technique in his treatise on painting, which he dedicated to Brunelleschi. Alberti adopted the perspective of an ideal window shaped like a rectangle, demonstrated by a “semi-transparent veil” with vertical and horizontal threads forming a grid. 20 Kittler observes that the “pattern then allowed geometrical constructions to be performed—in other words, operations with Dürer’s ruler and compass—to such a high degree of accuracy that the resulting drawing obeyed all the laws of linear perspective.” 21 Kittler stresses the technological invention, but Lefebvre observes that this vision was already in place in the new spatial organization of wealth accumulation, based on the métayage system, that emerged in Italy in the prior century. He writes: “Luxurious spending on the construction of palaces and monuments gave artists, and primarily painters, a chance to express, after their own fashion, what was happening, to display what they perceived. These artists ‘discovered’ perspective and developed the theory of it because a space in perspective lay before them, because such a space had already been produced.” 22 Perhaps anticipating the Protestant work ethic, this new, literally mundane vision revolutionized the gaze. Before the development of linear perspective, images such as paintings and stained glass windows identified the gaze with God, who presents “himself” to the viewer via the divine visual ray (Kittler points out the style of Byzantine painting in which gold light casts from its icons toward the viewer). 23 Now an abstract (geometric and free-floating) gaze presents accumulated wealth to the viewer. Light casts in rather than out. Although Alberti is still bound by geometry (as is Gibson’s visualization), Kittler refers to it as the first “mathematization of painting,” 24 especially for the scanning pattern that breaks the window into smaller windows, like so many virtual eyes. If the technique makes it possible to paint nature that does not exist, as Kittler argues, it seems possible for the patrons in Lefebvre’s narrative to aspire to new scenes of accumulation.
Linear perspective’s successors today form one component of a cyberspace gaze in computer drawing programs used in the urban planning that steers the production of space as means of production. New forms of the gaze find linear perspective too subjective for design tools, for the vanishing point hints at an observer. The orthographic gaze used in design applications imagines the viewer as a kind of free-floating camera that can zoom in and out of the drawing. This new space, Damjan Jovanovic explains, “can thus be described as a disassociated, fragmented space that had to be stitched together.” 25 Yet Jovanovic also points out the prevalence of Alberti’s rectangles in the flat ground grid in design applications and especially gaming. Thus, we have a free-floating and disinterested subject with full access to move in and out of the volumetric diagram, whose foundation is the grid. The wealthy patrons of such images would be a combination of cyber-cowboy and Thomas Piketty’s rentier. As David Harvey writes, “capital is building cities for people and institutions to invest in, not cities for common people to live in.” 26 Cyberspace as a vision of space, and the types of encounter or exchange that can happen in it, in this way may lead to what Lefebvre described as a production of space rather than things in space.
I focus now on three aspects of Gibson’s writing in the Blue Ant trilogy that may offer a renewed cyberspace figuration based on this technological development, though now incorporating the author’s focus on advertising and fashion. First, Gibson depicts advertising as a pervasive climate, or total environment, part of constructing a new space of capital accumulation. Second (zooming into this space), Gibson’s sentences exhibit a dense, referential—spatial—style that depicts the city as an intermingling of space and digital information. Third, as the trilogy progresses, Gibson’s characters increasingly move through, observe, and access the city as data, as if punching through cyberspace.
Total Environment
Descriptions of space in the Blue Ant trilogy recall some of the emphasis on abstract spatial representation in the original description of cyberspace, as well as the communication and control associated with cyber netics. Gibson’s shift of setting from the future to the present has often been explained with reference to technoscience and technoculture, usually with emphasis on particular advances that would have “seemed” futuristic to earlier generations of science fiction writers. 27 The term “technoscience” itself, however, refers not simply to a rate of advancements but to the intermingling of technology with modern scientific method, where the development of particular technologies is inextricably linked to, and perhaps confused with, the development of science. Writing a few years before the publication of Pattern Recognition , Paul Virilio begins The Information Bomb by defining technoscience as “the product of the fatal confusion between the operational instrument and exploratory research,” and noting that it has essentially become science itself in our time. 28 This confusion consequently shifts science’s emphasis from truth to effectiveness, and thus to digital procedures and cybernetic methods, as computing and optical technologies, now combined into a vision-machine, are used to observe, measure, and shape our behaviors with our coerced participation. Virilio finds the advertising industry exemplary of this change, observing that in the nineteenth century, advertising existed simply to cast light on a product, whereas in the twentieth it became an industry for producing desire. In the twenty-first, it will “become pure communication. To this end it will require the unfurling of an advertising space which stretches to the horizon of visibility of the planet.” 29 “Global advertising,” he continues, will no longer exist in the “breaks” between content but will encompass us in a “single world advertising market,” or “environment.” 30 What matters is not the message but the rapidity of the interaction, which, in the production of desire (the consumer), puts the means of communication in the role of the means of transportation.
This total environment is, of course, the setting of the Blue Ant trilogy, its novels unfolding by exploring manifold spaces of advertising as communication. Pattern Recognition begins by evoking such an encompassing environment. Cayce’s disturbed circadian rhythm suggests something like the postgeographic knowledge worker’s postindustrial brand of shift work sleep disorder, which blurs working time and life time. Gibson’s gray sky doesn’t crackle with the energy of television static as in the opening of Neuromancer . Rather, it forms a “gray bowl” that surrounds Cayce. 31 Much of this description at the beginning of the trilogy emphasizes space as a total environment, connecting climate, cartography, and colonialism (e.g., the restaurant Charlie Don’t Surf). The immaterial gray boundaries trap Cayce in a stasis, suggestively described through meteorological metaphor: “the trough of soul delay open[s] out into horizonless horse latitudes.” 32 The reference to the horse latitudes connotes the British Empire, whose crews could find themselves stalled at sea because of extremely calm winds, and thus be forced to throw horses overboard to conserve water. The connotation further suggests the abstract grid integral to the production of space, as the British Empire mastered maritime measurement when John Harrison created the first clock that could keep time at sea, solving the longitude problem. Gibson invokes souls and horizons in his description of the shopping mall where Cayce speculates about the existence of a “Tommy Hilfiger event horizon.” 33 When Cayce performs her peculiar brand of knowledge work by saying “yes” or “no” to a shoe company logo that suggests to her the iconic psychedelic art of American artist Rick Griffin, for a moment “she imagines the countless Asian workers who might, should she say yes, spend years of their lives applying versions of this symbol to an endless and unyielding flood of footwear.” 34 Cayce wonders, “What would it mean to them, this bouncing sperm? Would it work its way into their dreams, eventually?” 35 The trademark image (if not the connotation) can travel the length of the commodity chain in this diluvial image, which suggests the product and its communication, at least, will not languish in calm waters.
The Blue Ant trilogy thus captures the emerging space of empire that subsumes the spaces of the former colonial empires, featuring the loss of distance through speed of transport and communication, the growth of commodity chains that commonly stretch across the globe in nonlinear fashion, the blurring of work and leisure, and the mobilization of a global just-in-time stock of commodities constantly on the move from megaports to superhighways. In Spook Country , of course, GPS gridlines and container ships replace the horse latitudes, referencing the contemporary spatial regime of global capital, and connecting the system for the global movement of commodities in container ships to the global movement of communication via the internet. Virilio has written about this “just-in-time and stockless” system in futuristic terms as a “post-urban revolution that will drive the twenty-first century,” 36 the city replaced by a cyberspace-like immersion in the elsewhere of the screen or informational layers of the city, while commodity stocks pick up from docks and warehouses become mobile. Where Alberti’s perspectival painting fixed the palatial domains of the new town on a grid of points and lines, Virilio sees the city transforming from point to “trajectory.” 37 Gibson’s writing must be able to “keep up” with this movement.
Writing Posturban Space
Gibson seems to figure out how to make the web surfer’s waste of time productive, as one of the pleasures of reading the Blue Ant trilogy is to search for the proper name references and track them to what I sometimes imagine is the webpage he used in writing a particular passage. Although some references may be details or asides unnecessary to the plot, the writing strategy can formally enact Blue Ant’s branding and coolhunting work and the reading strategy the information worker’s leisure habits. Gibson name-drops brands and other proper nouns, adds manufacturing and purchase backgrounds about objects, and describes textures and spaces in which the action takes place. Adding to the effect, the action is often observation, as characters move like camera-eyes across global cities such as London and Los Angeles (a point I return to later)—akin to the virtual eyes in postperspectival digital drawing software. Critical essays on the trilogy often cite Gibson’s prose style, which maintains at least some estrangement despite the lack of a novum. Lee Konstantinou describes Gibson’s style in Pattern Recognition as “maximalist” in counterpoint to its main character’s logo-aversive minimalism. 38 Jameson calls it “hyped-up name dropping.” 39 Writing about the whole trilogy, Jaak Tomberg observes its “dense concentration of descriptive words.” 40 Veronica Hollinger uses the more familiar word “texture,” 41 which takes on an added layer of meaning considering the novels’ descriptions of spaces and objects that often evoke tactility through the references to materials that compose, for example, hotel lobbies and shop counters. Tomberg refers to the prose as “over-accelerated,” 42 but in these textural sentences it slows down, giving the prose as a whole a variety of speeds in addition to camera-eyes.
I agree with Tomberg that many of these stylistic features are not novel to the Blue Ant trilogy but are evident in Gibson’s writing from the beginning. I would add that the style seems more dominant in the Blue Ant trilogy. One way to think of this technique is as Jameson writes of Rem Koolhaas’s “Junkspace” sentences. 43 Here “it is the new language of space which is speaking through these self-replicating, self-perpetuating sentences, space itself become the dominant code or hegemonic language of the new moment of History—the last?—whose very raw material condemns it in its deterioration to extinction.” 44 We can construct an effective homology between Koolhaas’s language of space and Gibson’s descriptions, finding equivalence between Gibson’s informational density and Koolhaas’s perpetuum mobile. Where Koolhaas replicates a phrasing or image as a formal idea, creating unified thematic or imagistic blocks within the essay’s flow (the text appears as a monolithic block, perhaps like a cyber-stack, lacking indentation, section breaks, subtitles, or architectural photographs, divided only by ellipses), Gibson’s material descriptions seem to propel headlong on the momentum of the method, in this case an observational exhaustion. Gibson’s descriptions, like Koolhaas’s, are not simple denotations and use a complex referential code that can focus on embedded information. For instance, a recurring sentence, going back even to his early cyberpunk writing, describes the smell of plastic in terms of chemical components, seemingly making reference to the object’s materiality at a deeper, informational level, implying a form of immaterial property. A refrigerator is “so new that its interior smells only of cold and long-chain monomers.” 45 The observation penetrates the visible surface of things while remaining in the physical rather than editorializing or romanticizing. At other times, space itself is seen in terms of products. In Zero History , a building appears to Hollis as “a European countertop appliance from the Nineties, something by Cuisinart or Krups, metallic gray plastic, its corners blandly rounded.” Its interior surfaces appear made “of the same metallic-looking plastic, or plastic-looking metal.” 46 Thus, as with advertising, connotation is raised up as the primary level of the message for the reader as hyperinformed consumer.
Gibson’s references are often to cultural texts, such as paintings, film, or fashion, and he often describes a scene through reference to the artistic portrayal of another. In the first scene where Cayce flexes her unusual powers for the readers, Gibson describes Blue Ant employee Bernard Stonestreet (or Cayce describes him) as having “carroty hair upswept in a weird Aubrey Beardsley flame motif.” 47 The logo she has been hired to observe looks like “syncopated sperm, as rendered by the American underground cartoonist Rick Griffin, circa 1967.” 48 It is hard to see why most readers would need these proper references to make sense of the passages in a way that, say, “carroty hair upswept like a flame” or “syncopated sperm” would not signify. Descriptions of space follow the same pattern. In one scene, he writes that the sky was “like a gray-scale Cibachrome of a Turner print, too powerfully backlit.” 49 In another, “the street was as empty as that moment in the film just before Godzilla’s first footfall.” 50 In a film reference particularly relevant to Gibson, Cayce is in the Roppongi district in Tokyo:
where she’s had the cab drop her into the shadow of the multi-tiered expressway that looks like the oldest thing in town. Tarkovsky, someone had once told her, had filmed parts of Solaris here, using the expressway as found Future city.
Now it’s been Blade Runnered by half a century of use and pollution, edges of concrete worn porous as coral. 51
As connotations in the sense of ideological or cultural meanings, they seem to be just unfamiliar enough not to work precisely in that way. I imagine this scene in the way Gibson’s early short story “The Gernsback Continuum” flashes for its protagonist between abandoned retro–space age architecture and the imagined future that architecture at one time represented. 52 As the story’s title suggests, the architecture of this imagined future was called forth by the pulp sci-fi of Hugo Gernsback’s Amazing Stories , the first science fiction magazine. In this case, the entire freeway scene, once conjured up, should strike a mood conveyed by the hypnotic way it builds up to its final image of the multiple tiers while focusing on the single rider, former cosmonaut Berton. As Cayce embarks on this leg of her journey to find the maker of the mysterious video footage, the reader keeps in mind these cultural creations of the future, powerful as imaginations of the future and as distorted images of their own present tenses, now ancient history for the reader. Taken together, these close readings of Gibson’s prose capture one way the content of the form lies in the importance of information and immaterial labor to create and circulate commodities. Yet they also suggest subterranean possibilities, as one might rediscover a path not taken through the communication of moods via connotation.
As the trilogy progresses, Gibson writes with more of what I call a hypermediated description of the city, probably influenced by contemporary writing on London (Gibson refers to it as “The London Project”), including Peter Ackroyd’s London: A Biography and Alan Moore’s From Hell . 53 In Zero History especially, Gibson appears to combine his web surfer’s writing technique with the first trilogy’s movement through cyberspace, called “punching.” Moreover, the descriptive penetration of objects in space suggests the intermingling of information with the production of space. As Joe Shaw and Mark Graham observe in “An Informational Right to the City,” 54 this is a new aspect of urban spatial production different from Lefebvre’s emphasis on urban planning and architecture (and digital information was peripheral to the production of space in Lefebvre’s time). They argue that urbanization today reproduces the city through digital information, bringing together “ICTs and people as a productive force,” producing information and space that can be accumulated as capital. They point to how users of the city interact with ICTs, providing geospatial information, a process through which companies like Google produce the urban environment by gathering information and re-directing flows of information, capital, and people. As they point out, Google dominates urban space through their maps and search queries, and it “often outputs geographic information that displays a loss of nuance, an obscure provenance, hidden personal filtering, and an increasingly complex technical operation behind the process.” 55 Thus users of such electronic platforms produce space that serves capital. Moreover, their prosumption may seem to offer access and be participatory, but it also reduces interaction with the city to commodification and simulation of social relations while reducing the city to a market.
Although the Blue Ant trilogy’s thematic emphasis on marketing would appear to cover related territory, very little of the content directly connects to this particular type of spatial production that, as Shaw and Graham show, is a key method in the spatial accumulation of wealth. It does not appear as a new space extensively like the perspectival spaces of thirteenth century Italy. It appears intensively, as in the ground grid of digital modeling applications and the product and spatial descriptions in Gibson’s prose that penetrate to the informational property. In Zero History , transitions between the action often involve Hollis or Milgrim being transported, allowing them to observe the built space that surrounds them: buildings, infrastructure, signage. Although these movements are not slow enough that moments of extended observation between points is possible, they can work through juxtaposition, similar to the hyperjump punching of cyberspace movement. For instance, like the original book jacket for Zero History —which depicts an abstract railway tunnel (or fiber-optic cable?) impelling the observer around the bend and into the vanishing point—as Milgrim arrives in London, the city is seen as a medium, resembling the barely fleshed-out vistas of early video games. “Like entering a game, a layout, something flat and mazed, arbitrarily but fractally constructed from beautifully detailed but somehow unreal buildings, its order perhaps shuffled since the last time he’d been here. The pixels that comprised it were familiar, but it remained only provisionally mapped, a protean territory, a box of tricks, some possibly even benign.” 56 In part, the details of the metaphor are recognizable throughout the trilogy, as when hotel furniture veneer is described in terms of relative pixelation. Here the entrance into the game-city recalls the moment hackers jack into cyberspace. The description of the building layout as “perhaps shuffled” calls to mind late capitalism’s building and rebuilding in search of marginal value (or the “spectacular urbanization”). Moreover, the construction is more protean than solid, or perhaps exists as an illusion or perspectival trick, more like a digital model to be observed and manipulated on a screen.
In other moments, Gibson fills in the cyberspace layout, as a montage of proper names moves the characters through space in a series of cuts: “Pentonville Road, on a sign, though he didn’t know whether they were on it or near it. Midmorning traffic, though he’d never seen it from a motorcycle. . . . More signs, blurry, through the plastic: King’s Cross Road, Farringdon Road.” 57 The verb-less, fragmented syntax puts the focus on the urban space while detaching orientation or praxis from the subject’s actions in the space. Movement through the space is purely visual (like a video montage) and proceeds by jumps between images, as a hacker might punch his way through the abstract cyberspace layout. The cyber- prefix remains, literally, in the sense of being steered. The city space remains abstract, lacking detail due to the speed of the motorcycle, which reduces the city to jumps. It reads similar to passages from Neuromancer :
The transition to cyberspace, when he hit the switch, was instantaneous. He punched himself down a wall of primitive ice belonging to the New York Public Library automatically counting potential windows. Keying back into her sensorium, into the sinuous flow of muscle, senses sharp and bright. 58
Case’s virus had bored a window through the library’s command ice. He punched himself through and found an infinite blue space ranged with color-coded spheres strung on a tight grid of pale blue neon. In the nonspace of the matrix, the interior of a given data construct possessed unlimited subjective dimension; a child’s toy calculator, accessed through Case’s Sendai, would have presented limitless gulfs of nothingness hung with a few basic commands. 59
The proper names function as signs or iconic nodes for hypertextual interaction, as when Milgrim recognizes Blackfriars Bridge on this trip: “Eventually, a bridge, low railings, red and white paint. Blackfriars, he guessed, remembering the colors. Yes, there were the tops of the very formal iron columns that had once supported another bridge, beside it, that red paint slightly faded.” 60 When Fiona cuts the engine and kicks the kickstand, Milgrim jacks out. Cyberspace in Zero History is thus a mode of observation rather than a separate space, which of course is all cyberspace is.
It may be useful to think of cyberspace as a concrete abstraction, a category taken from Marx’s method to describe commodity exchange. Lefebvre defines it as a mental concept developed by thought until it becomes concretized as a form in social practice, and he uses the concept to describe the production of space out of social space. Social space has a form, which Lefebvre calls “encounter, assembly, simultaneity.” 61 Anything produced in space by living beings, whether through cooperation or conflict, assembles in social space and implies accumulation around a point. As productive forces have developed and capitalism expanded, Lefebvre sees the concretization of social space expanded, creating manifold spaces of production, consumption, leisure, and so on. As a heuretic exercise, I borrow Lefebvre’s formula and suggest that Gibson’s concept of cyberspace may fill one of the slots in a new formula, now updated for twenty-first-century capitalism. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, after all, described it as a “Platonic realm.” 62 Is cyberspace a figure for an emerging form of spatial representation that coincides with the creation of new spaces of accumulation, as in the history of linear perspective? This way of understanding cyberspace could explain more satisfactorily why Gibson’s writing evolves from science fiction to the science-fictionalized present: it follows the emergence of cyberspace from mental concept to concrete production and accumulation. Moreover, from this perspective, it may indicate a set of strategies for recording this hidden abode in the novel form, arresting this new spatial production in a place for reflection and suggesting ways to navigate it.