“The future is always experienced as a haunting: as a virtuality that already impinges on the present.”
A SPECTRE HAUNTING AMERICA
“All the powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre: Pope and Tsar, Metternich and Guizot, French Radicals and German police-spies.”
1993: jacques derrida, describing the impact of the marxian hypothesis on the politics of capitalist societies, coins the term hantologie, translated into english thereafter as hauntology1.
derrida wrote in the immediate wake of the fall of the USSR. the core of hauntology: now that the ailing corpus of global communism had returned to the earth, communism existed only as a spectre— as marx and engels had referred to communism long before the first socialist state arose.
our intimations of the socialist ghost have grown clearer in the decades since derrida’s Spectres of Marx was written. the ‘ten plagues’ that he wrote in that book have all remained relevant or indeed increased in relevance. the death of socialism at the end of history gave way to a new sense of haunting, in the same sense as marx and engels originally used the term.
as the movement no longer has a national champion for a typical ‘western’ audience, the question of socialism is once again a dichotomy between status quo and revolution. a new generation of activists has revived the sense of fervor that once seemed entirely dead— Mark Fisher had started wondering if even critique of capitalism had been taken over by capitalism, in a fatalist echo of Camatte.
what is in store for this new wave of socialism remains to be seen; it must however be kept in the forefront of our minds that there are other spectres about. one such echo issued from hugo gernsback.
FRAGMENTS OF THE MASS DREAM
“They're semiotic phantoms, bits of deep cultural imagery that have split off and taken on a life of their own, like the Jules Verne airships that those old Kansas farmers were always seeing. But you saw a different kind of ghost, that's all. That plane was part of the mass unconscious, once. You picked up on that, somehow.”
—William Gibson, The Gernsback Continuum
in william gibson’s short story The Gernsback Continuum, the main character hallucinates pulp sci-fi imagery of an earlier time. an expert refers to these images as semiotic ghosts.
The Gernsback Continuum was released in 1981, twelve years prior to the release of Spectres of Marx, but the concept bears a certain convergent similarity. in the story, bits of previously-imagined futures are caught in the Jungian ‘collective unconscious’, and become the subjects of dreams and hallucinations.
the short story was placed first in both the famous Mirrorshades compilation and in Gibson’s own short story collection, Burning Chrome— a notable decision, as the story contains none of the imagery which the cyberpunk genre would come to be known for; it depicts no violence, crime, or corporate hegemony2. just a bit of photography, and the mind of its subject.
the reason is embedded in the nature of the character’s hallucinations. beyond being optimistic— optimistic in the way that sci-fi media of the 1950s and prior is stereotypically thought of-the visions of the Gernsbackian3 future echo an american nationalism that shows all the worst of the interwar era. of two hallucinatory characters seen through the last moments of a postwar amphetamine tablet, the narrator says, “they were the children of Dialta Downes4's `80- that-wasn't; they were Heirs to the Dream. They were white, blond, and they probably had blue eyes. They were American… …They were smug, happy, and utterly content with themselves and their world. And in the Dream, it was their world.”
the alternate 1980, the one that an earlier America had believed in, is implied to include a global american empire, a conspicuously white populace, a technological milieu drawn from atom-age black sites with infinite budgets and an aerospace industry that had no concept of its own limitations. the main character is repulsed by, it, enough to draw a third-reich comparison: “it had all the sinister fruitiness of Hitler Youth propaganda.”
he’s presented with a way to exorcise his ‘ghosts’: a heavy prescription of very bad media— game shows, soap operas, porno titled Nazi Love Hotel. he chooses, in the end, to take another avenue, to immerse himself in news: “I rushed into the nearest newsstand and gathered up as much as I could find on the petroleum crisis and the nuclear energy hazard,” he writes.
these two exorcisms represent the ways forward for science fiction, both seeking to revitalize the genre with contemporary source material: the soaps and porn replicate the pulpiness of the sci-fi mode, but they update it, bringing it into the present without altering its nature. the news attacks the utopianism itself; it drags the genre back into realism by keeping modernity’s crises close at hand. the one chosen by the protagonist was also the one chosen by gibson himself, and that approach flows directly into his later work. according to Thomas A. Bredehoft: “Gary Westfahl has suggested that Neuromancer, the prototypical cyberpunk novel, relies far more heavily upon Gernsbackian paradigms of science-fiction narrative than has been previously believed.”
the basic formula for the Gibson mode: drugged perceptions, gernsback technological narrative, and the undiluted crises of the real world.
THERE IS A DIRECT NEURAL INTERFACE IN YOUR FUTURE
“The designers were populists, you see; they were trying to give the public what it wanted. What the public wanted was the future.”
—William Gibson, The Gernsback Continuum
it is by now a tired adage that our world currently blazes past the timestamps of the original works of cyberpunk.
last year, media critics stirred in their quarantine dens to question the relevance of the genre in our time, this time as a response to the release of CD Projekt RED’s adaptation of the Cyberpunk 2020 game system. Now titled Cyberpunk 2077, the game turned the clock forward on cyberpunk without updating much of its content; it watched Nazi Love Hotel instead of reading the news. It released in the same year the original game was set in5, a pure echo of the ‘20-that-wasn’t nested within the ‘20-that-was.
just the year prior, Blade Runner 2049 released a mere two years before the date on its opening card:
like Cyberpunk 2077, the Blade Runner sequel sought to bring a superficial update to the mode of its predecessor after a near-four-decade gap.6 "Sometimes I had a strange feeling that I was more doing a period movie than a sci-fi movie," director Denis Villeneuve said in one interview. 2049 shows not the future, but the ghost of a 1979 prognostication, replete with logos of Atari and Pan Am.
the futures of Johnny Mnemonic, Akira, The Running Man, and Terminator have all passed us by, and many more are fast approaching. this has set plenty of critics to allege that the problem with cyberpunk, was it were, is that it came true. and indeed, the Reaganite dystopia which cyberpunk promised has plenty of parallels in the world we now inhabit— the trend of patternless deregulation, ecological crisis, and a rising economic inequality is too uncanny to ignore. but this partly misses the point: the crises depicted in cyberpunk were the problems that were visible in the 80s; they weren’t intended to predict so much as to describe. and in that sense, the only notable prediction is that we’ve done nothing to escape the future cyberpunk laid out.
THE FLATLINE CONSTRUCT
“Wonder if she’s really gone
Like gone, gone
Come on, you know she’s gone, that’s a phantom arm…”
—Billy Woods, Nomento
The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.
—Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks Vol. II
what elements of Hugo Gernsback sci-fi echoed into the real 1980 are exact analogues of the ideas that Gibson’s Neuromancer and its literary descendents impinge upon the future we inhabit. The Gernsback Continuum is not only a continuum but a cycle. the time is out of joint; once more the future must be set back into its place.
Elon Musk’s quick-pitched vision of tomorrow, Neuralink and Cybertruck, draws directly from the futurist milieu of Gibson and his contemporaries— Musk’s companies certainly emit the “potent bursts of raw technological enthusiasm” that the Gernsback protagonist envisions firing from the Mongo gas-stations, while the company’s vision of future draws constantly from Blade Runner. Silicon Valley birthed acid-dropping engineers and MDMA ravers, MONDO 2000 and the Cyberians. though they were too ironic to ever really feel it (a certain type of self-awareness being a telltale symptom of psychedelic habit), those addled Discordians purely echoed cyberpunk— its promise as much as its product. sci-fi media provided the appropriate template for home-assistant devices such as Amazon’s “Alexa”. humanoid robots, styled unassuming and emotive, are displayed in much the same manner as The Gernsback Continuum described the flying cars ‘in your future’. the ghosts of the Sprawl have haunted since the dream first started to taper.
Neuromancer’s Dixie Flatline likened his technic unlife to the sensation of a phantom limb. the way an amputated digit can itch, but nothing could possibly scratch it, a hauntology can still leave us longing in a way postmodernity is ill-equipped to satisfy. the way the bitter para-hippies of Gibson’s age bemoaned the absence of flying “half-avocados” like the Jetsons flew to work, today there remains a hollow space where we expected we’d have a direct neural interface, or real cities in America. that cyberpunk, on the face of a dystopia, contained these utopian gamma-blasts might seem unintuitive, but it is the nature of technology to be measured in potential.
Thomas A. Bredehoft, writing about Gernsback, notes that “the fact that the science-fiction community's Hugo award (one of the awards which Gibson received for Neuromancer) is named in honor of Gernsback and is itself shaped suspiciously like the V2 rockets which devastated London attests to the power the supposedly “shambling figure of the SF tradition” still exerts, as well as the destructive potential of the intersections between science fiction and the real world.” and the leadership of the Third Reich itself spoke fluently the language of lost future. what was the Kaiserreich, if not Weimar’s phantom limb?
when science fiction writers are heralded as prophets it is because we are unwilling to accept that their omens are auto-assembling. the best among them, selected for their persistence in the collective vision and their distance from human grasp, are then woven into the very real future. the remaining biomass, the icons of the future which were too ambitious or impractical, then remain as the hauntologies of Derrida and Fisher, or the semiotic ghosts of Gibson.
CURATIVE CATASTROPHE
“It seemed to me that midcentury mainstream American science fiction had often been triumphalist and militaristic, a sort of folk propaganda for American exceptionalism. I was tired of America-as-the-future, the world as a white monoculture, the protagonist as a good guy from the middle class or above. I wanted there to be more elbow room. I wanted to make room for antiheroes.”
—William Gibson
in a sense, Gernsback was the mission-statement of Gibson’s discontent. it emphasizes the exceptionalist moment which science-fiction inhabited, which still haunted the sci-fi of 1980 despite the New Wave’s attempts to exorcise it. it presents the reader with two solutions, one false and one real, and emphasized the natural connection of sci-fi to reality.
that connection was how cyberpunk derived its critical energy. another cliche of the post-cyberpunk haze: that the genre was a victim of its own success. in a sense, that cyberpunk began so quickly to infect its parent reality was a disadvantage to its writers, but in the end, they mostly kept moving towards other frontiers.
and now that science fiction is so haunted by the genre, it returns to where it began: the semiotic ghosts of gibson betray the trouble beneath base reality, and science fiction must contend with the gibson continuum. there have already been attempts to do just this; it won’t be my motion here to present you with another praxis. but I can only iterate.
the meaning of hauntology (a portmanteau of ‘haunting’ and ‘ontology') is, to my reading, a vision of a dead future— predicted or hypothetical futures which never came to pass, yet still cast a shadow onto physical reality.
it is also true that much of the cyberpunk genre was less dependent on these typical modes than its reputation would indicate. John Shirley’s City Come A Walkin’ often gets slapped with the label ‘proto-cyberpunk’ for this, but Shirley was steeped in the literary environment of the original Mirrorshades group. it is a persistent error to mistake the superficial details of cyberpunk for the nature of its genre.
Hugo Gernsback, for anyone unaware, is the guy who the Hugo award was named after, the publisher of the first sci-fi magazine, and a backgrounded mainstay of the genre’s early days (at least, its early days as a genre). most of the cliches you associate with 50’s sci-fi were first channeled through Gernsback’s medium.
Downes is a character in the story fascinated with architecture and design which mimics sci-fi.
this awkward-fitting release date, with the inherent poetry that certainly didn’t mean what CD Projekt thought it meant, was the source of a lot of pain for the developers working on the project, and led to an infamously poor launch for the game. i’m neither a games writer nor an historian, but i myself cannot remember a game’s launch receiving as much bad press.
Blade Runner 2049, to its credit, was updating a better formula, and was much more creative in its application, so the result was much more successful (artistically, if not necessarily at the box office).