“I am going to taser your wall socket LAN port!”

Perhaps the above exclamation doesn’t sound like much of a threat in this era of wireless everything, but apparently it is stupidly simple to fry every device connected to a LAN network by applying a taser’s 50 kilovolts to the appropriate socket. This wonderful tidbit of sabotage comes only incidentally from a provocative reading of William Gibson’s latest Zero History. James Bridle argues that Gibson has created a new genre of fiction called “network realism”. In order to illustrate the Google noosphere of hyperlinked references that plug into Zero History, Bridle uses the example of a character asserting that it is possible to destroy a network by tasering a LAN socket. Lo and behold if one types in a google search for taser + LAN + socket, the reference pops right up. The fact that Zero History is in essence “pre-annotated” on Google provides Bridle with enough evidence to speculate that Gibson has created a new kind of realism where there is a “1:1 relationship between Fiction and the World”. I think I understand what Bridle is getting at, but his formulation is bit weird.

Perhaps I am merely hung-up on his use of the world “realism”, which in a literary context implies a whole raft of associations mainly having to do with the literary style of a text. In the end ‘realism’ in literature has nothing to do with “reality”, it is a set of stylistic conventions which matured in the 19th century and have been accepted as a way of rendering narratives “real” or “visceral”. Put simply, it’s basically a bag of writerly tricks. The fact that you can map and trackback all the content of Zero History does not make it more or less real, the book’s ability to evoke the “endless digital now” is entirely reliant on Gibson’s talent as a prose stylist. The form is the thing, not the skeletal links to the Google cloud. Content is easy, style is difficult. It is Gibson’s craft and skill in the rendering that makes his books compelling despite his disinterest in plot and somewhat facile, depthless characters. Nevermind the fact that Zero History is entirely written in the past tense, it’s closeness to present day reality is entirely illusory, it is a complete and total fiction.

What Bridle is perhaps getting at is even more subversive: the ontological break down between fiction and so-called reality. This is no longer a trope of meta-fiction, it is a component of everyday life. If the content is verifiable and plausible what is in fact fictional about the entire novel? We are living in a Bigendian world, therefore we are living in a world that has been totally fictionalized. I would almost run Bridle’s coinage backwards, it is all about “network fiction”. Wherever atemporality and reality meet, reality loses almost 100% of the time. This is an era where any notion of the “real” has been completely eviserated, mocked, warped and discarded. Need I provide examples? Let’s start with reality TV, Facebook and financial accounting standards…

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Despite an obnoxiously fêted literary debut five years ago, Benjamin Kunkel appears to have developed into a fine essayist. It probably helps that as an editor of N+1 he has a ready outlet for his writing, but Kunkel has an intriguing range of interests from  Argentina’s recent bicentennial, to the economics of full employment, and a review of Frederic Jameson’s latest. The Jameson review in particular is impressive. It is perhaps the most compelling summation of Jameson’s work and the “postmodern” that I have read yet.  In many ways it provides substantial evidence that postmodernism is quite dead, a past-on era, even if it has indelibly burned its afterimage into the cultural landscape and global economy. Kunkel’s interest in economics and theory is a fine rebuke to the idea that novelists are mindless nitwits, mere conduits of “inspiration”. God forbid that a bird has an interest in ornithology.