ÁNGEL MATEOS-APARICIO MARTÍN-ALBO
ABSTRACT
The aim of this chapter is to explore the representation of the city in several postmodern science fiction novels which display the ideological confrontation between modern and postmodern ideologies in the architectural elements (buildings, urban layouts) which appear in the fiction. Firstly, the chapter will summarize postmodern criticism of the ideological connotations of modernist architecture and urbanism. In opposition to this representation, postmodern science fiction will be seen to offer an image of the city that stands for a de-centred, and therefore unstructured, non-hierarchical, and un-cohesive urban layout, which in turn corresponds to a de-centred, fluid idea of social structure. In this sense, the description of the city in these postmodern texts is a political as well as an aesthetic question. The analysis will focus on the fictional and ideological connotations of the confrontation between solid, unitary buildings like J. G. Ballard’s tall apartment block in High-Rise and the Omphalos pyramid in Greg Bear’s Slant and the depiction of fluid, de-centred, fragmented urban spaces like The Raft in Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash, and the bridge city in William Gibson’s Virtual Light, which may stand as icons of the postmodern vision of human societies as multiple, changing political and ideological environments.
The Imagined Spaces of Science Fiction
In ‘Elements of a Poetics of Cyberpunk’, Brian McHale states that cyberpunk, the thematic and aesthetic trend within postmodern science fiction most acclaimed by critics, achieves its ‘aesthetic ← 155 | 156 → contemporaneity’1 with mainstream postmodernist fiction because of its ability to ‘“literalize” or “actualize” what occurs in postmodernist fiction as metaphor – metaphor […] in the extended sense in which a textual strategy or a particular use of language may be understood as a figurative representation of an “idea” or theme’ (1992a: 150). What McHale means is that cyberpunk’s fictional elements (characters, settings, plots, etc.) can be read as tangible, if fictitious, representations of well-known postmodern tenets. For instance, if the postmodern worldview pursues the fragmentation of the unitary subject as part of its criticism of the Enlightenment project, cyberpunk, and in general postmodern science fiction, will present characters that actualize this fragmentation, such as Wintermute, the artificial intelligence that manifests itself in a variety of digital identities in William Gibon’s Neuromancer (1984). Similarly, other frequent inhabitants of the cyberpunk universe, such as robots, replicants and cyborgs, represent alternative conceptions of the human that challenge established ideas and offer science fiction readers an insight into the posthuman condition. The environments envisioned for these characters, such as space stations, off-world colonies, and other ‘microworlds’, can correspondingly be understood as solid metal actualizations of the multiplicity of worlds the postmodern Weltanschauung avows. In this sense, one of the representations of space in cyberpunk has become not only its defining mark, but also a recurrent motif in all postmodern science fiction and even in the postmodern conception of reality: cyberspace. Also known as the ‘matrix’, ‘the Grid’, the ‘Net’, the ‘Web’ (Bukatman 105), or ‘virtual reality’, cyberspace may be defined as a ‘consensual hallucination’ (Gibson 1995a: 12), a virtual space that exists only in an electronic and therefore immaterial sphere at a mental level and cannot be connected to any actual geographical location. The science fiction film TRON (1982) visualizes this notion of space. Cyberspace can thus be read as an actualization of the postmodern conception of space as a constructed ← 156 | 157 → entity, and stands in opposition to real (geographical, geometrical) space. In this sense, this notion of space replicates the postmodern impression that every human reality has been constructed, as Dani Cavallaro suggests (2000: 35). Virtual reality will at the same time ‘decenter the conventional notions of space and locality’ (Cavallaro 2000: 32) and ‘[produce] a unified experience of spatiality, and thus social being, in a culture that has become impossibly fragmented’ (Bukatman 1993: 156).
The idea of a virtual space disconnected from physical, geographical, ‘real’ space and opposed to it is analysed by French philosopher Henri Lefebvre in his book The Production of Space (1992), where he describes this postmodern notion of space as ‘mental space’ (1999: 3). Lefebvre claims that the division between ‘mental’ and real space serves the dominant ideology (capitalism), as it erases the ideological and historical preconditions of what he calls the ‘production’ of space. From this point of view, the postmodern fascination with cyberspace and virtual reality should therefore be read as conservative, rather than as subversive.2 In order to avoid reinforcing dominant ideology, Lefebvre suggests that a unitary approach is necessary: what he calls a ‘science of space’ that connects both realms and reveals the political and ideological implications of the production of space in Western societies. This new science of space will uncover, Lefebvre claims, ‘a technological utopia, a sort of computer simulation of the future, or of the possible, within the framework of the real – the framework of the existing mode of production’ (Lefebvre 1999: 9). By ‘technological utopia’ Lefebvre means the dominant capitalist ideology: in this sense, cyberspace, the ‘sort of computer simulation of the future’, would be but a representation of late century postmodern society as a clean, stylish, orderly and systematic social ← 157 | 158 → space that conceals negative aspects of ‘real’ reality such as global economic inequality and the exploitation of natural resources. Lefebvre finds that this technological utopia is ‘a common feature not just of many science fiction novels, but also of all kinds of projects concerned with space, be they those of architecture, urbanism, or social planning’ (1999, 9). In short, according to Lefebvre, the organization of space at all levels (from urban planning to the imagined spaces of cultural products like science fiction) reveals, if analysed in detail, the political and ideological underpinnings of dominant capitalist (postmodern) culture, characterized as utopia. It then follows that the representation of space – and architecture is the art of space as well as the art that lies at the confluence of the utopian and the social – in postmodern science fiction has strong conceptual and ideological connotations, as this chapter intends to demonstrate.
The aim of this chapter is to explore the ideological background of the representation of space in a variety of postmodern science fiction novels, which include J. G. Ballard’s High-Rise (1975), a novel that predates the ‘aesthetic contemporaneity’ of postmodern science fiction McHale describes; three representative cyberpunk novels: William Gibson’s Virtual Light, Bruce Sterling’s Schismatrix and Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash; and Greg Bear’s Slant (1997), whose highly innovative science fiction is not so clearly associated with cyberpunk. Following Lefebvre, the main focus of this chapter will not be the analysis of cyberspace, whose interpretation as a mental space is clear, but the other urban and architectural elements present in the novels. The goal is to demonstrate that Lefebvre’s reading of the genre as conservative does not account for its complexity and ambiguity, because postmodern science fiction and cyberpunk, while prominent for their focus on cyberspace as a new locality, are not set entirely in a virtual realm. In fact, the novels contain conflicting visions of buildings and city structures that actualize the discursive clash between the modern and the postmodern social and ideological implications of architecture and urbanism. The skyscraper of Ballard’s novel and the pyramid at the centre of the fictional capital of the Republic of Green Idaho represent the principles of modernist architecture in conflict with the reality of the surrounding city; similarly, Stephenson’s fluid city in the middle of the ocean contradicts the principles of modernist urbanism which postulated clearly demarcated ← 158 | 159 → city centres. Nevertheless, the alternatives offered in the novels, such as city ‘sprawls’ and other decentred urban layouts (cf. Cavallaro and Bukatman) are not expressed in clear utopian terms, but rather as ‘critical utopias’ or dystopias of the present.3
Cities in Flight: Urban Space in Science Fiction
Science fiction has envisioned future cities in many different, often contradictory ways. In fact, cities (as artificial, technological spaces) have been so recurrent and relevant in the genre that Gary Wolfe regarded them not as simple fictional elements, but as generic icons in his study The Known and the Unknown: Iconography of Science Fiction (1979). The difference, according to this critic, consists in the fact that the ‘meaning of icons involve psychological and cultural levels as well as fictive and aesthetic ones’ (1979: 17). In this sense, the representation of urban spaces in science fiction has reflected the changes in the cultural (and ideological) perception of the city.
Wolfe’s analysis describes a constant fluctuation between two completely opposed, extreme versions of the city in science fiction. On the one hand, the genre has envisioned large cities which were the political and ideological centres of imaginary industrial nations or huge technological ← 159 | 160 → empires, such as Trantor, the famous capital of Asimov’s galactic empire, or Coruscant, the capital of Star Wars’ Galactic Republic. These fictional cities are immense in extension and population, and are inferred as results of an urban development controlled by the technocratic ideology dominant in the twentieth century. On the other, in its bleakest moments, science fiction has also foreseen massive and mechanized but alienating and oppressive cities, such as the setting of the film Metropolis (1926), and cities in ruins, like Samuel Delany’s Dhalgren (1974), to symbolize the culmination or the end of Western technological civilization. As can be deduced from his analysis, Wolfe suggests that the representation of cities in science fiction responds to the changes in the perception of the cultural, social and political climate. Furthermore, Wolfe perceives a trend in the prevailing representation of urban spaces in the genre: if cities had been mainly icons of progress in the early twentieth century, after the 1950s the positive vision of the massive urban conglomerates archetypal of early twentieth-century science fiction became increasingly understood and represented negatively as oppressive and alienating environments (1979: 88).
In the 1980s, cyberpunk came to be the spearhead of the incorporation of the tenets of postmodern literature in science fiction, and this included the postmodern perception of architecture and, consequently, of urban space. Cyberpunk thus assimilated the postmodern preference for de-centred, fragmented and scattered urban layouts, which avoided centres, and therefore ‘closure’, as will be explained in more detail in the next section. The epitome of this postmodern city is Los Angeles, whose massive, undifferentiated expanse is precisely the object of one of the foundational films of postmodern science fiction: Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982). In the film’s initial scene, Scott offers a panoramic view of a future Los Angeles (2019 in the fiction; no longer far away from our present) which highlights the contradiction between the size of Los Angeles’ seemingly never-ending ‘sprawl’ (the urban layout as it really is today), and the solid, unitary connotations of an immense (imaginary) pyramidal construction set in the middle of the city: the Tyrell tower. In this sense, an irresoluble contradiction between vertical (highly technological, optimistic) and horizontal (de-centred, sparse cities) urban space seems to appear, which reinforces the conflict between unitary (modernist) and decentred visions ← 160 | 161 → of cities (postmodern), or, to use Edward Dimendberg’s terms, between the centripetal (modernist) city and the centrifugal one. The same disparity between vertical, centripetal buildings and horizontal, de-centred, centrifugal urban spaces will appear most of the novels analysed here: in Ballard’s High-Rise, for instance, the residential skyscraper where the action takes place is described in opposition to the surrounding urban area. Similarly, in Greg Bear’s Slant, the action takes places mostly in another towering, solid construction, the Omphalos pyramid, and in Virtual Light William Gibson develops his idea of a ‘vertical city’ built literally under a bridge. As will be shown, these buildings are treated in fiction as relics of a modernist ideology that never fulfilled the expectations it created.
The following section will delve into the connections between postmodern architecture and literary criticism and will provide an example of how the social and ideological connotations attributed to architecture and urban planning can be used in a work of fiction. Nevertheless, before moving on to the next part it is necessary to point out that the buildings and cities that will be analysed are imaginary or part of a fictional work. On the one hand, this is essential to understand that this analysis will deal with the ideological background of architecture and urban planning considered as part of the overall production of space described by Henry Lefebvre. The novels are ‘actualizations’ of this notion and of the concept of ‘mental space’ discussed earlier. To be more precise, the representation of cities and buildings literalizes what Lefebvre calls ‘representational space’ (1999: 33), which refers to concrete spatial realities where the process of space creation works as a product and as a producer at the same time, organized so as to reproduce the ideological tenets of the dominant ideology. For Lefebvre, representational space is ‘actualized’4 in monuments and monumental architecture. Nevertheless, this ‘actualization’ is still imaginary, which means that readers remain at the conceptual level, so that the impression of space as a mental construct is reinforced. On the other hand, the fact that the ← 161 | 162 → buildings and cities are elements in a work of fiction allows the possibility of multiple readings, which is an essential attitude in postmodern literature. Cyberpunk, as postmodern science fiction, does not only set about undermining the principles of modernist architecture, which tend to reinforce the technological utopia Lefebvre describes as underlying capitalist ideology, but also all totalizing ideas, including a single postmodern reading of modernist architecture and urbanism. Postmodern rejections of closed interpretations includes the perception of late capitalism as (technological) utopia, and as dystopia.
Postmodernism and Architecture
Although the correspondence between the ideological and aesthetic fundamentals of postmodern architecture and postmodern literary theory are numerous,5 the most revealing among them is the association between buildings (and cities) and narratives, an association based on the metaphor of construction. For postmodern literary critics, narratives are structures which provide unity and meaning to loosely connected events; and for postmodern architects, buildings, like cities, have their own language and work as means of communication, that is, they tell histories and are not merely aseptic and functional spaces: ‘There are various analogies architecture shares with language and if we use the terms loosely, we can speak of architectural “words”, “phrases”, “syntax” and “semantics”’ (Jencks 39). ← 162 | 163 →
Analogous descriptions of both language and architecture as means of communication had previously been suggested by Michel Foucault and Roland Barthes in the 1960s. On the one hand, Michel Foucault described the discursive condition of architecture and urbanism, which were to be understood as the organization of space. For Foucault, the way space is organized is a visible sign of the exercise of power historically and, as a result, architecture and urbanism became political activities (cf. Lotringer 1989: 259). On the other hand, in his essay ‘Sémiologie et urbanisme’ (1967),6 Roland Barthes argued that all human space is meaningful (iconic, symbolic) and discursive (1990: 257). Barthes established a connection between the organization of cities and the concept of structure. The underlying meaning of a city lies in its centre, the position from which meaning is controlled. Barthes suggested that de-centred or multi-centred cities – Tokyo is the main example (1990: 264) – are freer and richer in meanings. It is thus clear that the postmodern worldview prefers the absence of a centre, and therefore would opt for scattered, fragmented and de-centred cities in the same way postmodern authors prefer de-centred, uncontrolled novels that lack a clear, linear interpretation.
In this sense, as Gary Wolfe suggested, postmodern science fiction writers use buildings and cities as icons, that is, as powerful narrative elements with strong symbolic and ideological connotations. Some of these buildings or cities are central in the novels we are going to analyse, whereas some others are described in passing, but all of them carry intense metaphorical and ideological connotations which can be better appreciated when contrasted with the kind of centripetal cities and vertical, solid modernist buildings that we have seen so far. For this reason, the analysis of the architectural elements of the novels will be based on a visualization of the buildings or cities that appear in some of them and on placing them in their fictional context. ← 163 | 164 →
There is a science fiction story that brilliantly represents the conflict between positive and negative visions of the city in science fiction: William Gibson’s ‘The Gernsback Continuum’ (1981). Published a year before the release of Blade Runner, it provides many of the keys to interpret not only the ideological associations of the description of urban space in Scott’s film, but also the conceptual implications of cities envisioned by postmodern science fiction authors in general. The main character of Gibson’s short story is a freelance architecture photographer, who gets an assignment to photograph 1930s futuristic architecture. This allows Gibson to explore the social and ideological implications of architecture and urbanism, as the main character compares the modernist architecture of the 1930s with the urban realities of the 1980s. As a background for his work, he goes over some previous photographs: ‘I saw a dozen shots of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Johnson’s Wax Building, juxtaposed with the covers of old Amazing Stories pulps, by an artist named Frank R. Paul; the employees of Johnson’s Wax must have felt as though they were walking into one of Paul’s spray-paint pulp utopias’ (Gibson 1995b: 41). From that moment on, the photographer begins to experience a curious case of hallucination or double vision: wherever he looks, he sees the cities envisioned by the 1930s science fiction superimposed over how the cities actually look like in the 1980s:
The books on Thirties design were in the trunk; one of them contained sketches of an idealized city that drew on Metropolis and Things to Come, but squared everything, soaring up through an architect’s perfect clouds to zeppelin docks and mad neon spires. That city was a scale model of the one that rose behind me. Spire stood on spire in gleaming ziggurat steps that climbed to a central golden temple tower ringed with the crazy radiator flanges of the Mongo gas stations. You could hide the Empire State Building in the smallest of those towers. Roads of crystal soared between the spires, crossed and recrossed by smooth silver shapes like beads of running mercury. The air was thick with ships: giant wing-liners, little darting silver things (sometimes one of the quicksilver shapes from the sky bridges rose gracefully into the air and flew up to join the dance), mile-long blimps, hovering dragonfly things that were gyrocopters. (Gibson 1995b: 45)
The sharp contrast between the naive and confident science fiction of the 1930s and the gloomy pessimism of the 1980s is linked in the story to urbanism and architecture. What the pulps from the 1930s were extrapolating ← 164 | 165 → was not only the genre’s optimism, but the absolute trust in the scientific and technological progress of humanity that pervaded Western culture at the time and was present in other arts like architecture: what Lefebvre calls the ‘technological utopia’, that is ‘a common feature not just of many science fiction novels but also of all kinds of projects concerned with space, be they those of architecture, urbanism, or social planning’ (1999: 9). The spires and skyscrapers designed by modernist architects like Hugh Ferriss or Le Corbusier were also deeply embedded in the dominant ideology of the time. As ‘The Gernback Continuum’ suggests, however, by the 1980s the absolute trust in progress was something that had to be weighed against reality:
That afternoon I spotted a flying wing over Castro Street, but there was something tenuous about it, as though it were only half there. I rushed into the nearest newsstand and gathered up as much as I could find on the petroleum crisis and the nuclear energy hazard. I’d just decided to buy a plane ticket for New York.
‘Hell of a world we live in, huh?’ The proprietor was a thin black man with bad teeth and an obvious wig. I nodded, fishing in my jeans for change, anxious to find a park bench where I could submerge myself in hard evidence of the human near-dystopia we live in. ‘But it could be worse, huh?’
‘That’s right,’ I said, ‘or even worse, it could be perfect.’ (Gibson 1995b: 50)
In the story, the spires, skyscrapers, and massive buildings located in orderly and centralized cities stand for an unwavering trust in science, technology and rationalism. In contrast to this reality represented by streamlined, dream-like architecture, the protagonist of the story lives in a 1980s America where this optimistic vision of the future no longer stands, or, to put it in other postmodern terms, where the future as a ‘metanarrative’ (Lyotard) had been substituted by what he calls ‘my little bundle of condensed catastrophe’ (Gibson 1995b: 50). ‘The Gernsback Continuum’ therefore recalls the criticism of modern urbanism by postmodern architecture theory in the late 1970s and early 1980s (Jencks; Portoghesi). The story could therefore be considered as meta-science-fictional, as it is a science fiction narrative that revisits and revises previous works in the genre, including probably Ralph 124c 41+ (1925), Hugo Gernsback’s most famous novel, but also the stories he published as editor of Amazing Stories since 1926. The tale also mentions explicitly H. G. Wells’s The Shape of Things to Come (1933), ← 165 | 166 → whether it is the novel or the film released in 1936, although he probably refers in general to the vision of the future predominant in the science fiction of the 1930s and 1940s, the period called the Golden Age. In this sense, the value of ‘The Gernsback Continuum’ as a postmodern science fiction story is double: on the one hand, it shows an awareness of the foundations of early postmodern literary theory, whereas on the other, its meta-(science)-fictionality recalls the aesthetic strategies of ‘mainstream’ literary postmodernism. ‘The Gernsback Continuum’ thus opens the path for a criticism of the ideological connotations of science fiction’s envisioned cities and organization of urban space, and suggests the major interpretative keys to much fiction coming afterwards. As an example of what Brian McHale would call the ‘aesthetic contemporaneity’ between postmodern ‘mainstream’ and science fiction literature (1992b: 225), Gibson’s story provides us with major tenets of the analysis of urban space in the postmodern worldview.
Spires and Sprawls: Monuments in Conflict
Blade Runner’s opening scenes offer a glimpse of the contrast between the singularity of vertical constructions and the inconceivability of the urban sprawl, while ‘The Gernsback Continuum’ provides the ideological and conceptual background for the analysis of the conflict between two opposing architectural and urban conceptions in science fiction: spires and sprawls. Both can be analysed as actualizations of Lefebvre’s notion of monumental spaces, and as instances of narrative structures that literalize the totalizing metanarratives of postmodern theory. Spires, towers, and skyscrapers tend to represent the principles of modernist architecture, which are associated with the technological utopia of the dominant ideology according to Lefebvre. Contrarily, the urban sprawl, together with decentred or fragmented images of the city, recalls the rhizome design of the postmodern worldview. The juxtaposition of spires and sprawls in a narrative context is not simply a revision of the principles of modernity ← 166 | 167 → regarded as totalitarian by the postmodern attitude, but also a dialectical strategy to avoid a seemingly uncritical acceptance of the new postmodern tenets: sprawls are not described as idyllic spaces in postmodern science fiction, but rather, as ‘critical dystopias’, as I have suggested.
The conflict between spires and sprawls can be found in a number of postmodern science fiction novels, some of which will be analysed here. The first one is J. G. Ballard’s High-Rise (1975), which, strictly speaking, predates the conventionally accepted beginning of postmodern science fiction in the early 1980s. Nevertheless, Ballard’s novel is an excellent example of the trend that led to the appearance of postmodern science fiction. The plot of High-Rise revolves around a solid building with obvious modernist connotations, where his main characters start to dwell in increasing isolation. The ideological context is clear. The description of the apartment block is linked to modern architectural principles from the beginning of the novel. The high-rise has a futuristic design that the main character perceives: ‘[W]hen [Laing, the protagonist] had sold the lease of his Chelsea house and moved to the security of the high-rise, he had traveled forward fifty years in time’ (Ballard 2000: 9). The skyscraper is also described as a clear example of massive architecture: ‘[T]he apartment block was a small vertical city, its 2000 inhabitants boxed up into the sky’ (9). Besides, it has obvious mechanical and technophiliac associations, as can be seen in the following quotation: ‘The high-rise was a huge machine designed to serve, not the collective body of tenants, but the individual resident in isolation’ (10). The building stands out and represents order in opposition to the rest of the urban space described in the novel: ‘[T]he ragged skyline of the city resembled a disturbed encephalograph of an unresolved mental crisis’ (9). Finally, the residential tower was developed in opposition to nineteenth-century residential and industrial architecture: ‘The massive scale of glass and concrete architecture, and its striking situation on a bend of the river, sharply separated the development project from the rundown areas around it, decaying nineteenth-century terraced houses and empty factories already zoned for reclamation’ (Ballard 2000: 8).
Nevertheless, this futuristic and comfortable building does not lead residents to more advanced and civilized states, but exactly the opposite. What happens in High-Rise can be described as a regression into more ← 167 | 168 → primitive human development. The ascent in the architectural structure of the block is identified with climbing the social scale, and it is also a decline into more primitive social organization, that is, a ‘descent into barbarism’ (2000: 134). The references to feudal and tribal order are inserted into other allusions to barbarism and animal behavior. The architect Royal acts as a ‘feudal lord’ (2000: 53); there are ‘tribal conferences’ (136); residents describe their society like an amalgamation of clans: ‘Perhaps a clan would be more exact’ (31); the tenants understand they are ‘moving towards a state of happy primitivism’ (109), and they even speak of themselves as ‘cave dwellers’ (2000: 108). Their reversion to a primitive state implies abandoning modern, sophisticated requirements for the satisfaction of basic human needs: ‘Now the new order had emerged, in which all life within the high-rise evolved around three obsessions –security, food and sex’ (2000: 136). The vertical coordinates are thus inverted or at least ambiguous, for the ‘ascent’ in the physical heights of the high-rise means a ‘descent’ into a stage of human development closer to savagery. The high-rise thus becomes an inversion of the technological utopia promised by a modernity that is associated with capitalist ideology. The economy inside the high-rise does not evolve towards the expansion of material production; contrarily, it soon becomes a closed system where mere survival is the main economic objective. In the end, the building becomes a monumental space where the dominant ideology does not succeed: instead of a technological utopia, the reader finds a modernist dystopia.
In the meantime, the high-rise stands in the middle of its urban background: the London suburban area, perceived as ‘a different world, in time as well as in space’ (8), which at the beginning of the novel seemed to be the dystopia the characters were escaping from in search of security. It is the cosmopolitan London of traffic jams, overpopulation, the city whose description recalls the ‘hell of a world we live in’ of ‘The Gernsback Continuum’, the dystopian city that would later be depicted as dislocated and decrepit by cyberpunk (Cavallaro 2000: 175). It is in fact from the dystopia of the real city that the characters are trying to escape only to find a baser version of a totalitarian society.
Similar, if not stronger ideological connotations can be found in Greg Bear’s Slant (1997). Like High-Rise, this novel does not belong to the most ← 168 | 169 → productive period of cyberpunk. Nevertheless, the ideological connotations of the monumental spaces the novel contains are comparable. If J. G. Ballard’s apartment skyscraper is the main symbolic element of High-Rise, Greg Bear’s Slant includes the Omphalos pyramid. Both buildings share an obvious solid, modern design and equally totalitarian and regressive associations in terms of social structures. Ballard uses height coordinates for social class division while the social elite in Bear’s novel build a pyramid, whose architectural features reinforce the symbolic connotations of modern architectural elements as oppressive and alienating, representative of a technological utopia that failed in the postmodern eyes.
Bear’s fiction offers readers a glimpse of a society not so far into the future (the year is 2052) where social dynamics are everything but uniform. The United States of 2052 is a country divided between those states that allow artificial modification of the human body with nanorobots and a Mid-West enclave, the Republic of Green Idaho, which rejects any kind of technological intervention in the human body. Nanorobots make the majority of the population a mixture of human and machine. Bear’s novel emphasizes the fluidity and indeterminacy of a postmodern society where people can change appearance, sex and race at will, and where the use of machines inside the human body is beneficial, thus overcoming the traditional opposition between the human and the mechanical. The only destabilizing factor will come precisely from conservative (and essentialist) attitudes, represented by the Republic of Green Idaho and the conspiracy to build a massive, monolithic and eternal Noah’s ark: the Omphalos Pyramid.
The Omphalos is a building with aspirations of unity, uniformity, and centrality (the word means ‘navel’ and ‘centre’ in ancient Greek): ‘The leading edge points at the heart of Moscow like a woodman’s edge (Bear 1998: 3). The pyramid in the novel is described as a massive building: ‘A tetrahedron four hundred feet high, with two vertical faces and a triangular base, it is the biggest thing in town’ (3). It also gives an impression of durability: ‘Omphalos is a broad-shouldered edifice, Herculean architecture for the ages […]’ (3). The building is associated in the novel with social elites, as the narration suggests: ‘[O]mphalos is publicly assumed to be a kind of fancy tomb for the rich and privileged […]’ (4). Its occupants are ‘just a different set of pharaohs’ (6). The Omphalos actualizes the traditional metaphor of ← 169 | 170 → the pyramid used to describe the social structure. These are precisely the connotations that are associated with it, for it is first believed to be a tomb for rich people who want to be frozen and revived in the future. But as the novel goes on, the reader discovers that it is in fact a shelter for a ‘natural’ (meaning ‘untherapied’ or non-modified genetically or technologically) elite, called the Aristos, who intend to survive what they considered to be a catastrophic social multiplicity. In this sense, they are the most reactionary of the already most conservative part of the United States, represented by the fictional Republic of Green Idaho. As happens in Ballard’s High-Rise, the pyramid’s milieu consists of fragmentary, decentred United States society whose postmodern fluidity and instability cannot be represented by monumental spaces such as the Omphalos building.
The contrast between centrality and fragmentation, stability and fluidity, permanence and mobility in human social structures is also the context in which Snow Crash (1992), Virtual Light (1994), and Schismatrix (1985) can be placed. The three novels subvert the established notions of the organization of space (and therefore of social organization) by presenting fictional buildings and urban structures that contradict modernist and traditional architectural principles. Stephenson’s Snow Crash envisions a floating (fluid) city consisting of numerous boats which navigate freely over the Earth’s oceans, while one of the settings of Gibson’s Virtual Light is a bridge transformed into a town where social outcasts have found a home. Sterling’s Schismatrix presents perhaps the most challenging human environments, as the novel imagines a future in which humans have left the Earth to live in cities which are enormous space stations; these interplanetary cities subvert the oppositions between inner/outer space, natural/artificial (human) space, and city/country (in both meanings of the word). These new, imagined monumental spaces respond to a different set of architectural, and therefore social and political, principles.
Like many other of Stephenson’s novels, the plot of Snow Crash is complex and difficult to summarize. The main character is Hiro Protagonist, a pizza deliverer who has a second identity in the Metaverse (Stephenson’s term for cyberspace). He gets involved in a complex global conspiracy to extend a computer virus, Snow Crash. The conspiracy plot is less relevant to this chapter than the social and political context in which the story ← 170 | 171 → takes place. Stephenson envisions a de-centred and fragmented globalized world where countries function as franchises and embassies as multinational branches in which a new kind of city emerges. One of the characters of the novel, Bob Rife, is the leader of a new religion based on ancient Sumerian beliefs. His followers have formed what they call ‘The Raft’: floating city formed by an accumulation of all kinds of ships and boats. Anyone can enter this city, and anyone can leave at will. It is not stable, because it floats on the Pacific, even though it seems to have a centre: the USS Enterprise aircraft carrier, which is Rife’s ship. The Raft is a new type of human dwelling completely opposed to traditional cities; it is a moving urban area that is never constant, as boats are continuously added and removed from this conglomerate. In this sense, ‘The Raft’ is, first of all, a literalization of Lefebvre’s notion of the production of space, because it represents a human dwelling space created in the middle of the ocean, and a representation of the production of space as a process (Lefebvre 1999: 34). Secondly, it is a representational space itself, that is, an urban design that incorporates some ideological principles of postmodernism such as fluidity and fragmentation. In fact, ‘The Raft’ is an overt postmodern critique of a modern architectural belief: the Modern Movement preferred functionalism to creativity and, in pursuit of its ideal of pure forms, it intended to develop a neutral and timeless architectural style, which postmodern architects read as the inevitable result of the application of the principles of mass standardized production and capitalistic waste policies to construction materials and techniques (cf. Portoghesi: 1981). Modernist claims to rational, faultless building and city designs were rejected by postmodern aesthetics, and functionality was seen as a dehumanizing trait. The mixture of all kinds of ships that constitute the Raft was not initially designed for human habitation, but they are used as houses where a fluid, multiple, and ever changing society lives.
This attack against the functionality of modernist architecture is also evident in William Gibson’s Virtual Light (1994). Again, the plot of the novel is difficult to summarize, so my analysis will concentrate on the ‘city’ where one of the main characters, Chevette Washington, lives. Chevette is a bicycle messenger who gets involved in a case of information theft among rival data smuggling groups. What is relevant for this chapter is ← 171 | 172 → the fact that Chevette lives literally under a bridge. The community she lives in moved into the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge when it was rendered useless by the construction of a tunnel. The bridge was closed, but many squatters and outlaws came to live there, occupying the bridge after violent confrontation with the police. After occupation, the bridge loses its modernist functionality and becomes subject to postmodern modification. Like the Raft in Snow Crash, it is built with materials reclaimed from junkyards. Contrarily to what many believed, this suspended city is described as a place of enormous vitality:
Its steel bones, its stranded tendons, were lost within an accretion of dreams: tattoo parlors, gaming arcades, dimly lit stalls stacked with decaying magazines, sellers of fireworks, of cut bait, betting shops, sushi bars, unlicensed pawnbrokers, herbalists, barbers, bars. Dreams of commerce, their locations generally corresponding with the decks that had once carried vehicular traffic; while above them, rising to the very peaks of the cable towers, lifted the intricately suspended barrio, with its unnumbered population and its zones of more private fantasy. […] Everything ran together, blurring, melting in the fog. Telepresence had only hinted at the magic and singularity of the thing, and he’d walked slowly forward, into the neon maw and all that patchwork carnival of scavenged surfaces, in perfect awe. Fairyland. Rain-silvered plywood, broken marble from the walls of forgotten banks, corrugated plastic, polished brass, sequins, painted canvas, mirrors, chrome gone dull and peeling in the salt air. So many things, too much for his reeling eye, and he’d known that his journey had not been in vain (Gibson: 1994, 70)
The modernist solid structure of the bridge no longer serves its original functionalist purposes. The bridge has been occupied by a subversive social group consisting of the homeless and outlaws, who have turned it into an alternative city, as some characters comment in the story.
‘And that bridge, man, that’s one evil motherfucking place. Those people anarchists, antichrists, cannibal motherfuckers out there, man […]’
‘I heard it was just a bunch of homeless people,’ Rydeli said, vaguely recollecting some documentary he’d seen in Knoxville, ‘just sort of making do.’
‘No, man,’ Freddie said, ‘homeless fuckers, they’re on the street. Those bridge motherfuckers, they’re like king-hell satanists and shit. You think you can just move on out there yourself? No fucking way. They’ll just let their own kind, see? Like a cult. With ’nitiations and shit.’ (Gibson 1994: 165) ← 172 | 173 →
As we can see in this quotation, the bridge dwellers constitute a solid, active, productive social group which has stronger ties to one another than other ‘traditional’ communities. In general, Gibson sees and describes these characters in a positive light, as part of a creative and vital society. In fact, he provided a visual example of this kind of community in the film adaptation of his short story ‘Johnny Mnemonic’ (1981), released in 1995. The film, whose screenplay was also written by Gibson, presents a city suspended from a bridge and inhabited by an unconventional social group. Again the anarchic structure of these communities challenges the dull uniformity intended by modernist architecture and urban designs.
These and other communities found in other novels by William Gibson, such as the Rastafarian space station of Neuromancer, are what McHale calls ‘microworlds’ (1992a: 152); they are and similar to the only human environments that can be found in Bruce Sterling’s Schismatrix (1985). At first glance, the connection between Bruce Sterling’s Schismatrix and architecture is not evident. Schismatrix is not a novel in the traditional sense, but a collection of short stories which share the same imaginary context, one in which humans have colonized the whole solar system and are living not only on Earth or on any of the other solid planets like Mars, but also on moons, small asteroids and artificial environments which are not exactly spaceships. Although at first sight the question of urban space is not relevant here, upon further reflection it is clear that Sterling’s artificial or modified environments are extensions of the city. In James Blish’s Cities in Flight (1970), scientists discover the technology necessary to control gravity, and as a consequence, many cities start floating and leave Earth, and even the solar system. This novel illustrates the union of two icons of science fiction, the city and the spaceship (which sometimes works as a city, as another ‘microworld’). Blish’s cities become the vehicle humans use to travel to the stars, and take human civilization with them. Instead of founding cities in a different planet, humans travel inside the cities themselves.
This brings some light into what the universe of Schismatrix may represent. The multiplication of human settlements in the solar system also implies the proliferation of different types of social organization. Some of these settlements are small enclaves inhabited by a hundred people; others are huge environments where many groups live, or whole planets like the ← 173 | 174 → Moon. Some of them are organized hierarchically; some others consist of freely associated individuals. In fact, there is only one kind of uniformity in the stories: the division between the ‘Mechs’, humans who have modified themselves using machines (mechanicals) and have become cyborgs, and the ‘Shapers’, who have preferred to improve humans through genetic modification. To complicate things, a species of elusive aliens have appeared and established contact with humans.
Each of these futures and diverse human social groups transforms, adapts and creates the artificial space where they live according to their needs. In opposition to the tendency towards uniformity and equality of globalization, each city is completely different from the others and has its own economy, government, and social division, as if humans had gone back in time to the era of the Greek city-states. There is simply no cultural centre in this atomized universe. Accordingly, these habitats are diverse: spaceships, asteroids, and cities excavated on the moon coexist in this mosaic of human societies which finally actualize Lefebvre’s main dictum: that the mode of production of a society has a definitive influence on the production of space, and consequently on the architecture and urban planning produced by the different societies. This is literalized in the diverse environments of Sterling’s novel, which can also be read as actualizations of John Gray’s (1998) vision of the global market not as a unified entity, but as a conglomerate of multiple versions of economic activity, ‘imperfect’ adaptions of laissez-faire capitalism.
Conclusion: New Cities, New Docieties
I began this chapter with a brief description of the significance of cyberspace in cyberpunk and in postmodern science fiction, as well as of the implications of the idea of virtual reality for the postmodern worldview in general. As a literary motif, the notion of cyberspace actualizes the idea of space as a constructed entity, which corresponds to the overall postmodern vision of Western cultural principles as the consequence of the long-lasting ← 174 | 175 → imposition of an ideological background naturalized by discourse a posteriori. To this conception of space as a construct Lefebvre adds his notion of space as a product, that is, as the result of one specific mode of production, capitalism, and of the technological utopia that goes with it. This reading can also be applied to the notion of cyberspace; as Bukatman states: ‘in an era of ATMs and global banking, cyberspace is where your money is. So cyberspace is a financial space, a space of capital […] a place of testing and the arena for new technological rites of passage’ (1993: 156). From this perspective, the celebration of cyberspace in cyberpunk and in postmodern science fiction can be read as a reinforcement of the dominant ideology and therefore as conservative or even reactionary.
Nevertheless, as this chapter has tried to show, cyberspace is not the only spatial configuration present in cyberpunk. In fact, the highly conceptual, ideal qualities of cyberspace (visualized in the film TRON, for instance) clash noticeably with the principles underlying the model of spatial organization endorsed by the postmodern worldview: the urban sprawl. The notion of a scattered, fragmentary, de-centred city clearly follows the tenets of the postmodernism and may well epitomize the postmodern concept of reality in opposition to cyberspace, which is subject to idealization. The sprawl is the urban setting outside cyberspace in postmodern science fiction novels, the place the bodies of the protagonists inhabit and where they go back to when they disconnect from the hallucination. However, in cyberpunk urban sprawls are far from ideal.
It would thus be more appropriate to argue that postmodern science fiction does not portray an uncritical acceptance of cyberspace or, alternatively, of the sprawl. Rather, it presents a contrast, set in dialogic terms, between the modernist and postmodernist spatial dominants, represented by modernist and postmodern architecture, where both the ideological connotations of the modernist stylized vision of space (in terms of social and economic planning) and those of the postmodern vision itself (which favour de-centred, fragmented, tangled urban layouts and social structures) are subject to permanent critical reflection. Following Lefebvre, the conflict between these two conceptions of space is the clash between two modes of production, and therefore the battle between two social, political, and ← 175 | 176 → economic organizations presented in a dialogical, narrative mode, something typical of the postmodern Weltanschauung.
In this sense, the unresolved spatial conflict of these novels is a challenge to the vision of global capitalism as utopia imposed by the dominant discourse. Francis Fukuyama’s celebration of the ‘end of history’ in his book The End of History and the Last Man (1999) is but the consolidation of the capitalist status quo defined in utopian terms as the perfect economic, social and political system, and incessantly supported by the discourse of what Lefebvre calls the technological utopia. Nevertheless, postmodern science fiction envisions global capitalism not as utopia, but as a dystopia, following the cues in John Gray’s False Dawn (1998: 2).7 Furthermore, the postmodern version of the genre moves somewhere beyond the categories of utopia and dystopia, and it is necessary to introduce concepts like ‘critical dystopia’, as Tom Moylan suggests (2003: 7), to understand its ideological stance in relation to the notion of utopia. The postmodern world, as Fred Pfeil suggested, reflects the collapse of the ‘utopian/dystopian dialectic’ (Fred Pfeil in Bukatman, 1996: 138). That postmodern science fiction continues to imagine new models of social organization literalized in its ‘microworlds’ indicates its rejection of the idea of the end of history as a construct of dominant capitalist ideology – another ‘metanarrative’ – and reveals the genre’s subversive potential in the search for new political alternatives that go beyond the simplistic definition of utopia or dystopia.
This refutation of metanarratives and the criticism of any totalizing discourse contradicts global capitalism’s constructed sense of inevitable historical evolution as well as its assumption that no alternative is possible. The confrontation between buildings, urban patterns and spatial configurations ← 176 | 177 → of the novels analysed here prolongs the dialectic discussion of different models of social, political and economic organization at a time where alternatives to the idea of a global society unified by the capitalist mode of production seemed inexistent. In this sense, the new spaces envisioned by postmodern science fiction, such as the bridge dwellings in Virtual Light, the ‘Raft’ in Snow Crash, or the multiple habitats of Schismatrix may represent these new types of society, these alternatives to global capitalism. To quote David Harvey’s statement in Spaces of Hope: ‘Ask first: where is anti-capitalist struggle to be found? The answer is everywhere’ (2000: 71).
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1 In Constructing Postmodernism, Brian McHale argues that ‘mainstream’ postmodern fiction and science fiction had begun an aesthetic and thematic contact in the 1950s which finally led to the confluence of the two genres with the consolidation of cyberpunk in the 1980s. This is what McHale calls ‘aesthetic contemporaneity’ (1992b: 225).
2 Since the publication of Fredric Jameson’s Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1992), Marxist criticism has in general supported the view that postmodernism is a result of the consolidation of late twentieth-century capitalist culture and therefore a manifestation of its superstructure. This is the reason why the Marxist reading of cyberpunk tends to define the genre as conservative because its pessimism and dystopian consciousness appear to support Fukuyama’s thesis of capitalist democracy as the culmination of history. See also Terry Eagleton’s The Illusions of Postmodernism (1996). As a Marxist thinker, Lefebvre seems to agree with this interpretation.
3 Although cyberpunk was initially described as a dystopian (Bukatman 1993: 143), and therefore conservative, genre for its dismissal of the possibility of utopia, the tendency to analyse the genre as critical has been on the increase because, as a postmodern literary product, science fiction also seems to reject the utopia/dystopian dialectic. The new category of ‘critical utopia/dystopia’ is perhaps more adequate to describe postmodern science fiction (Baccolini and Moylan 2003: 3–4). Similarly, Fredric Jameson warns of the increasing ‘reflexivity’ of utopian writing (2005: 213). Also, David Harvey (2000) and John Gray (1998) have suggested that global capitalism can be understood as a utopia. If cyberpunk’s vision of global capitalism is negative or critical (dystopian), then the genre must have a strong subversive inclination, as Linda Hutcheon has pointed out (1995: xiii).
4 Although the term ‘actualize’ has been taken from McHale here, Lefebvre suggests a similar idea when he argues that ‘[t]he monument thus effected a “consensus”, and this in the strongest sense of the term, rendering it practical and concrete’ (Lefebvre 1999: 220, my emphasis).
5 In Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1992), Fredric Jameson acknowledged that his idea of postmodernism was influenced by the new aesthetic trends followed by a variety of artists like Andy Warhol, musicians like Terry Riley and The Beatles, film directors like Jean-Luc Godard, writers like Thomas Pynchon and William S. Burroughs, and architects like Robert Venturi. In fact, he states: ‘[I]t was indeed from architectural debates that my own conception of postmodernism […] initially began to emerge’ (1995: 12). See also Linda Hutcheon (1995: 12).
6 The conference was first read in 1967 and the published in the magazine L’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui (no. 53, December 1970–January 1971). In this chapter, I am using the Spanish translation of the paper included in the compilation of essays L’aventure sémiologique (1985). See bibliography.
7 Although Gray actually uses the word utopia to define the single universal free market, he does so with a critical intention. This single global market is ‘a Utopia that can never be realized’ (1998: 2), and therefore, it can be understood as a dystopia. At the end of the book, after a long criticism of the negative consequences of this economic philosophy, he states: ‘A global free market is a project that was destined to fail. In this, as in much else, it resembles that other twentieth-century experiment in utopian social engineering, Marxian socialism’ (1998: 235). In the literary tradition, utopian systems that fail and produce oppressive economic and political systems are simply dystopias.