Agent 2000 : the paranoid post-sleuth

              ÍERRIÍORIES
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lali>. Sometimos llic poslmodcni
prolaL'onisl is licrscll a sp\ ol sorls.
I i a i ' k i i i i ; o l l i r r s (Ocdipa Maas in
l ' \ i i i l i o i i s 'llic ('r\-ini¡ DJ IJII -f')):
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spicd lipón. Irackcd. llic oliiccl ol
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lile lileraiN prodiielion ol llie seeond hall
ol lile e e i i l l i r \ . More prolileinal iealK .
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and a iiod lo modernism. e \ ( i k i i iu llie
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m i ' l a n a r r a l i \ i - (lolalizini; i i i i ' l a p l i \ sieal
syslems j i k i ' .Xhiixisiii. Idealisiii. e\(ai
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eniunia oí llie |)osl IIKK l e i i i : in lileraliire.
yw
I think it may be apprehended in a
cluster of characteristics. 1) Postmodem
writing is self-consciouslv iteralive,
driven by the compulsión to repeat,
obsessed with citation and recursive
narrative; it problematizes origins and
the original. 2) It is preoccupied with
aftermath. remainder, excess, fragment,
citing conventional stvle and cliché,
redeploving cultural artifacts; or its
cultural detritus seems to bear witness to
a global catastrophe. psvchologicaL
historical, or aesthetic, including the
splintering of the Cartesian subject. 3)
Post-writing reflects a profound crisis of
legitimation, including the authoritv of
language as referent. questioning its
capacity to account for the world it both
creates and confronts. 4) Post-fiction
gravitates towards the comic mode, its
slippery linguistic antics often serving to
undermine authority (inany postmodern
texts are, if not actually funny. decidedly
wr\'). 5) The postmodem narrative
reflects a pandemic paranoia, in its
theme, its structure, and its
configuration (where the reader is never
sure of what she "witnesses").
AU of these characteristics
converge around the sleuth/mystery/spy
motif: although at first glance it might
seem surprising that postmodern
literature would elect to quote a
"modem" fonn like the crime novel,
which extols the capacity of reason and
the reasoner, and purports to discover
an underlying truth or fact through
deduction. But it is this capacity for
Solutions, precisely. to which
postmodemism gravitates and which it
targets through its "unoriginal" citation
of the mysterv' novel fonn; through
recursive narration and repetition (the
sleuth discovers that the criminal he is
tracking is none other than himself):
through a preoccupation with excess
(the post-sleuth gets lost in a maze of
proliferated clues); through ironization
or humor (the postmodern crime novel is
often a romp which plays havoc with the
reason it putatively honors). And the
sleuth is the paranoid par excellence,
suspecting everyone, constructing a final
narrative that explains what has "really"
happened. Postmodemism, then,
purloins the form of detective fiction.
even while undercutting the very notion
of epistemological certainty or telos (by
withholding the "Aha!' which solves the
case).
We find a paranoid thematics in
many postmodem writers - obvious in
the work of writers such as Pynchon,
Auster, Eco, Murakami; the protagonist
feels watched, surveyed by a monitor, in
the grip of an ineffable conspiracy of
global proportions, or haunted by the
chatter of "white noise" (DeLillo's title)
from unseen sources. Unlike their
modernist predecessors, the post-writers
do not rehearse the vicissitudes of self-referentiality.
Rather than being
absorbed in the sublimity of their own
interior world -however tormented - the
post-protagonists of these writers seem
to be menaced from without, haunted by
crvptic characters, at once ubiquitous
and maddeningly elusive, sinister
shadows which the hero can't quite
figure, or finger. The minds of these
protagonists take on the riddle of life,
and are persecuted by it, not with a
metaphysical modem nausea, but with
the detective compulsión to figure things
out. But this very obsession for system,
this need to list, to discover, to account,
more often than not causes the
investigation to careen off-course, and
the novelistic or theatrical scenario with
it - Julián Bames's literary historian
[Flaubert's Parrot) discovers that
Flaubert's icón has an innumerable
series of "origináis;" lonesco's Amédée
has a giant corpse under wraps, who
bursts out of the closet at importime
moments. Barthleme's Lilliputian hero
[The Dead Father) drags a gigantic
paternal corpse cross-countrv, feeding
on it en route. Aha! - a paternal corpse -
psychoanalvsis sets the stage for the
paranoid postmodem scene. But what is
"paranoia"?
As psychoanalysis clearly suggests,
paranoia differs from fear or &ngst in its
intersubjective Identification mechanism,
blurring the boundary between the
fantasy and the real, protagonist and
antagonist, even reader and writer (is
what I see real or imagined? is what she
is saying reallv so?).
II) On Schreber's Case
In his famous analysis of Dr. Schreber's
writing (1911), Freud tells us that
paranoia is a narcissistic state, whereby
one's libido is turned inward, or fixed on
a like object. This is a strategy of
adaptation: the psyche wards off
homosexual attraction by projecting the
libidinal impulse outward, from whence
it retums transformed as aggression,
rather than amorous capture. Schrebers
persecutory fantasies are accompanied
by fantasies of omnipotence, the
compulsión to créate a complete
cosmological system, and an end of the
world fantasy. In Schreber's narrative,
the persecutor is God himself, who
communicates directly with Schreber,
whom He takes as his concubine, and
A
^ IF
then as His victim. This is a prime
example of projectíve thinking -
Schreber's projected libido retums as
systemic hostile energy, in a cosmic
agony of nerves and rays.
Interestingly, our postmodem
media universo, overseen by a
monitoring "eye," is strikingly like that
constructed and projected by Dr.
Schreber, who sits motionless and rapt
for hom-s at a time, in a state of intense
excitement, as he contemplates the vast
network of nerves that he calis God.
Tormented by a barrage of inner voices,
he hallucinates a complete cosmological
system (he is, in effect, "wired," on-line
with God). In Schreber's case, "God"
himself is a terminus linked to a subject
in ecstasy; He is an overseeing eye who
is sinister and hostile, rather than the
giver of Law or valué. Thus projective
thinking becomes the motor of fantasy,
and of psychotic delusion. Many
Freudians, indeed, have stressed the
primacy of projective thinking in
paranoia, rather than the instance of
persecutory fantasy, insisting that
paranoia is not only an illness, but also
a "normal" mode of perception and
thought by which we anticípate and
identify with the responses of others, in
advance. This is of course the technique
of the sleuth - Poe's arch-sleuth Dupin
(a postmodem icón, thanks to Lacan)
or the prominence of Sherlock Hohnes
in postmodem consciousness; but it is
also the strategy of the writer herself.
Lacan even suggests, in the third
seminar, that all knowledge has a
paranoid register. For we leam by
identifying with others and their
perceptions of us, in a mimetic gestxu*e
which projects our thoughts onto them,
and intemalizes our perceptions of their
perceptions of us. In other words,
projective Identification allows us to
think analogically, "as if" we were in
the other's place, seeing through Other
eyes. (Dupin, for instance, sees the
purloined letter, because he is able to
think like his adversary.)
Indeed, as my brief examples
signal, all of Schreber's symptoms
persist in postmodem writing: fantasies
of persecution, the construction of
elabórate systems, the projection of
intemal reality. Overseen by the
floating eye, the post-heroes are driven
by a demonic tirge to read the clues
inscribed in the landscape, and then -
perhaps - to seJvage themselves, or even
to wrest the world from the grip of a
global plot.
Among the "paranoid"
preoccupations of post-fiction we find:
cosmological hallucinations, or the "end
of the world' fantasy (as in Auster's In
the Country ofLast Things-^ Vian's
L'Ecume desjours, Queneau's Les Fleurs
bleues; Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow,
Beckett's Fin departie-^ Eco's FoucauU's
Pendulum); the centrality of a hated
persecutor, once loved (the absent
mother of Pynchon's Fineland,
Barthehne's Dead Father); the
construction of an exhaustive
encyclopedic cosmos or system (Walter
Abish's Alphabetical África-, Perec's Life:
a User's Manual; Bames's The History
ofthe World in Ten and a Half
Chapters); an obsessive attention to
detall and a proliferation of sheer data
which becomes menacing (as in
lonesco's theater; Pynchon's F and
Gravity's Rainbow; and Sarraute's
compulsive descriptions in Planetarium).
Indeed, many post-protagonists are
haunted by unexplained "background"
noises (the theme of DeLillo's White
Noise), which are actuaUy projected
intemal noises (like the pulse of Freud's
female paranoid, who mistakes her own
orgasm for the clickLng of a hidden
camera); the "chatter" to which Beckett
refers is the sound of the post-hero's
own wheels spinning.
In a similar vein, the capacity to
attend to detall becomes obsessive in
post-fiction, and is the plague of many
post-heroes, like Robbe-Grillet's
detective {Les Gommes) or Auster's
investigative joumaUst [New York
Trilogy), or Perec's disembodied
narrative eye (Life: A User's Manual), a
kind of floating camera that enters into
a linguistic maze as it describes the
contents of various apartments joined by
a staircase, ¿md explores the interlocking
jigsaw puzzle of the tenants' life-stories.
The Latter-day Oedipus of all of these
writers make an uncamiy discovery,
deciphering clues that are often
inscribed in writing: they each finally
discover, in different ways, that the
culprit they are tracking in the encoded
urban labyrinth, the suspect they
suspect, is none other than themselves.
Here the investigator is in fact a private
eye, a persecutor whose inculpating gaze
is tumed in on himself.
///; The Postmodem Prívate "I"
Little wonder, then, that the postmodem
sleuth has lost his vainglory; like the
self-effacing Detective Colombo, he
works with a certain humüity, simply by
dividing his attention, passing it out to
his objects of study, seeing from their
point of view. The divided subject of
postmodemism can be the keenest of
sleuths, because he is only a perspective
or point of view: there is little that is
idiosyncratic in Agent 2000. In any case,
judging from the perennial populanty of
the likes of Carver and Christie, our
species continúes to harbor an age-old
proclivitv for mystery: Oedipus Rex is
itself perhaps the first whodunit.
In fact we may detect a resonance
of Oedipus in many an enigmatic
postmodem tale, where a dead or silent
father - Godot or Knott - presides or
hovers, however absently, over the
novel's events, or lack of them. In
psychoanalytic terms, this hovering over
almost seems like the residue of the
super-ego, the remainder of the slaín
father, the paternal corpse that refuses
to go away even after his Law has been
exploded, eluded - or worse, replaced by
a value-free postmodem code, the
cybernetic rules of sheer performativity.
It is as though this lost father, this
anchor, has been expelled from the
subject, in an act of disavowal or casting
out (Freud's Verwerfung), only to retum
as a looming threat, a hovering eye that
monitors the scene, in the panopticon,
the telescope, the microscope.
But even if postmodem narrativo
is arguably "Oedipal" in nature,
mimicking the time-wom conventions of
detective stories, it nonetheless differs
from its models: for in postmodem
fiction, the emphasis is on the enigma,
the maze, not its resolution. A case in
point is Siri Huvstedt's frightening novel
The Blindfold, which works like a
detective tale on many levéis: when Iris,
a New York gradúate student, is hired
by a mysterious man (Mr. Moming) to
catalogue a murdered woman's
possessions in minute detail, she begins
to have the uneasy feeling that she is
working for a criminal, not a cop; and
there is more than a hint that it is her
own intemalized guilt that is stalking
her. But paranoia is more than a
thematic device for Huvstedt; the text
itself functions as an allegory of the act
of writing as projective thinking,
anticipating and playing upon the
response of the reading 'other' to créate
its uncanny effect, in altemating
narratives conceming Iris and her alter-ego
Klaus (the sadistic character in a
novel she is translating). Klaus becomes
Iris's nocturnal other, as she cross-dresses,
and prowls New York dressed in
a seedy men's suit. Like a dreamer of
sorts, she inhabits her oneiric creation,
in a relation of identification and
aggressivity that bears an unmistakably
paranoid resonance.
Even Iris's former protector and
mentor seems compelled to mime Iris's
sadistic projections, finally blindfolding
and raping her. And at the novel's end.
Iris once again catches a glimpse of the
sinister character who has no real ñame
and who seems to show up wherever she
is, a sardonic incarnation of all the men
who have abused her, and a projection
of her own guilty desire.
Like so much postmodem fiction,
this novel fails to provide a linear
outcome which would solve the mystery;
indeed the novel begins with a scene of
afteramth, immersing the reader in the
ambiance of a sinister after-effect:
"Sometimes even now I think I see him
in the Street or standing in a window or
bent over a book in a coffee shop." This
suggests how paranoia enters the
dynamic of reading itself, drawing the
reader into a lurid psychosis; the
nightmare veers into the fantastic
without waming, and yet is utterly
absorbing - the question of "reality"
aside. As her first shady employer, Mr.
Moming, suggests: "I mean that you've
invented the story yourself. It belongs to
you, not me. You've aheady chosen an
ending, a way out."
Iris does indeed survive these
events: the fact that the descent is
mitigated as narrative, transmitted to a
reading Other, evokes Lacan's
affirmative concept of "paranoid
knowledge," suggesting that because we
are always aware of being in the Other's
field of visión, we may "know" from
new angles.
V) Millennial Mysteries
So what is the status of the detective in
the millennial moment, in post-postmodernism?
We need to note the
nostalgia that inhabits the term
"postmodem," which is already looking
back: the century that prided itself on its
Modemity, and for which the 21st
century seemed like the furthest of
futuristic horizons, is, to its amazement,
actually drawing to a cióse - the year
2000 looms, cióse and ominous. But the
waning postmodem century casts a
backward glance, even while on the
brink of the fu ture.
For our millennial moment also
has a futuristic, forward-oriented
aesthetic, with its own built-in problems.
Bruce Sterling remarks that the
cyberpunk generation is the first to live
in an age where science fiction may be
realized not long after it is written; it
seems (like the joumal Mondo 2000) to
come with an expiration date; the year
of Bladerunner is less than two decades
away, the year of Kubrick's Space
^mf
Odyssey is on the heels of the
millennium. (Some of us remeinber
when 1984 had a doomsday ring.) We
Uve in a world of science fiction. where
dailv discoveries clamor for our
attention aud reshape our Uves,
contributing to tUe exponential growth
of techno-savvy. In tUis ever-sUifting
world, we are "sized up" - or down - by
the infinitelv vast, as in the space
adventure, or bv the infinitelv minute, as
in the nanotech mission (where tiny
machines enter the body, in an
infinitesimal "space odyssey").
In anv case, the detective/spy
narrative is goiiig strong as we head for
the third millennium, as evidenced by
the predominance of the motif in
futuristic classics like Bladerimner
(adaptad from Philip K. Dick's Do
Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?) and
William Gibson's Neuromancer (where
two human-cyborgs, programmed to
sleuth, break into a compound in
cvberspace. to uncover a global plot).
The paranoid tonality is actually
strengthened by the additión of
unfamiliar technology, which makes it
impossible to keep track of who is '"real"
and who is "replicated," what is image
and what is matter in cvberspace.
Things are even further complicated for
the cybersleuth by time travel, in such
works as Bruce Sterling's The Dijference
Engine (where time travel allows the
Computer age to arrive in the middle of
the industrial revolution, creating havoc;
Computer chips are objects which
"someone" is willing to kill for). In
works such as Tom HoUand's Attis. or
George Gaylord Simpson's The
Dechronization ofSam Magruder. post-millennials
shuttle back from the future;
sent bv their bosses to solve a mystery or
fathom a clue. they often ineddle with
history (as in Kay Bee Sulaiman's
political thriller Looking for the Mahdi.
where cyborgian spies are by definition
double agents, robotic and
human.)
Does the millennial techno-thriller
partake in the postmodem epistemic
shift. questioning narrative authority
itself? I think not: although techno-thrillers
reflect "paranoid'" scenarios (the
replicant cannot even trust his memory,
implanted in chips), the postmodem
novel "proper'" is generally more radical
infornt, both suggesting and enacting a
skepticism toward solutions; even while
its content remains deliberatelv
mundane, foregrounding recycled
cultural debris. (Formal complications
abound, however: Calvino's Ifon A
Winter^s Night A Trareler makes You
the Reader a character, chasing six
narrative threads in search of the "plot;"
Barthelme's Snow White inserís a
questionnaire midwav, asking the
readers what they think of the book so
far.) The postmodem form is
performative, enacting a critique of
order itself, in something like "/I Wild
Sheep Chase'" (Murakami) which eludes
the closure of definitive solution. As
Perec's jigsaw narrative shows {Life: a
User's Manual), solving a puzzle always
leaves out a critical piece.
The postmodem twist comes in a
perceptible epistemic shift from
positivism to "difference," where the
endings, such as they are, loop back to
beginnings, refusing to cióse the case:
pomo takes a devilish delight in messing
up the certainties of method. Nothing
was ever less elementary, my dear
Watson.
But the pre-millennial techno-thriller
creates an interesting chiasmus
with the postmodem novel. Millennial
classics - such as Neuromancer^ The
Dijference Engine, the stories in
Mirrorshades - are composed of
hyperbolic futuristic motifs, walking the
line bet'ween the just familiar enough
and the weird or outlandish (Case the
cvber-cowbov of Neuromancer still stavs
at the Hvatt): in the techno-thriller even
the paranoid thematics is a function of
what is described. not how it is
described. The narrative depicts age-old
themes: a search for self-knowledge.
looking for love in all the wrong places;
or a teleological odyssey. looking for
home in alien spaces.
The Brave New World does foster
a paranoid atmosphere of disorientation
- like the mirrored lenses of
Neuromancer^s MoUv ("shades" of
Ulysses), cyberspace is an elabórate self-perpetuating
grid which leads
everywhere and nowhere. But the
narrative has a beginning, a middle. and
there is always an end as well. however
bleak. All the apparent innovation is
window-dressing for the perennial
human activities of figuring out
whodunit. who's gonna do it, or who
wants to. Perhaps in this age of
uncertainty, we want fiction to tell us
that Kasparov can beat Big Blue. that
we can come back to our "home page."
So the sleuths of millennial sci-fi do
"find themselves," guilty as charged, in
the objects they seek. The Replicant
hunter "finds" a past that did not exist,
implanted. just as Oedipus leams that
his childhood in Corinth was "staged" in
a sense. Like the ancient Greek of the
polis, the millennial citizen of the
universe finds that the spy-glass is a
mirror.