Christian Moraru

Hologrammatology:

Bits and Pieces of a Postmodern Ontology

“The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel”; “Another postmodern sunset, rich in romantic imagery… We stood there watching a surge of florid light, like a heart pumping  in a documentary on color TV.” Who would not recognize these famous passages? The first opens William Gibson’s Neuromancer (3). The second can be found in Don DeLillo’s White Noise, in the novel’s third section, “Dylarama” (227). A strange title, indeed, but not illegible, especially if one recalls “Waves and Radiation,” and “The Airborne  Toxic Event,” as DeLillo entitles the previous parts. “Dylarama” combines “Dylar” and horama. “Dylar” is a medication supposedly countering the fear of death, a pill whose formula is developed with help from volunteers like Babette, Jack Gladney’s wife. Horama means “sight” in Ancient Greek. One can of course read “Dylarama” as a lexical analogue of “panorama,” “a complete view of an area in every direction,” as Webster defines it. Accordingly, “Dylarama” would designate a “panorama” of death, a totalizing view informed by the viewer’s fear of death. Now, virtually nobody dies in White Noise-even Gladney’s attempt to kill Gray fails. Death does not occur as we may expect even though everybody seems obsessed with it, and there is never a shortage of people eager to participate in exorcising simulations of deadly phenomena. While one can hardly locate it as a “terminal” event, as a “discreet” fact, linguists would say, death is nonetheless omnipresent as an ongoing, surreptitious process. This process brings about a radical transformation in postmodern ontology and DeLillo’s fictional world in particular. What White Noise plays out is a different kind of death, namely the accelerated erosion of the “real.” Subjectivity and its formerly “natural” environment are the categories most decisively affected by such an ontological displacement of the real. To be sure, death has combed out the rhetoric of its “classical” visibility. If it still deploys a “terminal” scenario, this is to be taken in a sense which sets DeLillo’s dark imagination and cyberpunk reconstructions of subjectivity in a promising dialogue: White Noise’s subjects and  objects have been made into “terminal identities,” to recall Scott Bukatman’s Baudrillardian title. People’s lives do not “terminate” due to “fatal” accidents or “terminal” diseases. However, death is in-scribed, literally written in the very structure of subjects once “the system” (the market, technology, etc.) has turned them into “terminals” of various networks, as Baudrillard insists in “The Ecstasy of Communication.” Humans and their environment have lost the ontological foundations that had so far granted their “reality” and “autonomy.” They are no longer self-sufficient entities, but effects and even side effects, fallout of various phenomena. Nature–human nature included–has become artificial performance and is now being staged as a “postmodern” play, a mediatic make-believe. The anthropological notion of subjectivity does not hold any more since the subject has changed into “a bunch of electronic dots,” to quote from DeLillo’s novel Running Dog. My purpose here is to look closer at the structure of the  “real,” of people and objects in White Noise and eventually locate the point at which this structure and the cyberpunk articulation of reality may overlap. My intervention also touches on the relationship between “mainstream” fiction and (still) “peripheral” genres like cyberpunk within postmodernism at large. As Brian McHale suggests in Constructing Postmodernism, these may share more than we tend to believe. Far from just covering a “marginal” sector of postmodern narrative, cyberpunk pieces like Neuromancer squares with “hardcore” texts such as Gravity’s Rainbow and Vineland by Pynchon or Ratner’s Star, White Noise, and Mao II by DeLillo. They all draw on the transformation real people and environments undergo under the pressure of technology in “late capitalism.” Needless to say, there are important differences between DeLillo’s and Gibson’s views of this process. But, again, what I am here most interested in is the area in which mainstream and not-so-mainstream postmodern representations of reality and  subjectivity may cross each other. It seems to me, in this regard, that the ontological assumptions belying these representations demarcate such a zone. Not only both DeLillo and Gibson, along with Pynchon, Coover, Barth, or Reed address chiefly ontological issues, foregrounding epistemological questions to a lesser extent, as McHale argues in Postmodernist Fiction. The treatment of human and natural reality in White Noise and  Neuromancer also shows that their specific takes on these issues dovetail pretty well. In both texts, such a reality gets dislodged or, shall I say, “deconstructed” as reality since, as I have pointed out, it is produced, written–which renders the ontological distinction  between the natural and the artificial hardly operative. The subject appears in DeLillo, to recall the terms Derrida uses in his interview “Eating Well,” as a “fable” (102), “a surface effect, a fallout” (103). It is the result of a “plot” that “writes  together,” mingles heterogeneous data or “pocket litter,” to recall a famous phrase of Libra. “You are the sum total of your data” (141), Gladney learns during a “simulated evacuation.” One can view this type of subject as the core theme of DeLillo’s whole work. In White Noise it is less the CIA “plotters” and “writers” who concoct the story of the subject, of the subject as an object and therefore as an instrument. Subjectivity gets processed, “written” by other, less visible  “agencies” and “agents.” Their intervention makes it fit into the post-structuralist paradigm that punctuates, to quote Derrida again, “dehiscence…, intrinsic dislocation …, différance, destinerrance” (103). In this light, DeLillo’s novel brings to the fore the subject’s condition in a “post-humanist” environment. To come back to the section titles, the human and its “natural” surroundings have been transformed into “unnatural” objects, upshots and spin-offs of various technologies. Once affected by “waves and radiation,” “airborne toxic events,” and the like, they have gotten “dehumanized,” to use a more traditional term. The subject is nothing more than a “fallout,” an “ersatz,” but so is its medium. Natural phenomena are always suspected of being nothing more than “by-products.” Chemistry has taken over. Psychologically, the formerly “genuine” perception of nature has been replaced by a “hermeneutics of suspicion” that routinely denounces the natural as technological setup. Heinrich, Gladney’s son, insists that what we assume to be rain may actually be “sulphuric acid from factories across the river” or, even worse, “fallout from awar in China” (24). It is such an unexamined belief, he suggests, that lays the basis for a sort of unacknowledged compact undergirding social life. We are simply supposed to take the natural origin of the visible for granted. But beside “spills, fallouts, leakages” (175) as visible phenomena that may motivate the exercise of the hermeneutics of suspicion, there are less noticeable yet far more menacing phenomena impinging upon us. “The real issue,” Heinrich claims, “is the kind of radiation that surrounds us every day. Your radio, your TV, your microwave oven, your power lines just outside the door, your radar speed-trap on the highway” (174). There are at lest two important implications here, physical (or physiological) and intellectual (or ideological). First, humans are literally affected by “being exposed to constant rays” (175). They are radiated and turned into “fields” themselves, dissolved as bodies and self-sufficient, Cartesian entities once they have come to be modelled by and depend upon an external source of energy. At a less symbolic level, this can result in “nerve disorders, strange and violent behaviour in the home,” “deformed babies” (175), and so forth. An analogous deformation may affect people’s minds, turning them into “Tubeheads,” as Pynchon suggests in Vineland. Watching TV is the utmost ritual of Gladney’s household. Hypnotically gazing at catastrophic  reports amidst catastrophic developments completes the disintegration of subjectivity. Intellectual radiation–intellectual eradication–equals physical radiation, whether this is controlled or occurs by accident, nuclear or otherwise. Exposure to TV rays or TV information, to X rays or atomic radiation, to media discourse or “toxic events” yields basically the same results. In this view, physiology may very well function as an intellectual trope. Our thinking is–or can turn into–the sum total of the information the TV screen “radiates” as much as our identity is, Gladney realizes, a computer file, a chemical formula perpetually “rewritten” by technology or a “contract,” a “capitalist transaction,” as Babette owns (194). White Noise brings forth a “digital subject” held captive and refashioned in a “digital world,” as Horst Ruthrof points out (196). The subject and its environment strike us, to use Gladney’s own term, as “texture,” writing effects, whether we are talking about humans, the “natural” or “commercial” landscape (the omnipresent “supermarket”). To cite one of Derrida’s observations of his essay “No Apocalypse, Not Now,” reality has become “fabulously textual,” “constructed by the fable” (23). Both Derrida’s nuclear criticism and DeLillo’s catastrophic imagery play out a reality, human or natural, deprived of original substance, a reality as fallout, effect, writing effect. Subjects and objects are being transformed into holograms through radiation, radio waves, toxic and TV emissions–which are basically the same thing. To indulge into etymological play a bit, not only renders DeLillo’s narrative hologrammatology the body–the nature’s body included–a technological performance, a hologram, specter, chemical sunset, or other picture “developed” by technological means. White Noise is more than such a simulating writing that defines reality, as Jonathan Culler described Derrida’s grammatological project, as “already written,” produced as text (75). It also forcefully foregrounds the ontological displacement such a writing brings about. Its “hologrammatology” pinpoints the lack of “substratum,” of “Aristotelian substratum,” to quote from another novel by DeLillo. Such lack characterizes his people and places. Not only are these pictures, computer simulations or “toxic events,” holograms; they are also generated through a “referentless” writing of sorts, to recall Gregory Ulmer’s Applied Grammatology (7 and passim). This “writing of emptiness” generates “empty” (hollow) subjects, objects, places, dŽj?-vu situations, simulated disasters and disastrous events that look like perfect simulations.  Cyberpunk hologrammatology dramatically intensifies the demise of the real, plays it off at a higher level. Neuromancer performs, as Veronica Hollinger points out, a radical “cybernetic deconstruction.” At a larger extent than White Noise, it blurs the boundary between the real and the simulated (the fictive), the “natural” and the “written.” DeLillo’s world at least still carries the painful memory of reality, of a subjectivity that may have boiled down to more than just a “field,” “contract,” of twilights that may be, or once had been, more than fallouts of ecological disasters. Disenchanted and “postmodern” as it can be, this universe is not simply accepted. The charecters still argue over its structure, the possibility of resisting incorporation into this destructuring structure does not get ruled out. Unlike DeLillo’s, Gibson’s writing of the fallout does write such a possibility off. Resistance and dissent take up different forms, they do not bear upon the ontological texture of cyberspace. On the contrary, the latter has become “a consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts . . . A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system” (51). “Criminal ecology” is hardly an exception, caused by “leakages” and other accidents: it represents, so to speak, “naturalized” negativity, the “normal” state of things after the ecological catastrophe has occurred. Gibson spins out a post-catastrophic world, one can hardly imagine any further deterioration of reality. A crucial paradigm shift has taken place: the matrix as omnipresent and all-comprehensive writing has replaced the fallout as “accidental” writing. “Dylarama,” an individual hallucination in the beginning, has become “consensual.” The sky does not look like a hologram–it is a hologram and nothing else, above Night City, the Sprawl, everywhere. But, of course, subjectivity marks the site of the most spectacular transformations. Subjects have turned into holograms, simulated presences, pictures. Much more than in DeLillo, they are “discursive constructions,” to use N. Katherine Hayles’s phrase (147). They embody both technological and cultural texts, even though Gibson gestures towards the obsolescence of “the written word” (88). The locus of the body is an intersection of grafted muscles, artificial organs, implants and “holographic memory” (170), which a certain character compares to an “ancient television . . . vacuum tube” but also to his own DNA (171). Subjectivity and its environment seem to rest upon such a nuclear vacuum, substratum without substance, “original,” “founding” emptiness. Pushing to an extreme some of the still “realistic” insights of mainstream postmodernism, literalizing certain of its most daring yet somewhat still “humane” allegories or narrativizing various post-structuralist concepts, Gibson sets the stage for a post-humanist rearticulation of reality. Humans and nature no longer are what they used to be. Neither is any kind of nostalgia or ethical judgement possible. The Lacanian “empty subject,” Barthes’s death of the authorial self, Foucault’s “vanishing” subject, Derrida’s fictitious, “supplemental” ego, Lyotard’s “inhuman,” and so many other post-human theoretical and fictional enactments converge and gets enhanced, upgraded in Neuromancer. At the very bottom, though, Gibson’s and DeLillo’s fiction meet. The degrees of their intervention in the inherited constitution of the real, of the self, the body, the organic, the natural may vary. Nonetheless, the specific emphasis they place on heterogeneous textuality, technological and cultural formation as practices that “inscribe” and “incorporate” (Hayles 156) both nature and humanity brings these authors under the authority of the same logic.