The Virtual Reader: Cybernetics and Technocracy in William Gibson
and Bruce Sterling’s The Difference Engine
Joseph Conte
University at
The Holodeck in the Garden:
Science and Technology in Contemporary American Fiction. Ed. Peter Freese and Charles B.
Harris.
Copyright © Dalkey Archive Press 2004
All Rights Reserved
The promise of a reader actively
engaged in the construction of the text has been held out by the practitioners
and theoreticians of cybernetic fictions, especially with respect to the
development of electronic media. Michael
Joyce, author of the original hypertext fiction afternoon, a story
(1987), posits the interactivity of such work because in “attempting to
accommodate our thinking in response to the demands of an application’s control
and data structures, true interactivity” exists (Of Two Minds 135). That the reader of print fiction has had to
learn to negotiate the information delivery platform that is the book can be
taken for granted, but the very motility of interactive fictions and the
mutability of their data structures presumably requires even greater engagement
on the part of the reader. George P.
Landow, invoking the poststructuralist theory of Barthes, Derrida, and
Foucault, also proposes that the “multiplicity of hypertext, which appears in
multiple links to individual blocks of text, calls for an active reader”
(6). These representative statements on
the reader in cybernetic fictions (and others by Stuart Moulthrop, Espen
Aarseth, and Ilana Snyder) all refer to the presence of an Actual Reader. Such a reader-in-the-world is thought to be
empowered by the toggle switching, hyperlink clicking, and page turning that he
or she is called upon to perform. But I
suspect that this liberatory, millennialist rhetoric of the active reader has
been oversold. Cybernetic fictions are
not so much concerned with the enabling of an actual reader who thumbs pages or
navigates interfaces than with deriving a concept of their most apt reader from
the disciplines of cybernetics and communications theory. That reader, always a lector in fabula,
is a Virtual Reader subject to the determinations and control of the text. The reader as avatar, not so much manipulating
the text as manipulated by it, not so much actively engaged in the making of
the text as entangled within the feedback loop of its production, represents a
darker vision, to be sure, of cybertextuality.
But that vision, I would argue, is more in keeping with the
technological dystopia that is depicted in my exemplary fiction, William Gibson
and Bruce Sterling’s The Difference Engine (1991), and in so many other
works of the genre.
1.
Ego,
Scriptor et Hannibal
In writing the epitaph of the Author, Roland Barthes
suggests that the prestige of the Author emanates from the humanist valuation
of the individual, “his person, his life, his tastes, his passions” (“The Death
of the Author” 143). The work of art becomes
subordinate to the aura of the individual that is thought to produce it. This concept of “authority” is a vestige of
Enlightenment rationalism, an historical construct that now may be enshrouded
in theory and consigned to the tomb of literary history. Barthes denaturalizes the Author. In place of that reassuring engraving of the
author’s visage on the frontispiece of so many leather-bound volumes, Barthes
reveals that this “more or less transparent allegory of the fiction, the voice
of a single person, the author ‘confiding’ in us” (143) is never more
than a collusion of the text and its critics.
Or, as he puts it uniquely, “the author is never more than the instance
writing, just as I is nothing other than the instance saying I”
(145). Barthes refuses to grant to the
Author an ontological status independent from the text. Rather than producing the text, the Author is
itself a construct of the text. So, far
from being a personage of some prestige, the Author is revealed as an object of
pathos, inspiring a funereal lament.
“Having buried the Author,” Barthes proposes in its place
a “modern scriptor” whose function in the text is “performative.” Derived from the speech-act theory of J. L.
Austin, the performative utterance would be an “enunciation [that] has no other
content … than the act by which it is uttered” (145-46). If I were to say that I had visited the home
of my favorite Author, William Carlos Williams, at 9 Ridge Road in Rutherford,
NJ, which I have done, I would be colluding through an act of homage to an
individual in the construction of his authority, in the proposition of the
pediatrician-poet that is other than the enunciation of the text. The question posed in Williams’s “Danse
Russe,” however, “Who shall say I am not / the happy genius of my household?”
(87), is performative, making of the poem’s speaker that which he
declares. Indeed, who shall say I in
this instance writing? No visit to the
household to confirm his identity—and no response to the rhetorical question—is
necessary. Unlike the Author, the scriptor
is not an identity construct. As its
Latinate derivation suggests, the scriptor is wholly equivalent to the
function of writing.
With this distinction made—that the
Author is a construction of identity in the collusion of the text and the
critic, while the scriptor is a function of textual production—should
there not be a comparable distinction to be made with respect to the
reader? Barthes states that “the total
existence of writing” can only be found in the place of the reader. But he would not make the same error as his
critical predecessors, assigning to the Reader (much less the actual audience
of book buyers and page thumbers), the ontological status of personhood. No, he argues, this “destination cannot any
longer be personal: the reader is without
history, biography, psychology; he is simply that someone who holds
together in a single field all the traces by which the written text is
constituted” (148). To this figure,
although Barthes declines to take this step, I would assign the term lector. The complement of the authorial function in
the text (the scriptor) must logically be the reader function in the
text (the lector). When the
narrator of Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones purports to make a direct address
to the Reader of the novel, he compares himself to an efficient and personable
hosteler who will see to the every need of his worthy and paying guest. Not only is an identity constructed for that
Reader, but it is one with fairly specific cultural predilections; there are
some readers, presumably, to whom the invitation might not apply. Fielding’s invocation of the gentle,
bourgeois Reader, is intended as a flattering portrait of his prospective
audience. In contrast, Barthes’s
depersonalized reader, whom I call the lector, dispenses with such
cultural and historical specificities.
There is no someone, no actual audience, that might singly
constitute all the multiple traces of the written text. Rather than passively consuming the repast of
the text, the lector consumes itself in the act of all readings. Barthes concludes that “the birth of the
reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author” (148). If so, then it would not do to substitute one
identity construct for another. The lector
is that place in the text where “multiple writings, drawn from many cultures
and entering into mutual relations to dialogue, parody, contestation” converge.
2.
Bi-Directional
Communications
The linear, unidirectional model of
communications proposed by Claude Shannon in The Mathematical Theory of Communication
(1969) and adapted to linguistics and poetics by Roman Jakobson reveals its
inadequacy in describing the relationship of reader and text in the age of
networked communications (Aarseth 58).
In “Linguistics and Poetics,” Jakobson based his taxonomy of the
linguistic functions involved in any verbal act of communication on the
declarative statement: “The addresser sends a message to the addressee” (66). This
basic formulation, addresser ® message
® addressee
conforms to the classical representation of text production, in which an author
conveys a text to a reader. As we know,
however, that the biographical Author does not directly convey a text to an
actual audience (except in the instance of the twentieth century’s most popular
literary event, the reading and book signing), it is necessary to insert,
perhaps especially for the classical narrative, the narrator and narratee
in the place of the textual function (message) and as minions to the Author and
Reader respectively. This yields a
communications model of classical narrative that looks like so: author
® narrator
® narratee
® reader
(Aarseth 93). The linearity and
unidirectionality of such a model make clear that the Author, so constructed,
is in control of the text. Barthes’s proposition
of the death of the Author gives us reason to reexamine the communications
model in which information, like water through a tubular channel, flows from
sender to receiver (a “reply,” of course, is only the same process in reverse). Barthes makes two provocative claims in his
essay, the death of the author and the birth of the reader. The first resituates the locus of creative
power; all along, it is the Author who has been historically constructed as a convenient
fiction by the text and its critics. The
narrator, a minion sent in place of the Author to effectuate his or her bidding
in classical narrative, is replaced by the modern scriptor that enacts
the “instance writing.” This revised
relationship can be written as [author] scriptor. Barthes’s proposal of the active reader
likewise revises the terminus of the communications channel. The reader of the classical text was very
much its passive receiver in the communications model; or, in the language of
political economy, a consumer of the text as artifact. That Reader, essentially synonymous with the
actual audience of book buyers, should similarly be consigned to the
coffin of brackets. But the reader in
whom the “total existence of writing” (“Death of the Author” 148) converges,
and whom I designate as the lector, assumes a constitutive role in the
Barthesian model. The “multiple
writings” of the Barthesian text thus establish bi-directional communication
between the scriptor and the lector. Although phylogenically related to the Shannon-Jakobson
communications model, the Barthesian plural text would be represented in this
fashion: [author] scriptor « lector [reader]. This model not only establishes a
bi-directional channel of communication, it disestablishes the obvious flow of
textual power as originating in the author and conveyed to the reader.
3.
The
Cybernetic Model of
Poststructuralism and reader
response criticism have provided further revisions of the “authorial function”
and the role of the reader.[1] Rather than recount that narrative in the
history of criticism, our time would be better spent in establishing a parallel
shift in theories of textual production in a cybernetic model. The verbal act of communication in the form
of addresser ® message
® addressee
can be compared in computing to the basic input/output system (BIOS). A programmer writes instructions for a
computer (program/input), whose results (data/output) are read by the user. To the extent that the programmer may also be
the user, and the output may be used to reprogram the input functions of the
computer, a feedback loop is established.
But just as the control of textual production is thought to reside with
the Author in classical narrative, so authority resides with the programmer in
computing. This basic relationship can
be represented as programmer ® computer
(Input) ® data
(Output) ® user. As for the promises of interactivity, while
as an “end user” I am at liberty to write whatever I wish within the
word-processing program, it is the program that determines the form and
parameters of what constitutes a text; nor am I able to alter the program. The user can write in Microsoft® Word,
but not rewrite it. Nevertheless, just
as the communications theory model has undergone revision since the middle of
the last century, so the cybernetic model of computing has experienced
homologous new conceptions of the author-programmer function and user response.
If there were a single moment in
which the programmer, having hitherto wielded uncontested authority in the
writing of directions for computing machinery, began to feel intimations of
mortality, it would be the publication in 1943 of a paper by neurophysiologist
Warren McCullough and mathematician Walter Pitts, “A Logical Calculus of the
Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity.”
They claimed that the brain could be modeled as a network of logical
operations such as and, or, and not (Waldrop 113). The McCullough-Pitts neuron offers a model of
brain activity as a form of information processing. The incipient neural network consists of
artificial neurons, or “nodes,” that are able to retain information about their
internal state. The neuron has inputs
that can be either in an excitatory or inhibitory state. The neuron fires when the level of excitation
exceeds a determined threshold (Hayles 58).
Artificial synapses establish connections between the various nodes,
with each connection “weighted” according to the strength of the synapse. In a neural network simulator, simple logical
gates are capable of performing exceedingly complex computations. Repeated firings strengthen some artificial
synapses, while others atrophy in an inhibited state. The emergence of patterns in information—one
hesitates to say “behavior”— suggests the possibility of creating an Artificial
Intelligence, or AI. In 1950, Alan
Turing famously issued the Turing test of artificial intelligence. If a computer system were created such that
it could fool an interrogator into thinking that he or she were having a
dialogue with another human being, not a machine, then an artificial
intelligence is born (Lewin 160). It’s
possible that a highly developed neural network simulator, through extended
iterations of synaptic firings and information retention in neural nodes, would
one day pass the Turing test. After all,
human observers could be duped (an eventuality that does not invalidate the
test). Much of the more recent work in
AI emphasizes feedback processes. An
intelligence, whether or not “human” in stature, could be said to reside in
computing machinery that were capable of self-modifying programs. Complex systems are distinguished by adaptive
behavior. A neural network would need to
do more than “run” programs; it would need to utilize feedback to modify its
own programming and thus adapt its activities.
Artificial intelligence signals the “death of the programmer” in ways
comparable to Barthes’s proposition of the “death of the author.” The behavior of the neural network would not
be determined by the programmer’s instructions.
The state of an artificial intelligence could no more be predicted by
its programmer’s intentions than the actions of a fictional character from its
author’s intentions. Like automatic
writing, the self-modifying program removes reference to an other, to an
outside. An artificial intelligence
would be an “instance writing.”
Although a neural network has yet to
pass the Turing test in science fact, the representation of artificial
intelligence in postwar science fiction has become so prevalent that it is hard
to imagine a successful galactic series without one or more (Commander Data’s
positronic brain encased in an android shell being only the most obvious). In William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984)
there are so many AIs in the matrix that their “Turing Registry numbers” must
be kept on file in
The premises of self-modifying
programs and artificial intelligence displace the authority for input in the
cybernetic model of computing from the sole domain of the programmer to that of
the computing machinery itself. A
reflexive shift has occurred in the cybernetic model with respect to output and
the role of the user. Theories of
hypertext and ergodic literatures seek to promote the user/reader from the
passive receiver of data in the communications channel to sender/participant in
a bi-directional exchange and, ultimately, to authorial status. In Hypertext 2.0, George P. Landow
invokes the Barthesian model of the active reader and the “writerly” text,
explicitly arguing that these theories are made manifest in multilinear, linked
hypertext. Suggesting that “Barthes’s
distinction between readerly and writerly text appears to be essentially a
distinction between text based on print technology and electronic hypertext”
(5), Landow cites from Barthes’s S/Z, that “the goal of literary work
(of literature as work) is to make the reader no longer a consumer, but a
producer of the text” (4). Barthes
argues that the reader of the classic text will be “intransitive” (S/Z
4), a passive reader able only to accept or reject a previously finished
text. Landow contends that the
“multiplicity of hypertext, which appears in multiple links to individual
blocks of text, calls for an active reader” (6). There are intriguing parallels between
Barthes’s theory of a “plural text” and the emerging practice of multicursal
hypertext and network communications.
Barthes did not require a change in the textual medium, however, to
usher in the active reader. Some print
texts are capable of presenting the “galaxy of signifiers” (S/Z 5), the
infinite semiosis, that would make the reader a producer of the text. Other print texts, including classic works of
literature, confine the reader to “a structure of signifieds.” In making his distinction between classic and
plural (print) texts, Barthes pays greater attention to the character of the
textual function—the play of the signifiers and the rigidity of the
signified—in the text than he does to the reader function. Would a classic (print) text respond to the
most earnest efforts of the active reader to discover a network of
interaction? It would seem that only the
“writerly,” plural text calls upon its reader to be a producer of the
text. Do we then accept Landow’s
contention that, by virtue of its shift from print to an electronic medium, the
hypertext likewise calls upon its reader to be an author? In following the links between “lexia”
(another Barthesian term) in a web or network, readers “continually shift the
center—and hence the focus or organizing principle—of their investigation and
experience. Hypertext,” Landow argues,
“provides an infinitely recenterable system whose provisional point of focus
depends upon the reader, who becomes a truly active reader” (36). Perhaps the reader’s course through lexia or
linked web pages provides an experience of infinite semiosis comparable to that
of Barthes’s plural (print) text. It may
matter if the linked pages carry the “structure of signifieds” that one finds
in the online Lands’ End [sic] catalog, or whether one is perusing a scholarly
reference site such as Landow’s own The Victorian Web, or reading an
electronic or web text that aspires to literary status. In short, the electronic, interactive reader
must follow links (noting the parlance of obedience rather than command)
that have been already encoded in the hypertext (whether in HTML [hypertext
markup language], Storyspace, or some other proprietary coding), whereas
Barthes’s active reader is freely disposed in the plural (print) text to pursue
new constellations of signifiers. In the
hypertext web, even the most intrepid reader finds his or her place already
marked by the galactic encoder.
Espen Aarseth makes the case for a
more independent, “ergodic” reader in Cybertext. In his taxonomy of cybernetic literature,
including story generators, interactive games, MUDs, and hypertext fiction, the
cybertext is a machine for the production and consumption of verbal expression
(3, 21). The distinguishing feature of
all cybertexts is that they involve the reader in some kind of information
feedback loop (19). While the activity
of the traditional reader may be confined to the hermeneutics of the text, the
cybertext reader is more properly a user who must intervene in the game-world
or machine production of the text (4).
In fact, cybertexts are more easily recognized as games in a variety of
media than as literary, or even sub-literary, narratives. Aarseth states that the key question with
regard to cybertexts, as it is throughout the field of cybernetics, is that of
domination or control:
Who
or what controls the text?
Ideologically, there are three positions in this struggle: author control, text control, and reader
control. Author control comes closest to
Barthes’s concept of the readable (lisible) text, where neither
signifiers nor interpretations are left to chance (Barthes, The Pleasure of
the Text). Text control is usually
characterized as the programmed play of elements and structures, so that the
process of sign production is both unpredictable and original, with creative
responsibility transferred to the machinery.
Reader control puts the creative initiative on the users, who must
assemble the available building blocks and make artistic sense according to
their individual preferences. (55-56)
In fact,
Barthes invests parental control in the Author of the readerly text who is
thought to exist before his work, “in the same relation of antecedence to his
work as a father to his child” (“Death of the Author” 145). Text control may not be tarred with the evident
sexism of the paternalistic Author, but works produced in this manner are
widely critiqued as posthumanist. These
texts are disparaged as the still-born products of pure intellect. They are refused the status of art precisely
because the choice afforded to the imaginative artist has been suppressed in
favor of predetermined rules and procedures for text production. In my analysis, text control bears
resemblance to the premises of artificial intelligence in computing
machinery. Of course, an author-programmer
must be present at the outset to establish the parameters of the “run,” and
after the fact to log and perhaps edit the results. But works produced under the sway of text
control would be an expression of the “death of the author.” Charles Babbage’s calculating machine,
churning its stack, becomes a creative machine.
Simple rules generate complex structures that cannot be predicted from
the programmer’s instructions. As much
as text control emulates the features of the self-modifying programs of an
artificial intelligence—still largely a flight of fancy in advanced
computing—the most interesting examples of such texts appear in the stolid
realm of print. John Cage assembles his
mesostic texts, such as Themes & Variations (1982), from selected
source texts, vertically aligned key words, strict rules for distributing lines
of text, and chance operations using a computer simulation of the I Ching. The authorial ego is annihilated, he says, in
the exercise of a “purposeful purposelessness” (7). In “Prose and Anticombinatorics,” Italo
Calvino suggests that computer-assisted composition can blaze a trail through
the dark wood of branching narratives.
Less sanguine about the death of the author, he says, “the aid of a
computer, far from replacing the creative act of the artist, permits the
latter rather to liberate himself from the slavery of a combinatory search,
allowing him also the best chance of concentrating on this ‘clinamen’ which,
alone, can make of the text a true work of art” (152). Other theorists of the Paris-based Oulipo
(Workshop for Potential Literature) examine the interventions of computing
machinery in the production and consumption of verbal texts. Paul Fournel, in “Computer and Writer,” suggests
that certain forms of algorithmic literature are best read with the aid of a
computer. Raymond Queneau’s combinatory
text, Cent Mille Milliards de poèmes, ten sonnets whose lines are
written on strips of paper that can be “flipped” to render in each case a new
poem, yields a total of 1014 sonnets. Neither the biographical Author nor the
actual reader would be sufficiently long-lived to produce and consume all 1014
sonnets. A computer, however, could be
programmed to randomly generate particular iterations of the sonnet. Such a relationship would be expressed as
work®computer®reader. Is the
computer merely a mechanical intermediary, or does it effectively conflate the
authorial and reader functions? Where
does the authorial function reside when the computer generates the ten millionth
iteration of the sonnet? Text control
may be best represented by such combinatory works that are “unpredictable and
original” in their random generation, and in which “creative responsibility
[has been] transferred to the machinery.”[2]
Aarseth expresses his reservations
about the freedom to produce the text that is accorded to the reader in
hypertext. Works created in Storyspace,
such as Michael Joyce’s afternoon: a story, and HTML-encoded web pages,
allow the reader to “follow only the sequences laid down by the
writer. Hyperfictions written in Storyspace,
like Afternoon, do not allow its readers free browsing, unlike any codex
fiction in existence. The reader’s
freedom from linear sequence, which is often held up as the political and
cognitive strength of hypertext, is a promise easily retracted and wholly
dependent on the hypertext system in question” (77). Aarseth challenges Landow’s claim that
hypertext promotes an “active reader.”
In effect, he argues that the degree of control and direction retained
by the hypertext author alienates rather than empowers the reader: “The engaged hypertext quickly turns into a
dense, multicursal labyrinth, and the reader becomes not so much lost as
caught, imprisoned by the repeating, circular paths and his own impotent
choices” (91). While legitimate, these
complaints might pertain only to the limitations of the hypertext authoring
program in question, or to “literary hypertexts” with a fixed number of lexia
and a closed system. The ergodic text,
in Aarseth’s formulation, more readily yields itself to reader control, the
premise of a user who is entrusted with the fashioning of the text. Reader control in the cybernetic text appears
to conform most closely to Barthes’s thesis of the writerly text in
which the reader is “no longer a consumer, but a producer of the text” (S/Z
4). On closer inspection, however,
Landow’s hypertext and Aarseth’s ergodic literature are related theories of an
actual reader (performing in the world), not an authorial reader (functioning
in the text). Landow envisions an actual
reader refiguring the hypertext by selecting and following links; however
“free” these paths may be, the decision to follow a particular link resides in
some personal choice of the reader.
Likewise, Aarseth’s ergodic readers busily assemble “the available
building blocks and make artistic sense according to their individual
preferences.” They are actual individuals
who click and fidget with electronic text objects. But the actual reader in the process of
following an appealing hyperlink or confronting a “bot” in a digital
game-world—which are historically and culturally defined expressions of
individual preference—cannot be said to represent Barthes’s reader. Barthes tells us that “a text’s unity lies
not in its origin but in its destination,” not in its Author but in its
reader. That “destination,” however,
“cannot any longer be personal” (“Death of the Author” 148). Text production and control cannot reside in
a personalized reader-in-the-world.
4.
Alternate
Worlds
William Gibson and Bruce Sterling’s The
Difference Engine (1991) is a work of alternative history that speculates on
how the course of political economy and culture in Victorian England—and indeed
the world in 1855—would have been changed had the English mathematician Charles
Babbage (1792-1871) succeeded in demonstrating a calculating machine, the
Difference Engine, which he had proposed to the Royal Society in 1822. Had not the Astronomer Royal, Sir George
Airy, convinced the British government to withdraw 
funding for Babbage’s partially
assembled computing machinery in 1842, it’s possible that the mechanical production
of the Industrial Revolution powered by James Watt’s steam engine (1769) might
have been conjoined with the information processing of the Computer Age.[3] Babbage sought to remedy the introduction of
errors that occurred when the tables of trigonometric functions, logarithmic
series, and planetary orbits that were needed by mathematicians and navigators
were calculated and reproduced manually.
The steam power that 
drove
the shafts and gears of locomotives and textile manufacturing, he reasoned,
could be employed to crank out sums more accurately.[4] A second ambitious design for a calculating
machine, which Babbage called the Analytical Engine, is more clearly the
precursor of the modern computer. It
consists of a “store” (memory), the “mill” (central processing unit, or CPU),
and a punched card reader (input device).
A part of the Analytical Engine, for which Babbage never received
funding to build, was successfully built and demonstrated by the Science Museum
in London in 1991, one hundred and twenty years after Babbage’s death.
Readers of The Difference Engine
who are familiar with the “cyberpunk” genre in which Gibson and 
reader with the conceptual reverse of
that process, a technological analepsis, in which a development of the
future—the introduction of the mainframe computer (ENIAC appeared in 1946)—is
thought to have occurred in the past.
Cyberpunk fiction asks the proleptic question, What if the privacy
concerns for electronic data transfer were not only ignored but unabashedly
compromised by multinational corporations and government ministry? The “steampunk” novel asks the 
analeptic question, What if the
calculating power of the computer were introduced to nineteenth-century
gunnery; would it have changed the outcome of the American Civil War? In this regard The Difference Engine
fulfills Jean-François Lyotard’s definition of the postmodern, as the “paradox
of the future (post) anterior (modo)” (81). We go back to the future, to the nascent
state of computing and information technology, to recognize there the full
conceptualization, in utero as it were, of our present technocracy.
The Difference Engine may
also be treated as historiographic metafiction.[5] Prominent historical figures such as Charles
Babbage, Augusta Ada Byron Lovelace (1815-1852), the British journalist and diplomat
Laurence Oliphant (1829-1888), George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788-1824), John
Keats (1795-1821), and biologist Thomas Henry Huxley (1825-1895) intermingle
with a host of fictive characters, some of whom are drawn from a novel of the
period by one-time Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli (1804-1881), Sybil
(1845).[6] Linda Hutcheon concisely states the
relationship thus: “Historiographic
metafiction shows fiction to be historically conditioned and history to be
discursively structured” (120). The
textuality of history and fiction is a function of bi-directional
communication, an open channel in either direction between historical fact and
narrative structure. Historical novels
conventionally respect the constraints placed upon them by historical facts;
these fictions may saturate the historical figures with a sensibility not
otherwise recorded for posterity, while heeding the curriculum vitae
that history has outlined for the characters.
Such is not the case in The Difference Engine as an alternative
history. The introduction of Babbage’s
computing machinery represents a clinamen, or swerve, in the course of
history; an alternate world forms that affects the path of every life, however
remotely. Keats, though he appears still
to suffer from consumption, has survived to the mature age of sixty in the
novel. He has abandoned poesy for
kinotropy, disdaining print for the programming of moving pictures. He speaks with enthusiasm not of eternal
Beauty but, analeptically, of the “screen’s resolution” and “refresh-rate,” and
of the remarkable effects secured “through algorithmic compression” (47). Lord Byron, who succumbs to fever in 1824
while an expatriate in disgrace in Greece, becomes the oratorical leader—if not
the intellectual force—of the Industrial Radical party and has risen to Prime
Minister in The Difference Engine.
Byron leads a revolt against
5.
Lady Lovelace’s Objection
Augusta Ada Lovelace (1815-1852) was
the only legitimate daughter of Byron, the product of his short-lived marriage
to mathematician Annabella Milbanke.
Rumors of an incestuous affair with his half sister, Augusta Leigh,
drove Byron into exile in April 1816, and he was never to meet his daughter
again, though he would memorialize her in Canto III of Childe Harold’s
Pilgrimage as “The child of Love! though born in bitterness, / And nurtured
in Convulsion! Of thy sire / These were the elements,—and thine no less.”[7] Determined not to allow her daughter to fall
under the captivating sway of Byron’s romanticism, Milbanke saw to it that 
juvenile, would have received such an
intensive education in mathematics in early nineteenth-century 
her father,
Ada Byron concluded her Notes with a
program for computing Bernoulli numbers that are found in the polynomial
expansion of some trigonometric functions that were once employed for
constructing navigational tables (Kim and Toole 78). On the basis of this “Diagram for the
computation by the Engine of the Numbers of Bernoulli,” demonstrating that
Babbage’s Analytical Engine was capable of conditional branching and multiple
loops (or iterations) (Kim and Toole 80),
In Gibson and
Although the alternative history of The
Difference Engine has embellished Ada Byron’s intellectual achievements,
Gibson and
Nor did Ada Lovelace require the
assistance of novelists to embellish her intellectual talents. Before Gibson and Sterling, none other than
Benjamin Disraeli published the semi-biographical novel Venetia (1837),
when she was only twenty-one, about a precocious young girl who resides in
England with her controlling mother, Lady Annabel, but who has become obsessed
with her subversive and impetuous father, the poet Carducis, in Italy.
Although it’s apparent that Gibson
and Sterling are familiar with Ada Lovelace’s Notes on the Analytical Engine,
they do not incorporate into the text of The Difference Engine one of
the most widely quoted passages, from Note G.
As a prelude to demonstrating her work on the Bernoulli numbers,
The
Analytical Engine has no pretensions whatever to originate
anything. It can do whatever we know
how to order it to perform. It can follow
analysis; but it has no power of anticipating any analytical relations
or truths. Its province is to assist us
in making available what we are already acquainted with. (her italics; quoted in Baum 82)
The characterization of Ada Byron in
The Difference Engine is less radically altered than that of other
historical figures from nineteenth-century
The novel itself is arranged in a
series of five Iterations, with the addition of an epilogue entitled
“Modus The Images Tabled” (397), a final
compiling of the program. Gibson and
“And
yet the execution of the so-called Modus Program demonstrated that any formal
system must be both incomplete and unable to establish its own
consistency. There is no finite mathematical way to
express the property of ‘truth.’ The transfinite nature of the Byron Conjectures were the ruination of the Grand
Napoleon [computer]; the Modus Program initiated a series of nested loops,
which, though difficult to establish, were yet more difficult to
extinguish. The program ran, yet
rendered its Engine useless! It was
indeed a painful lesson in the halting abilities of even our finest ordinateurs.
Yet
I do believe, and must assert most strongly, that the Modus technique of self-referentiality will
someday form the bedrock of a genuinely transcendent meta-system of calculatory
mathematics. The Modus has proven my
Conjectures, but their practical exfoliation awaits an Engine of vast capacity,
one capable of iterations of untold sophistication and complexity.” (421)
Ada Byron
analeptically invokes Kurt Gödel’s Incompleteness theorem (1931) that asserts
that no mathematical system is provable, or complete, within itself; every
system must be part of a larger structure; and thus, the nature of truth is
finally indeterminate—or, in Lady Byron’s terms, “transfinite.” Just as Ada Lovelace’s Notes referred to an
Analytical Engine that was never to be built in her or Babbage’s lifetime, so
Ada Byron speculates on the effects that her Modus program would have were it
run on a digital supercomputer well beyond “the limits of steam power” (422) in
her day.
has crashed
the Grand Napoleon ordinateur with its infinitely cycling loops. The Difference Engine is itself a work
of multiple iterations, compelling the reader simultaneously to regard the text
analeptically as an alternative history of Victorian England with steam-driven
computing machinery and proleptically as an examination of what effects an
information technocracy would have if it were fully instantiated in a society such
as our own. As an artist,
The
self-referentiality technique of
“If we envision the entire System of
Mathematics as a great Engine for proving theorems, then we must say, through
the agency of the Modus, that such a Engine lives, and could indeed prove
its own life, should it develop the capacity to look upon itself. The Lens for such a self-examination is of a
nature not yet known to us; yet we know that it exists, for we ourselves
possess it.” (421-22)
No computing machinery has yet passed
the test of self-examination. But were
such an artificial intelligence to exist, it would have to be able to
“originate” thought (the Lovelace Objection) or regard itself reflexively (the
Byron Conjecture). Such an Engine that lives,
freed from the ministrations of programmer and user, would be comparable to the
Barthesian scriptible text, an “instance writing” freed from the
ministrations of the biographical author or actual reader.
6.
The
Virtual Reader in Cyberfiction
Aarseth’s ergodic reader
participates in dynamical computer games and Multi-User Domains by following
the “work-path” that the system has established (1). The ergodic reader is indisputably endowed
with election, or the choice of following one or another of the possible
work-paths; and some work-paths may be more productive (as judged by the
reader, or by the system?) than others.
But in his or her election (Aarseth’s “nontrivial effort’ [1]), the
ergodic reader is not capable of originating a new passage or solution. Landow’s hypertext reader experiences similar
privileges and limitations. One can
elect to follow a particular link in hyperfiction or Internet web pages,
finding the traversal from one “docuverse” (Ted Nelson’s term) to be either
rewarding or, as is so often the case, frustrating or pointless. But again, the reader of hyperlinked texts
can neither fashion nor destroy the links that have been encoded there.
As I have
already suggested, both the ergodic and hypertext readers are actual readers;
they are purveyors of the text, subject to market research; and as such they
are, in Barthes’s determination, rather more consumers than producers of the
text than their respective theorists would grant. Actual readers-in-the-world are likewise
subject to Lady Lovelace’s Objection with regard to the Analytical Engine. The actual reader can have no pretensions
whatever to originate anything.
He or she can do only what the author-programmer knows how to order
it to perform. I am arguing that the
actual reader, because he or she is embodied, is always limited in the material
world in his or her performativity.
Keystroke combinations, mouse clicks, shaking the Etch-o-Sketch—whatever
servo-mechanical interface is required—must be established in advance of the
administration of the text. The actual
reader is made active only in his or her bio-mechanical domain, not within
textuality itself. Make no mistake, the
potential for innovation in the various modes of hypertext,
combinatorial-procedural, or cybertext fiction is enormous, and we are merely
limning the edge of what digital textuality has in store for us. But so far the power to create the text has
not been transferred to the actual reader.
Readers of hypertext and other forms of electronic fiction are more
acted upon than acting; not so much constructing the text as constructed by
it. Insofar as cybertext is a “machine
made of words” (William Carlos Williams’s definition of a poem), the actual reader
performs just as any other human being in a cybernetic system. Norbert Wiener, in The Human Use of Human
Beings (1954), emphasizes that the performance or nonperformance of the
human subject in a feedback loop with a machine may in the parlance of other
fields be called “conditioned reflex” or “learning” (33). In cybertexts, one must ask, who is the
teacher and who the pupil? As in any
cybernetic system, where does control reside?
Print-based cyberfiction envisages
for itself a Virtual Reader. Not an actual
reader with pretensions to originate anything through manipulation of keys or
cursors, but an avatar or “stand-in” for the Reader in the text. In Neuromancer, Gibson describes a
“construct” as “a hardwired ROM cassette replicating a dead man’s skills,
obsessions, knee-jerk responses” (76-77), a personality preserved on a memory
chip. Dixie Flatline is presented in the
novel not as a “live,” embodied character, but as a virtual personality
rendered in Silicon Graphics. The
Virtual Reader in cyberfiction can be regarded as an extension of this
premise: not as a member of an actual,
book-buying audience, but as the replication of the Reader in the text. Like a “construct,” the Virtual Reader is
rendered only within the cybertext and nonexistent when the system powers
down. Cyberfictions that are populated
with simulated life forms and autotelic information systems are naturally well
disposed toward implicating both the authorial and reader functions in the virtual
reality of the text. The biographical
author and the actual reader are vestiges of nineteenth-century realism, one of
whose prominently advertised features is the transparency of the work onto
Nature. As the author and reader in
realism are themselves regarded as au natural, their embodiment is
regarded uncritically; only thus can the book pass between them unimpeded by
the medium of transmission.
Cyberfictions recognize that author and reader are simulations of the
text and that the medium is the message.
An avatar is a “temporary manifestation or aspect of a continuing
entity.” The incarnation of a Hindu
deity is a temporary manifestation in human form of divinity; likewise, the
avatar of the user in virtual reality.
The player of a computer game may identify the avatar as a surrogate
self who, controlled by joysticks or other input devices, may be made to do the
player’s bidding in the virtual world of the game. And yet, the avatar is always already a
representation of that virtual reality’s programmers, with only those
capabilities and pursuits by them so defined.
Cyberfiction comfortably adopts as its native milieu the knowing
simulation of virtual reality, and thus the avatar serves to define of the
surrogate role of the reader.
The avatar, or Virtual Reader, is
assigned a performing role in the text.
In some computer simulations, the anthropoid avatar may assume the role
of the protagonist in an adventure, sporting contest, or narrative quest. Just as the performing role of the avatar in
computer games will vary with respect to its genre, so the performance of the
Virtual Reader will be established by the author to meet the specific needs of
cyberfiction. I have already suggested
that Gibson and
The Virtual Reader in cyberfiction
is, as Barthes would say, the destination of the text. The appeal of virtuality resides in its
utterly flexible adaptation to circumstance.
Unconstrained by physical limitations, the virtual space can be whatever
is required of it. Thus the Virtual
Reader as a simulacrum of the reader is “without history, biography,
psychology” (“Death of the Author” 148), except as those traits would be
transiently defined in the text. Italo
Calvino, who explored the relationship of cybernetics and literature, provides
an instance of this simulacral Reader in his fiction, If on a winter’s night
a traveler. The prologue to the
novel would appear to address, in the familiar second person singular, a “you”
who would be reading Italo Calvino’s new novel (3). Such a direct address to an assumed actual
reader occurs in the prologues of many classic texts, including the “Bill of
Fare” in Fielding’s Tom Jones (1749), the attestations of veracity in
Daniel DeFoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719), and Miguel de Cervantes’s Prologue
to the Reader in Don Quixote (1605).
Yet Calvino’s address to the actual reader, suavely seeing to his
physical comfort “because once you’re absorbed in reading there will be no
budging you” (4), is redolent with postmodern irony. Calvino quickly dispels the illusion that the
addressee in the prologue is the actual reader of the book. The recumbent reader, suddenly deprived of
the classic, “readerly” text that he desires, is then sent scrambling in
pursuit of the unity of the text. “Who
you are, Reader, your age, your status, profession, income: that would be indiscreet to ask. It’s your business, you’re on your own”
(32). Perusing the ten interrupted
narratives, Calvino’s Reader becomes a figure of the Barthesisan lector,
one for whom a “text is made of multiple writings, drawn from many cultures and
entering into mutual relations to dialogue, parody, contestation” (“Death of
the Author” 148).
As
in other game worlds, Calvino’s Reader pursues the completion of the text that
he is reading; he behaves as would any avatar, a subject that is both synthetic
and unspecified. The Reader has no
personal discretion, but exists to be the destination of the text’s unity. In cyberfiction, the narrative’s protagonist
will often be presented as an avatar.
Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash (1992) features a programmer named
Hiro Protagonist who has created a virtual reality known as the Metaverse
(22). The actions of Hiro, who in the
flesh is Korean- and African-American, as he pursues his nemesis, Raven, are
largely unaffected by the transmission from a Los Angeles wholly governed by
corporate franchises and the Metaverse that, “like any other place in Reality,”
is similarly subject to commercial development (23). The Metaverse is peopled with custom-built
avatars for the hackers, and for the neophytes, an assortment of off-the-shelf
models. “Hiros’ avatar just looks like
Hiro, with the difference that no matter what Hiro is wearing in Reality, his
avatar always wears a black leather kimono.”
For those who “can’t afford to have custom avatars made and don’t know
how to write their own,” they can purchase and assemble generic models from the
“Avatar Construction Setä”
(34-35).
Every avatar
is a “construct” that appears only as the programmer-user knows how to order it
to appear; and that avatar can only perform—with ritual kitane swords or
on a Yamaha motorcycle—what the programmer knows how to order it to
perform. In the transmission from
Reality to the Metaverse, the user would seem to create for himself or herself
an identity: “Your avatar can look any
way you want it to, up to the limitations of your equipment” (33). But in effect it is the virtual reality
system that creates the avatar. The
Virtual Reader in cyberfiction behaves as such an avatar, always more acted
upon than acting, not so much constructing the text as constructed by it.
7.
Scriptor
and Narratron
The Difference Engine begins
with an impersonal surveillance report consisting of a “composite image,
optically encoded” (1). Other such reports,
as if they were dispatches from a spy satellite in geosynchronous orbit above
Enthusiasm
for an empowered, actual reader accompanied the millennial optimism for new
forms of communications technology. The
marketing campaign for personal digital assistants (PDAs) such as the Palm
Pilot, cellular telephones and pagers stress the hand-held portability of the
devices; each can be personalized with one’s own vital data and contact lists;
each promises incessant interactivity, linkage to a network, roaming, and total
wireless access to the information or persons that matter to you. Yet, as becomes apparent to anyone who has
tried to avail themselves of universal connectivity—“Can you hear me now?”—or
negotiate the interface between one’s satellite devices and the docking
platform, or practice safe and seamless data entry and retrieval, the
liberation and empowerment of personal communications devices in practice has
been oversold. One might as well be
carrying a homing device strapped to one’s belt that makes targeting the user
that much easier for commercial or governmental purposes. Cybernetic fictions have taken a lesson from
the developments in communications technology:
they regard with skepticism the promised control and organization of
information; and they entertain a touch of paranoia that these liberating
devices are shackles in another form.
The actual reader of Gibson and
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